Betrayer of Worlds Read online

  From the decision of the Hindmost there could be no appeal.

  “We are ready,” a hidden ceiling speaker announced.

  Nessus set down his drink. He took two paces to the vestibule’s lone stepping disc and reappeared in the tribunal chamber. Baedeker straddled a ceremonial bench, flanked by high-ranking officials and trusted aides: the ruling elite of the Concordance. Achilles, his posture defiant, sat opposite the Hindmost.

  Nessus was too preoccupied to notice who guided him to the bench of testimony. He sat.

  “Please state your name,” Baedeker sang formally.

  Nessus sang his full, formal name.

  “You come to give testimony about the accused?”

  “I do,” Nessus responded.

  “Proceed.”

  Slowly, methodically, using video from Aegis’ security cameras, Nessus told his tale: the rescue of Achilles from the wreck of Argo; the recovery of the Library; Achilles’ scheme to destroy Aegis and its crew.

  Achilles resisted at every turn—but not in the manner Nessus had expected. “I never acted alone,” Achilles intoned often, more manic and intense with every iteration. “Others knew. Others here knew. For the Gw’oth peril must be eliminated.”

  The peril fomented by Achilles’ own threats against the Gw’oth. But policy toward the Gw’oth was not at issue today. If this tribunal became a policy debate, Achilles might yet go free.

  Nessus replayed the video of Achilles acting to destroy Aegis. “And this is how you would deter the Gw’oth? By killing a Citizen?”

  “We stop the Gw’oth with technology from the Library,” Achilles sang derisively. “You do still have it?”

  In fact, Nessus did not. One lonely shift en route to New Terra, while Louis slept and Achilles lay immobile in stasis, Nessus had jettisoned the recovered Pak hardware. The Carlos Wu autodoc as well, with its dangerously advanced nanotechnology. The abandoned equipment carried a code-activated transponder and Nessus could recover everything easily enough. He would—once Achilles had been found guilty and imprisoned, and his minions purged from the government. But no one here, not even Baedeker, knew of this precaution. It seemed best not to volunteer the information.

  “Answer the question,” Nessus ordered.

  “Others are party to my actions. Others here.” Achilles straightened his necks to stare down arrogantly at those who would decide his fate.

  By the time his testimony was done, and the ministers’ questioning, and Achilles’ mocking rebuttals, Nessus could almost have believed he was the one at risk.

  Vesta, wearing a formal sash of office, stepped into the large, unfurnished expanse that surrounded Achilles’ cell. Before Achilles could react, Vesta plucked a device from a pocket of the sash. There was a wriggle of lip nodes and on the tiny apparatus a green light began to blink.

  “A Clandestine Directorate jammer,” Vesta said. He spoke in English, whether because any guards who might happen by were unlikely to understand him, or because the jammer left only one mouth unencumbered. “We have a short while before the jailors become suspicious.”

  Because my cell is rife with sensors, Achilles completed. He had assumed that to be the case. “It is kind of you to visit.” Also, overdue.

  “Your pronouncements at the tribunal . . .” Vesta shivered. “You would expose me? Denounce me?”

  “I merely reminded you of your commitments.” And of the consequences if you choose not to remember them.

  They stared at one another until Vesta wilted. “What would you have me do, Your Excellency?”

  “On the flight to Hearth, you spoke of making an opportunity. I believe this would be a favorable moment.” Before the tribunal concludes.

  Vesta’s necks drooped farther. “Fewer will help than I had hoped. There have been . . . concerns. The actions taken aboard Aegis . . .”

  The lamp on the jammer blinked faster: they did not have much time left. Achilles kept his response simple. “I will not go alone to perform hard labor on Nature Preserve One.”

  Vesta quaked with fear, his unencumbered head swiveling helplessly between Achilles and the blinking device that he held.

  “If the tribunal should proceed to sentencing, Vesta, you know what I will disclose.”

  “It will not come to that,” Vesta sang sharply. With a snap of the jaw he turned off the jammer.

  Then, as abruptly as Vesta had arrived, he was gone.

  24

  “We are the Ol’t’ro you knew,” the hyperwaved message began. The voice, resonant and self-assured, spoke English. “And yet we are not. The Gw’oth you met, Sigmund, live only in our memories.”

  Louis watched and listened, self-consciously aware of Sigmund and Alice watching him. Sigmund had invited Louis, without explanation, to comment on “something interesting.” This was interesting, all right. And as clearly a test of some kind.

  “Pause,” Louis ordered.

  “Indeed, sir,” Jeeves announced.

  At least one small mystery had resolved itself. The first Jeeves had been the shipboard artificial intelligence of the hijacked ramscoop colony ship from which New Terra was settled. Voice, with his very un-Puppeteer butler mannerisms, derived from a Jeeves copy.

  Jeeves copies assisted the leaders of New Terra and flew on all modern New Terran ships. AI was a hard problem—and a discipline Puppeteers had shunned. New Terra’s few would-be cyberneticists, starting from scratch, had yet to develop anything to rival the centuries-old AI from Earth.

  Louis asked, “Sigmund, why say who they’re not?”

  “When last we met,” Sigmund said, “Ol’t’ro abandoned me in deep space. Well, really they abandoned Baedeker. A case can be made they engaged in a bit of preemptive self-defense, while I was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.” A fleeting, bitter smile. “The story of my life. Regardless, I was adrift, alone but for Baedeker in stasis, for a long time.”

  Was that a tic in Sigmund’s cheek? It was an oddly human weakness in someone Louis still saw as an evil genius. “Then why identify themselves at all? Why not make up a name?”

  “Except for the preamble, the message was—for reasons you’ll soon see—encrypted. Ol’t’ro used themselves as the hint I needed to deduce the key.” Sigmund clenched his jaw for a while without defeating the tic. “Their last words before splitting our hull. ‘We’re sorry.’ ”

  “A General Products hull,” Alice added.

  How did you split a GP hull? Louis had—somehow—turned Argo’s hull to powder, but that had involved positioning Aegis just right. Nessus would never explain what, exactly, they had aimed at. What, exactly, they had done.

  Suppose Aegis had been less precisely positioned in the derelict. What would have happened? Less than total destruction? Louis said, “Let me guess. The Gw’oth opened a hyperspace bubble at midship?”

  Sigmund blinked. “Your family has a worrisome aptitude, Louis, for destroying indestructible GP hulls.”

  How did one answer that? Rather than try, Louis looked around the room. It could be an executive conference room on any world he had ever visited. Almost. The proportions of walls, the ceiling height, and skinny table were all . . . odd. Influenced by a Puppeteer aesthetic, he supposed.

  “Resume playback,” Louis ordered.

  “Of course, sir.”

  The video had opened with a close-up of an icy world and panned back to encompass a gas giant and its other moons. Louis felt vaguely cheated. He would have liked to see Gw’oth.

  “Obviously, Ol’t’ro is a Gw’otesht,” he said. “Of how many members?”

  It seemed a lifetime since he had studied the Gw’oth, and that recollection had him wondering, yet again, what was keeping Nessus. With every passing day Louis thought more about making a home for himself on New Terra, with Alice. Not that he had had that kind of conversation with her yet. It was much too soon.

  “Sixteen,” Jeeves supplied.

  The recording went on. “You will remember Jm’ho, Sigmund. Jm�
��ho is a beautiful world, at least to us, but we no longer call it home. And therein, Sigmund, is the reason we now contact you.”

  “Pause,” Sigmund said. “The message came out of nowhere. Backtracking the inbound signal, the closest detectable object is a dust cloud two light-years from New Terra. If the signal originated anywhere in Jm’ho’s solar system, and I’m not saying it did, it bounced through hyperwave relays along the way.”

  “Did the signal come from ahead of New Terra?” Louis asked. New Terra was traveling the same way as the Fleet: to galactic north. That was the shortest and quickest route out of the galaxy. Once above the galaxy, they could change course and flee the core explosion without having to dodge solar systems—and anyone living in them.

  “Nessus showed me a map with a new Gw’oth colony in that direction. It had to do”—Louis hesitated, remembering the Puppeteer’s hesitance to discuss his mission with Sigmund—“with why Nessus recruited me.”

  Alice frowned. “We don’t know of any such colony. Either the Puppeteers have resumed scouting ahead on their own or our own scouts aren’t reporting back everything they find.”

  “When was this colony discovered?” Sigmund asked.

  “I don’t know.” Louis rubbed his chin, considering. “I think recently. Its discovery is why Nessus went looking for, well, ultimately me.”

  Sigmund laughed unpleasantly. “That, and knowing I won’t let Puppeteers involve New Terra in Concordance affairs. For now, let’s get back to Ol’t’ro’s message. Resume, Jeeves.”

  “We left the home world,” Ol’t’ro continued, “to gain our liberty. The monarch from whom we freed ourselves wants us back. And so he did this.”

  Louis didn’t especially understand terrestrial biology. What followed about alien biology required several timeouts so Jeeves could interpret and simplify. Getting his arms around the computational requirements to engineer new life forms took another lengthy digression. Apparently gengineering surpassed the mental capacity of even a Gw’otesht-16.

  But after Louis took in everything, the upshot was clear enough. “Biological warfare. Ol’t’ro wants computers to design biological defenses.”

  Sigmund was nonchalantly looking around the room.

  So the testing continued. Louis said, “The same computers could be used to design a counterattack against their enemies. We could be getting into the middle of an interstellar Gw’oth war.”

  (Alice smiled at “we,” Louis noticed. A good omen. This was not the place to comment.)

  “And?” Sigmund prompted.

  Wheels within wheels within wheels. . . . Trying to think like Sigmund made Louis’s head hurt! “It begs the question how Ol’t’ro’s enemies engineered their bioattack in the first place. Do the Gw’oth on Jm’ho have computers?”

  “Basic ones,” Alice said. “New Terra has commercial relations with several of the leading nations on Jm’ho. We sold them waterproofed versions of our pocket comps, which the Gw’oth have doubtless reverse-engineered and improved. But we know of nothing there with the capacity for genetic engineering.”

  “Maybe the Puppeteers provided bigger computers?” Louis shook his head. “I withdraw the question. The Gw’oth know the location of the Fleet. The Concordance would hardly provide technology that might make the Gw’oth an even bigger prospective threat.”

  Alice said, “If New Terra doesn’t offer help and Ol’t’ro are telling the truth, they may conclude we’re the ones who equipped their enemies.”

  Louis rocked in his chair, his mind churning. “We don’t actually know that Ol’t’ro’s colony was attacked. We have only an unsubstantiated claim. It could be a ruse, a way to get New Terran computers so they can build the first bioweapon.”

  “Or the gear could be honestly requested and still prove useful for a counterstrike. Or Ol’t’ro wants advanced computers for another reason, or to be applied against another adversary, they have not even hinted at. Or, or, or.” Sigmund stood and poured himself a glass of water from the carafe on the sideboard. “You know what we know, Louis. What is your advice?”

  When had it become Louis’s job to suggest New Terran foreign policy? More of him thought: New Terra could be my home. I want to be involved. It pained him to admit: “I don’t know enough to recommend anything.”

  Sigmund raised his water glass in salute. “Recognizing how little we know is the beginning of wisdom.”

  An unexpected sound roused Achilles. He looked about, bleary-eyed. The sound repeated, a timid rapping. And then, soft voices: “Your Excellency.”

  Vesta!

  Achilles clambered to his hooves. In the space around his cell, still sleep-period dim, three figures stood. The slender one was Vesta. Who were the silent ones? They were tall and stocky, with the slightly crazed expressions of thugs and guards. “What is it?” Achilles asked.

  “We must get you out,” Vesta sang. He dipped his heads. “Deliberations at the tribunal do not go well.”

  “Then get me out,” Achilles snapped.

  Vesta gestured and one of the silent ones took a transport controller from his sash. “The access disc should be active, Your Excellency.”

  Achilles trotted onto the disc at the center of his cell—and stepped off another disc in the dimly lit outer room. “What is the plan?” he asked Vesta.

  “These two are among your most loyal followers. They will take you to Greensward Field, where a ship and crew await your commands.”

  Greensward was a tertiary-at-best spaceport, an ignominious place from which to flee. When the time came to return, Achilles promised himself, it would be at a more suitable venue.

  He was getting ahead of himself. “You said ‘these two.’ Are you not coming with us?”

  “I am more useful to you here.” Vesta plucked nervously at his mane. “Excellency, we must hurry. The guards will wake up soon.”

  Achilles sidled to where he could read the insignia on his escorts’ sashes. They were members of Clandestine Directorate security. Who better to surprise the guards on duty? And leaving Vesta in place as Nike’s aide could certainly prove useful. “Very well, Vesta. I will remember your initiative at this critical time.”

  Vesta bobbed heads in acknowledgment. “It is an honor to serve, Excellency.”

  They trotted past two stunned guards, collapsed on the floor; up a flight of stairs; past an internal security station with three more stunned guards; down the length of a long, arcing corridor. Finally they reached an unshielded annex of the building, accessible to the public stepping-disc network.

  Pawing the floor nervously, Vesta turned to one of their escorts. “As I ordered. Do it quickly.”

  The false guard whipped out a stunner and Vesta crumpled to the floor. “So no one suspects him,” the guard sang. Then, his eyes wild, he lashed out with his hind leg. The hoof’s sharp edge opened a long gash in Vesta’s flank. Blood welled from the wound. “So no one suspects,” the false guard repeated.

  “Let us go,” Achilles ordered.

  A moment later they were on the bridge of a ship. A few of the bridge crew looked familiar to Achilles.

  Everyone stared at him expectantly.

  There at the pilot’s console: a figure with startling russet patches on his hide, earnestly coiffed, with lively green eyes. A veteran of the Scout Academy. A disciple.

  Clotho: the Fate who spun the thread of Life.

  Achilles believed in the greatness of his destiny. He told himself that did not require him to believe in omens. “Clotho, are we ready to depart?”

  “At your command, Excellency.”

  “Proceed,” Achilles ordered.

  There was a bit of radioed exchange with Space Traffic Control, and then, under Clotho’s practiced jaws, the ship lifted off from Hearth.

  Alone on the bridge of Aegis, a platter of chopped mixed grasses close by, Nessus studied the mass pointer. Pointing straight at him, a single, long line: New Terra.

  The bridge felt lonelier than usual. He had becom
e accustomed to the company of Louis Wu. But Nessus’ main sense of loss had nothing to do with Aegis or Louis. Nessus missed Baedeker.

  Even amid the madness of the tribunal, Baedeker had made time for them to be together. Private dinners. An evening at the Grand Ballet. There had even been an allusion—fleeting, but meaningful nonetheless—to finding a Companion. Mating and children beckoned . . .

  The tribunal must soon find Achilles culpable and sentence him to hard labor on Nature Preserve One. On that premise—and because Citizens insane enough to support Achilles might lash out at his main accuser—Nessus was en route to New Terra for Louis. Together they would retrieve the Pak Library and deliver it to a purged Ministry of Science on Hearth. And with Achilles banished, and his cause publicly condemned, the crisis with the Gw’oth should subside.

  Nessus pondered the future with unwonted optimism.

  In the mass pointer, the line for New Terra slowly grew.

  “In three, two . . .” Nessus stopped himself. There was no one here but Voice, and Voice did not require an alert.

  With a tremor, Aegis dropped into normal space. The walls flipped from pastoral recordings to external display. New Terra was a blue-white spark directly ahead.

  And on his main console, the hyperwave transceiver blinked a COSMIC alert.

  “Who is the message from?” Nessus asked.

  “The Hindmost, sir,” Voice intoned.

  An I-miss-you-already message? Or some fresh disaster? Tasting bitter cud, Nessus feared the latter. “Play the message.”

  Aegis was close enough to Hearth for video; the message opened to a hologram of Baedeker looking grim. “Achilles has escaped,” he began, the harmonics heavy with tragedy. “The investigation is ongoing. Nessus, call me as soon as you get this.”

  “Voice, place the call.”