Betrayer of Worlds (16 page)

Almost as hard as the waiting was Achilles’ gloating. Amid the clamoring by his faction for new Experimentalist Party leadership, keeping Achilles far from Hearth became the lesser evil. To the Hindmost, anyway. As Achilles had surely calculated when he advocated this mad scheme.

And so, as Achilles had urged,
Aegis
had reversed course. They could have been back on Hearth by now. Instead they leapt about the fringes and into the interstices of the Library fleet, siphoning knowledge.

Achilles grew more arrogant and insufferable by the day.

The extent of Achilles’ influence had taken Nessus by surprise. He promised himself things would be different when he reached Hearth with the proof of Achilles’ latest crimes—even as he worried political maneuvering might save Achilles yet again.

Especially if, as looked likely, Achilles returned with the knowledge of the Pak. Success had a way of excusing wrongs.

“Five minutes,” Louis announced over the intercom. He was on the bridge.

“On my way.” Nessus reluctantly uncurled and stood.

At the clatter of hooves, Louis glanced up from his console. “You look tired.”

The twitchy drug user on Wunderland was gone, become someone on
whom Nessus increasingly relied. It was hard to remember he had recruited Louis in desperation. Not every surprise was for the worse.

“I can rest on Hearth,” Nessus said. And you, Louis, look as haggard as I feel.

Louis smiled. “One minute to dropout.” Lips moving silently as he counted down the final seconds along with the timer, he took the hyperdrive controls, “And . . . now.”

Nessus’ heads swiveled frantically as an arc of instruments and displays returned to life. From readings of magnetic fields and the light of fusion exhausts: no ramscoops within two hours’ flight. From the radio backdrop: no diminution of message traffic to suggest any change in behavior among nearby Pak.

“We’re safe,” Louis said reassuringly. He said much the same each time they emerged to normal space. “We’re still stealthed, and even the closest Pak are too distant to see us optically.”

“In theory.”

“Lots of radio traffic.” Louis leaned back in his couch. “Not a surprise. These Pak are librarians. Of course they keep studying and indexing their archives. Even if they weren’t librarians, what else would they have to do?”

Hunt for alien intruders sniffing at their flanks, Nessus thought.

“They must be constantly accessing files and adding hyperlinks to enrich the archives,” Louis went on. (Nessus had heard it all before. Beowulf Shaeffer was a talker. Like stepfather, like stepson, perhaps. More likely, amid the insanity of this mission, Louis really spoke to reassure himself.) “With archives spread across the fleet, following hyperlinks usually involves inter-ship traffic. Quite possibly none of them know at any given moment which ramscoop has the nearest copy of the file they want. They have to broadcast their requests. It’s why
Argo
intercepted so much radio traffic among the ramscoops.”

That realization had turned
Aegis
around. That and spotting the potential of the hyperlinks. Both Louis’s insights.

“Ready to deploy the buoy,” Achilles called over the intercom.

“Acknowledged,” Nessus responded.

“There it goes.”

The cargo-hold hatch opened; over an external camera Nessus watched the comm-relay buoy recede.

The buoy’s tumbling retreat was somehow a metaphor for the convoluted path that had brought them here.

Triggering a hyperlink requested the transfer of related data. Clicks, Louis called the download requests, the origin of the term lost in human computing history. So read through the salvaged archives, eliciting and recording the wireless download requests. Broadcast the recordings to Library ships. Siphon up the radioed responses. Use the salvaged equipment to administer the Pak comm protocols and decrypt responses.

Scan newly retrieved data for new hyperlinks and repeat.

But in the time a radioed
click
took to reach a Pak ship, that ship might spot them. As quickly as a radioed response could reach them, so might a Pak laser beam. They had Achilles’ experience to prove Pak lasers could outwit or overpower General Products’ solar-flare shields.

So: buoys.

“Buoy online,” Louis announced. “Radio comm tests . . . all pass. Hyperwave comm tests . . . all pass. Onboard computer tests . . . all pass. Power output . . . nominal.”

“Hyperwave uploads completed from . . . twelve buoys.” Nessus stared at his comm panel, hoping he had miscounted and sure he had not. He hurriedly scanned the upload logs. “Buoy six reported a ramscoop on approach and self-destructed.” That made three losses.

“Cargo-hold hatch secured,” Achilles reported.

Louis leaned toward his flight controls. “Returning to hyperspace in three. Two. One.”

The view ports became soothing pastoral scenes.

Nessus trilled in relief. Another foray among the Pak in which they had not been ambushed.

How long could their luck last?

Louis squirmed on the copilot’s crash couch, yawning.

If he wasn’t so tired, he supposed he would wonder if they were accomplishing anything. No one had the time or energy to sift the incoming data. Maybe, once they finished here, during the long trip to the Fleet of Worlds.

On Hearth, scientists were salivating for a look at the Pak Library. They, too, had to wait. The highest bit rates that hyperwave transmitters could push through at this distance, even while drawing the ship’s full power, scarcely handled speech and short text messages.

Coffee and adrenaline notwithstanding, Louis could hardly keep his eyes open. He thought fleetingly of stim pills—and recoiled. He would
not
travel down that road again.

Instead, stifling another yawn, he reviewed the ship’s path.

Aegis
raced back and forth across the Pak fleet. Safety lay in speed, in disappearing before any of the Pak could spot them.

Success also lay in speed. Every passing moment carried the telltale gamma-ray pulse from
Argo
’s nuclear attack deeper into the Library fleet. Just as surely, the surreptitious probing of the Library revealed itself to Pak intrusion detectors. Unusual patterns of queries, Louis guessed. Whatever the reason, suspicions spread at light speed among the Pak. More and more ramscoops ignored clicks from the buoys. More and more buoys self-destructed, magnetic fuses denying hyperwave transceivers to the ramscoops swooping to investigate.

Yawning again, Louis reached for another drink bulb of coffee. Had
Aegis
not turned back when it had, the opportunity to ransack the Library would have been lost. Achilles had been correct about that.

So Louis and Nessus hyperdrive-hopped
Aegis
ahead of the warning broadcasts. In time, awareness of intruders would reach the last of the ramscoops. At that moment the expedition’s ability to pull information from the Library ended.

Or earlier, if their luck ran out.

It could happen so many ways. A Pak warship changing course or speed while
Aegis
was in hyperspace. Departing hyperspace a few seconds too soon or too late. Something he lacked the imagination even to consider. . . .

Keep your mind on your work.

Nessus was a bedraggled, insomniac mess, struggling more each day to maintain manic-crazy bravery. Achilles, after living through one encounter with the Pak, seemed permanently crazy-brave. Unless, as Louis increasingly sensed, Achilles was simply crazy.

As stressful as Louis found jumping about the Pak fleet, he had his pride. He could
not
suggest retreat before a Puppeteer did.

The moment approached to emerge from hyperspace into another cluster of Library ships. “Dropping out in five minutes,” Louis announced over the intercom. “Ready another buoy.”

He tried not to notice the tremor in his hands.

Achilles passed the homeward flight first in gloating, then in boredom, then, as Nessus, churlishly, continued to deny him access to the bridge controls, in fits of rage.

He had promised himself glory—and surely he had earned it. Despite jealousy and so many enemies conspiring against him, he would have everything. He would trample all who had opposed him. He would take his revenge for past indignities.

If this interminable flight ever ended.

He counted the days. He circled his cabin and, when that grew old, paced the corridors. If his meandering took him to one specific passageway more often than to any other, he deemed that coincidence.

And yet—

Doubts gnawed at him. Others had snatched success from his jaws before. His foes would stop at nothing to cheat him again.

So how would he return to Hearth? In triumph? Or to another banishment?

Pak had warred among themselves for eons. Where better than in the Pak Library to find technologies with which to squash the Gw’oth? Who better to install behind all other Citizens than the genius, the visionary, who delivered that great prize?

And yet—

Enemies always and everywhere beset him. They would bleat like lamed calves about trivia. That he had redirected
Argo
without authorization. That he had misled authorities. They would accuse him of risking war with the Pak.

And yet—

He had loyal servants on Hearth. Powerful servants. Well-placed servants.

Either to appease those supporters or to keep him apart from them, Baedeker and Nike had bent to Achilles’ will. How that must have galled them! To maintain consensus within the party councils they had had to allow
him
to go claim the Library. With that treasure he would wrest from their undeserving jaws the greatest prize of all. A new Experimentalist consensus must come. It must make
him
Hindmost.

And yet—

His foes would stop at nothing.

Then neither would he.

Louis squinted, bleary-eyed, into a slowly scrolling excerpt from the Pak Library.

The data dump contained a bewildering assortment of text layouts; flat images, both color and monochromatic; holographic images; animations; and simulations. He had suppressed any display of the underlying raw data, for the dataset formats came in an even more dizzying variety of dimensionalities and structures. Hyperlinks in green, red, and yellow pointed to related materials known to be aboard, known
not
to be aboard, or of as-yet-indeterminate presence.

Merely to skim the surface was to know beyond doubt that the Library was
old.

Most of the math was beyond Louis. Most graphics tantalized more than they taught. Most of the text remained without translation. The scattered translatable passages were painfully succinct and they often defied Louis.

He remembered Ausfaller’s comment about terseness. Pak protectors spoke in words or short phrases; their minds filled in the blanks faster than complexity could be articulated. It seemed their written language followed the same concise pattern.

So Louis caught only glimpses of meaning—and those hints fascinated him. He forgot for shifts at a time to eat, drink, or sleep, dictating comments whenever anything made an impression on him. His annotations might make things the least bit easier for the scientists on Hearth. Or they could have a good laugh at his ridiculous speculations.

“Your diligence is commendable,” Achilles said.

Louis discovered his eyes were closed, his head resting on arms folded across a cluttered workbench. He opened his eyes and sat up. “It’s something to do.”

Achilles walked into the workroom, hooves clicking on the deck. He wore a utilitarian belt with deep pockets rather than his customary sash of office. “The trip
is
tediously long.”

“There is more than enough in the Library for two to look at.”

“Indeed.” Achilles looked about the room, as though wondering where to begin. He peered at the still-scrolling display beside Louis, at the benches piled high with equipment, at the three racks of Pak archive still braced in place. Necks moved sinuously as he peered into one of the racks.

“See something?” Louis asked.

“I do not know. Something that struck me as I thought back.” Achilles straightened, raising a head to survey the benches. “Ah, there.” He found a flashlight-laser, checked that the beam was dialed to full dispersion, and shone the light into the gap between two adjacent component tiers. He sidled around the rack, flashlight in a mouth, projecting the beam into gaps between modules and tracing bundles of fiber-optic cables. “Interesting.” He went back to the top to survey more systematically.

“What is it?” Louis finally had to ask.

“Just engineering curiosity.” Achilles knelt for a closer look at the deck-level tier of components. The head without the flashlight stayed high, its lone eye focusing on Louis. “The Pak designers took a fascinating approach to coupling optical fibers.”

Long before Achilles finished his methodical examination, Louis lost interest and went back to his own studies. After a while he paused scrolling to admire images he had encountered of Pak space elevators. Hyperlinks, their subject matter often unintelligible, lay scattered throughout the accompanying text. Some links might have been about materials and orbital mechanics. The link about the tether itself was coded red. A pity: something strong and lightweight enough for a tether stretching to geosynch was the roadblock to building space elevators.