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

Hearth’s ancestral star. Death lunged at the herd from behind. Unknown perils lurked in their path. At that, the worst possible moment, as Citizen society strained and sanity crumbled, the servant humans had rebelled.
    And so Nature Preserve Four, renamed New Terra, had won its independence. It now flew ahead of the Fleet—a world of unwitting scouts. The New Terrans were too few and too weak to confront their former masters. And most were also too cautious, their culture having been modeled on their masters’ society.
    Earth authorities, if they should ever learn the fate of the lost colony ship, would have a more forceful reaction. Nessus had spent many years—if often in hiding—on Earth and its colony worlds. He did not doubt humanity’s wrath.
    But fits of bravery were not the only form of Nessus’ madness. He had come to
like
humans. When Achilles conspired to reclaim New Terra, hoping to govern there as viceroy for the Concordance, Nessus had brought the humans a champion: Sigmund Ausfaller. And so New Terra had kept its freedom. And so, for long years, Achilles had lost his.
    The next time trouble came to this part of the galaxy, it was the Gw’oth who first spotted it. They and Sigmund, as much as anyone, had saved everyone.
    Even the Fleet.
    It did not matter, in a way, that in saving everyone else Sigmund had been broken. He would have refused to take sides between Gw’oth and Citizens anyway.
    Nessus never intended Louis to know any of that.
    And then, this time by Nessus’ choice,
Aegis
dropped again into normal space. A recording awaited him on a remote hyperwave radio buoy.
    A foreboding message from New Terra, sent by Sigmund Ausfaller. . . .
    Ausfaller.
    It was a name from Louis’s troubled childhood, a name overheard when his parents were unaware he was in earshot. The boogeyman personified. Louis didn’t know who Ausfaller was, not exactly, but he had a pretty good idea
what
Ausfaller was. An evil genius. A raging paranoid. An obsessive. An ARM, an agent of the United Nations military.
    The one who had chased Louis’s family across the stars and into hiding.
    And now Louis had a face to put with the name.
    An altogether ordinary-looking man, thickset and middle-aged, looked out of
Aegis
’ main bridge display. He had a round face, with dark hair and eyes. He wore a jumpsuit that, aside from its programmed color choices, looked the twin to what Louis wore. Ausfaller could be any bureaucrat, on any world—
    Until you looked into those piercing, haunted eyes.
    “Voice, replay the message,” Louis said. His impression was that the message came via a relay of buoys. The direction of the ship’s hyperwave-radio beam—if he could figure out how to access that information—would tell him nothing.
    “Nessus,” the message began, Ausfaller’s brow ominously furrowed, “we have a situation. My sources say you are away from the Fleet. I neither know nor ask what your purpose is. I only hope that whatever you’re doing has you closer to the action than we are here. Call when you get this. You’ll be put through to me, day or night. Ausfaller, out.”
    Louis studied the frozen final frame, considering. Ausfaller spoke strangely accented Interworld. And there was a bit of hesitation at times, as though he was out of practice. Odd.
    Day or night? That phrasing suggested Ausfaller was on a planet. But hyperwave didn’t work inside a gravitational singularity. Laser or regular radio links from a habitable planet took hours to reach the edge of your solar system, where instantaneous hyperwave began to work—unless your planet was nowhere near a sun.
    Louis glowered at the holo. “What are you up to, Ausfaller? Why do you know about the Fleet?”
    Nessus sidled onto the bridge, nervously plucking at his already unkempt mane. He had retreated, shaking, to his cabin upon first seeing the message. “When Sigmund Ausfaller says something is a situation, worlds tremble. Let us see what he