Would Louis serve a society whose entire political class—by definition—was crazy?
The crazy-scariest possibility of all was that Nessus might have failed to find Beowulf Shaeffer because Achilles had found Shaeffer first. Trouble followed Shaeffer and Achilles both.
Nessus said, “Achilles aspires to guide the Experimentalists, and hence to become Hindmost of us all. As Minister of Science he has the public ear. He campaigns on taking ‘all necessary measures’ to end the Gw’oth threat.”
With a sigh, Louis looked away from the synthesizer and the drugs he was too proud to request.
Nessus waited.
Louis said, “The Gw’oth are too smart not to have stealthy ships or probes watching the Fleet. Whatever they overhear they can transmit home by hyperwave radio. And apparently what they’re overhearing is threats.”
Nessus stood, tottering on trembling legs. Of course the Gw’oth secretly followed events on Hearth, just as squadrons of stealthy Concordance probes ringed the Gw’oth worlds. “I fear, Louis, we are giving the Gw’oth a reason to decide they must strike first.”
“It would still be mad. . . .” Louis paused to gather his thoughts. “What if there is a message in where the Gw’oth put their settlement? Ice moons with oceans are common enough.”
“Of course there is a message! A threat. They put themselves in the Fleet’s path.”
Louis shook his head. “I suspect that it’s more than that. They could scatter planet-busters into the Fleet’s path from ships. They don’t need to establish, or expose, a colony to make an attack on the Fleet.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“If the Gw’oth established colonies as distant from Jm’ho, but in other directions, your people would never have encountered them. So maybe the meaning of the new colony, of this Kl’mo, is that they want the Concordance to know the extent of their capabilities.”
“Why would they want that?”
Louis began pacing. “To demonstrate that they are dispersed, that you cannot hope to find all their colonies. That if war should come, some of them will survive.”
“And we, bound to our Fleet of Worlds, will not.” Nessus shuddered, marveling that he did not collapse in terror. Even hindbrains and trembling flesh must know some disasters are too cosmic to flee. “War remains madness, but mutual destruction would no longer be the outcome. That, you are telling me, is the message.”
Louis laughed bitterly. “My entire military career was one skirmish in which I almost got myself killed, and from which I became an addict. Yet somehow you expect me to penetrate the grand strategy of genius aliens I’ve never met.”
Almost certainly you already have, Nessus thought. You have Beowulf’s quick mind and love of the strange. You have Carlos’s brilliance. You have the human heritage of aggression and war.
All Nessus said was, “That is why you are here.”
Only, it soon turned out, he had been preparing for the wrong crisis.
NO MAN’S LAND
8
Amid chaos and ruin, light-years from Hearth, alone but for the ragged sounds of his own breathing, Achilles stared.
Debris floated all around him. Some things were recognizable and more were not: bits beyond counting slashed—or melted and recongealed—from every part of the ship.
But no stretch of the imagination could still call Argo a ship. It was a hulk, nothing more. Here and there ragged edges of onetime decks clung to the hull. The last wisp of air was long vanished from the vast, cavernous expanse. Life support, communications, propulsion, artificial gravity, sensors: all were gone. The flotsam that cargo and bulkheads and ship’s systems had become endlessly rebounded, in eerie silence, from the hull or one another.
His spacesuit recycled almost without loss; it could sustain him for years. A stasis field froze time; it could sustain him forever. For what? No one knew where he was, and Pak warships would be converging on his location. His hearts would stop from fright and conditioned reflex when the Pak arrived to claim their prize. Until that ignominious end, he had only his memories to occupy him. Bitter memories.
Once again his plans had gone horribly awry. . . .
Argo popped into normal space.
Flat displays and holos sprang to life all around Achilles. He kept lips and tongue on the hyperdrive actuator while his other head swiveled to survey the readouts and imagery.
“Target acquired,” his copilot called. Roland Allen-Cartwright sat across the bridge. He was a large man, swarthy, with close-set eyes. “Call it three light-days.”
“And?” Achilles prompted.
“I’m looking at a squadron, twelve ships, about half a light-year distant. Big ships. Receding from us. And the usual background radio chatter.”
White-hot fusion flames streamed behind the twelve ramscoops, shouting their presence and course. Achilles had chosen his quarry from light-years away. By no known science could Argo’s reactionless thrusters be detected from similar distances.
Then again, he did not know what the Pak knew. Yet.
Any ramscoop accelerating toward Argo would be less obvious. Any ramscoop coasting toward Argo would be nearly invisible. To infer an approaching ramscoop required subtle modeling, element by element, of ripples in the tenuous interstellar medium, or triangulation of faint neutrino sources. Both methods entailed significant uncertainties. Both methods took time.
Or he could take more active measures.
“One radar ping,” Achilles ordered. If any ships lurked nearby, waiting to pounce, he meant to know now. The ping would not forewarn his quarry, three light-days distant. Before radar’s light-speed crawl ever reached that ship, Argo would strike.
“Ping sent,” Roland said. Seconds passed. “Nothing.”
Minutes passed before Achilles released his grip on the hyperdrive control. “What is the target ship doing?”
Roland frowned at his instruments. “It looks like there is a big free-floating snowball out ahead of it. So collecting water, I would guess.”
Hearth sweltered from pole to pole in the industrial waste heat of its trillion inhabitants. The home world had not seen snow in ages. In simpler times Achilles had encountered snow on human and Kzinti worlds. In more recent, more troubling times, in the “rehabilitation” camps on Nature Preserve One, he had made a far more intimate acquaintance with snow. He did not like snow.
At maximum acceleration Argo would match normal-space velocity with the isolated Pak ship within half a day. The hyperspace jump to the Pak’s position would take even less time. “Prepare your people, Roland. At this time tomorrow, we attack.”
“Did I actually say attack?” Achilles asked.
He was past caring that he talked to himself and starting to wonder when he would begin answering. His words were muffled by the ball of flesh into which he had wrapped himself, his necks between his front legs and his heads pressed tight against his belly. How long had it been since he last unclenched? Wearing a pressure suit, he need never loosen to catch a breath.
He unwound anyway. The white-hot flame of a ship, or ships, decelerating toward him would be his only warning of death’s arrival, and the only functioning long-range sensors were his eyes. He would circumnavigate yet again the transparent hull, from which most of the paint had been seared away.
A bit of the drifting flotsam bumped his flank. He arched a neck for a look—
At the severed arm of Roland Allen-Cartwright.
Achilles’ heads whipped back between his legs. As his mind retreated into the troubled past, his last coherent thought was that he needed more dependable human hirelings.
“Dropping from hyperspace in three,” Achilles announced over the intercom. “Two. One. Now.”
On the main bridge display, stars appeared. So did a Pak ramscoop, its fusion drive blazing. It was but ten light-seconds away.
“Missile launched,” Roland called. “Locked on target.”
View ports went blank automatically as Achilles po
pped Argo back to hyperspace.
The missile carried a neutron bomb armed with a proximity switch. Achilles doubted even Pak technology could fend off a nuclear attack launched from out of nowhere.
Three minutes later Argo returned to normal space.
There was no need for a second missile. The Pak ship was adrift, its fusion flame extinguished. Instruments detected not a flicker of ramscoop field or a whisper of comm.
The neutron flux from the bomb would kill everyone aboard within a day. Then Roland and his cronies could search the derelict at their leisure.
With a final precise wriggle of lip nodes, Achilles eased Argo into position slightly ahead of the Pak derelict. He set the autopilot to maintain their position.
“Two miles and a bit,” Roland said, standing. “Close enough.”
“Be careful,” Achilles answered.
He pretended not to hear the snort as Roland left the bridge. You had to make allowances for beings willing to run dangers for you. No one could still be alive where Achilles’ crew was headed, but that did not preclude dangers. Beginning with a ship-to-ship transfer at almost half light speed.
Capture of a Pak vessel was momentous, and Achilles had coiffed himself for the occasion. Gold chains and strands of jewels glittered in his mane. Curls and braids and waves, each artfully dyed, were piled high above his cranial dome. He took a moment to straighten a braid. No one aboard, alas, could appreciate his resplendence.
The Pak vessel, imaged by stern-mounted infrared sensors, loomed in the main bridge holo. Achilles’ overall impression was of a great length of pipe. The flared bow hinted at the magnetic field that had—until the neutron-bomb blast scrambled things—projected far ahead to sweep up interstellar hydrogen. Small tanks ringed the aft end. The ramscoop field gathered too little hydrogen for propulsion until the ship, feeding its fusion drive with onboard fuel, got up its speed. The fat torus amidships was the crew compartment.
On the main console, a status lamp began to blink: a cargo-hold hatch opening. Roland’s voice came over the intercom. “We’re leaving now.”
On an internal security camera Achilles watched ten figures in spacesuits leap from the open hold. On external IR sensors he watched them jet on invisible puffs of compressed gas toward the slowly tumbling Pak ship. He had Argo to himself.
A monument to the arrogance of genius, the Pak vessel held his eyes. In interstellar space, with neither planetary nor solar magnetic fields to protect you, the radiation would slowly kill you—and that was while you stood still. The faster you moved, the deadlier things became, with every stray atom and molecule coming on like cosmic rays. Ships needed shielding, and lots of it, for protection.
A ramscoop field, by sweeping up the atoms and molecules that came sleeting at a ship, did double duty as shielding. Pak were too sure of their technology, too certain of their ability to improvise around any problem, to backstop the ramscoop field with simple, foolproof, massive shielding. Why carry all that dead weight?
Even without the deadly blast of the neutron bomb, the Pak on that ship were doomed the moment their ramscoop failed.
But the ramscoop field was also deadly. Magnetic fields intense enough to deflect molecules moving at near light speed also induced massive electric currents. Crewed ramscoops had to warp the magnetic field around the habitat module. If that force-field bubble ever wavered, the magnetic flux would kill everyone.
It took arrogant brilliance to fly such ships—much of it, clearly, deserved. The Pak had crossed tens of thousands of light-years in ships like this.
The salvage party had shrunk to ten tiny dots. Sending one person would have sufficed, if that one carried a stepping disc. But if, against all logic, any of the Pak had survived? Achilles had refused to permit stepping discs on the first visit.
“Your status?” Achilles radioed.
“About halfway,” came Roland’s voice. “Argo still looks huge, I’m happy to say.”
Because it was huge, a #4 hull, the biggest that General Products made. Most #4s were cargo ships, hauling grain from the Nature Preserve worlds to Hearth. Achilles needed a ship this big for quite another reason: to carry home his prize. Once his hirelings confirmed that everyone aboard the ramscoop was dead. For now, in its position just in front of the wreck, Argo’s girth and impenetrable hull shielded the humans from the sleet of interstellar gas and dust.
Achilles continued to watch, anxiously, as the ten tiny hotspots closed the distance to the Pak ship. Closer they crept, and closer, and closer . . .
He began plucking at his so carefully styled mane. The madness of the moment asserted itself. It was so tempting. He could close the cargo hatch and jump to hyperspace. With minds of their own, his heads reached for the console—
“I wouldn’t do that.”
Achilles twitched, his heads whipping around toward the unexpected voice.
Roland stood in the entrance to the bridge, a stunner in hand. “You’re not going to abandon my people. Move away from the console.”
Achilles stood from his crash couch. “You did not trust me.”
Roland laughed scornfully. “Why would we?”
Meaning capture of an alien ramscoop struck very close to home. Achilles changed the subject. “Do I have other unannounced company?”
“Just me.” Roland laughed again. “If you choose to believe that.”
That was the problem with criminals and mercenaries. The attitudes and aptitudes that made them useful also made them unreliable. Long ago and far away, Beowulf Shaeffer had been a much more dependable tool.
Moving slowly, lest he get himself stunned, Achilles set a display to show the bridge security camera. Roland was nowhere in the picture. Achilles waved a head at the camera. His double in the image remained at work at his console.
Argo’s security sensors had been compromised.
“So who is about to board the Pak ship?” Achilles asked.
Roland leaned against a console shelf, far across the bridge from Achilles. Too bad the human did not take a proper seat. Had he settled into any crash couch on the bridge, Achilles could have immobilized him with the crash-protection force field. Maybe the human knew that.
“Nine,” Roland said. “All but me. The tenth suit was empty, a balloon on a string, towed along so you wouldn’t suspect anyone had stayed behind.” He managed to look apologetic. “Our mission cannot succeed if you get cold feet. Hooves. Now move to the center of the bridge.”
With its heater on, an empty suit looked no different to infrared sensors than an occupied suit. Clever.
Backing up as directed, Achilles pointed a head at the main display. “They are almost at the ship.”
Still standing, Roland reached for the copilot’s console. “Then let’s watch.”
Roland’s deputy, a dour and sturdy woman named Tabitha Jones-Calvani, led the salvage party aboard the derelict. “It’s not pretty in here,” she reported.
Helmet cameras told as much. Corpses floated about, contorted, dotted with lesions. Even knowing what to expect, Achilles felt nauseous.
The Pak were humanoid, although shorter than humans. Their leathery skin was like armor. Their limbs were heavily muscled, and their joints enormous to take the strain. In death, many hands curled like claws—with wicked talons protruding.
These were born warriors.
“No, it’s not pretty,” Roland answered. “Take it slow and be safe.”
Achilles could only agree. He watched the humans fan out to search the ship. They remained sealed in their spacesuits, and their boot magnets let them walk despite the lack of gravity.
Here and there, as the intruders proceeded, they found Pak belted to their stations. Panels were removed, racks extended, and components scattered about. Cabling snaked everywhere, looking improvised. Achilles managed to respect their doomed efforts to survive, wondering what they thought to construct that could change—anything.
“Approaching the bridge, I think,” Tabitha said. “The bow,
in any case.”
“Take it slow,” Roland repeated.
Helmet lamps sent bright spots skittering about, revealing more bodies and scavenged equipment. The camera through which Achilles looked wobbled as its wearer sidestepped yet another floating corpse. The body was frozen, its mouth agape, in a final paroxysm.
“Poor bastard,” someone muttered.
“He would kill you if he could,” another answered.
“How many bodies did—?” Achilles stopped. Something in the image had changed. In an open equipment bay: a bit of red glow, where all had been shadow before.
Screaming began. It was unworldly, inhuman. All around the camera’s suddenly spasmodic point of view, images writhed and jerked.
“Finagle!” Roland shouted. He nodded at a console, at external sensor readouts. “The ramscoop field is back up. Without a crew bubble.”
Too late, they knew what the dying Pak had been up to. Setting a trap. Everyone on that ship was as good as dead. Achilles galloped for the hyperdrive control.
There was a hiss like an angry swarm of purple pollinators: Roland’s stunner. It was a warning shot, and Achilles backed away from the console. His legs tingled from the near miss.
“We can save them!” Roland yelled, standing at the midrange comm console. “If I can kill that field quickly.”
The communications laser was powerful enough to cross a solar system. Up close it was a fearsome weapon. It might destroy the repaired field generator, or the power plant that fed it, without killing all the humans aboard. At the least, it would kill with merciful quickness.
Roland reached for the transmit button and—
The second Pak trap snapped shut its jaws.
9
The Fleet of Worlds had once held six worlds. On one of the six, then known simply as Nature Preserve Four, a few million humans had faithfully served the Citizens. As farmers, factory workers, eventually scouts: grateful humans did everything they could for their benefactors and mentors. They knew themselves to be descended from an embryo bank recovered from a derelict ramscoop found adrift in space. There had been, they were taught, no clues aboard to the location of the ship’s point of origin.