Destroyer of Worlds Read online

  Recall? Thssthfok needed deeper cores to prove this world safe. To make his breeders safe. Even to wrap the ice cores properly and recover the drilling equipment would take half a day. He took out his radio. “Commander, request another day. The cores—”

  Bphtolnok, commander of the mission, was stationed on their orbiting ramscoop. That the commander was Thssthfok’s grandfather’s sister would merit no favors. Everyone on the mission was family.

  Bphtolnok cut off Thssthfok. “Aboard in two day-tenths, or be left behind.”

  2

  The recall of everyone from the planet brought chaos to the landing bay.

  Thssthfok was still securing his shuttle when he was again summoned.

  He pressed through jammed corridors noisy with grumbling and the roar of ventilation fans. The full ship’s complement was never meant to be awake onboard. Whatever had inspired the recall, these conditions could not persist. Life support could not sustain so many at once. Already, some must be queuing for the cold-sleep pods.

  Even as Thssthfok struggled through the crowd, New Hope launched on full acceleration.

  He entered the commander’s cabin to find, besides Bphtolnok, four people. Three, like the commander, were warriors, marked honorably with scars. The last, his half brother, Floshftok, was an astrophysicist.

  Abandonment of a promising colony world. An emergency departure—and the commander away from the bridge. An urgent meeting that involved strategy, astrophysics, and climatology. Any of these circumstances was extraordinary. But all? There could be only one reason: Their breeders were at risk!

  Any message from Rilchuk had been a hundred years on its way. Despite his first scent in days of family, Thssthfok knew despair. Protectors without breeders had no purpose. They lost the will to live, and their appetite, and starved to death.

  And yet.

  Bphtolnok, at the least, knew what peril loomed—and she had acted decisively. There must yet be time. The danger must originate elsewhere than on Pakhome.

  Floshftok’s presence demonstrated an astrophysical dimension to the threat: something detected from afar. An unexpected neutrino flux, perhaps, from fusion reactors in a neighboring solar system. Or the hungry maw of a ramscoop approaching, or the white-hot exhaust of a fusion drive, ramscoop or otherwise, decelerating in this direction.

  It was to distinguish remote threats from natural phenomena that an astrophysicist was part of the expedition.

  Pak or alien, the response would be the same. If Pak, then certainly a rival for the pristine world New Hope had just deorbited. If alien, then at least potentially a rival. Thssthfok had no interest in another intelligent species. Curiosity was a breeder behavior, long outgrown.

  Pak or alien, intruders or neighbors, those whom Floshftok had seen must be destroyed.

  All this flashed through Thssthfok’s mind as he crossed the small cabin and took a seat. He leaned forward, desperate to know more.

  “Recap,” the commander ordered.

  Floshftok evoked a holo display of the stellar neighborhood, expanses of false color washing past nearby stars. Each color denoted a type of radiation.

  Thssthfok studied the image, too extensive to be other than an astronomical phenomenon. Lots of neutrinos and the radiant glow from . . . what?

  “Supernovae,” Floshftok offered.

  Plural. But how many? The wave front showed no curvature. Many supernovae then, the spherical wave fronts from each explosion averaging out. “The galactic core?” Thssthfok asked in wonderment. The closer an end-of-life star was to a supernova, the more likely—

  “A chain reaction,” Floshftok agreed.

  And so the meeting went, with seldom more than a word or a short phrase offered. The breeders for whose safety Thssthfok feared required many words to convey the simplest concept. Protectors wrung meaning from the subtlest clue, their minds racing faster than their reasoning could be put into words.

  No supernovae shone in the night sky over New Rilchuk. What Floshftok had detected was the leading edge of the wave front. The radiant glow, in frequencies across the spectrum, must blaze from stellar remnants lagging behind the neutrinos. The shock wave would be coming on at one-tenth light speed, thousands of light-years thick, sterilizing every world in its path.

  No wonder New Hope fled.

  Neither warrior nor climatologist nor astrophysicist could defeat exploding stars. He looked around the table. This time, one of the warriors beat Thssthfok to a conclusion.

  Klssthfok, their most senior strategist, said, “The end of cycles.”

  . . .

  FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS—how many, the historical record had too many gaps to ascertain—Pak had battled for their families and clans. Every possible advantage was embraced; every horrific consequence excused. In the process, Pak had visited upon themselves every imaginable disaster. Ecological failure. Gengineered plague. Nuclear winter. Bombardment from space. Toxic deserts and radioactive wastelands. The legacy spanned Pakhome, the home system’s asteroids and rocky moons, even the colonizable worlds of nearby stars.

  The return from each collapse was harder, the recovery time longer. Petroleum and coal were long gone from Pakhome, as were most fissile materials. Deuterium and tritium had all but vanished from the seas. Metals were more often stripped from ancient ruins than found as ore in new mines. Only knowledge—sometimes—persisted to alleviate the suffering.

  And to hasten the next collapse.

  Only there could be no recovery from a world sterilized.

  “ONE FINAL COLLAPSE,” Thssthfok said. This was why he had been summoned. Once imminent disaster was recognized, every protector on Pakhome would have a common goal: escape with his breeders.

  The resources did not exist to evacuate a world.

  There would be war over the few starships, and any resources that might be used to build more. There would be war over every type of supply necessary to provision a ship. And because this was, inevitably, the final war, it would be fought without restraint.

  However closely New Hope approached light speed, the ship could not quite catch up to the wave front now rushing toward Pakhome to presage disaster. And yet, they must return for their breeders. They would arrive, inevitably, during the fiercest of all wars.

  No Pak living had seen a nuclear winter, and the strategists needed the best possible information about the conditions in which they would fight. While most crew slept through the coming flight, Thssthfok would be analyzing the conditions into which they would arrive.

  Wondering, with no answer possible, if he had breeders left to rescue.

  3

  Pakhome was a world in torment.

  Its sky was banded in muddy black. Its continents were adrift in snow. Icebergs dotted its oceans. Day side or night side made little difference: Where the smoke was thickest, all was dark; everywhere else, the glare from the galaxy’s core ruled the sky.

  Rubble circled the world, the debris of this era’s space stations joining the detritus of cycles passed. New craters scarred the moon, where colonies had thrived. The fourth planet had lost one of its moons, the fragments still distributing themselves into a new ring.

  Up to a light-year distance, the fusion exhausts of small fleets showed that some clans had gotten away. Much of the ruin here came from their preparations: raiding for provisions for themselves and destroying what they could not steal lest rival clans pursue.

  How had clan Rilchuk fared? That remained to be determined.

  At maximum acceleration, Thssthfok’s shuttle was three days’ travel from Pakhome. New Hope was similarly distant, in another direction, hidden. Only scattered rock-and-ice balls registered on the shuttle’s instruments; a beam weapon from any of them would arrive without warning. He could do nothing about that, so, while he waited, he redirected his main telescope back to Pakhome.

  If protectors could, Thssthfok would have cried.

  Only charred ruins or still-roiling columns of ash and soot marked where great cit
ies had stood. The great dam on the river Lobok had been destroyed; most things that had not washed out to sea were now embedded in a sheet of ice. Nothing remained of the onetime great island of Rabal but a volcanic stump, lurid on the ocean floor. Thssthfok could not tell from this distance what had set off such a cataclysmic eruption, but his mind seethed with theories.

  The ancient, sprawling Library complex near the center of the south-polar desert looked unmolested, at least at this resolution. In their need to escape, what all Pak sought was better weaponry, and weapons technology was knowledge no family ever deposited to the Library. The onrushing radiation would leave none to use the knowledge long accumulated there.

  After millions of years and countless cycles, the great repository had become irrelevant.

  THE LIBRARY . . .

  For many breederless protectors, the Library was life itself. For as long as they could convince themselves they served the good of all Pak, they retained their appetites and managed to outlive their descendants.

  For others, the Librarians were abominations, crimes against nature, and the Library a depressing place.

  Thssthfok remembered visiting the Library before New Hope set out, poring over ancient records of Pakhome’s climate. Every archway was inscribed with the symbol of the Library: the stylized double helix that represented life and cycles. The upward spiral spoke to the promise of better times, of past collapses mitigated with the Library’s knowledge. The downward spiral represented the inevitable next collapse for which they must always prepare.

  His work had gone slowly. Most information existed only as written text stamped into nearly indestructible metal pages, survivability taking precedence over ease of use. It was said that neither absence of electricity nor obsolescence of format could devalue the data—never that the archaic representations made work for Library staff, painstakingly transcribing from old languages to newer.

  Thssthfok had worked quickly, eager to get away, vowing that if misfortune ever befell his bloodline, he would have the decency to fade away.

  THE LIBRARY WAS ONE of the few Pak institutions to extend beyond narrow family interests. All would pass.

  Some already had.

  New Hope had approached the home system just in time to witness the destruction of the final space elevator. The structure was too thin to discern even at maximum magnification, but there was no mistaking the slow-motion destruction as half of the long cable crashed to the ground, or the scattering of the blockading fleet as the counterbalance end of the cable writhed free. With their mutual enemies all but stranded on the planet, the fleets of the space-based civilizations immediately turned on one another.

  The island of Rilchuk, inconveniently remote from newly frozen lands, blessed with a paucity of natural resources, remained, for the moment, largely unmolested. Messages encrypted in family codes were answered with pleas for rescue. It wasn’t too late.

  Just all but impossible.

  Three years of endless war gaming gave consistent results. New Hope alone could not evacuate Rilchuk. Even to approach Pakhome would be folly: A single starship could not defend itself against those who would be eager to seize it. But in addition to their ship, irreplaceable, the crew had one asset to trade. . . .

  RADAR SIGNALED THE APPROACH of another shuttle and Thssthfok turned off his telescope display. The other craft was expected: Rilchuk was not the only clan bereft of options.

  The ships exchanged authentication codes and rendezvoused. Thssthfok waited for his visitor to board. Despite connected air locks, the stranger wore a pressure suit. What appeared to be a medical scanner dangled from his utility belt.

  The device could easily be a disguised weapon, but Thssthfok did not ask to examine it. Only unconsciousness or death could keep Thssthfok from protecting the secret he was here to trade, and a failsafe would blow the ship’s fusion reactor at the first anomaly in his vital signs. Given the stakes, his visitor would expect no lesser precaution.

  Warily, the stranger removed his helmet and sniffed the cabin. “Qweklothk,” he introduced himself.

  No clan name. Perhaps no snowball differed from another. Rilchuk emanated a heady bouquet, changing with the seasons, spiced with salt tang from the sea. Rilchuk was a place, a home, a proper clan name. Comet dweller would suffice, Thssthfok decided.

  Qweklothk exuded not the faintest aura of kinship, and Thssthfok’s skin crawled at the first new scent in years. He had not expected to find family here in the cometary belt, of course, but smell is a primitive sense, directly wired to the hindbrain. His mind and instincts warred. “Qweklothk,” he repeated.

  It was a label only, without meaning, the very concept jarring. Thssthfok was no arbitrary set of symbols but who he was: the dominant pheromones of his grandparents, represented in sound.

  He, surely, was as alien to his visitor. “Thssthfok of Rilchuk.”

  “Show me,” Qweklothk said.

  The shuttle’s small cargo bay held a cold-sleep pod. Thssthfok had been chosen for this meeting for what he did not know and could not reveal: the secrets of cold-sleep pods.

  Qweklothk expected nothing different. Asking no questions, he slowly circled the pod. The scanner, now in his hand, hummed. He compared the readings from his instrument to the display on the pod control panel. He brushed rime from the dome to peer inside. A still figure lay within; with patience, the slow rise and fall of the chest was visible.

  Qweklothk took a probe from a pouch of his pressure suit. Without asking—they would not be here unless Thssthfok was willing—Qweklothk retracted the dome to remove a tissue sample. The scanner chirped its approval.

  New Hope had carried no breeders on its long voyage. The breeder in the pod had been captured in a supply raid on an outer-system colony. Its family was as good as dead, anyway.

  The pod slowed metabolism, and with it pheromone release, to almost nothing. So, although this breeder was as foreign as Qweklothk, the gaping pod did not add to the stench—

  Until Thssthfok woke her. Successful revival was central to the demonstration.

  Thssthfok and Qweklothk smelled as alien to her. The breeder’s screech trailed off into the silence of abject terror. She quivered in the pod, her eyes flicking between two unknown protectors. To the extent a breeder could think, she knew she lived at their whim.

  Qweklothk poked and prodded her, gauging her reflexes. He scanned her where she lay. He lifted her from the pod and set her on her feet, running more scans as she stood shaking.

  “Acceptable,” Qweklothk said. That concluded their business, and he turned to leave. Almost as an afterthought, he snapped the breeder’s neck.

  Comet dwellers had resources to build starships and flee the oncoming radiation, but that would only prolong their extinction. Even at near light speed and measured in ship’s time, the flight to safety in the outer galactic reaches would be an epic endeavor. Without cold sleep, most of all for the children and breeders, the comet dwellers could not possibly survive the trek.

  Living quarters on a ramscoop were limited and austere. In less perilous times, it had been thought cold sleep would allow clan Rilchuk’s migration to a new home—a world distant enough that rivals without cold sleep would not follow. How ironic, Thssthfok thought, to have found such a world only to abandon it. And that one hundred light-years once seemed a great distance.

  Now cold-sleep technology might save his bloodline in another way.

  Many comet dwellers would die rescuing breeders from Rilchuk, in exchange for cold-sleep technology.

  THE ARMADA DESCENDED ON PILLARS of fusion fire. Airplanes and spaceships rose to intercept. Beam weapons, missiles, and railguns lashed out from every vessel. Plummeting like stones or bursting like fireworks, mortally injured craft disappeared from the sky. The evacuation fleet fought its way ever closer to the island of Rilchuk. At the appointed time, encrypted in clan codes, ships radioed the prearranged radio call signs.

  From the developed end of the island, protectors unleash
ed their weapons to cover the landing of their rescuers. On the opposite, primitive end of the island, children and breeders cowered from the noise and chaos.

  After massive losses to both sides, the enemy ships broke off their attack. The surviving evacuation ships, still broadcasting family recognition codes, vectored toward landing zones at the island’s unpopulated waist. At the last moment, the oncoming ships swerved—

  Incinerating with fusion flames the Rilchuk protectors on the ground. The comet dwellers could hardly rely on Rilchuk protectors to stand by passively while strangers captured their breeders.

  Thssthfok would have done the same. Protectors were always—except, possibly, to themselves—expendable.

  Through comm relays and by remote sensing, from the comparative safety of far-off New Hope, Thssthfok watched the comet dwellers round up, gas, and load children and breeders.

  The comet dwellers now held Rilchuk breeders as hostages. Clan Rilchuk had been granted an ample supply of comet-dweller breeders as its own hostages. One clan needed cold-sleep pods and expertise. The other clan needed additional ships. Apart, they would surely die. Together, they might survive.

  Thssthfok wondered how long the alliance could last.

  THE RILCHUK/COMET-DWELLER FLEET RECEDED into the void. Thssthfok’s final glimpse of Pakhome, before he lost it in the sternward glare, was of the southern hemisphere. At this distance, the Library complex was no longer visible. The stamped metal pages of the Library would survive the catastrophe soon to kill everyone left on the planet.

  Thssthfok redirected New Hope’s telescope forward. Toward the galactic arm, and beyond.

  Toward, if the fleet had one, its future.

  IMPENDING DOOM

  4

  Sigmund Ausfaller always knew he would die horribly. Oddly enough, he had been optimistic. He had died horribly—twice. So far.