Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

“I don’t know,” he told Alice. “Something new.”

“Sensors reported a gravity pulse,” Jeeves said. “Some kind of space-time distortion.”

Drones swarmed, almost as agile as Endurance.

“Our lasers are overheating,” Jeeves advised.

Louis cut their normal-space speed to nothing —

Everything happened at once. The hull rang like a bell. Even as Louis thought, Finagle bless twing, the air around him turned to glue: the pilot’s emergency restraint field kicking on. Alarms screamed.

For an instant, so did Alice.

“Alice!” he shouted. He got no answer. His back was to her, and the force field kept him from moving, even to turn his head. “Alice!”

Silence.

“Release my restraints,” he ordered.

“That’s too dangerous.”

“Do it,” Louis growled.

He found Alice perched astraddle an arm of the Puppeteer-style bench, her head canted at an unnatural angle. She was too tall or her bench’s restraint was too tailored for Puppeteer physiology — her head must have extended beyond the force field.

Her neck was broken.

“Have Endurance play dead,” Louis ordered Jeeves. “Do we have a medical-stasis unit aboard?”

“The ship’s manifest lists two, but I don’t know where they are. Julia would know.”

Louis couldn’t carry Alice to the autodoc without jostling that would compound her injuries — but while he hunted for stasis gear, she could die beyond hope of reviving. And Julia was too far away. Futz!

He released Alice’s restraint field and caught her, her head flopping as she toppled. With her limp body slung over his shoulder, he ran from the bridge.

“What’s going on?” he asked Jeeves.

“Long Shot is surrounded by drones, bathed in laser light.” His voice jumping from speaker to speaker, Jeeves mimicked Louis’s mad dash to the cargo hold and the ’doc. “Long Shot no longer maneuvers. Unless they can act soon, they will drift inside the singularity.”

“Tell them to go!” Louis raged.

Then he was in the cargo hold, where his father’s autodoc still rested on a cargo disk. The ’doc’s lid retracted with glacial slowness. At last he was able to lay Alice inside. “You can’t die,” he told her.

As the lid closed, diagnoses scrolled faster than he could make sense of them. From the spinal damage, he guessed. Her advanced age didn’t help. “Come back to me,” he whispered, then dashed back to the bridge.

“Status?” he ordered Jeeves.

“The Fleet of Worlds is pulling away from us. We have major damage, nothing immediately critical. The impact knocked out comm systems. Our main reactor is off-line — ”

“Are we under attack?”

“No.”

“Can we use hyperdrive?”

“Perhaps a light-year on reserve power.”

“Show me Long Shot.”

The tactical display opened. At the center: an image, greatly magnified, of Long Shot. All around it, icons representing battle drones. A faint translucent surface to denote the boundary of the singularity.

Long Shot had drifted inside the singularity.

“They are still being probed by laser beams.”

Louis’s restored memories knew several ways to destroy GP hulls. As he watched, Long Shot’s hull evaporated. Its fusion drives flashed.

When the glare cut off, he saw — nothing.

“Take us half a light-year from here,” Louis ordered wearily.

“In what direction?”

Louis said, “It doesn’t matter.”

REBELLION

Earth Date: 2894

32

More than two hundred years ago and (if what Julia had been told was true) more than two hundred light- years away, Sigmund had battled a band of space pirates. Like many adventures, this one had almost ended in tragedy. His mind’s eye offered up a radar image: three blips defining an equilateral triangle. Pirate ships on approach, towing their — invisible, of course — black hole.

Endings could not come much worse than down the maw of a black hole.

Stretched out in his hammock, trying and failing to take a predinner nap, that triangle kept nagging at Sigmund. Odd, he thought. He had survived that day and saved his crew, too. The pirates had ended up disappeared by the black hole. Why brood now about ancient history?

Then again, why not brood? He had nothing to do, nowhere to go.

Maybe he wasn’t meant for retirement. In the short time he had consulted to the defense forces, he had felt more alive than he had in years. Maybe this strange mood was just recognition that, while it lasted, he had enjoyed feeling useful.

But how useful had he been when Alice ended up as irretrievably lost as if she had fallen down a black hole?

Futz! She and Julia had found the way to Earth. Julia was homebound aboard an ARM ship, already thirty- two days on her way. Even as he continued to mourn Alice, he should be happy, tanj it.

“Jeeves,” Sigmund called. “How long till Julia arrives home?”

“Perhaps two weeks, sir. It can be estimated with more precision when Koala comes within range of the early-warning array.”

As Sigmund knew but wanted to hear again, even though the forecast never satisfied him. He had his doubts anyone from the Ministry would let him know when the ship did appear to the array. He might not hear anything till Julia landed.

And why did his mind’s eye keep offering that blasted equilateral triangle? What did that ancient incident on the borderlands of Sol system have to do with … anything?

With a grunt, he swung his feet from the hammock to the patio stone. Maybe a brandy would help him doze. It couldn’t hurt. He padded into the house to pour himself a drink.

“Not just a triangle,” he muttered to himself. “A futzy equilateral triangle.”

Creeping home from the pirate encounter aboard a crippled ship, his two crew in autodocs, had left Sigmund — being honest — a raving lunatic. For three years after, he could not bring himself to go near a spaceship.

Carlos Wu had almost died aboard Hobo Kelly, his body rejecting the replacement lungs the top-of-the-line ARM shipboard ’docs had had to offer. But an Earth hospital had saved Carlos, and he had