The Man-Kzin Wars 04

by Larry Niven

  "As you command, brave Hero!"

  "Now how shall we kill them? It was you who took out my particle-beamer for this test!" The thought of being disarmed put him back on the edge of anger. Not even a nuke. "Shall I slash at them with my w'tsai as they zip past?"

  "This combat couch is very uncomfortable, revered Hero," muttered short(arm). Listening to himself gave Long-Reach perversely practical ideas. "We could toss my combat couch at the enemy."

  "Silence!" roared Kr-Captain.

  Trainer-of-Slaves was looking around the cockpit for things that might be ripped out. "Gold dust is what we need, but your honor-bearing w'tsai blade is powerful enough to destroy even the most invincible monkey battleship."

  Long-Reach gave a good imitation of a kzin "hisssss" of profound inspiration. "We leave our noble Hero on the line-of-flight, waving his w'tsai. He leaps," said short(arm). "He strikes!" exclaimed freckled(arm). Then a chorus of arms imitated the spits and snarls of a kzin fight. Skinny(arm) intoned the denouement, "In one blow the enemy ship disintegrates in a blaze of shame! and ever afterwards Kr-Hero radiates bluely from the honor roll of the Patriarch!"

  Discretely, fast(arm) gripped a rod on the back of Trainer-of-Slaves combat couch in case he had to yank Long-Reach to a safer place.

  His lips twitching, Kr-Captain eyed his more yelloworange than red-orange kzin companion. "Where did you find this five course lunch?"

  "We've been together since Hssin. He really is a good mechanic."

  "We seem to have reached a consensus," grumbled the Captain. "Some massive object left along the line-of-flight."

  "Perhaps not massive. If we sprinkled gold dust in its path, each grain of dust carries the impact energy of a medium nuclear strike," said Trainer.

  Kr-Captain did not believe him. Kzin are not used to combat passes at relativistic speeds. But he did the calculation on his screen. The numbers convinced him. "A little dust in the monkey's path and nuclear fireball! Easy."

  "Not so easy," moaned big(arm). Long-Reach had been consulting among himselves. "It is not just a bigger high-velocity kinetic impact," stated the practical fast(arm). "We now pass into a new realm of the unimaginable where our intuition fails," expostulated the expansive short(arm).

  At relativistic speeds, kinetic impact becomes a cosmic ray shower.

  Visibly, Alpha Centauri began to creep across the glittering heavens toward Man-sun. The stars shimmered unnaturally through the strengthening polarizer field. Long-Reach, as "honorary" Weapons-Operator, busied himself with a simple project. He removed cameras from missiles. Then he built two makeshift warheads out of bottled oxygen and half their water rations and a few grams of tungsten-carbide grinding powder from his toolkit.

  The Flayer-of-Monkeys was well equipped with sensors. Seventeen hours from their rendezvous it began to pick up the ramscoop which had an "apparent velocity" of 120 lightspeeds. Electronic amplification constructed a foreshortened image. The scoop was gone. That was a shock.

  Trainer-of-Slaves thought, at first, that it had been "burnt-off' during the close flyby of A-star, but when he had the Flayer's data-link rotate the image to a side view, he saw that the funnel was simply folded-in to a vastly reduced scoop area so that its magnetic field was being used only to protect the crew. In the high mass regions around Alpha Centauri they had simply "furled their sails"!

  From a standstill, Flayer aimed and directed its missiles down the line-of-flight toward the oncoming UNSN ramscoop which was now occulting Man-sun. The makeshift warheads bled a lethal mist of oxygen and ice-coated tungsten. Then Flayer moseyed down the line, away from the ramscoop, bleeding its helium coolant, its cabin nitrogen reserve, plus a bottle of argon and for good measure the talcum powder that Kr-Captain used to bathe his fur. They returned at full acceleration, stopped, rolled and dropped to the side, rotating to face the coming action. Trainer-of-Slaves mounted the salvaged cameras.

  "All they have to do is dodge!" complained Kr-Captain, who was an expert at sixty-g maneuvers.

  "They are blind in front. Their course is laser-true. Do you know how much lateral-thrust energy it would take to deflect them a whisker's breadth? They don't command that kind of energy. They are committed!"

  The Heroes strapped in to do the warrior's greatest duty wait.

  Half an hour later the nameless ramscoop, its mission still a mystery to its attackers, zipped by, moving faster than any explanation can describe what the eye saw.

  The first missile missed.

  The second missile ticked through an edge of the folded scoop, ionizing into a fireball genie that lashed a flaming arm out after the ramscoop too late, too slow.

  The ramscoop plowed ahead into the mist.

  Valiantly the magnetic field tried to cope with the overload but wasn't equipped to handle the dust or the oxygen. Superconductors overheated. Electrical resistance began to vaporize the surface of the scoop...

  Meanwhile hydrogen and oxygen and tungsten, helium and nitrogen and argon, even talcum powder, were ionizing on impact to become tiny superdense nuclear projectiles sleeting through what to a nucleus is mostly empty space the bulkhead, the air, the life support, the instruments, the protein, the fusion engine, hardened lead-tungsten radiation barriers, everything and on out to the other side, leaving behind ionized trails as spoor.

  A few of these "cosmic rays" collided with the relativistically massive nuclei of the ramscoop, scattering, smashing nuclei into a spray of particle fragments. Mesons flashed into gamma rays and gave birth to muons. Muons lived out their leisurely lives and died. Positrons blinked into existence. Anti-matter screamed out of collisions. Wildly exotic nuclei spat out particles in a desperate search for a new equilibrium. Neutrons bounced and bled into space.

  But it was the energy of the stripped electrons that destroyed the monkeys' ramscoop. The ship was essentially transparent to the impacting nuclei but opaque to the electrons. The kinetic energy of the electrons was instantly transformed to heat.

  The flare blazed, then was gone at near lightspeed, doppler-shifting into the red. It had left them. Inertia is implacable. What is moving continues to move.

  The UNSN vessel was destined to travel on through the universe as a dense cosmic ray packet, slowly disintegrating and falling apart from its contact with the interstellar medium, from collisions with gases and particles. Billions of years later, in some distant galaxy, scientists might note its passing as an increase in the cosmic ray count from some strange quadrant of the sky. There would be theories about the high metallic content of the rays.

  On the return of the Flayer-of-Monkeys to the Sherrek's Ear, they learned of the ramscoop's mission a bombing run. From a great distance it had launched precision pellets at specific targets. The relativistic pellets carried the wallop of a nuclear blast.

  UNSN spoor was dated and their gunner's accuracy terrible. Whole areas of the arctic zone had been blasted without a single kzin or human casualty because there was nothing there. One lucky hit on a kzin base had killed four thousand Heroes. The human-beasts had taken gruesome casualties, only five percent of which were military related. A miss had impacted the ocean and created a tidal wave that had rolled over four seaside communities.

  Kr-Captain was furious. "Why didn't we get it before it attacked!"

  Alas, warriors were always reminded of the fortunes of war. Only the Black Prides carried the really long distance detection equipment. Both the Tigripard s Ear of the Fourth Black Pride and the Patriarch's Nose of the Fifth Black Pride had detected the ramscoop two days before the Sherrek's Ear had sniffed the electromagnetic scent, but each was almost two light-days from the line-of-flight. By lightbeam they didn't have time to warn Alpha Centauri, and by their fastest fighters, they didn't have time to intercept. The ramscoop was following too closely behind its own electromagnetic arrival notice.

  Sherrek's Ear, though it was behind Alpha Centauri, was stationed only eight light-hours from the line-of flight. Even then, interception would have been difficul
t had the Flayer not been out on a maintenance run in the right direction.

  Grraf-Hromfi gave a diagnostic lecture. Think before you leap. Never underestimate an enemy. He was furious at himself for assuming that no ramscoop could fly faster than half lightspeed. He was so furious that he set up a whole day of tournament to clean his liver of rage, taking on all comers.

  Only months later they learned the covert mission of the ramscoop when Chuut-Riit was assassinated.

  CHAPTER 20

  (2420 A.D.)

  Detection-Orderly-Two summoned Grraf-Hromfi immediately, rousing him from a curled sleep. Hromfi was not the kind who made life miserable for warriors who interrupted his rest. A Hero on duty had the obligation to wake the dead if he felt it in the interest of the Patriarchy. The Commander of the Third Black Pride appeared at the Command Room, naked in his copper red fur except for slippers, grumpy, but not angry.

  Analysis began promptly, without preliminaries. The small object had appeared in the heavens out of nowhere, near Rh’ya in the House of the Fanged God's Kzinretti the Pleiades. Only light-hours away. Very anomalous gravity pulse. That had set off the alarms. It was also a neutrino source.

  Another strange event.

  The Third Black Pride was up to full strength. Its Commander ordered a discrete reconnaissance probe. If the mystery pulse came from a small ship, he wanted it captured for interrogation. Quickly. And not destroyed.

  Instantly, he chose for the mission three pilots he could trust. the first an old warrior with grey in his pelt who had flown Scream-of-Vengeance fighters for Chuut-Riit since he was a kit, the second a wild-eyed Hssin barbarian who liked to pick the meat out of his fangs and comb his mane before he leaped, and the third, Grraf-Hromfi's most promising son.

  They, in turn, were shaken out of their sleep. Each hastily donned goggles so that he could receive his orders. "The intruder is to be disabled, not vaporized!" growled their Commander. "And while I have your attention: a warning." He shifted into the menacing tense of the Hero's Tongue to jolt their livers. "Our instruments tell us that this object appeared out of nowhere. Instruments can be deceived. The best kzin minds can be deceived. However, regardless of how irrational the concept, expect the object to defend itself by vanishing into nowhere. Attack without warning! Disable it immediately! Prisoners are to be taken! If it is an automatic ship, the brain is to be salvaged!"

  While the three crews scrambled, he called ahead to make sure that Fighter Command was ready to equip them with Screamers modified by Trainer-of-Slaves. He wanted them to have whatever edge he could supply.

  Grraf-Hromfi's nose was beginning to sniff the oddness of an alien technology lurking about. On the borderlands of the Patriarchy that could be extremely dangerous. But how to put these enigmatic pieces together? He thought of the wooden puzzles of the kzin Conundrum Priests of W'kkai. Eight ways there were to put any puzzle together, and seven of those ways always left an awkward shape protruding.

  In the meantime, decisions never waited for a finished puzzle.

  How had that unnaturally fast ramscoop dropped off agents? No obvious mode of deceleration suggested itself. At an incoming velocity near lightspeed any agent would have carried the energy of a continent-smashing bomb; the energy from any kind of capsule-braking would have been observed. And how had they penetrated Chuut-Riits security to juggle crèche feeding procedures so that Chuut-Riit had to face his own ravenously hungry sons behind locked doors? It seemed like magic. Of course it wasn't.

  But now an unauthorized ship that wrote its own unique gravity pulse. Could it be that the ramscoop hadn't delivered the agents? Was there a new player? He remembered Yiao-Captain's visit and his infectious insistence that they point their long distance antenna toward a possible "alien" artifact. Another orphaned piece of the puzzle that "protruded."

  This was indeed a time of troubles. After the launch of the three Screamers, Grraf-Hromfi brooded briefly on the other troubles while he did his warrior's duty, waiting. . .

  ... troubles enough to incline Grraf-Hromfi to leap off for Man-sun immediately and let these slashing Wunderkzin rip their own faces apart. Octals of the kzin nobility, who had been chafing under the rule of the outsider Chuut-Riit, had seized the assassination as license for them to seize power. Traat-Admiral's claws had been busy with duels. Political chaos.

  Regrettably, border barbarians were uneducated in honor! They thought of duels and Ascendancy as honor. They thought of death as Opportunity. They knew nothing of the honor of Loyalty After Death.

  Leaving them to their own murders was a warm, meaty idea, but impractical. The Fifth Fleet needed Wunderland as its supply base. They couldn't use Hssin. It was extra light-years away and Hssin kzin were all related by blood and. warrior oaths to the original Centauri Conquest Heroes anyway.

  The ramscoop attack, itself, had done little damage—but it had brought hundreds of honest slaves to a state of feral defiance. Now open defiance was spreading like a plague as the squabbles among the kzin became public knowledge. Ferals had even attacked the Gerning base from space and put its detectors out of commission for three days, long enough to land supplies for some of the renegade animals.

  Grraf-Hromfi was in a bad mood because he was just back from a political tour of Wunderland estates. He had picked the most obsequious of the power hungry back-stabbers first, cleverly led them to state the claims they believed to be true, challenged them to a duel for false claims, and killed them. After three such contests of honor, the rest of the Wunderkzin learned more quickly the value of careful reason. The power hungry always made the same mistake they built their True Case, the case they were willing to defend in public, upon false logic.

  Detection-Orderly-Two appeared at the oval bulkhead door of the Command Center of the Sherreks Ear. "Sire! May I have your attention again?"

  Grraf-Hromfi glanced up. The orderly mock-slashed his face sharply. "You look like you've just bested your father at arm-tug. Found something new? I hope not another of those objects."

  "No, Sire, not in this system. But I have something for you to consider, if you will, sir. May I use your data-link?" Without even waiting for assent, he switched on the wall screen and spat-hissed commands to the retrieval slavecrystal. Ribbons of telemetering appeared. "These are mystery signals which the Second Black Pride has been relaying to us from Mansun for analysis. They started arriving about three months ago, off and on. We have never been sure that they weren't noise, or the artifact of some instrument malfunction."

  "You've found something there besides noise?"

  "Yes, sir! They all have the same signature as our mysterious visitor. I did a comparison. It came out at the seven-eights confidence level excellent— considering that the signals we have are only whiskers above the noise jiggles. The Patriarch’s Nose has been seeing—what we have been seeing but just inside their maximum range.

  "And 4.3 years ago," muttered Grraf-Hromfi. "We must never the lightlag. A lot can happen in five years. The Fifth Fleet has doubled in that time. Who knows what cunning they have been up to at Man-sun."

  "What do you think the mystery object is, sir?"

  "A scout."

  "Do you think they've found a way to travel at lightspeed, sire"

  "We'll find out. All detection squads are on full battle alert?"

  "Yes, Sire!"

  Grraf-Hromfi was now very worried. Was the pulseobject a visitor from Man-sun? He turned up the gravity in the Command Room so that he could pace. On impulse he called Trainer-of-Slaves for a goggle-to-goggle conference. "You paw around with those agonized shrieks-and-spits of demented mathematicians? Their water-hole tracks describing unified field theory?" The virtual image of Trainer-of-Slaves hung in the air like a ghost, fixed in position.

  "Dominant Sire, I've inflicted some of that torture upon myself, yes. Do you want an opinion on that

  "What would this sudden appearance of mass mean?"

  "You are suggesting that the pulse tells of the creation of mass
out of nothing?" asked Trainer. "Yes."

  "That's impossible, sir. My opinion of the pulse..."

  "Mate yourself to a sthondat! I didn't ask your opinion, Eater-of-Grass, I asked what it meant!"

  "To avoid your insults, I will tell you what you wish to hear. Any mass passing through the light barrier would appear as if it had been created out of nothing."

  "But this one wasn't moving at relativistic speeds."

  "Light barriers can be stationary. I refer you to the work of Ssrkikn-the-Juggler: 'The Event Horizons o....' "

  "Yes, yes, yes. Can mass pass through an event horizon?"

  "Mass pops out of black holes all the time but it can't bring any information with it. Your faster-than-light ship would fry its occupants down to their unreadable parts. You couldn't find out where they came from not even the direction..

  "You think we'll have a simpler explanation for this pulse?"

  "I do, but my opinion is worthless beside your own, Lord Commander!"

  "In a few days I may have the object for you to examine if it doesn't play hide-the-copper-penny with us, or worse, put us in cages for some alien zoo! In the meantime I suspect that our visitor may be from Man-home. I want prisoners. There may be injuries in the attack. You are our veterinarian. Take a Ztirgor with that autodoc Chuut-Riit gave you, and follow the attack force. Do not attack. Your only function will be to handle human casualties."

  Grraf-Hromfi broke the contact and lifted his goggles above his eyes. His ears were folded and buried, his lips trembling over fangs. He didn't like to wait!

  CHAPTER 21

  (2420 A.D.)

  The United Nations Space Navy Shark materialized at a radius of 335 AU, some 50 billion kloms behind Alpha Centauri the location picked to keep them hidden from kzin eyes which might be watching Sol. There was minimal danger at this distance but UNSN Lieutenant Nora Argamentine was still filled with the dangerous excitement of her first combat patrol. She had a special reason for wanting revenge against the kzin.