Destroyer of Worlds (7 page)

Baedeker squealed like an abused bagpipe, still pawing the floor. “In just a few years the Gw'oth went from simple comsats to visiting the cometary belt? And you gave them a hyperwave radio to reverse-engineer? They could have hyperdrive in a matter of—”

“Not from us,” Kirsten said firmly. “They won't find the buoy.”

“And yet here they are using it,” Baedeker retorted.

Kirsten shook her head. “We left behind a standard radio beacon, omnidirectional, on another moon near them, and directions for contacting us in major Gw'oth languages.

“The hyperwave buoy forwards to New Terra any radio signal from that beacon. The comm channel runs only one way—they can't follow a reply to locate the hyperwave relay. It was all strictly for the Gw'oth to reach us if they needed help.”

Sigmund restarted the holo. The signal had repeated for days, but the message was short.

Amid fronds like drifting seaweed, a not-quite starfish—a Gw'o—undulated before them. Orifices puckered and relaxed rhythmically at the tips of its five tubular tentacles. Breathing? Speech? The shipboard translator rendered the runes that flowed across the bottom of the image.

“Friends, come at once. Something is rushing our way. Something very dangerous.”

 

Sigmund tossed and turned to the accompaniment of faint moans from the adjoining cabin. He didn't blame Kirsten and Eric, reunited after what only Sigmund thought of as more than a month. His empathy didn't make their urgent lovemaking any easier to overhear.

Sigmund missed his entire family, terribly, but right now his thoughts were on Penny. Well, not his thoughts, exactly.

He had to laugh. You would think someone approaching two centuries old could handle a bit of celibacy. Only you would be wrong. His memories—such of them as he retained—reached that far into the past, but he had arrived on New Terra in the body of a twenty-year-old. Only Carlos Wu's nanotech-enabled, experimental autodoc could have put Sigmund back together. Soon after, Nessus had whisked away the prototype. The
lone
prototype. No one else on New Terra would be rejuvenated as Sigmund had been.

Well, Sigmund had saved Carlos's life once. Use of the autodoc made them even.

With a groan, Sigmund collapsed his sleeper field and settled slowly to the deck. He wasn't going to sleep, so he might as well get up. A bit of exercise, he decided, and maybe a snack. Then, if sleep remained elusive, something productive.

Away from the crew cabins,
Don Quixote
's corridors were deathly quiet. The name was Sigmund's little joke. How did one explain a quixotic pursuit to people who had never read Cervantes? When asked to explain, Sigmund would say, “It's a long story.”

He paced from stem to stern, engine room to bridge. The ship was basically a cylinder with rounded ends, about 110 feet in diameter. It provided ample pacing room. He whistled tunelessly as he went, patting the hull for its reassuring solidity.

Don Quixote
was one of the few vessels in New Terra's tiny fleet made by the Puppeteers' General Products Corporation. The vessel was built in the #3 hull model. Before vanishing from Known Space, fleeing from the core explosion, General Products had advertised their hulls as all but indestructible.

Yes, but.

There are many obscure ways to die. Once upon a time, Sigmund had voraciously read and vidded mystery stories. The more impossible the crime, the more educational. Locked-room mysteries were the most instructive of all.

GP hulls were sort of like that.

As only a paranoid mind could, Sigmund began obsessing on the ways this hull could fail to protect him.

Hit something hard enough and passengers became stains on a stillunblemished hull.

And: Antimatter in sufficient quantities would destroy
anything
made of normal matter. But antimatter was scarce. The trick was to find enough.

And: Visible light passed right through the hull. The Puppeteers considered transparency a feature, not a flaw. You painted a GP hull where you wanted to block the light. So: A laser beam held on target long enough would vaporize the coating and overcome any antiflare shielding and pour unabated through the still-intact hull.

And: Each GP hull, it turned out, was a single artificial molecule, its interatomic bonds massively reinforced by an embedded power plant. It took an extremely lucky shot—or a nearby, stationary target—to fry the embedded power plant with a laser, but it could be done. Without the power plant, air pressure alone would burst the weakened hull.

And: There was at least one other way, one Sigmund had yet to fathom, to destroy a GP hull. Puppeteers had once destroyed a GP-hulled ship with a crew of ARMs aboard. Another time, they had destroyed, all at once, every GP hull in New Terra's tiny navy.

Baedeker had worked for General Products Corporation, and Sigmund sensed the engineer knew more than he would admit—which was nothing—about these events. An autodestruct code, Sigmund guessed, transmitted through the hull on visible light.

He did what seemed best to protect his people and his home.
Sigmund found it much easier to dish out that line to Eric than to accept Baedeker's deeds himself.

Sigmund continued his aimless pacing, still seeking reassurance in the solidity of the hull. Seeking in vain. No material could protect a ship in hyperdrive from the hungry maw of a gravitational singularity.

He looped back to the bridge to peek again at the mass pointer. Not that there could have been—he had checked just minutes ago—but the instrument revealed nothing massive nearby. With a sigh, he changed course to settle in the relax room. “Jeeves,” he called.

“Here, sir,” the familiar voice answered. Most New Terran ships carried a copy of Jeeves. Puppeteers, predictably, suppressed AI development—why build a potential rival?—making Jeeves, centuries old though he was, more advanced than anything else available.

A snake-crowned image popped into Sigmund's mind. Medusa, his onetime AIde. Medusa was largely self-directed.
She
would have finished mining Jeeves's archives long ago, correlated everything with everything, calculated probable relations, inferred much—

While Jeeves had to be led by the virtual hand. Sigmund said, “At home I've been looking at references to Earth's moon.”

“How may I help?”

Sigmund had been making his way through the music library, but in the faux-night of the ship's third shift, music seemed antisocial. He didn't feel like reading lyrics. What, then? “Literature with moon references. Most recent publication first.”

Jeeves offered things that were diverting or amusing or aggravating or depressing, but nothing useful. Nothing scientific, of course, not even in the fictional sense. All such had been erased. Eventually there was
Goodnight Moon
, a charming little bedtime story which Athena would surely enjoy, and
A Moon for the Misbegotten
, which Sigmund couldn't imagine anyone enjoying. Broadening the search parameters to works with “moon” anywhere within the text gave a ridiculously long list. Sigmund had tried that before.

He synthed a bulb of hot milk, opting to read simply for relaxation. A few titles on the list of books mentioning the moon looked diverting.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
, he decided. Connecticut sounded familiar, somewhere near a place he had once worked, he thought. Or maybe it was only that Mark Twain could be droll, or that King Arthur, like Jeeves, was English. Sigmund thought he might have seen a 3-V adaptation as a boy.

He straightened in his chair at the first mention of an eclipse. A solar eclipse. Something stirred in the back of his mind. . . .

“May I join you?”

Sigmund looked up. “Hi, Kirsten. Of course, I'll be glad for the company. I thought you were in for the night shift.”

“Couldn't sleep.” She covered a yawn. “Appearances to the contrary. What about you?”

“Same.” He gestured at the text projected from his comm. “Maybe a bit of reading and some warm milk will do the trick.”

She got herself tea before joining him at the table. “What do you think the Gw'oth saw?”

The four of them had gone round and round on that. The obvious answer, assuming the Gw'oth had seen
anything
and this wasn't a trap, was the Fleet.
Explorer
had found the Gw'oth precisely because their transmissions came from along the flight path of the Puppeteer worlds. That flight path had been changed, but the divergence was not yet significant.

The worrisome answer was that the Gw'oth had detected some kind of Puppeteer preemptive strike. If so,
Don Quixote
would almost certainly arrive too late to intervene.

“Gremlins,” Sigmund finally answered, and then had to explain what gremlins were.
Gremlin
was as good a term as any for the final possibility: something altogether unexpected.

She yawned again. “So, what are you reading?”

Sigmund slid his comm unit toward her. “An Earth story from way before my time. Before spaceflight.”

She blinked through a few pages and handed back the comm. “When you finish, let me know if you recommend it.”

“Will do.” Sigmund found Kirsten had lost his place. “Jeeves, I was coming up to an eclipse reference.”

Some invisible handshake between AI and his portable unit did the trick. Sigmund resumed where he had left off. What had he been reading?

A nineteenth-century time traveler fancifully thrown back to medieval England, condemned as a witch. He avoids getting burned at the stake (ugh!) by using his foreknowledge of the imminent eclipse to claim power over the sun. How very convenient, Sigmund thought—

“Finagle!” he blurted.

Kirsten looked up from her tea. “Sigmund?”

“I may need you to do some math for me.” A few taps put his comm's touchpad into drawing mode. He sketched a solar eclipse: sun, moon, Earth. Free-flying worlds don't experience eclipses.

“The sun is a yellow star,” he began. That was not only Sigmund's questionable memory talking; New Terran biologists concurred. Human eyes were optimized for such a sun. So were plants grown directly from seeds in
Long Pass
's dwindling collection. Earth-evolved crops cultivated on New Terra had already begun adapting to the more orange emissions of New Terra's orbiting artificial suns. Those false stars radiated the light that Hearth's biota preferred. The best estimate was that Earth's sun had a surface temperature around ten thousand degrees—entirely ordinary. As a clue to Earth's location, that inference was all but useless.

Earth's estimated year length was also entirely normal, putting the planet well within the habitable zone for a range of candidate stellar masses. Planetary orbital pa ram e ters were a function of solar mass, so even the decent guess Sigmund had at the length of Earth's year said nothing definitive about the orbital radius.

But now factor in
A Connecticut Yankee
's total eclipse . . .

Range of estimates for the apparent size from Earth of its sun. Twelve months—twelve orbits of a moon!—in a year. So how big is that moon to fully eclipse the sun?

It depended how close to Earth that moon orbited.

They needed a whole second set of approximations about Earth itself. New Terra had surface gravity Earth-like enough not to have seriously messed with Sigmund's reflexes. Call Earth's surface gravity New Terran, plus or minus a few percent. New Terra and the five worlds of the Fleet gave a range of densities for rocky, habitable worlds. Density and surface-gravity estimates together implied Earth's mass, and so orbital pa ram e ters for its satellites.

Jeeves collated estimates and crunched the numbers. Kirsten tweaked the program whenever Jeeves bogged down.

The moon was, in a word, big. At
least
two thousand miles in diameter. Call it a quarter the diameter of Earth itself. A real clue, at last!

“We're hardly looking for a world at all,” Kirsten said in awe. “Earth and its moon are nearly a double planet.”

 

Sigmund was hindmost for this mission, and the hindmost has prerogatives. Baedeker reluctantly admitted the human to his cabin.

The main furnishings were a small synthesizer and mounds of pillows. Sigmund looked about and elected to remain standing. “Baedeker, you need to make peace with Eric. We're a crew. We must all get to know each other, learn to trust each other.”

Trust Eric? The man had hate in his heart. And when had a Citizen ever shared a spaceship with another species without being in charge?

Still, the hindmost had his prerogatives. “I see your point, Sigmund. The Gw'oth are a most formidable species. We will need to work together.”

“And yet you remain in your cabin.”

Baedeker said nothing.

Sigmund jammed his hands in his jumpsuit pockets. “At the least, share what you have concluded about the Gw'oth.”

“You already know. I expressed my views at the mission briefing.”

Sigmund's nostrils flared. “You're not telling me something. Finagle, you're not telling me
anything
.”

Until they arrived, what more was there to tell? They could see nothing, learn nothing while in hyperspace.

Meanwhile, he was far from home, alone among humans. “There is something I have been thinking about.”

“What's that?”

“A moon,” Baedeker said—and Sigmund jerked. Why? “Until a few years ago, when New Terra left the Fleet, it had tides. Ten every day. Now it has no tides, and the coastal ecology has been devastated.” The reek remained fresh in Baedeker's imagination.

Sigmund said, “Penny, my wife, is a biologist. She's talked about the
problem. In fact, she wanted to talk to me about tidal zones, but we never got back to it.” The suspicion that was always lurking peeked out of Sigmund's eyes. “But why talk now of a moon?”