Achilles was never one to admit to doubt or uncertainty. Or to hesitate to gamble with the lives of others.
Still, could pillaging make these circumstances any worse? Probably not. And if Achilles’ mad adventure did turn the Pak attention toward the Fleet, Pak knowledge might even the odds.
Nessus sang, “If Louis agrees to the attempt, and I am convinced it does not put my mission at risk, I will act.”
“And what is that mission?”
“That is a matter for the Hindmost to disclose.” I have powerful friends.
“You never had any imagination,” Achilles sang, his undertunes rich with derision. “That is why you remain a scout and I am a minister.”
Yet I command a ship while you wear a convict’s stun anklet, Nessus thought, and that device will remain on your foreleg for as long as you are on my ship. I need only to trill the proper chords and you will topple like a tree in a storm.
And because Louis Wu is no fool, we saved you.
“If Louis agrees,” Nessus repeated, “and I am convinced the effort can be undertaken safely, we will see.”
And anything Louis recovers from the Library will be delivered to Baedeker, not Achilles.
The outer hatch of a Pak air lock loomed in Louis’s heads-up display, the image relayed from a camera in the nose of a remote-controlled, thruster-impelled Puppeteer probe.
The probe’s usual purpose was refueling. A stepping-disc/molecular-filter stack would transfer deuterium from any convenient ocean into Aegis’ tanks. Today, its nose cone removed, the stepping disc stripped of its filter, the probe would deliver Louis straight to the derelict’s air lock. Aegis, with its impenetrable GP hull, held station just ahead of the Pak derelict to block the sleet of relativistic interstellar muck.
Aegis would jump to hyperspace if anything unexpected happened. Louis could not expect Puppeteers to wait long for Louis to step back. If Achilles was at the helm, not at all.
“Ready, Louis?” Nessus asked.
Louis rechecked his spacesuit’s readouts. “Yes.” Ready as I’m going to be.
Nessus and Achilles had argued about whether to attempt a boarding. At least Louis inferred an argument, the conversation sounding to him like hopped-up squirrels shut in a grand piano. Voice had said he was not allowed to translate.
Nessus had left the decision up to Louis. Boarding might activate the ramscoop field or other, unknown, defenses. That the deuterium tanks on the derelict had run dry was pure speculation.
Unless someone recovered whatever part of the Library that ship carried, ten men and women would have died in vain.
Flashlight-laser in hand, its aperture narrowed to a lethally thin ray, Louis stepped from a cargo hold on Aegis to the probe—and into zero gravity. His boot magnets snapped to the probe fuselage.
No ramscoop field—yet. He would have been in agony, the magnetic field inducing massive electrical currents, in full-body spasm. He detached the stepping disc and stowed it in the sling across his back.
Even up close, the hull, aside from a few slightly discolored patches, seemed unmarred by Argo’s lasers. It wasn’t GP hull material, so what the tanj was the ship made of?
The air-lock controls were intuitive enough. Laser in hand, Louis said, “I’m going aboard.”
“Acknowledged,” Nessus said.
The air lock cycled and Louis saw a few dim lights inside. His suit sensors reported atmosphere. No artificial gravity. Batteries or fuel cells for emergency circuits, he told himself. Too little power for gravity or the ramscoop field. His skin crawled.
Bodies floated everywhere. The Pak were short, their proportions and enlarged joints making them caricatures of the human form. Most wore only vests covered in pockets. Their leathery skins were blotchy with radiation lesions and the mottling of decay. Putrefaction looked well advanced. Sealed in his suit Louis could smell nothing, but his gorge rose in his throat.
The New Terrans in their spacesuits were contorted, frozen in their final convulsions. Two looked like they might have snapped their own backs. One floated on her back, limbs askew, a red-brown film coating the inside of her visor. One glance inside at death’s rictus and Louis shuddered.
“Everyone is dead,” he said to break the eerie silence.
“As expected,” Achilles replied. “Are the computers intact?”
Computers were why Achilles was there—and why these men and women died. Capture a Library ship and, it stood to reason, you captured much of the Library. Computerized knowledge was compact—the hundreds of ships would be for mutual protection, not cargo capacity.
“A minute,” Louis said. A minute of silence to honor your crew, slaughtered on your watch. He turned slowly, taking everything in with his helmet-mounted camera. “I’ll ask again. Should I send back the bodies?”
“Funerals are not a New Terran custom,” Nessus said. “To judge by these images, returning the dead would bring no one comfort.”
A few deep breaths steadied Louis’s nerves. “I’ll look for computers.” He circled the air-lock-level deck, the thud of his boots and his too-fast breathing the only sounds. He saw nothing promising. It all looked—alien. Few objects exhibited a clear purpose. Or maybe they had too many purposes, multiuse items sharing common components. Here and there he found open cabinets, circuits and modules floating at the ends of spidery cable bundles.
Placards with squiggles labeled the hatches, but he could not read them. By trial and error he found a stairwell. “I’ll check another deck.”
He kept searching, wondering if he would recognize an alien computer—and what would trigger a booby trap. The salient fact about Pak was that they were smart. Smarter, by far, than human. Could he anticipate their thinking?
With each hatch Louis approached, his nerves grew tauter. The trap that killed the New Terrans had not triggered immediately. Maybe opening this door would rearm the trap.
Why hadn’t the ramscoop field come on the moment Achilles’ crew boarded? Why wait?
The Pak who set the trap might have hoped other Librarians would recover this ship. If so, the trap would have to decide whether boarders were Pak. Louis chewed on that theory as he kept searching. Humans and Pak were distant cousins and the humans wore spacesuits. Maybe the recognition logic had been fooled for a while.
Maybe. But no one could mistake a General Products #4 hull for a Pak ramscoop. No, the ramscoop trap was intended to strike after invaders came aboard. No matter how thoroughly an attacker’s ship was destroyed—and Argo had been reduced to a useless hulk—the ramscoop-field trap would capture useful data in the form of dead boarders and their gear.
“Do you recognize any computers yet?” Achilles asked impatiently.
No. Do you? Louis kept the sarcasm to himself. “Not yet.”
“What about weapons?” Achilles persisted.
Because this was all about weapons, something to use against the Gw’oth. If they didn’t find Pak computers, maybe useful technology would be lying around already weaponized. “No,” Louis answered again. He walked slowly, studying racks of exotic equipment, to a soft thump whenever a boot magnet snapped to the deck.
Working aft, he had reached the engine room. The massive magnetic coils could not be part of anything else. He had yet to see anything that looked like a computer.
Something tickled the back of his mind.
“Louis, finish your sweep of the derelict so we can leave,” Nessus said.
How tempting that was! Louis could declare himself done, set his stepping disc on the deck, and reboard Aegis in an instant. Still, he hated to admit failure. “Soon, Nessus,” he equivocated.
Computers could be tiny, and storage exceedingly dense. The Pak computers might be anywhere, in any of the unrecognizable gear around the ship. How would he know?
Because in any library, there are lots and lots of files.
Louis stomped forward a deck, his boot steps echoing in the stairwell. He opened a hatch to an equipment closet and stood starin
g at the photonics racks within. “I think I’ve seen this same physical configuration again and again. Can anyone confirm?”
“Perhaps,” Achilles and Nessus said, almost in unison.
Anyone solicited Voice, too, to offer an opinion. Louis’s suspicions about Puppeteer attitudes toward AI had been correct. Nessus had directed Louis not to mention Voice.
“Confirmed,” Voice said on a private channel. “So far you have passed eighty-seven racks of that exact physical layout. No other configuration is nearly as common.”
“This must be it.” Louis took the stepping disc from its sling. He set it on the floor and it floated off.
The racks ran floor to ceiling, and he could not jam the stepping disc beneath. “Tanj! The frame uprights look fused in place.”
“Cut out a rack,” Achilles ordered.
The oxyacetylene torch in Louis’s tool pouch might work—or chopping at the ship might trigger an intruder response. Louis had no better suggestion. “Can you pull me out remotely?”
“If you are on the disc, yes,” Nessus said.
With his left boot clinging to the deck Louis pinned the stepping disc with his right boot. The disc itself adhered to neither the deck nor his boot. Carefully he shifted his left boot onto the disc—and started drifting. The boot magnets were too weak to grip through the disc.
He used emergency suit patches to fasten the disc to the deck and his boots to the disc. “Watch my helmet camera. If I move suddenly, pull me out.”
He tried to ignore how contorted the corpses had been, how pain-crazed their faces. If the ramscoop field activated, would sticky patches hold despite his own spasms?
He lit the oxyacetylene torch. Directly beneath the blue-hot flame, a spot glowed on an upright. There was no smoke, no scorching, no hint of melting. He applied the flame to the ceiling and deck with the same lack of effect.
With a sigh, Louis extinguished the torch. Decks, bulkheads, the equipment frames: they were probably made from the same impervious stuff as the hull.
“It must be twing,” Achilles said. “A programmable Pak structural material. There will be handheld tools to soften it. Search the engine room.”
“What do these tools look like?” Louis asked.
“I don’t know.” Achilles sounded pained by the admission. “I had that information aboard Argo, but the computers, like everything else, were destroyed.”
“Do not comment,” Voice said. “Nessus has not told Achilles we have the same files from Sigmund.”
On Louis’s heads-up display a small hand tool shimmered. He said, “I’ll see what I can find.” He peeled the patches from his boots and tromped off. In the engine room he quickly spotted a tool that matched the image still on his HUD but took other items to avoid suspicions.
Then Louis experimented. The proper tool, with its one dial turned all the way up, its handgrip tightly squeezed, sliced an interior bulkhead. In minutes he had detached a rack of suspected computer gear. He floated it above the stepping disc—and pictured it crashing to the deck on Aegis. “Turn the cabin gravity way down wherever you’re going to want this.”
“Done,” Nessus said. “Ready to receive.”
It took Louis eight hours to cut loose all the suspected computer racks, or memory banks, or whatever they were, and teleport them, one by one, to Aegis.
Finally the last rack was delivered. Louis stepped through, bone weary, right after. He intended never again to set foot aboard that death ship.
14
It would be best not to abandon an intact General Products hull for the Pak to reverse-engineer. On that much Achilles and Nessus agreed. But could they destroy it? That was the core of the matter, and the bridge echoed with their disagreement.
The impudence of the scruffy scout enraged Achilles. He was Minister of Science!
Achilles knew several ways to destroy General Products hulls—all closely held secrets. Simplest was antimatter, if you could find enough. They had none.
Without antimatter, you needed subtlety.
At its most basic, a General Products hull was a single, nanotech-built supermolecule. An embedded fusion power plant massively reinforced the supermolecule’s interatomic bonds. At very close range, and with extremely good aim, you could overheat the power plant with a high-power laser. Or, if you knew the details of the embedded software, a laser could reprogram the photonic microprocessor that controlled the power plant—right through an intact hull.
When these vulnerabilities surfaced, General Products had enhanced its designs. Antimatter remained a threat, for basic physics could not be denied, but the other hazards had been vanquished. In late-model products, thousands of heat pipes fanned out from the embedded power plant. Using the entire hull to disperse energy made overheating the power plant all but impossible. The extensively rewritten controller program resisted alteration. Finally, alternating layers of waveguides and mirrors encapsulated the power plant, to deflect and divert even the attempt to access the embedded controller.
Achilles had had Argo built in a brand-new hull. Nessus, whether from sentiment or laziness, kept flying Aegis long after its hidden vulnerabilities became known. He was a fool.
If Achilles had been as careless, almost surely Pak lasers would have destroyed his hull during that endless instant he had spent frozen in stasis. He would still be in stasis, eternally adrift in the interstellar void. . . .
“There is another way,” Nessus insisted. “The Gw’oth way.”
Baedeker, not yet Hindmost, not yet even in politics, had had the opportunity to end the Gw’oth menace before it began. Instead he allowed the Gw’oth aboard his ship to learn the secrets of hyperdrive. In secret the Gw’oth built a hyperdrive shunt inside their habitat module. When they activated their shunt, the protective normal-space bubble carried off Baedeker’s own shunt—and with it the middle of his General Products hull.
“The Gw’oth split a hull,” Achilles rebutted. “The end of the hull containing the power plant remained intact. The loss is the same whether the Pak find a reinforced piece or a reinforced whole.”
Nessus looked himself in the eyes. “So we carry off the hulk’s power plant.”
That was—madness. “Holding Argo’s severed power plant against our hull is like toying with a hydrogen bomb. If the power plant destabilizes, the shock wave will atomize us.”
“The Hindmost says the power plant will not destabilize.”
Baedeker was a fool, and Nessus a bigger fool for listening. “Then I must speak with him.”
Baedeker and Nike joined the hyperwave consultation. They were rivals of Achilles, and of one another, for the hearts of the Experimentalist Party. Apparently they had united for the moment against him.
Radio waves creeping between Hearth and the edge of the Fleet’s gravitational singularity added two minutes’ delay each way. While they exchanged civilities, Achilles studied his adversaries.
Baedeker was burly. He wore his mane tightly woven in characterless braids, its array of precious stones extensive but mundane. His mane, naturally a pale yellow-brown, had been dyed a rich gold. It clashed with his sash of office.
The coiffure, like its wearer, was unfit for a Hindmost.
Nike was petite, his pale tan hide without spots or other markings. His tawny mane sparkled with gemstones and filigreed gold chains, but no more brightly than his eyes shone with ambition.
He resembled the Hindmost he once had been—and schemed to be again.
“You asked for a consultation,” Baedeker began.
“Thank you, Hindmost.” Using the title galled Achilles. Nike had waived such formalities among ministers and scouts. Not Baedeker. “I question using the so-called Gw’oth method to destroy what remains of Argo.”
“A decoupled hull power plant will shut down,” Baedeker insisted. Undertunes and subtleties of posture reminded that he had once been a senior engineer at General Products.
“Really?” Achilles warbled skeptically. “Has someone teste
d extracting a power plant using a hyperdrive jump? How many times?”
The gibe drew silence. Emboldened, Achilles continued. “If you are mistaken, we will lose everything we might have learned from the Library.”
Nike leaned toward the camera. “You mean: we will lose you.”
“Are we humans, to embrace danger?” Achilles sneered.
His voices dripping with sarcastic harmonics, Nike sang, “Those crazy enough to leave Hearth must be crazy enough to protect it.”
“Achilles was only vulnerable when he presented his heel,” Nessus added. “Where did I hear that?”
“Enough!” Baedeker spread his hooves, straightening his necks assertively to glower down on the camera. “Questing for secrets of the Library was never Concordance policy. That you made the attempt, Achilles, will be addressed when you get back. And lest there be any question, Nessus remains hindmost aboard Aegis.”
Take orders from Nessus? Achilles trembled with fury but said nothing.
Baedeker went on. “Our objective remains to avoid provoking the Pak. Nessus, you must destroy Argo. Nothing can connect the lost Pak ship with the Concordance.”
“And if the attempt to destroy Argo also destroys this ship?” Achilles chanted. If Aegis sails forever through hyperspace, its crew bloodstains on the walls? He resisted the need to paw at the deck. There was nowhere to run.
Baedeker and Nessus exchanged meaningful glances. “If that happens,” the Hindmost sang, “we will honor your sacrifices.”
. . .
From two decks away Louis heard without understanding another acrimonious round between Nessus and Achilles. They sounded like orchestras tuning up, and whistling teakettles, and cats on whose tails someone kept stomping. Argument that heated had to involve unpalatable choices. Then, if Louis’s ears could be trusted, at least two more Puppeteers weighed in: a hyperwave consultation.
He synthed a meal while waiting for the dispute to end. Eating slowly, he finished still waiting. He synthed some brandy.