The first fat raindrops fell. He and Nessus hurried their pace, for rain this late in the afternoon often became a downpour.
“What was in the files?” Nessus sang abruptly.
The files but for whose destruction—at Baedeker’s insistence—Nessus might have had the opportunity to escape Hearth and the wrath of Achilles.
Baedeker sang, “You know I cannot say.”
“I know you will not say.”
“And yet you persist in asking.” Baedeker veered, brushing flanks with Nessus to lessen the sting in his melody. “Some burdens only a Hindmost may bear.”
Like the appalling record of Citizen atrocities against other species—always for the safety of the Concordance, of course. In the now inaccessible Refuge, Nike watched over the sole remaining copy of that shameful history.
Proof of past Concordance ruthlessness lay along the Fleet’s path, not many years’ flight ahead. The alien artifact was enormous; Ol’t’ro could not fail, in time, to discover it.
Baedeker knew Ol’t’ro. Without a doubt, they would send an expedition to explore the ring world. They must never learn of Hearth’s prior involvement there. If Ol’t’ro ever suspected, let alone confirmed, what extreme measures the Concordance had taken to preempt possible adversaries, they would obliterate the herd without qualms. Not that Baedeker knew Gw’oth even had consciences. . . .
Baedeker shuddered. “Be thankful you do not know.”
. . .
The pings began more than a light-year from Hearth. Louis held his breath each time, but every hyperwave exchange ended with the authorization to come a micro-hop closer.
Sigmund would not break neutrality with Hearth, but he had bent it nearly into a pretzel. He provided information, and lots of it: identification codes and crew manifests from refugee ships impounded on the tarmac on New Terra. Instructions that Louis could not execute—but Maura could—to hack Addison’s space-traffic-control transponder and upload the new codes. Detailed maps of their destination. A copy of Jeeves as a Puppeteer translator.
“I can—maybe—get you into the Fleet,” Sigmund had said. “I can’t get you into, or out of, the prison.”
“Relax,” Louis had answered. “I have that covered.” And fervently hoped that was true.
Another drop to normal space. The worlds of the Fleet were naked-eye objects. Another digital exchange. And then—
From Addison’s main comm console: a clatter of notes. Metallica orchestrating the Goldberg Variations.
“ ‘This is Hearth traffic control,’ ” Jeeves translated. “Shall I respond?”
“That’s why you’re here,” Enzio muttered from the copilot’s couch.
He and his crew were here for the very large funds transfer Sigmund had made, the confirmation also part of Sigmund’s upload. It must have occurred to Enzio that Sigmund might forge the confirmation, because Enzio had not set their final course until he confirmed a deposit directly with his bank.
For past services, Sigmund had designated the payment. “If you are caught . . .”
Louis had had no difficulty completing that sentence: New Terra would deny all knowledge of their actions. It did not matter. He would not abandon Nessus to the nonexistent mercy of Achilles.
Louis tried not to imagine himself at Achilles’ mercy.
“Shall I respond, Louis?” Jeeves asked again.
“Proceed,” Louis directed. “As we discussed.”
Jeeves sang back, then translated. “This is scout training vessel Prudence, returning to Nature Preserve One.”
Another of Sigmund’s contributions: identifying among the refugee fleet a Concordance vessel officially stationed on NP1 and built, like Addison, in a GP2 hull.
A longer, more manic torrent. “ ‘Prudence, your transponder identification is confirmed, but you are listed as unaccounted for.’ ”
Louis suggested, “Say we panicked and ran from the Gw’oth. We’re better now.”
“Us and how many more?” Enzio laughed and gestured at the display filled with inbound Fleet transponders.
More back and forth. “ ‘You are cleared for Nature Preserve One,’ ” Jeeves translated. “I acknowledged.”
“Well done, Jeeves,” Louis said.
“Thank you, sir.”
A final jump and they would be in the thick of the Fleet’s automated defenses. Louis took a deep, steadying breath. “One more time, Enzio. With precision.”
Enzio dropped Addison from hyperspace eighteen million miles from the Fleet’s center of mass. That was scarcely a million miles—and under a second’s travel in hyperdrive—outside the singularity.
“Finagle, Enzio! That wasn’t precise,” Louis said. “That was insane.”
Enzio shrugged.
Another jangling burst of chords.
“ ‘Welcome back to the Fleet, Prudence,’ ” Jeeves translated. “ ‘Next time, do not emerge so nearby.’ I acknowledged, apologetically.”
“We’re still in training,” Enzio said. “Did you get that, traffic control?”
Addison’s inbound course toward NP1 wavered as Enzio feigned veering and overcompensating.
Louis projected a globe. Their destination—thousands of miles from their approved base—was a remote, near-equatorial, comma-shaped land mass near the center of NP1’s largest ocean. Penance Island.
The Concordance’s maximum-security prison colony and labor camp.
50
Addison swerved on final approach, diving bow-first into the ocean ninety miles from its designated landing field. Cabin gravity and inertial dampers absorbed most of the shock. “We’re trainees,” Enzio cackled.
“Just go deep and drive,” Louis growled. He couldn’t help but remember arriving on Aegis, beneath the ocean on Wunderland. I’m coming, Nessus. “I’m going to the main hold.”
“I’m picking up an emergency-services call,” Jeeves said. “Help is being dispatched to the crash site.”
“Ten minutes to the island,” Enzio said. Something thumped off the hull as he spoke.
Louis found the crew in the hold. All carried stunners and flashlights. Louis jammed a stunner in his pocket. “Is this it?” he asked Maura, pointing.
“That’s it,” she said.
Louis opened the utility box for a final look. There was not much inside. A fuel cell. A radio transmitter. And the gadget that might make this rescue possible: the fusion suppressor he had taken from Remembrance.
He would know soon enough if he was clever or delusional.
“Two minutes to the island,” Enzio announced on the intercom. “Coming up in one.”
“Radio off,” Louis ordered. “Confirm.”
“Confirmed.”
Louis had to imagine Addison bursting from the ocean and swooping to the island. He heard a thump and felt the bit of tremor the inertial dampeners had not perfectly offset. They were down! He slapped the release for the main hatch. “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted.
He rolled through the still-opening hatch, hugging the suppressor to his chest. A heavy rain was falling. The others followed and the hatch cycled shut behind them.
Lights suddenly blazed from the small, walled building complex, and floodlights swept across a cluster of tents. Sirens wailed. Puppeteers caterwauled and shrieked. At any moment, if it had not happened already, armed reinforcements would start stepping through.
Louis triggered the fusion suppressor—and all the lights went out. The sirens stopped. Stepping discs ran off embedded fusion reactors—they would have stopped, too. The shrieking got louder. Behind the wall a few emergency lamps came on, running from batteries or fuel cells.
Above the building complex, briefly, a faint green beam pulsed: Addison’s comm laser, its beam scattered by the rain. At this range, the laser would be quite deadly. The threat would keep any sane Puppeteers inside the walled compound.
“To the tents!” Louis ordered. “Reinforcements will be here soon.”
Arriving in ships built in General Produ
cts hulls, opaque to the radio waves carrying the suppression field. Louis could hope they would have radios on, and that the suppression field would sneak aboard through open comm circuits. He did not count on it.
Flashlight beams wobbled as the New Terrans dashed across muddy fields. Lightning flashed overhead. Thunder roared. Puppeteers erupted from the tents, screaming, scattering in all directions.
Two Puppeteers galloped straight at Louis.
“Don’t shoot!” Louis ordered.
A loud thump! sirens. From the compound’s wall, bright light streaming through the coarse cloth of the tents.
Then darkness and silence.
Hearts pounding in his chest, Nessus peeked between tent flaps. Lightning flashed, and in the fields he saw a ship! Dim beams of light jiggled and jogged. Hurtling from the ship toward the tents.
“Come,” Nessus sang to Baedeker. “We are rescued.” He kept chanting it, forcing himself to run at the mysterious intruders.
They galloped together into the fields. Nessus heard a shout, in English: “Don’t shoot!”
He knew that voice. “Louis Wu!”
“Nessus!” They met at midfield. “Is this Baedeker? We don’t have much time.”
“I came only to say good-bye,” Baedeker said. He switched to song. “Be strong, Nessus.”
What? “You must come,” Nessus sang back. “Achilles will . . .” His voices trailed off, his imagination failing him.
“I am the legitimate Hindmost, no matter who grasps power. I will not abandon the Concordance. I rose once before from prison to power. I will do it again.”
“What’s he saying?” Louis asked. “Nessus, we have to go.”
“A moment.” In song, “Achilles’ rage will be terrible after this.”
“Nessus, my place is here. Now go.”
“I will not abandon you.”
Baedeker stood tall. “As your Hindmost, I order you to leave. Make a new life for yourself, serving the herd as you think wise.”
Trembling with emotion, Nessus could only sing, “I obey.”
Then he was running across the fields, amid the humans, to the ship.
Louis reached down in his mad dash back to Addison to scoop up the fusion suppressor. He unlatched its access panel as he ran and toggled the power switch. The ON light died. He waved all-clear at the ship’s bow. Enzio would be monitoring through his infrared sensors.
The cargo-hold hatch started to open, and the landing party tumbled inside. Nessus stopped just within the open hatch to wail something mournful. He was filthy, his mane a tangled snarl, and his ribs showed.
“I’m sorry,” Louis said. He slapped the CLOSE button and then the intercom. “Enzio! Get us out of here!”
“Launching,” Enzio said. “Anyone care to join me on the bridge?”
“On my way.” Louis turned to Nessus. “Achilles had a cabin converted for himself. It’s on deck three, if you want to clean up. Join me on the bridge whenever you feel ready.”
“Thank you, Louis. For everything.”
They splashed back into the ocean, went deep, and surfaced thousands of miles away. Another of Sigmund’s transponder codes let Addison merge inconspicuously into the Fleet’s inter-world traffic. Nessus, cleaned up, had by then joined them on the bridge.
Between routine radar sweeps Maura disabled the ship’s transponder. Before traffic control noticed anything amiss, Addison was far from the shipping lanes. Increasingly frantic radar searches swept past Addison, fooled by the stealth gear Achilles had retrofitted into his erstwhile lifeboat.
After four hours at maximum acceleration, they exited the Fleet’s singularity.
“Jumping to hyperspace,” Louis announced, “in three. Two. One. Now.”
The external displays went blank. The mass pointer lit with five lines for the five worlds of the Fleet. At the instrument’s present sensitivity setting, a few nearby stars registered as stubs and New Terra did not appear at all.
“On to New Terra,” Louis said. He dismounted the very human-unfriendly pilot’s couch. “Nessus, would you care to do the honors?”
Nessus straddled the seat. “I am happy to set our course, Louis. But before we go to New Terra, there is something we need to retrieve.”
51
His hooves clattering on the hard tile floor, Nessus followed Sigmund down the long corridors of an underground lab complex. Sigmund lied that Nessus seemed recovered from his ordeal, and Nessus pretended to believe him. Most doors were shut, access controlled by the handprint sensors beside the jambs. Signs offered room numbers but no other information. Nessus suspected that what Sigmund called the Office of Strategic Analyses did not officially exist, an agency more clandestine than Clandestine Directorate.
That Sigmund disclosed this much (but not the stepping-disc address by which they had arrived) showed a surprising degree of trust. Nessus liked to think he had earned it. Or, perhaps, Sigmund meant to show Nessus the Library would be safe here. The Library whose existence aboard Addison Nessus had yet to mention, and Louis might not have mentioned—and information Enzio and his people had surely offered for sale to Sigmund.
A door flew open as a white-coated technician bustled out. Nessus glimpsed several dartlike spaceships in a small hangar.
Sigmund saw Nessus’ heads swivel. “One-person ships, hyperdrive-equipped. They’re pretty handy.”
“I would think so,” Nessus said. Such little ships would be hard to detect, even without the stealthing gear they doubtless carried. Useful for spying on the Fleet. With Achilles the Hindmost, more useful than ever.
Turning a corner they came to another closed door. Sigmund palmed the access panel and the lock clicked. Sigmund waved Nessus inside, where the wall displays showed only terrestrial-style forest. “My office.”
Nessus saw a Citizen bench, but chose to stand. “Times are bad,” he said to Sigmund. “Thank you for meeting with me.”
“Bad times are why I’m meeting with you. This is the most secure room on New Terra. What’s on your mind?”
Abandoning Baedeker, but that did not concern Sigmund. “I have important technology that needs safeguarding.”
Sigmund nodded. “The Pak Library and what, from the description I’ve heard, must be the Carlos Wu autodoc.”
“I have no secrets, do I?”
“Not if I am doing my job properly.”
“So will you protect them, Sigmund?”
“What are your terms?”
“Do not disclose that New Terra has these items. I ask this for your safety as well as my own purposes. Promise to return the items and all that you have learned from them when the rightful government returns to Hearth. Until that government returns, share what you learn only with me. And I will need a ship or . . . wait”—sudden thought—“make that two ships.”
“Generous terms. New Terra will keep copies of everything, of course.”
Nessus had never imagined otherwise, not was there any way to prevent it. “Agreed.”
“I understand the rightful government. That’s Baedeker.” Sigmund’s brow furrowed. “I’m not sure I understand the current government on Hearth. Is that Achilles? Or does . . . someone . . . rule from behind the new Hindmost?”
Nessus’ hoof scraped the hard floor. He wondered—and worried—too. Removing Achilles would be struggle enough. What if the Gw’oth secretly ruled? “Truly, I wish I understood. Do you accept my terms?”
And what will I do if you refuse? Seize Addison and its cargo anyway? Perhaps Sigmund already had.
“I accept,” Sigmund said.
Inside the melding chamber, at the center of Mighty Current, within the massive structure that housed Nature Preserve Five’s planetary drive—where none dared even to approach—Ol’t’ro considered:
Rebirth for Kl’mo colony under Ng’t’mo’s protection.
Bm’o’s inevitable struggles, after his long absence, to reassert his authority on Jm’ho.
The respite that the Tn’Tn’ho’s pr
oblems would give the colony.
The wealth of knowledge in Concordance archives, from nanotechnology to stepping discs, from starseed lures to computers, and much more they had yet even to sample.
How best to resource and guide millions of Citizen scientists and engineers.
Satisfaction with all that they had accomplished, with minimal loss of life to any species.
The wondrous plaything that was Voice, and the pleasurable prospect of future tinkering with the artificial intelligence.
The Chiron persona they had given Voice to monitor and interact with Citizens.
Achilles laboring, even while Ol’t’ro pondered, to restore order among the Citizens.
Reluctantly, Ol’t’ro diverted a bit of their attention through Chiron to the cabinet meeting on Hearth. . . .
“. . . resources with which to restore public confidence,” Hermes sang in conclusion. He was the newly appointed Minister of Information. “Naturally that must be our first priority.”
If the conclusion is natural, Achilles thought, why does making the case require so long a tune? Letting the discussion drone on, he left his place at the end of the long oval table to fill a plate from the grains bar on the sideboard. He had loathed cabinet meetings as a minister; the duty was even more onerous as Hindmost.
He had worked so long to be here. And everything was as glorious as he had imagined—at first. The mass adoration at his triumphant return. The spectacular mountainside residence. The fawning servants. The adulation of his acolytes. But another future stretched out before him, an era of endless meetings, bureaucratic trivia, and mind-numbing detail.
“Safety and order beget confidence,” Themis sang. His charge was the Department of Public Safety. “If we were to announce new resources for public safety—”