by Larry Niven
…but at a fifth of a gravity, year after year…
Grraf-Hromfi did not mention in his lecture that a fighting kzin warship could accelerate at sixty gravities with the pilot floating in his cockpit and thus reach its maximum cruising speed in about five days, because all of his officers knew that. “How long would it take this funny-funnel to attain six-eighths the velocity of light?”
“Six months?” ventured a bored officer who leaped to conclusions before.
“More like eight-ten years—with most of that time spent at low velocity. When will it reach Alpha Centauri?”
“About the time the Fifth Fleet has occupied Man-home,” said Long-Tooth-Son with a grin for the poor beasts.
…but it is here and the Fifth Fleet hasn’t even started yet…
“That’s a reasonable estimate. I’d like to remind you that these pictures are more than four years old.”
…it took them only nine plus years to get here…
“The monkey-funnel is already out of range of both the First and Second Black Pride. But even after all this time”—the 4.3 years the Pride’s message took to reach Alpha Centauri—“the ramscoop will still be close to Man-sun and just beginning its journey. It is not something we’ll ever have to worry about. We’ll keep an automatic tracker looking for it—that’s our duty—but I doubt if we’ll ever sniff it again. The monkeys will decelerate and sulk around outside Alpha Centauri well out of our range.”
So even Grraf-Hromfi could be dead wrong.
Trainer-of-Slaves did a calculation on the Sensor’s data-link. The automatic tracker had detected the first trace of the ramscoop two-hundred light-days out—yet years earlier than expected. Which meant that its maximum speed was far higher than kzin engineers had anticipated.
Kr-Captain finished his trajectory plot and put the Flayer-of-Monkeys on automatic. Turnaround was in twenty-three hours. “Sherrek’s Ear gave us orders to be creative.” He meant that they were unarmed.
“Best little mechanic in the galaxy sitting right beside me,” said Trainer-of-Slaves.
“So how are we going to kill this what-ever-it-is?”
“We may not have to. Grraf-Hromfi proved that a monkey can’t stay alive in a ship moving at that speed—cosmic sleeting.”
“Give old red-mane an ear,” he purred sarcastically. “We don’t have to fight because the enemy has already suicided! A nice philosophy until a monkey leaps out of the funeral pyre.” He returned to a commander’s inflected spits and growls. “We shall assume they have a gravity polarizer shield and are still alive.”
“A gravity shield is the same as a gravity drive. Then they wouldn’t need a ramscoop.”
“What’s a ramscoop?”
“A magnetic funnel that collects interstellar hydrogen and ejects helium as reaction mass.”
“Is a monkey going to stand at a porthole and shoot arrows at us?” Kr-Captain flapped his batwing ears.
“Maybe the magnetic field protects them,” suggested Long-Reach, two arm-slits speaking in unison.
“Slave! Shut up,” growled Kr-Captain.
“Does he play cards?” whispered the arm nearest the relaxed ears of Trainer-of-Slaves.
“Don’t eat your seat, Long-Reach. I’ll need your brains in due time.”
Long-Reach hunkered down on his undermouth, petulantly. He was muttering along internal channels to himselves that he was Weapons-Operator. That started an argument among the arms about who was to take charge of the camera missiles.
“The line-of-flight cuts right past the A-star,” said Trainer. “They’ll already be dead. The starwind is fierce at that distance. It will have hit them like your father’s claw.” Kr-Captain seemed unconvinced and so Trainer used an analogy from a virtual horror-adventure they had both lived together under shared eye-caps. “It’s like a hurricane wind in your sails.”
Kr-Captain bared his fangs. He didn’t like being reminded of that horror-story world covered with water, trying to survive in the company of five war-stranded Heroes on board a fleeing sloop in typhoon weather. His liver was still recovering. “I will not repeat myself again! We shall assume that the monkeys are alive, you miserable fur-tick fleeing-the-skin-of-a-dying-sthondat!”
“As you command, brave Hero!”
“Now how shall we kill them? It was you who took out my particle-beamer for this test!” The thought of being disarmed put him back on the edge of anger. Not even a nuke. “Shall I slash at them with my wtsai as they zip past?”
“This combat couch is very uncomfortable, revered Hero,” muttered short(arm). Listening to himself gave Long-Reach perversely practical ideas. “We could toss my combat couch at the enemy.”
“Silence!” roared Kr-Captain.
Trainer-of-Slaves was looking around the cockpit for things that might be ripped out. “Gold dust is what we need, but your honor-bearing wtsai blade is powerful enough to destroy even the most invincible monkey battleship.”
Long-Reach gave a good imitation of a kzin “hisssss” of profound inspiration. “We leave our noble Hero on the line-of-flight, waving his wtsai. He leaps,” said short(arm). “He strikes!” exclaimed freckled(arm). Then a chorus of arms imitated the spits and snarls of a kzin fight. Skinny(arm) intoned the denouement, “In one blow the enemy ship disintegrates in a blaze of shame! and ever afterwards Kr-Hero radiates bluely from the honor roll of the Patriarch!”
Discretely, fast(arm) gripped a rod on the back of Trainer-of-Slaves’s combat couch in case he had to yank Long-Reach to a safer place.
His lips twitching, Kr-Captain eyed his more yellow-orange than red-orange kzin companion. “Where did you find this five course lunch?”
“We’ve been together since Hssin. He really is a good mechanic.”
“We seem to have reached a consensus,” grumbled the Captain. “Some massive object left along the line-of-flight.”
“Perhaps not massive. If we sprinkled gold dust in its path, each grain of dust carries the impact energy of a medium nuclear strike,” said Trainer.
Kr-Captain did not believe him. Kzin are not used to combat passes at relativistic speeds. But he did the calculation on his screen. The numbers convinced him. “A little dust in the monkey’s path and—nuclear fireball! Easy.”
“Not so easy,” moaned big(arm). Long-Reach had been consulting among himselves. “It is not just a bigger high-velocity kinetic impact,” stated the practical fast(arm). “We now pass into a new realm of the unimaginable where our intuition fails,” expostulated the expansive short(arm).
At relativistic speeds, kinetic impact becomes a cosmic ray shower.
Visibly, Alpha Centauri began to creep across the glittering heavens toward Man-sun. The stars shimmered unnaturally through the strengthening polarizer field. Long-Reach, as “honorary” Weapons-Operator, busied himself with a simple project. He removed cameras from missiles. Then he built two makeshift warheads out of bottled oxygen and half their water rations and a few grams of tungsten-carbide grinding powder from his toolkit.
The Flayer-of-Monkeys was well equipped with sensors. Seventeen hours from their rendezvous it began to pick up the ramscoop which had an “apparent velocity” of 120 lightspeeds. Electronic amplification constructed a foreshortened image. The scoop was gone. That was a shock. Trainer-of-Slaves thought, at first, that it had been “burnt-off” during the close flyby of A-star, but when he had the Flayer’s data-link rotate the image to a side view, he saw that the funnel was simply folded-in to a vastly reduced scoop area so that its magnetic field was being used only to protect the crew. In the high mass regions around Alpha Centauri they had simply “furled their sails”!
From a standstill, Flayer aimed and directed its missiles down the line-of-flight toward the oncoming UNSN ramscoop which was now occulting Man-sun. The makeshift warheads bled a lethal mist of oxygen and ice-coated tungsten. Then Flayer moseyed down the line, away from the ramscoop, bleeding its helium coolant, its cabin nitrogen reserve, plus a bottle of argon—and
for good measure the talcum powder that Kr-Captain used to bathe his fur. They returned at full acceleration, stopped, rolled and dropped to the side, rotating to face the coming action. Trainer-of-Slaves mounted the salvaged cameras.
“All they have to do is dodge!” complained Kr-Captain, who was an expert at sixty-g maneuvers.
“They are blind in front. Their course is laser-true. Do you know how much lateral-thrust energy it would take to deflect them a whisker’s breadth? They don’t command that kind of energy. They are committed!”
The Heroes strapped in to do the warrior’s greatest duty—wait.
Half an hour later the nameless ramscoop, its mission still a mystery to its attackers, zipped by, moving faster than any explanation can describe what the eye saw.
The first missile missed.
The second missile ticked through an edge of the folded scoop, ionizing into a fireball genie that lashed a flaming arm out after the ramscoop—too late, too slow.
The ramscoop plowed ahead into the mist.
Valiantly the magnetic field tried to cope with the overload but wasn’t equipped to handle the dust or the oxygen. Superconductors overheated. Electrical resistance began to vaporize the surface of the scoop…
Meanwhile hydrogen and oxygen and tungsten, helium and nitrogen and argon, even talcum powder, were ionizing on impact to become tiny superdense nuclear projectiles sleeting through what to a nucleus is mostly empty space: the bulkhead, the air, the life support, the instruments, the protein, the fusion engine, hardened lead-tungsten radiation barriers, everything and on out to the other side, leaving behind ionized trails as spoor.
A few of these “cosmic rays” collided with the relativistically massive nuclei of the ramscoop, scattering, smashing nuclei into a spray of particle fragments. Mesons flashed into gamma rays and gave birth to muons. Muons lived out their leisurely lives and died. Positrons blinked into existence. Anti-matter screamed out of collisions. Wildly exotic nuclei spat out particles in a desperate search for a new equilibrium. Neutrons bounced and bled into space.
But it was the energy of the stripped electrons that destroyed the monkeys’ ramscoop. The ship was essentially transparent to the impacting nuclei—but opaque to the electrons. The kinetic energy of the electrons was instantly transformed to heat.
The flare blazed, then was gone at near lightspeed, doppler-shifting into the red. It had left them. Inertia is implacable. What is moving continues to move.
The UNSN vessel was destined to travel on through the universe as a dense cosmic ray packet, slowly disintegrating and falling apart from its contact with the interstellar medium, from collisions with gases and particles. Billions of years later, in some distant galaxy, scientists might note its passing as an increase in the cosmic ray count from some strange quadrant of the sky. There would be theories about the high metallic content of the rays.
On the return of the Flayer-of-Monkeys to the Sherrek’s Ear, they learned of the ramscoop’s mission—a bombing run. From a great distance it had launched precision pellets at specific targets. The relativistic pellets carried the wallop of a nuclear blast.
UNSN spoor was dated and their gunner’s accuracy terrible. Whole areas of the arctic zone had been blasted without a single kzin or human casualty because there was nothing there. One lucky hit on a kzin base had killed four thousand Heroes. The human-beasts had taken gruesome casualties, only five percent of which were military related. A miss had impacted the ocean and created a tidal wave that had rolled over four seaside communities.
Kr-Captain was furious. “Why didn’t we get it before it attacked!”
Alas, warriors were always reminded of the fortunes of war. Only the Black Prides carried the really long distance detection equipment. Both the Tigripard’s Ear of the Fourth Black Pride and the Patriarch’s Nose of the Fifth Black Pride had detected the ramscoop two days before the Sherrek’s Ear had sniffed the electromagnetic scent, but each was almost two light-days from the line-of-flight. By lightbeam they didn’t have time to warn Alpha Centauri, and by their fastest fighters, they didn’t have time to intercept. The ramscoop was following too closely behind its own electromagnetic arrival notice.
Sherrek’s Ear, though it was behind Alpha Centauri, was stationed only eight light-hours from the line-of flight. Even then, interception would have been difficult had the Flayer not been out on a maintenance run in the right direction.
Grraf-Hromfi gave a diagnostic lecture. Think before you leap. Never underestimate an enemy. He was furious at himself for assuming that no ramscoop could fly faster than half lightspeed. He was so furious that he set up a whole day of tournament to clean his liver of rage, taking on all comers.
Only months later they learned the covert mission of the ramscoop when Chuut-Riit was assassinated.
CHAPTER 20
(2420 A.D.)
Detection-Orderly-Two summoned Grraf-Hromfi immediately, rousing him from a curled sleep. Hromfi was not the kind who made life miserable for warriors who interrupted his rest. A Hero on duty had the obligation to wake the dead if he felt it in the interest of the Patriarchy. The Commander of the Third Black Pride appeared at the Command Room, naked in his copper red fur except for slippers, grumpy, but not angry.
Analysis began promptly, without preliminaries. The small object had appeared in the heavens out of nowhere, near Rh’ya in the House of the Fanged God’s kzinrretti—the Pleiades. Only light-hours away. Very anomalous gravity pulse. That had set off the alarms. It was also a neutrino source.
Another strange event.
The Third Black Pride was up to full strength. Its Commander ordered a discrete reconnaissance probe. If the mystery pulse came from a small ship, he wanted it captured for interrogation. Quickly. And not destroyed.
Instantly, he chose for the mission three pilots he could trust: the first an old warrior with gray in his pelt who had flown Scream-of-Vengeance fighters for Chuut-Riit since he was a kit, the second a wild-eyed Hssin barbarian who liked to pick the meat out of his fangs and comb his mane before he leaped, and the third, Grraf-Hromfi’s most promising son.
They, in turn, were shaken out of their sleep. Each hastily donned goggles so that he could receive his orders. “The intruder is to be disabled, not vaporized!” growled their Commander. “And while I have your attention: a warning.” He shifted into the menacing tense of the Hero’s Tongue to jolt their livers. “Our instruments tell us that this object appeared out of nowhere. Instruments can be deceived. The best kzin minds can be deceived. However, regardless of how irrational the concept, expect the object to defend itself by vanishing into nowhere. Attack without warning! Disable it immediately! Prisoners are to be taken! If it is an automatic ship, the brain is to be salvaged!”
While the three crews scrambled, he called ahead to make sure that Fighter Command was ready to equip them with Screamers modified by Trainer-of-Slaves. He wanted them to have whatever edge he could supply.
Grraf-Hromfi’s nose was beginning to sniff the oddness of an alien technology lurking about. On the borderlands of the Patriarchy that could be extremely dangerous. But how to put these enigmatic pieces together? He thought of the wooden puzzles of the kzin Conundrum Priests of W’kkai. Eight ways there were to put any puzzle together, and seven of those ways always left an awkward shape protruding.
In the meantime, decisions never waited for a finished puzzle.
How had that unnaturally fast ramscoop dropped off agents? No obvious mode of deceleration suggested itself. At an incoming velocity near lightspeed any agent would have carried the energy of a continent-smashing bomb; the energy from any kind of capsule-braking would have been observed. And how had they penetrated Chuut-Riit’s security to juggle creche feeding procedures so that Chuut-Riit had to face his own ravenously hungry sons behind locked doors? It seemed like magic. Of course it wasn’t.
But now—an unauthorized ship that wrote its own unique gravity pulse. Could it be that the ramscoop hadn’t delivered the a
gents? Was there a new player? He remembered Yiao-Captain’s visit and his infectious insistence that they point their long distance antenna toward a possible “alien” artifact. Another orphaned piece of the puzzle that “protruded.”
This was indeed a time of troubles. After the launch of the three Screamers, Grraf-Hromfi brooded briefly on the other troubles while he did his warrior’s duty, waiting…
…troubles enough to incline Grraf-Hromfi to leap off for Man-sun immediately and let these slashing Wunderkzin rip their own faces apart. Octals of the kzin nobility, who had been chafing under the rule of the outsider Chuut-Riit, had seized the assassination as license for them to seize power. Traat-Admiral’s claws had been busy with duels. Political chaos.
Regrettably, border barbarians were uneducated in honor! They thought of duels and Ascendancy as honor. They thought of death as Opportunity. They knew nothing of the honor of Loyalty After Death.
Leaving them to their own murders was a warm, meaty idea, but impractical. The Fifth Fleet needed Wunderland as its supply base. They couldn’t use Hssin. It was extra light-years away and Hssinkzin were all related by blood and warrior oaths to the original Centauri Conquest Heroes anyway.
The ramscoop attack, itself, had done little damage—but it had brought hundreds of honest slaves to a state of feral defiance. Now open defiance was spreading like a plague as the squabbles among the kzin became public knowledge. Ferals had even attacked the Gerning base from space and put its detectors out of commission for three days, long enough to land supplies for some of the renegade animals.
Grraf-Hromfi was in a bad mood because he was just back from a political tour of Wunderland estates. He had picked the most obsequious of the power hungry back-stabbers first, cleverly led them to state the claims they believed to be true, challenged them to a duel for false claims, and killed them. After three such contests of honor, the rest of the Wunderkzin learned more quickly the value of careful reason. The power hungry always made the same mistake—they built their True Case, the case they were willing to defend in public, upon false logic.