The Houses of the Kzinti

by Larry Niven

  Before Greow-Captain a stepped-down image showed the darkened curve of the gas envelope, and the gouting coriolis-driven plumes as the human projectiles plowed their way through plasma. Shocks of discharge arched between them as they drew away from the kzin craft above, away from the beams that sought to tumble them down into denser layers where even their velocity would not protect them. Or at least throw them enough off course that they would recede harmlessly into interstellar space. The light from the holo-screen crawled in iridescent streamers across the flared scarlet synthetic of the kzin's helmet and the huge lambent eyes; the whole corona of Alpha Centauri was writhing, flowers of nuclear fire, a thunder of forces beyond the understanding of human or kzinkind.

  The two Operators were uneasily conscious that Greow-Captain felt neither awe nor the slightest hint of fear. Not because he was more than normally courageous for a young male kzin, but because he was utterly indifferent to everything but how this would look on his record. Another uneasy glance went between them. Younger sons of nobles were notoriously anxious to earn full Names at record ages, and Greow-Captain had complained long and bitterly when their squadron was not assigned to the Fourth Fleet. Operational efficiency might suffer.

  They knew better than to complain openly, of course. Whatever the state of his wits, there was nothing wrong with Greow-Captain's reflexes, and he already had an imposing collection of kzin-ear dueling trophies.

  "Greow-Captain, the anomaly is greater than a variance in reflectivity," the Sensor-Operator yowled. Half his instruments were useless in the flux of energetic particles that were sheeting off the Slasher's screens. He hoped they were being deflected; as a lowly Sensor-Operator he had not had a chance to breed—not so much as a sniff of kzinrret fur since they carried him mewling from the teats of his mother to the training creche. "The projectile is not absorbing the quanta of our beam as the previous one did, nor is its surface ablating. And its trajectory is incompatible with the shape of the others; this is larger, less dense, and moving" . . . a pause of less than a second to query the computer . . . "moving as if its outer shell were absolutely frictionless and reflective, Greow-Captain. Should this not be reported?"

  Reporting would mean retreat, out to where a message-maser could punch through the chaotic broad-spectrum noise of an injured star's bellow.

  "Do my Heroes refuse to follow into danger?" Greow-Captain snarled.

  "Lead us, Greow-Captain!" Put that way, they had no choice; which was why a sensible officer would never have put it that way. Both Operators silently cursed the better diet and personal-combat training available to offspring of a noble's household. It had been a long time since kzin met an enemy capable of exercising greater selective pressure than their own social system. His very scent was intimidating, overflowing with the ketones of a fresh-meat diet.

  "Weapons-Operator, shift your aim to the region of compressed gases directly ahead of our target, all energy weapons. I am taking us down and accelerating past red-line." With a little luck, he could ignite the superheated and compressed monatomic hydrogen directly ahead of the projectile, and let the multimegaton explosion flip it up or down off the ballistic trajectory the humans had launched it on.

  Muffled howls and spitting sounds came from the workstations behind him; the thin black lips wrinkled back more fully from his fangs, and slender lines of saliva drooled down past the open neckring of his suit. Warren-dwellers, he thought, as the Slasher lurched and swooped.

  His hands darted over the controls, prompting the machinery that was throwing it about at hundreds of accelerations. Vatach hunters. The little quasi-rodents were all lower-caste kzin could get in the way of live meat. Although the anomaly was interesting, and he would report noticing it to Khurut-Squadron-Captain. I will show them how a true hunter—

  The input from the kzin boat's weapons was barely a fraction of the kinetic energy the Catskinner was shedding into the gases that slowed it, but that was just enough. Enough to set off chain-reaction fusion in a sizable volume around the invulnerably-protected human vessel. The kzin craft was far enough away for the wave-front to arrive before the killing blow:

  "—shield overload, loss of directional hhnrrreaw—"

  The Sensor-Operator shrieked and burned as induction-arcs crashed through his position. Weapons-Operator was screaming the hiss of a nursing kitten as his claws slashed at the useless controls.

  Greow-Captain's last fractional second was spent in a cry as well, but his was of pure rage. The Slasher's fusion-bottle destabilized at almost the same nanosecond as her shields went down and the gravity control vanished; an imperceptible instant later only a mass-spectroscope could have told the location as atoms of carbon and iron scattered through the hot plasma of the inner solar wind.

  —discontinuity—

  "Shit," Jonah said, with quiet conviction. "Report. And stabilize that view." The streaking pinwheel in the exterior-view screen slowed and halted, but the control surface beside it continued to show the Catskinner twirling end-over-end at a rate that would have pasted them both as a thin reddish film over the interior without the compensation fields. Gravity polarizers were a wonderful invention, and he was very glad humans had mastered them, but they were nerve-wracking.

  The screen split down the middle as Ingrid began establishing their possible paths.

  "We are," the computer said, "traveling twice as fast as our projected velocity at switchoff, and on a path twenty-five degrees further to the solar north." A pause. "We are still, you will note, in the plane of the ecliptic."

  "Thank Finagle for small favors," Jonah muttered, working his hands in the control gloves. The Catskinner was running on her accumulators, the fusion reactor and its so-detectable neutrino flux shut down.

  "Jonah," Ingrid said. "Take a look." A corner of the screen lit, showing the surface of the sun and a gigantic pillar of flare reaching out in their wake like the tongue of a hungry fire-elemental. "The pussies are burning up the communications spectra, yowling about losing scout-boats. They had them down low and dirty, trying to throw the slugs that went into the photosphere with us off-course."

  "Lovely," the man muttered. So much for quietly matching velocities with Wunderland while the commnet is still down. To the computer: "What's ahead of us?"

  "For approximately twenty-three point six light-years, nothing."

  "What do you mean, nothing?"

  "Hard vacuum, micrometeorites, interstellar dust, possible spacecraft, bodies too small or nonradiating to be detected, superstrings, shadowmatter—"

  "Shut up!" he snarled. "Can we brake?"

  "Yes. Unfortunately, this will require several hours of thrust and exhaust our onboard fuel reserves."

  "And put up a fucking great sign, 'Hurrah, we're back' for every pussy in the system," he grated. Ingrid touched him on the arm.

  "Wait, I have an idea. . . . Is there anything substantial in our way, that we could reach with less of a burn?"

  "Several asteroids, Lieutenant Raines. Uninhabited."

  "What's the status of our stasis-controller?"

  A pause. "Still . . . I must confess, I am surprised." The computer sounded surprised that it could be. "Still functional, Lieutenant Raines."

  Jonah winced. "Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?" he said plaintively. "Another collision?"

  Ingrid shrugged. "Right now, it'll be less noticeable than a long burn. Computer, will it work?"

  "Ninety-seven percent chance of achieving a stable Swarm orbit. The risk of emitting infrared and visible-light signals is unquantifiable. The field switch will probably continue to function, Lieutenant Raines."

  "It should, it's covered in neutronium." She turned her head to Jonah. "Well?"

  He sighed. "Offhand, I can't think of a better solution. When you can't think of a better solution than a high-speed collision with a rock, something's wrong with your thinking, but I can't think of what would be better to think . . . What do you think?"

  "That an unshielded c
ollision with a rock might be better than another month imprisoned with your sense of humor. . . . Gott, all those fish puns . . ."

  "Computer, prepare for minimal burn. Any distinguishing characteristics of those rocks?"

  "One largely silicate, one eighty-three percent nickel-iron with traces of—"

  "Spare me. The nickel-iron, it's denser and less likely to break up. Prepare for minimal burn."

  "I have so prepared, on the orders of Lieutenant Raines."

  Jonah opened his mouth, then frowned. "Wait a minute. Why is it always Lieutenant Raines? You're a damned sight more respectful of her."

  Ingrid buffed her fingernails. "While you were briefing up on Wunderland and the Swarm . . . I was helping the team that programmed our tin friend."

  * * *

  "Are you sure?"

  The radar operator held her temper in check with an effort. She had not been part of the Nietzsche's crew long, but more than long enough to learn that you did not back-talk Herrenmann Ulf Reichstein-Markham. Bastard's as arrogant as a kzin himself, she thought resentfully.

  "Yes, sir. It's definitely heading our way since that microburn. Overpowered thruster, unusual spectrum, and unless it's unmanned they have a gravity polarizer. Two hundred G's, they pulled."

  The guerrilla commander nodded thoughtfully. "Then it is either kzin, which is unlikely in the extreme since they do not use reaction drives on any of their standard vessels, or . . ."

  "And, sir, it's cool. Hardly radiating at all, when the fusion plant's off. If we weren't close and didn't know where to look . . . granted, this isn't a military sensor, but I doubt the ratcats have seen him."

  Markham's long face drew into an expression of disapproval. "They are called kzin, soldier. I will tolerate no vulgarities in my command."

  Bastard. "Yessir."

  The man was tugging at his asymmetric beard. "Evacuate the asteroid. It will be interesting to see how they decelerate, perhaps some gravitic effect . . . and even more interesting to find out what those fat cowards in the Sol system think they are doing."

  * * *

  "Prepare for stasis," the computer said.

  "How?" Ingrid and Jonah asked in unison. The rock came closer, tumbling, half a kilometer on a side, falling forever in a slow silent spiral. Closer . . .

  "Interesting," the computer said. "There is a ship adjacent."

  "What?" Jonah said. His fingers slid into the control gloves like snakes fleeing a mongoose, then froze. It was too late, and they were committed.

  "Very well stealthed." A pause, and the asteroid grew in the wall before them, filling it from end to end.

  Tin-brained idiot's a sadist, Jonah thought.

  "And the asteroid is an artifact. Well hidden as well, but at this range my semi-passive systems can pick up a tunnel complex and shut-down power system. Life support on maintenance. Twelve seconds to impact."

  "Is anybody there?" Jonah barked.

  "Negative, Jonah. The ship is occupied; I scan twinned fusion drives, and hull-mounted weaponry, concealed as part of the grappling apparatus. X-ray lasers, possible rail-guns. Two of the cargo bays have dropslots that would be of appropriate size for kzin light-seeker missiles. Eight seconds to impact."

  "Put us into combat mode," the Sol-Belter snapped. "Prepare for emergency stabilization as soon as the stasis field is off. Warm for boost. Ingrid, if we're going to talk you'll probably be better able to convince them of our—"

  —discontinuity—

  "—bona fides."

  The ripping-cloth sound of the gravity polarizer hummed louder and louder, and there was a wobble felt more as a subliminal tugging at the inner ear, as the system strained to stop a spin as rapid as a gyroscope's. The asteroid was fragments glowing a dull orange-red streaked with dark slag, receding; the Catskinner was moving backward under twenty G's, her laser-pods star-fishing out and railguns humming with maximum charge.

  "Alive again," Jonah breathed, feeling the response under his fingertips. The wall ahead had divided into a dozen panels, schematics of information, stresses, possibilities; the central was the exterior view. "Tightbeam signal, identify yourselves."

  "Sent. Receiving signal also tightbeam." A pause. "Obsolete hailing pattern. Requesting identification."

  "Request video, same pattern."

  The screen flickered twice, and an off-right panel lit with a furious bearded face, tightly contained fury, in a face no older than his own, less than thirty; beard close-shaven on one side, pointed on the right, yellow-blond and wiry, like the close-cropped mat on the narrow skull; pale narrow eyes, mobile ears, long-nosed with a prominent bony chin beneath the carefully cultivated goatee. Behind him a control-chamber that was like the one in the Belter museum back at Ceres, an early-model independent miner—but modified, crammed with jury-rigged systems of which many were marked in the squiggles-and-angles kzin script; crammed with people as well, some of them in armored spacesuits. An improvised warship, then. Most of the crew were in neatly tailored gray skinsuits, with a design of a phoenix on their chests.

  "Explain yourzelfs," the man said, with a slight guttural overtone to his Belter English, enough to mark him as one born speaking Wunderlander.

  "UNSN Catskinner, Captain Jonah Matthieson commanding, Lieutenant Raines as second. Presently," he added dryly, "on detached duty. As representative of the human armed forces, I require your cooperation."

  "Cooperation!" That was one of the spacesuited figures behind the Wunderlander, a tall man with hair cut in the Belter crest, and adorned with small silver bells. "You fucker, you just missiled my bloody base and a year's takings!"

  "We didn't missile it, we just rammed into it," Jonah said. "Takings? What are these people, pirates?"

  "Calm yourzelf, McAllistaire," the Wunderlander said. His eyes had narrowed slightly at the Sol-Belter's words, and his ears cocked forward. "Permit self-introduction, Hauptmann Matthieson. Commandant Ulf Reichstein-Markham, at your zerfice. Commandant in the Free Wunderland navy, zat is. My, ahh, coworker here is an independent entrepreneur who iss pleazed to cooperate wit' the naval forces."

  "Goddam you, Markham, that was a year's profits yours and mine both. Shop the bastard to the ratcats, now. We could get a pardon out of it, easy. Hell, you could get that piece of dirt back on Wunderland you're always on about."

  The self-proclaimed Commandant held up a hand palm-forward to Jonah and turned to speak to the owner of the ex-asteroid. "You try my patience, McAllistaire. Zilence."

  "Silence yourself, dirtsider. I—"

  "—am now dispensable." Markham's finger tapped the console. Stunners hummed in the guerrilla ship, and the figures not in gray crumpled.

  The Commandant turned to a figure offscreen. "Strip zem of all useful equipment and space zem," he said casually. Turning to the screen again, with a slight smile. "It is true, you haff cost us valuable matériel . . . You will understant, a clandestine war requires unort'odox measures, Captain. Ve are forced sometimes to requisition goods, as the Free Wunderland government cannot levy ordinary taxes, and it iss necessary to exchange these for vital supplies vit t'ose not of our cause." A more genuine smile. "As an officer ant a chentelman, you vill appreciate the relief of no lonker having to deal vit this schweinerie."

  Ingrid spoke softly to the computer, and another portion of the screen switched to an exterior view of the Free Wunderland ship. An airlock door swung open, and figures spewed out into vacuum with a puff of vapor; some struggled and thrashed for nearly a minute. Another murmur, and a green line drew itself around the figure of Markham. Stress-reading, Jonah reminded himself. Pupil-dilation monitoring. I should have thought of that. Interesting: he thinks he's telling the truth.

  One of the gray-clad figures gave a dry retch at her console. "Control yourzelf, soldier," Markham snapped. To the screen: "Wit' all the troubles, the kzin are unlikely to have noticed your, ah, sudden deceleration." The green line remained. "Still, ve should establish vectors to a less conspicuous spot. Then I can off
er you the hozpitality of the Nietzsche, and we can discuss your mission and how I may assist you at leisure." The green line flickered, shaded to green-blue. Mental reservations.

  Not on board your ship, that's for sure, Jonah thought, smiling into the steely fanatic's gaze in the screen. "By all means," he murmured.

  * * *

  " . . . zo, as you can imagine, we are anxious to take advantage of your actions," Markham was saying. The control chamber of the Catskinner was crowded with him and the three "advisors" he had insisted on; all three looked wirecord-tough, and all had stripped to usefully lumpy coveralls. And they all had something of the outer-orbit chill of Markham's expression.

  "To raid kzin outposts while they're off-balance?" Ingrid said. Markham gave her a quick glance down the eagle sweep of his nose.

  "You vill understand, wit' improvised equipment it is not always pozzible to attack the kzin directly," he said to Jonah, pointedly ignoring the junior officer. "As the great military t'inker Clausewitz said, the role of a guerrilla is to avoid strength and attack weakness. Ve undertake to sabotage their operations by dizrupting commerce, and to aid ze groundside partisans wit' intelligence and supplies as often as pozzible."

  Translated, you hijack ships and bung the crews out the airlock when it isn't an unmanned cargo pod, all for the Greater Good. Finagle's ghost, this is one scary bastard. Luckily, I know some things he doesn't.

  "And the late unlamented McAllistaire?"

  A frown. "Vell, unfortunately, not all are as devoted to the Cause as might be hoped. In terms of realpolitik, it iss to be eggspected, particularly of the common folk when so many of deir superiors haff decided that collaboration wit' the kzin is an unavoidable necessity." The faded blue eyes blinked at him. "Not an unreasonable supposition, when Earth has abandoned us—until now . . . Zo, of the ones willing to help, many are merely the lawless and corrupt. Motivated by money; vell, if one must shovel manure, one uses a pitchfork."