by Larry Niven
“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 he 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, compuwaldoes, 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…