Fleet of Worlds Read online

  “Excellency, my apologies. You will want to see this immediately.” Vesta looked surprised to find Nessus in Nike’s home, but also relieved. “You, too, Scout.”

  “Speak.”

  “This must speak for itself,” Vesta said. His off-screen head tripped something, and a hologram replaced him: humans, life-sized, too many.

  32

  As the old Colonist woman walked into the close foreground, Nessus screamed in chorus. He settled into the meadowplant rug, heads snaking under his belly . . . then pulled one out, and the other. Weirdly, terribly, he saw Nike doing the same.

  The woman glared. “I am Sabrina Gomez-Vanderhoff, Governor of the Arcadia Self-Governance Council. I speak for the humans who have been repressed and exploited on Arcadia for half a thousand local years—”

  Humans! How did she know that word?

  But it wasn’t just her. It was everything. Nessus forced himself to watch, made himself believe. Preserver, the ancient grain ship converted for exploration, and Long Pass, the old human-built interstellar ramscoop, and tiny Explorer, somehow unharmed. The three ships were in computer composite, surely not part of a physical scene, but their mere juxtaposition spoke of terrible secrets now revealed. In the foreground stood a crowd of Colonists as close-packed as Citizens. Despite his shock Nessus was relieved to see his three friends, still alive, among them.

  Sabrina talked. Nike and Nessus listened.

  “We have had enough of secrets and lies,” Sabrina finished. “You will accept our demands, or pay a very high price. To begin, we are prepared to broadcast your secrets across the Fleet unless you contact us very quickly.”

  TURF FLEW AS Nike pawed the floor in anger and fear.

  Long Pass, long hidden, now revealed. Colonists further provoked by Baedeker’s botched attack on Explorer. The Colonial government threatening to reveal everything. Predictions—thinly veiled threats—of civil unrest and food-export disruptions. Insistence upon free access to everything pertaining to their past, on every world of the Fleet.

  And they demanded what no Citizen would dare admit to knowing: the location of Earth.

  He and Nessus had stepped through to his office at the ministry, where the marble tableau now mocked him. The Council of the Gods, debating the wisdom of creating humans, arrived just as the wisdom of creating the colony arose anew.

  Nessus sidled up, pulling at a mane again unkempt. “They know too many Fleet secrets to ever have contact with wild humans. But to tolerate a hostile world within the Fleet—or to undertake to destroy a world here within the Fleet—both choices are mad.”

  Nike quivered agreement. He had seen simulations. A kinetic-weapon strike that eradicated the Colonists would blast loose mountains of debris. Most would fall back.

  Some wouldn’t.

  How much of the ejecta would fly free? How much be captured by the complex gravitational dance of six co-orbiting worlds? How much would bombard Hearth itself? These were questions beyond the capacity of any computer to determine. Flaming mountains falling among the arcologies—

  And no what-if scenario had ever considered that a Colonist-controlled, stealthed starship might retaliate in kind against Hearth.

  And yet . . .

  Nike willed his posture to straighten, his hooves to cease their restless pawing. Slowly he paced, pausing only once to seek inspiration in the eyes of Zeus.

  “Nike,” Nessus said. “Are you recovered?”

  The demands of the Colonists. The needs of the Concordance. The futility—for all sides—of open hostilities. Secrets now beyond keeping and secrets yet secure. Possibilities and perils coursed through Nike’s thoughts. “I’m fine, Nessus. Give me a moment.”

  Flight from the galaxy had somehow become familiar to the masses. But aggrieved neighbors living on a world so near as to raise tides on Hearth? That danger had no precedent, and Experimentalists always took their opportunities when the danger was most extreme.

  It seemed the Colonists meant to restore Long Pass. They might intend only an act of respect for or identification with their ancestors. They might have come to the wily realization that a fusion drive loose in the Fleet would affect the strategic balance. It mattered not. Locked safely inside a General Products hull, even a restored ramscoop represented no threat—except to the complacency of the Conservatives.

  A well-managed crisis here within the Fleet would bring Experimentalists—dare he hope? Would bring him—to power.

  Only more deception would do, perpetrated by one with great skill at controlling humans. “Nessus, do you love our people? Do you love me?”

  “Yes and yes!” Nessus sang. “What do you need?”

  As Nike summarized the plan—as much, anyway, as anyone but himself needed to know, he felt the eyes of gods boring into him.

  He tried not to worry about the warning from Euripides.

  33

  Omar loped on the dayroom treadmill, confident and secure, and not at all the obsequious shipmate Nessus had once known.

  “Tell me about Oceanus,” Nessus said. He had seen enough reports to know that nothing there represented a danger to the Fleet. The distant ocean world was merely a neutral topic of conversation.

  “Wet. Primitive. Probably a good . . . refueling station.” Omar blotted his forehead with a towel as he ran.

  “Refueling?” That was perceptive. The Fleet would not pass Oceanus for years, during which time much deuterium and tritium could be extracted from its seas. Hearth’s own fusion resources needed periodic replenishment, while the less depleted oceans of the Nature Preserves served as emergency reserves. “Good idea.”

  The treadmill slowed. Omar adjusted his pace. “How much about this did you know?”

  “This?” Nessus asked.

  “Long Pass,” Kirsten said. Nessus’ right head whipped around. He had not seen her enter the dayroom. “NP5. The way to Earth. Who did this to us.”

  “Hello. I wish I could answer your questions”—which was true, however misleading—“but you ask about things no one can know. Still, I know more than some.”

  He knew more than the technicians did. These were a dozen Citizens whom Nike had provided to work with the Colonists on Long Pass. They served as proof of Nike’s good intentions. They brought technical skills or an interface to factories that could fabricate unique parts. They did not carry dangerous historical knowledge. And they were instructed not to share what little they might know about the Colonists’ past.

  “Separately, I want to congratulate you on your new relationship with Eric.”

  “Which you have, several times now. You can’t change the subject forever, Nessus.”

  “My apologies. I mean no offense.”

  Coffee smell permeated the dayroom as she synthed a serving. “So how much about this did you know?”

  “Which I have explained repeatedly.” Nessus chose his words carefully. Since leading the small Citizen team to Long Pass, he doled out a bit more information with each repetition.

  “Most Citizens don’t know these things. You can believe that much! I could not have known you would buy histories while on Hearth. We’re dealing with information held by a few officials. These are long-suppressed secrets the current government would still resist revealing.”

  Secrets that made it plausible this alliance of convenience must remain clandestine and restricted. Nike had convinced the Colonist leaders, at least for now, that this coerced cooperation must remain confined aboard this ship. That Experimentalist agents and Colonist rebels alike must avoid the suspicions and scrutiny of Concordance security authorities. Doubtless Sabrina and Nike both thought to exploit what they learned, to improve their negotiating positions later on.

  Just as the technicians aboard conveniently knew only approved history, Nessus guessed he knew only a fraction of Nike’s plans. That was for the best. Nessus could not let slip in error what he did not know.

  He would rather that Nike trust him completely.

  Omar and Kirsten
exchanged skeptical looks. Nessus took it as a sign he was being too coy. “I’ve told you what I know about Preserver.” The ship that encased the little ramscoop. “Preserver’s crew deployed the planetary drive on the Ice World. As they escorted that world toward the Fleet, a comm laser contacted them. They panicked.

  “Extrapolating the migratory planet’s course, your ancestors would have been looking at the comet band around Red Star. They’d have seen five worlds in clearly artificial orbits. A gravitational rosette is stable, but it doesn’t happen naturally.

  “Then as now, the Concordance considered the secrecy of Hearth’s position essential to our safety. Long Pass was attacked lest it signal the Fleet’s position. By hyperdrive, the trip was a matter of days.”

  The treadmill stopped. Omar hopped off. “Nessus, that doesn’t make sense. We’re discussing two ships nearly a light-year separated, communicating by laser. Preserver responded to a year-old message. Long Pass had that same year to signal home.”

  “Preserver’s crew lost all reason to their fear. In a way, it appears they guessed right. Your ancestors evidently had not yet signaled home.” Nessus could hardly admit knowing that human records made no mention of a wandering Ice World. Long Pass itself appeared in UN records, the official cause of its disappearance “unknown.”

  Unofficially, everyone blamed technical failure.

  A ramscoop swept up interstellar hydrogen for fuel, using intense magnetic fields hundreds of miles wide. Fields that intense were deadly to advanced life, so ramscoop technology was reserved for robotic craft. Crewed vessels, carrying their own fusion fuel, followed robotic scouts to the stars at much slower speeds: slowboats.

  Long Pass’s designers had built a bubble in the magnetic field, a safe zone to contain the life-support compartments. The briefest interruption would have killed everyone onboard. Ramscoops were proven technology. At the time, safety bubbles were not. Everyone assumed bubble failure had doomed Long Pass. What else could happen in the emptiness between stars?

  More than two centuries had passed before humans crew-rated another ramscoop.

  Eric said, “Guessed right. They guessed?”

  “Please understand, I do not condone the attack.” Nessus didn’t back away from Eric’s rage, but it was hard. “I meant only, strictly for keeping secret the Fleet’s location, that they met their goal.”

  “You so carefully always say they,” Kirsten observed. “Were you involved?”

  The long-awaited question. “Absolutely not. This all happened before I was born.”

  Being entirely honest about something felt good. The opportunity so seldom presented itself.

  PRESERVER, MORE THAN a thousand feet in diameter, enclosed twelve cargo holds, three parks, hundreds of cabins, a network of interlocking hyperdrive motors, miles of corridors—and, in the central cavity which once transported a reactionless drive of planetary scale, Long Pass.

  A visitor setting hoof anywhere in Preserver inevitably spiked the temperature reading of some room sensor, the effect slightly more pronounced for Colonists than Citizens. By calibrating reporting thresholds with room sizes, Nessus turned the environmental-control subsystem into a serviceable tracking system.

  Within the privacy of his cabin, Nessus watched the Colonists wander about Preserver. Some things about humans never changed, with curiosity high on the list. Eric soon limited his forays to the engine room and its technical files. Kirsten mostly visited the bridge. Omar and Sven entirely lost interest in the great ship. Despite crowding, they spent most of their waking hours aboard the ramscoop.

  Then came the flash of empathy. Long Pass was built wholly by and for humans. It incorporated no Concordance technology. It made no compromise for the caution or convenience of visiting Citizens. In every detail, from ambient lighting to color combinations to door-latch and table heights to the taste of the air, the ramscoop proclaimed its independent origins.

  No Colonist had experienced such an environment.

  That the long-emptied ramscoop ship called to the Colonists made it simpler to keep them from coming upon anything unfortunate on Preserver. For that, at least, Nessus was grateful.

  He burrowed deeper into a mound of cushions. Much had changed between him and his erstwhile crew, some subtly, more often not. Eric’s close-cropped scalp was only the most glaring instance. Kirsten and Omar remained, warily, his friends. The newcomer, Sven, might become one.

  Gone was the deference inculcated by generations of indoctrination. It was as though Nessus shared Preserver—and its many secrets—with wild humans.

  Disaster loomed, and Nessus trembled.

  A dot blinked red on the wire-frame holo of Preserver, which floated before Nessus. A warm body had appeared on the bridge. With a two-throated lament, Nessus stood. Preserver’s bridge was but a step by disc from his cabin. He guessed he would find Kirsten there.

  It would not do for the Colonists to know he tracked them. Rather than onto Preserver’s bridge, Nessus stepped to the disc closest to the gangway onto Long Pass.

  He found Sven in the dayroom, deep in conversation with Jeeves. Eric and Omar stood in the ramscoop’s engine room, discussing technical esoterica with a General Products specialist.

  Something suggested Colonist progress, something that Nessus could not at first put a tongue on. Then he had it: the absence of the fat power cable that had snaked from an auxiliary fusion generator in Preserver, through the open airlock, along corridors and down stairways, to the main power-distribution panel in this room.

  Long Pass was now sufficiently repaired or refueled to generate its own power.

  Nike needed time for a purpose not yet shared with Nessus. Let the Colonists waste that time restoring this ship—it would never fly again. Nanotech had sealed the great doors that once opened to swallow Long Pass. Like entropy itself, the extension of the super-molecule was irreversible. Preserver’s hull, except for small hatches, was now seamless.

  It must be Kirsten’s body heat that had set off the temperature sensors. She was unattended on Preserver’s bridge, where, doubtless, she poked about in the main computer. Data archeology was an activity for which, Nessus had belatedly recognized, she had few equals. “Where’s Kirsten?” Nessus asked to cover for what he already knew. “I wanted to talk with her.”

  “The big ship’s bridge,” Eric interjected into the ongoing technical conversation. The rudeness miffed Nessus, although it spared him having to elaborate his story.

  A stepping disc later, Nessus found Kirsten leaning against a padded bench on the bridge of Preserver, head tipped backward, eyes closed in thought. Holos surrounded her: navigational, graphical, and textual. “Hello, Kirsten.”

  She started. “You surprised me.”

  “I wondered how you were doing,” Nessus said. “Eric said I’d find you here.”

  “You wondered what I was doing.”

  “There’s no need to think that, Kirsten.”

  “Yes, there is. Too many secrets have been kept from us Colonists. We’ve been told too many lies. I’ve been told lies.”

  She didn’t say by whom. She didn’t need to. “Yet here you are, aboard this ship. Tell me truthfully, Kirsten. Did your path to Long Pass ever stray from total candor?”

  She reddened. “We were inventive, of necessity.”

  Nessus said, “Then perhaps you can understand I also operated under constraints.”

  “You can see I’m fine.” She turned away from him.

  One of the floating holos caught Nessus’ eyes: more material Kirsten might find troubling. “The planet en route, I see.”

  She enlarged that video.

  At many times real time, the world that would become NP5 spun, swirled in clouds. The star that was no longer its sun shrank to a spark. Something in the display logic—Kirsten’s contribution?—maintained apparent brightness as the star receded.

  Storms raged as land and oceans surrendered their heat. The cyclones grew and merged, and the ocean spawned yet mo
re storms, until thick cloud completely hid the surface.

  “A world in its death throes,” Kirsten said, her tone flat with disapproval. She set the playback rate yet faster. Cloud churned and whirled, its texture subtly changing. The clouds thinned. “Lakes and streams have frozen. Finally ice coats the oceans themselves, starving the storms.” She fixed him now with a hard stare. “Now the atmosphere itself freezes, one gas at a time, covering land and ocean ice alike with new layers.

  “Fast-forward, to arrival at the Fleet.” Necklaces of little fusion suns streamed across space to ring the ice-sheathed planet. Storms formed anew as the atmosphere started to thaw. “An almost instant, oxygen-rich atmosphere, ready for eco-forming. Nothing above single-celled life could have survived the deep freeze to compete with Hearthian life forms.”

  Nessus straddled one of the bridge benches. “It was a primitive world. It would not otherwise have been taken.”

  “Primitive. Like Earth?”

  Nessus jerked, realizing: She thinks us monsters. “Not even like Oceanus.”

  She did not respond. The silence grew oppressive. “You know the Concordance eco-forms worlds,” Nessus said. “First, NP1 and NP2. They were arid worlds relocated within our original solar system, but further out. Before moving them, we bombarded them with comets. The collisions melted the ice. We massively seeded the new oceans with tailored single-celled organisms. Transformation of the primordial atmosphere took thousands of years.”

  Nessus pointed at her holo. “A world with ocean and oxygen-rich atmosphere is quickly productive, ready for soil treatment as soon as the thawing storms dissipate.”

  “Like NP3 and NP4, I suppose,” Kirsten said. “And NP5, soon enough.”

  He had to appear to cooperate with the rebellious Colonists. That precluded blocking her access to Preserver’s computers. What he couldn’t block, though, he might monitor—and so he had hurried here. Better still would be to divert her interest.

  Computers aboard the old ramscoop had been exhaustively studied. Earth’s location was gone. Nessus was supremely confident that not even Kirsten could recover the coordinates of any human world from those computers. He was far less confident that no proscribed data lurked in Preserver’s systems, if not residual from the ill-fated mission, then carelessly uploaded after its return to the Fleet.