Man-Kzin Wars III

by Larry Niven

  “It is well, it is well.” Ress-Chiuu rolled the words over his tongue as if they were the fine drink in his goblet.

  Weoch-Captain gauged that he had asserted himself as much as was advisable. He had his future to think of, the career that should bring him at last a full name and the right to breed. “If the High Admiral is pleased, that suffices. But it was mere information we captured, which the monkeys may in time have given us freely.”

  “Vouchsafed us,” Ress-Chiuu snarled. “Condescended to throw to us.”

  “True, sire.” It had indeed been in the minds of Weoch-Captain and his crew, a strong motivation to do what they did.

  “Nor could we be certain they would not lie.”

  “True, sire. Nonetheless—” The utterance was distasteful but necessary, if Weoch-Captain was to maintain the High Admiral’s opinion of him as an officer not only valiant but wise. “They will resent what happened. We have barely begun to modernize and re-expand the fleet. Theirs is much stronger. How may they react? I admit to fretting about that on the way home.”

  “The Patriarchs considered it beforehand,” Ress-Chiuu assured him. “The humans will bleat. Perhaps they will even huff and puff. We shall point out that they have registered no territorial claim on yonder sun and its planets, therefore they had no right to forbid entry to a peaceful visitor, and you did nothing but save yourselves after they opened fire. Arh, your restraint was masterly, Weoch-Captain. We will demand reparation, they will make a little more noise, and that will be the end of the matter. Meanwhile you have learned a great deal for us, about their capabilities and about what to expect, what to prepare for, when we start pushing at them in earnest. You deserve well of us, Weoch-Captain.”

  He leaned forward. His voice became music and distant thunder. “You deserve the opportunity to win more glory. You may earn the ultimate reward.”

  Energy thrilled along nerves and into blood. “Sire! I stand ready!”

  “I knew you would.” Ress-Chiuu sipped, rather than lapped, from his cup. His gaze went afar, his tone deceptively meditative. “We have our sources of information among the humans. They are limited in what they can convey but on occasion they have proven useful. For the present, you need know no more than that. Let me simply say that not everything the hyperwave brings us is known to the human government.” Perforce he attempted to pronounce the English word. Weoch-Captain recognized, if not exactly understood it.

  “For relevant example,” Ress-Chiuu continued, “we got early news of the disaster at the red sun, well before they contacted us officially about it. This you recall, of course. What you do not recall, because it happened while you were gone, is that we have received fresh intelligence, conceivably of the first importance.”

  Stoic, as became a Hero, Weoch-Captain waited. His ribs ached with tension. His heart slugged.

  “Briefly put—we will go into details later,” he heard, “a Wunderland resident has come upon a lost record from the time of the war. It appears that, some years before the enemy got the hyperdrive, an astronomer observed a cosmic phenomenon, about five light-years from Alpha Centauri. It was inexplicable, but involved enormous energies. The possibility of military uses caused the high command of the occupation to dispatch a ship to investigate. If the ship sent any messages back, those were expunged when the human armada appeared, and all kzinti who had knowledge of the mission died. Any beams that arrived afterward were never received, the tuned and programmed apparatus being destroyed; they are dissipated, lost. The ship has not been heard of again. Recent search has failed to detect anything remarkable in that part of the Wunderland sky.

  “Regardless, for reasons not quite clear to me, humans are trying to organize an expedition to that region. Humans, I say, individuals, not the humans. Their patriarchs are, as yet, unaware of it.

  “We have obtained the astronomical data. They are sufficient basis for an investigation. Perhaps nothing is there, or nothing of interest. Yet it is imaginable that those kzinti were justified who decided, three decades ago, that this was worth sending a high-velocity vessel.

  “We must know. If it is anything of value, we must win it ourselves. The way is considerably longer from here than from there. Are you and your crew prepared to leave again quite soon?”

  “Sire,” blazed Weoch-Captain, “you need not ask!”

  “And I say, to your honor, that I am unsurprised.” Ress-Chiuu showed fangs. “I give you an added incentive. If the humans do mount their expedition, it will apparently consist of a single ship, unarmed, commanded by one . . . S-s-saxtor-r-rph, the designation is. The ship, commander, and crew that wrought the havoc you beheld.”

  Weoch-Captain roared.

  They spoke together, ran computations and simulations, speculated, envisioned, dreamed their fierce dreams, until past sundown. Much remained to do when they stopped for a feast of celebration. The first flesh ripped from the zianya, before it died, was especially savory.

  Chapter VI

  While the government ground ponderously through its motions, Juan Yoshii and Laurinda Brozik were as trapped on Wunderland as their friends. Released, they could not get early passage to We Made It; as yet, few ships plied that route. When a sudden opportunity came by, they grabbed. The others took no offense. Laurinda’s parents were eager to get her home and legally married. Her father had already promised his prospective son-in-law an excellent job, no sinecure but still one that would allow him to pursue his literary interests on the side. You don’t dawdle over such things. However, the situation gave scant notice or time for a sendoff. Preoccupied as they were with the Nordbo business, skipper and mate could merely offer their best wishes. Kamehameha Ryan and Carita Fenger made what arrangements they were able, and the foursome took off for the pair of days available before departure.

  Though Gelbstein Park is popular in summer, visitors to that high country are few when winter has fallen over the southern hemisphere of Wunderland. These got romantic near-solitude. A walk amidst the scenery preceded dinner back at the lodge, drinks before the fireplace, and a long goodnight.

  “Brrr-hooee!” Ryan hugged himself. Breath smoked from his round brown countenance. “I’m glad I’m not a brass monkey.”

  Carita took his arm. The Jinxian’s own skin seemed coal-black against the snowscape, in which Laurinda’s albino complexion showed ghostly. “Keep reminding yourself that not all your ancestors were kanakas,” she suggested.

  “Or that it gets pretty cold on top of Mauna Kea too, yeah.” The quartermaster snuggled his chin under the collar of his jacket.

  “You could’ve insisted we go to Eden or the Roseninsel or wherever tropical.”

  “Naw, I’m okay. Juan opted for here, and this’s his last chance.”

  Yoshii seemed indeed lost in his surroundings. Was a poem brewing? Overhead the sky stood huge, cloudless, as deeply blue as the shadows cast by sun A across the snows. Paler were those from B, an elfin tracery mingled with the frost-glitter. A kilometer ahead, the trail ended at a hot springs area. The greens and russets of pools were twice vivid in the whiteness elsewhere; the steam that rose from them was utter purity. Beyond, the Lucknerberg gleamed in its might. The sounds of seething carried this far through the silence, but muffled, as if it were the underground working of the planet that one heard.

  “You are so kind,” Laurinda said. “We’ll miss you so much.”

  Yoshii shivered, left his reverie, and caught his girl’s gloved hand. They were walking in front of their companions. He glanced back. “Yes, and we’ll worry about you,” he added. “Headed into the . . . the unknown—”

  “You’ll have better things to do,” Ryan laughed.

  “And we’ll be fine,” Carita put in.

  “Shorthanded,” Yoshii said. They had not found a satisfactory replacement for him. “I can’t help feeling guilty, like a deserter.”

  “Juan, boy,” Carita replied, “if you left this lass behind now, even for a month’s jaunt, I’d turn you over my knee and
spank you till you took first prize at the next baboon show.” Quite possibly she meant it. Her short, massive frame certainly had the capability.

  “I might have gone too—” Laurinda’s words trailed off. No, she would not have done that to her parents. “If we could only stay in touch!”

  Ryan shrugged. “Someday they’ll miniaturize hyperwave equipment to the point where it’ll fit in a spaceship.”

  “Why haven’t they already?” she protested. “Or why didn’t it come with the hyperdrive?”

  “We can’t expect to understand or assimilate a non-human technology overnight,” Yoshii told her in his soft fashion. “As was, it took skull sweat to adapt what the Outsiders sold your world to our uses. I’m surprised that you, of all people, should ask such a question.”

  “A woman needs to spring an occasional surprise,” Carita said.

  Laurinda gulped. “But not a stupid remark. I’m sorry. My thinking had gone askew. I am afraid for you two and the Saxtorphs.”

  “Nonsense,” Ryan said. “It’ll be aheahe, a breeze, a well-paid junket.” Into reaches that had swallowed a kzinti warcraft. “You don’t get ol’ Bob haring right off on impulse. If we should meet difficulties we can’t skip straight away from, we’re equipped like an octopus to handle ’em.”

  “No weapons.” She had not been concerned with the refitting, but she knew this.

  “Oh, he and I saw quietly to our stash of small arms, explosives, and all.”

  Yoshii’s mouth tightened. “What use against the universe?”

  “As for that,” Carita stated, “you know full well what we’ve got.” Mainly to Laurinda: “A beefed-up grapnel field system. We can lock onto a fair-sized asteroid and shift its orbit, if we want to spend the fuel. Our new main laser can bore a hole from end to end of it. Our robot prospector-lander can boost at as high as a hundred Earth gees, for a total delta v of a thousand KPS. Plus the stuff we carried before, except for the second boat—radars, instruments, teleprobes, you name it. Oh, we’d be no match for a naval vessel, but aside from that, we’re loaded like a verguuz drinker.”

  “Now will you joyful honeymooners kindly reel in your faces and start singing and dancing as the drill calls for?” Ryan snorted.

  The couple traded a look, which rapidly grew warm. Smiles radiated between them. “Makes me feel downright lecherous,” Carita murmured to Ryan. “How ’bout you?”

  With a rumbling roar, a geyser erupted among the springs. Higher and higher it climbed against the gentle gravity, until the tower of it reached a hundred meters aloft. Light sharded to bows and diamonds in its plume. Thence it flung a fine rain which fell stinging hot, smelling of sulfur and tasting of iron, violence broken loose from rocks far below. Abruptly the humans felt very small.

  Chapter VII

  Waves move more slowly on Wunderland than on Earth and strike less hard, but the seas that beat against the cliffs of Korsness were heavy enough. The noise of them reached the old house on the headland as a muted throb, drums beneath the wind-skirl. Gray, green, and white-maned, they heaved out to a horizon vague with scud. The clouds flew low, like smoke. The room overlooking the view seemed full of their twilight, despite its fluoros. That glow lost itself in swartwood furniture, murky carpet, leatherbound codices and ancestral portraits. Above the stone mantel hung a crossed pair of oars, dried and cracked. The first Nordbo who settled here had used them after the motor in his boat failed, to fetch a son wrecked on Horn Reef.

  Saxtorph liked this place. It spoke to something in his blood. “You’ve got roots,” he remarked. “Not many folks do these days.”

  Seated on his left, Tyra nodded. Her hair was the sole real brightness. “The honor of the house,” she said, then grimaced. “No, forgive me, I do not mean to be pretentious.”

  “But you shouldn’t be afraid of speaking about what truly matters,” said Dorcas on her far side.

  “I am not. Your husband knows. But—” The com that they confronted chimed and blinked. Tyra stiffened. “Accept,” she snapped.

  The full-size image of a man appeared, and part of the desk behind which he sat, and through the window at his back a glimpse of the Drachenturm in Munchen. “Good day,” he greeted. Half rising to make a stiff little bow: “Frau Saxtorph, at last I get the pleasure of your acquaintance.” He must have worked to flatten out of his English the accent his sister retained.

  Dorcas inclined her head. The mahogany-hued crest and tail of her Belter hairstyle rippled. “How do you do, Herr,” she answered as formally. The smile on the Athene visage was less warm than usual. “Someday I may have the pleasure of shaking your hand.”

  Ib Nordbo took the implied reproof impassively. He was in his mid-forties, tall and low-gee slim, smooth-chinned, bearing much of Tyra’s blond handsomeness but none of her verve and frequent merriment. At least, during his previous two short encounters with Saxtorph he had been curt and somber. Insignia on the blue uniform proclaimed him a lieutenant commander of naval intelligence.

  “Why would you not come in person today?” burst from Tyra. “I tell you, this is the one spot on Wunderland where we can be sure we are private.”

  “Come, now,” her brother replied. “My office was and is perfectly secure, there is no reason to imagine your town apartment or the Saxtorphs’ hotel room were ever under surveillance, and I assure you, this circuit is well sealed.”

  Anxious to avoid a breach, for the earlier scenes had gotten a bit tense, Saxtorph said, “You’d know, in your job. Actually, my wife and I were glad of Tyra’s invitation because we were curious to see the homestead.”

  “We hoped to get some feel for your father, some insight or intuition,” Dorcas added.

  “What value can that have, on a search through space?” Nordbo’s question would have been a challenge or a gibe if it had been uttered less flatly.

  “Perhaps none. You never can tell. If nothing else, this was an interesting visit; and to hold his actual notebook in our hands was . . . an experience.”

  “I fear nobody else would agree, Frau.” Nordbo’s attention went to his sister. “Tyra, I hesitate to say you have become paranoiac on this subject, but you have exaggerated it in your mind out of all proportion. What cause does anyone have to spy on you? How often must I repeat, the Navy—no part of officialdom—will concern itself?”

  Saxtorph stirred. “And I repeat, if you please, that I have trouble believing that,” he said. “Okay, one kzinti ship was lost thirty years ago, among hundreds. There was an avalanche of matters to handle in the years right after liberation. This business was forgotten. Sure. But if we did show them your father’s notes and reminded them that the kzinti reckoned it worthwhile dispatching a ship—”

  “Nothing special is now in that part of the sky,” Nordbo retorted. “What he detected must have been a transient thing at best, an accident leaving no trace, perhaps the collision of a matter and an antimatter body.”

  “That’d have been plenty weird. Who’s ever found so much loose antimatter? But we’ve still got that infrared anomaly.” Saxtorph had insisted on Nordbo’s retrieving the entire record of the naval observation.

  “Meaningless. Its intensity against the cosmic background falls within probable error.” The officer stirred where he sat. “We need scarcely go over this ground again for your lady wife’s benefit. We have trodden it bare, and you must have relayed the arguments to her. But to complete the repetition, Frau Saxtorph, I have pointed out that the kzinti may well have had some entirely different destination, and took my father along merely because his noticing this phenomenon put them in mind of him as an excellent observer. They quite commonly employed human technicians, you know. Our species has more patience for detail work than theirs.”

  He paused before finishing: “This is how they will think in the Navy if we tell them. I have sounded out various high-ranking persons, at Tyra’s request. Besides, I am Navy myself; I ought to know, ought I not? It might be decided to go take a look, on the odd chance that my fa
ther did stumble on something special. But they would not care about him or his fate. Nor would they want civilians underfoot. You, Captain Saxtorph, would be specifically forbidden to enter that region.”

  “I understand that,” Tyra said. “At least, it is possible. Therefore Rover must go first, before anything has been revealed. What information it brings back can jumpstart some real action.”

  “Frau Saxtorph, I appeal to you,” Nordbo said. “My sister has involved me—”

  “It was your right to know,” Tyra interjected, “and I thought you would help.”

  “She wants me, if nothing else, to withhold from my service word about this ill-advised space mission of yours. Can you not see what a difficult position that creates for me?”

  “I agree your position is delicate,” Dorcas murmured.

  Did Nordbo wince or flinch? If so, he clamped control back down too fast for Robert Saxtorph to be sure. Either way, the captain felt momentarily sorry for what had happened of late.