Guardian of Night (32 page)

“Analysis, XO?” he said.

“The situation is only partially resolved,” DAFNE answered. “The sceeve vessel does not seem to have spotted us yet, but if we make an approach, there is little doubt she will notice. At that point I do not have enough information to make an informed prediction, although I can suggest several hypotheses.”

“Wait on that,” Coalbridge said.

He pulled down another display and began inputting overall battle-configuration prep to his weaponry and telemetry. The various expers and personas in charge of these areas would implement his orders on a smaller scale. Right now, he just wanted to go in prepared. And armed up.

“We on beta silence?”

“Locked it in first thing, Captain.”

“Very good.”

From now on, quieting all beta emanations would be essential. In equal measure, Coalbridge hoped the sceeve vessel did no such thing itself. Beta was not like radio waves or radar. There was no triangulation necessary when locating a beta-conditioning transceiver. Only two Q-entangled signals were necessary. A beta message was carefully ensorcelled uncertainty on either velocity or location for a particle. It was Schrödinger’s cat in a box. When you opened the box, the cat told you where it had come from and how fast it had arrived as part of its dying act. Every beta transmission contained its own countdown clock written into its essence, its own highly accurate radioactive-decay trigger, just as Schrodinger’s thought experiment had the dead-undead cat. You couldn’t send a beta message without giving away either your location or your velocity. If you sent two transmissions, your exact position among the stars could be fixed.

And you could be fired upon, if need be. Or fire upon others.

“Evasive, helm,” Coalbridge said. “Standard.”

“Aye, Captain,” said Katapodis, the exper manning the wheel. He and his geist copilot were the closest thing to a cyborg symbiosis between human and servant yet created. In fact, several helmsmen and helmservants had not only fallen in love—but had gotten married.

It was a curious thing. Something Coalbridge was particularly curious about himself. He’d always wondered what sex with a servant could possibly be like. It involved lots of salt, that he knew. He’d secretly wondered what DAFNE might be like in the chroma sack but hadn’t even begun to let those thoughts go far. Besides, DAFNE had a boyfriend, a servant back on Earth. One of the boyfriend’s iterations was President Frost’s chief of staff, KWAME. It was always confusing how the servants maintained individuality among their various copies (something to do with Q-based security codes that served as an immune-system analog for each instantiation, Coalbridge had been told). But
that
KWAME was not the copy with whom DAFNE was connected. The boyfriend was, instead, a biotech-lab manager in the New Pentagon.

Coalbridge relayed a couple of maneuvering instructions to the helmsman, all of them various presets that he and DAFNE had created while watching recording after recording of various battles with the sceeve and taking into account their own experiences, as well. Zigzag, the old ship pilots had called it during the Second World War. Q-zig was a little different because you didn’t necessarily have to move
through
space to get from one point to another. Q-driving was a lot like the movement of a knight on a chessboard. Although there were lots more rules of when and where you could set down. And the possibility of being in two places at the same time was always an option. As weird as that sounded, it was a constant possibility with travel through Q-space, and one that a good captain learned to use, if not to fully conceptually understand. No matter what, if you didn’t Q-zig before dropping into N-space (where all fights ultimately took place), you could emerge from the Q into a dead drop of rocks or rods that would take you out using your own kinetic energy for the self-slaughter.

So now the NAV portion of the iron triangle of battle readiness was set. NAV-DELTA-ZAP. DELTA for defense, ZAP 1 and ZAP 2 on the twin weaponry hubs the
Humphreys
mounted. The bridge ZAP officer, First Lieutenant Monroe Sakuda, a post-invasion African immigrant (he’d been eleven when the first drop-rods fell), was formerly Kenyan, a Massai who’d grown up speaking Swahili and had a decided accent in English. ZAP controlled both hubs, which were in turn manned by exper and servants and personas in various combinations. DELTA officer was a servant, HUGH, with a lieutenant-commander rank, although the servants had their own complicated hierarchy of position, as well. HUGH manifested as a geist on the bridge but was dispersed vessel-wide, controlling his array of personas and commanding human adjuncts within the vessel-defense systems.

“DELTA, give me standard armor with a twenty percent forward b-layer concentration,” said Coalbridge. “ZAP, unlock the mags on the AM cores.”

“Aye, Captain,” answered DELTA.

“Yes, sir,” said Sakuda, a trace of enthusiasm in his voice that matched Coalbridge’s own. Sakuda cultivated a devil-may-care attitude. Coalbridge had seen him use a handful of one hundred dollar bills to light his pot pipe in Red Houses on Ceres Base several months ago. But he was proficient and precise when on duty, or Coalbridge wouldn’t have had him as ZAP.

They were drawing nearer to the unidentified vessel that had occasioned the alert in the first place. Coalbridge remained in Q-space but ordered the helm to drop his speed to well below
c
.

“Okay, ZAP, get me two nukes up and running, and wake up a couple of personas and beam them keys to man them. Confirm and apply secondary security answerback before unlocking. DAFNE will squirt you the servant archive combination for decompressing the personas priority alpha.”

“Key received and DECOMP underway, Captain,” came the reply. Seconds later: “Servants decompressed and set for batch loading.” The nukes were under a couple of layers of protection against accidental firing, but Coalbridge like to strip his security clean before a possible engagement to be on the safe side. You didn’t want to die with a full arsenal of nukes you could not fire because the launch codes weren’t done shaking hands with a million-hexadecimal security lock.

“Roger that, ZAP,” Coalbridge replied. “Now load the rocks.”

“Number of launcher arrays, Captain?”

Getting the rocks into their slings was a process that was almost as literal as it sounded. The “slings,” however, were powered by coupled-charge rail guns. Some “FTL” shot was bottled up in Q and capable of deployment the moment the vessel dropped from Q—with exactly the same momentum, plus the slingshot throw, that the vessel dropped in with.

“All arrays on line, ZAP!”

“Aye, Captain. Fifty-two slingshots cocked, standard scatter ranging.”

Coalbridge felt better already. Rocks were the space warrior’s best friend. Explosive force was nice for precision work, but there was no thermal convection in a vacuum, no disruptive waves of heat and tornado-like wind. All nukes had going for them was radiation, and spacecraft were pretty good at handling onslaughts of radiation as a matter of course. No, nothing crippled or destroyed artificial structures in space like pure kinetic-energy weaponry—i.e., anything you could throw at your opponent with a modicum of force.

Which was why the old hands at space warfare had nicknamed it the Game of Rocks and Rods. You battered your opponent’s forward defenses with rocks. You blasted your way through his bottle armor with nukes. And then you finished him off with rods—going for a rip, a tear, even a strategic puncture.

Because the not-so-dark secret of spacecraft was that they were actually
anti-space
craft, designed specifically to keep space and all its implications
out.

Coalbridge had been in vessels where bottle failure had exposed them to vacuum several times. There was a cascading chain of fail-safes built in, of course (thanks to Admiral Tillich’s obsession), with several emergency SQUID devices remaining isolated and unentangled on a quantum level with the craft drives and main bottle. The worst had been the Gliese 876 battle with the sceeve attack craft when he’d lost so many. The pseudogravity had cut out as well, and Coalbridge had found himself floating on his PC’s bridge, on an inertial course for the abyss. He’d found purchase, managed to pull himself into the yellow-circled “safe” area where the emergency bottle would be reestablished. But then another blast of rods had pummeled the patrol craft, and the emergency bottle had to wait for the armor surge to clear before turning itself on.

The last thing Coalbridge remembered was the water on his tongue starting to boil. He’d passed out and come to only four minutes after as the atmosphere reached Earth stratosphere pressure. This was a good thing, because the craft persona had been wiped by an EMP and nobody was left alive on the bridge to drive the vessel. Coalbridge had wasted no time hightailing it out using the emergency manual controls (another Tillich requirement on all vessels).

He’d lost the battle itself by underestimating the wiliness of his foe. Most sceeve tactics were predictable, and they usually revolved around the ability to rapidly change formation in a group of vessels. The sceeve were masters of rocks and rods, and they liked to hunt in packs. The groups themselves could be combined, Lego fashion, into larger or smaller units, and the sceeve were very good at transfiguring these formations quickly. What they didn’t do too often was hunt alone.

Coalbridge had been surprised to find the sceeve vessel by itself. It was clearly sniffing out the human activity in the area. The red dwarf was being considered for an advanced base, and several large vessels were in the area performing surveys. Coalbridge had been on outer-perimeter patrol when he’d picked up the barest two-blip minimum on the beta. The sceeve commander was being very careful about pinpointing himself with transmissions.

Coalbridge had taken the patrol craft in silent—but someone somewhere on the vessel was conditioning beta (he’d later learned it was an exper’s fancy new Q-enhanced Palace, left on in a locker), and the sceeve commander had been alerted. He’d jumped into Q, and Coalbridge, cursing, had wasted a throw of perfectly useless rods through the space where he had been. Coalbridge had figured he’d scared his quarry away and was running scans of the area to see if any surveillance paraphernalia had been left behind when the sceeve had popped back into N-space about a kilometer from the point he’d made his exit.

The move was called a “suture.” Normally, you couldn’t return to the immediate vicinity where you’d jumped for a time (and that could vary from a day to a week), because, in essence, you’d used up all the uncertainty you had access to in the area. But there was an exception,
if
you planned for it in advance. With a powerful enough quantum algorithm, you could mark and save your exact entry point and only use
some
of the resolution of spin states necessary to drop into N-space.

Then, when you jumped back to Q-space, you had a choice. Go on to a new destination or double back to your exact entry point to the area, the marked and saved space. It was like making a quantum double stitch in Newtonian space-time. You snapped back to exactly where you’d dropped in before as the remaining entangled uncertain states resolved themselves. Not only was there the suture, there was even a so-far entirely theoretical move called a
double suture
where you made an exact exchange
of quantum state information with
another
vessel and dropped back to N-space precisely where
it
had previously entered the area.

No Extry craft had ever pulled off a suture movement in battle conditions, and Coalbridge was the first to observe a sceeve vessel accomplish one.

I didn’t just observe,
Coalbridge thought.
I took it in the jaw.

At close range, the sceeve vessel had ripped the hell out of Coalbridge’s little PC. He’d fought back, been chased, turned, and fought some more. He’d finally been able to shake the sceeve pursuer by passing through the edges of Gliese 876 D, a Jupiter analog. The bigger sceeve vessel hadn’t been able to follow and exclude entanglement, and the PC had nearly not made it. It had been a desperate gambit.

All told, Coalbridge had lost over half his crew, including a previous XO and good friend. It had been the worst drubbing he’d taken in his career, and he’d felt like a schooled little boy at the hands of the sceeve skipper, whoever he or she was. Playing back images of the fight, Coalbridge had found the sceeve vessel’s markings.

She’d been called the
Powers of Heaven.

Coalbridge checked his largest display once more. There was his blip. There was the sceeve. They were almost on top of one another.

“Helmsman, take us to N-space,” Coalbridge said. “Set us down next to that sceeve, zero polar moment.”

“Aye, Captain,” said the helmsman. “Drop in three, two, one—”

And they were in N-space.

The solar system was a pinprick nearly two light-years away—about as bright as the star Sirius in the Earth night sky would have been.

And there within shouting distance—if, of course, the two vessels hadn’t been separated by the void—was the vessel the Poet had told them about, the vessel they had come to find.

Only it
wasn’t.

This was not a Sporata war vessel.

It
was
sceeve. Coalbridge could instantly see that. It had all the lines. And it was
big
. The
Humphreys
was a baseball next to a basketball in size comparison. And something was very, very wrong with the other craft.

“What the . . .
 
Geist Leher up here, will you DAFNE?”

“Yes, sir.”

Good Lord,
he thought, gazing off the transparent edge of the bridge at the sceeve craft,
what a goddamn piece of
crap
.

If ever there were a sceeve vessel that did not look combat-ready, this was it. Coalbridge had seen supply barges and other sceeve logistics and service craft that were not Sporata vessels, but he’d never seen a sceeve vessel look so . . . slovenly. She was in a slow Newtonian spin, seemingly out of control, like a globe in a gimbal. Her exterior was dinged up, pocked with meteor scars, as if her protecting nanotech was depleted, doing a slack and lackadaisical job.