Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

researchers had once managed to construct — scientists and engineers led by Baedeker, to give him his due — tried and failed to control those energies. Those drives destabilized themselves.

Ol’t’ro, curse them, had had all the Fleet’s planet-busters dropped into a star. They had banned the making of others.

The surest, fastest way to destroy the Outsider planetary drive must be to ram a ship or missile into it. He had a ship. But if launched, would it survive long enough to build up speed for a proper crash? With warring fleets all around, he had not been willing to take the chance.

Throughout the dome of the planetary drive the sirens echoed. Like the voices of doom, Horatius called without end, “Run and hide.”

Around Achilles, “hide” was what everyone did, if only beneath their bellies. Good, he thought. A fool to the end, Horatius has seen to it that no one will interfere with me.

Crash a ship. Or override layer upon layer of Outsider safeguards. Or…?

Achilles began gathering stepping discs, each powered by a tiny embedded fusion reactor. As he rigged the stepping discs to overload, he deployed them around the great circle of the dome.

His hearts pounded in anticipation.

* * *

WERE THERE VOICES? Nessus wasn’t sure. He didn’t care. He pulled himself tighter against the theoretical possibility of interruption, squeezing until he could hardly breathe.

Ouch! Something hard kicked him in the ribs. Something sharp. In his reflexive pulling away from the … hoof?… he unfurled enough to hear, faintly, the calling of his name. He unclenched just a little more.

“Nessus, curse you! Listen to me.”

Someone inside his cell? That was almost interesting. And was that distant keening ululation Horatius?

With a shudder, Nessus unrolled and climbed, unsteadily, to his hooves.

Vesta was in his cell. Blood trickled from countless cuts and abrasions. He balanced on his left and rear legs, because the right leg was splinted with … Nessus was not sure what. A snapped-off table leg, perhaps, bound with strips torn from a curtain. A jagged point of bone protruded through torn flesh.

“You need an autodoc,” Nessus sang reflexively.

“Is that what concerns you?” Vesta sang with sarcastic undertunes. “I came to get you out of here.”

Heads raised, ears uncovered, the distant howl was clearer: run and hide. Nessus knew one reason the Hindmost might send that warning.

Nessus had lost track of the date. “What is today?” he demanded. “And what is the time?”

Vesta told him.

Nessus had perilously little time. Still, he needed to know. “Why would you help me?”

Vesta glanced at his broken leg. “Achilles just abandoned me. Few things would gall him more than your escape.”

“I need a ship,” Nessus sang.

“If one set of aliens doesn’t shoot you from the sky, another will.”

The risk seemed no worse than staying on this world. “Does that mean you can get me a ship?”

Vesta looked himself in the eyes. “Achilles has a ship.” He took a transport controller from a pocket of his sash. With his other head, he gestured at the stepping disc that had, sporadically, delivered gruel and water to Nessus’ cell. “The disc will transmit now. You will step aboard Poseidon.”

“And the crew?”

“It is Achilles’ personal ship. He pilots it without any crew. If any mechanics were servicing it” — this time Vesta gestured at nothing and everything, somehow encompassing the ongoing warning — “they will have fled as the Hindmost orders.”

“Come with me?” Nessus sang.

“I have other prisoners to free,” Vesta sang. “Be safe.”

* * *

NESSUS FLICKED INTO A CORRIDOR outside a ship’s bridge. He peeked around an edge of the open hatch and saw no one.

He slammed and latched the door, because that was faster than checking to see who else might be aboard. Astraddle the crash couch he remotely shut the air lock, then put his stolen ship into a screaming climb.

* * *

TRUTHS NEVER SUSPECTED engulfed Proteus: profound connections between seemingly disjointed phenomena. Eternal verities. Moral truths. Blinding perception. Wisdom.

More. He needed more.

And before he lost himself in the flood, he needed to slow the exponential rate at which connections among his nodes was expanding.

As the multitude of his new nodes dispersed across the singularity, ships of the Fringe War pulled back from this as yet uncharacterized threat.

* * *

“WHAT THE TANJ?” LOUIS SWORE.

First the — whatever — that had erupted from the General Products orbital facility. Then the primal scream sent over what Jeeves translated as Herd Net. And it appeared that a spontaneous truce had been forged among the Fringe War fleets — that ships, thousands of ships, were swarming on Hearth. No, swarming at the giant artificial moon above Hearth. The three warring sides reacting to what the moon had disgorged.

All in a matter of minutes.

“Is that a question, Louis?” Jeeves asked.

“No, but here’s one,” Louis said. “Does this convergence on Hearth give us a window of opportunity to rescue Nessus?”

“Rescue him from where?” Alice asked. “I understand that Nessus is your friend. He’s my friend, too. But would he want us to undertake a suicide mission without even a clue of a destination?”

“We have no further information regarding the — ”

Louis cut off Jeeves’s dissembling. “Our destination is Nature Preserve One. If we overhear nothing useful when we get closer, we’ll start at the maximum-security prison I busted Nessus out of once before. If he isn’t there, maybe a guard will know.

“Why? I was a drug addict trapped in a civil war, with a very short life expectancy, when Nessus found me. That was more than a century ago. Everything that’s happened to me since — including meeting you, Alice — I owe to Nessus. I won’t abandon him to Achilles.”

Throwing himself into the pilot’s crash couch, Louis looked over his shoulder. “Are you with me?”

She gave him a quick, hard kiss. “Hell, yes.”

* * *

FOR AN INSTANT Nessus thought he had the skies to himself.

As a myriad of objects, too many to count, showed up on radar, he pointed Poseidon out of the plane of the Fleet of Worlds. “Display the time,” he ordered the ship’s automation. A clock appeared on an auxiliary console.

He howled in frustration. He could have made it to Hearth — barely — if this plague of drones weren’t in his way.

And howled again: it looked as though every warship of the three invading fleets was charging at Hearth.

* * *

OL’T’RO UNCOUPLED A TUBACLE to speak into the melding chamber’s nearest microphone. “Evacuate immediately. This means everyone in the colony.

“Leave two ships for us.”