The Man-Kzin Wars 03

by Larry Niven

  "Yes, the fleet is absent. Always it is absent from where there is fighting to be done. We chase ghosts, Traat-Admiral. This 'activity' meant an attack on my estate, Dominant One. A successful attack, when I and my household were absent; my harem slaughtered, my kits destroyed. My generations are cut off!"

  Shaken, Traat-Admiral recoiled. A Hero expected to die in battle, but this was another matter altogether.

  "Hrrrr," he said. For a moment his thoughts dwelt on raking claws across the nose of Hroth-Staff-Officer; did he not think that piece of information worth his commander's attention? Then: "My condolences, honored Ktrodni-Stkaa. Rest assured that compensation and reprisal will be made."

  "Can land and monkeymeat bring back my blood?" Ktrodni-Stkaa screamed. He was in late middle age; by the time a new brood of kits reached adulthood they would be without a father-patron, dependent on the dubious support of their older half-siblings. And to be sure , Traat-Admiral thought, I would rage and grieve as well, if the kittens who had chewed on my tail were slaughtered by omnivores. But this is a combat situation.

  "Control yourself, honored Ktrodni-Stkaa," he said. "I myself will see to your young. I say it before the Conservor. And recall, we are under war regulations. Victory is the best revenge."

  "Victory! Victory over what, over vacuum, over kittenish bogeymen, you… YOU will guard my young? YOU? You Third Gunner!" There was a collective gasp from the bridges of both ships; Traat-Admiral could smell rage kindling among his subordinates at the grossness of the insult; that dampened his own, reminded him of duty. Conservor leaned forward to put himself in the pickup's field of view.

  "You forget the Law," he said, single eye blazing.

  "You have forgotten it, Subvertor of the Ancestral Past. First you worked tail-entwined with Chuut-Riit-if Riit he truly was-now with this." He turned to Traat-Admiral with a venomous hiss. "Licking its scarless ear, whispering grasseater words that always leave us where the danger is not. If true kzintosh of noble liver were in command of this system, the Fleet would have left to subdue the monkeys of Earth a year ago."

  Traat-Admiral crossed his arms, waggled brows. "Then the fleet would be four light-years away," he said patiently. "Would this have helped your estate? Is this your warrior logic?"

  "A true Hero scratches grass upon steaming logic. A true kzintosh knows only the logic of attack! Your ancestors are nameless, son of Jammed Litterdrop Repairer; your nose rubs the dirt at my slave's feet! Coward."

  This time there was no hush; a chorus of battlescreams filled the air, until the speakers squealed with feedback. Traat-Admiral was opening his mouth to give a command he knew he would regret when the alarm rang.

  "Attack. Hostile action. Corvette Brush Lurker does not report." The screen divided before him with a holo of fleet dispositions covering half of Ktrodni-Stkaa's face; a light was winking in the Traditionalist flotilla, and even as he watched it went from flashing blue to amber.

  " Brush Lurker destroyed. Weapon unknown. Standing by." The machine's voice was cool and impersonal, and Treat-Admiral's almost as much so.

  "Maximum alert," he said. Attendants came running with space armor for him and the Conservor, stripping away the ceremonial outfits. "Ktrodni-Stkaa, shall we put aside personalities while we hunt this thing that dares to kill kzinti?"

  "Ah," Markham said, as the kzinti corvette winked out of existence, its fusion pile destabilized. "It begins." Begins in a cloud of expanding plasma, stripped nuclei that once were metal and plastic and meat. "Wait for my command."

  The others on the bridge of the Nietzsche stared expressionlessly at their screens, moving and speaking with the same flat lack of expression. There was none of the feeling of controlled tension he remembered from previous actions, not even at the sight of a kzinti warship crushed so easily.

  "This is better," he muttered to himself. "More disciplined." There were times when he missed even backtalk, though- "No. This is better."

  "It isn't," Jonah said. His face was a little less like a skull, now, but he was wandering in circles, touching things at random. "I… are the kzinti… rescue…" His faced writhed, and he groaned again. "It doesn't connect, it doesn't connect."

  "Jonah," Markham said soothingly. "The kzinti are our enemies, isn't that so?"

  "I… think so. Yes. They wanted me to loll a kzin, and I did."

  "Then sit quietly, Jonah, and we will kill many kzinti." To one of the dead-faced ones. "Bring up those three fugitives we hauled in. No, on second thought, just the humans. Keep the kzin under sedation."

  He waited impatiently, listening to the monitored kzinti broadcasts. It was important to keep them waiting, past the point where the instinctive closing of ranks wore thin. And important to have an audience for my triumph, he admitted to himself. No, not my triumph. The Master's triumph. I am but the chosen instrument.

  "I don't like the look of this," Ingrid said, as the blank-faced guard pushed them toward the bridge of the warship. "Markham always kept a taut ship, but this-why won't they talk to us?"

  "I think I know why," Harold whispered back. The bridge was as eerily quiet as the rest of the ship had been, except for

  "Jonah!" Ingrid cried. "Jonah, what the hell's going on!

  "Ingrid?" he said, looking up.

  Harold grunted as he met those eyes, remembering. They did not have the flat deadness of the others, or the fanatical gleam of Markham's. A twisted grimace of… despair? puzzlement? framed them, as deeply as if it had become a permanent part of the face.

  "Ingrid? Is that you?" He smiled, a wet-lipped grimace. "We're fighting the kzinti." A hand waved vaguely at the computers. "I rigged it up. Put it through here. Better than trying to shift the hardware over from the Ruling Mind. You'll—" his voice faltered, and tears gleamed in his eyes "-you'll understand once you've met the Master."

  Harold gave her hand a warning squeeze. Time, he thought. We have to play for time.

  "Admiral Reichstein-Markham?" he said politely, with precisely the correct inclination of head and shoulders. Dear Father may not have let me in the doors of the schloss, but I know how to play that game. "Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann, at your service. I've heard a great deal about you."

  "Ah. Yes." Markham's well-bred nose went up, and he looked down it with an expression that was parsecs from the strange rigidity of a moment before. Harold swallowed past the dry lumpiness of his throat, and put on his best poor-relation grin.

  "Yes, I haff heard of you as well, Fro Yarthkin," the herrenmann said glacially.

  Well, that puts me in my place, Harold mused. Aloud: "I wonder if you could do the lady and me a small favor?"

  "Perhaps," Markham said, with a slight return of graciousness.

  "Well, we've been traveling together for some time now, and… well, we'd like to regularize it." Ingrid started, and he squeezed her hand again. "It'd mean a great deal to the young lady, to have it done by a hero of the Resistance."

  Markham smiled. "We haff gone beyond Resistance," he said. "But as hereditary landholder and ship's Captain, I am also qualified." He turned to one of the slumped figures. "Take out Number Two. Remember, from the same flotilla." The smile clicked back on as he faced Harold and Ingrid. "Step in front of me, please. Conrad, two steps behind them and keep the stunner aimed."

  "Attack." There was a long hiss from the bridge of the Throat Ripper. "Dreadnought Blood Drinker does not report. Blood Drinker destroyed. Analysis follows." A pause that stretched. One of their sister ships in the Traditionalist flotilla, and a substantial part of its fighting strength. Three thousand Heroes gone to the claws of the God. "Fusion pile destabilization. Correlating." Another instant. "Corvette Brush Lurker now reclassi–fied; fusion pile destabilization."

  "Computer!" Ktrodni-Stkaa's voice came through the open channel. "Probability of spontaneous failures!"

  Faintly, they could hear the reply. "Oh point oh seven percent, plus or minus." The rest faded, as Ktrodni-Stkaa's face filled the screen.

  "Now, traitor,"
he said. "Now I know which to be-lieve in, grass-eaters in kzinti fur or invisible bogeymen with access to our repair yards. Did you think it was clever, to gather all loyalty in one spot, a single throat for the fangs of treachery to rip? You will learn better. Briefly."

  "Ktrodni-Stkaa, no, I swear by the fangs of God—" the image cut off. Voices babbled in his ears:

  "Gut Tearer launching fighters—"

  "Hit, we have been hit!" Damage control klaxons howled. "Taking hits from Crusher of Ribs—"

  "Traat-Admiral, following units request fire-control release as they are under attack—"

  Traat-Admiral felt his gorge rise and his tail sink as he spoke. "Launch fighters. All units, neutralize the traitors. Fire control to Battle Central." A rolling snarl broke across the bridge, and then the huge weight of Throat Ripper shuddered. A bank of screens on the Damage Control panel went from green to amber to blood-red. "Communications, broadcast to system: all loyal kzintosh, rally to the Hand of the Patriarch—"

  Ktrodni-Stkaa's voice was sounding on another viewer, the all-system hailing frequency: "True kzintosh in the Alpha Centauri system, the lickurine traitor Traat-Admiral-that-was has sunk the first coward's fang in our back. Rally to me!"

  Aide-de-Camp sprang to Treat-Admiral's side. "We are at war, Honored Sire; the God will give us victory."

  The older kzin looked at him with a kind of wonder, as the bridge settled down to an ordered chaos of command and response. "Whatever happens here today, we are already in defeat," he said slowly. "Defeated by ourselves."

  "… so long as you both do desire to cohabit, by the authority vested in me by the Landsraat and Herrenhaus of the Republic of Wunderland," Markham said. "You may kiss your spouse."

  He turned, smiling, to the board. "Analysis?" he said.

  "Kzinti casualties in excess of twenty-five percent of units engaged," the flat voice said.

  Markham nodded, tapping his knuckles together and rising on the balls of his feet. "Densely packed, relatively speaking, and all at zero velocity to each other. Be careful to record everything; such a fleet engagement is probably unique." He frowned. "Any anomalies?"

  "Ship on collision course with Ruling Mind. Acceleration in excess of 400 gravities. Impact in 121 seconds, mark."

  Harold laughed aloud and tightened his grip around the new-made Frau Raines-Schotmann. "Together all the way, sweetheart," he shouted. She raised a whoop, ignoring the guard behind them with a stunner.

  Markham leaped for the board. "You said nothing could detect her!" he screamed at Jonah, throwing an inert crewman aside and punching for the communications channel.

  "It's… psionic," Jonah said. "Nothing conscious should—" His face contorted, and both arms clamped down on Markham's. There was a brief moment of struggle; none of the other crewfolk of the Nietzsche interfered; they had no orders. Markham snapped a blow to the groin, to the side of the head, cracked an arm; the Sol-Belter was in no condition for combat, but he clung leech-like until the Wunderlander's desperate strength sent him crashing halfway across the control deck.

  "Impact in sixty seconds, mark. " "Master, oh, Master, use the amplifier, you're under attack, use it, use it now—"

  "Impact in forty seconds, mark."

  Dnivtopun looked up from the solitaire deck. The words would have been enough, but the link to Mark-ham was deep and strong; urgency sent him crashing towards the control chair, his hands reaching for the bell-shape of the helmet even before his body stopped moving.

  This is how it will begin again, the being that had been Catskinner thought, watching the monobloc re-contract. This time the cycle had been perfect, the symmetry complete. It would be so easy to reaccelerate his perception, to alter the outcome. No, it thought. There must be free will. They too must have their cycle of creation.

  "Impact in ten seconds, mark."

  The connections settled onto Dnivtopun's head, and suddenly his consciousness stretched system-wide, perfect and isolate. The amplifier was better than any he had used before. His mind groped for the hostile intent, so close. Three hundred million sentients quivered in the grip of his Power.

  "Emperor Dnivtopun," he laughed, tendrils thrown wide. " Dnivtopun, God. You, with the funny thoughts, coming towards me. STOP. ALTER COURSE. IMMEDIATELY."

  Markham relaxed into a smile. "We are saved by faith," he whispered. "Two seconds to impact, mark."

  NO, DNIVTOPUN. YOUR TIME IS ENDED, AS IS MINE. COME TO ME.

  "One second to impact, mark. " The thrint screamed, antiphonally with the Ruling Minds collision alarm. The automatic failsafe switched on, and—

  -discontinuity

  Catskinner's mind engaged the circuit, and—

  -discontinuity

  A layer of quantum uncertainty merged, along the meeting edges of the stasis fields. Virtual particles showered out, draining energy without leaving the fields. Time attempted to precess at different rates, in an area of finite width and conceptual depth. The fields collapsed, and energy propagated, in a symmetrical five-dimensional shape.

  Chapter X

  Claude Montferrat-Palme laughed from the marble floor of his office; his face was bleeding, and the shattered glass of the windows lay in glittering swathes across desk and carpet. The air smelled of ozone, of burning, of the dust of wrecked buildings.

  CRACK. Another set of hypersonic booms across the sky, and the cloud off in the direction of the kzinti Government House was definitely assuming a mushroom shape. That was forty kilometers downwind, but there was no use wasting time. He crawled carefully to the desk, calling answers to the yammering voices that pleaded for orders.

  "No, I don't know what happened to the moon, except that something bright went through it and it blew up. Nothing but ratcats on it, anyway, these days. Yes, I said ratcats. Begin evacuation immediately, Plan Deinst; yes, civilians too, you fool. No, we can't ask the kzinti for orders; they're killing each other, hadn't you noticed? I'll be down there in thirty seconds. Out."

  A shockwave rocked the building, and for an instant blue-white light flooded through his tight-squeezed eyelids. When the hot wind passed he rose and sprinted for the locked closet, the one with the impact armor and the weapons. As he stripped and dressed, he turned his face to the sky, squinting.

  "I love you," he said. "Both. However you bloody well managed it." "He was a good son," Traat-Admiral said.

  Conservor and he had anchored themselves in an intact corner of the Throat Ripper's control room. None of the systems was in operation; that was to be expected, since most of the ship aft of this point had been sheared away by something. Stars shone vacuum-bleak through the rents; other lights flared and died in perfect spheres of light. Traat-Admiral found himself mildly amazed that there were still enough left to fight; more so that they had the energy, after whatever it was had happened.

  Such is our nature, he thought. This was the time for resignation; he and the Conservor were both bleeding from nose, ears, mouth, all the body openings. And within, he could feel it. Traat-Admiral looked down at the head of his son where it rested in his lap; the girder had driven straight through the youth's midsection, and his face was still fixed in eager alertness, frozen hard now.

  "Yes," Conservor said. "The shadow of the God lies on us, all three. We will go to Him together, the hunt will give Him honor." "Such honor as there is in defeat," he sighed.

  A quiver of ears behind the faceplate showed him the sage's laughter. "Defeat? That thing which we came to this place to fight, that has been defeated, even if we will never know how. And kzinti have defeated kzinti. Such is the only defeat here."

  Traat-Admiral tried to raise his ears and join the laughter, but found himself coughing a gout of red stickiness into the faceplate of his helmet; it rebounded.

  "If-I-must-drown," he managed to say, "not-in- my-own-blood." Vacuum was dry, at least. He raised fumbling hands to the catches of his helmet-ring. A single fierce regret seized him. I hope the kits will be protected.

  "We have hunt
ed well together on the trail of Truth," the sage said, copying his action. "Let us feast and lie in the shade by the waterhole together, forever."

  "What do you mean, it never happened?"

  Jonah's voice was sharp again; a week in the autodoc of the oyabun's flagship had repaired most of his physical injuries. The tremor in his hands showed that those were not all; he glanced behind him at Ingrid and Harold, where they sat with linked hands.

  "Just what I said," General Buford Early said. He glanced aside as well, at Shigehero's slight hard smile.

  "So much for the rewards of heroism," Jonah said, letting himself fall into the lounger with a bitter laugh. He lit a cigarette; the air was rank with them, and the smell of the general's stogies. That it did not bother a Sol-Belter born was itself a sign of wounds that did not show.

  The general leaned forward, his square pug face like a clenched fist. "These are the rewards of heroism, Captain," he said. "Markham's crew are vegetables. Markham may recover-incidentally, he'll be a hero too."

  "Hero? He was a flipping traitor! He liked the damned Thrint!" "What do you know about mind control?" Early asked. "Remember what it felt like? Were you a traitor?"

  "Maybe you're right…"

  "It doesn't matter. When he comes back from the psychist, the version he remembers will match the one I give. If you three weren't all fucking heroes, you'd be at the psychist's too." Another glance at the oyabun. "Or otherwise kept safely silent."

  Harold spoke. "And all the kzinti who might know something are dead, the Slaver ship and the Catskinner are quantum bubbles… and three vulnerable individuals are not in a position to upset heavy-duty organizational applecarts."

  "Exactly," Early said. "It never happened, as I said." He spread his hands. "No point in tantalizing people with technical miracles that no longer exist, either." Although knowing you can do it is half the effort. "We've still got a long war to fight, you know," he added. "Unless you expect Santa to arrive."

  "Who's Santa?" Jonah said.

  The commander of the hyperdrive warship Outsider's Gift sat back and relaxed for the first time in weeks as his craft broke through into normal space. He was of the large albino minority on We Made It, and like most Crashlanders had more than a touch of agoraphobia. The wrenching not-there of hyperspace reminded him unpleasantly of dreams he had had, of being trapped on the surface during storms.