Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - X

by Hal Colebatch

  And he moved fast. Well, kzin are always faster than humans, but he moved faster than Charrgh-Captain and he seems much less groggy. There is more to this Wunderkzin than meets the eye.

  “I counted their minds,” Peter Robinson went on. “They were, of course, momentarily confused and groping. They had no time to seize me. Now their minds have stopped again. I do not understand that…they must have gone back into stasis.”

  “I understand it!” said Charrgh-Captain. He seemed fully recovered and his ears twitched now in the kzinti expression of glee. “They must have opened their suits. Perhaps after a million eons in stasis they were ready to enjoy a bit of breathing space. Breathing space! You see, I can make a joke in monkey language!”

  “No, that doesn’t quite add up,” said Richard. “Not if they went into stasis before the installation was damaged. For them no time would have passed at all, only a kind of blip in their consciousness and a feeling of disorientation and grogginess. They would have been more wary about opening their suits. Besides, there were many more than four thrint in stasis there. Why should four fields have been turned off and not others? And from what we know of thrintun spacesuits, the stasis fields protecting them were turned on and off by the push of a button. It’s unlikely that relatively small gravity fluctuations could affect that so selectively.”

  “I do not call my colleagues monkeys,” said Peter Robinson. “They have treated my kind well. You have a diplomatic passport, and I cannot call you out, but I make the point that you have insulted them. And not for the first time.”

  “Well for you that you do not call me out, Freak and Renegade, and well for you that I am now a diplomat,” Charrgh-Captain replied. “In any event it is below my dignity to fight even an honest telepath of the Patriarchy…However, I will say to the real humans that I spoke in the mirth of contemplating Slavers suddenly in hard vacuum and trying to eat their own lungs and entrails as their large single eyes exploded out of their heads…No insult was intended. And surely it was worth feeling their pain for a moment to enjoy what happened to them!”

  “I do not mind being called a monkey,” said Richard hastily. “We are all companions on a hazardous task. But what happened? What has happened to the Slavers? You are certain their minds are gone.”

  “Certain,” said Peter Robinson. “For a few seconds after the great shout there was panic, pain, terror, and then it died away. But it was not directed at us. We should have been dead if it had been. There was death there, and that could not be mistaken.”

  “No. It could not. It must have been rough on you.”

  “My mental shields go up with the speed of thought. I have worked on them every day since I became a telepath, and more since I knew I would have to travel in this ship.”

  Otherwise, Charrgh-Captain’s loathing and contempt—and perhaps his inadmissible fear also—would be pouring into him every instant that both were conscious, thought Richard. I don’t think Melody likes him much either. Yes, it must be rough.

  He turned to the controls of the camera they had left in the control chamber.

  “Gently,” growled Charrgh-Captain. “Let it touch nothing.”

  The camera floated from one compartment to another. The stasis field covering the next sphere in the sequence had been deactivated. Its metal looked almost as shiny-new as if the field still operated, but its top had been opened. Four green-skinned thrintun floated out of it, plainly dead in the vacuum. They wore no helmets or pressure-suits, and it was gruesomely obvious that decompression had killed them before the many other deaths possible in space, before they had had time for coherent thought.

  “One field only was deactivated,” said Richard. “I guess its switch was either damaged or already partly operated. It could have been a lot worse, but we must not run a gravity motor near the chamber again. Let us be thankful for a harmless lesson. Harmless for us, anyway.”

  “It has given us something for the Institute of Knowledge,” said Melody. “Perhaps we are beginning to earn our money. Thrint brains to dissect will be treasures indeed.”

  “The Slaver-students of the Patriarchy are entitled to a share of them,” said Charrgh-Captain. He turned and spoke to the console, first in the Heroes’ Tongue and then in Interworld. “I make formal claim and I record that claim. By the Sigil of the Patriarch which I now display, I make that claim to the death and to the generations.” He was in a fighting stance again, and his hand with extended claws gripped the hilt of his w’tsai. Thrint brains, if they could somehow be made to reveal…

  “I think we should leave them and send another ship,” said Richard. “Let’s not push our luck.” In fact, he thought, it would probably be safe enough to approach again cautiously with chemical rockets or EV, but it was the best he could think of to defuse the situation. A human-kzin quarrel over thrint brains was not a good idea. In the time it would take to send another ship, the freeze-drying process of space might destroy some of their structure at least, and it was best destroyed. And he would like to be out of this grisly place.

  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 warloads.

  “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 sti
ll 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 creches, 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.