Betrayer of Worlds (37 page)

Vanity and greed won. “I shall take the necessary measures, Excellency.”

“Your service will be rewarded.” Achilles broke the connection.

Plunging
Remembrance
back to hyperspace, continuing onward toward Hearth, Achilles knew he would yet snatch glorious victory from the jaws of defeat.

He only wished that he knew how.

“ ‘We spared your worlds once. You attacked us anyway,’ ” Bm’o repeated. “Transmitting that at each emergence is all we need to do?”

“It is all
you
need to do,” Ol’t’ro corrected. “Except for the few ships we will borrow, you and your fleet may return to Jm’ho.” And we will be happy when you do.

“A few ships,” Bm’o persisted. “It seems insufficient.”

Because the monarch’s imagination was insufficient. Worse, his manner was arrogant. Even by audio-only hyperwave, Ol’t’ro found it an ordeal to work with Bm’o. During the Pak War,
they
had spent much of a Jm’ho year with Baedeker, now Hindmost.
They
had worked among the Citizen scientists struggling to stabilize their version of a planetary drive. And
they
had studied Achilles in detail, analyzing his actions and everything the New Terrans could share about the rogue Citizen.

So yes,
they
knew what would suffice.

All Ol’t’ro said was, “The Citizens’ own fear will do the rest.”

“Very well,” Bm’o said. “We will speak again before the fleet splits.”

“We are sorry,” Ol’t’ro said, “to hear about Rt’ o’s passing. She led a productive life. Doubtless you will find much to do after the loss of such an able advisor.”

“Thank you.” There was a hesitation in Bm’o’s response. Wondering who had told Ol’t’ro about the regent’s death? Or reasoning that Ol’t’ro had cracked the encryption on which the fleet’s security and Jm’ho’s defenses relied?

“We will speak again before you leave,” Ol’t’ro agreed and broke the connection.

.   .   .

Baedeker studied himself in his bedroom mirror. Mane matted and snarled. Eyes dull. Coat unbrushed. Had he ever been so disheveled? The slovenliness came not from neglect or panic, although both bubbled beneath the surface, but from the sheer lack of time as the end of the world approached.

The only beings with whom he sought contact were Gw’oth, and
they
would not care about his hygiene. If they might have, it hardly mattered. They ignored his messages. They ignored
all
messages from Hearth.

While transmitting, over and over, “We spared your worlds once. You attacked us anyway.”

Doom impended, all the more ominous for not knowing how the end would come. Not by kinetic-kill weapons, for the Gw’oth fleet once more aimed at Hearth still matched the Fleet’s normal-space velocity. What did the aliens want? What would they do?

What
and
how
continued to elude Baedeker.
When
was all too clear.

He plucked anxiously at his mane. Since first triggering the hyperwave radar on the Fleet’s northern perimeter, the Gw’oth had appeared four times in normal space. Each appearance brought them closer to Hearth.

A few days. No more. And then?

A tremulous voice from beyond Baedeker’s door: “Hindmost? Are you all right? May I get you anything?”

“Thank you, Minerva, but no,” Baedeker answered his aide through the closed door. Thank you for reminding me of my duty. I cannot save the herd, but I must do what I can to ease its final days. And to do
that,
I must appear to be in charge. “I will be ready presently.”

He sampled the news and public-safety cameras as he groomed. Another spate of grain ships stolen. Citizens by the billions unaccounted for, presumed catatonic in their apartments or hidden in the remotest recesses of Hearth’s few parks and botanical gardens. Terror and madness. Assemblies around the globe, from solemn to panic-stricken to angry. He watched an enormous rally whose orator, in full-throated threnody, excoriated the Hindmost for the coming destruction and demanded his resignation.

Brushing his mane, chewing bitter cud, Baedeker wondered: What would the herd think if they knew I had offered to resign? The elders of the party refused his resignation, lest any of them wind up presiding over the end of the world. Even Nike had sunk into despair. The Conservative
leaders were too overwhelmed to talk. The party of precedent had been totally immobilized by the coming day of reckoning.

How could he resign when none would take his place?

Still, he
had
offered. The Gw’oth responded to Baedeker’s resignation offer as they had responded to his attempts to surrender Hearth, as they responded to every transmission sent from the Fleet. “We spared your worlds once. You attacked us anyway.”

With his token grooming finished, Baedeker cantered to the door. He found aides and his security detachment clustered outside. “I will be in my personal office,” he announced, “preparing an address to the worlds. Send for Nike and Nessus.”

“Immediately, Hindmost,” Minerva replied. He trotted alongside Baedeker to the residence’s office complex.

Baedeker’s home office overlooked the rocky coast, and he stood for a while gazing over the ocean and the incoming tide. Cloud darkened the sky and reduced Nature Preserve One to a vaguely amorphous glow.

Chords to open an address refused to come to him. In past crises humans had kicked him—sometimes literally—out of a downward spiral of despair. But New Terrans maintained their neutrality.

And gloated at the coming karmic justice hurtling toward their former oppressors?

“Hindmost.” Minerva had reappeared at Baedeker’s door. “I cannot reach Nike.”

“I would expect him to be at Clandestine Affairs,” Baedeker sang impatiently.

Minerva bobbed heads. “I, too. He stepped there earlier today and there is no record that he has left, but no one can locate him.”

“Did you reach Nessus?”

“Yes, Hindmost, at Clandestine Directorate. He will complete his current interview and then join you here.”

“I changed my mind. Have Nessus meet me at Nike’s office.”

“Yes, Hindmost.”

The unlisted stepping disc in Nike’s office would not accept a connection, nor did it respond to an emergency override. If panic had reached even into Clandestine Directorate . . .

Preceded by armed guards, Baedeker stepped through to the Directorate’s security center. He found workers milling about in confusion.

“Who is in charge here?” Baedeker demanded. “What is happening?”

The ranking security officer groveled. “Hindmost, I am called Triton. Many are missing. Their communicators are out of range or powered down. Yet according to the stepping-disc system and the building’s door cameras they have not left the building.”

“Who?”

“Nike and much of his staff, Hindmost.”

“We will go to Nike’s office,” Baedeker sang. “Accompany us.”

Baedeker, his personal security detail, and Triton stepped to the hall outside Nike’s office. Nessus stood there waiting. Behind the locked door was only silence. “Open the door,” Baedeker ordered.

Cringing, Triton overrode the lock.

Of Nike and his staff, there was no sign. The meadowplant carpet was in tatters, as though shredded by countless anxious hooves. The desk had been pushed against the wall, its legs scoring parallel grooves in the living rug. Where the desk had been, a stepping disc stood revealed.

“What is that symbol embossed on the disc surface?” Triton asked. He turned to point at the second disc across the room. “And why hide a disc in a room that
has
a disc?”

“Everyone except Nessus, go to the hall,” Baedeker ordered. He shut and locked the door. A desk ornament tossed onto the formerly hidden disc landed with a clatter. The disc was no longer in transmit mode. He removed a transport controller from his sash pocket. It was a very special controller. “Do you know what this is?”

“A secret exit, obviously,” Nessus sang. “Where did they go?”

Voices murmured in the hallway, the melodies indistinct but the worry plain.

Lips and tongue pressed against the device’s biometric sensors, Baedeker crooned the pass code. The activation LED remained dark. He stepped onto the disc and nothing happened. The controller’s diagnostic mode insisted that the disc itself was working properly. The disc’s maintenance log had recorded twenty-three transfers that day. Everything was in order.

But the destination disc no longer responded.

“Where can
we
not go?” Nessus asked this time.

Baedeker put the transport controller back in his pocket. An eerie calm came over him. He had one fewer decision to make. “Nike has fled to the Hindmost’s Refuge and locked the door behind him.”

Nessus looked himself in the eyes. “I think we know who Achilles’ source was.”

.   .   .

Lost in thought, Achilles circled his empty bridge yet again.

He did not have
Remembrance
to himself, not quite. Metope and Hecate were quavering wrecks, scarcely able to feed themselves, useless to him. Even if he could anticipate the Gw’oth’s actions, even if—damn Louis Wu!—he had retained enough fusion suppressors to disable a fleet, he no longer had workers enough to deploy them.

But other options had begun to appear.

“Guide us,” one transmission pleaded. “Be our Hindmost,” another begged. At last count, entreaties had come from eighteen evacuation ships. Most signals were faint, broadcast in all directions, for the refugees could not know where to find him.

And, “Come home,” the Party elders implored. With the Gw’oth upon them, evidently the patriarchs were ready to overlook esoteric infractions. They, too, had had to resort to broadcast, but using Hearth’s most powerful transmitters their appeals came through clearly. “We need your wisdom. Baedeker has no answers, nor will the Gw’oth speak to him.”

How satisfying it would have been to return to Hearth, to see his enemies grovel at his hooves, to crush and humiliate Baedeker. But the gratification would have been short-lived. Whatever rancor the Gw’oth felt toward Baedeker, they must feel more toward
him
.

Let Baedeker officiate over disaster.

Achilles would bide his time. Vesta’s reports made clear that the Gw’oth were scant days behind him. If they left anything and anyone behind, Achilles would be ready to pick up the pieces. And if not? Then he would be Hindmost of those who had taken to ships, the founder of a whole new Citizen civilization.

He routed maximum power to the ship’s hyperwave transmitter. “To those who have left Hearth, I am touched by your pleas. Gather at”—and he gave coordinates far removed from the Gw’oth’s apparent course—“and I will meet you.”

But only after the Gw’oth ships were well past.

Achilles walked up and down the empty corridors of
Remembrance
. When pacing grew old, he synthesized and pecked at a shallow bowl of mixed grains. Vesta’s call was late. Had his disciple been caught?

When the contact finally came, Vesta’s eyes darted about wildly. His voices trembled, the undertunes strident with panic. “All here is chaos.”

“Your insights remain valuable,” Achilles answered. Stay where you are. “Tell me more.”

Vesta twitched. “Nike and many of his senior staff have fled, Excellency. Baedeker has put me in charge of Clandestine Directorate.”

And so put Hearth’s defenses and the emergency communications network into Vesta’s—and Achilles’—jaws. A fool, Baedeker. As ever.

“Fled where?” Achilles pressed. “Is Nike apt to return? Is anyone looking for him?”

“Unknown, Excellency. To my knowledge, no one is looking.”

Meaning Baedeker already knew where Nike had gone? Or a falling-out between the two so extreme that Baedeker did not want Nike back? Either possibility was interesting. Achilles set those scenarios aside to ponder another time.

“Nike and most of his senior staff. Why not you?”

Vesta looked away from the camera. “I was off-world, inspecting space-based defenses, when Nike fled.”

So Vesta, too, would have run if he could. The herd’s newly appointed defender was but one unexpected shadow, one loud noise, one surprise removed from panic. Achilles demanded the latest authentication codes for the automated planetary defenses before proceeding. The ability to slip past the Fleet’s defenses could prove useful.

Achilles sang, “And what would our useless ‘Hindmost’ have you do?”

“Whatever I can.” Vesta’s heads swiveled frantically, seeking safety where none existed. “
Can
anything be done, Excellency? Is the Concordance doomed?”

If the Gw’oth had wanted to destroy Hearth, they would have accelerated in normal space. They wanted something else. Something Baedeker could not, or would not concede. Something that a more insightful Citizen might provide?

And then Achilles
had
the insight. “Here are your orders. You control the Directorate’s emergency communications network. Use it. Tell the Gw’oth . . .”