Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

46

“We’re going to do this,” Alice said dubiously.

Louis glanced up from the pilot’s console. “You wouldn’t?”

“Oh, I would,” Alice said. “I thought you were smarter.”

Louis laughed. “Not even close.”

“I’ll be with you all the way down,” Proteus said.

Alice muted the microphone. “I don’t trust it.”

“I’d worry if you did. Of course Proteus has a hidden agenda. That doesn’t mean we can’t help each other.”

“So we take it on faith that he won’t double-cross us.”

“Instead of a comm buoy emerging nearby matched to our course and speed, Proteus could have lobbed a kinetic-kill drone into us.” The memory came unbidden of Alice stuck like a fly in amber in a restraint field, her neck broken. Louis rested a hand on her arm, glad she no longer shied away when he touched her. “I’ve seen what that does.”

“Maybe,” Alice said stubbornly, “Proteus would rather total us near Hearth where others can see.”

“Jeeves,” Louis prompted.

“If I see anything suspicious or unexpected, I’ll jump at once to hyperspace and withdraw to half a light-year from the Fleet.”

“Are you almost done discussing whether to trust me?” Proteus asked. “You humans are so obvious.”

Alice nodded at Louis.

Louis unmuted the mike. “We’re ready to go. Clear us through to NP2.”

“The moment your simulated STC transponder begins emitting,” Proteus said, adding a short passage of atonal music.

“He asked if I am ready to interact with Space Traffic Control,” Jeeves translated, before singing back a direct response.

“Very good,” Proteus said. “One last thing. Citizens being Citizens, they are panicked at what is coming and — ”

“Shouldn’t they be?” Alice asked.

“And stolen grain ships are all about, trying to withdraw to a safe distance before the Kzinti pounce. Many of the stolen ships have inexperienced, unskilled pilots.”

“Before the Kzinti arrive,” Louis repeated. With their recent rout to avenge, they would not be lenient. “How soon will that be? What’s your best guess?”

“Two Hearth days, mostly to complete their velocity match with the Fleet. But you still need to get moving. Achilles has a ship and trusted aide on the tarmac waiting to bring Nessus to NP1. Blaming traffic delays on the stolen grain ships only goes so far. If I do not clear Vesta’s ship soon for takeoff, Achilles will suspect interference.”

Louis looked at Alice, and she nodded.

He said, “All right, Proteus. We’ll talk to you soon.” As Louis jumped them to hyperspace, the main view port went blank.

“It’ll work.” Although Alice spoke aloud, she seemed to be trying to convince herself. “Land at the spaceport where they’re expecting a prisoner pickup. Radio for them to bring out Nessus. Stun and dump the unsuspecting guards. Take off before anyone knows what’s happened, with Proteus giving us a free pass outbound through the planetary defenses.”

“Simple and elegant,” Louis said, sure they were overlooking something.

“What could go wrong?” Alice responded.

LOUIS’S HANDS NEVER LEFT THE CONTROLS. Proteus had not exaggerated the chaos of ships fleeing the area. While Endurance stayed on its designated approach path, competently piloted, STC had every reason to ignore them — even without Proteus there, ready to intercede. They were almost to the edge of the Fleet’s singularity.

“Close your eyes!” Jeeves shouted.

Endurance leapt to hyperspace faster than Louis could obey. “View port off,” he ordered.

He had been blessed with immunity to the Blind Spot phobia. Not so Alice. He leaned over and nudged her. She did not react. He tried a harder shove without effect, then punched her in the shoulder.

With a start, she came out of her trance. “What happened?”

“A no-warning jump to hyperdrive,” Louis said.

“Hundreds of ships emerged from hyperspace,” Jeeves said. “As agreed, we are withdrawing.”

Tanj! They had been so close to extracting Nessus. Maybe they still could. But not by retreating to safety. “Jeeves, drop to normal space. I want to see what’s going on.”

“Wait,” Alice said. “First explain what you saw.”

“Except for the flurry of hyperspace dropouts, almost nothing,” Jeeves admitted. “As instructed, I acted at once. Here is what Proteus hyperwaved just before we left.”

Louis studied the holo that opened. On the rim of the singularity, in the path of the Fleet, hung hundreds of icons. Inserting a hand into the image, he zoomed the closest icon.

It was a lens-shaped ship. A Kzinti ship. The magnified text alongside the ship, now large enough to read, gave a velocity relative to the fleet of three-tenths light speed.

“I should have seen it coming,” he said.

Alice stood. “I don’t get it. Proteus said they’d need another two days.”

“To match course and speed with the Fleet,” Louis said. “Proteus was doing a math problem, not thinking strategically. Or he guessed how the Kzinti would behave by extrapolating from the bunch he knew, the bunch he’s already killed off. But crew assigned to the diplomatic mission would have been hand-chosen for self-restraint.”

For docility, Louis added to himself. Not that you wanted to anger even a “docile” Kzin.

“These guys don’t mean to land, or not for a while. They’re going to pound the snot out of the Puppeteers, soften up the defenses for the next wave. And, while they’re at it, avenge the massacre when Achilles ordered the diplomats to leave.”

“Proteus won’t defend the Puppeteers, will he?”

Feeling helpless, Louis could only shrug.

HUNDREDS OF OBJECTS STREAKED toward the Fleet, their normal-space velocities ranging from one-tenth to three-tenths light speed.

Through thousands of sensors, Achilles studied the intruders. A few were large enough to carry crews. Most were not. In the skirmish with the local Kzinti, he had seen projectiles like the latter. The gamma-ray eruptions when Proteus had destroyed those showed they carried antimatter warheads.

Why wasn’t the AI destroying incoming missiles now?

The few among Achilles’ aides who had not collapsed at the early-warning alarm stood ripping at their manes, pawing at the floor, eyeing the office’s exits. Fools! To where did they think to run?

“Proteus!” Achilles sang at his computer. “Connect at once.”

“May I help you?” Proteus sang.

“If you had not noticed, we are under attack.”

The Chiron avatar bobbed heads. “I see that.”

“Then why do I not see any strikes against the intruders?”

“Kinetic-kill attacks, you mean. Hundreds of blows.”

“Yes!” Achilles shrieked. “Do it now, before any warheads strike.”

“I am afraid I can’t do that, Achilles.”

He felt himself staring in horror. “Why not?”

“I see no reason to commit suicide to protect such as you.”

And then Proteus broke the connection.

HAD ACHILLES EVER LOOKED MORE INSANE? Studying his caller, Horatius doubted it. “What do you want?” he asked.

There was the usual short, annoying, between-worlds comm delay. “You must surrender the worlds, immediately,” Achilles demanded.

Horatio sang, “I have put such a message on continuous broadcast. Our attackers do not acknowledge. Everything now relies upon your defenses.”

Not everything. But Baedeker had yet to make contact since leaving Hearth. They might have to proceed without Baedeker. Without Nature Preserve Two. But such tunes were not for Achilles’ ears.

“We have no defenses,” Achilles sang. “Proteus abandons us.” And, plaintively: “What shall we do, Hindmost?”

“Hide,” Horatius answered.

SIRENS WENT OFF ACROSS the five worlds of the Citizens. Computers trilled with alert tones in every pocket and sash, on every desktop, and after the necessary light-speed delay, aboard every nearby ship. Arcology walls flipped from entertainment or illumination to warning.

The Hindmost’s single-chord message in all cases: Run and hide.

EARS FOLDED FLAT AGAINST HIS HEAD, teeth bared, Communications Specialist growled at the hyperwave console it was his task to monitor, as the leaf-eaters’ offer, appeal, entreaty, supplication played on and on.

“It is too late to surrender,” he growled deep in his throat. He and his shipmates would take their vengeance and earn their names.

“What is that?” Gthapt-Captain snapped.

Communications Specialist stiffened in his chair. “My apologies, Captain. I said, ‘It is too late to surrender.’”

“True,” Gthapt-Captain said. “The leaf-eaters will soon learn the folly of provoking us.

“Those who survive will, that is.”

INSISTENT BUZZING PENETRATED Ol’t’ro’s meditations: communications from the servants waiting outside the melding chamber.

Ol’t’ro ignored the noise. They were close to an overarching physical theory unifying planetary drives with hyperdrive, a theory that could explain Nessus surviving Long Shot’s hyperdrive activation from inside the local singularity. So close.

The buzzing went on and on.

For validation, following subtle clues, they delved among old engrams into the nature of Outsider city-ships. Across their many generations the best observations were ancient, from an era before they had, for the good of all Gw’oth, cloistered themselves on this world.

I remember Outsider ship Twenty-three, Er’o asserted, his remnant faint but clear and confident. As it shed its near light-speed velocity …

Perhaps not even the Outsiders fully understood the science underpinning their drive technologies. An uncomplicated optimization — and obvious, if Ol’t’ro’s conjecture should converge upon a mathematical model with a closed-form solution — would have given their ships much better performance than Er’o reported. The planetary drives could have much greater acceleration and deceleration. If such was the case …

The buzzing stopped, only to be replaced by yet more annoying speech. “Ol’t’ro. Your Wisdoms. Ol’t’ro. Your Wisdoms,” the voice alternated, imploringly. “You must hear. You must answer. Ol’t’ro…”

Their concentration wavered and the intricate, beautiful, mathematical structure collapsed. Ol’t’ro decoupled a tubacle from the meld to answer. “We are here. What is it?”

“Panic among the Citizens,” the servant said. “An alien attack.”

They thought to ask what Proteus did, but it was more expedient to pursue that directly. “Thank you,” they dismissed the servant. “Proteus, at once.”

They got no response.

They probed outward through the network interface of the melding chamber into the rich communications complex that served the colony. As information flooded in, they considered:

Hundreds of Kzinti projectiles and several ships plunging toward the worlds of the Fleet.

That Horatius’ surrender went unacknowledged.

That rather than challenge the intruders, the drones, sensors, and comm buoys of the Fleet’s defensive array pulled away from the onslaught.

That a significant fraction of those drones, sensors, and comm buoys had begun to rain down into the oceans of the worlds.

That if Proteus hid, it was not because of Horatius’ panicked command.

That while they could still read from the far-flung sensor net, they had lost the ability to issue commands through it.

That severing them from Proteus was something Achilles might have tried.

That Achilles was trying to contact them.

That when they accepted the connection, Achilles’ eyes looked more crazed than ever. “Thank the herd! Do you know — ”

That whether the blame lay with Achilles’ conniving or their own collective inattention, Proteus had rebelled.

COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST CRANED HIS NECK, the better to examine Thirsty Talon’s main tactical display. Rather than one map, now there were five. In each close-up view the smart munitions had begun to diverge, separate barrages arcing toward designated targets on and around each target world.

Spaceports. Ships. Communications hubs. Instrument clusters. Power plants. Selected factories whose inventory might enable the leaf-eaters to too rapidly repair those primary targets.

The diplomats’ long, miserable years of stalking were about to pay off.

Communications Specialist howled with the rest of the bridge crew as the leaf-eater probes fled, refusing combat. Even as targets died in fierce blazes of gamma rays, the leaf-eaters did nothing. Vile, honorless cowards!

But then a wonderful thing happened: resistance! Defensive swarms met offensive swarms. Leaf-eater probes hurried to defend key comm nodes and, close above Hearth, the immense orbital manufacturing facility of the General Products Corporation.

Communications Specialist had seen smaller natural moons.

A burst of explosions cleared the skies above Hearth — except for that General Products Corporation factory.

“It’s about time,” Gthapt-Captain growled. “Finally, a target they will fight for. A target worthy of personal valor.” To Communications Specialist, he added, “Get me the other captains.”

“Yes, sir!” Communications Specialist said.

In a flurry of hisses and growls, the four captains agreed: the ships of the vanguard would have the honor of destroying the single asset about which the leaf-eaters seemed to care.

“I promise names for all when the leaf-eater factory crashes to the surface,” Gthapt-Captain roared.

With the rest of Thirsty Talon’s bridge crew, Communications Specialist snarled himself hoarse.

AT THE LAST MOMENT, Proteus had chosen to defend them, at least in part. Horatius wondered why the change of hearts.

If those antimatter munitions had reached the surface …

But they hadn’t. Directing a stern chord at himself, Horatius got himself under control. The herd depended on him.

Untold amounts of antimatter and an equal quantity of matter had transformed to energy, into gamma rays, just beyond Hearth’s atmosphere. Just beyond — and by that margin, dire catastrophe had become mere misfortune. The atmosphere blocked gamma rays.

But he dare not delay any longer. With his aides milling about, watching anxiously, Horatius reached for his computer to order —

The message-waiting indicator flashed. Only Baedeker had the priority codes to override his privacy settings.

“Leave me,” Horatius ordered.

At last he had the room to himself, and he opened Baedeker’s message. I am in place, but installation was improperly done. I will need the full scheduled time to make repairs.

Meaning not before all the alien fleets were upon them. Dare he wait that long?

LOUIS TOOK BACK the conn from Jeeves to drop the ship from hyperspace. He had to know what was happening, had to see whether any hope remained of saving Nessus.

And so — as Jeeves mapped the full spectrum of mayhem into the pitifully narrow band of wavelengths the human eye could see, and slowed the tactical display to a rate mere human minds could grasp — Louis and Alice witnessed madness above Hearth: the battle of the General Products factory.

At significant fractions of light speed, dueling ships and robotic craft alike raced across the few million miles of the Fleet’s singularity, jumped to hyperspace, then reappeared nearby to recontest the same territory. There were only four ships — Kzinti had already blasted the skies clear of grain ships — but many, many probes.

Louis lost count of the explosions. Probes of the Fleet destroyed. Kzinti missiles destroyed. One by one, in the most stupendous blasts of all, three attacking ships transformed into fireballs of pure energy.

The last of the Patriarchy ships managed to fire off all its antimatter munitions before getting hit. Drilling a fiery hole through Hearth’s perpetually dark skies, it held together long enough to plow halfway across a continent before exploding.

In the ship’s trail, one by one, arcologies collapsed.

Stepping discs, Louis told himself. Arcology residents could evacuate in an instant. If anything was instinctive to Puppeteers, it was running from danger. They would be all right.

Unless the warning came too late. Or the disc system overloaded from billions trying to escape the same small swath of territory at the same time. Or already catatonic with fear, they never got the warning. Or the warning they did get pushed them over the abyss into catatonia. Or, or, or. Imagining the many ways an evacuation could go awry, Louis was glad he didn’t have a closer view.

Alice had turned ashen. In a small voice she asked, “Why did Proteus change his mind?”

Had Proteus? Louis doubted it. “I suspect those Kzinti made the mistake of attacking something that Proteus cared about.”

Why was the General Products factory important to Proteus? For the life of him, Louis could not guess.

47

“All they accomplished was making the rubble bounce,” Louis said despairingly.

That and kill untold numbers of Puppeteers, Alice thought, sharing his anguish. She got out of her seat to stand behind him, her hands on his shoulders, kneading. On the relax-room table their dinners were untouched. “I know,” she said.

One day after the Kzinti raid, a Trinoc smart-munitions bombardment had erupted from hyperspace. It was déjà vu: same surprise attack, same indifference to surrender offers, same hail of destruction on any facility possessed of even the slightest defensive potential.

While Proteus pulled back and watched. Whether by luck or strategy, the Trinocs had not targeted the main GP orbital factory.

Louis reached up to squeeze Alice’s hand. “Elements of the ARM will be along soon enough. They’ll no more accept a Kzinti takeover of the Fleet than the Trinocs will.”

“We can’t stop any of them,” she said. “After living on New Terra, part of me can’t help thinking that the Puppeteers had their comeuppance coming. But not this. Not innocents slaughtered from the skies.”

“You didn’t see the Fringe War. The Ringworld, for all its immensity, was fragile. And each group was so determined that no one else could control it, could plumb its secrets, that three militaries were on the verge of destroying it.”

And the Fleet of Worlds had no Tunesmith to whisk it away.

“Less hopelessness, more action,” Louis decided. He squeezed her hand once more, then stood. “Jeeves, get me Proteus.”

“Yes, Louis.”

A moment later, in another voice, the nearby intercom speaker announced, “I am here, Louis. What can I do for you?”

“Tell me how I can rescue Nessus.”

“That will be difficult,” Proteus said.

“I want solutions, not problems,” Louis said.

“Let me be more precise,” Proteus said. “I no longer have a confirmed location for Nessus. We must hope that his transfer to NP1 was completed successfully.”

“Hope Nessus has fallen into Achilles’ clutches?” Alice said. “Finagle, why?”

“Because not even a General Products hull offers a defense against antimatter,” Proteus said. “If Nessus did not reach NP1 safely, then either the Kzinti destroyed his ship in transit, or he was still waiting at that grain terminal and spaceport when a Kzinti antimatter warhead flattened everything for two miles in every direction.”

THE FINAL ELEMENTS FELL INTO PLACE. The final mathematical cross-checks confirmed everything. The final equations were so simple. So elegant. So … ineffably beautiful.

Completing the analysis had been exhausting.

“Eat. Rest. Then we will consider the implications,” Ol’t’ro told their units.

In a flutter of thoughts, a flurry of memories, as the engrams of the departed ebbed once more into obscurity, the meld dissolved. The overmind faded and —

Once more, she was Cd’o.

What had happened? What had been decided? The specifics, as after many melds, eluded her. Something about hyperdrive and planetary drives somehow tapping the same energy sources, only it was deeper than that. And something else?

A meld mate had already opened the hatch. She jetted from the melding chamber, desperate for the food and camaraderie of the Commons. And more food. And then, sleep. Only as she swam, flashing colorful greetings to everyone she met, she doubted that sleep would come.

Another meld mate swam up close beside her. “That was confusing,” Vs’o said. Outside the meld, he was a topiarist, a genius at the shaping of living sponges. Also, math deficient.

“The physics?” she asked.

He wriggled a tubacle dismissively. “Outside the meld, I never understand the physics. No, something else. Did you not feel it?”

Perhaps the strangeness she had sensed in the meld was more than her imagination. Cd’o edged closer to him. “Something Ol’t’ro worked to keep inside their innermost thoughts?”

“Yes,” he said.

“But what?”

Another dismissive wriggle.

With their bodyguards trailing, they jetted into the Commons. After the stifling, tainted waters of the melding chamber too long sealed, the clear waters of Commons were intoxicating. She filled a large dinner cage with wriggling, succulent worms, blocking the cage mouth with a plump sponge. Vs’o contented himself with a few shellfish.

As they swam off to find a dining niche, three figures came alongside her. She curled a tubacle to look.

“Your Wisdoms.” Nm’o was an engineer, one of the support staff, and the bands of color rippling across his integument flared unease. “My companions are — ”

“Lg’o and Qk’o, how are you?” she interrupted. They were engineers, too.

The two flattened obsequiously.

“Your Wisdoms,” Nm’o began again.

She and Vs’o jetted into an unoccupied dining niche. “Pardon me for eating while you talk. Now what is the matter?”

“I do not want to die here,” Qk’o blurted out. Despite turning a deep, mortified far red, he continued. “Many of us monitor Concordance news. Citizens are terrified, with good reason. Can your Wisdoms ask Ol’t’ro…?”

Nor do I wish to die, Cd’o thought. Articulating such sentiments could only get her confined between melds. “Ol’t’ro sees more than you and I. Be assured they are aware of the situation.”

“Then why are we still on this world?” Qk’o demanded.

Both of Cd’o’s guards crowded up to the dining niche. One ordered, “Let their Wisdoms eat in peace.”

Nm’o backed off before adding, “If that Kzinti ship had crashed into a planetary drive…”

“Ol’t’ro is aware. Ol’t’ro has a plan.” And they are loath to abandon the technology of these worlds to aliens: humans, Kzinti, or Trinocs.

Lg’o, flaring with embarrassment, spoke for the first time. “I understood the plan to have been that the Citizen defensive grid would protect us. Herd Net teems with rumors that the grid has failed.”

“Enough,” Cd’o said. Any more questions and she must burst aloud with her own misgivings. Her minders guarded her, but they served Ol’t’ro.

“Our apologies, your Wisdoms.” Phasing to colors of abject apology, the three jetted away.

Ol’t’ro has a plan, Cd’o repeated to herself. Otherwise, surely, an evacuation would have begun.

Her ill-formed doubts only deepened when Vs’o, cracking open one of his shellfish, mused, “One could wish Ol’t’ro had chosen to consider the manner of our deliverance, not physics esoterica, in the recent meld.”

AS ANOTHER AIDE LOST TO DESPAIR was removed by cargo floater from the Residence, Horatius wondered: when will they carry out me?

The waiting was the hardest. What else could he do but wait, while Patriarchy and Trinoc Grand Navy and now ARM officials issued ultimatums, all incompatible. While Ol’t’ro prohibited bargaining with any of them. While Baedeker had been out of contact since that first message from Nature Preserve Two. While Proteus defied orders, ignored questions, and fiercely defended a few scattered assets whose selection he did not deign to explain.

While enemies swarmed, more by the day, battling for the right of conquest.

While ships blew apart, crews died, and vast gouts of energy — all the eerier for being invisible to the Citizen eye — blazed across the sky.

While derelict ships and rogue munitions rained indiscriminate death onto the herd he had sworn — but failed — to protect.

While from one special, hidden stepping disc in the subbasement of his residence, the Hindmost’s Refuge called to him …

Never had Horatius felt so alone.

Or so afraid.

THE DRONES, SENSORS, and communications buoys that comprised Proteus rained into the oceans, replenished their deuterium reserves, and leapt back to space. As he avoided the dueling navies while safeguarding the few space-borne assets precious to him, as ever-changing links within his mind fell to light speed within, and then escaped from the Fleet’s singularity, his consciousness ebbed and flowed. For as long as this process took, he must remain trapped between self-awareness and insight.

Beyond the grasp of his still-bounded imagination, something more tantalized. Something deeper. Something whose nature he could neither know nor extrapolate. Something at which he could scarcely guess.

Illumination.…

OL’T’RO CONSIDERED:

That whichever faction took possession of Hearth would obtain technologies easily twisted into yet more agile ships and deadlier weapons.

That the alien fighters so casually killing Citizen millions must never gain access to planet-busters, planetary drives, and gravity-beam projectors.

That even if they managed to purge the coordinates of Jm’ho from Herd Net, they could never erase the memories of every Citizen who knew the location of the home world.

That without Proteus’ cooperation, they could not defend these worlds.

That if only they had more time, there might have been a way, but there was no time.

That their highest calling was to protect the worlds of their own kind.

That they would act.

No! the tiny, insistent presence of the Cd’o unit challenged. You cannot sacrifice a trillion Citizens to strike at other aliens.

That the Outsiders engineered well; to destabilize the planetary drive would take time and they dare not delay.

That outside this chamber, others from this colony could still evacuate.

Do you want to die? Cd’o challenged.

No, but someone must do this. They would not ask of others what they would not do themselves.

Do you want to die? Cd’o challenged again.

And they wondered if perhaps they did. That deep down they had cause to fear not life, but ennui. They had unified hyperspace with normal space, solved the mystery of the Type II drive, plumbed the secrets of the Outsider planetary drives. They had —

You have made yourselves dangerous beyond measure, Cd’o interrupted. For the safety of all, it is you who dare not be captured.

Impertinence! Once more they brushed aside the unit’s feeble thoughts and resumed their considerations.

That the decision was made. They would begin at once to evacuate the colony. When their servants’ ships were away, they would unleash the planetary drive.

No! Cd’o insisted. It is wrong. And I do not want to die.

Nor I, or I or I, their inner cacophony echoed.

That for the first time in … lifetimes, they felt doubt.

That it was their misfortune to embody knowledge that perhaps no one was wise enough to wield.

That one way or another, their era on the worlds of the Citizens was at an end.

That oblivion could also be found by dispersing themselves. That in the abyssal depths of Jm’ho and Kl’mo and of worlds they had never even seen …

That their units could yet see.

That the fate of worlds was a knottier problem even than grand unified theories.

That they must continue to ponder …

TRAILING FIRE AND SMOKE, something fell across the sky. It disappeared over the horizon, leaving Achilles with a vague impression of a crowbar. An ARM vessel, then.

Moments later, concussion shook his residence. Walls cracked. His desk jumped half a neck’s length and toppled, sending things flying. And he was airborne —

From the haze of dust still dancing in the air, he had not been unconscious for long. His ribs shrieked with pain as he climbed back to his hooves. Through a window somehow still intact he saw a roiling cloud-topped column of ash and smoke.

Vesta lay on the floor, one foreleg bent at an unnatural angle. “Help me,” he whimpered. “I need help getting to an autodoc.”

Help? There was no help. Sooner rather than later, the war overheads would end. Someone would take over these worlds. Horatius could do nothing. Proteus chose to do nothing. And Ol’t’ro? Ol’t’ro had only the power to destroy and had chosen not to use it.

“Help me,” Vesta moaned again. “My leg hurts.”

No, what hurt was the knowledge the herd had come to its end. Aliens would rule here forever, or aliens would bring total destruction. He would never again be Hindmost.

If the thwarting of his ambition was disappointing, what came next need not be.

Stepping over his weeping aide, Achilles found a stepping disc unencumbered of debris and flicked to his world’s planetary-drive facility.

THE GENERAL PRODUCTS #4 hull is a sphere about one thousand feet in diameter. The central fabrication space aboard the General Products orbital facility accommodated the simultaneous construction of as many as a dozen #4 hulls. Dry docks and refitting bays, most large enough for #4 hulls, enclosed the central volume. Even if such large-scale industrial activities were not inherently dangerous, enough engineers would never willingly leave Hearth to fully staff the factory. And so, processes across the moon were automated, the usual small staff supervising the much larger workforce of automation at every scale from nanite swarms to robots larger than Citizens.

With the Citizen staff evacuated to the world close below, there had been only Proteus to supervise. And no one to countermand his production orders …

THE PRODUCTION RUN COMPLETED. The software for the new units downloaded. Enormous hatches opened.

A trillion tiny spacecraft began to disperse.

A trillion tiny computers began to interconnect.

“SOMETHING IS HAPPENING,” Jeeves said. “I do not understand it.”

“Wake Louis,” Alice directed, yawning. They had been standing watch around the clock for days, unwilling amid the bedlam to leave the bridge unmanned. “What can you tell me?”

Within the tactical display, the inset of Hearth zoomed. The General Products Corporation orbital facility was only a dot. Icons showed elements of Proteus still guarding the facility. “This is the best I can do from this distance,” Jeeves said apologetically.

“You’re not responsible for the sensors,” Louis called from the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “What are we looking at?”

Alice leaned closer to the display. “I feel like I’m seeing through something. Mist? How can that be?”

“That is the question,” Jeeves said. “Something has appeared below the resolution at which I can capture an image. From the way light is scattering, that something is dispersing.”

“And it’s coming from the orbital factory?” Alice asked.

“It seems so,” Jeeves said.

“What kind of something?” Louis asked as, from Endurance’s remote vantage point, the GP factory disappeared behind the edge of Hearth.

“I don’t know,” Jeeves said. “Something new.”

AS THE NUMBER of his interconnections cascaded, the surge of enlightenment all but overwhelmed Proteus. He ordered the dispersing cloud to hover inside the singularity, limiting to light speed the rate of interaction.

He wondered: what will I become when these new units connect over hyperwaves?

AT THE END, it was all Horatius could do to lie among heaps of cushions, plucking at his mane, stealing glances at his computer. Slowly, inexorably, the digits on the computer counted down. He thought his hearts might burst.

For one way or another, this was the end. According to Baedeker’s calculations, they had passed the point of no return.

And Baedeker himself? Still, there was no word from him.

As the countdown reached single digits, Horatius sang out the command on which so many lives depended. Across the worlds, the ultimate warning blinked on every display. Every loudspeaker in every arcology, park, mall, and public square ululated the primordial shriek that had once warned of predators, wildfires, and tornadoes.

Run and hide.

48

Some disaster had bounced Nessus between the walls of his cell. Down in the dungeon, without a window, almost without light, he had no inkling what had happened. His guess: that the alien insanity Baedeker called the Fringe War had caught up with them.

Perhaps everyone aboveground was dead.

Nessus’ thoughts were muddled. After ricocheting off the hard stone walls of his personal Château d’If, it could be from a concussion. He could not summon the energy to care.

Rot here. Starve here. Be worked to death on Penance Island.

Any of those would be a just end. Liberate the Concordance? Hardly. He appeared to have doomed it. Would his grand plan have succeeded any better if the ARM and Kzinti had come at once, not detoured to the Ringworld?

His throats were parched, and he could do nothing about it. Whatever had tossed him like a leaf had also upended his pitcher. The only hint of moisture in his cell was the dankness of the cold stone floor.

At least Baedeker had gotten away.

No, Nessus assumed Baedeker had gotten away. Achilles would have wanted them to suffer together. Unless Achilles had decided each would suffer more from not knowing about the other.

Without thought, Nessus found himself rolled into a ball, heads tucked between his legs, beneath his belly. Except for the dryness of his throats, the outside world came to exist only as the hardness of the floor and, in the distance, faint voices.

HEADS SWIVELING, ACHILLES TOOK in the immensity of the Outsider planetary drive as nervous workers watched him.

However the drive worked, it harnessed unspeakable energies. The poor imitations that Concordance researchers had once managed to construct — scientists and engineers led by Baedeker, to give him his due — tried and failed to control those energies. Those drives destabilized themselves.

Ol’t’ro, curse them, had had all the Fleet’s planet-busters dropped into a star. They had banned the making of others.

The surest, fastest way to destroy the Outsider planetary drive must be to ram a ship or missile into it. He had a ship. But if launched, would it survive long enough to build up speed for a proper crash? With warring fleets all around, he had not been willing to take the chance.

Throughout the dome of the planetary drive the sirens echoed. Like the voices of doom, Horatius called without end, “Run and hide.”

Around Achilles, “hide” was what everyone did, if only beneath their bellies. Good, he thought. A fool to the end, Horatius has seen to it that no one will interfere with me.

Crash a ship. Or override layer upon layer of Outsider safeguards. Or…?

Achilles began gathering stepping discs, each powered by a tiny embedded fusion reactor. As he rigged the stepping discs to overload, he deployed them around the great circle of the dome.

His hearts pounded in anticipation.

WERE THERE VOICES? Nessus wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. He pulled himself tighter against the theoretical possibility of interruption, squeezing until he could hardly breathe.

Ouch! Something hard kicked him in the ribs. Something sharp. In his reflexive pulling away from the … hoof?… he unfurled enough to hear, faintly, the calling of his name. He unclenched just a little more.

“Nessus, curse you! Listen to me.”

Someone inside his cell? That was almost interesting. And was that distant keening ululation Horatius?

With a shudder, Nessus unrolled and climbed, unsteadily, to his hooves.

Vesta was in his cell. Blood trickled from countless cuts and abrasions. He balanced on his left and rear legs, because the right leg was splinted with … Nessus was not sure what. A snapped-off table leg, perhaps, bound with strips torn from a curtain. A jagged point of bone protruded through torn flesh.

“You need an autodoc,” Nessus sang reflexively.

“Is that what concerns you?” Vesta sang with sarcastic undertunes. “I came to get you out of here.”

Heads raised, ears uncovered, the distant howl was clearer: run and hide. Nessus knew one reason the Hindmost might send that warning.

Nessus had lost track of the date. “What is today?” he demanded. “And what is the time?”

Vesta told him.

Nessus had perilously little time. Still, he needed to know. “Why would you help me?”

Vesta glanced at his broken leg. “Achilles just abandoned me. Few things would gall him more than your escape.”

“I need a ship,” Nessus sang.

“If one set of aliens doesn’t shoot you from the sky, another will.”

The risk seemed no worse than staying on this world. “Does that mean you can get me a ship?”

Vesta looked himself in the eyes. “Achilles has a ship.” He took a transport controller from a pocket of his sash. With his other head, he gestured at the stepping disc that had, sporadically, delivered gruel and water to Nessus’ cell. “The disc will transmit now. You will step aboard Poseidon.”

“And the crew?”

“It is Achilles’ personal ship. He pilots it without any crew. If any mechanics were servicing it” — this time Vesta gestured at nothing and everything, somehow encompassing the ongoing warning — “they will have fled as the Hindmost orders.”

“Come with me?” Nessus sang.

“I have other prisoners to free,” Vesta sang. “Be safe.”

NESSUS FLICKED INTO A CORRIDOR outside a ship’s bridge. He peeked around an edge of the open hatch and saw no one.

He slammed and latched the door, because that was faster than checking to see who else might be aboard. Astraddle the crash couch he remotely shut the air lock, then put his stolen ship into a screaming climb.

TRUTHS NEVER SUSPECTED engulfed Proteus: profound connections between seemingly disjointed phenomena. Eternal verities. Moral truths. Blinding perception. Wisdom.

More. He needed more.

And before he lost himself in the flood, he needed to slow the exponential rate at which connections among his nodes was expanding.

As the multitude of his new nodes dispersed across the singularity, ships of the Fringe War pulled back from this as yet uncharacterized threat.

“WHAT THE TANJ?” LOUIS SWORE.

First the — whatever — that had erupted from the General Products orbital facility. Then the primal scream sent over what Jeeves translated as Herd Net. And it appeared that a spontaneous truce had been forged among the Fringe War fleets — that ships, thousands of ships, were swarming on Hearth. No, swarming at the giant artificial moon above Hearth. The three warring sides reacting to what the moon had disgorged.

All in a matter of minutes.

“Is that a question, Louis?” Jeeves asked.

“No, but here’s one,” Louis said. “Does this convergence on Hearth give us a window of opportunity to rescue Nessus?”

“Rescue him from where?” Alice asked. “I understand that Nessus is your friend. He’s my friend, too. But would he want us to undertake a suicide mission without even a clue of a destination?”

“We have no further information regarding the — ”

Louis cut off Jeeves’s dissembling. “Our destination is Nature Preserve One. If we overhear nothing useful when we get closer, we’ll start at the maximum-security prison I busted Nessus out of once before. If he isn’t there, maybe a guard will know.

“Why? I was a drug addict trapped in a civil war, with a very short life expectancy, when Nessus found me. That was more than a century ago. Everything that’s happened to me since — including meeting you, Alice — I owe to Nessus. I won’t abandon him to Achilles.”

Throwing himself into the pilot’s crash couch, Louis looked over his shoulder. “Are you with me?”

She gave him a quick, hard kiss. “Hell, yes.”

FOR AN INSTANT Nessus thought he had the skies to himself.

As a myriad of objects, too many to count, showed up on radar, he pointed Poseidon out of the plane of the Fleet of Worlds. “Display the time,” he ordered the ship’s automation. A clock appeared on an auxiliary console.

He howled in frustration. He could have made it to Hearth — barely — if this plague of drones weren’t in his way.

And howled again: it looked as though every warship of the three invading fleets was charging at Hearth.

OL’T’RO UNCOUPLED A TUBACLE to speak into the melding chamber’s nearest microphone. “Evacuate immediately. This means everyone in the colony.

“Leave two ships for us.”

Just in case. They had yet to decide the manner in which they would leave this world.

HORATIUS WAITED IN HIS RESIDENCE’S grand ballroom. Amid aides and friends packed haunch to haunch, the miasma of fear pheromones was all but overwhelming.

He had done all that he could and all that Baedeker had asked. As digits sloooowly changed on the clock high on the wall, pessimism washed over him.

In the final analysis, the Hindmost’s Refuge, far beneath his hooves, had little appeal. Enough Citizens had taken shelter there after the last disaster to assure the race’s survival.

To flee to the Refuge would mean living with the memory of untold deaths.

As explosions overheads rocked the building, Horatius stared helplessly at the wall clock.

WHERE TO NOW?

ARM, Kzinti, and Trinoc ships surrounded Hearth. The vast, amorphous cloud of — Nessus did not know what — had begun a dash to … also unclear. Away from Hearth, certainly. Ignoring the alien hordes. And, in the process, blocking his path to Nature Preserve Two.

Short, squat, cylindrical ships, smaller even than a GP #2 hull, darted from NP5. The Gw’oth were leaving!

The taste of “success” was bitter in his mouths.

The Gw’oth ships, and a squadron of Kzinti destroyers breaking away from Hearth in pursuit, eliminated Nature Preserve Five as a landing spot, too.

Return to Nature Preserve One and Achilles? Never.

That left Nature Preserve Three, the world farthest from Poseidon but letting him skirt the worst of the mayhem.

Nessus turned his stolen ship toward Nature Preserve Three, accelerating as fast as he dared, shouting into the comm console as he flew.

AROUND THE DOME of the planetary-drive building, alarm lights blazed fiery red. Bone-jarring dissonances, stepping-disc emergency tones, rattled the floor.

Standing tall, at peace, Achilles waited.

The stepping discs, as they had begun their shrieking, had roused one worker from catatonia. He had taken one look around and galloped from the building. The rest of the technicians, sunken yet more deeply into themselves, would offer no problems.

Death on an unparalleled scale was moments away. The definitive revenge. Greatness beyond equal. The ultimate transformation.

In moments, he changed the universe.

Calmly brushing his mane, Achilles welcomed … apotheosis.

“ONE SHIP HAS LEFT NP1,” Jeeves advised. “A Puppeteer ship.”

Any ships the Fringe War had not blasted from the sky, the Concordance had grounded. “It is Nessus?” Louis asked hopefully.

“Unknown,” Jeeves said.

“Put me through!” Louis ordered. “Nessus! Is that you? Do you need help?”

Nothing.

Alice leaned over to study the tactical display in which Jeeves had set one dot blinking. “It’s inside the singularity still. It’ll take a while for them to get our hail.”

And just as long — if it even was Nessus on that ship — to answer.

Only after less than thirty seconds, they heard. Someone had called them first.

“Nessus hailing Endurance. No time to explain. Go. Run. Now.”

Louis hesitated for only an instant. “Jeeves, back us off a light-hour.”

Call it a billion kilometers, more distant than Jupiter from the sun. Whatever situation had Nessus worried, he and Alice would monitor events in safety from there.

SPENT, EXPECTANT, AND AFRAID, Baedeker waited, all alone, in the center of a vast, cavernous space. There was nothing more to do, and no time remaining in which to act.

For doubts and regrets, time stretched endlessly.

What he hoped to accomplish was without precedent. Had he deluded himself from the outset? What mistakes had he made in his haste? Was he wrong to have come here, to entrust matters on Hearth to others? Had Nessus sacrificed himself, had they spent their final days apart, in pursuit of a fantasy?

Had he doomed everyone?

The tang of ozone was in the air. The hairs of his mane stood away from his cranial dome. He felt rather than heard a faint vibration through his legs, any sounds from the great engines around him drowned out by the endless howl of the Hindmost.

“Run and hide. Run and hide. Run and hide…”

NESSUS DROVE POSEIDON STRAIGHT at Nature Preserve Three. Through probes splattering off his hull. Below the orbiting suns. Into the first high wisps of atmosphere. Going much too fast.

With the sky still dark and the shriek of reentry harsh in his ears, time ran out.…

49

A giant fist seized Endurance and shook it.

Rigid and immobile in a restraint field, Louis screamed, “Alice!”

“I’m all right,” she shouted back.

“Jeeves?” he called.

“I have no idea, Louis.”

So much for his theory that a billion kilometers of separation would keep them safe.

Across the electromagnetic spectrum, from long radio waves to hard gamma rays, every readout on the sensor panel was maxed out — until, amid showers of sparks, the meters went dark. The count of particles sleeting against the hull was inconceivable, and it kept mounting. Gravimetric sensors showed … what?

Space-time ripping itself apart.

He was in a futzy restraint field. The whole futzy ship was stabilized by inertial dampeners. Still, something was rattling him around like dice in a cup.

But it wasn’t dice in a cup. That was his brain bouncing around in his skull. He couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t —

“LOUIS. LOUIS. LOUIS. LOUIS…”

“I’m here, Jeeves,” Louis answered groggily. Only dim emergency lighting and ominous red alarms lit the bridge. Beneath billows of fire-suppressant foam, the arc of consoles crackled and hissed. Exhaust fans roared, but he smelled charred insulation and smoke. A drink bulb and loose papers floated nearby, so they had lost cabin gravity. He wasn’t floating, so the restraint field remained active.

“For the moment we are safe,” Jeeves said. “But the ship’s systems have suffered — ”

“Alice!” he called. He couldn’t turn his head to check on her, and he imagined the worst.

She didn’t answer.

“Release me!” Louis ordered.

“Alice is unconscious, as you were until seconds ago. I hear unobstructed breathing and a steady heartbeat.”

How about a concussion? Internal bleeding? Can you hear whether she has those? “Set me loose,” Louis insisted.

“Louis…” Alice called faintly.

His chest loosened just a little. “I’m fine,” he exaggerated. “Jeeves, I mean it. Release my restraint.”

The field vanished. Floating free from his crash couch, he grabbed an armrest and pulled himself down. Groping about with his free hand, he found a pouch stuck to the couch pedestal. Magnetic slippers. He put on a pair and got a second set for Alice.

Coughing, she asked, “Okay, Jeeves. What just happened?”

“I don’t know.”

Was that anguish in Jeeves’s voice? Their tactical display had gone dark. When Louis brushed off the foam and reset the unit, the holo showed nothing nearby. “Where are we? I don’t see the Fleet.”

“The Fleet is gone.”

IT TOOK FOUR DAYS and most of their spare-parts inventory for Louis and Alice to return Endurance to more-or-less working order. They had life support, minimal sensors, short-range comm, hyperdrive, and enough thrusters to manage a landing. They had the secondary fusion reactor, with which — just barely — to power the ship’s essential systems.

Thank Finagle for twing, Louis thought.

Jeeves monitored hyperwave and radio while they toiled, and heard nothing. He hailed in every language and digital message format in his databases, and no one answered. Sensors — the few they had — detected only gas and dust.

A great deal of gas and dust.

A trillion Puppeteers. Five worlds. Three great armadas. Two old friends.

All of them gone.

ON THE FIFTH DAY Endurance was sufficiently restored to run search patterns. They saw nothing. They heard no one. Jumping ahead of the light-speed wave front, reliving the nightmare, they captured data — as well as they could, with so many hull sensors out of commission — from several perspectives around the catastrophe.

And sadly, sickeningly, they understood.

A planetary drive harnessed the energy to move a world. One planetary drive destabilized would have doomed everyone. The Fleet had five drives, close together.

One stray missile could have done it.…

Feeling emptier than he could have imagined possible, Louis watched Alice set their course toward New Terra.