Destroyer of Worlds (43 page)

“And you?”

“Shut into the engine room. I put the stepping disc here into standby just before he tried to use it. The send address matched the disc from the fifth-deck pantry.”

Sigmund had stepped to a moving destination without a pilot at the helm! He shuddered, but that was hardly their biggest problem. If Thssthfok understood the discs, he could be anywhere on the ship. Or
off
the ship. “Jeeves—break velocity sync with the ground.”

“Done, Sigmund. Resuming a standard orbit.”

On the ground, Eric and Baedeker were arguing about an instrument calibration. If Thssthfok had gotten below, he was keeping his distance. Sigmund sent Eric a private warning, just in case—and reassurance that Kirsten remained safe.

What else, Sigmund wondered. “Kirsten, how is the bridge secured?”

“I left the disc there in send-only mode. That's how I got to the engine room. The bridge hatch is locked from inside. Only Jeeves or an oxy-fuel cutting torch is getting us back in there.”

“Jeeves. Any reason to suppose Thssthfok isn't in the pantry?”

“No, but he has bypassed our sensors before.”

“Good point. Kirsten, are you armed?”

“No, sorry. My priority was securing the bridge and engine room.”

“That was a good call, but now stay where you are. I'm going to check the pantry.”

 

THE CORRIDOR WAS VACUUM-STILL
. Faint noises reached Thssthfok through the ceiling and floor. The pantry had become stuffy, and he bled oxygen from the tank of the unrolled rescue bag that sealed the hatch.

He ran through his options. He could wait here until armed jailors recaptured him. He could venture out, claws versus battle armor, claws doubly useless within a rescue bag. Or—

His one viable option was obvious.

 

THE PANTRY HATCH BULGED SLIGHTLY
. It might yet hold pressure. Sigmund switched to the intercom. “Thssthfok, this is Sigmund. I'm going to open the pantry hatch. Remain where you are. There should be rescue bags inside with you. You have two minutes to get inside one.”

Sigmund stood to the side of the hatch, ready to shoot anyone leaving. Stunners didn't work in a vacuum. He'd tried to send a flash-bang grenade to the pantry, but the stepping disc inside was in send-only mode. That left only the laser he now gripped. “All right, Thssthfok. Time's up.”

Sigmund released the latch. Air pressure flung open the door, ripping the handle from his grip. A white cloud burst out. Cans, bags, and an empty rescue bag rained to the deck as they cleared the hatch.

No Pak.

Sigmund backed away from the hatchway, lobbing a sealed rescue bag through the opening. After two minutes Sigmund approached cautiously. The pantry was a mess.

As for Thssthfok, there was no sign.

 

THE LITTLE SHIP
was how Thssthfok remembered it, only messier.

Some of the mess was of Thssthfok's doing. He had emptied a large bag—flour, whatever that was—to carry his supplies. White dust covered him. The far more serious disorder was in the cockpit. The command console had been opened and taken half apart! Cable bundles snaked out of the cabinet to tens of instruments and gauges.

Through the canopy, he saw the too-familiar walls of his onetime cell.

Before Thssthfok's latest escape, Eric had been suited up. Thssthfok doubted a mere spacesuit offered protection against the nothingness of hyperspace. And Sigmund's mysterious demo must take place in normal space, where the Pak could see it.

The path to freedom was clear.

He flipped over the stepping disc to disable it, then set to work reassembling the little ship's flight controls.

 

“
THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING
.” Sigmund broadcast over the intercom and the ship's public channel. If Thssthfok was alive and onboard, he would hear. “In one minute, I'll open the entire ship to vacuum. Tell us where you are.”

No response.

“Kirsten, are you still suited up?”

“Yes. But, Sigmund . . .”

“We don't know what Thssthfok is doing. I'll not put either of us at risk again. He's a lot less dangerous trapped in a rescue bag.”

“Opening the cargo bay means losing Brennan's old singleship, too.”

“It is far too heavy, Kirsten,” Jeeves said. “I will double gravity in the hold to be sure.”

Sigmund said, “Jeeves, disable the interior emergency hatches. Open the air locks and the cargo-hold doors.” To Kirsten, he added, “I have weapons. I'll be outside the engine-room door in a few minutes. Once you're armed, we'll sweep the ship end to end.” And though he took no pride in it, Sigmund half hoped to find Thssthfok dead.

 

THSSTHFOK WORKED FEVERISHLY
, ignoring Sigmund's threat. The little ship had an environmental system and its reservoirs were full.

Strobing red light flooded the canopy and an alarm wailed. The large exterior hatch began to rise and Thssthfok's weight doubled. The little ship's hull rang like a gong under the hail of loose tools and equipment being sucked out into space.

The hail ended. The audible alarm trailed off to silence.

What the disassembled console did not tell him, the spliced-in human instruments did. The deuterium tanks were two-thirds full. The drive appeared operational. The radio and comm laser passed muster—and at close range, the latter would serve as a weapon. The flight controls were operable,
merely exposed for examination. (Well, more than flight controls. Things he did not immediately recognize could be examined later.)

And now Sigmund had opened the cargo hold's exterior hatch. That saved Thssthfok the time to bypass the controls and loss-of-pressure alarms. A touch of the takeoff-and-landing jets would ease him from the cargo bay.

Stars beckoned.

The humans could have killed him. He had provoked them often enough. Thssthfok felt a pang of remorse, but he would not allow pursuit. His breeders were depending on him.

At least the end would be quick. Thssthfok flipped on the radio. “I'm sorry.”

He ignited the fusion drive and a plasma plume hotter than the surface of a star erupted into
Don Quixote
.

 

ACROSS
DON QUIXOTE
—and throughout the computing complex that housed Jeeves—alarms flared. Short circuits. Open circuits. Electrical fires. Popped, welded, and vanished circuit breakers. Temperature alarms. Equipment malfunctions. Tanks overpressure and burst. Comm fallouts. Faults beyond Jeeves's ability to categorize.

If only the hull would burst, it would release the plasma. But General Products had built too well. The hull trapped the plasma and everything that the plasma vaporized and ionized. In an instant, the trapped heat and radiation would destroy him. In an instant, he could not begin to calculate the optimal response.

He would do what he could.

He canceled the override that had held open external and emergency hatches. The doors would close on their own—unless they melted or warped from the intense heat. The main cargo-hold hatch jammed immediately.

The main fusion reactor had shut down on its own, but he dumped deuterium and tritium to space, against the remote possibility that ricocheting plasma could somehow fuse any of it. He flushed nitrogen throughout the crew areas for the little cooling that would provide. He vented oxygen to space, where it could not feed fires.

He fired main thrusters, fleeing the searing plasma. One thruster sputtered and quit. The rest quickly followed. The ship tumbled wildly.

He sent short laser bursts to the comm satellites deployed above Niflheim,
hoping he had retrieved the most important files. So many memory banks had failed, he could not be certain.

All of this was what Jeeves believed Sigmund would have wanted him to do.

Then thought ceased.

 

IMPOSSIBLE GLARE!
Sigmund's visor turned opaque. Intense heat washed over him. He stumbled through the hatch Kirsten had just unlocked, into the engine room. She slammed the hatch behind him. The ship shuddered and shook beneath them. A sudden hot wind buffeted him. It couldn't be oxygen; in this heat,
something
would have gone up in flames.

“I'm sorry.” Regret had not stayed Thssthfok's hand. What had he done?

Sigmund's visor cleared enough to show the hatch glowing orange and starting to sag. Gravity vanished, revealing the ship had gone into a wild tumble. He bounced off a bulkhead. Something clanged off his helmet.

Now the hatch blazed cherry red.

Kirsten snagged him from the air. “Boot magnets!” When his feet slapped to the deck, she led him behind some massive hunk of equipment he didn't recognize. A gale howled in his suit, but the cooling unit was overmatched. The air in his suit grew hotter by the second.

“We'll make it,” he told Kirsten.

False hope was all that Sigmund had to offer. Things were about to end very badly—again.

 

Activity across the ice came to an abrupt standstill. Cacophony overwhelmed the public comm channel. Then Eric burst from within the cluster of drive modules. He bounced in flat arcs toward the nearest stepping disc, cursing Sigmund and bargaining with the universe.

All from “I'm sorry.” Er'o was still grappling with the implications when
Haven
's transmitter overpowered the rest.

“Quiet!” Minerva shouted. “I have urgent news. Immediately after Thssthfok spoke, there was a data dump from
Don Quixote
. Comm dropped mid-transfer, and we can't reestablish the link. I have crew studying the data. Almost simultaneously with all this, a neutrino source began accelerating away from the planet. A ship, I assume, but it does not respond to hails.”

“A relay problem?” Er'o asked.

“The comm buoys are nominal,” Minerva said. “We've relayed test messages all the way around Niflheim.”

Eric called out, huffing as he ran. “Is the neutrino source
Don Quixote
?”

“Unknown,” Minerva said. “It will be out of Niflheim's shadow in a few minutes.”

If not
Don Quixote
, then who? Another ramscoop, perhaps, waiting in ambush to surprise the ramscoop sneaking up to this planet. Instead, it ambushed
Don Quixote
before Sigmund, Kirsten, or Jeeves could get out a coherent message.

Possible, but Er'o did not believe it. “Based on its last known course, when will
Don Quixote
come over the horizon?”

“Two minutes, ten seconds,” Minerva said.

Eric skidded to a stop on the disc. It was powered up and in transmit-only mode, to keep Thssthfok from coming down. Eric stood there, screaming.

The transport should not have worked, whether
Don Quixote
remained
in orbit or was racing away. The velocity mismatch was far too high. Er'o was not supposed to understand that, and kept the observation to himself. Had Er' o's mate been aboard, he would have tried, too.

A timer ticked down in one sensor cluster's augmented vision. As the count approached zero, Er'o netted to a telescope that Minerva had aimed.

A bit late, more than a bit off course, a tumbling cylinder appeared. It was eerily mottled, and random patches glowed fiery hot in far red.
Don Quixote
, everything and everyone aboard surely destroyed.

With a whimper, Baedeker fell to the ice and rolled himself into a tight ball. He had seen the image, too.

A second virtual counter approached zero, and a blue-white streak climbed over the horizon. A fusion flame. “No widespread magnetic field,” Minerva noted. “Not a ramscoop.”

“The singleship!” Eric howled. “I killed her!”

 

ON COMM, CHAOS REASSERTED ITSELF
. They should fly to
Don Quixote
and search for survivors. They should pursue whoever streaked away on that searing blue-white exhaust. And most of the voices: They should run for home—immediately.

Eric raged with dread and anger. Baedeker was lost to fear. Minerva, like all the rest, waited for someone else to make a decision.

Craning a tubacle, Er'o looked about the frozen waste. That left . . . him.

“Quiet, please!” With only a suit radio for amplification, Er'o had to keep calling. “Everyone, quiet! Calm down!” As the din ebbed, he added, “Hurry. We have to finish our work here.”

“You're crazy!” Eric yelled. “We have to rescue Kirsten and Sigmund.”

The wreckage remained far-red hot. Could anyone aboard still live? Er'o said gently, “I'm sorry, Eric. The ship must cool before we can try.” If it even cools enough for the attempt before the oncoming ramscoop makes us evacuate. “Kl'o, Ng'o, please complete checkout—”

Eric turned and ran toward
Haven
. “Checkout? Everything has changed! Thssthfok is getting away! He's running for the Pak fleet with everything he's learned about us and our technology. And in a few hours, the light from Thssthfok's fusion drive will reach the incoming ramscoop. That'll be the end of stealth and magnetic braking. They'll start their drive and be down our throats all the faster.”

Eric's frantic words had collapsed two more pressure-suited Citizens into unresponsive balls.

Er'o said, “All the more reason to finish here. The planet-buster is one technology Thssthfok has not seen. We cannot possibly remove everything before the ramscoop arrives. Instead we finish up and set off the weapon. And eliminate Thssthfok in the process.”

New murmurs, with some of the earlier certainty gone.

Er'o tried to bring order. “Kl'o, Ng'o, please complete checkout of the device. Omar, get the Citizens who need help back to
Haven
. If you are up to it, Eric, review the data dump from
Don Quixote
. It may offer some clues.”

For a moment, no one moved. Then Omar said, “You heard the starfish. Let's all get back to work.”