by Paul Chafe
To Cherenkova's surprise they didn't separate, but stayed tied together at the loins, like wolves, and crawled awkwardly from the center of the circle. The tension bled out of the pride like air from an overinflated balloon. After a long pause V'rli-Ztrak stood and went to the center of the circle.
“Was the fight fair?”
“It was fair, Honored Mother.” The pride answered, almost in unison.
“Was it fair, K'dro?” She turned to face the upper-middle-status female beside Hrell-Hromfi, who had just lost her eldest son.
“It was fair, Honored Mother.” K'dro's voice was low but level. She lowered her head, clearly grieving.
V'rli furled her ears, satisfied, and went back to her place. Greow-Czatz stood up and began to tell the next saga of the Taking of Fortress Cta'ian, his words breathing life into the ancient story. Wild-Son's body lay where it had fallen. Quicktail and Z'slee were still coupled, the violence of their first mating replaced with amorous licking and nibbles. They lay by Night-Prowler, who moved slightly in front of them to make his protective posture clear. A new coalition had been formed, and Ayla had no doubt that Night-Prowler would be mating Z'slee later in the night. She found she had to consciously relax herself after the intensity of the encounter, but the pride seemed to handle it quite naturally. The tight group postures relaxed, mothers chased after their younger kits, and the unmated females moved from group to group again. It was as if the encounter had never happened.
Hours later Greow-Czatz had finished his story, and Ferlitz-Telepath slipped over to Ayla, who was by then munching on a slice of dried tuskvor and caught up in the tale. “We will have the death rite for Wild-Son now. You can watch, but stay back.”
“I understand.”
The heavier mood of the challenge and mating returned to the cavern as the pride built the fire up into a roaring pyre. Quicktail rose again to kneel by the body while every member of the pride rose to stand beside them to pay homage to the dead. Some told a short story, some threw a valued possession on the fire, some simply stood in silence. There was a solemnity to the occasion, but also a wild and primitive energy. Some of the storytellers were excellent, throwing themselves into the roles as they related them, using the play of shadow and flickering firelight to add drama to their words. Around the circle some of the males sparred, sudden, snarling encounters that ended almost as quickly as they began, and Cherenkova found herself unsure if the bouts were serious or playful. At last V'rli rose and stood beside them.
“Wild-Son was brave,” she said. “Wild-Son hunted well. He fought hard at the battle in the jungle. He was our blood, and he remains our blood. Now he is dead.”
There were snarls and growls from around the circle.
“Quicktail was brave,” V'rli continued. “Quicktail was fast, and wise beyond his years. He was loyal and fierce. He was our blood and remains our blood. Now he is dead.” She took her w'tsai from her belt and gave it to Quicktail.
Quicktail took the blade and bent to Wild-Son's body. Two quick cuts and the severed ears were his.
“I am Swift-Claw!” He roared the name as he held the ears up in triumph. “I claim the name here before you all! No one will take it from me.” He roared again and the pride roared with him. Two males leapt forward and grabbed the earless body and threw it onto the roaring pyre, where it sizzled and was consumed. The action became a tussle, and suddenly the entire pride was rolling and fighting, male and females together. Some of the fights turned into matings, roars and screams and snarls splitting the night.
Ayla understood now why she had been warned to stay back. What is the meaning here? She watched in fascination, making quick notes on her beltcomp. The orgy, if that's what it was, was still going on when she went down into the den to find her frrch skins, and sleep.
The next day Quicktail had new respect from the rest of the pride, and both he and Night-Prowler had moved up in the circle, with Z'slee beside them. She saw several more matings while the Mating Moon was high, and she learned the rules of the ritual. The female would choose her suitor, yowling for him, raising her haunches, flipping her tail, but if he responded she'd skitter away to tease another one. Usually the status difference between males was enough that one or the other would abandon the pursuit, but sometimes there would be a fight, short and violent and frequently bloody, although unlike Quicktail's duel with Wild-Son, not usually lethal, a disappointment when the hostile Sraff-Tracker fought Kr-Pathfinder for M'rraow, although at least Ayla had the satisfaction of seeing him lose. The winner would continue chasing the female, who more often than not would already be flipping her tail for a third male. The females always started with lower ranked males and worked their way up the ladder until they could entice no better male to chase them. Mated males tended to have higher status, and they were approached only after a female had courted all the other males. Why not start at the top and work their way down? The higher ranked males already had mates, the highest had several. With mates already and kits to protect they risked more in the mating battles and stood to gain less. A female enticed the lower ranks to prove her desirability to the higher ranks. Bottom up worked for the males too; the higher ranks offloaded the risk of battle to the lower ranks. Quicktail had mated Z'slee first, but Night-Prowler would mate her too, without taking any risk himself. It's an auction, she realized, sexualized and ritualized, but nothing more or less. The females wanted the fittest, highest status male they could get to sire their kits; the males proved their worth by fighting and winning, or having enough status that they didn't have to fight. There were other subtleties. Males with their eye on a particular female would turn down another's advances. Females who had borne kits for a male would court their sire first, and often only. Sometimes a female would fight another one who tried to court their male. There were other scuffles, physical and social, that happened away from the pride circle but served to determine who stood where in the mate competition. Cherenkova recognized the patterns. It's little different from dating up at a bounce bar. And there was no reason it shouldn't be. Darwinian sexual dynamics were about optimizing the fitness of offspring, and though the details changed, the game remained the same, in any species on any world.
But there were differences in detail. Kzinti pair-bonded sometimes, as Ferlitz-Telepath and V'rli-Ztrak did. Relatedness was important in determining who might mate with who — Quicktail-Swift-Claw and Night-Prowler were half brothers, she learned — and the male coalitions tended to follow blood lines. Once mating was publicly consummated the pair, or trio, would vanish from the pride circle for a more private honeymoon. It was fascinating. Kefan would be in his element here. Kzinti mating dynamics where the females were major players in the mating decision were radically different from those of the mainstream where females were simple property. The energy of the mating season threw her own glands into overproduction and she felt sexual desire, not as a passing fancy but as a deep, primal drive, and if screaming her need and raising her haunches would have brought Quacy Tskombe's flesh to hers she would have done it. And where are you, Quacy? She didn't want to think of him as dead. I must find my own place here first, if I'm ever going to get back to you.
Oderint dum metuant.
(Let them hate so long as they fear.)
— Emperor Caligula
Oorwinnig came out of hyperspace and dropped. She was last in formation, screened by half a dozen cruisers and twice that number of destroyers. Most of her escort were UNF ships. Earth and Wunderland didn't see eye to eye on a lot of issues, but war was something they could agree on, at least since Secretary Ravalla had taken office. It was about time the Flatlanders understood the reality of the kzinti. Captain Cornelius Voortman allowed himself a grim smile.
“Navigation, set course for target, full thrust.” He bit the words off, keeping the exultation out of his voice.
This was the mission he'd lived his life to lead. Far below the star Alpha Mensae glowed yellow-orange. Invisible still was Alpha Mensae II, a planet
thrice the size of Mars, with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere thick enough to breathe. It was a dry world, just a third of its surface covered in shallow seas, and it supported a biosphere consisting largely of jellyfish, algae and lichen. The kzinti had maintained an advanced base there since before humans learned to fly, launching secret raids in the war that ultimately enslaved the Pierin at Zeta Reticuli.
No longer a secret, and not much longer a base. Oorwinnig would see to that.
“Course locked in,” reported the navigation officer, and the starfield spun and the deck seemed to shift as the cabin gravity compensated for the full push of Oorwinnig's massive polarizers. Voortman sat back in his command chair and relaxed. The kzinti had forces in system, but nothing that could deal with his ship. It was unlikely any of the ratcats would even get through the cruiser screen. In a way that was too bad.
“All secure, Captain?” Admiral Mysolin's face appeared in the viscom, his UN gray uniform immaculately pressed. Voortman checked the battleplot, saw the battleship Atlantic had come out of hyperspace beside him.
“Yes sir. Forty-five hours to attack position, standard.” It was galling to take orders from a Flatlander, but Voortman kept his demeanor carefully professional. There was a larger enemy to think about, and Earth had put more ships into the fleet than Wunderland had.
Mysolin nodded curtly. “Good. Keep me informed.” His image vanished and Voortman scowled. The Flatlanders had nothing like Oorwinnig and, despite being the flagship, Atlantic's role was nothing more than close defense of Oorwinnig. It was important to remember that. When the time came, the central weapon was Wunderland's.
The scouts and destroyers were twelve hours ahead of Oorwinnig, just enough time for the kzinti to have detected their arrival, and for the light units to have assessed their first responses and transmitted the data for the main fleet to pick up on arrival. They were going to have to fight their way in. Hours-long speed-of-light lag would characterize the initial stages of the battle; computerized targeting and countermeasures too fast for merely human reflexes would characterize the endgame. Voortman looked out the transpax at the glowing arch of the Milky Way, four hundred billion stars in a hundred-thousand-light-year disk, spinning on a timescale of millions of years and remotely indifferent to a handful of organic lifeforms struggling over the pitiful two thousand systems contained in the tiny volume of the minor Orion arm that humanity liked to call Known Space. Once the Thrintun Slavers had held an empire that encompassed all that vastness, or so the academics claimed. One day their Tnuctipun slaves had revolted, and the Slaver war had wiped out every sentient being alive in the galaxy at that time. How long does it take for a species to occupy the whole galaxy? What else might we meet out there? Both unanswerable questions. He was certain of one thing. Whatever species next occupied the entire galactic volume, it was not going to be kzinti.
The first watch passed uneventfully, though the scout reports said the kzinti were boosting every ship they had to intercept. He carefully monitored the battle board as Mysolin ordered his screening units on counter-intercept missions. Occasionally terse combat reports came in, and they lost a ship in the first encounter, the destroyer Gloire, rammed by a scoutship that happened to be close enough to match her infall orbit and fast enough to get past her defensive weapons. Damn ratcats never surrender. Extermination was not an answer, it was the answer. Nothing else will stop them. Anyone who thought differently hadn't seen them fight.
At watch end he handed off the bridge to Kirsch, his able first officer, and went to sleep in his dayroom. Stockpiling sleep was a commander's first duty, because when the battle was joined he might not rest for days. There was always the temptation to stay awake, to watch the battle developing, but the earliest possible kzinti intercept was eighteen hours away. To stay awake now would mean being exhausted at the critical moment, and he couldn't afford that. A good commander trains his subordinates well enough to trust them. Kirsch could handle the ship, and would wake him if anything unexpected happened.
And nothing did, though the first main force engagement came in just twelve hours, in the middle of the next top watch. A squadron of kzinti fighters who must have been boosting hard enough to burn out their polarizers blasted through the destroyer screen to take on the cruisers, salvo launching their missiles at some tremendous closing velocity. The UNSN Vengeance took the brunt of the attack, lacing the incoming formation with her lasers and evading hard. Her screener cannisters reduced the missiles to so much junk, though a few detonated early to degrade her sensors. None did enough damage to take her out of the battle, and then the fighters, those who might have survived, were through the formation and out the other side, braking hard but out of the fight for another thirty hours, according to the combat computer's best guess. With no missile rounds left the best they could do on their next pass was ram. Voortman was all too aware that they would if they could, but that was a problem for later. Admiral Mysolin was back on the viscom, reorganizing the attack fleet in accordance with the latest intelligence. He had a dolphin tactical team aboard Atlantic, and no doubt his deployments were several layers deep in their sophistication. Voortman didn't have a lot of faith in either combat computers or dolphins. As a source of information they were fine. When it came time to position his ship for battle he preferred to trust his own instincts. In this case his instincts disagreed with Mysolin's plan, whatever its source. The admiral sent scoutships back along the fighter's attack course to search out the carrier that must have launched them. A cruiser and four destroyers shaped course behind them to deliver the coup de grace, if and when they found it. At least Oorwinnig continued uninterrupted on her maximum acceleration infall to loop around A-M II in attack orbit. In Voortman's mind, there was no need to do anything other than close with the enemy as fast as possible. The kzinti didn't have enough strength in the system to seriously interrupt the human fleet. It was why A-M II was chosen in the first place. It was important that the first test of the charge suppressor weapon be a success.
It's a waste of resources to go hunting for a now fangless carrier in the vastness of the outer system. Even if they found and destroyed it there would be little advantage compared to the risk posed by the defenses closer in. The human fleet had numbers enough to pursue such luxuries, but war was not about luxury. To Voortman war was about annihilation as Schlieffen had used the word, victory so complete that your enemy could never again pose a threat. It was something Genghis Khan had understood, and perhaps no one since.
But that would come soon enough, and if the fleet was the Admiral's to direct, Oorwinnig was his to command. And then the kzinti will know annihilation, as God struck down the Cities of Sin with fire from heaven.
There was a lull then, and he went back to his dayroom to grab a nap. Several hours later Kirsch woke him up. A kzinti destroyer squadron, the main enemy force in the system, was boosting to intercept. Unlike the fighters, whose trajectory would take them nowhere near his ship, the destroyers clearly intended to make it past the cruiser screen to cripple the battleships. Com traffic was crackling and Voortman ordered the ship's cameras zoomed to the battle, but the range was too great and there was nothing to see save the occasional brief flash of light. A flash that was over in seconds was a warhead, a flash that lingered was the death of a warship, and almost certainly all aboard her.
Suddenly a face in the viscom, voice and image distorted by the storm of charged particles left behind by the warheads. “They've got a cruiser…”
The image vanished, and in the battle view another flash flared, and slowly faded. Voortman stabbed a finger on the icon and got the dead ship's details. The cruiser Aurora, destroyed in action. The kzinti had camouflaged their strength, overloaded the defenses and managed to get a dangerous unit through. The particle storm left by the warheads had replaced the neat trajectory trails on his battle plot with expanding course funnels. He zoomed the view, scanned the threats. There… One of them was narrower than the others, a ship with more mass and l
ess thrust, a kzinti heavy cruiser. Another warhead winked in the darkness, a large section of the screen went orange. The kzin had launched screeners and then ionized them with a conversion blast to blank out the human sensors. The kzinti captain was covering himself, and he would be somewhere behind the screen, decelerated just enough to let it race in front of him as he closed to firing range. Even a heavy cruiser couldn't stand up to two battleships in a standup fight, but if the ratcat got a missile through their screeners it would do a lot of damage. And if he rammed…
Voortman set target lines to stitch the particle cloud and keyed his com. “All turrets, engage at five light-seconds. Countermeasures to free mode. He's going to be coming fast.”
“Engagement parameters set.” Marxle, the weapons officer, clicked keys.
“Navigation, plot an intercept…” The viscom flashed Admiral Mysolin's face, interrupting him. “Oorwinnig, maintain your course and prepare to fire.”
“Acknowledged.” Voortman ground his teeth. Why does he waste time with the obvious? “Navigation, prepare to evade.” The Flatlanders were going to take the engagement. Atlantic rolled to put her thrust vector ahead of the oncoming warship and boosted hard. On the battle plot her icon slid past Oorwinnig, set for the intercept that Voortman wanted for himself. Long minutes dragged past as Atlantic positioned herself, and then suddenly a grid of flashes winked in the darkness. The kzin was attacking behind a wall of conversion detonations, trying to saturate Atlantic's defenses. More flashes blossomed, then a final, double flash that faded slowly. Had the kzinti gotten through?
“Oorwinnig, you are clear.” There was no image to go with the voice, so static torn as to be barely recognizable, but the message was what was important. Voortman felt a mild disappointment. His ship was strong, she could defend herself, and now the battle honors would fall to Atlantic. Focus on the mission, focus on the enemy.