Betrayer of Worlds Read Online Free Page B

useless to anyone else. Face it. Face what you are.
    He turned, finally, toward the mirror. A hollow-eyed figure stared back. Louis began to shake. “You promised a cure for my addiction!” he screamed.
    Nessus did not stir.
    Louis slumped against the side of the booth. He was trapped until Nessus recovered from his panic attack.
    It looked like the cure would be going cold turkey.
    Time passed. Nessus didn’t move.
    Louis switched to studying the walls beyond his cell. Standing on tiptoe he noticed a broad scratch in the curved gray wall behind Nessus. Those long gray curls on the deck beside him were peels of paint.
    A long disused synapse fired: General Products hull. A Puppeteer would choose nothing less.
    Back when Puppeteers had traded in Known Space, General Products Corporation was the core of their commercial empire. More than anything else, GP sold spaceship hulls. No one knew how a GP hull was built or of what it was made, only that the indemnity if one failed was enormous. (Another childhood memory: his fathers talking. Evidently, GP hulls were not
quite
impregnable. But the piddling little surface-to-air missile that reduced
Clementine
to a flaming ruin would not have scratched a GP hull.)
    The price of indestructible hulls soared after the Puppeteers withdrew from Known Space. The GP hulls left behind had been reconfigured mostly as warships, top-of-the-line cruise ships, and yachts for the superrich. The largest model GP hull, a sphere roughly three hundred meters in diameter, was used to transport whole new colonies. The tramp freighters Louis generally flew—as often as not working for his passage—were scruffy, human-manufactured ships.
    Louis had flown only once in a GP hull. He remembered that GP hull material was transparent. That light passed through was a feature. You painted whatever parts you wanted opaque.
    Recalling obscure history, like studying every seam, scratch, and dent on the unreachable walls, was a distraction. So what was he distracting himselffrom? The quaking in his limbs, of course: harbinger of the seizures destined to come.
    Tired of looking at Nessus, unwilling to face the mirror, he began yet another survey of the room.
    Through the scratched-clear swath behind Nessus: motion. Something drifting. Seaweed? And . . . bubbles? And something else—
    An eye! Enormous!
    Captive of a comatose alien, in a tiny prison, aboard an alien ship, beneath the sea, with Finagle knew
what
nosing about outside. Trapped without food or water, without as much as a chamber pot.
    He needed a pill! He needed an escape from the miasma of fear and doubt and mind-crushing depression. His hands shook and he broke into a sweat. His head buzzed and spun, and he kept expecting to vomit. Instead, his bowels let loose.
Then
he vomited, all over himself. A moan bubbled out of him as the seizures began.
    Nessus did not stir.
    Louis woke to an unbelievable stench, his nose centimeters above a puddle of vomit, urine, and excrement. His limbs were contorted and his joints screamed. His neck was on fire and his head pressed against the booth wall at an unnatural angle. Only the narrowness of the cylinder had kept his head from flopping into the filth.
His
filth.
    For now the seizures had stopped. He unfolded himself and stood. It felt like he had been beaten by a team of experts, had been detoxing for days. His wrist implant showed he had been trapped for only three hours. Almost a day, though, since his last pill. Black despair crashed down on him.
    Nessus remained a tightly wound mass.
    “Nessus!” No response. “Nessus, you useless piece of . . .” Louis trailed off. A hint of clarity had returned. Might a Puppeteer take offense at an insult?
    He did know they were cowards. “Fire!” he screamed. Nessus twitched and Louis dared to hope.
    The twitch faded away.
    Because despite everything, shreds of sentience must lurk in that rolled-up mass. If Puppeteer ships carried anything capable of combustion,