Destroyer of Worlds Read online

  “He’s with me,” Sigmund snapped. “Eric, back off. That’s an order.”

  Kirsten was listening over the intercom. “Who? Is everything okay?”

  “Fine, Kirsten,” Sigmund said. “Radio the shuttle. Tell Omar, ‘Well done, and have a safe trip home.’ ”

  Eric’s hands were fists, white-knuckled, as he kept moving toward Baedeker. “Do you know who this is, Sigmund? What he tried to do?”

  “Eric! Who is it?” Kirsten asked.

  “It’s Baedeker!” Eric shouted back. “Baedeker!”

  Sigmund chose his words carefully. “He did what seemed best to protect his people and his home. As you and I do.”

  “He hid explosives aboard my ship!”

  The late, lamented Explorer. “The ship you stole, Eric.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  It was precisely the point. In another life, on another world, Sigmund had hidden a bomb in another ship, and for the same reason: lest the vessel be stolen. Sigmund had done it first, and—unlike Baedeker—deterred a theft.

  Not that Sigmund was proud of what he’d had to do. “Baedeker was doing his job. Eric, do yours.”

  Eric winced. “I always have.”

  Sigmund permitted Eric the last word to lessen the sting of the rebuke. “All right, Kirsten.” Sigmund recited a set of coordinates. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Kirsten knew how Sigmund felt about spaceships and she allowed him no time to get cold feet. That, or she recognized their destination. “Dropping to hyperspace in five seconds . . . four . . . three . . .”

  HYPERSPACE!

  It was a place (dimension? abstraction? shared delusion?) that defied description. Whatever hyperspace was, or wasn’t, when you were in it a hyperdrive shunt carried you along at a prodigious clip: roughly a light-year of Einstein space every three days.

  Leave a view port uncovered in hyperspace and—if you were lucky—the walls seemed to converge in denial of the nothingness. If you were unlucky, your mind simply got lost. Whatever hyperspace was, or wasn’t, the mind refused to acknowledge it. Hyperspace had driven many minds mad.

  And so, ships sped through hyperspace with their view ports painted over, or hidden behind curtains, or powered down—and their crews, all the while, brooded on the oblivion that lurked just outside the hull. They dropped back to normal space, more and more frequently as a trip continued, just to know that something besides the ship still existed. And they found themselves, again and again, unable to stay away, on the bridge staring obsessively at the mass pointer. For whatever hyperspace was, or wasn’t, the hyperdrive did something strange if it came too near to a large mass. Approach a star or a planet too closely while in hyperspace and—

  Well, Sigmund didn’t know what. No one did. Perhaps the ship ceased to exist. Perhaps it was hurled into another dimension, or a deeper level of hyperspace, or far across the universe. The math was ambiguous.

  What Sigmund did know was that he feared hyperspace and that he wasn’t alone. Nor was an aversion to hyperspace merely a human frailty. Before New Terra, Sigmund had known many spacefaring species. He remembered every one, just not how to find them. They all recoiled, in one manner or another, from hyperspace. Puppeteers exhibited one of the most extreme reactions. Most—Baedeker was among the exceptions—would not, under any circumstances, travel by hyperdrive.

  The Fleet of Worlds would be a long time in its flight.

  With a shudder, Sigmund pulled himself together. He pressed his cabin’s intercom button. “Everyone, join me in the relax room. It’s time for a mission briefing.”

  A VID PLAYED above the relax-room table. Sigmund’s crew watched the holo. Sigmund watched them.

  Kirsten stared, her eyes shining, her fingers drumming absentmindedly on the tabletop, at the final, frozen scene of the vid. She was trim and athletic, fair-skinned with delicate features and high cheekbones. Her auburn hair was cropped short.

  Eric and Kirsten—husband and wife, reunited—sat together on a long side of the table. Baedeker occupied the parallel side, closest to the hatch the better to flee.

  (Or perhaps Baedeker merely maximized his distance from the pointy corners. Puppeteer design shunned edges and corners. To Sigmund their furniture looked half melted, like the Y-shaped overstuffed seat on which Baedeker sat astraddle. The chair was a small part of the mission supplies that had been teleported aboard.)

  Sigmund had taken the chair at the head of the table, the better to preside—and to separate Baedeker and Eric. The table end opposite Sigmund was flush with the bulkhead. When not in use, the table folded up against the wall.

  “The Gw’oth,” Kirsten said in wonder. “They mastered interplanetary travel.”

  Baedeker stared, too, but in horror. Like Kirsten, he was seeing this recording for the first time. “Another spacefaring race?” he said. “And you know of them? Explain.”

  Kirsten couldn’t take her eyes off the image. “It was our first mission away from the Fleet. Eric and I, and Omar, and Nessus.”

  Baedeker bleated something two-throated and discordant. He didn’t translate and he didn’t need to. No love was lost between him and Nessus.

  Kirsten frowned at the noise, then continued. “Unexpected radio broadcasts had just reached the Fleet. We backtracked, found these guys, tapped their communications. We learned a lot about them, without—at Nessus’ insistence—ever making contact. They call themselves the Gw’oth. Individually, a Gw’o. They’re from the ocean beneath the crust of an ice moon. We’re heading to their solar system.”

  Baedeker pawed nervously at the deck. “And you left these Gw’oth a hyperwave radio beacon? Why?”

  Eric and Kirsten exchanged unhappy looks. “It’s complicated,” Kirsten finally offered.

  In other words, they didn’t want to tell Baedeker. Tanj it, Sigmund thought, I need to build some trust among my crew. Distrusting Puppeteers is my job. “We have time,” he prompted.

  “We were testing the little guys,” Eric offered. “We fried one of their primitive comsats with a laser to see how they’d react. The Gw’oth launched a replacement very quickly. That got Nessus wondering about the extent of their sky watching. The Fleet would’ve been passing by in about seventy years, moving at three-tenths light speed by then. If there was any possibility the Gw’oth could lob something stealthy into the Fleet’s path. . .”

  Sigmund shuddered, even though the back story wasn’t new to him. You didn’t have to be a Puppeteer to find kinetic-kill weapons frightening. “Go on.”

  Eric stalled for a few seconds with a bulb of hot coffee. “Nessus ordered us to rig a cometary-belt object with a thruster. The idea was to temporarily modify the snowball’s orbit enough to seem a threat to the Gw’oth. He wanted to see if and how they reacted.”

  Baedeker’s forepaw scraped the deck. “And did they?”

  Kirsten shook her head. “We never did alter the snowball’s orbit. Explorer was recalled to the Fleet first. Nessus was needed on Hearth. He never explained. And of course the Fleet has altered course to avoid the Gw’oth.”

  Mention of Explorer brought sad reminiscence to Kirsten’s face and a flash of anger to Eric’s. Baedeker intoned something deep in both throats.

  There was a lot of shared history among these three, and Nessus, and the late ship Explorer. Sigmund tried, and failed, to interpret the Puppeteer’s reaction. Maybe it was emotional, not verbal.

  “Why leave the comm buoy?” Sigmund prompted.

  Eric and Kirsten exchanged looks again. Kirsten said, “Soon after, Eric, Omar, and I went out again to scout ahead of the Fleet. Just we three. Either we had passed a test on the previous mission, or no one could be spared to chaperone us.”

  More soft, low-pitched chanting: jarring chords in some exotic key or scale that made Sigmund uneasy. Mournful? He guessed Baedeker had opposed the unsupervised mission.

  Kirsten shivered and kept going. “Instead, we went hunting for Long Pass. Given what its discovery revealed
about our people’s own history, it was impossible to believe the Concordance”—Hearth’s government—“wouldn’t lob a comet at the Gw’oth.

  “After independence, Omar and I went back. Removing the thruster from the snowball prevented that particular remote-control attack. It didn’t guarantee the Gw’oth their safety. That’s why we left a hyperwave radio buoy in the cometary belt: to monitor Gw’oth radio chatter. I programmed the buoy to signal New Terra if it sensed any significant changes.”

  Baedeker squealed like an abused bagpipe, still pawing the floor. “In just a few years the Gw’oth went from simple comsats to visiting the cometary belt? And you gave them a hyperwave radio to reverse-engineer? They could have hyperdrive in a matter of—”

  “Not from us,” Kirsten said firmly. “They won’t find the buoy.”

  “And yet here they are using it,” Baedeker retorted.

  Kirsten shook her head. “We left behind a standard radio beacon, omnidirectional, on another moon near them, and directions for contacting us in major Gw’oth languages.

  “The hyperwave buoy forwards to New Terra any radio signal from that beacon. The comm channel runs only one way—they can’t follow a reply to locate the hyperwave relay. It was all strictly for the Gw’oth to reach us if they needed help.”

  Sigmund restarted the holo. The signal had repeated for days, but the message was short.

  Amid fronds like drifting seaweed, a not-quite starfish—a Gw’o—undulated before them. Orifices puckered and relaxed rhythmically at the tips of its five tubular tentacles. Breathing? Speech? The shipboard translator rendered the runes that flowed across the bottom of the image.

  “Friends, come at once. Something is rushing our way. Something very dangerous.”

  8

  Sigmund tossed and turned to the accompaniment of faint moans from the adjoining cabin. He didn’t blame Kirsten and Eric, reunited after what only Sigmund thought of as more than a month. His empathy didn’t make their urgent lovemaking any easier to overhear.

  Sigmund missed his entire family, terribly, but right now his thoughts were on Penny. Well, not his thoughts, exactly.

  He had to laugh. You would think someone approaching two centuries old could handle a bit of celibacy. Only you would be wrong. His memories—such of them as he retained—reached that far into the past, but he had arrived on New Terra in the body of a twenty-year-old. Only Carlos Wu’s nanotech-enabled, experimental autodoc could have put Sigmund back together. Soon after, Nessus had whisked away the prototype. The lone prototype. No one else on New Terra would be rejuvenated as Sigmund had been.

  Well, Sigmund had saved Carlos’s life once. Use of the autodoc made them even.

  With a groan, Sigmund collapsed his sleeper field and settled slowly to the deck. He wasn’t going to sleep, so he might as well get up. A bit of exercise, he decided, and maybe a snack. Then, if sleep remained elusive, something productive.

  Away from the crew cabins, Don Quixote’s corridors were deathly quiet. The name was Sigmund’s little joke. How did one explain a quixotic pursuit to people who had never read Cervantes? When asked to explain, Sigmund would say, “It’s a long story.”

  He paced from stem to stern, engine room to bridge. The ship was basically a cylinder with rounded ends, about 110 feet in diameter. It provided ample pacing room. He whistled tunelessly as he went, patting the hull for its reassuring solidity.

  Don Quixote was one of the few vessels in New Terra’s tiny fleet made by the Puppeteers’ General Products Corporation. The vessel was built in the #3 hull model. Before vanishing from Known Space, fleeing from the core explosion, General Products had advertised their hulls as all but indestructible.

  Yes, but.

  There are many obscure ways to die. Once upon a time, Sigmund had voraciously read and vidded mystery stories. The more impossible the crime, the more educational. Locked-room mysteries were the most instructive of all.

  GP hulls were sort of like that.

  As only a paranoid mind could, Sigmund began obsessing on the ways this hull could fail to protect him.

  Hit something hard enough and passengers became stains on a stillunblemished hull.

  And: Antimatter in sufficient quantities would destroy anything made of normal matter. But antimatter was scarce. The trick was to find enough.

  And: Visible light passed right through the hull. The Puppeteers considered transparency a feature, not a flaw. You painted a GP hull where you wanted to block the light. So: A laser beam held on target long enough would vaporize the coating and overcome any antiflare shielding and pour unabated through the still-intact hull.

  And: Each GP hull, it turned out, was a single artificial molecule, its interatomic bonds massively reinforced by an embedded power plant. It took an extremely lucky shot—or a nearby, stationary target—to fry the embedded power plant with a laser, but it could be done. Without the power plant, air pressure alone would burst the weakened hull.

  And: There was at least one other way, one Sigmund had yet to fathom, to destroy a GP hull. Puppeteers had once destroyed a GP-hulled ship with a crew of ARMs aboard. Another time, they had destroyed, all at once, every GP hull in New Terra’s tiny navy.

  Baedeker had worked for General Products Corporation, and Sigmund sensed the engineer knew more than he would admit—which was nothing—about these events. An autodestruct code, Sigmund guessed, transmitted through the hull on visible light.

  He did what seemed best to protect his people and his home. Sigmund found it much easier to dish out that line to Eric than to accept Baedeker’s deeds himself.

  Sigmund continued his aimless pacing, still seeking reassurance in the solidity of the hull. Seeking in vain. No material could protect a ship in hyperdrive from the hungry maw of a gravitational singularity.

  He looped back to the bridge to peek again at the mass pointer. Not that there could have been—he had checked just minutes ago—but the instrument revealed nothing massive nearby. With a sigh, he changed course to settle in the relax room. “Jeeves,” he called.

  “Here, sir,” the familiar voice answered. Most New Terran ships carried a copy of Jeeves. Puppeteers, predictably, suppressed AI development—why build a potential rival?—making Jeeves, centuries old though he was, more advanced than anything else available.

  A snake-crowned image popped into Sigmund’s mind. Medusa, his onetime AIde. Medusa was largely self-directed. She would have finished mining Jeeves’s archives long ago, correlated everything with everything, calculated probable relations, inferred much—

  While Jeeves had to be led by the virtual hand. Sigmund said, “At home I’ve been looking at references to Earth’s moon.”

  “How may I help?”

  Sigmund had been making his way through the music library, but in the faux-night of the ship’s third shift, music seemed antisocial. He didn’t feel like reading lyrics. What, then? “Literature with moon references. Most recent publication first.”

  Jeeves offered things that were diverting or amusing or aggravating or depressing, but nothing useful. Nothing scientific, of course, not even in the fictional sense. All such had been erased. Eventually there was Goodnight Moon, a charming little bedtime story which Athena would surely enjoy, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, which Sigmund couldn’t imagine anyone enjoying. Broadening the search parameters to works with “moon” anywhere within the text gave a ridiculously long list. Sigmund had tried that before.

  He synthed a bulb of hot milk, opting to read simply for relaxation. A few titles on the list of books mentioning the moon looked diverting. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, he decided. Connecticut sounded familiar, somewhere near a place he had once worked, he thought. Or maybe it was only that Mark Twain could be droll, or that King Arthur, like Jeeves, was English. Sigmund thought he might have seen a 3-V adaptation as a boy.

  He straightened in his chair at the first mention of an eclipse. A solar eclipse. Something stirred in the back of his mind. . . .r />
  “May I join you?”

  Sigmund looked up. “Hi, Kirsten. Of course, I’ll be glad for the company. I thought you were in for the night shift.”

  “Couldn’t sleep.” She covered a yawn. “Appearances to the contrary. What about you?”

  “Same.” He gestured at the text projected from his comm. “Maybe a bit of reading and some warm milk will do the trick.”

  She got herself tea before joining him at the table. “What do you think the Gw’oth saw?”

  The four of them had gone round and round on that. The obvious answer, assuming the Gw’oth had seen anything and this wasn’t a trap, was the Fleet. Explorer had found the Gw’oth precisely because their transmissions came from along the flight path of the Puppeteer worlds. That flight path had been changed, but the divergence was not yet significant.

  The worrisome answer was that the Gw’oth had detected some kind of Puppeteer preemptive strike. If so, Don Quixote would almost certainly arrive too late to intervene.

  “Gremlins,” Sigmund finally answered, and then had to explain what gremlins were. Gremlin was as good a term as any for the final possibility: something altogether unexpected.

  She yawned again. “So, what are you reading?”

  Sigmund slid his comm unit toward her. “An Earth story from way before my time. Before spaceflight.”

  She blinked through a few pages and handed back the comm. “When you finish, let me know if you recommend it.”

  “Will do.” Sigmund found Kirsten had lost his place. “Jeeves, I was coming up to an eclipse reference.”

  Some invisible handshake between AI and his portable unit did the trick. Sigmund resumed where he had left off. What had he been reading?

  A nineteenth-century time traveler fancifully thrown back to medieval England, condemned as a witch. He avoids getting burned at the stake (ugh!) by using his foreknowledge of the imminent eclipse to claim power over the sun. How very convenient, Sigmund thought—

  “Finagle!” he blurted.

  Kirsten looked up from her tea. “Sigmund?”