Destroyer of Worlds Read online

  Nearly half a millennium earlier, Puppeteers had established their slave colony using frozen embryos from a captured starship. To this day, no one in Human Space knew.

  Until recently, no one here had known, either. They had been taught for generations to believe themselves the fortunate survivors of a derelict found adrift in space, and that the Puppeteers were their generous benefactors. Happy, grateful slaves they were—

  Then the Puppeteers found out about the core explosion. Who better than expendable human slaves to scout ahead of the Fleet of Worlds?

  More of Nessus’ doing.

  To give humans a starship, even under supervision, was a mistake. In time, Nessus’ scouts found Long Pass, their supposed ancestral derelict. It wasn’t afloat in the vastness of space; it was stashed inside a Puppeteer cargo ship orbiting another Nature Preserve world. The whole tissue of lies collapsed.

  Much of the colonists’ true history lay hidden in the ancient shipboard AI. Alas, Jeeves also had holes in its memory. Its ill-fated crew had managed, under attack, to erase all the astronomical and navigational data that might reveal the location of Earth. Not that the Puppeteers hadn’t eventually found Earth anyway. . . .

  “We’re two of a kind, Jeeves,” Sigmund said. We’re brain-damaged fossils from Earth.

  “Indeed, sir.”

  Jeeves’s mellifluous voice brought England to mind, the accent reminding Sigmund of Shakespeare in Central Park. That, uselessly, Sigmund remembered, but not the shape of England, or its size, or where on Earth’s surface it resided. Or, for that matter, what Central Park was at the center of.

  Damn Nessus! He had violated Sigmund’s mind, and Sigmund hated the Puppeteer for that. But in bringing Sigmund here, Nessus had acted to protect the New Terrans from the darker instincts of his own kind. Here, Sigmund had started a new life. Here, he had the family on whom he doted. On New Terra, if he only could learn to embrace it, he might find actual happiness. So thank you, too, Nessus.

  “The usual, sir?” Jeeves prompted. “If I may be so bold.”

  Sigmund had to smile. “Please.”

  A holo globe appeared over his desk, slowly spinning. Land, sea, and ice appeared on the surface, their boundaries ever changing. Jeeves invented topography, subject to the facts, and glimmers of facts, and wild speculations from facts—anything the two of them managed to dredge up. Occasionally, one of the random variations struck a chord, and then they had one more datum to guide a search for Earth.

  The globe spun on, bringing into view twinkling motes atop an island peak. A city. It evoked the omelet Sigmund had had for breakfast. “Denver, the mile-high city,” he said to himself. Whether on an island or in the heart of some continent, at least one major Earth city sat at that approximate elevation. Useless of itself, the random phrase from his subconscious had woken up Sigmund, his heart pounding, years after his arrival. Where one descriptive detail had surfaced from cultural trivia, others must lurk unsuspected.

  New England clam chowder. Did England, wherever it was, have an overseas colony? It implied England had coastline.

  Baked Alaska. The recipe involved ice cream and baked meringue. An implication of glaciers and volcanoes in proximity? That vague speculation evoked a second trace of memory. Who, Sigmund wondered, was Seward? Why was Alaska his folly?

  Jeeves knew more than ten thousand recipes, replete with terms that might be place names or mythological references or—Finagle knew what.

  Jeeves had more than cookbooks in his memory, and Sigmund was working systematically through it all. Legends and literature. Song lyrics. Not 3-V movies. A rotating globe, the outlines of Earth’s oceans and continents plain to see, had been the logo of a movie company. The memory remained tauntingly just out of Sigmund’s reach. In the rush to hide Earth from those who were boarding Long Pass, the entire film library had been erased.

  That Earth had a moon was another fact Sigmund believed he knew. Month and moon went together—didn’t they?—yet the months he remembered ranged from twenty-eight days up to thirty-one days. Not that he knew the length of an Earth day. Perhaps Earth had several moons, each with its own orbital period . . . but no. He remembered tides, twice a day. One moon.

  Recently he had been sifting Jeeves’s musical library for clues. Lyrics cited a blue moon, a silvery moon, a harvest moon, an old devil moon, even a paper moon. What was fact, what metaphor, what—

  Sigmund started at a sharp rap on the door. The door swung open.

  A man, short and stocky, dark-skinned with a long, black ponytail, stood in the doorway. Eric Huang-Mbeke was the first person Sigmund, fresh from the autodoc, had met on this world. Now Eric was the chief tech wizard for the Office of Strategic Analyses. He usually managed to get made just about any gadget Sigmund could need—and like most New Terrans, Eric was too innocent to know what needed making until Sigmund asked.

  Eric looked—grim? No, stunned.

  The alarms were silent. New Terra was not under attack. What, then?

  “Is it Don Quixote?” Sigmund asked. Eric’s wife, Kirsten, was aboard Don Quixote, its navigator and chief pilot.

  Eric shook his head. “You have to see this, Sigmund. Jeeves, the incoming hyperwave message. Time—”

  “I have it, Eric. A distress call, looping.”

  Like a soap bubble pricked, the spinning globe vanished from above Sigmund’s desk, replaced by a 3-V playback. The text crawler was all squiggles, and Sigmund did not understand a single symbol. But that was not why he stared.

  The figure in the image looked like a cross between an octopus and a starfish.

  6

  Cowardice was overrated.

  The notion was insane, even seditious. Baedeker dared to think it anyway. He lived on New Terra in voluntary exile, far from home. Among Citizens, that choice alone branded him as insane.

  He crouched over his redmelon patch, patiently weeding. The suns warmed his back. Both necks ached and the joints in all three legs, but that would pass.

  Besides, few things tasted as fine as vine-ripened redmelon.

  Cowardice was not a Citizen concept, of course. Citizens were prudent. Cautious. Sensible. Where humans had their leaders, Citizens sought direction from their Hindmost.

  Once, the flight instinct was unassailably correct. To stray from the herd was to meet the jaws and claws of predators. Any tendency to wander had been bred from his ancestors long before the first glimmerings of sapience.

  But things change.

  Through fear, technology, and ruthless determination, Citizens had exterminated predators from the land surface of Hearth. They could not eliminate the lifecycle of stars. Now the Fleet of Worlds fled the sterilization of the whole galaxy—

  Headslong into unknown perils.

  THE DAY WAS ENDING, all but one arc of suns gone from the sky. Purple pollinators had begun to emerge from their nests, thrumming their delicate tunes. Far overhead, a lone terrestrial bird circled, effortlessly soaring. A cool breeze ruffled Baedeker’s mane. He continued his weeding, trying to lose himself in the moment and the company of friends.

  “I’m ready to stop,” Tantalus said, his voices raspy from the dust they had raised. In truth, he had just arrived and scarcely started, hoping to hurry Baedeker along to dinner.

  “And I,” Sibyl agreed. “Food all around and nothing here to eat.” His heads swiveled to look each other in the eyes. Sibyl was partial to irony, not least in the human-pronounceable label he had chosen for himself. Human independence had freed him from hard labor in a reeducation camp—not exactly how he had foretold regaining his freedom. “Baedeker, how about you?”

  Baedeker was hungry, too, and so what? “I’ll work a bit longer,” he sang.

  “A glutton for punishment,” Tantalus answered. It was a human aphorism, and as he delivered it in English, it required only one mouth and throat. With his other head, he was already gathering his tools.

  Tantalus’ gibe was hardly fair, but Baedeker saw no reason to comment. Why m
atch wits with his friends when to match wits with these weeds was the limit of his ambition?

  He toiled all day, every day, not as punishment, although once he had been banished to another farm world and condemned to hard labor, and not as penance, although he had much for which to atone. He gardened as therapy.

  With trills of farewell (and grace notes of disappointment) Baedeker’s friends brushed heads with him before cantering off. They dropped their loads of weeds through a stepping disc, to a composting facility, perhaps, or into a food-synthesis reservoir, before they disappeared themselves, leaving Baedeker alone in the sprawling garden.

  He knelt, picked up a trowel (carefully—it was a bladed instrument!), and resumed his task. When he had worked long enough, and hard enough, sometimes he lost himself in the rhythm of the task and forgot to think.

  Thinking was the root of his problems. Thinking about impregnable hulls that weren’t quite. About how to manufacture neutronium without exploding a star into a supernova. About the great sealed drives purchased from the Outsiders that moved whole worlds, and the all-but-complete mystery of the drives’ operation, and of the stupendous energies involved, and—

  No!

  With grim determination, Baedeker refocused on gathering weeds to add to his pile. After a while, when not a single weed remained within his reach, he stood, joints cracking, to shuffle to a new spot. The sky was nearly dark now. He would have to stop soon.

  The breeze hesitated, then returned from a new direction. He caught a whiff of something foul. The wind stiffened: a sea breeze.

  His nostrils wrinkled at the stench. The coastal ecology had all but vanished, killed by the lack of tides.

  As Nature Preserve Four, as a part of the Fleet, this world had been one of six worlds orbiting about their common center of mass. It had experienced ten tides a day. As New Terra, this world traveled alone. It had no tides.

  Imminent nightfall and the reek of long-dead . . . whatever. . . that had drifted ashore to rot. Baedeker sighed, with undertunes plaintive in his throats. He would get no more relief from thought this day.

  His examinations of an Outsider drive had not been entirely in vain. The mechanism somehow accessed the zero-point energy of the vacuum. Tapping the energy asymmetrically was inherently propulsive, enough so to move whole worlds. What if, he mused, one somehow superimposed the slightest of vibrations into the propulsive fields, applied a bit of a torque? Perhaps waves could be induced in the oceans, sloshing back and forth, to simulate tides.

  And then? The force would not limit its effects to the oceans. A bit too much stress might topple buildings. And more than a bit too much? The strain could unleash seismic faults. An unintended resonance might build the surges higher and higher, until tsunamis crashed across the continents and washed away entire cities.

  Baedeker trembled with the mad hubris his years of exile had yet to purge.

  Perhaps, in these modern and perilous times, cowardice was overrated. When danger is everywhere, you cannot escape it. Except—

  Quivering in shock and fear, Baedeker collapsed to the ground. His heads darted between his front legs, beneath his belly, into a Citizen’s refuge of last resort: a tightly curled wall of his own flesh.

  BAEDEKER COWERED IN HIS APARTMENT, picking disinterestedly at a bowl of grain mush and mixed grasses, still shaking from his latest panic attack. A holo played in the background, the ballet troupe surrogates for the companionship he craved but remained too shattered to handle. He would eat first, and comb the tangles and burrs from his mane, and bathe, and sleep. Then, perhaps, he would be fit to see and be seen.

  From the pocket with his comm unit, a glissando sounded, cycling up and down the scale. He ignored the music until it stopped. Moments later a fanfare rang out, louder and more insistent, denoting a higher priority call. He ignored that, too. Before it could interrupt a third time, he dipped a head into the pocket and powered off the unit, averting his eye from the display. He did not want to know who had called. The matter could wait, or it was beyond his present ability to cope.

  More tones, harsh and discordant, and from a new source: an emergencyoverride alert from his in-home stepping disc. Who? Why? Baedeker sidled away in fear.

  A human stepped off, short and thickset with a round face. He was entirely unimposing—until those dark, intense eyes impaled you. Baedeker knew those eyes. He dreaded those eyes. He flinched and looked away.

  It was Sigmund Ausfaller!

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Ausfaller said.

  Baedeker backed off farther, ready to bolt in any direction. Instinctively, he spread his heads warily, one high, one low.

  “Do you know who I am?” Ausfaller asked.

  It had been years since they last spoke, but of course Baedeker knew the human. Even if they had never met, he would have known. Ausfaller was the planet’s lone Earthman, and the minister of defense.

  The question made Baedeker wonder: How deranged do I look? He dared a sideways glance, and the mirror disclosed a slumped and disheveled figure. Despite himself, he plucked at his tangled mane. “Yes-s. Why have you come?”

  Ausfaller looked for a place to sit, and settled for a mound of overstuffed pillows. If he had hoped to make himself seem less threatening, he had failed. “Baedeker, I need your help.”

  “You don’t.” Baedeker shivered. “I am a simple gardener.”

  Ausfaller leaned forward. “I know, and I’m sorry. You were once much more than that, a brilliant engineer. I need you to be one again.”

  Because who shares their best technology with their servants? Only fools, and Citizens were anything but.

  Baedeker looked himself in the eyes. He remembered the cocky engineer he had been—and cringed at the memory. “I’m sorry. I can’t do that.”

  Lips pressed thin, Ausfaller considered. “There is a serious danger. . . .”

  Once again, one of Baedeker’s heads had plunged itself deep into his mane. He pulled it out to fix the human with a frank, two-headed stare. “The old Baedeker you seek? He is a serious danger. It is for the best—for everyone—that no one sees him again.”

  “And if a whole world is at risk? Perhaps many worlds? What then?”

  His necks shook from the struggle not to plunge between his legs. Cowardice was overrated, he thought. All he said was, “Perhaps, Sigmund, you should tell me more.”

  Ausfaller shook his head. “Join a crucial, off-world mission or return to Hearth.” When Baedeker said nothing, the human added, “Sanctuary is a privilege, not a right.”

  Many worlds at risk? That was no choice at all.

  7

  Hurtling through space on parallel courses a thousand miles apart, two ships prepared to swap crews. Cargoes had already been exchanged. Fuel had been transferred.

  “Ready on this end,” Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs called over an encrypted radio link from Don Quixote.

  “After you, Eric.” Sigmund gestured at the stepping disc inset on the relax-room floor. He was sweating. The ship-to-ship jump scared the crap out of him.

  A stepping disc could absorb only so much kinetic energy. The velocity match had to be all but exact: within two hundred feet per second. That limit wasn’t a problem when the velocity differences arose from planetary rotation. Then it was straightforward geometry to calculate the velocity difference between start and end discs. As necessary, the system relayed you through intervening discs.

  The void held no intervening discs.

  As a safeguard, send and receive discs were built to suppress transmission if they sensed a velocity mismatch approaching the threshold. The odds were all but infinitesimal that his two ships would cross the mismatch threshold during the light-speed-limited, under-a-millisecond interval between send and receive.

  Maybe if Sigmund had trained as a physicist rather than an accountant he would have been reassured. He settled for the simple truth that the bigger risk was delay. To rendezvous and dock would take time they might not have.

  “On my
way,” Eric replied. He stepped forward and disappeared. “Nothing to it,” he radioed back.

  Sigmund’s mouth was dry. He cleared his throat. “Send them from your end, Kirsten.”

  One of Don Quixote’s crew popped over, and then a second. Both did double takes at seeing Sigmund. “Minister,” one began.

  Sigmund returned a too-slow, self-conscious salute. “You didn’t see me. Captain Tanaka-Singh is on the bridge. He’ll explain.” Omar would keep these two hidden until Don Quixote returned from its upcoming, unannounced mission.

  “Yes, sir,” they chorused.

  Alert clicks came over the comm link, then Eric’s voice. “Sigmund, are you coming?”

  “In a minute.” Sigmund waited for the footsteps to fade. He muted the inter-ship link before connecting the intercom to Baedeker’s cabin. “It’s time.”

  Silence.

  “Now, tanj it!” Sigmund said.

  Finally: “Acknowledged, Sigmund.”

  However grudging, the answer was delivered in a breathy contralto. Puppeteers always spoke thus to humans. Given that a Puppeteer could imitate most musical instruments—and whole orchestras when he wished—the sexy voice had to be a conscious, manipulative choice.

  A moment later hooves clattered on the metal deck of the corridor. Baedeker hesitated in the doorway, ready to run in either direction.

  “Baedeker,” Sigmund coaxed. The Puppeteer edged into the relax room. “Baedeker, it’s your turn to cross.”

  With a bit less cajoling than Sigmund had expected, Baedeker sidled onto the disc and vanished. Sigmund allowed Baedeker a moment to vacate the receive disc before stepping to Don Quixote—

  Where Eric was red in the face. Baedeker had backed away. His heads were swiveling about in panic, searching for somewhere to bolt. He found refuge behind the crates of weapons and battle armor Sigmund had transferred before the crew exchange.

  “You!” Eric hissed. “How dare you—”