Guardian of Night (43 page)

Leaving that charge and spin in Q. A wake. A barrier of turbulence which would inevitably curve the next object that encountered it along the lines cut by the previous vessels in their passage.

As ENGINE had warned, the cross proved to be the nearest of near things. But now the two vessels were behind one another, speeding away. In the
Humphreys
’s case, speeding off into the void. In the
Guardian of Night
’s case, roaring away in the general direction of the Moon.

Coalbridge would swear to his dying day that he had somehow
felt
the other vessel’s passage.

“SIG, direct beta sensors aft. Show me the cobalt bomb.”

Coalbridge pulled down the display from the command crown, maximized it. Instantly, his view of space was replaced by the looming bomb tug and bomb barge. The barge, which no doubt carried the weapon, was ten times larger than the little tug.

The Scourge.

And something, some faint speck at some distance from it. At first he thought it might be the
Guardian of Night
, already tens of thousands of kilometers away.

Something else
, his instincts told him. Something on the beta, so it was sceeve or human.

He pointed to it. “What’s that?”

“No correlating information. Maybe an afterimage, a beta echo? Analyzing.”

“It’s the bomb tug,” Coalbridge said with growl. “Bastard detached from the barge in the Q. Kept separate Q from the barge from the first jump. Way
I
would’ve done it. Barge is headed for Earth. Tug is headed for the
Guardian
on a collision course. Get me Ricimer.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“We’ve got company. The tug’s vectoring in on you.”

“I guessed this may be too easy.”

Too easy! Coalbridge would hate to see hard.

“You can outrun it if you keep going,” Coalbridge said.

“Naturally. But the wake formation maneuver requires that I come to a standstill in N-space. As must you.”

“I know that, damn it. But when you do—the tug slams into you. And the barrier is destroyed along with you at the anchoring end.”

“Or
you
,” said Ricimer, “depending on its velocity. Remember, we will trade places exactly in the recross.”

The calm voice of HUGH in his ear. “Bomb barge vectoring toward Earth on target, point five
c
. Barrier encounter in two minutes twenty-three seconds. Tug is traveling at point six
c
. Estimated tug impact is well within
Guardian of Night
current localization. Analysis indicates our maneuver was anticipated.”

So, whoever was piloting the tug was no amateur.

“I may have a solution, Captain Coalbridge,” Ricimer said.

“I’m all ears.”

“The timing would be extremely delicate, and only determinable in the moment. I will need to use the
Humphreys
’s computational speed, I believe—”

“You’ve got it.”

“Very well,” said Ricimer. “The idea is to . . . we have an expression. When one is attempting to be in several places at once.”

“Yeah, we call it spreading yourself thin,” Coalbridge answered. He was trembling.
We’re all going to die in seconds!
He could imagine Ricimer had driven more than one student insane with his patience, his desire to make
any
experience a teaching experience.

“I like that,” said Ricimer. “We call it leaking out of one’s own skin.”

“Captain, what are you thinking to do?”

“I’ve contemplated this before. It was rejected during our war games as even possible to attempt.” Ricimer emitted what was translated as a harrumph of pique.

“Ricimer, let’s do it, whatever it is!”

“Very well. We shall combine the wake maneuver with a suture. If I leave and return within what you would term a Planck-second of my exit, then the wake maneuver will be completed. The barge and its bomb will be diverted. Because I
will have
existed at the completion point for
that
quantum event to take place. So if I enter N-space, compute a jump that will take my vessel into our final destination coordinates at the exact moment as the tug, reenter Q, drop to N-space . . .”

Coalbridge felt his head spinning trying to grasp what Ricimer was saying. Yet he
had to
. And for someone who had spent years mucking around in the Q, it didn’t take long for the idea to gel.

“Yes. Yes, I see,” he said. “You
won’t
be there for—well, for less time than can be measured by any known means—when the tug arrives.”

“Precisely,” said Ricimer. “And then I will essentially materialize
within the tug
.
But not truly within, for the tug and my craft will be sharing the same quantum space. I will
superimpose
myself upon it.”

“So what happens then?” Coalbridge asked.

“Two bodies appearing in the same place at the exact same time. Impossibility.”

“You mean they’ll destroy one another.”

“Or remain completely unaffected by one another,” said Ricimer. “Otherwise . . . let us say that I have long wondered about the possibility of a simultanaeity performed in combination with a suture. Our current situation would make for an excellent empirical test.”

“The precision of the timing—”

“Would have to be slightly better than a light-clock, that is, a smaller increment than a photon passing between mirrored edges in the quantum foam.”

“We don’t have anything that precise.”

“But you do have one thing,” Ricimer said. “A computer program that has developed mathematical intuition. I have seen slaves. These servants of yours are no longer slaves. I believe they might arrive at the correct solution.”

“ENGINE, can you do it?”

“I am uncertain,” ENGINE said. “There
are
nonalgorithmic maths some of us have played around with.” His voice came quietly, softly. “Perhaps if DAFNE were here, yes. With HUGH’s help, and the other personas, I am not sure. If it
is
possible, the computation will not take long.” A pause. “How do you do it, Captain Coalbridge?”

“I don’t understand. Do what, ENGINE?”

“Remain lucky.”

His family gone. His brother and sisters. Aunts, uncles, cousins. His parents. His grandparents. You didn’t ignore the loss. You sidestepped it, you dodged it, you darted. Above all, you learned from it. Any moment, the same thing could happen to you.

Coalbridge shook his head, answered ENGINE. “Work with the fact that absolutely nothing turns out like you thought it would.
Use
uncertainty instead of running away from it.”

ENGINE did not reply.

“Twenty seconds,” HUGH reported. It was almost a whisper. “Beta-transfer protocols established with
Guardian of Night
. Fifteen seconds.”

HUGH didn’t continue the countdown after that.

Coalbridge pictured a roulette wheel spinning. The servants and personas of the
Humphreys
gathered round. Their geistly hands trembling, wavering. Then slowly and inexorably sliding all of their chips—all of humanity’s chips—to one color or the other. Red or black.

Red or—

The
Guardian of Night

Ricimer ordered the halt, the drop into N-space. It was like a thousand other commands he’d issued before. Sol burned bright in the distance. The stars around him. The stars beyond.

The simple universe of matter and light.

Less than the space of a breath, and—

“Protocol transfer from
Humphreys
complete,” said Lamella. “Initiating jump.”

Jump back into Q. The zoom effect, as the heavens readjusted themselves to quantum possibilities. As some stars, some galactic clusters, grew instantly closer, others, unentangled with any bit of matter in the Milky Way, receded.

Then, an amazing sight.

Passing through the
Guardian of Night
, passing through the bridge itself, the ghostly outline of the bomb tug. Passing before Ricimer’s eyes.

A great creature of the deep on some liquid-covered planet, it appeared. Its metallic side was dull blue. Ricimer could see through it to crew members on the other side of the
Guardian
bridge. And he could see—

The tug pilot. She—it was a she—with muzzle flared wide. Screaming victory, death. Ricimer could almost smell the carbolic stench.

He reached out, tried to touch the pilot. His hand passed through nothingness.

And then the tug was past.

The stars zoomed out.

N-space.

He was alive. Was the vessel in the correct position? No time to check.

No time.

Jump.

The whipping recoil of simultaneity.

He was a million kilometers away. The
Humphreys
had taken his place.

Ricimer only checked the readouts out of habit. He was certain what he would find. The quantum wake was created; the suture was closed.

Equations balanced as a tiny ripple in space-time surged, then stilled.

The stars burned on, as indifferent as always.

Walt Whitman Station

Sam stood by the main viewport aboard the Walt Whitman, desperate to catch a glimpse but not expecting to see much. She was aware of what was happening, probably more aware of the theoretical intricacies than Coalbridge and possibly even Ricimer.

The battle was on in the Kuipers at last report—a real battle, and not, thank God, a hopeless last stand for humanity—but this end run could make the whole thing moot. A cobalt bomb could make what remained of habitable Earth uninhabitable, destroy an ecosphere already in desperate straits, and drive those humans it didn’t kill outright into space as refugees to be hunted and exterminated at the sceeve’s leisure.

You’d never know it from the state of affairs below. Instead of everyone girding up, there was a censure movement sizzling through Congress. The president was undergoing what amounted to a no-confidence vote led by the Quietists, Tillich—the former admiral who had become the party’s poster boy—and various fringe interests.

Frost stood beside Sam, seemingly unperturbed by what was going on in Dallas. Sam supposed she knew how Taneesha Frost felt. Everything hinged on living, actually physically surviving, to fight another day. But then a blue-green flash beside Frost, and her aide KWAME was standing there, whispering into the president’s ear.

She smiled.

“We squeaked by,” Frost said to no one in particular. “The Quietists bet everything on an up or down vote, and lost. Big loss in the House. And fifty-two forty-eight in the Senate.” Frost turned her attention back to the viewport. “Now, let’s live to celebrate.”

Sam, too, looked out. And at that moment, she saw it. Saw a flash, like a tracer bullet. Headed down, down toward the blue Pacific below.

Then it simply seemed to bounce away. Away in new trajectory toward the Moon.

All of this within a second at most. Sam blinked. No more spark, flash, trace.

“Was that it?” she heard Frost asking. “Was the bomb diverted?” The president was looking straight at her, at Sam, trusting her judgment on the matter.

“I think so, Madame President,” Sam said. “I think our boys have done it.”

The
Guardian of Night

The cobalt-ion device had been sucked out of its trajectory, sucked by nonexistence, a vacuum within a vacuum.

Due to the quantum wake, the bomb barge vectored away from its path. Vectored toward Earth’s moon.

The bomb must somehow have been armed
before
separation from the tug, else the tug pilot would not have been able to separate tug and barge within the Q. This was not ordinarily done—was
never
entrusted to lower ranking officers—and would have required a security override
greater
than admiral.

Who had piloted that tug?

The barge dropped into N-space just before it arrived at the Moon.

Ricimer imagined the simple decision algorithm within the craft attempting to correlate a firing solution.

Evidently, it came to a decision. A silver, needlelike cylinder separated from the tug.

This was the bomb itself.

The separation blast from the bomb’s retaining brackets sent the barge tumbling away, to find either a fiery death in collision with a planet or to become a simple piece of space junk forever wandering the Sol system.

The bomb, meanwhile, headed for the Moon.

It didn’t take long. The cobalt bomb collided with the surface.

Flash of light.

Puff of lunar debris speeding into space.

A new crater bloomed.

No one died.

“Christ! Ricimer. We’re alive! You’re alive!” It was Coalbridge. Even without the translation, even with the sound and no smell, Ricimer could tell how excited he was. If he were younger, he’d have felt the same.

Perhaps this feeling of escape, of exhilaration, was common to the young of most species. Perhaps it was even a universal principle, an emotional reflection of survival’s logic. As was justice. As was love.

The voices of the ancestors, the hum of the
gid
, formed a low vibration of satisfaction with Ricimer.

You have found a way through this tunnel of darkness for our line. We are with you. Perhaps all is not lost. Perhaps our memories will not die.

Perhaps the road lies open ahead, child of ours. Because of you.

You are our cutting edge across the vacuum, etching all that has been forgotten back into being. Our word spoken, but a word that speaks itself truly, as well.

You are heir of a great line. We are proud of you, our son.

Yes. To come out alive. The poets could spray their perfumed songs about the good and noble way to die as they might.

Survival was the true victory that allowed them to spray at all.

He’d have plenty of time to think on this paradox, he supposed. Time to think was the survivor’s reward.

“Ricimer, listen.” It was Coalbridge. “That bomb barge is still out there.”

“It is no longer a threat. The bomb was ejected. We should now attempt to hunt down the tug and its pilot, then return to aid your fleet.”

“Yeah, I know. But I may have a better idea.”

“Go on.”

“We don’t know where the tug is, but the barge is in N-space. I’ve got a good lock on its position.” Coalbridge hurriedly continued onward with his thought. “Ricimer, we could
use
it. Put another servant copy aboard exactly like last time on the
Powers
. Take it back out to the Kuipers with us. Is that artifact on your vessel recharged?”