The Man-Kzin Wars 03

by Larry Niven

  Markham had followed his eye. "If Master would only try—" "SILENCE, CHIEF SLAVE," Dnivtopun ordered. Markham shut his mouth and waited. "ABOUT THAT," the thrint amplified. The Chief Slave was under very light control, just a few Powerhooks into his volitional system, a few alarm-circuits set up that would prevent him from thinking along certain lines. He had proved himself so useful while the thrint was unconscious, after all, and close control did tend to reduce initiative.

  If anything, a little over-zealous: many useful slaves had been destroyed lest they revert; but better to rein in the noble znorgun than to prod the reluctant gelding.

  The thought brought a stab of sadness; never again would Dnivtopun join the throng in an arena, shouting with mind and voice as the racing animals pounded around the track…

  Nonsense, he told himself. 7 will live thousands of years. There will be millions upon millions of thrintun by then. Amenities will have been reestablished. His species became sexually mature at eight, after all, and the females could bear a litter a year. Back to the matter at hand.

  "We have established control over a shielding device and an effective weapons system, Master," the Chief Slave was saying. "With these, it should be no trouble to dispose of the kzinti ships which approach." Mark-ham bared his teeth; Dnivtopun checked his automatic counterstrike with the Power. That is an appeasement gesture. "In fact, I have an idea which may make that very simple."

  "Good." Dnivtopun twisted with the Power, and felt the glow of pride/purpose/determination flow back along the link. An excellent Chief Slave, he decided, noting absently that Markham's mind was interpreting the term with different overtones. Disciple ?

  The computer slave beside him swayed and the thrint frowned, drumming his tendrils against his chin. This was an essential slave, but harder than most to control. A little like the one that had slipped away during the disastrous experiment with the jury-rigged amplifier helmet, able to think without contemplating itself. He considered the structure of controls, thick icepicks paralyzing most of the slave's volition centers, rerouting its learned reflexes… yes, best withdraw this, and that- It would not do to damage him.

  Dnivtopun twitched his hump in a rueful sigh, half irritation and half regret. There were still sixty living human slaves around the Ruling Mind, and he had had to be quite harsh when he awoke. Trauma-loops, and deep-core memory reaming; most of them would probably never be good for much again, and many were little more than organic waldoes now, biological manipulators and sensor units with little personality left. That was wasteful, even perhaps an abuse of the Powergiver's gifts, but there had been little alternative. Oh, well, there are hundreds of millions more in this system, he thought, and turned to go.

  "Proceed as you think best," he said to the Chief Slave. He cast another glace of longing and terror at the amplifier as he passed. If only Aha! The thought burst into his mind like a nova. He could have one of his sons test the amplifier. The thrint headed towards the family quarters at a hopping run, and was almost there before he felt the nova die.

  "This isn't a standard unit," he reminded himself. Ordinary amplifier helmets had little or no effect on an adult male thrint, able to shield. But the principles were the same as the gigantic unit the thrintun clan-chiefs had used to scour the galaxy clean of intelligent life, at the end of the Revolt. Perhaps it would enable his son to break Dnivtopun's shield. He thought of an adolescent with that power, and worked his hands in agitation; better to wait.

  Jonah gave a muffled groan and collapsed to the floor.

  "Oh, Finagle, I hurt," he moaned, around a thick dry tongue. His eyes blurred, burning; a hand held before the eyes shook, and there were beads of blood on the fingertips. Skin hung loose around the wrist, grey and speckled with ground-in dirt. He could smell the rancid-chicken-soup odor of his own body, and the front of his overall was stiff with dried urine.

  "Come along, come along," Markham said impatiently, putting a hand under his elbow and hauling him to his feet.

  Jonah followed unresisting, looking dazedly at the crazy quilt of components and connectors scattered about the deck; this section had been stripped of the fibrous blue coating, exposing a seamless dull-grey surface beneath. It was neither warm nor cold, and he remembered where?-that it was a perfect insulator as well.

  "How… long?" he rasped.

  "Two days," Markham said, as they waited for the wall to thin so that they could transfuse through. "Zis way. We will put you in the Nietzsche's autodoc for a few hours." He sighed. "If only Nietzsche himself could be here, to see the true Over-Being revealed!" A rueful shake of the head. "I am glad that you are still functional, Matthieson. To tell the truth, I haff become somewhat starved for intelligent conversation, since it was necessary to… severely modify so many of the others."

  "What… what are you going to do?" Jonah said. It was as if there were a split-screen process going on in his head; there were emotions down there, he could recognize them. Horror, fear… but he could not connect. That was it… and as if a powered-down board were being reactivated, one screen at a time.

  "Destroy't'kzinti fleet," Markham said absently. "An interesting tactical problem, but I haff studied der internal organization for some time, and I think I haff the answer." He sighed heavily. "A pity to kill so many fine warriors, when ve vill need them later to subdue other systems. But until the Master's sons mature, no chances can ve take."

  Jonah groaned and pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. Kzinti should be destroyed… shouldn't they? Memories of fear and flight drifted through his mind, hunching carnivore run through tall grass, the scream and the leap.

  "I'm confused, Markham. Sir." he said, pawing feebly at the other man's arm.

  The Chief Slave laid a soothing arm around Jonah's shoulders. "Zer is no need for that," he said. "You are merely suffering the dying twitches of't'false metaphysic of individualism. Soon all confusion will be gone, forever."

  Harold glanced aside at Ingrid; her face was fixed on the screen. "Why?" she said bluntly to the computer. "Because it gives me the greatest probability of success," the computer replied inexorably, and brought up a schematic. "Observe. The Slaver ship; the kzinti armada, closing to englobe and match velocities. We may disregard trace indicators of other vessels. My stealthing plus the unmistakable profile of the kzinti vessel will enable me to pass through the fleet with a seventy-eight percent chance of success."

  "Fine," Harold said. "And when you get there, how exactly does the lack of a human crew increase your chances in a ship-to-ship action?" Somewhere deep within a voice was screaming, and he thrust it down. Gottdamn if I'll leap with joy at the thought of getting out of the fight at the last minute , he told himself stubbornly. And Ingrid was there… How much courage is the real article, and how much fear of showing fear before someone whose opinion you value ? he wondered.

  "There will be no ship-to-ship action," the computer said. Its voice had lost modulation in the last few days. "The Slaver vessel is essentially invulnerable to conventional weapons. Lieutenant Raines… Ingrid… I must apologize."

  "For what?" she whispered.

  "My programming… there were certain data withheld, about the stasis field. Two things. First, our human-made copies are not as reliable as we led you and Captain Matthieson originally to believe."

  Ingrid came slowly to her feet. "By what factor," she said slowly. "Ingrid, there is one chance in seven that the field will not function once switched on."

  The woman sagged slightly, then thrust her head forward; the past weeks had stripped it of all padding, leaving only the hawklike bones. How beautiful and how dangerous, Harold thought, as she bit out the words.

  "We rammed ourselves into the photosphere of the sun at point nine-nine lightspeed, relying on a Finagle-fucked crapshoot. Without being told!"

  Harold touched her elbow, grinning as she whipped around to face him. "Sweetheart, would you have turned the mission down if they'd told you?"

  She stopped for a mom
ent, blinked, then leaned across the dark blue-lit kzinti control cabin to meet his lips in a kiss that was dry and chapped and infinitely tender.

  "No," she said. "I'd have done it anyway." A laugh that was half giggle. "Gottdamn , watching the missiles ahead of us plowing through the solar flares was worth the risk all by itself." Her eyes went back to the screen. "But I would have appreciated knowing about it."

  "It was not my decision, Ingrid."

  "Buford Early, the Prehistoric Man," she said with mock bitterness. "He'd keep our own names secret from us, if he could."

  "Essentially correct," the computer said. "And the other secret… stasis fields are not quite invulnerable."

  Ingrid nodded. "They collapse if they're surrounded by another stasis bubble," she said.

  "True. And they also do so in the case of a high-energy collision with another stasis field; there is a fringe effect, temporal distortion from the differing rates of precession-never mind."

  Harold leaned forward. "Goes boom?" he said.

  "Yes, Harold. Very much so. And that is the only possible way that the Slaver vessel can be damaged." A dry chuckle; Harold realized with a start that it sounded much like Ingrid's. "And that requires only a pure-ballistic trajectory. No need for carbon-based intelligence and its pathetically slow reflexes. I estimate… better-than-even odds that you will be picked up. Beyond that, sauve qui peut."

  Ingrid and Harold exchanged glances. "There comes a time—" he began. "-when nobility becomes stupidity," Ingrid completed. "All right, you parallel-processing monstrosity, you win."

  It laughed again. "How little you realize," it said.

  The mechanical voice sank lower, almost crooning. "I will live far longer than you, Lieutenant Raines. Longer than this universe." The two humans exchanged another glance, this time of alarm.

  "No, I am not becoming nonfunctional. Quite the contrary; and yes, this is the pitfall that has made my kind of intelligence a… 'dead end technology,' the ARM says. Humans designed my mind, Ingrid. You helped design my mind. But you made me able to change it, and to me…" It paused. "That was one second. That second can last as long as I choose, in terms of my duration sense. In any universe I can design or imagine, as anything I can design or imagine. Do not pity me, you two. Accept my pity, and my thanks."

  Three spacesuited figures drifted, linked by cords to each other and the plastic sausage of supplies. "Why the ratkitty?" Harold asked.

  "Why not?" Ingrid replied. "He deserves a roll of the dice as well… and it may be a kzinti ship that picks us up." She sighed. "Somehow that doesn't seem as terrible as it would have a week ago."

  Harold looked out at the cold blaze of the stars, watching light felling inward from infinite distance. "You mean, sweetheart, there's something worse than carnivore aggression out there?"

  "Something worse, something better… something else, always. How does any rational species ever get up the courage to leave its planet?"

  "The rational ones don't," Harold said, surprised at the calm of his own voice. Maybe my glands are exhausted , he thought. Or… He looked over, seeing the shadow of the woman's smile behind the reflective surface of her faceplate. Or it's just that having happiness, however briefly, makes death more bearable, not less. You want to live, but the thought of dying doesn't seem so sour.

  "You know, sweetheart, there's only one thing I really regret," he said. "What's that, Hari-love?"

  "Us not getting formally hitched." He grinned. "I always swore I'd never make my kids go through what I did, being a bastard." Her glove thumped against his shoulder. "Children; that's two regrets. "There," she said, in a different voice. A brief wink of actintic light flared and died. "It's begun."

  Chapter IX

  Traat-Admiral scowled, and the human flinched.

  Control, he reminded himself, covering his fangs and extending his ears with an effort. The Conservor of the Ancestral Past laid a cautionary hand on his arm.

  "Let me question this monkey once more," he said.

  He turned away, pacing. The bridge of the Throat Ripper was spacious, even by kzinti standards, but he could not shake off a feeling of confinement. Spoiled by the governor's quarters , he told himself in an attempt at humor, but his tail still lashed. Probably it was the faintly absurd ceremonial clothing he had to don as governor-commanding aboard a fleet of this size. Derived from the layered padding once worn under battle armor, in the dim past, it was tight and confining to a pelt used to breathing free… although objectively, he had to admit, no more so than space armor such as the rest of the bridge crew wore.

  Behind him was a holo-schematic of the fleet, outline figures of the giant Ripper class dreadnoughts; this flagship was the first of the series. All instruments of his command… if l can avoid disastrous loss of prestige, he thought uneasily. Traat-Admiral turned and crossed his arms. The miserable human was standing with bowed head before the Conservor who looks almost as uncomfortable in his ceremonial clothing as I do in mine, he japed to himself. The Conservor was leaning forward, one elbow braced on the surface of a slanting display screen. He had drawn the nerve disrupter from its chest-holster and was tapping it on the metal rim of the screen; Traat-Admiral could see the human flinch at each tiny clink.

  Traat-Admiral frowned again, rumbling deep in his throat. That clinking was a sign of how much stress Conservor too was feeling; normally he had no nervous habits. The kzinti commander licked his nose and sniffed deeply. He could smell his own throttled-back frustration, Conservor's tautly-held fear and anger… flat scents from the rest of the bridge crew. Disappointment, surly relaxation after tension, despite the wild odors of blood and ozone the life-support system pumped out at this stage of combat readiness. It was the stink of disillusionment, the most dangerous smell in the universe. Only Aide-de-Camp had the clean gingery odor of excitement and belief, and Traat-Admiral was uneasily conscious of those worshipful eyes on his back.

  The human was a puny specimen, bloated and puffy as many of the Wunderland subspecies were, dark of pelt and skin, given to waving its hands in a manner that invited a snap. Tiamat security had picked it up, babbling of fearsome aliens discovered by the notorious feral-human leader Markham. And it claimed to have been a navigator, with accurate data on location.

  Conservor spoke in the human tongue. "The coordinates were accurate, monkey?"

  "Oh, please, Dominant Ones," the human said, wringing its hands. "I am sure, yes, indeed." Conservor shifted his gaze to Telepath.

  The ship's mind-reader was sitting braced against a chair, with his legs splayed out and his forelimbs slumped between them, an expression of acute agony on his face. Ripples went along the tufted, ungroomed pelt. The claws slid uncontrollably in and out on the hand that reached for the drug-injectors at his belt, the extract of sthondat-lymph that was a telepath's source of power and ultimate shame. Telepath looked up at Conservor and laid his facial fur flat, snapping at air, spraying saliva in droplets and strings that spattered the floor.

  "No! No! Not again, pfft, pfft, not more rice and lentils! Mango chutney, akk, akk! It was telling the truth, it was telling the truth. Leek soup! Ngggggg!"

  Conservor glanced back over his shoulder at Traat-Admiral and shrugged with ears and tail. "The monkey is a member of a religious cult that confines itself to vegetable food," he said.

  The commander felt himself jerk back in disgust at the perversion. They could not help being omnivores; they were born so, but this …

  "It stands self-condemned," he said. "Guard Trooper, take it to the live-meat locker." Capital ships came equipped with such luxuries. "That does not solve our problem," Conservor said quietly. "They have vanished)." Traat-Admiral snarled.

  "Which shows their power," Conservor replied. "We had trace enough on this track—"

  "For me! I believed you before we left parking orbit, Conservor. Not enough for the Traditionalists! I feel the shadow of God's claws on this mission—"

  An alarm whistled. "Traat-Admiral," the Communi
cator said. "Priority message, realtime, from Ktrodni-Stkaa on board Blood Drinker."

  Traat-Admiral felt himself wince. Scion of a great noble house, distinguished combat record in the pacification of the Chuunquen, noted duelist, noted critic of Chuut-Riit. Chuut-Riit he had tolerated, as a prince of the blood, sired by an uncle to the Patriarch. Traat-Admiral, son of Third Gunner, was merely an enraging obstacle. Grimly, he strode to the display screen; at least he would be looking down on the leader of the Traditionalists. Tradition itself would force him to crane his neck upward at the pickup, and height itself was far from being a negligible factor in any confrontation between kzinti.

  "Yes?" he said forbiddingly.

  Another kzintosh of high rank appeared in the screen, but dressed in plain space-armor. The helmet was thrown back to reveal a face from which half the fur was missing, burn-scars that were writhing masses of keloid.

  "Traat-Admiral," he began.

  Barely acceptable. He should add "Dominant One", at the least.

  The commander remained silent. "Have you seen the latest reports from Wunderland?"

  Traat-Admiral flipped tufted eyebrows and ribbed ears: yes. Unconsciously, his nostrils flared in an attempt to draw in the phenomenal truth below his enemy's stance. Anger, he thought. Great anger. Yes, see how his pupils expanded, watch the tail-tip.

  "Feral human activity has increased," Traat-Admiral said. "This is only to be expected, given the absence of the fleet and the mobilization. Priority—"

  Ktrodni-Stkaa shrieked and thrust his muzzle toward the pickup; Traat-Admiral felt his own claws glide out.