The Man-Kzin Wars 11

by Larry Niven

  "How?"

  "The gig has a gravity-motor."

  "Yes.

  "And a reaction drive."

  "So I saw when we came here."

  "I do not need to draw you a diagram, then?"

  Humans who had spoken so to kzinti before had not lived long to regret their insolence. But Vaemar sprang to the ship, Dimity following.

  "We still cannot get out," said Vaemar, as the door closed behind them. Chorth-Captain's key had worked but he punched in an electronic lock as well. Both Vaemar and Dimity had noted the locking and unlocking sequence earlier. "You must bear with me with patience here," said Vaemar. "No monkey-rattling... Dimity is not rattled any more?"

  "At least we have a weapon," said Dimity. "Let us use it."

  "Danger?"

  "Hero!"

  "Urrr!"

  The controls were built in duplicate, in sizes to be used by either Protector or kzinti hands, and Protector hands were very similar to human. As Dimity cut in the gravity-motor, thrusting it downwards, Vaemar fired the reaction-drive. Incandescent plasma gas roared out. The ship shook, but remained balanced between the two forces.

  A second was enough. At a gesture from Vaemar they killed the two drives together. Cautiously, they cleared a viewport. Nothing could be seen but blackness, with flames and points and bars of red-hot wreckage fading in it. Even with a powerful searchlight they could make out no more through the smoke for some time. When it cleared somewhat, all that they could see of the inside of the Hollow Moon about them was a charred, melted, ruin.

  "We have done it, Dimity!" said Vaemar. "We have killed at least five Protectors, though they took our weapons! Urrr!" A snarl of triumph rose in his throat.

  Dimity knew instinctively not to interrupt the young kzin's rejoicing too soon. Analyzing this knowledge, as she always analyzed her reactions, she realized they could not have done what they did had there not been a psi bond of some sort between them. It did not surprise her greatly. Vaemar's Ziirgah sense was a rudimentary form of proto-telepathy which most male kzinti possessed and she knew her own brainwaves were abnormal in several ways. They had acted and planned together almost instantaneously and partly without being aware of the fact.

  "Now it is a matter of getting out," she said at length. "The hatch above us is still closed."

  Vaemar turned to the control panel again.

  "In the absence of Protectors I think I can open it from here," he said. "I need but a little time to study the controls. Normal procedure for a ship like this when leaving a space station is to rise on the gravity motor when the lower hatch is opened, have that close behind us and then open the upper hatch. For obvious reasons both hatches cannot be opened together."

  "We can do that from here?"

  Vaemar operated a set of switches, watching lights sliding across a screen

  "Yes," he said. "And I find that disturbing. It suggests the mechanisms of this installation are less damaged than they might be. I hoped to blast our way out with lasers or armor-piercing shells." He gestured at another control panel. "I should have realized a Protector would have built strong. But it raises a thought in my mind that the Protector may have survived. Or there may be more Protectors than we knew. This place is complex. I am sure now that there are control centers we have not touched. They must have built many redundancies."

  "Well, let us run the reaction motor again as we leave, however we get out," said Dimity. "That will leave their possible survival, trapped in this damage, an academic matter until we summon security forces to make sure. Even a Protector can hardly cross space without a ship or a functioning motor. Vaemar, I hope we have done both our kinds a service this day."

  "The hatch is opening," said Vaemar a few minutes later. "I think we should go as destructively as possible."

  Dimity slid into the couch beside him. Again, one operated the gravity motor and the other the reaction-drive. On a pillar of incandescent plasma-gas the ship rose, slowly, out of the tube which led to the surface.

  "I can't hold it!" Dimity cried. "We're in a gun-barrel. The ship will implode!"

  "All right! Let it go. I think we have done what we can."

  A dark tunnel, a growing circle of light. Space suddenly infinite about them, the disk of Wunderland hanging huge in the meteor-streaked blackness. Behind them, fire venting from the hole in the hollow moon, fire which they hoped had burnt out its core and everything in it.

  "Home!"

  "Home!"

  A green light blinking on the control panel—the kzin color for danger. Vaemar's claws flashing on the keyboard.

  "The ship identifies another engine starting," he said. "The signature is that of a kzin Rending Fang-class fighter. It is behind us."

  "The Protector!"

  "I suspect so. In Chorth-Captain's ship."

  "Use the shielding!"

  "Dimity, I am trying to discover how. I know how to pilot kzin craft, but the Protector's innovations are new to me. Throw the gravity motor into parallel with the reaction-drive. We need speed!"

  "Can we fight?"

  "This is a naval gig. It has stealth if I can find it, but it is not built for speed. Nor has it adequate weapons to take on a fighter. We cannot ram. We must run. Fly the ship, Dimity, while I track the stealthing commands... you must dodge."

  They flew, firing missiles and decoys behind them. Vaemar gave a snarl of rage and stabbed with one claw point at a dial in front of Dimity in the pilot's seat.

  "Another source of neutrino emissions! Another engine starting! Not a gravity engine. Nothing this boat's brain recognizes. Dimity, I think we have been over-optimistic about the number of Protectors on the Hollow Moon and the damage we did. It is still under control and I think it is either moving or preparing to fire at us. I guess there are several Protectors still alive in it. I will launch more decoys."

  He stabbed at another switch. "The God be thanked that the mechanisms on this vessel have not been altered from Navy standard too much. The decoys operate. Now, Dimity, fly as you have never flown before! Use that brain of yours to fly in random variations a Protector cannot anticipate."

  Chapter 13

  "That must have been one of the shortest peaces in history," Arthur Guthlac said. "At least two kzinti ships are barrelling in. The defense satellites are preparing to fire. But I've asked them to hold off for the moment. They won't hold long though. They could be chock-full of multi-megatonners, or something worse."

  "Why hold, then?" Cumpston asked.

  "They appeared on the screens out of nowhere. Or rather from the vicinity of the Hollow Moon. I hope they might not be an officially-sanctioned attack by the Patriarchy. Why would the Patriarchy attack with only two small ships?"

  "Maybe they're freebooters, or fanatics defying orders. Maybe they don't know of the treaty."

  "And maybe that's what we're meant to think," Guthlac said. "They've only attacked with two ships to make it look like it's unsanctioned. To make it deniable. You know how much destruction two ships could cause. Then, while they're saying it was nothing to do with them, they attack with everything they've got. The fact they were only just picked up suggests they've got a cloaking technology we haven't. What if they've got a whole cloaked fleet past our outer defenses? What if there are a few hundred cloaked battle-wagons ready to follow them?"

  "That doesn't sound like the kzin Navy," said Cumpston. "If they'd got a cloaked fleet in close, I think they'd attack with everything they had. In any case, I don't want to start the war again if there's the slightest chance of preventing it." New data crawled across the screen. "A gig and a fighter. That's an odd combination for a fleet attack. The signatures of both are funny, thought. And the maneuvering doesn't make any sense."

  "You're making it sound more and more like a diversion."

  "It looks to me as if the gig is taking evasive action."

  "At least let's find out who they are. Kzinti on the attack like to tell their enemies their Names, if they've got them. I'm going
to call them up. That can't do any harm. And in the meantime we're closing with them. Stand by to help Hawkins at the main guns, Michael. "

  "There! There!" Cumpston's finger stabbed at a new light on the screen, a light that triggered a howling audio alarm-system. "That's the signature of a kzinti warship all right. A big one. Coming in fast... a heavy cruiser at least."

  "Got it!"

  "It still doesn't make sense," Cumpston said. "It's not a coherent attack. A cruiser, a fighter, a boat..."

  "Who knows why the pussies do anything? I thought I knew them, but this..."

  "I thought I knew them, too. Some of them, anyway."

  Both men looked at the clock. At the rate they were closing, both knew they probably had very little time to live. Waiting for reinforcements was not an option. They had alerted the ground and orbital defenses. Now all they could do was cause as much damage as possible to the kzinti strike-force before it hit the planet. Both had seen the silent annihilation of space-battles many times before. Small craft were dropping from the Tractate Middoth: flying bombs to either destroy by detonation or to pump X-ray lasers.

  "I'm getting another signature!" Guthlac's voice was tense but controlled. "Another ship!" Then he gasped, spat a curse. "The bastard is HUGE!

  "My God! It's the first attack on Wunderland all over again! A single giant carrier."

  "Better cloaked."

  "It would be. They've had sixty-six years to improve the technology. Well, it looks like the war's on again for young and old, as they say. I'm sorry, Arthur."

  "I'm sorry too." Then, "Michael..."

  "Yes?"

  "Gale's down there."

  "I know. Arthur, do what you have to do. We're soldiers."

  "How does a Hero's Death appeal to you?"

  "I don't think we've got much choice. It's been on the cards a long time." His finger ran down rows of switches. The lights of armed firing-circuits glowed. The leading kzin craft, the smallest, was getting close. It was already in range. Small, but capable of carrying a stick of multi-megatonners of its own. Deal with it, then turn to the great carrier. If Tractate Middoth survived that—and it would not—the cruiser next.

  "Ssstop!" Karan's nonhuman voice jolted them. She was standing, trembling. She had pulled out the plasma injector. She appeared to be holding herself upright by her extended claws dug into the fabric of a seat-cover. Her eyes had a strange, unfocused look. She appeared still half conscious, possibly delirious. Just what we need, thought Guthlac, going into battle against hopeless odds with a delirious kzinret loose in the ship.

  "Vaemar! Vaemar is there!"

  "How do you know?"

  "Karan knows! I know."

  A delirious kzinret. Was oxygen-starvation affecting her brain? But all kzinti had a sense from which the talent of the telepaths was made. Among nontelepaths it was extremely limited and did not work to cross the distances of space. But... Karan was Karan. And, Guthlac thought, Vaemar was Vaemar. Neither of them were ordinary kzinti.

  "The locators are dead," said Guthlac. "They say nothing. But this is close to the last position we had from them!"

  "That's not a ship! It's a moving moon!"

  "Vaemar is there! He comes!" Karan screamed.

  "The boat must have picked us up," said Cumpston, "but it's not firing at us. It's taking evasive action, all right, but it seems to be evading the fighter."

  "Shall we try a com-link?"

  "Yesss!" Karan leapt as she spoke. Not a great leap for a kzin, at least not one in good shape, but she was between the two men at the command console. Albert Manteufel sprang from his chair, drawing a pistol, but Guthlac motioned him back. In any event, gunplay within a spaceship was seldom a good idea. Karan spun to face them, claws out and jaws in the killing gape. Her knife was out, though the hand she held it in was trembling.

  Cumpston and Guthlac were veterans of many battles in space as well as on the ground, battles often faster than thought, in a realm where only certain instincts and intuitions given to a few could offer hope of survival, controlling machine-enhanced reflexes beyond the frontiers of the purely physical, swifter and more subtle than any dance of bodies or equations. Both knew, too, the potential treachery of instinct. They stayed their hands now, as Karan operated the com-link to the flying, twisting speck on the screen. Weak as she was, her claws flashed too fast for the humans to follow, and much too fast for them to interfere with.

  There on a screen was the cockpit of the gig. Flying it were Vaemar and Dimity. Karan collapsed.

  * * *

  "A dreadnought!" With shriek of ecstasy and blood lust Kzaargh-Commodore leapt onto the great kz'eerkt-hide battle-drum, sending its call booming throughout the ship. Was this what Chorth-Captain had somehow achieved? Already Night-Lurker had identified Chorth-Captain's fighter and gig. How had he done it? And what were the fighter and gig doing? Distracting the monkeys before the dreadnought's terrible slash ripped the guts out of their planet? But it mattered not. "The Patriarch's battle-fleet has joined us!" This was no time for thoughts of how so mighty a consort might have penetrated so deep into the Centauri system and so close to Wunderland undetected, nor for the unworthy thought that so mighty a consort would take most of the glory from a mission that a moment before had been a matter of lone heroism. His crew of Heroes roared an equally enthusiastic response. That they might be perhaps less concerned with Kzaargh-Commodore's glory and more with their own suddenly enhanced chances of survival was not a thought for that moment either. Night-Lurker barrelled in, closing with the strange gigantic vessel.

  Bigger than all but the biggest dreadnoughts. And camouflaged as Night-Lurker itself had been. The minds of the great strategists of the Patriarch's General Staff had thought like his own.

  There was no further need for radio silence. It would be sensible to co-ordinate plans with the great carrier. "Call them!" he ordered Captain. He stood posed before the com-screen, Captain at a respectful distance behind him.

  Com-screens on Night-Lurker's bridge and in the Hollow Moon blizzarded briefly with light and cleared. Kzinti and Protectors saw one another. Each lunged instantly at the firing-buttons on their consoles.

  Night-Lurker flung itself into evasive action, firing as it turned. Its heaviest punches included disrupter bomb-missiles. They were not in the class of Baphomet but powerful enough. Kzaargh-Commodore had taken the decision to fire, and fired, almost as fast as it was physically possible for a living being, even with motor-neurone enhancement. However the Protectors in the Hollow Moon were slightly faster.

  Night-Lurker glared fantastically in the heat of beams for seconds as its layers of mirror-shielding boiled away, a red, then blue, outline of a kzin heavy cruiser. Its disrupters hit the Hollow Moon, burrowed through its shell and exploded. The Hollow Moon vented gigantic plugs of rock and blew apart. Night-Lurker exploded simultaneously.

  The gig was perilously near the second explosion. Impact at such speeds with practically any piece of debris, however small, would be the end of it. Guthlac in the Tractate Middoth spread the lasers as far as possible and fired them to sweep between the blue-white sphere of the explosion and the little craft, hoping to at least reduce the flying wreckage. Smaller explosions sparkled and flared. The gig remained. Flying like a wounded bug, it turned and headed towards them. The Rending Fang fighter had disappeared again.

  Chapter 14

  Paddy Quickenden looked up from the deep-radar screen.

  "It looks like an ants' nest," he said "Things are boiling in there."

  "There's usually a lot of activity in the caves," said Leonie. "Let me see... But yes, things are boiling. There are sizeable creatures moving—bipeds."

  "Humans... Morlocks," said Raargh. His claws extended.

  "We can't see much more from here," said Leonie. "We'd better land and take a look."

  "What, go into the caves?"

  "With modern motion-detectors and Rarrgh's eye we should be able to see anything long before it gets near us. We bot
h know the caves."

  "I don't," said Paddy. "But I've lived underground most of my life."

  "I'm not letting you near these caves," said Leonie. "And there's no way I'd leave the car and the com-link unattended. You'll stay in this car, with the canopy closed and weapons cocked. But be ready to let us in if we have to get back in a big hurry." She opened the com-link and spoke to Nils Rykermann briefly. She was already suited up as she landed the car in a small limestone-sided valley. She and Rarrgh leapt down and disappeared into one of the cave mouths.

  Paddy settled himself before the console. The car's weapons were ready. Like all spacers, he was experienced in waiting. The broken limestone walls and pinnacles, "honeycombed, honey-colored" with small red Wunderland trees on the valley floor, and sprays and creepers of other red Wunderland vegetation, made the place seem like a wild, dishevelled garden, peaceful and, from within the car, silent, though instruments picked up the sounds of small animals and the murmuring of a tiny stream. This is a lovely place, he thought. Let me help Dimity find peace, let me cure her of what is torturing her, and she and I—and our children—could live on this world forever. They need spacers here, more than We Made It does. There could be a place for me here in paradise with the woman I love. He thought of Leonie, heading fearlessly into the cave with the great kzin. He could see them now on the deep radar, a large and a small figure, moving down the tunnel into the darkness and what lay beyond. How lucky Rykermann is to have such a wife! Well, this is paradise around me. Let me enjoy it for the moment.

  * * *

  Leonie and Raargh were both veteran cave fighters. Their checks of weapons, lights and other gear were fast, automatic and thorough. Both could read the ghostly, ambiguous shapes of tunnels and cavities on the screen of their small deep-radar as easily as a road-map. Raargh touched the lower right quadrant of the screen with a massive claw. There was movement, a lot of movement.

  "Looks like battle," he said. His infrared-capable artificial eye was ceaselessly scanning the cavern, especially the roof, as he spoke. They set off into the darkness. Raargh's artificial eye, seeing deep into infrared, guided them, but there were faint patches of luminosity here and there as well. Possibly Ferals' work, Leonie thought. They had learnt to crush and treat the shells of small crustaceanoids from the streams so as to make a ghostly radiance.