Destroyer of Worlds Read Free Page B

but stranded on the planet, the fleets of the space-based civilizations immediately turned on one another.
    The island of Rilchuk, inconveniently remote from newly frozen lands, blessed with a paucity of natural resources, remained, for the moment, largely unmolested. Messages encrypted in family codes were answered with pleas for rescue. It wasn’t too late.
    Just all but impossible.
    Three years of endless war gaming gave consistent results.
New Hope
alone could not evacuate Rilchuk. Even to approach Pakhome would be folly: A single starship could not defend itself against those who would be eager to seize it. But in addition to their ship, irreplaceable, the crew had one asset to trade. . . .
    Â 
    RADAR SIGNALED THE APPROACH of another shuttle and Thssthfok turned off his telescope display. The other craft was expected: Rilchuk was not the only clan bereft of options.
    The ships exchanged authentication codes and rendezvoused. Thssthfok waited for his visitor to board. Despite connected air locks, the stranger wore a pressure suit. What appeared to be a medical scanner dangled from his utility belt.
    The device could easily be a disguised weapon, but Thssthfok did not ask to examine it. Only unconsciousness or death could keep Thssthfok from protecting the secret he was here to trade, and a failsafe would blow the ship’s fusion reactor at the first anomaly in his vital signs. Given the stakes, his visitor would expect no lesser precaution.
    Warily, the stranger removed his helmet and sniffed the cabin. “Qweklothk,” he introduced himself.
    No clan name. Perhaps no snowball differed from another.
Rilchuk
emanated a heady bouquet, changing with the seasons, spiced with salt tang from the sea.
Rilchuk
was a place, a home, a proper clan name. Comet dweller would suffice, Thssthfok decided.
    Qweklothk exuded not the faintest aura of kinship, and Thssthfok’s skin crawled at the first new scent in years. He had not expected to find family here in the cometary belt, of course, but smell is a primitive sense,directly wired to the hindbrain. His mind and instincts warred. “Qweklothk,” he repeated.
    It was a label only, without meaning, the very concept jarring.
Thssthfok
was no arbitrary set of symbols but who he was: the dominant pheromones of his grandparents, represented in sound.
    He, surely, was as alien to his visitor. “Thssthfok of Rilchuk.”
    â€œShow me,” Qweklothk said.
    The shuttle’s small cargo bay held a cold-sleep pod. Thssthfok had been chosen for this meeting for what he did not know and could not reveal: the secrets of cold-sleep pods.
    Qweklothk expected nothing different. Asking no questions, he slowly circled the pod. The scanner, now in his hand, hummed. He compared the readings from his instrument to the display on the pod control panel. He brushed rime from the dome to peer inside. A still figure lay within; with patience, the slow rise and fall of the chest was visible.
    Qweklothk took a probe from a pouch of his pressure suit. Without asking—they would not be here unless Thssthfok was willing—Qweklothk retracted the dome to remove a tissue sample. The scanner chirped its approval.
    New Hope
had carried no breeders on its long voyage. The breeder in the pod had been captured in a supply raid on an outer-system colony. Its family was as good as dead, anyway.
    The pod slowed metabolism, and with it pheromone release, to almost nothing. So, although this breeder was as foreign as Qweklothk, the gaping pod did not add to the stench—
    Until Thssthfok woke her. Successful revival was central to the demonstration.
    Thssthfok and Qweklothk smelled as alien to her. The breeder’s screech trailed off into the silence of abject terror. She quivered in the pod, her eyes flicking between two unknown protectors. To the extent a breeder could think, she knew she lived at their whim.
    Qweklothk poked and prodded her, gauging her reflexes. He