Read Online Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven - Free Book Online

everything I know."
    All his life he'd thought in terms of a mathematical singularity. In such a system, the realm of heavy masses--suns and planets--would be undefined in hyperspace. Ships couldn't go there.
    "What we're doing is a standard maneuver. We have a velocity, right? We were flung up from the Ringworld, toward the sun and past it and outward. We still have that huge velocity, straight out from the sun.
    "But the Hindmost is taking us halfway around the system in hyperdrive. When he comes out, we'll have the same velocity we started with, but pointed back toward the sun and the Ringworld."
    "We're out," the Hindmost said. They were in black space with one overbright star. They'd been in hyperdrive about five minutes.
    The Hindmost said, "The Fringe War doesn't normally reach this far out. We're safe for the moment. Our velocity vector is inward, toward Diplomat. We should act within ten minutes, before Diplomat can see our neutrino wake and Cherenkov radiation."
    "Get me a view," Tunesmith ordered.
    Ten light-minutes is further than the distance between Earth and Sol. The virtual window popped up, and zoomed, and wiggled a loose-packed comet out of the starscape, and zoomed...
    A lens of steel and glass was the Kzinti command ship Diplomat emerging from its cometary nest.
    That larger sphere just popping into view was Long Shot, close and closing.
    Tunesmith barely glanced at the view. "They'll be a few minutes matching. We have time. Hindmost, show us what we recorded in this last hyperdrive jump."
    The hypercamera's record was blank. Louis snickered.
    Tunesmith reproved him. "Louis, there's nothing to see. We're outside the envelope of dark matter that collects around our star. Where there almost isn't any dark matter, there almost isn't space either! This is why we can travel faster than light does in vacuum, because distance in this domain is drastically contracted.
    "Now I need only learn why there is more than one characteristic velocity. I'll get that by studying Long Shot. Hindmost, take us in range of Diplomat."
    "Two fighting ships guard the near side of the comet."
    "I see them. Use hyperdrive. We'll beat our own light."
    The Blind Spot flashed for only an instant.
    Their target was still too far away to see, but the virtual window nailed it: a loose dark fluffy comet, icy puffball satellites drifting around it, and four ships, two linked. Tunesmith's knotty hands danced. Needle surged: the cabin gravity motors were whining again. The larger ships, Diplomat and Long Shot locked together at the airlocks, were coming up fast. Slowing. Slowing.
    "I'm taking the controls," Tunesmith said.
    Diplomat fired lasers: crew quarters went black.
    The virtual window was looking at something other than light. A flock of dim points was coming at them. Needle didn't have rocket motors; Tunesmith was using only the sluggish thrusters. Now the virtual window disappeared, and the hull was slapped sideways, then backward.
    Louis just had time to realize that they were mated. Then Needle's cabin gravity surged uneasily while the generators whined. Three ships, locked together, tried to turn round their common center of mass.
    Diplomat ripped loose, tumbling, dwindling.
    Hot Needle of Inquiry was using full thrust to push Long Shot. Needle's overbuilt thrusters against Long Shot's sizeable mass would give, what, around ten gravities? And Long Shot hadn't had cabin gravity when Louis flew it. In all that packed space there hadn't been room for extra machinery, or so he had assumed. Ten gravities would flatten any Kzinti aboard, knock them out or kill them.
    Diplomat, the Kzinti command ship, fired a cloud of missiles, then disappeared in a black-cored fireball.
    The missiles twinkled. Tunesmith was exercising his marksmanship. The warrior ships didn't fire--for fear of harming Long Shot? Tunesmith exploded the ship that tried to take up escort. The other fell behind.
    A ship carrying antimatter is very vulnerable, Louis thought.