Fleet of Worlds Read online

  They were miles from anywhere, and the nearest structure was someplace they weren’t supposed to know about. She patted a pocket, and was relieved to feel her communicator. “We can call for help.”

  “And wait for Citizens to extract us from the woods during a storm?” Another half-cough, half-laugh. He stood. “We might as well walk. At least that will avoid their questions.”

  Walk where? She had lost her compass. Thick cloud so suffused the NP glows that she could scarcely navigate by their light—and then, only in the occasional clearing from which the clouds were visible. The clouds hung only a few hundred feet over her, scarcely above the tree tops, blocking most of the now-distant arcology-wall light.

  It suddenly struck Kirsten what an alien world Hearth truly was. It had no little satellite suns and no great fireball star. There would be no daylight to save them.

  “I have an idea,” Eric said. “The institute is on the lake, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe we can follow that creek”—he pointed toward a faint gurgle—“downstream to the lake, and then follow the shore.”

  “We don’t know how much the creek wanders. The shore does wander. We’ll have a much longer walk.”

  “You identified our destination mathematically.” He coughed unproductively. “It’s all right if we get there another way.”

  “Lead on.” At the base of the hill she added, “I’m glad you came.”

  “I’m not.” He coughed. “Well, that’s not true. I had, however, envisioned our first date somewhat differently.” Cough. “That’s a joke.”

  “Why didn’t I know about this asthma condition?” Kirsten asked. Suddenly her face grew hot. She was thankful for the dark that hid her blush. She had been thinking like a crewmate; Eric would almost certainly fail to take her question that way. You never talked about hereditary medical conditions, unless with a doctor, or family, or a prospective mate.

  Eric asked, “Can you keep a secret?”

  “If not, we’re in a lot of trouble.”

  The shallowness of Eric’s breathing rendered his laugh horrifying. “Respiratory problems aren’t that uncommon where I come from.”

  “We come from the same place.” And she had never heard of asthma.

  Cough. Wheeze. “Here’s the secret, Kirsten. I grew up on NP3, a world away from you. There’s a small Colonist settlement there. Apparently growing Colonists from the embryo banks was trickier than the Concordance wants people to know, and problems can—do—recur generations later. Some problems take a lot of medical care.” Wheeze. “I was a success story. I owe them.”

  “I had no idea.” The depth of his loyalty to the Concordance, his deference to Nessus, his sometimes questionable social skills, began to make sense.

  “How could you know?” Cough. He crouched to peer below some branches.

  No wonder he felt so indebted to the Citizens. She was afraid to ask why he had not informed on Omar and her. Why he was here?

  Her doubts must have been written on her face. “Because it’s important to you.” As though afraid of her reaction he continued without pause, “I think I see the lake.”

  Moments later, she glimpsed the lake, too. A few more steps brought them out of the woods, to a narrow fringe of rocky shoreline. Around a curve of the lake, through the rain, she could just make out a hint of a domed structure.

  The Human Studies Institute.

  THE “TREES” BY the lake loosely resembled red saguaro cacti sprouting fleshy round leaves instead of spines. Despite the increasingly heavy rain, the NP light that diffused through the cloud cover and reflected off the water allowed Kirsten and Eric to move quickly through the woods near the shoreline. The institute itself provided no light.

  They were nearly to the isolated structure when Kirsten’s communicator trilled discreetly. “You need to get back,” Omar said. “Spaceport authorities are getting impatient. I blamed our delayed departure on a small technical glitch. If I don’t ‘resolve’ the problem soon, they’ll send tech support to help me fix it.”

  They were so close. “I told you to blame the delay on me: gone shopping. Now you’ll have to find a way to stall. We’re almost at the institute.”

  “If this doesn’t work, I’m not leaving you and Eric to take the blame,” Omar answered. “I’ll do what I can, Kirsten, but hurry.”

  The building they had come so far to explore was scarcely taller than the surrounding trees. From where they stood, no doors or windows suggested themselves. She edged deeper into the woods to circle the building. “Follow me.”

  They stayed among the trees, straining to make out details of the building. “It’s too dark,” Eric said. “If there is a door, we might not see it.” He crept up to the wall, hand over his mouth to muffle a cough. “Come on.”

  They reached the shore again, having closely examined four sides of the hexagon. The final sides, those nearest the lake, were sufficiently illuminated by sky glow not to need up-close scrutiny. They were unbroken.

  “I can’t believe it.” Kirsten sat heavily on the ground, her back against a tree. “To have come so far . . .” She meant not only this hike, but everything they had been through. It had been a long and arduous trail here from the ice moon.

  “Hmm.” Eric studied the inaccessible wall, head tipped thoughtfully. “Remember Nessus bringing us to a shopping complex?”

  “I do. Why?”

  “It used force fields for outside access, not doors.” He walked along the building, trailing a hand against the wall. “Just a hunch.” As he approached a corner, his hand sank into the wall. “Aha.” He stuck his head through briefly, then gestured her over.

  “What did you see?” she whispered.

  “A viewing gallery, I think, overlooking a roomful of Citizens and terminals. The gallery itself is empty.”

  Muddy splotches marked their approach. The rocky ground didn’t take full bootprints. She pointed at her boots, covered in muck. “We can hope the rain will wash away our tracks, but that won’t help us indoors. Our boots have to stay outside.”

  With a shrug, Eric sat down through the false wall. His head, shoulders, arms, and feet remained outside. He slipped off his boots, setting them just outside the holo wall, and then leaned backward to roll the rest of the way inside. His disembodied voice called, “Come on.”

  Faster than she could mimic Eric’s entry procedure, he was flat on the floor, peering through the railing at the activity below. His clothes had become a pale blue that closely matched the corridor wall. She reprogrammed her own clothes and joined him. Below them, ten Citizens were seated near terminals, three walked about, and seven more stood watch over an array of stepping discs.

  Holograms floated among and over the institute staff. Even the nearest projections were maddeningly indistinct at this distance. Images of Colonists—or was humans the correct term?—their activities unrecognizable. Impressions of text, none readable. The holo of a Nature Preserve world, clouds masking its surface. Holos of General Products hulls. It was all tantalizing.

  It told her nothing.

  Kirsten crawled around the balcony area, hugging the exterior wall. She was sopping wet from the rain and left a damp trail. She hoped strong winds sometimes blew in rain, or that the water would evaporate before a Citizen appeared up here.

  The unattended terminal she sought was at the railing, a third of the way around the gallery. For all Kirsten knew, it offered only administrative functions unrelated to the purposeful activity below. She scooted backward with its wireless keyboard in hand until the wall touched her back. If she managed to activate the terminal and set its display into flat mode, whatever she did should be invisible from the floor below.

  Murmurs and music whispered, snatches of speech from terminals and conversations below. Acoustical vagaries, echoes from the dome overhead, and her limited fluency reduced it all nearly to babble. Nearly, but not quite: Scattered words and phrases were intelligible. “Human” and “wild humans”
were distinct enough, and several mentions of known space, and something she must have misunderstood, about a suspicious arm.

  She could not get past the welcome display. Administrative or not, the terminal expected biometric authentication. Beyond turning the terminal on, all Kirsten had managed to do was to dim the display, still in floating holographic mode, to pale translucence. Faint characters continued to invite an authorizing tongueprint.

  She caught Eric’s eye. He shrugged, as unsuccessful as she at spotting anything useful. His face was mottled, pinkish-purple and pale. His chest moved shallowly but rapidly. She thought she heard wheezing. Whatever asthma was, she had to get him to an autodoc.

  The hike from the safety shelter and its stepping disc had taken hours. Could Eric make it back? He needed medical attention now. Without a stepping disc, that meant making their presence known. Surrendering.

  The still-scrolling characters of the welcome prompt taunted her. She restored the terminal, as best she could remember it, to the brightness level where she had found it, and powered it down. It had all been for nothing.

  As she slithered on her belly back toward Eric, her communicator trilled. Omar. “Not now,” she whispered.

  “Spaceport control has lost patience. In fifteen minutes, if Explorer is not ready to launch, they will send help. I’ll have to tell spaceport control I’ve been covering for your absence.”

  On the level below, Citizen voices rose and fell, at once lyrical and discordant. Holograms floated about, appearing and vanishing to the unknowable purposes of the staff. Sentries still ringed the stepping discs. Even if they could be activated, they would only access another restricted area.

  The only access she and Eric had found to the gallery was from outdoors. How did Citizens get to and from this level? They clearly never arrived at the institute by land, or there would have been guards outside. She began crawling the long way round to Eric. Halfway there she found a stepping disc in the floor. She waved for his attention. “Get our boots,” she mouthed. “Wrap them in your shirt.”

  Most likely, the disc would only move them to the busy main area below the gallery. Maybe they could alter it . . .

  Carefully, they pried up the disc. Eric, now shirtless, eyed the controls set in the edge. “It looks standard—with the minor problem that the customary maintenance keypad has been removed. Anything could be in the memory chip.” His lips were blue and his breathing labored. “Maybe, if we remove the programming chip, it will reset to default settings.” Cough. “Not that we know where its default setting would send us.”

  “There’s no way to give it an address?”

  “Only by communicator, and only then with an authentication code we can’t give it.”

  They were out of options. “Eric, we have to turn ourselves in. You need medical help, and soon.”

  Cough. “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “You came along to help me. That makes you my responsibility.” And, if not in the way Eric would wish it, she found she did care. “Unless you have a better idea.”

  “You walk out. I tell them I came alone.”

  The offer made Kirsten feel even worse. “We’re in this together.”

  The murmuring below continued to taunt her. Through the railing, holograms came and went: Colonists/humans. A grain ship. The nature-preserve world, now revealing enough continental outline through its clouds to suggest NP5. Still-indistinguishable hints of text.

  Why a grain ship and NP5? The newest world in the Fleet was still being eco-formed. It had no grain to export. “Eric, that’s NP5, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.” Cough. “Maybe. Judging by the amount of cloud cover. Geography isn’t my strong point.”

  The Human Studies Institute had interest in NP5. That sufficed to pique her interest. Kirsten pointed at the disc. “Let’s remove the memory chip. There’s only one way to find out the disc’s default address. Worst case, we’ll surrender there.”

  “All right.”

  She pried out the part.

  “Wait. Not like that.” Cough. “Say we get away. The next time someone here uses this disc, they’ll also be sent to the default location. Someone will check out the disc, and see that the chip is gone.” Cough. “They’ll see that someone has tampered with the disc.” Wheezing, he took the chip from her, bent a pin and put the chip back into place. “Let them think the chip had a bent pin all along, and the bent pin just now came completely unplugged. Random floor vibrations, not intruders.” Together they set the disc back into the floor.

  He picked up an awkward parcel, their boots knotted inside his shirt, and stepped. He did not reappear on the level below. She stepped after—

  To join him among a crowd of gaping Citizens. A holo-sign labeled the nearest structure as Department of Public Safety. The default disc address, of course.

  “Let’s go,” she said. She took his arm and pulled/lifted him toward an array of public stepping discs.

  After several random hops through public spaces, they popped aboard Explorer. Omar’s eyes widened, and she could only imagine how bedraggled they must look.

  “Two minutes to spare,” Kirsten said. “I’ll get Eric into the autodoc. You get us on our way.”

  18

  Nessus bowed to no sane sentient when it came to caution. Of course, he was insane and sadly aware of it. He could not otherwise be so distant from Hearth and herd. He could not otherwise be hurtling through the nothingness of hyperspace. Alone with his insanity, grazing absentmindedly from a trencher of freshly synthesized mixed grains, he contemplated another’s insanity—and wondered if he had finally met his match.

  For Sigmund Ausfaller was paranoid, and his delusions of persecution made him a formidable adversary. Nessus understood paranoia, although among Colonists it was treated. Among the wild humans, within the ARM, paranoia was nurtured—even induced.

  To be paranoid was to inflate one’s importance, to see oneself as worthy of persecution. Paranoids found things to worry about that no sane person could. Such a fear might sometimes prove not so irrational after all. Where Puppeteers were concerned, Ausfaller’s suspicions had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  The meal was disagreeably dry. Nessus synthesized a flagon of carrot juice to accompany it. The beverage was totally without nutritional value for him but he liked it nonetheless. It was one of the few pleasures available to him aboard Aegis.

  Another was the larger-than-life holo with which Nessus shared the bridge. He had taken the image at one of the earliest Experimentalist rallies he had ever attended. Perhaps Nike had meant the adoring expression for the entire crowd; Nessus chose to imagine it otherwise.

  But first he had a mission to complete.

  In his paranoia, Ausfaller hunted for Puppeteers years after all had departed. Nike had learned that fact from their most highly placed spy. Where, then, did the ARM seek? For what?

  Reason as distrustfully as Ausfaller, Nessus told himself. Put yourself into his place.

  General Products made its technology crucial to the economies of humans and their neighbors—and then disappeared, plunging those economies into chaos.

  Perhaps it had been a mistake to humor the term “Puppeteer.” To humans a Citizen’s heads might look like a pair of sock puppets, but—imagine how a paranoid would interpret aliens embracing that label.

  Put yourself in Ausfaller’s place.

  A world is too big to hide, hence it should long ago have been found. That worlds could be moved surely remained beyond the imagination of the wild humans, so failure to find the Puppeteers must only reinforce Ausfaller’s theories of conspiracy.

  A syllogism: All the UN’s resources would have found the homeworld. The homeworld has not been found. Ergo: Some resources have been diverted, or some discoveries hidden.

  Ausfaller deduced a Puppeteer secret agent in the ARM. QED.

  Nessus shivered. The ARM had likely leaked news of his latest search, hoping to lure Puppeteers and their agents into ex
posing themselves. Any of Nessus’ usual sources within the UN might now work with Ausfaller, or, unknowingly, be under his observation.

  Nessus contemplated his dilemma, food and drink abandoned, picking anxiously at his mane. He needed a whole new approach to gleaning Ausfaller’s strategy. He needed to recruit anonymously a whole new network. Could he act quickly enough to protect the Fleet?

  All hope of return to Hearth and Nike receded into the very indefinite future.

  SOL SYSTEM WAS home to scant billions, but those few knew no fear. They filled its skies with interplanetary yachts and liners, tugs and freighters, Belter patrol ships and UN frigates. To those argosies were added yet more, the many starships that plied the void to far-flung human colonies and the worlds of Kzinti and Kdatlyno.

  Nessus intended that his presence go unnoticed by all those teeming craft. He approached Sol system tangentially, rather than head-on, and at a steep angle to the plane of the ecliptic. He dropped Aegis from hyperspace into the anonymous outer reaches of the Oort Cloud—

  And, from habit, he reached toward his console to run a deep-radar scan.

  He jerked the head back. Aegis had just exited hyper-space far from the singularity, the better to let dissipate unremarked the unavoidable ripples of his emergence. Why emit a discretionary neutrino pulse?

  Did he think to find a stasis box here?

  He looked himself in the eyes, appalled and amused at the near-lapse. It could be worse, he supposed. He could be mystified, too, as Kirsten had wondered at being trained to emit a deep-radar ping on approach to a new star system.

  Nessus burst into song as, with full thrusters, he slowed the ship’s headlong plunge. Ride of the Valkyries in full orchestration. The music seemed somehow apt. Doubly apt, really, in that his erstwhile crew had once thoroughly enjoyed a performance.