Destroyer of Worlds (35 page)

Even the Puppeteers had learned—at the cost of a world—not to tangle with Kirsten.

She plowed ahead. “First I considered a second slingshot. Would that make sense, Alice?”

“Hardly. I'd be in the inner solar system before there was anything to slingshot around.”

“A moving reference point,” Sigmund interjected. That seemed odder than a maneuver Alice had not known was in the computer.

Kirsten nodded. “Yes, that's significant. Because if the moving reference point overtook the ship, the second course change could be an orbital insertion, not a flyby.”

Alice glowered. “An orbital insertion around what? A moving spot in the vacuum? A snowball? I was in the middle of the cometary belt.”

Only there
had
been something nearby: Kobold and its mass of neutronium. Yet Alice remembered leaving Kobold behind. Disappearing in her rearview mirror, so to speak.

Time for a truce, Sigmund decided. “Let's defer this conversation until Kirsten finishes analyzing the data.”

Kirsten would not be deterred. “Alice, you say Kobold ‘blinked off.' What exactly do you mean?”

“A flash,” Alice said. “When the light faded, I looked back. Even at max mag, my telescope didn't see anything.”

This was like Julian Forward all over again! Not an Oort Cloud object falling down a black hole, but a doughnut-shaped fairyland swallowed by a big hunk of neutronium. Julian had begun with a tiny black hole, but its mass, by the time it became dangerous, was from the chunk of neutronium Forward had fed it.

Sigmund remembered the black hole eating Forward Station. He, Carlos Wu, and Beowulf Shaeffer—
there
was a name Sigmund hadn't thought about in ages—had been too tanjed close. The flash had been blinding.

“Kobold was swallowed by its central neutronium mass,” Sigmund guessed. “That slingshot maneuver was to get you far away, Alice. Fast.”

“Makes sense,” Alice said. “Roy and Brennan wanted the Paks' attention drawn away from Sol system. That's why they headed for Wunderland. Anyone spotting Kobold—intact, I mean—would have known it was an advanced artifact. It had to be destroyed.”

“Something else was going on,” Sigmund said. Hundreds of starship pilots a year entered Sol system—wherever that was. A deep-radar ping
cost nothing, and finding an overlooked stasis box would bring a fortune. Someone would have found a neutronium mass like Kobold's long ago. “There isn't an object like that around Sol, at least not in my lifetime.”

The simplest explanation was that Twenty-three had taken the neutronium. The problem was, the Outsiders paid, usually handsomely, for resources. Sigmund remembered that they leased a moon of an outer planet in Sol system, and none of the details, of course. Had they stolen neutronium? It would be the first theft ever suspected of the Outsiders. So probably not.

What if Julian had found the remains of Kobold and tossed it down his black hole? That wouldn't explain why no one had found the neutronium in the centuries before him. And if Kobold—in a black hole or any other way—remained in Sol system, then how in Finagle's name did the singleship end up orbiting yet another neutronium mass?

 

Haven
's bridge had a round view port. A year ago, Baedeker would have taken no notice of the shape. A year ago, he had not spent months aboard a New Terran starship. Humans favored rectangular views, oddly indifferent to the sharp corners.

He thought often about humans these days.

This display held a spiral of overlapped round images, reminiscent of an insect's compound eye. The much-repeated lump of rock and ice was unexceptional. Nor did any star nearby shine especially brightly. Without lengthy observations, he could not judge with any certainty which of three nearby suns could properly claim this proto-comet. But one thing about the utterly ordinary object
was
unusual: the cluster of black monoliths now clinging to it.

The most recent in his series of scale-model prototype planetary drives.

From the center of the holo out, each sphere showed the image of the proto-comet from a progressively more distant instrument cluster. His probes were powered, each maneuvering to maintain a stationary view despite the proto-comet's tumbling. Telemetry far too small to read scrolled across the bottom of each inset holo, captured for later analysis.

“An impressive setup,” Nessus sang. He had arrived, unannounced, to witness the upcoming experiment. His ship,
Aegis
, was toylike beside
Haven
's #4 hull.

“Thank you,” Baedeker answered. The courtesy was human, because it was mostly New Terrans with whom he dealt. His experiments could only be done safely far from the Fleet, where few Citizens dared to roam. Even with Nessus' intervention, Baedeker had obtained only eight senior scientists—volunteers, they were not—from General Products Laboratories. The balance of
Haven
's crew, another forty-two, was human. To obtain
that
assistance Nessus had had to involve the New Terran government. “Without
your influence and assistance, Nessus, I could never have pulled this together.”

For the Hindmost's consort had considerable influence. There was a time that fact would have evoked bitterness, even fury—conflict with Nessus had once gotten Baedeker banished. But without Nessus' trust in humans, the Concordance would still be ignorant of the Pak threat. The scruffy scout had been proven correct—no matter the consequences for Baedeker.

My misjudgment was not Nessus' fault.
The admission eased a burden that Baedeker had not acknowledged—not even to himself.

Nessus bobbed heads in acknowledgment. “How distant are we?”

“Twenty million miles.” Baedeker now even thought in English units: another artifact of his time among the humans.

Nessus whistled approval. “That seems safe enough.”

“We try.” Baedeker extended a neck to the display controls; with a wriggle of lip nodes he fine-tuned the image contrast. He straightened up again. “Because the Outsider drives move worlds through normal space, it seemed logical that all manifestations of operation are localized to normal space. That suggests the propagation of any side effects of our experiment will be light-speed limited.

“So, the string of probes between our homemade drive and this ship uses hyperwave comm. Whatever happens, we'll know it long before any normal-space phenomenon can get to us.” And we'll jump into hyperspace if anything looks amiss.

“Excellent, Baedeker. What is the prognosis?”

“We learn a little more each time.” A nonanswer worthy of Sigmund, Baedeker thought. The best he could hope for was an anticlimactic result.

“What will we see?” Nessus persisted.

“Probably nothing.” Baedeker twisted a neck, scanning the controlled chaos around the bridge. Minerva seemed to have everything under control. His research assistant still wore General Products violet-and-blue mane ribbons, as though the fortunes of a business mattered anymore. “Nessus, expect this test to be brief.”

“How brief?”

“Ready for final countdown,” Minerva announced over the intercom, speaking English for the benefit of the humans. “Thirty seconds, on my mark.” He released the intercom button. “Baedeker?”

“Proceed.”

“Mark. Twenty-nine . . . twenty-eight . . .”

Everyone here carried comps, synched to the shipboard network. The verbal countdown was unnecessary, a peculiarly human custom to which Baedeker still struggled to adapt. Despite everything, he could not resist looking himself in the eyes.

“Nineteen. . . eighteen. . .”

“How brief,” Nessus repeated.

“You'll see soon enough.” Or we'll unleash energies so vast that they swallow us even here, and the discussion becomes moot.

Nessus bobbed agreement.

“Three . . . two. . . one. . . done. Commencing analysis.”

On the main display, the lump of icy rock appeared unchanged. “How long?” Baedeker sang out.

Minerva looked up from his station. “Twelve point two seven nanoseconds.”

“Nanoseconds?” Nessus' undertunes trilled with dismay.

“It's our best yet,” Baedeker rebutted, staccato and impatient. He might have come to terms with Nessus' unherdlike methods, but that tolerance hardly extended to uninformed criticism. “Have you
read
my progress reports?”

“I err on the side of other priorities. Like keeping your project funded and staffed.”

And if any of the herd were to survive the Pak onslaught that
was
the higher priority. Baedeker fluted apologetically. “Walk with me, and I'll explain.”

They cantered off the bridge together, Baedeker leading the way. They began a long, slow trip around the ship's rotund waist. (Humans had waists, although Citizens did not. A bigger difference between the species: where they chose to locate a ship's bridge. Only a human would think to expose a hindmost's duty station at the bow of the ship. The rational choice, surely, was at the center, as far as possible from any hull impacts.) The circuit was more than a half mile.

“You're familiar with the zero-point energy of vacuum,” Baedeker began. “The Outsider drive taps the zero-point energy. Doing so asymmetrically is inherently propulsive.”

“For nanoseconds,” Nessus chided.

Without missing a step, Baedeker plucked at his mane. If Nessus truly understood the risks,
he
would be tearing apart his mane. “The process evokes matter-antimatter particle pairs from the quantum foam, myriads of
pairs, scattered across a volume larger than the body to be moved. Every infinitesimal region requires a subtly different treatment to achieve net thrust. Every particle requires tracking. It all takes massive amounts of computing power—more than any technology customarily used on Hearth. You'll wonder what kind of computing power the Outsiders employed, and that is the scary part. We do not exactly know.”

Scary
was the ultimate expletive. Nessus twitched but made no comment.

“We do not dare to unseal an Outsider drive, or even to scan one invasively, yet somehow we had to determine how these tremendous forces are manipulated.” Baedeker fell silent as a human scurried past in the opposite direction, her errand unknown. He had accepted human help, but the nuances of the project must remain Concordance secrets. “An endless stream of neutrinos is constantly passing through everything, and deep-radar technology uses neutrino pulses. So, we modified a deep-radar unit to emit very weak pulses, at neutrino intensities Hearth last saw before our sun began to swell. Our ancestors' activation then of their planetary drive did not cause a disaster. It stood to reason another neutrino source emitting at the same level would not induce problems in a drive.”

And the uncertainties of that probing had
still
reduced Baedeker to a ball of tightly coiled flesh. He saw nothing to be gained by admitting it.

“And what did you find?” Nessus asked.

“All we got was a shadowy image, indistinct, the circuitry suggestive of quantum computing.” That, and a days-long retreat to catatonia. Any perturbation, even an unexpected neutrino flux, risked decohering the quantum superpositions on which the control algorithms must rely. If the probe's pulses had altered the quantum states—the potential damage was incalculable and unknowable.

And beyond the ability of a dilettante like Nessus to comprehend. “That revealed a great deal regarding the complexity of the control process and nothing about the algorithms.”

“But a mere twelve nanoseconds,” Nessus intoned. “The control processes seem rather sensitive.”

Sensitive? That seriously understated it. Baedeker had been left to determine—in theory, by analysis; in practice, by trial and error—how to shape and channel energy eruptions coaxed from the vacuum. And each iteration risked unleashing unknowably vast energies. . . .

“Our first three tries, Nessus, we failed to attain
one
nanosecond. That's how fast the process can destabilize.”

“What about net thrust?”

Two humans and a Citizen loped out of a cross corridor, comps in hands and mouth, talking excitedly about gravitational lobes, particle densities, and flux vortices. This was the stuff of progress—nanosecond by nanosecond—and the type of detail to which Baedeker
should
be attending. He waited for the technicians to disappear around the curve of the corridor. “Thrust? Certainly. Net thrust? Unclear. We may be seeing only a bit of random effect, beyond our control. And there may be longer-duration feedback effects we have yet to encounter.”

“A twelvefold increase is progress, but nanoseconds will be a hard sell.” Nessus came to a halt and fixed Baedeker with a bold, two-headed stare. “I'll have to embellish to the Hindmost. Your task is to make sure that by the time Nike looks closely at this project, I am not too much of a liar.”

 

Thssthfok sat on the floor of his cell, knees drawn against his chest, back against an unyielding bulkhead. Except for occasional fleeting moments of freedom, he had been in this prison for—with a jolt, he recognized he did not know how long.

He searched his memories and surroundings for clues. The faint clatter and clank of shipboard maintenance, become all but constant. Sigmund's appearances, less and less frequent. A tray of fruit, scarcely touched. Images of his long-lost breeders and friends, memories of long-ago conversations, more real to him than anything in the room.

Dispassionately, he studied the tray. The food looked tired but not yet spoiled. He forced himself to take a bite, and then another, and then a third, despite his lack of appetite. Without noticing, he had abandoned his hope of escape, had lost himself in the past.

Three times he had broken out of this cell; three times, his captors had retaken him with ease. Had failure reduced him to apathy? Yes, he decided. That, and the ceaseless activity outside the hatch. That, and the metallic stomping of armored workers, the corridors ever alive with a many-limbed gait. To wrest this ship from its crew demanded more than superior intellect and strength. He needed the element of surprise—and did not see how to achieve surprise when armored work parties constantly plied the vessel's corridors. And so, imperceptibly, he had stopped scheming, stopped analyzing, stopped watching. . ..