Betrayer of Worlds (17 page)

Louis could read the Pak numbers, though.
Twing
still awed him, and
twing
was like wattle and daub compared to the stuff of Pak space tethers. The bits of automated translation suggested the tether material even blocked neutrinos. That had to be in error.

Louis unfroze his display to resume skimming. A label he clearly misunderstood hyperlinked him into material about energy generation. Fission, maybe. Something about dampening fields? It made no sense to him. He retraced his steps and went on skimming.

A creepy, two-throated yawn right in Louis’s ear.

Louis blinked and turned around. “I guess you finished inspecting the equipment.”

“Yes. It is less interesting than what you are studying.” Another double yawn. “Perhaps I will not stay too much longer. Before returning to my cabin, I think I will try to learn a bit more about
twing.
”

Louis nodded and resumed skimming. He noticed Achilles open display windows across the workroom. He did not notice when Achilles left.

The next day, hunting for a multimeter probe that had fallen behind a workbench, Louis wondered where he had left his flashlight.

Nerves frayed. Tempers flared. Minds recoiled from the less-than-nothingness just outside the hull. For everyone’s sanity, drops to normal space came more frequently.

The closer they came to Hearth, the more messages Achilles found queued for him on hyperspace relay buoys.

Grumbling mightily, Achilles labored over ministry reports and requests. He sent responses via the same relays. After several iterations, Nessus agreed to schedule daily quick drops to normal space.

And (it amused Achilles) so Nessus sealed his own doom.

“Normal space in five minutes,” Nessus called over the intercom.

“Acknowledged,” Achilles said. The improvised sensor readouts in his cabin showed Nessus was on the bridge and Louis was in the engine room. All very normal for one of
Aegis
’ daily check-ins.

In the privacy of his cabin, Achilles had put on a pressure suit. He had one helmet already sealed. Now he sealed his second helmet. He reviewed the suit’s gauges and indicators. All systems nominal. All tanks and expendable supplies were maxed. He ran the self-test programs. All tests passed. He checked and rechecked his cache of supplies: radio beacons, fuel cells, medical-emergency stasis generators. The time until rescue would pass in an instant.

“Two minutes,” Nessus called.

Achilles’ hearts pounded. Just two more minutes!

His loyal servants waited for
Aegis
to emerge from hyperspace, the time and place finalized in innocuous code words within the stream of ministry business. The ministry had many ships. . . .

He—with the Library—would return in triumph to Hearth. None would presume to oppose him. He would be Hindmost, master of everything he deserved.

“One minute to dropout.”

And his enemies would pay for their insolence. The Gw’oth would be put in their place.

Achilles took a pocket computer from his desk. The crucial command had already been lipped into the touchpad. When the moment came, he had only to squeeze. . . .

“Three. Two. One. Now.”

The cabin wallpaper switched from rolling meadow to starscape. Achilles bit down on the touchpad.

Nothing happened!

He pressed again. Nothing. He set the computer on the desk and rechecked the command sequence: perfect.

A loose connection, perhaps. Stuffing the computer in an outside pocket, Achilles rushed from his cabin.

“Did you lose something?” Nessus intoned coldly.

Achilles had put on a pressure suit. His heads probed deep within a utility space that gave access to the hull. Shuddering, he backed up and turned. He winced when he saw what Nessus held in his mouth. “Where did you get that?”

With his free head, Nessus gestured toward the open access panel, to where a glob of putty clung to the hull. “I got it where you left it. Where
my
surveillance equipment recorded you installing it.”

Achilles lunged.

Nessus snatched back what he held: a pocket computer wired to a flashlight-laser. Laser case and computer were mottled with the putty from which he had extracted them. He flung the death trap behind him, sent it skittering down the corridor. The melodies of his outrage required two mouths.

“You are sickly clever,” Nessus sang, harmonics ringing with disgust. “
Aegis
is an old ship, and you know its vulnerability. So deactivate the embedded power plant and let air pressure blow the unreinforced hull to dust. You ‘somehow’ manage to get into your pressure suit in time. Your supporters collect you from the wreckage, and the ship’s computers, and the
lore of the Pak, and—oh, how sad—also the twisted, vacuum-bloated bodies of your shipmates.

“I do not much understand technology, Achilles, but I understand
you.
Killing me would not satisfy you. Ousting Baedeker would not satisfy you. But if Louis and I die because this hull fails? Then you could blame some imaginary delayed effect from how we destroyed
Argo.
You would take me from Baedeker and blame
him
for the ‘accident.’ Sick.”

Nessus gestured again at the access panel. “The shutdown sequence must be coupled into the hull here at the power-plant controller. If I truly understood the twisted nature of your thinking, you would come
here
to set your trap. And so you did.”

Achilles’ eyes darted like a trapped animal’s. “Yes!” he raged. “And you all deserve whatever—”

“Stand back.” Louis, holding a stunner, emerged from around a bend in the corridor. Likely he understood none of what had been said. Tones of voice had summoned him. “Against the wall.”

Achilles sidled backward.

“Politics? Extenuating circumstances? Past traumas?” Nessus summoned into his voices all the disdain he felt. “Throughout your career much has been rationalized. Even Baedeker excuses your excesses, so shamed is he by the violence you forced him into.

“But no longer, Achilles. No longer. Nothing can justify cold-blooded, premeditated murder.” Merely to sing those chords made Nessus ill. The herd protected, it did not prey on its own. “You have gone too far. Too far! Your friends will shun you. Your opponents will revile you. You
will
be punished.”

Nessus added in Interworld, “Louis. As we discussed.”

Achilles pushed off the wall and spun on his front legs. As he lashed out with his strong hind leg, the stunner crackled. He toppled, his body rigid, still wild-eyed, at Nessus’ hooves.

Nessus looked downward with repugnance. “You will return to Hearth in stasis. Hope that the herd has mercy on you.”

Storms raged across the perpetually shrouded skies of Kl’mo. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed. Gales lashed oceans and continents alike. Unending rain pummeled the barren land, patiently breaking rock into dust. In millions of years, perhaps, something would take root in that soil.

Far beneath the chaos, hugging a zigzag of hydrothermal vents, tranquil, extended the watery domain of the Gw’oth colony.

The trek to settle this new world had been long and arduous. Sr’o would be content never to leave the watery depths again. But what were the chances?

She hoisted a rock half as long as her tubacle. The serenity, she thought, was some sort of metaphor. She did not entirely understand metaphors or, for that matter, the humans who used them. Before the migration, fleetingly, she had met a few humans: traders from New Terra. She had never seen a Puppeteer or, thankfully, a Pak. She knew
of
the aliens of course, from Ol’t’ro’s memories—

The Gw’otesht, many in one, survived all, remembered all.

A guard scuttled up to take the rock from Sr’o. “Permit me, Your Wisdom.”

She hated being called that, least of all here in the new world, but to chastise the guard would only reemphasize her status. The change from a tradition-based society to a science-based one was already revolutionary; too many colonists could not at the same time overcome the habits of life in a dynastic autocracy. Perhaps the new generation would learn.

Presuming that the colony lasted that long.

“Thank you,” Sr’o answered mildly, arching a tubacle in search of a stone small enough that her solicitous protectors might permit her to move it.

She toiled, one among a crowd, at constructing yet another small
residence. The traditional stacked-stone building was not for her personal use, any more than the fives of other buildings in whose construction she had, however symbolically, contributed, for
she
lived apart in the colony’s great metal stronghold. The physical labor was its own reward: a task with an end to it. A respite.

More often, when Sr’o needed physical release, she joined those working in the fields among the creepers, sponges, and sessile worms. Kl’mo’s native biota thrived in the rich chemical plumes upwelling from the hydrothermal vents, but the life transported from Jm’ho—the ecosystem upon which the colonists depended for their survival—continued to struggle. Despite constant, labor-intensive interventions, the transplants grew sicklier and sicklier.

And she, although the lead biologist of the colony, had yet to discern why.

Oh, she could maintain the tiny biosphere of a ship indefinitely, or any number of the little, self-contained habitats with which the inhospitable worlds of the home system had been settled. Grafting an ecosystem into an existing ecology? That was something else entirely. And the problems kept getting worse. One of the colony’s many imbalances was between small predators and Gw’oth spawn. Too many mouths, immature and voracious, to feed. . . .

Sr’o lifted and piled bits of rock, hoping at least in this small way to contribute to making the colony successful. The task busied her tubacles—but not her thoughts. Her mind remained trapped in the critical puzzle: whatever nutrients were insufficient, or too abundant, or toxic to the transplants. Isolating the exact difficulties, subtly different for each species, involved slow and painstaking research. Until they solved their problems, the colony needed nutritional supplements from Jm’ho and breeding stocks of new varieties of—well, everything—to reinvigorate the still-fragile ocean-floor ecosystem.

Your Wisdom? She hardly felt wise.

A second guard jetted over to help Sr’o.
You are too important,
his solicitousness declared.
We cannot allow you to injure yourself.

At the unwelcome reminder of her responsibilities, the tips of her tubacles flared an anxious red. At the first hint of a mood shift the rest of her protectors swarmed, pushing aside her fellow workers. She willed herself to be calm until the chromatophoric cells along her tubacles faded to a less apprehensive yellow-green.

But the harm had been done. The colonists among whom she had toiled flattened obsequiously, and in that uncomfortable pose they sidled away. “We will work more carefully,” one murmured,
his
skin quickly shading all the way into far red.

“No one did anything wrong,” Sr’o answered. “Pardon my distraction.”

Her apology did no good. The polite fiction of equality had been wholly shattered. Her burdens were hers, and she must learn better to bear them. She would set a few more stones into place, then leave.

She was given the time to emplace only one.

“Two ships are entering the solar system,” announced the transceiver stowed deep inside one of her tubacles. “Both have radioed the expected call signs.” Unstated because it was obvious, the interruption also meant:
Come. We must meld.
Even if, as Sr’o believed, the arrival was the expected supply ship and its escort, the colony had little margin for error.

As the protective squad formed up around her, Sr’o swiveled a tubacle and surveyed those with whom she had been toiling. Those who depended on her. “I must attend to other matters,” she announced.

No one argued.

Sr’o jetted deep into the colony stronghold, tubacles trailing, guards lagging a respectful distance behind. As she approached the heart of the building, friends/colleagues/alter-egos converged from other corridors, exchanging only terse greetings. Why bother with the clumsiness of words when soon they would be a single mind?

Then she was inside the melding chamber, one among many. Ten. Twelve. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. The guards, waiting outside, sealed the chamber. The doors would only open from the inside.

Sr’o, trembling, extended the first tubacle. Lr’o took up the limb, and the eye and heat receptor within went dark. The ear within went all but deaf, sensing only the beating of two hearts.

The tubacle probing within Sr’ o’s own found its mark.

A jolt like the shock from an electric hunter-worm coursed through her mind. There was a flash, indescribable, and from the recesses of her mind unimaginable insights beckoned.

More! She must have more! Switching to ventral respiration, drifting, she extended her remaining tubacles. She groped all around her and felt probing in return. Limb found limb, aligned, conjoined . . .

Ganglia meshing!

Feedback building!