by Larry Niven
This was like ancient history, air and sea battles out of Earth's past. He was used to maneuvers that lasted hours or days, ships and fleets 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 is 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. They'd cripple the Swarm's economy and destroy its value." 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 bubble-worlds... More detectors on Wunderland than there used to be, and in close orbit. At the poles, and that looks like a military-geosynchronous setup."
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 he had been alive-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, rejoin the Catskinner, boost her 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 getting back by putting our heads between our knees and spitting hard.
"Ships," the computer said in its dispassionate tone. "Movement. Status, probable class and dispersal cones.
Color-coded lines blinked over the tactical map. Columns of print scrolled 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 them, but the kzin were certainly going to try.
"Aggressive bastards," he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tactical display. It took courage, individually and on the part of their commander to put themselves in the way of the Yamamoto. 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 had 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 increases with velocity: by now moving only fractionally slower than a laser beam, the Yamamoto had the effective bulk of a medium-sized moon.
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 an inverted cone of trajectories splayed out from the path of the Yamamoto's Highly-polished chrome-tungsten-steel alloy slugs, that had spent the trip from Sol riding grapnel-fields in the Yamamoto's wake. Wildly varying albedo, 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 slugs out in sprays and clusters, at velocities that would send them across the Wunderland system in mere hours. It would take the firepower of a heavy cruiser to significantly damage one, and there were a lot of slugs. 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."
"Oh. " When you put it that way, he could think of about a half-dozen ways to destabilize one; drop, oh, ultra-compressed radon into it. Countermeasures... luckily, nothing the kzin were likely to have right on hand.
"For that matter," she continued, "throwing relativistic weapons around inside a solar system is a bad idea. If you want to keep it."
"Impact," the computer said helpfully. An asteroid winked, the tactical screen's way of showing an expanding sphere of plasma. Nickel-iron, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon-compounds, some of the latter kzin and humans and children and their pet budgies.
"You have to aim at stationary targets," Ingrid was saying. "The very things that war is supposed to be about seizing. Blowing them up is as insane as fighting a planetside war with fusion weapons and no effective defense. Only possible once."
"Once would be enough, if we knew where the kzin home system was." For a vengeful moment he imagined robot ships fiddling into a sun from infinite distances, scores of lightyears of acceleration at hundreds Of G's, their own masses raised to near-stellar proportions. "No. Then again, no."
“I’m glad you said that," Ingrid replied. Softly: I wonder what it's like, for them out there."
"Interesting, " Jonah said tightly. "At the very least, interesting. "
"Please, keep calm," Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, for the fourth time. "For Finagle's sake, sit down and shut up!"
This one seemed to sink in, or perhaps the remaining patrons were getting tired of running around in circles and shouting. The staff were all at their posts, or preventing the paying customers from hitting each other or breaking anything expensive. Several of them had police-model stunners under their dinner jackets, like his; hideously illegal, hence quite difficult to square. Not through Claude-he was quite conscientious about avoiding things that would seriously annoy the ratcats-but there were plenty lower down the totem pole who lacked his gentlemanly sense of their own long-term interests.
Everyone was watching the screen behind the bar again; the UNSN announcement was off the air, but the München news service was slapping in random readouts from all over the planet. For once the collaborationist government was too busy to follow their natural instincts and keep everyone in the dark, and the kzin had never given much of a damn, the only thing they cared about was behavior. Propaganda be damned.
The flatlander warship was stiff beaded in system; from the look of things they were going to use the sun for a whip-round. He could feel rusty spaceman's reflexes creaking into action. That was a perfectly sensible ploy; ramscoop ships were not easy to turn. Even at relativistic speeds you couldn't use the interstellar medium to bank. Turning meant applying lateral thrust; it would be easier to decelerate, turn and work back up to high Tau-unless you could use a gravitational sling, like a kid on roller-skates going hell-for-leather down a street and then slapping a hand on a lamppost.
He raised his glass to the sometime mirror behind the bar. It was showing a scene from the south polar zone with its abundance of ratcat installations; kzin were stuck with Wunderland's light gravity, but they preferred a cooler, drier climate than humans. The first impact had looked like a line of light drawn down from heaven to earth, and the shockwave flipped the robot camera into a spin that had probably ended on hard, cold ground.
Yarthkin grinned, and sna
pped his fingers for the waitress. He ordered coffee, black, and a sandwich.
"Heavy on the mustard, sweetheart," he told the waitress. He loosened his tie and watched flickershots of boiling dust-clouds crawling with networks of purple-white lightning. Closer, into canyons of night seething up out of red-shot blackness, that must be molten rock... "Sam." The man at the musicomp looked up from trailing his fingers across the keyboard. It was configured for piano tonight-an archaism, like the whole setup. Popular, as more and more fled in fantasy what could not be avoided in reality, back into a history that was at least human. Of course, Wunderlanders were prone to that, the planet had been a patchwork of refugees from an increasingly homogenized and technophile Earth anyway. I've spent a generation cashing in on a nostalgia boom, Yarthkin thought wryly. Was that because I had foresight, or was I one of the first victim?
"Sir?" Sam was Krio, like McAndrews the doorman, although he had never gone the whole route and taken warrior scars. Many of the descendants of the refugees from Sierra Leone were traditionalists to a fault. just as tough in a fight, though. He'd been enrolled in the Sensor-Effector program at the Scholarium, been a gunner with Yarthkin in the brief war in space, and they had been together in the hills. And he had come along when Yarthkin took the amnesty, too. Even more of a wizard with the keys than he had been with a jazzer or a strakkaker or a ratchet knife. "Play something appropriate, Sam. Stormy Weather.
The musician's face lit with a vast white grin, and he launched into the ancient tune with a will, even singing his own version translated into Wunderlander. Yarthkin murmured into his lapel to turn down the hysterical commentary from the screen, still babbling about dastardly attacks and massive casualties.
It took a man back. Humans were dying out there, but so were ratcats... Here's looking at you, he thought to the hypothetical crew of the Yamamoto. Possibly nothing more than A.I. and sensor-effector mechanisms, but he doubted it.
"Stormy weather for sure," he said softly to himself. Megatons of dust and water vapor were being pumped into the atmosphere. "Bad for the crops. " Though there would be a harvest from this, yes indeed. I could have been on that ship, he thought to himself, with a sudden flare of murderous anger. I was good enough. There are probably Wunderlanders aboard her; those slowships got through. if I hadn't been left sucking vacuum at the airlock, it could have been me out there!
"But not Ingrid," he whispered to himself. "The bitch wouldn't have the guts." Sam was looking at him; it had been a long time since the memory of the last days came back. With a practiced effort of will he shoved it deeper below the threshold of consciousness and produced the same mocking smile with which he had faced the world for most of his adult life. "I wonder how our esteemed ratcat masters are taking it," he said. "Been a while since the ones here've had to lap out of the same saucer as us lowlife monkey-boys. I'd like to see it, I truly would."
"... estimate probability of successful interception at less than one-fifth," the figure on the screen said. "Vengeance Fang and Rampant Slayer do not respond to signals; Lurker at Waterholes continues to accelerate at right angles to the elliptic. We must assume they were struck by the ramscoop fields."
The governor watched closely; the slight bristle of whiskers and rapid open-shut flare of wet black nostrils was a sign of intense frustration.
"You have leapt well, Traat-Admiral," Chuut-Riit said formally. "Break off pursuit." A good tactician, Traat-Admiral; if he had come from a better family, he would have a double name by now. And he would have a double name, when Earth was conquered, a name and vast wealth. One percent of all the product of the new conquest, since he was to be in supreme military command of the Fifth Fleet. That would make him founder of a Noble Line, his bones in a worship shrine for a thousand generations. Chuut-Riit had hinted that he would send several of his daughters to the admiral's harem, letting him mingle his blood with that of the Patriarch.
.. Chuut-Riit, are we to let the... the... omnivores escape unscathed?" The admiral's ears were quivering.
A rumble came from the space-armored figures that bulked in the dim orange light behind the flotilla commandant. Good, the planetary governor thought. They are not daunted.
"Your bloodlust is commendable, Traat-Admiral, but the fact remains that the human ship is traveling at velocities which render it... it is at a different point on the energy gradient, Traat-Admiral."
"We can pursue as it leaves the system!”
"In ships designed to travel at .8 lightspeed? From behind? Remember the Human Lesson. That is a very effective reaction drive they are using." A deep ticking sound came from his throat and Traat-Admiral's ears laid back instinctively. The thought of trying to maneuver past that planetary length sword of nuclear fire ...
Chuut-Riit paused to let the thought sink home before continuing: "This has been a startling tactic. We assumed that possession of the gravity polarizer would lead the humans to neglect reaction drives, as we had done, hrrrearow echssseee nwaroweeaatrurrre, this-does-not-follow. We must prepare countermeasures, investigate the possibility of ramscoop interstellar missiles... at least they did not strike at this system's sun, or drop a really large mass into the planetary gravity well." The fur of the kzin on the battlewagon's bridge laid flat, sculpting the bone-and-muscle planes of their faces.
"Indeed, Chuut-Riit, " Traat-Admiral said fervently.
"It was only surprise that made the tactic so effective. Counters come readily to mind: a series of polarizer-driven missiles, with laser-cannon boost, deployed ready to destabilize ramscoop fields. In any case, you are ordered to break off action, assist with emergency efforts, detach two units with interstellar capacity to shadow the intruder until it leaves the immediate vicinity. Waste no more Heroes in futility; instead, we must repair the damage, redouble our preparations for the next attack on Sol."
"As you command, Chuut-Riit, although it shaves my mane to let the leaf-eating monkeys escape, when the Fifth Fleet is so near completion." The governor rose, letting his weight forward on hands whose claws slid free. He restrained any further display of impatience. I must teach him to think. To learn to think correctly he must be allowed to make errors. "Its departure has already been delayed. Will losing further units in fruitless pursuit speed the repairs and modifications which must be made? Attend to your orders!”
"At once, Chuut-Riit!”
The governor held himself impressively immobile until the screen blanked. Then he turned and leaped with a tearing shriek over the nearest wall, out into the unnatural storm and darkness. A half-hour later he returned, meditatively picking bits of hide and bone from between his teeth with a thumb-claw. His pelt was plastered flat with mud, leaves, and blood, and a thorned branch had cut a bleeding trough across his sloping forehead. The screens were still flicking between various disasters, each one worse than the last.
"Any emergency calls?" he asked mildly.
"None at the priority levels you established," the computer replied. "Murmeroumph," he said, opening his mouth wide into the killing gape to get at an irritating fragment between two of the back shearing teeth. "Staff."
One wall turned to the ordered bustle of the household's management central. "Ah, Henrietta," he said in Wunderlander. "You have that preliminary summary ready?"
The human swallowed and averted her eyes from the bits of something that the kzin was flicking from his fangs and muzzle. The others behind her were looking drawn and tense as well, but displayed no signs of panic. If I could recognize such signs, the kzin thought. They panic differently. A Hero overcome with terror either fled, striking out at anything in his path, or went into mindless berserker frenzy.
Berserker, he mused thoughtfully. The concept was fascinating; reading of it had convinced him that kzin and human kind were enough alike to cooperate effectively. "Yes, Chuut-Riit," she was saying. "Installations Seven, Three, and Twelve in the north polar zone have been effectively destroyed, loss of industrial function in the 75-80% range. Over 90% at Six, the main fusion
generator destabilized in the pulse from a near-miss." Ionization effects had been quite spectacular. "Casualties in the range of five thousand Heroes, thirty thousand humans. Four major orbital facilities hit, but there was less collateral damage there, of course, and more near-misses." No air to transmit blast in space. "Reports from the asteroid belt still coming in."
"Merrower," he said, meditatively. Kzin government was heavily decentralized; the average Hero did not make a good bureaucrat, that was work for slaves and computers. A governor was expected to confine himself to policy decisions. Still... "Have my personal spaceship prepared for lift, I will be doing a tour."
Henrietta hesitated. "Ah, noble Chuut-Riit, the feral humans will be active, with defense functions thrown out of order."
She was far too experienced to mistake Chuut-Riit's expression for a smile.
"Markham and his gang? I hope they do, Henrietta, I sincerely hope they do." He relaxed. "I'll view the reports from here. Send in the groomers, my pelt must be fit to be seen." A pause. "And replacements for one of the bull buffaloes in the holding pen."
The kzin threw himself down on the pillow behind his desk, massive head propped with its chin on the stone surface of the workspace. Grooming would help him think, humans were so good at grooming... and blowdryers, blowdryers alone were worth the trouble of conquering them.
"Prepare for separation," the computer said. The upper field of the Catskinner screen was a crawling slow-motion curve of orange and yellow and darker spots; the battle schematic showed the last few slugs dropping away from the Yamamoto, using the gravity of the sun to whip around and curve out toward targets in a different quarter of the elliptic plane. More than a few were deliberately misaimed, headed for catastrophic destruction in Alpha Centauri's photosphere as camouflage.
It can't be getting hotter, he thought.
"Gottdamn, it's hot," Ingrid said. "I'm swine sweating."
Thanks, he thought, refraining from speaking aloud with a savage effort. "Purely psychosomatic," he grated.