Betrayer of Worlds (19 page)

Something in the vista was wrong. What?

“Soon, Captain. Please bear with me.” She set off, clanking, new flurries of disturbed mud and silt marking her wake. The captain jetted away, growling.

“What is it?” Pk’o asked as she reached him. “We have checked and rechecked everything.”

An intuition Sr’o did not want to articulate. “A multiscanner, please.”

He recoiled—as much as the suit would let him—from something in her voice. “Yes, Your Wisdom,” Pk’o said formally.

She coiled a tubacle around the instrument. From another tubacle she looked once more around the hold. The cargo. The cluster of conversation. Crew swimming about.

The
swimming
was wrong.

“Captain,” she called, the exterior speaker on her suit turned up high.

He jetted to a halt and angled two tubacles back toward her. “What now?”

“Some of your crew seem . . . energetic.”

But energetic did not quite define the oddity. The supply ship’s crew was . . . what? Ebullient. Enthusiastic. All that, and more.

Euphoric.

The captain, for that matter, was much less irate than she had expected. Than he had every right to be.

He swam down toward her. “As I told you, a long trip. The crew is excited about getting off the ship, about seeing new people and a new world.”

By the end of her long trek through hyperspace to this world,
she
had been exhausted and twitchy. Certainly not euphoric.

Something about euphoria, then. “A moment, Captain,” she said.

It was, she decided, as though the crew were high on magnesium salts or hydrogen sulfide, but her suit’s instruments insisted all solutes in the water were within acceptable ranges.

She raised the tubacle that clasped the multiscanner. “May I take your readings?” He gave no answer, so she proceeded. He was the picture of health.

And yet, a few readouts were off: enzyme levels higher than she had ever seen. Those could account for the unexpected energy levels. A few repeating genes repeated many more times than she had ever encountered. Those genes coded for the anomalous enzymes. And, most puzzling to Sr’o, unexpected sequences
between
the genes—

Where retroviruses could lurk.

“My team and I must return to our transport,” she told the captain.

“Why?” he demanded. “Is something wrong with us?”

“Something is . . . unexpected. I do not have the resources here to make a full analysis.” Nor the mental capacity.

Ol’t’ro did.

Ol’t’ro considered:

The cargo ship’s crew: they were doomed. Had they been allowed to off-load their cargo and leave, none could have survived to return their ship to Jm’ho. Equally doomed was the navigator who had boarded the cargo ship at the rendezvous deep in the interstellar void, to safeguard the secret location of the colony.

The death that awaited them. Cells died, and cells reproduced. With each generation of cells, the anomalous enzyme concentrations would increase. Until, at sufficiently high concentrations, the enzymes would cleave the cell’s DNA, kill their unsuspecting hosts, and release the retroviruses that lay dormant within.

The retrovirus. Had it been set free near the ocean vents, it would have invaded the entire transplanted food chain—and yet it would not have affected the Gw’oth colonists themselves.

Biological warfare. This contagion was no accident. It was meant to force surrender. To force the colonists, to force Ol’t’ro themselves, back to Jm’ho. Back into servitude.

They
could not have engineered such a plague, or such a subtle way to deliver it. The task far exceeded
any
Gw’otesht’s capacity for handling data. The work could only be done on a large nonbiological computer, such as humans and Puppeteers used. A computer such as the Tn’Tn’ho might have purchased.

And, inevitably, Ol’t’ro thought about countermoves. . . .

From high atop a rocky promontory, his clothes and hair fluttering in the stiff sea breeze, Louis watched the rising—roaring—tide. Great North Bay was long and serpentine. Its tall, stony sides funneled the flow higher and higher, until the onrushing waters became more wall than waves. The ground vibrated beneath his boots. Spume crashed from the rocks. Even a hundred meters above the surge, spray occasionally spattered his face.

Three hundred feet, Louis corrected himself. Ancient English units and ancient English speech. English, by way of Spanglish, was the primary source language of Interworld. English all around made Louis feel like an extra in a Shakespeare play, but he understood without too much effort most things he heard. Not these illogical units of measure, though. Getting used to those would take practice.

Sometime soon Nessus would reappear. Louis did not believe in karma, not exactly, but this idyll would end. And if he followed in his father’s footsteps—

Beowulf Shaeffer’s bouts of tourism tended to end in existential crises.

While he could, Louis would enjoy life to the fullest.

A gust of wind. A face full of spray. Louis laughed with delight. This was
so
not like being aboard
Aegis.
It had seemed he would never get off that ship. “It’s beautiful up here.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Alice Jordan said.

On
Aegis
’ arrival on New Terra, Nessus and Ausfaller had (separately? That was not made clear) urgent business to attend to. Ausfaller foisted off Louis on a deputy. And that, once Louis met Alice, was fine with him. He had not seen a woman in a
long
time.

Once Alice realized Louis was, contrary to appearances, much nearer in age to her 150 or so years than the twenty years he looked, the assignment seemed fine with her, too.

Even if Alice had not towered a head taller than everyone else on New Terra, she would have stood out in a crowd. She was confident, if not cocky. Lush black hair broke over her shoulders and spilled down her back. He could get lost in her deep, deep brown eyes, and gaze forever at her lovely, tanned, chiseled features.

She had led Louis by stepping disc across New Terra. It was a beautiful planet, sparsely settled, its climate temperate from pole to pole. Its pristine seas sparkled. Vast forests, grassy plains, and expansive fields spread across its continents. Great mountains soared into its skies. What New Terrans considered cities, designed from the start around ubiquitous stepping discs, were—what was the word?—neighborhoods. When he put from his mind the necklaces of artificial suns orbiting low overhead, and the scattering of Puppeteer expatriates living among the humans, New Terra was what Earth might have been with maybe one percent of its current population.

In a word, paradise.

“Maturity in the body of a twenty-year-old.” Alice rolled contently onto her back. “Isn’t science wonderful? Any more back home like you?”

“One’s not enough?” Louis pretended to be offended.

She reached out to pat his arm. “Truthfully? More than one might kill me.”

Louis turned onto his side, the better to face her. He had been starved for human contact, starved for the company of a woman. And a woman as smart and beautiful and delightful as Alice? Once he met her, the need to know her, to be with her, matched the worst drug craving he had had on Wunderland. Alice was beautiful, and yet . . .

Maybe it
was
time for some truth.

All the while they had been together, amid the patter of flirting, interspersed among insights about New Terran history and culture, Alice had been pumping Louis for information, and with very perceptive questions, too. It had taken him three days to notice. Listening more skeptically, her phrasing hinted at knowledge no native New Terran would have. When he had sprinkled Interworld terms into his still tentative English, she understood more than he would have expected.

“What were you?” Louis asked suddenly, sharply. “An ARM like your boss?”

Alice jerked back. “No, a goldskin.”

Belter cops wore yellow pressure suits, hence, colloquially, they were goldskins. Alice was tall enough to be a Belter. Louis wondered why he had not seen it before. “So what do you want from me?”

“A way home for the New Terrans,” she said. “But you don’t know the way, any more than Sigmund or I do.”

Louis knew he was falling for this woman, and he was furious at her deception. “I suppose Nessus brought you here, too?”

“Do you trust Nessus?” she countered.

“Yes.” He considered further. “Mostly.”

“And Citizens?”

“One tried to kill me,” Louis barked. And guiltily, “Right. This whole world was once the Puppeteers’ slave colony.”

“Remember that. Cowards can be as ruthless as anyone else. Fear only makes Citizens more devious in their plots. When they resort to violence, they apply force overwhelmingly.”

Louis took her hand. “You’re avoiding my question. Did Nessus bring you here?” And you’re avoiding the question I can’t bring myself to ask. Is anything between us real?

“Nothing so straightforward.” Alice sighed. “Nessus knows nothing about my background. Sigmund and I would like to keep it that way.”

Louis waited.

“Keeping secrets was easier before I got to know you.”

He waited.

Before Alice found anything to add, Ausfaller called.

Louis stepped, emerging into a busy lobby. The stony-faced escorts waiting there closed ranks around him, and together they walked briskly into the bowels of a rambling, windowless building. They left him in an anteroom labeled
OFFICE OF THE MINISTER
. The willowy blonde aide at the reception desk nodded at Louis but said nothing.

The door behind the desk opened. “Louis Wu,” Ausfaller said. In person his eyes looked even more brooding and intense than over a hyperwave link. “I’m glad finally to meet you in person. Please come in.”

Louis walked into the office and stood waiting. Data screens, all blank, covered the walls. The large desk was clear except for a family holo. It was jarring to imagine Ausfaller as a man with a beautiful wife, children, and grandchildren.

Ausfaller gestured to a cluster of chairs. “Please, sit.”

“I prefer to stand.”

“This was never going to be easy.” Ausfaller grimaced. “You
should
hate me, if not for the reasons you think.”

You presume to know what I feel? Louis thought but did not bother to ask.

“Something to drink?” Ausfaller synthed himself a glass of something amber and shrugged at Louis’s silence. “Suit yourself. What is the date in Known Space, Louis? Just the year will be sufficient.”

“2780 when I left. Maybe 2781 now.”

“That makes you about one hundred thirty, and I’m closing in on three hundred. And yet you look like a kid and I look younger than your true age. Carlos, Finagle bless him, is a genius.”

“And as a reward,” Louis said coldly, “you chased him, chased all my family, off Earth.”

“Let me tell you how that autodoc came about.” Ausfaller sipped his whiskey. “I once rescued Carlos and Beowulf, the astrophysicist and the adventurer, from space pirates. I was almost too late, Louis. Vacuum had severely damaged Carlos’s lungs, and then his body rejected the organs the autodoc on my ship had to offer. He nearly died before we got back to Earth.”

Ausfaller
saved
his fathers’ lives? Nessus had said nothing about that. But with Ausfaller’s words, another cryptic, half-overheard conversation from Louis’s childhood made sense. . . .

Ausfaller was still talking. “That incident is why Carlos abandoned astrophysics for nanotech. After his close call, he turned his attention to making a better ’doc.”

“So you chased us off Earth,” Louis answered again.

“I might as well have.” His hands suddenly shaking, Ausfaller drained his glass in one convulsive swig. “The ARM agent who lured—who drove—your family from Earth invented threats from me to convince Carlos to go into hiding with her. The same woman who, incidentally, then did her best to kill Bey. Carlos had refused to leave without the rest of you.

“I’ve done things I’m not proud of, Louis, and they gave credibility to Feather’s claims. It’s a long story.”

This Feather woman had left Earth with Louis’s parents? Louis remembered his surprise at the records he had found on Fafnir: two Graynor men and
two
women. Was this Feather the missing woman?

Louis crossed his arms across his chest. “I’m not going anywhere, at least till Nessus comes back.”

“If it’s any consolation, Bey came back from the dead, rebuilt by the very autodoc that worked wonders on you and me, just in time to watch me die horribly. A hole blasted through the chest will do that.” Ausfaller waved off Louis’s questions. “Beowulf didn’t kill me, not that I could have blamed him. And yes, Carlos’s autodoc saved me, too. While I was more dead than alive, Nessus found it convenient to kidnap me, selectively wipe my memories, and bring me here.”

“So why should I hate you, Ausfaller? Because your paranoia made this Feather woman’s treachery possible?”

Ausfaller shook his head. “That would be fair, but my failings go deeper. No, Louis, hate me because at a critical time I wasn’t paranoid enough. Had I suspected what Feather had in mind, I might have stopped her. Avoided a lot of pain . . . for everyone.”