Destroyer of Worlds Read Free Page A

or night side made little difference: Where the smoke was thickest, all was dark; everywhere else, the glare from the galaxy’s core ruled the sky.
    Rubble circled the world, the debris of this era’s space stations joining the detritus of cycles passed. New craters scarred the moon, where colonies had thrived. The fourth planet had lost one of its moons, the fragments still distributing themselves into a new ring.
    Up to a light-year distance, the fusion exhausts of small fleets showed that some clans had gotten away. Much of the ruin here came from their preparations: raiding for provisions for themselves and destroying what they could not steal lest rival clans pursue.
    How had clan Rilchuk fared? That remained to be determined.
    At maximum acceleration, Thssthfok’s shuttle was three days’ travel from Pakhome.
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was similarly distant, in another direction, hidden. Only scattered rock-and-ice balls registered on the shuttle’s instruments; a beam weapon from any of them would arrive without warning. He could do nothing about that, so, while he waited, he redirected his main telescope back to Pakhome.
    If protectors could, Thssthfok would have cried.
    Only charred ruins or still-roiling columns of ash and soot marked where great cities had stood. The great dam on the river Lobok had been destroyed; most things that had not washed out to sea were now embedded in a sheet of ice. Nothing remained of the onetime great island of Rabal but a volcanic stump, lurid on the ocean floor. Thssthfok could not tell from this distance what had set off such a cataclysmic eruption, but his mind seethed with theories.
    The ancient, sprawling Library complex near the center of the south-polar desert looked unmolested, at least at this resolution. In their need to escape, what all Pak sought was better weaponry, and weapons technology was knowledge no family ever deposited to the Library. The onrushing radiation would leave none to use the knowledge long accumulated there.
    After millions of years and countless cycles, the great repository had become irrelevant.
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    THE LIBRARY . . .
    For many breederless protectors, the Library was life itself. For as long as they could convince themselves they served the good of all Pak, they retained their appetites and managed to outlive their descendants.
    For others, the Librarians were abominations, crimes against nature, and the Library a depressing place.
    Thssthfok remembered visiting the Library before
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set out, poring over ancient records of Pakhome’s climate. Every archway was inscribed with the symbol of the Library: the stylized double helix that represented life and cycles. The upward spiral spoke to the promise of better times, of past collapses mitigated with the Library’s knowledge. The downward spiral represented the inevitable next collapse for which they must always prepare.
    His work had gone slowly. Most information existed only as written text stamped into nearly indestructible metal pages, survivability taking precedence over ease of use. It was said that neither absence of electricity nor obsolescence of format could devalue the data—never that the archaic representations made work for Library staff, painstakingly transcribing from old languages to newer.
    Thssthfok had worked quickly, eager to get away, vowing that if misfortune ever befell his bloodline, he would have the decency to fade away.
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    THE LIBRARY WAS ONE of the few Pak institutions to extend beyond narrow family interests. All would pass.
    Some already had.
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had approached the home system just in time to witness the destruction of the final space elevator. The structure was too thin to discern even at maximum magnification, but there was no mistaking theslow-motion destruction as half of the long cable crashed to the ground, or the scattering of the blockading fleet as the counterbalance end of the cable writhed free. With their mutual enemies all