Destroyer of Worlds Read online

  Sigmund said, “Not a pretty sight, but important.” Perhaps the most important thing about the Gw’oth, if correct. “Make sure I understand this activity.”

  Kirsten ran a hand, the fingers splayed, through her hair. “Sure, Sigmund.”

  “As best I can count, that’s a set of eight. Where I can see what’s happening, each Gw’o has linked to three others. Just as one end of each tube links into the central mass, at the other end, the nervous system remains accessible. What you decided on the Explorer mission is that Gw’oth link to form group minds. Biological computers.”

  “An octuple like this . . .” She hesitated, not understanding his grin. She knew nothing of octopi.

  Penny, bless her, had come to terms with Sigmund’s apparent non sequiturs. Finagle, he missed her. “Go on,” he urged.

  “Right. We’ve seen groups of four and eight, and very rarely a group of sixteen. An octuple connected like this is suited to working 3-D simulations.” Kirsten leaned against an end of the table, putting her back to the imagery. “The big mystery about these guys was how they developed tech so quickly. But these . . . link ups. . . tell us.

  “I hacked Gw’oth netcams and databases to correlate these . . . episodes . . . with data growth rates in their archives. The correlation wasn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. Not all calculations produce data at the same rate. So a line of Gw’oth generates one kind of data, solving a particular class of physical problems. 2-D arrays of Gw’oth modeled another kind of problem. You’re looking at a 3-D array. They even do 4-D, but like sixteen-tuples that seemed to be rare.

  “Weird but true, these guys link into living computers. That makes the apparent speed of their technological spurt misleading. They had a lot of simulation to do before they ever moved above the ice to build a technological society.”

  Sigmund had left New Terra more or less this informed, only he had never really dwelt on it. It was hard to make time to contemplate the Gw’oth, a good ten light-years distant, when with a half-decent pair of binocs he could see the Fleet in the night sky.

  Only here, now, the Gw’oth weren’t distant.

  “Kirsten, bear with me.” It took Sigmund a while to put his misgivings into a coherent question. “How far back do their archives go?”

  She shrugged. “The digital ones I hacked went back thirty years. Until then they lacked the technology to build such things.”

  “But the Gw’oth have other archives, much older? Pre-tech archives?” He tried to imagine how such records would be kept. Scratched into soft stone with hard stone, perhaps.

  “They must, Sigmund. Unless the older records are digitized, we have no way to know.”

  And unless Kirsten gets back into the archives. Between her last visit and this one, the Gw’oth had deployed network security. Sigmund respected the robustness of the aliens’ encryption and authentication methods, even as he cursed them for making his job more difficult.

  Explorer had intercepted broadcasts in several languages, suggesting different societies, maybe distinct nations, among the Gw’oth. Rivalries could have spurred the new security measures. Or Kirsten might have brought this upon herself by leaving native-language messages with the radio beacon. It wouldn’t take geniuses—though the Gw’oth were—to infer alien visitors had tapped their comm.

  Most of what Kirsten had said made sense, but must? Her conclusion was too firm for the source data. He said, “What if the Gw’oth don’t have deep archives?”

  “Then they thought everything through quickly. But that can’t be.” She hesitated. “Can it?”

  Sigmund didn’t want to think so, either. Unpleasant implications hardly disproved the possibility. “Jeeves, do you have a full set of records from the Explorer mission?”

  “I do, Sigmund.”

  “We’re done viewing Gw’oth ensembles. Give us a map of cities versus data archives.”

  A black sphere popped up, with red filaments randomly zigzagging across its surface. Here and there, along the winding red threads, green dots shone. Jeeves said, “Red denotes population centers. Those stood out in Explorer’s deep-radar scans. Green dots are archive locations, not to scale so you can see them. Steady dots are confirmed archives, the ones Kirsten hacked into. Blinking dots are archives inferred from address directories.”

  Gw’oth cities hugged the ocean-floor hydrothermal vents and ringed the occasional volcano. Sunlight played little role in the ecology here; chemosynthesis around the vents drove the food chain. Tidal flexing by the gas giant kept the ice moon seismically active and its vents pumping out energy-rich nutrients. To the Gw’oth, the vast expanses of ocean between vents must be like deserts.

  But the few-and-scattered archives? That Sigmund could not explain. As the holo globe turned, the distribution of archives appeared less and less even. “Why don’t more cities have archives?” he wondered.

  “Unknown,” Jeeves said.

  Kirsten raised an eyebrow. “Sigmund, you’re imagining a puzzle where none exists. With worldwide comm, they can access data centers from anywhere. Not every city needs its own.”

  They must. They could. Kirsten was guessing.

  Hacking remotely into Gw’oth data centers and netcams had been brilliant. Likewise, deducing that the Gw’oth assembled into living computers. But Kirsten’s genius was technological. Divining intent, sniffing out deceit, recognizing threats . . . those tasks required different skills.

  “Jeeves,” Sigmund said. “Does prevalence of archives in a city correlate with anything?” That was too broad, so he clarified. “Population density, maybe. Local language. Ocean depth. Characteristics of the hydrothermal vent.”

  Pause. Then, “None of those, Sigmund.”

  Kirsten synthed a bulb of coffee for herself. “Where are you going with this, Sigmund?”

  “I don’t know.” Sigmund trusted his intuition. A hidden truth was trying to warn him. He was sure of it.

  “There is a correlation,” Jeeves finally decided. “It’s between archive sites and seismic damage.”

  Kirsten grinned. “Mystery solved, Sigmund. Data centers are valuable, so the Gw’oth don’t put them in areas prone to quakes.”

  “That’s not the case,” Jeeves said imperturbably. “The correlation is to seismic damage, not seismic activity. There’s less damage near archives because those cities use more metal construction. Differences in seismic activity aren’t statistically significant.”

  “Similar fractions of stone buildings fallen, Jeeves?” Sigmund guessed.

  “Correct, Sigmund.”

  Kirsten said, “Richer cities use more metal construction. Richer cities have archives. I just don’t see what’s bothering you, Sigmund.”

  “Maybe nothing.” And maybe biological computers, like the digital archives the ensembles filled with data, were a recent mutation or innovation. If the latter, the Gw’oth were a bigger potential threat than Baedeker already feared.

  If so—and if the call for help the Gw’oth continued to transmit wasn’t bait for a trap—how scary was whatever had them frightened?

  REAL-TIME DATA STREAMED into the main archive of Lm’Ba: highresolution observations from a fivefold of orbiting telescopes. Faint electromagnetic waves from sources across the sky. Counts of neutrinos and cosmic rays from instruments deployed worldwide.

  Ol’t’ro sucked in all the data. They synthesized and integrated, deduced and projected. They drank in the stars and planets. They delighted in the fire of the sun. They tasted the faint glints of distant asteroids and the even more remote rocks and ice in the far-off cometary belt.

  They gulped it all down and thirsted for more. Thirsted for one particular taste.

  Someone had left a radio beacon and a message of hope on the back of a nearby moon. Someone had marked the position of the beacon with crossed lines lased deep, and long, across the rocky surface. Simple micrometeoroid frequency measurements and abrasion-rate calculations proved the incisions were recent.

  T
oo recent to have been cut by whatever was headed this way.

  Ol’t’ro kept scanning the skies for whoever had left the beacon and the offer of help. They had to hope those Others who offered help would return in time.

  12

  After two days coasting and observing—during which the Gw’oth archives, despite Kirsten’s best efforts, kept their secrets—Sigmund had to concede they had learned what they could from afar. That, and he was tired of rehashing what little they knew about the Gw’oth. He assembled everyone in the relax room to discuss “next steps.”

  Kirsten was eager to meet her Gw’oth. She got right to the point. “Thrusters or gravity drag?”

  The answer was not obvious, at least to Sigmund. Which technology should they risk revealing to the Gw’oth? He tossed back the question. “Which do you recommend, and why?”

  “Thrusters. Even if we get all the way down to the ice surface on gravity drag—which would be fancy piloting, even for me—we’ll need thrusters to leave. If you hope to keep secrets, Sigmund, why show gravity drag at all?”

  Sensible—given her unstated assumption. “Eric. What do you think?”

  “Pilot’s decision,” Eric said.

  “Baedeker?” Sigmund asked.

  Baedeker tugged at a lock of his earnestly coiffed mane. “These Gw’oth learn so quickly. I opt for the less advanced technology, of course. But Citizens have used both technologies for so long I can’t tell you which was trickiest to develop.”

  And Don Quixote didn’t have a Puppeteer historical database. No New Terran ship or institution did.

  The Earth Sigmund remembered, however imperfectly, knew thrusters and gravity drag. Both were fairly recent technologies. Thrusters were very new; he had flown on ships that used fusion drives instead. Fusion drives being potential weapons of mass destruction, ships reliant on them used air compressed nearly into degenerate matter for takeoffs and landings.

  Sigmund did not understand thrusters well enough to make even an educated guess whether Earth’s and Hearth’s relied on the same physical principles. The history of technology was hardly his field. There might have been an earlier generation of thrusters he knew nothing about. “Jeeves. Have you been listening?”

  “Yes, Sigmund.”

  “When Long Pass left Earth”—at least four and a half centuries earlier—“was either technology known?”

  “Only gravity drag.”

  “Gravity drag only drags,” Kirsten said impatiently. “It won’t get us launched, so we’ll reveal our thrusters anyway when we leave. We might as well slow down with thrusters.”

  There was that unstated assumption again. She presumed Don Quixote must land.

  Neither Eric nor Kirsten would want to hear it, but setting down on the Gw’oth world was far from certain. The call for help that had brought them here could be part of a trap. If anything smelled wrong, Sigmund meant to go far, far away—fast.

  Humans in the Fleet had had no tech to call their own, only such crumbs as the Puppeteers had let drop from their table. Then came Explorer’s mission, discovery of the Gw’oth, and the loss of innocence. Learning to respect Gw’oth accomplishments had taught Kirsten and Eric respect for their own lost ancestors. It was the first step on the road to New Terran independence.

  Gratitude to the Gw’oth was understandable. It was also his friends’ blind spot.

  A partial truth would serve. Sigmund said, “Braking quickly, however we do it, shows we have artificial-gravity control to offset our deceleration. Braking by gravity drag gives little else away. So: gravity drag to slow us most of the way. When”—if!—“we land, we do so with our thrusters dialed way down, disclosing little about their capability. We launch the same way.” And thrusters remain our secret if we don’t land at all. “We’ll accelerate once we’re out of sensor range.”

  “Gravity drag, full braking,” Kirsten summarized. “Thirty gees.”

  Sigmund nodded.

  She grinned. “That should be fun.”

  The nervous tap of Baedeker’s forehoof suggested fun wasn’t the word he would have chosen.

  13

  Banded and wreathed in storms—much larger and, for that reason, more luminous even than the distant sun—mighty Tl’ho commanded Er’ o’s attention.

  It was scarcely an exaggeration to imagine that he felt the gas giant’s presence. Pure, beautiful mathematics had characterized the cyclic flexing of the ocean bottom, and from that, the force of gravity, and from that, the enormous mass that must somehow exist, unseen, theretofore unsuspected, beyond the ice that since time immemorial had been the roof of the world.

  And it was here, as real as the beauty of mathematics.

  That gigantic new world, unlike anything the Gw’oth had ever known, was but one wonder. Ice was not the roof of the world, but only of a world, at that a mere moon. The universe was far vaster than anyone had imagined. And while Tl’ho had been revealed by its gravitational attraction, none had anticipated the magnificence of its appearance, or the even larger, far more distant object in whose reflected light Tl’ho glowed.

  It had turned out that the sun and, by extension, the far-off stars were much hotter than Tl’ho. For a short while after first venturing up onto the ice, scientists puzzled why the fiery pinpoints in the sky had fixed locations. But as parallax measurements soon revealed, at least some of the fixed stars weren’t. They were only very, very remote.

  So Er’o had believed until the latest observations. Something was shooting across nearby skies. Something as hot, almost, as the surface of the sun. And that something, whatever it was, was slowing rapidly, exerting tremendous forces.

  Er’o emitted a sharp tone burst. The sounds would propagate along the science-station tunnels into the farthest lab, workshop, and private chamber. “Time to assemble.”

  Er’o was at a loss how best to proceed.

  As Ol’t’ro, he would know.

  OL’T’RO CONSIDERED:

  A rapidly decelerating object—a ship—detectable only by the vast amount of heat it radiated. Ol’t’ro contrasted the lost energy of motion with the measured radiated energy.

  An approximation—the efficiency of the deceleration mechanism being unknown—of the ship’s mass. Bigger by far than the largest Gw’oth ship.

  The arc of the ship’s course. A manipulation of space-time, Ol’t’ro concluded. Interesting. Almost instantly, they began to refine their concept of gravity.

  Reluctantly, they deferred the puzzle for a later time. Another inference had more urgent value to the polity. They disconnected a tubacle, to couple its mouth with a comm terminal.

  The Others had arrived. Their ship would reach the ice soon.

  BAEDEKER CIRCLED HIS TINY CABIN, too tense to sleep or even to sit. He had tried comforting digital-wallpaper motifs to no avail. Neither crowd scenes, not even with a double release of aerosol herd pheromones, nor tranquil meadows helped. A dollop of synthed grain mush sat in its bowl, scarcely touched.

  And they had hours to go before Don Quixote approached the gas giant.

  Over the intercom: an unfamiliar chime. Baedeker wondered if the tone was a new affectation from Jeeves.

  He was wrong.

  “All hands,” Jeeves announced a moment later. “The Gw’oth are hailing.”

  Baedeker gaped at the latched door of his cabin, as though aliens were about to swim through it. His reaction was foolish, of course. This ship was stealthed. The Gw’oth hail had to be a broadcast of some sort, in the hope that someone had responded to their earlier message.

  He was wrong again.

  “Comm laser,” Sigmund announced, surprise plain in his voice. Laser communication was directional. “The Gw’oth know we’re here. Everyone to duty stations.”

  Duty stations meant Kirsten and Sigmund on the bridge and Eric in the engine room. And himself? Anywhere not underhoof. Sigmund had phrased it more tactfully as “on call.”

  The others reported in from their posts. “I’ll remain in m
y cabin for now,” Baedeker declared for completeness. “Jeeves, what is the nature of the hail?”

  “I’m streaming the incoming signal, receive only,” Kirsten answered for the AI.

  To all appearances, rolling hills of lush purple meadowplant surrounded Baedeker for as far as the eye could see. He banished the idyllic pastoral setting from one cabin wall. The incoming message filled the cleared space.

  A Gw’o undulated before an unseen camera. In parallel rows, cryptic squiggles and English translation straddled the image. “Thank you for responding. Once you are closer, we will talk.”

  14

  Don Quixote plunged deep into the Gw’oth system, with every sensor straining for data.

  From bases across the Gw’oth solar system, radio chatter spiked. (Perhaps laser comm spiked, too. With no way to intercept directional traffic, how could one know?) Surface vehicles massed in large formations, fanning out from the few mountain peaks that poked above the ice. Spaceships maneuvered, their fusion flames hot and unmistakable. Electromagnetic launchers stretching far across the ice flung yet more vessels into space.

  So many ships! So many EM launchers! It seemed less and less likely the Puppeteers had intervened here since Kirsten’s last visit.

  Sigmund focused on more pressing matters: the present flurry of Gw’oth activity. Defensive measures? Factional rivalries? Preparation to attack Don Quixote? Knowing as little as he did about the aliens, Sigmund could rationalize any of those scenarios. Being who he was, he suspected the last.

  He was sharing the bridge with Kirsten. Leaving the piloting to her, he studied the tactical summary in the main holo display. It showed far too much activity for his liking. Kirsten’s certain disappointment notwithstanding, they would not meet soon with the Gw’oth on their home ice. That would simply be imprudent. Perhaps later, when they knew more.

  “Jeeves,” Sigmund said, “I assume you can also translate from English.”