Destroyer of Worlds (38 page)

And the colony on Home had failed no later than the very early 2400s. Had it happened any later, the plague would have been reported by hyperwave, and a relief mission dispatched by hyperdrive. “Those dates are suspiciously close together, Alice.”

She nodded, setting her Belter crest to bobbing. “You'll get no argument from me.”

He didn't need to take on faith that Alice had seen a protector—he had Kirsten's characterization of the singleship modifications. Finagle, he'd found her in Brennan's old singleship.

And as spotty as was Sigmund's knowledge of Belter history, Alice knew events from long after Brennan-monster should have starved to death. Put it all together and Brennan
had
solved the tree-of-life virus problem, and so survived, and so met Alice long after. All of her story hung together, except the most critical part—the supposed threat to Earth of Pak fleets long overdue in Sigmund's day.

“Sigmund? Are you all right?”

In his mind, finally, puzzle pieces fell into place. “Home had a plague, all right. A tree-of-life virus plague. A Pak plague.
That's
what wiped out the colony.” He kept on despite Alice's look of revulsion. Everything was suddenly, horrifyingly clear. “Brennan set loose the Pak virus on Home. That's how he got help. He raised an army of protectors.”

Roy, surely, among them.

Alice glanced down fearfully at her belly. At Roy's baby. Her expression asked: Am I carrying a monster? “But protectors . . . protect. What about Home's colonists?”

The colonists weren't related to Brennan or Roy. That made them expendable. Sigmund tried to think like a Pak, and about his many interrogations of Thssthfok. It made Sigmund ill—and eerily certain what must have happened.

“The original tree-of-life virus kills anyone too old,” he said. “Suppose Brennan's variant also killed everyone too young. That would leave a population of childless protectors.” And millions dead. Brennan had been right to call himself a monster. “Like Phssthpok, they could only die or adopt a cause. Brennan's cause: an armada to go after the Pak.” And as they left, they torched the abandoned cities to obliterate every trace of their actions.

“But there were no traces of a virus,” Alice insisted. There was no cool professionalism left in her. She wanted—desperately—to prove Sigmund wrong.

If only he were. “I imagine that the virus was engineered to be fragile outside its host. Maybe ultraviolet exposure killed it, maybe winter temperatures. Let a year pass, and Home was virus-free. Brennan would not have allowed rogue protectors to crop up among new settlers.”

“Well at least you have your answer.” Alice swallowed hard. “You say that in your time no one had heard of either Brennan's fleet or the Pak fleets. I see only one explanation. They wiped each other out.” She glanced again at her belly. This look was more wistful: Your father is dead, baby. “In a gruesome way, isn't this good news?”

Had there been only one set of Pak fleets, the Librarians who had followed in Phssthpok's wake, then yes. Of course. But there was
another
fleet. A merciless fleet, onrushing even now, its vanguard a scant few years from New Terra. Even as Sigmund dabbled in pointless historical mysteries.

“Here's how I see it,” Sigmund said finally. “Millions become protectors. A world looted of anything useful to build a navy. None of them came back.” Because if they had, they would have done something by now about the Kzinti. “So we know what it takes to stop a Pak fleet. A world of protectors.”

While New Terrans were merely human, and Puppeteer-conditioned pacifists at that. Puppeteers, like Kzinti, were unheard of in the Sol system of Alice's day. She knew nothing of either.

Sigmund was thankful, suddenly, that Baedeker had followed another path. Alice had much study ahead of her before Sigmund could hope to pass her off—for her own good—as a New Terran native.

Not that it really mattered. Going down fighting remained the only option on the table.

He took a deep breath. “A world of human protectors only fought Phssthpok's allies to a draw. What does that say about our hopes of surviving this onslaught?”

 

Thssthfok paced his newest cell. He had tugged experimentally at every massive metal bar of his cage, and ten Pak could not have bent them. The cell door, when armored guards opened it to deliver or remove a food tray, required a massive metal key and squealed on its hinges. The walls beyond his reach behind the bars were concrete. So were the floor and ceiling. He had memorized every discoloration, ripple, dip, and bump in every surface.

Armored guards in a clear-walled observation room watched him at all times. To judge from the faces behind the visors, all were too young to respond to tree-of-life root—when, one tuber at a time, it was doled out—if their suits should tear. They were well trained and refused to be drawn into conversation. On the bright side, he had a toilet, bedding, and, beyond the bars, one small window.

His confinement was primitive, and would take that much longer to defeat because of it.

He exercised steadily. It helped fill the time. It kept him fit for the opportunity to escape that must come. To doubt was to die.

His jailers gave him reading material. The books offered nothing useful and he ignored them. Little animals with bushy tails sometimes perched on the ledge outside his window. He ignored them, too.

Colored lights blinked on the bracelet clamped around his ankle, radioing his location independently of the guards and the beyond-the-bars cameras. Perhaps the anklet would also shock or drug him if he tried to escape. Thssthfok would have built in that capability.

The metal band flexed under stiffened fingers. With effort, he thought, he could tear off the anklet, but opening the band would at a minimum open a circuit and trigger an alarm. But if the metal was weak enough to tear—

Breeders fidget. Humans would think nothing of Thssthfok fidgeting.
He spun the band, around and around and around, a finger exploring the inner surface. He found an array of pinholes that might emit a gaseous or aerosol drug. Something to knock him out on contact.

A bit of well-chewed food would plug the holes—blocking airflow sensors inside. They would know that he had noticed the mechanism. A new anklet with another knockout device might not offer the convenience of holes. Hooking a claw tip in a perforation, he began tugging and scraping. In time, he would expose the hidden circuitry. . . .

Movement in the observation room caught Thssthfok's eye. A newcomer, armored like the rest. The guards stood stiffly in his presence. The person turned and Thssthfok saw his face. Sigmund.

The door opened from the observation room into the prison. Sigmund came through and the door slammed shut behind him. He waited outside the bars. “Hello, Thssthfok.”

“Sigmund.”

“Are you comfortable?”

Breeders cared about comfort. Perhaps Sigmund thought to induce or coerce him. “I would not mind a change of scenery.” Someplace less securely guarded.

Sigmund sat in a chair placed far back from the cell. He took a computer from a pocket. “I have some interesting scenery in here.”

Thssthfok had nothing else to do. He waited.

Sigmund said, “Here's the thing. Worlds important to me lie in the path of the Pak advance. It's necessary that the Pak go elsewhere.”

Thssthfok knew of this world only what could be seen through his one tiny window: the planet had many suns. He supposed it was among the fleet of worlds glimpsed during a brief escape. “This world, for example.”

Sigmund leaned forward. “We can do something for each other.”

Breeders used crude social rituals to establish hierarchy, assign their simple tasks, select mates, and allocate their meager belongings. Thssthfok remembered his life as a breeder, remembered giving favors and expecting favors in turn. He remembered the vague sense, too ill-defined to articulate, that such social obligations somehow helped everyone.

With maturity came clarity and wisdom. You protected your family and your clan. You took what you could, and all that you could, to benefit your bloodline, but never more than you could defend. Nothing else mattered.

To seek allies exposed weakness and desperation. When you allied, you
did so knowing the other side would betray you the moment the cost became acceptable. As the other side expected from you. . . .

Thus had clan Rilchuk aligned itself, so long ago, of dire necessity, with the comet dwellers. Thssthfok's fear for his breeders never ended.

Humans were neither breeder nor protector, but an unnatural mixture.
Do something for each other
. An advanced version of breeders trading favors, then. Sigmund had given aliens free run aboard his ship. Perhaps humans allied more readily than did protectors.

“What would you have me do?” Thssthfok asked.

A hologram leapt from the device in Sigmund's hand. A scattering of stars. A sprawling nebula, its dust and gas dimly lit by unseen stars within. And against that smoky backdrop: swarms of dots, in wave after wave, each wave shown in a separate color. The Pak fleets!

Nothing was as Thssthfok remembered from long-ago tactical displays, and yet . . . In the third wave, a cluster of dots occupied the relative position the comet-dweller/Rilchuk forces had once dominated. They might be his old fleet. They might not. Deployments had evolved during his exile—as they must—in the shifting of alliances and the rise and fall of military fortunes.

Sigmund terminated the image. “Unnatural helium concentrations and ripples in the interstellar medium pinpoint the Pak ships coming this way.”

“What would you have me do?” Thssthfok repeated.

“Spare my conscience. My people don't want to destroy your fleets, but we will.”

“Conscience? What is that?”

Sigmund sighed. “Knowing right from wrong, and preferring to do the former.”

Acts that benefited one's own were right. Failing to benefit one's own was wrong. To destroy one's enemy must always be right. If Sigmund could destroy the oncoming Pak fleets, he would. This
conscience
changed nothing.

Thssthfok gestured at the metal bars. “I have no influence over your actions, Sigmund.”

“But perhaps you could influence the Pak advance. Would they listen if you advised them to change their current course?”

Of course not. No rational adversary would lose the opportunity to destroy an adversary. Nothing Thssthfok could say would convince the clans that powerful opponents existed who might stay their hand. As nothing Sigmund said would ever convince Thssthfok.

Sigmund was attempting, incredibly, to bluff all the fleets of the Pak. But if Sigmund
believed
Thssthfok could influence the fleets—

“It is possible,” Thssthfok lied. “After my absence from the evacuation fleet, I must know more.”

“Like what?”

“The balance of influence”—the balance of power—“among clans.”

“How can we know that?” Sigmund asked.

Thssthfok gestured at the computer still in Sigmund's hand. “Perhaps from more data like what you showed me. How much do you have?”

Sigmund tapped at his device. “Similar long-range observations spanning about two hundred days.”

“Seen over what distance?”

A truthful response might reveal the distance to the Pak vanguard, and Sigmund chose not to answer. “Would the full set of imagery be useful?”

“Very much.”

Sigmund tapped some more on the computer. A slightly different stars-and-starships image appeared. “Here is the full data set in time-lapse form.”

The dots representing ships shifted against the nebula and stars and, more intricately and subtly, with respect to each other. Counting heartbeats as a crude clock, Thssthfok watched the images morph. The steadiness of his heartbeat was the least of his assumptions as he estimated angles and inferred course pa ram e ters. If by
day
, Sigmund meant the dark/light cycle on this planet, and if Sigmund had told the truth about the images representing two hundred days of observations, the vanguard approached at about half light speed.

“I will have to think about what I have seen,” Thssthfok said.

“Can you identify your clan's ships?”

So that you can threaten them to coerce me? Thssthfok said, “I need to think about what I have seen. Much has changed in my absence.”

Sigmund stood. “I'll check with you tomorrow.”

“All right.”

Sigmund left, and Thssthfok began circling the cell. The static image had revealed little. But the animation! The subtle dance—of dominated volumes shrinking and expanding, of squadrons gaining and losing ships, of swirling realignments as coalitions formed and were betrayed—told a story. Different clans favored different tactical deployments. They responded in time-tested ways to feints and attacks. Their weakest ships constrained their
maneuvering. To one with the knowledge to read it, the jitter of the dots told a great deal.

He replayed the animation in his thoughts, focusing one by one on the midsized clusters within the third wave. The squadron he had first looked to for his clan—wasn't. But among the last of the candidates, having fallen back defensively, their numbers depleted, he found a bunch of ships whose tactics he knew well. The comet-dweller/Rilchuk alliance still survived. He might yet have breeders in cold sleep—

And they needed his protection more than ever.

 

Sigmund strode across the broad plaza, the air crisp and fresh, sunlight warm on his face. People streamed all around, chatting or laughing or lost in thought. New Terra felt strange and wonderful at the same time. Strings of suns and the occasional red-and-purple plant beat deep space, let alone hyperspace, anytime.

Far better would have been a day at home with Penny and the kids, but he had work to do.