Destroyer of Worlds by Niven Larry & Lerner Edward M

Author:Niven, Larry & Lerner, Edward M. [Niven, Larry & Lerner, Edward M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9781429972291
Amazon: 1429972297
Goodreads: 7226255
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2009-10-21T07:00:00+00:00

ONCE SIGMUND AND BAEDEKER DEPARTED for Hearth, Eric and Kirsten found ways to use their newfound privacy.

Ol’t’ro did, too. They spent much of their time poring over observations gathered throughout the long voyage. Hyperdrive was wondrously fast—when Don Quixote used it. So why was hyperdrive not always used?

Flight by flight, Ol’t’ro reviewed their travels. When hyperdrive was first activated. When hyperdrive use ended, as Don Quixote neared its destination. They saw no pattern.

Perhaps the explanation lay in pilot discretion, not technical factors. Ol’t’ro tried to correlate hyperdrive usage to the urgency of their missions. And failed. Perhaps the subjectivity of urgency did not communicate well across species.

Ol’t’ro’s thorough review had recently come to the trips immediately after Thssthfok’s capture. First, Don Quixote had crept to the outer solar system for reasons no one would discuss. Then the ship retraced its course to harvest tree-of-life roots. Only after creeping back to the solar-system fringes had Kirsten finally engaged Don Quixote’s hyperdrive.

It would have been interesting to know how far Don Quixote had traveled in each instance. Ol’t’ro could not calculate the ship’s progress directly, since artificial gravity obscured the ship’s actual acceleration. They had learned to infer the strength of artificial gravity from the drain on a nearby ship’s power circuits. Alas, unrelated drains on the ship’s power made such estimates very crude.

So they had built their own, independent astronomical sensors. Those, too, offered only vague answers. Probing through habitat walls, interior ship partitions, and hull limited the instruments’ sensitivity.

And then Don Quixote came to the Fleet of Worlds.

Despite the ambiguity and many approximations in Ol’t’ro’s calculations, clearly Kirsten had used hyperdrive much closer to this destination than to any other. What differed about this place? The obvious difference: These worlds lacked a star.

A star is massive.

And so Ol’t’ro’s thoughts turned to abstruse physical theory and arcane scenarios. Perhaps hyperdrive was somehow constrained to nearly flat regions of space-time. To regions far from any gravitational singularity. Far from the type of worlds on which Gw’oth, humans, Citizens, or Drar could live—or, at least, from the suns that warmed those worlds. Far from anywhere a world-evolved species ever thought to experiment with a long-range drive.

Until now.

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