Guardian of Night by Tony Daniel Read Free Book Online

Well, he’d certainly found a way to make Susten pay for her little gypsum oversight. She could help him clean up. “And Talid?”
    “Yes, Captain?”
    “We now have our orders. We are to join the Sirius armada, yet we are directed to approach with the utmost stealth.”
    Talid immediately understood what this implied. “Lay in a course to the Vara Nebula, Captain?”
    The Vara lay ten degrees north of the galactic axis. A massive second-generation red giant had exploded there a billion years before, and the Vara was a nebula in the midst of birthing a clutch of third-generation star systems—none of which were past the gas-giant phase.
    It was dark. It was a seemingly never-ending system of tunnels and dead-end gaseous canyons. It was the perfect place to hide, and the perfect place to lose any who might be tracking you. Most important of all, it was only two light-years from Earth.
    “Very good,” Ricimer said. “Let your course take us out the Eridani gate.”
    “Aye, sir. The Vara, Eridani gate. And once through, do we have a vector and destination?”
    “Of course, Commander Talid,” Ricimer replied. “We are to have the glorious honor of playing a crucial role in a long-delayed conquest. Our final destination is Sol system, the C planet.”
    “Sol C. Aye, Captain.”

THREE
    7 December 2075
    New Pentagon
    Extry Xenological Division
    CRYPT

    Lieutenant Commander Griffin Leher took the space pen from his pocket once more and pulled another postcard from the coat that was hanging over the back of his cubicle chair.

    You wonder what Dad does at work? He’s a talker. A fancy talker and listener. I wanted to talk to you before you were born. When you were in your mother, I drove her crazy playing music and yacking up a storm to her belly. I put headphones on her tummy, can you believe it, and played, oh, probably Bach and Mozart through them. Predictable, I know, but they’re my favorites.

    Even writing in tiny script, he’d run out of room. He continued on a new postcard.

    It wasn’t till you came out and I held you in my arms that I understood how foolish I’d been. You were such a beautiful little bundle of nothing in particular yet. And yet you had all these built-in bootstraps, idioms of movement and behavior, that every other normal kid on the face of the planet was born with. There you were. You were you , Neddie, if only I’d known what to look for. So, in a way, you are like my work.
    Wish you were here. D.

    Leher made sure of the address, then put the postcard in his outbox and got back to work.
    He hated the sceeve. That went without saying. He was happy to help to kill them.
    But he loved their language. Passionately. It was elegant, rich—even though, yes, sometimes, it stank to high heaven. But he loved it all the more because of that fact.
    How had the sceeve gone so wrong?
    The more you understood them, the less alien they seemed—and the more blameworthy for what they’d done to humanity and—if you believed their own histories—to dozens of other species.
    What they’d done to him.
    Leher sighed and considered the pile of material on his desk. Before him was the entire spread of the intercepted sceeve bursts collected by the intelligence-gathering vessel Chief Seattle, now mysteriously disappeared, and three other craft in the 82 Eridani region. Most of these dispatches concerned the sceeve beta broadcaster who called himself Expresser of Rhythmic Composition in Lofty Elevation. Leher had translated this as “the Poet” in his reports. The name, he’d been told, had stuck among the space-based Xeno officers and was now in general use.
    Since the Skyhook Raid six years ago, it had been known that the sceeve had something like literature, including a body of myth and legend somewhat along the lines of the Odyssey and the Aeneid —tales in epic form that formed the sceeve conception of their own ancient history. Of course with the sceeve you never knew what was original and what