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

fuel cells for emergency circuits, he told himself. Too little power for gravity or the ramscoop field. His skin crawled.
    Bodies floated everywhere. The Pak were short, their proportions and enlarged joints making them caricatures of the human form. Most wore only vests covered in pockets. Their leathery skins were blotchy with radiation lesions and the mottling of decay. Putrefaction looked well advanced. Sealed in his suit Louis could smell nothing, but his gorge rose in his throat.
    The New Terrans in their spacesuits were contorted, frozen in their final convulsions. Two looked like they might have snapped their own backs. One floated on her back, limbs askew, a red-brown film coating the inside of her visor. One glance inside at death’s rictus and Louis shuddered.
    “Everyone is dead,” he said to break the eerie silence.
    “As expected,” Achilles replied. “Are the computers intact?”
    Computers were why Achilles was there—and why these men and women died. Capture a Library ship and, it stood to reason, you captured much of the Library. Computerized knowledge was compact—the hundreds of ships would be for mutual protection, not cargo capacity.
    “A minute,” Louis said. A minute of silence to honor
your
crew, slaughtered on
your
watch. He turned slowly, taking everything in with his helmet-mounted camera. “I’ll ask again. Should I send back the bodies?”
    “Funerals are not a New Terran custom,” Nessus said. “To judge by these images, returning the dead would bring no one comfort.”
    A few deep breaths steadied Louis’s nerves. “I’ll look for computers.” He circled the air-lock-level deck, the thud of his boots and his too-fast breathing the only sounds. He saw nothing promising. It all looked—alien. Few objects exhibited a clear purpose. Or maybe they had too many purposes, multiuse items sharing common components. Here and there he found open cabinets, circuits and modules floating at the ends of spidery cable bundles.
    Placards with squiggles labeled the hatches, but he could not read them. By trial and error he found a stairwell. “I’ll check another deck.”
    He kept searching, wondering if he would recognize an alien computer—and what would trigger a booby trap. The salient fact about Pak was that they were
smart.
Smarter, by far, than human. Could he anticipate their thinking?
    With each hatch Louis approached, his nerves grew tauter. The trap that killed the New Terrans had not triggered immediately. Maybe opening
this
door would rearm the trap.
    Why hadn’t the ramscoop field come on the moment Achilles’ crew boarded? Why wait?
    The Pak who set the trap might have hoped other Librarians would recover this ship. If so, the trap would have to decide whether boarders were Pak. Louis chewed on that theory as he kept searching. Humans and Pak were distant cousins and the humans wore spacesuits. Maybe the recognition logic had been fooled for a while.
    Maybe. But no one could mistake a General Products #4 hull for a Pak ramscoop. No, the ramscoop trap was intended to strike after invaders came aboard. No matter how thoroughly an attacker’s ship was destroyed—and
Argo
had been reduced to a useless hulk—the ramscoop-field trap would capture useful data in the form of dead boarders and their gear.
    “Do you recognize any computers yet?” Achilles asked impatiently.
    No. Do you? Louis kept the sarcasm to himself. “Not yet.”
    “What about weapons?” Achilles persisted.
    Because this was all about weapons, something to use against the Gw’oth. If they didn’t find Pak computers, maybe useful technology would be lying around already weaponized. “No,” Louis answered again. He walked slowly, studying racks of exotic equipment, to a soft
thump
whenever a boot magnet snapped to the deck.
    Working aft, he had reached the engine room. The massive magnetic coils could not be part of anything else. He had yet to see anything that looked like a computer.
    Something