Destroyer of Worlds (32 page)

The five digits on the registry plaque ignited rockets and flares in Sigmund's head. He knew those numbers!

This was not merely an antique vessel misplaced in space and time. This was the singleship in which, more than half a millennium earlier, Jack Brennan had encountered Phssthpok! Sigmund had seen the official registration in Lucas Garner's deposition. But Brennan-monster had evaded ARM custody and vanished—with
this
ship and a key module of Phssthpok's starship.

If this was a stasis field, the singleship might preserve—to save New Terra in its hour of need—the only known human protector.

 

TWENTY-THREE, IN ITS OWN WAY
, might be helping. It still would not give away the relic.

So what did Sigmund have with which to bargain? Discovery of the Pak invasion, already dismissed as old news and without value.

And Gw'oth!

“I would trade information for the ship,” Sigmund suggested.

Roots writhed. “If you have something more useful than your last disclosure.”

With a flick of his hand, Sigmund banished the singleship image. “How about a solar system filled with new customers? A young technological society, newly spacefaring.”

“That is an acceptable price,” Twenty-three agreed, “if, in fact, you identify a customer with whom we are unfamiliar.”

Sigmund nodded. “On that condition, we have a deal.” He quoted the coordinates of the Gw'oth solar system.

Roots wriggled and thrashed at the fastest rate yet. “Very clever, Sigmund. These coordinates lie in the path of the invaders. The customer whom you offer will be destroyed before we can reach them. Do you mock us?”

“The Gw'oth are quite real,” Sigmund said. “If my people find a way to survive, we will do our best to save them, too.”

Twenty-three replied, “We will help you transport the purchased item to your ship. For both our benefits, let us hope you survive.”

 

Quite possibly the stasis field in the singleship hid a potential ally—not that Sigmund entirely accepted the concept of a friendly protector. In practice, the field could hide
anything
.

And so he fretted and stewed for ten days before finalizing his plans. All the while the singleship, like some anachronistic remora, clung to the side of
Don Quixote
. With one cargo hold a prison and the other filled with Gw'oth, Sigmund could not have taken aboard his purchase even if such had been his wish.

Ship Twenty-three had carried the singleship behind a thick metal shield, towed by a very long tether. Those precautions made sense to Sigmund. The ancient singleship had been adrift, without maintenance, for centuries. And now? If anything were to trigger the fusion drive, better the potential H-bomb be outside
Don Quixote
's General Products hull. The shock wave would still liquefy everyone within—but any chance was better than none.

Of course the Outsiders had not known whose ship this was. The singleship might be entirely safe, rebuilt for the ages by Brennan.

Two of the ten days were lost in Einstein space, hanging between the stars to maintain hyperwave links. To open a stasis field took specialized equipment few ships had any reason to carry. So Sigmund wasted a day trying to find a New Terran who knew anything about breaking open a stasis field. In hindsight, the surprise would have been success. New Terra had very few ships, and they had only flown for a few years. They had yet to encounter a stasis box.

Sigmund spent much of that day wondering how much Baedeker knew about stasis fields. Everything Twenty-three had had to say suggested Baedeker's quest was futile. He would never master the planetary drives.

Baedeker should be
here
, tanj it, helping.

During the second day, Sabrina arranged for an expert to consult with Eric. That expert turned out to be—Baedeker. The real-time connection when he called meant the Puppeteer was working outside a singularity, somewhere in deep space.

Evidently, not every unbelievable thing happened around, or to, Sigmund.

 

DON QUIXOTE
SAT
on a planet with a breathable atmosphere, unremarkable except for its relative proximity to Ship Twenty-three. This was a young world, its oceans teeming with single-celled life but its continents utterly barren. The nearest possible source of food, if it was even edible, was seaborne sludge a thousand miles away. This was not a place Brennan-monster would choose to be left stranded.

With a delicate touch Sigmund could only envy, Kirsten had set
Don Quixote
, the singleship still lashed to its side, onto a bleak plain. “Ready when you are,” she sent over the comm.

Sigmund and Eric waited at the main air lock. “Copy that,” Eric replied.

“Check my gear,” Sigmund said.

“I have,” Eric said, reaching for the lock controls. “You're clean.”

Sigmund raised his arms. “Do it again.”

Eric shrugged. “You're the boss.” One by one he inspected Sigmund's battle armor, opening every pocket and examining every belt clip. He patted down Sigmund as a double check. “Nothing.”

Sigmund pointed with a boot tip at the paraphernalia piled on the airlock floor. “And anything here I don't need?”

“No, Sigmund,” Eric said, a touch impatiently.

Too bad. They would do this as carefully as possible.

Sigmund cycled through the air lock and stepped down to the sterile surface. He shuttled gear around
Don Quixote
, raising clouds of orange dust with every step, to where the singleship clung. Desolation stretched to the horizon in every direction. “Just a desert,” he muttered, lying to himself, trying not to look into the distance. Earth had deserts, after all. On his final trip, he shut the outer hatch behind himself. “Disable access from outside,” he directed.

“Copy that,” Kirsten radioed. “How's our position?”

“Close. The singleship is about one foot above the ground.”

“One foot, Sigmund. Copy that. Commencing adjustment.”

Ever so slowly, under precise thruster control,
Don Quixote
rolled along its main axis. The hard ground beneath the ship crunched and groaned. “Stop,” Sigmund called.

“What's the margin?” Kirsten asked.

“The singleship is still two inches off the ground,” Sigmund estimated.

“I can do better,” Kirsten said.

“Not necessary.” Sigmund took the clamp release from his pile of equipment. “It can't be that fragile.”
It
meant the singleship, which might contain clues to the location of Sol system. No bump—up to and including the fusion drive going off—could hurt whatever waited inside the stasis field.

Five sturdy cables bound the singleship to
Don Quixote
's hull. Sigmund released the clamps in pairs, leaving the center clamp for last. The remaining cable held the singleship aloft although, squealing against
Don Quixote
's hull, one end of the antique vessel sagged to the ground. “Releasing the last cable,” he radioed.

Cables whistled through their clamps. The singleship thumped to the ground. Sigmund left the clamps unfastened. “The payload is down.”

“I'll come out and help,” Eric radioed.

“No,” Sigmund said firmly. They had been over that, repeatedly. He unfolded a tripod and set up his camera. The camera opened a radio link; with some back-and-forth with Kirsten, he got the camera properly aimed at the singleship. “I'm going in.”

The little prospecting ship looked inexpensive, simple, and reliable. Hooks and clamps, all presently unused, dotted the hull. The ship predated thruster technology; instead, it had compressed gas or chemical-fuel attitude jets (Sigmund could not decide which) jutting at all angles. A massive nozzle aft served the fusion drive. There was no air lock; the canopy pivoted open for access. The pilot would always wear a spacesuit.

Viewed by direct sunlight, the surface glittering through the canopy shone more brightly than ever. It reflected light, radar, even neutrinos. No doubt about it: This
was
a stasis field.

Sigmund released the latch. The canopy rose slowly, hinged at the nose end, suggesting a giant clamshell. The stasis field stood revealed, encompassing the pilot's chair and much of the instrument console. Nothing in view looked like a stasis control.

Was the off switch right in front of him? Quite likely. No one had yet
made sense of Thssthfok's gadgets; Brennan as a protector was supposedly much smarter.

Sigmund set an emergency force-field generator (once again liberated from
Don Quixote
's bridge—Thssthfok would not fall twice for that ruse) onto an unprotected stretch of console ledge. Eric had spliced a remote control into the restraint module. Sigmund armed the remote; the green LED lit as the red LED went dark.

“Connectivity check on the restraint device,” Sigmund radioed.

“Online,” Kirsten reported.

Time to find out who or what waited within.

Sigmund picked up the improvised stasis-field interrupter. It felt awkward in his hand. It looked half melted, like something of Puppeteer design.

As it was. When Sigmund and Baedeker met with Nike, most of Baedeker's gear had remained on
Don Quixote
. Possibly, Baedeker had not yet decided to defect. Regardless, he had left behind a stasis-field generator in his cabin. For medical emergencies or as one more way to flee, Sigmund supposed.

After his escape from Hearth, Sigmund had searched Baedeker's cabin—after cutting out Baedeker's biometrically controlled lock with an oxy-fuel torch. It was hard to miss an active stasis field, but a quiescent stasis-field generator was another story. He had not recognized the Puppeteer field generator in Baedeker's abandoned luggage. None of them had.

Reconfiguring the generator to collapse a stasis field was trivial once Baedeker told Eric how. Sigmund read that cooperation as a sign Baedeker's own project did not go well.

Alas, the improvised stasis-field collapser had an extremely short range. Someone practically had to touch the stasis field. Sigmund aimed the device, clumsy in his hand. Finagle! It was time
something
went well.

He glanced over his shoulder to make sure he wasn't blocking the camera. “Kirsten, are you set?”

“Ready when you are,” she said.

The plan was straightforward. Drop the stasis field and replace it immediately with a restraint field. Activate the restraint remotely—because they
could
—lest anything prevent Sigmund from triggering it. And if
everything
went to hell, just launch. The singleship's mass now pinned the cables; the bindings would pull free through the unfastened clamps. Then take any necessary action from the air, whether with laser weapons or stunners.

If events progressed that far, more than likely no action would be necessary. Despite Kirsten's undoubted finesse, the fringing fields from the thrusters would probably crush Sigmund and—whatever.

“On my mark, Kirsten. Three. . . two. . . one. . . mark.”

The stasis field shimmered, rippled, and vanished. Two gloved arms shot up and grabbed Sigmund's armor around the throat. The restraint field kicked in. The air became concrete around him and his assailant—

Freezing Sigmund and the singleship's pilot, face-to-face.

Sigmund stared, and not at a protector. Who
was
this woman?

 

Alice Jordan hunched over the relax-room table, beset by tics, clutching a bulb of hot tea, lost in thought. Lost, too, in space, with which Sigmund empathized. And misplaced also in time, which he could not begin to fathom.

“There I was,” Alice burst out, “deep in the Oort Cloud. Alone in my ship. Nothing and no one anywhere near.”

As she had said, with slightly different wordings, in varying tones of anger and confusion and awe, using more than the occasional enigmatic expression, more times than Sigmund could remember. One iteration had referred cryptically to shell shock. He would have guessed Penny's work stories had exposed him to every possible obscure crustacean reference, but evidently not.

She kept paraphrasing and circumlocuting, as though searching for the secret incantation that would restore her life. And why wouldn't she? Her life had been turned upside down.

For entirely different reasons, Sigmund was as depressed as she. He tried to hide his disappointment. The stasis field
might
have held someone with the knowledge to find Earth. Using navigational beacons, Alice could find her way around the solar system. Alas, she had no idea how to find Sol itself. Her memory might brim with hints and clues, but extracting that data and putting them to good use was a long-term project.

Just then, it seemed unlikely New Terra would have a long term.

Her Spanglish fell somewhere between the twenty-second-century English Jeeves knew, and that
Long Pass
had brought to New Terra, and the Interworld with which Sigmund had grown up. It wasn't familiar, exactly, but he learned without much difficulty to understand her.

“My fusion drive was running flat out. Sol was a distant, brilliant spark straight ahead. Kobold had
just
winked out behind me. And then”—she
jabbed a bony finger into Sigmund's chest—“you were in my face. Wearing armor. On a freaking desert planet.”

Kobold
was merely the latest obscurity in the on-and-off torrent of words. From context, a place name: an object in the Oort Cloud. But as with Sigmund dubbing this ship
Don Quixote
, names had significance.

Kobold? Jeeves knew kobolds as figures from ancient folklore, like brownies, pixies, and elves. And surely not coincidentally, kobolds were household protectors.

As Alice rattled on, holding shock at bay with words, Sigmund studied her. She was much taller than he. Much darker, too, with space-darkened skin. From those clues alone, and the ship in which she had been found, he would have guessed she was a Belter. Her head, shaved except for a two-inch-wide, cockatoolike Belter crest, made guessing unnecessary.