Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI

by Larry Niven

  “There! There!” Cumpston’s finger stabbed at a new light on the screen, a light that triggered a howling audio alarm-system. “That’s the signature of a kzinti warship all right. A big one. Coming in fast…a heavy cruiser at least.”

  “Got it!”

  “It still doesn’t make sense,” Cumpston said. “It’s not a coherent attack. A cruiser, a fighter, a boat…”

  “Who knows why the pussies do anything? I thought I knew them, but this…”

  “I thought I knew them, too. Some of them, anyway.”

  Both men looked at the clock. At the rate they were closing, both knew they probably had very little time to live. Waiting for reinforcements was not an option. They had alerted the ground and orbital defenses. Now all they could do was cause as much damage as possible to the kzinti strike-force before it hit the planet. Both had seen the silent annihilation of space-battles many times before. Small craft were dropping from the Tractate Middoth: flying bombs to either destroy by detonation or to pump X-ray lasers.

  “I’m getting another signature!” Guthlac’s voice was tense but controlled. “Another ship!” Then he gasped, spat a curse. “The bastard is HUGE!

  “My God! It’s the first attack on Wunderland all over again! A single giant carrier.”

  “Better cloaked.”

  “It would be. They’ve had sixty-six years to improve the technology. Well, it looks like the war’s on again for young and old, as they say. I’m sorry, Arthur.”

  “I’m sorry too.” Then, “Michael…”

  “Yes?”

  “Gale’s down there.”

  “I know. Arthur, do what you have to do. We’re soldiers.”

  “How does a Hero’s Death appeal to you?”

  “I don’t think we’ve got much choice. It’s been on the cards a long time.” His finger ran down rows of switches. The lights of armed firing-circuits glowed. The leading kzin craft, the smallest, was getting close. It was already in range. Small, but capable of carrying a stick of multi-megatonners of its own. Deal with it, then turn to the great carrier. If Tractate Middoth survived that—and it would not—the cruiser next.

  “Ssstop!” Karan’s nonhuman voice jolted them. She was standing, trembling. She had pulled out the plasma injector. She appeared to be holding herself upright by her extended claws dug into the fabric of a seat-cover. Her eyes had a strange, unfocused look. She appeared still half conscious, possibly delirious. Just what we need, thought Guthlac, going into battle against hopeless odds with a delirious kzinrret loose in the ship.

  “Vaemar! Vaemar is there!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Karan knows! I know.”

  A delirious kzinrret. Was oxygen-starvation affecting her brain? But all kzinti had a sense from which the talent of the telepaths was made. Among nontelepaths it was extremely limited and did not work to cross the distances of space. But…Karan was Karan. And, Guthlac thought, Vaemar was Vaemar. Neither of them were ordinary kzinti.

  “The locators are dead,” said Guthlac. “They say nothing. But this is close to the last position we had from them!”

  “That’s not a ship! It’s a moving moon!”

  “Vaemar is there! He comes!” Karan screamed.

  “The boat must have picked us up,” said Cumpston, “but it’s not firing at us. It’s taking evasive action, all right, but it seems to be evading the fighter.”

  “Shall we try a com-link?”

  “Yesss!” Karan leapt as she spoke. Not a great leap for a kzin, at least not one in good shape, but she was between the two men at the command console. Albert Manteufel sprang from his chair, drawing a pistol, but Guthlac motioned him back. In any event, gunplay within a spaceship was seldom a good idea. Karan spun to face them, claws out and jaws in the killing gape. Her knife was out, though the hand she held it in was trembling.

  Cumpston and Guthlac were veterans of many battles in space as well as on the ground, battles often faster than thought, in a realm where only certain instincts and intuitions given to a few could offer hope of survival, controlling machine-enhanced reflexes beyond the frontiers of the purely physical, swifter and more subtle than any dance of bodies or equations. Both knew, too, the potential treachery of instinct. They stayed their hands now, as Karan operated the com-link to the flying, twisting speck on the screen. Weak as she was, her claws flashed too fast for the humans to follow, and much too fast for them to interfere with.

  There on a screen was the cockpit of the gig. Flying it were Vaemar and Dimity. Karan collapsed.

  “A dreadnought!” With shriek of ecstasy and blood lust Kzaargh-Commodore leapt onto the great kz’eerkt-hide battle-drum, sending its call booming throughout the ship. Was this what Chorth-Captain had somehow achieved? Already Night-Lurker had identified Chorth-Captain’s fighter and gig. How had he done it? And what were the fighter and gig doing? Distracting the monkeys before the dreadnought’s terrible slash ripped the guts out of their planet? But it mattered not. “The Patriarch’s battle-fleet has joined us!” This was no time for thoughts of how so mighty a consort might have penetrated so deep into the Centauri system and so close to Wunderland undetected, nor for the unworthy thought that so mighty a consort would take most of the glory from a mission that a moment before had been a matter of lone heroism. His crew of Heroes roared an equally enthusiastic response. That they might be perhaps less concerned with Kzaargh-Commodore’s glory and more with their own suddenly enhanced chances of survival was not a thought for that moment either. Night-Lurker barrelled in, closing with the strange gigantic vessel.

  Bigger than all but the biggest dreadnoughts. And camouflaged as Night-Lurker itself had been. The minds of the great strategists of the Patriarch’s General Staff had thought like his own.

  There was no further need for radio silence. It would be sensible to co-ordinate plans with the great carrier. “Call them!” he ordered Captain. He stood posed before the com-screen, Captain at a respectful distance behind him.

  Com-screens on Night-Lurker’s bridge and in the Hollow Moon blizzarded briefly with light and cleared. Kzinti and Protectors saw one another. Each lunged instantly at the firing-buttons on their consoles.

  Night-Lurker flung itself into evasive action, firing as it turned. Its heaviest punches included disrupter bomb-missiles. They were not in the class of Baphomet but powerful enough. Kzaargh-Commodore had taken the decision to fire, and fired, almost as fast as it was physically possible for a living being, even with motor-neurone enhancement. However the Protectors in the Hollow Moon were slightly faster.

  Night-Lurker glared fantastically in the heat of beams for seconds as its layers of mirror-shielding boiled away, a red, then blue, outline of a kzin heavy cruiser. Its disrupters hit the Hollow Moon, burrowed through its shell and exploded. The Hollow Moon vented gigantic plugs of rock and blew apart. Night-Lurker exploded simultaneously.

  The gig was perilously near the second explosion. Impact at such speeds with practically any piece of debris, however small, would be the end of it. Guthlac in the Tractate Middoth spread the lasers as far as possible and fired them to sweep between the blue-white sphere of the explosion and the little craft, hoping to at least reduce the flying wreckage. Smaller explosions sparkled and flared. The gig remained. Flying like a wounded bug, it turned and headed towards them. The Rending Fang fighter had disappeared again.

  Chapter 14

  Paddy Quickenden looked up from the deep-radar screen.

  “It looks like an ants’ nest,” he said “Things are boiling in there.”

  “There’s usually a lot of activity in the caves,” said Leonie. “Let me see…But yes, things are boiling. There are sizeable creatures moving—bipeds.”

  “Humans…Morlocks,” said Raargh. His claws extended.

  “We can’t see much more from here,” said Leonie. “We’d better land and take a look.”

  “What, go into the caves?”

  “With modern motion-detectors and Raargh’s
eye we should be able to see anything long before it gets near us. We both know the caves.”

  “I don’t,” said Paddy. “But I’ve lived underground most of my life.”

  “I’m not letting you near these caves,” said Leonie. “And there’s no way I’d leave the car and the com-link unattended. You’ll stay in this car, with the canopy closed and weapons cocked. But be ready to let us in if we have to get back in a big hurry.” She opened the com-link and spoke to Nils Rykermann briefly. She was already suited up as she landed the car in a small limestone-sided valley. She and Raargh leapt down and disappeared into one of the cave mouths.

  Paddy settled himself before the console. The car’s weapons were ready. Like all spacers, he was experienced in waiting. The broken limestone walls and pinnacles, “honeycombed, honey-colored” with small red Wunderland trees on the valley floor, and sprays and creepers of other red Wunderland vegetation, made the place seem like a wild, dishevelled garden, peaceful and, from within the car, silent, though instruments picked up the sounds of small animals and the murmuring of a tiny stream. This is a lovely place, he thought. Let me help Dimity find peace, let me cure her of what is torturing her, and she and I—and our children—could live on this world forever. They need spacers here, more than We Made It does. There could be a place for me here in paradise with the woman I love. He thought of Leonie, heading fearlessly into the cave with the great kzin. He could see them now on the deep radar, a large and a small figure, moving down the tunnel into the darkness and what lay beyond. How lucky Rykermann is to have such a wife! Well, this is paradise around me. Let me enjoy it for the moment.

  Leonie and Raargh were both veteran cave fighters. Their checks of weapons, lights and other gear were fast, automatic and thorough. Both could read the ghostly, ambiguous shapes of tunnels and cavities on the screen of their small deep-radar as easily as a road-map. Raargh touched the lower right quadrant of the screen with a massive claw. There was movement, a lot of movement.

  “Looks like battle,” he said. His infrared-capable artificial eye was ceaselessly scanning the cavern, especially the roof, as he spoke. They set off into the darkness. Raargh’s artificial eye, seeing deep into infrared, guided them, but there were faint patches of luminosity here and there as well. Possibly Ferals’ work, Leonie thought. They had learnt to crush and treat the shells of small crustaceanoids from the streams so as to make a ghostly radiance.

  “Smell strange,” Raargh said after a while. They were passing a complex of tunnel mouths.

  “Tree-of-life?” Leonie wondered. The faceplate of her helmet was firmly closed. No point in asking Raargh, but the old kzin knew the ordinary smells of the caves. Something strange was almost certainly something new. She did not want reports of any new smells. All she could do was check her mask again. If even a few molecules got in…But, whatever it was, it was evidently limited to a single tunnel, and later Raargh reported it gone.

  The com-links allowed them to pick up one another’s voices, but no natural sounds reached them. In the darkness of the caves, even with artificial aids, it was a claustrophobic experience. Leonie ordered Raargh to take hold of her.

  “I am going to take my helmet off,” she said. “If I smell tree-of-life I will become mad. You must disarm me, restrain me, and carry me back to the car.”

  She removed the helmet slowly. No new smell assailed her. There was nothing but the cave smells she knew so well, mainly limestone and biological processes of decay, and the wild, gingery smell of the kzin keyed up for battle. An instantaneous flashback: that strange, exciting, terrifying smell on Raargh the first time they had met, when in these very caves she, as she had obeyed an impulse she hardly understood to help the broken-legged kitten that had grown into Karan, had dug Raargh out of a rockfall with her beam rifle instead of killing him.

  A flashback gone in an instant. Evidently no tree-of-life here. But ahead, sounds of battle. Ahead, dim tunnels, lit distantly by the reflected flashes of explosions. Screams. The rattle of a Lewis-gun, cut off abruptly.

  Raargh leading, holding his prosthetic arm before him in case of Sinclair wire, they hurried on.

  Tractate Middoth’s com-screen cleared again, restoring communication with Dimity and Vaemar in the gig’s cabin. Karan yowled. A sweep of Arthur Guthlac’s hand killed the row of firing switches.

  The gig steadied in its flight and approached the Tractate Middoth, matching its course and its now reducing velocity easily. Dimity explained to Guthlac and Cumpston what had happened. There was damage to the gig, damage its meteor-patches could not cope with. It was losing air. They would have to be quick.

  Even without its Protector-built improvements, ship-to-ship transfer in space was one of the primary roles the gig had been designed for. A tube was extended between the two airlocks. Still, with safety-checks on the two sets of drive emissions, the transfer took some time. There was a kzin-sized spacesuit in the pilot’s place on board the gig, but the Protectors’ were in a locked compartment. Vaemar made Dimity put on the kzin suit as the air-loss got worse, though she could only just move its vast, semi-rigid limbs.

  Dimity and Vaemar crossed, Vaemar greeting the crew of the Tractate Middoth and Karan with the restrained dignity the situation demanded. Dimity sought wearable clothes. Guthlac indicated somewhat nervously to Vaemar that Karan was there very much as a result of her own insistence, and told of the part she had played. “She has saved my life before,” Vaemar said. Karan, now somewhat recovered but shaky and mentally as well as physically weary, greeted Vaemar with a mixture of pride and shyness and a good deal of mutual grooming. Cumpston sent a message to Wunderland suggesting the defenses be reduced from red to orange alert. They gathered around the control console. There was no trace of the Protector’s fighter.

  “The beam was only on it a moment,” Guthlac said. “Then it disappeared. Not exploded, I fear. The Protector must have deployed a cloaking device.”

  “Why didn’t it continue attacking the gig from the cloak, then?—I guess that would have betrayed its position.”

  “I guess. The energy required for cloaking like that must be prodigious, anyway. Maybe too much to cloak and fight at the same time. At least for now. I expect given time a Protector could improve such things. And there would be no point in such an attack now. If it thought the gig had broadcast to the system, destroying it would be a waste of time.”

  “What matters is that it’s still out there somewhere. A Pak Protector with a spacecraft, knowing there are hyperdrive ships in this system for the taking. We’ve alerted Tiamat and the Swarm, but given a Protector’s cunning and resourcefulness, I doubt that’s enough. And we don’t know what surprises it may have prepared for us.”

  “The Protector has to get back to the Morlock colonies sooner or later,” said Dimity. “That’s the only source of breeders, and where the remaining tree-of-life is. Now that we’re hunting it, and the system’s alerted, I don’t think it’s got too much chance of pulling off a successful surprise attack on its own anywhere else. Not till it makes and organizes more Protectors.”

  “It’s also, as far as we know, where most of the nukes are. And the Rending Fang class are aircraft as well as spaceships.”

  “What have we got at the caves now?” asked Vaemar.

  “Paddy and Leonie,” said Guthlac. “And Raargh.”

  “Get after it!”

  “What craft do they have?” asked Dimity.

  “A car. An ordinary flyer.”

  “Not much to stop a Rending Fang.”

  “I’m ordering them to try.” Guthlac touched the com-link’s face again. “At all costs.”

  A pair of humans blundered up the passage towards Leonie and Raargh. They stumbled and fell as they approached. Young ferals, streaming blood, heads and shoulders covered in the lacerations and bites of Morlock attacks. A group of Morlocks followed them. Before Leonie could speak, Raargh shot the Morlocks down. The humans regained their feet and continued on at a staggering run, igno
ring Leonie’s shouts to them. She did not know if they saw Raargh or not, but she guessed that to them kzinti were far more terrifying than Morlocks. There was no time to try any other communication. Raargh and Leonie advanced cautiously. They went down, crawling and wriggling forward on the muddy cave floor, old instincts hiding them in the shadows of pillars and columns. The sounds of fighting stopped.

  The tunnel led to a great “ballroom” cave. White and crystal rock reflected fantastically a few smoky, primitive lights. By these lights and their infrared, Raargh and Leonie saw where the fight had been.

  Both could read a recent battlefield as easily as a book. This one, they saw, had been short and one-sided. Dead humans lay everywhere, along with some smashed weapons, including modern beamers. They were young, dressed in dirt-colored rags. Ferals. That would have been obvious even without the primitive facial tattoos.

  Weapons ready, they examined the bodies as they might. Most of the ferals had been killed quickly and efficiently with broken necks. Few had the characteristic head-and-shoulder wounds of Morlock attacks. There were twisting, random trails of blackened or melted rock cutting into walls and columns that suggested weapons fired unaimed and with their triggers held down by dead hands. Raargh and Leonie had seen such things before, but here it seemed an unusually large number had died without getting off an aimed shot. Among the bodies were several wearing the grey uniforms of Wunderland police. They had died with their hands tied. Prisoners. And others whose clothes suggested they were farmers. There was also a much larger bulk: a dead kzin, killed the same way. His scars, greying fur and a prosthetic leg-brace suggested an old soldier. He too had died with his hands and claws tied with tape like a prisoner.

  “This one worked on a farm with humans,” said Raargh. “I suggested it to him. Told him we must make new lives. Now I must meet those who have done this. Honor demands it.”