“I see nothing different,” Alice began. “Oh. Picket ships.”
The phrase drew another questioning glance from Nessus, and Sigmund kicked Alice under the table. “What my apt pupil says is correct.” He pointed at a few spots on the leading edge and northern fringe of the Pak advance. “More scout ships. They may not know what hit them, but they saw the effects dissipate with distance. They mean to keep whoever did it far away.”
Nessus and Baedeker exchanged snatches of melody. Not an argument this time, and Sigmund needed a moment to put a label on it. More than sad. More than wistful. It was . . . elegiac.
“Even unwarned,” Nessus said sadly, “a Pak scout ship surprised your mission. It is no use removing the Outsider drive from NP5. You might never again destroy a planet close enough to inflict real damage.”
The sad truth was, Nessus was right.
62
Sigmund watched Baedeker stare obsessively into Sancho Panza’s main tactical display. “No offense, but you’re one brave Citizen.”
“Calling me insane. Why would that insult me?” Without moving his gaze, with an involuntary quick paw-paw at the deck, Baedeker added, “I will consider the source and take your words in the manner you intended.”
“Fair enough.”
Hundreds of ships filled the display. Reaction to Niflheim’s spectacular destruction continued to evolve. The most intense activity propagated with the E-M blast and, lagging farther and farther behind, the wave of debris. Where the Pak had had more than a few days to react, open warfare had mostly concluded. Instead the squadrons maneuvered in a way Sigmund interpreted as wary clannish defensiveness.
The migration continued toward New Terra, the Fleet, and Jm’ho.
These were not the ships that had threatened Earth. They couldn’t be. Back in Sol system, Alice had glimpsed a tidy fleet, arrayed hexagonally. The formations at which Baedeker stared were anything but tidy. There were small, mutually supporting groups, sure, but overall this was a slow-motion turf war. It made sense: The Librarians trailing after Phssthpok had been one cohesive force. These ships were clans jockeying for military advantage, supporting and betraying one another at every opportunity.
So the black cloud of doom hanging over their heads had a shiny silver lining. Sigmund could not share it without revealing Alice’s secret past. Not that Baedeker would find comfort in Earth’s safety. . . .
No matter. Did Pak wear shoes? Because another shoe was about to drop.
WERE TWO GENERAL PRODUCTS hulls safer than one?
To Baedeker’s knowledge, no one had ever tried the experiment. The Pak incursion continued to drive improvisation. I have become an Experimentalist, he thought wryly. Like it or not.
Reap the Whirlwind had a General Products #4 hull, like Haven, but there the resemblance ended. Baedeker remembered Haven almost fondly: a busy, fully crewed, comfortably equipped vessel. Not so Reap the Whirlwind. This ship had no scientific instruments or engineering workshops, no spacious quarters or well-stocked pantries. For that matter, it had no decks and very few rooms.
Reap the Whirlwind was a freighter, pure and simple, but there was nothing simple about its cargoes. Only Sigmund could have conceived such a vessel. The ship carried:
—As its main cargo, all the mass it could hold: depleted uranium, and when stockpiles of that had been exhausted, lead and gold.
—An extra power plant and the extra fuel tanks to run it. Any #4 hull, because of its size, consumed prodigious energies in hyperspace. The massive cargo drained energy from the protective normal-space bubble that much faster. Their deuterium and tritium had been chilled down to solids to conserve volume for more payload.
—A planet-buster, like the one that had shattered Niflheim, already assembled.
—And Sancho Panza.
Like a ship in a bottle, Sigmund had described Sancho Panza, until he gave up trying to convey the simile. Something about wind-powered boats. It related somehow, in Sigmund’s convoluted mind, to calling the massive main cargo aboard Reap the Whirlwind grapeshot. And to somebody named Jolly Roger. With a sigh, Sigmund had eventually changed his analogy to lifeboat. Baedeker understood lifeboats.
As for the ships’ names, Baedeker understood neither. When Sigmund named ships, not even native New Terrans always got it.
“Five minutes from dropout,” Sigmund announced from Sancho Panza’s bridge. It served as the bridge for both vessels. Lead pellets filled the volume where any normal #4-based ship would have its flight controls.
“Acknowledged,” Baedeker called back. “I am in the engine room.”
“Acknowledged,” Ol’t’ro also replied. “We are ready to monitor instruments.” That the group mind answered made any mention of location superfluous: They were in their habitat. Sigmund had granted the Gw’oth near total network privileges, so they could access instruments from inside their water tank. With a few words, Ol’t’ro had gotten a place aboard: We no more can leave this task unfinished than can you, Sigmund.
These three—or eighteen, if you counted the Gw’oth individually—comprised the entire crew. A skeleton crew, Sigmund called it, and the image always made Baedeker shiver. Sigmund was crazy.
Sigmund was crazier to have brought the Gw’oth. Of course Baedeker was insane, too—how else travel light-years from Hearth and herd?—but there were types and degrees of mental illness.
He would find out soon if Sigmund was crazy enough. Baedeker opened a holo slaved to the main bridge display.
“One minute,” Sigmund called. “Unless anyone sees a reason to keep going.”
No sane being could do anything but keep going. Baedeker chanted mournfully to himself and did not answer.
“Breakout in five. . . four. . .”
“TWO . . . ONE . . . NOW.”
With peripheral tubacles poised above the controls, Ol’t’ro switched on sensors.
To one side, hundreds of blue-white lights. To the other side, the hungry magnetic maws of many more ramscoops. Sancho Panza had emerged, as planned, inside a small void deep within the leading Pak wave: a noman’s-land between battle fronts.
“In position,” Ol’t’ro reported. “Taking our first reading.”
Sancho Panza was at a near stop relative to the stars. The ramscoops were racing at significant fractions of light speed. Ol’t’ro took bearings on the brightest fusion exhausts—nearby ships—and the strongest of the neutrino-only sources—those that might be nearby. They waited a few seconds, and as the ships sped on, still unsuspecting, took a second set of bearings. They were only ten seconds in normal space.
“Nothing closer than a light-hour,” Ol’t’ro reported. “Nothing nearby coming faster than at half-light.” They were perfectly safe—even by Baedeker’s standards—for now. “We’ll refine that every few minutes.”
“Good enough,” Sigmund replied. “I’m sending the message.”
The main message went out by radio, endlessly repeating, but Sigmund also played the recording over the intercom. A Jeeves, speaking its version of Pak. Ol’t’ro understood parts of it, his aptitude with Thssthfok’s speech only one of the many secrets he still kept. It wasn’t a complicated message. Turn south now or we will appear again. And again. And again.
“Enough of that noise,” Sigmund finally said. The pops and whistles ended. “We’re still transmitting.”
Ten long minutes after their emergence among the Pak, Sigmund spoke again. “Let’s do this. Baedeker, are you ready?” Silence. “Baedeker!”
“Ready, Sigmund,” Baedeker finally answered.
“By the numbers,” Sigmund said. “Counting down from fifteen.”
ON TWELVE, the hull of Reap the Whirlwind became powder. Here and there, where the cargo was loosely packed, air pressure burst through the weakened surface.
On ten, Sancho Panza, a minnow to Reap the Whirlwind’s whale, burst free. Its thrusters scattered a small fraction of the dense metal pellets as it crept away.
On three, Sancho Panza di
sappeared into hyperspace.
On zero, the planet-buster in the heart of Reap the Whirlwind switched on.
63
“It’s working,” Sigmund recorded. “We got their attention.”
Success could be captured in remarkably few words.
The time-lapse surveillance data showed squadron after squadron of Pak ships breaking off, often fighting their way, toward galactic south. Turning away from New Terra, Hearth, and Jm’ho.
Doubtless the Pak had their own visualizations: of unlucky ships torn apart as the space-time ripples spread. Close behind that came a blast of lead and gold and uranium that even shredded to individual ions was all but impossible to avoid. The ions were too massive, and coming too fast, for a ramscoop magnetic field to confine or deflect. Relativistic heavy nuclei made the strongest cosmic rays look puny.
Reap the whirlwind, indeed.
Sancho Panza was eerily quiet. The Gw’oth were in their habitat, assimilating the experience in their own way. Baedeker was locked in his cabin, cowering in delayed reaction. That was all right. He would recover.
Sigmund hoped that happened soon. The isolation was getting to him. He talked to Jeeves, of course, but that only brought to mind another Jeeves, a friend, now gone.
In the bridge view port, stars shone like diamonds. Sigmund added a few details and hyperwaved his report, surveillance file attached. He pulled up a holo of Penny and the kids. How much had Hermes and Athena grown during this long trip?
Sancho Panza could stay in normal space long enough for another message.
“Jeeves, begin a new recording. ‘Dearest Penelope. All is well. It will take a while, but we’re coming home. . . . ’ ”
. . .
HEADS HELD HIGH, mane meticulously coiffed and bejeweled, songs in his throats, Baedeker cantered into the relax room. Why not sing? He was going home, the weight of worlds lifted from his shoulders. “Hello, Sigmund,” he said cheerily.
Sigmund was jogging on the treadmill. He raised an eyebrow at Baedeker’s dramatic entrance. “You’re in a good mood.”
“Indeed.” Baedeker got a bulb of redmelon juice and begin synthing a double portion of steamed mixed grains. “It finally registered. We have a future again. That is a very good thing.”
“I can’t argue.” Sigmund wiped his forehead with the back of an arm. “What does the future look like for you? Will you come back to New Terra?”
English required only one throat, and Baedeker started eating. “There are things I must do on Hearth.” That was not very forthcoming. “There are things I want to accomplish.”
“Good for you,” Sigmund huffed.
Why am I so reticent? Baedeker wondered. “Do not think me an ingrate. New Terra welcomed me when I felt unwelcome on Hearth. When I was dismayed by the terrible things the Concordance had done.”
“All you wanted was a garden and to be left alone. In return, you saved our world. We’re more than even.”
“No more than you saved Hearth.” Leaving Baedeker as indebted as before.
But changed in other ways. Now he had seen the good that governments could do. It took people to save the worlds, people like him and Sigmund—and yes, like Nessus—but it took government, too. No one else could have provided starships, labs, crews, and access to the Outsider drives.
What did the future hold? Nessus had tempted Baedeker more than he cared to admit. He would discover the remaining secrets of the Outsider drives. How better than as minister of science, with all the resources, talent, and influence that position controlled?
In his hearts, Baedeker felt the stirrings of an even higher purpose. Might he not, someday, become Hindmost? Then, surely, he could act on the Gw’oth threat. Unlike the New Terrans, the Gw’oth truly were a menace—and no one understood that danger better than he.
“Are you all right? You got awfully quiet.”
“Just thinking.” Baedeker preferred not to discuss his ambitions. He would not discuss the Gw’oth. About the latter, he and Sigmund had argued more than enough. At least the aliens had mostly kept to themselves, within their habitat, since Sancho Panza had left behind the Pak.
So what else? “I have been thinking about New Terra, Sigmund. About the tides.”
Sigmund stopped the treadmill and stepped off. “The lack of tides.”
“Maybe not.”
Sigmund blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I have learned a great deal about planetary drives. Enough, I believe, to fine-tune the operation of an Outsider drive.”
“Safely?” Sigmund asked suspiciously. “To what purpose?”
Of course, safely. “To superimpose an occasional tiny pulse or stutter.” And unlike the first time Baedeker had imagined—and, wisely, recoiled from—that notion, he now understood the implications, down to the tertiary feedback loops.
“I don’t follow.”
Was it not obvious? “The resulting ocean surges will emulate the effect of tides.”
Sigmund grinned. “If so, New Terra owes you a deep debt.”
64
Er’o climbed from the habitat level toward the bridge. The whine of exoskeleton motors and the clump of his steps echoed in the stairwell. Bubbles streamed past his eyes whenever he lifted a tubacle. Most distracting of all: Ol’t’ro’s admonition, still echoing in his thoughts. If it is at all possible, find us an alternative.
Exiting onto the bridge level, he found Sigmund alone. As intended. “Are you busy?” Er’o asked.
“Not at all.”
Er’o sidled through the door onto the bridge proper. The main display showed a landscape, rather than the view ahead. The mass pointer—a device no one would explain, but whose function his studies had made obvious—showed no significant objects nearby. “May we talk?”
Sigmund pointed to the spare couch. “Of course. Have a seat.”
Er’o clambered up and indulged the human need for small talk before getting to the point. “My friends and I wonder about our future.” More so Ol’t’ro wondered, but they had calculated Sigmund would respond best to an approach by a single Gw’o. “Recent events have been . . . unsettling.”
“To say the least. Er’o, something is troubling you. Out with it.”
“What comes next for my people?”
“You have new friends. So swapping information, what we call cultural exchange. Commerce, probably. You’ll be going home soon. Sabrina plans to send along a New Terran representative, what we call an ambassador, to consult with your governments. We would welcome your representatives on our world.”
“And the Concordance. Tell me honestly. Are we also its friend?”
A long pause. “The Concordance doesn’t have friends. It has interests.”
As rival city-states of the ocean depths had interests. How could it be otherwise? “You know the Citizens far better than I. How will they see their interest regarding the Gw’oth?”
A longer, more ominous pause. “I don’t know, Er’o. Perhaps as trading partners. The Citizens trade with New Terra.”
“You seem doubtful.” Though no more skeptical than I, or Ol’t’ro.
“I can’t speak for them. I can tell you New Terra will be your advocates.”
Jm’ho needed allies, not advocates. “Baedeker does not trust us. We assume his opinion will have considerable influence on Hearth.”
“Why do you say that? Why wouldn’t Baedeker trust you?”
Er’o was not about to mention sowing Haven with listening devices. “He is not very discreet about his opinion.”
“No, I suppose not. Still, why would he distrust you?”
“We know the location of the Fleet. And our talents scare him.”
“Your talents helped defeat the Pak,” Sigmund said, and yet he looked away. Yesterday’s triumph only made Ol’t’ro and those like him scarier today.
“For now”—without hyperdrives of our own—“we cannot defend ourselves.” Nor threaten Hearth, for deterrence was the best way to defend Jm’ho.
Meanwhile planet-busters, both Pak-like kinetic weapons and devices of Baedeker’s design, remained a terrible threat. “I fear that our absence would be in the Concordance’s . . . interest.”
So would eliminating Ol’t’ro. Baedeker had already suggested it, likening Ol’t’ro to Thssthfok, even while the Gw’oth had helped to improve Baedeker’s prototype drives.
Sigmund frowned. “I’m sure Sabrina will assert forcefully that we consider the Gw’oth our friends.”
“And what beyond words would she do for us?”
Sigmund said nothing.
What could he say? New Terra also had interests, and war with the Fleet would hardly be among them. Ol’t’ro was right. New Terra might help, but Ol’t’ro dare not depend on it.
They would take a lesson from Sigmund. Paranoia showed great survival value.
Er’o concluded the conversation and scurried back to the habitat. It was time to put to the test research under way since he first encountered humans.
. . .
“BREAKING OUT OF HYPERSPACE IN FIVE SECONDS,” Sigmund called. Soon he added, “Nice, rational stars. A sight for sore eyes.”
“For those who have eyes,” Jeeves answered, also over the intercom.
Ol’t’ro said nothing. They were deep in thought, in a final assessment of tactics and contingencies, and they had three sensor clusters fully engaged with instruments. Normal space, all right. They took bearings on four familiar pulsars. Easy calculations put their position not quite eighteen light-years from Jm’ho. New Terra and the Fleet of Worlds were marginally closer, on slightly different bearings. They ran a final diagnostic on the mechanism that had long been the focus of the Er’o unit’s research efforts. It passed.
“I’m sorry,” Ol’t’ro radioed. They activated Er’ o’s homemade hyperdrive shunt—
Transporting into hyperspace their habitat, the middle of Sancho Panza, and a corresponding third of the otherwise all-but-indestructible hull.