Return to Nature Preserve One and Achilles? Never.
That left Nature Preserve Three, the world farthest from Poseidon but letting him skirt the worst of the mayhem.
Nessus turned his stolen ship toward Nature Preserve Three, accelerating as fast as he dared, shouting into the comm console as he flew.
AROUND THE DOME of the planetary-drive building, alarm lights blazed fiery red. Bone-jarring dissonances, stepping-disc emergency tones, rattled the floor.
Standing tall, at peace, Achilles waited.
The stepping discs, as they had begun their shrieking, had roused one worker from catatonia. He had taken one look around and galloped from the building. The rest of the technicians, sunken yet more deeply into themselves, would offer no problems.
Death on an unparalleled scale was moments away. The definitive revenge. Greatness beyond equal. The ultimate transformation.
In moments, he changed the universe.
Calmly brushing his mane, Achilles welcomed … apotheosis.
“ONE SHIP HAS LEFT NP1,” Jeeves advised. “A Puppeteer ship.”
Any ships the Fringe War had not blasted from the sky, the Concordance had grounded. “It is Nessus?” Louis asked hopefully.
“Unknown,” Jeeves said.
“Put me through!” Louis ordered. “Nessus! Is that you? Do you need help?”
Nothing.
Alice leaned over to study the tactical display in which Jeeves had set one dot blinking. “It’s inside the singularity still. It’ll take a while for them to get our hail.”
And just as long — if it even was Nessus on that ship — to answer.
Only after less than thirty seconds, they heard. Someone had called them first.
“Nessus hailing Endurance. No time to explain. Go. Run. Now.”
Louis hesitated for only an instant. “Jeeves, back us off a light-hour.”
Call it a billion kilometers, more distant than Jupiter from the sun. Whatever situation had Nessus worried, he and Alice would monitor events in safety from there.
SPENT, EXPECTANT, AND AFRAID, Baedeker waited, all alone, in the center of a vast, cavernous space. There was nothing more to do, and no time remaining in which to act.
For doubts and regrets, time stretched endlessly.
What he hoped to accomplish was without precedent. Had he deluded himself from the outset? What mistakes had he made in his haste? Was he wrong to have come here, to entrust matters on Hearth to others? Had Nessus sacrificed himself, had they spent their final days apart, in pursuit of a fantasy?
Had he doomed everyone?
The tang of ozone was in the air. The hairs of his mane stood away from his cranial dome. He felt rather than heard a faint vibration through his legs, any sounds from the great engines around him drowned out by the endless howl of the Hindmost.
“Run and hide. Run and hide. Run and hide…”
NESSUS DROVE POSEIDON STRAIGHT at Nature Preserve Three. Through probes splattering off his hull. Below the orbiting suns. Into the first high wisps of atmosphere. Going much too fast.
With the sky still dark and the shriek of reentry harsh in his ears, time ran out.…
49
A giant fist seized Endurance and shook it.
Rigid and immobile in a restraint field, Louis screamed, “Alice!”
“I’m all right,” she shouted back.
“Jeeves?” he called.
“I have no idea, Louis.”
So much for his theory that a billion kilometers of separation would keep them safe.
Across the electromagnetic spectrum, from long radio waves to hard gamma rays, every readout on the sensor panel was maxed out — until, amid showers of sparks, the meters went dark. The count of particles sleeting against the hull was inconceivable, and it kept mounting. Gravimetric sensors showed … what?
Space-time ripping itself apart.
He was in a futzy restraint field. The whole futzy ship was stabilized by inertial dampeners. Still, something was rattling him around like dice in a cup.
But it wasn’t dice in a cup. That was his brain bouncing around in his skull. He couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t —
“LOUIS. LOUIS. LOUIS. LOUIS…”
“I’m here, Jeeves,” Louis answered groggily. Only dim emergency lighting and ominous red alarms lit the bridge. Beneath billows of fire-suppressant foam, the arc of consoles crackled and hissed. Exhaust fans roared, but he smelled charred insulation and smoke. A drink bulb and loose papers floated nearby, so they had lost cabin gravity. He wasn’t floating, so the restraint field remained active.
“For the moment we are safe,” Jeeves said. “But the ship’s systems have suffered — ”
“Alice!” he called. He couldn’t turn his head to check on her, and he imagined the worst.
She didn’t answer.
“Release me!” Louis ordered.
“Alice is unconscious, as you were until seconds ago. I hear unobstructed breathing and a steady heartbeat.”
How about a concussion? Internal bleeding? Can you hear whether she has those? “Set me loose,” Louis insisted.
“Louis…” Alice called faintly.
His chest loosened just a little. “I’m fine,” he exaggerated. “Jeeves, I mean it. Release my restraint.”
The field vanished. Floating free from his crash couch, he grabbed an armrest and pulled himself down. Groping about with his free hand, he found a pouch stuck to the couch pedestal. Magnetic slippers. He put on a pair and got a second set for Alice.
Coughing, she asked, “Okay, Jeeves. What just happened?”
“I don’t know.”
Was that anguish in Jeeves’s voice? Their tactical display had gone dark. When Louis brushed off the foam and reset the unit, the holo showed nothing nearby. “Where are we? I don’t see the Fleet.”
“The Fleet is gone.”
IT TOOK FOUR DAYS and most of their spare-parts inventory for Louis and Alice to return Endurance to more-or-less working order. They had life support, minimal sensors, short-range comm, hyperdrive, and enough thrusters to manage a landing. They had the secondary fusion reactor, with which — just barely — to power the ship’s essential systems.
Thank Finagle for twing, Louis thought.
Jeeves monitored hyperwave and radio while they toiled, and heard nothing. He hailed in every language and digital message format in his databases, and no one answered. Sensors — the few they had — detected only gas and dust.
A great deal of gas and dust.
A trillion Puppeteers. Five worlds. Three great armadas. Two old friends.
All of them gone.
ON THE FIFTH DAY Endurance was sufficiently restored to run search patterns. They saw nothing. They heard no one. Jumping ahead of the light-speed wave front, reliving the nightmare, they captured data — as well as they could, with so many hull sensors out of commission — from several perspectives around the catastrophe.
And sadly, sickeningly, they understood.
A planetary drive harnessed the energy to move a world. One planetary drive destabilized would have doomed everyone. The Fleet had five drives, close together.
One stray missile could have done it.…
Feeling emptier than he could have imagined possible, Louis watched Alice set their course toward New Terra.