by Larry Niven
Most of these things had been unrecognizable. Now they were junk, with one exception.
Seeing Acolyte and him flick in and out, Louis thought, would have told Whisper about stepping disks. She must have ripped the stepping disk off the probe and tossed it into the sled, for there it was, unharmed.
Three pressure suits leaped into the sled in the same instant. Two fired sprays of projectiles at anything big, then hurled anything hurlable in a rapid search for a protector hiding in wreckage. But Whisper was nowhere.
Two protectors picked up the stepping disk and held it on edge so that the third could inspect its underside. They turned it to show the upper surface. The vampire must have thought it more dangerous than useful, because he adjusted his weapon and fired a bright, narrow beam at it.
The beam lashed straight up out of the cabin's main stepping disk and began to char the ceiling.
Though Louis couldn't remember jumping for cover, he and the Hindmost were now curled intimately behind the recycler wall. The Hindmost didn't look like he intended to uncurl.
Louis poked his head around.
The vampire protector had picked up the stepping disk and was trying to hurl it over the edge of the track.
The disk was suddenly too heavy, as an intruder's weight slammed it down.
The intruder -- Bram! -- lashed out as the other leapt away. The other vampire -- Collier? -- fell and separated, cut in half by six feet of wire in a stasis field. Both ends of him spewed fog. But Collier's torso still had arms, and one came around with the bulky light-weapon.
Bram's variable-knife licked out again. The light-weapon fell.
No telling where Whisper had come from, but she was there. Two spill mountain protectors faced two vampire protectors.
The puppeteer was still in something like a catatonic state. Louis tried to follow what was happening in the webeye window. It wasn't simple.
The spill mountain protectors hadn't attacked.
Whisper was wearing one of their suits; she'd be able to talk to them. Louis could hear Bram's breath huffing with recent exertion, but he wasn't talking. He wouldn't have the right kind of suit radio.
He was blinking his helmet lamp at Whisper.
Tanj, that must be the Ghouls' heliograph language! Louis realized. And now the others were using helmet lamps, too.
It went on and on, and presently an agreement was reached.
The spill mountain protectors picked up the ruined sled with some difficulty. Bram gave his weapon to Whisper and helped them throw the sled over the rim and into space.
They dropped the stepping disk into the undamaged maglev sled. The two vampire protectors got in, then the spill mountain protectors. The sled began to move back *down* the track. As the sled began to pull away, Bram puffed a webeye onto the track, then another onto the sled.
Then Bram sang the song of an orchestra being gunned down by terrorists.
He stepped on the disk and flicked out, gone, *here*. As the light through the webeye window showed his going, Bram walked off the stepping disk, lifting his helmet. Something like a fat burl flute was in his hard beak of a mouth.
When a puppeteer is upset, he loses control, not of speech, but of emotional signals. The Hindmost's song was as pure as wind chimes. "You've learned my programming language."
Bram put the flute away. "Our contract does not preclude such a thing."
"I am disturbed."
"Did you follow what you saw? No? Of Mary-Shelley's blood-children, we've killed Lovecraft and Collier. Collier's servants tell us that Lovecraft's servants are ready to load cargo. We expect that they will aid us. Now only King remains. When King is dead, Whisper will control the rim and I the Repair Center, and then we may accomplish something."
The kitchen delivered a flask, and Bram drank deeply. Louis noticed he was carrying the big light-weapon. That thing would probably kill everyone in the cabin if it was fired.
Bram looked at him. "Louis Wu, what would you do now?"
"Well, she's *got* to kill King. Too late for anything else. Me? My suit would keep me alive for two falans, so *I* don't have to board a sled and rev it up to seven hundred seventy miles per second and then let King shoot at me. *I* might come back to this side of the rim, then climb up the wall from here."
"You would lose all surprise."
"He still --"
Bram waved it away. "Anne's suit won't last that long."
"Mph." *Cargo*, Bram had said. "Well, if I had something King wanted, I could put it on the sled with me. Of course he'd have to *know* I had it. What does King want?"
"Never mind, Louis. I thought it worth seeking a different viewpoint." Bram whistled at the stepping disk system, then flicked out.
"*Now* where's he gone? Hindmost, are you still locked out?"
"I can't use stepping disks. I can find him."
"Do it."
Two windows showed moire patterns: webeyes destroyed in the battle. The Hindmost sang them out, then popped one up in their place. It began flicking past other views. Weaver Town. Hidden Patriarch: the foremast crow's nest.
The Hindmost sang flutes and percussion. He said, "I've begun a search program. If invaders come using familiar craft, we'll know it in minutes."
"Good." Louis pointed at the window half obscured by that one. "I hope you were recording that."
"Yes."
The stolen webeye had reached the spaceport ledge. Tiny starlit pressure suits walked through vacuum toward a structure too huge to show its shape. It took them forever to round the curve of it.
Bigger yet: a pair of golden toroids mounted on tall gantries. It took Louis a moment to see the rest of it.
Cables were growing out of the toroids, spreading like a growing plant, narrowing at the ends to invisibly fine wire.
"Stet. They're actually making new motors."
The Hindmost said, "I've wondered if the wire frames are an innovation. My records show no more than the toroids."
"Interesting notion, but maybe the City Builders took just the toroids. That wire frame could be awkward if you wanted to land a ship."
The shifting window showed Hidden Patriarch's aft crow's nest; then the kitchen and two adult City Builders and three children. Where had the older children been hiding, Louis wondered, that he hadn't met them? But they were all moving out the door. And now they came chattering back with Bram between them.
Bram had stripped off his suit. He stretched out on a bench. Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok began a massage.
Bones and swollen joints and no fat anywhere. "He looks like a tanj skeleton *now*," Louis said.
Bram seemed asleep.
"If Bram thinks there's time for that, he's likely right. Hindmost, let's get Acolyte out of that box and me in."
The puppeteer whistled up a window. "Louis, the nanotech devices are still repairing damage to his spinal cord. He should be free in a few hours."
"Tanj!"
"Leave him?"
"Yes!" Louis curled up on the water bed. "I'm going to sleep."
Chapter 30 -
King
Louis uncurled slowly. Pain is a great teacher. Still, he moved more easily than he had these last four days.
The medkit had been giving him diet supplements, but he'd turned off the pain drip. Louis disengaged himself and went to the fore wall.
Here: in Hidden Patriarch's dining hall, Bram was speaking to the City Builders. The webeye windows in the walls were active, and one was the same as this second window --
Here: the vast width of the spaceport ledge. The nearly finished rim wall motor was gone, completed and moved somewhere. Here passed a huge floating sledge with
skeletal towers and alien waldos at the corners. A tower with a spiral decor ... more than decor: it was bending over like a silver tentacle, and its tip was an infinite bifurcation. It englobed the picked-over hull of a City Builder starship and lifted.
Beyond the edge of the ledge was a line of vertical rings: the deceleration track for incoming ships.
Here: a blur of maglev track with stars showing faintly through. Whisper must have set her sled moving, Louis decided. Built up considerable speed, too, while he slept. It had to be Whisper; who else would have sprayed a webeye?
Here: a sluggishly drifting starscape seen through a filigree maglev track, and a tiny green blinking cursor. "I found a spacecraft," the Hindmost said.
"Show me."
The puppeteer sang and the view zoomed hugely, to a blurred view of something more crowbar than ship. Little winged spacecraft ran its length like aphids on a twig. At the near end, a big drive cone and/or plasma cannon drifted past.
"Another ARM ship," Louis said. "Good catch."
Bram had left the dining hall.
The Hindmost noticed motion along the maglev track. He chimed. The window reversed to show the other side of Whisper's webeye.
*That* wasn't the sled Whisper had been using. It was a vast dark plane. Cable rose in loops of varying thickness and varying curvatures, branching like arteries, reaching around and up and out of sight. A slender pillar rose out of the center.
Whisper's handhold was on the narrowest of these loops. She was floating in close foreground, with one hand on a cable as thick as her fist.
It seemed a fantasy, like some ancient book cover. The only item Louis could recognize was welded just behind Whisper: the stepping disk off the refueling probe.
Louis realized that his mind wasn't tracking. What he needed was breakfast.
Muscles in his back, groin, right hamstring, and some transverse muscles under his ribs protested when he moved to the kitchen wall. Lifting a Kzin, even a Kzin not quite grown ... "Remember, I'm a trained professional," he muttered. "Don't try this stunt in Earth gravity." He dialed up a pastiche omelet, papaya, grapefruit, bread.
"Louis?"
"Nothing. Is Acolyte ready to come out?"
The Hindmost looked. "Yes --"
"Wait." Louis tapped an order. "Let's pacify him with haunch of mammal."
***
Acolyte sat up fast and found himself looking at a rack of beef ribs. He took it and found the Hindmost behind it. He said, "Your munificence as host must be legendary," and began to tear ribs apart.
The Hindmost said, "Your father came to us as an ambassador. He's taught you well."
Acolyte waggled his ears and kept eating.
The puppeteer dialed up a big bowl of grassy stuff, but it only stopped one mouth at a time. For Acolyte's benefit, he described the deaths on the maglev track, singing up visual displays, with Louis filling in a word here and there. The puppeteer didn't grasp strategy. One thing Acolyte *wasn't* hearing was that Bram had begun treating his alien serfs as prisoners.
Acolyte dropped a big white imitation bone into the recycler. "Louis, are you healthy?"
"I'm not ready to race you again, not just yet."
"You did well. What it cost you ... you did well. I think my main nerve trunk was broken. Shall I put you in the 'doc?"
"No no no, it's all coming to a head! Look --" Louis waved through the webeye window, at Whisper floating motionless above an infinite field of superconductor. His mind had had time to digest a little of that weird picture, and he spoke for the puppeteer as well as the adolescent Kzin. "Whisper's in free fall. That means we're looking at a vehicle moving at seven hundred seventy miles per second, antispinward. It's a vehicle even if it has to stretch the full width of the maglev track. Two hundred feet wide and maybe longer than that.
"Those loops -- Acolyte, you were in the 'doc when Bram was hinting around. You're looking at the barest fringes of a rim wall ramjet. Lovecraft's team had one all ready to go. Whisper's holding it hostage."
Whisper was looking back, watching the webeye. Bram must have told her what it was.
Bram flicked in. He was wearing Louis's pressure suit with the helmet back. He looked at his allies; glanced into the windows; then turned to the kitchen. "Louis, Acolyte, Hindmost. What news?"
"As you see," the Hindmost said. "An ARM carrier vessel orbits a hundred million miles out from the Ringworld's underside. How will you deal with it?"
"Not yet." Bram turned back to the windows. Now Whisper was clinging like a frightened monkey to the loop of superconductor.
"She's begun deceleration. Acolyte, do you understand? We hope that King will consider a rim ramjet and the large sled too valuable to destroy."
"Louis explained."
Bram said, "Whisper expects me. What do you need of me before I go?"
The puppeteer bleated, "Give me access to the stepping disks!"
"Not quite yet, Hindmost."
Louis asked, "What kind of opposition ..."
"King has a long supply line. He'll have a few spill mountain protectors. He will rotate them frequently unless he prefers to watch them die. They must scent their own kind, to know whom they protect, or else protect all beneath the Arch. King reserves that for himself."
"Not many, then."
"None, it may be. King's own hands may serve him. The rim wall ramjet motors cannot be moved by muscle. In any case, I don't fear the High Point protectors. If they see a clear victory, they will finish the loser. The victor holds their people ransom."
Louis said, "Give us a hint. If you and Whisper are killed, what do we do?"
"Your contract. Protect all beneath the Arch." Bram lowered his faceplate and fixed it in place. He was gone, a virtual particle in motion, and the port and starboard walls were glowing bright orange with the heat of the momentum exchange.
***
Tiny bottles popped into the kitchen well. The Hindmost inserted them one by one into the little medkit on the cargo plate stack. "Antibiotics," he said.
"Thanks, Hindmost. I must have been clean out."
More bottles. "Pain blockers."
Whisper wasn't in sight on the barge. She'd been conspicuous enough until now. She'd shown herself to King's telescopes, with King's treasure displayed vastly behind her. What was she playing at now?
Was she high in that cone of superconducting cable? How well did vampires climb?
*Under* the maglev barge?
The view ahead hadn't changed. The track ran on and on. The barge and its unwieldy cargo might be decelerating, but even at high gee it would take awhile. Louis wondered if Whisper was planning to ram the terminus. King might be wondering the same thing.
*Nah.* In ten hours at 770 miles/second, she'd covered around twenty-four million miles. But the track ran for two hundred million miles, and where in that length was her target? She couldn't give King that much time to shoot at her.
Where, for that matter, was King? The vampire protector could be anywhere, if he'd trained High Point protectors to mount the ramjets for him. *What was that?*
Maglev sled, the small variety, almost lost on the vast track. Coming straight toward the window. Now veering from side to side, and slowing ... matching speed with the barge ... *contact*, and five matching pressure suits were past the webeye before Louis could blink. The Hindmost whistle-chimed, the view reversed, and ... gone. They had already disappeared into the maze of coils.
Five matching pressure suits would be five spill mountain protectors, stet? They'd guard the ramjet, protect it from stray effects of a battle, serving both sides. For King, they would also serve as a distraction.
And anyone who had ever watched a magic act might
guess that one of the five was King himself, his suit bulked out with additional weapons or armor.
Where were they?
Action far aft. Louis couldn't make it out. This was going to be frustrating, he thought. He glanced at the Kzin: would Acolyte freak out? But he was watching with the patience of a cat at a mouse hole.
Traces of motion, distant flashes of light ... and two maglev sleds were weaving through the coils! Sporadic flashes of light followed them. They dipped below view, then rose. One struck a coil and rebounded into an actinic blast, crashed into another coil and was out, over the edge of the track, gone. The other ...
"Clever," Louis whispered, and lowered his gaze to the bed of the barge. But there was nothing to be seen.
The Hindmost said, "Louis?"
"Whisper had the little sleds following the barge, right aft where King couldn't see them. I only saw two, but maybe there were more, all slaved to the one she was in, and which one is that? Now she's dipped them and rolled clear and sent them up again for King to shoot at. Even if King's figured it out by now, it puts her in two places, and Whisper knows where *he* is. And I could be completely wrong."
"The barge will stop soon. Then the dueling field expands, stet, Louis?"
"Ye gods, you're right. If --"
Bram flicked in.
Light slashed where he had been, but Bram was among the superconductor loops and firing back with Louis's flash. Light flared among the loops, a storm of energy beams. Bram stood up, holding his suit together with one hand.
The first beam hadn't missed. It was hellishly intense, having gotten through the laser shielding on Louis's suit.
Now two tiny man-shapes were firing among the loops, leaping, firing, chewing up the ramjet.
Louis said, "I just --" and stopped.
"Share it," Acolyte spat.
"Light doesn't hurt a superconductor. They're all *three* using light-weapons. If King had known ..."
Bram would be dead if he didn't get to safety soon. He'd taken cover behind a thick loop of ramjet and was watching, just watching. Likely Bram had no better idea than he did, Louis thought, as to which man-shape was Whisper, which was King. He'd done what he could.
