Destroyer of Worlds (45 page)

He scarcely had the time to admit how utterly he had failed his breeders.

 

What?

Sigmund was on his back, eyes darting beneath closed eyelids. There had been heat—oh, so
much
heat. And a roaring gale, the air almost searing. He hadn't been able to breathe! Had his pulse been racing, his skin tight? Maybe. He remembered knowing he was about to die, and regret, and confusion.

And he was
still
confused, because, tanj it, he felt
great
.

Cured or healed, then. . . but of what? That, Sigmund couldn't remember.

He opened his eyes. A clear dome was inches above his face. He was in an autodoc. Status LEDs shone steady green. Tiny text filled a display beside his head, but he ignored it. First things first. He had to know where he was. He slapped the panic button, and the dome began to retract.

“Sigmund?” a familiar voice called. Penelope!

He didn't know much, but he remembered being far away on a mission. That snippet of memory brought a lot more crashing down on him. But not the end. Not how he got . . . here. “Kirsten?” he whispered. “Is she . . . ?” He couldn't bear to finish that sentence.

The dome completed its glacial retreat and he sat up. Penny stood across the room, blinking back tears. “Sigmund . . . I thought I'd lost you.”

“I'm sorry.” He grabbed the robe off the foot of the autodoc, slipped it on, and climbed out. There was a time for nakedness, and this wasn't it. They hugged, hard. “I'm so sorry.”

They stood near a window and Sigmund looked through a crack between the curtains behind her. The main square of Long Pass City. More questions bubbled up by the moment, but one came first. “How is Kirsten?”

“In the same shape that you were.” Penny gave him a final squeeze and stepped back. “The governor ruled you went into Nessus' autodoc first.”

It was hardly Nessus' autodoc. Nessus had only obtained it from Human Space. Bought? Stolen? He was evasive about that. This was Carlos Wu's prototype 'doc, amazing nanotech stuff. It had saved Sigmund once before, from a gaping hole blown through his chest.

So something horrible had happened to him yet again.

He should have read the tiny print on the 'doc display. “Penny, what was wrong with me? I don't remember.”

“Burns, radiation sickness, and heatstroke. All severe.” She wiped a tear from her cheek. “I can't bear to think about it. And no one will tell me how it happened.”

ARM agents learned first aid. Autodocs only helped when you lived long enough to get to one. So what had he learned? Yeah, severe heatstroke caused confusion and hallucinations. Maybe Puppeteers had nothing to do with the latest gaps in his memory. “How did I get
here
?”

The door swung open. A woman came in, wearing a long white coat and holding a medical scanner. “Good, you're up, Minister. We need to clear the room.”

For Kirsten, of course. Sigmund pulled his robe tighter. They filed into the hall, where Eric waited beside a floating gurney. On the gurney was something Sigmund should have expected, since Kirsten had been waiting for the 'doc. A long, silvery ovoid. A stasis field.

Technicians broke the field and scorching air whooshed out. Kirsten was still in her pressure suit, her face lurid beneath the alarm LEDs ablaze inside her helmet.

Sigmund staggered at a rush of memories. The tempest of emotions was worse: rage, sorrow, disappointment, remorse—too many to sort out and now was not the time.

Eric stared at the prostrate figure of his wife, unable to look away.

Sigmund swallowed. “Eric, I promised you Kirsten would be all right. So far I've done a lousy job of it, but she will.” More thanks to Carlos than to me.

“She has to,” Eric whispered. “She has to.”

“We need to get her into the 'doc,” one of the technicians reminded them. “The sooner the better.”

Sigmund and Penelope slipped by, Sigmund resting a hand briefly on Eric's shoulder as they passed. The door clicked shut behind them.

The last thing Sigmund heard as they turned a corner was the nearly
ultrasonic whine of a saw, the techs hastily extracting Kirsten from her pressure suit.

 

A QUARTER OF A YEAR IN STASIS
for the return to New Terra. Thirty-some days more in the autodoc. A war to be waged and its general AWOL. Sigmund didn't want to believe he'd lost so much time, but a glance at Alice left no doubt. She looked ready to give birth any day.

By almost getting himself killed, he had left Alice in charge of New Terra's defense.

Alice and Sigmund weren't the only ones Sabrina had invited. Baedeker and Nessus were there, too. Eric had opted out. Watching Kirsten through the 'doc's transparent dome was more contact than he had had since putting her into stasis.

“We should begin,” Sabrina said.

It was another brunch meeting. Alice set down her coffee mug. “Jeeves, run the video.”

This was Sigmund's first day back at work, and a strategy session with Puppeteers and the governor was a rough way to jump back in. Sabrina's insistence was ominous. Sigmund had called Alice the night before for an explanation; she had asked him to wait. “It's complicated.”

A holo popped up over the conference table. “You've all seen such images: wave after wave of Pak ships. This is a close-up, an image taken just before
Haven
initiated the Niflheim demo. Having the close-up as a reference let me better calibrate the ongoing long-range observations from the stealthed probes Sigmund deployed en route to Niflheim.”

This was
a
Jeeves talking. This Jeeves even integrated the few files beamed at the last minute from
Don Quixote
. In no way was it
Jeeves
. Not Jeeves whose quick thinking had saved Sigmund's and Kirsten's lives. That Jeeves was gone.

A blinking red dot appeared in front and toward the northern edge of the first wave. “Niflheim was a quarter light-year in front of the Pak vanguard. The effects of the demonstration propagated in all directions at essentially light speed. The leading ramscoops, in the blue wave, converged with the demo at half light speed. Sixty-two days later, the vanguard and the wave front met. Here is what happened, sped up by a factor of fifty thousand.”

The red dot was suddenly a sphere, rapidly inflating. Behind a bright red edge, color faded to pink, dimming as it swelled: diminishing effects, cleverly represented.

“The leading edge expands at light speed. That's everything from infrared to hard gammas. The debris comes behind, shown in pink.” As the pink region spread, now lagging farther and farther behind the sharp red rim, Jeeves went on. “By now, propagation of the debris field has smoothed out. I do not understand the change.”

“The space-time disruptions have dampened out, dissipated to almost nothing,” Baedeker explained.

Sigmund watched, awestruck. Finagle bless 'em, the team had done it!
Despite
Thssthfok's violent escape.

The sphere grew and grew. Jeeves said, “The leading edge is about one-third light-year across as it first reaches the Pak.” One-third light-year was small compared to the breadth of the Pak advance. “Watch how the Pak respond.”

The expanding sphere penetrated into and across Pak territory. Dots swerved as the electromagnetic blast struck. None could outrun the debris racing—on the time scale of the video—ten seconds behind. Three scattered blue dots blinked out.

Sigmund had planned to transmit the warning message days before the blast. Not seconds. He tried to regret what had turned into an unprovoked attack, and failed. It wasn't as though, under the circumstances, the team had had any choice. Or acted any more ruthlessly than Pak did routinely.

Parboiling by the enemy had leached any empathy out of Sigmund. He wondered how Kirsten's treatment fared.

The Pak, put on notice, were supposed to veer south. Well, they had gotten notice, if not exactly been forewarned.

“Look at that,” Sabrina whispered.

As the red bubble continued to grow, more ships scattered—or tried to. News of their course changes also traveled outward at light speed. More distant ships often turned
toward
the blast, resisting encroachment. Then, catching sight of the slower-moving debris field, many of those more distant ships also turned to flee—

Only to find
their
way blocked.

Chaos bubbled through the Pak armada, in a sphere that expanded along with Niflheim's remains. Maneuvering and skirmishes continued after the debris field passed.

“All right,” Sigmund said, “they reacted like Pak. Each clan protected its own ships. I want to see what they did after the immediate danger passed.”

Most movement continued forward, still away from the core and the next wave of ships racing up behind them. These ships had built up a lot of momentum. Changing course enough to spot on this scale would take time. Sigmund found he was holding his breath. Forewarning or not, they had gotten his message, and the demo would certainly have convinced
him
.

After a few minutes, a change became clear. More and more of the Pak were veering
north
.

 

THE NEARER TO GALACTIC SOUTH
the course changes began, the more pronounced the swing northward. Flurries of motion and knotting of Pak ships suggested frantic space battles—as did several ships disappearing. Melees grew and others erupted. The planet-buster blast, largely spent, swept onward.

“This makes no sense,” Nessus said. “Not to me, at least. Did the Pak ships not understand the recorded warning?”

It made sense to Sigmund. At least something useful had come of his time with Thssthfok. “They understood, all right. We demonstrated a credible threat. The more southern clans are pushing others
into
that threat. Against that pressure, the ships along the northern edge are hard-pressed even to maintain their original course.”

Alice nodded. “We convinced the clans closest to the demo. Otherwise they would turn north, away from the new attacks. We've become unwitting allies of the southern clans.”

Sabrina looked puzzled and Nessus eyed Alice suspiciously.

Ally
was a perfectly good Spanglish word, but not part of Puppeteer-subsetted English. Allies implied enemies, and
enemy
, like slavery, was a concept the Puppeteers had scrubbed from their slaves' dialect.

“A cooperating partner in warfare,” Jeeves volunteered unhelpfully. It only emphasized Alice's gaffe.

“I see some good news here.” Sigmund gestured at the holo, hastily changing the subject. “Not even an epic migration across much of the galaxy can make the clans cooperate.”

Baedeker poked dispiritedly at his platter of mixed chopped grasses. “So the clans will compete for the honor of destroying us. I am not consoled.”

“Where is the good news, Sigmund?” Nessus asked.

Sigmund straightened in his chair. “If clans
must
fight, Thssthfok knew it, too. Consider: He was at least a quarter light-year from his clan when he escaped, probably more distant. Any signal he transmitted would diverge and reveal information to many clans. Almost certainly he sent nothing. He was saving what he learned until he could reunite with his clan. Whatever he knew about us and our technology died with him.”

Baedeker climbed unsteadily out of his mound of cushions and began circling the room. On each lap he edged closer to the door. “At best, we failed to make things worse. We have not made anything better.”

Sabrina grimaced. “I must agree with Baedeker. Where do we go from here?”

They could use their single up-close weapon, sacrificing the Outsider drive from NP5. If that didn't convince the Pak, Sigmund's quiver would be empty.

Best to hold that in reserve.

That left one or more additional warning shots, set off elsewhere along the Pak advance. The Pak incursion was light-years across, and demo lessons only propagated at light speed. It could take several blasts, even assuming enough rogue planets in the right places, and a long time. Sigmund doubted they could pull it off, even before something in the evolving holo caught his eye. “Oh, tanj,” he cursed. “They learn fast.”

“I see nothing different,” Alice began. “Oh. Picket ships.”

The phrase drew another questioning glance from Nessus, and Sigmund kicked Alice under the table. “What my apt pupil says is correct.” He pointed at a few spots on the leading edge and northern fringe of the Pak advance. “More scout ships. They may not know what hit them, but they saw the effects dissipate with distance. They mean to keep whoever did it far away.”

Nessus and Baedeker exchanged snatches of melody. Not an argument this time, and Sigmund needed a moment to put a label on it. More than sad. More than wistful. It was . . . elegiac.

“Even unwarned,” Nessus said sadly, “a Pak scout ship surprised your mission. It is no use removing the Outsider drive from NP5. You might never again destroy a planet close enough to inflict real damage.”

The sad truth was, Nessus was right.

 

Sigmund watched Baedeker stare obsessively into
Sancho Panza
's main tactical display. “No offense, but you're one brave Citizen.”

“Calling me insane. Why would that insult me?” Without moving his gaze, with an involuntary quick paw-paw at the deck, Baedeker added, “I will consider the source and take your words in the manner you intended.”

“Fair enough.”

Hundreds of ships filled the display. Reaction to Niflheim's spectacular destruction continued to evolve. The most intense activity propagated with the E-M blast and, lagging farther and farther behind, the wave of debris. Where the Pak had had more than a few days to react, open warfare had mostly concluded. Instead the squadrons maneuvered in a way Sigmund interpreted as wary clannish defensiveness.