Betrayer of Worlds (27 page)

The stratagem must have occurred to Achilles, too.

Maura somebody was in the copilot’s seat. She was ex-police. Unlike the drunks with whom Louis had been tussling, she probably had had martial-arts training. Sigmund had trained the trainers who had trained most first responders. She was built like a wall and could probably beat Louis to a pulp.

He decided not to try for the controls.

Enzio and Maura let Louis observe from the bridge doorway. When they dropped from hyperspace, to his surprise the radar ping located two ships. From the blip sizes, both had #4 hulls.

“Calling
Remembrance,
” Maura called. She had a booming, slightly nasal voice. “
Remembrance,
come in. This is
Addison.
”

“
Remembrance,
” answered an unfamiliar voice in English. A Puppeteer, because no real-world woman ever sounded that sexy. Not even Alice—

Louis tamped thoughts of Alice
way
down. He had to stay focused.

After an exchange of authentication codes, the Puppeteer continued. “We have opened a cargo-bay hatch. Proceed to docking.”

Fly into a hatch? Not an easy bit of piloting. “I’ve done that before,” Louis said casually.

Enzio ignored him.

“Achilles escaped Hearth on one ship. What’s the other for?” Louis asked.

“Supplies,” Maura said. “Now be quiet.”

Two
GP #4s? What the tanj did Achilles have in mind?

With a deft touch Enzio rotated
Addison
bow-out from the larger ship, backed through the yawning hatch using only his attitude thrusters, and set his ship onto a cradle in the otherwise empty hold. With a thump something clamped onto
Addison
’s hull.

Addison
brought more than mercenaries, Louis guessed. Achilles had just acquired a lifeboat.

Achilles chose the empty cargo hold he had come to consider his audience chamber to interview Louis Wu. At the appointed time, he heard a soft, respectful trilling. Achilles recognized Clotho’s voices. “You may enter,” Achilles sang.

Clotho entered first. “Excellency,” he intoned, heads held low respectfully. Louis came next, looking all around, followed by two Citizen crew.

“Leave us,” Achilles sang. Clotho and the crew withdrew, closing the door behind them.

Louis stood tall with hands clasped behind his back. “Did you bring me here to kill me?”

“If I did not trust you, Louis, would we meet alone?”

Louis shrugged. “My escorts likely remain just outside the door. Holding stunners, I think. You wouldn’t risk potentially lethal weapons near you. It’s easy enough to toss a stunned person out an air lock.”

Achilles looked himself in the eyes. “You have learned to understand us, I see.”

“So
will
you have me killed? You will not have forgotten that I stunned you.”

Achilles sat astraddle a comfortably padded bench. He stretched a neck briefly to point at a human-style chair. “Sit. No, I have not forgotten. But Nessus was your hindmost, and you followed his orders.”

“Nessus.” Louis spat on the floor. “That’s what I think of Nessus. If he had any honor, I would be home by now, a rich man.”

“Without memories of your adventure,” Achilles reminded.

“Without nightmares. You can’t imagine how often I dream of that Pak ship filled with corpses.”

“Let me share something with you. I have come to learn Beowulf Shaeffer is your . . . I believe the term is stepfather. I knew Beowulf. I respected him a great deal. When I worked in Human Space for General Products, I hired him twice.
And
I paid him in full both times.”

“Keep talking,” Louis said.

“Nessus treated you badly. He poisons the mind of the Hindmost, thus serving the Concordance badly. And so it falls to me to end the threat of the Gw’oth.” And to take command of Hearth, and destroy my enemies, as my reward.

“I have watched you work, Louis, and come to respect your talents. Join me. Be an asset to our cause and teach Nessus the lesson he deserves.”

“Two ships against a Gw’oth war fleet? I didn’t think Citizens went in for suicide missions.”

Achilles was unaccustomed to being questioned. He reminded himself he valued the human’s independent mind. “We have weaponry the Gw’oth cannot even suspect.”

“Pak technology.” Louis narrowed his eyes in thought. “And when we’re done, Achilles? Will you honor Nessus’ bargain?”

“When we succeed everything changes, for the herd cherishes those who can keep them safe. Baedeker will be gone and I will be Hindmost. The reward of the Hindmost will vastly overshadow whatever paltry reward Nessus might have provided.” Or fail me, and you
will
go out the air lock.

“And I’ve watched you at work,” Louis said. “You do not take no for an answer. So tell me where I start.”

Louis’s first assignment was entirely mundane. What Maura had called a supply ship turned out to be a Ministry of Science research
vessel. The New Terrans got to off-load most of its supplies to
Remembrance.

Sigmund knew from Nessus that a Concordance research ship had gone missing.

No one volunteered what the other vessel would do after the cargo transfer. Skulk around Hearth, coordinating with Achilles’ loyalists, Louis supposed.

The two big ships flew in tandem, a few kilometers apart. The New Terrans shuttled between cargo holds by stepping disc. Louis asked for his pocket comp back to use as a stepping-disc controller. Enzio declined but found Louis a spare computer.

For the largest items they used floaters to shift cargo onto freight-sized discs. With hold gravity turned down the crates were light, but they still had inertia and, all too often, awkward sizes and shapes. It was hard, mindless work, and it left Louis fretting about how to reestablish contact with Sigmund.

Packaged emergency rations. Vats of biomass for synthesizers. Synthesizers. Stepping discs. Space probes, basketball-sized, built inside General Products #1 hulls. Puppeteer autodocs and pressure suits. Portable power sources. Lab instruments. Cable reels. Equipment consoles. Spare parts for shipboard systems. Raw materials for machine shops.

Three of the New Terrans could read Puppeteer labels, which was fortunate because Louis could not. They had to know what was what to appropriately deliver the goods to holds and storerooms, labs and workshops, closets and pantries throughout
Remembrance.

The ministry vessel also carried tens of powerful lasers. For experiments into long-range communication or improved fusion devices, Louis supposed—or so Achilles, as Minister of Science, might once have justified equipping a research ship. The lasers would make excellent weapons. Puppeteers unwired the lasers and secured them in crates that the humans moved.

Then things got interesting.

At the back of the last cargo hold, looming larger than anything Louis had yet handled, were a dozen or so enormous black slabs. No matter how low they dialed gravity, these things were
huge.
Inertia did not care about gravity. The monoliths would be tough to move.

“What are these?” he asked Maura.

She looked up and down several slabs. “The labels only say, ‘
MAIN EXTERIOR HOLD
.’ ”

Near deck level each monolith had what looked like a service bay. Louis released a latch and slid open the access panel. He uncovered fat connectors for power hookups, skinny connectors for fiber-optic cables, and little digital readouts.

Did these slabs get wired together? In his mind’s eye, he pictured something like Stonehenge.

Sigmund, in one of his war stories, had described something like that. A device from the long-ago conflict with the Pak. One of the unsuccessful, homegrown planetary drives that instead tore worlds to gravel.

That Achilles controlled such a device made Louis’s blood run cold.

The Fleet of Worlds, slowly but steadily accelerating toward galactic north since the discovery of the core explosion, had attained almost half light speed. (The New Terrans, who had for decades pushed their planetary drive closer to redline to get some separation from their former masters, traveled a bit faster still.)

Remembrance
started with Hearth’s normal-space velocity and quickly matched course and speed with the Gw’oth war fleet rushing its way.

Louis’s experience in the Wunderland civil war—greatly embellished, because who could know otherwise?—made him the expedition’s lone military veteran. Enzio remained the leader of the combat crew, but Louis’s veteran status made him tolerated on the bridge. Even when Enzio was not running weapons drills. Even though Clotho, the ship’s hindmost, seemed skeptical about Louis.

It probably helped that after the cargo-loading exercise, Puppeteers and New Terrans alike knew that Louis could not read Citizen writing.

He couldn’t. But Louis had spent a long time on
Aegis
’ bridge, comparing readouts on his console with the displays on the Puppeteer version, watching Nessus operate his controls.

Louis had a tanj good idea what most of
Remembrance
’s bridge instruments had to say—

Enough to begin to worry Achilles might actually be able to
win
his war.

If a sphere could be said to have a midsection,
Remembrance
’s bridge occupied most of its waist. Concentric circles of consoles ringed the deck.
Most consoles and crash couches accommodated Puppeteers, but one cluster was designed for humans. The combat cluster.

Enzio drilled his team two shifts every day. While
Remembrance
was in hyperspace they drilled with simulators. When
Remembrance
dropped back to normal space they drilled with live instruments and shot at target drones. They practiced with anti-space-junk systems. They practiced targeting manually. And Louis, to maintain his credibility—and with it, free run of the bridge—had to demonstrate weapons competence.

Why did they keep hopping through hyperspace? The New Terrans claimed not to know and the bridge crew would not say. Whatever the reason, after every emergence
Remembrance
disgorged squadrons of free-flying spacecraft: most of the probes Louis had helped unload from the Ministry of Science vessel. Hyperwave buoys, Louis guessed, judging from the associated flurries of activity at the bridge’s comm console. He could not imagine why they deployed so many relays, so close together.

“Redeploy drones,” Enzio called for the tenth time that shift.

A small fraction of the little space probes—still numbering in the dozens—were target drones. Each drone carried thrusters, a fusion reactor, and optronics for guidance, comm, and sensing.

“Drones repositioned,” the stringy-maned Citizen named Hecate reported from a supervisory console. He was one of the few Puppeteers aboard who spoke English. “Thrusters active. Stealth active.”

A stealthed General Products hull was
very
stealthy, actively canceling both neutrino probes and electromagnetic energy across the spectrum. It gave only two hints to its presence.

The first clue, but only in one very specific direction, was a jet of neutrinos. Every GP hull blocked neutrinos to hide the emissions of its onboard fusion reactors—except in one small area left transparent to the particles. Otherwise the neutrino flux from the reactors would accumulate, bouncing inside forever. Over time there might be consequences. Puppeteers built these things, after all.

The Gw’oth had stealth, too, but not impregnable hulls. They had not managed to reverse-engineer General Products hull technology—and the Concordance refused to sell them GP hulls. Lacking GP hulls, the reactors aboard Gw’oth ships spewed neutrinos in all directions.

“Evasive maneuvers,” Enzio ordered. “Begin.”

“Maneuvering,” Hecate acknowledged. “Drones turning.”

For this exercise Louis sat at a sensor console. The drones reoriented,
now beaming their neutrino emissions straight at
Remembrance,
and his display lit up. It was as though the targets had just emerged from hyperspace.

“Six drones,” Louis announced. Hecate varied the number of targets to keep the humans alert. “Weapons lock on four. Five. Five. Still five.”

The sixth drone, jinxing and zigzagging, kept outwitting the targeting software. Space junk did not make evasive maneuvers.

“Fire on automatic,” Enzio called.

“Three hits,” Hecate reported. The lasers had been set to minuscule output levels and the drones carried coherent-light sensors.

On Louis’s display, three of the targets flipped from red, for active, to black.

“Switch to manual,” Enzio said.

Maura and a hatchet-faced man named Rogers started firing short bursts at the remaining “live” drones. And Louis stole a glance at the hyperwave-radar display.

Hyperwave was the other way to find a stealthed GP hull. Anywhere outside of gravitational singularities hyperwaves interacted weakly with normal matter. Had it been otherwise, hyperwave transceivers and hyperdrive shunts would not have been possible. Because hyperwaves traveled instantaneously, the hyperwave echo off an object only revealed a direction. But if one deployed arrays of hyperwave transceivers, and those units coordinated among themselves instantaneously by hyperwave, and they triangulated . . .