Read Guardian of Night for Free Online Page A

sound, the skull slowly opened. Tissue parted, revealing the neural mass known as the sensory conglomerate. This was not Milt’s brain. He didn’t have one. No Guardian did. Their nervous system was distributed, with processing centers located in the chest. This was merely the Guardian equivalent to the human olfactory bulb. It also contained several language pre-processing centers, since for Guardians smell was speech.
    Ricimer didn’t care about any of that. What he was after lay nearer to the surface, should be just under the rind. He felt around inside, moving aside tissue, lumps of organs and glands.
    Remembering that night, two cycles ago. The night the Special Depletion was declared and the Sol gleaning operation put on hold in order to deal with the Mutualist menace. The night that ended with Ricimer and Milt on their backs, gazing up at the blue-white planet the inhabitants called Earth.
    The shared night of melancholy and revelry on Sol C’s satellite, called the Moon by the primitive locals, in one of the little blister-habitat bars that followed any invasion force around.
    Milt drunk with NH 4 whippets and whatever other drugs they could get their hands on. Ricimer playing along.
    Plotting, even then.
    Milt passed out, dead drunk.
    The injector pistol he’d stolen from pharmacist’s stores on his destroyer billet, the Long Arm of Distributive Justice. It was meant for field surgery, the introduction of subdermal medicinal-patch constructors.
    But Ricimer wanted it for another purpose.
    That purpose was to hide the technology he’d stolen from the humans. For primitive as they were, like many trading species, there was one product at which they’d proved overly skilled.
    The creation of computer viruses.
    It was the perfect plan. Hide the tech where the DDCM monitors and Directorate of Innovation Assimilation inspectors would never look in a million cycles. Inside the head of a DDCM agent. Allow him to smuggle it back home. Then find a way to extract it. The original motivation: to sell it back to the Administration on the Souk, the Shiro’s black market.
    Ricimer had felt no particular shame in hiding the Earth tech at the time. Pocketing bits of tech to sell on the Souk was practically de rigueur for a Sporata officer. The Administration was aware of the trade but didn’t crack down so long as it didn’t get out of hand. It was a tacit way of keeping its best officers entrepreneurial to the extent they needed to be, and relatively well-off. The equivalent of what a small private plot for gardening and lichen cultivation would mean if he were an agrarian.
    He’d overthought it, and the extraction had proved a trifle difficult. Meanwhile, life had not taken the course he’d intended. He’d foundered on debris.
    He’d lost everything.
    Almost everything.
    Everything, everything , echoed the ancestral voices.
    He felt it, there inside Milt’s opened skull. A hard little square of material. Yes. His gripping gills closed around it. Yes!
    He pulled the square out. Wiped it off as best he could. Held it up to the light. It glistened a dull black. Several metal tines formed a keyboard pattern along one side of the square. The square itself was covered in markings that Ricimer could not understand. Visually based writing. How strange to think in such a manner.
    If he could have read it, he would have seen that the square said, in English: “500 PB Extended Memory.”
    “All right, Lamella, I’ve got it,” he said. “If you want to incorporate this program and make use of the Sol C hardware, you must again swear to the terms. Key word: ‘Teshinaw.’”
    “Key word accepted,” Lamell replied brightly. “My interior kill-switch is now activated, Captain Ricimer, as we agreed. Please place the storage device on the projection table. We do not have much time.”
    Ricimer jerked himself to his feet and stumbled over to the table, feeling quite exhausted now.
    A little longer. Hold course.
    He placed the