Betrayer of Worlds by Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner Page A

boiled from the vacuum.
    He got a head, gasping, into a helmet and tongued a control. Air spewed. He felt a bit less muddled. Wriggling into a pressure suit floating in the dark, battered by debris, was the hardest thing he had ever done. With the last of his strength, he sealed the suit’s seams. The roar of air in his helmets fell to a whisper. The suit heater kicked itself on.
    And then, his chest heaving, Achilles blacked out.
    Steeped in dread, Achilles jetted about the dead hulk. He used his compressed air sparingly, with no way to refill the propulsion tanks.
    After overloading or outwitting the flare defenses, how long had the Pak laser cannon blasted
Argo
? He could not tell. The pressure suit’s chronometer had, like him, been frozen in time inside the stasis field, and he had not found a functioning clock amid the wreckage. But for a long while, surely. Long enough to sear most paint from the hull. Long enough to cut decks and overheads and bulkheads into scraps. Long enough to melt the hinges of the cargo holds’ hatches. Long enough to dissipate the massive debris field that must have sprayed out when the first hatch blew.
    So how long? Until, Achilles supposed, the Pak ship’s deuterium tanks ran dry.
    He raged, then, at the unfairness of life. He raged at the Gw’oth, the threat—and opportunity—who had brought him here. He howled at party leadership that was Experimentalist in name more than in deed, too timid to empower him, and even louder at the bungling Hindmost who ruled but refused to
act.
He cursed his New Terran minions, deservedly dead for their incompetence, and at Pak too stubborn to die before setting their cunning traps.
    He raged, above all, at injustice, and at everyone who had ever hindered him, and that he would die here, never having achieved the recognition he deserved.
He
should be Hindmost.
    Exhausted, his throats raw from screaming and his exposure to vacuum, Achilles finally slept.
    Consciousness returned. Clarity of a sort slowly followed.
    His one slim hope was to cross over to the Pak derelict, scavenge parts for a hyperwave radio and something to power it, and cross back before he fried.
Argo
’s hull still served as a radiation shelter. If he called for help, a rescue ship from the Fleet might reach him before the Pak.
    The thought of a spacewalk made Achilles ache to withdraw into a catatonic ball, but that innate flight reflex only guaranteed tragedy. He forced himself around and around the hull, searching everywhere through the clear wall for the Pak ship. And when he failed to find that ship—drifted, who knew where, while he hung insensate in stasis—he
did
collapse.
    He barely managed to tie a tether before clenching himself into a ball of despair.

11

    “Let me share a bit of history,” Ausfaller said. “It will save time.”
    An alien starship, a ramscoop, had plunged into Sol system in 2125. Its pilot had spent most of his life traveling from his home world, somewhere near the galactic core. He was looking for a long-lost colony of his own kind, responding to an ancient distress signal. The lost colonists had evolved, over the eons, into humans.
    “I
have
taken a virtual tour of the Smithsonian,” Louis said at one point. As in: don’t treat me like an ignoramus. “I saw the pilot’s mummified body, recovered from Mars. I know he found a Belter prospector in a singleship and told the Belter his story, that his name was Phssthpok.”
    “Good,” Ausfaller said. “I’ve been off Earth for a long time. That’s more background than the ARM had made public in my day. What else?”
    “The aliens call themselves Pak.”
    “More like this.” Ausfaller rearticulated the name while popping his lips. “It takes a bony beak to say it properly.”
    Whatever, Louis thought. That will be useful when I have a bony beak. “They’re essentially early hominids,
Homo habilis,
I think, except that the adults can morph into another life stage. If they eat some plant