Destroyer of Worlds (6 page)

It was Sigmund Ausfaller!

“Don't be alarmed,” Ausfaller said.

Baedeker backed off farther, ready to bolt in any direction. Instinctively, he spread his heads warily, one high, one low.

“Do you know who I am?” Ausfaller asked.

It had been years since they last spoke, but of
course
Baedeker knew the human. Even if they had never met, he would have known. Ausfaller was the planet's lone Earthman, and the minister of defense.

The question made Baedeker wonder: How deranged do I look? He dared a sideways glance, and the mirror disclosed a slumped and disheveled figure. Despite himself, he plucked at his tangled mane. “Yes-s. Why have you come?”

Ausfaller looked for a place to sit, and settled for a mound of overstuffed pillows. If he had hoped to make himself seem less threatening, he had failed. “Baedeker, I need your help.”

“You don't.” Baedeker shivered. “I am a simple gardener.”

Ausfaller leaned forward. “I know, and I'm sorry. You were once much more than that, a brilliant engineer. I need you to be one again.”

Because who shares their best technology with their servants? Only fools, and Citizens were anything but.

Baedeker looked himself in the eyes. He remembered the cocky engineer he had been—and cringed at the memory. “I'm sorry. I can't do that.”

Lips pressed thin, Ausfaller considered. “There is a serious danger. . . .”

Once again, one of Baedeker's heads had plunged itself deep into his mane. He pulled it out to fix the human with a frank, two-headed stare.
“The old Baedeker you seek?
He
is a serious danger. It is for the best—for everyone—that no one sees him again.”

“And if a whole world is at risk? Perhaps many worlds? What then?”

His necks shook from the struggle not to plunge between his legs. Cowardice was overrated, he thought. All he said was, “Perhaps, Sigmund, you should tell me more.”

Ausfaller shook his head. “Join a crucial, off-world mission or return to Hearth.” When Baedeker said nothing, the human added, “Sanctuary is a privilege, not a right.”

Many worlds at risk? That was no choice at all.

 

Hurtling through space on parallel courses a thousand miles apart, two ships prepared to swap crews. Cargoes had already been exchanged. Fuel had been transferred.

“Ready on this end,” Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs called over an encrypted radio link from
Don Quixote
.

“After you, Eric.” Sigmund gestured at the stepping disc inset on the relax-room floor. He was sweating. The ship-to-ship jump scared the crap out of him.

A stepping disc could absorb only so much kinetic energy. The velocity match had to be all but exact: within two hundred feet per second. That limit wasn't a problem when the velocity differences arose from planetary rotation. Then it was straightforward geometry to calculate the velocity difference between start and end discs. As necessary, the system relayed you through intervening discs.

The void held no intervening discs.

As a safeguard, send and receive discs were built to suppress transmission if they sensed a velocity mismatch approaching the threshold. The odds were all but infinitesimal that his two ships would cross the mismatch threshold during the light-speed-limited, under-a-millisecond interval between send and receive.

Maybe if Sigmund had trained as a physicist rather than an accountant he would have been reassured. He settled for the simple truth that the bigger risk was delay. To rendezvous and dock would take time they might not have.

“On my way,” Eric replied. He stepped forward and disappeared. “Nothing to it,” he radioed back.

Sigmund's mouth was dry. He cleared his throat. “Send them from your end, Kirsten.”

One of
Don Quixote
's crew popped over, and then a second. Both did double takes at seeing Sigmund. “Minister,” one began.

Sigmund returned a too-slow, self-conscious salute. “You didn't see me. Captain Tanaka-Singh is on the bridge. He'll explain.” Omar would keep these two hidden until
Don Quixote
returned from its upcoming, unannounced mission.

“Yes, sir,” they chorused.

Alert clicks came over the comm link, then Eric's voice. “Sigmund, are you coming?”

“In a minute.” Sigmund waited for the footsteps to fade. He muted the inter-ship link before connecting the intercom to Baedeker's cabin. “It's time.”

Silence.

“Now, tanj it!” Sigmund said.

Finally: “Acknowledged, Sigmund.”

However grudging, the answer was delivered in a breathy contralto. Puppeteers always spoke thus to humans. Given that a Puppeteer could imitate most musical instruments—and whole orchestras when he wished—the sexy voice had to be a conscious, manipulative choice.

A moment later hooves clattered on the metal deck of the corridor. Baedeker hesitated in the doorway, ready to run in either direction.

“Baedeker,” Sigmund coaxed. The Puppeteer edged into the relax room. “Baedeker, it's your turn to cross.”

With a bit less cajoling than Sigmund had expected, Baedeker sidled onto the disc and vanished. Sigmund allowed Baedeker a moment to vacate the receive disc before stepping to
Don Quixote
—

Where Eric was red in the face. Baedeker had backed away. His heads were swiveling about in panic, searching for somewhere to bolt. He found refuge behind the crates of weapons and battle armor Sigmund had transferred before the crew exchange.

“You!” Eric hissed. “How dare you—”

“He's with me,” Sigmund snapped. “Eric, back off. That's an order.”

Kirsten was listening over the intercom. “Who? Is everything okay?”

“Fine, Kirsten,” Sigmund said. “Radio the shuttle. Tell Omar, ‘Well done, and have a safe trip home.' ”

Eric's hands were fists, white-knuckled, as he kept moving toward Baedeker. “Do you know who this is, Sigmund? What he tried to do?”

“Eric! Who is it?” Kirsten asked.

“It's Baedeker!” Eric shouted back. “Baedeker!”

Sigmund chose his words carefully. “He did what seemed best to protect his people and his home. As you and I do.”

“He hid explosives aboard my ship!”

The late, lamented
Explorer
. “The ship you stole, Eric.”

“That's not the point!”

It was precisely the point. In another life, on another world, Sigmund had hidden a bomb in another ship, and for the same reason: lest the vessel be stolen. Sigmund had done it first, and—unlike Baedeker—deterred a theft.

Not that Sigmund was proud of what he'd had to do. “Baedeker was doing his job. Eric, do yours.”

Eric winced. “I always have.”

Sigmund permitted Eric the last word to lessen the sting of the rebuke. “All right, Kirsten.” Sigmund recited a set of coordinates. “Whenever you're ready.”

Kirsten knew how Sigmund felt about spaceships and she allowed him no time to get cold feet. That, or she recognized their destination. “Dropping to hyperspace in five seconds . . . four . . . three . . .”

 

HYPERSPACE!

It was a place (dimension? abstraction? shared delusion?) that defied description. Whatever hyperspace was, or wasn't, when you were in it a hyperdrive shunt carried you along at a prodigious clip: roughly a light-year of Einstein space every three days.

Leave a view port uncovered in hyperspace and—if you were lucky—the walls seemed to converge in denial of the nothingness. If you were unlucky, your mind simply got lost. Whatever hyperspace was, or wasn't, the mind refused to acknowledge it. Hyperspace had driven many minds mad.

And so, ships sped through hyperspace with their view ports painted over, or hidden behind curtains, or powered down—and their crews, all the while, brooded on the oblivion that lurked just outside the hull. They dropped back to normal space, more and more frequently as a trip continued, just to know that something besides the ship still existed. And they found themselves, again and again, unable to stay away, on the bridge staring obsessively at the mass pointer. For whatever hyperspace was, or wasn't, the hyperdrive did something strange if it came too near
to a large mass. Approach a star or a planet too closely while in hyperspace and—

Well, Sigmund didn't know what. No one did. Perhaps the ship ceased to exist. Perhaps it was hurled into another dimension, or a deeper level of hyperspace, or far across the universe. The math was ambiguous.

What Sigmund
did
know was that he feared hyperspace and that he wasn't alone. Nor was an aversion to hyperspace merely a human frailty. Before New Terra, Sigmund had known many spacefaring species. He remembered every one, just not how to find them. They all recoiled, in one manner or another, from hyperspace. Puppeteers exhibited one of the most extreme reactions. Most—Baedeker was among the exceptions—would not, under any circumstances, travel by hyperdrive.

The Fleet of Worlds would be a long time in its flight.

With a shudder, Sigmund pulled himself together. He pressed his cabin's intercom button. “Everyone, join me in the relax room. It's time for a mission briefing.”

 

A VID PLAYED
above the relax-room table. Sigmund's crew watched the holo. Sigmund watched them.

Kirsten stared, her eyes shining, her fingers drumming absentmindedly on the tabletop, at the final, frozen scene of the vid. She was trim and athletic, fair-skinned with delicate features and high cheekbones. Her auburn hair was cropped short.

Eric and Kirsten—husband and wife, reunited—sat together on a long side of the table. Baedeker occupied the parallel side, closest to the hatch the better to flee.

(Or perhaps Baedeker merely maximized his distance from the pointy corners. Puppeteer design shunned edges and corners. To Sigmund their furniture looked half melted, like the Y-shaped overstuffed seat on which Baedeker sat astraddle. The chair was a small part of the mission supplies that had been teleported aboard.)

Sigmund had taken the chair at the head of the table, the better to preside—and to separate Baedeker and Eric. The table end opposite Sigmund was flush with the bulkhead. When not in use, the table folded up against the wall.

“The Gw'oth,” Kirsten said in wonder. “They mastered interplanetary travel.”

Baedeker stared, too, but in horror. Like Kirsten, he was seeing this recording for the first time. “Another spacefaring race?” he said. “And you know of them? Explain.”

Kirsten couldn't take her eyes off the image. “It was our first mission away from the Fleet. Eric and I, and Omar, and Nessus.”

Baedeker bleated something two-throated and discordant. He didn't translate and he didn't need to. No love was lost between him and Nessus.

Kirsten frowned at the noise, then continued. “Unexpected radio broadcasts had just reached the Fleet. We backtracked, found these guys, tapped their communications. We learned a lot about them, without—at Nessus' insistence—ever making contact. They call themselves the Gw'oth. Individually, a Gw'o. They're from the ocean beneath the crust of an ice moon. We're heading to their solar system.”

Baedeker pawed nervously at the deck. “And you left these Gw'oth a hyperwave radio beacon? Why?”

Eric and Kirsten exchanged unhappy looks. “It's complicated,” Kirsten finally offered.

In other words, they didn't want to tell Baedeker. Tanj it, Sigmund thought, I need to build some trust among my crew. Distrusting Puppeteers is
my
job. “We have time,” he prompted.

“We were testing the little guys,” Eric offered. “We fried one of their primitive comsats with a laser to see how they'd react. The Gw'oth launched a replacement very quickly. That got Nessus wondering about the extent of their sky watching. The Fleet would've been passing by in about seventy years, moving at three-tenths light speed by then. If there was any possibility the Gw'oth could lob something stealthy into the Fleet's path. . .”

Sigmund shuddered, even though the back story wasn't new to him. You didn't have to be a Puppeteer to find kinetic-kill weapons frightening. “Go on.”

Eric stalled for a few seconds with a bulb of hot coffee. “Nessus ordered us to rig a cometary-belt object with a thruster. The idea was to temporarily modify the snowball's orbit enough to seem a threat to the Gw'oth. He wanted to see if and how they reacted.”

Baedeker's forepaw scraped the deck. “And did they?”

Kirsten shook her head. “We never did alter the snowball's orbit.
Explorer
was recalled to the Fleet first. Nessus was needed on Hearth. He never explained. And of course the Fleet has altered course to avoid the Gw'oth.”

Mention of
Explorer
brought sad reminiscence to Kirsten's face and a flash of anger to Eric's. Baedeker intoned something deep in both throats.

There was a lot of shared history among these three, and Nessus, and the late ship
Explorer
. Sigmund tried, and failed, to interpret the Puppeteer's reaction. Maybe it was emotional, not verbal.

“Why leave the comm buoy?” Sigmund prompted.

Eric and Kirsten exchanged looks again. Kirsten said, “Soon after, Eric, Omar, and I went out again to scout ahead of the Fleet. Just we three. Either we had passed a test on the previous mission, or no one could be spared to chaperone us.”

More soft, low-pitched chanting: jarring chords in some exotic key or scale that made Sigmund uneasy. Mournful? He guessed Baedeker had opposed the unsupervised mission.

Kirsten shivered and kept going. “Instead, we went hunting for
Long Pass
. Given what its discovery revealed about our people's own history, it was impossible to believe the Concordance”—Hearth's government—“wouldn't lob a comet at the Gw'oth.

“After independence, Omar and I went back. Removing the thruster from the snowball prevented that particular remote-control attack. It didn't guarantee the Gw'oth their safety. That's why we left a hyperwave radio buoy in the cometary belt: to monitor Gw'oth radio chatter. I programmed the buoy to signal New Terra if it sensed any significant changes.”