From the furtive glances in Er’ o’s direction, Eric had had the same thought. Sigmund, more subtly, looked everywhere but at Er’o.
“I would like to analyze the melted door,” Er’o said, to change the subject. “Maybe that will suggest what type of Pak device we are seeking.”
“I’ll help,” Eric said quickly.
The sense of trust had been good while it lasted.
THSSTHFOK SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the cell floor. Except for three simple containers, of water, food, and for bodily waste, his cell was bare. Gone with the shelving and cabinets—removed while he lay helpless, still stunned—were most of his repair kit and any pretense of privacy.
The repair kit, he would miss.
He wondered if his captors had thought to search inside the hollow recesses of the removed furniture. In their haste to clear the room before his paralysis wore off, they had overlooked the small spot on the floor turned transparent by the structural modulator.
As his stomach rumbled, Thssthfok wondered when the tool would reappear.
He had positioned the water pitcher to cover his peephole into the room below. His captors were more apt to check the other containers for anything he might have hidden inside. Why bother with the pitcher, though? They could see through the water to the bottom.
So far, he had managed to sit or stand on that clear spot, or to set something on it, and the altered area had gone unnoticed. He thought. He kept hoping for food the color of the deck—something to chew into a paste that, surreptitiously spread, would stop light from leaking out of the room below. So far, nothing he had been offered matched the floor.
For now, the floor must tend to itself. Thssthfok had company and more immediate concerns.
“How did you get out?” Sigmund asked. Armored, he could almost pass for Pak. The same could not be said for the other suited figure. Er’o.
Thssthfok made a broad gesture with his arm. “You see everything I have.” Except for the structural modulator, still inside me.
“Answer the question,” Sigmund said.
Thssthfok said nothing.
“How did you make a hole in a hatch?”
The bridge hatch. Thssthfok said nothing. If they thought it possible he had not recognized the bridge, why should he enlighten them?
“The breach is very odd,” Er’o said suddenly. “The opening appears melted, but something more complex has occurred. At the molecular level, the material surrounding the hole is stronger than the door. The bulge shows too few microscopic gaps and voids. Trace impurities are too regularly distributed. The material is, for lack of a better word, improved.”
Alien and perceptive.
Through their questions and comments, Sigmund and Er’o revealed clues about the ship’s systems and their manner of thinking. Thssthfok, through his silence, revealed nothing. Not how he had cut ship’s gravity. Not how he had bypassed the security system or operated the emergency hatches or exited this cell. Not how he had injected false images into the wirelessly networked surveillance cameras—although that, given the repair-kit instruments they had confiscated from Thssthfok’s cell, his captors would doubtless soon determine. Not anything.
Thssthfok wondered when his captors would try coercion. He would resist torture, but he would not enjoy it. He could not stop them from stunning and immobilizing him. But reawakened for questioning, he might surprise them. He had done nothing to reveal his true strength.
And then Sigmund did something surprising. He opened a pouch in the leg of his armor and removed a sheaf of flimsy sheets, fastened along one edge. When he dropped it, it fluttered to the floor. “You need something to occupy your mind besides escape. These pages deal with plants and animals on a world far away. Jeeves can speak the words aloud while you learn to read English. We can provide more material. And we can take it away. Understood?”
“Understood,” Thssthfok said.
Mostly he understood that Sigmund expected to be too busy for a while to continue the questioning.
Leaving Thssthfok trying to deduce what Sigmund considered more urgent.
38
“This is unacceptable,” Baedeker trilled. The peculiar thing was, he complained to, not about, Nessus. Somehow, imperceptibly and unobtrusively, Nessus had become the voice of reason.
In calmer moments, Baedeker wondered what this newfound rapport said about himself. For now, he was anything but calm. “I cannot work in these conditions,” he sang.
Heads swinging in opposing directions, Nessus pointedly surveyed the spacious office. “Your surroundings seem comfortable enough.”
“That’s the problem!” Baedeker intoned, stressing the second harmonics for emphasis. “I’m here, in an office. Taking reports. Providing assurances. Giving direction to others.”
Nessus turned his gaze to the office window, beyond which stood the small, hexagonal building in which the planetary drive resided. “Then leave your office. You are hindmost of this project, are you not?”
Sides heaving, Baedeker controlled his anger. Anger was a most un-Citizen behavior, a bad habit learned from living too long among humans. Surely Nessus would understand that.
Baedeker was hindmost here—and yet he could seldom do what he wanted. With authority came responsibility. How could it be responsible to perform any of the experiments he envisioned? The shielding of the planetary drives was imperfect—it could hardly be otherwise, when its effects must encompass an entire world—but the shielding obscured enough.
Outside his office window, wind howled. Snow swirled. Snow! Nature Preserve Five, as yet untamed, had been made available for his experiments. He had determined during an earlier crisis that the planetary drive drew upon the zero-point energy of the vacuum. By somehow shaping an asymmetry, the mechanism effectively created a slope in empty space. The steeper the slope, the higher the acceleration. But how to tap those energies, or control them, or what might happen if control was lost . . .
Baedeker found himself staring into a ragged trench his hoof had torn in the lush meadowplant carpet of his office.
“The fate of the Concordance is no small thing,” Nessus crooned. He crossed the room, a little awkwardly, to brush flanks.
And that show of empathy permitted Baedeker, finally, to confront his real problem. “The issue is not the lack of progress, Nessus. It is the rate of our progress.” Along a great arc of wall display, digital herds milled and sang. Unaware of the catastrophe coming their way. Unaware of the catastrophe Baedeker’s experimentation could unleash even sooner. “My engineers are ready to attempt constructing a scale-model prototype drive.” And as Sigmund would say, only Finagle knew what would happen then.
Nessus hummed wordlessly, waiting. Supporting.
Baedeker sidled to the window and looked up into the sky. The final string of suns had set. Hearth was rising, an indistinct glow through the blizzard. You know what must happen, he wanted to shout. But this was not something for Nessus to propose, but for Baedeker to admit to himself. He said, “Nessus, such experiments are dangerous. We must do them far from the Fleet.”
“The New Terrans might help,” Nessus said.
Indeed, they might. Even Sigmund, whose escape, like his incarceration in the Fleet, was known only to a few. Baedeker knew, because Nessus had shared the information, and felt shame at abandoning a colleague. A friend.
Nessus generally knew more than he chose to divulge. When, Baedeker wondered, had such antisocial behavior come to seem wise? And which of us has changed?
Baedeker resumed pawing the carpet, this time fully conscious of his desire to flee. “I would welcome New Terran support, but I will not endanger them, either. This work must be done elsewhere.”
“Understood,” Nessus trilled. Grace notes alluded, deniably, to unspoken levels of agreement. Or was it approval?
Something was happening between them, something Baedeker could not now take the time to analyze. It was sufficient for the moment to know that Nessus would help.
&nbs
p; So, they would test somewhere else. Deep in space. Far from the Fleet. Far from New Terra. Far from all those for whom Baedeker felt so responsible.
Finagle knew where.
39
If Sigmund were a Puppeteer, by now he would have plucked himself bald.
Admittedly, he had a lot on his mind. The existential threat posed by the Pak. Baedeker’s experiments, for which Nessus was circuitously forwarding progress reports. The evolving mystery of Thssthfok’s second escape.
While refitting Don Quixote, the shipyard had located the many taps, bypasses, and splices by which ship systems had been compromised. That only replaced one question—how had Sigmund’s crew gone so long without seeing the changes?—with another. Circuits had been altered far from any wiring closet, cover plate, or recognizable access point. It was as though someone had reached through the wall! Still unaccounted for, despite tearing the ship nearly apart, was whatever had been disposed of inside the ducts. And Defense Ministry experts continued to scratch their heads as to how plasteel had been altered around the hole in the bridge hatch.
Maybe Thssthfok was a magician.
Or maybe the Gw’oth were involved. Perhaps only Sigmund had thought to wonder. Alas, searching an ally’s habitat on only suspicion was not a viable option (ignoring how long it might take to fabricate waterproof robots to fit the little water lock—and whether the Gw’oth would figure out how to compromise them).
“We’ll take you home,” Sigmund had told Ol’t’ro as the refitting neared completion. “It’s almost on our way.”
That last was not—necessarily—a lie, because Sigmund had not yet known where to go next. Only to whom: the last party, yet to be located, who could conceivably aid New Terra.
The group mind had declined, as had every Gw’o when asked individually. “Our kind also has a stake in this crisis,” Ol’t’ro said. “We wish to continue helping.”
Continue helping. Setting aside the mystery surrounding Thssthfok’s last escape, the Gw’oth had helped, time and again. Sigmund finally decided that, like Thssthfok, the best place for these Gw’oth was where he could keep an eye on them. And if Sigmund’s suspicions were misplaced, he really could use their help.
DON QUIXOTE’S REFITTING on New Terra proceeded glacially—and yet passed far too quickly. Children changed a lot in a few months. During Sigmund’s absence, Hermes had broken an arm playing football and grown two inches. Athena had begun to read, made and changed best friends forever three times, and wheedled her mother into a pet lamb. But Penny was Penny, unchanged, as delightful and adorable as ever, as impossible to leave.
Endless meetings with Sabrina and her cabinet, endless simulations and exercises to run at the Defense Ministry and the Office of Strategic Analyses . . . the universe conspired to keep Sigmund at work late every evening. With what little time the crisis and the kids left, what passed for pillow talk concerned the slow-motion disaster with which Penelope continued to grapple. Oceanic dead zones kept spreading as, without tidal mixing, rotting vegetation sucked the oxygen from more and more of the sea. And the oxygen depletion would keep getting worse.
New Terrans would not die from the lack of tides—if they should live so long—but the handwriting was on the wall. The economy would tank from a lack of healthy algae mats and seaweed, delicacies, to export to Hearth. (Something about seaweed tickled Sigmund’s memory. Seaweed, Sargasso Sea, Bermuda Triangle, the associations ran. So maybe he had another clue, a triangular island, for the well-nigh hopeless hunt for Earth.) Worst case, people here could survive on synthesized food, eating no worse than ninety-nine percent of Puppeteers.
If they should live so long.
Sigmund’s family, for the fleeting, precious few minutes he saw them, reminded him daily why he must go back out among the stars, must look anywhere a solution might hide. He did not have it in him to sit, counting down the hours and days and years, planning a noble but futile war, hoping Baedeker would invent a technical solution to the Pak problem.
So instead Sigmund waited here, far from home. Glued, more or less, to the copilot’s seat. Waiting. Waiting. Until—
“An incoming hyperwave message, Sigmund,” Jeeves announced.
“On the bridge speaker,” Sigmund answered. He gave Kirsten a confident smile.
“New Terra vessel Don Quixote, this is Ship Twenty-three. Your request to trade is accepted. We will reach your coordinates shortly. When we arrive, you will maintain a separation of six miles. Our escorts will meet your representative outside your air lock.”
Kirsten leaned forward. “I have them on radar, making point nine light speed. They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
“Radio an acknowledgment, Jeeves,” Sigmund said, standing. “Kirsten, the ship is yours.”
Sigmund swung by the main air lock to retrieve his pressure suit and armor from a locker. With one cargo hold home to the Gw’oth and a second cargo hold a prison cell, pallets of supplies clogged the corridors. The only reasonable space aboard in which to wriggle into his vacuum gear was the relax room. He headed that way, with helmet in hand and suit draped over his arm.
Faint noises emerged from a closed hatch as Sigmund passed. He paused to listen closely. Metal clanking. The hum of electric motors. These were the sounds of a Gw’o wearing his exoskeleton. On the last voyage this storage space had served as small-arms locker. Putting an observatory there for the Gw’oth eliminated the unpleasantness of explaining why the weapons had been moved. Everyone could pretend to believe no weapons were aboard this trip.
The Gw’oth were better astronomers than anyone on New Terra. Even if Baedeker had been available for this trip, Sigmund would have authorized retrofitting this little facility. Kirsten swore the firewall between external-instrument control and the rest of the ship’s network was hackproof. Her assurance was good enough for Sigmund.
Almost.
Whenever the observatory was in use, a New Terran would happen to be nearby. Today it was Omar, the newest member of the crew, searching nearby stacks of provisions.
Omar Tanaka-Singh was tall and wiry, with a square jaw and a shock of thick, dark hair. If he minded being posted on this ship rather than being captain of his own, he kept the opinion to himself. Omar had as much naval experience as any New Terran and better skill with small arms than most. And unlike Baedeker, Omar would not run at the first sign of trouble.
With Thssthfok aboard, Sigmund could not imagine the voyage passing without trouble. Unfortunately, neither could he imagine leaving the Pak under anyone else’s supervision. And so Thssthfok remained aboard.
Sigmund crooked a finger: Come with me. Omar nodded and set off, in his long-legged lope, after Sigmund.
From the next deck, Sigmund used his pocket comm to reach Eric in the engine room. This flight the intercom was only for emergencies. The less Thssthfok overheard about the shipboard routine, the better.
While climbing into his pressure suit, Sigmund gave his final directions. Kirsten listened in from the bridge. “I can’t say how long the bargaining will take. Kirsten has the bridge and is in command in my absence. Eric, keep an eye on Thssthfok’s cell door. Omar, watch the observatory. And both of you armed.”
Omar frowned. “That leaves you unsupported, Sigmund. I think you should bring one of us along.”
Sigmund was about to visit a veritable city in space, miles long, with a population of millions. If the Outsiders meant him any harm—then he was dead. A companion would not change that. “Thanks, but I need you here.”
“If Er’o returns to his tank that will free up one of us,” Omar persisted.
Only Er’o, because the Gw’oth tended to stay in their habitat. Since Ol’t’ro revealed themselves, the Gw’oth had been slightly more forthcoming. Melds attempted short of two members generally failed. Sigmund could not confirm that assertion, but it felt right to him. Or maybe the group mind simply refused to risk two pieces of itself at the same time.
Omar cleared his throat, pressing for a
response.
Sigmund said, “Let Er’o stay where he is. He may learn something useful by monitoring the Outsider ship.”
Throughout Known Space, and in unknowable regions beyond, the Outsiders were the source of the most advanced tech. Some tech they sold: hyperwave radio, hyperdrive, and occasionally—at a very high price—the planetary drive. Even when the Outsider devices were reproducible, such as the hyperdrive shunt and hyperwave radio, the underlying science remained illusive. Some tech, like the Einstein-space drive their ships used, the Outsiders had yet to sell.
And knowledge is power.
Before Sigmund’s birth, an Outsider ship sold hyperdrive technology to a human colony. That sale saved humanity from certain defeat at the talons of the Kzinti. Who was to say another Outsider sale wouldn’t tip the balance the other way, or empower other aliens to threaten Earth?
And so Sigmund had, in his time as an ARM, worried about the Outsiders. That they disclosed little about themselves only deepened the mystery—and Sigmund’s fears. Throughout that era of his life, he had never encountered anyone admitting to have learned much by studying an Outsider ship.
But no previous observer had been a Gw’o scientist radio-linked with his Gw’otesht. Sigmund would not miss this opportunity—nor would he leave an armored Gw’o unsupervised on Don Quixote.
“And we might learn something, accompanying you,” Eric said.
“True,” Sigmund said, to show he had heard the comment. With a final bit of contortion, he got his second arm into the pressure suit. “Let’s stick with the plan I outlined.” He put on his helmet by way of declaring the matter closed. He opened a link to the Gw’oth shared channel. “Er’o, you should be seeing the Outsider ship now.”
“Affirmative, Sigmund.”
Minutes later, pressure suit sealed and safety-checked, Sigmund was cycling through the air lock to await his escorts.