“I found four more,” the Hindmost said. He was at a wall of clumsy, clunky lights and dials and switches. Now Louis recognized where he was. This was the system that twisted the sun’s magnetic field. He had seen this array in a holo projection, eleven years ago, when the Hindmost manipulated the Meteor Defense.
The air here must be soupy with tree-of-life spores.
It was a tidy place, except-hmmm?
Across that great width of floor, a shadow-shape was standing in near darkness. A shape of motionless menace, skewed from the human shape, too thin and too pointy in spots. Bones. Bones mounted in a pose of attack.
In the shadows beyond those standing bones, gear seemed scattered at random.
Later. Louis said, “I should finish my checklist. Do you need me instantly?”
The knobby man said, “No. Hindmost, show me.”
No Belter would have yanked a man into a vacuum before he had checked his pressure suit. That would be murderously rude. Had the protector read the readiness of his suit at a glance? Louis wondered. Was the protector testing his attitude? His equipment? His temper?
The Hindmost was riding one of the cargo plates. He lifted by a yard; his heads dipped among the controls. The skyview zoomed on an orange near-sphere marked in black dots-and-commas. A kzinti ship, probably centuries old and retrofitted with hyperdrive.
The view shrank, and moved, and expanded. This next ship looked big, a long, slowly rotating lever with a bubble at the near end. Louis didn’t recognize the type.
The view shrank and moved and expanded to show a gray and black object like a diseased potato seen through fog. The Hindmost said, “The Ringworld engineers left only the most distant comets. Too many to destroy them all—”
“Air reserve,” the knobby man said. “To replace air lost over the rim walls.”
“…Yes. Now note this…” A blinking green circle marked a crater on the proto-comet. The view expanded, then shifted to deep-radar, with a blurred view of structure in the ice below the pock.
The knobby man asked, “What species built that?”
“I can’t tell,” the Hindmost said. “Mining projects always have that look, like the root system of a plant. But here…” Another rotating lever, a ship of the same make, viewed from the side. Familiar little stubby-winged aerospacecraft were strung all along its length.
“These are United Nations craft made by Louis’s species.”
Louis had finished his checklist. The suit would keep him alive for weeks, maybe months.
“Very good. Allow me,” the knobby man said. He stepped on another cargo plate, and rose. His hands were dexterous where the puppeteer’s mouths had been unsure. A second screen lit with a darkened view of the sun.
Minutes passed. Then a bright plume began to rise, twisting in magnetic fields.
Louis said, “You’re going to kill them, I take it.”
“Such are my directions. They came as invaders,” the Hindmost said.
“So did we.”
“Yes. Are you healthy?”
Louis wiggled his bound hand. “Healing. It’s a waste of time, anyway, if I’m going into your magic ‘doc. What have you been doing?”
“We’ve destroyed six carrier ships and a fleet of thirty-two landers. Those were the ships closest to the sun, the most vulnerable. These last are so distant that we may do no more than enrage them. I’m inclined to ignore the installation in the comet. We would only boil ice. I found an Outsider ship on one of the farthest comets—”
“Tanj! Knobby man? You didn’t shoot down an Outsider, did you?”
“The Hindmost advised against.”
“Good. They’re very fragile, but they’ve got technology we can’t even properly describe. For that matter, they don’t want anything we’ve got, and what they want, they buy. There’d be no point to hurting an Outsider.”
“Do you like them?”
That was a somewhat surprising question. Louis said, “Yes.”
“What would they be doing here?”
Louis shrugged inside his suit. “The sky is full of planets. There’s only one Ringworld. Outsiders are curious.”
The solar plume was still rising. “Observe and criticize,” the knobby man said to the Hindmost. Fingers like strings of walnuts danced over the wall.
The puppeteer watched. He said, “Good.”
It all seemed very leisurely. The plume would take hours to form. The superthermal laser effect would be propagating for minutes before it left the plume. The targets looked to be hours away at lightspeed.
Louis had already discarded the notion of a last minute rescue.
Louis Wu owed nothing at all to the United Nations or the ARM. He wasn’t obliged to protect kzinti ships either. Disarmed and injured, he was no match for a protector of any species. He knew he’d be lucky to keep his life, now that he was back in this dance of powers.
His contract didn’t bind him to rescue the knobby man’s prey. And they had come as invaders.
“I pointed out a monitor station, too. One of mine,” the Hindmost was saying. “The Conservatives will never miss it.”
“Right. Knobby man, I’m tempted to call you ‘Dracula.’ Dracula was the archetype of story vampires.”
“Follow your whim.”
“No. Trite. You’re a protector, a prime mover among vampires. Let’s call you ‘Bram.’ Can you tell me what you want of me?”
“I want what is best for my species. Vampires face three threats, and each threatens all beneath the Arch including yourselves.”
The knobby man watched Louis’s face as he spoke. “First, if vampires become numerous, we deplete our prey. Intelligent hominids might even find a way to exterminate us. I don’t want any species of vampire getting too much attention. You don’t want us spreading.”
“The vampire slayers, were they yours? No, that’s crazy. They’re your own species.”
“No, Louis, they’re not. There must be a hundred separate species of vampire on the Ringworld.”
“Ah. Where do yours live?”
Bram ignored that. “Louis, I did not shape the Shadow Nest Alliance. Their solution was elegant, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Second, these invaders from space threaten the Ringworld structure itself.”
Louis nodded. “An interstellar warship can always use a meteoroid impact for a weapon. Watch for falling comets.”
“The third threat is protectors, for the duels they fight.”
Louis asked, “Just how many protectors have we got already?”
“Three or more involved in repairing the rim wall installations. Each would seem to have its task, but all will bear watching.”
“What species, can you tell?”
“It’s an important question, isn’t it? Those who rule would be vampires. Any others would be servants drafted from local species. Louis, one can argue—”
“How the tanj did the Ringworld come to be infested with vampire protectors?”
“That is an intricate tale, but why should I tell it?”
Louis had carefully not bound himself or the Hindmost to reveal secrets. How could he urge Bram to reveal his? He said, “It’s your call. First decide what you want. Decide if we can give it to you. Then decide how much we need to know to do it right.”
The knobby man’s hand danced over the wall. He said, “You keep secrets. Why should I tell mine? You are bound to obey regardless.”
Try this - “You’ve been shooting down ships. Stet, but suppose you miss one? You’ve no way to judge what they’ll do next. We three, I and Acolyte and the Hindmost, are the only aliens at hand. You expect to watch us and extrapolate what invaders would do. But we don’t react if we don’t know anything.”