Destroyer of Worlds Read online

  Here and there survivors struggled to put things back together. The natives of those violated worlds either hid or attacked on sight—in the latter case, futilely, to be sure—wherever Don Quixote had landed in pursuit of information.

  All that prevented Baedeker from retreating into catatonia was the threat much nearer. The Gw’oth had done exactly what they promised, and therein loomed a new horror. They did glean more information from astronomical clues, from the outputs of Don Quixote’s sensor suite, than the humans or even Baedeker himself. Day by day, Er’o and his cohorts wrung new insights from the ship’s sensors, intuited infinitesimal drifts from calibration, invented novel means of data collection, and made intriguing new correlations.

  And as though making sense of the enemy onslaught was insufficiently challenging, the Gw’oth also mapped nearby dark-matter concentrations and discovered for themselves the concept of black holes. If, miraculously, the Fleet survived the onrushing threat, Citizens would confront another fearsome rival soon enough.

  Unless the Concordance learned a lesson about ruthless preemption from the enemy.

  Turning away from a hoof’s ceaseless pawing, Baedeker found himself staring himself in the eyes. He forced his gazes apart. The action he contemplated was bitterly ironic, but he saw no humor in it.

  He had once stopped a genocidal attack on newly independent New Terra, and then, disgusted at what his government had sanctioned, settled among the humans. Now New Terra might be the Concordance’s best hope, for Citizens had no aptitude for war. Meanwhile he contemplated his own atrocity, and for no more reason than that the Gw’oth might be too smart.

  Sigmund’s voice over the intercom interrupted Baedeker’s dark thoughts. “We need to regroup, people. Meet in the relax room in ten minutes.”

  THE CLOSER ER’O LOOKED, the more wondrous things grew.

  Not the nameless enemy, of course, but everything—even danger—existed within a broader context. Such as the means of study . . .

  Don Quixote carried extraordinary instruments. Er’o eagerly drank in everything that the ship’s sensors had to offer, but while he and his companions extracted meaning where their giant shipmates did not, those new eyes on the universe were only a part of the wonder.

  The true marvel was Don Quixote itself, and the technology it embodied, and the secrets its crew hoped to keep. Such as the never-seen Jeeves.

  The network that interfaced the Gw’oth habitat with Don Quixote’s sensors also gave access to shipboard archives. Er’o—and more so, Ol’t’ro—was increasingly certain their shipmates must control artificial computing devices of some kind. Those might be electrical, optical, or even quantum mechanical, for direct access to the hypothesized devices was blocked. All questions about such technology were turned away.

  But as Ol’t’ro characterized the shipboard comm network, many things became clearer. The ship’s sensors were under real-time control. Ol’t’ro felt certain that that control operated too quickly to be biological and natural. Like the synthetic-aperture calculations preceding this mission, some of the data consolidations embodied algorithms requiring prodigious computations. Data retrievals from shipboard archives exhibited responses that correlated with the behavior of one—and only one—member of the crew.

  And so, even as Er’o analyzed the latest sensor data, his speculations returned to the unseen shipmate. Er’o spoke into a comm terminal that interfaced wirelessly through the opaque habitat wall to a network node Eric had mounted to a wall of the cargo hold. “Jeeves.”

  “Yes, Er’o,” the familiar voice replied.

  That Jeeves never appeared in person was surely significant. Even the timorous one, Baedeker, visited the cargo hold. From time to time Er’o invented a reason to put on a pressure suit and walk around. He never encountered anyone that might be Jeeves, only a hatch marked Jeeves in the curiously blocky script of the humans. That hatch was always locked.

  But Er’ o’s wandering about the ship (except onto the bridge and into the engine room—his shipmates had countless reasons why he should not visit those compartments) revealed internal dimensions. Trivial geometry showed that the “cabin” behind that hatch must be compact even by Gw’oth standards, no larger than nooks elsewhere labeled as wiring closets.

  So what secret did the mysterious crewman embody? That was one of many topics Er’o chose never to raise explicitly. “Jeeves, I am interested in readings of the electric constant.”

  “That’s not something measured by ship’s sensors,” Jeeves answered.

  Theory related the speed of light to the electric constant, a measure of electric-field penetration. Theory decreed that the speed of light in vacuum was everywhere the same. Here, on Don Quixote, Er’o could test those theories. He and his companions measured, with instruments that probed beyond habitat, cargo hold, and hull, many properties of the vacuum.

  When Don Quixote traveled between stars, those readings were—odd. A clue to the nature of faster-than-light travel, Er’o surmised.

  Inferences and clues were all he had. The humans and Baedeker steadfastly declined to discuss faster-than-light travel, even if or when the drive operated. “Whether to transfer technologies is not for any of us to decide,” Sigmund had declared. “Perhaps after this mission.”

  Doubtless Don Quixote’s digital archives contained relevant data, but cautious probing of the network had yet to find it. In an incautious moment, Kirsten had made mention of a firewall.

  Fire was unnatural, chaotic, and transformative. Fire was fearsome. Early in the great breakout above the ice, fires had killed and hideously maimed many. As Er’o, he had never experienced a wildfire, but a mountaintop foundry consumed by flames was etched deep into Ol’t’ro’s memory. The Gw’otesht had lost two members to that terrible conflagration. Two dead! That accident had almost extinguished Ol’t’ro themselves, long before Er’ o’s birth.

  Firewall! Er’o wriggled in revulsion at an almost-remembered wall of flame: hypnotic, searing, alien. Surely Kirsten had used a metaphor—a distinctly human notion—but the evoked image horrified nonetheless.

  It was better to imagine other things, even the cataclysms on the worlds Don Quixote surveyed.

  To make a planet-killer required no imagination. Anything moving fast enough would do. The enemy ships certainly moved fast enough. And when, soon enough, enemy ships came upon Jm’ho?

  Then the ice would shatter and much of the ocean would flash to steam. Death would come in a race between boiling and exploding. Around the point of impact the crust itself would shatter. Waves of magma—walls of fire, indeed!—would spew forth.

  Millions would die. Everything Ol’t’ro had accomplished would be lost. Civilization itself might fall. And the Gw’oth were defenseless.

  Er’o forced himself to focus. This ship held secrets that might give the Gw’oth a chance to survive. Secrets that Ol’t’ro, better than anyone, could exploit in the defense of Gw’oth and Citizens and New Terrans alike. Secrets that he must acquire.

  The secret of faster-than-light travel would surely be a start.

  Er’o said, “Jeeves, perhaps the archives have surveys of electric-constant measurements from other interstellar journeys.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Jeeves answered, sounding apologetic.

  Did Jeeves dissemble? Almost certainly, but confirmation would need eight separate metrics, each a multispectral correlation in several frequency bands across a series of speech samples. The calculations were far beyond Er’ o’s capacity.

  Even Ol’t’ro had needed much of the flight to fully master alien voice inflections. Aural qualities and nonverbal cues correlated imprecisely, varying slightly from person to person. The correlations even drifted over time for an individual—except for Jeeves. Jeeves always inflected the same way. And his spoken mannerisms correlated exactly with the translator used at Er’ o’s first encounter with his shipmates. He no longer needed a translator, of course.

  All around Er’o, throughout the
habitat tank, his companions analyzed observations, tended to the recycling apparatus, and considered various open questions. Everything that they did was important, but it could all wait. Er’o gestured to the group: We must meld.

  Human computing technology, its specifics well hidden (firewall!), seemed to be even more capable than first surmised. Any artificial computation was a mind-expanding notion, but what Er’o most recently inferred greatly surpassed computation. How could intelligent, aware behavior happen on machines? Perhaps Jeeves was something like Ol’t’ro themselves, arising from grouped minds.

  The Gw’otesht gathered. Tubacles quested. Memories merged. Egos meshed. Overmind began to emerge. What remained of Er’o began to offer his latest suspicions—

  “We need to regroup, people,” Sigmund announced over the intercom. “Meet in the relax room in ten minutes.”

  Er’o projected his speculations into the group mind. Reluctantly, he disconnected. It must be another meld without him.

  To the comm terminal Er’o said, “That gives me time to suit up.” And the others enough time, barely, while he wriggled into his pressure suit, to evacuate the equipment from the water lock. The tiny out-of-water machine shop and laboratory remained a Gw’oth secret.

  “That’s why ten minutes,” Sigmund said.

  21

  Sigmund paced the confines of the relax room, a bulb of untasted coffee warm in his hand. The digital wallpaper suggested that lush forest surrounded him. Eyes might have accepted the illusion, but his other senses refused to be fooled. The whir and clatter of the ventilation system intruded, and the unyielding plasteel deck beneath his feet, and the taint of air too long recycled.

  Tanj, but he was sick of this ship!

  Quickly enough the crew assembled. Er’o, clad in pressure suit and exoskeleton, assumed his usual position on the table. Kirsten and Eric sat side by side along one edge of the table. Baedeker, predictably, occupied the table edge nearest the hatch, twitching whenever Sigmund’s meandering blocked the way to the exit. The Puppeteer crept closer every day to collapse.

  Jeeves, as always, “would participate from the bridge.” His absence should be no more noteworthy than that few of the Gw’oth, and typically only Er’o, ever ventured from the opaque water tank/habitat that largely filled the largest cargo hold.

  For that real mystery, Sigmund had a theory. The Gw’oth recognized that their protective gear and exoskeletons looked a lot like battle armor. Too many of them roaming the ship would look like a boarding party.

  Ordering the Gw’oth to limit their excursions would imply distrust, so Sigmund only took precautions. The ill-concealed stunner he carried was the least of them.

  “We’ve seen the same data about the enemy. We agree on the facts,” Sigmund said abruptly. “We need options. Ideas, anyone?”

  Eric and Kirsten exchanged weary looks. Eric said, “We’ve talked about it endlessly. Neither of us sees what else we can learn out here.”

  Meaning they wanted to go home. “And then what?” Sigmund asked gently.

  Silence greeted the question. Kirsten could not meet Sigmund’s eyes.

  “Baedeker, what do you think?”

  The Puppeteer plucked at his mane. “Reluctantly, Sigmund, I agree. It is time to go.”

  For appearance’s sake, Sigmund called, “Jeeves, anything to add?”

  “No, Sigmund,” they heard over the intercom.

  Sigmund paused for a sip of coffee. “Er’o, can you speak for your colleagues?”

  The Gw’o raised and waggled a limb sinuously, in the gesture Sigmund had come to interpret—never mind that the alien had no head—as a nod. “I am in radio contact. We all recommend continued study.”

  “To what end?” Baedeker asked. All the grace notes, the richness, the harmonic depth, were gone from his voice, as though even to speak English had become too much to bear. Perhaps it had.

  “We’re still learning.” With a clink, Er’o settled the raised limb back onto the table.

  Baedeker dipped a head into a pocket of his belt. Moments later a text from Baedeker popped onto Sigmund’s contact-lens display: “Yes, and it is clear why. They continue to learn the secrets of this ship. Er’o is still spying on us.”

  Of course the Gw’oth spied on them, Sigmund thought. Why wouldn’t they? It seemed an acceptable price for their aid in characterizing the bigger threat.

  “What’s your opinion, Sigmund?” Kirsten asked. She had dark bags beneath her eyes, as though she had not slept in days.

  Sigmund knew how that felt. “I lean toward heading back.” He didn’t explain. Here or there, what could they do? Fighting for real estate set limits: Your adversary did not destroy the worlds he hoped to occupy. But when your enemy only wanted to destroy. . .

  Eric reached for his wife’s hand. “New Terra has few pilots. It has very few ships to match Don Quixote. The Concordance can build endless ships, but how does that matter? Not one in a billion Citizens will leave Hearth.

  “Sigmund, for the sake of our loved ones, perhaps we need to sacrifice ourselves. Help us. Tell us how we can make a difference.”

  A diversion, in other words. That would be heroic and selfless—Kirsten and Eric also had children on New Terra—and entirely futile.

  Sigmund kept his voice level. “It’s a noble offer. Who knows? In a few years, it may come to that. But for now, I see no way one ship can deter so many.”

  “So we go home and wait for the end?” Kirsten asked sadly.

  Baedeker took the head from his pocket to pluck again at his mane.

  Home it was, then, Sigmund thought. He stood to make the announcement and never got out the words.

  “WE MUST STAY! Make it happen.”

  The command reverberated in Er’ o’s earplugs. He fully agreed—how could he not?—but that hardly mattered.

  Melds were subtle things. Every Gw’otesht delicately balanced minds and temperaments, blending many personalities into one superordinate distinctiveness. Partial melds, their customary symmetries broken, were always volatile. Many, like this meld, were a bit petulant.

  Er’o understood; he also felt incomplete. He replied on an encrypted link, using a microphone inserted well down into a tubacle, “Ol’t’ro, the others want to go home.”

  “That is unacceptable!” Ol’t’ro insisted. “Our studies are unfinished.”

  Er’o felt like he debated with himself. With each interstellar journey he learned a little, came that much closer to insight. In the course of this mission, Rj’o had twice rebuilt their long-range sensors. The data suggested, so far inconclusively, that faster-than-light flight involved extra or other dimensions. Either theory would explain the electric-constant anomalies. Call it travel through a hyperspace.

  It seemed Jm’ho must suffer the same doom as the worlds Don Quixote had surveyed. Ramscoops, the implementation of which had become obvious, might save a few Gw’oth—for as long as they could maintain a precarious lead. If they stopped for supplies, or fell short of the efficiency of the enemy ships . . .

  And launching ramscoops might draw that much more death and destruction upon the world that dispatched them.

  In past melds, Ol’t’ro had considered taking control of this ship, for the Gw’oth aboard outnumbered the original crew four to one. Mastering the secrets of faster-than-light travel would surely be simpler with a working mechanism to study.

  Overwhelming uncertainties always stopped them. Merely opening the cargo hold’s outer door with artificial gravity turned off would blow the habitat into space. Or Sigmund might (in Er’ o’s opinion, would) have set booby traps. And even a successful takeover, if they incurred only two or three casualties, might mean the end of Ol’t’ro.

  Seizure was too risky. Their current state of ignorance was intolerable. They must extend the mission long enough to solve the hyperspace puzzle.

  Er’o radioed, “Ol’t’ro, they mean to leave. Give me a reason for Sigmund to stay.”

  “The mission fil
es are rife with observational anomalies. We will find something intriguing. Can you postpone Sigmund’s decision?”

  What alternative did he have? “Somehow.”

  As Sigmund stood, Er’o switched to English. “We may have found something worth a closer look.” He waited anxiously for Ol’t’ro to disclose that something.

  “What?” Kirsten finally prompted.

  “I am sorry. I need a moment to put this into English,” Er’o lied. To Ol’t’ro, using the deep-in-the-tubacle mike, Er’o added, “I need something now.”

  A moment later: “Done. Check ship comm channel three. We will talk you through it.”

  “I apologize again for the delay,” Er’o told the gathering in the relax room. “My colleagues suggest we look at channel three.”

  Eric set his pocket communicator on the table. He tapped the touch screen and a hologram shone up from it. “Another tanj stellar map! What now?”

  Ol’t’ro explained on a secure channel.

  Er’o said, “This is a view from our present coordinates toward the galactic center. Away from the enemy vanguard. The blinking dot marks a world our research has recently noticed.”

  “What kind of research?” Baedeker asked.

  Er’o flexed several tubacles. His exoskeleton amplified the effort, raising him from the table—though no one here would recognize the confident stance. “We looked for radio signals, something to indicate a possibly better source of information.”

  “And you found something?” Eric replied. “A technological civilization the enemy failed to destroy?”

  “We found something.” Er’o paused for them to digest the simple statement. “A very weak signal that took a great deal of signal processing to separate from the background noise. Perhaps the transmissions are shielded, or very directional, and the enemy did not notice.” The modest level of atmospheric dust made it almost certain the enemy had left this world un-molested.

  Baedeker stopped tugging at his mane. “How long to get there?”

  Er’o hesitated. Astronomical skills had earned him and his companions their place on Don Quixote. Merely a clock and before-and-after navigational fixes revealed the ship’s rate of travel. It should come as no surprise he could answer the question. Still, he hesitated to show any attention paid to the interstellar drive. “About ten of your light-years.” Meaning thirty days, had Er’o cared to answer fully.