Larry Niven - Fate of Worlds - Return From the Ringworld

“It’ll work.” Although Alice spoke aloud, she seemed to be trying to convince herself. “Land at the spaceport where they’re expecting a prisoner pickup. Radio for them to bring out Nessus. Stun and dump the unsuspecting guards. Take off before anyone knows what’s happened, with Proteus giving us a free pass outbound through the planetary defenses.”

“Simple and elegant,” Louis said, sure they were overlooking something.

“What could go wrong?” Alice responded.

LOUIS’S HANDS NEVER LEFT THE CONTROLS. Proteus had not exaggerated the chaos of ships fleeing the area. While Endurance stayed on its designated approach path, competently piloted, STC had every reason to ignore them — even without Proteus there, ready to intercede. They were almost to the edge of the Fleet’s singularity.

“Close your eyes!” Jeeves shouted.

Endurance leapt to hyperspace faster than Louis could obey. “View port off,” he ordered.

He had been blessed with immunity to the Blind Spot phobia. Not so Alice. He leaned over and nudged her. She did not react. He tried a harder shove without effect, then punched her in the shoulder.

With a start, she came out of her trance. “What happened?”

“A no-warning jump to hyperdrive,” Louis said.

“Hundreds of ships emerged from hyperspace,” Jeeves said. “As agreed, we are withdrawing.”

Tanj! They had been so close to extracting Nessus. Maybe they still could. But not by retreating to safety. “Jeeves, drop to normal space. I want to see what’s going on.”

“Wait,” Alice said. “First explain what you saw.”

“Except for the flurry of hyperspace dropouts, almost nothing,” Jeeves admitted. “As instructed, I acted at once. Here is what Proteus hyperwaved just before we left.”

Louis studied the holo that opened. On the rim of the singularity, in the path of the Fleet, hung hundreds of icons. Inserting a hand into the image, he zoomed the closest icon.

It was a lens-shaped ship. A Kzinti ship. The magnified text alongside the ship, now large enough to read, gave a velocity relative to the fleet of three-tenths light speed.

“I should have seen it coming,” he said.

Alice stood. “I don’t get it. Proteus said they’d need another two days.”

“To match course and speed with the Fleet,” Louis said. “Proteus was doing a math problem, not thinking strategically. Or he guessed how the Kzinti would behave by extrapolating from the bunch he knew, the bunch he’s already killed off. But crew assigned to the diplomatic mission would have been hand-chosen for self-restraint.”

For docility, Louis added to himself. Not that you wanted to anger even a “docile” Kzin.

“These guys don’t mean to land, or not for a while. They’re going to pound the snot out of the Puppeteers, soften up the defenses for the next wave. And, while they’re at it, avenge the massacre when Achilles ordered the diplomats to leave.”

“Proteus won’t defend the Puppeteers, will he?”

Feeling helpless, Louis could only shrug.

HUNDREDS OF OBJECTS STREAKED toward the Fleet, their normal-space velocities ranging from one-tenth to three-tenths light speed.

Through thousands of sensors, Achilles studied the intruders. A few were large enough to carry crews. Most were not. In the skirmish with the local Kzinti, he had seen projectiles like the latter. The gamma-ray eruptions when Proteus had destroyed those showed they carried antimatter warheads.

Why wasn’t the AI destroying incoming missiles now ?

The few among Achilles’ aides who had not collapsed at the early-warning alarm stood ripping at their manes, pawing at the floor, eyeing the office’s exits. Fools! To where did they think to run?

“Proteus!” Achilles sang at his computer. “Connect at once.”

“May I help you?” Proteus sang.

“If you had not noticed, we are under attack.”

The Chiron avatar bobbed heads. “I see that.”

“Then why do I not see any strikes against the intruders?”

“Kinetic-kill attacks, you mean. Hundreds of blows.”

“Yes!” Achilles shrieked. “Do it now, before any warheads strike.”

“I am afraid I can’t do that, Achilles.”

He felt himself staring in horror. “Why not?”

“I see no reason to commit suicide to protect such as you.”

And then Proteus broke the connection.

HAD ACHILLES EVER LOOKED MORE INSANE? Studying his caller, Horatius doubted it. “What do you want?” he asked.

There was the usual short, annoying, between-worlds comm delay. “You must surrender the worlds, immediately,” Achilles demanded.

Horatio sang, “I have put such a message on continuous broadcast. Our attackers do not acknowledge. Everything now relies upon your defenses.”

Not everything. But Baedeker had yet to make contact since leaving Hearth. They might have to proceed without Baedeker. Without Nature Preserve Two. But such tunes were not for Achilles’ ears.

“We have no defenses,” Achilles sang. “Proteus abandons us.” And, plaintively: “What shall we do, Hindmost?”

“Hide,” Horatius answered.

SIRENS WENT OFF ACROSS the five worlds of the Citizens. Computers trilled with alert tones in every pocket and sash, on every desktop, and after the necessary light-speed delay, aboard every nearby ship. Arcology walls flipped from entertainment or illumination to warning.

The Hindmost’s single-chord message in all cases: Run and hide.

EARS FOLDED FLAT AGAINST HIS HEAD, teeth bared, Communications Specialist growled at the hyperwave console it was his task to monitor, as the leaf-eaters’ offer, appeal, entreaty, supplication played on and on.

“It is too late to surrender,” he growled deep in his throat. He and his shipmates would take their vengeance and earn their names.

“What is that?” Gthapt-Captain snapped.

Communications Specialist stiffened in his chair. “My apologies, Captain. I said, ‘It is too late to surrender.’”

“True,” Gthapt-Captain said. “The leaf-eaters will soon learn the folly of provoking us.

“Those who survive will, that is.”

INSISTENT BUZZING PENETRATED Ol’t’ro’s meditations: communications from the servants waiting outside the melding chamber.

Ol’t’ro ignored the noise. They were close to an overarching physical theory unifying planetary drives with hyperdrive, a theory that could explain Nessus surviving Long Shot ’s hyperdrive activation from inside the local singularity. So close.

The buzzing went on and on.

For validation, following subtle clues, they delved among old engrams into the nature of Outsider city-ships. Across their many generations the best observations were ancient, from an era before they had, for the good of all Gw’oth, cloistered themselves on this world.

I remember Outsider ship Twenty-three, Er’o asserted, his remnant faint but clear and confident. As it shed its near light-speed velocity …

Perhaps not even the Outsiders fully understood the science underpinning their drive technologies. An uncomplicated optimization — and obvious, if Ol’t’ro’s conjecture should converge upon a mathematical model with a closed-form solution — would have given their ships much better performance than Er’o reported. The planetary drives could have much greater acceleration and deceleration. If such was the case …

The buzzing stopped, only to be replaced by yet more annoying speech. “Ol’t’ro. Your Wisdoms. Ol’t’ro. Your Wisdoms,” the voice alternated, imploringly. “You must hear. You must answer. Ol’t’ro…”