The starseed-lure network gave Nessus a fairly precise location. He might still reach the Outsiders first.
He had to.
Nessus sent a belated reply to Nike—another lie, another deception, to fester between them—and then Aegis dropped into hyperspace. He must get to the Outsiders first.
The universe had gone insane.
WHY NOT DROPPED from hyperspace, to find . . . absolutely nothing.
Sigmund studied the bridge sensor displays, smiling with a serene confidence he did not feel. Eric and Kirsten stood by expectantly, both looking like they hadn’t slept in a week. Crew across the ship waited to hear good news over the intercom. It was all they had to do, beyond waiting to repair whatever next failed on this jury-rigged hulk. They were here to support Sigmund. Endangered, because of him.
If only he and Kirsten had gotten back aboard Aegis. They never got the chance. Nessus changed access codes, whether from suspicion or routine. A second mysterious fainting spell was not credible. Then even the option of more direct action was lost, as Concordance business reclaimed Nessus’ attention. The Puppeteer left, and Earth’s location remained lost.
But we have the Outsider coordinates. Make it work.
“All right.” Sigmund rubbed his hands briskly. “Spotting Outsiders on passive sensors was too much to expect. Kirsten found out where they were, not where they are. Eric, a radar ping.”
“Aye-aye, Captain,” Eric said. “Now we sit and wait.”
Sigmund shook his head. “Now we use the telescope, and look around the nearest suns for starseeds. Find a starseed and the odds are good the Outsider ship is following. Just don’t ask me why.”
“Look near?” Kirsten said. “That’s rather vague. And it’s not like I understand what we’re looking for.”
Sigmund had Bey’s description, but none of his eloquence, to go by. “Usually it’s only a node maybe a mile or two across. Could be taken for a boulder, a little asteroid. We’d never see it. But sometimes . . . well, most of that ball is a gossamer-thin, silvery sail, tightly rolled. Unfurled, it’s thousands of miles across. When it catches the sunlight . . .”
A lump caught in Sigmund’s throat. He had been a bastard to Shaeffer. Maybe, just maybe, the man was having a decent life now, beyond Sigmund’s reach. He hoped so.
“Got it,” Kirsten said. “Look for light glints that don’t behave like planets.”
Hours later, neither radar nor random peering had found a thing. Sigmund asked a question whose answer he dreaded. “Kirsten, did you recover a date for Nessus’ visit to the Outsiders?”
“You never wanted to know,” she said.
“I do now. How long ago?”
She checked her pocket comp. “The coordinates on Aegis were last accessed about two and a half years ago, but didn’t Nessus say he hired another ship? A Known Space human ship?”
Sigmund twitched: I died, Nessus scooped me up, he went to the Outsiders, and I was awakened.
How had Nessus put it? “It became urgent to find the antimatter before the ARM did. Buying the coordinates from the Outsiders no longer seemed a waste of resources. For technical reasons I hired a human ship and crew for the mission. We found Ship Fourteen. . . .”
Only Nessus had glossed over a minor detail. He waited a couple years to revive me. Why? If we get through this, Sigmund thought, I’ll ask.
The key was getting through it. “Two-plus years? That’s not too bad. The Outsiders don’t use hyperdrive. They can accelerate to near light effectively instantaneously, so they’re somewhere in a sphere of about two light-years’ radius.”
“Somewhere within. Do you know how big that volume is?” Kirsten asked.
“It’s a lot smaller than the whole tanj galaxy,” Sigmund snapped, “and we can cross it in days. Plot a search pattern. Err on the side of searching nearer stars. We hop, look around with radar and telescope for, I’ll say ten hours, and then repeat.”
“Aye-aye, Captain.” From Kirsten’s lips, the words were skeptical.
“All hands,” Eric called over the intercom. “We’ll be returning to hyperspace soon. Details to follow.” Kirsten plotted their course with her usual eerie dispatch, and they did.
As the nothingness beyond the void engulfed them, Sigmund wondered how Sabrina was faring. His final advice to her, before Why Not left on its desperate mission, had been, “Stall.”
THE COLONIST WOMAN, safe behind an isolation partition, droned on nonstop. With no encouragement, she would segue into minutiae. The so-called rights of the people. Emergency assistance. Satellite services disrupted by debris from the attack. A sudden urgent need to erect a tall wall around the pathetic Arcadian government compound, for protection against the apparently inexhaustible supply of extremists.
Now she had somehow diverted herself onto the resumption of grain exports. “. . . So many of the fields that once grew Hearthian grains have been replanted in terrestrial crops. Cargo floaters have been dispersed to new uses. We’ll need new shipments of seeds and Hearthian fertilizer. And ships, of course.”
At least negotiations were progressing with the extremists who occupied the planetary drive facility. If he had to, he would return to the Fleet for a shipload of robots. They would clear the building.
But things were so close. He could taste success.
He would wait a little longer.
ERIC WALKED INTO the relax room, looking apologetic. “Nothing, Sigmund.”
“Thanks.” Sigmund managed a smile. “That’s progress. We’ve found one more place the Outsiders aren’t.”
What was this, their fourth hop? For an elder race who had roamed the galaxy forever, the Outsiders were deucedly hard to find. Sigmund took a long sip of coffee from his drink bulb. “This is taking so long, you’d think we were looking for Ship Thirteen.”
Unlucky numbers were as foreign a concept as games of chance. “This will take a while, Eric. Hold on.” He called Kirsten on the bridge. “You’re clear for the next leg of the search.”
She called a warning over the intercom, and plunged them back into the nothingness.
Something nagged at the borders of Sigmund’s consciousness, something he and Eric had just been talking about. He let it go. They were talking about superstitious nonsense.
At least explaining superstition gave Sigmund something to do for two days in hyperspace. Knocking on wood. Black cats (actually, any cats). Walking under ladders. Tarot cards. He had not quite exhausted the topic when they returned to Einstein space.
Once again, they found nothing.
“THAT INCOMPETENT FOOL!” Achilles raved. “He got himself captured.”
Harsh discordances echoed across the ship. Baedeker cantered to the bridge. “Who?” he asked cautiously.
“Nessus.” Achilles summarized the message from Hearth. “He got a short message off before his comp was confiscated.”
Baedeker chose his notes carefully. Achilles in a rage was frightening. “Captured by whom? Where?”
New Terra hung in the main bridge display, and Achilles straightened a neck directly at it. “There. He sneaked back to negotiate secretly with his friends. Fool that he is, he allowed them aboard his ship. Now they control Aegis.”
A stealthy ship, its location unknown to Achilles’ spies. Baedeker quivered: He could not dissolve a ship whose location he did not know. Worse, Aegis would have a Fleet space-traffic-control transponder. Change the transponder’s identification code and the captured ship could approach the Fleet, even Hearth itself, with no questions asked.
Baedeker shook off the horror that threatened to paralyze him. They—he—had attacked the New Terrans. Now the humans had a weapon. “I will begin a search for the ship.”
“And I will—” Achilles stopped midphrase, harmonies dangling. “I will await your success. Until then, you will say nothing about Nessus or his ship to our human ‘guest.’ ”
STEP, STEP, TURN.
Sigmund was exhausted, but he could not sleep. He could no
t stay still. He could not let the crew even suspect his doubt. And so he paced about his tiny cabin.
Step, step, turn.
Six jumps already on their search pattern, and nothing found. Back and forth across the volume of space where logic said the Outsiders must be. Fear of failure gnawed at Sigmund, scarier than the nothingness on the other side of his cabin wall. This search wasn’t working, and he knew of nothing else to try.
Step, step, turn.
The intercom emitted three quick clicks: a pending announcement. “Dropping out of hyperspace, in five, four, three . . .” Kirsten had the con, and it was her voice. She sounded as weary as Sigmund felt.
Step, step, turn.
Each time Why Not dropped from hyperspace, Eric retrieved hyperwave radio messages from a remote comm buoy. Sabrina was reportedly still on Achilles’ ship, supposedly negotiating—a hostage. And Omar, out of touch with everyone when Nessus contacted him, had made a judgment call: He told Nessus about Why Not and where Sigmund had taken it.
What Nessus would do with that information was anyone’s guess.
Sigmund squeezed water from a drink bulb into a cupped palm, and splashed it on his face. The tepid water helped, just a little.
It was time again to act hopeful and positive. Sigmund opened the cabin door, to go help man the sensors on the bridge.
A victorious cheer burst from the intercom: Kirsten shouting with glee. “I’ve spotted a starseed!”
71
“Calling Outsider ship. Calling Outsider ship. This is the human starship Why Not.”
The starseed was more or less a light-year away. That distance was an estimate, based on a guess at how much light the sail reflected. Eric had likewise approximated its velocity, reasoning from the apparent tilt of the scarcely detectable sail and the red-shifting of sunlight reflected off the sail from the nearest sun.
“Calling Outsider ship. Calling Outsider ship. This is the human starship Why Not.” The message repeated endlessly, recorded by Sigmund in Interworld, each time hyperwaved along a slightly different path.
Hope that the Outsiders with whom Nessus once parlayed had chased this starseed. How soon after the meeting did they start their pursuit? How fast did they travel? What might have distracted them along the way?
Finding the starseed reduced their enormous search sphere into a still-vast cone. If Sigmund allowed himself to dwell on all the variables, he would go insane.
“Calling Outsider ship. Calling Outsider ship. This is the human starship Why Not.”
“This is Outsider—”
The cheering was so loud Sigmund had to replay the incoming message. “This is Outsider Ship Fourteen. Greetings, Why Not. Can we help you?”
“We have information to trade,” Sigmund hyperwaved back along the same bearing. “May we join you?”
“We are about nine-tenths a light-year apart,” Ship Fourteen answered. “We’ll wait for you.”
How far was that? Because of Nessus, Sigmund had no idea how long Earth’s year was. New Terra’s calendar followed Hearth’s, measuring years that had lost all physical significance ages ago. The Puppeteers’ treachery was much of what Sigmund had to trade. He would not let slip that secret by asking for the distance to be specified in Puppeteer light-years.
There had to be something he remembered, something Nessus did not think to remove, that related to the calendar.
Maybe there was.
New Terrans were puritanical about sex, Sigmund thought. They probably got it from the Puppeteers. “Kirsten. Excuse me if this is a bit forward. What fraction of a year does it take a woman to have a baby? From conception?”
She blushed. “About five-sixths of a year.”
On Earth, if you were lucky enough to get a birthright, it was nine months. Ergo: “On Earth, it’s three-quarters. An Earth year is about eleven percent longer than your year.”
Three days later, Why Not emerged again from hyperspace.
A city made of ribbons lit by its own artificial sun—exactly as Bey had once described it, the Outsider ship waited for them.
Hovering alongside, tiny in comparison, was a GP hull.
IF NOT FOR Beowulf’s stories, Sigmund would never have found his way here. And if not for Bey’s stories as warning, Sigmund would now, surely, have gone mad.
Giant cat-o’-nine-tails clad in exoskeletons came out to Why Not. So slowly Sigmund almost screamed, they ferried him back to their ship. The gas pistols they used barely nudged them along. He was miles from both ships. If they were to release his hands . . .
He closed his eyes to shut out the universe.
Subtle maneuvering alerted Sigmund to their imminent arrival. He opened his eyes and the Outsider ship loomed. So many interlaced bands! They had been woven and swirled into a convolution his mind refused to grasp. Up close, glimpsed through random loops of that Gordian knot, the central spar seemed more like a mountain than a mast.
They landed finally on a ribbon. The feeble artificial gravity seemed inadequate to the task, and he activated boot electromagnets before he dared to take a step. After his heels snapped to the ribbon with a reassuring clang—there was a lot of metal to this ship—he allowed himself to be led. He passed hundreds of Outsiders basking in light and shadow before reaching a door. One of his escorts held it open. Sigmund pressed through a weak force field, and the door closed behind him.
A Puppeteer waited inside, his mane a disheveled mess. He turned. One eye was red, and the other yellow. Nessus.
Why Not had a long head start. How had Nessus gotten here first? He obviously knew exactly where to go. But how?
A clear dome was the only feature in the room. An Outsider reposed beneath. “Take off your pressure suit and stay awhile.” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Wall and ceiling speakers, Sigmund decided. Vacuum creatures do not use sound. “You will be quite comfortable.”
“My name is Sigmund. What shall I call you?”
“Fourteen will do.”
Sigmund removed his helmet. “We have a common acquaintance, Fourteen. Beowulf Shaeffer.”
“Indeed,” the room said. Inside the dome, the Outsider had not stirred. “Shaeffer has been here before you. Now as to the information you wished to sell?”
NESSUS’ HEARTS SKIPPED beats as a human entered. The human turned toward him: Sigmund, of course.
It was too soon! Nessus had just arrived himself. He had had no time to . . . do anything.
The conversation veered all too quickly to business. “Now as to the information you wished to sell?” Fourteen said.
That was surely the secret of New Terra. “Sigmund!” Nessus shouted. “Stop and think. The consequences would be”—he stuttered to a halt, at a loss for words—“unknowably huge.”
“Can you call off Achilles? Can you make everything as it was? Can you guarantee it will never happen again?”
Nessus lowered his heads. “You know I cannot. But this will be worse.”
Sigmund bared his teeth. “For you, perhaps. That’s not my problem.”
SIGMUND SET DOWN his helmet. “We should talk first about price.”
“What do you think the information is worth?” Fourteen countered.
The lives of everyone on New Terra. How did one set a price on that? “Fourteen, Beowulf has assured me your people are very honest traders.”
“That is our intention,” Fourteen said.
Now we’ll test that, Sigmund thought. “Is it satisfactory for me to reveal what I know, and for you to then set the price?”
“Perhaps we cannot afford an honest price.”
“I’m sure you can,” Sigmund said. “If we can agree on no other terms, I will take as payment the right to independently operate one of your planetary drives.”
“Interesting.” The room grew deathly quiet. Sigmund’s impression was that Fourteen consulted somehow with others of his kind. “Your price is the cancellation of that part of the Concordance’s debt.”
“It is.”
>
“A princely sum,” Fourteen said. “We are intrigued.”
“Then you accept my terms?” Sigmund pressed.
“I do. Proceed.”
And so Sigmund revealed, as Nessus moaned softly beside him, the long-secret history of Long Pass and New Terra.
72
“I must consult,” Fourteen said abruptly. “Return to your ships. We will meet again in one Hearth day.”
Their own ships. Sigmund suddenly pictured Nessus’ indestructible ship plunging through his cobbled-together vessel. Like a laser through butter.
Nessus had kept him alive—for years, apparently—within a stasis field. The Puppeteer could shelter himself from such an impact in stasis. If not for such contingencies, why even have a person-sized stasis-field generator aboard?
Sigmund cleared his throat. “Fourteen, I would like to moor my ship to yours.”
“That is not customary. Explain.”
“For the safety of my crew. Given what you have just heard, I’m sure you can understand.”
“Nessus,” Fourteen said. “All who visit here are under our protection. You are aware of the power we wield. For the sake of the Concordance, you should respect our rules.”
Sigmund took Nessus’ shiver as acquiescence.
• • •
“CALLING NESSUS. CALLING Nessus. Calling Nessus.”
I must confront Sigmund soon enough, Nessus thought. Then it will be faces to face. What harm can come of talking by radio now? He rolled out of a nest of pillows.
The ex-Colonists would see the despair and panic in his unkemptness. He left video turned off. “This is Nessus.”
“I suggest a secure channel,” Sigmund said. “Eric tells me we use Fleet-standard encryption, from before independence. I assume your automation knows the algorithm.”
So now Sigmund would keep secrets from the Outsiders. Not for the first time, Nessus wondered what depths of insanity had possessed him to bring an ARM to New Terra. “Aegis has the algorithm, but we will need a common secret key.”
“Use the name of the man who killed me.”