Betrayer of Worlds by Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner Page A

what that did?”
    “Give me a minute.” Louis paced a bit, brow furrowed. “Ships wrap themselves in a normal space bubble to protect the crew from hyperspace. The hyperspace shunt carries with it everything inside the bubble. So if the Gw’oth bubble was any larger than this habitat . . .”
    “Among other things, it carried away most of our ship’s hyperdrive shunt.” And cut the General Products hull itself in half. Nessus was not about to reveal a way to destroy the supposedly impregnable hull. “The remaining crew barely survived long enough to be rescued.”
    A crew, at that point, of only two. Sigmund Ausfaller was insane, all but comatose, by the time rescuers arrived. He had preserved Baedeker in medical stasis.
    “But
why
?” Louis asked.
    “The Gw’oth did not say.”
    Even within Clandestine Directorate, that was the only answer. Unofficially? Baedeker had his suspicions. The Gw’oth had surreptitiously learned the secret of hyperdrive. They must also have tapped into discussions they were not meant to hear—such as Baedeker advocating the execution of Gw’oth allies lest they bring home Concordance secrets.
    Louis considered. “But the Gw’oth know the Concordance has its own ships. That puts their worlds equally at risk. It brings to mind something from Earth history. Atomic bombs, as horrible as they were, turned out to be stabilizing. No one dared start a full-out war. Mutual assured destruction, I think people called the balancing act. MAD, for short. Surely neitherthe Fleet nor the Gw’oth would be foolish enough to make first use of planet-busters.”
    Mutual assured destruction. That was madness indeed! That was why the Concordance had hidden for so long from—everyone. But New Terra knew the Fleet’s location, and now, too, so did the Gw’oth.
    “What defenses does the Fleet have?” Louis asked.
    Until New Terra went free, only secrecy had been needed. And little else had been possible. Few enough Citizens could scout. There would never be enough Citizens able to crew a navy!
    Since New Terran independence, the Fleet had steadily deployed sensors and weapons: lasers, particle beams, guided missiles. Since the rise of the Gw’oth the pace had accelerated. Without crews, and unwilling to use AI, inflexible automation had to operate everything. In far too many scenarios, the Fleet’s defenses could only blast away without hesitation at any possible threat.
    “Nessus? I can’t understand the danger without knowing how the Fleet would defend itself.”
    A nasty toxin waited in the relax-room synthesizer. Louis would be in his father’s autodoc when
Aegis
neared Hearth and authentication codes were given. Voice would be turned off. Nessus would take
no
chances with compromising the Fleet’s defenses, inadequate as they were.
    “I am not prepared to discuss that.” Nessus felt little less programmed than Voice.
    With a flick of a hand, Louis banished the star map. “Then how am I to . . . never mind. I’ll leave that alone for now. Maybe the Gw’oth don’t even want to attack. The world they settled may simply be a good choice for them. Its location along the Fleet’s path doesn’t prove anything.”
    “They may believe they have a reason,” Nessus conceded.
    And yet for all Baedeker’s antipathy toward the Gw’oth, he had never, even as Hindmost, taken action against them. MAD had prevailed.
    “A reason?” Louis finally prompted.
    “There was . . . friction in our early contacts.”
    Much more than friction, if Baedeker’s plans for the Gw’oth had been overheard. But the Gw’oth had greater cause to fear the Fleet.
    “What
kind
of friction?”
    “Not important.” Nessus shuddered. “This is. In recent years, the Concordance has faced one danger after another. The times being soextraordinary, the Citizens have entrusted governance to the Experimentalist Party. What you would call politics now comes down to competition among the—”
    “
Politics?
You