He wondered: what will I become when these new units connect over hyperwaves?
* * *
AT THE END, it was all Horatius could do to lie among heaps of cushions, plucking at his mane, stealing glances at his computer. Slowly, inexorably, the digits on the computer counted down. He thought his hearts might burst.
For one way or another, this was the end. According to Baedeker’s calculations, they had passed the point of no return.
And Baedeker himself? Still, there was no word from him.
As the countdown reached single digits, Horatius sang out the command on which so many lives depended. Across the worlds, the ultimate warning blinked on every display. Every loudspeaker in every arcology, park, mall, and public square ululated the primordial shriek that had once warned of predators, wildfires, and tornadoes.
Run and hide.
48
Some disaster had bounced Nessus between the walls of his cell. Down in the dungeon, without a window, almost without light, he had no inkling what had happened. His guess: that the alien insanity Baedeker called the Fringe War had caught up with them.
Perhaps everyone aboveground was dead.
Nessus’ thoughts were muddled. After ricocheting off the hard stone walls of his personal Château d’If, it could be from a concussion. He could not summon the energy to care.
Rot here. Starve here. Be worked to death on Penance Island.
Any of those would be a just end. Liberate the Concordance? Hardly. He appeared to have doomed it. Would his grand plan have succeeded any better if the ARM and Kzinti had come at once, not detoured to the Ringworld?
His throats were parched, and he could do nothing about it. Whatever had tossed him like a leaf had also upended his pitcher. The only hint of moisture in his cell was the dankness of the cold stone floor.
At least Baedeker had gotten away.
No, Nessus assumed Baedeker had gotten away. Achilles would have wanted them to suffer together. Unless Achilles had decided each would suffer more from not knowing about the other.
Without thought, Nessus found himself rolled into a ball, heads tucked between his legs, beneath his belly. Except for the dryness of his throats, the outside world came to exist only as the hardness of the floor and, in the distance, faint voices.
* * *
HEADS SWIVELING, ACHILLES TOOK in the immensity of the Outsider planetary drive as nervous workers watched him.
However the drive worked, it harnessed unspeakable energies. The poor imitations that Concordance researchers had once managed to construct—scientists and engineers led by Baedeker, to give him his due—tried and failed to control those energies. Those drives destabilized themselves.
Ol’t’ro, curse them, had had all the Fleet’s planet-busters dropped into a star. They had banned the making of others.
The surest, fastest way to destroy the Outsider planetary drive must be to ram a ship or missile into it. He had a ship. But if launched, would it survive long enough to build up speed for a proper crash? With warring fleets all around, he had not been willing to take the chance.
Throughout the dome of the planetary drive the sirens echoed. Like the voices of doom, Horatius called without end, “Run and hide.”
Around Achilles, “hide” was what everyone did, if only beneath their bellies. Good, he thought. A fool to the end, Horatius has seen to it that no one will interfere with me.
Crash a ship. Or override layer upon layer of Outsider safeguards. Or…?
Achilles began gathering stepping discs, each powered by a tiny embedded fusion reactor. As he rigged the stepping discs to overload, he deployed them around the great circle of the dome.
His hearts pounded in anticipation.
* * *
WERE THERE VOICES? Nessus wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. He pulled himself tighter against the theoretical possibility of interruption, squeezing until he could hardly breathe.
Ouch! Something hard kicked him in the ribs. Something sharp. In his reflexive pulling away from the … hoof?… he unfurled enough to hear, faintly, the calling of his name. He unclenched just a little more.
“Nessus, curse you! Listen to me.”
Someone inside his cell? That was almost interesting. And was that distant keening ululation Horatius?
With a shudder, Nessus unrolled and climbed, unsteadily, to his hooves.
Vesta was in his cell. Blood trickled from countless cuts and abrasions. He balanced on his left and rear legs, because the right leg was splinted with … Nessus was not sure what. A snapped-off table leg, perhaps, bound with strips torn from a curtain. A jagged point of bone protruded through torn flesh.
“You need an autodoc,” Nessus sang reflexively.
“Is that what concerns you?” Vesta sang with sarcastic undertunes. “I came to get you out of here.”
Heads raised, ears uncovered, the distant howl was clearer: run and hide. Nessus knew one reason the Hindmost might send that warning.
Nessus had lost track of the date. “What is today?” he demanded. “And what is the time?”
Vesta told him.
Nessus had perilously little time. Still, he needed to know. “Why would you help me?”
Vesta glanced at his broken leg. “Achilles just abandoned me. Few things would gall him more than your escape.”
“I need a ship,” Nessus sang.
“If one set of aliens doesn’t shoot you from the sky, another will.”
The risk seemed no worse than staying on this world. “Does that mean you can get me a ship?”
Vesta looked himself in the eyes. “Achilles has a ship.” He took a transport controller from a pocket of his sash. With his other head, he gestured at the stepping disc that had, sporadically, delivered gruel and water to Nessus’ cell. “The disc will transmit now. You will step aboard Poseidon.”
“And the crew?”
“It is Achilles’ personal ship. He pilots it without any crew. If any mechanics were servicing it”—this time Vesta gestured at nothing and everything, somehow encompassing the ongoing warning—“they will have fled as the Hindmost orders.”
“Come with me?” Nessus sang.
“I have other prisoners to free,” Vesta sang. “Be safe.”
* * *
NESSUS FLICKED INTO A CORRIDOR outside a ship’s bridge. He peeked around an edge of the open hatch and saw no one.
He slammed and latched the door, because that was faster than checking to see who else might be aboard. Astraddle the crash couch he remotely shut the air lock, then put his stolen ship into a screaming climb.
* * *
TRUTHS NEVER SUSPECTED engulfed Proteus: profound connections between seemingly disjointed phenomena. Eternal verities. Moral truths. Blinding perception. Wisdom.
More. He needed more.
And before he lost himself in the flood, he needed to slow the exponential rate at which connections among his nodes was expanding.
As the multitude of his new nodes dispersed across the singularity, ships of the Fringe War pulled back from this as yet uncharacterized threat.
* * *
“WHAT THE TANJ?” LOUIS SWORE.
First the—whatever—that had erupted from the General Products orbital facility. Then the primal scream sent over what Jeeves translated as Herd Net. And it appeared that a spontaneous truce had been forged among the Fringe War fleets—that ships, thousands of ships, were swarming on Hearth. No, swarming at the giant artificial moon above Hearth. The three warring sides reacting to what the moon had disgorged.
All in a matter of minutes.
“Is that a question, Louis?” Jeeves asked.
“No, but here’s one,” Louis said. “Does this convergence on Hearth give us a window of opportunity to rescue Nessus?”
“Rescue him from where?” Alice asked. “I understand that Nessus is your friend. He’s my friend, too. But would he want us to undertake a suicide mission without even a clue of a destination?”
“We
have no further information regarding the—”
Louis cut off Jeeves’s dissembling. “Our destination is Nature Preserve One. If we overhear nothing useful when we get closer, we’ll start at the maximum-security prison I busted Nessus out of once before. If he isn’t there, maybe a guard will know.
“Why? I was a drug addict trapped in a civil war, with a very short life expectancy, when Nessus found me. That was more than a century ago. Everything that’s happened to me since—including meeting you, Alice—I owe to Nessus. I won’t abandon him to Achilles.”
Throwing himself into the pilot’s crash couch, Louis looked over his shoulder. “Are you with me?”
She gave him a quick, hard kiss. “Hell, yes.”
* * *
FOR AN INSTANT Nessus thought he had the skies to himself.
As a myriad of objects, too many to count, showed up on radar, he pointed Poseidon out of the plane of the Fleet of Worlds. “Display the time,” he ordered the ship’s automation. A clock appeared on an auxiliary console.
He howled in frustration. He could have made it to Hearth—barely—if this plague of drones weren’t in his way.
And howled again: it looked as though every warship of the three invading fleets was charging at Hearth.
* * *
OL’T’RO UNCOUPLED A TUBACLE to speak into the melding chamber’s nearest microphone. “Evacuate immediately. This means everyone in the colony.
“Leave two ships for us.”
Just in case. They had yet to decide the manner in which they would leave this world.
* * *
HORATIUS WAITED IN HIS RESIDENCE’S grand ballroom. Amid aides and friends packed haunch to haunch, the miasma of fear pheromones was all but overwhelming.
He had done all that he could and all that Baedeker had asked. As digits sloooowly changed on the clock high on the wall, pessimism washed over him.
In the final analysis, the Hindmost’s Refuge, far beneath his hooves, had little appeal. Enough Citizens had taken shelter there after the last disaster to assure the race’s survival.
To flee to the Refuge would mean living with the memory of untold deaths.
As explosions overheads rocked the building, Horatius stared helplessly at the wall clock.
* * *
WHERE TO NOW?
ARM, Kzinti, and Trinoc ships surrounded Hearth. The vast, amorphous cloud of—Nessus did not know what—had begun a dash to … also unclear. Away from Hearth, certainly. Ignoring the alien hordes. And, in the process, blocking his path to Nature Preserve Two.
Short, squat, cylindrical ships, smaller even than a GP #2 hull, darted from NP5. The Gw’oth were leaving!
The taste of “success” was bitter in his mouths.
The Gw’oth ships, and a squadron of Kzinti destroyers breaking away from Hearth in pursuit, eliminated Nature Preserve Five as a landing spot, too.
Return to Nature Preserve One and Achilles? Never.
That left Nature Preserve Three, the world farthest from Poseidon but letting him skirt the worst of the mayhem.
Nessus turned his stolen ship toward Nature Preserve Three, accelerating as fast as he dared, shouting into the comm console as he flew.
* * *
AROUND THE DOME of the planetary-drive building, alarm lights blazed fiery red. Bone-jarring dissonances, stepping-disc emergency tones, rattled the floor.
Standing tall, at peace, Achilles waited.
The stepping discs, as they had begun their shrieking, had roused one worker from catatonia. He had taken one look around and galloped from the building. The rest of the technicians, sunken yet more deeply into themselves, would offer no problems.
Death on an unparalleled scale was moments away. The definitive revenge. Greatness beyond equal. The ultimate transformation.
In moments, he changed the universe.
Calmly brushing his mane, Achilles welcomed … apotheosis.
* * *
“ONE SHIP HAS LEFT NP1,” Jeeves advised. “A Puppeteer ship.”
Any ships the Fringe War had not blasted from the sky, the Concordance had grounded. “It is Nessus?” Louis asked hopefully.
“Unknown,” Jeeves said.
“Put me through!” Louis ordered. “Nessus! Is that you? Do you need help?”
Nothing.
Alice leaned over to study the tactical display in which Jeeves had set one dot blinking. “It’s inside the singularity still. It’ll take a while for them to get our hail.”
And just as long—if it even was Nessus on that ship—to answer.
Only after less than thirty seconds, they heard. Someone had called them first.
“Nessus hailing Endurance. No time to explain. Go. Run. Now.”
Louis hesitated for only an instant. “Jeeves, back us off a light-hour.”
Call it a billion kilometers, more distant than Jupiter from the sun. Whatever situation had Nessus worried, he and Alice would monitor events in safety from there.
* * *
SPENT, EXPECTANT, AND AFRAID, Baedeker waited, all alone, in the center of a vast, cavernous space. There was nothing more to do, and no time remaining in which to act.
For doubts and regrets, time stretched endlessly.
What he hoped to accomplish was without precedent. Had he deluded himself from the outset? What mistakes had he made in his haste? Was he wrong to have come here, to entrust matters on Hearth to others? Had Nessus sacrificed himself, had they spent their final days apart, in pursuit of a fantasy?
Had he doomed everyone?
The tang of ozone was in the air. The hairs of his mane stood away from his cranial dome. He felt rather than heard a faint vibration through his legs, any sounds from the great engines around him drowned out by the endless howl of the Hindmost.
“Run and hide. Run and hide. Run and hide…”
* * *
NESSUS DROVE POSEIDON STRAIGHT at Nature Preserve Three. Through probes splattering off his hull. Below the orbiting suns. Into the first high wisps of atmosphere. Going much too fast.
With the sky still dark and the shriek of reentry harsh in his ears, time ran out.…
49
A giant fist seized Endurance and shook it.
Rigid and immobile in a restraint field, Louis screamed, “Alice!”
“I’m all right,” she shouted back.
“Jeeves?” he called.
“I have no idea, Louis.”
So much for his theory that a billion kilometers of separation would keep them safe.
Across the electromagnetic spectrum, from long radio waves to hard gamma rays, every readout on the sensor panel was maxed out—until, amid showers of sparks, the meters went dark. The count of particles sleeting against the hull was inconceivable, and it kept mounting. Gravimetric sensors showed … what?
Space-time ripping itself apart.
He was in a futzy restraint field. The whole futzy ship was stabilized by inertial dampeners. Still, something was rattling him around like dice in a cup.
But it wasn’t dice in a cup. That was his brain bouncing around in his skull. He couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t—
* * *
“LOUIS. LOUIS. LOUIS. LOUIS…”
“I’m here, Jeeves,” Louis answered groggily. Only dim emergency lighting and ominous red alarms lit the bridge. Beneath billows of fire-suppressant foam, the arc of consoles crackled and hissed. Exhaust fans roared, but he smelled charred insulation and smoke. A drink bulb and loose papers floated nearby, so they had lost cabin gravity. He wasn’t floating, so the restraint field remained active.
“For the moment we are safe,” Jeeves said. “But the ship’s systems have suffered—”
“Alice!” he called. He couldn’t turn his head to check on her, and he imagined the worst.
She didn’t answer.
“Release me!” Louis ordered.
“Alice is unconscious, as you were until seconds ago. I hear unobstructed breathing and a steady heartbeat.??
?
How about a concussion? Internal bleeding? Can you hear whether she has those? “Set me loose,” Louis insisted.
“Louis…” Alice called faintly.
His chest loosened just a little. “I’m fine,” he exaggerated. “Jeeves, I mean it. Release my restraint.”
The field vanished. Floating free from his crash couch, he grabbed an armrest and pulled himself down. Groping about with his free hand, he found a pouch stuck to the couch pedestal. Magnetic slippers. He put on a pair and got a second set for Alice.
Coughing, she asked, “Okay, Jeeves. What just happened?”
“I don’t know.”
Was that anguish in Jeeves’s voice? Their tactical display had gone dark. When Louis brushed off the foam and reset the unit, the holo showed nothing nearby. “Where are we? I don’t see the Fleet.”
“The Fleet is gone.”
* * *
IT TOOK FOUR DAYS and most of their spare-parts inventory for Louis and Alice to return Endurance to more-or-less working order. They had life support, minimal sensors, short-range comm, hyperdrive, and enough thrusters to manage a landing. They had the secondary fusion reactor, with which—just barely—to power the ship’s essential systems.
Thank Finagle for twing, Louis thought.
Jeeves monitored hyperwave and radio while they toiled, and heard nothing. He hailed in every language and digital message format in his databases, and no one answered. Sensors—the few they had—detected only gas and dust.
A great deal of gas and dust.
A trillion Puppeteers. Five worlds. Three great armadas. Two old friends.
All of them gone.
* * *
ON THE FIFTH DAY Endurance was sufficiently restored to run search patterns. They saw nothing. They heard no one. Jumping ahead of the light-speed wave front, reliving the nightmare, they captured data—as well as they could, with so many hull sensors out of commission—from several perspectives around the catastrophe.
And sadly, sickeningly, they understood.
A planetary drive harnessed the energy to move a world. One planetary drive destabilized would have doomed everyone. The Fleet had five drives, close together.
One stray missile could have done it.…