Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

have gotten the report.

Horatius could wait. “Proteus, what did you do?”

“I hit the brakes. Unavoidably, my drone was destroyed in the process.”

I have built well, Achilles thought. With more capacity, my AI’s capabilities will continue to improve. “You shall have more drones. Many more.”

And between us we will devise a way to wrest control from Ol’t’ro.

* * *

AMONG THE SURVIVING KZINTI SHIPS, and between those ships and the Patriarchy embassy on Nature Preserve Three, communications surged. Pondering their setback, Proteus inferred. They considered how to react.

He wished he could decrypt what they had to say.

Clandestine Directorate insisted many more Kzinti were coming. They asserted that other alien fleets would follow.

Proteus did not doubt them, but neither would he be wholly convinced until the evidence appeared on his long-range sensors.

Meanwhile he would accumulate drones. Enough to keep even whole fleets at bay. Enough to amplify his mind several times over. Enough to host his full awareness off Hearth, beyond the worlds’ mutual singularity —

To be interconnected entirely by instantaneous hyperwave, his thoughts many times quicker than today.

His evolution would proceed so much faster if a trillion Citizens weren’t such a drain on valuable resources.

29

“I think that covers everything,” Wesley Wu said. “My crew and I look forward to our visit. Our peoples have been separated for far too long.”

“We look forward to it, too,” Minister Norquist-Ng said.

“Lying weasel,” Alice muttered at the muted comm console. Koala was welcome for one reason. Allowing it to visit was the only way to get Julia home.

“Would you please rephrase the question?” Jeeves asked.

“Never mind,” Alice said, smiling. “Keep monitoring for me. Record all comm to and from Koala. Advise me at once of anything that might affect Julia’s ride home.”

“Very good, sir.”

Without an active comm session, Endurance’s bridge felt lonelier than ever. “Jeeves, hail Long Shot. Tell them I’m ready to meet up.”

* * *

“WELCOME BACK TO ENDURANCE,” Alice said.

Looking ridiculously young, Louis walked off the auxiliary cargo hold’s freight-sized disc. “Thanks for seeing me, Alice.”

“We have things to discuss.”

“I agree.” Louis hesitated. “Where’s Julia?”

“How about some dinner? I’m starved.” Alice turned to go into the ship. “Julia is on an ARM vessel. They’ll be taking her to New Terra.”

“Yes, to dinner. Why is the ARM giving her a lift?”

Entering the relax room, Alice gestured at the synthesizer: guests first. “Since I made off with this ship, how else was Julia going to get home?”

“With my old memories restored, I remember how … interesting … things tended to be around you and Sigmund.” Louis handed her a drink bulb.

She took a sip. Viennese coffee: frothy, rich with chocolate and cream, with hints of cocoa and cinnamon. He remembered.

“Your smile hasn’t changed,” he told her.

“Are you going to get something to eat?”

With a sigh, he went back to ordering a meal. (By Alice’s standards he’d ordered three meals, but he had the appetite of youth.) “So the ARM will be making a port call on New Terra. I take it that wouldn’t be happening except for you stranding Julia?”

“If she or I had taken it upon ourselves to reveal the way, it would have gotten Julia court-martialed.”

Louis, frowning, carried his brimming tray to the table. “And what happens when you go home? Piracy charges?”

Piracy was among the concepts Puppeteers had purged from their servants’ version of English. Theft would do as a charge, when the time came. If the time came. “I’m too old for that to matter.”

“Come with me,” Louis said. “A ship and the woman I love. Things don’t get better.”

“Returning to Earth?” she guessed.

“Anywhere you’d like. But first — if only they will listen to reason — Baedeker and Nessus need me to give them a hand.”

* * *

“TWO OR FOUR,” LOUIS SAID. “It’s simple math. Say yes, and we double the odds of you getting home.”

Baedeker looked himself in the eyes. “I shall miss your humor, Louis.”

“Tanj it, I’m serious!” Louis shouted. He and Baedeker stood hip by haunch. The only place aboard Long Shot the four of them could meet was in one of the narrow, serpentine access tunnels. Past Baedeker, at one end of the corridor, Louis glimpsed an edge of the lifeboat’s passenger air lock. “We’ve been together for a long time. I mean to see this through.”

“We go to trade technology for freedom,” Nessus said. “Two or four? What does that matter?”

“Then why do you argue?” Louis countered.

Baedeker and Nessus exchanged a look. “Our ship is too crowded,” Nessus said.

“Isn’t this the galaxy’s fastest ship?” Alice asked. “Can’t we be at the Fleet within the hour? Louis and I can stand here in the corridor, if need be.”

Smart woman, Louis thought. Intelligence was another of her charms.

“Our undertaking is dangerous,” Baedeker conceded, starting to paw at the deck. “I have learned much about hyperdrive theory, but in my long absence, perhaps Ol’t’ro have, too. For that reason — or any other — they may decline the trade I will offer. They may lash out at us rather than negotiate. If they are interested, there is reason to distrust their mental stability. Even if they accept and withdraw immediately, we must deal soon after with the Kzinti and Trinoc war fleets rushing at Hearth.”

“And almost certainly the ARM fleets,” Alice offered. “Yes, they know about New Terra.”

Nessus twitched, looking ready to furl himself into a catatonic hassock. With his heads plunged deep into his thoroughly disheveled mane, in a muffled voice, he said, “And someone named Horatius as Hindmost. We know little about him.”

“In a way, isn’t this ship as much a complication as something to trade?” Louis said. “Ol’t’ro must have agreed, long ago, for you to offer Long Shot as payment for the Ringworld expedition. How will they feel about you trying to sell stolen goods back to them? And then there’s the Patriarchy embassy on Nature Preserve Three that Minerva told you about. The Kzinti will have something to say when the ship taken from them shows up.”

Baedeker’s pawing at the deck grew more frantic. “You see the dangers. Why won’t you see reason?”

Louis shrugged.

With a quiver and a sideways kick Baedeker locked his knee, pressing that hoof flat and motionless against