by Larry Niven
Nessus raised his heads optimistically. “Can you run drives in tandem?”
A digital herd meandered in a nearby arc of wall. Fields of tall grain rippled in the simulated breeze. Baedeker took a moment to adjust the image. “Nothing we have seen contradicts Twenty-three’s warning to Sigmund.”
“That is unfortunate,” Nessus said.
They stood watching the idyllic scene, Baedeker wondering what he could add to that.
“You will succeed,” Nessus finally said. “And when you do, much will become possible for you.”
Baedeker blinked. “What do you mean?”
“The Hindmost will be in your debt. Have you given thought to the path you will take then?”
Stress and exhaustion filled Baedeker’s waking hours, the weight of worlds heavy on his shoulders. “Truthfully, no.”
Nessus edged closer, brushing flanks intimately. “I am not without influence. You have it within your grasp to have a great future. If you were to express an interest in government and show some hints of sympathy with Experimentalist policy. . .”
Then opportunities would come Baedeker’s way. Was he interested? Maybe—if not for the reasons Nessus might suspect. Baedeker temporized. “What sort of interest in government?”
“Something in the Ministry of Science, perhaps.” Nessus swiveled his heads to gauge Baedeker’s reaction. “Something very well positioned.”
Such as Minister of Science? To direct science policy for the Concordance would be no small thing. Baedeker felt tempted and terrified in equal measure. But there was an element of temptation Nessus could not have anticipated.
With government authority might come action against the Gw’oth threat.
55
The kids were bathed and changed for bed, and Penny’s uncle Sven had come over to watch them. Neither ecological nor existential threats showed any signs of worsening overnight. Prison sensors showed Thssthfok was soundly asleep. Circumstances would never get better.
Sigmund offered Penelope his arm. They went outside to stroll to a nearby restaurant. Master chef, all-natural ingredients, live band, the works. And, in unison, they yawned.
He had to laugh. “Going to be quite the night on the town.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, covering another yawn. “Just a lot going on.”
The cloudless night sky was bleeding away the day’s heat, putting a nip in the air. Stars sparkled overhead. Sigmund tried and failed to imagine a big moon hanging overhead. He thought he remembered that the full moon was romantic.
A lot was going on. All the more reason to enjoy what they had, while they still had it, and they were long overdue for a romantic evening. He leaned over and kissed Penny’s hair. “I won’t notice you yawn if you return the favor.”
“Deal.”
They made another deal over hors d’ouevres not to talk about the kids. Without erecting an electronic privacy barrier, neither of them could talk about work. And so, insanely, the conversation lagged. What had they talked about—before?
They managed to discuss entrée options. Penny patted his hand. “This is ridiculous, Sigmund. We don’t need to chatter. It’s all right simply to enjoy each other’s company.”
“I know.” He didn’t see this being a long evening.
They lapsed into uncomfortable silence, pretending this was a normal night out and that the end of the world wasn’t rushing their way. Occasionally one of them would compliment the food, which deserved it, or the musicians, who didn’t. The evening became more and more . . .
Sigmund couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The evening was—what? Familiar? Hardly. Well deserved. Strained. Overshadowed by the overwhelming problems they had vowed to leave at home but he couldn’t banish from his mind.
Tideless oceans. Moonless nights. Sigmund didn’t see New Terra obtaining a moon anytime soon. Implacable enemies. Progress measured in nanoseconds.
He must have been muttering to himself, because Penny asked, “What’s Rome?”
“It’s a city on Earth.”
Rome. The Eternal City. An ancient, ruined coliseum. The mental image of a boot. Something about roads. Earth’s landscape had roads, mostly in disuse, made obsolete by antigrav floaters and transfer booths. What about roads? New Terra didn’t have them, its infrastructure designed from the start for stepping discs and gravity floaters. What about roads?
Penny was frowning at him. He said, “I don’t know, only that all roads lead . . .”
All roads lead to Rome. Just as everything on Sigmund’s mind led to Baedeker.
SIGMUND MET ERIC AND KIRSTEN at an Office of Strategic Analyses safe house. They were yawning, too.
“What’s the emergency?” Eric asked.
Sigmund jammed his hands in his pockets to keep from fidgeting. “Maybe nothing. Maybe an answer to everything. Until I know, I’m not going to sleep.” And if he was right, he wouldn’t sleep tonight, either. Hope was exhilarating. “Only it’s half an idea at best.”
Kirsten brushed bangs off her forehead. “All right, Sigmund, begin at the beginning.”
He saw no need to start that far back. “First, Baedeker’s drive. It won’t move planets. It just blows them up.”
“If he’s not careful,” Eric agreed.
“Second, we’re unable to do to the Pak what the Pak do to everyone they pass.”
Kirsten nodded. “Because everyone else is planet-based. One kinetic-kill weapon can smash a world. They, having abandoned their world, are too dispersed to attack that way.”
“Turn the problem on its head.” Sigmund waited for them to see it, but they didn’t. “Pak will use a kinetic-kill vehicle against a planet. With Baedeker’s drive, we can shatter a planet into overwhelming amounts of kinetic-kill debris.”
Eric’s eyes got round. “Huge amounts of relativistic dust and gas, blasted right down the maw of the ramscoops. Massive overload. It’d be unavoidable—and lethal.”
“Yes, but.” Kirsten used a voice-of-reason tone. “There’s no way to get a planet into position. Baedeker’s drives won’t do that.”
The perfect weapon and no way to deliver it. So close.
“Here’s a thought,” Eric said suddenly. “Take a world out of the Fleet. We know that can be done: Not so long ago we pulled NP4 out of the configuration. NP5 is expendable. It’s not yet fully reengineered for Hearth life. It’d be easy to evacuate the few planetary engineers living there.”
The Fleet had accelerated steadily since the Concordance first fled the core explosion. Worlds racing at ten percent of light speed (a bit more for New Terra, redlining its drive to get away from their former masters) was astounding—and yet hardly enough. They couldn’t outrun the Pak even if the Fleet had been heading in exactly the right direction.
But some of the Fleet’s velocity vector did point away from the Pak. NP5 would need years to shed that momentum. And the Pak, given years to notice a whole planet headed their way, were much faster and more maneuverable.
So how could NP5 help? Sigmund didn’t get it. “I don’t see—”
Eric chuckled, but not unkindly. “Now you know how we feel around you, Sigmund. You’re always three steps ahead of us. NP5 isn’t the weapon. We get NP5 out of the way, salvage its planetary drive, and put the drive onto a sacrificial world close to the Pak. With luck, they won’t detect an unlit planet coming at them until too late.”
Sigmund rolled the idea around in his head. A plausible weapon. A way to deliver it. And probably just one shot.
That was one more opportunity than they had had until now.
. . .
OL’T’RO COMPLETELY UNDERSTOOD the humans’ proposed attack. It was brilliant—and as brutal as the enemy.
They were not surprised. Pak and humans were related.
With a shudder, Ol’t’ro detached the Er’o unit. They wanted an alternative, even before the hyperwave consultation ended, and that required eyes on instruments. They kept monitoring the conversation as Er’o struggled into
a pressure suit for the trek to Haven’s observatory.
“Yes, it is possible we might spare NP5,” Nessus said. He participated by hyperwave link from somewhere near Hearth. “It is not yet producing food. Even if it were, almost everyone lives on synthesized food. Nature-grown food is a luxury.
“The issue will be sacrificing an Outsider drive. No Nature Preserve world matters as much as the planetary drive it carries. The Concordance bought several drives—and will continue paying the Outsiders long after we are all dead—lest Hearth’s unit ever fail. Only the Hindmost can make such a decision.”
Hearth’s drive, if it failed as spectacularly as Baedeker’s prototype, would leave no survivors—and quite possibly no world, either. A spare drive served no purpose. Baedeker surely saw that, too, and chose not to comment. The Pak threat was all the reality the Citizens could handle.
“How long will it take to extricate NP5 and remove its drive?” Eric asked. He, Kirsten, and Sigmund had linked in from a ship just outside New Terra’s singularity.
In Ol’t’ro’s comm terminal, Baedeker pawed at the vegetation-covered deck of his cabin. “No planetary drive has been installed within living memory, but records show installation is a lengthy process. To my knowledge, no one has ever uninstalled one.”
Ol’t’ro sent a private message—hurry!—to Er’o, who was finally suited up and through the water lock. “We see a possible way to save time,” they said. “Fine-tune your other drives. Mold the space-time neighborhoods around all the planets to give NP5 a harder push out of the way.”
That started the argument Ol’t’ro intended. Had they learned enough to even consider such a maneuver? Might they cause worlds to crash? What real-time sensing and control would they need? How long would it take to reestablish the old space-time slope? Would asymmetries in the drive field cause tidal waves or trigger seismic activity?
Whenever a conclusion threatened, Ol’t’ro found some complication to raise. Otherwise they kept quiet. Their goal was delay, not decision, while Er’o made his observations. That left Ol’t’ro to brood about the quickness with which humans and Citizens alike accepted a genocidal attack. Ol’t’ro would have hoped for a moment of regret.
But Ol’t’ro, too, had a home to protect, and memories washed over them. The boundless ocean of Jm’ho. The lush seaweed forests, swaying in the hot currents upwelling from seafloor vents. The great, sprawling seafloor cities. The icy roof of the world and above that the banded splendor of Tl’ho.
They told themselves they were feeling the cramped confines of the tiny habitat. They told themselves they were suffering the imbalance of a meld short of a unit—
They did not believe it.
Ol’t’ro could not forget Baedeker’s recent private words to Sigmund. Would they see their home again? If the Pak were defeated, would a kinetic-kill weapon still find its way to Jm’ho?
Jm’ho must be made too powerful to attack.
Perhaps they had mastered enough technology to make that possible. If they brought their new knowledge home and applied it. (conveniently, the hyperwave link with Jm’ho was one-way, the wrong way.) If they lived that long.
“I am in the observatory,” Er’o finally radioed. “Commencing scans.”
“Excellent.” Ol’t’ro netted Eric simulation data about withdrawing a world from the Fleet, maintaining the dispute at a boil. “Work quickly, Er’o.”
And so the argument continued to rage. “Something about this feels lousy,” Sigmund eventually interrupted. “As single-minded as are the Pak, they have not yet attacked us. Even Pak deserve a warning shot. Give me some options, people.”
That turned the discussion to how fastest to recover the precious Outsider drive—before a homemade model blew it apart with the sacrificial planet. Baedeker got excited. Nessus fretted that the evacuation ship would be exposed, unable to flee to hyperspace, from within the weapon world’s singularity.
Neither Citizen mentioned Sigmund’s moral reservation.
“I have two candidates,” Er’o radioed privately. “Here are the coordinates. With time for a complete survey, surely I could find several more.”
The new data sufficed. Ol’t’ro said, “Sigmund, we propose another possibility. Planets are not always bound to suns.” Many float free, where hyperspace-traveling species have little reason to look. “Use a wandering body close to the Pak, and explode that. Er’o found two candidates with only a quick scan. Your warning shot need not endanger the drive from NP5.”
“That,” Sigmund said, “is an option I can live with.”
56
“Keep it simple,” Sigmund told Thssthfok. They were in Thssthfok’s cell.
“Jeeves will record it for transmission.” And do a sanity-check, to the extent he could.
It was a warning message. For the demonstration to matter, the Pak had to see Niflheim shatter.
Jeeves had named the plutoid after the Norse abode of the dead, a place of eternal ice and cold. Sigmund took the AI’s word for it. So did Nessus, Norse creation myth being too obscure even for him.
Thssthfok set aside the tree-of-life root on which he had been gnawing, swallowed, and spoke a few clicks and pops.
Maybe the Pak language was more efficient than English. It had to be more logical. Still, that utterance sounded awfully short to Sigmund. “What did you tell the Pak ships?”
“Look here,” Thssthfok said.
He was the mission interpreter, assuming he would cooperate. And even if not, Sigmund would rather personally keep an eye on Thssthfok than have the protector anywhere else.
Jeeves claimed he could translate, but Sigmund had his doubts. Jeeves knew of Thssthfok’s speech—and surely different clans used different languages—only what Thssthfok had chosen to reveal. Double meanings, secret codes, tanj near anything, could lurk unsuspected in vocabulary exposed to Jeeves. Sigmund half suspected Thssthfok had synthesized a language on the fly.
If Thssthfok minded Don Quixote’s smaller cargo hold, he kept it to himself. The larger hold, the Pak’s cell on their previous voyage, was now filled by the old singleship. Before this trip ended, Kirsten and Eric swore, they would make some sense of Brennan’s modifications.
Would they succeed? Either way, the effort occupied Sigmund’s friends on the long flight to Niflheim. Besides, more than intellectual curiosity drove Eric and Kirsten to spend every free hour in the hold. The singleship was a relic of New Terra’s lost heritage. Long Pass had been another such relic. Restoring that had been the key to recovering their past and regaining their freedom. They couldn’t not restore the singleship.
And if the singleship hadn’t filled the larger hold, Thssthfok would still be here. More than once Thssthfok had hidden tools in that old cell. There was no reason to gamble that the refit crew had found everything, when the Gw’oth and their habitat remained aboard Haven.
That left only the lesser risk of whatever the Gw’oth might have hidden in this hold.
“Look here,” Sigmund echoed. “Is that all?”
Thssthfok shrugged, those massive shoulder joints rendering the familiar mannerism alien.
Oh. “Because if they see the . . . demonstration, they’ll figure out everything.”
Sigmund had only described the coming demonstration as “attention-getting,” Thssthfok being too tanj smart to be given hints about new weapons technology. Still, even if Thssthfok somehow escaped yet again, he would not learn much. Baedeker’s drives-become-weapons were huge. Sigmund’s arsenal was aboard Haven, flying along in tandem.
Thssthfok picked up his half-eaten root. “If not, it is a useless demonstration.”
Sigmund refused to react. “The message you propose still seems terse.”
“No, it is redundant.”
“What do you mean?” Sigmund asked, keeping his growing irritation to himself.
Another caricatured shrug.
Because the Pak would look toward any unexpected signal, Sigmund realized. Loud static would suffice
.
Eventually, frustrated, Sigmund left. He stowed his armor and went to the relax room. “Jeeves,” he called.
“Yes, Sigmund.”
“Did you monitor Thssthfok and me?”
“I did.” Jeeves managed to sound disapproving. “He wasn’t very cooperative.”
Really? “Did you translate his message, such as it was?”
“Yes. ‘Look here,’ was accurate.”
Sigmund tipped back his chair, trying, and failing, to find comfort in the illusion of blue sky and scudding white clouds. “Jeeves, I want our message to say more. ‘Cease attacks on occupied worlds. Veer toward galactic south. Comply, or be destroyed.’ Can you add that?”
“I can come close. It may not be grammatical.”
“That’s fine,” Sigmund said. “We’ll have given them fair warning.” And they will know from the bad grammar that we got the best of at least some Pak.
And if the Pak did veer? Bravado aside, Sigmund could not protect everyone. He would have aimed the Pak fleet at other worlds.
Acid churning in his gut, Sigmund hoped none of those worlds was Earth.
57
First Kirsten peered through the hatch window into Thssthfok’s cell. Then Eric looked in. He was taller, and Thssthfok saw the metal neck ring of a pressure suit. Both frowned in concentration, like breeders preparing for battle. Reminding themselves of the enemy.
Sigmund’s “demonstration” was imminent.
Thssthfok sat on the deck, heels pulled in close to his buttocks, knees spread, “fidgeting” with the anklet. He probed the jagged hole he had torn, avoiding the peeled-back edges. A drop of blood might short-circuit the electronics he had exposed.
He would escape while the humans were occupied.
BAEDEKER CREPT ACROSS THE ICE, distrusting in equal measure the crampons on his boots, the sticks that humans called ski poles, and Niflheim’s feeble gravity. The horizon loomed too close. Unfamiliar stars shone overhead. Pressure-suited figures, humans and Gw’oth and Citizens, labored around a cluster of large, black monoliths: a flawed planetary drive become a doomsday device.