The Guardian

 

Hello, what's this? Travelers. We don't get travelers very often here.

It's not a big town. The usual town square, some merchants buying and selling wares made almost exclusively right here, a couple of inns hosting almost exclusively people from right here - sometimes you just want a dinner someone else has cooked. Or you're working on the house, and in the meantime you need a room to sleep in with a solid roof over it. This is a very circular economy, the money in town just goes around and around.

It works. It's quiet. We love it here.

I mean. There is of course the occasional, unavoidable livestock loss. But it's invariably the older, less hardy ones. The ones that might not have made it through the winter. As losses go, it can be overlooked.

In exchange, the roads into and out of town are safe. One hundred percent, guaranteed, no equivocation. Safe. And the whole town is safe. Kids can play outside after dark. Strangers are not a threat - guaranteed.

So when the travelers come sauntering up toward the east gate - I can barely remember the last time the gate was even closed, even before the underbrush was allowed to grow up so close to the town wall, that's how safe this town is - I was there to meet them.

There were four of them: three men, one woman. The woman was the tallest, with muscles, armor and a sword. The sword looked a little short for her but otherwise she looked competent. A couple of scars attested that she wasn't inexperienced. The men were Small, Medium and Large; the largest carried a hammer and shield but looked barely strong enough to use the hammer as a weapon. Maybe he would be using it to split wood? He almost certainly wasn't a fighter, but the other two...maybe.

"Welcome, friends...if friends you be."

They jumped. They hadn't spotted me in my hiding spot. I'll be honest, I do enjoy surprising folks. I'm pretty good at staying out of sight. Being a guard can be unexciting; you find ways to pass the time. Me, I hide. The kids love it when I pop out and surprise them.

"Hello? We're here to help you with your problem."

"Help is always welcome. But to what problem are you referring?"

"The word we heard, from three towns away," and the tall young man with the war hammer gestured vaguely over his shoulder, meaning there were about nine towns to choose from in less than a week's walk, "was that there's a monster here threatening the town. And if that's the case, we'd like to help you get rid of it."

Hmm. "'Threatening the town,' you say? Are you sure you heard that rumor correctly?" They looked at each other. "Well...yes? They told us this town, they said there was a monster and a threat."

Oh dear. "Ah, poo. I'm afraid you've been taken in. There is a monster, but he's only here to deal with threats, not be a threat. There's no enmity between the dragon and the town at all, but an equitable exchange of services and goods. Townsfolk get a guardian, dragon gets a steer once in a while. It works out for everyone."

The travelers shuffled their feet. "That doesn't make sense. Will you please show yourself? It's strange, talking to a person we can't see." As their spokesman addressed me, Small was moving carefully around, getting away from the middle of the road.

"Stay put, please. Stay where I can see you clearly."

"But we can't see you."

"Yes, well, you're not the gatekeeper, and I am. I'm deciding whether to let you through the gate or not."

"We're only here to fight the dragon."

"Why? Did he insult your mother, or something? Leave him be, he's not bothering you and we'd much prefer you not bother him. We get along around here. Don't start any trouble and there won't be any trouble. That was the deal between the town and the dragon, and it's held so far."

They talked amongst themselves. I couldn't hear it all, but one thing I did catch was, "...doesn't sound like he's afraid of any dragons or anything else..."

"I think you folks have wasted a trip. Listen, it's getting late and you shouldn't travel after dark. Why don't you take a couple of rooms at the inn for the night, and you can start your journey back home in the morning?"

Again, they conferred. "Well, okay. Where is it?"

I stood up from my hiding spot in the bushes and pointed with my tail over the town wall. "It's right over there on the far side of the square. See the sign? 'The Dragon's Deal,' very clean and the doors lock from the inside, though I assure you that if any harm comes to you in the night, I'll harm the ones that did it ere long. Okay?"

A-ha. The men are making The Face, the face that means Oh Dear and Oh Shit and We're Screwed all at once, but the woman is smiling. Clearly, she's been around. "Okay."

I stretched my wings briefly. They do cramp up when I hold still to hide. I'm very good at hiding. The kids love it when I surprise them.

-end-

Shifted

 

There's an old song, I don't know who by or even what it's about. But the dominating line is, "I'm blue." Blah blah blah, I'm blue, ah-bah-dee, I'm blue blah blah blah.

That's me. I'm blue. I'm so fucking blue.

Don't look back. Look back and there's a red so dim it's beyond black. It's a fuller awareness of nothing, not just the absence of light, but light sucked from your eyes by an enraged continuum.

So look ahead. Squint. Turn the rad shield as high up as it'll go and hope like hell it actually works. It's not though. I can feel it not working.

Breach Lead Specialist. Blue. Hull surface, unmarked stealth ship in a widely acknowledged interdiction zone. Everybody knows you stay the hell out. Hasn't been seriously contested in nearly twenty years.

Except today. This guy - these guys, I guess - sneak in quiet and dark, coasting with engines cold, the radar cross section of a small mote of dust. We might never have spotted him, except our stealth is better. And we can spot us okay, then again we don't use radar. Emitting sensor energies isn't stealthy, so we don't do it. We use other methods.

So we spotted them. And with our better stealth we intercepted, quiet and dark - quieter and darker, with the radar cross section of a we don't have a radar cross section. We're not something you spot.

The intruder's surface is fuzzy. Good stealth usually is, absorbing detection energies with fractally discontinuous contours. The science people have better terminology, that's me remembering it to the best of my ability. You ask them how it works, they'll tell you. You ask me, I tell you it works great. That's all I know.

Boots aren't magnetic because hulls usually aren't steel. They're electronic, glomming themselves into the electron orbits of materials' molecules. Even extremely stable stuff like lead and nitrogen, they stick. So fuzzy polymer hulls aren't a problem, I stay put.

Good thing. Or maybe not, come to think of it.

As soon as I made contact, the target one-eightied and lit up. With me on the hull. I'm still on the hull.

These boots will hold against nearly two gee which is good, because this ship - not as big as a Marine frigate but not a dinky little miner either - whipped right around. I'd call it a full five meters per second rate, nothing to sneeze at. And then she lit up.

A marine frigate under full burn can hit five gees if the pilot hates you. You'll sure as hell hate the pilot by the time a burn like that is over. This? I don't know what this is. After the flip, there was no acceleration. There was a glare from the drive bell and let me just say that was fucking weird. Marine drives are completely invisible from the front. You'll never spot a glimmer from the drive plume. From behind you can see the drive very clearly, bright as hell for sure but the reaction mass is monatomic carbon and the exhaust temperature is dead cold - like I said, our stealth is damn good.

But this ship's drive flared like a goddamn sun, so bright that I could see the glare sparkling on individual grains of dust even from where I stood, on the forward ventral curve of the hull. I wasn't even facing the right way, and I could see it.

And then I couldn't. Because I am blue.

The entire universe comes streaming from directly in front of me, compressed to an infinitesimal point of unbelievable light that contains all the energy radiated by every source everywhere, all pouring in from directly ahead. Imagine that, all that energy cranked up and up by your incident velocity - the light isn't going faster than light, of course not - but I sure as hell am. Shit, some of this energy pouring into me might just be sound, cranked up so high into the EM spectrum by our relative velocity that it shoots into me like a laser through a drop of water. Visible light hits like hard gamma rays,; gamma rays, hell, I don't know. Neutrinos, maybe? I'm getting cooked like a goddamn Hot Pocket out here. Colonial Marine environment battle suit shielding is second to none, but what the hell. Nobody ever expected us to be outside a hull in cee-plus, the energy of all of creation raining down, blasted beyond a blueshifted white hailstorm of chaos.

If I look straight sideways, I can see stars going by. Actually see them. To the rear, what I can see of the rear, a fading surly murk that recedes into oblivion, darkness. Space isn't dark but damn, that is dark. That is Dark.

Look ahead, then. Because Dark is way too much nothing. All the radiation shooting through me is probably going to kill me in a few minutes, might as well wonder at the view. All that energy. Now we know what cee-plus looks like, it's amazing. Mesmerizing. Beautiful, if it wasn't killing me.

How in the hell did these people ever develop cee-plus?

And how did they spot me?

Who are they?

I reckon I might find out if they stop soon.

I am so blue.

Echoes of Love: The Adventures of Human Gina

“I call the ship Gruvmaja because I love her.

“And she loves me back.

“You could say, how can a soulless thing, an unalive mechanical husk with no heart, no mind, love?  But she has a soul.  In fact she has a lot of souls.

“She was built in a small factory.  It’s a company of people who all came together to conceive the design.  They ran simulations and modified the design, they ran more simulations and modified the modifications.  Then they built a prototype and modified some more.  They built software, and modified that.

They built the ship.  They built this ship.”

Gina was almost singing now.  In a whirlwind tour of the shipyards where the tough little single-crewed, long-duration mining utility – the longstay single – had been constructed, she had fallen into a kind of love with not just the ship, but the entire process of how it had come to be, forged from a mountain of purified lunar aluminum, basaltic fiber-reinforced composites and sweat.  And out of that kind of love had slowly grown the real thing.

“They’ve built a few ships.  They’re similar to each other.  They’re not a big company so they can’t afford to branch out much.  But they’re smart and passionate.  The hulls are more or less modular so there are some identical dimensions here and there.  But none of the ships are exactly like this one.  As soon as they start building a ship, it begins to deviate from the initial specification.  Right from the very first casting. 

“I call her Gruvmaja, the Mine Mother.  She watches over the mine and the miners.  Take care of her and she’ll take care of you.

“Her soul is a smorgasbord of all the other souls that came together to build her, welded into the seams and grown into the viewport crystal.  Everyone who’s ever touched her with even a moment’s respect has left their share.

“You don’t love things.  Don’t love things that can’t love you back.  But love isn’t as simple as that.  I don’t have to have the people in front of me to love them, to respect them.  I don’t love the photograph of my mother, but I love my mother and it’s a picture of her.  I love my friends, not their messages – but I treasure their messages because the messages are from them.  I go back through the messages and remember how I felt, laugh again at the jokes, cry at the struggles.  I love the messages for my friends’ sake, I love the picture for my mother’s sake.  They’re my relationships with them, and totems of the relationships that remind me how I’m part of them.  We belong to each other.  It’s a belongingness that reflects back and forth.

“So I love the Mine Mother, I respect and care for her because she’s mine.  She protects and cares for me because I’m here for her.”

The chant had gone around and around her mind before, a lucid dream that tried to square the relationships of purpose and practice.  If the ship existed for the purpose of mining, had mining come to be a practice so that the ship could exist?  Did humanity evolve into a spacefaring race so that the asteroids could become more than clods of accreted dust wandering around one insignificant star?

Admittedly, some of these thoughts could feel a little overwrought and whenever she allowed herself to realize that, they would come to an abrupt halt and the dream’s end, silly though it might be when examined, left her feeling a little sad.  It felt nice – spiritually fulfilling - believing at some level, however briefly, that she was part of something great.

“It’s not that I love the ship specifically, do you see?  Except I do, too.

“All these hearts and minds have touched it.  Have touched her.  They thought carefully, they worked hard.  They touched every portion of this ship.  Some of them may have said prayers over it.  Some were fiercely competitive.  Some were watching out for my safety.  By extension they all touch me.  And I have poured a lot of myself into this ship too.  No other ship in space is like this one.  I’ve put time and energy into making her what she is, all that work doesn’t go away.  All that energy doesn’t disappear.  It’s all still here, and here, and here.  It’s all me, it’s all those people, it’s all Gruvmaja.  And I love her.”

She patted the hull gently, pat pat pat.   By Newton’s Third Law, the hull patted her back exactly as gently.

“All those people…all those souls left an echo on this ship, like a baby changing her mother even as she grows inside.  All those people left a bit of themselves here to become this, to shape Gruvmaja.  I love what they have done.  I love what they have put in my care, and I promise every minute to take care of that care and not waste it.

“To not love their work, to not love them, to not love her…would break my heart.

“And I love myself too much to let that happen.”