"We want you to kill a kzin," the general said.
Captain Jonah Matthieson blinked. Is this some sort of flatlander idea of a joke? he thought.
"Well . . . that's more or less what I've been doing," the Sol-Belter said, running a hand down the short-cropped black crest that was his concession to military dress codes. He was a tall man even for a Belter, slim, with slanted green eyes.
The general sighed and lit another cheroot. "Display. A-7, schematic," he said. The rear wall of the office lit with a display of hashmarked columns; Jonah studied it for a moment and decided it represented the duration and intensity of a kzin attack: number of ships, weapons, comparative casualties.
"Time sequence, phased," the senior officer continued. The computer obliged, superimposing four separate mats.
"That," he said, "is the record of the four fleets the kzin have sent since they took Wunderland and the Alpha Centauri system, forty-two years ago. Notice anything?"
Jonah shrugged: "We're losing." The war with the felinoid aliens had been going on since before his birth, since humanity's first contact with them, sixty years before. Interstellar warfare at sublight speeds was a game for the patient.
"Fucking brilliant, Captain!" General Early was a short man, even for a Terran: black, balding, carrying a weight of muscle that was almost obscene to someone raised in low gravity; he looked to be in early middle age, which, depending on how much he cared about appearances, might mean anything up to a century and a half these days. With a visible effort, he controlled himself.
"Yeah, we're losing. Their fleets have been getting bigger and their weapons are getting better. We've made some improvements too, but not as fast as they have."
Jonah nodded. There wasn't any need to say anything.
"What do you think I did before the war?" the general demanded.
"I have no idea, sir."
"Sure you do. ARM bureaucrat, like all the other generals," Early said. The ARM was the UN's enforcement arm, and supervised—mainly suppressed, before the kzin had arrived—technology of all types. "Well, I was. But I also taught military history in the ARM academy. Damn near the only Terran left who paid any attention to the subject."
"Oh."
"Right. We weren't ready for wars, any of us. Terrans didn't believe in them. Belters didn't either; too damned independent. Well, the goddam pussies do."
"Yes sir." Goddam, he thought. This joker is older than I thought. It had been a long time since many in the Sol system took a deity's name in vain.
"Right. Everyone knows that. Now think about it. We're facing a race of carnivores with a unified interstellar government of completely unknown size, organized for war. They started ahead of us, and now they've had Wunderland and its belt for better than a generation. If nothing else, at this rate they can eventually swamp us with numbers. Just one set of multimegatonners getting through to Earth . . ."
He puffed on the cigar with short, vicious breaths. Jonah shivered inside himself at the thought: all those people, dependent on a single life-support system. . . . He wondered how flatlanders had ever stood it. Why, a single asteroid impact . . . The Belt was less vulnerable. Too much delta vee required to match the wildly varying vectors of its scores of thousands of rocks, its targets weaker individually but vastly more numerous and scattered.
He forced his mind back to the man before him, gagging slightly on the smell of the tobacco. How does he get away with that on shipboard? For that matter, the habit had almost died out; it must have been revived since the pussies came, like so many archaic customs.
Like war and armies, the Belter thought sardonically. The branch-of-service flashes on the shoulder of the flatlander's coverall were not ones he recognized. Of course, there were 18 billion people in the solar system, and most of them seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform these days; flatlanders particularly, they loved playing dress-up. Comes of having nothing useful to do most of their lives, he thought. Except wear uniforms and collect knickknacks. There was a truly odd one on the flatlander's desk, a weird-looking pyramid with an eye in it, topped by a tiny cross.
"So every time it gets harder. First time was bad enough, but they really underestimated us. Did the next time, too, but not so badly. They're getting better all the time. This last one—that was bad." General Early pointedly eyed the ribbons on Jonah's chest. Two Comets, and the unit citation his squadron of Darts had earned when they destroyed a kzin fighter-base ship.
"As you know. You saw some of that. What you didn't see was the big picture—because we censored it, even from our military units. Captain, they nearly broke us. Because we underestimated them. This time they didn't just 'shriek and leap.' They came in tricky, fooled us completely when they looked like retreating . . . and we know why."
He spoke to the computer again, and the rear wall turned to holo image. A woman in lieutenant's stripes, but with the same branch-badges as the general. Tall and slender, paler-skinned than most, and muscular in the fashion of low-gravity types who exercise. When she spoke it was in Belter dialect.
"The subject's name was Esteban Cheung Jagrannath," the woman said. The screen split, and a battered-looking individual appeared beside her; Jonah's eye picked out the glisten of sealant over artificial skin, the dying-rummy pattern of burst blood vessels from explosive decompression, the mangy look of someone given accelerated marrow treatments for radiation overdose. That is one sorry-looking son of a bitch. "He claims to have been born in Tiamat, in the Serpent Swarm of Wunderland, twenty-five subjective years ago."
Now I recognize the accent, Jonah thought. The lieutenant's English had a guttural overtone despite the crisp Belter vowels; the Belters who migrated to the asteroids of Alpha Centauri talked that way. Wunderlander influence.
"Subject is a power-systems specialist, drafted into the kzin service as a crewman on a corvette tender"—the blue eyes looked down to a readout below the pickup's line of sight "—called—" Something followed in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero's Tongue.
"Roughly translated, the Bounteous-Mother's-Teats. Tits took a near-miss from a radiation-pulse bomb right toward the end. The kzin captain didn't have time to self-destruct; the bridge took most of the blast. She was a big mother"—the general blinked, snorted—"so a few of the repair crew survived, like this gonzo. All humans, as were most of the technical staff. A few nonhuman, nonkzin species as well, but they were all killed. Pity."
Jonah and the flatlander both nodded in unconscious union. The kzin empire was big, hostile, not interested in negotiation, and contained many subject species and planets; and that was about the limit of human knowledge. Not much background information had been included in the computers of the previous fleets, and very little of that survived; vessels too badly damaged for their crews to self-destruct before capture usually held little beyond wreckage.
The general spoke again: "Gracie, fast forward to the main point." The holo-recording blurred ahead. "Captain, you can review at your leisure. It's all important background, but for now—" He signed, and the recording returned to normal speed.
" . . . the new kzin commander arrived three years before they left. His name's Chuut-Riit, which indicates a close relation to the . . . Patriarch, that's as close as we've been able to get. Apparently, his first command was to delay the departure of the fleet." A thin smile. "Chuut-Riit's not just related to their panjandrum; he's an author, of sorts. Two works on strategy: Logistical Preparation as the Key to Victory in War and Conquest Through the Defensive Offensive."
Jonah shaped a soundless whistle. Not your typical kzin. If we have any idea of what a typical kzin is like. We've met their warriors, coming our way behind beams and bombs.
The lieutenant's image was agreeing with him. "The pussies find him a little eccentric, as well; according to the subject, gossip had it that he fought a whole series of duels, starting almost the moment he arrived and held a staff conference. The new directives included a pretty massive increase in the support infrastructure to go with the fleet. Meanwhile, he ordered a complete changeover in tactics, especially to ensure that accurate reports of the fighting got back to Wunderland."
The flatlander general cut off the scene with a wave. "So." He folded his hands and leaned forward, the yellowish whites of his eyes glittering in lights that must be kept deliberately low. "We are in trouble, Captain. So far we've beaten off the pussies because we're a lot closer to our main sources of supply, and because they're . . . predictable. Adequate tacticians, but with little strategic sense, even less than we had at first, despite the Long Peace. The analysts say that indicates they've never come across much in the way of significant opposition before. If they had they'd have learned from it like they are—damn it!—from us.
"In fact, what little intelligence information we've got, a lot of it from prisoners taken with the Fourth Fleet, backs that up; the kzin just don't have much experience of war."
Jonah blinked. "Not what you'd assume," he said carefully.
A choppy nod. "Yep. Surprises you, eh? Me, too."
General Early puffed delicately on his cigar. "Oh, they're aggressive enough. Almost insanely so, barely gregarious enough to maintain a civilization. Ritualized conflict to the death is a central institution of theirs. Some of the xenologists swear they must have gotten their technology from somebody else, that this culture they've got could barely rise above the hunter-gatherer stage on its own.
"In any event; they're wedded to a style of attack that's almost pitifully straightforward." He looked thoughtfully at the wet chewed end of his cigar and selected another from the sealed humidor.
"And as far as we can tell, they have only one society, one social system, one religion, and one state. That fits in with some other clues we've gotten. The kzin species has been united for a long time—millennia. They have a longer continuous history than any human culture." Another puff. "They're curiously genetically uniform, too. We know more about their biology than their beliefs, more corpses than live prisoners. Less variation than you'd expect; large numbers of them seem to be siblings."
Jonah stirred. "Well, this is all very interesting, General, but—"
"—what's it got to do with you?" The flatlander leaned forward again, tapping paired thumbs together. "This Chuut-Riit is a first-class menace. You see, we're losing those advantages I mentioned. The kzin have been shipping additional force into the Wunderland system in relays, not so much weapons as knocked-down industrial plants and personnel; furthermore, they've got the locals well organized. It's a fully industrialized economy, with an Earth-type planet and an asteroid belt richer than Sol's; the population's much lower—hundreds of millions instead of nearly twenty billion—but that doesn't matter much."
Jonah nodded in his turn. With ample energy and raw materials, the geometric-increase potential of automated machinery could build a war-making capacity in a single generation, given the knowledge and skills the kzin inner sphere could supply. Faster than that, if a few crucial administrators and technicians were imported too. Earth's witless hordes were of little help to Sol's military effort, a drain on resources, and not even useful as cannon fodder in a conflict largely fought in space.
"So now they're in a position to outproduce us. We have to keep our advantages in operational efficiency."
"You play chess with good chessplayers, you get good," the Belter said.
"No. It's academic whether the pussies are more or less intelligent than we. What's intelligence, anyway? But we've proven experimentally that they're culturally and genetically less flexible. Man, when this war started we were absolute pacifists, we hadn't had so much as a riot in three centuries. We even censored history so that the majority didn't know there had ever been wars! That was less than a century ago, less than a single lifetime, and look at what we've done since. The pussies are only just now starting to smarten up about us."
"This Chuut-Riit sounds as if he's, oh shit. Sir."
A wide white grin. "Exactly. An exceptionally able rat-cat, and they're less prone to either genius or stupidity than we are. In a position to knock sense into their heads. He has to go."
The Earther stood and began striding back and forth behind the desk, gesturing with the cigar. Something more than the stink made Jonah's stomach clench.
"Covert operations is another thing we've had to reinvent, just lately. We need somebody who's good with spacecraft . . . a Belter, because the ones who settled the Serpent Swarm belt of Wunderland have stayed closer to the ancestral stock than the Wunderlanders downside. A good combat man, who's proved himself capable of taking on kzin hand-to-hand. And someone who's good with computer systems, because our informants tell us that is the skill most in demand by the kzin on Wunderland itself."
The general halted and stabbed toward Jonah with the hand that held the stub of burning weeds. "Last but not least, someone with contacts in the Alpha Centauri system."
Jonah felt a wave of relief. A little relief, because the general was still grinning at him.
"Sir, I've never left—"
An upraised hand halted him. "Lieutenant Raines?" A woman came in and saluted smartly, first the general and then Jonah; he recognized her from the holo report. "I'd like you to meet Captain Matthieson."
"Hrrrr," the cub crooned, plastering itself to the ground.
Chuut-Riit, Scion of the Patriarch, kzinti overlord of the Wunderland system, Grand Admiral of the Conquest Fleet; pulled on the string.
The clump of feathers dragged through the long grass, and the young kzin crept after it on all fours, belly flat to the ground. The grass was Terran, as alien to Wunderland as the felinoids, and bright green; the brown-spotted orange of the cub's fur showed clearly as be snaked through the meter-high stems. Eyes flared wide, pupils swallowing amber-yellow iris, and the young kzin screamed and leaped.
"Huufff!" it exclaimed, as Chuut-Riit's hand made the lure blur out from underneath the pounce.
"Sire!" it mewled complainingly, sprawled on its belly. The fur went flat as the adult kzinti picked it up by the scruff of the neck; reflex made the cub's limbs splay out stiffly.
"You made a noise, youngling," Chuut-Riit said, leaning forward to lick his son's ears in affectionate admonishment "You'll never catch your prey that way." His nostrils flared, taking in the pleasant scent of healthy youngster.
"Sorry, Sire," the cub said, abashed. His head pivoted; a dozen of his brothers were rioting up from the copse of trees in the valley below, where the guards and aircars were parked. They showed as ripples in the long grass of the hillside, with bursts of orange movement as cubs soared up in leaps after the white glitter of butterflies, or just for the sake of movement. They could leap ten meters or more, in this gravity; Wunderland was only about half Kzin-normal, less than two-thirds of Earth's pull.
"Gertrude-nurse!" Chuut-Riit called.
A Wunderlander woman came puffing up, dressed in a white uniform with body-apron and gloves of tough synthetic. Chuut-Riit extended the cub at the end of one tree-thick arm.
"Yes, Chuut-Riit," the nurse said; a kzin with a full Name was never addressed by title, of course. "Come along, now, young master," the nurse said, in a passable imitation of the Hero's Tongue. House servants were allowed to speak it, as a special favor. "Dinner-time."
The God alone knows what sort of accent the young will learn, Chuut-Riit thought, amused.
"Eat?" The cub made a throaty rumble. "Want to eat, Gertrude-human." The kzin dropped into Wunderlander. "Is it good? Is it warm and salty? Will there be cream?"
"Certainly not," Gertrude said with mock severity. Her charge bounced up as his father released him, wrapping arms and legs and long pink prehensile tail around the human, pressing his muzzle to her chest and purring.
"Dinner! Dinner!" the other cubs chorused as they arrived on the hilltop; they made a hasty obeisance to Chuut-Riit and the other adults, then followed the nurse downslope, walking upright and making little bounds of excitement, their tails held rigid. "Dinner!"
"I caught a mouse, it tasted funny."
"Gertrude-human, Funny-Spots ate a bug!"
"I did not, I spit it out. Liar, tie a knot in your tail!"
The two quarreling youngsters flew together and rolled down ahead of the others in a ball, play-fighting. Chuut-Riit rippled his whiskers, and the fur on his blunt-muzzled face moved in the kzinti equivalent of a chuckle as he rejoined the group at the kill. Traat-Admiral was there, his closest supporter; Conservor-of-the-Patriarchal-Past, holy and ancient; and Staff-Officer, most promising of the inner-world youngsters who had come with him from homeworld. The kill was a fine young buffalo bull, and had even given them something of a fight before they brought it down beneath a tall native toshborg tree. The kzinti males were all in high good humor, panting slightly as they lolled, occasionally worrying a mouthful free from the carcass.
"A fine lot of youngsters," Conservor said, a little wistfully; such as he maintained no harem, although they were privileged to sire offspring on the mates of others at ritual intervals. "Very well-behaved for their age."
Chuut-Riit threw himself down and pulled a flask out of his hunter's pack, pouring it into broad shallow bowls the others held out. The strong minty-herb scent of the liquor filled the air, along with the pleasant scent of fresh-killed meat, grass, trees. The Viceroyal hunting preserve sprawled over hundreds of kilometers of rich land, and the signs of agriculture had almost vanished in the generation since the conquest. It was a mixed landscape, the varying shades of green from Terra, native Wunderlander reddish-gold, and here and there a spot of kzin orange. The animals were likewise diverse: squat thickset armored beasts from homeworld, tall spindly local forms like stick-figures from a cartoon, Earth-creatures halfway between.
We fit in as well as anything, Chuut-Riit thought. More, since we own it. The kzinti lay sprawled on their bellies, their quarter-ton of stocky muscle and dense bone relaxed into the grass. Bat-wing ears were fully extended and lips were loosened from fangs in fellowship; all here were old friends, and sharing a kill built trust at a level deeper even than that.
The kzinti governor sank his fangs into a haunch, rearing back and shaking his head until a two-kilo gobbet pulled loose. He threw back his head to bolt it—kzinti teeth were designed for ripping and tearing, not chewing—and extended the claws on one four-digit hand to pick bits of gristle from his teeth.
"Rrrrr, yes, they're promising," he said, nodding to the boil of cubs around the table where the human nurse was cutting chunks of rib from a porker. "The local servants are very good with infants, if you select carefully."
"Some kzintosh is very glad of that!" Staff-Officer joked, making a playful-protective grab at his crotch.
The others bristled in mock-fear-amusement. Kzinti females were useless for child-rearing beyond the nursing stage, being subsapient and speechless; the traditional caregiver for youngsters was a gelded male. Such were usually very docile, and without hope for offspring of their own tended to identify with any cubs they were exposed to. Still, it was a little distasteful to modern sensibilities; one of the many conveniences of alien slaves was their suitability for such work. Humans were very useful. . . .
"Speaking of which, Traat-Admiral, tell me again of your protégé's pet."
Traat-Admiral lapped at his cup for an instant longer and belched. "Yiao-Captain. He swears this human of his has found an astronomical anomaly worth investigating." A sideways flick of the head, a kzin shrug. "I sent him to that ancestor-forsaken outpost in . . . urrrr, Skogarna, to test his patience." The word was slightly derogatory, in the Hero's Tongue . . . but among Chuut-Riit's entourage they were working to change that.
"Good hunting up there," Staff-Officer said brashly, then touched his nose in a patently insincere apology when the older males gave him a glare.
"Chhrrrup. As you say. Worth dispatching a Swift Hunter to investigate, at least . . . which brings us to the accelerated Solward surveillance."
"To receive quickly the news of the Fourth Fleet's triumphant leap upon the humans?" Conservor asked.
The tip of his tail twitched. The others could sniff the dusty scent of irony. For that matter, it would be better than a decade before the news returned; worst-case analysis and political realities both demanded that the years ahead be spent readying a Fifth Fleet.
A part of Chuut-Riit's good humor left him. Moodily, he drew his wtsai and used the pommel of the knife to crack a thighbone.
"Grrf," he muttered; sucking marrow. His own tail thumped the ground. "I await inconclusive results at best." They all winced slightly. Four fleets; and the home system of the monkeys was still resisting the Eternal Pack. Chuut-Riit's power here was still new, still shaky; it had been necessary to ship most of those who resented a homeworld prince as governor off with the Fourth Fleet. Since they also constituted the core of policy resistance to his more cautious strategy, that had considerable political merit as well.
"No, it is possible that the wild humans will attempt some countermeasure. What, I cannot guess—they still have not made extensive use of gravity polarizer technology, which means we control interstellar space—but my nose is dry when I consider the time we have left them for thought. A decade for each attack . . . They are tricky prey, these hairless tree-swingers."
"God, what have you done to her?" Jonah asked, as they grabbed stanchions and halted by the viewport nearest his ship.
The observation corridor outside the central graving dock of the base-asteroid was a luxury, but then, with a multimegaton mass to work with and unlimited energy, the Sol-system military could afford that type of extravagance. Take a nickel-iron rock. Drill a hole down the center with bomb-pumped lasers. Put a spin on the resulting tube, and rig large mirrors with the object at their focal points; the sun is dim beyond the orbit of Mars, but in zero-G you can build big mirrors big. The nickel-iron pipe heats, glows, turns soft as taffy, swells outward evenly like cotton candy at a fair; cooling, it leaves a huge open space surrounded by a thick shell of metal-rich rock. Robots drill the tunnels and corridors, humans and robots install the power sources, life-support, gravity polarizers . . .
An enlisted crewman bounced by them horizontal to their plane of reference, sketching a sloppy salute as he twisted, hit the corner feetfirst, and rebounded away. The air had the cool clean tang that Belters grew up with, and an industrial-tasting underlay of ozone and hot metal: the seals inside UNSN base Gibraltar were adequate for health but not up to Belt civilian standards. Even while he hung motionless and watched the technicians gutting his ship, some remote corner of Jonah's mind noted that again. Flatlanders had a nerve-wracking tendency to make-do solutions.
My ship, he thought.
UNSN Catskinner hung in the vacuum chamber, surrounded by the flitting shapes of spacesuited repair workers, compuwaldos, and robots; torches blinked blue-white, and a haze of detached fittings hinted the haste of the work. Beneath it the basic shape of the Dart-class attack boat showed, a massive fusion-power unit, tiny life-support bubble, and the asymmetric fringe of weapons and sensors designed for deep-space operation.
"What have you done to her?" Jonah said again.
"Made modifications, Captain," Raines replied. "The basic drive and armament systems are unaltered."
Jonah nodded grudgingly. He could see the clustered grips for the spike-pods, featureless egg-shaped ovoids, that were the basic weapon for light vessels, a one-megaton bomb pumping an X-ray laser. In battle they would spread out like the wings of a raptor, a pattern thousands of kilometers wide slaved to the computers in the control pod; and the other weapons, fixed lasers, ball-bearing scatterers, railguns, particle-beam projectors, the antennae for stealthing and beam-deflection fields.
Unconsciously, the pilot's hands twitched; his reflexes and memory were back in the crashcouch, fingers moving infinitesimally in the lightfield gloves, holos feeding data into his eyes. Dodging with fusion-powered feet, striking with missile fists, his Darts locked with the kzinti Vengeful Slashers in a dance of battle that was as much like zero-G ballet as anything else. . . .
"What modifications?" he asked.
"Grappling points for attachment to a ramscoop ship. Battleship class, technically, although she's a one-off, experimental; they're calling her the Yamamoto. The plan is that we ride piggyback, and she goes through the Wunderland system at high Tau, accelerating all the way from here to Alpha Centauri, and drops us off on the way. They won't have much time to prepare, at those speeds."
The ship would be on the heels of the wave-front announcing its arrival. She called up data on her beltcomp, and he examined it. His lips shaped a silent whistle; big tanks of onboard hydrogen, and initial boost from half the launch-lasers in the solar system. There was going to be a lot of energy behind the Yamamoto. For that matter, the fields a ramscooper used to collect interstellar matter were supposed to be fatal to higher life forms.
Lucky it's just us sods in uniform, then, he thought sardonically, continuing aloud: "Great. And just how are we supposed to stop?" At .90 light, things started to get really strange. Particles of interstellar hydrogen began acting like cosmic rays. . . .
"Oh, that's simple," Raines said. For the first time in their brief acquaintance, she smiled. Damn, she's good looking, Jonah thought with mild surprise. Better than good. How could I not notice?
"We ram ourselves into the sun," she continued.
Several billion years before, there had been a species of sophonts with a peculiar ability. They called themselves (as nearly as humans could reproduce the sound) the thrint; others knew them as Slavers. The ability amounted to an absolutely irresistible form of telepathic hypnosis, evolved as a hunting aid in an ecosystem where most animals advanced enough to have a spinal cord were at least mildly telepathic; this was a low-probability development, but in a universe as large as ours anything possible will occur sooner or later. On their native world, thrintun could give a subtle prod to a prey-animal, enough to tip its decision to come down to the waterhole. The thrint evolved intelligence, as an additional advantage. After all, their prey had millions of years to develop resistance.
Then a spaceship landed on the thrint homeworld. Its crew immediately became slaves; absolutely obedient, absolutely trustworthy, willing and enthusiastic slaves. Operating on nervous systems that had not evolved in an environment saturated with the Power, any thrint could control dozens of sophonts. With the amplifiers that slave-technicians developed, a thrint could control an entire planet. Slaves industrialized a culture in the hunting-band stage, in a single generation. Controlled by the Power, slaves built an interstellar empire covering most of a galaxy.
Slaves did everything, because the thrint had never been a very intelligent species, and once loose with the Power they had no need to think. Eventually they met, and thought they had enslaved, a very clever race indeed, the tnuctipun. The revolt that eventually followed resulted in the extermination of every tool-using sentient in the Galaxy, but before it did the tnuctipun made some remarkable things. . . .
"A Slaver stasis field?" he said. Despite himself, awe showed in his voice. One such field had been discovered on Earth, then lost, one more on a human-explored world. Three centuries of study had found no slightest clue concerning their operating principles; they were as incomprehensible as a molecular-distortion battery would have been to Thomas Edison. Monkey-see monkey-do copies had been made, each taking more time and expense than the Gibraltar, and so far exactly two had functioned. One was supposedly guarding UNSN headquarters, wherever that was.
"Uh-mmm, give the captain a big cigar, right the first time."
Jonah shuddered, remembering the flatlander's smoke. "No, thanks."
"Too right, Captain. Just a figure of speech."
"Call me Jonah. We're going to be camped enough on this trip without poking rank-elbows in each other's ribs."
"Jonah. The Yamamoto skims through the system, throwing rocks." At .90 of c, missiles needed no warheads. The kinetic energies involved made the impacts as destructive as antimatter. "We go in as an offcourse rock. Course corrections, then on with the stasis field, go ballistic, use the outer layer of the sun for braking down to orbital speeds."
Nothing outside its surface could affect the contents of a Slaver field; let the path of the Catskinner stray too far inward and they would spend the rest of the lifespan of the universe at the center of Alpha Centauri's sun, in a single instant of frozen time. For that matter, the stasis field would probably survive the re-contraction of the primal monobloc and its explosion into a new cosmic cycle. . . . He forced his mind away from the prospect.
"And we're putting in a Class-VII computer system."
Jonah raised a brow. Class-VII systems were consciousness-level; they also went irredeemably insane sometime between six months and a year after activation, as did any artificial entity complex enough to be aware of being aware.
"Our . . . mission won't take any longer than that, and it's worth it." A shrug. "Look, why don't we hit a cafeteria and talk some more. Really talk, you're going to have briefings running out of every orifice before long, but that isn't the same."
Jonah sighed, and stopped thinking of ways out of the role for which he had been "volunteered." This was too big to be dodged, far and away too big. Two stasis fields in the whole Sol system; one guarding United Nations Space Navy HQ, the other on his ship. His ship, a Dart-Commander like ten thousand or so others, until this week. How many Class-VII computers? Nobody built consciousness-level systems anymore, except occasionally for research; it simply wasn't cost-effective. Build them much more intelligent than humans and they went non-comp almost at once; a human-level machine gave you a sentient with a six-month lifespan that could do arithmetic in its head. Ordinary computers could do the math, and for thinking people were much cheaper. It was a dead-end technology, like direct interfacing between human neural systems and computers. And they had revived it, for a special purpose mission.
"Shit," Jonah mumbled, as they came to a lock and reoriented themselves feet-down. There was a gravity warning strobing beside it; they pushed through the air-screen curtain and into the dragging acceleration of a one-G field. The crewfolk about them were mostly flatlander now, relaxed in the murderous weight that crushed their frames lifelong.
"Naacht wh'r?" Ingrid asked. In Wunderlander, but the Sol-Belter did not have to know that bastard offspring of Danish and Plattdeutsch to sense the meaning.
"I just realized . . . hell, I just realized how important this must all be. If the high command were willing to put that much effort into this, willing to sacrifice half of our most precious military asset, throw in a computer that costs more than this base complete with crew . . . then they must have put at least equal effort into searching for just the right pilot. There's simply no point in trying to get out of it. Tanj. I need a drink."
"Take your grass-eater stink out of my air!" Chuut-Riit shrieked. He was standing, looking twice his size as his orange-red pelt bottled out, teeth exposed in what an uninformed human might have mistaken for a grin, naked pink tail lashing. The reference to smell was purely metaphorical, since the conversation was 'cast. Which was as well, he was pouring aggression-pheromones into the air at a rate that would have made a roomful of adult male kzin nervous to the point of lost control.
The holo images on the wall before him laid themselves belly-down on the decking of their ship and crinkled their ears, their fur lying flat in propitiation.
"Leave the recordings and flee, devourers of your own kittens!" screamed the kzinti governor of the Alpha Centauri system. The Hero's Tongue is remarkably rich in expressive insults. "Roll in your own shit and mate with sthondats!" The wall blanked, and a light blinked in one corner as the data was packed through the link into his private files.
Chuut-Riit's fur smoothed as he strode around the great chamber. It stood open to the sky, beneath a near-invisible dome that kept the scant rain of this area off the kudlotlin-hide rugs. They were priceless imports from the home world; the stuffed matched pair of Chunquen on a granite pedestal were souvenirs acquired during the pacification of that world. He looked at them, soothing his eyes with the memory-taste of a successful hunt, at other mementos. Wild smells drifted in over thin walls that were crystal-enclosed sandwiches of circuitry; in the distance something squalled hungrily. The palace-preserve-fortress of a planetary governor, governor of the richest world to be conquered by kzin in living memory. Richest in wealth, richest in honor . . . if the next attack on the human homeworld was something more than a fifth disaster.
"Secretariat," he rasped. The wall lit.
A human looked from a desk, stood and came to attention. "Henrietta," the kzin began, "hold my calls for the rest of the day. I've just gotten the final download on the Fourth Fleet fiasco, and I'm a little upset. Run it against my projections, will you?" Most of the worst-case scenarios he had run were quite close to the actual results; that did not make it much easier to bear.
"Yes, Chuut-Riit," he said—No, God devour it, she, I've got to start remembering human females are sentient. At least he could tell them apart without smelling them, now. Even distinguish between individuals of the same subspecies. There are so many types of them!
"I don't think you'll find major discrepancies."
"That bad?" the human said.
The expression was a closed curve of the lips; the locals had learned that baring their teeth at a kzin was not a good idea. Smile, Chuut-Riit reminded himself. Betokening amusement, or friendliness, or submission. Which is it feeling? Born after the Conquest Fleet arrived here. Reared from a cub in the governor's palace, superbly efficient . . . but what does it think inside that ugly little head?
"Worse, the ——"—he lapsed into the Hero's Tongue, since no human language was sufficient for what he felt about the Fourth Fleet's hapless Kfraksha-Admiral—"couldn't apply the strategy properly in circumstances beyond the calculated range of probable response."
It was impossible to set out too detailed a plan of campaign, when communication took over four years. His fur began to bristle again, and he controlled his reaction with a monumental effort of will. I need to fight something, he thought.
"Screen out all calls for the next sixteen hours, unless they're Code VI or above." A thought prompted at him. "Oh, It's your offspring's naming-day next week, isn't it?"
"Yes, Chuut-Riit." Henrietta had once told him that among pre-Conquest humans it had been a mark of deference to refer to a superior by title, and of familiarity to use names. His tail twitched. Extraordinary. Of course, humans all had names, without having to earn them. In a sense, they're assigned names as we are rank titles, he thought.
"Well, I'll drop by at the celebration for an hour or so and bring one of my cubs." That would be safe enough if closely supervised; most intelligent species had long infancies.
"We are honored, Chuut-Riit!" The human bowed, and the kzin waved a hand to break contact.
"Valuable," he muttered to himself, rising and pacing once more. Humans were the most valuable subject-species the kzin had yet acquired. Or partially acquired, he reminded himself. Most kzin nobles on Wunderland had large numbers of human servants and technicians about their estates, but few had gone as far as he in using their administrative talents.
"Fools," he said in the same undertone; his kzin peers knew his opinion of them, but it was still inadvisable to get into the habit of saying it aloud. "I am surrounded by fools." Humans fell into groups naturally, they thought organization. The remote ancestors of Kzin had hunted in small packs; the prehumans in much larger ones. Stupidity to deny the evidence of senses and logic, he thought with contempt. These hairless monkeys have talents we lack.
Most refused to admit that, as though it somehow diminished the Hero to grant a servant could do what the master could not. Idiocy. Chuut-Riit yawned, a pink, red, and white expanse of ridged palate, tongue, and fangs, his species's equivalent of a dismissive shrug. Is it beneath the Hero to admit that a sword extends his claws, or a computer his mind? With human patience and organizational talent at the service of the Heroes, there was nothing that they could not accomplish! Even monkey inquisitiveness was a trait not without merit, irritating though it could be.
He pulled his mind away from vistas of endless victory, a hunt ranging over whole spiral arms; that was a familiar vision, one that had driven him to intrigue and duel for this position. To use a tool effectively, you had to know its balance and heft, its strengths and weaknesses. Humans were more gregarious than kzin, more ready to identify with a leader-figure; but to elicit such cooperation, you had to know the symbol-systems that held power over them. I must wear the mask they can see. Besides which, their young are . . . what is their word? Cute. I will select the cub carefully, one just weaned, and stuff it full of meat first. That will be safest.
Chuut-Riit intended to take his offspring, the best of them, with him to Earth, after the conquest. Early exposure to humans would give them an intuitive grasp of the animals that he could only simulate through careful study. With a fully domesticated human species at their disposal, his sons' sons' sons could even aspire to . . . no, unthinkable. And not necessary to think of it; that was generations away.
Besides that, it would take a great deal of time to tame the humans properly. Useful already, but far too wild, too undependable, too varied. A millennium of culling might be necessary before they were fully shaped to the purpose.
" . . . didn't just bull in," Lieutenant Raines was saying, as she followed the third aquavit with a beer chaser. Jonah sipped more cautiously at his, thinking that the asymmetry of nearly pure alcohol and lager was typically Wunderlander. "Only it wasn't caution—the pussies just didn't want to mess the place up and weren't expecting much resistance. Rightly so."
Jonah restrained himself from patting her hand as she scowled into her beer. It was dim in their nook, and the gravity was Wunderland-standard, .61 Earth. The initial refugees from the Alpha Centauri system had been mostly planetsiders, and from the dominant Danish-Dutch-German-Balt ethnic group. They had grown even more clannish in the generation since, which showed in the tall ceramic steins along the walls, plastic wainscoting that made a valiant attempt to imitate fumed oak, and a human bartender in wooden shoes, lederhosen, and a beard clipped closer on one side than the other.
The drinks slipped up out of the center of the table, of course.
"That was, teufel, three years ago, my time. We'd had some warning, of course, once the UN started masering what the crew of the Angel's Pencil found on the wreckage of that kzin ship. Plenty of singleships, and any reaction drive's a weapon; couple of big boost-lasers. But"—a shrug—"you know how it was back then."
"Before my time, Lieutenant," Jonah said, then cursed himself as he saw her wince. Raines had been born nearly three quarters of a century ago, even if her private duration included only two and a half decades of it.
"Ingrid, if you're going to be Jonah instead of Captain Matthiesson. Time—I keep forgetting, my head remembers but my gut forgets . . . Well, we just weren't set up to think in terms of war, that was ancient history. We held them off for nearly six months, though. Long enough to refit the three slowships in orbit and give them emergency boost; I think the pussies didn't catch up and blast us simply because they didn't give a damn. They couldn't decelerate us and get the ships back . . . arrogant sons of . . ." Another of those broad urchin grins. "Well, bitches isn't quite appropriate, is it?"
Jonah laughed outright. "You were in Munchen when the kzin arrived?"
"No, I'd been studying at the Scholarium there, software design philosophy, but I was on sabbatical in Vallburg with two friends of mine, working out some, ah, personal problems."
The bartender with the unevenly forked beard was nearly as attenuated as a Belter, but he had the disturbingly mobile ears of a pure-bred Wunderland herrenmann, and they were pricked forward. Alpha Centauri's only habitable planet has a thin atmosphere; the original settlers have adapted, and keen hearing is common among them. Jonah smiled at the man and stabbed a finger for a privacy screen. It flickered into the air across the outlet of the booth, and the refugee saloonkeeper went back to polishing a mug.
"That'd be, hmmm, Claude Montferrat-Palme and Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann?"
Raines nodded, moodily drawing a design on the tabletop with a forefinger dipped in the dark beer. "Yes . . . teufel, they're both of them in their fifties now, getting on for middle-aged." A sigh. "Look . . . Harold's a—hmmm, hard to explain to a Sol-Belter, or even someone from the Serpent Swarm who hasn't spent a lot of time dirtside. His father was a Herrenmann, one of the Nineteen Families, senior line. His mother wasn't married to him."
"Oh," Jonah said, racking his memory. History had never been an interest of his, and his generation had been brought up to the War, anyway. "Problems with wills and inheritances and suchlike?"
"You know what a bastard is?"
"Sure. Someone you don't like, such as for example that flatlander bastard who assigned me to this." He raised his stein in salute. "Though I'm fast becoming resigned to it, Ingrid."
She half-smiled in absent-minded acknowledgment, her mind 4.3 light-years and four decades away. "It means he got an expensive education, a nice little nest-egg settled on him . . . and that he'd never, never be allowed past the front door of the Yarthkin-Schotmanns' family schloss. Lucky to be allowed to use the name. An embarrassment."
"Might eat at a man," Jonah said.
"Like a little kzin in the guts. Especially when he grew enough to realize why his father only came for occasional visits; and then that his half-siblings didn't have half his brains or drive and didn't need them either. It drove him, he had to do everything twice as fast and twice as good, take crazy risks . . . made him a bit of a bastard in the Sol sense of the word too, spines like a pincodillo, sense of humor that could flay a gruntfish."
"And Montferrat-Palme?"
"Claude? Now, he was Herrenmann all through; younger son of a younger son, poor as an Amish dirt-farmer, and . . ." A laugh. "You had to meet Claude to understand him. I think he got serious about me mostly because I kept turning him down—it was a new experience and drove him crazy. And Harold he halfway liked and halfway enjoyed needling . . ."
Municipal Director of Internal Affairs Claude Montferrat-Palme adjusted his cape and looked up at the luminous letters that floated disembodied ten centimeters from the smooth brown brick of the building in front of him.
HAROLD'S TERRAN BAR, it read. A WORLD ON ITS OWN. Below, in smaller letters: HUMANS ONLY.
Ah, Harold, he thought. Always the one for a piece of useless melodrama. As if kzin would be likely to frequent this section of Old Munchen, or wish to enter a human entertainment spot if they did, or as if they could be stopped if by some fluke of probability they did end up down here.
His escort stirred, looking around nervously. The Karl-Jorge Avenue was dark, most of its glowstrips long ago stolen or simply spray-painted in the random vandalism that breeds in lives fueled by purposeless anger. It was fairly clean, because the kzin insisted on that, and the four-story brick buildings were solid enough, because the early settlers had built well. Brick and concrete and cobbled streets glimmered faintly, still damp from the afternoon's rain; loud wailing music echoed from open windows, and there would have been groups of idle-looking youths loitering on the front steps of the tenements, if the car had not had Munchen Polezi plates.
Baha'i, he thought, mentally snapping his fingers. He was tall, even for a Herrenmann, with one side of his face cleanshaven and the other a close-trimmed brown beard cut to a foppish point; the plain blue uniform and circular brimmed cap of the city police emphasized the deep-chested greyhound build. This was a Baha'i neighborhood.
"You may go," he said to the guards. "I will call for the car."
"Sir," the sergeant said, the guide-cone of her stunner waving about uncertainly. Helmet and nightsight goggles made her eyes unreadable. " 'Tis iz a rough district."
"I am aware of that, Sergeant. Also that Harold's place is a known underworld hangout. Assignment to my headquarters squad is a promotion; please do not assume that it entitles you to doubt my judgment." Or you may find yourself back walking a beat, without such opportunities for income-enhancement, went unspoken between them. He ignored her salute and walked up the two low stairs.
The door recognized him, read retinas and encephalograph patterns, slid open. The coal-black doorman was as tall as the police officer and twice as broad, with highly-illegal impact armor underneath the white coat and bow tie of Harold's Terran Bar. The impassive smoky eyes above the ritually scarred cheeks gave him a polite once-over, an equally polite and empty bow.
"Pleased to see you here again, Herrenmann Montferrat-Palme," he said.
You grafting ratcat-loving collaborationist son of a bitch. Montferrat added the unspoken portion himself. And I love you too.
Harold's Terran Bar was a historical revival, and therefore less out of place on Wunderland than it would have been in the Sol system. Once through the vestibule's inner bead-curtain doorway Montferrat could see most of the smoke-hazed main room, a raised platform in a C around the sunken dance-floor and the long bar. Strictly human-service here, which was less of an affectation now than it had been when the place opened, twenty years ago. Machinery was dearer than it used to be, and human labor much cheaper, particularly since refugees began pouring into Munchen from a countryside increasingly preempted for kzin estates. Not to mention those displaced by strip-mining . . .
"Good evening, Claude."
He started; it was always disconcerting, how quietly Harold moved. There at his elbow now, expressionless blue eyes. Face that should have been ugly, big-nosed with a thick lower lip and drooping eyelids. He was . . . what, sixty-three now? Just going grizzled at the temples, which was an affectation or a sign that his income didn't stretch to really first-class geriatric treatments. Short, barrel-chested; what sort of genetic mismatch had produced that build from a Herrenmann father and a Belter mother?
"Looking me over for signs of impending dissolution, Claude?" Harold said, steering him toward his usual table and snapping his fingers for a waiter. "It'll be a while yet."
Perhaps not so long, Montferrat thought, looking at the pouches beneath his eyes. That could be stress . . . or Harold could be really skimping on the geriatrics. They become more expensive every year. The kzin don't care . . . there are people dying of old age at seventy, now, and not just Amish. Shut up, Claude, you hypocrite. Nothing you can do about it.
"You will outlast me, old friend."
"A case of cynical apathy wearing better than cynical corruption?" Harold asked, seating himself across from the police chief.
Montferrat pulled a cigarette case from his jacket's inner pocket and snapped it open with a flick of the wrist. It was plain white gold, from Earth, with a Paris jeweler's initials inside the frame and a date two centuries old, one of his few inheritances from his parents . . . Harold took the proffered cigarette.
"You will join me in a schnapps?" Montferrat said.
"Claude, you've been asking that question for twenty years, and I've been saying no for twenty years. I don't drink with the paying customers."
Yarthkin leaned back, let smoke trickle through his nostrils. The liquor arrived, and a plateful of grilled things that resembled shrimp about as much as a lemur resembled a man, apart from being dark-green and having far too many eyes. "Now, didn't my bribe arrive on time?"
Montferrat winced. "Harold, Harold, will you never learn to phrase these things politely?" He peeled the translucent shell back from one of the grumblies, snapped off the head between thumb and forefinger and dipped it in the sauce. "Exquisite . . ." he breathed, after the first bite, and chased it down with a swallow of schnapps. "Bribes? Merely a token recompense, when out of the goodness of my heart and in memory of old friendship, I secure licenses, produce permits, contacts with owners of estates and fishing boats—"
"—so you can have a first-rate place to guzzle—"
"—I allow this questionable establishment to flourish, risking my position, despite the, shall we say, dubious characters known to frequent it—"
"—because it makes a convenient listening post and you get a lot of, shall we say, lucrative contacts."
They looked at each other coolly for a moment, and then Montferrat laughed. "Harold, perhaps the real reason I allow this den of iniquity to continue is that you're the only person who still has the audacity to deflate my hypocrisies."
Yarthkin nodded calmly. "Comes of knowing you when you were an idealistic patriot, Director. Like being in hospital together . . . Will you be gambling tonight, or did you come to pump me about the rumors?"
"Rumors?" Montferrat said mildly, shelling another grumbly.
"Of another kzin defeat. Two shiploads of our esteemed ratcat masters coming back with their fur singed."
"For god's sake!" Montferrat hissed, looking around.
"No bugs," Yarthkin continued. "Not even by your ambitious assistants. They offered a hefty sweetener, but I wouldn't want to see them in your office. They don't stay bought."
Montferrat smoothed his mustache. "Well, the kzin do seem to have a rather lax attitude toward security at times," he said. Mostly, they don't realize how strong the human desire to get together and chatter is, he mused.
"Then there's the rumor about a flatlander counterstrike," Yarthkin continued.
Montferrat raised a brow and cocked his mobile Herrenmann ears forward. "Not becoming a believer in the myth of liberation, I hope," he drawled.
Yarthkin waved the hand that held the cigarette, leaving a trail of blue smoke. "I did my bit for liberation. Got left at the altar, as I recall, and took the amnesty," he said. His face had become even more blank, merely the slightest hint of a sardonic curve to the lips. "Now I'm just an innkeeper. What goes on outside these walls is no business of mine." A pause. "It is yours, of course, Director. People know the ratcats got their whiskers pasted back, for the fourth time. They're encouraged . . . also desperate. The kzin will be stepping up the war effort, which means they'll be putting more pressure on us. Not to mention that they're breeding faster than ever."
Montferrat nodded with a frown. Battle casualties made little difference to a kzin population; their nonsentient females were held in harems by a small minority of males, in any event. Heavy losses meant the lands and mates of the dead passing to the survivors . . . and more young males thrown out of the nest, looking for lands and a Name of their own. And kzin took up a lot of space; they weighed in at a quarter-ton each, and they were pure carnivores. Nor would they eat synthesized meat except on board a military spaceship. There were still fewer than a hundred thousand in the Wunderland system, and more than twenty times that many humans, and even so it was getting crowded.
"More 'flighters crowding into Munchen every day," Yarthkin continued in that carefully neutral tone.
Refugees. Munchen had been a small town within their own lifetimes; the original settlers of Wunderland had been a close-knit coterie of plutocrats, looking for elbow room. Limited industrialization, even in the Serpent Swarm, and rather little on the planetary surface. Huge domains staked out by the Nineteen Families and their descendants; later immigrants had fitted into the cracks of the pattern, as tenants, or carving out smallholdings on the fringes of the settled zone. Many of them were ethnic or religious separatists anyway.
Until the kzin came. Kzin nobles expected vast territories for their own polygamous households, and naturally seized the best and most-developed acreages. Some of the human landworkers stayed to labor for new masters, but many more were displaced. Or eaten, if they objected.
Forced-draft industrialization in Munchen and the other towns; kzin did not live in cities, and cared little for the social consequences. Their planets had always been sparsely settled, and they had developed the gravity polarizer early in their history, hence they mined their asteroid belts but put little industry in space. Refugees flooding in, to work in industries that produced war matériel for the kzin fleets, not housing or consumer-goods for human use . . .
"It must be a bonanza for you, selling exit-permits to the Swarm," Harold continued. Outside the base-asteroid of Tiamat, the Belters were much more loosely controlled than the groundside population. "And exemptions from military call-up."
Montferrat smiled and leaned back, following the schnapps with lager. "There must be regulations," he said reasonably. "The Swarm cannot absorb all the would-be immigrants. Nor can Wunderland afford to lose the labor of all who would like to leave. The kzin demand technicians, and we cannot refuse; the burden must be allocated."
"Nor can you afford to pass up the palm-greasing and the, ach, romantic possibilities—" Yarthkin began.
"Alert! Alert! Emergency broadcast!" The mirror behind the long bar flashed from reflective to broadcast, and the smoky gloom of the bar's main hall erupted in shouted questions and screams.
The strobing pattern of light settled into the civil-defense blazon, and the unmistakable precision of an artificial voice. "All civilians are to remain in their residences. Emergency and security personnel to their duty stations, repeat, emergency and security personnel to their—"
A blast of static and white noise loud enough to send hands to ears, before the system's emergency overrides cut in. When reception returned the broadcast was two-dimensional, a space-armored figure reading from a screenprompt over the receiver. The noise in Harold's Terran Bar sank to shocked silence at the sight of the human shape of the combat armor, the blue-and-white UN sigil on its chest.
"—o all citizens of the Alpha Centauri system," the Terran was saying. In Wunderlander, but with a thick accent that could not handle the gutturals. "Evacuate areas of military or industrial importance immediately. Repeat, immediately. The United Nations Space Command is attacking kzinti military and industrial targets in the Alpha Centauri system. Evacuate areas—" The broadcast began again, but the screen split to show the same message in English and two more of the planet's principal languages. The door burst open and a squad of Munchen Polezi burst through.
"Scheisse!" Montferrat shouted, rising. He froze as the receiver in his uniform cap began hissing and snarling override-transmission in the Hero's Tongue. Yarthkin relaxed and smiled as the policeman sprinted for the exit. He cocked one eye towards the ceiling and silently flourished Montferrat's last glass of schnapps before sending it down with a snap of his wrist.
"Weird," Jonah Matthieson muttered, looking at the redshifted cone of light ahead of them. Better this way. This way he didn't have to think of what they were going to do when they arrived. He had been a singleship pilot before doing his military service; the Belt still needed miners. You could do software design anywhere there was a computer system, of course, and miners had a lot of spare time. His reflexes were a pilot's, and they included a strong inhibition against high-speed intercept trajectories.
This was going to be the highest-speed intercept of all time.
The forward end of the pilot's cabin was very simple, a hemisphere of smooth synthetic. For that matter, the rest of the cabin was quite basic as well; two padded crashcouches, which was one more than normal, an autodoc, an autochef, and rather basic sanitary facilities. That left just enough room to move—in zero gravity. Right now they were under one-G acceleration, crushingly uncomfortable. They had been under one-G for weeks, subjective time; the Yamamoto was being run to flatlander specifications.
"Compensate," Ingrid said. The view swam back, the blue stars ahead and the dim red behind turning to the normal variation of colors. The dual-sun Centauri system was dead ahead, looking uncomfortably close. "We're making good time. It took thirty years coming back on the slowboat, but the Yamamoto's going to put us near Wunderland in five point seven. Objective, that is. Probably right on the heels of the pussy scouts."
Jonah nodded, looking ahead at the innocuous twinned stars. His hands were in the control-gloves of his couch, but the pressure-sensors and lightfields were off, of course. There had been very little to do in the month-subjective since they left the orbit of Pluto. Accelerated learning with RNA boosters, and he could now speak as much of the Hero's Tongue as Ingrid—enough to understand it. Kzin evidently didn't like their slaves to speak much of it; they weren't worthy. He could also talk Belter-English with the accent of the Serpent Swarm, Wunderland's dominant language, and the five or six other tongues prevalent in the many ethnic enclaves . . . sometimes he found himself dreaming in Pahlavi or Croat or Amish Pletterdeisz. It wasn't going to be a long trip; with the gravity polarizer and the big orbital lasers to push them up to ramscoop speeds, and no limit on the acceleration their compensators could handle . . .
We must be nipping the heels of photons by now, he thought. Speeds only robot ships had achieved before, with experimental fields supposedly keeping the killing torrent of secondary radiation out. . . .
"Tell me some more about Wunderland," he said. Neither of them were fidgeting. Belters didn't; this sort of cramped environment had been normal for their people since the settlement of the Sol-system Belt three centuries before. It was the thought of how they were going to stop that had his nerves twisting.
I've already briefed you twenty times," she replied, with something of a snap in the tone. Military formality wore thin pretty quickly in close quarters like this. "All the first-hand stuff is fifty-six years out of date, and the nine-year-old material's in the computer. You're just bored."
No, I'm just scared shitless. "Well, talking would be better than nothing. Spending a month strapped to this thing is even more monotonous than being a rockjack You were right, I'm bored."
"And scared."
He looked around. She was lying with her hands behind her head, grinning at him.
"I'm scared too. The offswitch is exterior to the surface of the effect." It had to be; time did not pass inside a stasis field.
"The designers were pretty sure it'd work."
"I'm sure of only two things, Jonah."
"Which are?"
"Well, the first one is that the designers aren't going to be diving into the photosphere of a sun at point-nine lights."
"Oh." That had occurred to him too. On the other hand, it really was easier to be objective when your life wasn't on the line . . . and in any case, it would be quick. "What's the other thing?"
Her smile grew wider, and she undid the collar-catch of her uniform. "Even in a gravity field, there's one thing I want to experience again before possible death."
"Overview, schematic, trajectory," Traat-Admiral commanded. The big semicircle of the kzinti dreadnought's bridge was dim-lit by the blue and red glow of screens and telltales, crackly with the ozone scents of alerted kzintosh; Throat-Ripper was preparing for action.
Spray-fans appeared on the big circular display-screen below his crash couch. Traat-Admiral's fangs glinted wet as he considered them. The ship would pass fairly near Wunderland, and quite near Alpha Centauri itself. Slingshot effect was modest with something moving at such speeds, but . . . ah, yes. The other two suns of this cluster would also help. Still, it would be a long time before that vessel headed back towards the Sol system, if indeed that was their aim.
What forsaken-of-ancestors trick is this? he wondered. Then: Were those Kfraksha-Admiral's last thoughts?
He shook off the mood. "Identification?"
"Definitely a ramscoop vessel, Dominant One," Riesu-Fleet-Operations said. "Estimated speed is approximately .9071 c. In the 1600 kilokzinmass range."
About the mass of a light cruiser, then. His whiskers ruffled. Quite a weight to get up to such a respectable fraction of c, when you did not have the gravity polarizer. On the other paw, the humans used very powerful launch-boost lasers—useful as weapons, too, which had been an unanticipated disaster for the kzinti fleets—and by now they might have the gravity polarizer. Polarizer-drive vessels could get up to about .8 c if they were willing to spend the energy, and that was well above ramscoop initial speeds.
"Hrrr. That is considerably above the mass-range of the robot vessels the humans used"—for scouting new systems and carrying small freight loads over interstellar distances. They used big slowboats at .3 c for colonization and passenger traffic. "Fleet positions, tactical."
The screen changed, showing the positions of his squadrons, stingfighter carriers and dreadnoughts, destroyers and cruisers. Most were still crawling across the disk of the Alpha Centauri system, boosting from their ready stations near replenishment asteroids or in orbit around Wunderland itself. He scowled; the human probe was damnably well stealthed for something moving that fast, and there had been little time. His own personal dreadnought and battle-group were thirty AU outside the outermost planet, beginning to accelerate back in toward the star. The problem was that no sane being moved at interstellar speeds this close to high concentrations of matter, which put the enemy vessel in an entirely different energy envelope.
We must strike in passing, he thought; he could feel the claws slide out of the black-leather-glove shapes of his hands, pricking against the rests in the gloves of his space armor.
"Dominant One," Riesu-Fleet-Operations said. The tone in his voice and a sudden waft of spoiled-ginger scent brought Traat-Admiral's ears folding back into combat position, and his tongue lapped across his nose instinctively. "Separation . . . No, it's not breaking up . . . We're getting relay from the outer-system drone sentinels, Traat-Admiral. The human ship is launching."
"Launching what?"
"Traat-Admiral . . . ahhh. Projectiles of various sorts. Continuous launch. None over one-tenth kzinfist mass." About twenty grams, in human measurements—but stealthing could be in use, hiding much larger objects in the clutter. "Some are buckshot arrays, others slugs. Spectroscopic analysis indicates most are of nickel-iron composition. Magnetic flux. The human ship is using magnetic launchers of very great power for initial guidance."
Traat-Admiral's fur went flat, then fluffed out to stand erect all over his body.
"Trajectories!" he screamed.
"Ereaauuuu—" the officer mewled, then pulled himself together. "Dominant One, intersection trajectories for the planet itself and the following installations—"
Alarm klaxons began to screech. Traat-Admiral ignored them and reached for his communicator. Chuut-Riit was not going to be happy, when he learned of how the humans replied to the Fourth Fleet.
Chuut-Riit had told him that some humans were worthy of respect. He was beginning to believe it.
Raines and Jonah commanded the front screen to stop mimicking a control board; beyond a certain level fear-adrenaline was an anti-aphrodisiac. Now the upper half was an unmodified view of the Alpha Centauri system; the lower was a battle schematic, dots and graphs and probability-curves like bundles of fuzzy sticks. The Yamamoto was going to cross the disk of the Wunderland system in subjective minutes, mere hours even by outside clocks, with her ramscoop fields spreading a corona around her deadly to any life-form with a nervous system, and the fusion flare a sword behind her half a parsec long, fed by the fantastically rich gas-field that surrounded a star. Nothing but beam-weapons stood a chance of catching her, and even messages were going to take prodigies of computing power to unscramble. Her own weapons were quite simple: iron eggs. Velocity equals mass; when they intercepted their targets, the results would be in the megaton-yield range.
Jonah's lips skinned back from his teeth, and the hair struggled to raise itself along his spine. Plains ape reflex, he thought, smelling the rank odor of fight/flight sweat trickling down his flanks. Your genes think they're about to tackle a Cape buffalo with a thighbone club. His fingers pressed the inside of the chair seat in a complex pattern.
"Responding," said the computer in its usual husky contralto.
Was it imagination that there was more inflection in it? Conscious computer, but not a human consciousness. Memory and instincts designed by humans . . . free will, unless he or Ingrid used the override keys. Unless the high command had left sleeper drives. Perhaps not so much free will; a computer would see the path most likely to succeed and follow it. How would it be to know that you were a made thing, and doomed to encysted madness in six months or less? Nobody had ever been able to learn why. He had speculated to himself that it was a matter of time; to a consciousness that could think in nanoseconds, that could govern its own sensory input, what would be the point of remaining linked to a refractory cosmos? It could make its own universe, and have it last forever in a few milliseconds. Perhaps that was why humans who linked directly to a computer system of any size went catatonic as well. . . .
"Detection. Neutronic and electromagnetic-range sensors." The ship's system was linked to the hugely powerful but subconscious level machines of the Yamamoto. "Point sources."
Rubies sprang out across the battle map, and they moved as he watched, swelling up on either side and pivoting in relation to each other. A quick glimpse at the fire-bright point source of Alpha Centauri in the upper screen showed a perceptible disk, swelling as he watched. Jonah's skin crawled at the sight; this was like ancient history, air and sea battles out of Earth's past. He was used to maneuvers that lasted hours or days, matching relative velocities while the planets moved slowly and the sun might as well be a fixed point at the center of the universe . . . perhaps when gravity polarizers were small and cheap enough to fit in Dart-class boats, it would all be like this.
"The pussies have the system pretty well covered," he said.
"And the Swarm's Belters," Ingrid replied. Jonah turned his head, slowly, at the sound of her voice. Shocked, he saw a glistening in her eyes.
"Home . . ." she whispered. Then more decisively: "Identification, human-range sensors, discrete."
Half the rubies flickered for a few seconds. Ingrid continued to Jonah: "This is a messy system; more of its mass in asteroids and assorted junk than yours. Belters use more deep-radar and don't rely on telescopes as much. The pussies couldn't have changed that much; they'd cripple the Swarm's economy and destroy its value to them." Slowly. "That's the big station on Tiamat. They've got a garrison there, it's a major shipbuilding center, was even"—she swallowed—"fifty years ago. Those others are bubbleworlds . . . More detectors on Wunderland than there used to be, and in close orbit. At the poles, and that looks like a military-geosynchronous setup."
"Enemy action. Laser and particle-beam weapons." Nothing they could do about that. "Enemy vessels are detonating high-yield fusion weapons on our anticipated trajectory."
Attempting to overload the ramscoop, and unlikely to succeed unless they had something tailored for it, like cesium gas bombs. The UNSN had done theoretical studies, but the pussies were unlikely to have anything on hand. This trick was not in their book, and they were rather inflexible in tactics.
Of course, if they did have something, the Yamamoto would become a rather dangerous slug of high-velocity gas in nanoseconds. Catskinner might very well survive, if the stasis field kicked in quickly enough . . . in which case her passengers would spend the next several thousand years in stasis, waiting for just the right target to slow them down.
"Home," Ingrid said, very softly.
Jonah thought briefly what it would be like to return to the Sol-Belt after fifty years. Nearly a third of the average lifetime, longer than Jonah had been alive. What it would be like, if he ever got home. The Yamamoto could expect to see Sol again in twenty years objective, allowing time to pass through the Alpha Centauri system, decelerate and work back up to a respectable Tau value. The plan-in-theory was for him and Ingrid to accomplish their mission and then boost the Catskinner out in the direction of Sol, turn on the stasis field again and wait to be picked up by UNSN craft.
About as likely as doing it by putting our heads between our knees and spitting hard, he thought sardonically.
"Ships," the computer said in its dispassionate tone. "Movement. Status, probable class and dispersal cones."
Color-coded lines blinking over the tactical map. Columns of print scrolling down one margin, coded velocities and key-data; hypnotic training triggered bursts into their minds, crystalline shards of fact, faster than conscious recall. Jonah whistled.
"Loaded for bandersnatch," he said. There were a lot of warships spraying out from bases and holding-orbits, and that was not counting those too small for the Yamamoto's detection systems: their own speed would be degrading signal drastically. Between the ramscoop fields, their velocity, and normal shielding, there was very little that could touch the ramscooper, but the kzin were certainly going to try.
"Aggressive bastards," he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tactical display. Getting in the way of the Yamamoto took courage, individually and on the part of their commander. Nobody had used a ramscoop ship like this before; the kzin had never developed a Bussard-type drive; they had had the gravity polarizer for a long time, and it had aborted work on reaction jet systems. But they must have made staff studies, and they would know what they were facing. Which was something more in the nature of a large-scale cosmic event than a ship. Mass equals velocity: by now the Yamamoto had the effective bulk of a medium-sized moon, moving only a tenth slower than a laser beam.
That reminded him of what the Catskinner would be doing shortly—and the Dart did not have anything like the scale of protection the ramscoop warship did. Even a micrometeorite . . . Alpha Centauri was a black disk edged by fire in the upper half of the screen.
"Projectiles away," the computer said. Nothing physical, but another inverted cone of trajectories splayed out from the path of the Yamamoto. Highly polished chrome-tungsten-steel alloy slugs, which had spent the trip from Sol riding grapnel-fields in the Yamamoto's wake. Others were clusters of small shot, or balloons, to transmit energy to fragile targets; at these speeds, a slug could punch through a ship without slowing enough to do more than leave a small glowing hole through the structure. Wildly varying albedos, from fully-stealthed to deliberately reflective; the Catskinner was going to be rather conspicuous when the Slaver stasis field's impenetrable surface went on. Now the warship's magnetics were twitching the kinetic-energy weapons out in sprays and clusters, at velocities that would send them across the Wunderland system in hours. It would take the firepower of a heavy cruiser to significantly damage one, and there were a lot of them. Iron was cheap, and the Yamamoto grossly overpowered.
"You know, we ought to have done this before," Jonah said. The sun-disk filled the upper screen, then snapped down several sizes as the computer reduced the field. A sphere, floating in the wild arching discharges and coronas of a G-type sun. "We could have used ramrobots. Or the pussies could have copied our designs and done it to us."
"Nope," Ingrid said. She coughed, and he wondered if her eyes were locking on the sphere again as it clicked down to a size that would fit the upper screen. "Ramscoop fields. Think about it."
"Oh." When you put it that way, he could think of about a half-dozen ways to destabilize one; drop, oh, ultracompressed radon into it. Countermeasures . . . luckily, nothing the kzin were likely to have right on hand.
"For that matter," she continued, "throwing relativistic weapons around inside a solar system is a bad idea. If you want to keep it."
"Impact," the computer said helpfully. An asteroid winked, the tactical screen's way of showing an expanding sphere of plasma: nickel-iron, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon-compounds, some of the latter kzin and humans and children and their pet budgies.
"You have to aim at stationary targets," Ingrid was saying. "The things that war is supposed to be about seizing. It's as insane as fighting a planetside war with fusion weapons and no effective defense. Only possible once."
"Once would be enough, if we knew where the kzin home system was." For a vengeful moment he imagined robot ships falling into a sun from infinite distances, scores of light-years of acceleration at hundreds of G's, their own masses raised to near-stellar proportions. "No. Then again, no."
"I'm glad you said that," Ingrid replied. Softly: "I wonder what it's like, for them out there."
"Interesting," Jonah said tightly. "At the very least, interesting."