The Man-Kzin Wars 02

by Larry Niven

  One of the gray-clad figures gave a dry retch at her console. "Control yourzeff, soldier," Markham snapped. To the screen: "Wit all the troubles, the kzin are unlikely to have noticed your, ah, sudden deceleration. " The green fine remained. "Still, ve should establish vectors to a less conspicuous spot. Then I can offer you the hozpitality of the Nietzsche, and we can discuss your mission and how I may assist you at leisure. "

  The green line flickered, shaded to green-blue. Mental reservations. Not on board your ship, that's for sure, Jonah thought, smiling into the steely fanatic's gaze in the screen. "By all means," he murmured.

  "... Zo, as you can imagine, we are anxious to take advantage of your actions," Markham was saying. The control chamber of the Catskinner was crowded with him and the three "advisors" he had insisted on; all three looked wirecord-tough, and all had stripped to useffilly lumpy coveralls. And they all had something of the outer-orbit chill of Markham's expression.

  "To raid kzin outposts while they're off-balance?" Ingrid said. Markham gave her a quick glance down the eagle sweep of his nose.

  "You Vill understant, wit improvised equipment it is not always possible to attack the kzin directly," he said to Jonah, pointedly ignoring the junior officer. "As the great military tinker Clausewitz said, the role of a guerrilla is to avoid strength and attack weakness. Ve undertake to sabotage their operations by disrupting commerce, and to aid ze groundside partisans wit intelligence and supplies as often as pozzible. "

  Translated, you hyack ships and bung the crews out the airlock when it isn't an unmanned cargo pod, all for the Greater Good. Finagle's ghost, this is one scary bastard. Luckily, I know some things he doesn't.

  "And the late unlamented MeAllistaire?"

  A frown. "Vell, unfortunately, not all are as devoted to the Cause as might be hoped. In terms of realpolitik, it iss to be eggspected, particularly of the common folk when so many of deir superiors haff decided that collaboration wit the kzin is an unavoidable necessity." The faded blue eyes blinked at him. "Not an unreasonable supposition, when Earth has abandoned us... until now... zo, of the ones willing to help, many are merely the lawless and corrupt. Motivated by money; vell, if one must shovel manure, one uses a pitchfork."

  Jonah smiled and nodded, grasping the meaning if not the agricultural metaphor. And the end justifies the means. My cheeks are starting to hurt, "Well, I have my mission to perform. On a need-to-know basis, let's just say that Lieutenant Raines and I have to get to Wunderland, preferably to a city. With cover identities, currency, and instructions to the underground there to assist us, if it's safe enough to contact. "

  "Vell." Markham seemed lost in thought for moments. I do not believe ve can expect a fleet from Earth. They would have followed on the heels of the so-effective attack, and such would be impossible to hide. You are an afterthought. " Decision, and a mouth drawn into a cold line. "You must tell me of this mission before scarce resources are devoted to it." "Impossible. This whole attack was to get Ingrithe lieutenant and me to Wunderland. " Jonah cursed himself for the slip, saw Markham's ears twitch slightly.

  His mouth was dry, and he could feel his vision focusing and narrowing, bringing the aquiline features of the guerrilla chieftain into closer view.

  "Zo. This I seriously doubt. But we haff become adept at finding answers, even some kzin haff ve persuaded." The three "aides" drew their weapons, smooth and fast; two stunners and some sort of homemade dart-thrower. "You will answer. Pozzibley, if the answers come quickly and wizzout our having to damage you, I will let you proceed and giff you the help you require. This ship vill be of extreme use to the Cause, vahtever the bankers and merchants of Earth, who have done for us nothing in fifty years of fighting, intended. Ve who haff fought the kzin vit our bare hands, while Earth did nothing, nothing... "

  Markham pulled himself back to self-command. "if it is inadvisable to assist you, you may join my crew or die. " His eyes, flatly dispassionate, turned to Ingrid. "You are from zis system. You also will speak, and then join or... no, there is always a market for workable bodies, if the mind is first removed. Search them thoroughly and take them across to the Nietzsche in a bubble." A sign to his followers. "The first thing you must learn, is that I am not to be lied to."

  "I don't doubt it," Jonah drawled, lying back in his crashcouch. "But you can't take this ship."

  "Ah." Markham smiled again. "Codes. You vill furnish them."

  "The ship," Ingrid said, considering her fingertips, "has a mind of its own. You may test it."

  The Wunderlander snorted. "A self-aware computer? Impossible. Laboratory curiosities."

  "Now that," the computer said, 1. could be considered an insult, Landholder Ulf Reichstein-markham."

  The weapons of Markham's companions were suddenly thrown away with stifled curses and cries of pain. "Induction fields... your error, sir. Spaceships in this benighted vicinity may be metal shells with various systems tacked on, but I am an organism. And you are in my intestines."

  Markham crossed his arms. "You are two to our four, and in the same environment, so no gasses or other such may be used. You vill tell me the control codes for this machine eventually; it is easy to make such a device mimic certain functions of sentience. Better for you if you come quietly." "Landholder Markham, I grow annoyed with you," the computer said. "Furthermore, consider that your knowledge of cybernetics is fifty years out of date, and that the kzin are a technologically conservative people with no particular gift for information systems. Watch. "

  A railgun yapped through the hull, and there was a bright flare on the flank of the stubby toroid of Markham's ship. A voice babbled from the handset at his belt, and the view in the screen swooped crazily as the Catskinner dodged.

  "That was your main screen generator," the computer continued. "You are now open to energy weapons. Need I remind you that this ship carries more than thirty parasite-rider X-ray lasers, pumped by one-megaton bombs? Do we need to alert the kzin to our presence?"

  There was a sheen of sweat on Markham's face. "I haff perhaps been somewhat hasty," he said flatly. No nonsentient computer could have been given this degree of initiative. "A fault of youth, as mein mutter is saying." His accent had become thicker. "As chentlemen, we may come to some agreement."

  "Or we can barter like merchants," Jonah said, with malice aforethought. Out of the comer of his eye, he saw Ingrid flash an "o" with her fingers. "Is he telling the truth?"

  "To within 97% of probability," the computer said. "From pupil, skin-conductivity, encephalographic and other evidence." Markham hid his start quite well, "I suggest the bargaining commence. Commandant Reichstein-Markham, you would also be well advised not to... engage in falsehoods."

  Chuut-Riit always enjoyed visiting the quarters of his male offspring. "What will it be this time?" he wondered, as he passed the outer guards. The household troopers drew claws before their eyes in salute, faceless in impact-armor and goggled helmets, the beam-rifles ready in their hands. He paced past the surveillance cameras, the detector pods, the death-casters and the mines; then past the inner guards at their consoles, humans raised in the household under the supervision of his personal retainers. The retainers were males grown old in the Riit family's service. There had always been those willing to exchange the uncertain rewards of competition for a secure place, maintenance, and the odd female. Ordinary kzin were not to be trusted in so sensitive a position, of course, but these were families which had served the Riit clan for generation after generation. There was a natural culling effect; those too ambitious left for the Patriarchy's military and the slim chance of advancement, those too timid were not given opportunity to breed.

  Perhaps a pity that such cannot be used outside the household, Chuut-Riit thought. Competition for rank was far too intense and personal for that, of course.

  He walked past the modern sections, and into an area that was pure Old Kzin; maze-walls of reddish sandstone with twisted spines of wrought-iron on their tops, the tips glistening razor-e
dged. Fortress architecture from a world older than this, more massive, colder and drier; from a planet harsh enough that a plains carnivore had changed its ways, put to different use an upright posture designed to place its head above savanna grass, grasping paws evolved to climb rock. Here the modem features were reclusive, hidden in wall and buttress. The door was a hammered slab graven with the faces of night-hunting beasts, between towers five times the height of a kzin. The air smelled of wet rock and the raked sand of the gardens.

  Chuut-Riit put his hand on the black metal of the outer portal, stopped. His ears pivoted, and he blinked; out of the comer of his eye he saw a pair of tufted eyebrows glancing through the thick twisted metal on the rim of the ten-meter battlement. Why, the little sthondats, he thought affectionately. They managed to put it together out of reach of the holo pickups.

  The adult put his hand to the door again, keying the locking sequence, then bounded backward four times his own length from a standing start. Even under the lighter gravity of Wunderland, it was a creditable feat. And necessary, for the massive panels rang and toppled as the rope-swung boulder slammed forward. The children had hung two cables from either tower, with the rock at the point of the V and a third rope to draw it back. As the doors bounced wide he saw the blade they had driven into the apex of the egg-shaped granite rock, long and barbed and polished to a wicked point.

  Kittens, he thought. Always going for the dramatic. If that thing had struck him, or the doors under its impetus had, there would have been no need of a blade. Watching too many historical adventure holos. "Errorowwww!" he shrieked in mock-rage, bounding through the shattered portal and into the interior court, halting atop the kzin-high boulder. A round dozen of his older sons were grouped behind the rock, standing in a defensive clump and glaring at him; the crackly scent of their excitement and fear made the fur bristle along his spine. He glared until they dropped their eyes, continued it until they went down on their stomachs, rubbed their chins along the ground and then rolled over for a symbolic exposure of the stomach.

  "Congratulations," he said. "That was the closest you've gotten. Who was in charge?"

  More guilty sidelong glances among the adolescent males crouching among their discarded pull-rope, and then a lanky youngster with platter-sized feet and hands came squatting-erect. His fur was in the proper flat posture, but the naked pink of his tail still twitched stiffly.

  I was," he said, keeping his eyes formally down. "Honored Sire Chuut-Riit," he added, at the adult's warning rumble.

  "Now, youngling, what did you learn from your first attempt?" "That no one among us is your match, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit," the kitten said. Uneasy ripples went over the black-striped orange of his pelt.

  "And what have you learned from this attempt?"

  "That all of us together are no match for you, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit," the striped youth said.

  "That we didn't locate all of the cameras," another muttered. "You idiot, Spotty." That to one of his siblings; they snarled at each other from their crouches, hissing past barred fangs and making striking motions with unsheathed claws.

  "No, you did locate them all, cubs," Chuut-Riit said. "I presume you stole the ropes and tools from the workshop, prepared the boulder in the ravine in the next courtyard, then rushed to set it all up between the time I cleared the last gatehouse and my arrival?"

  Uneasy nods. He held his ears and tail stiffly, letting his whiskers quiver slightly and holding in the rush of love and pride he felt, more delicious than milk heated with bourbon. Look at them! he thought. At the age when most young kzin were helpless prisoners of instinct and hormone, wasting their strength ripping each other up or making fruitless direct attacks on their sires, or demanding to be allowed to join the Patriarchy's service at once to win a Name and household of their own... His get had learned to cooperate and I’d use their minds!

  "Ali, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit, we set the ropes up beforehand, but made it look as if we were using them for tumbling practice," the one the others called Spotty said. Some of them glared at him, and the adult raised his hand again.

  "No, no, I am moderately pleased

  ." A pause. "You did not hope to take over my official position if you had disposed of me?"

  "No, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit," the tall leader said. There had been a time when any kzin's holdings were the prize of the victor in a duel, and the dueling rules were interpreted more leniently for a young subadult. Everyone had a sentimental streak for a successful youngster; every male kzin remembered the intolerable stress of being physically mature but remaining under dominance as a child.

  Still, these days aflkrs were handled in a more civilized manner. Only the Patriarchy could award military and political office. And this mass assassination attempt was... unorthodox, to say the least. Outside the rules more because of its rarity than because of formal disapproval.... A vigorous toss of the head. "Oh, no, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit. We had an agreement to divide the private possessions. The lands and the, ah, females." Passing their own mothers to half-siblings, of course. "Then we wouldn't each have so much we'd get too many challenges, and we'd agreed to help each other against outsiders," the leader of the plot finished virtuously.

  "Fatuous young scoundrels," Chuut-Riit said. His eyes narrowed dangerously. "You haven't been communicating outside the household, have you?" he snarled.

  "Oh, no, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit!”

  "Word of honorl May we die nameless if we should do such a thing!” The adult nodded, satisfied that good family feeling had prevailed. "Well, as I said, I am somewhat pleased. If you have been keeping up with your lessons. Is there anythifig you wish?"

  "Fresh meat, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit," the spotted one said. The adult could have told him by the scent, of course, a kzin never forgot another's personal odor, that was one reason why names were less necessary among their species. "The reconstituted stuff from the dispensers is always... so... quiet."

  Chuut-Riit hid his amusement. Young Heroes-to-be were always kept on an inadequate diet, to increase their aggressiveness. A matter for careful gauging, since too much hunger would drive them into mindless cannibalistic frenzy.

  "And couldn't we have the human servants back? They were nice." Vigorous gestures of assent. Another added: "They told good stories. I miss my Clothilda-human. "

  "Silence!” Chuut-Riit roared. The youngsters flattened stomach and chin to the ground again. "Not until you can be trusted not to injure them; how many times do I have to tell you, it's dishonorable to attack household servantsf Until you learn self-control, you will have to make do with machines."

  This time all of them turned and glared at a mottled youngster in the rear of their group; there were half-healed scars over his head and shoulders. "it bared its teeth at me," he said sulkily. "All I did was swipe at it, how was I supposed to know it would die?" A chorus of rumbles, and this time several of the covert kicks and clawstrikes landed.

  "Enough," Chuut-Riit said after a moment. Good, they have even learned -how to discipline each other as a unit. "I will consider it, when all of you can pass a test on the interpretation of human expressions and body-language." He drew himself up. "In the meantime, within the next two eight-days, there will be a formal hunt and meeting in the Patriarch's Preserve; kzinti homeworld game, the best Earth animals, and even some feral-human outlaws, perhaps!”

  He could smell their excitement increase, a manecrinkling musky odor not unmixed with the sour whiff of fear. Such a hunt was not without danger for adolescents, being a good opportunity for hostile adults to cull a few of a hated rival's offspring with no possibility of blame. They will be in less danger than most, Chuut-Riit thought judiciously. In fact, they may run across a few of my subordinates' get and mob them. Good. "And if we do well, afterwards a feast and a visit to the Sterile Ones." That had them all quiveringly alert, their tails held rigid and tongues lolling; nonbearing females were kept as a rare privilege for Heroes whose accomplishments were not quite deserving of a mat
e of their own. Very rare for kits still in the household to be granted such, but Chuut-Riit thought it past time to admit that modern society demanded a prolonged adolescence. The day when a male kit could be given a spear, a knife, a rope, and a bag of salt and kicked out the front gate at puberty were long gone. Those were the wild, wandering years in the old days, when survival challenges used up the superabundant energies. Now they must be spent learning history, technology, xenology, none of which burned off the gland-juices saturating flesh and brain.

  He jumped down amid his sons, and they pressed around him, purring throatily with adoration and fear and respect; his presence and the failure of their plot had reestablished his personal dominance unambiguously, and there was no danger from them for now. Chuut-Riit basked in their worship, feeling the rough caress of their tongues on his fur and scratching behind his ears. Together, he thought. Together we will do wonders.

  Interesting, Chuut-Riit thought, standing on the verandah of his staff-secretary's house and lapping at the gallon tub of half-melted vanilla ice cream in his hands. Quite conwly, in its way.

  In a very un-kzin fashion. The senior staff quarters of his estate were laid out in a section of rolling hills, lawns and shrubs and eucalyptus trees, modest stone houses with high-pitched shingle roofs set among flowerbeds. A dozen or so of the adults who dwelt here were gathered at a discreet distance, down by the landing pad; he could smell their colognes and perfumes, the slightly mealy odor of human flesh beneath, a mechanical tang overlaid with alien greenness and animals and... yes, the children were coming back. Preceded by the usual blast of sound. The kzin's ears folded themselves away at the jumbled high-pitched squealing, one of the less attractive qualities of young humans. Although there was a very kzinlike warbling mixed in among the monkey sounds ...