He glanced over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t blocking the camera. “Kirsten, are you set?”
“Ready when you are,” she said.
The plan was straightforward. Drop the stasis field and replace it immediately with a restraint field. Activate the restraint remotely—because they could—lest anything prevent Sigmund from triggering it. And if everything went to hell, just launch. The singleship’s mass now pinned the cables; the bindings would pull free through the unfastened clamps. Then take any necessary action from the air, whether with laser weapons or stunners.
If events progressed that far, more than likely no action would be necessary. Despite Kirsten’s undoubted finesse, the fringing fields from the thrusters would probably crush Sigmund and—whatever.
“On my mark, Kirsten. Three. . . two. . . one. . . mark.”
The stasis field shimmered, rippled, and vanished. Two gloved arms shot up and grabbed Sigmund’s armor around the throat. The restraint field kicked in. The air became concrete around him and his assailant—
Freezing Sigmund and the singleship’s pilot, face-to-face.
Sigmund stared, and not at a protector. Who was this woman?
EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY
44
Alice Jordan hunched over the relax-room table, beset by tics, clutching a bulb of hot tea, lost in thought. Lost, too, in space, with which Sigmund empathized. And misplaced also in time, which he could not begin to fathom.
“There I was,” Alice burst out, “deep in the Oort Cloud. Alone in my ship. Nothing and no one anywhere near.”
As she had said, with slightly different wordings, in varying tones of anger and confusion and awe, using more than the occasional enigmatic expression, more times than Sigmund could remember. One iteration had referred cryptically to shell shock. He would have guessed Penny’s work stories had exposed him to every possible obscure crustacean reference, but evidently not.
She kept paraphrasing and circumlocuting, as though searching for the secret incantation that would restore her life. And why wouldn’t she? Her life had been turned upside down.
For entirely different reasons, Sigmund was as depressed as she. He tried to hide his disappointment. The stasis field might have held someone with the knowledge to find Earth. Using navigational beacons, Alice could find her way around the solar system. Alas, she had no idea how to find Sol itself. Her memory might brim with hints and clues, but extracting that data and putting them to good use was a long-term project.
Just then, it seemed unlikely New Terra would have a long term.
Her Spanglish fell somewhere between the twenty-second-century English Jeeves knew, and that Long Pass had brought to New Terra, and the Interworld with which Sigmund had grown up. It wasn’t familiar, exactly, but he learned without much difficulty to understand her.
“My fusion drive was running flat out. Sol was a distant, brilliant spark straight ahead. Kobold had just winked out behind me. And then”—she jabbed a bony finger into Sigmund’s chest—“you were in my face. Wearing armor. On a freaking desert planet.”
Kobold was merely the latest obscurity in the on-and-off torrent of words. From context, a place name: an object in the Oort Cloud. But as with Sigmund dubbing this ship Don Quixote, names had significance.
Kobold? Jeeves knew kobolds as figures from ancient folklore, like brownies, pixies, and elves. And surely not coincidentally, kobolds were household protectors.
As Alice rattled on, holding shock at bay with words, Sigmund studied her. She was much taller than he. Much darker, too, with space-darkened skin. From those clues alone, and the ship in which she had been found, he would have guessed she was a Belter. Her head, shaved except for a two-inch-wide, cockatoolike Belter crest, made guessing unnecessary.
Part of Sigmund struggled to get past the past: that a Belter had once killed him. Alice had had nothing to do with that.
(It could have been Brennan-monster inside the stasis field. But it wasn’t, and no superhuman mind would be relieving Sigmund of responsibility for New Terra’s fate. Maybe he was disappointed about that. Maybe he was thankful. Sorting out his feelings could wait.)
“And this ship! By comparison, every ship, every structure, I’ve ever seen is so much cardboard and duct tape. Excepting Brennan’s constructions, of course.”
Brennan! Sigmund managed not to react. It wasn’t just the coincidence of the singleship.
Don Quixote now raced at maximum acceleration from the planet on which Alice had been freed to where they could engage hyperdrive. Next stop: New Terra. Sigmund meant to know a lot more before he got there.
“Alice,” Sigmund interrupted gently. Her life had been turned upside down, but he needed information.
Kirsten shot Sigmund a dirty look. Don Quixote was on autopilot for now. Eric and Omar were also in the relax room, observing expectantly. Ol’t’ro netted in to watch and listen.
“Alice,” Sigmund repeated.
She turned his way.
“You’ve shared a lot,” Sigmund said. That was an understatement. Alice had talked, in fits and starts—compulsively, maybe cathartically—since Eric unfroze her. Not systematically, hence almost certainly not completely. “I know this is overwhelming, Alice. That’s why it’s important to go over everything methodically, however long that takes, while it remains fresh in your mind. So please bear with me. I was once an ARM.”
She smiled crookedly. “Understood. I was a goldskin not that long ago.” The smile became wistful and then vanished. She straightened in her chair. “Well, it feels recent. In my mind, I left Kobold only a few hours ago. Somehow I know it’s been much longer. Ask away, Sigmund, if it’ll help you make sense of things. It may help me, too.”
“Goldskin?” Omar asked.
“The law-enforcement organization of the outer solar system,” Sigmund explained. If Alice was telling the truth, New Terra’s pool of veterans had just doubled. “Their uniforms were gold-colored pressure suits. Hence, colloquially, goldskins.”
“Makes sense,” Omar said.
“Alice, from the beginning please,” Sigmund prompted.
“The beginning? I guess that’s 2341.” She looked about with an expression that somehow encompassed all of Don Quixote. “Seeing your tech, that was a long time ago.”
By Sigmund’s best estimate, at least three centuries. And yet that was two centuries after Brennan-monster disappeared. The situation was more than a little confusing. “Your story first,” Sigmund suggested gently.
Alice showed her crooked smile again. “Yeah, I know the routine. Pump me dry first. All right, back to the beginning. Vacationing on Earth, I met a flatlander named Roy Truesdale. He had a story: four months stolen from his life. He went hiking one day, only to wake up with four months gone. . ..”
Trailing off again, wondering how much time she had lost. She would not like the answer. “We’ll brief you later,” Sigmund promised. “Please go on.”
“Roy had gone to the ARM, of course. They eventually identified two similar abductions, decades apart.” She looked at Sigmund expectantly, as in: You say you’re an ARM. Why don’t you know? When he didn’t comment, she shrugged. “Roy wanted to know whether the goldskins knew of similar cases. And when I dug into old files, we did.”
“And?”
“My bosses no more wanted to admit to the pattern than the ARM.” Alice paused to sip her tea. “Roy described whoever was behind the kidnapping as too considerate for an alien and too powerful for a human.”
“Which left?” Sigmund asked.
“Brennan,” she said simply.
THE PROTECTOR JACK BRENNAN HAD EVADED ARMs and goldskins alike—more than two centuries before Alice’s last admitted memory. Both military services had tracked his ship into the dark fringes of the solar system. He had stayed in the Oort Cloud for a while before—the ignition of his ramscoop unmistakable—launching toward . . .
Once again, Sigmund’s memory failed him. One of the interstellar colonies.
Regardless, Brennan was never to be heard from again.
Lucas Garner had recorded the whole incident in ARM files. By rights, the protector had starved to death. Other than a small stock of tree-of-life root that had been entrusted to Brennan (he had to eat, after all), the only supply for thousands of light-years had been in ARM custody—and they had incinerated it.
As a goldskin, Alice would have had access as good as Sigmund’s to the suppressed history of the Brennan-and-Phssthpok incident. (Why kid himself? Better information. Except for Lucas Garner, everyone who had gotten a good look at Phssthpok’s ship or had dealt with the Brennan-monster had been a Belter.) She had shared what she knew with her new friend, Roy.
And then the rampant speculation began.
What if Brennan had survived? Maybe the ramscoop was a decoy while he remained in the Oort Cloud. Brennan was, after all, a protector. Who but the billions in Sol system—most of humanity—would he protect? He had the superior intellect of a protector, the technology embodied by the Pak ship, and the diffuse but boundless resources of the Oort Cloud.
Phssthpok would not have come thousands of light-years without knowing everything possible about tree-of-life and its virus. Brennan might have learned enough from Phssthpok—before killing him—to produce the virus. Then why couldn’t Brennan have made a home for himself at the edge of the solar system?
And if all that guesswork was true, it wasn’t a big stretch that Brennan would commit the occasional abduction to assess the progress of his un-suspecting wards.
Alice and Roy had piled extrapolation upon surmise upon conjecture. No one in authority would approve an expedition into the vastness of the Oort Cloud to pursue such a will-o’-the-wisp. But during his lost months, Roy’s great-to-the-fourth grandmother had died. Roy, like all “Greatly Stelle’s” heirs, came into a lot of money.
Enough to buy a ship.
And so, deep in the Oort Cloud, en route to the region where, two centuries earlier, Brennan-monster had once tarried, a mysterious force had seized Alice and Roy’s ship.
EXHAUSTION CLAIMED ALICE LONG BEFORE her debrief was complete. Kirsten led away their guest to get some rest. Don Quixote had no unused cabins, only lockers, storerooms, and pantries that might be unloaded and repurposed. Sigmund guessed he would find Alice in Kirsten and Eric’s cabin, and his friends camping out in a storeroom.
Kirsten took a surprisingly long time to reappear. “We had a detour to the autodoc,” Kirsten explained. “No, she’s fine.”
Sigmund frowned. “Then why—”
“She thought she might be pregnant. She is pregnant.”
“This Roy Truesdale fellow?” Sigmund guessed.
Kirsten nodded. “So she says.”
Then Alice had lost her space, time, and the father of her child—and somehow, the relationship with Truesdale had not come up. Professional detachment? She was, after all, a goldskin. Or maybe simple Belter stoicism. The Belters Sigmund had known, so determined to be self-sufficient, so fiercely independent—so cold—often seemed to him like a breed apart.
45
Alice finally reappeared in the relax room, wearing a freshly synthed jumpsuit. Despite almost twelve hours of sleep she did not look rested. Belter prickly independence be damned, maybe she was human after all.
Sigmund and Alice had the room to themselves. Kirsten split her time between the bridge and trying to parse a data dump from the singleship. Eric, Omar, and most of the Gw’oth had more pressing duties: holding together Don Quixote. They listened in by radio but were too busy to contribute much.
The normal-space region that protected a starship from hyperspace hugged the hull. The bigger the enclosed volume, the more energy the field consumed. Expanding the field to encompass the strapped-on singleship took energy. Lots of it. The problem boiled down to basic geometry: Expanding the radius of the more-or-less cylindrical bubble by a mere ten feet increased the enclosed volume more than sixfold.
Locally stretching the protective field to add a small volume around the singleship would have been far more energy efficient. Eric—never shy about his engineering skills—balked. The tiniest, briefest gap in the field could kill them all instantly. He insisted that to safely fine-tune the field’s shape would take a fully equipped shipyard. About the time Eric likened an energy-efficient localized field expansion to an aneurism, Sigmund lost his interest in trying.
So the ship’s fusion generator was redlined, even with every nonessential function disabled. Now the essential systems had begun to hiccough from marginal power. The Gw’oth were supplying a trickle of excess power from the tiny fusion reactor in their habitat, and looking for ways to economize and provide more. Jeeves was on call, to be wakened once a shift to run an independent diagnostic and then shut himself down.
Don Quixote would reach New Terra with its main tanks drained and its reserves mostly gone. Well, reserves existed for unforeseen circumstances. The secrets they might find in the old singleship certainly qualified.
They could refuel along the way, sieving deuterium from any world with an ocean. More fuel would do nothing to unburden the overtaxed power plant—only prolong the strain. And time spent refueling was time they could never get back. At least the stepping disc they had installed in the singleship gave them easy access. Left to herself, Kirsten would be living in the old ship, trying to make sense of its computers.
With Sigmund’s assistance Alice heaped a tray with synthed food. Eating for two, he remembered. To conserve a bit of energy, shipboard temperature was barely above freezing and vapor hung above her meal. He turned up his jumpsuit heater, wondering if her odd choices reflected cuisine changes over the centuries or pregnancy cravings. They sat and Alice dug in.
“So, Kobold,” Sigmund began. “Your average hollowed-out rock?”
“No! A marvel, actually. Like a park, with a beautiful blue sky.” She looked up from a mound of eggs scrambled with peppers. “I know that sounds impossible and that anything big enough to hold an atmosphere should have been spotted from the inner system. But Kobold wasn’t big. It was an artifact, not a world, not even round. Picture a grassy, lumpy doughnut with a mass of neutronium at the center. Brennan said the neutronium had a surface gravity of eight million gees.”
Neutronium! Probably the same mass around which Twenty-three had found Alice’s ship orbiting. How that could be, like how Alice’s ship had gotten so far from home, surpassed Sigmund’s understanding. Maybe Baedeker could connect the dots, but Sigmund was not about to involve any Puppeteer. Whether or not Alice could help Sigmund find Earth, the Puppeteers would surely fear she would.
Sigmund knew all too well the extremes Puppeteers took to prevent New Terrans from phoning home.
“And Brennan was using gravity generators like toys. That’s why, as remote as Kobold was, its climate was Earthlike: a gravity lens that magnified the sun. Somehow he scattered the sunlight to make Kobold’s sky blue.”
Sigmund eventually interrupted a long recitation of the wonders on Kobold. How many demonstrations did he need that a human protector was impossibly smart? “Why were you on the singleship? Where are Truesdale and his ship?”
Alice swallowed heavily, set down her fork, and slid away her plate. (Morning sickness? Unlikely, given that she had wanted confirmation she was pregnant. Not to mention the quantity of food she had gathered.) “Roy went with Brennan to get help. Brennan had spotted more Pak coming. The gravity lens, again. He used it in a super-powerful telescope. There was a fleet on its way, a couple hundred or so ships in a tidy hexagonal array. And just before I left, Brennan glimpsed another wave farther back.”
Had Vesta actually told Sigmund the truth? Could Earth be . . . gone? Bombarded back to a new stone age? Sigmund’s stomach knotted. And how in Finagle’s name could ARM files have failed to show Brennan returning?
Something didn’t add up. “Back up, Alice. Where did they go for help? Not anywhere in Sol system.” Or I’d have found clues in the ARM files.
“Wunderland. Brennan wanted to draw attention away from Sol.”
Sigmund had been to Wunderland, the main settled world in. . . he didn’t remember where. He diverted her onto a survey of the interstellar colonies in her era. She spouted names, bits of physical description, types of stars, planetary neighbors, even approximate distances from Sol and each other. Vague as it was, she knew more about Earth’s locale than Sigmund and Jeeves together had reconstructed in years.
Wunderland. Plateau. Home. Jinx. We Made It. Almost every word flooded Sigmund’s mind with associations. No navigational data—life wasn’t that kind—but still a plethora of details to refill voids in his memories.
Alice began fidgeting impatiently, and Sigmund returned to her story. “If Brennan and Truesdale left in your time, they’d have gotten to Wunderland long ago. Didn’t happen.”
Alice fought off a shiver. “So when is now?”
This wasn’t the time to get into Sigmund’s own complicated past. “I left Earth in 2652.”
She managed to both blink in surprise and slump in relief. “Brennan said the first wave of Pak would arrive in 172 or 173 years. Somehow Brennan and Roy did it. Stopped them.”
How long had Alice been in stasis? She claimed to be from 2341, a century and a half before Sigmund’s birth. He didn’t know enough about that period, especially events a Belter might notice, to put her assertion to the test.
He had only himself to blame. Nessus could hardly erase historical trivia Sigmund had never cared to learn. Of the history that had mattered to him, of relations between Sol and its neighbors, human and other, his recollections felt hole-free. Presumably tinkering in that part of his brain would tread too close to his core paranoia. Break that, and he wouldn’t have been a suitable tool for Nessus’ machinations. A suitable puppet.
Alice had slept twelve hours. Sigmund, maybe three, and those unproductive—explaining without excusing his lack of focus. So, Alice’s story. Might she have come from a more modern time, feigning ignorance of recent events? Certainly, but he couldn’t say why. Not yet, anyway.