by Larry Niven
Trainer thought frantically for a moment, scanning his memories. He damned his loose mouth. “I admit to that conversation, Sire.”
“That’s hardly necessary since I have an audio recording of it. The stories are true; you do have enemies, as my files will testify. They have made depositions unflattering to your bravery, but those reports were filed on Hssin. In the meantime those enemies you cherish so close to your liver, have forgotten you. In their memory you have impugned the efforts of those who sought to grant your self-seeking application to join the Blood of Heroes. Your application was accepted at all levels, even by those who disapproved of you. The ‘enemy’ you are so bitter about is Chuut-Riit himself.”
“Then I abase myself!”
“Shall I read to you what you said about this enemy? I particularly liked the one about him speaking with his anus and beshitting with his mouth.”
“I have made a grievous error!”
“Beshitted with your mouth, did you? Hr-r, but you will be sufficiently punished. You have come under my command by the orders of Chuut-Riit. That is punishment enough for any sin. I make Heroes out of kits. It is easier on me if you do all the work.”
“I volunteer immediately for any duty you may assign me!”
“Excellent.” Grraf-Hromfi pulled an antique flintspark pistol from a belt holster, and raised the goggles to his forehead, out of the way. “I prefer this to a wtsai knife,” he said wryly. “It gives me several octenturies over my opponents. That makes me feel modern.” Since the pistol could fire only one musket ball at a time, it had skull-cracking knobs on the barrel so that it could be used as a club. “Disassemble and polish my weapon while we talk.” He handed Trainer-of-Slaves a polishing kit.
“Yes, Sire!”
“Chuut-Riit has been building two fleets for the last three years, not one. The Fourth Fleet was a full attack unit. The Fifth Fleet, to which you are now an honored member by the personal order of Chuut-Riit, was conceived of as an elite seed. With the launching of the Fourth Fleet, the seed is being planted. The Fifth Fleet is to grow into a fully operational attack force—assimilating warriors and warships only as fast as they can learn its strict code. It will not be a loose confederation like the Fourth Fleet. Any breaks in discipline will not be tolerated.”
“Already I feel the juices of obedience in my liver, Dominant One!”
“Do you have questions?”
“Will we see action, Wise One? Or are we just a Fourth Fleet backup?” For a moment, Trainer-of-Slaves stopped his vigorous polishing of the ceremonial pistol.
“Let’s take an example. Your brazen friend, Ssis-Captain, takes what he wants and does what he wants. Once he has an idea in his head, he acts. If his ears are tickled, he acts. His liver stops at nothing. If it took his fancy to put a kzinrret in command of his bridge, there she’d be pacing about and purring!”
The ears of Trainer-of-Slaves had to be consciously immobilized as he polished. He was imagining their kzinrret in command of the Blood of Heroes.
“Am I not right about your friend?”
“Hr-r, absolutely!”
“Yes. And he has never commanded a ship in battle. He sees an enemy position and he takes it, right?”
“The Blood of Heroes has a valiant crew. They are totally loyal to Ssis-Captain.”
“What will his battle-lifetime be? An octal-day? Two if he’s lucky! Then again he may have no more than the time to see a monkey before he is dead and his ship, cooked meat. Chuut-Riit has assigned all such commanders to the Fourth Fleet. If they survive he may be able to teach them something. They may even kill a few monkeys. Perhaps not even that. What have the first three fleets of you outworld barbarians accomplished, you screaming berserkers of Hssin, you borderland ragpickers? Bloody nothing!”
Grraf-Hromfi was now stirred up enough to clutch his planning-surface. “Hr-r, perhaps you wild barbarians have been teaching the monkeys military strategy in your own cunning way, one fleet at a time, never making the problems harder than a monkey can solve? The next thing we know, you Imperial-border scavengers will be hiring man-beasts to do your fighting. Why waste the talents you have taught them? Put them in command of your warships!”
“Sir, you speak of my father, not me.”
“Hr-r, and you are different?”
“I admire firearms. This is a fine pistol, Sire. I believe I’m ready to reassemble it.”
“Picked it up on W’kkai. That’s where Chuut-Riit found me. We were both bored and listening to rumors in the marketplace to see if we couldn’t sniff up some action. I had just bought the pistol from an old warrior who needed the gold. Chuut wanted the pistol, too, being a collector of pre-space weapons. He swears that he added me to his retinue so that he can keep track of this pistol. Notice the mark of Kai, a famous forger for the Riits.”
“The Fourth Fleet will have glory with such a great weapons collector as Chuut-Riit.”
“You are clawing for fish? The flattery does not disguise your question. Let me be blunt since my position allows it. Chuut-Riit is not the leader of the Fourth Fleet. He is here, mere light-days away, sitting in a palace on Wunderland. You can have no idea of the difficulties he has had in trying to shape Fourth Fleet discipline. Every border Hero thinks of himself as Heaven’s Admiral ripe to pillage the wealth of the unexplored frontier. The Fourth Fleet is a fleet of admirals!”
Hromfi was raving again. “And let me tell you something else, youngling. It will be Chuut-Riit who will be taking the Fifth Fleet to Man-sun as his personal armada. That’s where his confidence lies. But we won’t be stalking that path of victory until he is certain that both you and I are ready. I am ready; you are not.”
“I am instantly ready to take any assignment!” Eagerness flamed.
“Hr-r, now. Finish the pistol first. I keep even the flint ready to spark, so test that.” He checked the weapon, then returned it to Trainer-of-Slaves. “It must have been a cramped journey in the Ztirgor. Take some rest. Then report to Duty-Sergeant at lights-on. We’ll have time to talk again. What else to do but exercise the Hero’s Tongue? We have heaven above and stars below and years of time. An interstellar warrior’s main duty is to wait.”
“Have I been dismissed, Grraf-Hromfi, Sire?”
“Not on this ship. Your duties never cease. You will, of course, take charge of maintenance immediately. But there will be many other tasks you will have to learn—besides the polishing of pistols. Correct communication protocols. How one coordinates an interstellar war. And we have fighter craft out here with the Sherrek’s Ear. You will learn how to defend a deep space base such as ours. Coextensively you will be learning sound military strategy. To cudgel that into your Hssin head, you will be teaching what I teach you, in turn, to my sons, a thankless and trying task, alas, for which I need help.”
“Is that all, Sire?”
“I detect a note of sarcasm in your hisses. No, that is not all. That is the beginning.”
“I look forward to your regime. In the end I shall become convinced that I am one of Heaven’s Admirals, a worthy goal for a Hssin barbarian.”
“Claw your face and begone—Eater-of-Grass.”
Trainer-of-Slaves took no notice of the insult for Grraf-Hromfi had spoken it with a purr. What could one’s liver make of it all? He was terrified of this old kzin battle-ax—but he wasn’t afraid of him.
CHAPTER 16
(2403–2404 A.D.)
The “unclawed,” as the new ratings were called, had to attend an irregular seminar given by Grraf-Hromfi. The texts, the simulations, the work sheets, the drills were based on Chuut-Riit’s Military Comprehendium, the complete collection of his works. The lectures, however, were pure Grraf-Hromfi. They were all based on the exhortation: “Think before you leap!” He had a thousand ways of drubbing that message home as if he despaired of it being received.
Sometimes he used it to deliver a warning. The day he received Chuut-Riit’s final report on the Third Fleet, he paced his students through
that defeat, what was known of it.
On the screen he pointed, here, where Kgiss-Colonel had been left without reinforcements because the impetuous Warriors of the Right Arm had found their own irresistible target. The pointer moved to the details of the ancillary battle. Hindsight showed that the two monkey torchships had been both a decoy and a trap for valiant—and overeager—Heroes.
Grraf-Hromfi called other engagements to the screen. Ordnance had arrived at the battle of Ceres when there were no longer any functioning warships to be supplied. Since the warships were already derelict, no warriors rallied to defend the late-arriving kzin freighters. It was a recipe for massacre.
Further sunward, against orders, the Second Maintenance group had found, and enthusiastically attacked, a target of opportunity. They were not equipped to blitz a major laser battery and were so crippled by the attempt that they lost the capacity to refit damaged Scream-of-Vengeance fighters—their appointed assignment. Without fighter cover, the Victory-at-Swordbeak’s-Nebula was destroyed by a suicidal squadron of Darts.
“Think before you leap,” Grraf-Hromfi admonished the Heroes who had died in those battles. His was the funeral voice of a father reprimanding the corpse of an arrogant son.
Trainer-of-Slaves had been all too willing to leap aboard the Fourth Fleet. He recalled the carbonized Gunners of the Third. Whatever flesh hadn’t been burned had been mummified by space during the desperate journey home. The images were vivid. Fangs grinning through fried face. The black ash of fur along a pair of legs. Yet each of those Gunners must have had his ambitions of liveried slaves, of estates on the pampas of Central France or on the great steppes of England. For the first time Trainer-of-Slaves felt a real contentment with his own simple, unexotic servants.
And sometimes, when he was in a bad mood, Grraf-Hromfi used the practical arts to illustrate his motto.
With gloved claws, he took his seminar group into the tournament ring. None of the young kzin could touch him while the cameras were active. He always drew them into a fatal move and then stopped the fight for review. Full-sized slow-motion holos of the contest flickered in the ring. The master’s pointer jabbed at the swimming image of his last opponent with caustic comment.
“By launching his assault from here, he gave me too much time to react. Look at my feet anticipating. He can’t change his trajectory. Here—keep your eyes on my feet—I’m braced for the attack and”—the pointer whipped upward—“see my arm coming to grab his wrist? There, I’ve got it, and all I do is flick him around his axis just enough so that his own feet trip him when they touch the ground. Three seconds later he is dead.” Grraf-Hromfi cuffed the young loser while the youth’s holo image leisurely impacted the mat. “See? Think before you leap! Develop your brains beyond the level of a sthondat ganglion!”
And sometimes Grraf-Hromfi used the dry rhetoric of formula to hammer home his motto.
The Sherrek’s Ear was the nucleus of the Third Black Pride that was to go out with the Fifth Fleet. What was a Black Pride? Black was space’s invisible color. Grraf-Hromfi scratched his nose with a claw. That was a sure sign that he was going to hold their ears for hours explaining, in detail, how every action-of-the-moment had a future consequence. Yes, he would repeat it again and again. Warriors who won battles could actually smell consequences, could read the spoor of distant consequence in current events.
What startled Trainer-of-Slaves was the depth of Chuut-Riit’s long-term planning. Two stripped-down and experimental Black Prides of the Fifth Fleet had preceded the Fourth Fleet to Man-sun. They would stand in place to assess the coming battles from two positions at distances far greater than the aphelion of Neptune. If the latest armada met with valorous defeat they alone would remain, undetectable, monitoring the electromagnetic fetor of man’s activities, photographing the solar planets, mapping the asteroids, waiting … brooding the ultimate avenging strike.
Kzin equipment was competent to find large defensive systems. Grraf-Hromfi showed his students what the Sherrek’s Ear could do from such a distance. He had photographs of ships docking at Tiamat in the Serpent’s Swarm. He showed them street maps of Munchen, fuzzy but readable by a trained hunter. He played for them an overlay composite of the fusion power station at Wunderland’s Wachsamkeit, done in twenty frequencies from gamma to ELF.
Think before you leap.
Before the Fifth Fleet attacked, five full-strength Black Prides would be girding Man-sun at distances too great to be observed without already knowing their location, unreachable by torchship even if detected—each a fallback and resupply base for a sustained operation, each a spoor gathering center.
Grraf-Hromfi outlined two main flaws in the previous conquest attempts (1) local logistics dependent upon pillaging the fruits of the battlefield, and (2) long-distance logistical support which was nonexistent.
The Black Prides were designed to serve local logistic needs. A Black Pride was to comprise: (1) a communication ship such as the Sherrek’s Ear, (2) for defense, a Carrier and its litter of Scream-of-Vengeance fighters and Ztirgors, (3) a combination manufacturing ship and floating drydock which could tool up for—and build—any spare part within hours, (4) four fast ships to mine the comets, (5) a warehouse, and (6) a hospital ship. The antenna was to be assembled by replicating robots after arrival. Prefabricated and expendable rest-and-exercise modules were to be built in the case of a protracted battle.
Long-distance logistic support was to come from Alpha Centauri. For a full six years Wunderland and the factories of the Serpent’s Swarm would be launching a monthly convoy of supplies and hibernating warriors, divertible either for battle or occupation use.
But talk and diagrams never really reached the liver of a kzin warrior who had survived the quarrels of youth. Sometimes, to teach what he had to teach, Grraf-Hromfi called in a student to assign special duty. Then he would repeat his motto, sotto voce, flicking his tail leisurely. There was always a trap in such duty, some hidden factor to waylay the over-hasty. Doing was learning. A brush with death stimulated thinking.
Grraf-Hromfi turned over the education of his sons to Trainer-of-Slaves. The sons learned little. Trainer learned how to anticipate lethal pranks. He even had to kill one of the fiends. The Conquest Commander did not reprimand him for that. It was the first trophy he had ever earned for his belt.
Over the next few years the primary duty of Trainer-of-Slaves remained—to train Jotoki for Pride maintenance as the group built up to strength. Pre-transient Jotoki were shipped out to him from Fortress Aarku. He took each one of them through their parent fixation, and when they were trustworthy, he introduced them to the simulators.
It was difficult to remain aloof from his creatures. He couldn’t talk to them about their history or about military strategy, but they were so curious that they often tricked him into conversations he didn’t know he was having. One of his charges he found skittering jerkily across a forbidden corridor on his second elbows; a shoulder eye was following an insect with great puzzlement.
Another eye caught the appearance of Trainer. “Master. What is?”
“An insect. Probably from Wunderland, and wondering how it got here.”
“Alive or machine?”
“It’s organic, like you or me.”
That took Trainer-of-Slaves into a discussion of the differences between the reproductive cycle of life and automated factory production.
His Jotok charge wanted to know if machines were “made up” in the imagination.
“Of course.”
“By us?” He meant intelligent life, including kzinti.
“Of course!”
The Jotok scratched his undermouth and wondered about the mind that had made up the “assembly book” for kzin.
They had to retire to the arboretum to handle that one, Trainer-of-Slaves gently bringing the virescent insect with him. Mellow-Yellow gave his lecture on evolution to a rapt audience.
“How did I evolve?”
And there they w
ere, right up against Jotok history.
One time when he was playing cards with Long-Reach they were discussing the marvelous estate they would have together after the conquest of Man-home. Long-Reach asked him about the forests of Earth.
“How different could they be from the forests in Hssin?” countered Trainer, looking through his hand for the ace of clubs.
“Will the Conquest burn them to charcoal?”
And there they were, right up against the subject of military strategy. Conversation was spherical—no matter whether one headed north, south, east, or west to avoid a subject, one always navigated right into it.
CHAPTER 17
(2404–2409 A.D.)
Over the years Grraf-Hromfi honed his force, expanded it. The shipyards of the Serpent’s Swarm were busy. Gradually, he acquired the warcraft he needed to bring the Third Black Pride up to strength. He ran the Pride as if it were actually in place above Man-sun. Perhaps his Heroes spied on the Wunderland Admiralty for fun, but they listened to the fading broadcasts of the Fourth Fleet with disciplined seriousness.
Once they received their floating drydock, the duties of Trainer-of-Slaves multiplied. Grraf-Hromfi did not trust the monkey workmanship of any Alpha Centauri-built ship or weapons system. He had his maintenance staff check everything, sometimes rebuilding to tighter specifications. It was exhausting work for Trainer. By necessity he learned the customs of the naval architect. Eventually he just gave up, found ways to delay the overhauling—and trained more Jotoki to do the work for him.
At other times there was no real activity at all. He filed reports and played cards. He sniffed for trouble. During one of those lulls he learned to fly a Scream-of-Vengeance fighter. That was safer than dreaming about Grraf-Hromfi’s harem. Dreams about kzinrretti tended to fill idle moments. Sometimes he was back in the Chiirr-Nig household on Hssin, in the study, with his mother’s loyal head in his lap, scratching her forehead. He regretted having to sell his sex-demon, Jriingh.