Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online

backed off farther, ready to bolt in any direction. Instinctively, he spread his heads warily, one high, one low.
    â€œDo you know who I am?” Ausfaller asked.
    It had been years since they last spoke, but of
course
Baedeker knew the human. Even if they had never met, he would have known. Ausfaller was the planet’s lone Earthman, and the minister of defense.
    The question made Baedeker wonder: How deranged do I look? He dared a sideways glance, and the mirror disclosed a slumped and disheveled figure. Despite himself, he plucked at his tangled mane. “Yes-s. Why have you come?”
    Ausfaller looked for a place to sit, and settled for a mound of overstuffed pillows. If he had hoped to make himself seem less threatening, he had failed. “Baedeker, I need your help.”
    â€œYou don’t.” Baedeker shivered. “I am a simple gardener.”
    Ausfaller leaned forward. “I know, and I’m sorry. You were once much more than that, a brilliant engineer. I need you to be one again.”
    Because who shares their best technology with their servants? Only fools, and Citizens were anything but.
    Baedeker looked himself in the eyes. He remembered the cocky engineer he had been—and cringed at the memory. “I’m sorry. I can’t do that.”
    Lips pressed thin, Ausfaller considered. “There is a serious danger. . . .”
    Once again, one of Baedeker’s heads had plunged itself deep into his mane. He pulled it out to fix the human with a frank, two-headed stare.“The old Baedeker you seek?
He
is a serious danger. It is for the best—for everyone—that no one sees him again.”
    â€œAnd if a whole world is at risk? Perhaps many worlds? What then?”
    His necks shook from the struggle not to plunge between his legs. Cowardice was overrated, he thought. All he said was, “Perhaps, Sigmund, you should tell me more.”
    Ausfaller shook his head. “Join a crucial, off-world mission or return to Hearth.” When Baedeker said nothing, the human added, “Sanctuary is a privilege, not a right.”
    Many worlds at risk? That was no choice at all.

7
    Â 
    Hurtling through space on parallel courses a thousand miles apart, two ships prepared to swap crews. Cargoes had already been exchanged. Fuel had been transferred.
    â€œReady on this end,” Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs called over an encrypted radio link from
Don Quixote
.
    â€œAfter you, Eric.” Sigmund gestured at the stepping disc inset on the relax-room floor. He was sweating. The ship-to-ship jump scared the crap out of him.
    A stepping disc could absorb only so much kinetic energy. The velocity match had to be all but exact: within two hundred feet per second. That limit wasn’t a problem when the velocity differences arose from planetary rotation. Then it was straightforward geometry to calculate the velocity difference between start and end discs. As necessary, the system relayed you through intervening discs.
    The void held no intervening discs.
    As a safeguard, send and receive discs were built to suppress transmission if they sensed a velocity mismatch approaching the threshold. The odds were all but infinitesimal that his two ships would cross the mismatch threshold during the light-speed-limited, under-a-millisecond interval between send and receive.
    Maybe if Sigmund had trained as a physicist rather than an accountant he would have been reassured. He settled for the simple truth that the bigger risk was delay. To rendezvous and dock would take time they might not have.
    â€œOn my way,” Eric replied. He stepped forward and disappeared. “Nothing to it,” he radioed back.
    Sigmund’s mouth was dry. He cleared his throat. “Send them from your end, Kirsten.”
    One of
Don Quixote
’s crew popped over, and then a second. Both did double takes at seeing Sigmund. “Minister,” one began.
    Sigmund returned a too-slow, self-conscious