The Wunder War mw-10

by Hal Colebatch

  Charrgh-Captain leaped to the console in a bound. “There is activity!” He shrieked. “Look! There is energy discharge! And lights!”

  The camera, still trained on the sphere, showed red points in its dark depths, appearing and disappearing in a regular pattern.

  “What do we do?”

  Peter Robinson was hunched, crouching, ears knotted. He was trying, Richard thought, to block out something none of the others could feel—or did not know they felt? The last words had come from Charrgh-Captain, and Richard realized that what he was trying to block out was Charrgh-Captain's fear. Charrgh-Captain himself stood dignified and motionless now, his ears, tail and testicles all in the relaxed position. What an act! thought Richard. Only Peter Robinson gives it away. Speculating on the body language of the two great felines kept his own cold apprehension for a moment at bay.

  The Slavers are dead, he told himself.

  Then Charrgh-Captain pointed to another screen.

  The deep-radar showed that beneath its stony covering, the great sphere was changing preparatory to its stasis field being switched off.

  “Flight is pointless,” said Charrgh-Captain. “Whatever is happening, we must see it through. Have the main weapons poised.”

  “Be prepared to fire without my command,” Richard told Melody. He noticed Charrgh-Captain's tendency to give orders. Comes naturally to a Kzin in a dangerous situation, I suppose, he thought. But I had better assert my authority right now.

  – discontinuity –

  “I detect no Slaver minds,” said Peter Robinson. The relief in his humanized voice, and in the atmosphere of the cabin, was almost palpable. “None whatsoever. There is no danger of live Slavers, I think.”

  The Slavers are dead!

  There was no change to the surface of the sphere. “The accreted material now becomes a thin shell over whatever is within.”

  “We can see it with deep-radar anyway. Also, there is a possible advantage to the shell remaining in place. If there is anything dangerous in there, the shell will help stop it getting out.”

  “It would not stop the Slaver Power. And if it is anything of high gravity the shell will crumble inwards.”

  “It would have to be something of abnormally high gravity, I think. It would be prudent to move farther away, but not so far as to slow our responses appreciably.”

  “There is nothing,” said Peter Robinson. “No living minds.”

  As the Wallaby moved away, the deep-radar's screen compensated and held its image at constant size. A great, irregular, metallic shape was seen within. It did not resemble any human, kzin or Puppeteer ship. It was not spherical, but asymmetrical and relatively compact. A large circle could be made out near a kind of double protuberance. What they called the control chamber was connected to it by a metallic stem. The #4 General Products hull, the biggest of the range, used almost entirely for colony expeditions, was a vast cargo-carrying sphere more than a thousand feet in diameter. This was far bigger, miles from one point to another. The Wallaby's instruments picked up another, still very faint energy discharge.

  “A thrint battle-wagon!”

  “I have seen nothing like it,” said Gatley Ivor.

  “I am awed,” said Charrgh-Captain. “I have seen holos of the dreadnaughts of the great wars. This dwarfs them. But it is cold and a dead ship. It must have been laid up to conserve it against need…”

  “It is almost too big to be a dreadnaught,” he said after a few moment's thought. “I do not understand.”

  “No 'almost' about it,” said Richard. “It is too big. Building a ship that size would be, as far as I can tell, an exercise beyond the point of diminishing returns. Thrintun were stupid but not, surely, that stupid. The same resources could have been used to build a score or more of respectable-sized battlewagons, big enough to do anything you liked, or any number of smaller warships still capable of carrying heavy war-loads.

  “Too many eggs in one basket… Once the stasis field was turned off—and it would have to be turned off before the thing could be used—a simple fusion missile could wreck it, let alone antimatter, which we know both sides used as a weapon… Besides, the deep-radar shows nothing that looks like weapons.”

  “Anything can be made into a weapon,” said Charrgh-Captain grimly. “You humans taught us that.”

  “Nonetheless, surely a purpose-built warship would have purpose-built weapons. Rail-guns, laser-cannon…”

  “Apart from war, you only need a truly vast ship like this if you cross space rarely,” said Gay. “But with an FTL drive, you can cross it as often as you like. And they did have FTL. They wouldn't have needed a freighter, or even a colony-ship, that size.”

  “It's worth plenty, anyway,” said Melody. “The Institute will be pleased. And the Foundation. We've shown the Puppeteers again that we are worthy of the hire.”

  “I'm not so sure,” said Richard. “It might be an interesting historical artifact, but as a ship it's hardly likely to give us new knowledge apart from the archaeological. We have better drives than the ancients ever had, and their materials were inferior to General Products hulls. Perhaps if it had been a tnuctipun ship it would have taught us more. I'm not saying it's worthless, of course. There must be some discoveries on board. I'm sure an army of Ph.D. students will pick through it. I suppose the Institute may sell it to a wealthy collector.”

  “How do you propose to get it there?” asked Charrgh-Captain.

  “Fly it, I suppose. It would make quite a sensation!”

  “Fly it how? Can you see a drive on it?”

  “Finagle's ghost!”

  “I did wonder how long it would take you to notice that.”

  They peered into the deep-radar ghost of the thing. Melody said, “There are massive fusion toroids, and what look like fuel tanks, part full. You can see there are massive stores of both hydrogen and heavy elements. The center of the thing, at least, seems to be built more of less on a pattern of concentric spheres.”

  “A good shape for a warship. As little surface as possible to target,” said Charrgh-Captain. “But the surface itself is not spherical. It is intuition only, but I feel-see a resemblance to the architecture of a computer whose cognitive cells are linked to give a cascading effect.”

  “Are you saying it is a computer, Charrgh-Captain?”

  “No, I am saying it reminds me of one. What would such a computer do? No, sense tells me it is a spaceship whose design is too alien for us to understand.”

  “Drives must be there, if only we can find them,” said Gay. “Let's look systematically.”

  “The ancient Slaver style of hyperdrive could not function until light-speed had nearly been reached,” said Richard some time later. He turned away from a search of the deep-radar images. The Whomping Wallaby's main computer screen was large, but he had almost covered it with boxes of data. “The ancient craft needed massive conventional subluminal engines to accelerate them initially. But Charrgh-Captain is right: There are no propulsive engines apparent here. Despite the fusion-toroids, I see no ramscoop collector-head. And even a ramscoop would need something to boost it initially. There is no surface for either the discharge of a laser drive or to receive the impact of a pushing laser, unless that bulging circle has something to do with it. There are no reaction-drive ports. They did not have the Jotoki-Kzinti gravity-drive. There are only relatively tiny attitude-jets, which can maneuver it around various axes but can do little else. So we have a spaceship without a drive.”

  “What about a sailing ship? Might it have had a lightsail?”

  “It's too big. No buildable lightsail could move that mass. And why build a sailing ship when they had a hyperdrive? Besides, what good is a lightsail when you're being attacked by enemy warships? It's vulnerable and it's hard to maneuver at all. Thrintun had others do most of their thinking for them, so even if they weren't too bright they weren't too primitive, and they had had thousands of years to refine their ships, with Tnuctipun input.”


  “Could it be a naval base rather than a ship?” asked Peter Robinson. “That would account for the size. Why, hundreds of years ago humans blew up Confinement Asteroid into something bigger than this. Sol's old Gibraltar base is bigger. So are Tiamat and many others. That might account for the massive fuel tanks: fleet replenishment.”

  “I see no docking ports,” said Charrgh-Captain. His pursuit of the answer to the puzzle seemed for the moment to have overcome even his loathing for the Wunderkzin, so that he answered him thoughtfully. “And would not a base have workshops, accommodation for crews, and defensive weapons? We see no evidence of any of those things. The sensor shows gold, which may be worth stripping. But this”—he stabbed at one of the boxes of light on the screen—“I do not like. These read like organic compounds.”

  “Yes,” said Gatley Ivor. “That is the composition of thrint tissue. I agree it is not reassuring. But it is apparently quite inert.”

  “Thrint corpses?” asked Melody.

  “Great masses of inert organic tissue. That's all I can say so far.”

  “Thrint and tnuctipun were both carnivores. If this was a tnuctip artifact I would suggest a larder of enemy's meat.”

  “The thrintun sent out a command that every sapient mind must die,” said Gatley Ivor. “The open question is, did they include themselves? The survival of the Grogs on Down suggests they didn't. We aren't sure, though. Perhaps they thought life without slaves would be no life at all, and they might as well all die together. Some think they had degenerated to the point that, left to their own devices, they could hardly have fed themselves, let alone maintained complex machinery and the luxurious conditions they had come to need. Students have been awarded doctorates for arguing for and against both propositions. Anyway, they died. The Grogs might be descendants of a late-emerging group.”

  Gay struck her fist on the table with a shout of triumph. “An ark! It's an ark! That's the only explanation!”

  “Arrk?” Charrgh-Captain pronounced the word easily, but his ears betrayed puzzlement.

  “A refuge, to preserve some remnant of their race so that they might begin again. That also accounts for the setup in the control chamber: They knew no one else was coming to get them out… The series of clocks to switch off the main stasis field is a series of fail-safes.”

  “Fine,” said Richard. “But where are they? Peter detects no trace of alien minds. There's all that inert tissue. Slavers in frozen sleep?”

  “No. A DNA bank, maybe. Slaver genetic material with mechanisms for rearing little Slavers. That might not need much space. All that tissue… like the yolk in an egg. Food.”

  “Slaver genetic material? There's a nasty thought! What do we do?”

  “Destroy it at once!” Charrgh-Captain's voice contained no doubt.

  “We have a little time, I think. They can hardly produce adult thrintun instantaneously. And there still appears to be no activity but a very faint energy discharge.”

  “And where,” said Gatley Ivor, “are the facilities for young thrintun? There would be crèches, surely. Things of that nature. We know they took several years to mature and develop the Power. As infants, even as adolescents, they would need to be cared for, disciplined, taught. It would cost little to have living slaves to care for them—during the time spent in stasis they would consume no stores—and, indeed, why not living Thrint adults to direct the slaves? Why did the adult Slavers who built the ark not take the elementary step of preserving their own lives inside it?”

  “Maybe they are the thrintun in the control chamber,” said Gay. “Maybe there were other facilities outside the stasis field that have been lost. Perhaps they were attacked and had to put it into stasis before the crew could be embarked.”

  “It seems the artifact came out of stasis periodically, and then returned to it,” said Charrgh-Captain. “Why should an arrk do that?”

  “That is simple. They wished to ensure their enemies were truly dead,” said Peter Robinson. “Perhaps when they first emerged from stasis they detected mental emanations from live tnuctipun. Perhaps not all tnuctipun were killed by the suicide command: They may have been coming out of their own stasis-protected arks and shelters for some time. This thrintun ark would return to stasis till all possible enemies were dead.”

  “That doesn't quite fit, Peter,” said Richard. “The great floating stasis-bubble would be vulnerable to attack if any tnuctipun were still around. They could detect it, close on it, turn off the field—child's play for the tnuctipun, who invented the field anyway—and do a thorough job of destroying whatever was inside. And if it was an ark like that, one would expect it to be defensively armed, as well as mobile. Besides, given that a lot of genetic material might have been preserved in a small space, a smaller artifact would surely have been big enough.

  “Another possibility occurs to me. Suppose the thrint knew the simple, blanket suicide command—easier to transmit, perhaps, than a selective one to kill slaves only—would get them too? Surely many would seek refuge in stasis fields. But they would have no one to get them out. The purpose of this artifact and its array of clocks may be to ensure that some would come out of stasis in the future to release others elsewhere.”

  “But they didn't,” said Gay.

  “We have found ancient artifacts estimated at much less than three billion Earth years old. That suggests arks or colonies emerged from stasis from time to time,” said Gatley Ivor. “For some reason they didn't survive, but they might be connected to the attack on this ark's control center. Perhaps some late-emerging tnuctipun came on it and attacked it but didn't survive to finish the job, disabling it without destroying it. If there was fighting in spaceships or on the surface of the big field, there would be no trace of that fighting now. Perhaps gun turrets or other weapons mounted on the surface were destroyed in the fighting or have disintegrated under meteor and dust bombardment since.”

  “Yes, for some reason they didn't survive,” said Gay.

  “Too much of the infrastructure of their—well, I suppose you have to call it their 'civilization,' for want of a better word—was gone.”

  “Yet at least tnuctipun emerging from stasis should have survived,” said Charrgh-Captain. “They were masters of science and technology. Not even clever races like the Jotok or the Pak—yes, humans, I know about the Pak—discovered a hyperdrive. Modern stasis fields are mere copies of the tnuctipun originals. Their biological engineering has survived on many worlds. They knew all the mechanisms of genetics and cloning. Surely any tnuctipun arrk would have carried copious genetic material so they could repopulate the universe with their own kind. Without the Slavers they could have rebuilt their civilization in a single generation, perhaps. What happened to them? Anyway, this is not a tnuctipun arrk, whatever it is… Urrr,” he growled. Normally kzintosh would no more betray bewilderment by thinking aloud, least of all in front of aliens, than they would betray fear. “The shape is not optimal for any utilitarian purpose. It has no warlike purpose. It is not a weapon or a weapons system. It is not a dreadnaught. There are no gun-ports, no missiles, no weapons of any kind. It has no room to carry fighter-craft or infantry.”

  “Greenberg drew all he remembered of thrintun artifacts,” said Gatley Ivor. “But I don't recall anything like this.”

  “Grrinberrg?” asked Charrgh-Captain. “I remember the name from my human Studies. Was Grrinberrg not a human who somehow defeated a Thrint?”

  “Yes, a human telepath. He learned something of its mind.”

  “A Slaver was released from stasis on a world of the Patriarchy,” said Charrgh-Captain. “Fortunately, it could control only a limited number of minds at one time. A Hero employed guile to escape and give warning. We destroyed the relevant continent with missiles from space. Many Heroes died—some of them undignified, dishonored deaths, still slaves of an alien mind, and we destroyed most of the habitable land on the planet and made species extinct.”

  “Was that a grief to you?” asked Gay.


  “The Fanged God set us to dominate and prey upon other species, not to exterminate them unless we must. Even when we boiled the Chunquens' seas, we did it selectively. Otherwise the humans of Wunderland might have fared differently… And the shape… Gay, you are right to be puzzled. Almost it reminds me of something, but I cannot think what.”

  “I have a similar feeling,” said Peter Robinson. “Also, I have an intuition that the shape is of importance. My intuition,” he added, staring defiantly at Charrgh-Captain again, “is a trained one. It is connected to my talent. May I experiment?” He sat at the controls and rotated the holo through different planes. “I had something there,” he said after a moment. “One great difficulty is arbitrarily assigning an up or down to this thing. But here, with the control chamber at the bottom, a South Pole, as it were, it appears to have at least bilateral symmetry.

  “Now let me project thrint artifacts we know.” His claws clicked on the keyboard's kzin-sized track-ball. “No, nothing. What of thrint body shapes?”

  Two clicks were enough. The holo of the gigantic artifact and a holo of a thrint head were projected side by side.

  “A thrint head! The circle is the eye! The protuberances below it are jaws! The protuberance at the rear is the Power-organ. A statue.”

  “On Kzin we have statues of Heroes in plenty,” said Charrgh-Captain. “There is a great one of Lord Chmee in orbit that all may see while the stars stand. But who would spend resources in a war to build one on this scale?”

  “Perhaps it predates the war?”

  “Unlikely. There would be signs of tnuctipun work in the control chamber at least.”

  “On Wunderland,” said Peter Robinson, staring defiantly again at Charrgh-Captain, “we have put up statues to notable kzinti recently. There is one of Chuut-Riit, the old Governor, who was wise, and Vaemar, and Raargh, who raised Vaemar when he was young, and others. There is a grove of them in the Arhus Hunting Preserve.”

  “Do you seek to provoke me?” asked Charrgh-Captain, grinning so all his teeth showed. His tail lashed, and one hand was on his w'tsai again.