《The Soft Weapon》作者： - Larry Niven【EPUB】

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The Soft Weapon Larry Niven Produced by calibre 0.6.40 THE SOFT WEAPON LOGICALLY JASON PAPANDREOU should have taken the Court Jester straight home to Jinx. But... He'd seen a queer star once, He'd been single then, a gunner volunteer on one of Earth's warships during the last stages of the last Kzinti war. The war had been highly unequal in Earth's favor. Kzinti fight gallantly, ferociously, and with no concept of mercy; and they always take on several times as much as they can handle. Earth's ships had pushed the Kzinti back out of human space, then pushed a little farther, annexing two Kzinti worlds for punitive damages. The fleets had turned for home. But Jason's captain had altered course to give his crew what might be their last chance to see Beta Lyrae. Now, decades later, Jason, his wife, and their single alien passenger were rattling around in a ship built for ten times their number. Anne-Marie's curiosity was driving her up the walls with the frustration of not being able to open the stasis box in the forward locker. Nessus, the mad puppeteer, had taken to spending all his time in his room, hovering motionless and morose between the sleeping plates. Jinx was still weeks away. Clearly a diversion was in order. Beta Lyrae. A six-degree shift in course would do it. Anne-Marie glared at the locker containing the stasis box. "Isn't there any way to open it?" Jason didn't answer. His whole attention was on the mass indicator, the transparent ball in which a green radial line was growing toward the surface??growing and splitting in two. "Jay?" "We can't open it, Anne. We don't have the equipment to break a stasis field. It's illegal anyway." Almost time. The radial double-line must not grow too long. When a working hyperdrive gets too deep into a gravity well, it disappears. "Think they'll tell us what's