Yet the taste of cowardice, like that obtained by chewing roots and leaves, returned all too soon. With half his attention, Rrowl-Captain watched Strategist waiting silently, eyes averted yet forward, clearly ready for the attack. The other kzin believed that his commander would rend him limb from limb.
This was not a surprise to the master of the Belly-Slasher. It had happened often enough in the past on this command bridge, after all.
But Rrowl-Captain could afford to lose no more competent officers, particularly with this new monkey threat. He mastered his fury for the moment, and concentrated again on the issue at hand. Chsst-Admiral had ordered Rrowl-Captain's ships to act as observers in the long grass of deep space, attacking nothing. They were to prepare the way for the Fourth Fleet. And he had done so, at great cost to his honor and digestion.
Yet this human ship, traveling from Man-home to the Ka’ashi system, was too rich a prize for any kzin to resist. Stealthed and invisible, Rrowl-Captain's ships had stalked from afar the queer monkey spacecraft for many watches, studying it. Its reaction drive was a shockingly efficient blaze of plasma and hard gamma radiation. Alien-Technologist had even suggested that the monkeys had developed a contramatter spacedrive, impossible as that seemed.
But it was much more than a spacedrive, at least to a kzin with the true Warrior Heart! Such a device could be used to incinerate whole continents from orbit, like some enormous Flenser of Judgment out of forgotten myth. A fearsome weapon, sure to gain for its discoverer the approval of the Riit Patriarch Himself, and all that such approval would mean.
Finally, Rrowl-Captain could wait no longer, and had moved his trio of warcraft slowly toward the monkeyship, preparing to capture this rich prize. Then the alien craft's drive had shut down! His tail lashed again in frustration.
It would have been simple to capture the monkeyship had the humans not detected them. The only question would have been how many Heroes' lives to spend in minimizing harm to the ship and its contents. Perhaps the best plan would have been a large boarding party with kinetic penetration aids in reserve… Or Belly-Slasher or one of his brother ships could have simply hammered the human craft with kinetic energy bombs, then landed some boarding parties of Heroes in the confusion.
Such an approach would have done much to salve the wounded Honor of Rrowl-Captain.
The lethal wash of gamma radiation and ionized gas pushing the monkeyship through space would have effectively prevented communication with the other monkeys at Man-home. The monkeys would simply think that their new vessel had failed, having hit some interstellar debris at nearly six eighths light-speed.
Conquest-Governor would surely welcome Rrowl-Captain back to Wunderland, bearing such a rich prize. Honor, slaves, a place on the Governor's Council, landholdings, and kzinretti would have been his! Perhaps his own hunting park. Almost certainly a full Name!
But this savory morsel had been snatched from his closing jaws by cowardly incompetence! Rrowl-Captain's killing teeth ached with the loss.
The fury within his thwarted Warrior Heart, never far below the surface, boiled anew. Rrowl-Captain lifted his massive head and roared his frustration, slashing at the air in front of him with angry claws. The entire bridge crew slapped sheathed claws across faces in submissive salute.
Rrowl-Captain grumbled and pushed his thinplate aside. He bolted upright to his full height of nearly three meters, like a bipedal tiger on anabolic steroids, and stalked the bridge as if he were seeking prey in a hunting park. The crew held their collective breaths, motionless, waiting to see who would be the captain's target.
He padded silently up to Strategist, his voice now very calm and therefore particularly dangerous. The captain of the kzinti warship looked Strategist rudely in the eyes, kzin to kzin, in barely veiled challenge. His tail slowly moved from side to side, in sly counterpoint to his words.
“So tell me, kzin-without-a-name, how the primitive monkeys, these humans, are able to detect our gravitic polarizers?” His contained fury revealed itself in a rictus grin of needle-sharp carnivore teeth.
Strategist choked back his own growl of challenge, saying nothing. Rrowl-Captain contained a cough of approval.
“They can detect our monopoles, true. Quite true.” The captain tapped the other kzin's broad chest twice with an unsheathed claw as he spoke, a profound insult to any Hero.
Strategist gurgled, trembling with the kzin combination of fear and rage.
“Yet this is no great surprise,” Rrowl-Captain half purred, “as the pitiful monkeys use monopoles themselves extensively and are therefore familiar with their properties. This is why we shield them from monkey instrumentation, as the smallest unblooded kitten could surmise.” His tail flicked.
Strategist gulped, gasped. In a thin, flat voice he started to speak. “Dominant One, it would seem —”
“It would seem,” Rrowl-Captain interrupted silkily, “that you would insult my intelligence, to claim that these pitiful monkeys can understand the workings of gravitic polarizers, yet still fly through space balanced on hot exhaust fumes?” He displayed his teeth in a wide grin, then picked between them with a sharp claw tip in derision and insult.
Rrowl-Captain watched Strategist take a deep breath at the offensive slur to his ancestors, and twitched his tail with some satisfaction. There were some advantages to leadership after all.
“These are monkeys,” he continued, scorn dripping from every growling syllable of the Heroes' Tongue. “These nameless and honor-lacking humans are leaf-eating vermin…” he railed suddenly, again beginning to lose control. He wiped drool from his thin black lips with the back of a furred hand.
Rrowl-Captain's anger concealed from his Heroes what he held secret in his heart of hearts: the gut-wrenching terror of entire fleets boiled to vapor by lasers that filled the sky, lasers everywhere, crewed by the seemingly puny monkeys. The horrible sensation of wishing to hide from enemies, to run from danger! His liver once more turned to water as the alien emotion gripped him.
For a moment, Rrowl-Captain's eyes saw nothing but the awful green blaze of laser light filling the universe, his nostrils swarming with the odor of his own hidden cowardice, like the smell of a grazing animal.
The scent of prey.
The madness receded after a moment. Rrowl-Captain spat onto the deck and mumbled, half to himself. “Just big hairless ch'tachi, monkeys, with their inefficient fusion drives and puny lasers and particle beams…”
The deck was silent, his crewkzin looking intently at the tapestry covered floorplates.
He stopped, moistening a now dry nose-pad with his tongue carefully, trying to control his conflicting emotions.
Breath steamed from his mouth in the chill air of Belly-Slasher. The captain's hairless, ratlike tail stood straight out in a posture of angry challenge.
Strategist looked straight ahead, his violet eyes unreadable. After a respectful pause, he saluted again with sheathed claws and averted eyes. “Dominant One, I do not believe the humans can detect our gravitic polarizers under normal conditions; it must be that one or more of the polarizers are unbalanced.”
“Oh?” Calm, silky.
Strategist held his breath while Rrowl-Captain continued to stare at him, then finished, whiskers still twitching. “Unbalanced gravitic polarizers… will leave a faint graviton signature on mass-detection instruments.”
Rrowl-Captain stood stock-still for a moment, thinking deeply. His fur, bristling with rage moments before, relaxed deceptively. The master of the Belly-Slasher began to groom himself thoughtfully, smoothing back his luxurious orange-red pelt with the back of an absently licked hand.
“Urrr… yes,” Rrowl-Captain agreed. “It would be difficult for these humans to detect us near light-speed by any other method, considering their primitive technology.”
A hanging silence, as quiet as the moment before stalked prey is caught with killing jaws. In a single lithe bound the Captain leaped back to his command chair — and sat. Lounged. “Unbalanc
ed gravitic polarizers,” he hissed softly to himself. Pupils dilated and contracted as he considered implications.
And the cause.
Strategist gave another deferential salute — unnoticed — and then sat heavily at his station. The bridge crew remained silent, guessing with secret relief what would come next. They became calmer, waiting for the inevitable, not looking away from their thinplates.
Rrowl-Captain smiled widely, but not with humor. “Engine-Tinker,” he purred over the shipwide commlink, “do the memory of the Conquest Heroes of Wunderland the favor of reporting to your humble captain. I have some questions concerning your last routine balancing of the gravitic polarizers.”
He chuckled low in his throat as he examined his right hand, back first, then the leathery palm. Rrowl-Captain extended his four black claws deliberately, one at a time. He began stropping them methodically on the worn, centimeter-thick Kdatlyno-hide arms of his command chair.
Minutes passed slowly as the captain purred a kit's hunting tune to himself, the sounds of his sharpening claws loud on the command bridge. Rrowl-Captain directed the kzin named Communication-Officer to tightbeam Strategist's information to Pouncing-Strike and Spine-Cruncher, and take compensatory action. Still purring throatily, Rrowl-Captain reviewed his strategy regarding the monkeyship, making a few notes on his personal logscreen in the dots-and-commas script of the kzin. A new approach to dealing with the monkeyship occurred to him…
The crew did not dare look up from their stations as the access door to the bridge irised open silently. Rrowl-Captain lifted his lambent gaze from his thinplate, like a hunter rising from tall grasses. A hunter done with stalking, and ready to finish the hunt.
The technician entered limp-tailed, crawling on his belly toward the command chair. The air seemed to grow thick and cloying as the captain began to growl, the image of a knife-toothed smile in his voice.
Rrowl-Captain screamed and leaped.
The crew relaxed slightly at their stations, their batlike ears folded tightly against the wet rending sounds on the bridge. They were familiar with their captain's routine, having experienced it before. Shipboard discipline would relax slightly for a time, and full attention could be placed on capturing the monkeyship.
Also, there would be opportunities. Engine-Tinker's second would shortly be promoted, of course.
CHAPTER FIVE
Snick-click.
Carol Faulk looked at Bruno's anxious face as he plugged the thick interface cable into the socket set in the left side of his neck. He looked almost wistful. She was half able to hide the wince she felt as she heard the sharp metallic sounds of the locking connector mechanism holding the cable firmly in place to his neck.
Leech, she thought to herself, irrationally cursing the computer. But there was worse to come.
Carol particularly hated the next part.
With the cable hanging from his neck like a heavy-bodied electronic lamprey, Bruno smiled a little at her, a bit self-consciously. Much as she hated the knowledge, she knew that his expression was one of half-hidden anticipation.
“Would you do the honors?” he asked her quietly.
Bruno had little choice; due to its long-term risks, full Linkage was a command decision, and as such required Carol's direct and active approval. The ship sighed and muttered all around them now that the Sun-Tzu was in free-fall and the ever-present thrumming of the constant-boost drive was silent; a white noise of hissing ventilators and the muted clicking of servo-mechanisms filled her ears. Dust from the corners drifted on the ventilator's breeze, glittering like tiny multicolored stars where it floated into the holoscreen projection beams.
Carol nodded, molding her lips into the confident smile that she knew her lover wanted to see. She verbally told the computer to begin the full Linkage protocol, then repeated the approval two times, in standard confirmation procedure. Finally, she thumbed her console pad, entering the command into the Sun-Tzu's permanent log.
Bruno's crash couch extruded padded restraints, gently pinning his arms, legs, neck and midsection. He said nothing, eyes forward on the holoscreen starscape. Or maybe he was looking beyond the starscape, she wondered. Closing her eyes for a moment, Carol leaned over and kissed Bruno's cheek. She could feel the muscles in his face smile in response to her through her lips. Carol settled back into her own crash couch.
“It'll be all right,” he whispered. “I'm not like any other Linker, remember?”
Carol nodded. “You betcha, sport.”
He certainly wasn't like any other Linker; Bruno was much more. Carol didn't want to lose that.
The computer chimed and informed the navigation deck in its cool electronic voice that full computer-neural net Linkage was commencing. A window in the Status section of the main holoscreen opened, reporting graphically the progress of Bruno's Linkage with the Sun-Tzu's main computer.
Carol grimaced as Bruno's interface booted him up, and sent him into the usual violent convulsions. He bucked and shook, the restraints holding him firmly in place. Spittle shook from his open mouth, floating in tiny droplets in the microgravity.
She wanted to hold him, but held herself back. It couldn't help Bruno now.
“Ah! Aahhhh!” A hypospray swiveled out of his neckrest, striking at his neck like a rattlesnake, and hissed some medicinal compound into his jugular vein. It seemed to calm him after a few moments, though he still twitched and murmured in seeming pain as his mind felt its way into the complex data architecture of the Sun-Tzu's computers.
Or, as Carol suspected, his mind was dragged kicking and screaming to silicon rates of speed, like some kind of terrible mental whiplash.
Linkage, she reminded herself, was painful, no matter what Linkers said before or after the event. They never seemed to remember very much about the process of Linking and un-Linking; the pain and convulsions and time spent convalescing in the autodoc afterwards.
It was all worth it to the Linker. They only remembered Transcendence. Becoming One with the All.
The human mind, Linked to a sixth-generation macroframe array, was capable of the straight numerical number-crunching ability of the computer alone, of course. But the Linker was much more than a lightning calculator, able to balance a World Bank's worth of credit accounts in nanoseconds. The Linked human mind could also access the analog judgment subroutines, of fuzzy logic and hard syntax, with a sureness that non-AI silicon alone could never generate.
Yet a human mind in full communion with such a computer did not think in a linear, machinelike fashion. Far from it.
Instead, the computer-Linked human mind was estimated to think at a rate hundreds of thousands of times faster than an un-Linked neuronal network. Faster, better, deeper; but most of all, differently. The Linked mind could find connections where none were apparent, practical answers to seemingly impossible questions. Complex systems were easily controlled, chaos theory or not, with a Linked human mind at the homeostatic controls.
There was a hitch, naturally. While Linked, the human mind was no longer strictly human. The longer a human mind stayed in full Linkage with a sixth-generation macroframe, the more difficult it was for the human mind to un-Link. Eventually, it became impossible. It was as if more and more of the computer was left behind in the Linker's human skull, or more and more of the Linker's human mind was shoved into the computer architecture. Whatever the explanation, the process progressively left less and less of the Linker's humanity intact.
Carol had seen evidence of this horror herself, with poor Bruno.
The full AI computers were initially very useful, but always shut down after a few months, producing an extremely expensive piece of junk. Unusable for even straight calculations. Carol felt that this observation should have been hint enough to the brain-computer interface researchers in Luna to leave well enough alone. Yet again and again, humans were entered into full Linkage with high-level computers.
The Linkers also shut down, just like their pure silicon cousins, after a certai
n period of time. But what could cause catatonia in both machine and mind?
No one knew.
With this in mind, Carol did her best as captain of the Sun-Tzu to minimize Bruno's full Linkage time. It was useful to have the pilot be part of the ship, of course; but he was needed, whole and sane, when Dolittle made its first and final run on the Wunderland system. Bruno would do that piloting in full Linkage, for as long as necessary.
It would surely drive him insane, Carol knew sadly, no matter how different Bruno's hybrid brain might be from that of other Linkers. And yet it was all part of the mission of the Sun-Tzu, to which all of the crew — including Carol and Bruno — had agreed. Volunteered.
Carol would meet her own fate at that time, too. It didn't concern her too much. She had seen enough battle action during the Third Wave, lost enough comrades, to know about sacrifices. She didn't want to die, no, but Carol knew what humanity had at stake in the war against the ratcats. Humanity should be ready to try anything.
Even Project Cherubim.
She watched odd expressions flit across Bruno's twitching face as the Linkage proceeded toward its symbiotic conclusion. His muscles seemed to bunch and move differently under Bruno's skin in odd ways, reflecting the changing biotelemetry displayed in the holoscreen window. Bruno's fingers quested blindly within their restraints, twitching and moving in patterns that seemed somehow inhuman to Carol.
Carol thought that Bruno's eyes were the worst part. They stared, bulged, rolled up to show the whites and impossibly wide pupils. She wanted to stroke Bruno's face, but knew it was too early in the process to touch him. Not that he would even feel it. Sweat beaded out of his pores as he twitched, leaping from his skin in fine droplets, floating around the navigation deck in freefall.
When they had first had sex, Carol swore to herself that she was not in love with this sad little man with the bumpy, scarred cranium. The voyage was long, and it was doubtful that any of them would live through even its early stages. Years spent aboard an experimental spacecraft, followed by a suicide mission. Everyone on board Sun-Tzu, asleep or awake, knew the score displayed on that particular chip.
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