Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XIV

by Larry Niven

  Persoff nodded, had a grabber bring in the final singleship, and said, “If we don’t mind dying before we see if we hit anything. When we came out of hyperspace we’d have hydrogen inside the ramfield, moving at a whisper short of lightspeed relative to us. Allowing for mass change, I’d say over a microgram within the ship itself. Secondary radiation from collisions should come to about half a million rads.”

  “Aw, crap,” said Conreid. “Here I thought I had a way for the fins to strike one last blow. I know Monstro would have wanted to.” Someone with normal empathy would have looked depressed. The astrogator looked really annoyed.

  “So where do we come to rest?” Persoff said.

  “Not real sure. There’s a little cluster of stars in that direction that we’ll have to pick our way through, and it’s hard to tell what’s beyond them. Old kzin charts we got in the First War don’t show any missions that way, probably because the stars are too blue to suit them. Captain, may I suggest we get those singleships back?”

  “I had intended to. What’s your reason?”

  “We can use the engines as laser cannon on the way back.”

  “Mr. Conreid, I like the way you think, but there’s every chance we’ll have to strip them for parts. The ramfield is just barely handling deflection, and we’ll be nursing it pretty carefully for the next twenty months.”

  Conreid nodded. “In that case, sir, we should dump the water as soon as possible.”

  “Less mass to decelerate, good thinking.”

  “That too, sir, but what I had in mind was smashing the crap out of anything in our way.”

  Persoff blinked. “Such as what, that the drive laser won’t vaporize?”

  Conreid spread his hands, palms up. “Such as whatever the Eva Peron ran into. Their matrix ionizer was as good as ours is, and they weren’t going as fast.”

  “Persuasive. All departments report.”

  One by one, he heard from everyone at their battle stations that the ship was intact and no further enemies were available. The last was hyperdrive systems, and Kershner told him, “I don’t think we can use the hyperdrive or the hyperwave at all, sir.”

  “Explain.”

  “The mass of everything else in the universe has increased by a factor of fifty and a bit. At this speed, a rock that’s normally small enough to ignore turns into a boojum, coming on too fast to spot when we charge up. The hyperwave is even more fussy than the drive when it comes to general background gravity, and it’s my belief it’ll be wrecked if we turn it on. Also, we’d have to record a message and play it back slowly for them to understand it, and I honestly have no idea what relativistic effects do to whatever the hyperwave medium is anyway. I also don’t know if our tau factor would carry over in hyperspace, or what the transition effects are if it doesn’t.”

  “Recommendations?”

  “Let’s not find out.”

  Persoff nodded. “Stand down to Condition Yellow and prepare to jettison water.” He thought about it. “Astrogator, that water will spread out enough for some of it to go through the kzin system, won’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Conreid suddenly smiled, which he rarely did. “Ought to screw things up a little.”

  “Or a lot. Our combat pilots are getting burial in space. Work out the trajectory that gives them the best chance of going through the system. The funeral will be at the start of the midwatch.”

  The chance of attracting someone’s attention with the com laser wasn’t even discussed. Nobody would be wasting time monitoring a frequency that was less than two percent of normal.

  The funeral necessarily took place while they were at Alert stations, as the ship was still in constant danger and would be until they at least managed to get below about point eight C. That wouldn’t be until they were well past kzin space. On the bright side, aside from a few rare and lightly-armed antique courier ships, the kzin didn’t have anything that could catch them on the way through. As long as it didn’t run into anything, the Yorktown was safe enough.

  It rankled. Kzinti weren’t the only ones who’d changed their viewpoint during the First War. They had become more prudent as the reckless ones charged into overwhelming enemy fire, but humans had become more aggressive as the conciliatory ones were eaten.

  Persoff established training drills in combat and ships’ systems. Not everybody was qualified to learn everything, but all of them were capable of learning something, and knowing more would make them better fighters. Someone—he never found out who, but he suspected it was Tokugawa, who in addition to his other duties was a historian—put up a sign in the rec room that said:

  KILL KZINTI. KILL KZINTI.

  KILL MORE KZINTI.

  IF YOU LEARN A NEW JOB

  YOU WILL BE BETTER

  AT KILLING THE ORANGE FREEMOTHERS.

  It had a profound effect on enrollment in the classes being offered.

  A bigger problem was the ratio of sixty-eight men to nine women, which led to some serious fights until Persoff bluntly ordered the women to set up a rota of when they would and would not be available to any particular man. One man had to go into the ship’s organ bank before this was accepted, but after that there were no more fights—or attempted rapes.

  His own partner of choice was Newmar, the ship’s master at arms, who had astonishing balance and a relaxed attitude about fidelity—which was good, because he had to pay some attention to each of the other women now and then or risk the appearance of favoritism.

  The mission was never intended to last more than eight weeks. Holding the ship and crew together for more than a year and a half was a strain he’d never anticipated.

  He got the remaining seventy-six of them through alive, and sane, as far as he could tell.

  Persoff declared a celebration when they got down to point eight C, which was their intended cruising speed. In the midst of it, Potter, the communications officer on duty, interrupted him with the news that he was picking up a radio signal from a nearby system—transmitted on what, allowing for Doppler effects, must have started as a one-meter frequency. “It’s got to be from humans, sir.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Well, that’s a problem. It’s some kind of dot-dash system I’m not familiar with. Short groups, repeated.”

  “What would they say if it were Morse code?”

  “‘OSO OSO OSO,’ over and over.”

  People of merely high intelligence need not apply for special missions, and Persoff had not been made the leader of this crew for nothing. “It sounds like someone trying to send an SOS who doesn’t know Morse.”

  Potter was no slouch himself. “Good grief. Got the dots and dashes reversed.”

  “Exactly. I’ll be there at once. Call Conreid and Kershner and tell them to join me on the bridge.”

  Conreid showed up barefoot, and Persoff forbore to ask what he’d interrupted. Kershner had been sleeping, and was wearing a bandolier of flasks of tea. When he arrived he was foggily opening a nicotine patch. “You can smoke if you want,” Persoff told him.

  “Can’t stand the smell,” Kershner said, glaring at the patch as he worked the adhesive layer off one corner. “I just want the IQ boost.”

  “Oh. We’re getting a signal from human beings in a system—how far away?”

  “About two lightyears,” Potter said, “almost lateral to our course.”

  “Right. I want you two to plot a course that’ll take us through hyperspace and come out at a point that’ll bring us to a halt in that system when we’re done decelerating.”

  “Oh. Okay. A little over fifteen days uphill from the source, then,” Kershner said.

  “You worked that out just like that?” Persoff said.

  “Hell, no,” Kershner said. “But I remember how long it was supposed to take us to ramp up to this speed.” He freed the patch, put it on, opened a flask, drained it, and said, “Then what?”

  There had been complaints about Kershner’s manner from officers all through the tri
p. Hesitant ones. He’d been one of the corpsicles revived for training duty in the First War, and no one was entirely certain whether his behavior was due to an attitude problem or a touch of thawing damage—what the ARM called Ice on the Mind, and the corpsicles, even less politely, called Freezer Burn.

  Some of them had been known to milk it for all it was worth. It would have been easier to deal with if so many of them hadn’t been the best in the world at something or other. Kershner, for example, had an intuitive grasp of hyperspatial relationships that rivaled that of Carmody herself. The odd part was that he wasn’t that much of a mathematician.

  “Then we do it,” Persoff said.

  “Okay.”

  Kershner earned his pay as they came out of hyperspace. In a civilized system there would be beacons and beams providing constant, clear, insistent instructions about where the inhabited sites were and how to match course. This place just had the one repeating beacon, which wasn’t even enough to ascertain the plane of the ecliptic.

  Nor, indeed, the extent of the local Oort halo. Something—just what wasn’t clear on the films afterward, but it must have been rock—sheared away a chunk of the outermost ram ring about three seconds after they returned to normal space. When they were checking, the tapes also showed that Kershner had them back in hyperspace something like a hundred and forty milliseconds after the alarm sounded, and they came out again a couple of seconds after that.

  “We still have deflection,” Persoff told his crew after checking, “but that ring has to be rebuilt before we can collect fuel. We’ve got enough to make rendezvous, and what the planer can collect will run the ship while we make repairs. Kershner, that was some sweet piloting.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Kershner said, barely audible over the sound of his suit recycler starting up.

  “Need anything?”

  “Maybe new kidneys? I think I’ve ruined mine.”

  Conreid found the beacon again, assessed its motion from the frequency changes, beat drums, burned incense, and gave an opinion of where the ecliptic was which proved to be accurate to within a tenth of a percent.

  The planet was weird. It was Earth-like, but lower in density, and had a thicker atmosphere and no moon, and according to what was believed about planetary development that was just wrong. Earth had had much of its lightweight crust knocked off by a major collision, the debris had formed Luna, and the excess atmosphere had been stored as carbonates while things cooled. Just to make things more confusing, this place had too much nitrogen, about twice as much as Earth. Almost half as much as Venus.

  There were huge icecaps, a lot of shallow ocean, and not much land. All of the land was islands, and all the islands had volcanoes, with the solitary exception of one big equatorial one. The source of the beacon was in synchronous orbit over that.

  The source was colossal.

  As they approached it kept getting bigger. It must have been half a mile long, not even counting the big spikes sticking out of each end. There was a hole in the side that the Yorktown would have just fitted into. Persoff, unable to find anything like it in the database, finally called Tokugawa as they were maneuvering for a better view of one of the spikes, to have him look at the images they were getting of it. He couldn’t believe humans had ever built a ship that big.

  At his first glance the history buff screamed, “Get us away from that!”

  Persoff had the planer at thirty gees before Tokugawa could inhale for the explanation. It was too late. This spike was a railgun longer than the Yorktown, and it threw one rock.

  Drill called for everyone to be in suits for maneuvers, and the planer had moved the ship somewhat, but six men died when the rock hit, and most of one end of the ship was sheared off. It was the end the ram was attached to.

  Persoff wrecked the railgun with a plasma shot and set about the serious business of getting them onto that island. There was no way they could stay in space to repair the ship. Half of the bio converter had gone with the ram.

  He took his time setting the ship down, which was the best part about gravity planers: you could land a ship that was open to space. The bad news about the landing site was also the good news: almost all the island was covered by trees, in perfect rows, which meant that there were definitely people who thought like humans here. Kzinti liked loose forests with large clearings, Jotoki liked groves with pools in the middle, and the sonar-using Kdatlyno kept trees widely separated when they allowed them around at all.

  Up close, the trees were mostly pines, which implied humans again; someone else might have taken over a world with a human ship orbiting it, but no race that wasn’t from Earth could stand the smell.

  The Yorktown’s planer cut out just as they settled, and everyone and everything aboard gave a little bounce as the lower local gravity took over. Persoff froze, then said, “Emery, what was that?”

  “I don’t know, Captain, but half my board just went black,” she replied. “The cutoff point…looks to be just about where that shot hit us.”

  “Sweet reason. We just made it. Tokugawa, what was that ship?—Tokugawa?”

  “He hit his head when he fell, sir,” said his assistant, Fiester.

  “Tanj. How is he?”

  “I got him to sick bay right away. He was doing well when I left.”

  “Good grief, how fast were you moving? We just got down.”

  “No, sir, not just now; he fainted when they shot at us.”

  “Fainted?”

  “Passed out? Went all pale and blotchy—”

  “I’m familiar with the procedure. Sick bay, this is the captain, connect me with Tokugawa.”

  “He’s not well, sir,” said Meier.

  “Now, Doctor,” he told her.

  “Doctors,” Kershner muttered.

  “Sorry I funked, sir,” Tokugawa said.

  “I gather you had reason? What is that ship, anyway?”

  “It’s the Galaxias, sir. Built by Sinclair Enterprises in 2164. It was supposed to be the first manned ramship.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “No, sir, it was headed in this general direction and disappeared in a big flash of light. It just dropped out of the news, and references to it disappeared.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Not really. The UN didn’t want any bad publicity for the colony ships, and the ARM had draconian powers over the media even then. It was an experimental design, too. Had a whopping big Sinclair accelerator as part of its drive.”

  “I would think they’d have noticed pretty quickly that it doesn’t really reduce inertia,” Persoff remarked.

  “Not from outside the field,” Tokugawa agreed. “The thing is, they mounted the generator on a spike that extended way in front of the ship, and used the field as a nonmagnetic ramscoop. Everything went in just fine, but when it tried to get out the aft side of the field, it slowed way down and gathered at the middle. That was what got fed into the fusion drive. Worked great in the tests, and they kept solid objects out of the path with an early version of the medium ionizer all later ramships use, a big blue laser aimed forward from inside the field. Came out as X rays, vaporized everything. I guess the kzinti noticed the laser, attacked, and got fried like the ones we met. I was afraid that was the end pointed at us. Instead we got the exhaust accelerator.”

  “Why was it so big?”

  “Generation ship, sir. They were planning to go outside the plane of the galaxy and terraform planets, setting down colonies every century or so. The starting crew was three hundred, and they meant to expand to six thousand on each leg, retaining the best gene patterns in the crew for the next trip. They had embryo banks, seeds, bacteria, the works, mostly in stasis. They must have used the accelerator on the planet,” he added.

  Persoff frowned. “Explain?”

  “They couldn’t have had much choice about where to stop. The planet here would have been the right distance from the primary, but with no collision and no moon it would have been more like Venus
or the lowlands of Plateau. If they separated the landing vessels and stocked them as lifeboats, they could have expanded the accelerator around the planet, so it radiated heat five hundred times as fast as it absorbed it. Let me see—Doctor, this computer link doesn’t work.”

  “You’re injured,” came her voice.

  “My hand is fine. See?” There was an exclamation and the sound of a smack. “Ow. Thanks. Now, yes, nine or ten years would be enough time for the carbonates to form, then they’d have the field timed to shut off, and seed algae and so forth.”

  “You sound like you were there.”

  “Oh, it’s an old idea. John Smith, an exile on Mars, came up with it before the First War as a way of terraforming Venus. He wanted to leave part of the atmosphere out to let the nitrogen boil off, then add water, and helium to keep the water from breaking down, like Jinx has.”

  In spite of the urgency of the situation, Persoff had to ask, “Where was he going to get that much water?”

  “Callisto.”

  “The Jovian moon? The ships would roast in Jupiter’s radiation belts.”

  “No ships. He wanted to hit Venus with Callisto. Ion thrusters. For some reason he couldn’t get the UN interested in moving a planet almost as big as Mars past Earth’s orbit.”

  Kershner made a noise Persoff would normally have considered medically alarming, and put his face on his control board. Persoff was trying not to grin himself. “I would think not.”

  “No. Anyway, Smith should be happy to hear it works, if we can get the news to him.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Was when we left. He’s one of those people who does really well in low gee. Has some weird medical condition that prevents osteoporosis, actually has to have excess calcium cleaned out of his cells on a regular basis. I’ve heard it suggested that’s inherited from our Pak ancestors.”