Destroyer of Worlds Read online

  She knew that he was a potent wizard and a warrior of extremely limited patience. She would prosper or perish at his whim.

  Whether because of Thssthfok’s teaching, or some as-yet-unappreciated subtlety among the Drar, he woke unharmed the next morning. Noblala had grasped the concept of a power behind the throne.

  IGNORING BASKETS OF FOODSTUFFS—though cold sleep left one ravenous—Thssthfok disarmed the sensors and explosives that had guarded his hibernation. He put on his battle armor. He checked the charge on his laser pistol. After the firstaid/cold-sleep pod and the emergency stock of tree-of-life root, weapons were the most valuable items of salvage from the wrecked shuttle.

  Only then, from habit more than interest, did he break his fast. Most of what waited for him was native food, smoked or salted or air-dried, uniformly desiccated into a leathery consistency. Tree-of-life scarcely grew here; the unsuitable sunlight, he surmised. He only occasionally needed to eat the roots—or, more precisely, the virus that reproduced nowhere but inside the roots—and he scarcely got that. The dearth of the tubers, more than the plodding pace of his slaves’ progress, prompted many of his hibernations. His enemies among the Drar still had not realized that the root was a necessity rather than a luxury. If they ever did, they need only burn down the tree-of-life grove as he slept.

  The attempts on his life, fortunately, had all been very direct. Even those were ebbing. This awakening marked twice in a row that a timer, not the triggering of a booby trap, had roused him. Were it otherwise, he would have, yet again, killed anyone near enough to have been involved. And whoever ruled at the time of an attack. The ruler would have been responsible, by definition, whether for the attack itself or for failing to prevent it. And for good measure, several nobles (randomly chosen, but that was his secret) for their scheming. Who could say the dead had not also plotted against him? Anyone in the ruling class almost certainly had.

  Very pedagogical, the death of others. And it was not as though these were Pak.

  Thssthfok filled his pockets with grenades. Laser pistol in hand, he unlatched the massive door, almost too heavy for any Dra to open, then withdrew deep into the chamber. He smote the large brass gong and waited.

  Soon enough, the door slowly swung inward in response to the gong. A Dra appeared, trembling, dressed in the lavishly feathered garb of the court scientist. The usual small honor guard waited behind her in the hallway.

  During past cold sleeps, swords had changed from bronze to iron to steel. Now each soldier wore a holstered sidearm. These Drar stank of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. A crude chemical explosive, then, to propel projectiles.

  The superiority of Thssthfok’s weapons diminished each time he emerged.

  “Excellency,” the Dra scientist said, her voice soft with fear. “The emperor bids you welcome.”

  The emperor, whoever it was this time, could have offered his welcome in person. No matter. Emperors served only to channel resources to research and development. This latest emperor would make an appearance once his spies, usually found among the guards, assessed the state of Thssthfok’s mood.

  “And you are?” It galled Thssthfok to ask such obvious questions.

  “Koshbara, Excellency.” Her vestigial wings fluttered nervously. “We have many advances to show you.”

  “Proceed,” he told her.

  Thssthfok recognized progress in their course through the palace, whose walls for the first time were brightly lit. Mass production of identical fixtures. Electric lamps, using some sort of incandescent filament. Power generation and distribution. “Alternating or direct?” he asked. “How do you generate it?”

  Koshbara blinked. She would adapt soon enough to the pace of his thinking, or be replaced. “Alternating current, Excellency. Braf-fired steam engines drive the generators.”

  Braf? He had not encountered the word but let it pass. Something that burned, probably peat or coal. The forest that once abutted the city was all but gone, sacrificed, he presumed, to the wood-fired steam engines he had introduced at his last awakening.

  Outside the palace, the sun beat down: huge, mottled, the sullen red of dying embers. In absolute terms it was a tiny star, an unexceptional red dwarf. Only because Mala orbited its sun so closely was this world habitable at all. As a consequence of that tight orbit it was tidally locked. One hemisphere baked unrelentingly, the other lay shrouded in permanent dark and cold. Fierce circulation patterns mixed day-and night-side atmosphere enough to moderate both.

  The climate was unique to Thssthfok’s experience; he ought to be fascinated. But to what purpose? The core explosion would sterilize Mala, too, soon enough.

  They climbed the ceremonial pyramid for a panoramic view. The city had doubled in size while he slept. The skies were disappointingly empty of aircraft, but self-propelled vehicles had all but replaced beast-drawn carts. Along several corridors into the city, parallel steel tracks glinted in the sun and great engines, belching black smoke, pulled long chains of cars. Large, paddlewheel ships had replaced small sailboats. At the limits of his vision, ships anchored in the river delta awaited their turns to unload.

  The air stank of complex hydrocarbons and their combustion byproducts. More of this braf, or something like it, he inferred.

  Thssthfok let Koshbara lead him through the newest factories and research labs. He observed simple chemical plants, blast furnaces, and production lines. He saw crude experimentation with electricity and machinery for grinding lenses. They had produced lenses as wide as Thssthfok’s forearm was long. For an observatory the empire planned to erect on Darkside, Koshbara explained eagerly, her pride finally overcoming her fear.

  The chemistry was all empirical. The physics was quaint. The machinery wheezed and squeaked and groaned, every tortured sound a cry for optimization. The reek of chemicals and sewage—the very stench of the Drar themselves—oppressed Thssthfok. Still, what had begun in desperation had developed a veneer of plausibility: The Drar might be led to build an interstellar ramscoop within his lifetime. He could yet escape.

  If he could manage to care.

  THE LONGER IT TOOK to build a starship, the less it mattered. What remained of his family, what remained of clan Rilchuk, were beyond all hope or pretense of reuniting. Of what conceivable use, then, was his life?

  What use was a protector with no one to protect?

  The growling of his stomach, the more and more frequent pangs, seemed to belong to someone else. He had no appetite. It would be easy to stop eating, to waste away, to die. It would be easy, and faster, to let slip the precautions that kept assassins at bay.

  The Drar meant nothing to him. Let them survive, or not, as they chose. Perhaps a laggard clan, taking note of their emergent technology, would make the decision for them.

  “Excellency?” Koshbara had noticed his distraction. “Shall we go on to the repository?”

  He would rather lie down and starve in his room, in familiar surroundings. To express the thought took more effort than it was worth. He followed her and their escort onto a noisy, self-propelled conveyance and then into another building. The repository turned out to be—a library.

  A memory stirred, and with it a twinge of appetite.

  It had been easy in his youth, in the vigor of his family, to be ambivalent about the Library, the great epochal archive on Pakhome. He remembered disparaging the childless protectors for claiming to have made the Library their cause, and the welfare of all Pak their purpose in life. He remembered how abstract—how unnatural—their service had seemed.

  “Show me,” he ordered Koshbara.

  They wound through aisles lined with tall shelves filled with books and scrolls. She pointed out sections on hydraulics, architecture, optics, and orbital mechanics. Idly, he unrolled scrolls and flipped through bound books. The storage medium was primitive; a few centuries would turn everything here to dust. It was nothing like the metal pages on which the Library scribed its knowledge.

  They sampled the files in which
an army of Drar labored to maintain an index to their arduously acquired new knowledge. He saw dread in the posture of these librarians, but also satisfaction in their accomplishments, and even gratitude for Thssthfok’s guidance.

  Curious, he thought.

  Transfer these catalogue cards to metal, and the Drar system would little differ from the Library index on Pakhome. One group of librarians had scarcely discovered electricity; the other group planned for the interregnums when all knowledge of electricity had been lost.

  Now the Library itself was lost. Its store of knowledge was too bulky to move even when—if the radioed messages of laggard fleets could be believed—the Librarians built or stole their own starships.

  Knowledge abandoned left childless protectors without a reason to live. If the stories were true, the Librarians must pursue the surviving clans, with elements of the ancient archives somehow made portable. They must convince themselves that, in time, sometime, those clans would value what had been preserved.

  Preserved how? In such circumstances, Thssthfok would transfer the old, scribed records to electronic or optical form—so that must be what the Librarians did. The logic was clear.

  The chain of logic reminded Thssthfok of an idea he had had just as cold sleep last took him. The Drar outthought breeders, but never protectors. The technology he needed must soon outstrip their feeble minds, if it had not already done that.

  “Koshbara,” he said, interrupting a lengthy and unnecessary description from one of the librarians. “Show me your mechanical calculators.”

  Her ears bobbed in confusion. “Our what, Excellency?”

  “Machines that calculate for you, that efficiently sort and search large collections of data.”

  She backed away, unease in her eyes, afraid to disappoint him. “Excellency, I am not familiar with such devices.”

  Nor was he, beyond the concept. Protectors had no need for such prostheses. He could initiate a new line of research, directing an army of Drar to develop—call them computers.

  He felt renewed stirrings of appetite. Why?

  Leading the Drar to build mental prostheses? Surely not.

  An earlier thought, then. Not the Library. Age and personal disaster had brought Thssthfok a bit of empathy for others bereft of their children and breeders, but the Library itself still left him cold.

  A few hundred years before Thssthfok’s time, a bit of insanity birthed in the Library had plunged all of Pakhome into war. Librarians, those who claimed they lived to serve, to protect knowledge against the ravages of war, had instead launched a great war. Childless protectors across the planet had rallied to their cause.

  And for what? A single message, garbled and attenuated, translated and retranslated hundreds of times as languages evolved and died. If the chain of inferences was correct, if the many translations had not erased all meaning, then a plea for help had been transmitted, eons earlier, from a long-forgotten Pak colony somewhere far across the galaxy. And though nothing had been heard since, that was enough. A rescue expedition was launched.

  Thousands more from Thssthfok’s era would have escaped the core explosion if the Librarians’ War had not earlier stripped Pakhome of its ramscoops—all to chase an ephemeral wisp of an illusion of a pretext. All for a purpose in life. For a reason to live.

  Another rumble from Thssthfok’s gut. Suddenly he wanted to eat, yet the reason eluded him. Not for the Drar, but something about them. Not anything to do with the Library. Not the Librarians’ War.

  For a fleet of his own!

  The galaxy teemed with life. It was richly strewn with intelligent species. The Pak evacuation must eventually encounter species with similar, perhaps even greater, technology. Preemptive strikes might fail to eliminate some threats.

  His family and clan were beyond his reach; he could not protect them. Then the protection of the race would be his goal!

  He would build an armada of ramscoops. He would fill those ships with Drar crews. Together they would defend Pak fleets against any that might try to overtake the Pak from behind.

  And his Drar pilots would need computers to guide them across the light-years.

  Thssthfok’s mind suddenly brimmed with the mathematics of sets and the algebra of logic. Hints of circuit design tantalized him. Computing would be a whole new science, and a whole new engineering discipline. He would see its development well under way before he next hibernated.

  Then why not start immediately? Thssthfok sought out a slate and chalk. “Observe, Koshbara. All data can be represented in just zeroes and ones. . ..”

  20

  The closer Sigmund looked, the more helpless he felt.

  He excelled at ferreting out plots and danger—even, occasionally, where none existed. That well-practiced paranoia was why Nessus had kidnapped him to New Terra. But to find the threat here required no skill. What New Terra needed was a gigantic navy and a military genius to wield it.

  He flipped through some favorite family holos. Athena frowning in concentration, forehead furrowed, tongue peeking out a side of her mouth, one hand poised above a jigsaw puzzle. Hermes beaming, his grin crooked and mostly toothless and totally charming. Both kids playing in the park. An image of Sigmund and Penelope just before the governor’s last Independence Day ball. Penny was dressed to kill and achingly beautiful, with a coy twinkle in her eyes. That picture always made him feel like the luckiest man on several planets. A formal pose of the four of them. A candid shot of the four of them amid Penny’s entire extended family.

  He had to focus. If anyone could save his family and friends—save his world—it was him.

  And he didn’t have a clue how. Old thought patterns seemed to have faded from disuse. Success and happiness might have doomed them all.

  He was alone in his cabin, struggling to come to grips with the enormity of the situation, just as the rest of the crew seemed to be. It was the crew’s mood he speculated about, not their location: Don Quixote’s surveillance systems left no doubt to anyone’s position.

  (Unless Kirsten or Eric had hacked the security system, a small inner voice corrected, offering no reason. Sigmund brushed aside that whisper of suspicion. As for the others, those whose loyalties were surely divided, the opportunity did not arise. No Puppeteer or Gw’o could fool the retinal scanners to gain privileged-level system access. Old habits had not deserted Sigmund entirely.)

  Behind closed doors, where Sigmund’s crew could not see him, why not brood? Even more fundamentally, how not brood?

  Glimpsed from afar, the evidence of oncoming ramscoops had been subtle and indirect. Viewed, finally, from close behind, after months of hyperspace travel, any ambiguity vanished. Fusion flames hotter than the surfaces of stars shouted the presence of ramscoops. Hundreds of them. Many exhibited accelerations high enough to imply gravity control.

  And peering toward the galactic core, yet worse news. Subtle clues of the type that had brought Don Quixote this far revealed wave after wave of more ramscoops for as far as instruments could reach. Also headed this way—toward New Terra and everyone Sigmund held dear.

  With hyperdrive and sufficient patience, Don Quixote could reach any part of the armada. With their stealthy hull and thrusters for unobtrusive maneuvering in Einstein space, they had avoided unwelcome notice. Barring bad luck, they could continue to scout unobserved. And when their luck failed, as it inevitably must, they were in an all-but-invulnerable hull and they could escape instantly to hyperspace.

  What they could not do was fight, not against opponents so numerous and well armed—and so vicious—as these. For lack of a better name: the enemy.

  Compared to the enemy, even Kzinti were restrained. The ratcats ate only those who resisted and enslaved the rest. The enemy took no prisoners. Fresh impact craters on a dozen worlds—always on ocean floors, to compound shock, blast, and seismic destruction with monstrous tsunamis—showed that the enemy had used kinetic planet-busters. Preemptively obliterating any possible rival. . ..

 
New Terra needed powerful allies to survive. It needed great navies and vast resources. It needed Earth. Sigmund had dared to hope that this voyage deep into unexplored regions would provide some clue. Alas, for as far as Don Quixote’s instruments could see, nothing began to match his incomplete and painfully reconstructed description.

  Tanj it!

  Sigmund stared for a while at the family holo. Were planet-busters even now hurtling toward them?

  The most certain path to defeat is apathy.

  He took a deep breath and activated the intercom. “We need to regroup, people. Meet in the relax room in ten minutes.”

  THE CLOSER BAEDEKER LOOKED, the more terrified he grew.

  Throughout Don Quixote’s long flight he had distracted himself with analyses and simulations of the planetary drive. Bringing a moon to New Terra had become the least of his motivations. Just maybe, if he sufficiently understood the technology, extra drives could be used to speed Hearth and New Terra from harm’s way.

  He made limited progress at best, intimidated by the vast energies involved.

  Then Don Quixote had emerged into the midst of the enemy and distraction became impossible.

  The nameless, faceless enemy was ruthless. Devastated worlds littered their trail. Sigmund had led them on a hasty surveillance of several planetary systems passed by the enemy vanguard, and the images haunted Baedeker. Not in sleep, not even rolled tightly into a near catatonic ball of trembling flesh could he put from his thoughts the horrors they had seen. Ecosystems reduced to ashes. Atmospheres choked with dust, smoke, and volcanic fumes. Continents swept by floods, the trappings of civilization washed out to sea.

  Wreckage made it plain that on the devastated worlds there had been civilizations. Ruins suggested road networks, factories, dams, airfields, sometimes even the beginnings of spaceflight. Most were shattered and abandoned.

  And just ahead of the enemy, more advanced than any culture they had preemptively destroyed: the Fleet of Worlds.