by Larry Niven
"Now, traitor," he said, "now I know which to believe 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 hit!" Damage control klaxons howled. "Taking hits from Blood-Drinker—"
"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 Traat-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 four hundred gravities. Impact in one hundred twenty-one seconds, mark."
Harold laughed aloud and tightened his grip around the new-made Fru Raines-Schotmaun. "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 Markham was deep and strong; urgency sent him crashing toward the control chair, his hands reaching for the bellshape 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 monoblock recontract. 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 toward 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 Mind's collision alarm. The automatic failsafe switched on, and—
—discontinuity—
Catskinner's mind engaged the circuit, and—
—discontinuity—
and 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 18
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 swaths 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 Dienzt; yes, civilians too, you fool. No, we can't ask the kzin 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 operational; 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 hunted 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."
Epilogue
"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 the smell of them, and 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 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 as well. The wrenching not-there of hyperspace reminded him unpleasantly of dreams he had had, of being trapped on the surface during storms.
"Well. Two weeks, faster than light," he said.
The executive officer nodded, her eyes on the displays. "More breakthroughs," she said. "Seven . . . twelve . . . looks like the whole fleet made it." She laughed. "Wunderland, prepare to welcome your liberators."
"Careful now," the captain said. "This is a reconnaissance in force. We can chop up anything we meet in interstellar space, but this close to a star we're strictly Einsteinian, just like the pussies."
The executive officer was frowning over her board. "Well, I'll be damned," she said. "Sir, something very strange is going on in there. If I didn't know better . . . that looks like a fleet action already going on."
The captain straightened. "Secure from hyperdrive quarters," he said. "Battle stations." A deep breath. "Let's go find out."
THE END
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