“Many thanks. Do you need any other information?”
“Undoubtedly,” the Protector replied, “but I don't know what yet. I can find this starseed again when I do know. You can keep the relay, in case you have to leave the starseed's vicinity—you can mark it with an encrypted message saying where you've gone.”
“Why would we have to leave?” the Outsider said, unable to think of a compelling reason.
“If I knew that, I wouldn't have to leave you the relay.”
That was reasonable. “Very well. Are you aware that your converter could be adapted to suppress the spin on the proton?”
“Certainly, but I don't need yet another kind of large bomb. It'd annihilate the generator. Unless I beamed two partial fields and had them intersect—which seems like a lot of trouble, for not much more result. Here are the coordinates for the working model.”
“Thank you.”
Neither of them saw any necessity for formal goodbyes.
Peace hadn't even thought of rejuvenating stars. The converter beam was a statistical effect, and beyond a certain dispersion of the cone it simply didn't work; but partial fields intersecting in a star's core would do a decent enough job of cleaning it out, as slowly as you liked. Warming the core would expand it, and since it would be ridiculously difficult to do so symmetrically there would be massive convection, extracting trapped fossil heat and delaying helium ignition. Sol could be restored to full luminosity in time to keep it from turning red giant. The star was plainly older than current theory supposed; but then, so was the Universe.
She moved off a ways in hyperspace, dropped out and put her arsenal back together, then continued to her primary base at 70 Ophiuchi. The old homestead.
It was a binary star, and her birthworld, Pleasance, was at one of the system's Trojan points. By rights it should have been a frozen ball of rock, but evidently some 25,000 centuries or so back a Pak Protector had added most of the system's asteroidal thorium and uranium, and they'd been soaking in and giving off heat and helium ever since.
Her base was in the dustcloud at the other Trojan point. At 36 A.U. from Pleasance, it was never visited after the first colonists' survey—nothing there worth the trip. Peace found it especially handy because it was easy to reach from hyperspace—it was outside the system's deflection curvature. It was also handy for spotting arriving Outsiders, as it was the human system closest to the galaxy's center.
There was a human intruder when she got there. A kzin would have used a gravity planer, which would have roiled up the dust. Other species wouldn't have come here. The ship was hidden in one of the shelters, but the heat of its exhaust was all through the dust. Not a roomy ship; the heat patterns indicated sluggish maneuvering.
Peace had a look inside the main habitat before docking. Buckminster—a cyborg kzin once known as Technology Officer, who had enjoyed her unending stream of gadgets so much he'd stuck with her when she relocated his companions—was in his suite, whose visible entrance was sealed from the outside. He had evidently been coming out to raid the kitchen while his putative captor was asleep, as he had put on some weight. At the moment he was reading a spool and having a good scratch. The intruder was at a control console in the observatory, monitoring her arrival. He had a largely mundane but decent arsenal, including a pretty good bomb.
Peace took over the monitor system, told it lies, suited up, had her ship dock on its own, and used the softener to step through the hull. She jumped to the observatory, came through the wall, reached over his shoulder to pluck the dead-man detonator out of his hand, and stunned him. It was a good detonator: it took her a couple of seconds of real thought to figure out the disarm.
When she opened her suit, the man's smell was severe. She'd been away for a couple of weeks, and that wasn't long enough for him to get into this condition, so he'd arrived filthy. He must be deranged.
She restored the console, then called her associate. “Hi, Buckminster, I'm home. You leave me any butter?”
His reply began with a chuckle. With the telepathic region removed from the brain, a kzin was remarkably easygoing. “I only had a few pounds. Is our guest still alive?”
“By the smell he could be a zombie, but I'll take a chance and say yes. How come you didn't disarm him?” she asked, though she knew; she also knew Buckminster would want to say it, though.
“I didn't want to touch him,” Buckminster confirmed. “Besides, I didn't think it would make him stop fighting, and I didn't want to have to explain bite marks on a human corpse.”
“Difficult to do when you're swollen up with ptomaine, too. Come to the observatory and sort through his stuff. I'll be cleaning him up.”
“You humans show the most unexpected reserves of courage,” Buckminster remarked.
As she stripped, washed, and depilated the man, the remark seemed progressively less likely to have been a joke. There was a significant layer of dead skin, and the smell of him underneath it was actually somewhat worse. He must not have bathed in months, if not years.
Getting the hair off his face confirmed an impression: she'd seen him before. He'd been one of the psychists at her mother's prison. Peace hadn't actually met him, and Jan Corben hadn't given his name—she'd called him Corky. He was evidently a survivor of the kzinti occupation of Pleasance, and had probably witnessed some awful things. Peace didn't spend much pity on him—she'd been her mother's clone, created to be the recipient in a brain transplant like many before her, and she had yet to hear a worse story.
Once he was clean, he was also pretty raw in spots, so Peace had to spray some skinfilm on, to hold him while she programmed the autodoc. This took her almost half an hour, as she'd never expected to have a human breeder here, and she had to start from scratch. When she was done she stuck him in, then washed herself and went to see how Buckminster was doing.
He was having a great time. He'd taken Corky's arms to the small firing range (the big one was necessarily outside), where he had laid them out in a long row and was methodically using them to perforate targets of various compositions. “Interesting viewpoint he has,” Buckminster told her. “No nonlethal weapons, but not many random-effect ones. This man wants to kill in a very personal way.”
“He talk to you much?”
“Nothing informative. 'Go there, do that, you baby-eater.' Made eye contact and grinned a lot. Seemed to bother him that I didn't get hostile.”
“I expect so. Did you explain?” Peace said, amused.
“No, the baby-eater remark offended me, so I just let him pant.”
“Sweat.”
“Sweat? Yes, that would mean the same thing, wouldn't it?”
“Not quite. A human letting someone else work off his foul mood on his own doesn't need as much self-control,” Peace pointed out. “So there's less satisfaction involved for us. Well, I'd better check his ship. Want to come along?”
“If it's as big a mess as he was I'll need my suit.”
“I'll put mine back on too,” Peace agreed.
There was only one boobytrap; it was in the airlock, and Buckminster spotted it too. The ship only had deck gravity in the exercise room, and that was turned off. There wasn't any debris floating about, but surfaces were dirty and smeared, and the air plant was in extremis. The ship's arms looked like he'd tried for the greatest lethality for the money: there was a turret with two disintegrators, plus and minus, to slice targets open with bars of lightning; and torpedo tubes that fired Silver Bullets, a weapon the Wunderlanders had devised at the end of the Third War but never got to use. These were all-but-invisible pellets of stasis-held antihydrogen, stasis shutting down on impact—the blast would punch through thick hullmetal, and the surplus neutrons from the destroyed atoms would flood a ship's interior. “What a stupid concept,” Buckminster said. “That'd ruin everything but the hull. You'd have to rebuild the ship almost completely for any sort of prize.”