Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - VI

by Donald Kingsbury, Mark O. Martin, Gregory Benford

  “Zap-p-p-p-p!” harmonized Long-Reach in an exclamation from the five mouths of his lunged arms. He had taken out his first closing missile with a beam bolt.

  Grraf-Nig roared something in the Hero’s Tongue that translated roughly as, “Mate with sthondats!” Fortunately the robe-assassins were chasing them; none were attacking from the forward direction, which would have been really dangerous. He had been wrong about his comrades’ willingness to attack him with missiles. They weren’t going to limit themselves to boarding; they were killing mad. Manually he began to add fillips to the automatic evasions. Long-Reach got two more in a row, pause, then five, the last one right on their tail—blossoms as the polarizer fields collapsed. An individual missile had little chance of making it through—but Long-Reach could be overwhelmed. Grraf-Nig wished he was in fighter formation with several beams protecting their rear. This, however, was more exciting.

  As quickly as it began, the missile attack ceased. That was good. As time passed, their pursuers’ ability to estimate their present position was seriously degrading. But Grraf-Nig watched his instruments with the intensity of a predator anticipating a flock of dangerous prey. It was to the advantage of a cluster of missiles to talk to each other and coordinate their attack for the same moment. The light-lag in the “talk” probably doomed that kind of blow, but any possibility had to be watched for.

  When it came, the second missile attack was of an entirely different kind. The missiles began to detonate in front of them. It was a strategy of desperation since their pursuers knew only where they had been. If the explosion erupted behind them, it posed no danger. If it was just beyond them, the fireball of fragments presented too small a cross-section to be dangerous. And if the warhead detonated too far ahead of them, the fireball was too diffuse to do damage when they passed through it. After all, the kzin had been traveling through interstellar space at eighty percent of light-speed for thousands of years. The fierce gravitic polarizer fields that they used to move their ships were quite good enough to protect them from normal interstellar debris.

  Nevertheless Grraf-Nig dodged cautiously among the fireballs, careful not to let himself be herded toward an ambush point. The adventure reminded him of a jerky video he had viewed on Wunderland. The Revolutionary American Air Claw was bombing Hamburg in winged B-TwoEights+Ones, thousands strong. Hamburg’s Prince of Huns had been sending mercenaries to the English to fight on American soil, and the American man-beasts had become annoyed. Alarmed, the Hun animals tried to defend themselves by tossing exploding cylinders into the sky. But the berserker monkeys just flew through the black flak puffs yelling their Rebel cry of vengeance against the English, blowing up Huns along the way.

  The kzin ran for his life until, gradually, the fireballs of “flak” faded as the Shark’s probable position began to be smeared over too vast a volume to make a scatter-shot attack plausible. But new attackers would now be converging from the sides. Long-Reach was keeping track of the pursuers with a Weapons-Officer’s wide-angle telescopic sensors.

  “Eleven pursuers visible,” said one of Long-Reach’s arms.

  Grraf-Nig was more worried about what was coming from the direction of Hrotish than he was about the group that had already fired on him. But nothing happened. They lost track of their pursuers by outrunning them. That was unnerving, not to know where the enemy was, or whether they were accelerating headlong into a trap. They continued maximum evasion shifts as a precaution.

  After uneventful hours, he began a methodical re-programming of the escape. They had lost him, but he knew exactly where he was—by now well above the thin asteroid ring of W’kkaisun. He had a good idea of where each W’kkai warship had been at the beginning of his escape and what their probable moves would be. His computations (based on pre-escape intelligence, probably inadequate) showed him that there were five warships up ahead that he need worry about, one of them a carrier of eight fast Scream-of-Vengeance fighters. If they made contact with him, his advantage would be hours of acceleration lead time. They could only attack him in a single fast flyby. It would be like stealing mother’s milk. He’d be moving at something like an eighth the velocity of light.

  But once he crossed the singularity, evading the UNSN patrol was going to be a special challenge. There was only one hyperspace warship out there now but the monkeys had hyperwave radio and could quickly call in reinforcements from light years away. Surely its captain had sat bolt upright at that fireworks display of flak and might already be calling for help. It didn’t matter that his patrol ship was on the other side of the singularity—in a hop, skip, and jump he could be on top of the Shark. The UNSN had perfected the art of hunting down and killing the gravitic ships of the kzinti in interstellar space.

  None of this was in the manuals—not even Chuut-Riit’s manuals. Grraf-Nig needed to give his moves heavy thought in the few hours of peace left to him. The major problem with equipping a hypershunt ship like the Shark with a gravitic drive was that the gravitic polarizer, when in use, created its own hyperspace singularity. He was going to have to collapse his gravitic field before he disappeared into hyperspace—an action that was equivalent to decelerating down to his rest velocity. If he burst through the singularity at twenty percent of light speed. He’d be vulnerable to the UNSN for a full day before he could evade them by hypershunt.

  He began his deceleration early. It was risky. On the other claw, it meant that the W’kkai fleet would overshoot him and, while penetrating the singularity in front of him, become a decoy fleet masking his escape—if they didn’t find and kill him before the UNSN found and killed them. It was a melee he hoped wasn’t going to start a new war—no world of the Patriarch was ready for that yet!

  By the time the Shark passed through the singularity, much later than his original planning, he was still traveling fast—but slow enough so that he was flying into a swarm of W’kkai warriors. His sensors began to pick up more and more of them until he located twenty at about maximum range. It wasn’t the formation he expected to see. There were already four UNSN warships on the scene. Neither fleet was attacking the other. Both were wary and moving in defensive array. Because of light-lag he was well behind on the true situation.

  It looked like the monkeys were holding back in a blocking formation, waiting for reinforcement. It looked like the W’kkai fleet was well on the way to a conservative interception which would not threaten the UNSN warships. Such precautions were all in the Shark’s favor. Grraf-Nig began to pick up frantic bits of communication between Hero and Man-beast.

  He was being sold as a renegade. The W’kkai commander was giving the beasts permission to vaporize him, promising no retaliation if they did. They were offering to take out the Shark themselves if the United Nations would stand aside. All the niceties of the MacDonald-Rishshi treaty were being observed. Only the light-minutes were keeping the opponents from each other’s throats.

  Grraf-Nig was enormously relieved. He had timed everything perfectly. His luck as a survivor had held. Before anyone could get to them, the Shark would disappear into hyperspace and reappear alone inside an interstellar sphere of stars.

  The gravitic field died. The Shark had come to rest relative to its starting frame of reference—minus the velocity of escape from W’kkai’s orbital distance. Grraf-Nig wiggled his ears and cut in the phase-change for the hypershunt build-up. Nothing happened.

  For a stunned moment the giant kzin thought that Long-Reach had made a mistake when he rewired the controls, but Long-Reach himself had no such doubts. He had worked with this motor a good part of his life. Instantly he was at the motor housing and hit the clamps. The housing popped away and floated off to the wall. A cast iron dummy of the correct weight and balance sat where the hypershunt should have been.

  It was something to think about—but death was only minutes away. There was no time to yowl in anguish. There was no time even to curse High Admiral Si-Kish’s paranoia. Outward from W’kkaisun, the UNSN waited. The W’kkai fleet was
moving in on their renegade cautiously—of course, cautiously because they already knew that the Shark couldn’t escape into hyperspace.

  “Battle stations!” Grraf-Nig screamed at Long-Reach.

  A second later they were moving at full acceleration toward W’kkai. There was no escape. No matter how frantically his mind panicked through the alternatives, there was no reasonable way out. It was either fight to an honorable death or suffer the humiliation of surrender. He sat at the controls, brilliantly evading attack, but numb. He could no longer think of himself as the noble Grraf-Nig. He remembered a terrible day from his past when a gang of Hssin kits had cornered him for an easy kill—and he had saved his life by eating grass. What honor was there for a kit out to prove his warrior skills who carried the ears of a grass-eater on his belt?

  Grass-Eater negotiated the surrender of the Shark through electronic static and violent maneuvers. He knew they wanted to save the ship because it was the prototype of a deadly fighter that was intended to spearhead W’kkai ambition, but he wasn’t sure they would spare his life once the Shark was secure. It didn’t matter. Better that W’kkai should triumph over Kzinhome with a reinvigorated Patriarchy than for Heroes to languish as the slaves of squabbling monkeys. Let them have their prototype.

  There wasn’t room enough for a warrior to board the Shark. Long-Reach and his defeated master met their captors in space and were taken back to a warship. The slave disappeared into its slave quarters; the mortified one was stripped inside the airlock. Undressed, a warrior of W’kkai was a nameless animal without power. No W’kkai Hero among those who had captured him called him by name. He had no name. They could not even look at him.

  •

  Chapter 13

  (2437 A.D.)

  The landing party came down at dawn in the plains outside of what they all called Fort Hssin. In his brief glimpse of Hssin’s ruins from high descent, Yankee had seen the widespread damage; sections of the city were crumpled or gone—but from the ground it looked almost whole. The ruddy light of a huge R’hshssira on the horizon had been further reddened by an oblique passage through the poisonous air, the general gloom and the low angle of their landing site obscuring the injury to the sprawling, once airtight buildings. A steady wind was whipping a thin drift of snow in the direction of the city and the dawn-bright mountains.

  “Godforsaken place.”

  They had maps of Hssin made by the naval force that destroyed it, and they could run these 3D plots inside their helmets along with marine battle films of the ground assault, keyed to the battle locations. Still, once they had slipped into the city through the breached atmospheric barrier, they were lost tourists in a huge necropolis without any friendly local residents to set them straight—only mummified kzinti who lay in the dark where they had suffocated.

  The size of the rooms and corridors was intimidating—built for two-hundred-kilogram, two-and-a-half-meter-tall kzinti. War damage an obstacle to mobility. One grisly room contained racks of improvised hospital beds for badly wounded warriors who had died with their masks on, waiting for medical help that never came, now preserved for posterity. Some of the roofs were open to the sky, exposed corridors drifting in snow. Some corridors looked down into a well of rubble. Yankee’s beamlight caught the upside down head of a kzin grinning at them from a hole in a half-collapsed ceiling. One corridor was filled with the fallen wreckage of four stories. Some of the caverns that Yankee wanted to explore were declared off-limits by the team’s cautious structural engineer.

  “Nobody could be living here now!” exclaimed one of Yankee’s companions.

  “You’re a flatlander.” Yankee’s eyes and lamp were picking out the details of the strange kzinti air seals with the fascination of a man who had spent half his life in the Belt and in spaceships. “When you’ve lived in space a while you know a city like this is so compartmentalized against failure that even several blowouts won’t knock it out of commission. Life support could be restored in pieces of it. I wouldn’t want the job. But it could be done. That’s what we’re looking for.”

  They found nothing. They were afraid to call in their kept kzin, afraid the devastation would send him into a rage, but he had passed through this city with Chuut-Riit’s armada and knew the ways of kzin when they were forced to live together. They needed his insight.

  In one of the least damaged of Hssin’s public spaces Clandeboye set up an inflatable command center, hardly more than a balloon with portable airlock and life support and communications interfaces. He added instruments that allowed him to follow Hwass by remote sensing, then brought down the kzin and let him loose with his marine escort.

  Whatever the warrior felt in this world where the evidence of massacre was everywhere, he maintained an icy professional calm. He was a bloodhound looking for the lost trail. Almost the first place he searched was the old Hssin hunting park.

  “Iss where I hunted with Chuut-Riit my first humans.”

  “Why don’t we just cut that flea-bitten cat’s throat,” whispered one of Yankee’s men on the monitoring team, two-way comm off. He was a fashionable Belter with delicately carved combs in his mohawk, a postwar hair style that the older generation of Belters considered effete. Mohawks were designed to keep the head shaved and the hair out of the way in space. Adding combs, grumbled parents, was an insubordinate generation’s defiance of practicality.

  Yankee had his eyes on the tiny color screen whose image bobbed and whizzed with Hwass’s head motions. “He’s getting even with us for shoving his muzzle into the massacre of his people. Be patient. He’s going to lead us right to this Trainer-of-Slaves.”

  “Why would he do that?” asked the logician among Yankee’s companions. “It’s not in his best interest.”

  “You think. Hwass is a gambler. If he finds the Shark before we do, he’s probably going to try to kill us all. Maybe teamed up with Trainer and his slaves he can capture the Erfolg and take it to Kzin. He can’t do that alone. Why wouldn’t he want to find Trainer?”

  “For a pessimist, you’re in a strangely sanguine mood!” snapped the Belter.

  Another of Yankee’s men commented wryly, “He just wants us to keep our terrified eyes glued to the screen.”

  “If that ratcat’s going to kill us, why don’t we kill him now?” The Belter was back to his theme song.

  “We don’t know that he’s going to kill us,” said Yankee happily, watching Hwass’s camera eye move through a hunting park turned to petrified forest. A poisonous snow had drifted in from the open sky.

  “So we wait till he does before we object?” grumbled the coiffured Belter sarcastically.

  “No. We draw first.”

  “Nero fiddles while Rome burns. Yankee draws pictures while Rome burns? You aren’t making sense.”

  Yankee smiled. “A ‘fast draw’ is just an old flatlander expression in use before you floaters corrupted the language with ‘nano-swat.’”

  “We’re going to nano-swat him? You could have fooled me. Old man switches don’t swat.”

  “You aren’t making sense,” said Yankee. “I ain’t old yet; I’m a spring chicken baby-sitting toddlers.”

  Their kzin had picked up his spoor. He was moving out of a pattern of random search and into a quick lope.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Hwass thinks Trainer would have gone right to the hunting park. It was a Jotoki run when he was an apprentice slave-master. That’s where he recruited his slaves. Sentimental attachment. We revisit those places we are sentimentally attached to and leave spoor for Hwass to sniff at.”

  “A kzin is sentimental?”

  “Who knows? I’m just simianizing their emotions. I’m sentimental so that’s what I understand. I once cut short a frantically urgent trip just to stop at a motel and rent the same room where I first got laid. Number 27. The wallpaper was bamboo and stars. Over the room’s comp was a huge animation of a deer in the forest done by one of those production line programmers—it just kept wandering t
hrough the forest. I remember everything about my lady but her eyes; she was wearing VR goggles plugged into the comp, morphing me into Finagle knows what. Maybe kzinti are sentimental about their first slave. Who knows?”

  “Iss used path of travel,” commented Hwass over the phones.

  The camera eye was moving now with the speed of one who wasn’t bollixed by sudden rubble intrusions that shouldn’t be there. It wasn’t that Hwass knew where he was going; he was following the trail of someone who did. Once he stopped to examine kzin boot tracks across snow that had taken years to drift in through some breached barrier.

  Yankee quickly uploaded a message to the Erfolg. “We’ve got him.” He switched to one of the marine cameras to check that the explosive charge was still attached to Hwass’s upper spine, then followed the lead camera in fascination as it routed itself around the damage.

  Suddenly Hwass stopped. One of the internal airlocks was shut. He cycled through it manually into a sector where the telemetry said the air was good, though too cold for comfort. Hwass’s perceptive eyes spotted exactly where the war-made breaches had been sealed. He found an emergency power plant that matched a missing unit from the Bitch. When he turned it on, the lights faded in and the air conditioner began to recycle the stale atmosphere. The system had been left on standby, as if someone had anticipated that he might have to return.