by Larry Niven
Chuut-Riit had told him that some humans were worthy of respect. He was beginning to believe it.
✩ ✩ ✩
Raines and Jonah commanded the front screen to stop mimicking a control board; beyond a certain level fear-adrenaline was an anti-aphrodisiac. 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, fed by the fantastically rich gas-field that surrounded a star. Nothing but beam-weapons stood a chance of catching her, and even messages were going to take prodigies of computing power to unscramble. Her own weapons were quite simple: iron eggs. Velocity equals mass; when they intercepted their targets, the results would be in the megaton-yield range.
Jonah’s lips 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 they’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 more inflection in it? Conscious computer, but not a human consciousness. Memory and instincts designed by humans…free will, unless he or Ingrid used the override keys. 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. 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 catatonic as well…
“Detection. Neutronic and electromagnetic-range sensors.” The ship’s system was linked to the hugely powerful but subconscious level machines of the Yamamoto. “Point sources.”
Rubies sprang out across the battle map, and they moved as he watched, swelling up on either side and pivoting in relation to each other. A quick glimpse at the fire-bright point source of Alpha Centauri in the upper screen showed a perceptible disk, swelling as he watched. 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, 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 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 much; they’d cripple the Swarm’s economy and destroy its value to them.” 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.”
“Enemy action. Laser and particle-beam weapons.” Nothing they could do about that. “Enemy vessels are detonating high-yield fusion weapons on our anticipated trajectory.”
Attempting to overload the ramscoop, and unlikely to succeed unless they had something tailored for it, like cesium gas bombs. The UNSN had done theoretical studies, but the pussies were unlikely to have anything on hand. This trick was not in their book, and they were rather inflexible in tactics.
Of course, if they did have something, the Yamamoto would become a rather dangerous slug of high-velocity gas in nanoseconds. Catskinner might very well survive, if the stasis field kicked in quickly enough…in which case her passengers would spend the next several thousand years in stasis, waiting for just the right target to slow them down.
“Home,” Ingrid said, very softly.
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 Jonah had been alive. What it would be like, 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 and then boost the Catskinner 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 doing it by putting our heads between our knees and spitting hard, he thought sardonically.
“Ships,” the computer said in its dispassionate tone. “Movement. Status, probable class and dispersal cones.”
Color-coded lines blinking over the tactical map. Columns of print scrolling 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 the ramscooper, but the kzin were certainly going to try.
“Aggressive bastards,” he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tactical display. Getting in the way of the Yamamoto took courage, individually and on the part of their commander. 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 equals velocity: by now the Yamamoto had the effective bulk of a medium-sized moon, moving only a tenth slower than a laser beam.
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 another inverted cone of trajectories splayed out from the path of the Yamamoto. Highly polished chrome-tungsten-steel alloy slugs, which had spent the trip from Sol riding grapnel-fields in the Yamamoto’s wake. Others were clusters of small shot, or balloons, to transmit energy to fragile targets; at these speeds, a slug could punch through a ship without slowing enough to do more than leave a small glowing hole through the structure. Wildly varying albedos, 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 kinetic-energy weapons out in sprays and clusters, at velocities that would send them across the Wunderland system in hours. It would take the firepower of a heavy cruiser to significantly damage one, and there were a lot of them.
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 things that war is supposed to be about seizing. It’s 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 light-years 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 2
“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; hideous 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 as much of a course-alteration as possible. 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 their speeds, you couldn’t use the interstellar medium to bank; turning meant applying lateral thrust, and 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—and even a star’s gravity was pretty feeble at those speeds.
He raised his glass to the sometime mirror behind the bar. It was showing a scene from the south polar zone. 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 coffee.
“With a sandwich, sweetheart,” he told the waitress. “Heavy on the mustard.” He loosened his archaic 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; something had punched right through into the magma.
“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 victims?
“Sir?” Sam was Krio, like McAndrews the doorman, although he had never gone the whole route and taken warrior scars. 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 strakaker or a ratchet knife.
“Play something appropriate, Sam. ‘Stormy Weather.’”
The musician’s face lit with a vast white grin, and he launched into the ancient tune with a will, even singing his own version, translated into Wunderlander. Yarthkin murmured into his lapel to turn down the hysterical commentary from the screen, still babbling about dastardly attacks and massive casualties.
It took a man back. Humans were dying out there, but so were ratcats…Here’s looking at you, he thought to the hypothetical crew of the Yamamoto. Possibly nothing more than recordings and sensor-effector mechanisms, but he doubted it.
“Stormy weather for sure,” he said softly to himself. Megatons of dust and water vapor were being pumped into the atmosphere. “Bad for the crops.” Though there would be a harvest from this, yes indeed. I could have been on that ship, he thought to himself, with a sudden flare of murderous anger. I was good enough. There are probably Wunderlanders aboard her; those slowships got through. If I hadn’t been left sucking vacuum at the airlock, it could have been me out there!
“But not Ingrid,” he whispered to himself. “The bitch wouldn’t have the guts.” Sam was looking at him; it had been a long time since the memory of the last days came back. With a practiced effort of will he shoved it deeper below the threshold of consciousness and produced the same mocking smile that had faced the world for most of his adult life.
“I wonder how our esteemed ratcat masters are taking it,” he said. “Been a while since the ones here’ve had to lap out of the same saucer as us lowlife monkey-boys. I’d like to see it, I truly would.”
✩ ✩ ✩
“…estimate probability of successful interception at less than one-fifth,” the figure in the screen said. “Vengeance-Fang and Rampant-Slayer do not respond to signals. Lurker-At-Waterholes continues to accelerate at right angles to the ecliptic. We must assume they were struck by the ramscoop fields.”
The governor watched closely; the slight bristle of whiskers and rapid open-shut flare of wet black nostrils was a sign of intense frustration.
“You have leapt well, Traat-Admiral,” Chuut-Riit said formally. “Break off pursuit. The distant shadow-watchers would have their chance.”
A good tactician, Traat-Admiral; if he had come from a better family, he would have a double name by now. Would have a double name, when Earth was conquered, a name, and vast wealth. One percent of all the product of the new conquest for life, since he was to be in supreme military command of the Fifth Fleet. That would make him founder of a Noble Line, his bones in a worship shrine for a thousand generations; Chuut-Riit had hinted that he would send several of his daughters to the admiral�
�s harem, letting him mingle his blood with that of the Patriarch.
“Chuut-Riit, are we to let the…the…omnivores escape unscathed?” The admiral’s ears were quivering with the effort required to keep them out at parade-rest.
A rumble came from the space-armored figures that bulked in the dim orange light behind the flotilla commandant. Good, the planetary governor thought. They are not daunted.
“Your bloodlust is commendable, Traat-Admiral, but the fact remains that the human ship is traveling at velocities which render it…It is at a different point on the energy gradient, Traat-Admiral.”
“We can pursue as it leaves the system!”
“In ships designed to travel at point-eight lightspeed? From behind? Remember the Human Lesson. That is a very effective reaction drive they are using.”
A deep ticking sound came from his throat, and Traat-Admiral’s ears laid back instinctively. The thought of trying to maneuver past that planetary-length sword of nuclear fire…
Chuut-Riit paused to let the thought sink home before continuing: “This has been a startling tactic. We assumed that possession of the gravity polarizer would lead the humans to neglect further development of their so-efficient reaction drives, as we had done; hr’rrearow t’chssseee mearowet’aatrurrte, this-does-not-follow. We must prepare countermeasures, investigate the possibility of ramscoop interstellar missiles…At least they did not strike at this system’s sun, or drop a really large mass into the planetary gravity well.”
The fur of the kzin on Throat-Ripper’s bridge lay flat, sculpting the bone-and-muscle planes of their faces.
“Indeed, Chuut-Riit,” Traat-Admiral said fervently.
“A series of polarizer-driven missiles, with laser-cannon boost, deployed ready to destabilize ramscoop fields…In any case, you are ordered to break off action, assist with emergency rescue efforts, detach two units with interstellar capacity to shadow the intruder until it leaves the immediate vicinity. Waste no more Heroes in futility; instead, we must repair the damage and redouble our preparations for the next attack on Sol.”
