Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

been definitively located, whether by Koala’s instruments or in hyperwave downloads from remote sensors, a tiny icon replaced the bubble. Sometimes nothing replaced a bubble; that meant a ship had disappeared into hyperspace in the seconds while Koala had been disconnected from the familiar universe.

“Report,” Johansson ordered.

“Jump timer at three minutes and holding, sir,” the pilot said.

“No threatening deployments, Commander,” the tactical officer said.

“Hyperwave links opened to London and Prague” — respectively the task force’s flagship and Koala’s assigned escort — “sir,” Tanya said.

“What do you think?” Johansson asked her again.

She reached into the tactical display to point out a nearby proto-comet, a vaguely potato-shaped glob about five kilometers along its shortest axis. “I don’t care for the snowball,” she said. “We’re too close, and a decent-sized squadron could hide behind it.” If so, perhaps well stocked with nukes or antimatter.

The grating, prepare-to-jump tone blasted.

“Jump in twenty seconds,” the pilot called over the intercom.

At eleven seconds, another audible alarm, at the pitch that warned of a bogey. It morphed into the warble that identified the bogey as a hostile. A scattering of new icons, lens-shaped, manifested in the tactical display, from Koala’s perspective lurking behind the snowball. The latest intel download from Hawking.

“I see some Kzinti agreed with you,” Johansson said, a rare touch of approval in his voice.

“Jumping in three. Two…”

The task force executed seven more micro-jumps before the watch changed and Tanya, exhausted, could shamble to the ship’s mess for a hurried meal.

* * *

TANYA TOSSED AND TURNED, suspended in midair between sleeper plates in her tiny cabin. As the intercom blasted alerts every few minutes, her thoughts churned. Could three navies, and armed observers from yet more military powers, converge like this without everything ending in disaster? How long until someone lost patience, or cracked under the unending pressure, or simply made an honest mistake?

Reaching through the loose mesh of the crash netting, she slapped the touchpoint and collapsed the antigrav field. She recorded a quick it’s-crazy-here-how’s-it-going-with-you message for Elena, wrapped it in standard fleet encryption, and queued it for transmission. She and Elena hadn’t managed a live vid call since soon after Tanya arrived; now they counted themselves lucky when even short texts got through without long delays. As the pace of jumps grew ever more frenetic, tactical traffic between ships consumed almost every scrap of available bandwidth.

After graduating ARM Naval Academy, she and Elena had gone their separate ways. Elena had been posted to the Artifact Monitoring Mission, two hundred light-years from Earth. Tanya’s first posting was as assistant cargo officer on a supply ship supporting the Fleet of Worlds diplomatic mission, even farther from home.

Elena was a line officer, however junior, and Canberra an actual warship. Tanya, in her heart of hearts, admitted to a twinge of envy. She had volunteered repeatedly and insistently for reassignment. Nothing interesting, in any military sense, would ever happen around the Fleet. No matter that the Puppeteers were cowards — or, perhaps, because they were — an intimidating defensive array of sensors and robotic craft protected their worlds.

Which was too tanj bad! The Puppeteers had much for which to answer.

A Puppeteer scout had bared the Concordance’s sordid history of interspecies meddling. (Why? Tanya did not begin to understand. The retired admirals among the Academy faculty did not pretend to understand, either.) And this scout, Nessus, had revealed those secrets — and the long-hidden location of the Puppeteer worlds, the theretofore unimaginable Fleet of Worlds — and the existence and location of the yet more inconceivable Ringworld — to, of all improbable people, her great-grandfather! Louis Wu had vanished from Human Space before Tanya was born. Dad scarcely remembered the man.

After six interstellar wars and their megadeaths, human governments and the Kzinti Patriarchy had learned to coexist — the uneasy peace of four centuries that had given way in this system to bloody skirmishes. A peace whose prospects further crumbled by the nanosecond.

Wherever they were, if they still were, did Nessus and Louis comprehend the mess they had left behind?

Whatever the reasoning behind past disclosures, day by day, year by year, the Puppeteer worlds receded farther into the galactic north. Even by hyperdrive, the Fleet was already a two-plus-year epic journey from Earth. Maybe the aliens gambled — if so, correctly — that humans and Kzinti, no matter their just grievances with the Puppeteers, would put off confronting the Concordance to first seize a nearer, stationary, more enticing — and seemingly defenseless — prize.

And that far from being an opportunity, the Ringworld would turn out to be a trap.

* * *

THE RINGWORLD …

A loop of ribbon, its circumference rivaling Earth’s orbit, encircling its sun. A ribbon broader than four times the distance that separated Earth from its moon. A ribbon as massive as Jupiter and with a surface area to equal millions of Earths. An inconceivably huge construct, made of a mysterious, impossible something as strong as the force that bound together the particles of an atomic nucleus. Home to many trillions of intelligent beings. Home, undeniably, to wondrous technologies.

Its civilization fallen; its wealth and its secrets ripe for plunder.

And more incredibly still, vanished in an instant into hyperspace, no matter that the “experts” insisted such a thing could not happen.

All that mass disappearing had sent a gravity wave crashing through this system’s Oort Cloud. Billions, perhaps trillions of snowballs careened from their once stable orbits. Snowballs? Snow worlds, rather, some of them bigger, even, than Pluto. Large and small, they plunged inward toward the sun, or hurtled outward into the interstellar darkness, or shattered one another. Wherever they went, they made an already overcomplicated tactical situation that much worse. All those fleets dodging —

The ceiling light of Tanya’s cabin flashed. Her wake-up gonged. Time again to stand watch on the bridge.

* * *

THIS WASN’T A WAR ZONE. Not exactly. Not technically.

A distinction without significance to all who had died here.

“Welcome back, Lieutenant,” Commander Johansson said, yawning despite the blat of another emergency-jump alarm.

“Yes, sir.” Tanya managed not to yawn back.

In Koala’s main tactical display chaos still reigned, as it had for the weeks since the Ringworld — somehow — vanished.

Even without the prize, the mission continued. Artifact Monitoring Mission, the deployment was officially called, although outside of formal communications no one called it that. Across the fleet, names ranged from Mexican Standoff to Cold Confrontation, from the Interspecies Scrimmage to the No-Win War. Tanya favored the Frigid Face-Off. Naval Intelligence said the Kzinti called it something that sounded like a cat fight (then again, what in Hero’s Tongue didn’t?) and that translated loosely into Interworld as Grudge Match. What the Trinocs called the situation was anyone’s guess.

Or the locals when, at last, they had joined the fray. The natives were not as helpless as they had first appeared. The rumor mill whispered about ships erupting, blazingly fast, from the Ringworld, and even more incredibly about X-ray lasers — powered by solar flares! — vaporizing intruders that had ventured too close.

And that was only the combatants. Puppeteers had ships here observing, too, as did the Outsiders, as did —

“Jump in ten seconds,” the copilot announced, her voice grown hoarse.

“Sit, Lieutenant,” Johansson ordered.