Destroyer of Worlds (31 page)

“We are not at liberty to say.”

Because anything you said would be a hint. Sigmund pressed his temples and tried to think. Turning up the planetary drive or running them in tandem related, somehow, to things the Outsiders would not discuss. The secret science behind the planetary drive? Something about the reactionless ship drive? Sigmund
knew
the two were related—and also that he had only his paranoia to bring him to that conclusion.

Regardless, a clue for Baedeker.

“Is your business completed?” Twenty-three asked.

From Sigmund's days as an accountant, two lives ago, an ancient aphorism asserted itself. Borrow a thousand dollars—whatever a dollar might have been—and the bank owns you. Borrow a million dollars, and you own the bank.

Sigmund said, “It's in your interest to help my people defend ourselves and our friends. After the danger has passed and you return to this part of the galaxy, you'll want trading partners. And how much do the Puppeteers already owe your people?”

It was a rhetorical question. Puppeteers had been in debt to the Outsiders for eons, since purchasing the planetary drive to save Hearth when its sun prepared to swell into a red giant. New Terra was too poor to get such credit.

Just maybe, the Concordance owned the bank.

Beyond the domes, roots wriggled at the fastest rate yet. Agitation or laughter, or merely sign language for the creature's natural environment? There was no way to tell.

Twenty-three finally spoke. “You are correct, Sigmund. Loss of our trading partners would be disadvantageous.”

“Then help us help ourselves!”

“How?”

“Teach us to use our drives more efficiently. If our worlds escape, we'll
all
come out ahead.” Sigmund promised himself he would reveal nothing until Nike swore to transfer a planetary drive to the Gw'oth. Loss of a farm world would be a small recompense for Ol't'ro's contributions.

“The drives are already as efficient as we can safely make them,” Twenty-three insisted.

Uh-huh. “Better eat into the safety margin than swallow a planet-killer weapon.” Even a Puppeteer would see the logic in that trade-off.

“A moment, Sigmund.”

Twenty-three's roots writhed more frenetically than ever. Consultation, Sigmund decided. The moment became minutes.

“It can't be done,” Twenty-three announced. “If more energy is applied, the drive becomes dangerously unstable.”

“Unstable how?”

“Vast destruction, Sigmund.”

Now what? Sigmund was running out even of crazy ideas. “Lend the Puppeteers and New Terra planetary drives. Teach us to use them in tandem.”

“We
have
no more drives.” Somehow, Twenty-three managed to sound plaintive. “Not that it would matter. We have never successfully used two drives to move a single mass.”

Was Baedeker experimenting somewhere expendable? He was a Puppeteer, so of course he was. But he had not heard the fear and doubt in Twenty-three's “voice” . . .

Sigmund said, “Twenty-three, you're not telling me something.”

More wriggling of roots, strikingly different. This time, Sigmund felt certain, it denoted ironic laughter. “There is
much
we do not tell you, Sigmund. We will share this. The planetary drive employs great energy.
Great
energy. It is very challenging to control. We start many such drives for each unit that completes production. The Concordance accepted its drives one at a time.”

Doubtless believing that they had managed their debt by staging the deliveries.

An audio recorder sat in a pocket of Sigmund's pressure suit. In theory it was capturing this conversation. Almost certainly, the Outsiders were suppressing it. Sigmund hoped he could remember this exchange in detail. There were surely useful clues here for Baedeker.

Sigmund said, “What about relocating a drive, perhaps from a farm world to Hearth?”

Writhing again of the agitated variety. “You must not try that. To operate two drives in proximity is to make both . . . unstable.”

Unstable and great energy—a bad combination. Sigmund guessed, “
You
don't know how the drives work, do you?”

“We sell only the device, not the underlying science,” Twenty-three said. “The terms of sale were honest.”

And the drives
had
worked, without incident. So the Outsiders were no
different than any other species—they, too, used technologies imperfectly understood.

Sigmund picked up his helmet. “I guess we are done. Wish us luck.”

“If your business is done,” Twenty-three said, “we have something you might find interesting.”

 

Thssthfok's dashing about his cell occasionally brought him past the hatch. Eric was still visible through the window, not especially attentive. Breeders were like that, Thssthfok remembered: easily lulled by routine, easily fooled by their expectations.

While he did more one-handed push-ups, hiding a patch of floor with his body, Thssthfok stroked the area with the structural modulator clutched in his free hand. He continued singing as he worked, with lots of hisses and pops. Strip by strip he softened an area large enough to pull himself through.

To judge from the etched areas on the modulator, swallowing the device again would be a bad idea. Thssthfok thumbed off the modulator, jumped back to his feet, and did more pull-ups—during which he pushed the modulator through the permanently softened spot behind a handhold. If Eric was listening, the wall's soft pop would surely go unnoticed amid Thssthfok's pop-filled singing.

Taking another lap around the cell, Thssthfok glanced out the hatch window. Eric remained preoccupied or disinterested. Thssthfok dropped to the floor—

And plunged an arm through the altered spot in the floor. A recessed handhold in the relax-room ceiling below gave him the leverage to pull himself through.

Now safety lay in speed. Thssthfok dashed through the relax room into the corridor and into the nearby stairwell. Taking the stairs three at a time, he scaled the flights between three decks. He burst onto the top deck and was in the bridge before Kirsten could turn around at the crash of the stairwell door.

Logic decreed that the bright red button beside the door would close it. Thssthfok slapped it, and the door sprang shut.

“Jeeves! Turn up—” Kirsten shouted.

Thssthfok grabbed her throat and squeezed. Her order trailed off in an inarticulate gurgle as he pressed her down into her seat. Easing his stranglehold just enough so that she could breathe, he took the other seat. It was the only place from which he could reach the console.

Fools! Teaching him to read irrelevant material
also
taught him to read the bridge controls.

The console was deceptively empty. Most functions must be handled by the computer, whether by keyboard or voice command. Those would take time to decode, with his hostage's coerced assistance, if necessary.

Still, the console had some ordinary buttons, sliders, and toggles. Those would be for emergency functions, as simple and accessible as possible. He found the emergency-hatches release, clearly labeled.
That
should keep the others at bay for a while. He slapped the button—

And an invisible something grabbed him. A force field. He could not move! He could scarcely breathe.

Panting from exertion, her chest heaving, Kirsten pried loose Thssthfok's grip one finger at a time. Strain as he might, he could not tighten his grip. He could not stop her.

“Jeeves,” Kirsten rasped, “get Eric up here.” She climbed from her chair, out of Thssthfok's impotent reach, and stared with rage in her eyes. “Sigmund assumed you would try for the bridge again if you escaped. So he set a trap.”

An elementary trap, Thssthfok thought, with the reading material as bait—and I fell for it. Sigmund was clever, and that made him dangerous.

When he stayed as still as possible, Thssthfok found the restraint eased off just a little. A field to protect the pilot from collisions or turbulence, minimally modified so as not to relax. He could breathe more easily now; even, he guessed, speak if he should have something to say.

Stars drifted across the main view port, sign of the ship's slow roll. Then
something
—a vessel? a city in space?—came into view. Something unlike anything Thssthfok had ever seen. And it kept coming. An artificial sun, tiny but blindingly bright, shone at one end.

The structure was either very near or very large—and given that fusion flame, it was hard to imagine it was close. He stared at it until Eric appeared on the bridge.

Eric took one look at Kirsten massaging her neck, bruises already starting to form. The sizzle of his stunner drowned out whatever he snarled.

 

“Something I might find interesting,” Sigmund echoed dubiously. The end of the world approached, and Twenty-three refused to help. Yet he expected Sigmund to go shopping.

The thing of it was, the Outsiders often had wondrous things to sell.

“An old human ship,” Twenty-three clarified. “Derelict. We found it adrift in space.”

“Where?” Sigmund asked.

“We are not allowed to say.”

Sigmund had expected that answer, but it hardly hurt to ask. In a trade deal with the Puppeteers, Ship Fourteen had committed all Outsiders to deny New Terrans clues to the location of Earth and its colonies. An old derelict human ship came very close to such a clue, didn't it?

Maybe Twenty-three
did
want to help.

Sigmund knew of one other such incredible coincidence. But Puppeteers had not “happened” upon
Long Pass
, wandering deep in interstellar space. They had traced a message back to the ramscoop that sent it. And then they bred slaves from the frozen embryos aboard.

“Adrift in space, you say,” Sigmund said. It was as implausible as the fairy tale the Puppeteer had told their servants.

Twenty-three shifted position. “We understand your skepticism, Sigmund. No, we did not happen upon a ship. We detected a relativistic gravitational anomaly, which we found to be a neutronium object with the mass of a small planet. The ship orbited the larger mass.”

Sigmund blinked. Nature required a supernova explosion to produce neutronium. Only once, to his knowledge, had anyone made neutronium artificially. Julian Forward used
his
neutronium to bulk up a quantum black hole, with which he terrorized Sol system for months. And though Sigmund
never discovered the specifics, Forward had had surreptitious Puppeteer backing.

On the bright side, Sigmund remembered Forward getting eaten by his own black hole, and taking the secret of his process with him.

A large, fast-moving neutronium mass made an exceptional beacon.

“I wouldn't mind looking,” Sigmund answered cautiously. He lifted his helmet.

“That is not necessary,” Twenty-three said. With a wave of a root bunch it evoked a hologram inside its dome.

Sigmund knew one thing for certain about Earth and its colonies. They were
far
away. Had it been otherwise, Nessus would never have started a scout program using human Colonists. It stood to reason the salvaged ship was a starship, probably a hyperdrive vessel.

It wasn't.

How could a little fusion-powered Belter singleship, something a solo prospector might use in the inner solar system, end up far from Earth? How, when, and where had the ship assumed an orbit around the neutronium mass? How had the singleship reached relativistic speed—no
way
it could carry enough fuel—to overtake the neutronium mass? Where did the neutronium come from?

With too many questions already roiling his thoughts, Sigmund spotted something shiny at the singleship's bow. It looked out of place. Boot electromagnets clomping, he started around the dome to inspect the holo from another angle.

“You now have control of the image,” Twenty-three said. “It will follow your hand motions.”

Sigmund extended an arm experimentally. The holo ship receded. He rotated his hand, and the image rotated to follow. Something gleamed at him through the cockpit canopy. The age-pitted hull looked all the darker in contrast. Strange. He brought his hand toward his chest; the ship zoomed closer.

Inside the cockpit, as shiny as quicksilver, a smooth, ovoid surface hid the space where the pilot would sit. Staring at a holo Sigmund could not be certain, but that certainly looked like total reflection. Could that be a
stasis field
inside the singleship?

Twenty-three would know. Feigned ignorance could be a kind of help, to keep the price affordable for Sigmund. For stasis had but one use: freezing time inside to preserve something valuable.

Eons ago, two ancient races had waged a conflict of galactic extermination. Little remained from that era but a few artifacts preserved for eternity within stasis fields. Most items recovered from stasis defied understanding. All embodied technology of frightening potency—often weapons caches.

Stasis fields reflected
everything
, from visible light to the hardest gamma ray. A stasis field even reflected neutrinos, which was why pilots routinely deep-radar pinged every solar system they approached. A person could live in princely style on the standard ARM bounty for a stasis box—and it was a rare decade that saw the ARM making that payout.

Still, compared to a huge mass of neutronium (which, coincidentally, also stopped most neutrinos), the ship that had orbited it, and whatever waited inside, were but the ribbon around a priceless package. If Twenty-three chose to overlook a stasis field, Sigmund would not ask.

With slow, careful gestures, Sigmund turned the holo for study. The registration plaque came into view, the ship's ID a mere five digits long. This ship was
old
.

The feel of Earth, its appearance, the constellations in its night sky . . . all were lost from his mind. Instead, useless numbers cluttered his memory. PINs for bank accounts of a former life. Bits of obscure tax rules, and entire tax tables. The addresses of former residences, but not the cities where he had lived. Too many years as an accountant had made numbers and patterns second nature to Sigmund. And maybe that much harder to erase, if Nessus had tried.