Guardian of Night (30 page)

A mad spin inside the craft. Guardians holding tight to bulkhead railings, gripping floor grills. Anything to hang on. The spin nauseating, almost unendurable. Emergency lights flashed. Emergency esters blared.

Yet the crew did endure. They did hold on.

Finally, after what seemed an eon to those aboard, a gilled hand moved over a toggle.

The spin slowed, arrested by gyroscopic motion in the other direction.

The spin ceased.

The vessel righted itself.

The first mate looked to the captain, who was standing beside her on the bridge. They exchanged a glance, but no esters. All was silent.

Both gazed at the large view-screen display on the bulkhead beside them.

Blinking lights headed away from their vessel on the display. Farther away.

One off the screen.

The other.

“They have gone to make their reports, Captain.”

“Yes. Good.”

“I don’t like our exterior configuration,” said the first mate, who was not a civilian in actuality, not a trader, but was, in truth, this vessel’s executive officer. “It pains me. A mere transport. And succumbing to the throes—as if this crew would ever permit matters to come to that. It is shameful.”

“It was necessary.”

The XO nodded to the right. Agreement. Yet she still seemed troubled, unsure.

The captain didn’t blame her.

“Do you really think this will work, Captain?” she asked.

“Do you mean have we fooled them into thinking we are a foundering Mutualist vessel? Yes, I believe we have.”

“And on a larger level, sir?”

“I do not know,” Ricimer answered. “What I most long to see at the moment is our true namesake. Where is the
Efficacy of Symbiosis
?”

“It is troubling.”

“If she does not appear, we will have to rethink our strategy,” the captain said. “We cannot carry these refugees into battle.”

“Perhaps this is for the best,” said the XO.

“For the best? We have near a thousand souls on board that were to be delivered at this rendezvous. If the
Efficacy
does not appear, we will have to find them a home.”

“Or they could join the fight.”

“Half of our refugees are children. What if they are all that remains of Mutualism? Of what is good in our species?”

The XO lowered her head, chagrined. “Of course you are right. They must be protected.”

“I’m willing to gamble my life in our venture, and you have agreed to follow me,” the captain said. “But all of theirs? I cannot. I cannot.”

The captain looked at his view screen one more time. “Where is she?” he asked. The XO wished she had an answer. She did not. She remained silent. “Where is the
Efficacy
?”

Then, without another word, the captain turned and left the bridge, shaking his head and clenching his fists in troubled thought.

For the first time in many
molts
, the XO felt her captain’s uncertainty. She must be careful not to communicate it to the rest of the crew. But she was distressed.

If
he
, if the captain she’d followed into dozens of engagements and emerged somehow alive, didn’t know what do next, then who did?

Nobody.

SEVENTEEN

5 January 2076

Femtodynamics Warren D

Huntsville, Alabama

Boom, boom, boom!

Topside, the drop-rods had begun to fall once again. Surface transport would take a beating, but everyone was safely below ground. Safe for the moment. Sam could just imagine the pulverizing the surface infrastructure was taking.

She suspected there must be a major churn drop as well, or else planetary defense would have dealt with the rods. The servants in the upper atmosphere and the orbital guard must be scrambling like crazy.

Sam squeezed her unlit cigarette (how had
that
gotten there?), folded and crushed it in her palm, then put the crumbly mass into her lab-coat pocket. “Okay, my dears,” she said to her gathered team. “Welcome to the Chinese Wall once again. Functions? Information flow? What have we got?”

Before them, in chroma re-creation, the Kilcher artifact hung in macabre three-dimensional splendor.

Sam’s first impression was that she was looking at an enormous narwhale tusk, or the horn of a zombie unicorn cut through with some animating, undead fungus. It was simultaneously lovely and nasty-looking. Menacing.

The artifact had the appearance of a twisted horn, a pointed stake tapering from about the thickness of a body-length at its base to a rounded point a human hand might cup comfortably at its tip. The raised, weltlike striations of the artifact’s twist were crusted with flaky extruded salt and coruscated blisters of rust. The declivities of the artifact between were blackened by a smear of something that looked very like mold. You got the sense that it would be soft to the touch—and quite possibly poisonous.

She turned to Remy, her IT whiz—a virtuoso at computational modeling. Sam rarely trusted virtual creations to match reality, but she trusted Remy’s. He didn’t fudge, and he told you when he was making an educated guess. “How close are we on this?”

“If the translation of the material is correct, this is how the artifact would appear,” Remy said with a slight French accent. “But as to how it works or what it does, or if it actually
does
anything . . .”

“Yeah, that’s the trillion dollar question,” Sam replied.

Sam’s team was gathered around the chroma projection of the artifact. Some stood still. Others tried to see it from different angles. Bai, her quantum chromadynamist and chemical engineer, fidgeted and bit her black-painted nails and occasionally whisked stringy hair from her eyes. Total darkender. Amusing, because Sam knew she was in a quiet relationship with Reynolds, her straightlaced evangelical mathematician. Sam decided to give them a few more minutes before she started the differential.

She knocked out another Rojo and had it in her mouth before she realized what she was doing. Probably best not to light up at the moment, but holding the cigarette calmed her. She rolled it around between her right index finger and thumb, felt the tobacco give within the packed cylinder of paper.

Nothing like an early conference call with your high-flying, perpetually caffeinated boss—oh, and additionally with the
U.S. president
—to put a quick step in your morning. Especially when the purpose of the call was to push you to figure out an entire new branch of science and decipher an enemy’s superweapon in the process—not necessarily in that order, but all preferably by lunch, if possible.

You want it
when
?

The problem was, it wasn’t Kylie Jorgenson or President Frost imposing the deadline. The approaching sceeve armada was doing that. They were closing from Alpha Centauri, having obliterated the Extry outpost there. They were now spreading in a half-domed canopy formation, vectoring in on the solar system and scheduled to arrive from galactic north at the Kuiper Belt. Control of the Kuipers was strategically important, since it was an area rich with throwing rocks for rapid rearmament of kinetic weaponry. The Extry fleet was already there, determined to deny the sceeve the resource or, if not, to use the Kuipers for cover and camouflaged attack if the anticipated space battle came down to guerilla tactics and harassing strikes.

There was, of course, the possibility that the sceeve would alter course and attempt a solar-system entry at the asteroid belt or even glean the Jovian system for debris. But most bets were on the Kuipers for the coming Ragnarok—as a steady stream of returning scout craft seemed to confirm.

The sceeve were predictable if nothing else, Sam thought.
At least we have that on our side.
Of course, when one side possesses near overwhelming force, bringing unpredictable tactics to bear was usually beside the point.

Sam had given up her morning bicycle rides in to work through Huntsville’s hilly terrain for the past weeks as air attacks escalated, and she missed them. She’d reluctantly accepted a servant chauffeur at Jorgenson’s insistence, even though she still liked to override the autopilot and drive herself. But during her four a.m. commute in this morning, she’d surrendered the car to autopilot and watched the news in a chroma hover display.

Not good. The capitol complex in Dallas had been under a virtual siege yesterday with an anti-war rally in full swing. In Old City Park, one speaker after another took to a platform denouncing the “instigationist” policy of Frost and her Recommitment Party. Chief among the rabble-rousers was none other than retired admiral Alan Tillich. In the past days, he’d found a second career as a public figure, and there was talk of his running for Senate in the November midterms on a Quietist ticket.

That is,
if
there was going to be a November at all for humans.

Those people can’t believe it’s happening again,
Sam had thought.
They’re blocking it out, trying to wish it away. Talk it away.

That had been her first, charitable response. Later she had come to other, darker conclusions.

Boom!
Another drop plowed into Huntsville.

The lights flickered, as did the artifact representation before them. Power switching, compensation. A plant may have been taken out. After a moment, the image held steady once again.

Reynolds, her mathematician, spoke first. “So, for one thing, I’m getting some really strange return values trying to calculate the density. Keep having to renormalize infinities. I hate that. Makes for a wanky equation.”

Sam nodded. “Or points toward something we’re not considering. What if you don’t renormalize?”

“Insanity. Densities greater than the known universe, that sort of thing.”

“All right. What else do we have?”

“Even with renormalization, the fact that it doesn’t warp space-time when it ought to is kind of not right,” said Vitogard, a materials physicist and Sam’s main experiment-builder. “I mean they presumably pick this thing up, move it around somehow. It’s heavy. Like quark-matter heavy. Or at least it should be. But the specs say otherwise. So we have to be dealing with an alternate physics, something we’re going to have conceptualize—”

“Or a black hole,” Sam replied.

“It is spooky similar, but—”

“I know, you’re pulling for something we actually know the physics for,” Sam said with a smile. “So am I.”

“But black holes are spooky just because we can’t look inside them,” said Sam’s chromodynamics specialist, Bai. “What if it’s a black hole that’s taken or been fed a massive dose of J?” Bai, who’d been playing with her hair while considering the artifact, spoke in a quiet voice. Bai had been lurking in a corner, her straight black hair, as usual, nearly covering the features of her extremely pale face. She didn’t get out of the lab much, if ever.

Reminds me of me, back in the day,
Sam thought.

“J? Angular momentum, you mean?” she said.

“Yeah,” answered Bai. “A normal black hole has mass greater than the J and the charge right? Has to. That’s the
definition
of the event horizon.”

“The squares of the mass, angular mo, and charge,” said Sam. “Square of the mass is always greater than the square of J plus the square of Q.”

“Actually the momentum component is J divided by the mass squared,” put in Reynolds.

“So if you up the J or the charge, you could eventually tip the scales,” Bai said. “Make angular momentum and charge greater than the mass. You’d strip the event horizon away, and there would sit your singularity.”

“It’s been discussed for decades in theory,” Vitogard said. “Nobody knows what would happen. So, assuming this is somehow possible to do and you suddenly are able to see inside a black hole, what would you see?”

Sam pointed toward the floating virtual representation. “Maybe this,” she said. “
This
in real life.”

Sam noticed her cigarette again. Oh, what the hell? She shook it and the churn on the tip lit it up and she was breathing in the smoke. No one objected. They didn’t seem to notice.

“So we assume it’s, what? What would you call such a thing?” asked Vitogard.

“I think you might call it an evaporated black hole,” Sam said.

“Of course,” Reynolds suddenly said. “Of course that’s what it is.” He furiously scribbled away with his finger, seemingly on the air itself. He looked a bit like a spindly limbed wizard working up a spell. Sam noticed that Bai was looking on adoringly.

Sam adjusted her chroma and examined Reynold’s hasty equation. Its terms and variables floated in the air about him in pinks and yellows. “What if the mass is nil but the J and Q remain in place. Or are somehow
held
in place. Then you’d get what’s left after a black hole has bled itself dry,” Reynolds said. He pointed to the artifact. “You’d get
that
.”

Sam took another drag on her Rojo, breathed out. What a team she’d assembled. Maybe she really was management material after all.

“Okay, my dears, let’s assume we’ve figured out what it is,” she told them. “Now let’s figure out what we can
do
with it.”

18 January 2076

Vicinity of Alpha Centauri

A.F.V.
Indifference to Suffering
Dedicated Bomb Tug AE5515

Ah, Heavenly Road.

So close.

“Cradit!”

Not now, not now!

“Cradit, where are you?”

So close. Heaven, heaven . . .
 

“Cradit what are you doing?”

Not now!

Commander Lareno Quartz Intrusion Cradit couldn’t believe it. That twice-cursed Admiral Blawfus was calling him away from a pleasure-session
again
. So Blawfus was the boss? So what? He was also a half-hypha striped lowborn. The fact that Blawfus was his superior was going to be remedied one of these days. Cradit thumbed off the bomb-pod view screen and muted the feed.

Cradit had his positor fully unfurled into the hands of the whore, and she was chaffing him as if she were rolling a length of smoking coil. The odor of wet copper preceding the give of ejaculation let them both know that he was
nearly there, nearly there.
. . .