Fate of Worlds Read online

  “All that can wait,” Baedeker sang, “if only because we cannot change it.”

  Baedeker’s pocket comp trilled insistently. They ignored it. Nessus’ pocket comp rang, and they ignored it, too.

  “I have an urgent hail from Louis, aboard Endurance,” Voice announced.

  “It can wait,” Nessus sang. “Tell Louis we will call back.”

  They were on the fastest ship in the galaxy. They could run away and know peace at last. Only neither of them was built that way.

  “We must speak with Louis,” Nessus sang.

  Baedeker bobbed heads in agreement. “We owe Louis. More than he knows.”

  “We will have to explain … did you hear something?”

  Footsteps. Louis stuck his head into the room. His face was flushed. “I want to know my past. All of it. Now. Start with Alice Jordan.”

  Nessus untwined his necks from Baedeker’s, and they stood. “And you will. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. But perhaps…”

  “No perhaps. Start by explaining why I don’t remember Alice or New Terra.”

  “Do you still have the Carlos Wu autodoc?” Nessus asked Baedeker.

  “It is aboard,” Baedeker said.

  “What does the autodoc have to do with this?” Louis asked.

  Nessus stood tall, his hooves set far apart, summoning a confidence he did not feel. He might as well be unready to run: he and Baedeker were cornered. “Your surmise is true, Louis. I brought you to New Terra long ago. Your memories of that visit, and much more, are recorded in that autodoc. If I had not been in an autodoc on our return from the Ringworld, I would have offered you your memories then.

  “You will come out of the autodoc remembering everything. You will find you agreed that those memories be edited.”

  The color had drained from Louis’s face. With fists clenched, he studied Baedeker. “In all our years on the Ringworld, you never spoke a word of this.”

  Baedeker said, “I knew of your past visit—to New Terra and the Fleet, too. I knew those memories had been removed. I did not know the recordings were with us the entire time.” With a sad glance at Nessus, he added, “We have too many secrets, even from each other.”

  “But no longer,” Nessus said.

  “No longer,” Baedeker agreed.

  Finally, Louis spoke. “Whenever you’re ready, Nessus.”

  REJECTION

  Earth Date: 2893

  22

  Would the ARM ship ever get back in touch? Julia, finally, had to sleep. She had no sooner reached her cabin than Jeeves announced, “Koala is hailing us.”

  “Respond ‘message received’ and that we’ll be online soon.”

  “Will do. Shall I awaken Alice?”

  “Yes. Have her meet me with coffee.” Julia strode onto the bridge. “Jeeves, until I direct otherwise, you and I will communicate only by text. Now open the link.” A holo popped up, showing Wesley Wu. “Captain Wu. I am Captain Julia Byerley-Mancini. Alice Jordan will join us shortly.”

  “Good to meet you, Captain.” He looked as weary as she felt. “I have news.”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “I’ve gotten the go-ahead for a rendezvous. It will be just my ship, lest I am mistaken in trusting you. Let’s see what velocity mismatch we have to contend with. Here is our vector.”

  A string of text appeared at the bottom of the holo.

  Jeeves understood kilometers per second—if, over centuries, the meanings of kilometer and second had not diverged—but not the reference axes for Koala’s heading. Louis might have known, but he remained incommunicado aboard Long Shot. Until he reappeared, she didn’t have to decide if or how to mention the reappearance of Captain Wu’s grandfather, or that Louis looked younger than Wesley Wu’s daughter.

  Julia wondered, fleetingly, how her grandfather was doing.

  Comparing ship’s clocks, she and Wesley Wu confirmed that they agreed on the duration of a second. Comparing the number of kilometers in a light-second, they found they agreed about the length of a kilometer, too.

  Wu sent a cartoon: an arrow and its bearings on several pulsars. “That’s our heading and we’re doing about a thousand klicks per second.”

  Here it is in our coordinates, Jeeves wrote.

  Alice walked onto the bridge and stood behind Julia’s crash couch. “It’s good to see you again, Captain Wu,” Alice said.

  “Ms. Jordan,” Wu said. “We are discussing how best to get together.”

  Louis had worried about velocity matching before Julia brought Endurance alongside Long Shot. Now another Wu raised the same issue. Whether courtesy of Puppeteer science or the Pak Library, maybe New Terra had things to offer their home world.

  Thinking again of her grandfather, Julia lied, “We’re making about the same speed, but pretty much at right angles to your heading.” With a burst of typing, she passed fake course and speed data to Jeeves. “Sending that data … now.”

  Alice offered Julia a drink bulb. When Julia took the coffee, Alice’s hand lingered on Julia’s shoulder. Julia chose to take the gesture as support for her deception.

  “I propose that we meet here in an hour,” Captain Wu said. A new cartoon indicated a location a few light-hours from Endurance’s present location. “Keep your present normal-space velocity and we’ll match course and speed with you.”

  “Agreed,” Julia said. It would be easy enough to change velocity to what she had told him.

  “Wu out.” The holo disappeared.

  “For what it’s worth,” Alice said, “I think you made a smart call. There’s no reason to reveal our ship can outmaneuver theirs. They distrust us enough already.”

  “Thanks.” Julia took a long swallow from her coffee bulb. “Jeeves, tell Long Shot we’re going on an errand and radio silent, but that we’ll get back in touch.”

  * * *

  TANYA JETTED ALONE THROUGH FRIGID DARKNESS, Koala shrinking behind her faster than her target grew. She was more than a kilometer from anything, and every twitch of the telltales in her HUD screamed “cosmic rays.” The local sun was scarcely a spark.

  For an instant, purser duties had their charms.

  After one look at Endurance, Dad had declined the offer to dock. “That’s a GP #2 hull,” he had growled. All that kept him from jumping back to hyperspace was that the ship at the rendezvous point reflected light differently than did a GP hull. It didn’t reflect like anything anyone on the bridge had ever encountered, or anything in Hawking’s databases.

  Tanya saw the resemblance, too. She’d seen plenty of General Products-built ships during her posting to the Fleet of Worlds. Precious few humans, though: only her fellow ARMs, a few would-be traders, and the diplomats in the United Nations embassy on Nature Preserve Three.

  So yes: the ship at the rendezvous point did resemble a GP #2 hull. Was a long, thin cylinder so unlikely?

  “There’s one way we’ll find out,” Tanya had declared. She, specifically, had been invited aboard Endurance and had volunteered to go—knowing she had left Dad with no choice. To send anyone else or abort the contact now would look like he was protecting her. He had answered, only, “Stay in touch, Lieutenant.”

  Midpoint in ten seconds, flashed on her HUD. A counter began decrementing to remind her when to begin braking.

  With her visor at max magnification, she spotted someone in the open air lock of the still-distant Endurance. A biped, certainly, if not from this distance definitively human.

  Tanya brought herself to a halt a half meter from Endurance, then holstered her gas pistol. Alice, wearing a simple jumpsuit, stood watching. Tanya reached through the pressure curtain, grabbed a handhold, and pulled herself aboard. The outer hatch began to close.

  “Welcome to Endurance.” Alice pointed to a row of lockers. “You can stow your gear here.”

  In bare feet Tanya stood 190 centimeters tall. Alice, even stooped, was taller—like every Belter Tanya had ever met. Of course, people were tall on low-grav world
s like Wunderland, too. Alice’s height proved nothing.

  As Tanya removed her helmet, text began flowing across her contact lenses. We have audio and visual. She twitched a finger twice to acknowledge, her gesture sensed by an implanted accelerometer. “I’m pleased to meet you, Alice.”

  Once Tanya’s pressure suit was stowed, Alice asked, “Would you and everyone watching like to see the ship?”

  They’re good, Tanya read, and had to agree. Her spy gear used microburst transmissions and top-secret crypto, not the simple—and known to be compromised—algorithms that sufficed for routine ship-to-ship chatter.

  “It’s only medical telemetry,” she lied. “Standard protocol.”

  Alice smiled knowingly.

  Tanya said, “And yes, I would appreciate a tour.”

  “Very good. We’ll start aft, in the engine room.”

  Despite unending texted questions and prompts to turn her head this way and that, Tanya managed not to trip over her feet as she followed Alice. Endurance seemed like a ship configured by and for humans. In the relax room, randomly checking the synthesizer menu, Tanya recognized many options. The coffee it synthed tasted no worse than what she drank on Koala.

  “Next stop, the bridge,” Alice said.

  “Lead on.” They headed forward, which Tanya took as a good sign. The bow was the last place a Puppeteer would put a bridge: too exposed. Tanya was ready to chalk up the hull’s resemblance to a GP model to pure coincidence.

  “Are you prepared to believe that New Terra is a human world?” Alice asked.

  Tanya needed no prompting to answer, “Are you ready to tell us where New Terra is?”

  Alice laughed. “Yes, actually, although I think that is more properly the captain’s prerogative. And we’re here.”

  “Welcome aboard,” Julia called through the bridge’s open hatch. She stood (and wasn’t nearly as tall as Alice, who maybe was a Belter) and offered her hand.

  Filling half the bridge was a padded, Y-shaped bench.

  What’s that doing there? Tanya read. “That’s a Puppeteer bench, isn’t it,” she said, knowing tanj well that it was. So why didn’t you just contact an ARM vessel at the Fleet of Worlds?

  Julia returned her hand to her side. “Come in and have a seat. It turns out New Terra’s history is more complicated than we’ve so far volunteered.”

  * * *

  TANYA QUIT TRYING to take it all in. Everything Alice and Julia said—and Jeeves, too, once Julia introduced the AI—streamed in real time from Tanya’s audio pickup to Koala. Hawking texted from time to time to corroborate bits of narration. After a while, Dad texted he was ready to open a channel.

  “Have we convinced you, Captain?” Julia asked him.

  “Enough to have recommended that we dispatch a ship to visit New Terra. The admiral asked if your government will extend a formal invitation.”

  “I’ll call home to arrange that when we finish,” Julia said.

  “One more thing,” Dad said. “You cracked our encryption in a few days? Truly?”

  Julia nodded.

  “Have you cracked codes for the other fleets in the area?”

  “Jeeves?” Julia asked.

  “No,” Jeeves said. “I would need to know the underlying languages first. If provided with dictionaries and grammar rules, then perhaps.”

  “We can do that,” Dad said. “Hawking—that’s our AI, Julia—will send linguistic files for Hero’s Tongue and whatever information we have relating to Interworld evolution since Jeeves’s time.”

  Why Kzinti and not also Trinoc? Tanya wondered.

  Maybe Dad knew her well enough to read the question from her expression, or maybe he would have volunteered an explanation anyway. He said, “Messaging among the Kzinti warships has trebled in the last few hours. We need to understand why.”

  23

  “It’s too dangerous. We don’t know how the situation has evolved,” Nessus sang. The chords stuck in his throats, as though he were failing Baedeker. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he had hidden too long on New Terra, had lost all his skills. “For all we know, Achilles again rules.”

  “We can’t discover the situation on Hearth until we go back,” Baedeker countered.

  Both opinions were correct, and in the uneasy truce that followed the only sounds were faint whirrings from Long Shot’s ventilation fans and the low hum of the autodoc.

  Nessus arched a neck to study the still figure within the autodoc. “Perhaps Louis can undertake an exploration for us.” But the idea was ludicrous. Louis would awaken with his memories of New Terra restored, with personal priorities to pursue.

  “I respect Louis,” Baedeker sang, “but can he illuminate the political situation within the Concordance? Can he discern Ol’t’ro’s frame of mind? This time, Louis cannot help us. We must help ourselves.”

  “Hindmost,” Voice interrupted. “I have a message for Louis from Alice, sent from Endurance.”

  “Go ahead,” Baedeker sang.

  “Louis, we’ve made contact with the ARM fleet. You have family aboard one of the ships! They would very much like to see you.” Voice switched from Alice’s voice, in English, to proper song. “I advised her that Louis is unavailable. She asked for specifics.”

  Baedeker studied the status readouts. “He must stay in the autodoc for two more days.”

  “I will inform Alice,” Voice sang.

  “Assure her that he is well, that the process simply takes time.”

  “I will,” Voice sang.

  While Baedeker and Voice consulted, Nessus brooded. The premier scout of the Concordance fears to go home. Scared sane, he had described himself to Alice and that was the truth. A scout no longer, when one was desperately needed. He tasted bitter cud.

  “Too few,” he sang softly.

  “What is that?” Baedeker asked.

  “Nothing. I was singing to myself.” Nessus stopped midmeasure. “Very few can bear to scout.”

  “The burden is great and unfair,” Baedeker agreed. “Voice, can you finish that message for Alice?”

  “Yes, Hindmost.”

  Very few. Nessus felt the stirrings of an idea. “I might know crew aboard the Concordance observer ships. Or you might.”

  “How?”

  “With three ships of the Fleet here observing, how could we not know someone among the crews? Someone, perhaps, loyal to the rightful Hindmost.”

  Baedeker considered, shifting his weight from hoof to hoof to hoof. “Among crew loyal to the present government.”

  “Or to Achilles personally.”

  With a mind of its own, one of Nessus’ hooves scraped at the deck. Some in the Concordance ships would be Achilles’ disciples. While hindmost of the scout academy, he had molded many an impressionable cadet to further his ambitions. As Achilles almost warped me.

  “There are apt to be Gw’oth aboard, too,” Baedeker sang.

  “Very likely,” Nessus agreed.

  “Allies and enemies, both in much smaller numbers than in the Fleet,” Baedeker crooned, his undertunes pensive. Then, decisively, he added, “That was a prudent idea. Let us contact the Concordance ships and see what we can learn.”

  * * *

  “I AM PREPARED TO TRANSMIT on narrow beam,” Voice announced.

  Baedeker stretched a neck into the tactical display, indicating with his tongue the Concordance vessel lurking farthest from the skirmishing. “A Citizen may have influence aboard that ship. We will try it first.”

  “Yes, Hindmost,” Voice sang.

  Nessus stood at the ready before the pilot’s console. He read and spoke Hero’s Tongue. “And I am prepared to run,” he sang.

  “Hail the designated ship,” Baedeker sang. “Put it on speaker.”

  “We wish to speak with the hindmost of the Concordance vessel.” The recorded message was audio-only. It began in Baedeker’s voices, then switched to Nessus’ song. Anyone with whom they dare confer should recognize their voices. “We are far from home and seek g
uidance.”

  “We have a response,” Voice sang. “Also audio only.”

  “Do not speak on the link, Voice,” Baedeker sang. “Put them on.”

  Understood, Hindmost.

  “This is the Concordance vessel Amity. To whom am I speaking?”

  “Our ship does not carry a Concordance designation,” Baedeker lied. He was not about to identify Long Shot in the clear. “Is your hindmost present?”

  “Minerva is off duty,” the unfamiliar voices sang. “May I help?”

  Minerva! Some of the tension drained from Baedeker. “I must speak with Minerva. At once.”

  “Who is this?” the voices on Amity asked.

  “Friends of Minerva. I can sing no more.” Baedeker loaded his voices with authoritative undertunes. “You may tell him we worked together twice before.” As Minister of Science and again as Hindmost, Baedeker had been fortunate to have Minerva as his chief aide.

  “Very well,” the unseen Citizen decided. “I will relay your message.”

  “Thank you.” Mute, Baedeker signaled with a swipe of a head. “He’ll come,” he sang to Nessus. As the link stayed quiescent, Baedeker sang again, more softly and to himself, “Minerva will come.”

  The link returned to life. “Who is this?” so-familiar voices sang. Minerva!

  Baedeker unmuted the link. “A very old friend.”

  “And a second,” Nessus added.

  “One moment,” Minerva sang. They heard him order the bridge cleared. A hatch clanged shut. “We need a secure link.”

  “I have software”—at least, Voice did—“but no current keys,” Baedeker sang. “If you know my voices, perhaps you will know this.” He alluded with subtle indirection to the planetary-drive research program at the Ministry of Science. “Do you recall our name for that project?”

  “Yes, Hind.… That is, yes. I remember.”

  “We will use that term as the encryption key.”

  “Agreed.”

  Baedeker tongued in the key for Voice.

  I have a secure connection, Voice reported.

  Open video, Baedeker keyed back. The holo that opened showed an old and trusted friend. “Minerva.”