Larry Niven - Fate of Worlds - Return From the Ringworld

“Oh, they’ll do as you asked.” Amelia exhaled sharply. “Will that bring the results you expect? That’s out of my hands.”

Mine, too, Sigmund thought. “Shall we get them deployed?”

“That’s why we built them.” She paused. “Oh, crap, Sigmund. I can’t stay cool. I don’t know how you do it. That’s Julia out there.”

“I know.” Awkwardly, he gave Amelia a hug. “We’ll keep her safe. I promise.”

Snuggled against his chest, he felt her nod.

“I’ll be on the bridge for a little while,” he told her, letting go. “Once we’re in position, I’ll help you put the probes out the air lock.”

Their ship hung beyond the sensor range of the New Terran early-warning array, its normal-space velocity toward New Terra about five percent of light speed. A five-second jump brought them almost within the array’s reach.

They each carried one modified probe. With inner and outer air-lock hatches open, Sigmund pushed the altered defensive drone out through the air-pressure curtain. He backed out of the lock to let Amelia launch the modified hyperwave-radar buoy. When he rejoined her, the drone was only a glint by the glow of a distant blue nebula. They watched both probes drift away.

Sigmund slapped the button to close the outer hatch. “Shall we?”

“What if you’re wrong, Sigmund?”

Then we go to jail, my faith in humanity somewhat restored. “What if I’m right?” he countered.

Looking ready to cry, Amelia said, “Let’s do it.”

THE PROBES COASTED ACROSS the unmarked border of New Terra’s early-warning array. By then, Elysium had jumped several light-seconds away and killed its normal-space velocity.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Sigmund told Amelia.

“I’m ready now. First signal.”

She sent a low-power pulse to the modified defensive drone and it vanished into hyperspace. Like anything transitioning between normal and hyperspace, it made a ripple. The bigger the normal-space protective bubble, the bigger the ripple. Squandering energy prodigiously, this probe had, before jumping, inflated its bubble to the size of a decent-sized starship. To the early-warning array, it was a starship.

Now to make it look like an arriving starship.

“Second signal sent,” Amelia announced. “Our hyperwave gear is back in receive mode.”

They heard, “This is the Earth vessel Koala, calling New Terra.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” Amelia said.

“So do I.”

From his console, Sigmund read the faint trace of hyperwave-radar pings. This far from the array, the echoes off Elysium would be undetectable. The buoy they had dropped was nearer to the array, but due to the little probe’s size its echoes would not be detectable either.

Instead, the scan had triggered an active hyperwave pulse from the decoy buoy. That pulse mimicked a ship-sized echo. As modified, the buoy radiated infrared, too. The IR would look like a ship’s waste heat.

“We’ll know soon,” Sigmund said.

But the seconds crawled.

“This is New Terra Planetary Defense,” their hyperwave radio announced. “Welcome, Koala. We’ve been expecting you. Maintain your course and speed while we hand off your approach to Space Traffic Control, who will prepare landing guidance…”

Sigmund’s console squawked twice as things dropped into normal space nearby. Moments later, his passive infrared sensor acquired two faint objects streaking, relative to Elysium and the decoy buoy, at nine-tenths light speed. Defensive drones. Kinetic killers. His console chirped again: at hyperwave pings for terminal guidance.

“ Koala, if you carry hyperwave transponders, we request that you…”

There was a blinding flash before the view-port polarizer cut in. His eyes watering, Sigmund squinted at his instruments. “They just killed ‘ Koala. ’”

The deed was done, the risks taken, the dirty truths transmitted to New Terra. There was nothing left to do but wait — trying not to obsess about the many ways everything could still end badly. Neither the government Sigmund strove to overthrow nor the cold, dark vacuum of space was forgiving.

He endlessly paced (if locomotion at his slow shuffle could be called pacing) the short corridors of Elysium. On this slow lap he found Amelia slouched over the small table in the relax room: dark bags under her eyes; picking at a crust of bread; staring, transfixed, at the recorded loop they transmitted — circuitously, through a series of hyperwave relays, lest kinetic killers find them.

The old man in the vid looked twitchier and far wearier than she.

“It’s a recording, you know,” Sigmund teased her. “It’s the same every time.”

“I know.” Amelia frowned at the circle of bread crumbs that surrounded her plate. “Is this going to work?”

He gestured at the vid. It had just cut to a file shot of Donald Norquist-Ng. He told her, “The minister will do his best to blame everything on me. I made illegal recordings. I assaulted people and stole a ship. Having improvised a fake Koala, who’s to say that I didn’t destroy the fake ship, too?”

“You didn’t, ” she protested.

“That’s what we’re counting on.” Sigmund gestured at the continuing playback. “Plenty of people were in that room. You can hear them in the background. They weren’t all happy. Some of them will come forward.”

Uh-huh. And pigs will fly, said the forlorn expression on Amelia’s face.

Sigmund found the recording easier to face than Amelia. He listened to his voice-over saying, “… Known to your government for many weeks. Here is Minister Norquist-Ng first hearing the news.”

As Alice’s recorded voice replaced Sigmund’s, loss and anger washed over him. What had she been thinking, to run off like that? To get herself killed like that?

The vid rolled on, indifferent to Sigmund’s pain. “We know the way to Earth,” Alice was saying. “From this location, it’s about two hundred light-years, mostly to galactic south. From New Terra, a bit over two ten. Jeeves? Show them.”

“Graphic off,” Norquist-Ng barked. “Jeeves, you will show that image to no one except by my authorization. I’ll brief the governor. No one is to speak a word about this development outside this room.”

In the looping message, Sigmund explained to — did he have viewers? — that a stellar map had been erased before anyone in the meeting room could study it. “But was suppressing this report the misguided decision of one man? Did the minister tell the governor? Let’s find out.”

For his meeting with the governor, Sigmund had risked wearing spy lenses. His audience — again assuming that he had viewers, that this transmission was not being jammed — would see the executive office and the governor herself.

He heard himself telling the governor, “ Koala will arrive in about two weeks. It’s my opinion that we should be preparing the population. First contact with representatives of long-lost Earth … that’s a big deal.”

Rodgers-Bjornstad shook her head. “People would worry and wonder about what will change, what it all means, to the exclusion of everything else. Everyone who needs the information has it. The coming visit remains classified until Koala arrives.”

“The governor was complicit in withholding this news,” recorded-Sigmund summarized. “Because she fretted about lost productivity? Or, as I had feared, because she and the Minister of Defense had an undisclosed motive? I had to know. Here is what happened next.”