Destiny's Forge

by Larry Niven

  None of which would give any enlightenment to Far Hunter. “It is a form of strakh, formalized for exchange purposes,” he finished. It was not really an explanation at all, though Far Hunter accepted it at face value.

  Far Hunter nodded. “I have strakh with my half-uncle, Cargo Pilot. In turn he will have strakh enough at the spaceport for fuel.”

  Night Pilot’s ears fanned up. “A stall vendor has strakh to fuel a starship?”

  Far Hunter rippled his ears. “My strakh does not come from trading grashi. I fight the Tzaatz for what they did to my father, but I am not alone. The Rrit governed fairly; the Tzaatz demand too much from us. The Lesser Prides are afraid to act but we of the kzintzag have little to lose. We leap in the name of First-Son-of-Meerz-Rrit. A search for Cherenkova-Captain is a search for First-Son. For this purpose I command all the strakh on Kzinhome.” He smiled to show his fangs. “Tell me how much fuel you need, you will have it.”

  “This is good. We will need maps too.” Night Pilot tapped at his beltcomp. “Coordinates. I can track you on the ground in real-time as you move, and search terrain ahead of you. Our sensors are better than you might think for a ship our size, and I know how to avoid notice from the orbital tracking net.”

  Tskombe looked at him. “Have you smuggled on Kzinhome before?”

  Night Pilot rippled his ears. “Smuggling is unknown to kzinti, in the human sense.”

  “Because it’s against the honor code?”

  Night Pilot rippled his ears. “Because there are no import or export restrictions in the Patriarchy. What Great Pride would accept such an arbitrary imposition by the Patriarch?”

  “So what is your role here then?”

  “There are still those who make shipments in secret, to avoid the oversight of rivals, just for example. In honor, this is not smuggling.”

  Tskombe shrugged. The difference between the rules of human honor and kzinti honor was as wide as the gulf between barter and a market economy. “So we need maps, survival gear, food and water, transportation to the area, what else?”

  “A place to start.” Night Pilot turned to Far Hunter. “You said a vehicle was found?”

  “It was. There are snippets of information. Kchula-Tzaatz’s brother leads raids to distant places, first the jungle, then the desert and the high forests. It is said they search for First-Son.”

  Tskombe shook his head. “We need something better than that.”

  “I have friends among the cvari savannah hunters. Little escapes them. I will see if I can learn where the grav loader crashed, and we can start there. In the morning I will arrange to have your ship refueled.”

  Night Pilot twitched his tail. “Where should I aim my sensors?”

  Tskombe shrugged. “Can we find out where the Tzaatz have launched these raids?”

  “Hrrr.” Night Pilot turned a paw over. “I have contacts who will know. In the morning I will ask.”

  Tskombe nodded. “I’m grateful for your help, Far Hunter.”

  Far Hunter waved a paw. “It is nothing. My father swore fealty to the Rrit, and I have sworn to serve his memory. You wore the Patriarch’s sigil. I am at your service.”

  “I still have it.” Tskombe held up the medallion he had carried a hundred light-years.

  “You are true to your own honor, Tskombe-kz’zeerkti. We need a toast.” Far Hunter raised his voice. “Apprentice! Blood mead for our guests!”

  Apprentice appeared with a set of huge flagons and a ceramic decanter and poured a thick, dark red liquid. Tskombe looked at it dubiously, but there was no way to refuse it.

  Far Hunter stood up. “To vengeance,” he snarled, and Tskombe was about to echo him and drink when Night Pilot stood up.

  “To success!”

  They looked at him expectantly. Kzinti toasts are individual. No matter; it was amazing enough that a custom like toasting existed in any form in another species’s culture. He stood up. “To the Rrit!” It seemed the thing to say.

  The kzinti snarled in approval and drained their flagons at a gulp. Tskombe drank his as quickly as he could. The mead was heavy, thick, and bitter, and he nearly gagged getting it down. And to Ayla.

  He sat down, stomach churning and head already swimming. The flagons were two liters at least, and the drink’s alcohol content was high. He had never been much of a drinker, and the rest of the night was a blur.

  61 Ursae Majoris was high in the sky when he woke up, and painfully bright. He was back in Provider’s house, now Far Hunter’s, though he couldn’t remember getting there. His head was pounding, and he wished for a fistful of detox pills and the rest of the day to stay in bed. Not the smartest way to start the mission. But he couldn’t have avoided it. Far Hunter and Night Pilot were his only allies, and he was lucky to have them. Perhaps they wouldn’t have been insulted if he’d turned down the toast, but he couldn’t have taken the risk.

  He dragged himself up to find Trina waiting for him. “Good morning.”

  “What are you doing here?” The same two silent Kdatlyno were performing their morning cleaning rituals. It’s as if I never left.

  Trina smiled far too cheerily, she was enjoying her adventure. “Night Pilot brought me here. Contradictory is refueling the ship. They’re taking off tomorrow.”

  Tskombe nodded and suppressed the urge to scold her. It wasn’t her fault, and though he’d be more comfortable with her safe on the ship, Night Pilot couldn’t take responsibility for her forever. Instead he sat, waiting for the room to stop spinning.

  “There’s some meat here. The kzin in the front gave it to me. The sauces are good. Night Pilot went out with the other one; they said they’d be back this evening.”

  Tskombe looked at the serving. She was eating with a serrated skeceri knife, slicing off chunks of still warm raw meat, dunking them in sauce, and swallowing them almost whole. She’d developed a taste for kzinti cooking, or lack of it, on Black Saber. He looked away. His stomach wasn’t ready to consider food yet.

  Trina saw his look. “There’s these eggs, too. Nay-something, they use them raw in the sauce, but I boiled mine.” She held one up, a mottled round sphere, fuzzy like a peach. “I can make some for you too.” She seemed eager for him to say yes.

  “It’s pronounced nyalzeri.” He avoided her question to avoid disappointing her. “You don’t speak the Hero’s Tongue, do you?”

  She laughed. “No. When would I have learned that?”

  He sighed. She shouldn’t be here, and here she is. “You’re going to have to know the basics.” He touched his nose. “Nose, naughl. Nostril, raughl.”

  She repeated what he’d said, stumbling over the accent, and they began to run through the language. He taught her only the slave’s form, to prevent her from getting herself into trouble. It filled the time. By hvlazch’pira—afternoon—she was getting good at the vocabulary, and his appetite had returned enough to eat. Trina boiled him a pair of the eggs while they worked, and then later cooked some of the meat for him. By evening she was stringing together sentences and her accent had improved considerably. She was good at languages. Or just lucky. The hypothesis he’d developed with Curvy seemed almost silly now. But she wins at chess. So how to test the hypothesis?

  He picked up one of the uncooked nyalzeri eggs. It was firm rather than hard, like an oversized chicken’s egg with a layer of leather over it, resilient up to its breaking point. He looked it over. Trina was looking at the wall, her eyes distant as she memorized verb conjugations. He hefted the egg, calculating, and without warning threw it at her. She turned to face him, her mouth starting to ask a question. The egg grazed her ear and hit the wall with a splat, leaving a small mess behind.

  “What did you do that for?” Trina looked at him, wide eyed and aggrieved.

  “It was an experiment to see how lucky you are. I’m sorry.”

  “I guess I am lucky.” She smiled, pleased that he’d confirmed her rationale for sneaking aboard Black Saber. “No harm done. I’ll clean it up.”
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br />   She hopped up to get a rag, also pleased to demonstrate her usefulness, and Tskombe watched her carefully. She turned at the exact instant necessary to make the egg miss her. So what did that prove? What would it have proven if he’d hit her square on the side of the head? The consequences were too trivial either way. If random luck was actually a non-random psi talent then it couldn’t be expected to intervene when survival wasn’t at stake. He pursed his lips, thinking about it. The heavy kreera sword he had practiced with last time he had hidden in Provider’s house was hanging on the wall. One good swing would cut Trina in half. Unless she has preternatural luck. He looked away. He wasn’t convinced enough of the hypothesis to do the experiment.

  Far Hunter was back at dusk, looking like the cat that got the canary. “I have the regions the Tzaatz have been operating in. Night Pilot has them too, and his ship will be boosted by midnight. We can leave at once. He will guide us from orbit as we enter the area.”

  Tskombe nodded, pleased and relieved. Coming to Kzinhome had been the ultimate gamble. So far it was paying off. They began packing Far Hunter’s gravcar with pup tents, rappel gear, flash-dried meat rations in foil pouches, emergency supplies. It was the same gravcar that he had taken with Provider to the spaceport, and he wondered how Far Hunter had managed to get it out without being caught.

  Trina helped them load as they put the weapons on board. There were variable swords for each of them, a compound bow as tall as he was, a set of edge-weighted throwing nets of almost invisible filaments in graduated sizes. He watched as she heaved a well-worn magrifle into the back of the vehicle, then struggled to lift a case of its rounds. He remembered the competent way Ayla Cherenkova had handled her oversized beamer and looked away. Trina was untrained, unqualified, inexperienced and, so far as combat and survival went, woefully naïve. There was not a weapon there she could be expected to use effectively. He bent over to pick up a box of grashi traps. I hope she really is lucky. Winning chess games was one thing; taking on an alien planet was another.

  The next day Far Hunter’s contacts had gotten the locations of all the Tzaatz movements that might conceivably be involved in a hunt for Pouncer, along with the relevant dates. There were a lot of areas. Night Pilot and Contradictory boosted for low orbit and they were soon downlinking a steady stream of high resolution imagery of the areas where they might, potentially, find a clue. The operational areas Far Hunter had identified were hardly pinpoint precise, but they told the story of a steadily expanding search starting from a canyon at the base of the Long Range. That’s where the loader ran out of fuel, if the rumors are true. Black Saber’s sensors gave them multispectrum images of the valley, and when the first orbital pass was complete, Tskombe put on a set of data goggles that had belonged to Far Hunter when he was a kitten. They gave him a bird’s eye view of the rugged, stony valley floor good enough to resolve individual pebbles. That was a problem. The area was six kilometers long and two wide, and Kzinhome’s seasons had changed and changed again since the crash. He’d started with optimism, scanning over the projected terrain images at high speed in the hopes of finding the abandoned loader, the logical search start point for both the Tzaatz and them. He hadn’t found it, which might have been because the Tzaatz had hauled it out and might have meant it was never there in the first place because they were searching the wrong valley. He’d gone back at maximum resolution and started again, in the hopes of finding some wreckage, landing skid marks, anything. It was a much slower process. Black Saber had the whole valley mapped in high detail under five minutes, but to examine the images closely enough required picking up some long-degraded trace that Ayla might have left. That meant a slow, thorough search for some tiny ambiguous detail, scanning through the imagery at a speed that would have been a walking pace on the ground. He concentrated first on the watercourses. Anyone traveling the wilderness for any distance wouldn’t want to get too far from water.

  Some hours later he took the goggles off. He had sore eyes and no way of knowing if he’d missed the vital clue, or if it wasn’t even in this valley. The enormity of the task he’d undertaken began to sink in. When Stanley set out to find Livingstone he at least knew to follow the Nile. I have no such guidance. Still, it was what he had come to do, and he would do it. The UNF doesn’t abandon its own, and I will not abandon Ayla.

  Trina came in with a tray of fire-roasted grashi and sauce. He took the dish eagerly, only then aware of how hungry he was. She took the datagoggles in exchange and sat down with them. He’d agreed to let her help with the search when he was done, privately resolving to go over everything she covered himself, just to make sure. She wasn’t trained to track and trail, as he was. She could easily miss something subtle, and he wasn’t prepared to take that risk.

  “Where should I start?” She was experimentally waving her hands in the air, learning the gesture commands that would pan and zoom the image, her head turning left and right as she searched what for her had become a wide valley in the distant mountains. Tskombe looked up at Far Hunter’s wall screen, where the image she was seeing was remoted, along with a moving map display that showed the topographic features of the area, with the viewpoint displayed on the main screen highlighted.

  “Try here.” He pointed to the blue line of the watercourse he’d been searching, and made a sweeping motion with his other hand to command the AI to move the datagoggle viewpoint there.

  “Sure.” She turned her head left and right, searching, twitching her wrist to advance her viewpoint slowly as she looked. Tskombe turned to his grashi. Trina was becoming a good cook.

  “What’s this?” He looked up from his meal to see what she meant. On the wallscreen she’d outlined a small pile of rocks in the rough shape of a person.

  Adrenaline surged and it took him a second to find his voice. “It’s an inukshuk.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means ‘in the form of a man’ in Inuktitut. The original cultures in the high Arctic on Earth used them to mark trails, because there were no easy landmarks there.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Tskombe went up to the image, examining the inukshuk in mingled joy and disbelief. “It means Ayla was there. It means she made it out of the spaceport alive.” He noticed something and gestured the image to the right. “There’s the remains of a campfire too, just about the right age from the look of it.”

  Trina took off the datagoggles. “I guess we should go here then. The gravcar is packed.”

  Tskombe nodded and looked at his beltcomp so she wouldn’t catch him staring at her. He’d spent eight hours tediously scanning through the image data for some trace of Ayla, and she’d found exactly what they were looking for almost as soon as she’d put on the goggles. Luck? Evolved luck might or might not trouble itself to save her from a face full of egg, but life was about time, and Trina’s luck seemed to see no reason to have her waste her life on tedious searching when what she wanted was right there to be found in the dataset.

  He nodded. “Yes, we should go here.”

  Trina was smiling proudly. “I’m good at finding things.”

  He nodded again and rubbed his sore eyes, wishing his own luck were as good as hers. But she’s here, and I might have spent a month searching that valley and missed the inukshuk. He smiled to himself. Luck is a relative term. The important thing was, Ayla was out there somewhere. Now all he had to do was go and find her.

  The greatest commander knows his enemy’s thoughts before his enemy thinks them.

  —Si-Rrit

  The Hrungn Valley fell jagged out of the Mooncatcher Mountains to spread into a broad and fertile river basin that opened onto the northern extreme of the vast plain of Stgrat as the Mooncatchers fell away to foothills. From his vantage point Pouncer could see the house of Chiuu Pride, its polished obsidian roof glinting over its rambling vastness in the setting sun, with pennants fluttering from jutting spires. The house was a tangible testament to the pride’s wealth and power. Chiuu Pride’s fea
lty to the Rrit was so old it was told of in the legends, and the Hrungn Valley had been theirs for all that time. The cold mountain streams that fed the meandering Hrungn River in its center brought nutrients that fed the soil. In the vast meeflri fields surrounding the great house the Kdatlyno slaves were ending their day. At the change of the seasons the meeflri would be tall and golden, but now the fields were shorn flat, and the Kdatlyno had spread husk mulch to nourish the tiny seedlings while protecting them from the harsh sun of the dry time. Here and there long feeder trays held last year’s crop, the heavy seeds ground fine to make tempting fodder for the wild melyar herds that moved through the valley. Hrungn Valley melyar raised on meeflri was prized throughout the Patriarchy for its rich, delicate meat.

  It was an idyllic scene, or should have been. Pouncer’s lips twitched over his fangs as he raised his binoptics to his eyes and scanned the valley. Beside the great house was a series of pop-domes, sprouting like excrescences to mar the view from its broad upper windows. A patrol mounted on raider rapsari watched by the gate as the Kdatlyno filed past. Farther north another patrol was heading back from their daily vigil over the tungsten mine dug into the rich veins that had formed when tectonic forces thrust the ancient Mooncatchers up from the plain. The Tzaatz were there in force, extracting strakh which was not theirs, and Vsar-Chiuu’s Eldest and Second-Sons had already died in the arena for insisting on their birth-given rights. Vsar-Chiuu himself, too old now to leap in defense of his own honor, bore the enemy presence in humiliated silence to buy the lives of his surviving kits, while the Tzaatz made free with his lands and holdings. It was wrong. Chiuu Pride gave fealty to the Rrit, and the Rrit in turn were sworn to their protection. Pouncer’s tail lashed in anger. His father was dead, and his brother, his honorless, nameless brother, was allowing Kchula-Tzaatz to do this in the Rrit name.

  He snarled deep in his throat. No more.