Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven

Author:Larry Niven [Niven, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-03-17T01:10:20.668000+00:00

SOL SYSTEM WAS home to scant billions, but those few knew no fear. They filled its skies with interplanetary yachts and liners, tugs and freighters, Belter patrol ships and UN frigates. To those argosies were added yet more, the many starships that plied the void to far-flung human colonies and the worlds of Kzinti and Kdatlyno.

Nessus intended that his presence go unnoticed by all those teeming craft. He approached Sol system tangentially, rather than head-on, and at a steep angle to the plane of the ecliptic. He dropped Aegis from hyperspace into the anonymous outer reaches of the Oort Cloud—

And, from habit, he reached toward his console to run a deep-radar scan.

He jerked the head back. Aegis had just exited hyper-space far from the singularity, the better to let dissipate unremarked the unavoidable ripples of his emergence. Why emit a discretionary neutrino pulse?

Did he think to find a stasis box here?

He looked himself in the eyes, appalled and amused at the near-lapse. It could be worse, he supposed. He could be mystified, too, as Kirsten had wondered at being trained to emit a deep-radar ping on approach to a new star system.

Nessus burst into song as, with full thrusters, he slowed the ship’s headlong plunge. Ride of the Valkyries in full orchestration. The music seemed somehow apt. Doubly apt, really, in that his erstwhile crew had once thoroughly enjoyed a performance.

Trust Kirsten to notice phonetic similarities between English and German. Coincidence, he had told her. What was one more deception?

Had she dutifully deep-scanned Explorer’s most recent destination, wondering what there was to be learned that way?

If she only knew.

Eons ago there had been a war of galactic extermination, of which naught remained but scattered artifacts preserved for eternity within stasis fields. Most objects recovered from stasis storage defied understanding. All embodied technologies of terrifying potency. The prevailing opinion was that these were weapons caches.

The one course of action more frightening than to locate and open a stasis box was to leave it for another race to find.

The stasis field was opaque to neutrino pulses. Only degenerate matter, like the collapsed central mass of a star, shared that property. A stasis field could not be missed—so it was foolish to look for a stasis box in such a heavily traveled region as Sol system.

As his singing swelled to a crescendo, enjoying his manic glee while it lasted, Nessus could not help wondering how Omar, Eric, and Kirsten were coming on their mission.

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