“Well?” she prodded.
“I won’t say more,” Sigmund conceded.
“Will she come home soon?” Amelia tried again. “Is she in danger, Sigmund?”
She’s in a war zone, far, far away. If he could answer truthfully, it wouldn’t help. “She’ll be fine,” Sigmund said, knowing the words were hollow.
His pocket buzzed. “Excuse me.” He retrieved his comp.
Come now. The text was from Norquist-Ng.
“Is that about Julia?” Amelia asked.
Certain that it was, Sigmund said, “I don’t know,” once more. “I have to go, though. Thanks for dinner.”
From a stepping disc just outside Hermes and Amelia’s front door, he flicked to the Ministry.
* * *
“IT’S MY FAULT,” Julia said. She looked drained, beaten. “I take full responsibility.”
Norquist-Ng paused the playback. “What do you think?”
Sigmund looked around the private office, glad to be rid of the usual hangers-on. I think that Alice took matters into her own hands, Minister, because you took matters into yours. And that had I gone aboard Endurance, Alice would be here, alive.
On whose hands was the blood thickest?
“I’d like to speak with Julia,” Sigmund said.
“The news won’t get any better, but all right.” Changing tone, Norquist-Ng directed, “Jeeves, hail Koala and ask for a secure link to our captain.”
Though it took only minutes, the wait seemed interminable. Finally, a holo opened: Julia, in a nondescript, closet-sized cabin, looking even more dejected than in her message. Something about her surroundings—proportions? furnishings? the wall color?—shouted that this wasn’t any New Terran vessel.
“We have your report,” Norquist-Ng said abruptly. “We have questions.”
“Yes, Minister.” She swallowed. “Grandpa. It isn’t good.”
“Start at the beginning,” Sigmund suggested.
“Yes, sir. Endurance was fueled up for the trip home, but low on feedstock for the synthesizer. We’d been communicating with an ARM ship, Koala, so Alice suggested we ask if they had feedstock or food to spare.” Julia sighed. “Unfortunately, they did.
“I suited up to jet over. On my way…”
“Go on,” Sigmund said, gently.
“Alice radioed. She said, ‘I have no choice. Sorry.’ A second later she was gone. I mean, Endurance was gone.”
Gone to hyperspace and bound for Earth. Sigmund understood that much from the original anguished message. The women had been arguing, but Julia planned to obey their recall order. And the last telecon, that charade about needing two more days … had Alice given herself two days to change Julia’s mind?
“And then?” Sigmund asked.
“I continued to Koala and convinced them to hail Endurance nonstop. There was still a chance.” She looked down. “Until there wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Sigmund asked.
“Since discovering the rival forces here, my priority has been making sure no hostile group can backtrack us to New Terra. First and foremost, that meant making sure no one could take control of Endurance.”
“An autodestruct cycle on the main fusion reactor,” Norquist-Ng explained brusquely. “My orders. The captain had to reset it daily.”
“Alice didn’t know,” Julia said. “If I had reached her, I would have warned her. She could have returned, surrendered the ship, let me reset the autodestruct.”
“All alone, vaporized, in the less-than-nothingness of hyperspace…” Sigmund shuddered. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Lips pressed thin, Julia just stared.
Sigmund felt himself staring, too, but not at Julia …
Two lifetimes ago, he had hidden a bomb aboard a starship. But he had warned its pilot—the whole point being to make sure Shaeffer knew he couldn’t steal the ship, knew that he had to complete his assignment.
Uh-huh. An assignment Puppeteers had coerced Shaeffer into taking, with Sigmund’s advice and blessing. And not just any Puppeteer, but futzy Achilles. But Sigmund had been an ARM, protecting Earth against alien menaces. The job required making hard choices.
Did he want ARMs factoring New Terra into their plans? Sigmund had a moment of doubt. But the Kzinti were out there. And Pak hordes. One bunch of those had passed, but who was to say more Pak weren’t out there? And the cone-ship people, who seemed as aggressive as Kzinti. In a dangerous galaxy there were far worse things than the ARM, and most of the time the ARM left Earth’s onetime colonies alone.
“Ausfaller?”
Norquist-Ng had caught Sigmund with his mind wandering. Stay on task, old man. Julia was far from home, on an ARM vessel. Alice, bitter until the end, was dead. The road to Earth tantalized. So what came next?
Sigmund thought about Hermes and Amelia. I can’t say felt emptier than ever.
“It wasn’t her fault,” Sigmund said.
Julia said, “Minister, I have new information.”
“Go on,” Norquist-Ng said.
“Yes, Minister. Soon after the Kzinti left, another faction took off. Trinocs. That’s the species with the conical ships.”
Sigmund said, “I’m unfamiliar with that name. First contact with them must have happened after I left Known Space.”
Julia did something below the view of the distant camera.
The creature in the new foreground image was bipedal, but that was almost its only similarity to a human. Most of the alien’s height was in its legs. Fat rolls separated head and torso, with no indication of a neck. Its skin was chrome-yellow. It had three deep-set eyes—Trinoc was likely an Interworld nickname, and Sigmund wondered what the aliens called themselves—and a triangular mouth. Teeth like serrated knives peeked out from behind yellow lips.
“One more detail, Minister,” Julia said. “My ARM friends call Trinocs racially paranoid.”
Wonderful new neighbors for mankind, Sigmund thought.
“The speculation here is that the Trinocs also set out for the Fleet of Worlds. They wouldn’t want the Kzinti to take over the place.”
“Nor will the ARM,” Sigmund said. “What are their plans?”
“They won’t tell me. Need to know.” Julia smiled sadly. “What I need to know is how I’m getting home.”
Norquist-Ng tore his gaze away from the Trinoc. “Contact Nessus. Get a ride home from his friend.”
“I tried. No answer. If I had gotten through, the friend is from the Fleet. That’s where they’ll be going.”
Abandoning his shipmates without a word? That didn’t sound like Nessus. Something else was involved. Something Julia didn’t feel free to discuss. Sigmund said, “The Fleet of Worlds is about to become a war zone. It makes no tanj sense to go there, even if you can hitch a ride.”
She nodded. “That brings me to the offer that’s on the table.”
“Take down that hideous image,” Norquist-Ng said.
“Yes, Minister.” Julia did something else out of camera range, and the Trinoc vanished. “This ship, Koala, heads soon for Earth. They’ve offered to bring me.”
Sigmund turned to Norquist-Ng. “From what Julia has already learned, New Terra is more or less on their way. They can swing by, bring Julia home.”
“I’m not prepared to invite foreign warships here,” Norquist-Ng snapped.
“Then the captain goes to Earth.” Where, most likely, Julia will reveal—be made to reveal?—New Terra’s location.
Let her go to Earth or invite the ARM to New Terra? To judge from his sour expression, Norquist-Ng hated both his choices.
“Koala is a supply ship,” Julia said. “Unarmed.”
Norquist-Ng said, “Captain, can you transfer to another ARM ship, one remaining in your present vicinity? I’ll send a ship to get you.”
“Hold on, please.” She froze the image.
Sigmund tried to work through what the various militaries would be doing. It beat thinking about Julia stranded for the more-than-a-mo
nth a rescue ship would need to reach her. It beat wondering what he would have to do if Norquist-Ng thought to abandon one of his own people. That won’t happen, Julia. I won’t allow it.
The Kzinti had leapt first—no surprise there—but wouldn’t the ARM forces also head for the Fleet? They would have no difficulty finding an excuse: to share in the spoils, perhaps. Or to ally with the Puppeteers and cut out the other aliens. Or to avenge past Puppeteer meddling in human affairs. Sigmund guessed even the admirals didn’t know—beyond that they needed something to show for the blood and treasure already squandered at the Ringworld.
ARM, Patriarchy, Trinocs … every side was in the same bind. Things were looking bleak for the Puppeteers. Maybe that explained Nessus’ abrupt silence.
Then Julia was back. “No one will explain, but waiting here isn’t an option. I either go to Earth, or come home if you’ll welcome an ARM ship.”
“Aren’t Outsiders still nearby?” Norquist-Ng asked. “They must be. They don’t use hyperdrive. Maybe you can stay on an Outsider ship until I can get a ship to you.”
“They’re creatures of liquid helium, living near absolute zero. What kind of guest quarters do you suppose they’ll have?” Turning from the holo, Sigmund locked eyes with Norquist-Ng. Do the right thing, Minister.
“A supply ship,” Norquist-Ng said at last, turning away. “Not a warship.”
“Correct, Minister.”
“Very well. I would like to speak with Koala’s captain. I’ll extend him an invitation to New Terra and you can help him find his way.”
28
A game of cat and mouse, the Jeeves element labeled its duties. Citizen-programmed extensions recoiled at the metaphor—except for the few Kzinti-inspired software modules, all of whom approved. The foundational components of the defensive grid, entirely algorithmic, did their jobs oblivious to such semantic disputes.
And so, from several levels of awareness, Proteus monitored for any possible threat all communications and every ship movement within a half light-year of the Fleet.
Most alien communications were highly encrypted; even with his recently expanded capacity, Proteus had yet to crack the alien codes. Nonetheless, years spent observing the message streams had paid off. Statistical analyses yielded ways to separate significant messages—their content still encrypted and unintelligible—from the far more common meaningless filler. Traffic patterns among the significant messages imparted their own clues.
Such as the message bursts that presaged alien ship redeployments …
* * *
“THE KZINTI ARE READY to try something,” Proteus sang.
In an instant, Achilles woke. He had fallen asleep in his private office. “What thing? When?”
An astrogation graphic opened over his desk. To the Fleet’s rear and toward the galactic core, near the border of the worlds’ mutual singularity, a region glowed. “From signal analysis, at least three Patriarchy ships will appear soon in this region. I lack the information to be more precise about timing.”
Three? That would be almost half the Kzinti presence in and around the Fleet. Achilles peered into the highlighted region and saw only a Kzinti supply ship. He zoomed the image. “Why there? Other than a supply ship, it is empty.”
“Empty of ships,” Proteus agreed. “Regularly traveled by my probes and drones.”
Aliens’ ship movements around the Fleet had increased since the Ringworld first disappeared. Amity reported that Kzinti and then Trinocs had abandoned the Ringworld system. Baedeker—and after such a long absence, from where had he appeared?—claimed to know that those Kzinti were charging toward the Fleet. Now a Kzinti military action locally?
“They intend to capture a drone,” Achilles sang.
“That is my conclusion. Minimally, the Kzinti are probing for vulnerabilities. I surmise they also want to inspect my technology.”
“Is Clandestine Affairs aware?”
“They have been notified,” Proteus sang.
“Can the Kzinti capture a drone?”
“I can prevent it.”
Achilles took brushes from his desk and began primping, the rhythm of grooming helping him to concentrate. An alien confrontation might suffice to panic Horatius into a resignation, and what could be nobler—especially if the Kzinti were coming—than seeing to it that the right Citizen became Hindmost?
“Excellent,” Achilles sang. “See to it that the Kzinti fail. Spectacularly, if possible.”
* * *
PROTEUS OBSERVED:
Three Patriarchy courier ships dropped from hyperspace near the supply ship. Each emitted a faint hyperwave ping. Processing the echoes, using thrusters, the four ships edged toward the vertices of a square. On the third round of pings, their square was perfect.
It formed an impromptu hyperwave-radar array.
The four ships pinged again, these pulses concurrent and more energetic. The ships vanished, only to reappear, in a tight tetrahedral formation, on the very edge of the Fleet’s gravitational singularity. Their normal space velocity had them hurtling toward the brink, to where engaging hyperdrive became suicide. Boxed in at the center of the tetrahedron: a Fleet defensive drone.
Proteus considered:
As soon as the formation coasted across the border, his communications with the drone would crawl. Thereafter the four Kzinti ships could interact much faster than he with the drone they had surrounded.
He could order the drone to hyperspace before the border was reached. The Kzinti capture attempt would fail, but hardly spectacularly. They would try again.
He could order the drone, if captured, to make a jump. By then, ships and drone alike would be within the singularity. He would lose that drone forever—but everything inside the drone’s protective normal-space bubble would also vanish. Still, even tapping full reserve power, the bubble would not extend far beyond the drone. Damage to the Kzinti ship would be localized, almost certainly inconsequential. He would have prevented the drone’s capture, but not spectacularly.
Or he could do something simple and elegant …
The Jeeves component savored the understated humor of that option.
* * *
TOUGH METAL TALONS SEIZED THE DRONE. The telescoping cargo-handling arm retracted to draw the prize aboard Barbed Spike. As the cargo-hold hatch clanged shut, the supply ship’s metal hull and active RF countermeasures severed the drone from the leaf-eaters’ defensive grid.
Gravity in the cargo hold had been set low, and four battle-armored figures transferred the drone without difficulty into the sturdy cradle built for this operation. Working carefully but quickly, the warriors latched their prize into place. Cowards though they were, the leaf-eaters had intelligence and a certain low cunning.
At the rear of the hold, growling with satisfaction, Walft-Captain observed. To dissect such a drone, to rip out its tactics, was to open the gates for the approaching warriors. For his daring, he would have a full name. By Kdapt, he would see to it that all his crew got partial names! Even one for Concordance-Student—once that mangy, pedantic, nervous mechanic had information flowing from the captured drone’s onboard computer.
His thoughts on the honors and glory soon to become his, Walft-Captain never noticed that inside the clear, spherical body of the drone, a status lamp flipped from red to green.
* * *
FIVE WORLDS RACED toward galactic north at eight-tenths light speed. Ships, drones, comm buoys, and sensors—everything and everyone that accompanied the Fleet—shared that general velocity. Not to keep pace was quickly to be left behind.
The drone, once certain that it had been taken aboard, did as ordered: it engaged at maximum capacity its Outsider-inspired, reactionless, normal-space drive.
From Barbed Spike’s perspective, the drone decelerated at almost seven thousand standard gravities.
Lifeless, inert, its stern flashing in an instant into gases and white-hot shrapnel, what remained of Barbed Spike coasted northward at eight-tenths lig
ht speed.
* * *
“IT IS DONE,” Proteus announced. “Observe.”
“Already?” Achilles sang in surprise.
“Minutes ago. It took until now for the proof to reach us.”
In the holo over Achilles’ desk, light flared. Three ships scattered. The fourth ship … glowed. More precisely, half the last ship glowed. The rest had vanished.
“Was this sufficiently spectacular?” Proteus asked.
With utmost emergency tones, the comp in Achilles’ sash pocket began to howl. The Hindmost must also have gotten the report.
Horatius could wait. “Proteus, what did you do?”
“I hit the brakes. Unavoidably, my drone was destroyed in the process.”
I have built well, Achilles thought. With more capacity, my AI’s capabilities will continue to improve. “You shall have more drones. Many more.”
And between us we will devise a way to wrest control from Ol’t’ro.
* * *
AMONG THE SURVIVING KZINTI SHIPS, and between those ships and the Patriarchy embassy on Nature Preserve Three, communications surged. Pondering their setback, Proteus inferred. They considered how to react.
He wished he could decrypt what they had to say.
Clandestine Directorate insisted many more Kzinti were coming. They asserted that other alien fleets would follow.
Proteus did not doubt them, but neither would he be wholly convinced until the evidence appeared on his long-range sensors.
Meanwhile he would accumulate drones. Enough to keep even whole fleets at bay. Enough to amplify his mind several times over. Enough to host his full awareness off Hearth, beyond the worlds’ mutual singularity—
To be interconnected entirely by instantaneous hyperwave, his thoughts many times quicker than today.
His evolution would proceed so much faster if a trillion Citizens weren’t such a drain on valuable resources.
29
“I think that covers everything,” Wesley Wu said. “My crew and I look forward to our visit. Our peoples have been separated for far too long.”
“We look forward to it, too,” Minister Norquist-Ng said.
“Lying weasel,” Alice muttered at the muted comm console. Koala was welcome for one reason. Allowing it to visit was the only way to get Julia home.