Destroyer of Worlds (44 page)

 

EARNEST ENTREATIES FAILED
to coax Baedeker out of a tightly curled ball. Kneading mouths made little impression through the sturdy material of his pressure suit. His heads-up displays reported warm air; his body sensed normal gravity. In his catatonia, unaware, he had been carted aboard
Haven
. He emptied his mind, seeking to return to oblivion.

Danger!
Piercing ululations jerked him back to reality. He whipped out a head and looked around wildly. He was in his cabin. Eric and Minerva stood over him. The warning shout trailed off from Minerva's mouths.

“I need your help,” Eric said. He remained suited except for the helmet in his hands. “You can go to pieces later.”

“Wh-what can I do?” Baedeker stammered. What could anyone do against the Pak? Even Sigmund could not control a single naked Pak prisoner.

“
Don Quixote
isn't in a proper orbit,” Eric said. “Within thirty minutes it impacts Niflheim. We're going to rescue Kirsten and Sigmund first.”

What did it matter? Why did they bother him? Baedeker felt himself drifting back to oblivion, but he managed to ask, “Why me?”

“When we blow the planet-buster, it will destroy everything. Niflheim. The ramscoop that's a few hours away. Thssthfok and the ship he escaped in. Everything except . . .”

“Except what? Oh. The hull of
Don Quixote
.” Even in Baedeker's near stupor, any possibility the Pak would recover a nearly impregnable hull seemed like a bad idea. “Surely it cannot still fly.”

“Enough.” Eric kicked Baedeker in the flank, and Minerva whistled in surprise. “Get
up
. Your task is to destroy the hull once we get Kirsten and Sigmund off.”

“I cannot—”

The next kick
hurt.
Minerva shifted his weight nervously between his hooves, wanting to intervene but at a loss what to do.

Eric said, “New Terra has very few ships with General Products hulls. Most were turned to powder at the outset of the last war. Sigmund thought—he
thinks
—you know the code to shut down the embedded power plant that reinforces the hull super-molecule.”

Sigmund was almost right, but a built-in code suggested premeditation. Who would make a ship that an errant data-entry error could turn to dust? There was no self-destruct code.

What Baedeker
had
recognized was an unintended back door to the microprocessors embedded in the hull to control the reinforcing power plant. Target a ship with a comm laser tuned to the right frequency; some of the light penetrated the photonic components. After that, it was a matter of simple programming to shut down the power plant. Eliminating the vulnerability would take replacing all the ships built over millennia.

Of a trillion Citizens of the Concordance, perhaps five knew that secret. But why did Eric even need to be told? His people's ancestral ramscoop had been kept for study inside a General Products #4 hull just like
Haven
's—until Eric and Kirsten broke it out. “You already know how.”

“
Long Pass
was stationary, held in place by massive struts. The power plant was a fixed target, only a few hundred feet away. I used
Long Pass
's comm laser to overload or overheat the power plant until it shut down. We'll never be able to hold focus on the power plant with
Don Quixote
tumbling like that.” Eric pulled back his boot again. “So it's up to you.”

Baedeker's method also worked at a distance, but tumbling would defeat him, too. Could
Haven
swoop around the tumbling hulk, matching the motion? What pilot would be insane enough to attempt
that
maneuver? With a will of its own, Baedeker's exposed head inched closer to his belly.

Someone rapped on the closed cabin door. “Four minutes,” she called.

It took two more kicks to get Baedeker moving. By then he had figured out that
Haven
was almost at its rendezvous with the wreck. That the
only way to destroy its hull was to
carry
a laser aboard. And that boarding meant a spacewalk to the tumbling, still-glowing ship. And yet—

The doomed rescue seemed like a faster demise than being kicked to death by a madman.

 

WITH A WHISPERED PLEA TO FINAGLE
, Eric dove from the gaping mouth of the cargo hold. He vanished into the darkness on invisible wings of compressed air.

Niflheim filled much of the sky, more as an absence of stars than from the feeble glitter of its icy surface. A mile away, what remained of
Don Quixote
tumbled and rolled. Here and there, within its tortured hull, blotches glowed in angry reds. Moments when the wreck pointed directly at Baedeker, it was as big as NP1 or NP5 seen from Hearth. When he could see the wreck's full length, it loomed three times larger than Hearth's closest planetary neighbors.

Baedeker lectured himself, scolded himself, and whimpered. He reminded himself what was at stake: everything. He swung his necks and stomped his hooves. He tried everything that might stampede himself deeper into a fit of mania, and still the wait was all but unbearable.

He remained on
Haven
with the rest of the rescue team. Eric carried a stepping disc on his back. Everyone else would step across. Assuming Eric made it aboard the wreck.

With his visor turned active, Baedeker zoomed in on the distant speck that was Eric. He had nearly reached the ruined ship. Baedeker's stomach lurched at the magnified tumbling and rolling.

After a false start, Eric began spiraling toward the wreck, zigzagging to match the ship's bucking motions. “The main hold reads too hot. I'm entering through the primary air lock.”

Twice Eric rebounded from the hull, cursing. On his third try, with a
clang
, one magnetized boot grabbed a bulkhead within the air lock. His body went one way while the ship continued another. He spun around his leg as he slammed face-first into the hull. “I'm down,” he gasped.

A minute later, Baedeker stepped across into the wreck. A massive sack slapped his side. Most of the load was
two
stepping discs. No matter what, he would have a way off this derelict.

Gravity was off. Blue light flickered and flashed from innumerable shorts. Between sparks a sullen red glow seeped down the corridor. Behind
the hatch of a nearby storeroom, things thumped and crashed with every wobble of the ship.

Had even Nessus ever attempted anything this crazy?

“Are you all right?” Baedeker asked Eric.

“Broken leg, almost certainly. The armor immobilizes it.”

Baedeker blinked. “Now that a working disc is aboard, others can finish the search. Go back and let an autodoc fix it.”

“When I find Kirsten and Sigmund. Not before. Now get off the disc so that the others can board.”

Baedeker gingerly took two steps down the corridor, boot magnets holding him down. In quick succession, three humans stepped through behind him. “Withdrawing to a safe distance,” Minerva radioed. “We will resume velocity match there.”

The rolling, yawing, pitching, tumbling. . . tried to move Baedeker every direction at once. Steadying himself on three legs was hard. How anyone managed on two was a mystery.

He took two devices from a pressure-suit pocket. “Eric, these are personal stasis-field generators. We use them for medical emergencies.” It was a futile gesture, but all Baedeker had to offer. No one could have survived this catastrophe.

Eric stowed the generators in pockets of his own. “Thanks. Now you have a job to do.”

The embedded power plant was just two decks forward and half a hull circumference away, but at every turn something blocked Baedeker's path. A buckled bulkhead. Emergency hatches heat-warped in place. Pockets of intolerable heat. Thickets of sparking wires. When no course led where he needed to go, he carved detours with his flashlight laser, its beam focused all the way down to lethal intensity. Over comm, he tracked the similarly slow progress of the searchers, fanning out across the ship.

“I've reached the bridge,” Omar reported. He led team A, searching forward. “No signs of them anywhere. Sorry, Eric.”

“Any sign of Jeeves?” Eric asked.

Omar hesitated. “The server room is a charred ruin. No way.”

“Sweep again, back toward the stern,” Eric directed. “Maybe team B missed something.”

Baedeker finally reached the arc of corridor in whose wall sat the embedded power plant. Most wall paint had been seared away. He spread the flashlight beam and burned off the rest of the paint—then kept his neck
and head in motion. Optical waveguides warped most light
around
the power plant, but there were unavoidable distortions if the light source wavered. You could spot the power plant if you knew how and where to look.

And there it was.

At this range, even the headheld laser was sufficient to reprogram the power-plant controls. He used both heads to stick the laser to the wall with a blob of putty. The laser had no wireless interface; he clipped on cables to interface a pocket comp.

He had left the final programming, to be done only if he got this far. Some secrets were meant to stay secret. For the same reason, he worked—awkwardly, because of his suit—through the comp's tactile interface. Nothing he did here would be overheard or intercepted.

It was delicate work, demanding intense concentration, and he tuned out the depressing radio chatter. The searchers had found nothing good. Most likely they would find nothing at all, the remains of Sigmund and Kirsten having been blown out to space or even vaporized.

He did hear the evacuation warning: impact with Niflheim in five minutes. Get out.

Four minutes. Three. At two minutes, a warning shriek echoed through his suit. Lipping frantically, Baedeker finished without time to check his work. “The device is set,” he called. “One minute to hull destruction. I am stepping back to
Haven
.”

He flicked through to his own ship, into the cargo bay that served as their staging area—and collapsed into a tight ball.

 

Thssthfok's new ship was fast and maneuverable, a delight to fly. He concentrated on getting a feel for its controls and capabilities.

Straight ahead, coming right at him, something he had never expected to see: the vanguard of the Pak fleets. And behind him, a second surprise: a ramscoop, either a forward scout or a foraging mission, stealthily converging on the icy world his prison had orbited.

But not as stealthily as they believed. Whoever had built this little ship had equipped it with extraordinary instruments.

Who
had
built this ship? Humans, certainly—the cockpit suited the length of their arms, the grasp of their hands, the contours of their bodies—and yet Pak influence was unmistakable in the console circuits he had so hastily reassembled. Phssthpok's doing, somehow.

Thssthfok would have liked to examine whatever “demo” the humans had had planned, but did not. Surrender to curiosity was a breeder weakness. He had shouted his presence to that inbound ship the instant he lit his fusion drive. Soon enough, the other ship would see him. It would fire its own engine and give chase.

He would use all the head start he had, and not risk losing everything. This ship. A stepping disc. The scans and measurements he had taken of
Don Quixote
's amazingly strong, dynamically reinforced hull. The existence of hyperspace and a faster-than-light drive. Knowledge of dangerous races, their worlds flying through space, in the fleets' paths.

No matter what had happened in the long years of his absence, he would be welcomed back to family and clan with open arms.

He took a tree-of-life root from the flour sack, blew off traces of white powder, and gnawed contentedly.

 

.   .   .

 

THSSTHFOK SWITCHED OFF
the fusion drive. Time for a quick look behind.

The lonely world
Don Quixote
orbited was spewing ice crystals and steam. More likely,
had
orbited, the plume marking the spot of its crash.

As expected, the ramscoop had lit its drive. The range was too great to know if the ship raced toward Thssthfok or the planet—only that it came at high acceleration. And a radio signal, blaring at very high power. A short digital data stream, rapidly repeating.

His ship's receiver understood the modulation scheme. A human signal, then. “Look here,” Thssthfok heard himself say.

The demo warning!

Another voice (Jeeves?) continued, in accented high Rilchukian. Making allowance for the bad grammar, it said, “Cease attacks on occupied worlds. Veer toward galactic south. Comply, or be destroyed.”

“Look here,” the message began again.

Thssthfok turned down the volume, the better to concentrate. Would anything else happen? If so, he was in an excellent position to observe Sigmund's attention-getting demo.

Thssthfok directed every sensor back the way he had come. Same icy world. (At the limit of the telescope's resolution, at its maximum magnification, a pixel zoomed away from the planet. To be seen from this distance, a vessel would have to be many times the size of Sigmund's ship. A glitch in image enhancement, surely. The dot vanished, confirming his suspicion.) Same plume of ice and steam. Same repeating radio signal—

Dissolved suddenly into deafening static. Gibberish erupted across the spectrum. Particle detectors reported impossible densities of everything. Gravimetric sensors showed—what? He did not understand. It was as though space-time itself had gone mad.

Everything grew in intensity. And grew. And grew.

The cockpit canopy had turned black. Protecting his eyes from what? When Thssthfok applied maximum filtering to the ship's telescope, a maelstrom of gas, dust, and gravel had replaced the little planet. A world torn apart, heading his way, heading
every
way, at very nearly light speed.