Fleet of Worlds Page 28

  Her hands wandered, vainly seeking pockets in which to hide. “In a few months, eight ships vanished. The last communication with any of them was from the Oort Cloud, which the newsies took to calling ‘The Borderland of Sol.’ Then Ausfaller himself went after suspected pirates, using his own ship as bait.”

  Ausfaller diverted from the scent of the Fleet by pirates. It seemed much too convenient. Nessus disbelieved in coincidences, especially those that worked to his advantage. “Continue.”

  “How can you not know about this?” Sangeeta asked incredulously.

  “I was busy. Tell me more.”

  “Ausfaller’s reports are highly classified. No administrator, even a full undersecretary, has access.”

  “So he reported pirates.” A suspicion came over Nessus. Yes, the Oort Cloud was an immense region. It was still odd that he could not contact Julian Forward. It was odder still that public databases made no mention of Forward Station since shortly after Nessus’ hasty return to the Fleet. Nessus ventured a guess. “Pirates operating out of Forward Station?”

  Her eyes widened. “How did you know?”

  “Then you do know something more,” Nessus said.

  “Nothing certain. You have to understand.” She swallowed hard. “There were rumors everywhere about conspiracies and cover-ups. One of the most prominent scientists in Human Space, gone without a trace. Ausfaller was suddenly questioning gravity theorists, cosmologists, every manner of esoteric physicist. Interstellar commerce shut down for months. People feared to leave the inner system. Surely you remember how confusing everything was.”

  Behind the mirror, Nessus twitched. He knew all about conspiracy and confusion.

  Sangeeta babbled on about witch hunts. “And the Jinx government is still demanding answers about Julian Forward, information Ausfaller refuses to give.” She leaned forward to whisper, “I believe Forward is dead, that Ausfaller killed him.”

  Nessus did not believe in coincidences. Sangeeta’s account suggested he did not need to. “So Ausfaller is obsessed now, wondering how Forward made neutronium,” he summarized.

  “Yes, damn you! Haven’t you been listening? No one knows much more. Ausfaller simply won’t talk. After he ended the pirate attacks, no one, not even the ARM director, would dare challenge Ausfaller to reveal more than he chooses.”

  Nessus shut his eyes in thought. It was suddenly clear. After he lost his grant from the Institute of Knowledge, Julian had fixated about money for his research. Forward must have managed to produce enough neutronium to make a tiny hyperspace singularity, a mini black hole. Any ship passing close enough to it would be dropped precipitously from hyperspace, to be looted by Julian’s lurking henchmen. Probably the looted ships and their crews were now but a bit more mass added to the singularity.

  “Very good. You may go.” Nessus transferred Sangeeta to a remote booth before she could comment.

  Ausfaller chasing shadows. Julian Forward, and the advanced Concordance technology reluctantly disclosed to him, both gone. The Fleet, once again, safe from prying eyes.

  On the other head . . .

  Eight starship crews vanished, dead. Earth still in convulsion—in the final analysis, unnecessarily—over Fertility Board corruption scandals and birthright lotteries. Rather than research and tally those casualties, Nessus turned his attention to ending the mayhem.

  Perhaps minions could be put to good use.

  GLOWING STREAKS OF pink cloud alternated with impossibly azure bands of sky. Pink deepened to red, and azure to ever darker shades of blue, as the great crimson ball of Sol sank slowly behind the mountains.

  Nessus watched in awe until the sky over the spaceport faded to black. Once, on sunless Hearth, he had described the beauty of a sunrise to Nike. How long ago that seemed!

  How distant seemed the time until they might reunite.

  An upper atmosphere wind drove the clouds steadily eastward. Stars took their place, glittering like diamonds. Nessus watched until the sun rose.

  In his hearts, Nessus knew: If he and Nike were to have a future, first they needed time apart. Time to come to terms with each other’s actions. Time to accept actions that could never be admitted.

  When Hearth itself faced imminent catastrophe, what did a promise matter? Nessus had had no choice but to urge it. Nike had had no choice but to give it.

  Had Nike guessed how overwhelmingly the terrified populace would support that coerced promise? That Kirsten’s War, no less than the false emergency Nike had sought to contrive, would crystallize into a new Consensus? Probably, yes. Who but Experimentalists could even look at the Long Pass crisis, let alone deal with it?

  But Nike must wonder whether Nessus had acted under duress. Far better that ambiguity than that Nike ever know Nessus’ true beliefs:

  The Colonists deserved their freedom.

  He had never believed Kirsten capable of fulfilling her threat.

  Nessus rose stiffly from his nest of pillows, grateful that his responsibilities would keep him in Sol system for a while. He still looked forward, in the fullness of time, to returning to Hearth. To never again leaving Hearth.

  And just possibly, to life there as the mate of the new Hindmost.

  40

  Boldly striped in yellows and browns, its unbroken clouds aswirl with storms, the mighty world, ninety thousand miles wide, dominated the sky. From the Ice Moon’s orbit the gas giant spanned six degrees—a dozen times the apparent size of nearest neighbors within the Fleet.

  The Ice Moon itself glowed, on one side from the light of the distant sun, and on the other side, far more brightly, from the sunlight reflected by its primary. Large structures snaked across the ice, many erected since Explorer’s previous visit.

  From the comparative comfort of her crash couch, Kirsten pointed into the holo. The incomplete ice-and-metal space station glittered like jewels. “They did it, Omar. Crewed spaceflight.”

  “I can almost understand a Citizen’s instinctive reaction,” Omar said. “The Gw’oth rate of development is astonishing.” He waved off her objection faster than she could get it out. “I said almost, Kirsten. The galaxy would be a poorer place without the little guys. I’m happy to find them faring so well.”

  She was gladdest to have found and disarmed the comet bomb Nessus had insisted they rig. The recovered and reprogrammed GP #1 probe would forever orbit this solar system, reporting by hyperwave radio any abrupt change in radio chatter—such as would occur if the Concordance should ever drop a comet on them.

  “They must be protected.” Omar grunted agreement, but Kirsten knew she spoke mostly to herself. “We owe the Gw’oth a lot. Appreciating their accomplishments taught us to appreciate our own. Questioning Citizen intentions toward the Gw’oth taught us to question Concordance policy toward Colonists.”

  Habits died hard. She corrected herself: “I mean toward humans.”

  Omar stood and yawned. “I’m going for coffee. Can I bring you anything?”

  “Ice cream. Strawberry,” she said. One of the first changes made to Explorer after the crisis was new choices in the synthesizer’s repertoire.

  “Kirsten.”

  She looked up, and Omar handed her a bowl. How long had she been contemplating the holo? Omar said, “We’re done here, Kirsten. The Gw’oth are as safe as we can make them. Our place now is at home.”

  Omar was right, of course, and yet . . . “There is one thing more we can do. A message for them. A way to thank them properly.”

  He shook his head. “Everyone agreed, Kirsten, before we set out. Science and technology are very new to the Gw’oth. We can’t know how they would respond to alien contact.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.” She explained, and he went off to translate her words.

  AND SO THEY departed—but first they left a message.

  The Ice Moon’s closest neighbor was a rocky, cloud-shrouded moon. It was tidally locked to its more distant primary, keeping one face forever hidden from the Ice Moon.

/>   But not, if they continued to advance, from the Gw’oth.

  A miles-long X, etched by laser, now marked the far side of that moon. A cubic structure of laser-carved stone slabs stood at the X’s center. Inside that cube, sealed within a clear plasteel container, in an inert atmosphere of pure nitrogen, the Gw’oth would someday find the powerful radio buoy for which the guardian hyperwave buoy would forever listen. In every common pictographic script of the Gw’oth, ahead of instructions on operating the radio, the accompanying note began:

  “Call if you ever find yourselves in need. The Gw’oth are not without friends in the galaxy.”

  KIRSTEN SHIFTED POSITIONS yet again, wondering how she had ever considered crash couches comfortable. More likely, the General Products couches were yet another evil device designed by Baedeker. She stood, circled the tiny bridge several times, then settled back down with a groan. The mass pointer remained empty.

  Omar walked onto the bridge and handed her a bowl. Vanilla. “I’m ready for home, too. New Terra.”

  Kirsten patted her swelling belly. “We both are.”

  41

  Jeeves had described the long delay as necessary to get their ducks in a row. Eric had neither the patience nor the passivity of an AI. For him, this was personal. For that matter, Eric didn’t know what a duck was.

  Metaphor aside, Jeeves’s meaning was clear. Many milestones necessarily preceded this mission. Repatriation of Colonists from the secret facility on NP3. The vote whether to withdraw NP4 from the Fleet. Instruction on operating and maintaining the world-moving drive. Accumulating new deuterium and tritium reserves. Acceleration of NP4—New Terra—away from the Fleet of Worlds. Learning to stealth the few starships retained by the former colony.

  The painful recovery of long repressed memories.

  Sharing the tiny bridge of Long Pass Two, Sven fidgeted with his gear and pretended to ignore the blind spot that lurked just beyond the covered view port. “How much longer?” he asked yet again.

  Minutes matter when using hyperdrive. Exit a minute earlier than necessary and you had an extra billion miles of normal space to cross. Of course waiting a minute too long could drop you into a singularity, beyond the knowledge of even Citizen science. “It’s all right, Sven. No one likes being in hyperspace.” Eric canted his head and assessed the mass pointer one more time. Five scarcely distinguishable lines pointed toward them. “A few more minutes.”

  Shadowy figures darkened Eric’s own thoughts. NP3 repatriates shared too many irrational dreads to doubt a common cause. It had taken extensive painful therapy to reconstruct their—and his—repressed memories of another human facility somewhere on NP3. Neither psychotherapy nor data mining had located that other place, the compound whose existence the Concordance indignantly denied.

  Traumatic amnesia, Jeeves had called the condition, and recovering the lost childhood memories was painful. As an adult, Eric understood: The coerced cooperation of Long Pass’s women had not ended Citizens’ experimentation with human breeding.

  The successes, their memories suppressed, were relocated to the main NP3 colony, or even, as in Eric’s case, to NP4. The failures, those beyond the ability of autodocs to help, remained behind: crippled and scarred in ways not even therapy could force Eric to face.

  What he no longer forgot, he would never forgive.

  They would find out soon enough whether the pain of recovering those memories had been worth it.

  Sven squirmed in his crash couch. In the mass pointer, singularities reached out to devour them. It’s time, Eric thought. “Ten seconds. Five. Now.” He uncovered the view port.

  Five dull lights in a pentagon lay directly ahead.

  MOMENTS LATER, ERIC received a radio burst: Courageous. After final confirmation of details, Eric took Long Pass Two ahead on an arcing course.

  They approached the Fleet from within the plane of the pentagon, waiting until NP3 hid the other worlds before reversing thrusters to hover. Chance observation by a Citizen ship could be disastrous. In free flight, the embedded power plant of another ship would be an impossible target. The credible threat of antimatter encouraged the Concordance to honor its commitments to Arcadia—and, of course, Arcadia had only the illusion of antimatter.

  Ice caps glittered in the suns. Extensive snow cover appeared on northern and southern continents. One more duck they had waited for, Eric thought. Winter, and with it the evacuation of most Citizens from the compound. Hearth with its unavoidable waste heat, like NP4 with its polar-orbiting suns, had a temperate climate worldwide. Citizens hated the cold.

  Despite himself, Eric smiled. Romping in the snow was a good recovered memory; he savored it while waiting for the suns to set.

  Preserving samples of all Hearthian life required reproducing all Hearthian climates and seasons. NP3’s equatorial suns heated higher latitudes less. In full “winter,” a few suns at the end of the orbiting string went dark, for the shorter and cooler days some life forms required.

  The last sun finally disappeared around the horizon. “Ready?” Eric asked.

  “Ready,” Sven agreed.

  Viewed in infrared, the night side cooled rapidly. Scattered areas continued to glow hot. A few glowed too hot: hot springs and volcanoes. Other anomalies took study to identify: factories and power plants.

  By process of elimination, Eric narrowed the possibilities to five heat sources. Two were at latitudes too low to fit the consensus recovered memory of long winters at the compound. High-resolution thermal sensing eliminated two more locations—

  And revealed unmistakably human shapes at the last site.

  Sven said, “That must be it.”

  At some level, Eric had dared to hope the traumatic memories false. He breathed slowly and deeply until he trusted himself to speak. “Agreed. We’re going in.”

  Hearthian forest surrounded the compound. He set Long Pass Two down in the closest clearing, ten miles away, trying not to remember the hike through woods to the Human Studies Institute—or Kirsten. Better to remain focused. “Let’s unload the floaters.”

  Stepping discs had eliminated most ground transportation. The floaters they rode from the cargo bay were essentially miniaturized but full-powered tractors. Snow swirled all around. Despite heating elements woven into his nanofabric garment, Eric shivered.

  They slipped into the woods, guided by inertial navigation units in the floaters. Infrared goggles made the view bright as day. Only wind whistling through the branches and the soft hum of the floater motors broke the silence.

  These woods were far denser than on Elysium or the Hearthian park. Thickets and hedges far outnumbered single-trunk trees. Their route grew circuitous as the dense growth stymied their passage. Glancing at his wrist Sven said, “This is taking too long,”

  “Agreed.” Eric dialed a flashlight-laser down to a narrow beam that scythed through the undergrowth. Snow on the forest floor flashed to steam, enveloping them. Sap sizzled and popped, and scattered plants burst into flame. Things screamed in dismay from the winter-bare limbs of the forest canopy. “Let’s go.”

  Seventy minutes later, with several smoldering thickets in their wake, they reached a sprawl of buildings within a tall fence. The sky remained dark. They circled the facility on foot, scanning with infrared as they went. The only Citizen IR signatures came from a single building. Unmoving: asleep. The human signatures were concentrated in a second building. A dormitory and hospital, Eric guessed. Dispersed quarters would have made their task that much harder.

  Their breath hung before them in the cold. “Let’s do this,” Sven finally said. Without waiting for an answer, he sent his floater soaring over the fence. Eric followed.

  A few faces peered out of dormitory windows. Within moments, the windows filled. Eric bypassed the alarm on the dormitory door, then stepped back. “Your turn, Sven.”

  Eric followed Sven inside and jammed the door latch behind them. Sven spoke soothingly, about nothing specific at first, as Eric reset steppin
g discs to send-only mode. He tried to ignore the people he glimpsed as he worked. Shriveled adults, unlike anyone he had ever encountered. Short people who must be children, whose eyes revealed sad truths no child should ever have to bear. Crippled and wasted bodies. Terrified faces.

  And a few faces that awakened memories in a terrifying rush.

  “We have come to take you home,” Sven was saying. “To where our kind, not Citizens, make the laws. I promise you will be cared for if you come. It is your choice, but I urge you, I implore you, to join us. You must decide now, and quickly.

  “I bring you something of our past to help you decide.” Sven activated his pocket computer.

  The image of Diego MacMillan appeared. “I am the navigator of starship Long Pass. I have a story to tell.”

  As people wept and moaned, and the younger children stared with incomprehension, Eric radioed Courageous. “Loading to commence within minutes,” he said.

  “Copy that,” replied Terrence, the pilot. “We’re standing by, burning fuel like mad to hover ten thousand miles over your heads.”

  In other words: hurry.

  “There were spontaneous abortions, horrific birth defects, and developmental problems,” Diego said. Tears streamed down the faces of the inmates. They understood all too well.

  When the recording ended Sven added, quite simply, “These reprogrammed stepping discs will bring you to our ship, for a short flight to a better world. A human world.”

  A bent and wizened woman stepped forward and disappeared. An emaciated man with horribly gnarled limbs followed. Parents gathered their weeping children. With a shuffling gait, people formed lines. The lines shortened. Shortened. Disappeared.

  “Time to go,” Eric said. He had never felt so drained. He retrieved the stepping-disc address that would return them to Long Pass Two.

  Sven was gone.

  “Over here!” Sven’s voice echoed down a long corridor. Eric followed. He found Sven gazing through a massive plasteel window into a lab. Shiny metal cabinets covered in gauges and buttons lined the walls.