Betrayer of Worlds (29 page)

And it was entirely his fault. If only he had never looked at the Pak Library. Without the fusion suppressor, this ambush would not be possible.

But what about another weapon, another attack, another vicious, amoral scheme? Achilles did not quit, Louis reminded himself—knowing it was only useless rationalization.
This
ambush was his doing.
These
deaths would be on
his
conscience. He stood from his console.

“Hey!” Enzio shouted. “Where are you going?”

Louis cupped his hand over his mouth. “Sick. I’m going to hurl.”

“I’ve got it,” Rogers said, moving from one of the weapons consoles.

“Go,” Enzio said.

Louis bolted from the bridge, as though rushing to the recycler. He went three decks aft to prowl a deserted corridor. Apart from the bridge, engine room, and crew quarters, the huge ship was all but uninhabited.
Remembrance
’s entire crew was perhaps twenty-five Citizens, plus the mercenaries all busy with their combat drill.

Back and forth Louis paced, his stomach churning. This was Wunderland all over again, but without any birds circling overhead for him to shoot in warning. He needed to alert the Gw’oth, move them past
Remembrance
without incident. Getting out a message meant using hyperwave, and that was impossible. He had never seen fewer than six Puppeteers on the bridge, and the closer the Gw’oth approached, the more often Enzio had the New Terrans on the bridge drilling.
Addison
had a hyperwave radio, but Achilles
had engineers all over the little ship. That Louis knew of, they were installing stealth gear, equipping a cabin with Puppeteer amenities, and retrofitting the bridge with a Puppeteer-friendly crash couch and console.

Sometime in the next few days, following their pattern, the Gw’oth would drop from hyperspace. The exit after that would put them into Achilles’ trap. Typically the Gw’oth stayed in normal space for a few hours. Those few hours were Louis’s only opportunity to warn them. And he had no tanj hyperwave access!

Unless . . .

He stopped his pacing. There might be a way to alert the Gw’oth, and it would require Achilles’ unwitting cooperation.

“You are most persistent, Louis,” Achilles sang. He meant:
you are pushy.
Still, he allowed the human into his suite. The man had proven useful before.

“I apologize,” Louis answered. He looked in vain for a New Terran chair before perching on an end of a padded bench. “For what I have to say, time is of the essence.”

Achilles settled into a deep nest of cushions. “Proceed.”

“With their fusion reactors inoperative, the Gw’oth will be helpless. That is the plan, correct?”

“You see a problem?”

“Possibly.” Looking uncomfortable, Louis squirmed on his bench. “Suppose the Gw’oth ships have backup power. Batteries. Fuel cells. Some unanticipated power source that a Gw’otesht invented.”

“Then they will not be entirely helpless,” Achilles completed. “They might get off a few shots from their lasers before exhausting their emergency power reserves.”

“Exactly.” Louis rubbed his chin. “And with emergency power for their launch systems, they could target us with missiles. They must carry guided missiles, or they would not have accelerated to kinetic-kill velocities.”

“And you imagine I did not think of these possibilities,” Achilles said coldly.

“I’m sure you did. At the core of a ship this size, within a General Products hull, probably the Gw’oth can do us no serious harm before we destroy them.”

Almost certainly correct, although a few crew on
Remembrance
’s periphery might not fare well if the Gw’oth got lucky. Lasers and concussion could kill right through the hull. “Louis, are you more timid than a Citizen?”

Louis laughed. “No, but I would still rather eliminate the enemy more safely.
Really
safely. I think I know a way.”

Safer was always better. “What is your suggestion?”

“It goes back to a war story from that bastard Ausfaller.” Louis stood, rubbed his posterior, and began shifting his weight from leg to leg. “That’s just not comfortable.”

A war story. “The Pak War?” Achilles guessed.

“Right. Do we have a planet-buster aboard? Like Ausfaller used to blast Pak fleets?”

The technology was much improved since the Pak War. Then, the devices took days to set up and calibrate.
Remembrance
carried a unit of the latest design, and it could be made operational in less than a day. And the irony would be delicious: to stabilize the early homemade planetary drives even long enough to use as weapons, Baedeker had required the assistance of a Gw’otesht.

Achilles plucked absentmindedly at the meadowplant carpet, considering. “Set off such a device while the Gw’oth ships drift without power.”

“That was my thought. Assuming we can find a world nearby to bust.”

Planet-buster. What a naïve oversimplification. When a planetary drive destabilized, it shook nearby space-time and sent waves of quantum chaos in every direction.

A planet-buster near the ambush point would more than destroy the Gw’oth ships. The space-time ripples would rattle every dish on Hearth. None would be able to deny that something extraordinary had happened. That someone extraordinary had saved the Concordance.

And eliminating even the remotest possibility of a lucky Gw’oth shot
did
have appeal.

It would have been nice, Louis thought, to have an actual plan. Instead he had had a notion and a rush to improvise. But time pressure also distracted the Puppeteers. Urgency might be working in his favor.

It was a nice thought, anyway.

Louis’s crash couch twitched: one of the Puppeteer engineers at
work on
Addison
’s bridge, prone on the deck, his heads and necks deep inside a wiring cabinet, had kicked the seat. A melody, using the term loosely, sounded from the cabinet.

“He said, ‘I am sorry,’ ” Metope translated from the bridge doorway. His tan-and-cream hide was striped, like some sort of understated zebra.

Everyone pretended Metope was here to translate, not to supervise Louis.

“It’s all right,” Louis answered. Better than all right. He had access to a hyperwave radio, with far fewer eyes watching than if he were on
Remembrance
’s bridge.

Many worlds drifted between the stars, but nothing guaranteed a world in a suitable spot for blasting the Gw’oth. The plan remained to fry disabled ships with lasers, and neither Achilles nor Clotho would divert any resource essential to that attack. That very Puppeteer caution relegated the proposed search for roaming worlds to idle instruments on
Addison.

As Louis had hoped.

He hummed to himself as he reconfigured
Addison
’s hyperwave radio. The equipment sent and listened in only one direction. If its beam encountered any substantial object, the strength of the echo would hint, with
very
uncertain precision, at a distance.

To pinpoint a remote object with hyperwaves took triangulation. Achilles would not redirect the Fleet’s hyperwave array—and risk disclosing that he could control the array—until a reasonably small search area was isolated.

The scary part was that Achilles
had
access. Traitors high in Hearth’s defense establishment, Louis inferred.

And if he failed to warn the Gw’oth and this search
did
locate a suitable free-floating world? He told himself that the Gw’oth would be no deader one way than the other. He told himself Achilles would have expended the most terrible weapon in his arsenal.

Mostly, Louis told himself that he must not fail.

“Why does this take so long,” Metope asked.

“We can trade jobs if you want,” Louis snapped. He knew Metope wouldn’t accept: cables still dangled from the Puppeteer-friendly console awaiting installation. “Look, it’s complicated. This is a hyperwave
radio,
not part of a radar array. The faint echo it will get from a distant object is more like background noise than signal. I had to reprogram the noise filters. And because this is a radio, it’s supposed to
point,
not sweep.”

If only the Gw’oth were in normal space! Then merely a “misdirected” scan could scare them off. But Achilles, whether from distrust or simple Puppeteer caution, had restricted the search window. Louis would be escorted from
Addison
long before the Gw’oth might next reappear. Or if Louis had had his old pocket comp, with its hidden codes for reaching Sigmund. Or, or, or.

You have this one chance, Louis lectured himself. Do
not
blow it.

“So you are programming a scan pattern,” Metope offered.

“Exactly.” Louis talked about scan-pattern parameters. He prattled about the spin axes of nearby stars, and what that said about planetary orbital planes, and what
that
said about where best to seek planets ejected from their native solar systems. Anything that might distract Metope. Happily, Louis’s babysitter was not an engineer.

All the while keying the emergency codes Nessus had insisted Louis memorize. Nessus had distrusted Achilles then; Louis could hope that whoever monitored Clandestine Directorate’s emergency communications network was no friend of Achilles now.

Galactic coordinates, presumably the location of a trusted hyperwave relay buoy. Louis arranged his scan pattern to sweep over those coordinates. As he chattered about the difficulties of reconfiguring the hyperwave set, and needing to transmit a distinctive pulse sequence so that any hyperwave echoes would be unique, and the parameters to be estimated, Louis entered the memorized control sequences.

“This approach seems unlikely to work,” Metope decided, “if you ever even finish.”

“Almost done.” Louis planted a boot tip deep into the flank of the engineer still sprawled on the deck. The engineer wailed atonally, Metope’s heads swiveled—

And Louis keyed a short message to modulate the scan beam. His final keystroke cleared the display.

“Arrrgh! My foot slipped. Tell your friend I apologize,” Louis told Metope. “The good news is the configuration is complete. We are ready to begin scanning.”

Baedeker jolted from deep sleep, his hearts pounding. Utmost emergency tones!

He leapt from his nest of cushions. Hooves pummeled his door, and alarmed voices bleated for permission to enter.

Few had his
very
private personal number; fewer still the codes that overrode his privacy settings. This interruption could only portend ill. He must take the call alone. He sang through the door to the unseen sentries, servants, and aides, “I am all right. Stay where you are.”

He had left his communicator in the pocket of a sash. He took the unit, still ululating, and set it onto a table. “Take the call,” Baedeker ordered.

Over the communicator, a hologram opened: Nike. He appeared to be standing in his office, but the bedraggled mane said he, too, had just been awakened.

“My pardon, Hindmost. I seek your guidance.”

We live in troubled times, Baedeker thought. “What has happened?”

“A text message from Nessus, very cryptic, received over the Directorate’s emergency communications network.” Nike’s hoof tapped nervously at his floor. “But we heard from Nessus earlier today, on a scheduled respite from hyperspace. He intended to be in hyperspace, unreachable, for the next three days. After this odd message, we tried and failed to contact him.”

Because Nessus was making the long trek to the Gw’oth home system. “What is this cryptic message?”

“Galactic coordinates and two English words: hyperwave power.”

Many at Clandestine Directorate knew English, from training during the colonial period or more recent dealings with New Terra. The message would not be in English for security purposes. “
Is
the message from Nessus?”

“It has his authentication code,” Nike said. “That could not be coerced from him”—because he would die first from fright—“but conceivably he gave the code away.”

“You infer something. Sing plainly.”

Nike bobbed heads. “The message entered our network at a remote relay buoy. Nessus is far from there. But when he chased after Achilles, at the rear of the Pak fleets . . .”

“You believe Nessus gave highly classified Concordance codes to Louis Wu.”

“I think Nessus was more realistic than the rest of us about the danger posed by Achilles.”

Baedeker understood that melody as agreement. And as a rebuke for so long tolerating Achilles in the name of Party unity. “Assume this message comes from Wu. ‘Hyperwave power.’ What does it mean? What do the coordinates tell us?”

“The coordinates define a place in the Fleet’s wake. If the Gw’oth ships follow their pattern, the message points to the center of the region in which they are likely to emerge next.”

A human unaccustomed to Citizens might think to propose an attack on the Gw’oth, but Louis Wu was no stranger to Citizens. The message’s brevity and cryptic nature suggested haste; what little the human had sent must have meaning.

“ ‘Hyperwave power,’ ” Baedeker sang. “A powerful signal? Sent to the Gw’oth when they next appear?”