Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven Page B

version.”
    Gw’oth cities hugged the hydrothermal vents. Life on their world sought heat, not light. Sigmund guessed the aliens were sensitive mostly to infrared.
    An image formed on his contact lenses. Stars shifted color. Dust clouds, and the turbulence within them, took clearer shape. The phenomenon, whatever it was, loosely suggested a rippled, steep-sided cone. The tip of that cone was truncated, lost in the distance.
    Jeeves, helpfully, had superimposed grid lines in the coordinate system learned by Puppeteer and New Terran pilots.
    Baedeker made no comment. Rolled into a tight ball, comatose, Sigmund guessed.
    Something
was erupting from the galactic center. The disturbance was light-years deep, light-years across, and spreading.
    Before reaching the Gw’oth, it—whatever
it
was—would overtake the Fleet of Worlds and New Terra.

16
    Â 
    Sealing his pressure suit, preparing to exit the dubious protection of an inflatable emergency habitat, Baedeker groped for reasons to venture onto the ice. He tried logic: The Gw’oth had no reason to harm him. And the greater good: What he might accomplish here could safeguard the herd. Even cowardice, after a fashion, helped: He would die painlessly, his hearts stopped by autonomic conditioning, if the Gw’oth used coercion to obtain Concordance secrets.
    Mostly, though, an epiphany propelled him forward. He finally understood how Nessus, and other scouts like him, did it. One quivering step at a time.
    Kirsten exhibited neither doubts nor rational prudence. She was fairly bouncing with impatience. Of course bouncing took little effort here. The Gw’oth home world—Jm’ho, Er’o had called it—massed less than a quarter what Hearth or New Terra did.
    Bending his necks this way and that, Baedeker gave his pressure suit a final front-to-back, top-to-bottom inspection. Everything looked proper. A small, flickering light reported that the suit’s sensors were active and recording. He tongued an electronics self-test.
All systems functional
, his heads-up displays declared. Clearing the HUDs brought up
Me, too
. As uneasy as artificial intelligence made Baedeker, he would not forgo an onboard translator. That had meant downloading a Jeeves subset into his suit computer.
    Finally, Baedeker checked the shelter’s external radiation sensor. It barely registered. This moon generated enough of a magnetic field to shield against the radiation belts of the nearby planet. The local field originated in the currents in the salty ocean just beneath his hooves.
    â€œReady,” Baedeker declared reluctantly.
    â€œAbout time,” Kirsten said. “They’re waiting for us.”
    As though he had not known. What Citizen on an unknown world would
not
monitor all available surveillance sensors? He tongued a mike control. “We’re coming out.”
    â€œExcellent,” a Gw’o responded. “We have much to do.”
    Er’o
, Baedeker read. So the AI, too, could identify Gw’oth from auditory cues. That made sense. Clearly Jeeves recognized humans and Citizens from their speech.
    The Gw’oth who spoke English—more by the hour—had personalized their voices. Baedeker had noticed emphases on different harmonics and slight variations in pitch. Whether he could rely on the Gw’oth to maintain consistent auditory cues remained to be seen.
    The shelter air lock accommodated only one person at a time. Baedeker let Kirsten precede him, as a favor more than from caution. He activated intrusion alarms. Then his turn came and he stepped onto the icy, vacuumcloaked surface.
    Eight Gw’oth waited in a semicircle beyond the air lock. Despite their transparent protective suits Baedeker could not tell them apart. One stood on all five limbs, the rest on three. The freed limbs coiled around unfamiliar devices or were merely held aloft (for a better view, perhaps).
    The gas giant hung overhead, at nearly