by Larry Niven
“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, s
tingfighter 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.