Destroyer

Table of Contents

 

“This series has lost none of its vigor.
Destroyer
is an excellent adventure.”

—
The Denver Post

 

“Well-developed characters, fine style, and intense psychological realism. Cherryh’s many readers should snap this one up.”

—
Publishers Weekly

 

“With every new “Foreigner” novel, Cherryh strengthens the saga’s already imposing reputation as one of the foremost series exploring the complex and delicate relationships between human and alien cultures. Cherryh’s Foreigner saga is cerebral science fiction at its very best—as entertaining as it is contemplative.”

—
The Barnes & Noble Review

 

 

“Cherryh’s gift for conjuring believable alien cultures is in full force here, and her characters . . . are brought to life with a sure and convincing hand.”

—
Publishers Weekly

 

“A seriously probing, thoughtful, intelligent piece of work, with more insight in half a dozen pages than most authors manage in half a hundred.”

—
Kirkus

 

“Close-grained and carefully constructed . . . a book that will stick in the mind for a lot longer than the usual adventure romp.”

—
Locus

 

“A large new Cherryh novel is always welcome . . . a return to the anthropological science fiction in which she has made such a name is a double pleasure . . . superlatively drawn aliens and characterization.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

DAW TITLES BY C. J. CHERRYH

FOREIGNER
INVADER
INHERITOR
PRECURSOR
DEFENDER
EXPLORER
DESTROYER
PRETENDER
¹

 

THE ALLIANCE-UNION UNIVERSE
DOWNBELOW STATION
MERCHANTER’S LUCK
FORTY THOUSAND IN GEHENNA
SERPENT’S REACH
AT THE EDGE OF SPACE Omnibus:
Brothers of Earth | Hunter of Worlds
THE FADED SUN Omnibus:
Kesrith | Shon’jir | Kutath

 

THE CHANUR NOVELS
THE CHANUR SAGA Omnibus:
The Pride of Chanur | Chanur’s Venture |
The Kif Strike Back
CHANUR’S HOMECOMING
CHANUR’S LEGACY

 

THE MORGAINE CYCLE
THE MORGAINE SAGA Omnibus:
Gate of Ivrel | Well of Shiuan | Fires of Azeroth
EXILE’S GATE

 

OTHER WORKS
THE DREAMING TREE OMNIBUS:
The Tree of Swords and Jewels | The Dreamstone
ALTERNATE REALITIES Omnibus:
Port Eternity | Wave Without a Shore | Voyager in Night
THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF
C.J. CHERRYH
ANGEL WITH THE SWORD
CUCKOO’S EGG

Copyright © 2005 by C.J. Cherryh

All Rights Reserved.

 

 

DAW Books Collectors No. 1318

 

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. All resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

 

 

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

eISBN : 978-1-101-14375-9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First Paperback Printing, February 2006

 

 

 

S
pider plants had taken over the cabin, cascading sheets of spider plants growing from pots improvised from sealed sections of plastic pipe arranged in racks around the ceiling of every wall. They made showers of green runners and gave out clouds of miniature pale-edged spider babies that swayed in the gusts from vents, in the opening of doors.

The plants were fortunate,
kabiu,
to atevi sensibilities. They were alive. They grew, they changed, masking steel walls that never changed, and in their increasingly abundant green, they reminded a voyager that ahead of them in the vast deep dark of space was a planet where atevi and humans shared natural breezes, enjoyed meadows and forests and the occasional wild mountain-bred storm, in an environment where, indeed, growth was lush and abundant.

“The planting is becoming extravagant, nandi,” Narani had once suggested, that excellent gentleman, when the pipe-pots were only ten, and ran along only one wall. “Bindanda wishes to inquire if we should simply discard the excess at this point.”

Bren Cameron’s devoted staff had by now offered spider plants to every colonist in the deck above, and bestowed them on every crew cabin that would accept them, where he supposed they likewise proliferated to the limit of tolerance. He had consulted the ship’s lab, to whom he had given the first offshoots, fearing the spread of his house plants might provide lifesupport a real problem . . . but lifesupport declared that, no, living biomass provided their systems no problem at all, except as they tied up water and nutrients. The ship had plenty of both, and the chief disruption to the closed loop of life aboard
Phoenix,
so they said, was simply that the plants made “an interesting intervention” in the daily oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle, the energy budget, humidity and climate control. “A catastrophic die-off would be a matter for concern,” lifesupport told him, “but we would of course consume the biomass that might result. Slow changes, we accommodate quite well. We find this an interesting variance in the system. They balance humidity. And they clean the air.”

So the plants grew, and showered out their runners with baby spiders unrestrained over the two years of their voyage, proceeding from one wall, to two, and now four, having found conditions very much to their liking—the plants especially liked their intervals in folded space, such as now, when plants thrived in crazy abundance and intelligent beings operated on minimal intellect. The spider plants cured dry air, static, and nosebleeds, that persistent malady aboard. They were, most of all,
alive,
and in the metal world of the ship, they were a bizarre sort of hobby.

Pity, Bren thought, that he hadn’t brought along tomatoes instead of inedible house plants, preserved tomatoes having completely run out aboard, in the two-plus years of their voyage—tomato sauce depleted along with other commodities, like the highly favored sugar candies. The better part of three thousand souls aboard consumed a great deal of sugar and fruit, fruit being novel to a spacefaring population, the simplest flavors generally being favored over more complex tastes.

He, himself, was
not
from a spacefaring population, and he dreaded the day that their daily fare would get down to the yeasts and algaes that had been lonely Reunion Station’s ordinary fare for the few centuries of its existence.

Reunion was now in other hands. Its population was aboard, headed for a refuge and a new life on a station orbiting what they understood to be an eden, a reservoir of fruit candies and other such delights.

They consumed stores at a higher rate than planned. Now tea was running short. Caffeine was about to run out altogether.
That
was a crisis.

Bren took his carefully cherished cup—he afforded himself one small pot a day and kept a careful eye on what remained in their stores, knowing that his atevi staff would sacrifice their own ration to provide for him till it ran out, if he did not insist they share.

This late evening as usual, after a very nice dinner, he seated himself at his writing-desk, which supported his computer along with the paper, pen, formal stationery and wax-jack of an atevi gentleman . . . not the only paper aboard, but close to it. He set his teacup down precisely at the proper spot, just so, opened the computer, and resumed his letters, a tapping of keys so rapid it made a sort of music; it had a rhythm, a living rhythm of his thoughts, like a conversation with himself.

He wore his lightest coat in the snug, pleasantly humidified warmth of his cabin, maintained only a minimum of lace at the cuffs—in the general diminution of intelligence and enterprise, no one stirred much during their transit of folded space, few people went visiting, and entertainments were mostly, during such times, television of the very lowest order. Staff gathered in the dining hall to watch dramas from the human archive . . . but there were no longer refreshments, under the general rationing, and the whole affair had begun to assume a worn, threadbare cheerfulness, which he usually left early.

He dressed, every day, wore the clothes of a gentleman, which his staff meticulously prepared and laid out daily . . . the lace now unstarched, that commodity having run short, too, but the shirts carefully ironed, the knee-length coats immaculate. He read in the afternoons. He was learning ancient Greek, long an ambition of his, and working on a kyo grammar—being a linguist, the translator, the paidhi, long before he became Lord of the Heavens. He had been charged with retrieving a few thousand inconvenient colonists and getting them back to safe territory, and in the process he had discovered a further need for his services. He had words. He could make a dictionary and a grammar. He reverted to his old scholarly duties to keep his mind sharp.

He likewise kept up his letters, daily, his evening ritual, along with the after-dinner tea. He had a cyclic record of the rise in the quality of his output during sojourns in normal space, when his brain formed connections, and, longer still, those intervals of folded space, when his prose suffered jumps of logic and grammar and other flaws. In the latter instance he learned that the ship’s crew had a reason for rules and discipline and careful procedure. He found that strict schedule and meticulous procedure afforded his dimmer days a necessary structure, when it was oh so easy to grow slovenly in habit. Rules and formality were increasingly necessary for him and the staff, when getting out of bed these days took an act of moral fortitude.