Guardian of Night (2 page)

“HQ is translating the vessel designation as the
Powers of Heaven,
” said the XO.

Japps nodded. She’d taken the message that contained the name translation and had been a bit disappointed to see she no longer could refer to the target vessel as the
Brown Turd
, the temporary call sign she’d assigned the craft.

Japps touched the chroma screen again and zoomed in on a particular spike in the audio.

“What’s that?” asked the XO.

“That,” said Japps, “is a characteristic ten-decibel pop at a thirty-two-kilohertz frequency. I call it the thirty-two spike.”

“Okay, what does it mean?”

“Every one of the raw feeds has it,” said Japps. “And it doesn’t always come at the same place, so I don’t think it’s solely equipment-related.”

“What else could it correlate with?” The XO seemed genuinely puzzled.

That’s because the Poet’s still just a concept to her,
Japps thought.
She’s not really picturing him making these beta broadcasts. How it would look. And smell.

“It’s a popped
p
, XO.”

“A what?”

“You know how sometimes you get those airpuffs on
p
and
b
s when you’re talking into an old-fashioned microphone, one without a pop screen?”

“Nope, not really.”

“Trust me. This is the same thing, only with odor.”

“Not following you, Japps.”

“It’s chemical. The sceeve equivalent to a plosive in our spoken languages,” Japps said. “It’s something like overextension on his sensing microphone’s dynamic range in an oxygen-helium atmospheric mix. But in our guy’s case, the effect’s produced not with overpressurization by spoken word but via oversaturation with a chemical signal.”

“So the Poet—”

“Pops his
p
s. He’s got bad technique. Or he’s doing it on purpose for some reason.”

“And you’re sure about this?”

“Oh, yeah. See here?” she pointed to a prime example. “And this from two weeks ago.”

The XO made a motion with her hand, and the chroma screen floated in closer to her eyes. “Yeah, I see it. I do.” She turned to Japps. “Thirty-two spike, huh. Good work. Have to talk to the cap, but I can just about guarantee you another stripe under that crow if this holds up.”

“Thanks, XO. Just get me the E-6 rate so I can upgrade to a 140 PB Pocket Palace Plus.”

“You and your tech fetish, Japps—”

Bink.

And the Poet’s transmission was done. Japps quickly secured and verified her redundancies and labeled the session with the date.

For nearly two months now the
Chief Seattle
had been stalking the sceeve craft, always attempting to remain in beta range for whenever the Poet felt the urge to broadcast. He was saying things the sceeve simply had never said before. Seditious, rebellious stuff, verging on the crazy. He seemed utterly “unsceeve,” as a matter of fact. Nothing like the sceeve command who had run their invasion of Earth like a factory operation with a slaughterhouse component. In fact, the Poet seemed almost human in his sensibilities. And the fact that there was trouble in the sceeve ranks—if the Poet truly had a large audience (another unknown)—was the best news humanity had received in a long time.

Attention, you dry-gilled strugglers! Attention, you children of the promise broken! You who have spent your miserable lives soaking your feet in the feeding pool of untruth, cant, fibs, propaganda, and hatred!

Rise up! Shake off this dust!

Calling for the downfall of the Administration? Encouraging an uprising within the Sporata ranks? It was beyond incendiary. It was fascinating. Plus, the Poet was extolling a philosophy or a religion that was, so far as anybody knew, completely at odds with everything humans thought they knew about the sceeve.

Your history is a history of war.

Wars waged to steal and to hoard.

Wars waged to justify the unconscionable.

Civil wars.

Genocides.

The Shiro itself is nothing more than a hive for ongoing fighting, a hideous fortress that ate a beautiful and wondrous city-in-the-stars.

Yet still there is hope!

What the Poet preached was a philosophy or belief or something having to do with both—Japps didn’t think the distinction mattered very much, anyway—that had been translated as “Mutualism.”

Attention! Attention! From behind the veil of lies, a simple message of truth.

I am nothing but a vessel, a pointer toward the feeding pool that never runs dry.

I am no leader, only a poet.

And I say: your life, our lives, they do not have to be this way.

Parasitism can give way to symbiosis. It must.

Regulation must give way to Mutualism, or we’re doomed.

Hear me, you dry-gilled strugglers! Wet your gills with my words.

Hear me, you children of the broken promise! Learn a new way of giving. The galactic economy is no zero-sum heat exchange. The calling of the symbiot is not for domination, but to aid. The symbiot creates; the symbiot is not a distributor, but a maker. The symbiot does not regulate, but trusts in plurality, the profligate creativity of the universe.

The symbiot is our only way home.

So, down with Regulation!

I do not speak as a warrior. Nor as one who wishes to coerce. What I give you is words, only words. But words that point to the new, the old that has been forgotten or overlooked, the extravagant universe!

Give me your feet, you dry-gilled strugglers. Wet your gills. Drink it up!

Down with the Administration!

Thrive the symbiosis!

And then the Poet’s tone changed, and he would begin reading his poems or songs or whatever they were. Japps tended to side with the faction that thought the Poet was a kind of pirate-radio DJ among the sceeve beta operators, broadcasting his thoughts into the ether for anyone listening at the right time to hear. In any case, he seemed to be knowledgeable enough about beta signals to avoid detection—a very difficult feat. Japps wasn’t even sure
she
could figure out how to do that.

Usually the beginning of any message was filled with the Poet’s political cant, kind of the sceeve version of a Peepsie protest rally. It was only with a careful listen—and after you’d heard a bunch of normal sceeve broadcasts—that you figured out the Poet was having fun with the usual sceeve catchphrases, that he was delivering an opening monolog before he started the main event: reading his poetry. Or songs. Or whatever you wanted to call it. Some of his material was either original or at least from an unknown source. It wasn’t in any of the captured databases, that was for sure. But then there would be some of the poems that matched up with known sceeve works, usually from some ancient, pre-Administration writer.

And then there were the poems that were by human writers. “Gleaned,” as the sceeve termed it.

Fucking thieves.

Fucking sceeve.

The poems were famous ones. Marvell, Rimbaud, Lorca, Emily Dickinson. There seemed to be no connecting theme and method for when a human poem got dropped in a broadcast. Japps’s own opinion was that the choice was down to whatever happened to tickle the Poet’s fancy.

She remembered when she’d first seen the translation on a Dickinson:

Safe in their alabaster chambers,
 

Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,
 

Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,
 

Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.

And had gone back to the original sceeve signal and figured out how sceeve rhymes worked. It was always the aromatic portion of the chemistry that was duplicated. The fucking scum-crawling murdering sceeve did have some cool aspects about them, Japps had to admit. Which took nothing away from the fact that she wanted to see them all dead, dead, dead. And killed in horrible ways, too.

Bink.

Over the SIGINT loudspeakers, the crackle of more incoming signal.

What the heck? Another Poet show? She called up a visual on her chroma monitor, checked.

The Poet
never
broadcasted back-to-back. HQ figured randomness was an important part of the method he used to avoid detection.

She checked a portion of the feed. There was the thirty-two spike.

It
was
the Poet again.

Didn’t he realize he was exposing himself to discovery? If she could figure out how to identify him, then so could the other sceeve. And two broadcasts from the same source was bad form. Japps shuddered to think what the sceeve might do to a captured traitor.

What was going on? It had to be important.

Whatever it was, Japps had a gut feeling that she was tuning in to the Poet’s final broadcast.

And then LARK delivered the translation prelim. And for the second time in her young life, Japps’s world changed yet again forever.

The Poet was calling out to the humans.

Directly.

It was a cry for help.

And then there was one scream that went on for a very long time.

ONE

1 December 2075

Vicinity of Beta Geminorum, aka Pollux

Shiro Portal

Captain Sub-receptor Arid Ricimer stood stiff-backed in the vacuum of space and breathed in the silence absolute. He’d long made it a habit to ride out of harbor on a new command while standing on the exterior observation deck of his vessel. The deck was a feature built into all Administration vessels larger than a skirmish pod. Its electro-weak pseudogravity and silver-plated brightwork were wholly unnecessary features in a starcraft in these times, but for now he was glad of the inflexibility in Sporata design. He loved to face the naked stars at least once during a mission, to smell the universe bare, and this was the perfect place to do it.

The experience reminded him of his boyhood and the dangerous trips he and his friends had made onto the hull of the habitat in which they lived. His friends had gotten over the urge, learned to stay inside where it was safe.

Ricimer had never learned that lesson.

“Captain Ricimer, your presence is requested on the bridge.”

The fruit-scented voice of Governess, part of the vessel computer, whispered in his mind. He’d have to answer eventually, but he could afford to ignore it a little longer.

The naked stars. Space. Emptiness. A hush beyond hush. He loved it almost more than life itself. Perhaps too much. His adoration of space had kept him away from home for many cycles, away and always promising to return, to sell his command to a youngster, take a half-depletion allowance, settle down.

Make love to his beautiful wife every day for an entire cycle. Carefully transfer his important memories to his children.

He had not retired, of course. Not after twenty-five cycles a sailor.

Too late for any of that now. Del and the children were gone.

Gone, gone,
echoed the ancestral voices within Ricimer, almost as real to him as his own thoughts.
We are cut off. Our purpose destroyed. Lost.

But he was not destroyed. Not quite. He would not let himself be. And he had been dealing with emptiness for his entire adult life. The vacuum. The stars.

So he was going back to them. His stars.

Again the other interior voice, the more insistent, far less welcome voice than that of the ancestors, spoke.

“Captain, it is most urgent that you return to the bridge.” Governess’s interiorized communication channel again, a mental wave of gagging perfume. “Receptor Milt requests your presence to resolve a logistics discrepancy before the vessel clears Shiro Portal.”

Will you please shut up?
The thought was fully articulated, but he had long practice at not allowing the computer to pick up his thoughts. The ability to shut out Governess was one of the privileges of rank in the Sporata.

He leaned forward onto the rail, stretched to his full height, arms out, palms up. Soaring.

Almost.

Ricimer was tall for his species, nearly two meters. His was humanoid, bilaterally symmetric, but with a facial muzzle of folded membranes similar to the multiple crenellations of a fruit bat’s nose. He had no mouth. His eyes were irisless, black, with gaping pupils that were double the size of a human’s. They were protected by a clear membrane that cycled through a momentary opaque phase every few seconds—a protective mechanism against the universal background gamma radiation of the vacuum. Ricimer’s species had evolved in space.

His wife before she’d died had often called him craggy and told him he was handsome for an old male getting close to one hundred cycles. He accepted that she might have been right. None of that had ever mattered much to him, and it mattered even less now that she was gone.

He wore the sleeveless black tunic of an officer. The fabric was silver-rimmed and gathered at the waist by a supple cord of pure silver. From the cord his ceremonial captain’s knife dangled in its silver scabbard. The knife was generally a useless trinket, but it was required adornment for generations of Guardian officers. Sporata traditions changed
exceedingly
slowly.

With the expert eyes of his species, its built-in astral sense of balance, he scanned the constellations of the Shiro’s current position, quickly picked out the points of light nearest to his destination.

Tau Ceti. Epsilon Eridani.

He squinted hard, and the motion upped the magnification of his eyes nearly ten times normal. He zoomed in with his scleral muscles.

He was returning to old battlegrounds.

The Cygni system, with its twin red dwarves in a mad dash about one another. Bright young Sirius. The Centauris.

Sol.

He was going back, but to think them
his
stars? Foolish.

Ricimer laughed out his nose, as his species did, and his humorous esters, propelled by their own momentum, floated away into the darkness.

No, the stars didn’t give a damn if an individual named Ricimer lived, died, or had never existed in the first place. How could you not respect such obliviousness, such complete lack of purpose? It was as if the stars were spitting in the eyes of the Administration and its Regulators. It was as the ancient pre-civil-war ode “Star Song” put it: