Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

more hyperspace-jump ripples its instruments detected. The ship stocked — and had widely scattered — sensors far better than anything the Ministry had had in her day. Compared to the tech with which Alice had, long ago, grown up in the Belt, the new sensors were scarcely distinguishable from magic. The sensors, like twing, were a gift from the Pak Library.

Alice froze her display on a ship so long and thin that it suggested a crowbar. At the limits of resolution, smaller dartlike ships buzzed around it. “We see lots of ships like this, a second type like thick lenses, and a third kind more like squat cones. Each shape seems to stick with its own. Fleets, do you suppose, Sigmund?”

“Almost certainly,” Sigmund answered a minute and a half later. “The formations look defensive. As makes sense when at least one faction has antimatter weapons.”

“But whose fleets are they?” Julia asked. “Sigmund, Nessus, do you know?”

Pausing his soft, rhythmic humming, Nessus looked up from the pilot console. “The Ringworld is gone. The danger it embodied is gone. The mystery of the hyperspace ripple is resolved. I do not understand why we tarry.”

Changing the subject, Alice noted. She waited for Sigmund to comment.

Sigmund’s answer eventually arrived. “When I left Known Space, most human warships, including ARM ships, had been built in GP hulls. Kzinti warships, too. Of course, General Products had just pulled out of Known Space and…”

Nessus turned one head toward the camera. “Not knowing whose fleets these are, we must consider them dangerous.”

Strange creatures, Alice thought. Puppeteers had no curiosity. And though Nessus yearned to flee, he stayed alert. Sigmund used to say something about no true coward ever turning his back on danger. And that Nessus always had undisclosed motives.

This was neither the time nor the place to let her mind wander. Damn old age.

“… Almost certain I recognize some ARM and Patriarchy vessels,” Sigmund was saying. “Cut off from their supply of General Products hulls, I suspect naval designers reverted to proven configurations.”

Sigmund’s brow furrowed in the manner Alice remembered so well.

Even … before, the closest of friends, working together every day, she hadn’t always understood what had plunged him into one of his dark moods. But this scowl held no mystery: General Products hulls were among his fiercest obsessions.

It turned out that a GP hull was a single nanotech-grown super-molecule, the interatomic bonds massively reinforced by an embedded power plant. Disable that hidden fusion generator, and a ship’s own air pressure blows apart the hull.

Not a feature General Products had chosen to disclose to its customers.

In his life on Earth, Sigmund had worried that Puppeteers could destroy the “indestructible” hulls they sold. Of course he had, but that had been only the paranoia speaking. The first time Sigmund truly knew, he had lost someone very close to him.

Lost, dead. Not just lost, gone far away. For a moment Alice forgot her ancient, simmering bitterness.

“… The long skinny ships remind me of ARM ships from archives of the first two wars with the ratcats. And before GP showed up, the ratcats favored lens-shaped ships like those Endurance is also seeing.

“No one can improve on Outsider hyperdrive technology, so maybe there hasn’t been a reason to radically redesign ships.” Shrewdly: “Or has General Products mastered the much faster drive used by Long Shot.”

“No.” Nessus shuddered. “Not while I lived on Hearth. As far as I know, Long Shot remains one of a kind.”

“Ratcats?” Julia asked.

Nessus twisted a lock of his mane. “An informal term for aliens who call themselves Kzinti. A Kzin looks something like an Earth animal called a cat and has a hairless tail like another Earth animal called a rat.”

To hear Sigmund speak of Kzinti, a very large cat: kind of like a bipedal tiger looming eight feet tall. Kzinti ate their prey — almost certainly, when Sigmund was a child, his parents. It might explain Sigmund, just a little.

That didn’t mean that Alice forgave him.

“What about the conical ships?” Julia asked. “Those are present in large numbers, too.”

“I don’t recognize them,” Sigmund admitted. “Do you, Nessus?”

Nessus shifted his humming to a single throat. “I do not, Sigmund. That scares me.”

Everything scared a Puppeteer. As for the claim not to recognize the third fleet, Alice did not believe it. Am I reading body language, or channeling Sigmund’s suspicions?

Sigmund broke the growing silence. “I guess I need to say it. The ARM is the military force of Earth’s government. Earth, people. The home world of humanity. New Terra’s long-lost roots. We have to make contact.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Norquist-Ng snapped back. “Ours is one ship among hundreds, maybe thousands. Of all people, Ausfaller, I would expect you to know to be wary.” He paused, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe Nessus is right about Endurance coming home.”

“You can’t mean that!” Sigmund said.

“I will not gamble the safety of this crew, much less the safety of this world, on vague recollections of prehistoric ship designs. Captain…”

“I understand, Minister.” Julia did not meet Sigmund’s anguished gaze.

To have come this far. To have come so close. Alice’s heart sank.

“But hopping around like we’ve had to do uses a lot of fuel,” Julia continued. “Minister, we will redirect our efforts to refueling for the long return flight. Maintaining a safe distance from the alien ships as we must, collecting deuterium may take us a while. Will there be anything else, Minister, or may we get started?”

“Proceed, Captain. We’re done.” The connection broke.

Alice could not look away from the darkened comm console. So close …

Julia crossed the bridge to rest a hand on Alice’s shoulder. “I can stall for a few days. See what you can find.”

* * *

IT ALL CAME DOWN to Pak crypto software.

Because loath as Alice was to admit it, Norquist-Ng might be right. After two centuries, who was to say that Sigmund could recognize an Earth warship? Maybe another species had independently come to use the same basic shape. Maybe the flying crowbars were Earth ships of ancient design, but long ago sold to … whomever.

Maybe if Nessus would stop that infernal humming, half a dozen melodies at the same finagling time, she could think straight.

The Pak were whizzes at crypto. Alice suspected the best Pak algorithms never made it into the Library — clans battled clans, after all — but the Library offered plenty of the underlying math. Not even Norquist-Ng knew she had brought Pak algorithms, from the stash Sigmund called their “Secret Santa.”

But not even superior crypto technique would be enough. Suppose ARM ships were out there. What languages would their crews speak? You can hardly decrypt what you can’t even understand in plaintext.

Nessus knew human languages, and not only New Terra’s English. With but one set of vocal cords, no human could manage any Puppeteer language.

And so, Nessus had spoken Interworld back in the day he and Sigmund first met on Earth. And Nessus must have mastered a more recent dialect — and likely also Kzinti-speak, the so-called Hero’s Tongue — when he recruited on Earth for the disastrous Ringworld expedition.

Nessus, characteristically, refused to share his expertise.

His refusal wouldn’t have mattered if Endurance carried a Puppeteer translator. The Puppeteers had effective translation software — and it was among the most controlled of their technologies. Natural-language processing was too close to AI, was the official story, and Puppeteers saw no reason to risk building their own successors. Still, of necessity, scout ships had carried translators — and no ship that New Terra, upon gaining its independence, had been allowed to retain had had translation software. No record had ever been