by Larry Niven
She switched on the instruction mike, and when the indicator lit told the computer, "We're there."
CONFIRMED, it replied. She had it use visual replies only, on a screen for one of the ruined instrument pods. It was less unnerving that way. Its voice sounded like her mother.
"Great. Now where the puke are we?"
EPSILON INDI SYSTEM, it replied.
Peace growled, then muttered, "How am I supposed to find out what I'm doing here?"
REQUEST THE REASON FOR THE CHOSEN DESTINATION, it told her.
Peace stared at the screen for a long moment, intensely annoyed. If she'd been in the habit of thinking aloud, she could long since have... rrrgh! "Why was this destination chosen?" she finally said.
EPSILON INDI SYSTEM WAS ABANDONED DUE TO FAILURE OF THE COLONY WORLD HOME, AND IS TOO DEEP IN HUMAN SPACE TO BE PRACTICAL FOR OTHER RACES. MATERIALS FROM COLONY STRUCTURES SHOULD BE MORE THAN SUFFICIENT FOR REPAIRS, AND TRACE ELEMENTS FOR SUPPLIES CAN BE ACQUIRED FROM THE ENVIRONMENT.
"Why did the colony fail?"
PLAGUE, ETIOLOGY UNKNOWN, BUT RAPID IN EFFECT. ONLY A PARTIAL WARNING WAS SENT BEFORE COMMUNICATIONS CEASED.
"Nobody's tried to find a cure?" To obtain a whole planet?
FIVE EXPEDITIONS ARE RECORDED SINCE 2360. THREE WERE UN ARM, ONE JINX INSTITUTE OF KNOWLEDGE, ONE WUNDERLAND INDEPENDENCE SOCIETY. NO SURVIVORS ARE RECORDED.
"Didn't anybody think to leave someone in orbit?"
ALL FIVE MISSION PLANS INCLUDED ISOLATED OBSERVERS.
"Piles," Peace murmured. Then she yelled, "So what's the point of being here if I can't go outside?"
REPAIRS MUST BE PERFORMED IN A PRESSURE SUIT.
"Pus."
* * *
Epsilon Indi system had been colonized by flatlanders and Belters, but the Belters must have been malcontents or something: there wasn't a trace of asteroid industry. There were hardly any asteroids, contrary to what the ship's records said. Home itself had been named by consensus, but the right to name the other major bodies had been distributed by lot, and the first settlers must have been an odd bunch. From inmost to outermost, the planets were: Monongahela, Home, Bullwinkle, Rapunzel, and Godzilla. Peace was unable to find any explanations for these choices in Cockroach's memory.
Home itself was... strange. The icecaps were a lot bigger than the computer's maps showed, and the coastlines were all screwed up. Why would there be an ice age? The primary wasn't contracting, the way that, for instance, Sol was. In the putative tropics, the coastlines were thick with jungle showing no sign of habitation, but this cut off sharply—about where the old coastlines used to be, in fact. The interior was all but sterile—but well supplied with highways. There were circular lakes, ranging in size from big to absurd, sprinkled over the continents, and all of them had several big roads leading right up to their rims, connecting them to others. Some intersecting lake patterns had dozens of those leading away from them. What it looked like was, there had been a bunch of cities all over, and they'd exploded.
Maybe they'd tried to stop the plague with fusion blasts? But then why was there an ice age? All that soot would reduce the planet's albedo and melt the icecaps. Anyone who went to school on Pleasance knew all about light absorption.
Rot it. Peace deep-radared the crust, looking for refined metal she could land near.
Then, incredulous, she did it again.
There was no piece of refined metal larger than her fist within a quarter-mile of the surface. Whatever the research ships had landed with was gone, which was at least plausible if you assumed they'd taken off and died on the way back; but the residues of industry were absent too. There wasn't so much as a bearing from a groundcar down there, not even where city sites were under the ice. Outside the newly-exposed coastal areas there weren't even ore concentrations. Records said Home was supposed to be poor in ferrous ores, but they couldn't have built everything out of aluminum and brick, could they? And there was no refined aluminum, which meant either somebody had used it all for something, or there had been some amazingly corrosive rainfall here—like hydrofluoric acid, or a strong lye solution. Aluminum didn't break down by itself.
There were no satellites in orbit.
Nothing manmade on the moon, Indigo. (It wasn't. Who named these things?) No useful concentrations, either, which would have sidestepped the risks involved in landing on the planet.
Peace grumbled and set the surviving instruments to performing a spectroscopic assay. If nothing else, there would be mine tailings. The last visitors had been two or three centuries back; metal reclamation technology had been stimulated considerably by the three intervening Kzinti Wars. She told the computer to map incidence levels of the elements needed for Cockroach's repairs, then had a nap—after it nagged her into taking another meal she didn't want, of course.
When she got up, her first impression was that she'd instructed the computer wrong. She hadn't. According to the scan, the nine most essential elements—the Group VIII set—were distributed in three ways:
First, there was a light dusting of them, all over the planet—except in the lakes, where there were only traces.
Second, there were massive deposits in all river deltas—pre-glacial ones—and deep ocean trenches. Massive as in, kilotons.
Third, there were five concentrations, of all nine elements, in the immediate vicinity of the former location of Claytown, where the spaceport had been. This was on a former river delta, so Peace decided to set down there—after wondering briefly why anybody would put a spaceport next to an ocean, which could potentially wreck it in minutes. (She dismissed the question, on the grounds that people who would blow up cities would do anything at all.) The five spots there also held concentrations of niobium and chromium—where five large supplies of hullmetal had been chemically separated, then scattered.
She decided to be especially careful. The plague clearly did something to your brain.
* * *
In forty days of inactivity, morale aboard the Fury had plummeted. The crew slept a lot off duty. Some began grooming compulsively. Dueling had fallen off, and Power Officer had reported hearing one of his crewkzin apologize to another of equal rank. Gnyr-Captain didn't even have the comfort of nagging Manexpert, for he knew intuition was a hairless thing, curling up under pressure.
Gnyr-Captain was exercising in his cabin, leaping across it with the gravity turned low. He didn't need that much exercise, but it ate time—and he'd caught himself wondering if his tail would look good tattooed.... Someone buzzed, and he poised, turned the gravity back up, and grabbed a variable-sword in one combined movement. Could have been smoother, he noted. Getting soft. "Enter," he said.
Manexpert opened the door. "If I entered you might get ill, sir," he said. It was a good bet; he wasn't clean. He was matted, too, and missing chin hairs where he'd been tugging on them. One of his ears was half-curled, and had a persistent twitch; and he—
"What are you doing?" Gnyr-Captain exclaimed.
"Sir? Oh, the tail. I thought fiddling with the end of it would help me think more like a human, sir."
"Humans don't have tails," said Gnyr-Captain distractedly, disturbed at the sight.
"I know, sir, but if they did they'd fiddle with the tuft."
"Why?"
"They fiddle with everything, sir. —I have five possible destinations, Gnyr-Captain."
This was simultaneously annoying and a relief; he'd expected thirty-two or forty. "Name them."
"From most to least dangerous: first, he could return to his own system."
"Suicide."
"Just being thorough, sir. Next, the asteroid belt of Gunpoint."
"How is that dangerous?"
"As the system nearest Sol it's ruled from Earth. There are rebels in the asteroids who want to overthrow the governors, and they'd want the ship, but they might save money by killing him and taking it."
That sounded remarkably sensible. "Humans would do that? They're usually so scrupulous in matters of trade."
"Not with each other, sir. In fact, the humans most concerned with dealing honorably with other species often treat their fellow humans like sthondats."
"Why?"
"I've never even heard a theory, sir. It's one of those human things."
"Ftah. Proceed."
"Third is Fuzz. Fourth is Warhead. I judge them nearly equal in danger. I don't know whether human telepaths go insane on Fuzz; on the other hand, though Warhead is closer to Kzin, it presents logistical difficulties for invasion—"
"I know about Warhead," Gnyr-Captain said sharply. He had had ancestors there—might still have, in stasis. "Fifth?"
"Home," Manexpert said in human speech.
"Never heard of it."
"A colony destroyed by an unidentified disease, which was still active during later visits. We may assume the prey has a pressure suit, and colony relics would include repair materials—"
"He's there," Gnyr-Captain said with certainty.
"It is least likely, sir—I see, playing a double game?"
Gnyr-Captain's ears cupped.
"Human phrase, sir. Their strategies often—"
"Manexpert," Gnyr-Captain interrupted, surprising himself with his mildness, "go groom, and get some rest, and rinse yourself with that polymer solvent or whatever it is you like so much. But first tell Navigator where to find Huwwng—that world."
"Home, sir?" Manexpert enunciated.
"Yes. I don't know how you can reproduce that monkey howling. Dismissed."
"Yes, sir. You get used to the taste after a few years, sir," Manexpert said, and saluted, and closed the door.
Gnyr-Captain squinted at the closed door for a full minute, trying to make sense of that.
III
Within a week of landing, Peace was sick. Not with the plague; with rage. She'd done the first repairs with parts in storage, then done a full rundown on ship's systems to see about cannibalizing anything redundant.
The autodoc had a telomerizing subsystem—it could restore one cell's chromosomes to a youthful condition. It also had the capacity for full brain transplant. Which had been used. Repeatedly.
She should have realized. Boosterspice will not restore fertility; Peace had "never met" her father because she never had one. She'd been gestated as a supply of spare parts. Her thyroid had been kept low to make her easy to catch. And what a funny pun her name was!
Jan had been sentenced to twelve years, and had been due out... about now, in fact. Peace was nearing the end of her fertility; Jan would have had to hurry to get her brain put into the spare in time to bear a replacement. The spare brain would be thrown away, of course, and Jan Corben would be reported as suffering a sad accident.
It came to Peace suddenly that the kzinti invasion had saved her life.
When she finally got her hysterical laughter under control, she was very calm.
She thought.
She called up the manual-operations checklist on the computer, started a test run, and while it was fully occupied did a physical disconnect between the overseer system and the airlock, the gravity planer, the fusion tube, and the autodoc. She resisted temptation: she used a cutting laser. An axe would have been less accurate.
This done, she used a handheld computer to check the autodoc programs, and found that they were indeed not what the ship's computer had said they were. She found the programs used on Jan, copied them to crystal storage, and simply replaced the old crystals with the new ones. She traced circuit paths, found other storage media with programs inside, and destroyed them. Then she used the autodoc.
When she awoke, the first thing she realized was that the kzinti would come looking for her.
Repairs would have to wait. She needed weaponry. The computer would know everything that could be made from materials on hand; it could make a list while the autodoc made up a pressure suit. She'd have to get the parts fabricators outside.
* * *
It happened this way:
She was out rigging a sluice for the refiner's waste dust—it ate the local soil, but needed a lot of it—when she began wondering what was wrong with the trees, just past where the original shoreline had been. Ship's equipment included two crawlers; Jan, of course, had believed in having a spare. Peace drove out to the treeline to cut samples, then brought them back only to realize that the analysis had to be done by the autodoc. She thought, then had the computer isolate everything not needed in stasis. Each system and each compartment had its own field generator. Jan must have been really rich at some point. Then she took the samples in, staying in her suit the whole time as she couldn't very well decontaminate without destroying the samples, and ran them through the doc. It might just be some local blight, but if not...
It wasn't. The trees had been tailored to take up useful elements—not well enough to kill the trees, but well enough to make it worthwhile to use their ashes instead of the local soil. Peace could have done it with Cockroach's facilities, but it would have taken too long for the trees to grow. One of the previous expeditions must have been badly wrecked, and done the work before the plague killed them.
Cheerfully, Peace had the computer sterilize the ship's interior while she was still in it; of course she wore her pressure suit. When the cycle was completed she left, of course to load equipment before moving the ship.
And the computer of course no longer had any control over the interior of the airlock.
A trace of dust got into the ship from the airlock.
When she came back, of course she had the airlock clean off her suit before she went in to the control cone. She moved the ship over to the trees, then went back out to set things up—instead of soil being dug up, trees would have to be cut and burned. She used a few pounds of metal foil to make up a huge funnel on legs, then put it in stasis and set it over the intake hopper. The machinery she set to cutting up trees and dumping the chunks in the funnel, and she used a laser at wide aperture to char some from underneath, through the hole, to get them burning. It took some time; they were green, and kept going out. Finally the fire was going, though, and ashes started falling into the hopper. Burning wood, too, but the mechanism of the refiner was built to do worse than that itself.
And when she came in, of course it was only natural that she felt hot, and wanted to sleep.
Before she drifted off, it occurred to her that the fat was just going to be replaced by muscle if she had to work like this. She'd be awfully strong by the time the kzinti showed up.
Pleased, she settled into the sleep of the despicable. (It is of course the innocent whose rest is uneasy; true villains slumber undisturbed by anything but an occasional chuckle.)
The gas giant had the usual litter of moons. Fury landed on one, refueled, and took off immediately. The prey ship had been found within hours, in stasis—perfect reflection, no neutrino output. What Gnyr-Captain had wanted to do was plunge in, grab the crew (probably only one, but they could be lucky), return to Kzin at once, see to it Manexpert got a Name, and if permitted make helpful suggestions to the prey's torturers before being executed for disobedience. Fathers would wean their sons on the tale of Gnyr-Avenger for 512s of years. It was a proud and public thing, to be a kzin.
Unfortunately, records of its departure indicated the old courier ship was just a touch too big to fit into the destroyer's hold. They would have to land, wrap it in a net, disable its stasis, and take it home. And the prey might not even be inside! Bringing back the ship, with its useful arms features, would be honorable enough to save his crewkzin from execution along with Gnyr-Captain, but Manexpert would probably never get his Name. The thought shamed Gnyr-Captain. "Take us near the prey, planer only, and hover," he told First Flyer.
Approaching the planet was disturbing. Clearly it had undergone asteroid bombardment, but the targets had obviously been cities (and oceans, judging by the oversized icecaps), in what must have been a deliberate attempt to destroy the population. Industrial areas, certainly, but what kind of monster would a conqu
eror have to be to incinerate a potential labor force?
The prey had landed near the only remaining town, some kind of coastal industrial facility. It couldn't have housed more than two or three 512s of humans from the size of it, but parts of it were warm. Somebody must indeed have been using colony facilities to try to repair the ship, an excellent sign. They couldn't have had much success, judging by the amount of equipment that was lying around in pieces.
"Find them," Gnyr-Captain told Strategy Officer.
"Yes, sir. —Look for pressure suits," he told Second Tactician. (Naturally First Tactician was standing by with the landing party.) "Batteries may be chemical instead of electronic. Also look for gaps or rings in the neutrino background; someone may have put a conical reflector into stasis."
"There's a human-sized warm spot among those leafless trees, sir," said Second Tactician.
"No, their suits are well-insulated, and would show up as a small very hot spot. Must be an animal."
"Yes, sir. It's just that it was moving from one metallic object to another—"
"Animals mark things."
Gnyr-Captain looked properly impatient, though privately he agreed; he'd once seen a ftheer do that to an electric fence. It was surprised.
Unexpectedly, Power Officer signaled. "Gnyr-Captain, the feeder lines to the fusion tubes will not operate."
Gnyr-Captain grumbled, then said, "Is our storage fully charged?"
"Yes, sir, but as I cannot find a cause I thought it might be some form of—"
And the lights went out.
The next word would have been "attack."
* * *
Manexpert had been seething. He had found the prey, he should be in the assault party! Instead he was bound in his crash fooch, protected like a kitten. The explanation, that he was too valuable to become a target, just made him feel worse. Kittens got explanations; warriors took orders.
It didn't occur to him that the landing party didn't want him—his fellow kzinti were afraid of his unpredictability. If it had, he would have been much happier. As it was, he was merely bitter about missing all the excitement.