by Paul Chafe
Maybe if he held on to the connector with one hand and leaned back…The cables looked strong enough to hold his not-so-large weight. He let the antenna go and tried it, gingerly, ready to grab with his free hand if the cable suddenly gave way.
It held. He breathed out, and slowly, carefully pulled the antenna back up and positioned the screw threads. It was still awkward to rotate with the length of the wire whipping around, but he managed to get the first thread mated, and after that it was easier. He took his time, screwing down the mounting a turn at a time. Finally it was threaded as tightly as he could get it by hand. Mission accomplished, time to go back. He stood, dancing carefully around the now mounted antenna, to get himself in position to launch out and away far enough that he could clear the tail while he maneuvered back to the airlock.
Something slipped and all of a sudden he was falling, slowly at first. He twisted, and punched wildly at the polarizer controls. Thrust hit him in the back and something snagged, then tore. He bounced painfully off of the courier’s hull, and spun, sliding over the top of the ship. He went right between the tails and fell off into space, spinning wildly with the polarizer still on full thrust. The centrifugal force of his spin made it difficult to operate the controls and it took him some time to get the thruster switched off. Awkwardly, he killed his rotation. Valiant was now five hundred meters distant and receding rapidly, so thrust again to come to zero relative and coast. It took a lot of thrust to stop; he’d picked up a lot of momentum from the ship, plus whatever the uncontrolled surge had given him. He was trembling. That had been a near thing, and if he’d hit the tails he would have been injured, and he could have torn the suit. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. He was drifting slowly toward Valiant, and they should be able to hear him now.
He keyed the transmitter. “Tskombe to Valiant.”
Nothing.
“Tskombe to Valiant.”
Silence. On instinct he reached behind to his service pack to where his suit antenna should be. His hand found only empty space, and remembered the momentary snag he’d felt. The antenna must have caught on some jagged piece of hull, and torn off when he’d hit the polarizers to clear the tail. He adjusted his heading slightly to carry him past the airlock, then hit the polarizers gently to increase his closure rate.
An amber light blinked in the corner of his vision. He turned his head to the suit readouts projected on the visor. Low power. He breathed in and out again. He’d used a fair bit getting the feel of the polarizer, wasted a lot in the fall, and a lot more in killing the momentum he’d picked up from it. Nothing to worry about, he was on his way back. I just need to nail the approach…
He didn’t nail it, though he came heartbreakingly close. He was off a couple of degrees as he came in and overcorrected. He corrected back the other way as the airlock handholds came close, grabbed for them and missed. He drifted past, rotated to line up again, and hit the thruster. There was a second of thrust, and then it cut out. The amber icon flashed to red, and he was still drifting away at perhaps a half a meter per second. No power. Cold horror seized him as he realized the situation had switched from risky to fatal in that split second. Desperately he keyed his transmitter again, but there was still no response. Inexorably Valiant got farther away. His suit still had power, but the thruster had its own batteries, and they were dead. The suit was good for forty-eight hours, give or take, and he was going to die a slow and lonely death.
Hours later Valiant had faded to a pinprick and then finally vanished. Time dragged. He slept and woke, and slept again. Occasionally, and without much hope, he keyed his transmitter. His air was becoming heavy, saturated with CO2 and his thinking was fuzzy and unclear. This is what it is to die. He had nightmares then, about Ayla at the spaceport. She was taken by the kzinti, and when he tried to save her the kzin who nearly killed him at Vega IV screamed and leapt, fangs bared for the killing bite. I never should have left her. Sleep blended with delirium and he barely recognized the warship when it occulted a quarter of the sky, black on black, bristling with sensors and turrets, a weapon tube large enough to destroy worlds running down its lower spine. They sent a flitter for him and he wondered if they’d eat him alive. It wasn’t until they vented pressure into the hangar and the medics ran in to strip his suit off that he realized it was a human ship. His legs wouldn’t support him, and his rescuers held up him.
“Colonel Tskombe?” The man was tall and broad-shouldered, with iron gray hair and beard, and an air of command in his Wunderland-accented English.
“Yes.”
The man offered his hand “I’m Captain Cornelius Voortman, and you’re aboard the battleship Oorwinnig. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Thank you, sir.” Tskombe took the hand and shook it, doing the expected thing and saying the required words. “Sir, my ship…”
“Your dolphin and the girl are safe aboard. We responded as soon as we got their distress call. You are the hero of the day, I understand.”
“Commander Khalsa fought the ship, sir.”
“And you saved it. My report to the UN will be clear on your role, and on the kzinti’s treaty violation in attacking you.” Voortman’s voice hardened. “The ratcats will pay dearly for this attack.”
Kzinti. Tskombe controlled his expression. Whatever story Curvy had told the Free Wunderland Navy didn’t involve an illegal flight from Earth and attack by a UNSN cruiser. They pinned the attack on the kzinti, which is exactly who the Wunderlanders would expect. It was a logical and necessary move, but it made his position difficult. He spoke carefully. “Sir, this mission…” There was no way to explain the situation. “…Sir, I would rather you hold back your report.”
Not the required words. Voortman stiffened. “May I ask the nature of your mission?”
“It’s need-to-know only information in the UNF, sir. Our very presence here is secret.” Would the UN have warned Wunderland to look out for Valiant? If it had our reception would have been very different.
Voortman nodded, relaxing slightly. “I understand your concerns, but I have my duty to carry out. The UN is jealous of Alpha Centauri’s independence. We don’t need to provoke discord by falsifying reports.”
Tskombe nodded. “All I can ask is that you consider that our very presence here is secret within the UN hierarchy. A lot is at stake.”
“I’ll do that.” Voortman bowed, polite but formal. “Your distress call interrupted us in the middle of an exercise. My medics will look after you.”
He left and the medics took him to the battleship’s small but well-equipped med station. Trina and Curvy were already there. Trina hugged him fiercely; the dolphin chirped and twirled in her suspensor belt and came over to nose him affectionately. They fed him while the medics fussed over him, and finally let him sleep. They didn’t get a chance to talk alone.
He didn’t get a chance to talk to them in the morning either. On first watch the next ship cycle there was a service for Virenze and Khalsa on the hangar deck, and Tskombe watched impassively as the bodies were ceremoniously loaded into the airlock. Two crewmen in immaculate dress uniform took the sky blue UN flag from the coffins, while Captain Voortman said the eulogy. Tskombe didn’t really hear it. How many times have I said those words myself? Perhaps it would have meant more if Curvy had said it. The sentiments were heartfelt, but ultimately meaningless. Words would not give life back to the dead. The loudspeaker played some somber bugle call as the heavy airlock door swung shut. As the mournful trumpet faded away there was a faint shudder in the deck as the bodies were jettisoned into space. He saluted at the right time, and turned to go with Trina and Curvy.
There were no fighters in the hangar deck. Almost all the available space had been given over to four pairs of tremendous fusion generators. He asked Captain Voortman about them idly on the way out.
“Very observant, Colonel.” Voortman hesitated, then seemed to reach a decision. “I am going to exercise my discretionary power as captain, Colonel Tskombe, and allo
w you to see something no one in the UN knows about. You’re about to enjoy the unique privilege of seeing this ship prove its full capabilities for the first time.”
“I’m honored, I’m sure.” Tskombe didn’t know what else to say. Voortman took him up to the bridge. Why he was invited while Trina and Curvy were not he didn’t ask. The bridge itself was spacious, even luxurious, in stark contrast to Valiant’s cramped cockpit, even in comparison to Crusader’s ample control spaces. Oorwinnig was a battleship, an expression not only of Alpha Centauri’s power but of the system’s pride and independence as well. There was room in her design for more than lethal functionality.
“See that?” Voortman pointed through the wrap-around transpax panels to an irregular blob against the starfield, about the size of the full moon but barely a quarter as bright. “That’s Echo Delta 1272, a trivial chunk of this system’s Kuiper belt, more rock than ice, twenty kilometers by fifteen, and a thousand kilometers distant. It’s been unremarkable for the last five billion years, but it’s about to become part of history.”
“What…”
Voortman held up a hand to cut off the question. “Indulge me please, and watch.” He turned to an officer behind him. “Weapons free, engage at will.”
“Aye, sir.”
At first nothing happened, but then Tskombe noticed faint fountains of dust erupting from either end of the asteroid, as though twin meteors had struck it on opposite sides. Faint, but they must have been kilometers big already to be visible at this distance, and they grew as he watched. For long seconds that was all there was, but then the impact zones began to glow red. The red points expanded into circles and their centers ran up the spectrum to white hot and then to actinic blue. The transpax automatically darkened, then darkened again until the body of the asteroid was invisible except where it was incandescent, until Tskombe could feel the heat coming through the screen despite the damping and at a distance of a thousand kilometers. To make its heat tangible at that range, whatever they were hitting ED1272 with had the energy of a small star. He saw red through his eyelids and had to turn away, waited until he felt the heat fade from the side of his face to look back. The transpax had undarkened and there was an expanding orange halo where the asteroid had been, hazy like a streetlight seen through fog, still expanding and fading back to red as he watched.
Conversion weapons. A gigatonne warhead could vaporize an asteroid that big, but a conversion attack was over in a single flash, and the destruction had commenced at most a few seconds after Voortman had given the order. No launcher, no missile was fast enough to cross a thousand kilometers in that time. What he had seen looked like a pair of beam weapon hits, but the energy output! No ship-mounted laser put out a fraction of a percent of the power required to do what he’d just seen done, and the inescapably low energy transport efficiency of laser beams guaranteed that none ever would. Not even the huge fusion generators that had taken over Oorwinnig’s hangar deck would provide enough power.
So either this was a carefully staged demonstration or the Wunderlanders had something very new. And given the complete accident of our presence here, this isn’t being staged.
“We call it the Treatymaker”—Voortman answered his unspoken question—“and it is this ship’s primary weapon.” The tall Viking smirked. “It’s based on a kzinti invention called a charge suppressor. As you’d expect it suppresses electric charges; to be exact it uses a monopole beam to interfere with the mediation particles of the electrostatic force. They use it for climate control, preventing charge separation in the upper atmosphere to keep clouds from forming. It’s derived from a Thrintun device, although we suspect it was actually developed by the Tnuctipun, back when life on Earth was limited to algae. They used it as a weapon, at short ranges. As you can see we’ve made improvements.”
“That’s…” Tskombe groped for words. “That’s incredible.”
“Impressive little toy, yes?” Voortman smiled in grim satisfaction. “A single beam literally tears matter apart as the atoms repel each other, but the trick is to use two beams, one positive and one negative. That creates a current flow between the contact points. Beam power requirements are tremendous of course, but all of it is delivered to the target and the zone of destruction can be controlled with fine accuracy. Unlike lasers the atmospheric degradation is trivial. Unlike conversion warheads there is no possibility of intercept. Power coupling approaches one hundred percent. It is a tremendously efficient weapon. The ratcats are about to learn a painful lesson.”
Tskombe looked at him in shock. “You can’t be intending to use it.”
Voortman raised an eyebrow. “And why not?”
“It would start another war.”
The captain snorted. “The war has already begun, or didn’t you notice? Secretary General Ravalla has wasted no time making his intentions clear. Wunderland is offering full cooperation and support, of course. We have our differences with Earth, but we recognize our common enemies.”
Ravalla was moving with tremendous speed. Not a good sign. Tskombe controlled his reaction. “Do you know how soon the war is going to turn hot?”
“Not long. It will take some time to gather forces, and then we strike, with the full strength of the human race combined. The timing is perfect, with this new weapon coming on line. Wunderland lacks the strength to attack by itself, but Ravalla is a man of action. With the UN beside us, we can rid ourselves of the ratcats once and for all.”
Tskombe felt sick in the pit of his stomach. “Using this weapon on a world…It would be nothing short of genocide.” Ayla is on Kzinhome.
The tall man laughed bitterly. “You are a Flatlander, Colonel Tskombe. Your world was never occupied.”
“But still…”
“Don’t pretend to be shocked, you are a soldier.” Voortman’s voice was hard. “Ten generations of my family have known only war with the kzinti, and there are no records before that because Earth chose to use relativistic weapons to prevent what was happening here from happening there. I lost ancestors then, though I’ll never know their names.” He turned to look out through the transpax to the still expanding incandescence that had been Echo Delta 1272. “This is war, Colonel. This is another war with the goddamned ratcats. My mother was crippled fighting them, my father was killed before I was born.” He turned back to face Tskombe, his eyes blazing. “I swear upon the cross that Christ died on my children will grow up in peace, and if I must sterilize a thousand worlds to buy that for them I will consider the price cheap.”
“You invite the kzinti to do the same in return. Would you see Wunderland razed?”
“Wunderland has been razed, Colonel, and by humans, not kzinti. Go look at Thor’s Crater and then give me a Flatlander’s moralizing on genocide. But the kzinti will not have the chance to retaliate. You speak of genocide as if it were a bad thing, Colonel. In fact, genocide is the plan.” The captain’s words were hard edged with anger. Tskombe had been to Thor’s Crater on Wunderland, where metric-ton slugs sent at nearly lightspeed from Earth had punched through the planet’s crust with impacts measured in tens of gigatonnes. Millions of Wunderlanders had died in that attack. Tskombe found it wiser to say nothing.
Voortman was still talking, his voice slightly less intense. “Ironically enough that was when we learned of the charge suppressor. The kzinti used it to clear the impact dust out of the skies and forestall environmental collapse. For that at least we owe them. And now that we have duplicated their technology, they will be repaid for everything.” The captain smiled a smile as lethal as any kzin’s. “In full.”
Beware the hidden blade.
—Si-Rrit
“They are called czrav, brother.” Ftzaal-Tzaatz looked out windows of the Patriarch’s Tower, watching the landers coming and going from the distant spaceport. His thigh still ached where the Chief Surgeon had repaired the wound the tuskvor had given him. “And they represent a grave danger.”
“A bunch of primitives cowering in the jungle?
Don’t be a fool.” Kchula-Tzaatz reclined on his prrstet, stroking the ears of a young kzinrette.
Ftzaal ignored the insult and kept his voice level. “I do not believe they are primitive.”
“You just told me they were.” Kchula keyed his vocom and spoke into it. “Slave Handler, send food to the Patriarch’s tower.”
“At once, sire.”
“Fresh zianya, Ftzaal?” Kchula ran his hand down the kzinrette’s sleek flanks, and she purred and nuzzled him in response.
My brother distracts himself with luxuries. Ftzaal lashed his tail in annoyance and went on with his point. “Even the cvari nomads who hunt the savannah call them primitive, but they never penetrate the deep jungle. They see the czrav only when the czrav choose to be seen. I think theirs is a world hidden in the very heart of the Patriarchy, a world we do not control.”
“So they hide in the jungle. Let them. We have nothing to fear. We went to the jungle to find First-Son-of-Meerz-Rrit. Both Ktronaz-Commander’s experience and your own shows us that, even if it was he who we tracked to the jungle verge, he cannot have survived.”
“This is my point, brother. Even the cvari who live next to the jungle shun it; only a few of the Lesser Pride nobility will hunt the fringes, more for the honor than the sport. They go well equipped and they do not stay long, and even then the jungle claims enough of them. No one returns from the deep jungle. No one. I lost three Ftz’yeer just tracking First-Son-of-Meerz-Rrit, plus Telepath, and Ktronaz-Commander’s attack force was destroyed.”
“Ktronaz-Commander.” Kchula snorted. “His competence is marginal.”
“He is unimaginative brother, but not incompetent, and my Ftz’yeer fared no better.” Ftzaal’s lips twitched over his fangs. “I hope you are not questioning my competence as well.”
“No, brother, but…”
“But nothing! We can barely survive a night in the jungle with all the equipment we can bring to bear on the problem, and yet the czrav live their lives there. First-Son fled there quite deliberately. What does he know that we do not?”