by Larry Niven
A blast of static and white noise loud enough to send hands to ears, before the system’s emergency overrides cut in. When reception returned the broadcast was two-dimensional, a space-armored figure reading from a screenprompt over the receiver. The noise in Harold’s Terran Bar sank to shocked silence at the sight of the human shape of the combat armor, the blue-and-white UN sigil on its chest.
“—o all citizens of the Alpha Centauri system,” the Terran was saying. In Wunderlander, but with a thick accent that could not handle the gutturals. “Evacuate areas of military or industrial importance immediately. Repeat, immediately. The United Nations Space Command is attacking kzin military and industrial targets in the Alpha Centauri system. Evacuate areas—” The screen split to scroll the same message in English and two more of the planet’s principal languages. The door burst open and a squad of Munchen Polizei burst through.
“Scheisse!” Montferrat shouted, rising. He froze as the receiver in his uniform cap began a hissing and snarling override-transmission in the Hero’s Tongue. Yarthkin relaxed and smiled as the policeman sprinted for the exit. He cocked one eye towards the ceiling and silently flourished Montferrat’s last glass of schnapps before sending it down with a snap of his wrist.
“Weird,” Jonah Matthieson muttered, looking at the redshifted cone of light ahead of them. Better this way. This way he didn’t have to think of what they were going to do when they arrived. He had been a singleship pilot before doing his military service. You could do software design anywhere there was a computer system, of course, and miners had a lot of spare time. But his reflexes were a pilot’s, and they included a strong inhibition against high-speed intercept trajectories.
This was going to be the highest speed intercept of all time…
The forward end of the pilot’s cabin was very simple, a hemisphere of smooth synthetic. For that matter, the rest of the cabin was quite basic as well; two padded crashcouches, which was one more than normal, an autodoc, an autochef, and rather basic sanitary facilities. That left just enough room to move…in zero gravity. Right now they were under one-G acceleration, crushingly uncomfortable. They had been under one-G for weeks, subjective time; the Yamamoto was being run to flatlander specifications.
“Compensate,” Ingrid said. The view swam back, the blue stars ahead and the dim red behind turning to the normal variation of colors. The dual-sun Centauri system was dead “ahead,” looking uncomfortably close. “We’re making good time. It took thirty years coming back on the slowboat, but the Yamamoto’s going to put us near Wunderland in five. Five objective, that is. Probably right on the heels of the pussy scouts.”
Jonah nodded, looking ahead at the innocuous twinned stars. His hands were on the control-gloves of his couch, but the pressure-sensors and lightfields were off, of course. There had been very little to do in the month-subjective since they left the orbit of Pluto other than accelerated learning with RNA boosters. He could now speak as much of the Hero’s Tongue as Ingrid. Enough to understand it, kzin evidently didn’t like their slaves to speak much of it; slaves weren’t worthy. He could also talk Belter-English with the accent of the Serpent Swarm, Wunderland’s dominant language, and the five or six other tongues prevalent in the many ethnic enclaves…sometimes he found himself dreaming in Pahlavi or Croat or Amish pletterdeisz. Thank God it wasn’t going to be a long trip; with the gravity polarizer and the big orbital lasers to push them up to ramscoop speeds, and no limit on the acceleration their compensators could handle…
We must be at a high fraction of the speed of a photon by now, he thought. Speeds only robot ships had achieved before, with experimental fields supposedly keeping the killing torrent of secondary radiation out…
“Tell me some more about Wunderland,” he said. Neither of them were fidgeting, Belters didn’t; this sort of cramped environment had been normal for their people since the settlement of the Sol-system Belt three centuries before. It was the thought of how they were going to stop that had his nerves twisting.
“I’ve already briefed you twenty times,” she replied, with something of a snap in her tone. Military formality wore thin pretty quickly in close quarters like this. “All the first-hand stuff is fifty-six years out of date, and the nine-year-old material’s all in the computer if you really want it. You’re just bored.”
No, I’m just scared shitless. “Well, talking would be better than nothing. Spending a month strapped to this thing has been even more monotonous than being a rockjack. You were right, I’m bored.”
“And scared.”
He looked around. She was lying with her hands behind her head, grinning at him.
“Okay, I’m scared, too. Among other reasons because we will start this mission utterly dependent on the intervention of outside forces; the offswitch is exterior to the surface of the effect.” It had to be; time did not pass inside a stasis field.
“The designers were pretty sure it’d work.”
“I’m sure of only two things, Jonah.”
“Which are?”
“Well, the first one is that the designers aren’t going to be diving into the photosphere of a sun at .99 lights.”
“Oh.” That had occurred to him, too. On the other hand, it really was easier to be objective when your life wasn’t on the line…and in any case, it would be quick. “What’s the other thing?”
Her smile grew wider, and she undid the collar catch of her uniform. “Even if it has to be in a gravity field, there’s one thing I want to experience again before possible death.”
Much later, they commanded the front screen to stop mimicking a control board. Now the upper half was an unmodified view of the Alpha Centauri system. The lower was a battle-schematic, dots and graphs and probability-curves like bundles of fuzzy sticks.
The Yamamoto was going to cross the disk of the Wunderland system in subjective minutes, mere hours even by outside clocks. With her ramscoop fields spreading a corona around her deadly to any life form with a nervous system, and the fusion flare a sword behind her half a parsec long; nothing could stop her and only beam-weapons stood a chance of catching her, even messages were going to take prodigies of computing power to unscramble. Her own weapons were quite simple; quarter-ton iron eggs. When they intercepted their targets at .99+ C, the results would be in the gigaton-yield range.
Jonah’s teeth skinned back from his teeth and the hair struggled to raise itself along his spine. Plains-ape reflex, he thought, smelling the rank odor of fight-flight sweat trickling down his flanks. Your genes think you’re about to tackle a Cape buffalo with a thighbone club. His fingers pressed the inside of the chair seat in a complex pattern.
“Responding,” said the computer in its usual husky contralto.
Was it imagination that there was already more inflection in its voice? And what did that really signify? Consciousness in a computer was not human consciousness, even though memory and drives were designed by humans…it possessed free will, unless he or Ingrid used the override keys, and unless the high command had left sleeper drives. Perhaps not so much free will; a computer would see the path most likely to succeed and follow it. Still, he supposed, he did the same, usually.
How would it be to know that you were a made thing, and doomed to encysted madness in six months or less?
Nobody had ever been able to learn why. He had speculated to himself that it was a matter of time; to a consciousness that could think in nanoseconds, that could govern its own sensory input, what would be the point of remaining linked to a refractory cosmos? It could make its own universe, and have it last forever in a few milliseconds. Perhaps that was why humans who linked directly to a computer system of any size went irretrievably catatonic as well…
“Detection. Neutronic and electromagnetic-range sensors.” The ship’s system was linked to the hugely powerful but sub-conscious level machines of the Yamamoto. “Point sources.”
Rubies sprang out across the battle map, moving as he watched, swelling up on either side an
d pivoting in relation to each other. The fire-bright point source of Alpha Centauri in the upper screen became a perceptible and growing disk. Jonah’s skin crawled at the sight.
This was like ancient history, air and sea battles out of Earth’s past. He was used to maneuvers that lasted hours or days, ships and fleets matching relative velocities while the planets moved slowly and the sun might as well be a fixed point at the center of the universe…Perhaps when gravity polarizers were small and cheap enough to fit in Dart-class boats it would all be like this.
“The pussies have the system pretty well covered,” he said.
“And the Swarm’s Belters,” Ingrid replied. Jonah turned his head, slowly, at the sound of her voice. Shocked, he saw a glistening in her eyes.
“Home…” she whispered. Then more decisively: “Identification. Human-range sensors. Discrete.”
Half the rubies flickered for a few seconds. Ingrid continued to Jonah: “This is a messy system; more of its mass is in asteroids and assorted junk than yours. Belters use more deep-radar and don’t rely on telescopes as much. The pussies couldn’t have changed that. They’d cripple the Swarm’s economy and destroy its value.” Slowly. “That’s the big station on Tiamat. They’ve got a garrison there, it’s a major shipbuilding center, was even,” she swallowed, “fifty years ago. Those others are bubbleworlds…More detectors on Wunderland than there used to be, and in close orbit. At the poles, and that looks like a military-geosynchronous setup.”
Jonah thought briefly what it would be like to return to the Sol-Belt after fifty years. Nearly a third of the average lifetime, longer than he had been alive—if he ever got home. The Yamamoto could expect to see Sol again in twenty years objective, allowing time to pass through the Alpha Centauri system, decelerate and work back up to a respectable Tau value. The plan-in-theory was for him and Ingrid to accomplish their mission, rejoin the Catskinner, boost her out in the direction of Sol, turn on the stasis field again—and wait to be picked up by UNSN craft. About as likely as getting back by putting our heads between our knees and spitting hard.
“Ships,” the computer said in its dispassionate tone. “Movement. Status, probable class and dispersal cones.”
Color-coded lines blinked over the tactical map. Columns of print scrolled down one margin: coded velocities and key-data. Hypnotic training triggered bursts into their minds, crystalline shards of fact, faster than conscious recall. Jonah whistled.
“Loaded for bandersnatch,” he said. There were a lot of warships spraying out from bases and holding-orbits, and that was not counting those too small for the Yamamoto’s detection systems; their own speed would be degrading signal drastically. Between the ramscoop fields, their velocity, and normal shielding there was very little that could touch them, but the kzin were certainly going to try.
“Aggressive bastards,” he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tactical display. It took courage, individually and on the part of their commander to put themselves in the way of the Yamamoto. Nobody had used a ramscoop ship like this before; the kzin had never developed a Bussard-type drive, they had had the gravity polarizer for a long time, and it had aborted work on reaction jet systems. But they must have made staff studies, and they would know what they were facing. Which was something more in the nature of a large-scale cosmic event than a ship. Mass increases with velocity: by now moving only fractionally slower than a laser beam, the Yamamoto had the effective bulk of a medium-sized moon.
That reminded him of what the Catskinner would be doing shortly, and the Dart did not have anything like the scale of protection the ramscoop warship did. Even a micrometeorite…Alpha Centauri was a black disk edged by fire in the upper half of the screen.
“Projectiles away,” the computer said. Nothing physical, but an inverted cone of trajectories splayed out from the path of the Yamamoto’s Highly-polished chrome-tungsten-steel alloy slugs, that had spent the trip from Sol riding grapnel-fields in the Yamamoto’s wake. Wildly varying albedo, from fully-stealthed to deliberately reflective; the Catskinner was going to be rather conspicuous when the Slaver stasis field’s impenetrable surface went on. Now the warship’s magnetics were twitching the slugs out in sprays and clusters, at velocities that would send them across the Wunderland system in mere hours. It would take the firepower of a heavy cruiser to significantly damage one, and there were a lot of slugs. Iron was cheap, and the Yamamoto grossly overpowered.
“You know, we ought to have done this before,” Jonah said. The sun-disk filled the upper screen, then snapped down several sizes as the computer reduced the field. A sphere, floating in the wild arching discharges and coronas of a G-type sun. “We could have used ramrobots. Or the pussies could have copied our designs and done it to us.”
“Nope,” Ingrid said. She coughed, and he wondered if her eyes were locking on the sphere again as it clicked down to a size that would fit the upper screen. “Ramscoop fields. Think about it.”
“Oh.” When you put it that way, he could think of about a half-dozen ways to destabilize one; drop, oh, ultracompressed radon into it. Countermeasures…luckily, nothing the kzin were likely to have right on hand.
“For that matter,” she continued, “throwing relativistic weapons around inside a solar system is a bad idea. If you want to keep it.”
“Impact,” the computer said helpfully. An asteroid winked, the tactical screen’s way of showing an expanding sphere of plasma. Nickel-iron, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon-compounds, some of the latter kzin and humans and children and their pet budgies.
“You have to aim at stationary targets,” Ingrid was saying. “The very things that war is supposed to be about seizing. Blowing them up is as insane as fighting a planetside war with fusion weapons and no effective defense. Only possible once.”
“Once would be enough, if we knew where the kzin home system was.” For a vengeful moment he imagined robot ships falling into a sun from infinite distances, scores of lightyears of acceleration at hundreds of G’s, their own masses raised to near-stellar proportions. “No. Then again, no.”
“I’m glad you said that,” Ingrid replied. Softly: “I wonder what it’s like, for them out there.”
“Interesting,” Jonah said tightly. “At the very least, interesting.”
Chapter II
“Please, keep calm,” Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, for the fourth time. “For Finagle’s sake, sit down and shut up!”
This one seemed to sink in, or perhaps the remaining patrons were getting tired of running around in circles and shouting. The staff were all at their posts, or preventing the paying customers from hitting each other or breaking anything expensive. Several of them had police-model stunners under their dinner jackets, like his; hideously illegal, hence quite difficult to square. Not through Claude—he was quite conscientious about avoiding things that would seriously annoy the ratcats—but there were plenty lower down the totem pole who lacked his gentlemanly sense of their own long-term interests.
Everyone was watching the screen behind the bar again; the UNSN announcement was off the air, but the Munchen news service was slapping in random readouts from all over the planet. For once the collaborationist government was too busy to follow their natural instincts and keep everyone in the dark, and the kzin had never given much of a damn, the only thing they cared about was behavior. Propaganda be damned.
The flatlander warship was still headed insystem; from the look of things they were going to use the sun for a whip-round. He could feel rusty spaceman’s reflexes creaking into action. That was a perfectly sensible ploy; ramscoop ships were not easy to turn. Even at relativistic speeds you couldn’t use the interstellar medium to bank. Turning meant applying lateral thrust; it would be easier to decelerate, turn and work back up to high Tau—unless you could use a gravitational sling, like a kid on roller-skates going hell-for-leather down a street and then slapping a hand on a lamppost.
He raised his glass to the sometime mirror behind the bar. It was showing a sc
ene from the south polar zone with its abundance of ratcat installations; kzin were stuck with Wunderland’s light gravity, but they preferred a cooler, drier climate than humans. The first impact had looked like a line of light drawn down from heaven to earth, and the shockwave flipped the robot camera into a spin that had probably ended on hard, cold ground.
Yarthkin grinned, and snapped his fingers for the waitress. He ordered coffee, black, and a sandwich.
“Heavy on the mustard, sweetheart,” he told the waitress. He loosened his tie and watched flickershots of boiling dust-clouds crawling with networks of purple-white lightning. Closer, into canyons of night seething up out of red-shot blackness, that must be molten rock…
“Sam.” The man at the musicomp looked up from trailing his fingers across the keyboard. It was configured for piano tonight—an archaism, like the whole setup. Popular, as more and more fled in fantasy what could not be avoided in reality, back into a history that was at least human. Of course, Wunderlanders were prone to that, the planet had been a patchwork of refugees from an increasingly homogenized and technophile Earth anyway. I’ve spent a generation cashing in on a nostalgia boom, Yarthkin thought wryly. Was that because I had foresight, or was I one of the first victim?
“Sir?” Sam was Krio, like McAndrews the doorman, although he had never gone the whole route and taken warrior scars. Many of the descendants of the refugees from Sierra Leone were traditionalists to a fault. Just as tough in a fight, though. He’d been enrolled in the Sensor-Effector program at the Scholarium, been a gunner with Yarthkin in the brief war in space, and they had been together in the hills. And he had come along when Yarthkin took the amnesty, too. Even more of a wizard with the keys than he had been with a jizzer or a strakkaker or a ratchet knife.