Guardian of Night by Tony Daniel

shake. Earth tones combined with vanilla, almost mushroom-like. Berries and vanilla. Chemical tang. Compared to most sceeve communication, the Poet’s transcripts were verbose and chatty. They were a veritable flower garden of scent, some of them pleasant, some of them oversweet, many uncomfortably sulfuric and carbolic—full of sceeve intensifiers often used to mean “very, very” or “pay attention” or “emergency!” It all depended on the context.
    Whoever the tech was who recorded this had done an excellent job in riding the signal. The usual smell palate was expanded and tuned to particular sceeve idiomatic usage. As a result, the dynamic range of esters was much richer than most recordings of the sceeve. The tech had also, with the last transmission, come up with a way to definitely identify a single broadcaster. There had been a few multiple-origin theories floating around CRYPT, with the idea that there was some sort of cabal at work within the Sporata and all of them were the “Poet.” Leher had never really bought this theory—too many similarities in the Poet’s quirky diction among the broadcasts—and now the single-origin theory was confirmed by this frequency spike the alert tech had spotted. Leher made a mental note to put the tech up for a commendation.
    Except he’d heard that she was likely dead.
    Okay, he had good copy. What was he missing here? He’d read the transcript of the Poet’s last broadcast—nearly one hundred sceeve pages of it—several times since the messenger bottle had delivered it yesterday.

    Our sun is dead. The stars blink broken code.   He kept coming back to that line. It was repeated throughout the transcript as a kind of mantra.
    The smells from the paper were telling their story, too. Leher wrote down their order with a pen and small notepad on his desk.
    “Retranslate with grammar using the secondary-checkpoint hydroxyl,” he said to LOVE’s heart icon.
    “Yes, LTC Leher.”
    He’d wanted LOVE to call him Griff, but she’d refused and seemed a bit miffed at him for asking. Or what he took for miffed. He was no expert on servant emotional analogs. In any case, they’d settled on a shortening of “lieutenant commander” for use in their private communication channels.
    Leher moved his reading hand over the text again. Breathed in.
    The sun is dead. The stars blink broken—
    “Code,” Leher said aloud.
    Leher found himself considering the confirmation that the Poet was likely one individual. And that spike in the thirty-two kilohertz range. Like popping a p on a microphone, but in this case with a chemical signal.
    The occurrences are so regular. What if—
    What if the Poet was doing it on purpose? As a whispered marker.
    Leher thumbed up a projection of the frequency analysis of this particular message on his desk. He laid the printed transcript next to it. Compared chemical trace to sceeve meaning ester.
    Touched each spot on the page where the overmodulation occurred.
    Smelled.
    And he had it. A faint cinnamon accent to the vanillin. Sceeve esters usually occurred discreetly. Rider accents were a call to rearrange esters and restructure syntax in a sceeve paragraph.
    The Poet was chemically popping his p s at certain sentences and not others. Random? A personal tic? Or was he doing it on purpose?
    “LOVE, please make a catalog search for this ‘sun is dead’ cinnamon ester.”
    LOVE’s quietly intense voice. “All right, LTC Leher.” Half a second later. “I’ve found something from Skyhook Non-Euclidean B, LTC Leher.”
    Skyhook Non-Euclidean B. The notoriously untranslated portion of the haul from the Skyhook raid.
    “Not much help there,” Leher said.
    “Sorry, LTC Leher.”
    “That’s all right, LOVE.” Griff sat back, lost in contemplation.
    Had to mean something. Had to . . .  
    After a moment, he turned to the other messages he’d printed out. He read through them all once and then again, mostly sniffing for the cinnamon tang.