Guardian of Night (7 page)

He really had a way with words, after all.

FOUR

31 December 2075

Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.

Capitol Complex Perimeter

Extry Captain Jim Coalbridge buttoned his greatcoat against the Texas wind. A dusting of what looked like snow but what was actually “curd,” or neutralized sceeve military nanotech, was falling on the downtown streets, coating them with a fine gray-white powder. The day was mild for December in Dallas, but Coalbridge was used to the regulated temperatures of spacecraft, and he’d been shivering since stepping out of the downtown train platform.

Coalbridge turned up his coat’s collar. He had grown up in Oklahoma, and he knew that Southern prairie weather could be unpredictable. There were no nearby mountain ranges—practically no natural features whatsoever—to direct the huge pressure cells that roamed the plains. Any stray upper-level current might mean a thirty- or forty-degree shift in temperature within hours. North Texas summers were unbearably hot. Fall and spring were tolerable—but those seasons were filled with tornadoes and hurricanes. Now, with global weather patterns thrown into chaos by the sceeve planetary attacks, there were more killer storms than ever.

And winter? Winter was still mostly brown in these parts—with the occasional ice storm to provide a day or so of treacherous beauty.

He had to admit that walking under the sky, any planetary sky, made him uneasy now. After years spent mostly in space, it felt a bit dangerous and wrong to be under all those layers of atmosphere.

Space was better. Space would kill you, true. But the planetary atmosphere you had to expose yourself to because you had to breathe it. Space you could protect against in a reasonable way.

Coalbridge glanced upward reflexively at the empty blue sky, checking for a telltale approaching shadow. Stupid. Should have gotten over that behavior years ago. The drop-rods fell at hypersonic speeds. They said you had five seconds from hearing a raid alert until impact. They also said you never heard the one that hit you.

I’m a walking Extry cliché,
Coalbridge thought.
I’ve lost my landlubber instincts and spend half my time down here feeling that I’m stuck in permanent airlock-failure mode and that the sky is falling.

Of course, on Earth, the sky sometimes
did
fall. And the effects weren’t pretty.

Take Dallas, for instance. The place was more rubble than city. Much of downtown had been flattened by drop-rod titanium rainfalls and a sceeve silicon-eating churn during the first invasion. Although the churn was mostly turned to curd, it had infected and weakened the city’s infrastructure before being deactivated by ground defenses. What skyscrapers remained were brittle and useless. Business, and humanity along with it, had moved underground. Transportation was too expensive and difficult to bury, so it remained on the surface. Big sporting events and concerts still happened topside, as well (and fans took their lives into their hands to attend them).

Political protests also were a surface-based activity. The sceeve invasion, which had abruptly ended eight years before, was about to resume.

Everyone in the Extry knew it. The Xeno division had confirmed it with its startling communiqué from a sceeve source. Everyone in the government should be well aware by now. And anybody else was an idiot who didn’t suspect what was coming. Bad things had once again begun to fall from the sky.

Yet even before the recent precursors to reinvasion, planet Earth had been a wreck.

Stuck in half-ass gear. That was the way Coalbridge’s great-great-grandfather had once described the old European city of Prague to Coalbridge when Coalbridge was a kid. Half-ass gear was when you were going too fast for first or second but not fast enough to shift to the next higher gear.

Aging in humans—at least in the developed world—had been short-circuited starting in 2025 around the time Coalbridge’s great-great, whom Coalbridge called Paw Paw, was in his sixties. It was ironic that humans had solved the aging problem—well, forestalled it, at least, by a hundred or so years—only to have the unsolvable
death
problem hit them like a thunderbolt from space when the sceeve attacked.

Paw Paw had lived in Prague for a year in the early 1990s after the twentieth century’s Cold War ended, and he’d described his impressions of the city to young Jimmy on more than one occasion.

He always called it Praha, like the natives, Coalbridge thought, and always made it feminine, like a vessel. Well, Praha or Prague, the place no longer existed, so it was pretty much a worry for historians now.

“Praha got the shit kicked out of her during World War II but escaped the worst of the damage. She didn’t get flattened, like, say, Krakow in Poland. But she was busted up enough. And the commies just
left her that way
for fifty years. Damnedest thing. They didn’t abandon her. Everyone stilled lived there. But nobody fixed anything. There was nothing to fix anything
with
. No money. No materials. No tools.”

Coalbridge remembered his great-grandfather going on about the city while sitting at the battered kitchen table in Oklahoma City, the table’s plasticized wood-grain surface pockmarked with cigarette burns from the older man’s endless train of Marlboro Reds.

“I was having a little thing with this woman, Lenka Justinova—well, she was my Czech teacher at the intelligence station, to tell the truth—this was before your maw maw and me got married—and Lenka lived way up inside one of those gigantic concrete monsters the comms threw up all over Eastern Europe. Called ’em
panelaks
in Czech. Twenty thousand poor suckers in a cluster of ’em, if you can believe it. Made ’em out of this inferior concrete with too much sand that started to degrade the moment it set. It was nice having a little thing on the side with Lenka, but let me tell you, I’d always go see her with a set of tools and spend half my time fixing her toilet or working on her sink instead of, you know, having
fun
.”

Except for the mysterious Lenka, his great-grandfather could’ve been talking about modern-day Dallas, Coalbridge thought. All the old buildings were torn to bits and pieces, and all the new stuff was cheap-ass, thrown together with whatever could be easily manufactured or salvaged.

The centers of the downtown streets had become the only reliably clear thoroughfares, and were used by auto, bus, and foot traffic. Rubble lined the sidewalks and filled the gutters—rubble coated with the gray-white denuded sceeve curd, so that the entire city looked like it had received a thin shellacking with primer and was awaiting a paint job.

There was also sparkle. A fine glass—the grain-sized shards of shattered windows, Coalbridge figured—paved the center of the streets and remained exposed due to steady traffic. The stuff wasn’t sharp. It had long ago been ground to a sand-like fineness, and the roadway glittered like diamonds when the sun shone.

Lining the streets, or overturned on the rubble where there had once been sidewalks, were the battered and rusted remains of cars, trucks, and minivans: Fords, Sonys, Apples, Quicks. And for color, here and there some brave soul had attempted a bit of civic improvement. Along Field Street, a line of the burned-out hulks of cars still parallel-parked in the places their owners had left them twelve years ago had been coated on the roof of each car with a layer of potting soil. The soil was, in turn, sprinkled with a hardy strain of nanotech protectant and fertilizer—one of the new varieties of crunch that DARPA and some of the private firms had developed, Coalbridge figured.

Growing on the car roofs of Field Street—flowers. Daffodils, geraniums, chrysanthemums. All were in full bloom. Either nobody had programmed into the crunch the idea of winter, or perhaps whoever engineered this display had thought blossoms made the place look more Christmassy and had turned them on for the month.

They looked like zombie daffodils, Coalbridge thought. Undead mums and nasturtiums. Not allowed by the crunch to rest, to wilt, to die off, to proceed through the natural cycle of birth, death, and resurrection. Held in stasis by Frankenstein bugs and the human desire to find some way to spruce up even a hellhole of a place.

One car, an Apple Rhombi minivan, was completely roofed in poinsettias. Maybe his Christmas theory had been right. But the Rhombi didn’t really look Christmassy.

Looks like a grave is what,
Coalbridge thought.
They all do. Like a country graveyard on Decoration Day.

For a moment, Coalbridge considered how many graves, how many pulverized home sites, how many dunes of human-charnel curd, he’d have to visit to properly honor
his
dead on Decoration Day.

Have to be magic like Santa Claus. Need some flying reindeer, too.

The thought of one day retiring to become a stockman with a herd of flying reindeer made Coalbridge smile. He’d long ago found ways to ward off the crushing weight that came from knowing that everyone—every last one of his relatives—was gone.

The sceeve invasion had killed ninety-eight percent of humanity. Coalbridge was part of the two percent remnant that had, by luck or chance, somehow survived. He was his family’s last representative among the living.

Coalbridge had celebrated Christmas alone by cooking himself a complete holiday dinner.

Ah, hell,
thought Coalbridge,
it’s the holidays for one more day. Why not get into the spirit?
He found himself liking the weirdly vibrant car tops. Dallas was still alive.
Okay, Paw Paw: like you did Praha, I’ll call her
she
.
She was alive. And fighting her way out of sickness and despair. People lived here. This broken, blasted ruin of a metropolis was the home to two million souls, three million if you counted nearby Fort Worth. It was the most populous city on planet Earth.

Coalbridge turned a corner.

And there they are,
he thought.
Some of them, at least.

Peepsies.

As he’d seen on the news feed that morning, the antiwar protesters, the Peepsies, were out in force today. Even with reports of fresh drop-rod attacks on Sydney and Nairobi, the organizers had evidently decided the protest must go on. They probably didn’t believe the news anyway.

He’d been warned to start early for his meeting downtown but hadn’t expected this: the entire Capitol complex was cordoned off by a line of beaten-up school buses stretching from Field to Elm to St. Paul to Commerce, squaring off at Field once more. Paper scraps were plastered on the buses—Coalbridge couldn’t make out what they were and assumed they might be slogans or announcements. They flapped in the breeze.

Around the buses milled hundreds of Peepsies: students in the new retraining programs out on winter break, the professionally disgruntled, paid “volunteers” working for various antiwar NGO interests, and the hard-core contingent of the permanently deranged and hopelessly bereaved.

The Capitol complex was surrounded.

One hundred eighty million human beings left on the planet—barely enough to keep civilization from collapsing around itself, maybe
not
enough—an imminent attack by a rapacious enemy on its way, and
this
was how these people chose to spend their time? It was strange to think that they were some of the people he’d spent the last twelve years defending with his life. Yet . . .
 

He couldn’t hate them. He could only feel pity for the Peepsies.

All of these people had lost most or all of their friends and family. Earth’s population hadn’t merely been devastated; it had been treated to an extinction event.

Asia had been the first target. The sceeve were after resources and technology. At least, that was the theory. Their choice of what to take and what they left behind was often bizarre. Entire mountains of limestone taken. The contents of a gypsum mine sucked out. As far as technology went, they sought out the most pedestrian means of production—the factories of China, those of the Asian Tigers. After pacification, their “harvesters” would arrive and begin gleaning the landscape, disassembling manufacturing plants, carting them off to space.

There was no attempt to “collect” any human, scientist, innovator, or entrepreneur. The sceeve did not seem to care about the human brain trust, the universities and corporate campuses, the industrial-park concrete boxes and basement labs, where the
ideas
came from. These they merely destroyed. They seemed to regard ideas as some sort of epiphenomena, a by-product of technology instead of its generator. Every continental coast was devastated, but the tech that was “sceeved” was always a fabrication plant, a car lot, a copper pit. And retail stores. Every Best Buy store up and down both coasts was dismantled and taken away, every Home Depot, Duggers Lifescience, every Amazon and Walmart warehouse looted. Humans themselves were inconveniences—but not too lowly to destroy at every opportunity. In the end, only the United States managed to put up effective resistance. Earth’s military was now the U.S. military.

Then, after four years of devastation, the sceeve had left. Suddenly. Mysteriously. Left with the Earth only partially “harvested,” as far as anybody could tell.

Oh, the sceeve were still out there. The war continued as humans were hemmed in, cordoned off from systems at a distance greater than twenty-five light-years from Sol, the so-called Fomalhaut Limit.

And now, just as suddenly, they had decided to return. All the signs were there in the heavens. Over the past year, the Fomalhaut Limit had shrunk as the sceeve began to move their blockade inexorably toward Sol system.

The armada had not arrived yet, but it was coming. And as for the Peepsie protestors Coalbridge was now confronted with, all most of them had experienced directly was the fact that they were the inheritors of a destroyed Earth. The ones responsible—the sceeve—had vanished from the planet surface itself eight years ago.

Maybe you couldn’t blame people for thinking it was all a ruse, or believing that the automated attacks that still got through were somehow the creation of the government. People could convince themselves of all manner of things to make some sort of sense of a senseless situation.