Guardian of Night (44 page)

“Yes,” said Ricimer.

What was Coalbridge considering?

Battle logic dictated—

But then Ricimer’s muzzle widened to a smile. “Yes, I see what you mean, Coalbridge. You humans learn
very
quickly. Yes, this
is
a good idea.”

TWENTY-THREE

20 January 2076

Sol System

Kuipers

BETA BROADCAST BEGIN

Hail, all vessels. Hail the armada.

We, the Human-Mutualist Alliance, speak.

We speak in the name of the Poet and in his spirit.

You will have noticed the eye of the armada hemisphere is destroyed by a weapon recently gleaned from the species Kilcher. Some of you will have heard of this through unofficial channels. Some of you will not have known of its existence. Now you have seen one of the effects of this weapon. We have, very simply, created a small exploding sun. An ensuing attempt to eradicate the resident species of Sol C by irradiated bomb was eliminated.

As for this secondary action, what sort of justification could there have been for such a course? Think on it—to make a world uninhabitable for
any
species? To create a world that cannot be parasitized? By your own oath of office, by your own beliefs, this is supremely unjust. It is wrong.

In any case, your current operation is over.

Leave this system. Do not return unless and until you understand. Regulation has destroyed families, hypha. It has replaced the truths we know in our
gid
, in our very sense of self, with its own logic of power, its own zero-sum game. Regulation has reached its inevitable end point.

We Guardians have become our own parasites.

We proclaim to you that the galaxy cannot be regulated. We tell you that if you continue to seek domination, the universe itself will rise up and cast you down.

We say to you that we, human and Mutualist together, will burn you, blast you, and disassemble you down to subatomic particles. We will create a floating ring of the dead to circle around a dozen suns as a reminder for all species who come after.

Do not do as the Administration did.

Do not seek to regulate what you cannot begin to understand.

Live in symbiosis.

And if you cannot do that, then do the universe a favor and exit in dignity.

For exit you will.

We will see to it.

Leave this system or face the consequences. Remain and you will become so much stardust. This is a warning, not a threat. It is inevitable. And every Guardian should know not to tempt the inevitable. The acid rains fall on the regulated and the unregulated alike. This cycle it has fallen on you.

Down with the Council.

Down with the Administration.

Thrive the United States of America.

Thrive the Symbiosis.

MESSAGE END.

USX
Petraeus

SIGINT was crackling with the St. Elmo’s fire of appearing and disappearing geists, messages, and chroma relays, and Japps was in the middle of it all. Her adrenaline was pumping, sure, but there was a calm that came with knowing and executing the duties of her post, finding the readouts and remote sensing what the vessels of the fleet needed at each moment, routing them to the destination where they would save lives. Kill sceeve.

It felt good to be back. Back on the job. Back in her native habitat, now with her field promotion to chief and the promise of a pay raise and an ungodly amount of new audio gear. She had a long list, and she was going to take pleasure in checking each item off.

First, of course, she had to survive this in order to
get
to the music store.

The sceeve had—she quickly totted—a little under a thousand vessels remaining. Most had been on the hemisphere’s periphery when the
Powers of Heaven
had exploded in its supernova fury. The blast had obliterated a good nine thousand craft.

Which left the Extry fleet’s two thousand and two hundred with a two-to-one numerical advantage over the sceeve survivors. But the sceeve had more firepower per vessel in general and were now in as desperate position as the humans.

For both sides, it was a battle for survival.

Even scattered and broken, the armada remnant was proving a formidable foe. The big advantage the Extry had was that it was sitting on the Kuipers and was able to rearm its kinetic weaponry at will.

For a time it was shooting fish in a barrel as the sceeve battlecraft careened in individually at the fleet in what turned out to be suicide runs. Then they got smart, or, more likely, somebody intelligent took command, and they regrouped. It was clear whoever was in charge was trying to make a flank run up and over or down and under the Kuipers—and head toward Earth. That was the one thing everyone knew the fleet couldn’t allow, and so the Extry moved to counter by surrounding the concentrating sceeve, about four hundred vessels strong by this point.

A furious fight ensued. Japps, whose intelligence-gathering billet aboard the
David Petraeus
put her at the center of the fleet’s sensing nexus, experienced it all. The Battle of the Kuipers they’d probably call it, if anybody lived to give it a name at all.

The way things were going, Japps could believe that
both
sides might annihilate one another.

Nukes flew, surged into firework expansions. Rocks and rods tumbled through the void at velocities so extreme they were physically foreshortened by relativistic effects and got smaller as they sped away with a rapid effect that had nothing to do with their distance from the observer.

Vessels flowered in flame and agony of destruction. Rescue craft zipped hither and yon attempting to save what survivors they might.

And, damn it, the sceeve were winning. Because winning meant breaking out, breaking through. And they were doing it. The sphere of the Extry fleet was crumbling as one vessel after another guttered in flame and death and careened off into the nowhere between Neptune’s and Pluto’s orbits.

And then everything changed.

A message from Earthward.

“Fleet, this is
Guardian of Night
. We are closing on your position with encoded torpedo in tow. Please provide fire solution for torpedo. Fleet confirm?”

Familiar voice on com. It took Japps only a moment to mark it as Coalbridge’s.

The crackle of reply from the admiral on Flagship
Petraeus.
“Get in here,
Guardian!
We’ve been waiting for you!”

OVERZAP, the main weaponry command, fed the
Petraeus
’s
SIGINT station the firing coordinates and Japps squirted them over the beta without running strong encrypt and therefore adding the millisecond of delay such a process would have entailed.

She figured the sceeve knew where they were.

“Bomb-tug torpedo away!” said Coalbridge.

Japps watched as the device threaded through the fleet sphere, its tiny reaction plume speeding toward the heart of the sceeve knot of resistance.

They must be laughing at such a tiny threat,
Japps thought. Sceeve, at least some of them, she knew, could laugh—particularly at grim jokes. The grimmer the better, actually.

The torpedo bleated its location. Japps routed the signal and the
Guardian
locked on.

“
Guardian
activating artifact,” said Coalbridge. “Good luck, LOVE-2.”

Then nothing.

No death ray. No plume of energy.

Nothing.

Nothing for one second. Two.

Then
something
.

Something
huge.

A star.

A momentary star.

A second sun in the solar system.

And then that sun went nova.

21 February 2076

The Shiro

Central Council Chamber

“And you are certain it was the
entire
fleet?”

“I tell you they are gone.”

“How is this possible?”

“I have no answer,” said Gergen. “The surveillance drones returned with the images. All of their telemetry was cross-checked, confirmed.”

“So the humans have the weapon?”

“I do not know,” said Gergen. “What I do know is that they have somehow learned to create the energy of a star and use it as a weapon.”

The Chair considered for moment.
Surely
this
fact must give her pause. Make her question her own certainties.

But no.

She finally spoke. “So, they have become more powerful. We’ve dealt with strong enemies before. In the end, they fall to us. They fall to us because we are the embodiment of will. We are the congealing of a thousand million years of desire for order.”

Gergen knew he should say no more. In a thousand similar circumstances he would have held his tongue. What prompted him to speak further was beyond him. Perhaps he’d caught an alien virus merely by drawing near to the humans. He’d put himself in the enemy’s shoes. Into humanity’s mind, as best he could.

And, curse her, he’d liked it there.

Free, but
not
weak. Free, but assiduous, competent, disciplined, unrelenting.

The logic was inescapable. If liberty could produce such qualities, then the entire foundational structure of Regulation must be called into question.

And so Gergen spoke the truth as he saw it, knowing as he did so that he was dooming himself. “It may be best not to underestimate them, Madame Chair. They have this new weapon. They likely have the Kilcher artifact. Their demands for our surrender claimed as much. And, if so, they now have Guardian support in the traitor . . .” For a moment, Gergen hesitated. But he was laying the truth bare, was he not? Shriving himself. Attempting to
help
the Chair to see. To understand the strategic situation her Administration now faced. He was an ally, even at the end. Gergen completed his thought. “The support of Ricimer.”

I’ve sealed my fate.

The slightest whiff of distaste from the Chair.

She wasn’t taking this well.

All for naught.

If he were lucky, they’d allow him a final passing of his
gid
to his children.

“I do believe, Director Gergen, that you have identified with a host animal too thoroughly,” said the Chair. Her calm-scented words cut through the suddenly stilled chamber like a bracing wind.

“Forgive me, Excellency.”

He gazed up at her, his political salvation for all these cycles.

Now his doom.

Not really a surprise. He had merely wondered
when
, not
if,
he would be destroyed by the power he sought to shape. To wield.

The question was resolved.

The answer was:
now.

“This extrusion of defeat is a stench that must never suffuse this chamber again. It does us dishonor.” The Chair waved a hand in front of her muzzle, as if to clear to the air. “You’re dismissed, Gergen.”

“Thank you, madame.” Gergen fell to one knee in the traditional leave-taking genuflection due the Chair and the chamber.

And as he turned to exit, as the chamber guards moved in on either side of him at a gesture from the Chair, Gergen understood.

I am for the knives. I am not to be allowed even the
gid
passage. Pity for the children.

So many things I have seen, done. Risked for a life that meant something. So much lost.

Everything.

And even as Gergen exited the chamber, his last act of protocol accomplished, the odor of his final pronouncement still hung in the air. A mere waving of the hand could never remove it, could not dissipate that name.

It was the odor that would linger with Gergen to his death.

The scent of oranges and musk.

A mere smell.

At least so the humans might pronounce it in their unsubtle attempt to describe what was to them sensation, as meaningless as a loud clap of thunder, the whistle of nothing but wind.

But, to a Guardian, the wind would always have a voice.

And to a Guardian, this particular scent would always have a name.

Oranges and musk.

Ricimer.

Curse him.

29 February 2076

Walt Whitman Station

I know you’re not really there. And I know you always
will be
there, at the other end of these messages.

I’m sorry I didn’t show up that weekend. I could have hung around the same city where you lived, been a better dad.

You know that. I know that.

I thought I had to apologize. All the things I would never teach you, all the talks we would never have.

I couldn’t save you.

I couldn’t protect you.

I will mourn you forever. I love you always.

But now I have to let you go.

Little Shadow, I will always, always remain—

Big Shadow,

Your dad

Leher placed the three postcards it had taken him to write his message into the MDR compartment along with the material that Coalbridge and Sam had brought along. Coalbridge’s contribution had been a jar full of red earth taken from his native Oklahoma. He’d made a pilgrimage to the home sites and workplaces of his extended family and collected a pinch of dirt from each place. It was a big jar. Coalbridge hadn’t been exaggerating about how huge his family had been.

Sam’s contribution was a single small item—an old-fashioned thumbdrive with, she said, an MP3 of the song she’d been listening to on the night when the sceeve first attacked.

An old October Lincoln pop ditty. Leher remembered it well.

“My innocence,” Sam said. “My lost chance to be a normal woman in a normal world.”

Now the drone was fully loaded and the three of them stood upon the edge of forever waiting to find the right moment to release it.

Actually they were standing on the lip of Walt Whitman’s dry-dock portal, a football field long and as high as one of the remaining skyscrapers of Dallas. It was an enormous cavity within the space station, and at the moment, the lip was oriented toward Earth. In five minutes, it would find the sun and they would release the bottle drone.