Betrayer of Worlds (34 page)

And so
Mighty Current
had accelerated to the Fleet’s normal-space velocity. When, inexorably, the battle opened, when every instant would count, Ol’t’ro would have no need to adjust for relativistic distortions.

If
they had correctly divined the enemy’s thoughts.

Meanwhile, like its constellation of defensive probes,
Mighty Current
remained near the solar system with an unending series of hyperspace micro-jumps.

“Very well,” Alice said. “About how we might help. As a neutral party, we have our own perspective. We can be objective. We may recognize options the conflicting sides have not. We may—”

Ululating sound over the hyperwave channel. At the same instant, bright lights resumed strobing through the clear floor of the melding chamber:
intruder alert
.

On the bridge, the captain redirected a portion of the hyperwave array at the disturbance. “A very large ship,” he called. “Making half light speed northward directly toward Kl’mo.”

It all happened at once.

Alice was already struggling to keep pace with Ol’t’ro. Sigmund had warned her—about the commanding, resonant voice the Gw’otesht would adopt; the stunningly quick thoughts; the seemingly intuitive leaps whose thoughtful underpinnings she would only deduce later—but she had had to
experience
the ensemble mind to understand. To be properly humbled. She talked slowly, circuitously, verbosely, buying with her wordiness extra seconds for reflection.

How could she find a possibility Ol’t’ro had not envisioned long before?

Metternich
was only minutes out of hyperspace, the domain visible to its light-speed-bounded active sensors still limited. Every glance she could spare toward the tactical display revealed another one or two neutrino sources whizzing about at relativistic speeds. Neutrino emissions meant fusion reactors, but what devices did those reactors power? As she watched the display, frowning in concentration, one of the sources winked out. Elsewhere, seconds later, another appeared.

Meanwhile, the hyperwave detector was alive with ripples. From the transient neutrino sources, hopping through hyperspace? From the hyperwave buoy Ol’t’ro claimed? She did not understand boosting a relay to such high speed.

Meanwhile her earnest young aide, by his stance and facial expression
and standing
way
too close, signaled frantically for her attention. “What?” she barked.

“A message from Sigmund just uploaded from a comm relay.” He handed her a comp, and perhaps by accident started the message playing. “Sorry to add to your worries, Alice, but Achilles is probably headed your way and out for Gw’oth blood. He may not be too happy about humans, either. Louis says—”

Louis! She had worried since he dropped from sight. That had to wait. She tried to foresee Achilles’ probable actions even as she kept speaking with Ol’t’ro. “Very well,” she said. “About how we might help. As a neutral party, we have our own perspective. We can be objective. We may recognize options the conflicting sides have not. We may—”

And a bridge alarm wailed. “Something big just dropped from hyperspace,” the captain announced.

On
Remembrance
’s bridge, no longer crowded, Achilles focused on the mass pointer. A long blue line representing his destination groped hungrily at him. The longer he waited, the surer the doom of the Gw’oth world. Deploying fusion suppressors—in one cargo hold, Louis Wu’s explosive device had fizzled—would be safer without any risk of local interference.

Curse that Louis Wu! Achilles needed badly to
smash
something.

But in the back of his mind, terror gibbered. Wait
too
long and they would disappear into the singularity’s hungry maw. The ultimate predator . . .

Hecate stood, trembling, alone among the combat consoles. He kept glancing furtively at the mass pointer.

“We will be safe,” Achilles sang impatiently.

“Yes, Excellency.”

“Launch status?” Achilles prompted, more to occupy Hecate’s thoughts than expecting anything to have changed.

“Missiles ready. The cargo-hold hatch is armed. The pressure curtain is active.” A surveillance hologram changed as Hecate panned a security camera. “Excellency, Phoebe has fallen into catatonia. The others stand ready.”

Just beyond that hatch, one button push away, lurked—nothing. Less than nothing. Oblivion. The wonder was not that Phoebe had collapsed, but that
Hebe and Theia had not. But the hatch must be opened as quickly as possible, the probes set to thrust outward through the air-pressure curtain.

The long blue line nearly licked the mass pointer’s transparent sphere. Achilles called, “Return to normal space in three . . . two . . . one . . . now.”

The stars returned. One shone far brighter than the rest: the sun that warmed their target. The sun at which
Remembrance
raced at half light speed. With attitude thrusters, Achilles spun the ship so that his kinetic-kill weapons faced directly sunward.

“Hatch open,” Hecate reported. “Missiles report sensor lock.”

“Launch.”

“Missiles launched!” Hecate called.

On Achilles’ instruments, two objects streaked away.

And an inexplicable number of neutrino sources seemed to be zipping about in all directions. Without waiting, Achilles plunged
Remembrance
back to hyperspace before the ship crossed into the singularity.

From Hecate: a bleat of sheer terror. Then, silence.

Eyes closed, Achilles sidled to the combat center. By touch he found the
ON/OFF
switches and powered down the video displays. When he dared to open his eyes, Hecate still stared where the surveillance hologram of the cargo hold had been—without focus, lost in some infinite distance. Lost in the Blind Spot.

“Hecate,” Achilles sang. No response. “Hecate,” he repeated, much louder. Nothing. He raised a forehoof and gave Hecate a strong shove in the flank.

“Excellency.” Hecate shuddered. “What have you
done
?”

“Probably saved us,” Achilles sang.

But not the crew in the cargo hold, its enormous hatch gaping into hyperspace. Only Phoebe, his eyes and ears and consciousness withdrawn into a tightly rolled ball of flesh, might survive.

Ng’t’mo floated in their tiny chamber, melded and waiting. Waiting on the master of masters. Waiting to leave hyperspace. Waiting for sensors to come alive. Waiting for threat and conflict. Waiting for the deaths certain to come.

Whose deaths? That they must wait to learn.

.   .   .

“Surrender or die!” Bm’o shouted. His fleet was just out of hyperspace.

A moment later chaos erupted across the control center. How could a reply come so soon? Radio waves had only begun their light-speed trek into the inner solar system. Unless the reply came from outside the singularity, via a relay very close by.

“We will do neither,” a familiar voice said.
Ol’t’ro.
“Look around. We have an enemy in common.”

And in his displays Bm’o saw
another
vessel. It was huge, larger than all his ships combined. It must be a Citizen ship! Its normal-space velocity matched that of Bm’o’s fleet. And inward from that monstrous ship—

Fusion flames drove missiles streaking toward the rebel world.

A wondrous puzzle!

Ng’t’mo drank in the data sent to their cage from the ship’s control center. The sun and planets. Neutrino sources racing at great speeds in all directions. And two large ships, not part of the master of masters’ fleet. And missiles.

Two missiles raced toward the world where Ol’t’ro must live!

Ng’t’mo remembered puzzling whether anything could defend against missiles at these speeds. They remembered concluding it was possible. And that Ol’t’ro was smarter than they.

They hoped they were correct.

Louis was on hyperwave the moment
Addison
dropped from hyperspace. “
Metternich,
a hostile Puppeteer ship is on its way.
Metternich,
be prepared to evade.”

From the copilot’s couch, Enzio stared in disbelief. He keyed furiously at his console. A hologram popped up, a riot of colors. “Louis, you need to look at this.”

What was he seeing? A solar system. Many objects, neutrino sources, rushing in all directions at relativistic speeds. Two streaked straight for the inner planets!

“We are busy,” Ol’t’ro broadcast. They closed channels to
Metternich
and the Tn’Tn’ho’s fleet.

The huge Citizen ship plummeted toward Kl’mo at half light speed. The missiles, accelerating steadily, plunged faster still. But aboard
Mighty Current,
Ol’t’ro had almost the same relative velocity. They studied their defensive array, its many elements racing in all directions. Ol’t’ro selected two probes speeding crosswise to the plunging missiles. The closing velocity between those probes and the missiles approached three-quarters light speed.

Hyperwave signals were instantaneous; the course and bearing calculations were quickly completed. Ol’t’ro dispatched targeting information to their chosen interceptors. The interceptors micro-jumped through hyperspace to the optimum launch points, where they would also receive final readouts from the hyperwave-radar system.

Ol’t’ro repeated the process with a second pair of probes.

The missiles plunged across an invisible border, into the singularity where hyperwave ceased to function. Ol’t’ro used visual observations to target a third set of interceptors, knowing the data was obsolete.

The first pair of interceptors fell into the singularity, beyond instantaneous communication. From now on, the antimissiles must guide themselves.

And Ol’t’ro could only watch.

Half a minute—and a light-hour removed from the singularity—later,
Remembrance
dropped from hyperspace. Achilles waited impatiently for the light and neutrinos from his missiles to reach him. Hecate, without asking permission, galloped from the bridge to care for those in the cargo hold. Futile.

Achilles stared, transfixed, into the tactical display. He saw a swarm of ships: the main Gw’oth fleet had arrived. Streaking to the colony world, he saw the missiles’ fusion exhausts—

With two unknown neutrino sources shooting directly at them.

The telescopic displays flashed impossibly bright in the instant before overload protection cut in. Tears filled his eyes.

A proximity alarm screamed. An object, relativistic, had appeared from nowhere. The object rushed straight at him!

Another of whatever had destroyed his missiles?

The ship’s hull might survive impact, and the emergency stasis field for his crash couch
would
protect him. Nothing else within the ship could
possibly withstand the concussion. Achilles’ mind flashed back in horror to the hollowed-out hulk of
Argo
.

Bleating in terror, Achilles slapped
Remembrance
back into hyperspace. He was not safe here. No one was.

But where did he dare go now?

Louis knew he was no diplomat. He told himself that that was for the best, for surely no negotiation had ever unfolded under circumstances so strange.

Leaders of both Gw’oth factions were on ships outside the singularity, able to converse instantaneously by hyperwave. But Bm’o and Ol’t’ro also consulted with counselors back home, entailing many hours for light-speed delays within their respective solar systems.

Louis and Alice could also communicate instantaneously, with each other and with the space-based Gw’oth. Sigmund sometimes joined the conversations. Because New Terra flew free, without a star, that round-trip comm delay was less than two minutes. (Closer to two minutes for Alice than for Sigmund or Louis. From her frame of reference, New Terra and its singularity had relativistic speed. Time dilation added about twenty percent to the delay she experienced.)

Twice the Hindmost called, the round-trip comm delay with the Fleet of Worlds a still-manageable three minutes. He apologized for the rogue actions of Achilles, promised severe punishment once Achilles was apprehended, hinted at opportunities for trade, and offered good will to everyone—while reminding everyone that the Concordance would soon be far away.

Every ship but
Metternich
had started with or accelerated to the normal-space velocity of the Fleet of Worlds: about half light speed toward galactic north. Ol’t’ro’s planetary defense probes raced just as quickly, but in all directions.

To stay near Kl’mo—whether defensively, offensively, or as neutral observers—spacecraft kept vanishing to hyperspace to loop back. No one trusted anyone; disappearances came without warning, even midsentence. The
hyperspace jumps could be seconds or minutes, and to avoid predictability, jumps were also made for no reason beyond keeping everyone else off balance.

Louis’s bridge displays were an ever-changing froth of ships appearing and disappearing, of space writhing with hyperwave ripples from ships and the more numerous defensive probes entering and returning from hyperspace at points around the solar system.

And most ships were armed to the teeth. And no one could keep pace with Ol’t’ro’s thoughts or Sigmund’s paranoia. And when Gw’oth factions chose to speak directly, the humans were left to speculate among themselves.