Betrayer of Worlds (12 page)

Louis reached into the holo, a fingertip at the spot toward which three ramscoops were converging. He said, “
There
is where we’ll find Achilles.”

Achilles ate and drank indifferently, floating at random to the limit of his tether. In the beating of his hearts, in the random nudges of drifting wreckage, in the recurrence of hunger, in the coming and going of sleep
and dream and catatonia, time passed. He had nothing to do but wait. He had nothing to wait for but extinction.

Death would be quick. The Pak would come, and his hearts would stop in fright.

Once he had had the choice of waiting in stasis. In a moment of clarity, he had taken apart the field generator and hurled its components into the void. The Pak whom Ausfaller had once captured had not known about stasis fields. Achilles would not let an enemy acquire the technology from him.

The tether pulled Achilles up short yet again, and he looked himself in the eyes. He had aspired to rule worlds, and now the limit of his domain was this short range of salvaged fiber-optic cable. He had been a great scientist, and now his only tool was the pressure suit that kept him alive. He had traveled among the stars, and now, other than dim readouts in his helmets, starlight would be the only illumination for the rest of his miserable existence.

Why wait for the Pak? He could end everything now. True, his pressure suit would not open in a vacuum, or allow him to turn off life support, but it could not stop him from piercing the fabric on some jagged bit of debris. Or he could slip his tether and jet from the shelter of the hull. Radiation would kill him slowly, but the suit’s life support, unable to save him, had ample drugs to ease his passage.

He drifted in and out of sleep, considering the possibilities. To be or not to be.

Motion!

Not floating debris. That he no longer noticed. And his helmet lights had been off for—well, he did not know how long—but long enough. His eyes were fully adapted to starlight. He could hardly have missed the approach of a fusion-drive ship.

Voices!

Voices, he understood. He was talking to himself again without knowing it.

He listened to the voices for a while, wondering why he did not sound like himself and why he muttered so softly. As long as he was feeling curious, he wondered a bit more about the odd sense that he had seen something moving.

The motion came from
outside
this hulk, in the form of stars eclipsed. A ship!

He tongued the radio controls in his helmets. The muttering became the beautiful, musical speech of another Citizen.

“. . . Vessel
Aegis.
Please respond. Repeat. This is Concordance vessel
Aegis
. Please respond. Repeat. This is—”

“Here!” Achilles shouted, harmonics pulsing with need. “I am in here! Here!”

“
Aegis.
Please respond. Repeat. This—”

The hail, obviously recorded, cut out. “I am sending in a human with a stepping disc,” the voices said. “You are safe.”

Achilles cantered onto the bridge, glanced at the main display, and sneered. “I suppose you think we owe them apologies.”

Nessus dismissed the image of the Pak derelict, then stood from the pilot’s couch. He tried to make allowances, but it was hard. Maybe if Achilles had shown any sympathy for the New Terrans he had sent to their deaths. . . .

No matter how Nessus tried, he could not justify the unprovoked attack on the Pak. The aliens had turned away from the Fleet many years ago. In a few more years, even the alien rearguard would have passed. Why draw their attention now?

Achilles had quickly put behind him the horrors of his ordeal. His coat, off-white with patches of tan, had been brushed until it glowed. His brown mane was replete with braids and curls, freshly woven with orange garnets. Rather than wear a standard shipboard utility belt, he had synthed an ornamental sash decorated with full Ministry of Science regalia.

By asserting his status, Achilles must hope to commandeer
Aegis.

“I suppose,” Nessus answered cautiously, “that provoking the Pak is a dangerous activity.”

Achilles stood tall, his hooves set far apart.
Un
ready to run: the stance of dominance. “The Pak crew of that ship is dead, not provoked, and with knowledge from the Library we can eliminate the Gw’oth as a threat. We will take what I came for and be gone before other Pak can respond.”

One unstated assumption piled on another in that speech, Nessus thought. Whatever technology Achilles sought might never have existed aboard this specific ship—or at all. The information might be aboard and yet undecipherable, expressed in an unfamiliar clan dialect or extinct language. The information might have been destroyed in the attack, or the repositories—what was the human term?—booby-trapped by the Pak crew before they died.

Achilles was never one to admit to doubt or uncertainty. Or to hesitate to gamble with the lives of others.

Still, could pillaging make these circumstances any worse? Probably not. And if Achilles’ mad adventure
did
turn the Pak attention toward the Fleet, Pak knowledge might even the odds.

Nessus sang, “If Louis agrees to the attempt, and I am convinced it does not put my mission at risk, I will act.”

“And what is that mission?”

“That is a matter for the Hindmost to disclose.”
I
have powerful friends.

“You never had any imagination,” Achilles sang, his undertunes rich with derision. “That is why you remain a scout and I am a minister.”

Yet I command a ship while you wear a convict’s stun anklet, Nessus thought, and that device will remain on your foreleg for as long as you are on my ship. I need only to trill the proper chords and you will topple like a tree in a storm.

And because Louis Wu is no fool,
we
saved
you
.

“If Louis agrees,” Nessus repeated, “and I am convinced the effort can be undertaken safely, we will see.”

And anything Louis recovers from the Library will be delivered to Baedeker, not Achilles.

The outer hatch of a Pak air lock loomed in Louis’s heads-up display, the image relayed from a camera in the nose of a remote-controlled, thruster-impelled Puppeteer probe.

The probe’s usual purpose was refueling. A stepping-disc/molecular-filter stack would transfer deuterium from any convenient ocean into
Aegis
’ tanks. Today, its nose cone removed, the stepping disc stripped of its filter, the probe would deliver Louis straight to the derelict’s air lock.
Aegis
, with its impenetrable GP hull, held station just ahead of the Pak derelict to block the sleet of relativistic interstellar muck.

Aegis
would jump to hyperspace if anything unexpected happened. Louis could not expect Puppeteers to wait long for Louis to step back. If Achilles was at the helm, not at all.

“Ready, Louis?” Nessus asked.

Louis rechecked his spacesuit’s readouts. “Yes.” Ready as I’m going to be.

Nessus and Achilles had argued about whether to attempt a boarding. At least Louis inferred an argument, the conversation sounding to him like hopped-up squirrels shut in a grand piano. Voice had said he was not allowed to translate.

Nessus had left the decision up to Louis. Boarding might activate the ramscoop field or other, unknown, defenses. That the deuterium tanks on the derelict had run dry was pure speculation.

Unless someone recovered whatever part of the Library that ship carried, ten men and women would have died in vain.

Flashlight-laser in hand, its aperture narrowed to a lethally thin ray, Louis stepped from a cargo hold on
Aegis
to the probe—and into zero gravity. His boot magnets snapped to the probe fuselage.

No ramscoop field—yet. He would have been in agony, the magnetic field inducing massive electrical currents, in full-body spasm. He detached the stepping disc and stowed it in the sling across his back.

Even up close, the hull, aside from a few slightly discolored patches, seemed unmarred by
Argo
’s lasers. It wasn’t GP hull material, so what the tanj was the ship made of?

The air-lock controls were intuitive enough. Laser in hand, Louis said, “I’m going aboard.”

“Acknowledged,” Nessus said.

The air lock cycled and Louis saw a few dim lights inside. His suit sensors reported atmosphere. No artificial gravity. Batteries or fuel cells for emergency circuits, he told himself. Too little power for gravity or the ramscoop field. His skin crawled.

Bodies floated everywhere. The Pak were short, their proportions and enlarged joints making them caricatures of the human form. Most wore only vests covered in pockets. Their leathery skins were blotchy with radiation lesions and the mottling of decay. Putrefaction looked well advanced. Sealed in his suit Louis could smell nothing, but his gorge rose in his throat.

The New Terrans in their spacesuits were contorted, frozen in their final convulsions. Two looked like they might have snapped their own backs. One floated on her back, limbs askew, a red-brown film coating the inside of her visor. One glance inside at death’s rictus and Louis shuddered.

“Everyone is dead,” he said to break the eerie silence.

“As expected,” Achilles replied. “Are the computers intact?”

Computers were why Achilles was there—and why these men and women died. Capture a Library ship and, it stood to reason, you captured much of the Library. Computerized knowledge was compact—the hundreds of ships would be for mutual protection, not cargo capacity.

“A minute,” Louis said. A minute of silence to honor
your
crew, slaughtered on
your
watch. He turned slowly, taking everything in with his helmet-mounted camera. “I’ll ask again. Should I send back the bodies?”

“Funerals are not a New Terran custom,” Nessus said. “To judge by these images, returning the dead would bring no one comfort.”

A few deep breaths steadied Louis’s nerves. “I’ll look for computers.” He circled the air-lock-level deck, the thud of his boots and his too-fast breathing the only sounds. He saw nothing promising. It all looked—alien. Few objects exhibited a clear purpose. Or maybe they had too many purposes, multiuse items sharing common components. Here and there he found open cabinets, circuits and modules floating at the ends of spidery cable bundles.

Placards with squiggles labeled the hatches, but he could not read them. By trial and error he found a stairwell. “I’ll check another deck.”

He kept searching, wondering if he would recognize an alien computer—and what would trigger a booby trap. The salient fact about Pak was that they were
smart.
Smarter, by far, than human. Could he anticipate their thinking?

With each hatch Louis approached, his nerves grew tauter. The trap that killed the New Terrans had not triggered immediately. Maybe opening
this
door would rearm the trap.

Why hadn’t the ramscoop field come on the moment Achilles’ crew boarded? Why wait?

The Pak who set the trap might have hoped other Librarians would recover this ship. If so, the trap would have to decide whether boarders were Pak. Louis chewed on that theory as he kept searching. Humans and Pak were distant cousins and the humans wore spacesuits. Maybe the recognition logic had been fooled for a while.

Maybe. But no one could mistake a General Products #4 hull for a Pak ramscoop. No, the ramscoop trap was intended to strike after invaders came aboard. No matter how thoroughly an attacker’s ship was destroyed—and
Argo
had been reduced to a useless hulk—the ramscoop-field trap would capture useful data in the form of dead boarders and their gear.

“Do you recognize any computers yet?” Achilles asked impatiently.

No. Do you? Louis kept the sarcasm to himself. “Not yet.”

“What about weapons?” Achilles persisted.

Because this was all about weapons, something to use against the Gw’oth. If they didn’t find Pak computers, maybe useful technology would be lying around already weaponized. “No,” Louis answered again. He walked slowly, studying racks of exotic equipment, to a soft
thump
whenever a boot magnet snapped to the deck.

Working aft, he had reached the engine room. The massive magnetic coils could not be part of anything else. He had yet to see anything that looked like a computer.

Something tickled the back of his mind.

“Louis, finish your sweep of the derelict so we can leave,” Nessus said.

How tempting that was! Louis could declare himself done, set his stepping disc on the deck, and reboard
Aegis
in an instant. Still, he hated to admit failure. “Soon, Nessus,” he equivocated.

Computers could be tiny, and storage exceedingly dense. The Pak computers might be anywhere, in any of the unrecognizable gear around the ship. How would he know?

Because in any library, there are lots and
lots
of files.

Louis stomped forward a deck, his boot steps echoing in the stairwell. He opened a hatch to an equipment closet and stood staring at the photonics racks within. “I think I’ve seen this same physical configuration again and again. Can anyone confirm?”