by Larry Niven
The quality of the crate matters little. Success depends upon the man who sits in it.
—Manfred von Richthofen
Nothing had changed on the screens, but the situation was deteriorating. Despite the fact that his own survival hung in the balance Quacy Tskombe found it hard to concentrate. Unconsciously his jaw clenched, his stomach knotted tight. He had no choice but to take off. Ayla had said it herself, and she was right. She was an officer, a commander. She knew the risks, knew how to balance them, and there were larger things at stake than a man’s love for a woman. The UN needed to know what was happening on Kzinhome, and the mission had to take priority. She was not the first friend he’d lost in combat, not even the first lover.
He pushed his feelings aside. There was no finagled time to lose focus. There were fighters back there, with pilots who knew the orbital combat game. He couldn’t allow himself to be caught. First things first. He hauled out the automanual, punched keys desperately to find out how to read the combat display. He had practiced on it, but not enough to memorize the symbology. Fortunately he was used to the manual by now, if not the actual ship, and he found the relevant manpage quickly.
The triangular icons with the dot in the middle were the fighters, and the transparent green funnels attached to them showed how much they could have changed their velocity vector in the half-second delay speed of light lag imposed on the situation. The Swiftwing was simply the point at the center of the display where the three coordinate system lines met, and the little silver spheres were the battle stations. The huge orange sphere was obviously Kzinhome itself, the smaller orange sphere was a moon—the Hunter’s Moon, by the dots-and-commas label floating above its surface; the Traveler’s Moon was invisible on the other side of the planet. He touched some keys, and a series of transparent, curved surfaces in red and green appeared around his position: intercept planes. If nothing changed, the fighters would be in a position to shoot when he crossed them.
And they were coming rapidly closer. He didn’t have a lot of time. He called up his own course funnel to see what his options were. For a few seconds he thought he might have hope. A slice of his course funnel was blue instead of orange and he thought that might indicate an escape route, but when he looked up the key in the automanual he discovered that it was simply a collision vector warning. If he chose a course in the light blue slice it would slam him into the moon if he didn’t change course again before he entered the dark blue slice. Nothing he could do would move his delta vector out of the intercept plane. The best he could do was crash into the moon and cheat the hunters of their prey.
Unless—unless he could plot his course close to the moon, skim around it and use the gravitational slingshot to pick up velocity. TSTD would be sharper there, giving the advantage to the ship with more muscle. He could pick up a lot of velocity if he cut it fine enough. He’d get catapulted out of the system at some tremendous rate and the fighters would be left far, far behind. If he picked his course right even the warships up in the gravity well would have trouble laying on a vector to intercept. That was the trick he needed. Hope surged and he slid his finger through the air, drawing a new course line, watching his course funnel bend and extend as he set up the lunar pass. The results were astonishing, his velocity on exit getting up to a measurable fraction of light speed. The red shift would make a noticeable difference to the total power flux of any lasers from behind that happened to hit him, and it couldn’t help but make things difficult for the gunners.
Except the fighters, of course, would be on his tail and they wouldn’t be affected much by relativity. In fact if they followed him through the maneuver they would gain almost as much through the slingshot effect as he did. And when they got in missile range they would blow him out of the sky.
He put the automanual down feeling sick. He was helpless, with nothing to do but watch the end coming. It was a horrible feeling. Combat on the ground was messier than it was in space, physically demanding, mentally exhausting, lethal in the extreme. Death, when it came, came quickly, but there was always something you could do right up to the last instant; no matter how desperate the situation, how faint the hope, you could keep trying until you died. Unconsciously he touched the claw scars on his arm. During the mop-up on Vega IV a kzin had screamed and leapt. His battle armor had saved him from instant death, but the kzin would have killed him anyway if he hadn’t fought back, kept on fighting back as it ripped his combat carapace off piece by piece to get at his vitals, kept on fighting against an enemy who was so clearly going to kill him with strength and reflexes and kill rage that he could not hope to match, kept fighting right up to the instant DeVries had blown its head off with a magrifle. They thought he’d need a new arm but he’d managed to keep the one he was born with. On the ground you could hide, you could run, you could ambush. Ground combat was as much art as science, and still a matter of force of will. Space combat was ruled entirely by cold equations, the remorseless variables of mass, thrust, acceleration, velocity and momentum. Know the initial conditions and you could predict the outcome with the certainty of an introductory physics experiment.
It was not his choice of arena, but here he was, and his only choice was death at the hands of superior pilots in superior craft with superior weapons or deliberate suicide by ramming the moon. He pounded his fist on the over-sized armrests of the crash couch in helpless frustration.
Unless…
He drew his finger through the display space, trailing the navigation cursor, dialing in acceleration. Unless he could turn this encounter into ground combat after all, or at least some close approximation. He was closing on the moon fast, and if he cut his course right in tight, right down on the deck where a combat car belonged, there might be a brief period when the curve of the moon hid him from his pursuer’s view. He moved his finger, pulled the course funnel around until it was skimming the moon’s surface and, yes, at maximum acceleration he’d have a quarter of the surface between him and the fighters. And if they thought he was doing the gravitational slingshot and he instead threw on the brakes…
I’ll be on the surface and they’ll go right on past at speed and wonder what happened to me.
It was worth a try. It was the only chance he had. The key would be to back off on the acceleration slowly while the fighters had him in view, then jam on deceleration once he was below the horizon. Too much too soon and they’d figure out the game. Too little too late and he wouldn’t be able to stop and he’d be on the slingshot to oblivion.
Heart pounding, he set the problem up. For several long minutes it looked like there was no solution. The Swiftwing simply didn’t have the thrust to stop the slingshot effect completely. On the first pass the best he could manage would be an elongated egg of an orbit, and when the accelerating fighters came around the curve of the moon behind him as he slowed down he’d actually be on his way up and away toward the apogee—or whatever the apogee was called for the Hunter’s Moon. He’d be a sitting duck. His mind raced, he was running out of time and options.
The answer, when it came, was blindingly simple. He would brake hard on the curve in, right up to perigee, then flip the courier on her back, cant the thrusters up and use them to hold his orbit close to the surface. That wouldn’t help him land. He’d whip around the moon at low altitude and some tremendous orbital velocity and stay below the horizon while the fighters accelerated past and out toward the edge of the gravity well. The thrusters would hold him in the low point of the orbit while the axis of his orbital egg rotated around the moon’s center. Once he had come right the way around he’d put the thrust forward again and decelerate. He couldn’t do that forever of course, but if he made a full orbit his pop up and subsequent deceleration would happen with Fourth Flight already past and boosting for the singularity’s edge. A fighter’s best sensors faced forward; with luck they wouldn’t even pick him up. If they didn’t they’d have to slow down and change course to catch up with him.
This is the pilot’s a
rt. Physics frames the rules, but the game is chess.
Except he was the only piece on his side of the board, and he wouldn’t get to trade colors and start again if he lost.
And if I make an orbit and a half before braking I’ll pop up with the fighters on the other side of the moon. They’d have one chance to pick him up as he came around behind them, but he’d be low and fast, hidden in the ground clutter from pulsed search beams, moving perpendicular to the beam line to render Doppler search useless. Turn off the mag armor and deep radar would see right through him, maybe. It was a chance, it was worth trying.
He set up the course. His inexperience made it take longer than it should have, and he wasn’t entirely sure how much margin of error he needed for his high speed spin around the moon. Cut it close, his instincts told him, and he cut it as fine as he dared. Better to slam it in trying to get away then let himself be picked off as a Tzaatz pilot’s trophy. He almost missed his first critical point trying to correct an error that cut it just too close, but he made it and, punched execute. The course icon flashed and the AI growled that it was entering the funnel gate just in time, but there was no discernible change to the progress of the icons. The Swiftwing was dialing back thrust by just over one percent per minute, if he was reading the kzinti panels correctly. Nothing to do now but wait, but no longer passive waiting. He was tempted to take command of his surviving turret and try to shoot down some of Fourth Flight, but decided against it. The AI was a far better gunner than he was, and it still thought the fighters were too far back to make it worth the shot.
So wait, and watch the moon grow larger, and larger, and larger, looming overhead until it filled the transpax and fell toward him at a horrific rate. And then the artificial gravity wrenched at his stomach with sickening force and the lunar surface was a gray blur and he was upside down and the gravity wrenched again as the thrusters shifted vector to keep him tight, tight, tight to the surface as he whipped around. And the dots on the plot board had disappeared and he was behind the moon and fought down the urge to vomit at the vertigo.
This too is the pilot’s art. He had ridden assault landers through the atmospheric interface, felt the wrenching jolts and wondered which were maneuvers and which might be hits that would leave them a tumbling wreck, burning through the atmosphere toward a death they’d never feel, and then the final controlled crash of touchdown and the ramp slamming down and he had led his company out to take the control tower or the outer defense line or whatever the objective had been that time. Never had he been anything more than a passenger, and now that made all the difference in nerves and tension. But he had to be in control this time because he was flying below the moon’s mountain tops and the AI knew nothing of topography. It was up to him to fly the contours, if there were any, and a miscalculation would leave nothing but another crater in the moon’s well scarred surface. How high was he anyway? A thousand meters maybe; apo-whatever was three kilometers, peri-whatever under a hundred meters when the Swiftwing had flipped over to present her thrusters to the stars.
So he kept his eyes glued to the transpax for a bump of gray on the too close horizon that would grow to a mountain in the time it took him to blink, and then twitched the controls left just in time to see gray flash past on either side. And then he was through the crater rim wall and sailing over a vast expanse of emptiness that spoke of the impact of something bigger than Everest in a time before the Earth was born. And three heartbeats later he twitched the column again and he was out the other side. He flicked his eyes to the course funnel to see if he had to do it again and saw he was already more than halfway around. And the fighters must be in front of him by now. His muscles were rigid and aching but he didn’t dare let go, didn’t dare relax. He had to remind himself to breathe. It seemed to take forever for his ship icon to crawl around the tiny world. And it occurred to him that he hadn’t shut down the transponder and that the fighters might have picked up his signal and be tracking him. They shouldn’t be able to pick it up below the curve of the horizon but once he popped out behind them it would be a dead giveaway. He didn’t dare look away from the gray/black horizon ahead. And then he was starting his second orbit and the enemy icons had vanished from display, though whether that was because they were lost in space ahead of him, accelerating after nothing or because they were tucked in behind him just waiting for him to pop up was unknowable.
A second time the vast crater wall loomed. An orbit and a half. This time he was ready for it, the tremendous speed of his passage seeming to slow down as he became accustomed to it. And then it was over and the thrust switched from below to behind as the courier spun on its axis and he was looking backward. He took his hands off the controls, flipped off the transponder, and the surface fell away as he arced high out above it, vulnerable now to detection, if the fighters hadn’t been fooled by his trick. No way of knowing that either. At least he was no longer liable to drill a hole in the side of a mountain. He breathed out and waited again, this time for the apo-whatever so the thrusters could bring him into landing orbit. He breathed deep. What else could they pick up? Navigation radar? Data carrier? Mag armor? Shut it all down, then check the manual to see if there was anything else. And then very quickly the moon was coming up again, but this time he wouldn’t be skimming the surface. He came in at a low angle, took control back from the AI as the Swiftwing skimmed in, braking hard. He picked out a boulder field, extended the skids and brought the ship down like a combat car. It was a harder landing than he intended and rocks bigger than he was sailed gracefully into the distance in the low gravity. The Swiftwing skidded to a stop. He was down. His heartbeat pounded in his ears and he realized he was shaking.
He took a deep breath, glanced at his beltcomp. It had taken three hours for the entire chase. It had seemed like minutes. Could they pick up his drive emissions? No time to waste figuring it out. He snapped the master power switch to off. The cockpit went dark and the whir of the lifesystem faded. He wouldn’t boil or suffocate immediately, and now there would be no stray radiation from the drives or anything else giving him away. Not much he could do about his thermal signature, but in the full glare of 61 Ursae Majoris the boulder field would be a hot, noisy image to anyone searching for him. It would be easier to pick him up visually—a glint of that hard bright light from the transpax would be all it would take—but that meant Fourth Flight would have to search visually, and that would be difficult, at best.
And that meant Fourth Flight would have had to track him to the moon. They had to know something had happened. Ships didn’t just vanish into the blackness of space, and experienced fighter pilots would know better than he how to exploit a gravity well. There was nothing he could do about that possibility now. He was a rabbit and he’d beaten the foxes to his hole. Now he had to simply wait and wonder if they’d given up and gone away. He watched the harsh gray landscape and the brilliant starscape for a while. For a while he thought he might catch a glimpse of his hunters, see a star moving steadily across the background that would be the sun reflecting from one of the fighters, but with the sun almost right overhead that wasn’t going to happen.
He went to the food processor, found it gave out nothing but slabs of raw meat, flash heated to body temperature. It might be his last meal, but he wasn’t that hungry yet. So he waited, once again, for a death that might come without warning at any instant. He had done what he could to survive, and waiting was now an active strategy, not a passive acceptance of a hopeless situation. He would stay where he was until he couldn’t stay there any longer, until his life support threatened to give out, until the fighters had to give it up for lack of fuel.
Except, he realized, they could put themselves in orbit and use none. But a fighter only carried its pilot, and one kzin could only fly so long before he had to go back to the carrier. Would there be another relay of fighters? How many resources would they devote to searching him out? It was a question impossible to answer. The only solution was, wait as long as he could. H
ow long that was depended on the lifesystem. At least with no active pursuit he could lay a course to rendezvous with Crusader. Captain Detringer would be getting worried by now, after two weeks with no contact with his diplomatic team. He would have monitored disturbing transmissions from Kzinhome. He’d know something had gone drastically wrong. His emergency orders were to wait for their return if there was a loss of contact, unless he was actually attacked by superior kzinti forces. There was no time frame specified for how long he was to wait. The captain of a capital ship had considerable latitude in cases like that. Lars Detringer had impressed him as a patient man, but he would have notified the UNSN by now, and perhaps gotten orders to leave. Was he still waiting?
The alternative was to attempt to navigate hyperspace by himself, in a damaged ship with low power reserves, not his first choice option. He got out the automanual to study rendezvous orbits, but found he couldn’t concentrate on the words. Stress reaction. I left Ayla behind. The thought would not leave his mind, and already he knew he would be returning to Kzinhome to get her. There was simply no other option. He put the automanual down again, looked out at the bleak, lifeless vista through the transpax. He would have lots of time to learn now, if he had any time at all. It began to get warmer. Eventually he’d have to turn the power back on to run the lifesystem, but not yet.
WISDOM OF THE CONSERVERS
The mightiest river is made of raindrops.
Not even the Patriarch commands the sun.
Time makes bones of life as stlsi [carrion grubs] make bones of a carcass.
A wise enemy is better than a foolish friend.
Wisdom comes slowly even to the wise.
No slave comes willingly to anger.
All warriors must eat.
Ask the experienced, not the learned.
The Fanged God won’t protect a fool.