The Man-Kzin Wars 06

by Larry Niven

  None of this would work without the kzin worship of the Warrior Heart. Gamble after gamble after gamble, but the only game in town....

  Jacobi and I could see little from where we were packed next to one another in the back of the ratcat fighter. He smelled sour with fear, sweaty. What had broken in the kzin fighter to turn him into what he had become? I ignored him as best I could, and looked at the dots-and-comma script of the kzin language on various pieces of ratcat tech in my field of vision.

  “Kenneth,” he whispered to me quietly.

  I didn’t look at him. Instead I continued to scan the interior of the spacecraft, lit in garish orange. I doubted that any humans had seen as much of kzinti spacecraft as the two of us had over the last few months.

  I for one didn’t understand much of what we had seen. Kraach-Captain had kept us in a largish cabin during the trip out to Feynman, with our own supplies and autodoc.

  The occasional trip outside the cabin looked like the kzin fighter ship around us: cavernous spaces, orange lit. Oddly shaped devices, flickering thinscreens. Could that kind of information ever be of use? I shook my head, trying to make sense of the alien spaces around me. I was a singleship pilot and part-time smuggler, not a genius.

  Jacobi’s voice was an insistent whisper, like a pesky insect. “Did you find your mother, boy?”

  Now I turned and looked at him “Yeah,” I grated. Stay in character “I did what I must. I do not thank you for it.”

  Jacobi nodded. “In the coming years, Kenneth,” he replied, “you will come to see that I had your best interests at heart.” Jacobi started to reach out to me, perhaps to pat my arm.

  My expression stopped him cold, as I studied his ruined face, and smiled like a kzin. “I give you respect of sorts, Jacobi, even as a traitor. Because of the scars you earned fighting the kzin. But don’t push me.”

  Outrage glinted in his eyes. “And what are you? A saint?”

  “I am nothing like you, Jacobi. Nothing. Now seal it and lock it down, before I see how long it would take Kraach-Captain to get back here and pull my hands from around your miserable throat.”

  He fell silent.

  The rest of the trip was quiet, except for more unintelligible snarling arguments in the Hero’s Tongue from the command cockpit. From Jacobi I could have found out what Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist were saying, but I think that I understood the gist. Irritation seems quite universal among sentient beings.

  I had left the outer airlock open when I had departed Feynman in Victrix. That way the kzin crew tunnel mechanism could adapt and seal the two vessels together. We were instructed to leave our helmets open and to come along. The old kzin was clearly impatient, ready to get started on the real job.

  Kraach-Captain paused for a moment before we left the kzin airlock He bent nearly double and put his face near mine, rasped, “Think of your cubs and your mate. Their fate is in your hands.”

  “I know that, Kraach-Captain.” I studiously looked to one side of his huge eyes.

  He coughed and spat in reply, then he and Alien-Technologist herded us into Feynman. Alien-Technologist had a complicated device clipped to his forearm. It beeped at intervals.

  I felt a heavy weight on my shoulder. A four-fingered black hand squeezed like a vise. “Lead us to the control lair,” Kraach-Captain rumbled. I walked them along the main ring corridor. The kzinti had to stoop. I thought that I heard Alien-Technologist hiss-spit something at Kraach-Captain, who coughed kzin laughter in reply Perhaps a joke about the edibility of the passengers in cryosuspension.

  I lead them into the cramped control room, feeling the tension build. I pointed to the sleeping bodies on the floor. Careful, careful...

  “Your sources of information, Kraach-Captain” I said. “They altered the ship systems such that I cannot turn off the ramscoop.”

  Kraach-Captain sniffed through his open faceplate, looking around the control room. “We will deal with them in a moment,” he rasped. “Show us these ship systems.”

  I smoothly called up the various subroutines on the main viewscreen. Jacobi was leaning over my shoulder to see better. First, the safety interlocks. Since the fusion drive used interstellar matter swept up by ramscoop fields, shutting the fields down was a delicate matter. I showed them encrypted block after encrypted block at every step of the shutdown commands. The kzinti rumbled and hissed their impatience. Claws tapped at keypads as they called up diagnostic subroutines far more quickly than I had expected.

  I snuck a glance at the chronometer above the central console. It was almost time.

  Kraach-Captain turned to me. “Prepare one of these for interrogation.” A claw flicked at the three sleeping bodies.

  I carefully lifted the body of my mother, and moved to put her in a chair.

  “No,” thundered Kraach-Captain. “That one would be too fragile.” He hissed and spat at Alien-Technologist, who yowled in reply.

  Jacobi looked thoughtful. “Dominant One, may I speak?”

  A careless wave of unsheathed claws.

  “It could be,” Jacobi continued, “that an older human would be a better choice. Heroes have... ah, a tendency to overestimate human tolerances. The writhings of a young male might be misinterpreted as defiance.” He carefully looked away.

  “Hrrrr mused Kraach-Captain. “You could well be right, cull. Prepare her.”

  I moved to tie my mother down in the chair.

  There was a sudden broad-band squeal across all commlink frequencies. The two aliens shrieked in pain and surprise at the sound. It was loudest from the huge wristband on Alien-Technologist. Kraach-Captain looked at the main viewscreen in time to see a multicolored bloom of ionized gas fluorescing where his vessel waited.

  The kzin stared at the screen, not breathing. The cloud of gas glowed, changing from blue to yellow to reddish as it cooled and expanded. Behind their backs, quick as an eyeblink, my mother shot from the chair into the corridor, bounding in the low gravity.

  Kraach-Captain’s impressive ears drooped suddenly, then folded tightly into knots. The orange ruff visible around his helmet seal puffed out in rage. “Death Cry;” he growled past thin black lips.

  The old kzin turned and looked at me, smiling like a... like a kzin. “What have you done?”

  I looked him back in the eye, carefully moving to one side. “The fusion-point generator I brought back in Victrix was sabotaged. It just fried the inside of your troopship, Kraach-Captain.”

  Alien-Technologist started to snarl something, but Kraach-Captain slashed a gesture for quiet. His claws unsheathed, he gathered himself to leap. Nervously I prepared myself as best I could to dodge the elderly kzin’s attack.

  From behind the huge alien, Klaus Bergen suddenly leaped up like a child’s toy from his false sleep in the microgravity. He thrust a sharpened power conduit into Kraach-Captain’s massive back. The kzin spread his huge arms in an enormous embrace, his scream going up and up in frequency—

  —into silence. He hung limply in midair as his pelt began to smoke.

  Madchen Franke shoved an electrode into Alien Technologist. She was quick, but the kzin caught her with one spasming swipe, tearing her arm off. As she slammed into a bulkhead, blood spurting from a fleshy gaping socket, Alien-Technologist roared and collapsed in convulsions.

  Bergen’s face was a mask of grief, but he never eased his grip on the electrode lodged in Kraach-Captain’s back.

  My mother peered into the control room, a laser aimed and ready. She looked around quickly, tossed me the laser.

  Quickly, she grabbed the electrode piercing Alien-Technologist, standing above the concussed woman lying on the deck.

  Jacobi looked wildly from side to side at the twitching kzinti. At two crew carefully holding the electrodes steady. His eyes jerked toward me.

  “You,” he exclaimed.

  “Me,” I replied, puffing down the laser.

  Then I broke his neck with my own hands. I felt nothing.

  We had Troj
an Horsed the Trojan Cat. Or perhaps Trojan Monkeyed the Trojan Cat.

  My mother stood over us with the welding laser while Bergen and I quickly but very carefully bound the two unconscious kzin. Franke had lost consciousness immediately. We could leave her for a few minutes without risking significant further damage. If there was one thing the crew of Feynman knew, it was cryosuspension.

  I entered the kzin fighter ship in search of medical supplies. I was careful not to touch anything. This fighter was a very important prize now. There could be booby traps anywhere. Strange devices, complicated controls. I couldn’t make sense of it. Perhaps wiser heads than mine could.

  “Well done, my son,” I heard my mother say to me as I sealed the kzin ship behind me. “I am proud.”

  I smiled tightly, but shook my head a little. I did what I had to do. Still, I would never know the price I paid, nor what I had bought.

  But at least it felt right.

  Later, I stood in the tiny control room of the Feynman. Stars filled the screen, a riot of gaudy pinpoints against velvet blackness. With some thought and careful orientation, I was able to pick out Sol The sight still didn’t warm me, nor make me feel victorious.

  I heard a voice behind me. “Son?”

  “Yes, mother?” I replied, not needing to turn around.

  “It’s time.” Her voice was old, yes, but it still crackled and burned with a trace of Herrenmann command.

  I felt the familiar argument rise in my throat. “I don’t see why we can’t at least try to understand the ratcat drive. If we succeed, we would…

  “If, if, if,” she interrupted softly. “You know perfectly well that the kzin booby trap their devices to keep them out of slave-race hands. And we dare not risk either of our captives to explain the failsafes here and now”

  She was right, irritatingly right, Both Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist would be invaluable to unlocking the secrets of kzin technology when we reached Sol. But the aliens were far too large and strong to keep conscious. That was an unacceptable risk in a small lifebubble. Life support was already beginning to breakdown on Feynman. It stank. We had rigged two coldsleep chambers for our alien captives and iced them down for the trip.

  But only after we had carefully deep-suspended Madchen Franke. She would reawaken on Earth intact and healed.

  Kraach-Captain had never really wakened before we chilled him down. His kzin physiology had put his body into hibernation state without the biochemical tricks we humans needed for suspension. I never had the chance to explain to the alien ratcat about human honor.

  Or human vengeance.

  My mother and I watched the stars together for a time in silence.

  I said nothing. Why should victory taste of ashes?

  Finally she spoke. “Remember this, my son. Had you succeeded in the original plan, you would have saved their lives, true. But as slaves” She gestured Solward. “Perhaps, with our new cargo, we have a chance at leveling the playing field with the kzin. We can start to erase their technological advantage, to drive them back” She was right. An intact kzin fighter and crew was a prize indeed. But still...

  I felt my mouth form a tense line across my face. “It isn’t enough. Sharna and the children—they need to know that I did not betray them.”

  “They cannot—and must not—know. The kzin must think that their Trojan Horse expedition failed utterly.” I heard an ironic smile in her voice. “But think, Kenneth: you judged me yourself, did you not? A coward and a traitor, I believe. Both of us did what we did. What we had to do.”

  Would Sharna have faith in me? Would my children see me as pawn to the kzin, or as a hero? Would they ever know howl really felt, what I had done?

  Deal with it. My mother’s words echoed in my head. This was honor, the thin reassurance that I had done the right thing? It could not compare to seeing my wife and children again. To telling them in person.

  I felt a tugging at my arm, and looked down to see a gnarled, blue-veined hand at my elbow. I could see how the long years of exposure to the ramscoop fusion drive had aged her, burning away everything but her devotion to a cause. And I knew how empty victory could make you feel.

  “It is time for you to take the coldsleep,” she said simply. “You will awaken at Sol, a hero. Perhaps you can convince the Earthers to let you return to Wunderland, to battle for what you believe.” There was a sly smile playing about her aged face.

  Even smiling, the face seemed stern. A mirror to my own, as I had recently discovered. How had I not seen it? I had been blinded by my own knotty conflicts.

  “No,” I told her. “I’ll stay awake—with you.”

  A slight squeeze on my arm. “Kenneth, Bergen knows Feynman far better than you.”

  “There is nothing Bergen knows that I cannot learn.”

  She smiled wanly. “No, there is nothing you cannot learn. But still, you must sleep.”

  “You deserve to sleep, then.”

  “As for me, I am too old to take the rigors of coldsleep, except for deep suspension.” She chuckled a bit. “But do not worry, Kenneth Klaus and I, we make quite the team.”

  I couldn’t find the words in my Herrenmann mouth to express how I felt. I nodded agreement.

  “It is all right,” she soothed, standing up a bit straighter. “I may be feeble, but never confuse that with weakness. Do not forget that I am Herrenmann, as are you.” A chuckle in the dim control room. “I will be there to waken you at Sol, my son, as I used to do when you were a child. I never expected to have that honor again.”

  Finally I simply nodded I had no words.

  I started to adjust the viewscreen, to get a last glimpse of Alpha Centauri before leaving the control room. To see the faint glimmer of light that four years ago had shone on my wife and children, Principle willing. But even as I began to touch the keypads, my mother’s hands gently turned me around. She peered intently into my face.

  “Never backward, Kenneth.” Her voice was old, yes, but very strong. “Always look forward. That is what every Herrenmann must do.”

  That is what Herrenmannen do. I nodded tightly. The future had to be focus, for now.

  We walked together away from the warm lights of the control room. Toward the coldsleep chambers. I thought of the sunny seas of Earth, the salty waters, and tried to ignore the images flitting behind my eyes, images of small pale shadows fleeing hopelessly through leafy glades.