Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - III

by Larry Niven

  His tone softened. “Tyra, you sit in what we have left of our inheritance, our father’s and mother’s and ancestors’ heritage. Will you really throw it away?”

  “No,” she whispered. Her shoulders straightened. “But I will do what is my right.”

  Korsness was no Landholding, only a freehold, shared by the heirs. She had arranged to hypothecate her half of the equity, to pay for the charter. The agreement lay awaiting her print. In the odds-on event that Rover found nothing of monetary value, her income from the property ought to pay off the debt, though not before she was well along in years. It would have helped if Ib had joined in.

  Saxtorph didn’t feel abashed. He had a living to make. If Tyra wanted his capabilities this badly, why, her profession supported her. For his part, and Dorcas’, Kam’s, Carita’s, they’d be putting their necks on the line. Still, he admired her spirit.

  “Then best I say farewell,” Nordbo sighed. “Before we quarrel. I will see you in a few days, Tyra, and we will speak of happier things.”

  “I am not sure where I will be,” she replied. “I cannot sit idle while—It will be research for a new piece of writing. But of course I will get in touch when I can.” Her words wavered. “We shall always be friends, broder min.”

  “Yes,” he said gravely. “Fare you ever well.” His image vanished.

  The surf and the wind resounded through silence. After a while Dorcas said low, “I think that was why he chose to call, instead of coming in person as you asked. So he could leave at once.”

  They barely heard Tyra: “Dealings like this are hard for him. He knows not well how to cope with humans.”

  She sprang to her feet. “But I am not crushed.” Her stance, her voice avowed it. “I had small hope for better, after our talks before. Poor soul, he took more wounds than I did, and fears they might come open. I gave him his chance.” Louder yet: “We can proceed. Robert, you have told me very little of what you intend.”

  Dorcas cast a glance at her man and also raised her lean length from the chair.

  “Uh, yah, I s’pose we are on first-name terms by now,” he said fast, fumbling after pipe and tobacco. They had in fact been for a while, when by themselves. “I’ve had my thoughts, and discussed them with Dorcas, but we figured we’d best wait with you till the contract was definite. It is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, in all except our prints,” Tyra told him. “You have seen it, have you not, Frau—m-m, Dorcas?”

  Rover’s mate smiled and nodded. “I rewrote two of the clauses,” she said. “Evidently, next time you met Bob, you agreed.”

  “But what do you propose to do?” Tyra demanded.

  Saxtorph busied his hands. “A lot will depend on what we find.” He had explained earlier, but sketchily. “What Dorcas and I have drawn up is not a plan but a set of contingency plans, subject to change without notice. However, it makes sense to start by trying for that whatever-it-is that your father spotted. Presumably the kzinti ship got there, and what the crew found became a factor in determining what they did afterward.”

  “Have you any idea about it?”

  “None, really,” Dorcas admitted. “Your brother may well be right, it was a freak of no special significance.”

  “Except, we believe, Yiao-Captain thought otherwise,” Saxtorph pointed out. “And he got his superiors to agree it was worth a shot. Of course, from a human viewpoint, kzinti are natural-born wild gamblers.” He thumbed tobacco down into bowl. “Well, this is a secondary mystery. What you’ve engaged us for is to learn, if we can, what happened to your father. Yonder objective is a starting point.”

  Tyra went to a window and gazed out across sea and wrack. A burst of rain spattered on the glasyl. “You have mentioned intercepting radio waves in space,” she said slowly. “Could you get any from that ship?”

  “We’ll try. I’m not optimistic. Space is almighty big, and if a beam wasn’t very tightly collimated to start with, I doubt we could pick it out of the background noise after this many years, supposing we could locate it at all. Shipboard transmitters aren’t really powerful. But I do have some notions as to what the kzinti may have done.”

  “Ja?” she exclaimed, and swung around to stare at him.

  He got his pipe going. “What do you know about the Swift Hunter class?”

  “Almost nothing. I see now that I should have looked it up, but—”

  “No blame. You had a lot else to keep track of, including the earning of your daily bread and peanut butter. I remembered things from the war, and retrieved more from the naval histories in the Wunderland library system.”

  Saxtorph blew a smoke ring. “I don’t know if the kzinti still use Swift Hunters. Who knows for sure what goes on in their empire? Any that remain in service will certainly be phased out as hyperdrive comes in, because it makes them as obsolete as windjammers. In their time, though, they were wicked.

  “Good-sized, but skimpy payload, most of what they carried being mass for conversion. Generally they took special weapons, or sometimes special troops, on ultra-quick missions followed by getaways faster than any missile could pursue. Total delta v of about two and a half c, Newtonian regime. Customarily, during the war, they’d boost to one-half c and go ballistic till time to decelerate. Anything higher would’ve been too inefficient, as relativity effects began getting large. This means that they’d strike and return, with the extra half light-speed available for high-powered maneuvers in between. The gravity polarizer made it all possible. Jets would never have managed anything comparable. At that, the Swift Hunters were so energy-hungry that the kzinti saved them for special jobs, as I said. Obviously they figured this was one such.”

  “Nevertheless, ten years to their goal,” Dorcas murmured.

  “But in stasis, apart from standing watch,” Saxtorph reminded her. “Or, rather, the kzinti version of time-suspension technics, in those days. You can be pretty patient if you get to lie unconscious and unaging during most of the voyage.”

  It had been in Tyra’s awareness, of course, but she tautened and breathed, “My father—” Seen from indoors, she was a shapely shadow against the silver-gray in the window, save for the light on her hair.

  Saxtorph nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said around puffs. “Do not, repeat, do not get your hopes up. But it just could be. Bound back here with word of something tremendous—or without, for that matter—the kzinti captain catches a beam that tells him Wunderland is falling to humans who’ve acquired a faster-than-light drive. What’s he going to do? He’s got a half c of delta v left to kill his forward vector, and another half c to boost him to the kzinti home sun.”

  “But when he got there, he could not stop,” she said, as if against her will.

  “He might wager they could do something about that at the other end,” Saxtorph answered. “Or he might travel at one-fourth c and take about 120 years, instead of about sixty, to arrive. In stasis he wouldn’t notice the difference. But I doubt that, especially if he was carrying important information which he couldn’t reliably transmit by radio. And kzinti always do go balls-out. If he could not be recovered at his new destination, at least he’d die a hero.

  “Anyway, this is a possibility that we’ll investigate as best we can, within the bounds of due caution.”

  Once again, as on that evening in the tavern, Tyra stared beyond him and the room and this world. “To find my father,” shuddered from her. “To waken him back to life.”

  Dorcas gave her a hard look. The same unease touched Saxtorph. He rose. “Uh, wait a minute,” he said, “you’re not supposing you—”

  Tyra returned to them. Total calm was upon her. “Oh, yes,” she stated. “I am going with you.”

  “Hey, there!”

  He saw her grin. “Nothing is in the contract to deny me.” Grimly: “If you refuse, I do not give it my print and you have no charter. Then I must see what if anything the Navy will do.”

  “But—”

  Dorcas laid a hand over his. “She is determ
ined,” she said. “I don’t imagine it can do any harm, if we write in a waiver of liability.”

  “You may have that, but you won’t need it,” Tyra promised. “I take responsibility for myself. Did you imagine I would stay behind while you hunted for my father? Well, Ib does, so I suppose it is natural for you. Let him. If he knew, he might feel he must release the truth and get the authorities to stop us. As for me—” sudden laughter belled—“after all, I am a travel writer. What a story!”

  Saxtorph chuckled and dismissed his objections. She could well prove an asset, and would indisputably be an ornament.

  Dorcas stood pensive. When she spoke, it was so quietly that he knew she was thinking aloud. “In relativity physics, travel faster than light is equivalent to time travel. We use quantum rules. And yet what are we trying on this voyage but to probe the past and learn what happened long ago?”

  Chapter VIII

  When the kzinti drew Peter Nordbo into time, his first clear thought was: Hulda, Tyra, Ib. Oh, unmerciful God, it’s been ten years now.

  “Up, monkey,” growled the technician and cuffed him, lightly, claws sheathed, but with force to rock his head. “The commander wants you.”

  Nordbo crept from his box. He shivered with the cold inside him. Weight dragged at his bones, an interior field set higher than Earth’s. Around him, huge forms were likewise stirring, crew revived. Their snarls and spits ripped at the gloom. He stumbled from them, down a remembered passageway. His second clear thought was: What would I give for a cup of coffee!

  Noticing, he barked a laugh at himself. Full awareness seeped back into him, and warmth as he moved and unstiffened. Even in this his exile, eagerness kindled. Snapping Sherrek had arrived. What had it reached?

  Yiao-Captain waited in the observation turret. It was illuminated only by the images of the stars, he a shadow blotting out that constellation in which Alpha Centauri and Sol must lie. The light of their legions gleamed off an eyeball when he glanced about. “Arh, Speaker for Humans,” he greeted, brusque but not hostile, as in days that were suddenly old. “I know you are still somewhat numb. However, behold.”

  He turned a dial. A section of the view seemed to rush toward them. Magnification stabilized. Nordbo stood an instant dumbfounded, then a low whistle passed his lips. “What is that thing?”

  Against frosty star-clouds floated a sphere. Shapes encrusted it here and there, a dome in the form of half a dodecahedron, three concentric helices bent into a semicircle, several curving dendritic masts or antennae, objects less recognizable. The hue was dull gray, spotted with shadows filling countless pocks and scratches. Erosion by spatial dust, Nordbo thought dazedly, by near-vanishingly rare interstellar meteoroids, and, yes, by cosmic rays. How long has this derelict drifted?

  “Diameter about sixteen kilometers,” he heard Yiao-Captain say, using kzinti units. “We have taken a parallel trajectory at a goodly distance.”

  “Where is…the energy I detected…at home?” At home.

  “On the other side. We who were on watch in the terminal stages of approach saw it from far. It was what decided us to stay well away until we know more. Now we commence the real investigation. The first observer capsule leaves in a few minutes.”

  Already, before most of the crew were properly roused. Kzin style.

  Yiao-Captain’s fingers crooked, his tail flicked. “I envy that Hero,” he said. “The first, the first. But I must stay in command until…I am the first to set foot there.”

  In spite of everything, Nordbo was curiously touched, that the other should, consciously or not, reveal that much to a human. Well, doubtless Nordbo was the sole such human in existence.

  A question came to him. “Have you measured the infrared emission?”

  “Not yet. Why?”

  “Maybe whatever is inside that thing sends its output through a single spot. If not, if it emits in all directions, then the remaining energy has to go somewhere. Presumably the shell reradiates it in the infrared. But given the size of the shell, that must be at a low temperature, so it’s not readily distinguished from the galactic background.”

  “And the integrated emission over the entire surface will give us the total power. Good. Our scientists would have thought of it, but perhaps not at once. Yes-s-s, you will be useful.”

  “If the shell rotates—”

  “It does, on three axes. Tumbles. Quite slowly, but it does. We established that upon arrival.”

  “Then the bright spot would only point at Alpha Centauri, or any given star, for a short span of time, a few years at most. No wonder it wasn’t noticed before. Sheer chance that I did.” And condemned myself.

  A thump shivered through metal and Nordbo’s anguish. “The capsule is on its way,” Yiao-Captain said with glee.

  Nordbo understood. He had heard about the arrangement before the expedition departed. The intensity of the hard radiation here was such that nothing else would serve for a close passage. The screen fields that had protected the ship from collision with interstellar gas at half the speed of light were insufficient; near this fire, enough stray particles and gamma ray photons would get through to wreck her electronics and give the crew a lethal dose. Her two boats were laughably more vulnerable.

  Room and mass were at a premium in a Swift Hunter, but Sherrek carried a pair of thickly armored spheroids which contained generators for ultra-strong fields. Wunderlanders before the war had used them in flyby studies of their suns. The kzinti had quickly modified them to accommodate a single crew member; when dealing with the unknown, a live brain overseeing the instruments might well prove best. Besides an air and water recycler, life support included a gravity polarizer. It was necessarily small, its action confined to the interior, but at such close quarters it could counteract possible accelerations that would kill even a kzin, up to fifty or sixty Terran gravities.

  The capsule whipped through the magnified part of the turret view. Its metal gleamed hazy-bright, a nucleus cocooned in shimmering forces. Nordbo imagined the rider voicing an exuberant screech. It vanished from his sight.

  More sounds followed, quieter and longer-drawn. A boat was not thrown out by a machine; it launched itself. The lean form glided by on its way to a rendezvous point at the far side of the mystery. There it would seize the capsule in a grapnel field, haul it inboard, and bring it back.

  Yiao-Captain stared yonder. “What might the thing be?” he mumbled.

  “Artificial, obviously,” Nordbo answered, just as low.

  “Yes, but for what? Who built it?”

  “And when? It’s extremely old, I’m sure. Just look at it.”

  Yiao-Captain’s fur bristled. “Billions of years?”

  “Not a bad guess.”

  “The Slavers—”

  “The tnuctipun. They were engineers to the Slavers, the thrintun, you know, till they revolted.” And the war that followed exterminated both races, back while the ancestors of man and kzin were microbes in primordial seas.

  Yiao-Captain’s ears lay flat. He shivered. “Haunted weapons. We have tales about things ancient and accursed—” Resolution surged. “Aowrrgh!” he shouted. “Whatever this be, we’ll master it! It’s ours now!”

  Time crept. Nordbo realized he was hungry. Was that right? Why hadn’t grief filled him to the brim? He had lost his loves, twenty-odd years of their lives at least, and he felt hungry and ragingly curious.

  Well, but they wouldn’t expect him to wallow in self-pity, would they? Despicable emotion. Let him take whatever anodyne that work offered. He could do nothing else about his situation.

  Yet.

  It was actually no long spell until the boat, at a safe distance, snared the capsule. Although its screen fields had degraded incoming data, a shipboard computer could restore much. Transmission commenced at once. In minutes numbers and images were appearing on screens.

  Blue-white hell-flame streamed from a ragged hole in the shell, meters wide. The color was nothing but ghost-flicker, quanta given off by
excited atoms. The real glow was the gamma light of annihilation, matter and antimatter created, meeting, perishing in cascade after curious cascade until the photons flew free in search of revenge.

  “Yes,” Nordbo whispered, “I think the source does emit in all directions. The output—fantastic. On the order of terawatts, no, I suspect magnitudes higher than that. The material enclosing it, though, that is what’s truly incredible. It stops those hard rays, it’s totally opaque to them, damps them down to infrared before it lets them go…But after billions of years, even it has worn thin and fragile. Something, a large meteoroid or something, finally punched through at one point, and there the radiation escapes unchecked. Elsewhere—”

  “Can we make contact?” Yiao-Captain screamed. “Can we land and take possession?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to study, probe, set up models and run them through the computer. My guess at the moment is that probably we can, if we choose the place well and are careful. No promises, understand, and not soon.”

  “Get to work on it! Immediately! Go!”

  Nordbo obeyed, before Yiao-Captain should lose his temper and give him the claws.

  He’d been granted a comparatively free hand to carry on research, with access to a laboratory and the production shop, assistance if necessary, provided of course that he remained properly servile. On a ship like this, those facilities were improvised, tucked into odd corners, so cramped that as a rule only one individual at a time could use them. That suited Nordbo fine.

  First he required nourishment. He made for the food synthesizer. What it dispensed was as loathsome to the kzinti as to him, albeit for different reasons. Irritable at the lack of fresh meat, a spacehand kicked the man aside. Nordbo crashed against a bulkhead. The bruises lasted for days. “Keep your place, monkey! You’ll swill after the wakened Heroes have fed.”

  “Yes, my master. I am sorry, my master.” Nordbo withdrew on hands and knees, as became an animal.