Betrayer of Worlds Read online

  As stressful as Louis found jumping about the Pak fleet, he had his pride. He could not suggest retreat before a Puppeteer did.

  The moment approached to emerge from hyperspace into another cluster of Library ships. “Dropping out in five minutes,” Louis announced over the intercom. “Ready another buoy.”

  He tried not to notice the tremor in his hands.

  18

  Achilles passed the homeward flight first in gloating, then in boredom, then, as Nessus, churlishly, continued to deny him access to the bridge controls, in fits of rage.

  He had promised himself glory—and surely he had earned it. Despite jealousy and so many enemies conspiring against him, he would have everything. He would trample all who had opposed him. He would take his revenge for past indignities.

  If this interminable flight ever ended.

  He counted the days. He circled his cabin and, when that grew old, paced the corridors. If his meandering took him to one specific passageway more often than to any other, he deemed that coincidence.

  And yet—

  Doubts gnawed at him. Others had snatched success from his jaws before. His foes would stop at nothing to cheat him again.

  So how would he return to Hearth? In triumph? Or to another banishment?

  Pak had warred among themselves for eons. Where better than in the Pak Library to find technologies with which to squash the Gw’oth? Who better to install behind all other Citizens than the genius, the visionary, who delivered that great prize?

  And yet—

  Enemies always and everywhere beset him. They would bleat like lamed calves about trivia. That he had redirected Argo without authorization. That he had misled authorities. They would accuse him of risking war with the Pak.

  And yet—

  He had loyal servants on Hearth. Powerful servants. Well-placed servants.

  Either to appease those supporters or to keep him apart from them, Baedeker and Nike had bent to Achilles’ will. How that must have galled them! To maintain consensus within the party councils they had had to allow him to go claim the Library. With that treasure he would wrest from their undeserving jaws the greatest prize of all. A new Experimentalist consensus must come. It must make him Hindmost.

  And yet—

  His foes would stop at nothing.

  Then neither would he.

  Louis squinted, bleary-eyed, into a slowly scrolling excerpt from the Pak Library.

  The data dump contained a bewildering assortment of text layouts; flat images, both color and monochromatic; holographic images; animations; and simulations. He had suppressed any display of the underlying raw data, for the dataset formats came in an even more dizzying variety of dimensionalities and structures. Hyperlinks in green, red, and yellow pointed to related materials known to be aboard, known not to be aboard, or of as-yet-indeterminate presence.

  Merely to skim the surface was to know beyond doubt that the Library was old.

  Most of the math was beyond Louis. Most graphics tantalized more than they taught. Most of the text remained without translation. The scattered translatable passages were painfully succinct and they often defied Louis.

  He remembered Ausfaller’s comment about terseness. Pak protectors spoke in words or short phrases; their minds filled in the blanks faster than complexity could be articulated. It seemed their written language followed the same concise pattern.

  So Louis caught only glimpses of meaning—and those hints fascinated him. He forgot for shifts at a time to eat, drink, or sleep, dictating comments whenever anything made an impression on him. His annotations might make things the least bit easier for the scientists on Hearth. Or they could have a good laugh at his ridiculous speculations.

  “Your diligence is commendable,” Achilles said.

  Louis discovered his eyes were closed, his head resting on arms folded across a cluttered workbench. He opened his eyes and sat up. “It’s something to do.”

  Achilles walked into the workroom, hooves clicking on the deck. He wore a utilitarian belt with deep pockets rather than his customary sash of office. “The trip is tediously long.”

  “There is more than enough in the Library for two to look at.”

  “Indeed.” Achilles looked about the room, as though wondering where to begin. He peered at the still-scrolling display beside Louis, at the benches piled high with equipment, at the three racks of Pak archive still braced in place. Necks moved sinuously as he peered into one of the racks.

  “See something?” Louis asked.

  “I do not know. Something that struck me as I thought back.” Achilles straightened, raising a head to survey the benches. “Ah, there.” He found a flashlight-laser, checked that the beam was dialed to full dispersion, and shone the light into the gap between two adjacent component tiers. He sidled around the rack, flashlight in a mouth, projecting the beam into gaps between modules and tracing bundles of fiber-optic cables. “Interesting.” He went back to the top to survey more systematically.

  “What is it?” Louis finally had to ask.

  “Just engineering curiosity.” Achilles knelt for a closer look at the deck-level tier of components. The head without the flashlight stayed high, its lone eye focusing on Louis. “The Pak designers took a fascinating approach to coupling optical fibers.”

  Long before Achilles finished his methodical examination, Louis lost interest and went back to his own studies. After a while he paused scrolling to admire images he had encountered of Pak space elevators. Hyperlinks, their subject matter often unintelligible, lay scattered throughout the accompanying text. Some links might have been about materials and orbital mechanics. The link about the tether itself was coded red. A pity: something strong and lightweight enough for a tether stretching to geosynch was the roadblock to building space elevators.

  Louis could read the Pak numbers, though. Twing still awed him, and twing was like wattle and daub compared to the stuff of Pak space tethers. The bits of automated translation suggested the tether material even blocked neutrinos. That had to be in error.

  Louis unfroze his display to resume skimming. A label he clearly misunderstood hyperlinked him into material about energy generation. Fission, maybe. Something about dampening fields? It made no sense to him. He retraced his steps and went on skimming.

  A creepy, two-throated yawn right in Louis’s ear.

  Louis blinked and turned around. “I guess you finished inspecting the equipment.”

  “Yes. It is less interesting than what you are studying.” Another double yawn. “Perhaps I will not stay too much longer. Before returning to my cabin, I think I will try to learn a bit more about twing.”

  Louis nodded and resumed skimming. He noticed Achilles open display windows across the workroom. He did not notice when Achilles left.

  The next day, hunting for a multimeter probe that had fallen behind a workbench, Louis wondered where he had left his flashlight.

  Nerves frayed. Tempers flared. Minds recoiled from the less-than-nothingness just outside the hull. For everyone’s sanity, drops to normal space came more frequently.

  The closer they came to Hearth, the more messages Achilles found queued for him on hyperspace relay buoys.

  Grumbling mightily, Achilles labored over ministry reports and requests. He sent responses via the same relays. After several iterations, Nessus agreed to schedule daily quick drops to normal space.

  And (it amused Achilles) so Nessus sealed his own doom.

  “Normal space in five minutes,” Nessus called over the intercom.

  “Acknowledged,” Achilles said. The improvised sensor readouts in his cabin showed Nessus was on the bridge and Louis was in the engine room. All very normal for one of Aegis’ daily check-ins.

  In the privacy of his cabin, Achilles had put on a pressure suit. He had one helmet already sealed. Now he sealed his second helmet. He reviewed the suit’s gauges and indicators. All systems nominal. All tanks and expendable supplies were maxed. He ran the self-test program
s. All tests passed. He checked and rechecked his cache of supplies: radio beacons, fuel cells, medical-emergency stasis generators. The time until rescue would pass in an instant.

  “Two minutes,” Nessus called.

  Achilles’ hearts pounded. Just two more minutes!

  His loyal servants waited for Aegis to emerge from hyperspace, the time and place finalized in innocuous code words within the stream of ministry business. The ministry had many ships. . . .

  He—with the Library—would return in triumph to Hearth. None would presume to oppose him. He would be Hindmost, master of everything he deserved.

  “One minute to dropout.”

  And his enemies would pay for their insolence. The Gw’oth would be put in their place.

  Achilles took a pocket computer from his desk. The crucial command had already been lipped into the touchpad. When the moment came, he had only to squeeze. . . .

  “Three. Two. One. Now.”

  The cabin wallpaper switched from rolling meadow to starscape. Achilles bit down on the touchpad.

  Nothing happened!

  He pressed again. Nothing. He set the computer on the desk and rechecked the command sequence: perfect.

  A loose connection, perhaps. Stuffing the computer in an outside pocket, Achilles rushed from his cabin.

  “Did you lose something?” Nessus intoned coldly.

  Achilles had put on a pressure suit. His heads probed deep within a utility space that gave access to the hull. Shuddering, he backed up and turned. He winced when he saw what Nessus held in his mouth. “Where did you get that?”

  With his free head, Nessus gestured toward the open access panel, to where a glob of putty clung to the hull. “I got it where you left it. Where my surveillance equipment recorded you installing it.”

  Achilles lunged.

  Nessus snatched back what he held: a pocket computer wired to a flashlight-laser. Laser case and computer were mottled with the putty from which he had extracted them. He flung the death trap behind him, sent it skittering down the corridor. The melodies of his outrage required two mouths.

  “You are sickly clever,” Nessus sang, harmonics ringing with disgust. “Aegis is an old ship, and you know its vulnerability. So deactivate the embedded power plant and let air pressure blow the unreinforced hull to dust. You ‘somehow’ manage to get into your pressure suit in time. Your supporters collect you from the wreckage, and the ship’s computers, and the lore of the Pak, and—oh, how sad—also the twisted, vacuum-bloated bodies of your shipmates.

  “I do not much understand technology, Achilles, but I understand you. Killing me would not satisfy you. Ousting Baedeker would not satisfy you. But if Louis and I die because this hull fails? Then you could blame some imaginary delayed effect from how we destroyed Argo. You would take me from Baedeker and blame him for the ‘accident.’ Sick.”

  Nessus gestured again at the access panel. “The shutdown sequence must be coupled into the hull here at the power-plant controller. If I truly understood the twisted nature of your thinking, you would come here to set your trap. And so you did.”

  Achilles’ eyes darted like a trapped animal’s. “Yes!” he raged. “And you all deserve whatever—”

  “Stand back.” Louis, holding a stunner, emerged from around a bend in the corridor. Likely he understood none of what had been said. Tones of voice had summoned him. “Against the wall.”

  Achilles sidled backward.

  “Politics? Extenuating circumstances? Past traumas?” Nessus summoned into his voices all the disdain he felt. “Throughout your career much has been rationalized. Even Baedeker excuses your excesses, so shamed is he by the violence you forced him into.

  “But no longer, Achilles. No longer. Nothing can justify cold-blooded, premeditated murder.” Merely to sing those chords made Nessus ill. The herd protected, it did not prey on its own. “You have gone too far. Too far! Your friends will shun you. Your opponents will revile you. You will be punished.”

  Nessus added in Interworld, “Louis. As we discussed.”

  Achilles pushed off the wall and spun on his front legs. As he lashed out with his strong hind leg, the stunner crackled. He toppled, his body rigid, still wild-eyed, at Nessus’ hooves.

  Nessus looked downward with repugnance. “You will return to Hearth in stasis. Hope that the herd has mercy on you.”

  COLD WAR

  19

  Storms raged across the perpetually shrouded skies of Kl’mo. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed. Gales lashed oceans and continents alike. Unending rain pummeled the barren land, patiently breaking rock into dust. In millions of years, perhaps, something would take root in that soil.

  Far beneath the chaos, hugging a zigzag of hydrothermal vents, tranquil, extended the watery domain of the Gw’oth colony.

  The trek to settle this new world had been long and arduous. Sr’o would be content never to leave the watery depths again. But what were the chances?

  She hoisted a rock half as long as her tubacle. The serenity, she thought, was some sort of metaphor. She did not entirely understand metaphors or, for that matter, the humans who used them. Before the migration, fleetingly, she had met a few humans: traders from New Terra. She had never seen a Puppeteer or, thankfully, a Pak. She knew of the aliens of course, from Ol’t’ro’s memories—

  The Gw’otesht, many in one, survived all, remembered all.

  A guard scuttled up to take the rock from Sr’o. “Permit me, Your Wisdom.”

  She hated being called that, least of all here in the new world, but to chastise the guard would only reemphasize her status. The change from a tradition-based society to a science-based one was already revolutionary; too many colonists could not at the same time overcome the habits of life in a dynastic autocracy. Perhaps the new generation would learn.

  Presuming that the colony lasted that long.

  “Thank you,” Sr’o answered mildly, arching a tubacle in search of a stone small enough that her solicitous protectors might permit her to move it.

  She toiled, one among a crowd, at constructing yet another small residence. The traditional stacked-stone building was not for her personal use, any more than the fives of other buildings in whose construction she had, however symbolically, contributed, for she lived apart in the colony’s great metal stronghold. The physical labor was its own reward: a task with an end to it. A respite.

  More often, when Sr’o needed physical release, she joined those working in the fields among the creepers, sponges, and sessile worms. Kl’mo’s native biota thrived in the rich chemical plumes upwelling from the hydrothermal vents, but the life transported from Jm’ho—the ecosystem upon which the colonists depended for their survival—continued to struggle. Despite constant, labor-intensive interventions, the transplants grew sicklier and sicklier.

  And she, although the lead biologist of the colony, had yet to discern why.

  Oh, she could maintain the tiny biosphere of a ship indefinitely, or any number of the little, self-contained habitats with which the inhospitable worlds of the home system had been settled. Grafting an ecosystem into an existing ecology? That was something else entirely. And the problems kept getting worse. One of the colony’s many imbalances was between small predators and Gw’oth spawn. Too many mouths, immature and voracious, to feed. . . .

  Sr’o lifted and piled bits of rock, hoping at least in this small way to contribute to making the colony successful. The task busied her tubacles—but not her thoughts. Her mind remained trapped in the critical puzzle: whatever nutrients were insufficient, or too abundant, or toxic to the transplants. Isolating the exact difficulties, subtly different for each species, involved slow and painstaking research. Until they solved their problems, the colony needed nutritional supplements from Jm’ho and breeding stocks of new varieties of—well, everything—to reinvigorate the still-fragile ocean-floor ecosystem.

  Your Wisdom? She hardly felt wise.

  A second guard jetted over to help Sr’o. You a
re too important, his solicitousness declared. We cannot allow you to injure yourself.

  At the unwelcome reminder of her responsibilities, the tips of her tubacles flared an anxious red. At the first hint of a mood shift the rest of her protectors swarmed, pushing aside her fellow workers. She willed herself to be calm until the chromatophoric cells along her tubacles faded to a less apprehensive yellow-green.

  But the harm had been done. The colonists among whom she had toiled flattened obsequiously, and in that uncomfortable pose they sidled away. “We will work more carefully,” one murmured, his skin quickly shading all the way into far red.

  “No one did anything wrong,” Sr’o answered. “Pardon my distraction.”

  Her apology did no good. The polite fiction of equality had been wholly shattered. Her burdens were hers, and she must learn better to bear them. She would set a few more stones into place, then leave.

  She was given the time to emplace only one.

  “Two ships are entering the solar system,” announced the transceiver stowed deep inside one of her tubacles. “Both have radioed the expected call signs.” Unstated because it was obvious, the interruption also meant: Come. We must meld. Even if, as Sr’o believed, the arrival was the expected supply ship and its escort, the colony had little margin for error.

  As the protective squad formed up around her, Sr’o swiveled a tubacle and surveyed those with whom she had been toiling. Those who depended on her. “I must attend to other matters,” she announced.

  No one argued.

  Sr’o jetted deep into the colony stronghold, tubacles trailing, guards lagging a respectful distance behind. As she approached the heart of the building, friends/colleagues/alter-egos converged from other corridors, exchanging only terse greetings. Why bother with the clumsiness of words when soon they would be a single mind?