by Larry Niven
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.
Detection-Orderly-Two appeared at the oval bulkhead door of the Command Center of the Sherrek’s Ear. “Sire! May I have your attention again?”
Grraf-Hromfi glanced up. The orderly mock-slashed his face sharply. “You look like you’ve just bested your father at arm-tug. Found something new? I hope not another of those objects.”
“No, Sire, not in this system. But I have something for you to consider, if you will, sir. May I use your data-link?” Without even waiting for assent, he switched on the wall screen and spat-hissed commands to the retrieval slavecrystal. Ribbons of telemetering appeared. “These are mystery signals which the Second Black Pride has been relaying to us from Man-sun for analysis. They started arriving about three months ago, off and on. We have never been sure that they weren’t noise, or the artifact of some instrument malfunction.”
“You’ve found something there besides noise?”
“Yes, sir! They all have the same signature as our mysterious visitor. I did a comparison. It came out at the seven-eighths confidence level—excellent, considering that the signals we have are only whiskers above the noise jiggles. The Patriarch’s Nose has been seeing what we have been seeing—but just inside their maximum range.”
“And 4.3 years ago,” muttered Grraf-Hromfi. “We must never forget the lightlag. A lot can happen in five years. The Fifth Fleet has doubled in that time. Who knows what cunning they have been up to at Man-sun.”
“What do you think the mystery object is, sir?”
“A scout.”
“Do you think they’ve found a way to travel at lightspeed, sire?”
“We’ll find out. All detection squads are on full battle alert?”
“Yes, Sire!”
Grraf-Hromfi was now very worried. Was the pulse-object a visitor from Man-sun? He turned up the gravity in the Command Room so that he could pace. On impulse he called Trainer-of-Slaves for a goggle-to-goggle conference. “You paw around with those agonized shrieks-and-spits of demented mathematicians? Their water-hole tracks describing unified field theory?” The virtual image of Trainer-of-Slaves hung in the air like a ghost, fixed in position.
“Dominant Sire, I’ve inflicted some of that torture upon myself, yes. Do you want an opinion on that pulse?”
“What would this sudden appearance of mass mean?”
“You are suggesting that the pulse tells of the creation of mass out of nothing?” asked Trainer.
“Yes.”
“That’s impossible, sir. My opinion of the pulse…”
“Mate yourself to a sthondat! I didn’t ask your opinion, Eater-of-Grass, I asked what it meant!”
“To avoid your insults, I will tell you what you wish to hear. Any mass passing through the light barrier would appear as if it had been created out of nothing.”
“But this one wasn’t moving at relativistic speeds.”
“Light barriers can be stationary. I refer you to the work of Ssrkikn-the-Juggler: ‘The Event Horizons of…’ ”
“Yes, yes, yes. Can mass pass through an event horizon?”
“Mass pops out of black holes all the time but it can’t bring any information with it. Your faster-than-light ship would fry its occupants down to their unreadable parts. You couldn’t find out where they came from—not even the direction.”
“You think we’ll have a simpler explanation for this pulse?”
“I do, but my opinion is worthless beside your own, Lord Commander!”
“In a few days I may have the object for you to examine—if it doesn’t play hide-the-copper-penny with us, or worse, put us in cages for some alien zoo! In the meantime I suspect that our visitor may be from Man-home. I want prisoners. There may be injuries in the attack. You are our veterinarian. Take a Ztirgor with that autodoc Chuut-Riit gave you, and follow the attack force. Do not attack. Your only function will be to handle human casualties.”
Grraf-Hromfi broke the contact and lifted his goggles above his eyes. His ears were folded and buried, his lips trembling over fangs. He didn’t like to wait!
CHAPTER 21
(2420 A.D.)
The United Nations Space Navy Shark materialized at a radius of 335 AU, some 50 billion kloms behind Alpha Centauri—the location picked to keep them hidden from kzin eyes which might be watching Sol. There was minimal danger at this distance but UNSN Lieutenant Nora Argamentine was still filled with the dangerous excitement of her first combat patrol. She had a special reason for wanting revenge against the kzin.
“It’s looking okay, Charlie. Clear field,” she said. The detectors were in the green.
Charlie was captain. Prakit was hyperdrive engineer. The other two in the cramped cargo capsule didn’t belong. They were special forces, checking out the fate of the Yamamoto, silent, untalkative, to be dropped off in their tiny torchship if a closer approach was possible, their mission to kill Chuut-Riit if that ratcat had survived the attempt on his life by Captain Matthieson and Lieutenant Raines. Efficient killers.
Once she got her telescope operational they’d be looking at Wunderland. The Yamamoto’s relativistic pellets should have left marks perhaps not visible from this distance. They intended to move much closer, in stages.
Nora was not so sure that the Yamamoto had even passed through Alpha Centauri yet. It might still be hell bent on its mission, delayed by a patch of low density interstellar gas or a magnetic field breakdown or tanj knew what kind of trouble. The arrival time of a ramscoop was not highly predictable. Raines and Matthieson would be shocked by the level of technological progress since 2409. Wonderland might be liberated before they even arrived!
Prakit fussed over his hyperdrive unit, tuning it up for the next jump. Nora could turn around to encourage him, but there wasn’t room for her to help him. She reached out a fist and banged him affectionately on his helmet with her wrist, grinning at him because he was so sober.
“Betsy giving you trouble?”
“Naw, Betsy’s just a baby. If I feed her every four hours and bounce her on my knee, she calms down.”
Betsy was a new crashlander model and they were lucky to have her. We Made It had been in the hyperspace-shunt engine business two years earlier than Earth, having bought the technology from incomprehensibly alien spacewanderers. The quality of the product from Procyon was better than Earth’s—for all of Earth’s vaunted technological superiority—and the UNSN crews fought over every shipment from Crashlanding City.
This model could make the transition between relativistic and quantum modes in half an hour when it was fine-tuned. When it wasn’t fine-tuned, when Prakit couldn’t get the hyperwave functions of the atoms into the proper phase relationship, Betsy just wavered and whined and if you were looking at her you’d feel as if pieces of retina were peeling off the back of your eyeball. Prakit didn’t mind.
“She’s fastened down,” he’d say.
“If you guys need to stretch your legs just stick them up here!” Nora joked, shouted into the hold at the “special forces.” Argamentine was a good-natured woman who liked to take care of her men even if that wasn’t the style of military women. Her father had been fried in the Battle of Ceres during the Fourth Kzin Invasion when she was a teenager, and somehow she could never give enough love—or hate enough.
“We’ve got lots of room. There’s room for you down here,” said the first killer because there wasn’t.
“Are we there yet! Are we there yet!” cried the other killer.
Nora fixed her two commandoe
s ration crackers with a little smuggled Camembert, and passed her gift down the “hole.” “Don’t get crackers in your bed!”
Charlie and Nora spent more than a day between naps taking photos and scanning the volume of space they wanted to move to, about 50 AU farther in. Nora spent a few moments off duty just gazing at the Serpent’s Swarm through the electronic image amplifier. “God, Charlie, you’ve got to take a look at their Belt!” There was no hurry about tasks and no frantic priorities. They were making a very cautious approach. It took only about five minutes to move across 50 AU in hyperspace, but they didn’t want to jump into a nest of kzin, not when they needed a minimum of 30 minutes to set up another jump.
Sometimes she had nightmares sleeping in the cockpit. As a teenager on the Iowa farm-city she had imagined such a cockpit around herself at dusk while the stars rose above the trees, imagining herself killing kzin before they got to Daddy, wondering where he was, what he was doing out there—and if he was safe. It had been a nightly ritual, murdering imaginary kzin.
Charlie woke her up with a gentle nudge. “Bandits, at eight o’clock, twenty degrees high. Hey, Prakit, get us the tanj out of here!”
Lieutenant Argamentine was instantly awake and reading the flowing graphics on her screen. She asked her machine questions and the graphs changed in response. “Bandits coming in fast. The doppler reading shows a deceleration of sixty-four g’s. Three fighters. They carry the Scream-of-Vengeance signature. That’s the fighter that got my Dad.”
“How much time have we got?” Charlie’s voice was rapid-fire, impatient with chatter.
“Easy, Charlie. This is a different war. We aren’t fighting the last war. They are hours away and we’ll never have to engage them.” Daddy had had no choice—in a fighter with only a fraction of their maneuverability. “We have time for coffee and crullers.” But she was nervously straightening a strand of curly hair. “I used to play this game with my little sister when she was three. I’d let her almost catch me—then I’d disappear.” She turned around to smile at Prakit. “How are you doing?”
“I’m doing! I’m doing,” snapped Prakit.
The phase-change built up while Prakit counted off the minutes. They fell into a silence of suspense. War was waiting for those few seconds of action. “We love you, Betsy,” said Nora when she couldn’t stand the suspense any more.
“Shut up. Let Prakit work.”
The hyperdrive suddenly went into a vibration that built up over three seconds and then died. Prakit cursed. “She just reset.”
“Plenty of time,” said Lieutenant Argamentine.
“I’m going to take five to make an adjustment. We don’t want Betsy to burp again.”
Charlie was thinking of defensive action now. He rolled the Shark so that the jet of its piggy-back torchship was pointed toward the Screamers.
“It won’t do any good,” said Nora. “Those devils are maneuverable enough to get out of the way of anything.”
Charlie called down to his special forces. “We’re under attack. Get ready to fire the torch. When I call for fire, fire!”
“We’re going to be out of here!” said Prakit.
This time, as the phase-change built up, nobody broke the silence. Nora stared at the engine even while the sight of it started to “peel” the rods off the back of her eyeballs. Go! she prayed. But the Shark stayed suspended, agonizingly. Too long.
Betsy shuddered and reset.
“I should rebuild her,” said Prakit frantically.
“You had all day!” snarled Charlie. “Time?” He was asking Nora how much time they had to live.
“They’re still decelerating. Looks like a boarding. If they decide to take us alive, Betsy will have time. If they decide to make a fast pass, we are dead meat.”
“Suits sealed,” said Charlie. He meant helmets and gloves. They were already wearing airtights under their uniforms.
“Can’t!” Prakit’s voice was frantic. “I can’t afford to be encumbered. I’m taking her up manually. I can shave off minutes that way. I can keep her in the canyon. I’ve done it before. The autoguide has been hitting the walls. Shouldn’t happen.”
They began a third countdown. “Can we do a short tunneling?” Charlie was looking for straws.
“Doesn’t work that way. Don’t talk to me.”
They waited. Again. Finally Charlie could wait no more. “Attention. All crew. I’m arming the self-destruct.” If they got into hyperspace, each officer knew how to deactivate it before it blew. If they didn’t…
They waited. The kzin continued to close.
“Down below. Get your torch primed.” Charlie turned to Nora. “You and I are going to practice keeping our ass aimed at the kzin.”
“There are two bandits coming in. One is doing a boarding maneuver, the other seems to be setting up a fast flyby.” Nora twisted that ringlet of hair with her free hand, then found she needed both hands for her combat duties.
“And the third?”
“Hanging back. He’ll be able to board or kill.”
“We’ll practice wiggling our ass between the two lead Screamers.” The Shark began to oscillate between two points—the aiming precision-controlled by the ship’s computer.
They waited.
“We’re going to make it,” Prakit said, calm certainty in his voice.
“Fire!” screamed Charlie to his torchmen.
Fire blazed out at the dancing kzin, seeking while the Screamers avoided. The countdown continued.
A lurch as the torchship was blown away. Nora saw it cartwheeling across the heavens before it detonated. A moment later the cabin took a hit. She didn’t see Prakit sucked into space, helmetless. Her faceplate was triggering to opaque on cue from the explosive glare while actinic light burned the unshadowed half of her uniform. In the instant of death’s visitation she saw, not the father’s battle doom which had, until now, never left her mind, but a baby sister running toward her with ruffles around the bottoms of her tiny pant…
* * *
The Hssin barbarian had already flashed past. The second Screamer dropped from 60 g’s down to a fraction of a g and was only nudging the alien object as the old warrior jumped out with a backpack into the hole that had been opened for him. He knew what he was looking for, but it took him precious seconds to find it. He slapped the backpack down. Its electro-gravitic vibrators cut a clean hole through the floor and the backpack disappeared at 230 g’s carrying an amputated hunk of the Shark with it. The battle-armored Gunner leapt into the cockpit with two airbags, and in a choreographed economy of gesture the old Hero and his Gunner each stuffed a body into a bag, and then hunkered down, waiting for the explosion.
Chuut-Riit’s warrior was grinning through his faceplate. “Maybe the acceleration killed it.”
But no—the destruct bomb lit up the underside of the Screamer and the wreckage of the Shark.
The engine was intact. Give that wild Hssin barbarian credit—he could shoot straight! While the old warrior was examining the salvage, Hromfi’s son drifted to within hailing distance. The veteran Hero made hand signals to Hromfi’s Son: Where was that laggard, Trainer-of-Slaves?
Double arm motions signaled back: On his way.
The Ztirgor rolled and locked onto the bottom of the old warrior’s Screamer. Its insides had been stripped out to accommodate the autodoc. The body airbags were delivered efficiently and opened. Messy. Trainer-of-Slaves had a choice. There was room for only one prisoner in the autodoc. He chose the man-male because he was a male, then changed his mind because the male was dead, space-boiled blood clotting a neck wound, half his back carbonized to the bone. The female would have to do—after all, the man-females were intelligent and information could be tortured out of them.
He didn’t know if the autodoc could save her. He slashed away the remains of the green UNSN uniform with his claws. He slit, and then peeled off, the airtights. Some of the melted flesh came with it. He didn’t know what to do with the bra, trying various t
echniques of puzzle-solving to unleash it, then in exasperation cut it off. The rest was easy.
* * *
The first time Lieutenant Argamentine rose out of her dark delirium she was proud that she knew exactly where she was—she was in the womb-like care of an autodoc. She could feel it all around her and, if she moved her right side, she could feel the needles and the jell. But where was the autodoc?
Memories were elusive. When she struggled with their vapors she saw corncobs cooking in their husks in a bonfire. That didn’t seem right. It was too distant. She saw a starving man in a red shirt selling cow dung. Damn! She wanted to remember yesterday! What had happened to her?
She struggled to remember where she was, almost getting it and then forgetting. General Fry! A flash! That was the right clue! The sudden jubilation of knowing. But then it all went away. All she could remember about General Fry was being caught naked in a space-hammock with him by a laughing Colonel who wrapped them around and around in their netted prison.
But that was it! Revelation! Sobs of relief! She was at the hospital in Gibraltar Base and the Shark had blown up trying to jump to Alpha Centauri. She faded back into delirium with a desperate need to tell her baby sister that she was all right, and when she woke up again she was talking to General Fry, not sure that the conversation wasn’t a dream, trying to convince him that he should still let her go out to fight the kzinti.
The delirium went away. The autodoc became more real. She could feel herself healing. She slept normally. She knew her life signs were good. They would open the box and talk to her. General Fry loved her and he would be there when they opened the box, tenderness in his flinty old eyes. Maybe not. Maybe just a nurse.
When the box opened it was a kzin face staring down at her, tall, massive, hairy, fangs as large as the wolf’s in Little Red Riding Hood. It was the first kzin face she had ever seen. She still remembered nothing.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the ratcat asked. “Ich spreche nicht sehr gut.”