by Larry Niven
The strobing pattern of light settled into the civil-defense blazon, and the unmistakable precision of an artificial voice. "All civilians are to remain in their residences. Emergency and security personnel to their duty stations, repeat, emergency and security personnel to their—"
A blast of static and white noise loud enough to send hands to ears, before the system's emergency overrides cut in. When reception returned the broadcast was two-dimensional, a space-armored figure reading from a screenprompt over the receiver. The noise in Harold's Terran Bar sank to shocked silence at the sight of the human shape of the combat armor, the blue-and-white UN sigil on its chest.
"—o all citizens of the Alpha Centauri system," the Terran was saying. In Wunderlander, but with a thick accent that could not handle the gutturals. "Evacuate areas of military or industrial importance immediately. Repeat, immediately. The United Nations Space Command is attacking kzinti military and industrial targets in the Alpha Centauri system. Evacuate areas—" The broadcast began again, but the screen split to show the same message in English and two more of the planet's principal languages. The door burst open and a squad of Munchen Polezi burst through.
"Scheisse!" Montferrat shouted, rising. He froze as the receiver in his uniform cap began hissing and snarling override-transmission in the Hero's Tongue. Yarthkin relaxed and smiled as the policeman sprinted for the exit. He cocked one eye towards the ceiling and silently flourished Montferrat's last glass of schnapps before sending it down with a snap of his wrist.
* * *
"Weird," Jonah Matthieson muttered, looking at the redshifted cone of light ahead of them. Better this way. This way he didn't have to think of what they were going to do when they arrived. He had been a singleship pilot before doing his military service; the Belt still needed miners. You could do software design anywhere there was a computer system, of course, and miners had a lot of spare time. His reflexes were a pilot's, and they included a strong inhibition against high-speed intercept trajectories.
This was going to be the highest-speed intercept of all time.
The forward end of the pilot's cabin was very simple, a hemisphere of smooth synthetic. For that matter, the rest of the cabin was quite basic as well; two padded crashcouches, which was one more than normal, an autodoc, an autochef, and rather basic sanitary facilities. That left just enough room to move—in zero gravity. Right now they were under one-G acceleration, crushingly uncomfortable. They had been under one-G for weeks, subjective time; the Yamamoto was being run to flatlander specifications.
"Compensate," Ingrid said. The view swam back, the blue stars ahead and the dim red behind turning to the normal variation of colors. The dual-sun Centauri system was dead ahead, looking uncomfortably close. "We're making good time. It took thirty years coming back on the slowboat, but the Yamamoto's going to put us near Wunderland in five point seven. Objective, that is. Probably right on the heels of the pussy scouts."
Jonah nodded, looking ahead at the innocuous twinned stars. His hands were in the control-gloves of his couch, but the pressure-sensors and lightfields were off, of course. There had been very little to do in the month-subjective since they left the orbit of Pluto. Accelerated learning with RNA boosters, and he could now speak as much of the Hero's Tongue as Ingrid—enough to understand it. Kzin evidently didn't like their slaves to speak much of it; they weren't worthy. He could also talk Belter-English with the accent of the Serpent Swarm, Wunderland's dominant language, and the five or six other tongues prevalent in the many ethnic enclaves . . . sometimes he found himself dreaming in Pahlavi or Croat or Amish Pletterdeisz. It wasn't going to be a long trip; with the gravity polarizer and the big orbital lasers to push them up to ramscoop speeds, and no limit on the acceleration their compensators could handle . . .
We must be nipping the heels of photons by now, he thought. Speeds only robot ships had achieved before, with experimental fields supposedly keeping the killing torrent of secondary radiation out. . . .
"Tell me some more about Wunderland," he said. Neither of them were fidgeting. Belters didn't; this sort of cramped environment had been normal for their people since the settlement of the Sol-system Belt three centuries before. It was the thought of how they were going to stop that had his nerves twisting.
I've already briefed you twenty times," she replied, with something of a snap in the tone. Military formality wore thin pretty quickly in close quarters like this. "All the first-hand stuff is fifty-six years out of date, and the nine-year-old material's in the computer. You're just bored."
No, I'm just scared shitless. "Well, talking would be better than nothing. Spending a month strapped to this thing is even more monotonous than being a rockjack You were right, I'm bored."
"And scared."
He looked around. She was lying with her hands behind her head, grinning at him.
"I'm scared too. The offswitch is exterior to the surface of the effect." It had to be; time did not pass inside a stasis field.
"The designers were pretty sure it'd work."
"I'm sure of only two things, Jonah."
"Which are?"
"Well, the first one is that the designers aren't going to be diving into the photosphere of a sun at point-nine lights."
"Oh." That had occurred to him too. On the other hand, it really was easier to be objective when your life wasn't on the line . . . and in any case, it would be quick. "What's the other thing?"
Her smile grew wider, and she undid the collar-catch of her uniform. "Even in a gravity field, there's one thing I want to experience again before possible death."
* * *
"Overview, schematic, trajectory," Traat-Admiral commanded. The big semicircle of the kzinti dreadnought's bridge was dim-lit by the blue and red glow of screens and telltales, crackly with the ozone scents of alerted kzintosh; Throat-Ripper was preparing for action.
Spray-fans appeared on the big circular display-screen below his crash couch. Traat-Admiral's fangs glinted wet as he considered them. The ship would pass fairly near Wunderland, and quite near Alpha Centauri itself. Slingshot effect was modest with something moving at such speeds, but . . . ah, yes. The other two suns of this cluster would also help. Still, it would be a long time before that vessel headed back towards the Sol system, if indeed that was their aim.
What forsaken-of-ancestors trick is this? he wondered. Then: Were those Kfraksha-Admiral's last thoughts?
He shook off the mood. "Identification?"
"Definitely a ramscoop vessel, Dominant One," Riesu-Fleet-Operations said. "Estimated speed is approximately .9071 c. In the 1600 kilokzinmass range."
About the mass of a light cruiser, then. His whiskers ruffled. Quite a weight to get up to such a respectable fraction of c, when you did not have the gravity polarizer. On the other paw, the humans used very powerful launch-boost lasers—useful as weapons, too, which had been an unanticipated disaster for the kzinti fleets—and by now they might have the gravity polarizer. Polarizer-drive vessels could get up to about .8 c if they were willing to spend the energy, and that was well above ramscoop initial speeds.
"Hrrr. That is considerably above the mass-range of the robot vessels the humans used"—for scouting new systems and carrying small freight loads over interstellar distances. They used big slowboats at .3 c for colonization and passenger traffic. "Fleet positions, tactical."
The screen changed, showing the positions of his squadrons, stingfighter carriers and dreadnoughts, destroyers and cruisers. Most were still crawling across the disk of the Alpha Centauri system, boosting from their ready stations near replenishment asteroids or in orbit around Wunderland itself. He scowled; the human probe was damnably well stealthed for something moving that fast, and there had been little time. His own personal dreadnought and battle-group were thirty AU outside the outermost planet, beginning to accelerate back in toward the star. The problem was that no sane being moved at interstellar speeds this close to high concentrations of matter, which put the enemy ve
ssel in an entirely different energy envelope.
We must strike in passing, he thought; he could feel the claws slide out of the black-leather-glove shapes of his hands, pricking against the rests in the gloves of his space armor.
"Dominant One," Riesu-Fleet-Operations said. The tone in his voice and a sudden waft of spoiled-ginger scent brought Traat-Admiral's ears folding back into combat position, and his tongue lapped across his nose instinctively. "Separation . . . No, it's not breaking up . . . We're getting relay from the outer-system drone sentinels, Traat-Admiral. The human ship is launching."
"Launching what?"
"Traat-Admiral . . . ahhh. Projectiles of various sorts. Continuous launch. None over one-tenth kzinfist mass." About twenty grams, in human measurements—but stealthing could be in use, hiding much larger objects in the clutter. "Some are buckshot arrays, others slugs. Spectroscopic analysis indicates most are of nickel-iron composition. Magnetic flux. The human ship is using magnetic launchers of very great power for initial guidance."
Traat-Admiral's fur went flat, then fluffed out to stand erect all over his body.
"Trajectories!" he screamed.
"Ereaauuuu—" the officer mewled, then pulled himself together. "Dominant One, intersection trajectories for the planet itself and the following installations—"
Alarm klaxons began to screech. Traat-Admiral ignored them and reached for his communicator. Chuut-Riit was not going to be happy, when he learned of how the humans replied to the Fourth Fleet.
Chuut-Riit had told him that some humans were worthy of respect. He was beginning to believe it.
* * *
Raines and Jonah commanded the front screen to stop mimicking a control board; beyond a certain level fear-adrenaline was an anti-aphrodisiac. Now the upper half was an unmodified view of the Alpha Centauri system; the lower was a battle schematic, dots and graphs and probability-curves like bundles of fuzzy sticks. The Yamamoto was going to cross the disk of the Wunderland system in subjective minutes, mere hours even by outside clocks, with her ramscoop fields spreading a corona around her deadly to any life-form with a nervous system, and the fusion flare a sword behind her half a parsec long, fed by the fantastically rich gas-field that surrounded a star. Nothing but beam-weapons stood a chance of catching her, and even messages were going to take prodigies of computing power to unscramble. Her own weapons were quite simple: iron eggs. Velocity equals mass; when they intercepted their targets, the results would be in the megaton-yield range.
Jonah's lips skinned back from his teeth, and the hair struggled to raise itself along his spine. Plains ape reflex, he thought, smelling the rank odor of fight/flight sweat trickling down his flanks. Your genes think they're about to tackle a Cape buffalo with a thighbone club. His fingers pressed the inside of the chair seat in a complex pattern.
"Responding," said the computer in its usual husky contralto.
Was it imagination that there was more inflection in it? Conscious computer, but not a human consciousness. Memory and instincts designed by humans . . . free will, unless he or Ingrid used the override keys. Unless the high command had left sleeper drives. Perhaps not so much free will; a computer would see the path most likely to succeed and follow it. How would it be to know that you were a made thing, and doomed to encysted madness in six months or less? Nobody had ever been able to learn why. He had speculated to himself that it was a matter of time; to a consciousness that could think in nanoseconds, that could govern its own sensory input, what would be the point of remaining linked to a refractory cosmos? It could make its own universe, and have it last forever in a few milliseconds. Perhaps that was why humans who linked directly to a computer system of any size went catatonic as well. . . .
"Detection. Neutronic and electromagnetic-range sensors." The ship's system was linked to the hugely powerful but subconscious level machines of the Yamamoto. "Point sources."
Rubies sprang out across the battle map, and they moved as he watched, swelling up on either side and pivoting in relation to each other. A quick glimpse at the fire-bright point source of Alpha Centauri in the upper screen showed a perceptible disk, swelling as he watched. Jonah's skin crawled at the sight; this was like ancient history, air and sea battles out of Earth's past. He was used to maneuvers that lasted hours or days, matching relative velocities while the planets moved slowly and the sun might as well be a fixed point at the center of the universe . . . perhaps when gravity polarizers were small and cheap enough to fit in Dart-class boats, it would all be like this.
"The pussies have the system pretty well covered," he said.
"And the Swarm's Belters," Ingrid replied. Jonah turned his head, slowly, at the sound of her voice. Shocked, he saw a glistening in her eyes.
"Home . . ." she whispered. Then more decisively: "Identification, human-range sensors, discrete."
Half the rubies flickered for a few seconds. Ingrid continued to Jonah: "This is a messy system; more of its mass in asteroids and assorted junk than yours. Belters use more deep-radar and don't rely on telescopes as much. The pussies couldn't have changed that much; they'd cripple the Swarm's economy and destroy its value to them." Slowly. "That's the big station on Tiamat. They've got a garrison there, it's a major shipbuilding center, was even"—she swallowed—"fifty years ago. Those others are bubbleworlds . . . More detectors on Wunderland than there used to be, and in close orbit. At the poles, and that looks like a military-geosynchronous setup."
"Enemy action. Laser and particle-beam weapons." Nothing they could do about that. "Enemy vessels are detonating high-yield fusion weapons on our anticipated trajectory."
Attempting to overload the ramscoop, and unlikely to succeed unless they had something tailored for it, like cesium gas bombs. The UNSN had done theoretical studies, but the pussies were unlikely to have anything on hand. This trick was not in their book, and they were rather inflexible in tactics.
Of course, if they did have something, the Yamamoto would become a rather dangerous slug of high-velocity gas in nanoseconds. Catskinner might very well survive, if the stasis field kicked in quickly enough . . . in which case her passengers would spend the next several thousand years in stasis, waiting for just the right target to slow them down.
"Home," Ingrid said, very softly.
Jonah thought briefly what it would be like to return to the Sol-Belt after fifty years. Nearly a third of the average lifetime, longer than Jonah had been alive. What it would be like, if he ever got home. The Yamamoto could expect to see Sol again in twenty years objective, allowing time to pass through the Alpha Centauri system, decelerate and work back up to a respectable Tau value. The plan-in-theory was for him and Ingrid to accomplish their mission and then boost the Catskinner out in the direction of Sol, turn on the stasis field again and wait to be picked up by UNSN craft.
About as likely as doing it by putting our heads between our knees and spitting hard, he thought sardonically.
"Ships," the computer said in its dispassionate tone. "Movement. Status, probable class and dispersal cones."
Color-coded lines blinking over the tactical map. Columns of print scrolling down one margin, coded velocities and key-data; hypnotic training triggered bursts into their minds, crystalline shards of fact, faster than conscious recall. Jonah whistled.
"Loaded for bandersnatch," he said. There were a lot of warships spraying out from bases and holding-orbits, and that was not counting those too small for the Yamamoto's detection systems: their own speed would be degrading signal drastically. Between the ramscoop fields, their velocity, and normal shielding, there was very little that could touch the ramscooper, but the kzin were certainly going to try.
"Aggressive bastards," he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tactical display. Getting in the way of the Yamamoto took courage, individually and on the part of their commander. Nobody had used a ramscoop ship like this before; the kzin had never developed a Bussard-type drive; they had had the gravity polarizer for a long time, and it h
ad aborted work on reaction jet systems. But they must have made staff studies, and they would know what they were facing. Which was something more in the nature of a large-scale cosmic event than a ship. Mass equals velocity: by now the Yamamoto had the effective bulk of a medium-sized moon, moving only a tenth slower than a laser beam.
That reminded him of what the Catskinner would be doing shortly—and the Dart did not have anything like the scale of protection the ramscoop warship did. Even a micrometeorite . . . Alpha Centauri was a black disk edged by fire in the upper half of the screen.
"Projectiles away," the computer said. Nothing physical, but another inverted cone of trajectories splayed out from the path of the Yamamoto. Highly polished chrome-tungsten-steel alloy slugs, which had spent the trip from Sol riding grapnel-fields in the Yamamoto's wake. Others were clusters of small shot, or balloons, to transmit energy to fragile targets; at these speeds, a slug could punch through a ship without slowing enough to do more than leave a small glowing hole through the structure. Wildly varying albedos, from fully-stealthed to deliberately reflective; the Catskinner was going to be rather conspicuous when the Slaver stasis field's impenetrable surface went on. Now the warship's magnetics were twitching the kinetic-energy weapons out in sprays and clusters, at velocities that would send them across the Wunderland system in hours. It would take the firepower of a heavy cruiser to significantly damage one, and there were a lot of them. Iron was cheap, and the Yamamoto grossly overpowered.
"You know, we ought to have done this before," Jonah said. The sun-disk filled the upper screen, then snapped down several sizes as the computer reduced the field. A sphere, floating in the wild arching discharges and coronas of a G-type sun. "We could have used ramrobots. Or the pussies could have copied our designs and done it to us."
"Nope," Ingrid said. She coughed, and he wondered if her eyes were locking on the sphere again as it clicked down to a size that would fit the upper screen. "Ramscoop fields. Think about it."