Crashlander

GHOST: THREE

I said, «And there you were in Sirius Mater, all ready to write my story for me. I guessed then that Ausfaller must have sent you both times.»

«So why did you hire me?»

«I didn't care much. The big question was, How do I tell the human race about the Core explosion? How do I make them believe? I hoped you were an ARM. Maybe you could do something.»

Ander said, «I should have asked you then. There's supposed to be a huge black hole in there, millions of solar masses. Did you see it?»

I shook my head. «Maybe the shell of novas hid it, if it's there at all. Maybe it even caused the chain reaction. Sucking gas and dust and stars for fifteen billion years, maybe its mass passed some kind of threshold and boom! Maybe you'd even find it if you processed the recordings I took. They're proprietary, Ander. Get them from General Products.»

«Well, but they're gone.» But he had that smirk again. «Where did you go after that?»

«Earth. After the galactic core, what else could measure up?»

Ander laughed.

Five teams were fighting over two prey turtles that glowed intermittently among thrashing bodies. The crowd was standing, yelling their heads off. And Ander pulled a flat portable out of his backpurse, ten inches by ten inches by a quarter inch thick, and opened it in my lap. He tapped rapidly.

A picture stood above my lap. Five blue-white points rotated against a black background. They pulled apart, growing slowly brighter, coming toward me. Suddenly they blossomed into blue and white globes; the starscape wheeled; the spheres went murky red and began to recede. Ander tapped, and the picture froze.

Tiny suns circled four of the globes. The fifth glowed of itself, as if the continents of a world had caught fire. Flying planets! And nobody around us was looking at anything but the miniature war beyond the glass.

Ander said, «The puppeteers are still in known space. Receding at relativistic speeds, and they took their planets with them.» He snapped his portable shut. «Five worlds all about the same size, orbiting in a pentagon around each other. Do the math yourself. You'll find that you can put a sun at the center, or not, and the orbits are stable either way. They understand tides just fine, Beowulf. That's what they hid from you.»

My mind lurched. Cowards or not, peaceable or not, I could see how the traditionally paranoid ARM might react to so much sheer brute power. «What are they like? Oxygen worlds? Natural or terraformed? How —»

«Sigmund says we've dropped cameras in their path, not too close. The system goes flying by at point eight lights. We haven't learned much. Free oxygen, liquid water, fusion light sources redder than Sol, and we don't know why the odd one looks so odd. There's nothing else in the system, no asteroids, no cometary halo, just chains of spacecraft moving between the five worlds.»

«Where are they going?»

«Straight north along the galactic axis.»

«That's what I did, coming back from the Core. Get clear of occupied space and then turn … turning five planets could be a bitch.»

«Well, there's nothing but empty space where they're going.»

«Maybe that's what they want.»

Ander mulled it. «Possible.. Meanwhile, we've got to guard them and keep their secret. They won't pass all that close to the Patriarchy, but that's too close. It's not that they can't defend themselves. It's that they're cowards.»

I began to see what he meant. «Free enterprise.»

«No species can control all its members.»

«If some futzer published their location, you could see pirates of every shape and size.»

«Yes, and reporters and news anchors likewise. Any entrepreneur with a money-making offer. Any undertrained ARM out to make a name. Whole fleets lying in wait for the puppeteer worlds to pass. Any kind of fool might cause the puppeteer government to defend themselves in some drastic fashion, with power like that,» Ander said. «So we have to stop any passing ships from interfering with the fleet and guard their secret, too. Meanwhile, they haven't all left. There are business matters, loose ends being wrapped up.»

«I know. I had dealings with one of their agents myself.»

He perked up. «How did that come about?»

«I had a complaint about a General Products hull.»

«Again?»