Betrayer of Worlds (33 page)

“Take her out, Enzio,” Louis said.
Addison
was barely outside when Louis engaged the hyperdrive.

Sensors flashed from intense hyperwave backwash. The treacherous humans were gone.

On the status board, more and more zones reported themselves free of smoke. Achilles announced over the intercom, “There is no cause for alarm. The fires have been contained. I will release the emergency quarantine, deck by deck, as that becomes safe.”

And then we will restart the reactors and resume course. Wu could not stop him. But the human
would
pay later. Pay dearly. Pay and pay and . . .

Louis’s eyes were glued to his wristwatch. “Three. Two. One.”

At zero, timers triggered the second set of devices deployed earlier by stepping discs.
These
bombs did more than smoke.

An hour departed from
Remembrance,
Louis dropped
Addison
from hyperspace. “I need to contact the authorities,” he told Enzio.

“Uh-huh,” Enzio said casually. Too casually.

Endangering New Terran neutrality was serious business, and Louis was the one witness. Enzio and his gang could easily enough chuck their problem out the air lock.

Would they? The next seconds were critical.

Louis said, “The six of you have been nothing but helpful. That’s all I’ll have to say.”

“And about the manner of your arrival?” Enzio prompted.

“I needed to find Achilles. You brought me where I wanted to be.” Louis smiled. “As I remember it, I volunteered.”

Enzio mulled that over. “Go ahead. Make your call.” But he stayed on the bridge to monitor.

Louis took out his comp and unlocked the classified access codes. He made the call.

Sigmund responded immediately, apparently from home. “Louis! It’s good to see you.”

“This is a friend, Sigmund.” Louis left it to Enzio to introduce himself if he wished. The comm delay in and out of New Terra’s singularity left him plenty of time to decide. “He and his crew got me aboard Achilles’ ship. And as important, they just got me off.”

“New Terra thanks you, friend,” Sigmund said. “Louis, you know the protocol.”

Louis took
protocol
as a protocol-gamma reference. As in: report in private. To try excluding Enzio seemed likely to shatter the fragile bonds of trust. Sorry, Sigmund.

Louis said, “In a minute. First, what about Alice?”

“En route, checking in routinely. Her last contact was yesterday, so she’ll be out of touch for a while. She’ll be glad to hear you’re all right.” Sigmund’s brow furrowed. He wanted his report.

“Here is the story, Sigmund.” Louis compressed weeks of adventure into a few minutes. “If my bombs worked, Achilles is disarmed. The planet-buster, busted. The fusion suppressors were inside GP number one hulls, but concussion should have taken out many of them.”

Louis withheld one detail: he had burgled a buoy. Achilles could not know, not until someone checked out the little spacecraft one by one. Thrusters, micro-reactor, and hyperwave transmitter occupied most of each basketball-sized hull. The Pak-inspired fusion suppressor itself was impressively tiny. Louis had crammed the small space he had emptied with random optronics parts from a spares cabinet. With luck and enough concussion, maybe no one would notice.

Fifteen minutes after launching from
Remembrance,
on a recycler break, Louis had popped into his old cabin. The suppressor circuitry went from jumpsuit pocket to the toe of a spare boot in his closet. Fusion suppression was
not
a capability he wanted in the hands of soldiers of fortune.

“So what do you think Achilles will do?” Sigmund asked.

Louis had wracked his brains for days, trying to anticipate. He had had no insight, only intuition. He knew with whom they contended. “He won’t quit, Sigmund.”

Sigmund sighed. “I suppose not. So when can we expect you home?”

“I’ll get back to you,” Louis said, and broke the connection.

“You don’t trust Ausfaller,” Enzio observed.

“Let’s just say,” Louis said, “that forgiveness is easier to obtain than permission.”

“Forgiveness for
what
?”

Louis gazed longingly at the stars. If he had his way, none of them would see normal space for a while. “The woman I love is going to Kl’mo, hoping to broker a peace deal.”

“While a Gw’oth fleet races straight at her. Probably Achilles, too.”

Louis had been as cold as ice through the escape. Fear for Alice made him tremble. “Whatever Achilles tries, he will not want witnesses.”

“And how do you see this playing out?” Enzio asked pointedly.

Everyone was racing toward galactic north.

Departing from New Terra, Alice had the shortest trip to Kl’mo. But she had begun with New Terra’s normal-space velocity. The plan had been to take long breaks from hyperspace, shedding velocity on the way, to appear less threatening upon arrival.

Setting out from the failed ambush, from just south of the Fleet of Worlds, Achilles had a bit farther to travel to Kl’mo. But he had no interest in
Remembrance
shedding the normal-space velocity it had inherited from the Fleet. And he wasn’t taking many or long breaks in normal space.

The Gw’oth war fleet was not far behind
Remembrance
—and they would keep gaining until Achilles managed to restart his ship’s fusion reactors. The Gw’oth had matched normal-space velocity with Hearth before Louis warned them off. Best guess, they meant to use that velocity to threaten Kl’mo with kinetic-kill weapons. So the Gw’oth ships would not be slowing down, either.

“I think,” Louis said, “that Alice, Achilles, and the Gw’oth warships will all arrive at about the same time.”

“And us, too? That’s what you’re thinking.”

“And us, too,” Louis agreed. “If you will let Sigmund hire you and your ship.”

Enzio leaned back in his crash couch, fingers interlaced behind his head, eyes closed in thought. He finally said, “We would have to be crazy.”

Louis said nothing.

“And do what when we arrive?”

“Improvise,” Louis said.

Achilles thought: Yet again, I can rely only on myself.

Two crew had been frightened to death. More, including Clotho, had lapsed into catatonia so deep that not even blasting the hull-breach alarm could animate them. They were in stasis, stacked in an out-of-the-way storeroom. Even among the crew back on duty, several exhibited insanity beyond the ability of autodocs to treat.

Louis Wu had much to answer for.

But first—although the planet-buster was crushed beyond repair—the Gw’oth must be defanged.

.   .   .

Louis waited in his cabin while the New Terrans, crowded into
Addison
’s relax room, debated. His future. And Alice’s. And the fates of several worlds.

After far too long: a chime from his pocket computer. Louis grabbed it. It showed Enzio’s comm ID. “Yes?”

“You got us out of a real mess, Louis. We decided we owe you.” Enzio paused. “On Ausfaller’s promise he’ll pay us.”

“You’ll have it.”

“Apologies, Your Wisdom.”

“Unavoidable,” Sr’o said, neither knowing nor caring who had bumped her or who had spoken. She could not summon the energy to protest the unwanted honorific. When last she had counted two fivefolds swam laps with her. They jetted about for exercise, and to clear their minds, and in vain hopes of making themselves weary enough to sleep.

The melding chamber, as crammed as it was, remained the least crowded large space aboard
Mighty Current
. Through the transparent partitions she could see into the more congested control center and engine room. She would be back in the control center soon enough.

The colony was ever vigilant because Ol’t’ro was certain an attack must come. They poured their resources into weapons because to do any less might doom them all. They kept
Mighty Current
hopping around Kl’mo system because any defense coordinated from inside the singularity was destined to fail.

And they were stressed beyond endurance, waiting.

Drowsiness continued to elude Sr’o. With ripples of resignation (dorsal, yellow and green), she acknowledged that she could not sleep, and that once again a duty shift loomed.

Until then she would ponder the colony’s ever more precarious ecosystem. All her interventions had been futile, the transplanted biota dwindling with each passing day. She saw no solution without new supplies from Jm’ho.

Yet they did not dare divert resources to seek healthy stocks. Ol’t’ro calculated an assault was imminent, and decreed the colony must defend foremost against genocidal violence. Absolute rulers were absolutely mad. Before escaping, the Gw’otesht had watched Bm’o’s descent into absolute power and self-absorption.

Sr’o found herself reduced to hoping the onslaught was imminent. Unless an attack came quickly—even if the colony survived it—there would be no colony left to seek resupply from the home world.

There was a three-way collision midchamber, and a tangle of tubacles. “Sorry,” she said automatically. “My thoughts were elsewhere.”

She did not doubt Ol’t’ro—that would be too much like doubting herself—but the colony’s options tormented her. Die slowly? Die quickly? Return to servitude? Ol’t’ro insisted none of those would come to pass. The others would—

The pulsating glare of an alarm lamp sliced through the ship.
Intruder alert.
Sr’o jetted to the floor to peer into the control center. A second alarm began to blink.
Hyperwave hail.

The captain put the incoming call on speaker. The hail was in the New Terran language, English. “. . . Terran embassy ship
Metternich
. Repeat, this is the New Terran embassy ship
Metternich
. We come in peace and friendship. This is . . .”

The tactical display presented hyperwave-radar data from the recently completed defensive array. A big blip, Sr’o thought, the ship significantly larger than hers. But humans were bigger than Gw’oth.

That the newcomer spoke English proved nothing. Citizens knew English. Anyone dealing with the New Terran traders learned English. It was trivially simple compared to any Gw’oth language.

If the ship did originate from the human world, they had taken pains to shed their normal-space velocity. Their course vector did not point to the inner solar system. Sr’o saw nothing immediately threatening.

“
Metternich,
” the captain responded, “this is Kl’mo planetary defense. Maintain course and speed. Await further instructions.”

“. . . peace and friendship. This is—” The recording stopped and a new voice began. Sr’o thought it was a human woman’s voice. “Kl’mo planetary defense, we are pleased to find your colony still well. My name is Alice Jordan, and Sigmund Ausfaller sent me. I would like to speak to Ol’t’ro.”

The sixteen were already jetting to the melding chamber.

“We are Ol’t’ro,” they declared.

“Before we start,” the one calling herself Alice Jordan said, “I bring a message from Sigmund. I am to tell you, ‘Apology accepted.’ ”

The probability that the intruder was New Terran rose significantly. “We meant him no harm,” Ol’t’ro replied.

“You asked Sigmund for help. There is little New Terra can do without taking sides, and that we cannot do.”

Take sides. Ol’t’ro remembered humans’ peculiar appearance, symmetrical only around one vertical plane. Sides: an odd term, but they understood. “Little you can do, but not nothing. What can you do?” What
will
you do?

“You and the other side may not need to fight. Perhaps a neutral party can help you find a middle ground.”

Middle ground: more strangeness. The only middle grounds on Jm’ho were the nutrient-free wastelands far from any hydrothermal vents. Worthless. The middle “ground” between stars was void, likewise useless.

Alice prattled on for a while, all platitudes. It was pie in the sky, wishful thinking, pipe dreams, the wire talking. From Ol’t’ro’s long-ago sojourn with humans during the Pak War, they had an excellent grasp of English idiom, even though the antecedents often eluded them.

Not even Jeeves, Sigmund’s artificial intelligence, had been able to explain every human expression.
That
Jeeves had been killed in the Pak War. The death made Ol’t’ro sad: an AI was as potentially immortal as a Gw’otesht. Someday, maybe they could meet another Jeeves.

“A compromise,” Ol’t’ro summarized eventually.

“Exactly.”

“Explain the compromise between the side who would be free and the side who would enslave.”

Alice was silent for a long while. “My bridge crew reports I am talking with a source moving at half light speed.”

“A hyperwave relay,” Ol’t’ro lied.

The inevitable war fleet from Jm’ho would race out of hyperspace. Every time Ol’t’ro did the calculation, their prediction was the same: the Tn’Tn’ho’s ships would have matched velocities with the Fleet of Worlds. With that velocity they would make themselves less threatening to the Citizens—and they might even pretend to be Citizens themselves. With that velocity they would be
very
threatening to the fragile colony Ol’t’ro must defend.