The Man-Kzin Wars 11 mw-11

by Hal Colebatch

  Slightly before arrival, she got through the password system, and thus was able to use the hyperwave, to warn humanity of the onset of the Fourth Kzinti War. She then discovered that the panic program was still active. Cockroach responded to the content of the messages by turning around and heading for a place to sit out the war unobserved, incidentally adding two months to the voyage.

  Interstellar travel was turning out to be principally a pain in the ass.

  The autodoc was amazingly old, programmed for her rather hyperactive mother, built into the kitchen, and stubborn as gravity. Peace put on close to three pounds a week. She had to turn up the cabin gravity just to keep it from all turning to fat. And she couldn't keep it above twelve meters or the autodoc just turned down her thyroid.

  If Cockroach ended up picking a third destination, Peace was going to have no more contours than a bandersnatch by the time she arrived.

  * * *

  The Fury dropped out of hyperspace outside the Procyon singularity about forty-five hours after Cockroach had done so. There was a fleet. Fury returned to hyperspace for a few minutes of direction changes, then returned to normal space on a very different side of the gravity well.

  Gnyr-Captain growled wordlessly to himself for a while. The habit was probably annoying, but so far no one had had the blood to say so. Then he said, “Technology Officer, was our prey in that fleet?”

  “I believe not, Gnyr-Captain, but I am having the computer check my observation… All craft in that fleet are of human manufacture.”

  Gnyr-Captain growled some more. “Strategy Officer, do you judge that humans would include such a ship in a war fleet if it were available?”

  “Yes, sir,” was the immediate reply. “Anyone would. Should I expound?”

  “No.” The ranking of Strategy Officer was a recent innovation, and this one was always trying to demonstrate his worth. Gnyr-Captain wished for about the 512th time that he had a Telepath, then opened a channel. “Manexpert to the bridge.”

  When Manexpert had buzzed, been admitted, and come to attention, Gnyr-Captain looked him over. That was about all the examining anyone could do. Manexpert habitually breathed through his mouth to control his expression, and groomed with some kind of fabric cleaner to minimize his scent. It was enough to thin your blood sometimes—it was very like talking to a holo of a kzin, but a holo that could smell you. Manexpert had explained, when ordered, that he had adopted the appearance of harmlessness from the humans he studied, on the grounds that it made it possible to surprise and defeat a superior warrior. His dueling record supported this theory.

  “Manexpert,” said Gnyr-Captain, “our prey is not in this system. Could he have been less damaged than he seemed, and changed course in hyperspace?” Then he waited; such questions always took time.

  Manexpert's pupils dilated, his ears cupped, and his tail lashed. He stared at a spot on the bulkhead—which was in fact in about the same direction as the nearby star—and thought very hard for about two minutes, trying to think like a human. Then he resumed a more normal attitude and said, “Gnyr-Captain, regardless of his damage he did not know of our pursuit. If he had, by then he would have been terrified, so he would have attacked, taking advantage of his Red Age ship's superior acceleration.”

  “A reasoned response, made out of panic?” said Strategy Officer scornfully.

  “Humans do it often,” Manexpert replied, apparently unoffended. But then, who could know?

  “Why?” said Gnyr-Captain, startled.

  “I don't know, sir. I'm not sure even they know. My own theory is it's a way to be rid of the fear.”

  “Reflexively?” Gnyr-Captain said in disbelief.

  “It isn't a widely-accepted theory, sir,” Manexpert admitted.

  “Good—Why wouldn't he stay in their primary shipbuilding system, if he wasn't aware of pursuit?”

  “Because it's a very sensible place to go, sir,” Manexpert replied. Close study of human thought had gotten him a reputation for strange comments, but this one stood out. He saw his commander's expression and hastily added, “He would realize that a hunter would expect him to go to the safest place possible, and he would expect a hunter to arrive there whether he saw pursuit or not, and therefore would avoid that place. You see, sir, humans seem to have evolved intelligence in order to become predators, which gives them—”

  “If I want a lecture I'll catch a pierin!” Gnyr-Captain roared. “Where would he go instead?”

  “By this reasoning, the last place a human with his fur straight—urr, hmf—who wasn't mad, I mean, would want to go.”

  “What, Kzin?”

  “They're mad, sir, not idiots. Mostly. —I'm going to have to check my library to figure out just where that would be, Gnyr-Captain. Certainly someplace humans would consider dangerous.”

  “Go do it. Dismissed.”

  “Sir.”

  * * *

  Peace watched the line in the middle of the mass detector lengthen to nearly the edge of the globe before dropping Cockroach into normal space. It was her second approach to the system; her first had only been to use the gravity drag, since she'd been moving at over three percent of lightspeed when she dropped out. She didn't want to run low on fuel again. She didn't know how she was going to restore the ruined instruments, as the apertures for the shells were about a fifth of an inch across. The old woman must have made models in bottles for fun, sometime in the past.

  She switched on the instruction mike, and when the indicator lit told the computer, “We're there.”

  CONFIRMED, it replied. She had it use visual replies only, on a screen for one of the ruined instrument pods. It was less unnerving that way. Its voice sounded like her mother.

  “Great. Now where the puke are we?”

  EPSILON INDI SYSTEM, it replied.

  Peace growled, then muttered, “How am I supposed to find out what I'm doing here?”

  REQUEST THE REASON FOR THE CHOSEN DESTINATION, it told her.

  Peace stared at the screen for a long moment, intensely annoyed. If she'd been in the habit of thinking aloud, she could long since have… rrrgh! “Why was this destination chosen?” she finally said.

  EPSILON INDI SYSTEM WAS ABANDONED DUE TO FAILURE OF THE COLONY WORLD HOME, AND IS TOO DEEP IN HUMAN SPACE TO BE PRACTICAL FOR OTHER RACES. MATERIALS FROM COLONY STRUCTURES SHOULD BE MORE THAN SUFFICIENT FOR REPAIRS, AND TRACE ELEMENTS FOR SUPPLIES CAN BE ACQUIRED FROM THE ENVIRONMENT.

  “Why did the colony fail?”

  PLAGUE, ETIOLOGY UNKNOWN, BUT RAPID IN EFFECT. ONLY A PARTIAL WARNING WAS SENT BEFORE COMMUNICATIONS CEASED.

  “Nobody's tried to find a cure?” To obtain a whole planet?

  FIVE EXPEDITIONS ARE RECORDED SINCE 2360. THREE WERE UN ARM, ONE JINX INSTITUTE OF KNOWLEDGE, ONE WUNDERLAND INDEPENDENCE SOCIETY. NO SURVIVORS ARE RECORDED.

  “Didn't anybody think to leave someone in orbit?”

  ALL FIVE MISSION PLANS INCLUDED ISOLATED OBSERVERS.

  “Piles,” Peace murmured. Then she yelled, “So what's the point of being here if I can't go outside?”

  REPAIRS MUST BE PERFORMED IN A PRESSURE SUIT.

  “Pus.”

  * * *

  Epsilon Indi system had been colonized by flatlanders and Belters, but the Belters must have been malcontents or something: there wasn't a trace of asteroid industry. There were hardly any asteroids, contrary to what the ship's records said. Home itself had been named by consensus, but the right to name the other major bodies had been distributed by lot, and the first settlers must have been an odd bunch. From inmost to outermost, the planets were: Monongahela, Home, Bullwinkle, Rapunzel, and Godzilla. Peace was unable to find any explanations for these choices in Cockroach's memory.

  Home itself was… strange. The icecaps were a lot bigger than the computer's maps showed, and the coastlines were all screwed up. Why would there be an ice age? The primary wasn't contracting, the way that, for instance, Sol was. In the putative tropics, the coastlines were thick with jung
le showing no sign of habitation, but this cut off sharply—about where the old coastlines used to be, in fact. The interior was all but sterile—but well supplied with highways. There were circular lakes, ranging in size from big to absurd, sprinkled over the continents, and all of them had several big roads leading right up to their rims, connecting them to others. Some intersecting lake patterns had dozens of those leading away from them. What it looked like was, there had been a bunch of cities all over, and they'd exploded.

  Maybe they'd tried to stop the plague with fusion blasts? But then why was there an ice age? All that soot would reduce the planet's albedo and melt the icecaps. Anyone who went to school on Pleasance knew all about light absorption.

  Rot it. Peace deep-radared the crust, looking for refined metal she could land near.

  Then, incredulous, she did it again.

  There was no piece of refined metal larger than her fist within a quarter-mile of the surface. Whatever the research ships had landed with was gone, which was at least plausible if you assumed they'd taken off and died on the way back; but the residues of industry were absent too. There wasn't so much as a bearing from a groundcar down there, not even where city sites were under the ice. Outside the newly-exposed coastal areas there weren't even ore concentrations. Records said Home was supposed to be poor in ferrous ores, but they couldn't have built everything out of aluminum and brick, could they? And there was no refined aluminum, which meant either somebody had used it all for something, or there had been some amazingly corrosive rainfall here—like hydrofluoric acid, or a strong lye solution. Aluminum didn't break down by itself.

  There were no satellites in orbit.

  Nothing manmade on the moon, Indigo. (It wasn't. Who named these things?) No useful concentrations, either, which would have sidestepped the risks involved in landing on the planet.

  Peace grumbled and set the surviving instruments to performing a spectroscopic assay. If nothing else, there would be mine tailings. The last visitors had been two or three centuries back; metal reclamation technology had been stimulated considerably by the three intervening Kzinti Wars. She told the computer to map incidence levels of the elements needed for Cockroach's repairs, then had a nap—after it nagged her into taking another meal she didn't want, of course.

  When she got up, her first impression was that she'd instructed the computer wrong. She hadn't. According to the scan, the nine most essential elements—the Group VIII set—were distributed in three ways:

  First, there was a light dusting of them, all over the planet—except in the lakes, where there were only traces.

  Second, there were massive deposits in all river deltas—pre-glacial ones—and deep ocean trenches. Massive as in, kilotons.

  Third, there were five concentrations, of all nine elements, in the immediate vicinity of the former location of Claytown, where the spaceport had been. This was on a former river delta, so Peace decided to set down there—after wondering briefly why anybody would put a spaceport next to an ocean, which could potentially wreck it in minutes. (She dismissed the question, on the grounds that people who would blow up cities would do anything at all.) The five spots there also held concentrations of niobium and chromium—where five large supplies of hullmetal had been chemically separated, then scattered.

  She decided to be especially careful. The plague clearly did something to your brain.

  * * *

  In forty days of inactivity, morale aboard the Fury had plummeted. The crew slept a lot off duty. Some began grooming compulsively. Dueling had fallen off, and Power Officer had reported hearing one of his crewkzin apologize to another of equal rank. Gnyr-Captain didn't even have the comfort of nagging Manexpert, for he knew intuition was a hairless thing, curling up under pressure.

  Gnyr-Captain was exercising in his cabin, leaping across it with the gravity turned low. He didn't need that much exercise, but it ate time—and he'd caught himself wondering if his tail would look good tattooed… Someone buzzed, and he poised, turned the gravity back up, and grabbed a variable-sword in one combined movement. Could have been smoother, he noted. Getting soft. “Enter,” he said.

  Manexpert opened the door. “If I entered you might get ill, sir,” he said. It was a good bet; he wasn't clean. He was matted, too, and missing chin hairs where he'd been tugging on them. One of his ears was half-curled, and had a persistent twitch; and he—

  “What are you doing?” Gnyr-Captain exclaimed.

  “Sir? Oh, the tail. I thought fiddling with the end of it would help me think more like a human, sir.”

  “Humans don't have tails,” said Gnyr-Captain distractedly, disturbed at the sight.

  “I know, sir, but if they did they'd fiddle with the tuft.”

  “Why?”

  “They fiddle with everything, sir. —I have five possible destinations, Gnyr-Captain.”

  This was simultaneously annoying and a relief; he'd expected thirty-two or forty. “Name them.”

  “From most to least dangerous: first, he could return to his own system.”

  “Suicide.”

  “Just being thorough, sir. Next, the asteroid belt of Gunpoint.”

  “How is that dangerous?”

  “As the system nearest Sol it's ruled from Earth. There are rebels in the asteroids who want to overthrow the governors, and they'd want the ship, but they might save money by killing him and taking it.”

  That sounded remarkably sensible. “Humans would do that? They're usually so scrupulous in matters of trade.”

  “Not with each other, sir. In fact, the humans most concerned with dealing honorably with other species often treat their fellow humans like sthondats.”

  “Why?”

  “I've never even heard a theory, sir. It's one of those human things.”

  “Ftah. Proceed.”

  “Third is Fuzz. Fourth is Warhead. I judge them nearly equal in danger. I don't know whether human telepaths go insane on Fuzz; on the other hand, though Warhead is closer to Kzin, it presents logistical difficulties for invasion—”

  “I know about Warhead,” Gnyr-Captain said sharply. He had had ancestors there—might still have, in stasis. “Fifth?”

  “Home,” Manexpert said in human speech.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “A colony destroyed by an unidentified disease, which was still active during later visits. We may assume the prey has a pressure suit, and colony relics would include repair materials—”

  “He's there,” Gnyr-Captain said with certainty.

  “It is least likely, sir—I see, playing a double game?”

  Gnyr-Captain's ears cupped.

  “Human phrase, sir. Their strategies often—”

  “Manexpert,” Gnyr-Captain interrupted, surprising himself with his mildness, “go groom, and get some rest, and rinse yourself with that polymer solvent or whatever it is you like so much. But first tell Navigator where to find Huwwng—that world.”

  “Home, sir?” Manexpert enunciated.

  “Yes. I don't know how you can reproduce that monkey howling. Dismissed.”

  “Yes, sir. You get used to the taste after a few years, sir,” Manexpert said, and saluted, and closed the door.

  Gnyr-Captain squinted at the closed door for a full minute, trying to make sense of that.

  III

  Within a week of landing, Peace was sick. Not with the plague; with rage. She'd done the first repairs with parts in storage, then done a full rundown on ship's systems to see about cannibalizing anything redundant.

  The autodoc had a telomerizing subsystem—it could restore one cell's chromosomes to a youthful condition. It also had the capacity for full brain transplant. Which had been used. Repeatedly.

  She should have realized. Boosterspice will not restore fertility; Peace had “never met” her father because she never had one. She'd been gestated as a supply of spare parts. Her thyroid had been kept low to make her easy to catch. And what a funny pun her name was!

  Jan had
been sentenced to twelve years, and had been due out… about now, in fact. Peace was nearing the end of her fertility; Jan would have had to hurry to get her brain put into the spare in time to bear a replacement. The spare brain would be thrown away, of course, and Jan Corben would be reported as suffering a sad accident.

  It came to Peace suddenly that the kzinti invasion had saved her life.

  When she finally got her hysterical laughter under control, she was very calm.

  She thought.

  She called up the manual-operations checklist on the computer, started a test run, and while it was fully occupied did a physical disconnect between the overseer system and the airlock, the gravity planer, the fusion tube, and the autodoc. She resisted temptation: she used a cutting laser. An axe would have been less accurate.

  This done, she used a handheld computer to check the autodoc programs, and found that they were indeed not what the ship's computer had said they were. She found the programs used on Jan, copied them to crystal storage, and simply replaced the old crystals with the new ones. She traced circuit paths, found other storage media with programs inside, and destroyed them. Then she used the autodoc.

  When she awoke, the first thing she realized was that the kzinti would come looking for her.

  Repairs would have to wait. She needed weaponry. The computer would know everything that could be made from materials on hand; it could make a list while the autodoc made up a pressure suit. She'd have to get the parts fabricators outside.