Read Online Betrayer of Worlds by Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner - Free Book Online

met.”
    Almost certainly you already have, Nessus thought. You have Beowulf’s quick mind and love of the strange. You have Carlos’s brilliance. You have the human heritage of aggression and war.
    All Nessus said was, “That is why you are here.”
    Only, it soon turned out, he had been preparing for the wrong crisis.

NO MAN’S LAND

8

    Amid chaos and ruin, light-years from Hearth, alone but for the ragged sounds of his own breathing, Achilles stared.
    Debris floated all around him. Some things were recognizable and more were not: bits beyond counting slashed—or melted and recongealed—from every part of the ship.
    But no stretch of the imagination could still call
Argo
a ship. It was a hulk, nothing more. Here and there ragged edges of onetime decks clung to the hull. The last wisp of air was long vanished from the vast, cavernous expanse. Life support, communications, propulsion, artificial gravity, sensors: all were gone. The flotsam that cargo and bulkheads and ship’s systems had become endlessly rebounded, in eerie silence, from the hull or one another.
    His spacesuit recycled almost without loss; it could sustain him for years. A stasis field froze time; it could sustain him forever. For what? No one knew where he was, and Pak warships would be converging on his location. His hearts would stop from fright and conditioned reflex when the Pak arrived to claim their prize. Until that ignominious end, he had only his memories to occupy him. Bitter memories.
    Once again his plans had gone horribly awry. . . .
    Argo
popped into normal space.
    Flat displays and holos sprang to life all around Achilles. He kept lips and tongue on the hyperdrive actuator while his other head swiveled to survey the readouts and imagery.
    “Target acquired,” his copilot called. Roland Allen-Cartwright sat across the bridge. He was a large man, swarthy, with close-set eyes. “Call it three light-days.”
    “And?” Achilles prompted.
    “I’m looking at a squadron, twelve ships, about half a light-year distant. Big ships. Receding from us. And the usual background radio chatter.”
    White-hot fusion flames streamed behind the twelve ramscoops, shouting their presence and course. Achilles had chosen his quarry from light-years away. By no known science could
Argo
’s reactionless thrusters be detected from similar distances.
    Then again, he did not know what the Pak knew. Yet.
    Any ramscoop accelerating toward
Argo
would be less obvious. Any ramscoop coasting toward
Argo
would be nearly invisible. To infer an approaching ramscoop required subtle modeling, element by element, of ripples in the tenuous interstellar medium, or triangulation of faint neutrino sources. Both methods entailed significant uncertainties. Both methods took time.
    Or he could take more active measures.
    “One radar ping,” Achilles ordered. If any ships lurked nearby, waiting to pounce, he meant to know
now.
The ping would not forewarn his quarry, three light-days distant. Before radar’s light-speed crawl ever reached that ship,
Argo
would strike.
    “Ping sent,” Roland said. Seconds passed. “Nothing.”
    Minutes passed before Achilles released his grip on the hyperdrive control. “What is the target ship doing?”
    Roland frowned at his instruments. “It looks like there is a big free-floating snowball out ahead of it. So collecting water, I would guess.”
    Hearth sweltered from pole to pole in the industrial waste heat of its trillion inhabitants. The home world had not seen snow in ages. In simpler times Achilles had encountered snow on human and Kzinti worlds. In more recent, more troubling times, in the “rehabilitation” camps on Nature Preserve One, he had made a far more intimate acquaintance with snow. He did not like snow.
    At maximum acceleration
Argo
would match normal-space velocity with the isolated Pak ship within half a day. The hyperspace jump to the Pak’s position would take even less time. “Prepare your people, Roland.