Betrayer of Worlds (30 page)

“I believe that is the intent.” Nike hesitated. “But to say what?”

“ ‘Power,’ ” Baedeker mused. “Wu sent only two words. Both must be significant. Suppose we transmit at high power or using many convergent beams. To what purpose?” The instincts of a politician told Baedeker nothing. But reasoning as the engineer he once was . . . “Powerful beams would simulate many ships, hidden ships, nearby. All scanning.”

“Wu means a trick?” Nike trilled, baffled. “But to fool whom? Ausfaller sent Wu off to pursue Achilles.”

“I think we cannot know.” Baedeker stared at his bedchamber walls, over the heads of virtual herds and into the illusion of distance. He decided. “Nessus trusts Louis Wu. So does Ausfaller. Isolate everyone with knowledge of this message, then proceed as Wu proposes.”

.   .   .

“Nothing,” Louis declared. “Not a world to be found. I’ve run the search pattern twice.”

“Then we have finished,” Metope said. He had claimed the pilot’s bench the moment the engineers completed their work and departed
Addison
’s cramped bridge. “Turn off everything and come with me.”

Louis powered down the copilot console. He closed and pocketed his doodle-filled notepad. “You don’t sound disappointed.”

“I trust His Excellency. His plan will work.”

I hope to tanj it does not come to that.
“We will know soon enough,” Louis said.

Metope took a transport controller from his utility belt. For the stepping disc in the corridor, just beyond the bridge hatch.

“Hold on,” Louis said. “I’m going to grab a few provisions while I’m aboard. The synthesizers on
Remembrance
do a lousy job with human recipes. No offense.”

“The others do not complain.”

“Look, I only want some food items, cleaning supplies, and a notebook and pen. It’s all sitting in the pantry or closets, going to waste. Five minutes, Metope. Help me carry, and it will go faster still.”

Metope considered. “And you will leave anything if I ask. No argument.”

“No argument.”

Five minutes later, the bags of supplies stowed in his cabin, Louis was drilling in the combat center.

Another scheduled exit from hyperspace drew near, and Bm’o’s guests had become restless. Some hastened their eating, or stopped eating altogether. Others wriggled where they lay, tubacle tips curling in the banquet-floor mud.

He shared their impatience, but he would never show it.

Across his fleet, crews prepared. Bridge crews calibrated their sensors. Combat crews readied their weapons. Communications crews queued outgoing messages and prepared to download any messages waiting on distant relay buoys. They had done it all before, many times.

More than routine, the return to normal space . . . beckoned. No less than the lowliest Gw’o in the fleet,
his
mind, too, crawled whenever they swam in hyperspace. Inarticulate whispers. Hints of madness. An insatiable void endlessly gnawing at his consciousness. But he was Tn’Tn’ho. He showed emotion neither on entering hyperspace nor when leaving.

Especially not when leaving. The Citizens, far from being a threat, trembled before the might of his war fleet. Their fear was plain in their broadcasts, long relayed to Jm’ho by stealthed buoys. As Bm’o’s ships drew near, Citizens in ever larger numbers urged their government to surrender.

Surrender! Of what possible interest to him were a trillion alien subjects? Of what conceivable value was their overcrowded, overheated world—even if it were not escaping from the galaxy?

“All may leave,” Bm’o announced to his guests, and they scrambled from his presence as speedily as decorum permitted. He followed at a far more leisurely swim.

The direct path to Ol’t’ro’s rebels was already long. Rt’o had counseled, her wisdom more evident with each passing day, that to detour around cowards was senseless. By choosing to match course and speed with the Citizen worlds, he had demonstrated that he meant them no harm. His fleet’s course was predictable, to avoid alarming the Concordance (if not
too
predictable, lest, against their nature and all logic, the Citizens should consider an attack).

And still they feared Bm’o’s might.

Air or water, tubacles or jaws, the laws of politics never changed. Rt’o had correctly seen the threats of Concordance politicians as posturing for domestic consumption—just as Bm’o had often used external threats to intimidate his rivals. By the same universal laws he dare not ignore Ol’t’ro’s insolence, no matter how far the rebels fled. Any unanswered flouting of the Tn’Tn’ho’s authority would incite new resistance at home.

And so, uneventfully, the voyage proceeded, with naught to fear but the eeriness of hyperspace.

As the scheduled moment of emergence approached, Bm’o jetted into the control center of his command ship. Crew flattened, groveling, at their duty stations. Commanders respectfully lowered the arcs of their tubacles.

“As you were,” Bm’o ordered.

The crews and junior commanders returned to their tasks. The captain directed a tubacle at his sovereign, awaiting guidance.

“Reenter as planned,” Bm’o said.

Displays filled with stars. (Extraordinary objects, stars. He wondered if he would ever become accustomed to them.) In other displays, ships. His fleet, intact, clustered to support each other and protect him.

The routine chaos of emergence began. Astrogational measurements. Sensor sweeps. Communication exchanges. The commanders would be—

“Sire!” the ship’s captain said. Alarm hues rippled across his integument. “We are being scanned!”

“From where?” Bm’o asked calmly. The Citizens had been tracking them at every recent emergence. “The same border sensors?”

“Those sources, Sire, and many others,” the captain answered. “The Citizens’ stealth technology must be . . . very good. From the power levels, they are close. Very close.”

So the Citizens meant to defend themselves against a nonexistent attack. Commendable, although surprising.

Waiting only until a revised sequence of reemergence points—
un
predictable, this time—could be radioed and acknowledged, Bm’o ordered his fleet back to hyperspace.

“Catastrophe is upon us.” Behind the camera, gazing adoringly at Achilles, virtual Citizens stood in untold thousands. Their rapt attention inspired him. “Catastrophe is upon us, and our Hindmost does . . . nothing.

“He flatters his inaction with imposing names. He speaks of calm and patient determination, of deterrence and quiet diplomacy. He claims we have nothing to fear. All the while, the enemy approaches.”

At this point, when broadcast, the recording would cut to an animation: a time-lapse holographic map built with data from the hyperwave-radar system. Achilles risked nothing now by revealing that his minions had access to the border sensors. The Gw’oth were in hyperspace on their last hop this side of Hearth. The last hop before he obliterated them.

“See how the enemy’s war fleet approaches while your government does
nothing
.

“But who is this enemy? To whom did the Hindmost lose the secret of hyperdrive? At whose mercy does the Hindmost’s paralysis leave us?”

A video sequence would appear here:

—A single Gw’o scuttling across seabed muck, slimy and repugnant.

—A Gw’oth banquet surreptitiously recorded by Thalia, the aliens grabbing, crushing, rending their food. Their
live
food. Their
prey.

—More imagery from Thalia, this of Gw’oth warships leaping from an icebound world.

—And the final sequence: the pulsating, entangled mass of a Gw’otesht. That this scene came from Nessus’ long-ago mission files made using it all the more satisfying. The throbbing, writhing tangle looked like an orgy, and Achilles would not say otherwise. Let Baedeker’s experts try to explain.

“
These
are the predators almost upon us.”

Now the images would vanish. Achilles leaned toward the camera,
toward his virtual audience, toward his glorious destiny. “The Hindmost has failed you. I shall not.

“Within five days”—although, more likely, the Gw’oth would reappear sooner—“
I
shall have eliminated this threat.”

And you will have acclaimed me Hindmost.

“Where do they go?” Achilles raged. His tune echoed from the walls of his cabin.

Clotho stood with heads bowed. “I cannot say, Excellency.”

Then what good are you? Achilles nearly wailed, but he kept the grievance inside. He needed loyal supporters more than ever.

(In his mind’s eye, classmates and parents . . . watching. Doing nothing. Always, others failed him. He must dominate. He must work his will. He
would.
)

The Gw’oth should have emerged within a day of his broadcast. But that day had gone by, and another, and now
another.
“The aliens avoid us,” he roared.

“Yes, Excellency.” Timidly, “How is that possible, Excellency?”

“Go find out!”

“Yes, Excellency, at once.” Clotho sidled to the hatch, reeking of fear pheromones. He stood, frozen, one head looking at Achilles and the other at the closed hatch.

“Now.”

Clotho pelted from the room, scarcely slowing to shut the hatch behind him.

Achilles called up and studied the latest tactical data. The gleaming icon of the Fleet of Worlds. The dotted, not-quite-straight path of Gw’oth reappearances in normal space. The mauve region within range of the buoys that projected the suppressor field. The yellow region into which the Gw’oth might next emerge—
that
volume growing with every moment the aliens continued in hyperspace.

Ships in hyperspace traveled at a constant rate: a quantum limitation. Achilles knew with mathematical precision that if the accursed aliens did not soon reenter normal space, they would emerge beyond the reach of his farthest tier of suppressor buoys. Untouchable.

He caterwauled in frustration.

Soon after the Gw’oth passed his buoys, they would pass
Remembrance
itself. If he allowed
that
to happen, mathematical precision also decreed he would never catch up. Not unless, unlike their past behavior, the Gw’oth chose to dally in normal space.

But if
Remembrance
jumped to hyperspace to remain ahead of the Gw’oth, he risked them emerging when he could not see.

Mathematical precision could not guide him now. Intuition must serve. Achilles took a comm unit from his desk. “Clotho, set course for Kl’mo. For now, use only thrusters. Be prepared to jump to hyperspace on my order.”

For days Baedeker had lived and slept in the Clandestine Directorate command bunker. Each time he checked with his ministers the panic among the public had grown. The uncertainty became palpable.

For days—as the tension in the bunker grew, as defenders lapsed into catatonia and had to be replaced, as hushed whispers became murmurs became intermittent keening—nothing happened. No Gw’oth. No pronouncements from Achilles. No news from Nessus, or Sigmund, or Louis Wu.

Until—

“A strong signal,” Nike sang out from near a hyperwave-radar console. “A large return. Many ships.”

“Ripples,” sang another operator. “Many ships are emerging from hyperspace.”

Baedeker had been fitfully dozing astraddle a shift-watcher’s bench. He jerked awake. “Copy the data to my station,” he ordered.

With a sweep of a head he superimposed both holograms. A short, sharp trill expanded the scale. Another trill brightened the grid lines. “Thank the herd,” he crooned to no one and everyone.

The Gw’oth had reemerged a light-year
beyond
the Fleet, still speeding northward.

Baedeker, laughing at him!

Achilles galloped through the corridors of his ship, sweat running down his flanks, chest heaving, inarticulate with rage. His mane coiffure had collapsed into a sodden mass. Crew, round-eyed, scrambled out of his way.

How fitting that he ran in circles, for there was nowhere
to
run.

Baedeker, mocking him!

Achilles could not banish the humiliation from his mind.

Oh, the Hindmost’s speech to the Concordance had been entirely proper: the Gw’oth ships have passed. There never was danger. Even the appearance of danger has ended. Citizens should return to their homes, their work, and their normal routines. “Alarmists” should be ignored.

Alarmist.
How casually, unceremoniously, callously, Baedeker dismissed him.

While across Hearth countless lackeys did Baedeker’s bidding, proclaimed the Hindmost’s
true
message: that the crisis Achilles had so grandly proclaimed was a mirage, the great battle he had foreseen, a delusion. That Achilles was a failure, a fool, and a menace.

Success had been snatched—Achilles still did not know how!—from his jaws. He
would
have vanquished the Gw’oth and then claimed his rightful place as Hindmost. Now, cheated of his victory, he could not return at all, except to shame and banishment and Baedeker’s gloating.

The Gw’oth must pay. His enemies must pay. Above all,
Baedeker
must pay.