Fate of Worlds

  “What can I do?” Louis asked.

  “We,” Alice corrected.

  “Leave us, and live well. In a moment, when we return to normal space, I’ll open the hatch.”

  “No way will I, we, abandon—”

  “You cannot help us this time, Louis,” Baedeker shouted from the corridor. “Do as Nessus and I ask.”

  Nessus began the countdown. “Dropping out in three … two … one…”

  “All right,” Louis said.

  “Now,” Nessus said. Normal space returned. “Hatch opening.”

  Ruby-red light suffused the ship, brighter and brighter as more lasers locked on. But the drones emitting the laser beams were too distant—so far—to do harm, the light too diffuse even to activate flare shields. What was the point?

  “Spin the ship!” Baedeker sang. “They are trying to shut down our hull.”

  Nessus flinched. How could he have forgotten?

  This ship was old, nano-grown before anyone understood that General Products hulls could be shut down. The hull was a single supermolecule, its interatomic bonds reinforced by an embedded power plant. Reinforcement was the source of the hull’s incredible strength—and, once revealed, also its biggest vulnerability. Overload that power plant or reprogram its photonic controller and you could shut it off—

  And cabin pressure alone would burst the gossamer structure of the unsupported bonds.

  Nessus wondered, do Gw’oth see irony? It had been Baedeker who discovered this weakness. General Products had long since redesigned power plant and controller to defy such attacks.

  Falling into old memories was a retreat from reality as much as hiding beneath his belly—and as apt to get them all killed. With auxiliary thrusters, Nessus threw the ship into a spin. “Adjust for our rotation, Louis. And get moving!”

  “Acknowledged,” Louis called.

  On radar, Nessus watched Endurance sprint away. “Godspeed,” he radioed his friends.

  From more and more nearby drones, lasers probed Long Shot’s twirling hull.

  Chiron came back. “It is just a matter of time until your hull comes apart. You will die; the modified Type II hyperdrive will be salvaged. Surrender or perish.”

  “I think not,” Nessus trilled, jumping to hyperspace. “Baedeker, how long will you need?”

  “Give it three minutes,” his beloved sang.

  Because neutrinos and their ultrafaint echoes crawled at light speed. And because their message, if it had not been received by then, would never get through at all.

  Nessus dropped the ship back to normal space.

  Transmitting, Voice sent. As the ship spun and jinked, only their AI could hold the focused neutrino beam on its target.

  A blip much larger than any drone appeared in Nessus’ hyperwave radar display. Endurance! “Louis! You said you would leave.”

  “True, but I didn’t say when.”

  A nearby drone blazed in infrared, then another. Endurance, zigzagging, stalked targets among the nearest arcs of the defensive array! Endurance leapt in and out of hyperspace, staying close to Long Shot, attacking the closest drones.

  Lasers shifted off Long Shot.

  “You have made yourself a target, Louis,” Nessus called.

  “Just a decoy. Do what you have to do. Quickly would be good.”

  If only Long Shot had such maneuverability! Alas, not even the best normal-space thrusters could outrun light. On his console, Nessus saw ever more glints of laser beams reflecting from Endurance.

  Endurance had not diverted all the drones; the intensity of light pouring onto Long Shot was climbing again. But Louis was buying them time.

  “Get us closer,” Baedeker sang, his voices quavering.

  Nessus jumped to hyperspace. A moment later Long Shot reappeared yet closer to the Fleet, among even more drones. Transmitting, Voice wrote.

  Endurance reappeared. It no longer glowed with reflected laser light.

  “Louis! They’re ready to attack you some other way. Get out of here!”

  “Real soon,” Alice answered. “Are you done?”

  An instant later: drones everywhere, swooping and pouncing. One solid hit could destroy Endurance.

  Endurance veered; changed speeds; leapt to and from hyperspace. Drones flared and died under its assault—but never as quickly as others arrived. Endurance zigzagged, its (Pak Library-inspired?) laser cannons blazing.

  “How much longer?” Nessus sang desperately to Baedeker.

  “Just a little longer. And we need to slow down.”

  Making ourselves an even better target, Nessus thought. If only they had another choice.

  Drones kept coming …

  * * *

  PROTEUS CONSIDERED:

  That Long Shot was spewing neutrinos at the Fleet. The emissions were pulsed like deep radar but highly modulated like communications. It was a message, he decided, because he could read it. Seek shelter immediately, the short, repeating message sang. But shelter from what? Whom did Baedeker warn? Why use such feeble security measures: neutrinos, rather than radio waves, and short bursts, rather than a continuous broadcast? Why not just encrypt the message?

  That Ol’t’ro insisted Long Shot not be destroyed unless it became an imminent threat to Ol’t’ro themselves on Nature Preserve Five, or to Hearth, or to Proteus.

  That the smaller vessel Long Shot had disgorged used thrusters more nearly reactionless than anything Ol’t’ro had seen off an Outsider city-ship. That by taking part in Baedeker’s scheme—whatever that was—the little ship had declared itself hostile.

  That while the newcomer had the silhouette of a General Products #2 hull, reflections showed it to be made of a different material. This hull could not be switched off.

  That both ships must be stopped—Kzinti, ARM, and Trinoc diplomatic missions were observing. That the sooner this incident ended, the less alien watchers would deduce about his capabilities.

  That Long Shot’s evasive maneuvers were far from random. It stayed close to the singularity, with little normal-space velocity relative to the Fleet. The better to aim its warning message?

  That because Long Shot so constrained itself (again, why?), in a matter of seconds he must soon succeed in turning off its hull.

  That not even Ol’t’ro could guess why or how Citizens stayed to meet certain death.

  That while the smaller ship’s agility should have made it an elusive target, its maneuvers became predictable the longer it stayed near Long Shot.

  That the problem with Ol’t’ro’s gravity-pulse projector was that there was no known way to spot a ship still in hyperspace for targeting.

  But as the annoying little ship’s maneuvers became more and more predictable …

  * * *

  BARELY TWO MINUTES INTO THE BATTLE, the wonder was that Endurance had yet to take a hit.

  “Get ready,” Louis called.

  “Ready,” Jeeves and Alice answered.

  Despite everything, the sight of Alice perched on the Puppeteer copilot’s bench made Louis smile. “In five. Four.”

  Endurance lurched. The main view port lit. Something had knocked them out of hyperspace!

  “Drones swarming,” Jeeves said.

  Nearby, amid its own cloud of drones, the Long Shot glowed luridly. “Run!” Louis radioed. He’d seen Nessus and Baedeker both goad themselves into acts of insane bravery, but staying any longer would be suicide. For both crews.

  “What just happened?” Alice yelled.

  Louis killed their normal-space velocity, shedding their swarm of drones. With a slightly different speed than before he zoomed back toward Long Shot.

  “I don’t know,” he told Alice. “Something new.”

  “Sensors reported a gravity pulse,” Jeeves said. “Some kind of space-time distortion.”

  Drones swarmed, almost as agile as Endurance.

  “Our lasers are overheating,” Jeeves advised.

  Louis cut their normal-space speed to nothing—

/>   Everything happened at once. The hull rang like a bell. Even as Louis thought, Finagle bless twing, the air around him turned to glue: the pilot’s emergency restraint field kicking on. Alarms screamed.

  For an instant, so did Alice.

  “Alice!” he shouted. He got no answer. His back was to her, and the force field kept him from moving, even to turn his head. “Alice!”

  Silence.

  “Release my restraints,” he ordered.

  “That’s too dangerous.”

  “Do it,” Louis growled.

  He found Alice perched astraddle an arm of the Puppeteer-style bench, her head canted at an unnatural angle. She was too tall or her bench’s restraint was too tailored for Puppeteer physiology—her head must have extended beyond the force field.

  Her neck was broken.

  “Have Endurance play dead,” Louis ordered Jeeves. “Do we have a medical-stasis unit aboard?”

  “The ship’s manifest lists two, but I don’t know where they are. Julia would know.”

  Louis couldn’t carry Alice to the autodoc without jostling that would compound her injuries—but while he hunted for stasis gear, she could die beyond hope of reviving. And Julia was too far away. Futz!

  He released Alice’s restraint field and caught her, her head flopping as she toppled. With her limp body slung over his shoulder, he ran from the bridge.

  “What’s going on?” he asked Jeeves.

  “Long Shot is surrounded by drones, bathed in laser light.” His voice jumping from speaker to speaker, Jeeves mimicked Louis’s mad dash to the cargo hold and the ’doc. “Long Shot no longer maneuvers. Unless they can act soon, they will drift inside the singularity.”

  “Tell them to go!” Louis raged.

  Then he was in the cargo hold, where his father’s autodoc still rested on a cargo disk. The ’doc’s lid retracted with glacial slowness. At last he was able to lay Alice inside. “You can’t die,” he told her.

  As the lid closed, diagnoses scrolled faster than he could make sense of them. From the spinal damage, he guessed. Her advanced age didn’t help. “Come back to me,” he whispered, then dashed back to the bridge.

  “Status?” he ordered Jeeves.

  “The Fleet of Worlds is pulling away from us. We have major damage, nothing immediately critical. The impact knocked out comm systems. Our main reactor is off-line—”

  “Are we under attack?”

  “No.”

  “Can we use hyperdrive?”

  “Perhaps a light-year on reserve power.”

  “Show me Long Shot.”

  The tactical display opened. At the center: an image, greatly magnified, of Long Shot. All around it, icons representing battle drones. A faint translucent surface to denote the boundary of the singularity.

  Long Shot had drifted inside the singularity.

  “They are still being probed by laser beams.”

  Louis’s restored memories knew several ways to destroy GP hulls. As he watched, Long Shot’s hull evaporated. Its fusion drives flashed.

  When the glare cut off, he saw—nothing.

  “Take us half a light-year from here,” Louis ordered wearily.

  “In what direction?”

  Louis said, “It doesn’t matter.”

  REBELLION

  Earth Date: 2894

  32

  More than two hundred years ago and (if what Julia had been told was true) more than two hundred light-years away, Sigmund had battled a band of space pirates. Like many adventures, this one had almost ended in tragedy. His mind’s eye offered up a radar image: three blips defining an equilateral triangle. Pirate ships on approach, towing their—invisible, of course—black hole.

  Endings could not come much worse than down the maw of a black hole.

  Stretched out in his hammock, trying and failing to take a predinner nap, that triangle kept nagging at Sigmund. Odd, he thought. He had survived that day and saved his crew, too. The pirates had ended up disappeared by the black hole. Why brood now about ancient history?

  Then again, why not brood? He had nothing to do, nowhere to go.

  Maybe he wasn’t meant for retirement. In the short time he had consulted to the defense forces, he had felt more alive than he had in years. Maybe this strange mood was just recognition that, while it lasted, he had enjoyed feeling useful.

  But how useful had he been when Alice ended up as irretrievably lost as if she had fallen down a black hole?

  Futz! She and Julia had found the way to Earth. Julia was homebound aboard an ARM ship, already thirty-two days on her way. Even as he continued to mourn Alice, he should be happy, tanj it.

  “Jeeves,” Sigmund called. “How long till Julia arrives home?”

  “Perhaps two weeks, sir. It can be estimated with more precision when Koala comes within range of the early-warning array.”

  As Sigmund knew but wanted to hear again, even though the forecast never satisfied him. He had his doubts anyone from the Ministry would let him know when the ship did appear to the array. He might not hear anything till Julia landed.

  And why did his mind’s eye keep offering that blasted equilateral triangle? What did that ancient incident on the borderlands of Sol system have to do with … anything?

  With a grunt, he swung his feet from the hammock to the patio stone. Maybe a brandy would help him doze. It couldn’t hurt. He padded into the house to pour himself a drink.

  “Not just a triangle,” he muttered to himself. “A futzy equilateral triangle.”

  Creeping home from the pirate encounter aboard a crippled ship, his two crew in autodocs, had left Sigmund—being honest—a raving lunatic. For three years after, he could not bring himself to go near a spaceship.

  Carlos Wu had almost died aboard Hobo Kelly, his body rejecting the replacement lungs the top-of-the-line ARM shipboard ’docs had had to offer. But an Earth hospital had saved Carlos, and he had dedicated himself to building a better autodoc. The nanotech-based prototype ’doc Carlos created as a result was nothing short of miraculous.

  And that was fortunate, because Finagle worked in mysterious ways. When Sigmund had forced himself to board a starship—once again, to rescue Carlos and Beowulf Shaeffer—he had gotten himself killed. Again.

  To be kidnapped by Nessus—who saved Sigmund using Carlos’s autodoc.

  Was that what bothered him? Something about Nessus? Or about the ’doc, wherever the tanj it had ended up?

  Sigmund didn’t think either was the issue.

  Or was his hang-up that after his second stranding in space, he had vowed never, ever again to set foot on a spaceship. After the disasters that kept befalling him, staying on the ground was totally sane.

  His vow hadn’t worked out well for Alice, had it?

  None of this involved an equilateral triangle. Was his mind going off its tracks again? Triangle. Carlos. Autodoc. Shipwrecked in space.

  Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip.

  Sigmund wandered back outside, his mind churning, brandy snifter in hand, to watch the suns setting over the desert. He had awakened in a New Terran jungle after Nessus abducted/rescued/healed him. There was nothing triangular about New Terra. Nothing equilateral, either.

  He froze, two strides onto the patio. New Terra came from the Fleet, and it was equilateral. The Fleet as he had known it, after New Terra went free, was five worlds at the corners of an equilateral pentagon, all orbiting about their common center of mass. And like the three tugs towing their black hole, the Fleet was extremely dangerous.

  Weird, Sigmund thought. He had learned to associate equilateral shapes with danger.

  He took the last few steps to the hammock and sat. Gazing into the setting suns, sipping brandy, he let his subconscious flail away.

  Equilateral. Danger. Equal-sided. Danger. Planes of symmetry. Danger. Symmetry. Danger. Symmetric shapes. Danger.

  The spherical array of kinetic-kill defensive drones that surrounded New Terra.

  The snifter slipped from a hand
gone suddenly nerveless.

  * * *

  “GOOD AFTERNOON, MR. AUSFALLER,” Denise Rodgers-Bjornstad said.

  “Good afternoon, Governor,” Sigmund responded.

  The long-serving governor of New Terra was, in a word, intense. Tall and blond, her hair pulled back in a tight bun, her face lean and her expression invariably stern, she commanded respect. She stood but did not emerge from behind her desk.

  Her executive mansion, dominating the planetary administrative building complex, was an imposing structure and the symbol on this world of executive power. Sigmund found it hideous: Windsor Palace meets the Kremlin. Perhaps no one but he remembered the old, independence-era Governor’s Building. It had been built to far humbler standards, and in his opinion that had been for the best.

  This governor, her ostentatious palace, and this cavernous office intimidated most people. They might have intimidated Sigmund, if he were prone to manipulation.

  But Sigmund had lived in cities with a bigger population than New Terra. Filtered through the old memories, as vague as they were, New Terra’s sprawling government complex came across as pretentious more than impressive. Or maybe it was because as an ARM, two lives ago, he had sometimes reported to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. She had had responsibilities for eighteen billion people.

  Frown all you want, Madame Governor. I’m not impressed.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” Sigmund said as the young executive secretary closed the door behind her, leaving him alone with the governor.

  “You said it was important, Mr. Ausfaller.” Rodgers-Bjornstad sat back down. “Have a seat.”

  “It is important.” That much was true, whether or not his suspicions turned out to be warranted. “It’s about the upcoming visit of the Earth ship.”

  “Yes?”

  Concerning the end of an era, Sigmund found her response rather understated. She ought to be excited, tanj it, not … guarded. His fears deepened. But he had to push to learn more. He had to know.

  He said, “Koala will arrive in about two weeks. It’s my opinion that we should be preparing the population. First contact with representatives of long-lost Earth … that’s a big deal.”

  She shook her head. “People would worry and wonder about what will change, what it all means, to the exclusion of everything else. Everyone who needs the information has it. The coming visit remains classified until Koala arrives.”