Destroyer of Worlds (22 page)

A faster-than-light ship changed everything.

He could reunite with his sleeping breeders. He could lead clan Rilchuk to safety in some secluded hinterland of the outer galaxy. Now, Thssthfok wanted to live. He ached to live. He
must
live. Suddenly he craved food, in a way he had not since being abandoned.

He must seize the humans' ship. To take the ship, he needed to stay aboard. To remain aboard, he must seem to offer value to the humans. He must speak.

Thssthfok told his visitor, “You asked why Pak attack. You have many more questions. Answer my questions and I will answer yours.”

“There are questions I won't answer,” the human answered. “But here is one fact, for free. I am called Sigmund.”

As there are questions I will not answer. “Very well, Sigmund. We eliminate from our path those who pose a danger to our safety.”

“Have any of those worlds done anything hostile?” Sigmund asked.

English was verbose, its words ill-suited to Thssthfok's mouth. Vs and Ws came out entirely wrong. Still he explained patiently, slowly, almost as though to a breeder. “To wait for an enemy to attack is to sustain unnecessary losses.” And is a breeder-stupid error in tactics.

“How are they your enemy?” Sigmund bellowed. “You talk of civilizations struck down before you even meet.”

Sigmund knew of Pak by name. From other Pak prisoners was the obvious explanation. Even the prospect of another Pak prisoner made Thssthfok
himself less valuable. He must seem to offer more information. And he must act quickly. Another prisoner would also covet the FTL ship. “They are not Pak, so they are enemies.”

“Expendable, then.”

By definition. Thssthfok snapped his beak in answer.

His turn to ask a question. Any question about technology or the humans' home would be wasted. Useful information would come only when he could seize it. Until then he must bide his time.

A carafe of water and a tray of unfamiliar foods had been provided hours earlier. Nothing smelled inedible, but Thssthfok had yet to touch it. Of course, he had had little appetite. Now the newly awakened hunger gnawed at him. “Sigmund, is this the best food you have for me?”

“You can eat it,” Sigmund said bluntly. “I know.”

Because, presumably, other prisoners had eaten such fare. “I cannot live on this indefinitely.”

“No, I suppose not.” Sigmund crossed his arms across his chest. “Not without tree-of-life, too.”

Other prisoners, clearly.

Thssthfok turned to look behind him and point to the world below. “In the city from which I was taken, there is an orchard. I will need a supply of the root.”

“You got tree-of-life to grow out here?”

Sigmund sounded surprised. Why? And what was the context of “out here”? Then Sigmund continued, shocking Thssthfok speechless.

Sigmund said, “Phssthpok thought he had the solution. Did you get the cultivation technique from him?”

 

“Go down fighting” was not a plan.

Oh, Sabrina and her senior ministers, consulting over hyperwave radio, entertained other options. Volunteers would be shuttled to other worlds, yet to be identified, to live lives hopefully primitive enough to escape Pak notice. On New Terra itself the government would dig deep shelters, in the unlikely event sensors spotted the inward plunging planet-buster with enough warning for an evacuation.

Neither precaution could save more than a few thousand lives.

No one had liked the idea of exposing childless volunteers to tree-of-life root, and that made Sigmund proud. Human protectors would be scary smart. If anyone could find a way to defeat the Pak,
they
would. But afterward, would New Terra be a human world? Better to rebuild a shattered world as humans than to become the enemy.

So going down fighting was the best anyone could offer. Sigmund stood in awe of the courage to confront such overwhelming odds. To fight at all was to triumph over centuries of Puppeteer conditioning.

It was all so futile.

Sigmund shook off the depression that threatened to overwhelm him. He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and looked straight into the camera. “Sabrina, you and I need to speak alone.” He sat in stubborn silence until her advisors, looking grim and relieved at the same time, shuffled from her cabinet room. The
secure
cabinet room, in the undisclosed location in which Sigmund's people did not allow bugs.

“
We
can't defeat the Pak, Sabrina. We don't begin to have the resources. The Puppeteers might have the resources, but they don't have the will.” Baedeker, the last time he had emerged from his cabin, was a twitchy mass of reflexes, his mane long collapsed into the tangle at which he had plucked compulsively. Yet for a Puppeteer, Baedeker was crazy/brave. He could not
otherwise have left home and herd. “If we have
any
chance, it's by our worlds working together. It's time we bring Concordance authorities into the loop.”

“Do you believe we can convince them to provide ships?” Sabrina asked. “From past dealings, I fear this news will be more than they can handle. I picture them going catatonic.”

“They might rise to the occasion,” Sigmund said.

And pigs might fly. The slightly more hopeful scenario was that enough Puppeteer ships could be stolen for use by New Terran pilots. For that gambit, Sigmund needed
lots
of intel. It could only be gathered on the ground, among the worlds of the Fleet.

He respected Sabrina too much to involve her in such a harebrained scheme.

“You were right to want everyone to leave, Sigmund. We'll have to get an audience with the Hindmost himself, and that's always a most sensitive matter.” Lost in thought, Sabrina brushed a strand of loose gray hair from her forehead. “Maybe Nessus can help us.”

The last time Nessus wanted to help New Terra, he had kidnapped Sigmund and poked holes in his memory.

Sigmund shook his head. “I need to do this in person, Sabrina. It's best the Puppeteers not speculate uselessly until I get there.”

That meant appearing with little warning. Hearth's safety had long lain in stealth and secrecy, but the home world's location was hardly a secret from its former colony. In the years since New Terra won its freedom, the Concordance had surrounded Hearth with conventional planetary defenses. Not nearly enough to inconvenience the hordes of Pak, but
Don Quixote
alone? Despite an “invulnerable” hull, they would not stand a chance.

“On second thought, Sabrina, once we're back to the Fleet”—months from now—“maybe you should give Nessus a heads-up. You can hint that we're all in danger and I need an audience with the Hindmost.”

 

HATING THE TOO-FAMILIAR RELAX ROOM
, hating the too-familiar
ship
, hating—impersonally and without reservation—everyone else aboard, Baedeker waited. And waited some more. His mane, unattended, had long ago dissolved into the snarl at which he now plucked listlessly. All the herd pheromone in the world could no longer comfort him.

Those with whom he waited were as despairing. Kirsten clearly had
not slept in days. Eric's cheeks were hollow and his eyes dull; he had stopped shaving days ago. The Gw'oth participated by comm link and did their waiting remotely. Baedeker could not read their body language, anyway, assuming they had any.

A holo of the improvised prison hung over the relax-room table. Thssthfok was in one of his accustomed places: amid the empty storage units of the repurposed cargo hold. Privacy mattered to him, Baedeker presumed, as it did for his distant human cousins. Not that Thssthfok had privacy. Even seated as he was, on the deck between rows of empty shelves, two of the fiber-optic cables that penetrated the cell ceiling caught glimpses of his head and neck.

Sigmund, when he arrived, quite late, was as desperate as anyone. Oh, not outwardly: He was too proud, too duty bound, to project anything but serene assurance.

But after so many months together, Baedeker knew the stoic exterior for the facade that it was. That confident attitude must be harder and harder to maintain. Almost certainly, that was why Sigmund came late. He was as close to the edge as any of them. If
he
cracked, it was hard to imagine how any of them would ever get home.

Not that Hearth would be a haven much longer.

“You know why we're here,” Sigmund began abruptly. No one commented, nor even met his gaze. “There's one bit of unfinished business before we can head home.”

Everyone turned to the holo that floated over the table. The unfinished business they kept putting off: what to do with Thssthfok.

Sigmund was hindmost of the mission. What he decided would happen. To give credit, Sigmund solicited opinions before he chose. A hindmost could do worse.

“Thssthfok goes,” Baedeker said. “We all know that he must.”

Kirsten cleared her throat. “Goes where? Back to the flying squirrels?”

With a mind of its own, one of Baedeker's paws began scraping at the deck. “The prisoner knows about us. Maybe not much, but some things. That we have starships. He knows enough to make our worlds prime targets.”

“So kill him, you mean,” Kirsten snapped. “At least admit it.”

Yes! Killing the Pak was the only safe option. But Baedeker had not said it, had he? Even a Citizen found it hard to kill in—what was the human expression?—cold blood. “Regrettably, I see no option,” Baedeker finally said.

Sigmund looked at Eric. “What do you think?”

“If a Pak ship rescued Thssthfok today, it wouldn't matter. We're too many light-years behind the vanguard here. The lead ships will have attacked our various home worlds, or passed them by, long before any light-speed signal from here could reach them.”

As Sigmund nodded agreement, Baedeker's paw ceased its scratching. This was insanity! “Suppose that, for some reason, the front wave does pass by our homes. However unlikely, it is possible. We must do nothing to risk the attention of later waves.”

Kirsten stood to pace, fists jammed in her jumpsuit pockets. “Thssthfok's clan is near the front of the pack, among the first to escape Pakhome. Clans are bitter enemies. Why would he signal another—”

“He
says
his clan is near the front,” Baedeker interrupted. “Assume it was. He cannot know what happened since he was marooned. He has to allow for the possibility his clan lost a skirmish and fell back, or delayed to gather supplies. You cannot know Thssthfok
won't
signal ahead if he can.”

And of course the prisoner lied! Only naïveté could say otherwise. The only mystery was on which topics.

Conflict among clans was the only disclosure Baedeker truly believed—not for the stubborn skill of Sigmund's interrogation, or anything about how or why Thssthfok revealed the detail, but because, for once, they had corroborating data. The cone of destruction that marked the Pak incursion grew wider the farther the aliens traveled from home. Such dispersal was only logical as a consequence of battles among the Pak. Some would break away from the rest to replenish supplies, or scatter after a defeat, or to find shelter behind a convenient dust cloud. They fled from each other as much as from the deadly radiation that pursued them.

Holo Thssthfok stood abruptly and stalked across his cell. He settled again, seated, with his back against a bulkhead. That was another of his preferred spots, although Baedeker could discern no pattern to where along the long bulkhead the Pak chose to sit.

Thssthfok
must
go, and not back to where they found him. Blowing the hatch was the safest way to do it. And as even the youngest Citizen knew, the safest way is the only way.

Still.

To die with one's blood boiling, screaming silently into the void to relieve the pressure and keep one's lungs from bursting . . . Baedeker
shivered. “We can leave the Pak on another habitable planet. Someplace no one can know to look for him.”

“Where he would starve to death, slowly, for lack of tree-of-life,” Kirsten said. “Even if we leave him with a supply, we won't know if a new crop will grow. Any planet we pick might turn out like Earth, where the crop failed.”

“Return him to where we found him,” Eric said firmly. “It's the humane thing to do.”

“Er'o?” Sigmund called. “What do you and your friends think?”

Silence.

“Er'o,” Sigmund said again. “Are you there?”

“Yes, Sigmund,” a voice answered over the intercom.

But that voice did not belong to Er'o, nor could Baedeker match it to any of the Gw'oth. The unfamiliar voice was deeper than a Gw'o, resonant, commanding. Of course all Gw'oth “voices” were synthesized; they could be changed on a whim. Maybe Baedeker's failure to recognize it meant nothing.

The quaver in his gut told him otherwise.

 

HANDS BEHIND HIS BACK
, back against a bulkhead, Thssthfok activated the makeshift sensor in his fist. Hiding the device with his body, he characterized one more handspan of the cable bundle that led to the hatch.

Tracing cables and analyzing control logic were standard uses of his multi-scanner—but like most items in his utility kit, the instrument made no provision for surreptitious readout. Designing a tactile-feedback mode was straightforward. Making the modifications with the few resources at his disposal, working by touch within the unobservable regions between and inside empty storage units—that had been difficult.

To live long enough to capture this ship, he had to keep up the interest of the humans. Ancient history was curiously fascinating to Sigmund, and it would not disadvantage clan Rilchuk, so Thssthfok doled out what he knew about Phssthpok. Time spent discussing the mad Librarian was time not being questioned about far more dangerous topics.

And Sigmund talked, too. How strange to know the lost colony had actually existed. How strange that Phssthpok had found it! Alone. Without even a hibernation pod. Just twelve hundred subjective years in a tiny cabin, in a ramscoop accelerated to near light speed to prolong his life.