Fate of Worlds

  “It’s just me aboard,” Lorraine said. “I’m running routine diagnostics on—”

  “It can wait.” Sigmund pointed to the air lock. “Out, now. Run, don’t walk, to the terminal.” That was a half mile away. “Let us do our job.”

  “If you’re safe here then so am I.”

  “Have you ever seen a hydrogen-gas explosion?” Sigmund asked. “Deuterium goes boom just like ordinary hydrogen.”

  Lorraine squinted at Sigmund’s badge. “You’re not Joe. Get off the ship immediately.”

  As Lorraine reached for her pocket comp, Sigmund stepped behind her, forcing her to the deck with a quick yank and twist on her right arm. It was a desperation move: he was too slow and frail to wrestle, and putting an armlock on anyone standing was tricky. If she had had any self-defense training, she would have slipped free and tied him into a pretzel.

  He had gambled that she wouldn’t.

  Wrestling, boxing, karate … Puppeteers had kept such skills from developing among their slaves. Sigmund had brought martial arts to this world, had taught the original trainers as he formed the Defense Ministry. A random mechanic was unlikely to have had the training.

  For once, things had broken his way.

  Things were going too fast, too improvised. He had not thought to give Amelia an alias. He had not planned an op in … he didn’t dare to remember how long it had been. Lorraine might not have read Amelia’s ID. “You,” he barked over his shoulder. “Get her comp.”

  “Me?” Amelia said, confused.

  “Yah.” He yanked Lorraine’s arm as she squirmed. “Lie still. Look, I’m sorry about this. Once we let you go, I suggest you run like hell. We’re launching immediately.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lorraine hissed. “This ship doesn’t have the range to take you anywhere. It’s only for servicing the array.”

  He knew that. If these ships had had interstellar range, they would have been much better secured. “Let me worry about where I’m going.” Because I’m worried enough for all of us.

  Gingerly, Amelia extracted the comp from their captive’s pocket.

  “Now get the roll of tape from my pocket. Lorraine, when I ease up bring your arms together. My colleague will tape your wrists together behind your back. Do you understand?”

  Lorraine nodded.

  “Try anything,” Sigmund warned, “and I’ll dislocate your shoulder.”

  Amelia, paler than ever, sloppily taped together Lorraine’s wrists.

  Sigmund released his hold, took the roll of tape, and did a proper job binding Lorraine’s arms. “You can get up now.”

  Shrugging off Sigmund’s helping hand, Lorraine struggled to her feet.

  He led the mechanic to the air lock. “Again, I’m sorry about this. If it makes a difference, this is done in a good cause.”

  “You can tell yourself that,” Lorraine snarled.

  He shoved her out the hatch. “Come with me to the bridge,” he ordered Amelia.

  From a hundred feet above the field, in an infrared view as he tipped Elysium’s bow skyward, Sigmund glimpsed Lorraine. She ran awkwardly, arms bound behind her, already halfway across the tarmac.

  He opened up the ship’s main thrusters.

  * * *

  MINUTES LATER, while Planetary Defense dithered over what to do about a receding object, Elysium shot beyond the edge of New Terra’s singularity and then vanished into hyperspace.

  * * *

  AS THE MASS POINTER LIT, its one long line indicating New Terra, Sigmund turned toward Amelia. He wondered which of them was more upset.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “No, I’m not all right!” she shouted. “Thanks to you, I’m a mugger, a thief, a traitor, and a fugitive.”

  He was all those things—and ancient and exhausted. His skin crawled from the knowledge he was once more in space, and on a ship before it could be fully checked out.

  But he was also the professional here. Suck it up, he told himself.

  Great advice, but he found himself lost in the view port’s hyperspace-denying images of a stormy, rockbound coast.

  Koala could pop up within days and everything now depended on Amelia. He had to get her moving, engaged, fired up—and fast. The question was: how? For the love of her daughter? Patriotism? The lure of long-lost Earth.

  No, Sigmund decided. Her pride.

  “It’s time,” he told Amelia, “to prove you’re as smart as you think you are.”

  * * *

  “I HADN’T DARED not to believe,” Amelia said. Though her face was drawn and her eyes had grown puffy with exhaustion, she gazed with satisfaction upon her handiwork. Around her, Elysium’s photonics shop was awash in cannibalized probes: sensor platforms, hyperwave-radar buoys, and defensive drones. Two extensively modified probes sat side by side on a workbench. “But actually to have done it…”

  Sigmund rubbed his eyes, as weary as she. He could contribute nothing to the effort beyond fetching spare probes from the nearby cargo bay and coffee from the relax room, but if he had gone off for much needed rest, Amelia might have slept, too. The hell of things was, he had no idea how much time they had. He had to assume, very little. With a gung-ho captain, Koala could appear any day.

  What were the odds Louis Wu’s grandson was a slacker?

  Sigmund said, “Then the probes will work?”

  “Oh, they’ll do as you asked.” Amelia exhaled sharply. “Will that bring the results you expect? That’s out of my hands.”

  Mine, too, Sigmund thought. “Shall we get them deployed?”

  “That’s why we built them.” She paused. “Oh, crap, Sigmund. I can’t stay cool. I don’t know how you do it. That’s Julia out there.”

  “I know.” Awkwardly, he gave Amelia a hug. “We’ll keep her safe. I promise.”

  Snuggled against his chest, he felt her nod.

  “I’ll be on the bridge for a little while,” he told her, letting go. “Once we’re in position, I’ll help you put the probes out the air lock.”

  Their ship hung beyond the sensor range of the New Terran early-warning array, its normal-space velocity toward New Terra about five percent of light speed. A five-second jump brought them almost within the array’s reach.

  They each carried one modified probe. With inner and outer air-lock hatches open, Sigmund pushed the altered defensive drone out through the air-pressure curtain. He backed out of the lock to let Amelia launch the modified hyperwave-radar buoy. When he rejoined her, the drone was only a glint by the glow of a distant blue nebula. They watched both probes drift away.

  Sigmund slapped the button to close the outer hatch. “Shall we?”

  “What if you’re wrong, Sigmund?”

  Then we go to jail, my faith in humanity somewhat restored. “What if I’m right?” he countered.

  Looking ready to cry, Amelia said, “Let’s do it.”

  * * *

  THE PROBES COASTED ACROSS the unmarked border of New Terra’s early-warning array. By then, Elysium had jumped several light-seconds away and killed its normal-space velocity.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Sigmund told Amelia.

  “I’m ready now. First signal.”

  She sent a low-power pulse to the modified defensive drone and it vanished into hyperspace. Like anything transitioning between normal and hyperspace, it made a ripple. The bigger the normal-space protective bubble, the bigger the ripple. Squandering energy prodigiously, this probe had, before jumping, inflated its bubble to the size of a decent-sized starship. To the early-warning array, it was a starship.

  Now to make it look like an arriving starship.

  “Second signal sent,” Amelia announced. “Our hyperwave gear is back in receive mode.”

  They heard, “This is the Earth vessel Koala, calling New Terra.”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” Amelia said.

  “So do I.”

  From his console, Sigmund read the faint trace of hyperwave-radar pings. This
far from the array, the echoes off Elysium would be undetectable. The buoy they had dropped was nearer to the array, but due to the little probe’s size its echoes would not be detectable either.

  Instead, the scan had triggered an active hyperwave pulse from the decoy buoy. That pulse mimicked a ship-sized echo. As modified, the buoy radiated infrared, too. The IR would look like a ship’s waste heat.

  “We’ll know soon,” Sigmund said.

  But the seconds crawled.

  “This is New Terra Planetary Defense,” their hyperwave radio announced. “Welcome, Koala. We’ve been expecting you. Maintain your course and speed while we hand off your approach to Space Traffic Control, who will prepare landing guidance…”

  Sigmund’s console squawked twice as things dropped into normal space nearby. Moments later, his passive infrared sensor acquired two faint objects streaking, relative to Elysium and the decoy buoy, at nine-tenths light speed. Defensive drones. Kinetic killers. His console chirped again: at hyperwave pings for terminal guidance.

  “Koala, if you carry hyperwave transponders, we request that you…”

  There was a blinding flash before the view-port polarizer cut in. His eyes watering, Sigmund squinted at his instruments. “They just killed ‘Koala.’”

  37

  The deed was done, the risks taken, the dirty truths transmitted to New Terra. There was nothing left to do but wait—trying not to obsess about the many ways everything could still end badly. Neither the government Sigmund strove to overthrow nor the cold, dark vacuum of space was forgiving.

  He endlessly paced (if locomotion at his slow shuffle could be called pacing) the short corridors of Elysium. On this slow lap he found Amelia slouched over the small table in the relax room: dark bags under her eyes; picking at a crust of bread; staring, transfixed, at the recorded loop they transmitted—circuitously, through a series of hyperwave relays, lest kinetic killers find them.

  The old man in the vid looked twitchier and far wearier than she.

  “It’s a recording, you know,” Sigmund teased her. “It’s the same every time.”

  “I know.” Amelia frowned at the circle of bread crumbs that surrounded her plate. “Is this going to work?”

  He gestured at the vid. It had just cut to a file shot of Donald Norquist-Ng. He told her, “The minister will do his best to blame everything on me. I made illegal recordings. I assaulted people and stole a ship. Having improvised a fake Koala, who’s to say that I didn’t destroy the fake ship, too?”

  “You didn’t,” she protested.

  “That’s what we’re counting on.” Sigmund gestured at the continuing playback. “Plenty of people were in that room. You can hear them in the background. They weren’t all happy. Some of them will come forward.”

  Uh-huh. And pigs will fly, said the forlorn expression on Amelia’s face.

  Sigmund found the recording easier to face than Amelia. He listened to his voice-over saying, “… Known to your government for many weeks. Here is Minister Norquist-Ng first hearing the news.”

  As Alice’s recorded voice replaced Sigmund’s, loss and anger washed over him. What had she been thinking, to run off like that? To get herself killed like that?

  The vid rolled on, indifferent to Sigmund’s pain. “We know the way to Earth,” Alice was saying. “From this location, it’s about two hundred light-years, mostly to galactic south. From New Terra, a bit over two ten. Jeeves? Show them.”

  “Graphic off,” Norquist-Ng barked. “Jeeves, you will show that image to no one except by my authorization. I’ll brief the governor. No one is to speak a word about this development outside this room.”

  In the looping message, Sigmund explained to—did he have viewers?—that a stellar map had been erased before anyone in the meeting room could study it. “But was suppressing this report the misguided decision of one man? Did the minister tell the governor? Let’s find out.”

  For his meeting with the governor, Sigmund had risked wearing spy lenses. His audience—again assuming that he had viewers, that this transmission was not being jammed—would see the executive office and the governor herself.

  He heard himself telling the governor, “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.”

  Rodgers-Bjornstad 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.”

  “The governor was complicit in withholding this news,” recorded-Sigmund summarized. “Because she fretted about lost productivity? Or, as I had feared, because she and the Minister of Defense had an undisclosed motive? I had to know. Here is what happened next.”

  Video switched to a star field centered on New Terra. The blue dot was an icon; from this distance, the planet was hard to spot even if you knew where to look. The world and its low-flying suns together shone only one millionth as bright as the dimmest red-dwarf star.

  The voice-over announced, “This is the Earth vessel Koala, calling New Terra.”

  This segment of the recording ended all too quickly in a blinding flash.

  “That was an attack without warning”—Puppeteer-cleansed English lacked the word ambush—“on the embassy ship from Earth. A ship that Minister Norquist-Ng had personally promised safe passage. A ship bringing home one of his own officers.

  “Suspecting deceit by our leaders, I arranged what looked to sensors like a ship’s arrival. I am saddened to have been correct in my suspicions, appalled at the actions taken by our government. But here, finally, is good news. Koala has yet to reach us. It has not been destroyed.

  “I submit to you, my fellow citizens of New Terra, that those who would suppress the rediscovery of Earth, those who would kill to keep that secret, are unworthy to lead us.”

  He concluded the broadcast as he had begun. “This is Sigmund Ausfaller, onetime Earth resident, your former defense minister. I wait in nearby space to warn away the embassy ship from Earth when it arrives. Or we can reconnect with our cousins and our long-lost past. The choice is yours … if you act quickly.”

  * * *

  ROCKING HERSELF, ARMS CROSSED across her chest to clutch her own upper arms, Amelia sat perched on an armrest of the pilot’s crash couch. The star field had been banished from the main view port, replaced with an old image of Hermes, Amelia, and their three children. Julia, the youngest, was at the missing-tooth, cheesy-grin stage.

  Sigmund backed away silently. Whistling loudly, he returned to the bridge. This time Amelia had heard him coming. She sat more normally—looking posed. Stars once again showed in the view port.

  He said, “I’m going to make some dinner. What can I get you?”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  “You have to eat something,” he said gently.

  She shook her head. “Was everything we did for nothing?”

  “Don’t think that.” A hand set on her shoulder confirmed that she was trembling.

  Why wouldn’t she be terrified? Their buoys had broadcasted for three days, and they had heard back … nothing.

  Every second they spent out here terrified Sigmund, too, but he had to be strong. Their ship was intact and no one aboard had died. That was better than usual for him. “Worst case, we’ll warn away Koala. Julia will be safe.”

  “With Earth knowing they’re unwelcome here. Hermes and I will never see our daughter again—unless this ARM organization of yours takes offense and returns with a fleet.” Amelia laughed cynically. “Of course I’ll be in prison. Maybe that will take my mind off things.”

  How would the ARM take news of a planned ambush? Assuming the organization hadn’t changed since Sigmund’s era, not well.

  What came next hinged on the answer to a single question. Would New Terran authorities alter their plans? The shortsighted fools ha
d been relying on the ARM being too preoccupied—by the Ringworld disappearance and the multispecies conflict moving to the Fleet—to investigate a lone ship gone missing far away, in unfamiliar space. The politicians might even have been correct.

  Now they had to worry about Koala escaping to report an ambush.

  A lost ship might be written off; a hostile act would elicit an armed response. The governor and her cronies had to realize that. Didn’t they? But as the silence from New Terra dragged on, an outbreak of clear thinking seemed ever less likely …

  Sigmund squeezed Amelia’s shoulder. “It won’t come to that. Either part.”

  “Yes, it will.”

  He gave her shoulder another squeeze. “Prison isn’t an option. Not for you. When we head back”—which must happen soon, because Elysium was running low on deuterium and food—“we’ll both tell the authorities that I forced you to help me. You’ll be in the emergency medical stasis unit because I no longer needed you awake after you’d configured probes for me.” He hesitated. “If I smack you a little, bruise your face, no one will question that story.”

  She shook off Sigmund’s hand to stand facing him, her eyes blazing. “Absolutely not! I came of my own free will, and I’ll not have anyone think such terrible things of you. Certainly not your son!” Her expression softened. “I can’t believe you would take the blame for me.”

  He shrugged, embarrassed.

  The hardest part of waiting was the silence. Maybe they had initiated a debate groundside, but it was impossible to know. Back in the day, Sigmund had kept spy ships skulking near the Fleet of Worlds. Any of those ships could have tapped into New Terra’s public networks from this distance. All he had was this short-range cargo ship, equipped and provisioned for same-day jaunts. Hiding beyond the reach of the early-warning arrays, carrying only commercial comm gear, the planet’s low-powered RF leakage was unintelligible babble.

  “Maybe I will have a snack,” Amelia said. Changing the subject?

  “Sure. What can I bring you?”

  “Soup and a sandwich. Maybe some…”

  Sigmund saw it, too: the flashing indicator for an incoming comm signal. But was the contact from Koala or New Terra?