by Larry Niven
“As you command, Chuut-Riit, although it goes against the grain to let the leaf-eating monkeys escape, when the Fifth Fleet is so near completion.”
The governor rose, letting his weight forward on hands whose claws slid free. He restrained any further display of impatience. I must teach him to think. To think correctly, he must be allowed to make errors.
“Its departure has already been delayed. Will losing further units in fruitless pursuit speed the repairs and modifications which must be made? Attend to your orders!”
“At once, Chuut-Riit!”
The governor held himself impressively immobile until the screen blanked. Then he turned and leaped with a tearing shriek over the nearest wall, out into the unnatural storm and darkness. A half-hour later he returned, meditatively picking bits of hide and bone from between his teeth with a thumb-claw. His pelt was plastered flat with mud, leaves, and blood, and a thorned branch had cut a bleeding trough across his sloping forehead. The screens were still flicking between various disasters, each one worse than the last.
“Any emergency calls?” he asked mildly.
“None at the priority levels you established,” the computer replied.
“Murmeroumph,” he said, opening his mouth wide into the killing gape to get at an irritating fragment between two of the back shearing teeth. “Staff.”
One wall turned to the ordered bustle of the household’s management centrum. “Ah, Henrietta,” he said in Wunderlander. “You have that preliminary summary ready?”
The human swallowed and averted her eyes from the bits of something that the kzin was flicking from his fangs and muzzle. The others behind her were looking drawn and tense as well, but no signs of panic. If I could recognize them, the kzin thought. They panic differently. A Hero overcome with terror either fled, striking out at anything in his path, or went into mindless berserker frenzy.
Berserker, he mused thoughtfully. The concept was fascinating; reading of it had convinced him that kzin and humankind were enough alike to cooperate effectively.
“Yes, Chuut-Riit,” she was saying. “Installations Seven, Three, and Twelve in the north polar zone have been effectively destroyed, loss of industrial function in the seventy-five to eighty percent range. Over ninety percent at Six, the main fusion generator destabilized in the pulse from a near-miss.” Ionization effects had been quite spectacular. “Casualties in the range of five thousand Heroes, thirty thousand humans. Four major orbital facilities hit, but there was less collateral damage there, of course, and more near-misses.” No air to transmit blast in space. “Reports from the asteroid belt still coming in.”
“Merrower,” he said, meditatively. Kzin government was heavily decentralized; the average Hero did not make a good bureaucrat, that was work for slaves and computers. A governor was expected to confine himself to policy decisions. Still…“Have my personal spaceship prepared for lift. I will be doing a tour.”
Henrietta hesitated. “Ah, noble Chuut-Riit, the feral humans will be active, with defense functions thrown out of order.”
She was far too experienced to mistake Chuut-Riit’s expression for a smile.
“Markham and his gang? I hope they do, Henrietta, I sincerely hope they do.” He relaxed. “I’ll view the reports from here. Send in the groomers; my pelt must be fit to be seen.” A pause. “And replacements for one of the bull buffalo in the holding pen.”
The kzin threw himself down on the pillow behind his desk, massive head propped with its chin on the stone surface of the workspace. Grooming would help him think. Humans were so good at it…and blowdryers, blowdryers alone were worth the trouble of conquering them.
✩ ✩ ✩
“Prepare for separation,” the computer said. The upper field of the Catskinner’s screen was a crawling slow-motion curve of orange and yellow and darker spots; the battle schematic showed the last few slugs dropping away from the Yamamoto, using the gravity of the sun to whip around and curve out toward targets in a different quarter of the ecliptic plane. More than a few were deliberately misaimed, headed for catastrophic destruction in Alpha Centauri’s photosphere as camouflage.
It can’t be getting hotter, he thought.
“Gottdamn, it’s hot,” Ingrid said. “I’m swine-sweating.”
Thanks, he thought, refraining from speaking aloud with a savage effort. “Purely psychosomatic,” he grated.
“There’s one thing I regret,” Ingrid continued.
“What’s that?”
“That we’re not going to be able to see what happens when the Catskinner and those slugs make a high-Tau transit of the sun’s outer envelope,” she said.
Jonah felt a smile crease the rigid sweat-slick muscles of his face. The consequences had been extrapolated, but only roughly. At the very least, there would be solar-flare effects like nothing this system had ever witnessed before, enough to foul up every receptor pointed this way. “It would be interesting, at that.”
“Prepare for separation,” the computer continued. “Five seconds and counting.”
One. Ingrid had crossed herself just before the field went on. Astonishing. There were worse people to be crammed into a Dart with for a month, even among the more interesting half of the human race.
Two. They were probably going to be closer to an active star than any other human beings had ever been and survived to tell the tale. Provided they survived, of course.
Three. His grandparents had considered emigrating to the Wunderland system; he remembered them complaining about how the Belt had been then, everything regulated and taxed to death, and psychists hovering to resanitize your mind as soon as you came in from a prospecting trip. If that’d happened, he might have ended up as a conscript technician with the Fourth Fleet.
Four. Or a guerrilla: the prisoners had mentioned activity by “feral humans.” Jonah bared his teeth in an expression a kzin would have had no trouble at all understanding. I intend to remain very feral indeed. The kzin may have done us a favor; we were well on the way to turning ourselves into sheep when they arrived. If I’m going to be a monkey, I’ll be a big, mean baboon, by choice.
Five. Ingrid was right, it was a pity they wouldn’t be able to see it.
“Personally, I just wish that ARM bastard who volunteered me for this was here—”
—discontinuity—
“Ready for separation, sir,” the computer said.
Buford Early grunted. He was alone in the corvette’s control room; none of the others had wanted to come out of deepsleep just to sit helplessly and watch their fate decided by chance.
“The kzinti aren’t the ones who should be called pussies,” he said. Early chuckled softly, enjoying a pun not one human in ten million would have appreciated. Patterns of sunlight crawled across his face from the screens; the Inner Ring was built inside the hull of a captured kzinti corvette, but the UNSN—and the ARM—had stuffed her full of surprises. “I don’t know what the youth of today is coming to.”
At that he laughed outright; he had been born into a family of the…even mentally, he decided not to specify…secret path. Born a long, long time ago, longer even than the creaking quasi-androids of the Struldbrug Club would have believed; there were geriatric technologies that the ARM and its masters guarded as closely as the weapons and destabilizing inventions people knew about.
Damn, but I’m glad the Long Peace is over, he mused. It had been far too long, whatever the uppermost leadership thought, although of course he had backed the policy. Besides, there was no real fun in being master in the Country of the Cows; Earthers had gotten just plain boring, however docile.
“Boring this isn’t, no jive,” he said, watching the disk of Alpha Centauri grow. “About—”
—discontinuity—
“Greow-Captain, there is an anomaly in the last projectile!”
“They are all anomalies, Sensor-Operator!” The commander did not move his eyes from the schematic before his face, but his tone held conviction that the humans had
used irritatingly nonstandard weapons solely to annoy and humiliate him. Behind his back, the other two kzin exchanged glances and moved expressive ears.
The Slasher-class armed scout held three crewkzin in its delta-shaped control chamber: the commander forward and the Sensor and Weapons operators behind him to either side. There were three small screens instead of the single larger divisible one a human boat of the same size would have had, and many more manually activated controls. Kzin had broader-range senses than humans, faster reflexes, and they trusted cybernetic systems rather less. They had also had gravity control almost from the beginning of spaceflight; a failure serious enough to immobilize the crew usually destroyed the vessel.
“Simply tell me,” the kzin commander said, “if our particle-beam is driving it down.” The cooling system was whining audibly as it pumped energy into its central tank of degenerate matter, and still the cabin was furnace-hot and dry, full of the wild odors of fear and blood that the habitation-system poured out in combat conditions. The ship shuddered and banged as it plunged in a curve that was not quite suicidally close to the outer envelope of the sun.
Before Greow-Captain a stepped-down image showed the darkened curve of the gas envelope, and the gouting coriolis-driven plumes as the human projectiles plowed their way through plasma. Shocks of discharge arched between them as they drew away from the kzin craft above, away from the beams that sought to tumble them down into denser layers where even their velocity would not protect them. Or at least throw them enough off course that they would recede harmlessly into interstellar space. The light from the holo-screen crawled in iridescent streamers across the flared scarlet synthetic of the kzin’s helmet and the huge lambent eyes; the whole corona of Alpha Centauri was writhing, flowers of nuclear fire, a thunder of forces beyond the understanding of human or kzinkind.
The two Operators were uneasily conscious that Greow-Captain felt neither awe nor the slightest hint of fear. Not because he was more than normally courageous for a young male kzin, but because he was utterly indifferent to everything but how this would look on his record. Another uneasy glance went between them. Younger sons of nobles were notoriously anxious to earn full Names at record ages, and Greow-Captain had complained long and bitterly when their squadron was not assigned to the Fourth Fleet. Operational efficiency might suffer.
They knew better than to complain openly, of course. Whatever the state of his wits, there was nothing wrong with Greow-Captain’s reflexes, and he already had an imposing collection of kzin-ear dueling trophies.
“Greow-Captain, the anomaly is greater than a variance in reflectivity,” the Sensor-Operator yowled. Half his instruments were useless in the flux of energetic particles that were sheeting off the Slasher’s screens. He hoped they were being deflected; as a lowly Sensor-Operator he had not had a chance to breed—not so much as a sniff of kzinrret fur since they carried him mewling from the teats of his mother to the training creche. “The projectile is not absorbing the quanta of our beam as the previous one did, nor is its surface ablating. And its trajectory is incompatible with the shape of the others; this is larger, less dense, and moving”…a pause of less than a second to query the computer…“moving as if its outer shell were absolutely frictionless and reflective, Greow-Captain. Should this not be reported?”
Reporting would mean retreat, out to where a message-maser could punch through the chaotic broad-spectrum noise of an injured star’s bellow.
“Do my Heroes refuse to follow into danger?” Greow-Captain snarled.
“Lead us, Greow-Captain!” Put that way, they had no choice; which was why a sensible officer would never have put it that way. Both Operators silently cursed the better diet and personal-combat training available to offspring of a noble’s household. It had been a long time since kzin met an enemy capable of exercising greater selective pressure than their own social system. His very scent was intimidating, overflowing with the ketones of a fresh-meat diet.
“Weapons-Operator, shift your aim to the region of compressed gases directly ahead of our target, all energy weapons. I am taking us down and accelerating past red-line.” With a little luck, he could ignite the superheated and compressed monatomic hydrogen directly ahead of the projectile, and let the multimegaton explosion flip it up or down off the ballistic trajectory the humans had launched it on.
Muffled howls and spitting sounds came from the workstations behind him; the thin black lips wrinkled back more fully from his fangs, and slender lines of saliva drooled down past the open neckring of his suit. Warren-dwellers, he thought, as the Slasher lurched and swooped.
His hands darted over the controls, prompting the machinery that was throwing it about at hundreds of accelerations. Vatach hunters. The little quasi-rodents were all lower-caste kzin could get in the way of live meat. Although the anomaly was interesting, and he would report noticing it to Khurut-Squadron-Captain. I will show them how a true hunter—
The input from the kzin boat’s weapons was barely a fraction of the kinetic energy the Catskinner was shedding into the gases that slowed it, but that was just enough. Enough to set off chain-reaction fusion in a sizable volume around the invulnerably-protected human vessel. The kzin craft was far enough away for the wave-front to arrive before the killing blow:
“—shield overload, loss of directional hhnrrreaw—”
The Sensor-Operator shrieked and burned as induction-arcs crashed through his position. Weapons-Operator was screaming the hiss of a nursing kitten as his claws slashed at the useless controls.
Greow-Captain’s last fractional second was spent in a cry as well, but his was of pure rage. The Slasher’s fusion-bottle destabilized at almost the same nanosecond as her shields went down and the gravity control vanished; an imperceptible instant later only a mass-spectroscope could have told the location as atoms of carbon and iron scattered through the hot plasma of the inner solar wind.
—discontinuity—
“Shit,” Jonah said, with quiet conviction. “Report. And stabilize that view.” The streaking pinwheel in the exterior-view screen slowed and halted, but the control surface beside it continued to show the Catskinner twirling end-over-end at a rate that would have pasted them both as a thin reddish film over the interior without the compensation fields. Gravity polarizers were a wonderful invention, and he was very glad humans had mastered them, but they were nerve-wracking.
The screen split down the middle as Ingrid began establishing their possible paths.
“We are,” the computer said, “traveling twice as fast as our projected velocity at switchoff, and on a path twenty-five degrees further to the solar north.” A pause. “We are still, you will note, in the plane of the ecliptic.”
“Thank Finagle for small favors,” Jonah muttered, working his hands in the control gloves. The Catskinner was running on her accumulators, the fusion reactor and its so-detectable neutrino flux shut down.
“Jonah,” Ingrid said. “Take a look.” A corner of the screen lit, showing the surface of the sun and a gigantic pillar of flare reaching out in their wake like the tongue of a hungry fire-elemental. “The pussies are burning up the communications spectra, yowling about losing scout-boats. They had them down low and dirty, trying to throw the slugs that went into the photosphere with us off-course.”
“Lovely,” the man muttered. So much for quietly matching velocities with Wunderland while the commnet is still down. To the computer: “What’s ahead of us?”
“For approximately twenty-three point six light-years, nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Hard vacuum, micrometeorites, interstellar dust, possible spacecraft, bodies too small or nonradiating to be detected, superstrings, shadowmatter—”
“Shut up!” he snarled. “Can we brake?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, this will require several hours of thrust and exhaust our onboard fuel reserves.”
“And put up a fucking great sign, ‘Hurrah, we’re back’ for every pussy
in the system,” he grated. Ingrid touched him on the arm.
“Wait, I have an idea…Is there anything substantial in our way, that we could reach with less of a burn?”
“Several asteroids, Lieutenant Raines. Uninhabited.”
“What’s the status of our stasis-controller?”
A pause. “Still…I must confess, I am surprised.” The computer sounded surprised that it could be. “Still functional, Lieutenant Raines.”
Jonah winced. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?” he said plaintively. “Another collision?”
Ingrid shrugged. “Right now, it’ll be less noticeable than a long burn. Computer, will it work?”
“Ninety-seven percent chance of achieving a stable Swarm orbit. The risk of emitting infrared and visible-light signals is unquantifiable. The field switch will probably continue to function, Lieutenant Raines.”
“It should, it’s covered in neutronium.” She turned her head to Jonah. “Well?”
He sighed. “Offhand, I can’t think of a better solution. When you can’t think of a better solution than a high-speed collision with a rock, something’s wrong with your thinking, but I can’t think of what would be better to think…What do you think?”
“That an unshielded collision with a rock might be better than another month imprisoned with your sense of humor…Gott, all those fish puns…”
“Computer, prepare for minimal burn. Any distinguishing characteristics of those rocks?”
“One largely silicate, one eighty-three percent nickel-iron with traces of—”
“Spare me. The nickel-iron, it’s denser and less likely to break up. Prepare for minimal burn.”
“I have so prepared, on the orders of Lieutenant Raines.”
Jonah opened his mouth, then frowned. “Wait a minute. Why is it always Lieutenant Raines? You’re a damned sight more respectful of her.”