The Man-Kzin Wars 11 mw-11

by Hal Colebatch

  “So it begins, perhaps,” said Rykermann. Now, with Leonie's hand in his, he realized that he was looking at Dimity without hopeless pain and longing. Not because of what she had done, nor indeed because he loved her any the less, but because his love for Leonie filled his heart, suddenly, strangely, and with a depth and fullness he had never known before. She had been near death with him many times, but this time, watching her enter the Protectors' caves with only Raargh, as he himself prayed desperately over a console of screens, had been different.

  “Strange,” he said. “This was where it all began so many years ago. I had flown out here because the monks had sighted a strange creature, a big catlike thing that didn't fit into the ecology.” He remembered giving the strange orange hair he had found to Leonie, his graduate student, to dissect. Thinking of her as she had been in those days, he realized something else. Her walk was as it had been then, no longer clumsy.

  “So it begins,” echoed Colonel Cumpston, as he followed, escorting Dimity. His gaze wandered to Vaemar, resplendent in gold armor and shimmering cloak and sash of Earth silk, who, with Karan, Raargh and Big John, was pointing to one of the monastery fishponds. The juvenile Jotok he had helped save in Grossgeister Swamp were growing and joining. Orlando had fished one from a pond and was waving it playfully at Albert Manteufel. Don't pretend to be scared, Albert! Cumpston tried to telepath him. Don't pretend to run! But Guthlac's pilot was a veteran and knew better than to do any such thing. A growl from Raargh and a gesture at his proud new possession—a second ear-ring for his belt, there being no room for more ears left on the first—and the kitten snapped to attention. Another growl and warning cuff from Karan and the Jotock was restored to the water.

  “Hope. Perhaps joy. Perhaps, truly… peace. For this little world at least,” Cumpston said. As with Guthlac and Rykermann, many lines of strain and weariness seemed to have gone from his face. Reports from far-flung ships and bases were that the peace was holding. At this moment, for this moment at least, humans and the kzinti Empire were sharing a universe.

  The group of friends drew together. Vaemar drew Rykermann aside for a moment.

  “You love her, I know,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Rykermann. He had never heard a kzin use the word “love” before, and wondered what Vaemar's conception of it was. But he knew who he meant.

  “I think I understand,” said Vaemar. “I say that to you alone. Speak it to no other human. She has taught me a little of that… but she must go her own way.”

  “I know,” said Rykermann. They drifted apart in the flow of the company.

  Dimity had known Cumpston since her return to Wunderland eight Earth-years previously. He and Vaemar had made the counterattack that had relieved their desperately outnumbered group in the fight against the mad ones. But now it was as if she saw him for the first time: a hardened warrior and leader, yet a man whose kindness and patience had done as much as any to bring peace to this tortured planet. That unnatural blend of human qualities that made up the knight.

  The wedding party drifted through the monastery gates into the meadow spangled and starred with its multicolored flowers. Brightly-colored creepers covered the last few outlines of what had once been a refugee shantytown. Two pavilions had been set up, food laid out for two different feasts, and a couple of great kzin drums. There would be dancing later. Orlando and Tabitha were looking forward to that.

  Vaemar again approached Rykermann and Leonie as they walked. His eyes followed Rykermann's to Dimity, her hand moving to take the colonel's.

  “I know she had to do what she did,” he said. “I know more about the Pak, the Protectors, now. There was no choice.” He muttered something about a dream that Rykermann did not hear clearly.

  “We humans have come a long way from the Pak,” said Rykermann. “How far will we go? What will we become?”

  And then: “What will we all become.”

  “That, I think,” said Vaemar, “is a very good question.”

  Teacher's Pet

  Matthew Joseph Harrington

  I

  PLEASANCE: 70 Ophiuchi AB-I (A-II/B-V), located in Trojan relationship to its binary suns, Topaz and Amethyst.

  Orbital distance from either star: 20.8 A.U.

  Principal source of heat: geothermal.

  Gravity: .93.

  Diameter: 6510 miles.

  Rotation: 27 hours 55 minutes.

  Year: 12263 standard days.

  Axial inclination: ‹1°.

  Atmosphere: 39% oxygen, 57% nitrogen, 3% helium, 1% argon.

  Sea level pressure: 7.9 pounds/square inch.

  No moons. Discovery by ramrobot reported 2136, but existence concealed and colonization limited to families of UN officials until corruption trials of 2342-2355.

  Pleasance's crops are grown under artificial lighting, as natural illumination comes to about 0.5% of Earth's. The climate does not vary with latitude, and qualifies as warm temperate. Constant low-level vulcanism is found everywhere on the planet, both land and sea. Almost all of Pleasance's warmth is due to release of massive fossil heat by outgassing of carbon dioxide and helium; the carbon dioxide is taken up by native oceanic life with great efficiency. Local lifeforms are killed by excess light, however.

  The planet has the distinction of being the only known habitable world whose orbit is outside its system's singularity, so that ships may reach it within minutes after leaving hyperspace.

  As a result of its founders' propensities, Pleasance's culture is legalistic to a possibly excessive degree…

  Peace Corben's mother was this old: she had met Lucas Garner.

  The name had not been Corben, then, and the real name wasn't in the records Peace had found in Cockroach's computer. Possibly the old woman hadn't seen any reason to include it; more likely, given her paranoia, she'd feared its discovery by hostile parties.

  Like everything else she'd tried to be, Jan Corben had been a great paranoid. The ship was a fine example.

  It looked like a mining ship designed by a cube director. An old Belter drive guide protruded from a wallowing hog of a hull. The lifesystem seemed to be mostly windows. The cardinal points bristled with important-looking, redundant instruments. Some of the windows had curtains. It was ludicrous. It was all a lie.

  The “windows” were viewscreens, showing the universe whatever the pilot pleased. Most of the “instruments” were antipersonnel weapons with proximity triggers. The “drive guide” was a gamma-ray laser; the actual drive had come with the hull, which was that of a First War kzin courier ship. The gravity planer developed six hundred gravities—twenty times the limit now allowed by treaty. A little bubble in the nose and three behind the central bulge were all that showed of the real instrument packages, which were in four General Products #1 hulls to enable them to survive events that required the rest of the ship to use one or more stasis fields. There was a fusion drive, but it was for the oversized attitude jets. When acting in concert with the gyros, which were also oversized, they could turn the ship a full 360 degrees in any plane in 1.2 seconds, coming to a dead stop; faster for smaller adjustments, of course. This aimed the laser anywhere. There was a suitfitter in the autodoc; what the suit locker held was powered armor. All this had been accumulated over the course of three Wars' time, and consistently upgraded as technology progressed. The latest addition, barely older than Peace herself, was a top-of-the-line hyperdrive motor, custom-built by Cornelius Industries of We Made It.

  That last may have been a mistake. There were laws about product safety, and since you could more or less smooth out the convolutions in your brain thinking of what could result from a faulty hyperdrive, there was a strict schedule of warranty inspections. During one of these, some Helpful Citizen had apparently noticed one of the other features. The old woman had still been in Rehab when the kzinti bombed Pleasance.

  When Peace had stolen the ship—trivially easy, in the panic—her first act had been to go after her mother. Rehabilitation include
d work therapy, to the point where there were economically vital companies that would go broke if every law were obeyed. The camps were guarded and organized as thoroughly as bases for conscript troop training.

  Doubtless that was why the kzinti had bombed them so heavily.

  Peace was circling over Camp Fourteen for the fourth time, scanning for any rubble that might be loose enough to hold survivors, when it became apparent that the invaders had realized that their order-of-battle included no antiques. (The hull display had been altered to Heroes' Script that translated as something like Unthinking Lunge, a not-atypical ship's name. Probably curtained windows would have attracted attention sooner.) Cockroach's hull was coated with superconductor under the screen layer, but the lasers aimed at it were designed for planetary assault. It got very warm inside before Peace found the panic button.

  It was a good panic button. It had a routine for almost anything. Inundation by laser fire didn't even call up lesser subroutines.

  Cockroach turned on its head, the lifesystem went into stasis, and the hull became a perfect reflector. It was textured with optical corners. Most of the kzinti ships lost their paint and a little hullmetal before their lasers switched off, but the one nearest the azimuth was lined up with Cockroach's drive guide. The planer held the ship immobile while the stinger fired, and a stream of ultrahard gamma rays ran back up the beam coming from the orbiting flagship. All the oscillating electrons in the flagship laser's pulse chamber suddenly left it at relativistic speeds. Kzin weaponcraft was amazing, but it wasn't magic: the insulators blew, and dense random currents scrambled every circuit they touched—a category which included nervous systems. Survivors didn't suffer, as the effect opened the circuit of the stasis on the mirror at the back of the laser, and the gamma beam punched through into a fuel preheater. This opened a channel between the main fusion plant and a deuterium tank. After that—

  Well, there wasn't really a flagship after that.

  Peace didn't learn of the flagship's destruction until days later. She merely saw the ground leap up at her, then saw it further off and receding, then saw it much further off and receding a lot faster, obscured by a glowing smoke ring. (Cockroach had gone back into stasis to pass through the fireball.) More trouble followed, figuratively and literally.

  The portmaster at Arcadia had been unwilling to keep a fully-fueled warship at her field, and had had Cockroach's tanks drained. The ship could and did extract deuterium from ambient water vapor, but there wasn't much built up by the time of the attack, and the gravity planer was using that up right smartly. Fortunately—from the computer's viewpoint—there was an excellent source of very pure hydrogen barely a quarter-radian off the ship's present course. Unfortunately—for Peace's nerves—it was Lucifer: 70 Ophiuchi B-IV, a gas giant larger but less massive than Jupiter. Cockroach accelerated toward it for slightly over half an hour, leaving a fuel reserve that would have fit inside a coffee urn, and spent the next twenty-six hours and change in free flight.

  Torpedoes could have been upgraded to catch the ship; this was not even contemplated. The invasion's flag officer, who was now interacting with Pleasance's magnetic field, had been Hthht'-Riit, bravest son of the Patriarch. It was he who had come up with the plan of taking over remote human worlds first and working their way in, a strategy which might actually have succeeded if he'd remained alive to keep the fleet from making sudden lunges. As it was, the rest of the shipmasters didn't want the human pilot vaporized: they wanted “him” kept alive for as long as possible, while they expressed their extreme disappointment.

  It took seven hours of screaming and spitting to cram a fuel tank large enough into a 25G assault boat; kzinti do not work and play well with others. They were not stupid—less so with every War they lost—and they knew it had to be done if they wanted to flyby and yoke before the human could refuel. A 20G destroyer, say, could never have done it in time.

  The assault boat was closing the gap at three thousand miles per second when it finally got close enough to throw on a gravity yoke. The boat's radiator blossom instantly turned sheer white. Cockroach's gamma cannon was detected starting up, but this was deemed of far less concern than the heat-exchange situation: hitting at this range would have required a miracle, and not a small one. Humans simply weren't that good.

  They were notoriously demented. This one was no exception. The human ship wasn't on an atmosphere-skimming path, it was aimed for the center of the disk. By the time their velocities were matched, slowing the pursuer and speeding up the prey, no further effort could be spared to bring them together yet, as the boat was engaged in hauling them both aside to save the human ship's crew.

  Cockroach, aboard which Peace Corben had finished having conniptions hours ago, fired its gamma laser into Lucifer's atmosphere and went immediately into stasis. The shot heated a large volume to electrons and stripped nuclei, but did not suffice to ignite fusion. It took the impact, a few milliseconds later, of the relativistic byproducts of the gamma-generating blast to do that. The atmospheric fusion blast was brief, and didn't do much more than UV-ionize a tremendous volume of hydrogen around it, which expanded until it was cool enough to recombine. This created, then uncreated, a discontinuity about the size of Earth's Moon in Lucifer's magnetic field.

  When the electromagnetic pulse hit the assault boat, the superconductive pulse shielding expanded by internal repulsion until hull members tore it apart; then the overloaded gravity planer collapsed the boat to a point, which evaporated in Hawking radiation at once. The blast was seen on Pleasance.

  It was followed by the flare of Lucifer, in visible light, as Cockroach plowed into the contracting remains of the atmospheric fireball. The ship's fuel intakes were in stasis, as were the tanks themselves, and the local material was now heavily enriched in deuterium; when inertial sensors in the instrument bubbles detected a halt, indicating that the ship was as deep as it was going to get, the field on the tank intakes was flickered for just long enough for the pressure to slam them shut. The tanks' contents would be cooled and separated when things were less exciting.

  * * *

  A destroyer had set out immediately after the destruction of the flagship, had refused to acknowledge transmissions, and had been declared outlaw—largely as a matter of form, as its intentions were obvious. Gnyr-Captain and his crew wouldn't have cared if they weren't. They had sworn personal fealty to Hthht'-Riit, and considered their own lives to be over. All that remained was to finish dying, and they would do it like kzinti.

  They were still two hours from Lucifer when the human ship recoiled out of the atmosphere. Much of it came out of stasis, and the ship presently stopped tumbling. It cast about as if purblind (which it was, as three of the four instrument packages were now condensing metal vapor inside their shells), picked a direction, and shot away at six hundred gees.

  The outlaw destroyer could not spare the time for much of a ceremony: a minute or so to contemplate the ship's new name. This was less precisely transliteratable into a human language than most kzinti concepts, as it was less a word than an expression of feeling, sounding like some primordial red scream. It did have a meaning as a noun—it was the title of an ancient (pre-industrial!) mythical being, whom the gods sent to punish cannibals and those who claimed Names they had not earned. According to legend, the creature had been a kzin who had contradicted some god, and had been flayed alive and boiled in vinegar—but only after being made immortal, so he couldn't escape by dying. After torture he stuck to his assertions, so impressing the ruler of the gods with his courage and principles that they made him their instrument, granting him perfection of movement in battle.

  It may or may not have been a coincidence of etymology that led the ancient Greeks to give the name Eumenides, “perfect in grace,” to three figures of similar function, more properly known as Erinyes. The Romans, however, gave them the name by which they were most familiarly known.

  The Fury continued its pursuit.

  * * *

&nbs
p; Peace Corben knew nothing of this. The ship's computer hadn't noticed the destroyer, and hadn't been informative with her anyway. She did finally manage to get out of it the origin of the name Cockroach: it was an ugly little Earth insect, notorious for its ubiquity and its capacity to survive attempts to kill it. It didn't please her to be in a vessel with such a name, particularly one that acted like this one did.

  Peace would have been less pleased, if that were possible, to learn that the things were extinct.

  II

  Peace had been offplanet about twenty standard years back, to the research base orbiting Amethyst (which star still obstinately kept secret its reason for being a brilliant shade of theoretically-impossible purple). Supposedly she was there to gather material for her sociobiology dissertation on isolated communities; in fact, she was a rich kid playing tourist, and the staff had promptly put her to work programming the kitchen—which she became so unexpectedly good at (she'd never done it before) that the base autodoc had to constantly fiddle with everybody's thyroids to keep their weight down. She'd never been in hyperspace, though. Naturally she'd heard about its peculiarities, but now she still didn't get to experience them. A viewscreen will not display the Blind Spot. Consequently it wasn't the eerie experience she'd been expecting.

  As the ship was badly damaged, the computer was heading for We Made It. Once Peace had gotten it to tell her anything, she discovered that this was because crashlanders: A) knew everything any human being knew about repairing spaceships; and, B) were still paying the Outsiders installments on the purchase of hyperdrive, and could thus be reasonably expected to possess a certain moral flexibility about reporting cash customers to ARM agents. So the trip wasn't all that mysterious in itself, either. However, Peace had plenty to occupy her mind, because she'd gotten these tidbits by locating and decrypting the ship's log. It was a long read, but better than the first week of the trip—the autodoc had been treating her for cataract formation, triggered by the sharp transient acceleration the kzinti grav lock had caused before the ship compensated. (It had been terrifying. She'd never heard of cataracts before—the genes for them had been on the UN Fertility Board's list from the day it was started.)