Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven Page B

Gw’oth accomplishments had taught Kirsten and Eric respect for their own lost ancestors. It was the first step on the road to New Terran independence.
    Gratitude to the Gw’oth was understandable. It was also his friends’ blind spot.
    A partial truth would serve. Sigmund said, “Braking quickly, however we do it, shows we have artificial-gravity control to offset our deceleration. Braking by gravity drag gives little else away. So: gravity drag to slow us most of the way. When”—if!—“we land, we do so with our thrusters dialed way down, disclosing little about their capability. We launch the same way.” And thrusters remain our secret if we don’t land at all. “We’ll accelerate once we’re out of sensor range.”
    â€œGravity drag, full braking,” Kirsten summarized. “Thirty gees.”
    Sigmund nodded.
    She grinned. “That should be fun.”
    The nervous tap of Baedeker’s forehoof suggested
fun
wasn’t the word he would have chosen.

13
    Â 
    Banded and wreathed in storms—much larger and, for that reason, more luminous even than the distant sun—mighty Tl’ho commanded Er’ o’s attention.
    It was scarcely an exaggeration to imagine that he felt the gas giant’s presence. Pure, beautiful mathematics had characterized the cyclic flexing of the ocean bottom, and from that, the force of gravity, and from
that
, the enormous mass that must somehow exist, unseen, theretofore unsuspected, beyond the ice that since time immemorial had been the roof of the world.
    And it was here, as real as the beauty of mathematics.
    That gigantic new world, unlike anything the Gw’oth had ever known, was but one wonder. Ice was not the roof of
the
world, but only of
a
world, at that a mere moon. The universe was far vaster than anyone had imagined. And while Tl’ho had been revealed by its gravitational attraction, none had anticipated the magnificence of its appearance, or the even larger, far more distant object in whose reflected light Tl’ho glowed.
    It had turned out that the sun and, by extension, the far-off stars were much hotter than Tl’ho. For a short while after first venturing up onto the ice, scientists puzzled why the fiery pinpoints in the sky had fixed locations. But as parallax measurements soon revealed, at least some of the fixed stars weren’t. They were only very,
very
remote.
    So Er’o had believed until the latest observations.
Something
was shooting across nearby skies. Something as hot, almost, as the surface of the sun. And that something, whatever it was, was slowing rapidly, exerting tremendous forces.
    Er’o emitted a sharp tone burst. The sounds would propagate along the science-station tunnels into the farthest lab, workshop, and private chamber. “Time to assemble.”
    Er’o was at a loss how best to proceed.
    As Ol’t’ro, he would know.
    Â 
    OL’T’RO CONSIDERED:
    A rapidly decelerating object—a ship—detectable only by the vast amount of heat it radiated. Ol’t’ro contrasted the lost energy of motion with the measured radiated energy.
    An approximation—the efficiency of the deceleration mechanism being unknown—of the ship’s mass. Bigger by far than the largest Gw’oth ship.
    The arc of the ship’s course. A manipulation of space-time, Ol’t’ro concluded. Interesting. Almost instantly, they began to refine their concept of gravity.
    Reluctantly, they deferred the puzzle for a later time. Another inference had more urgent value to the polity. They disconnected a tubacle, to couple its mouth with a comm terminal.
    The Others had arrived. Their ship would reach the ice soon.
    Â 
    BAEDEKER CIRCLED HIS TINY CABIN , too tense to sleep or even to sit. He had tried comforting digital-wallpaper motifs to no avail. Neither crowd scenes, not even with a double release of aerosol herd pheromones, nor