The Ringworld Throne

Louis said, “I might have guessed. You, too, Bram. What else would Teela’s crew use to move their reclaimed ramjets?”

“The terminus is far to spinward, perhaps on a spaceport ledge. We’re in the wrong place to be looking for a factory.”

Stacked cargo plates flicked in, with pressure gear and a webeye sprayer added to Louis’s clutter. Louis shouldered the floating mass aside to leave room for Acolyte.

The Kzin flicked in wearing full pressure gear: concentric clear balloons and a fishbowl helmet. He tipped back the helmet and asked, “Are we ready?”

Louis gestured at a rippling starscape. “You don’t want to flick into that.”

Unexpectedly, the Hindmost said, “The link is still open and has stopped moving.”

Louis said, “What…”

Bram snapped, “Sprayed with plasma flame, dropped for a thousand miles, and it still works? Improbable!”

Louis took the webeye sprayer off the stacked cargo plates. “Try it.”

Heads turned. They didn’t get it. Louis said, “Hindmost, I want to spray a webeye through the stepping disk link. Set me up. We’ll just see what it hits.”

The Hindmost whistled. “Try,” he said.

Louis sprayed a bronze net at the stepping disk and saw it vanish.

They waited. Acolyte used the time to take a shower. Thirty-five degrees of Ringworld arc: five and a half minutes in transit, and the same again before they’d see it arrive. Transfer booths didn’t work faster than lightspeed, and neither, it seemed, did stepping disks.

“Signal,” the Hindmost said as his other tongue licked out. A fifth window popped up.

They looked up at stars crossed by the rim wall. A fuzzy bulk at the edge might be the probe. A lousy view-but the probe wasn’t falling. It had landed on a tiny target, the maglev track.

Bram said, “Acolyte, take the sprayer. Go through. Spray us a camera where we might see something interesting. Return instantly and report. Don’t wait for danger. We know it’s there.”

Too fast. Louis was just beginning to pull his suit on. Acolyte would be gone before he was ready. He said, “Hold it. Bram, he’s got to be armed!”

“Against protectors already on site? I prefer Acolyte to be conspicuously unarmed. Acolyte, go.”

The Kzin flicked out.

Louis finished getting into his suit. They’d have eleven minutes to wait.

Did Chmeee really think an old man like him, Louis wondered, could restrain and protect an eleven-year-old Kzin male?

It had been four minutes, and something was in view.

They watched a dark blur moving around the blurred edges of the window, inspecting the probe at its leisure. Then suddenly it was clear and close, an elegant alien pressure suit with a bubble helmet, and a near- triangular face with a mouth that seemed to be all bone. A single fingertip came closer yet, and traced curves Louis couldn’t see. It had found the webeye.

It snapped around quicksilver-fast, and still wasn’t quick enough. Something fast and black brushed across it and leapt away, out of range, gone.

The elegant intruder’s suit was slashed wide along the left side. It lifted a weapon like an old-fashioned chemical rocket motor. Violet-white flame lashed after the attacker. It must have missed. The elegant one bounded after, holding its suit almost closed with one hand, firing with the other. A ghost-trail of ice crystals followed it.

Bram said, “That was Anne.”

“Which?”

“Anne was the killer, Louis. They’re both vampire protectors, but I remember how Anne moves.”

“How do we warn Acolyte?”

“We cannot.”

Louis caught himself grinding his teeth. Acolyte was nowhere: a signal, a point, an energy quantum moving at lightspeed toward where one protector had killed another and was ready for more.

“Your Teela was too trusting,” Bram said. “She made a vampire into a protector, and that one must have changed others of his species before Teela killed him. But Anne and I are of another species than theirs.”

“Signal,” the Hindmost said as his other tongue licked out. Now they had two windows placed on the maglev transport track.

Acolyte had arrived; had sprayed a webeye on… Louis couldn’t tell. On something above his head. There was no sign of another intruder. The Kzin posed with the probe just behind him. It looked half melted and somewhat battered, and it was blocking the track.

Any protector would have to remove that blockage.

Acolyte, get out!

The track receded into infinity. It looked to be around two hundred feet across, and geometrically straight.

Acolyte was turning slowly, taking it all in. He sprayed another webeye, then stepped back to the probe and was gone.

The Hindmost said, “He flicked out.”

“Well, where is he?”

“Do you assume I want fusion plasma spraying through my cabin?”

“Where’s the link? Where did you flick him?” The Hindmost didn’t answer, and Louis knew. “Mons Olympus, you freemother?”

He lunged toward the stepping disk, stopped himself, and scrambled onto the stack of cargo plates instead. He led a line through the handholds, then around his tool belt: a poor man’s crash web. “Chmeee will have my ears and guts!” He set the cargo plates aloft and eased them onto the stepping disk.

Flick, and the sky was half stars, half black. Silver fractal filigree under his feet and stars showing through that.

Marvelous.

He looked up and down the maglev track. It was peaceful as hell. Nothing moved at all.

Silver lace. Where had he seen this kind of fractal pattern? He’d expected the maglev track to be a solid trough, but you could see stars through the mesh.

Hah! It was the Pinwheel, the old orbital tether they still used to transfer bulk cargos between Earth and the moon and Belt. The fractal distributed the stresses better. But never mind that-

“Bram, Hindmost, the maglev track is lacework. Can you see it? If I had the sprayer, I’d put a webeye on it right now. Look through the lace and see whatever tries to hide in the Ringworld’s shadow.”

They’d hear that in five and a half minutes. Hot Needle of Inquiry was that far away at lightspeed.

An ink blot pulled itself over the edge and walked toward Louis… a bulk like a sack of potatoes painted black, with a flared bell held negligently in one hand.

Louis touched the lift throttle.

The cargo plates didn’t move. There was a maglev track under him, but it wasn’t giving him enough lift.

“I’m looking at an ARM weapon,” Louis said. They’d hear him and know the rest: ARMs must have landed on a spaceport ledge and found protectors there.

How do you activate stepping disks when you can’t step off first? I’ll be dead when they hear all this. Should have brought an orchestra-or a recording of the command.

The protector-killer examined Louis Wu with a proprietary air. It-Anne-She was a slender shape in an inflated suit designed for something a little taller-recessed eyes peeped over the chin readouts-and much wider-

Flick, he was upside down and falling through red light.

It was red rock all around him and below his head, and hundreds of feet of smooth lava running down, down. The cargo plates surged upward, and Louis hung head-down over red rocks. He could feel the ropes