The Ringworld Throne (41 page)

Nova light blasted through the hologram window.

Louis, with his arms thrown over his eyes, heard music from hell, then a voice that had lost all human traits. “My fuel source is destroyed!”

Bram’s voice was cool. “My concern is for the enemy that fired on us.”

“We are challenged! Arm me and send me through!” A bestial bellow, all madness.
Acolyte’s idea of a distraction? Or are we locked in with a mad Kzin?

“Let me through to my cabin,” the Hindmost pleaded. “I must see what is still working.”

“What could be working? Your probe is destroyed and we are attacked, we are known. Could an invader react so quickly, or was that a protector?”

“The stepping disk at least should be safe.”

Louis opened his eyes. “Why?”

“I’m not a fool!” the Hindmost bleated. “I opened a stepping disk link as we crossed the rim. A plasma blast, kinetic weapons, any threat should go straight through.”

“Straight through to
what
?” Louis blinked. He was still seeing spots.

“I linked it to the stepping disk at the map of Mons Olympus.”

Louis laughed. It was probably too much to hope for, that a thousand Martians were setting a new trap when the stepping disk sprayed star-hot plasma over them, but heyyy ...

Big claws closed on his shoulders; warm red meat breathed in his face. “We are at war, Louis Wu! This is not a time for distractions!”

Distractions
. Stet. “Acolyte, go suit up. Get my suit, and a webeye sprayer, too, and my cargo disk stack, wherever Bram—Bram?”

“Dining hall aboard Hidden Patriarch,” Bram said.

“Hindmost, route him there first. Bram, get him some weapons. If we have a working stepping disk on the probe, we should use it.”

Bram said, “Go.”

The Hindmost rattled / chimed / bonged. Acolyte stepped and flicked out. The Hindmost stepped where the granite block had been and was gone, was in his cabin, his tongues licking out at what looked like an alien chess set but must be a virtual keyboard. One head rose to say, “We have a link. The stepping disk still operates.”

“Try the webeye sprayer,” Bram ordered.

“Spray what?”

“Vacuum.”

Eleven minutes later the blacked-out window lit again: a revolving starscape with a slow ripple to it. Louis could picture a webeye falling free through vacuum, spinning a little—was the probe spinning too? -- drifting gradually away from the probe. And while the protector was worrying about the Kzin and trying to watch the puppeteer and all
four
hologram windows, Louis knelt above the stepping disk and lifted the edge.

A tiny hologram of glowing sticks rose just above the disk itself—the map of the stepping disk system. A larger display would have given him away, but the Hindmost had fixed that. Louis tapped his changes in quickly and pushed the rim down.

“Do you see?”

“Hindmost, explain to see me how we could have missed
that
until now!”

Bram and the Hindmost sure as tanj weren’t watching
him
. Louis turned.

As viewed through the free-falling webeye, the silver thread had become a silver ribbon with raised edges, a shallow trough not unlike a miniature of the Ringworld itself. Slender toroids arced over it.

Unmistakably, it was the transport system: the magnetic levitation track that ran along the top of the rim wall for a third of its length. Teela’s repair crew must have led it over the rim wall and down the outside.

Louis said, “Well,
I
haven’t been watching the rim wall for a good half year.”

“We should have looked closer,” the Hindmost said.

The silver rail swept past. Now there was only starscape. The fluttering webeye was below the Ringworld floor, falling into the universe.

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 slipping, in the moment before the plates’ inherent stability turned him upright.

Louis’s brain and belly and inner ears were whirling. Moments passed before his eyes could focus.

No Martians were there to watch.

He was hovering alongside a glassy-smooth stretch of lava that dropped almost straight for ... futz ... a thousand feet before it eased toward horizontal like a ski jump. Louis could see a splash of orange at the bottom: Acolyte in his translucent suit. He might even have survived such a fall ... or not.

Louis decided he needn’t fear Martians.

This time the Martians had mounted their stepping disk upside down at the top of the highest cliff they could find. Then the flame that destroyed the Hindmost’s refueling probe had flooded through the stepping disk. Any Martians watching the trap must have been crisped. The cliff side had melted and flowed, forming a slide.

Louis landed the cargo plates, loosed the lines, and jumped down.

Acolyte by at an angle on hot red rock.

Louis got a shoulder under the Kzin. Not enough, and he pulled to roll the Kzin over him. Acolyte was an inert mass. Louis could feel broken ribs shifting.

He could have used Martian gravity about now.

He tightened his abdominal muscles, knees and back, grunt and lift. Lift! A nearly grown male Kzin, pressure suit and all, rose just high enough to roll onto the cargo plate.

Louis crawled aboard. Tied the Kzin down. Took the cargo plates up. He used the little thruster to put him just under the stepping disk. Lifted until his shoulders touched.

Flick
, they were upside down in Needle with the cargo plates on top of them.

Bram did the rest: rolled the cargo plates off, opened all the sealstrips that held the Kzin’s suit together, and pulled him out. The Kzin’s eyes blinked, focused, found Louis. Otherwise he seemed unable to move.