Destroyer of Worlds (15 page)

“Machines that calculate for you, that efficiently sort and search large collections of data.”

She backed away, unease in her eyes, afraid to disappoint him. “Excellency, I am not familiar with such devices.”

Nor was he, beyond the concept. Protectors had no need for such prostheses. He could initiate a new line of research, directing an army of Drar to develop—call them computers.

He felt renewed stirrings of appetite. Why?

Leading the Drar to build mental prostheses? Surely not.

An earlier thought, then. Not the Library. Age and personal disaster had brought Thssthfok a bit of empathy for others bereft of their children and breeders, but the Library itself still left him cold.

A few hundred years before Thssthfok's time, a bit of insanity birthed in the Library had plunged all of Pakhome into war. Librarians, those who claimed they lived to serve, to protect knowledge against the ravages of war, had instead
launched
a great war. Childless protectors across the planet had rallied to their cause.

And for what? A single message, garbled and attenuated, translated and retranslated hundreds of times as languages evolved and died. If the chain of inferences was correct, if the many translations had not erased all meaning,
then a plea for help had been transmitted, eons earlier, from a long-forgotten Pak colony somewhere far across the galaxy. And though nothing had been heard since,
that
was enough. A rescue expedition was launched.

Thousands more from Thssthfok's era would have escaped the core explosion if the Librarians' War had not earlier stripped Pakhome of its ramscoops—all to chase an ephemeral wisp of an illusion of a pretext. All for a purpose in life. For a reason to live.

Another rumble from Thssthfok's gut. Suddenly he
wanted
to eat, yet the reason eluded him. Not for the Drar, but something about them. Not anything to do with the Library. Not the Librarians' War.

For a fleet of his own!

The galaxy teemed with life. It was richly strewn with intelligent species. The Pak evacuation must eventually encounter species with similar, perhaps even greater, technology. Preemptive strikes might fail to eliminate some threats.

His
family and clan were beyond his reach; he could not protect them. Then the protection of the race would be his goal!

He would build an armada of ramscoops. He would fill those ships with Drar crews. Together they would defend Pak fleets against any that might try to overtake the Pak from behind.

And his Drar pilots would need computers to guide them across the light-years.

Thssthfok's mind suddenly brimmed with the mathematics of sets and the algebra of logic. Hints of circuit design tantalized him. Computing would be a whole new science, and a whole new engineering discipline. He would see its development well under way before he next hibernated.

Then why not start immediately? Thssthfok sought out a slate and chalk. “Observe, Koshbara. All data can be represented in just zeroes and ones. . ..”

 

The closer Sigmund looked, the more helpless he felt.

He excelled at ferreting out plots and danger—even, occasionally, where none existed. That well-practiced paranoia was why Nessus had kidnapped him to New Terra. But to find the threat
here
required no skill. What New Terra needed was a gigantic navy and a military genius to wield it.

He flipped through some favorite family holos. Athena frowning in concentration, forehead furrowed, tongue peeking out a side of her mouth, one hand poised above a jigsaw puzzle. Hermes beaming, his grin crooked and mostly toothless and totally charming. Both kids playing in the park. An image of Sigmund and Penelope just before the governor's last Independence Day ball. Penny was dressed to kill and achingly beautiful, with a coy twinkle in her eyes. That picture always made him feel like the luckiest man on several planets. A formal pose of the four of them. A candid shot of the four of them amid Penny's entire extended family.

He had to focus. If anyone could save his family and friends—save his
world
—it was him.

And he didn't have a clue how. Old thought patterns seemed to have faded from disuse. Success and happiness might have doomed them all.

He was alone in his cabin, struggling to come to grips with the enormity of the situation, just as the rest of the crew seemed to be. It was the crew's mood he speculated about, not their location:
Don Quixote
's surveillance systems left no doubt to anyone's position.

(Unless Kirsten or Eric had hacked the security system, a small inner voice corrected, offering no reason. Sigmund brushed aside that whisper of suspicion. As for the others, those whose loyalties were surely divided, the opportunity did not arise. No Puppeteer or Gw'o could fool the retinal
scanners to gain privileged-level system access. Old habits had not deserted Sigmund entirely.)

Behind closed doors, where Sigmund's crew could not see him, why not brood? Even more fundamentally,
how
not brood?

Glimpsed from afar, the evidence of oncoming ramscoops had been subtle and indirect. Viewed, finally, from close behind, after months of hyperspace travel, any ambiguity vanished. Fusion flames hotter than the surfaces of stars shouted the presence of ramscoops. Hundreds of them. Many exhibited accelerations high enough to imply gravity control.

And peering toward the galactic core, yet worse news. Subtle clues of the type that had brought
Don Quixote
this far revealed wave after wave of more ramscoops for as far as instruments could reach. Also headed this way—toward New Terra and everyone Sigmund held dear.

With hyperdrive and sufficient patience,
Don Quixote
could reach any part of the armada. With their stealthy hull and thrusters for unobtrusive maneuvering in Einstein space, they had avoided unwelcome notice. Barring bad luck, they could continue to scout unobserved. And when their luck failed, as it inevitably must, they were in an all-but-invulnerable hull and they could escape instantly to hyperspace.

What they could not do was fight, not against opponents so numerous and well armed—and so
vicious
—as these. For lack of a better name: the enemy.

Compared to the enemy, even Kzinti were restrained. The ratcats ate only those who resisted and enslaved the rest. The enemy took no prisoners. Fresh impact craters on a dozen worlds—always on ocean floors, to compound shock, blast, and seismic destruction with monstrous tsunamis—showed that the enemy had used kinetic planet-busters. Preemptively obliterating any possible rival. . ..

New Terra needed powerful allies to survive. It needed great navies and vast resources. It needed
Earth
. Sigmund had dared to hope that this voyage deep into unexplored regions would provide some clue. Alas, for as far as
Don Quixote
's instruments could see, nothing began to match his incomplete and painfully reconstructed description.

Tanj it!

Sigmund stared for a while at the family holo. Were planet-busters even now hurtling toward them?

The most certain path to defeat is apathy.

He took a deep breath and activated the intercom. “We need to regroup, people. Meet in the relax room in ten minutes.”

 

THE CLOSER BAEDEKER LOOKED
, the more terrified he grew.

Throughout
Don Quixote
's long flight he had distracted himself with analyses and simulations of the planetary drive. Bringing a moon to New Terra had become the least of his motivations. Just maybe, if he sufficiently understood the technology, extra drives could be used to speed Hearth and New Terra from harm's way.

He made limited progress at best, intimidated by the vast energies involved.

Then
Don Quixote
had emerged into the midst of the enemy and distraction became impossible.

The nameless, faceless enemy was ruthless. Devastated worlds littered their trail. Sigmund had led them on a hasty surveillance of several planetary systems passed by the enemy vanguard, and the images haunted Baedeker. Not in sleep, not even rolled tightly into a near catatonic ball of trembling flesh could he put from his thoughts the horrors they had seen. Ecosystems reduced to ashes. Atmospheres choked with dust, smoke, and volcanic fumes. Continents swept by floods, the trappings of civilization washed out to sea.

Wreckage made it plain that on the devastated worlds there
had
been civilizations. Ruins suggested road networks, factories, dams, airfields, sometimes even the beginnings of spaceflight. Most were shattered and abandoned.

And just ahead of the enemy, more advanced than any culture they had preemptively destroyed: the Fleet of Worlds.

Here and there survivors struggled to put things back together. The natives of those violated worlds either hid or attacked on sight—in the latter case, futilely, to be sure—wherever
Don Quixote
had landed in pursuit of information.

All that prevented Baedeker from retreating into catatonia was the threat much nearer. The Gw'oth had done exactly what they promised, and therein loomed a new horror. They
did
glean more information from astronomical clues, from the outputs of
Don Quixote
's sensor suite, than the humans or even Baedeker himself. Day by day, Er'o and his cohorts wrung new insights from the ship's sensors, intuited infinitesimal drifts from
calibration, invented novel means of data collection, and made intriguing new correlations.

And as though making sense of the enemy onslaught was insufficiently challenging, the Gw'oth also mapped nearby dark-matter concentrations and discovered for themselves the concept of black holes. If, miraculously, the Fleet survived the onrushing threat, Citizens would confront another fearsome rival soon enough.

Unless the Concordance learned a lesson about ruthless preemption from the enemy.

Turning away from a hoof's ceaseless pawing, Baedeker found himself staring himself in the eyes. He forced his gazes apart. The action he contemplated was bitterly ironic, but he saw no humor in it.

He had once stopped a genocidal attack on newly independent New Terra, and then, disgusted at what his government had sanctioned, settled among the humans. Now New Terra might be the Concordance's best hope, for Citizens had no aptitude for war. Meanwhile
he
contemplated his own atrocity, and for no more reason than that the Gw'oth might be too smart.

Sigmund's voice over the intercom interrupted Baedeker's dark thoughts. “We need to regroup, people. Meet in the relax room in ten minutes.”

 

THE CLOSER ER'O LOOKED
, the more wondrous things grew.

Not the nameless enemy, of course, but everything—even danger—existed within a broader context. Such as the means of study . . .

Don Quixote
carried extraordinary instruments. Er'o eagerly drank in everything that the ship's sensors had to offer, but while he and his companions extracted meaning where their giant shipmates did not, those new eyes on the universe were only a part of the wonder.

The true marvel was
Don Quixote
itself, and the technology it embodied, and the secrets its crew hoped to keep. Such as the never-seen Jeeves.

The network that interfaced the Gw'oth habitat with
Don Quixote
's sensors also gave access to shipboard archives. Er'o—and more so, Ol't'ro—was increasingly certain their shipmates must control artificial computing devices of some kind. Those might be electrical, optical, or even quantum mechanical, for direct access to the hypothesized devices was blocked. All questions about such technology were turned away.

But as Ol't'ro characterized the shipboard comm network, many things
became clearer. The ship's sensors were under real-time control. Ol't'ro felt certain that that control operated too quickly to be biological and natural. Like the synthetic-aperture calculations preceding this mission, some of the data consolidations embodied algorithms requiring
prodigious
computations. Data retrievals from shipboard archives exhibited responses that correlated with the behavior of one—and only one—member of the crew.

And so, even as Er'o analyzed the latest sensor data, his speculations returned to the unseen shipmate. Er'o spoke into a comm terminal that interfaced wirelessly through the opaque habitat wall to a network node Eric had mounted to a wall of the cargo hold. “Jeeves.”

“Yes, Er'o,” the familiar voice replied.

That Jeeves
never
appeared in person was surely significant. Even the timorous one, Baedeker, visited the cargo hold. From time to time Er'o invented a reason to put on a pressure suit and walk around. He never encountered anyone that might be Jeeves, only a hatch marked Jeeves in the curiously blocky script of the humans. That hatch was always locked.

But Er' o's wandering about the ship (except onto the bridge and into the engine room—his shipmates had countless reasons why he should not visit those compartments) revealed internal dimensions. Trivial geometry showed that the “cabin” behind that hatch must be compact even by Gw'oth standards, no larger than nooks elsewhere labeled as wiring closets.

So what secret did the mysterious crewman embody? That was one of many topics Er'o chose never to raise explicitly. “Jeeves, I am interested in readings of the electric constant.”

“That's not something measured by ship's sensors,” Jeeves answered.

Theory related the speed of light to the electric constant, a measure of electric-field penetration. Theory decreed that the speed of light in vacuum was everywhere the same. Here, on
Don Quixote
, Er'o could test those theories. He and his companions measured, with instruments that probed beyond habitat, cargo hold, and hull, many properties of the vacuum.

When
Don Quixote
traveled between stars, those readings were—odd. A clue to the nature of faster-than-light travel, Er'o surmised.