Destroyer of Worlds Read online

  “I may need you to do some math for me.” A few taps put his comm’s touchpad into drawing mode. He sketched a solar eclipse: sun, moon, Earth. Free-flying worlds don’t experience eclipses.

  “The sun is a yellow star,” he began. That was not only Sigmund’s questionable memory talking; New Terran biologists concurred. Human eyes were optimized for such a sun. So were plants grown directly from seeds in Long Pass’s dwindling collection. Earth-evolved crops cultivated on New Terra had already begun adapting to the more orange emissions of New Terra’s orbiting artificial suns. Those false stars radiated the light that Hearth’s biota preferred. The best estimate was that Earth’s sun had a surface temperature around ten thousand degrees—entirely ordinary. As a clue to Earth’s location, that inference was all but useless.

  Earth’s estimated year length was also entirely normal, putting the planet well within the habitable zone for a range of candidate stellar masses. Planetary orbital pa ram e ters were a function of solar mass, so even the decent guess Sigmund had at the length of Earth’s year said nothing definitive about the orbital radius.

  But now factor in A Connecticut Yankee’s total eclipse . . .

  Range of estimates for the apparent size from Earth of its sun. Twelve months—twelve orbits of a moon!—in a year. So how big is that moon to fully eclipse the sun?

  It depended how close to Earth that moon orbited.

  They needed a whole second set of approximations about Earth itself. New Terra had surface gravity Earth-like enough not to have seriously messed with Sigmund’s reflexes. Call Earth’s surface gravity New Terran, plus or minus a few percent. New Terra and the five worlds of the Fleet gave a range of densities for rocky, habitable worlds. Density and surface-gravity estimates together implied Earth’s mass, and so orbital pa ram e ters for its satellites.

  Jeeves collated estimates and crunched the numbers. Kirsten tweaked the program whenever Jeeves bogged down.

  The moon was, in a word, big. At least two thousand miles in diameter. Call it a quarter the diameter of Earth itself. A real clue, at last!

  “We’re hardly looking for a world at all,” Kirsten said in awe. “Earth and its moon are nearly a double planet.”

  9

  Sigmund was hindmost for this mission, and the hindmost has prerogatives. Baedeker reluctantly admitted the human to his cabin.

  The main furnishings were a small synthesizer and mounds of pillows. Sigmund looked about and elected to remain standing. “Baedeker, you need to make peace with Eric. We’re a crew. We must all get to know each other, learn to trust each other.”

  Trust Eric? The man had hate in his heart. And when had a Citizen ever shared a spaceship with another species without being in charge?

  Still, the hindmost had his prerogatives. “I see your point, Sigmund. The Gw’oth are a most formidable species. We will need to work together.”

  “And yet you remain in your cabin.”

  Baedeker said nothing.

  Sigmund jammed his hands in his jumpsuit pockets. “At the least, share what you have concluded about the Gw’oth.”

  “You already know. I expressed my views at the mission briefing.”

  Sigmund’s nostrils flared. “You’re not telling me something. Finagle, you’re not telling me anything.”

  Until they arrived, what more was there to tell? They could see nothing, learn nothing while in hyperspace.

  Meanwhile, he was far from home, alone among humans. “There is something I have been thinking about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A moon,” Baedeker said—and Sigmund jerked. Why? “Until a few years ago, when New Terra left the Fleet, it had tides. Ten every day. Now it has no tides, and the coastal ecology has been devastated.” The reek remained fresh in Baedeker’s imagination.

  Sigmund said, “Penny, my wife, is a biologist. She’s talked about the problem. In fact, she wanted to talk to me about tidal zones, but we never got back to it.” The suspicion that was always lurking peeked out of Sigmund’s eyes. “But why talk now of a moon?”

  “Because a moon is the answer,” Baedeker said. “Give New Terra its own moon and it regains some tides.”

  “Give New Terra its own moon. I should have thought of that. Doubtless the Outsiders are eager to give us a planetary drive.”

  The sarcasm was unmistakable—long after they were dead and forgotten, the Concordance would still be paying the Outsiders the price of the Fleet’s drives—but Baedeker saw something more. Sigmund truly was interested. And Sigmund’s government ministry must control a lot of resources.

  “I have been thinking,” Baedeker began cautiously. “Maybe I can build such drives.”

  NOT EVEN A CITIZEN can wallow forever in fear.

  Citizens were social creatures. Humans were not of the herd, but Baedeker had lived among humans long enough for them to have become familiar. He could talk with them. And so, with Don Quixote still ten days from its destination, he left the sterile confines of his tiny cabin.

  Emerging during the night shift, he was typically faces to face with only one human at a time. Dealing with all at once could wait arrival at their destination. Most often he saw Kirsten. She seemed not to sleep much.

  “Mothers learn to get by without much sleep,” she had explained more than once.

  Would he ever experience parenting? Perhaps, if he returned to Hearth. Nothing prevented him—except him. He had seen how power was wielded by those who led from behind. It was ugly and self-serving. No, it was better to take more time, to forget.

  Which begged the question: How much more would he need to forget after this mad adventure?

  ONCE MORE, Baedeker circled the corridors of Don Quixote with Kirsten. She had a quick mind and a good heart, and she had taken it upon herself to look after the interests of the Gw’oth.

  The more she spoke of them, the more foolish her advocacy seemed.

  Few on Hearth knew anything of the Gw’oth, and for good reason. The sea creatures were too scary to reveal to the public. Baedeker was in the small minority, one of the technologists asked to assess the implausible findings of the Explorer expedition. Only everything Nessus had reported was true! The Gw’oth had, incredibly, advanced from fire to fission in two generations.

  No one ever told Baedeker the Fleet had veered to give the Gw’oth a wider berth. No one had had to. The nanotech process by which General Products built its hulls was sensitive to the slightest of perturbations. Soon after Explorer returned, transient gravitational ripples had disrupted production in the orbiting microgravity factory. Ripples such as a planetary course change might cause.

  In the few years since Kirsten last visited, the Gw’oth had added interplanetary travel to their capabilities. Who could say interstellar travel would not soon follow?

  Baedeker was here, today, coerced onto this mission, because he had been immobilized by an existential question. Was it time for him to return to Hearth? Now he had his answer.

  If a strike by the Fleet was not why the Gw’oth called for help, it would be—as soon as Baedeker returned to report what he now knew.

  10

  “Five minutes to dropout,” Kirsten announced calmly.

  Sigmund’s eyes refused to leave the mass pointer. It was by far the largest instrument on the bridge, a transparent sphere from whose center extended blue lines of varying lengths. The direction of a line showed the direction to the corresponding astronomical object. The length was proportional to the object’s gravitational influence: mass over distance squared.

  He sat, transfixed, in the copilot’s crash couch. The longest line, aimed right at him, nearly touched the clear surface, and that terrified him. The line seemed somehow hungry, ready to devour this ship, and that horrified him even more. Only a sentient mind could operate a mass pointer, which begged the question: What might be out there contemplating him?

  Five minutes!

  The math was simple. Every extra second they remained in hyperspace brough
t Don Quixote another two light-minutes closer to their destination. But a moment too late would be fatal. Sigmund gritted his teeth and said nothing. Kirsten was by far New Terra’s best pilot.

  “Sounds good,” Eric answered from the engine room. “All ready back here.”

  Baedeker did not report from his cabin. Sigmund imagined the Puppeteer was a tightly rolled ball just now.

  Five minutes!

  After an eternity Kirsten began the final countdown. “Ten seconds, everyone. Eight, seven. . .”

  “Passive sensors only,” Sigmund reminded her.

  She nodded. “Two, one, now.”

  The mass pointer went dark. Sigmund activated the forward view screen. Ahead: stars.

  . . .

  DON QUIXOTE DOVE into the solar system at breakneck speed.

  It was a crawl compared to their moments-ago pace through hyperspace—but with the mind refusing to see hyperspace, how could you judge?

  “Lots of background EM,” Kirsten reported. “Data links. Video and radio chatter. It’s all from the inner system. Nothing’s intelligible from this far out.”

  “Radar?” Sigmund asked her. He raised his voice over the clatter of hooves in the corridor. Baedeker had emerged from his cabin.

  “Not that I can tell, Sigmund. Nor lidar, nor deep radar, not that any of those matter in a stealthed ship.” She took a deep breath. “It’ll be hours before the Gw’oth can know we’re here.”

  Because it would be hours before information from here could reach the inner system. Hyperwave radio was instantaneous where it worked—which was outside of gravitational singularities. They were almost 4.5 billion miles from the star, only a bright orange dot to the naked eye, and Don Quixote’s black hull would reflect little of the faint light that reached out here.

  “Unless they are already out here,” Baedeker chided from the hallway, before Sigmund got out the caveat. Cowardice was not a bad substitute for paranoia.

  “I’m detecting interesting neutrino flux,” Eric said over the intercom.

  Kirsten frowned. “Check your instruments and I’ll check mine. I’m still not seeing any deep radar.”

  “Because it’s not deep radar. It looks like fusion reactors.”

  Sigmund glanced toward the nervous tap-tap of hoof pawing deck. Baedeker had to be thinking: fission to fusion in a few years. Sigmund knew how the Puppeteer felt. On Earth, if Sigmund remembered correctly, that transition had taken close to a century. Jeeves probably knew exactly, but Sigmund didn’t ask. The details could wait. Or maybe, at some level, he didn’t want to know.

  Don Quixote was scarcely a minute out of hyperspace—and a third of a million miles deeper into the solar system. Einstein space (an attribution no one on New Terra but Sigmund understood) and hyperspace velocities were independent. When Sigmund had recalled Don Quixote, Kirsten came back as quickly as she could. It had meant a thirty-gee sprint out of the system that she had been scouting, to get where she could engage hyperdrive. Don Quixote still had all that Einstein-space velocity, because they hadn’t spent the time to slow down before swapping crews. Relative to this solar system, Don Quixote traveled at about seven percent of light speed.

  Well, they would have to slow down to meet the Gw’oth.

  “Thrusters or gravity drag?” Kirsten had a hand poised above the thruster controls. Her preference, obviously.

  Sigmund turned toward her. “Neither, just yet. Let’s coast for a while and gather data.”

  Kirsten’s hand pulled back. She used it to give Sigmund a perfunctory salute. He read disapproval.

  Not so, Baedeker. From the corner of his eye Sigmund saw heads bobbing—high/low, low/high, high/low—in emphatic agreement.

  Kirsten changed her tune within the hour. By then Eric had localized the neutrino readings. Fusion plants existed on every major moon of the lone gas giant and on two of the three rocky planets.

  11

  Intelligence was overrated.

  Since time immemorial the Gw’oth had lived and died beneath the world-encompassing ice. In just three generations all that had changed. Now they built mighty structures in the vacuum above the ice, ringed the world with satellites and water-filled habitats, even colonized nearby worlds. Intelligence had made all that possible.

  But intelligence required you to give up so much.

  Er’o hovered in his meditation chamber, his tubacles rippling, seeking respite in the simple joys of motion. His hide was mostly cautious oranges and reds, shading to far red on the tips of his spines. But for an undertaste of lubricant from the pumps, he might have been below the ice. The water that endlessly circulated through this chamber was lush: rich with salts, thick with nutrients, ripe with the synthetic spoor of prey. Nothing was too good for those who made possible all the progress.

  Except free will.

  From tubacle tips curled downward, he gazed through the clear ice floor. Structures in every shape imaginable sprawled down the seamount slope and across the world’s foundation until detail faded into a distant haze. The ancient city was built mostly in stone, of course, but here, there, everywhere jutted new steel construction. Artificial lights glowed everywhere. Cargo vessels glided about, over and among the buildings. Tn’ho Nation ruled the longest, most productive hydrothermal vent in all the ocean, and Lm’Ba was its greatest city.

  But that power and wealth might vanish even more quickly than it had come.

  Er’o bent and flexed, tensed and relaxed, until the stress flowed down the length of his tubacles and out of his body, until his hide recolored to more serene hues. Succulent worms and fat scuttlebugs had been delivered while he worked, and now he ate his fill. He voided his wastes. As best he could, he cleared his mind. He permitted himself a brief, timed rest period.

  Food and elimination, motion and meditation: for true intelligence, one abstained from them all.

  The timer rumbled, and Er’o roused himself. Somehow, he had managed to sleep. He jetted from his private meditation chamber, down the narrow access tunnel. His was one cylinder among many, arranged like spokes around the hub (wheeled vehicles above the ice being another small marvel of the age) that was the central work space. High above the clear dome, great Tl’ho, radiant, striped, roiling with storms, dominated the sky. Two cold spots—whole worlds themselves—transited the great orb.

  And Gw’oth like himself crept about on their arid, rocky surfaces!

  He was first among the sixteen to reach the central work space. Quickly the others arrived, emerging from their meditation spaces, most colored the same anxious reds and far reds he now showed. Their common task, unchanged for several shifts, glowed on the assignment board: Find the Others.

  Er’o knew the task was urgent. Also impossible, unless the aliens responded to his people’s plea.

  He extended one tubacle, trembling, and then another. Both limbs were taken up. Within, ears went all but deaf, registering only the beating of hearts. Within, eyes and heat receptors went dark.

  A jolt like electricity coursed through his thoughts.

  More! He needed more! Switching to ventral respiration, he extended his remaining tubacles. He groped about for contact, felt probing in return. Limb found limb, aligned, conjoined . . .

  Ganglia meshing!

  Feedback swelling!

  Heart racing!

  Electricity surging!

  We will take over. The thought roared in Er’ o’s mind. His own musings, feeble things, plodding, inconsequential, faded. . . .

  Ol’t’ro, the group mind, had emerged.

  Intelligence was wonderful.

  “IT AIN’T WHAT YOU DON’T know that kills you,” Sigmund recited softly. “It’s what you know that ain’t so.”

  “To what do you refer, sir?” Jeeves replied.

  Sigmund had been talking to himself but chose not to admit it. “Our slithery friends.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Jeeves said.

  It was a neutral response, signifying nothing. An answering
noise, not an answer. Sigmund missed the reasoning power—and the friend—that had been Medusa. Wishful thinking got him nowhere.

  Then what about some productive thinking? “Jeeves, bring up a picture of a Gw’oth ensemble.” An image shimmered over the relax-room table. “Thanks, Jeeves.”

  Images of the Gw’oth had become familiar. A Gw’o had five limbs arrayed about a central disc, sort of like a starfish. Spines covered the skin, again like a starfish. There the resemblance ended. A Gw’ o’s skin changed colors like a squid or octopus. Its appendages were flexible, like those of an octopus, and hollow like tubeworms. Tier after tier of sharp teeth ringed the inner surface of each tube. Eyes and other as-yet unidentified sensors peeked out from behind the teeth. Almost certainly Gw’oth had evolved from some type of symbiotic carnivorous worm colony. Yes, Gw’oth had become familiar, singly and in groups. Except—

  Fascinated and repulsed, Sigmund examined a pile of writhing Gw’oth. The archival image was flat—in the era of Explorer’s visits, the Gw’oth had yet to develop holography—and for that Sigmund was grateful. Those piled, pulsing tubes, ends swallowing one another, the throbbing flesh, the occasional limb disconnecting and groping free of the twisting mass (to breathe?) came just a little too close to . . . what? A spill of loose intestines? A nest of snakes having an orgy?

  No one would look Sigmund in the eye around pictures like this. Puppeteers wouldn’t discuss sex with anyone but Puppeteers, and not among themselves for all Sigmund knew. They had imposed much of their prudery on New Terrans. Not that this pile of protoplasm was engaged in sex. Mature Gw’oth sprayed gametes into reefs and let nature take its course.

  With a sigh, Sigmund called Kirsten’s comm. “Can I pick your brain for a bit? I’m in the relax room.”

  “Be right up. Give me a few minutes to finish something.” Faint background noises suggested she was in the engine room.

  She strode into the relax room a few minutes later and suddenly noticed something interesting about her boots.