And then those servants discovered the whole truth: Citizens had attacked the ancient ship when it risked finding Hearth.
The chain reaction at the galactic core had just been revealed, and the Fleet of Worlds had just cast off its tie to Hearth’s ancestral star. Death lunged at the herd from behind. Unknown perils lurked in their path. At that, the worst possible moment, as Citizen society strained and sanity crumbled, the servant humans had rebelled.
And so Nature Preserve Four, renamed New Terra, had won its independence. It now flew ahead of the Fleet—a world of unwitting scouts. The New Terrans were too few and too weak to confront their former masters. And most were also too cautious, their culture having been modeled on their masters’ society.
Earth authorities, if they should ever learn the fate of the lost colony ship, would have a more forceful reaction. Nessus had spent many years—if often in hiding—on Earth and its colony worlds. He did not doubt humanity’s wrath.
But fits of bravery were not the only form of Nessus’ madness. He had come to like humans. When Achilles conspired to reclaim New Terra, hoping to govern there as viceroy for the Concordance, Nessus had brought the humans a champion: Sigmund Ausfaller. And so New Terra had kept its freedom. And so, for long years, Achilles had lost his.
The next time trouble came to this part of the galaxy, it was the Gw’oth who first spotted it. They and Sigmund, as much as anyone, had saved everyone.
Even the Fleet.
It did not matter, in a way, that in saving everyone else Sigmund had been broken. He would have refused to take sides between Gw’oth and Citizens anyway.
Nessus never intended Louis to know any of that.
And then, this time by Nessus’ choice, Aegis dropped again into normal space. A recording awaited him on a remote hyperwave radio buoy.
A foreboding message from New Terra, sent by Sigmund Ausfaller. . . .
Ausfaller.
It was a name from Louis’s troubled childhood, a name overheard when his parents were unaware he was in earshot. The boogeyman personified. Louis didn’t know who Ausfaller was, not exactly, but he had a pretty good idea what Ausfaller was. An evil genius. A raging paranoid. An obsessive. An ARM, an agent of the United Nations military.
The one who had chased Louis’s family across the stars and into hiding.
And now Louis had a face to put with the name.
An altogether ordinary-looking man, thickset and middle-aged, looked out of Aegis’ main bridge display. He had a round face, with dark hair and eyes. He wore a jumpsuit that, aside from its programmed color choices, looked the twin to what Louis wore. Ausfaller could be any bureaucrat, on any world—
Until you looked into those piercing, haunted eyes.
“Voice, replay the message,” Louis said. His impression was that the message came via a relay of buoys. The direction of the ship’s hyperwave-radio beam—if he could figure out how to access that information—would tell him nothing.
“Nessus,” the message began, Ausfaller’s brow ominously furrowed, “we have a situation. My sources say you are away from the Fleet. I neither know nor ask what your purpose is. I only hope that whatever you’re doing has you closer to the action than we are here. Call when you get this. You’ll be put through to me, day or night. Ausfaller, out.”
Louis studied the frozen final frame, considering. Ausfaller spoke strangely accented Interworld. And there was a bit of hesitation at times, as though he was out of practice. Odd.
Day or night? That phrasing suggested Ausfaller was on a planet. But hyperwave didn’t work inside a gravitational singularity. Laser or regular radio links from a habitable planet took hours to reach the edge of your solar system, where instantaneous hyperwave began to work—unless your planet was nowhere near a sun.
Louis glowered at the holo. “What are you up to, Ausfaller? Why do you know about the Fleet?”
Nessus sidled onto the bridge, nervously plucking at his already unkempt mane. He had retreated, shaking, to his cabin upon first seeing the message. “When Sigmund Ausfaller says something is a situation, worlds tremble. Let us see what he knows.”
“Putting through the call,” Voice said.
“Louis, you are about to learn things you will not take back to Known Space.” Nessus shifted his weight from hoof to hoof. He seemed about to say more when the comm display changed. Ausfaller again, looking very tired.
“Nessus, thank you for responding. It appears our old friend Achilles is away on a mission of his own.” A curl of the lip showed that friend meant anything but. “If whatever he’s up to is sanctioned by Clandestine Directorate, they are not admitting it. I’ve asked.” (Ausfaller named names with whom he had checked, all from Earth’s mythology. Louis wondered what that was about.) “And the disturbing thing is—” Ausfaller paused. “Who is that with you?”
“My name is Wu. Louis Wu.”
“I invited Louis to help me on my business,” Nessus said.
It had taken perhaps a minute for Ausfaller to notice Louis. Even doing the math in his head, approximating like mad, Louis was certain: no way was Ausfaller on a planet among the Fleet of Worlds. A hyperspace relay beyond the singularity of five clustered terrestrial worlds had to be well over a light-minute away from any of them.
Suddenly, it was painfully obvious.
Louis muted the connection. “Another world. A human world, apparently, and they don’t speak Interworld. Why did you need me?”
“Not all humans are created equal,” Nessus said. “As your quick mind demonstrates.”
“Very well,” Ausfaller eventually resumed. “I’m pleased to meet you, Louis.”
Ausfaller had not reacted. Because Wu was a common name? No, Louis decided. Because Ausfaller had not allowed himself to react. He was, undoubtedly, trained not to react. He would surely have had more to say if Nessus had included a random party in the conversation.
You and I will talk about what you did to my family, Louis promised himself. Ideally when I can reach out with more than words.
Nessus unmuted the connection. “All right, Sigmund. Tell us what you find disturbing.”
“It starts with a band of New Terran criminals unaccounted for. Some of our worst, I’m afraid. Out of sight for about a third of a year, now.”
“Criminals and Achilles unseen at the same time?” Nessus said, “That is a tenuous connection at best.”
The round-trip comm delays gave Louis’s mind ample time to churn. New Terra was a human world, obviously. This Achilles sounded like a high-ranking Puppeteer official, and Sigmund was keeping tabs on him. As secretive as Puppeteers were, Nessus did not seem surprised. Why not? Ausfaller doling out the bad news: because he knew that too much misfortune too fast would send a Puppeteer into shock.
“For one, there is the leader of these vanished criminals. Roland Allen-Cartwright.” Ausfaller permitted a flash of anger to show. “He was one of my best people—and, it turned out, a sociopath. I booted him out of the Office of Strategic Analyses, but he had learned very special skills first.”
Office of Strategic Analyses. That had to be government doublespeak, like the United Nations giving its massive security apparatus the innocuous name of Amalgamated Regional Militia.
A spy agency, Louis guessed. “What ARM dirty tricks did you teach your bad apple?”
Another delay. Ausfaller refused to take the bait. “The relevant skills for now are how to probe security systems for vulnerabilities. I didn’t have my own computer network in mind.”
“What did he get into?” Nessus asked.
But Ausfaller was still talking. “Too late, audit software found anomalies that triggered an intruder alert. Someone with far more computer savvy than me would have to give you the details. How isn’t the important part. The thing is”—and Ausfaller glowered—“Roland hacked into the sealed archives of the Pak War.”
10
Achilles woke screaming. Something tugged at his leg!
His shouts echoin
g in his helmets, he saw that the tether he had tied just above a forehoof had gone taut. He lived in fear of the tether coming loose, of drifting out the yawning hole that a cargo-hold hatch no longer sealed, into the deadly hail of relativistic interstellar muck.
He forced himself to stop shouting, to breathe slowly and evenly. Gradually his hearts stopped pounding. The battery-powered lights he had rigged scarcely managed to ease the gloom, and shadows moved ominously whenever anything—himself included—shifted in the zero gravity.
He had been alone before. Solitude did not bother him. Much. But this solitude was different. He was light-years from any help, his predicament unknown. Other Pak ships would come to investigate the unexpected energy release of the neutron bomb. He wondered how long he had before they arrived.
He had exactly that long left to live. . . .
Flare shields had activated almost before Achilles noticed the bright green light. An instant later there was a flash of orange, as quickly vanquished, then blue, then normal shipboard illumination again. He screamed at Roland, “Get us out of here!”
The human stood, cursing, dueling with lasers with the not-so-dead Pak ship. “Flare shields are holding,” he called out. “It’s just another automated defense, like the ramscoop field. Probably also triggered by our people going aboard. I’ll have it off in a minute.”
Achilles sidled toward the pilot’s console. The shield blocked the visible light from solar flares. The hull itself would stop the particle flux from even the biggest flare or coronal mass ejection. The shield adapted automatically to ambient light—not all flares were equally hot, hence their color distributions varied—but that did not mean it was agile enough to adjust to—
Another blaze of color, this time fiery red. It seemed longer than the last flash. Then blue again. Then, not any light Achilles could see, but a sensation of heat. Infrared. “Visible” meant something different for every species, and General Products hulls were transparent for all its onetime customers.
“We have to get out—” A stunner blast to the deck made his hooves sting.
“A few seconds more,” Roland snapped. “The ramscoop field is down now.”
The flare shield could not keep up with these frequency jumps. Why should it? There was a sensation of light behind Achilles’ eyes—ultraviolet?—then that bright green again, then heat. So much heat! He dove for the pilot’s couch.
Roland screamed and—
Discontinuity.
Vacuum! Achilles was shrieking, his chest in agony. He had to spew the air from his lungs before they exploded.
Except for dim emergency lamps, the bridge was dark. Something struck him high on a flank. He turned, still soundlessly screeching. It was floating debris, one chunk among countless many, nondescript in the gloom.
It, or something like it, may have saved his life.
The pilot’s couch had a stasis-field generator. Inside stasis, time stood still. Nothing could harm him. Had some bit of flotsam not nudged the control, he would have stayed inside, unaware, as the field protected him from the vacuum.
Until, inevitably, more Pak came to investigate.
The gushing from his lungs was weaker now. He was freezing, and yet he thought he could feel his blood starting to simmer. The bridge seemed even darker than a moment ago. A few emergency lamps were lit, and shadows moved unsettlingly. With an eerie distant warble, faintly heard by sound conduction through his body, the last gases erupted from his lungs.
He was drifting!
He lunged at a padded neck rest of the pilot’s couch, biting it so hard that his jaw throbbed. His body kept moving, until it gave a tremendous yank on his neck. Somehow he managed not to scream. To lose his grip was to die.
With his other head he tore open the pouch at the base of the couch and extracted the emergency pressure suit. Any other vacuum gear aboard, unprotected by the stasis field, would likely be in tatters and shreds—even if he could find it before his blood boiled from the vacuum.
He got a head, gasping, into a helmet and tongued a control. Air spewed. He felt a bit less muddled. Wriggling into a pressure suit floating in the dark, battered by debris, was the hardest thing he had ever done. With the last of his strength, he sealed the suit’s seams. The roar of air in his helmets fell to a whisper. The suit heater kicked itself on.
And then, his chest heaving, Achilles blacked out.
Steeped in dread, Achilles jetted about the dead hulk. He used his compressed air sparingly, with no way to refill the propulsion tanks.
After overloading or outwitting the flare defenses, how long had the Pak laser cannon blasted Argo? He could not tell. The pressure suit’s chronometer had, like him, been frozen in time inside the stasis field, and he had not found a functioning clock amid the wreckage. But for a long while, surely. Long enough to sear most paint from the hull. Long enough to cut decks and overheads and bulkheads into scraps. Long enough to melt the hinges of the cargo holds’ hatches. Long enough to dissipate the massive debris field that must have sprayed out when the first hatch blew.
So how long? Until, Achilles supposed, the Pak ship’s deuterium tanks ran dry.
He raged, then, at the unfairness of life. He raged at the Gw’oth, the threat—and opportunity—who had brought him here. He howled at party leadership that was Experimentalist in name more than in deed, too timid to empower him, and even louder at the bungling Hindmost who ruled but refused to act. He cursed his New Terran minions, deservedly dead for their incompetence, and at Pak too stubborn to die before setting their cunning traps.
He raged, above all, at injustice, and at everyone who had ever hindered him, and that he would die here, never having achieved the recognition he deserved. He should be Hindmost.
Exhausted, his throats raw from screaming and his exposure to vacuum, Achilles finally slept.
Consciousness returned. Clarity of a sort slowly followed.
His one slim hope was to cross over to the Pak derelict, scavenge parts for a hyperwave radio and something to power it, and cross back before he fried. Argo’s hull still served as a radiation shelter. If he called for help, a rescue ship from the Fleet might reach him before the Pak.
The thought of a spacewalk made Achilles ache to withdraw into a catatonic ball, but that innate flight reflex only guaranteed tragedy. He forced himself around and around the hull, searching everywhere through the clear wall for the Pak ship. And when he failed to find that ship—drifted, who knew where, while he hung insensate in stasis—he did collapse.
He barely managed to tie a tether before clenching himself into a ball of despair.
11
“Let me share a bit of history,” Ausfaller said. “It will save time.”
An alien starship, a ramscoop, had plunged into Sol system in 2125. Its pilot had spent most of his life traveling from his home world, somewhere near the galactic core. He was looking for a long-lost colony of his own kind, responding to an ancient distress signal. The lost colonists had evolved, over the eons, into humans.
“I have taken a virtual tour of the Smithsonian,” Louis said at one point. As in: don’t treat me like an ignoramus. “I saw the pilot’s mummified body, recovered from Mars. I know he found a Belter prospector in a singleship and told the Belter his story, that his name was Phssthpok.”
“Good,” Ausfaller said. “I’ve been off Earth for a long time. That’s more background than the ARM had made public in my day. What else?”
“The aliens call themselves Pak.”
“More like this.” Ausfaller rearticulated the name while popping his lips. “It takes a bony beak to say it properly.”
Whatever, Louis thought. That will be useful when I have a bony beak. “They’re essentially early hominids, Homo habilis, I think, except that the adults can morph into another life stage. If they eat some plant that didn’t grow properly on Earth, which is why the ancient colony failed, they become protectors. Protectors are ruthlessly obsessed with protecting their bloodlines and they
’re scary smart.”
“What else,” Ausfaller prompted.
So am I a schoolboy to be tested on my lessons? Louis wondered. “The Belter was exposed to that Pak plant. Tree-of-life, was it called? He became a protector. Probably to protect his own family, he killed Phssthpok and disappeared. End of story.” Louis paused. “There hasn’t been any Pak War. People would have noticed.”
Another comm delay, and then Ausfaller smiled wryly. “You think? If you are who I suspect you are, Louis, you grew up on Home.”
“Yah,” Louis conceded. His parents were less well hidden than they had supposed. Why hadn’t Ausfaller come after them?
“The first colony on Home failed, didn’t it? A suspected plague.” Ausfaller did not pause for an answer. “Jack Brennan, that Belter turned protector, was responsible.”
Louis started. Home’s history went back only a few centuries. Of course he had studied the lost colony while in school—only the collapse of that first colony was mysterious. Plague was just a guess. No pathogen had ever been found. No human remains of that era had ever been recovered, either, only cremated ashes. It seemed the original colonists had gone mad.
A later group of settlers, expecting to arrive at an established colony, instead found every building had been blasted or burned to the ground. That was in an era before hyperdrive; the new colonists were on their own. By the time they had established themselves, the charred and weathered ruins were all but beyond study. The plague—or whatever had happened—never recurred.
That the ARM kept secrets did not surprise Louis. Still, a human protector would protect humans, wouldn’t he? And while Brennan attacking Home—if, for some strange reason, he had—might fairly be called a protector war, it would not be a Pak War.