by Larry Niven
“I’ve reached the bridge,” Omar reported. He led team A, searching forward. “No signs of them anywhere. Sorry, Eric.”
“Any sign of Jeeves?” Eric asked.
Omar hesitated. “The server room is a charred ruin. No way.”
“Sweep again, back toward the stern,” Eric directed. “Maybe team B missed something.”
Baedeker finally reached the arc of corridor in whose wall sat the embedded power plant. Most wall paint had been seared away. He spread the flashlight beam and burned off the rest of the paint—then kept his neck and head in motion. Optical waveguides warped most light around the power plant, but there were unavoidable distortions if the light source wavered. You could spot the power plant if you knew how and where to look.
And there it was.
At this range, even the headheld laser was sufficient to reprogram the power-plant controls. He used both heads to stick the laser to the wall with a blob of putty. The laser had no wireless interface; he clipped on cables to interface a pocket comp.
He had left the final programming, to be done only if he got this far. Some secrets were meant to stay secret. For the same reason, he worked—awkwardly, because of his suit—through the comp’s tactile interface. Nothing he did here would be overheard or intercepted.
It was delicate work, demanding intense concentration, and he tuned out the depressing radio chatter. The searchers had found nothing good. Most likely they would find nothing at all, the remains of Sigmund and Kirsten having been blown out to space or even vaporized.
He did hear the evacuation warning: impact with Niflheim in five minutes. Get out.
Four minutes. Three. At two minutes, a warning shriek echoed through his suit. Lipping frantically, Baedeker finished without time to check his work. “The device is set,” he called. “One minute to hull destruction. I am stepping back to Haven.”
He flicked through to his own ship, into the cargo bay that served as their staging area—and collapsed into a tight ball.
60
Thssthfok’s new ship was fast and maneuverable, a delight to fly. He concentrated on getting a feel for its controls and capabilities.
Straight ahead, coming right at him, something he had never expected to see: the vanguard of the Pak fleets. And behind him, a second surprise: a ramscoop, either a forward scout or a foraging mission, stealthily converging on the icy world his prison had orbited.
But not as stealthily as they believed. Whoever had built this little ship had equipped it with extraordinary instruments.
Who had built this ship? Humans, certainly—the cockpit suited the length of their arms, the grasp of their hands, the contours of their bodies—and yet Pak influence was unmistakable in the console circuits he had so hastily reassembled. Phssthpok’s doing, somehow.
Thssthfok would have liked to examine whatever “demo” the humans had had planned, but did not. Surrender to curiosity was a breeder weakness. He had shouted his presence to that inbound ship the instant he lit his fusion drive. Soon enough, the other ship would see him. It would fire its own engine and give chase.
He would use all the head start he had, and not risk losing everything. This ship. A stepping disc. The scans and measurements he had taken of Don Quixote’s amazingly strong, dynamically reinforced hull. The existence of hyperspace and a faster-than-light drive. Knowledge of dangerous races, their worlds flying through space, in the fleets’ paths.
No matter what had happened in the long years of his absence, he would be welcomed back to family and clan with open arms.
He took a tree-of-life root from the flour sack, blew off traces of white powder, and gnawed contentedly.
. . .
THSSTHFOK SWITCHED OFF the fusion drive. Time for a quick look behind.
The lonely world Don Quixote orbited was spewing ice crystals and steam. More likely, had orbited, the plume marking the spot of its crash.
As expected, the ramscoop had lit its drive. The range was too great to know if the ship raced toward Thssthfok or the planet—only that it came at high acceleration. And a radio signal, blaring at very high power. A short digital data stream, rapidly repeating.
His ship’s receiver understood the modulation scheme. A human signal, then. “Look here,” Thssthfok heard himself say.
The demo warning!
Another voice (Jeeves?) continued, in accented high Rilchukian. Making allowance for the bad grammar, it said, “Cease attacks on occupied worlds. Veer toward galactic south. Comply, or be destroyed.”
“Look here,” the message began again.
Thssthfok turned down the volume, the better to concentrate. Would anything else happen? If so, he was in an excellent position to observe Sigmund’s attention-getting demo.
Thssthfok directed every sensor back the way he had come. Same icy world. (At the limit of the telescope’s resolution, at its maximum magnification, a pixel zoomed away from the planet. To be seen from this distance, a vessel would have to be many times the size of Sigmund’s ship. A glitch in image enhancement, surely. The dot vanished, confirming his suspicion.) Same plume of ice and steam. Same repeating radio signal—
Dissolved suddenly into deafening static. Gibberish erupted across the spectrum. Particle detectors reported impossible densities of everything. Gravimetric sensors showed—what? He did not understand. It was as though space-time itself had gone mad.
Everything grew in intensity. And grew. And grew.
The cockpit canopy had turned black. Protecting his eyes from what? When Thssthfok applied maximum filtering to the ship’s telescope, a maelstrom of gas, dust, and gravel had replaced the little planet. A world torn apart, heading his way, heading every way, at very nearly light speed.
He scarcely had the time to admit how utterly he had failed his breeders.
ENDGAME
61
What?
Sigmund was on his back, eyes darting beneath closed eyelids. There had been heat—oh, so much heat. And a roaring gale, the air almost searing. He hadn’t been able to breathe! Had his pulse been racing, his skin tight? Maybe. He remembered knowing he was about to die, and regret, and confusion.
And he was still confused, because, tanj it, he felt great.
Cured or healed, then. . . but of what? That, Sigmund couldn’t remember.
He opened his eyes. A clear dome was inches above his face. He was in an autodoc. Status LEDs shone steady green. Tiny text filled a display beside his head, but he ignored it. First things first. He had to know where he was. He slapped the panic button, and the dome began to retract.
“Sigmund?” a familiar voice called. Penelope!
He didn’t know much, but he remembered being far away on a mission. That snippet of memory brought a lot more crashing down on him. But not the end. Not how he got . . . here. “Kirsten?” he whispered. “Is she . . . ?” He couldn’t bear to finish that sentence.
The dome completed its glacial retreat and he sat up. Penny stood across the room, blinking back tears. “Sigmund . . . I thought I’d lost you.”
“I’m sorry.” He grabbed the robe off the foot of the autodoc, slipped it on, and climbed out. There was a time for nakedness, and this wasn’t it. They hugged, hard. “I’m so sorry.”
They stood near a window and Sigmund looked through a crack between the curtains behind her. The main square of Long Pass City. More questions bubbled up by the moment, but one came first. “How is Kirsten?”
“In the same shape that you were.” Penny gave him a final squeeze and stepped back. “The governor ruled you went into Nessus’ autodoc first.”
It was hardly Nessus’ autodoc. Nessus had only obtained it from Human Space. Bought? Stolen? He was evasive about that. This was Carlos Wu’s prototype ’doc, amazing nanotech stuff. It had saved Sigmund once before, from a gaping hole blown through his chest.
So something horrible had happened to him yet again.
He should have read the tiny print on the ’doc display. “Penny, what was w
rong with me? I don’t remember.”
“Burns, radiation sickness, and heatstroke. All severe.” She wiped a tear from her cheek. “I can’t bear to think about it. And no one will tell me how it happened.”
ARM agents learned first aid. Autodocs only helped when you lived long enough to get to one. So what had he learned? Yeah, severe heatstroke caused confusion and hallucinations. Maybe Puppeteers had nothing to do with the latest gaps in his memory. “How did I get here?”
The door swung open. A woman came in, wearing a long white coat and holding a medical scanner. “Good, you’re up, Minister. We need to clear the room.”
For Kirsten, of course. Sigmund pulled his robe tighter. They filed into the hall, where Eric waited beside a floating gurney. On the gurney was something Sigmund should have expected, since Kirsten had been waiting for the ’doc. A long, silvery ovoid. A stasis field.
Technicians broke the field and scorching air whooshed out. Kirsten was still in her pressure suit, her face lurid beneath the alarm LEDs ablaze inside her helmet.
Sigmund staggered at a rush of memories. The tempest of emotions was worse: rage, sorrow, disappointment, remorse—too many to sort out and now was not the time.
Eric stared at the prostrate figure of his wife, unable to look away.
Sigmund swallowed. “Eric, I promised you Kirsten would be all right. So far I’ve done a lousy job of it, but she will.” More thanks to Carlos than to me.
“She has to,” Eric whispered. “She has to.”
“We need to get her into the ’doc,” one of the technicians reminded them. “The sooner the better.”
Sigmund and Penelope slipped by, Sigmund resting a hand briefly on Eric’s shoulder as they passed. The door clicked shut behind them.
The last thing Sigmund heard as they turned a corner was the nearly ultrasonic whine of a saw, the techs hastily extracting Kirsten from her pressure suit.
A QUARTER OF A YEAR IN STASIS for the return to New Terra. Thirty-some days more in the autodoc. A war to be waged and its general AWOL. Sigmund didn’t want to believe he’d lost so much time, but a glance at Alice left no doubt. She looked ready to give birth any day.
By almost getting himself killed, he had left Alice in charge of New Terra’s defense.
Alice and Sigmund weren’t the only ones Sabrina had invited. Baedeker and Nessus were there, too. Eric had opted out. Watching Kirsten through the ’doc’s transparent dome was more contact than he had had since putting her into stasis.
“We should begin,” Sabrina said.
It was another brunch meeting. Alice set down her coffee mug. “Jeeves, run the video.”
This was Sigmund’s first day back at work, and a strategy session with Puppeteers and the governor was a rough way to jump back in. Sabrina’s insistence was ominous. Sigmund had called Alice the night before for an explanation; she had asked him to wait. “It’s complicated.”
A holo popped up over the conference table. “You’ve all seen such images: wave after wave of Pak ships. This is a close-up, an image taken just before Haven initiated the Niflheim demo. Having the close-up as a reference let me better calibrate the ongoing long-range observations from the stealthed probes Sigmund deployed en route to Niflheim.”
This was a Jeeves talking. This Jeeves even integrated the few files beamed at the last minute from Don Quixote. In no way was it Jeeves. Not Jeeves whose quick thinking had saved Sigmund’s and Kirsten’s lives. That Jeeves was gone.
A blinking red dot appeared in front and toward the northern edge of the first wave. “Niflheim was a quarter light-year in front of the Pak vanguard. The effects of the demonstration propagated in all directions at essentially light speed. The leading ramscoops, in the blue wave, converged with the demo at half light speed. Sixty-two days later, the vanguard and the wave front met. Here is what happened, sped up by a factor of fifty thousand.”
The red dot was suddenly a sphere, rapidly inflating. Behind a bright red edge, color faded to pink, dimming as it swelled: diminishing effects, cleverly represented.
“The leading edge expands at light speed. That’s everything from infrared to hard gammas. The debris comes behind, shown in pink.” As the pink region spread, now lagging farther and farther behind the sharp red rim, Jeeves went on. “By now, propagation of the debris field has smoothed out. I do not understand the change.”
“The space-time disruptions have dampened out, dissipated to almost nothing,” Baedeker explained.
Sigmund watched, awestruck. Finagle bless ’em, the team had done it! Despite Thssthfok’s violent escape.
The sphere grew and grew. Jeeves said, “The leading edge is about one-third light-year across as it first reaches the Pak.” One-third light-year was small compared to the breadth of the Pak advance. “Watch how the Pak respond.”
The expanding sphere penetrated into and across Pak territory. Dots swerved as the electromagnetic blast struck. None could outrun the debris racing—on the time scale of the video—ten seconds behind. Three scattered blue dots blinked out.
Sigmund had planned to transmit the warning message days before the blast. Not seconds. He tried to regret what had turned into an unprovoked attack, and failed. It wasn’t as though, under the circumstances, the team had had any choice. Or acted any more ruthlessly than Pak did routinely.
Parboiling by the enemy had leached any empathy out of Sigmund. He wondered how Kirsten’s treatment fared.
The Pak, put on notice, were supposed to veer south. Well, they had gotten notice, if not exactly been forewarned.
“Look at that,” Sabrina whispered.
As the red bubble continued to grow, more ships scattered—or tried to. News of their course changes also traveled outward at light speed. More distant ships often turned toward the blast, resisting encroachment. Then, catching sight of the slower-moving debris field, many of those more distant ships also turned to flee—
Only to find their way blocked.
Chaos bubbled through the Pak armada, in a sphere that expanded along with Niflheim’s remains. Maneuvering and skirmishes continued after the debris field passed.
“All right,” Sigmund said, “they reacted like Pak. Each clan protected its own ships. I want to see what they did after the immediate danger passed.”
Most movement continued forward, still away from the core and the next wave of ships racing up behind them. These ships had built up a lot of momentum. Changing course enough to spot on this scale would take time. Sigmund found he was holding his breath. Forewarning or not, they had gotten his message, and the demo would certainly have convinced him.
After a few minutes, a change became clear. More and more of the Pak were veering north.
THE NEARER TO GALACTIC SOUTH the course changes began, the more pronounced the swing northward. Flurries of motion and knotting of Pak ships suggested frantic space battles—as did several ships disappearing. Melees grew and others erupted. The planet-buster blast, largely spent, swept onward.
“This makes no sense,” Nessus said. “Not to me, at least. Did the Pak ships not understand the recorded warning?”
It made sense to Sigmund. At least something useful had come of his time with Thssthfok. “They understood, all right. We demonstrated a credible threat. The more southern clans are pushing others into that threat. Against that pressure, the ships along the northern edge are hard-pressed even to maintain their original course.”
Alice nodded. “We convinced the clans closest to the demo. Otherwise they would turn north, away from the new attacks. We’ve become unwitting allies of the southern clans.”
Sabrina looked puzzled and Nessus eyed Alice suspiciously.
Ally was a perfectly good Spanglish word, but not part of Puppeteer-subsetted English. Allies implied enemies, and enemy, like slavery, was a concept the Puppeteers had scrubbed from their slaves’ dialect.
“A cooperating partner in warfare,” Jeeves volunteered unhelpfully. It only emphasized Alice’s gaffe.
Baedeker poked dispiritedly at his platter of mixed chopped grasses. “So the clans will compete for the honor of destroying us. I am not consoled.”
“Where is the good news, Sigmund?” Nessus asked.
Sigmund straightened in his chair. “If clans must fight, Thssthfok knew it, too. Consider: He was at least a quarter light-year from his clan when he escaped, probably more distant. Any signal he transmitted would diverge and reveal information to many clans. Almost certainly he sent nothing. He was saving what he learned until he could reunite with his clan. Whatever he knew about us and our technology died with him.”
Baedeker climbed unsteadily out of his mound of cushions and began circling the room. On each lap he edged closer to the door. “At best, we failed to make things worse. We have not made anything better.”
Sabrina grimaced. “I must agree with Baedeker. Where do we go from here?”
They could use their single up-close weapon, sacrificing the Outsider drive from NP5. If that didn’t convince the Pak, Sigmund’s quiver would be empty.
Best to hold that in reserve.
That left one or more additional warning shots, set off elsewhere along the Pak advance. The Pak incursion was light-years across, and demo lessons only propagated at light speed. It could take several blasts, even assuming enough rogue planets in the right places, and a long time. Sigmund doubted they could pull it off, even before something in the evolving holo caught his eye. “Oh, tanj,” he cursed. “They learn fast.”