Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI

by Larry Niven, Hal Colebatch, Matthew Joseph Harrington

  She moved off a ways in hyperspace, dropped out and put her arsenal back together, then continued to her primary base at 70 Ophiuchi. The old homestead.

  It was a binary star, and her birthworld, Pleasance, was at one of the system’s Trojan points. By rights it should have been a frozen ball of rock, but evidently some 25,000 centuries or so back a Pak Protector had added most of the system’s asteroidal thorium and uranium, and they’d been soaking in and giving off heat and helium ever since.

  Her base was in the dustcloud at the other Trojan point. At 36 A.U. from Pleasance, it was never visited after the first colonists’ survey—nothing there worth the trip. Peace found it especially handy because it was easy to reach from hyperspace—it was outside the system’s deflection curvature. It was also handy for spotting arriving Outsiders, as it was the human system closest to the galaxy’s center.

  There was a human intruder when she got there. A kzin would have used a gravity planer, which would have roiled up the dust. Other species wouldn’t have come here. The ship was hidden in one of the shelters, but the heat of its exhaust was all through the dust. Not a roomy ship; the heat patterns indicated sluggish maneuvering.

  Peace had a look inside the main habitat before docking. Buckminster—a cyborg kzin once known as Technology Officer, who had enjoyed her unending stream of gadgets so much he’d stuck with her when she relocated his companions—was in his suite, whose visible entrance was sealed from the outside. He had evidently been coming out to raid the kitchen while his putative captor was asleep, as he had put on some weight. At the moment he was reading a spool and having a good scratch. The intruder was at a control console in the observatory, monitoring her arrival. He had a largely mundane but decent arsenal, including a pretty good bomb.

  Peace took over the monitor system, told it lies, suited up, had her ship dock on its own, and used the softener to step through the hull. She jumped to the observatory, came through the wall, reached over his shoulder to pluck the dead-man detonator out of his hand, and stunned him. It was a good detonator: it took her a couple of seconds of real thought to figure out the disarm.

  When she opened her suit, the man’s smell was severe. She’d been away for a couple of weeks, and that wasn’t long enough for him to get into this condition, so he’d arrived filthy. He must be deranged.

  She restored the console, then called her associate. “Hi, Buckminster, I’m home. You leave me any butter?”

  His reply began with a chuckle. With the telepathic region removed from the brain, a kzin was remarkably easygoing. “I only had a few pounds. Is our guest still alive?”

  “By the smell he could be a zombie, but I’ll take a chance and say yes. How come you didn’t disarm him?” she asked, though she knew; she also knew Buckminster would want to say it, though.

  “I didn’t want to touch him,” Buckminster confirmed. “Besides, I didn’t think it would make him stop fighting, and I didn’t want to have to explain bite marks on a human corpse.”

  “Difficult to do when you’re swollen up with ptomaine, too. Come to the observatory and sort through his stuff. I’ll be cleaning him up.”

  “You humans show the most unexpected reserves of courage,” Buckminster remarked.

  As she stripped, washed, and depilated the man, the remark seemed progressively less likely to have been a joke. There was a significant layer of dead skin, and the smell of him underneath it was actually somewhat worse. He must not have bathed in months, if not years.

  Getting the hair off his face confirmed an impression: she’d seen him before. He’d been one of the psychists at her mother’s prison. Peace hadn’t actually met him, and Jan Corben hadn’t given his name—she’d called him Corky. He was evidently a survivor of the kzinti occupation of Pleasance, and had probably witnessed some awful things. Peace didn’t spend much pity on him—she’d been her mother’s clone, created to be the recipient in a brain transplant like many before her, and she had yet to hear a worse story.

  Once he was clean, he was also pretty raw in spots, so Peace had to spray some skinfilm on, to hold him while she programmed the autodoc. This took her almost half an hour, as she’d never expected to have a human breeder here, and she had to start from scratch. When she was done she stuck him in, then washed herself and went to see how Buckminster was doing.

  He was having a great time. He’d taken Corky’s arms to the small firing range (the big one was necessarily outside), where he had laid them out in a long row and was methodically using them to perforate targets of various compositions. “Interesting viewpoint he has,” Buckminster told her. “No nonlethal weapons, but not many random-effect ones. This man wants to kill in a very personal way.”

  “He talk to you much?”

  “Nothing informative. ‘Go there, do that, you baby-eater.’ Made eye contact and grinned a lot. Seemed to bother him that I didn’t get hostile.”

  “I expect so. Did you explain?” Peace said, amused.

  “No, the baby-eater remark offended me, so I just let him pant.”

  “Sweat.”

  “Sweat? Yes, that would mean the same thing, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not quite. A human letting someone else work off his foul mood on his own doesn’t need as much self-control,” Peace pointed out. “So there’s less satisfaction involved for us. Well, I’d better check his ship. Want to come along?”

  “If it’s as big a mess as he was I’ll need my suit.”

  “I’ll put mine back on too,” Peace agreed.

  There was only one boobytrap; it was in the airlock, and Buckminster spotted it too. The ship only had deck gravity in the exercise room, and that was turned off. There wasn’t any debris floating about, but surfaces were dirty and smeared, and the air plant was in extremis. The ship’s arms looked like he’d tried for the greatest lethality for the money: there was a turret with two disintegrators, plus and minus, to slice targets open with bars of lightning; and torpedo tubes that fired Silver Bullets, a weapon the Wunderlanders had devised at the end of the Third War but never got to use. These were all-but-invisible pellets of stasis-held antihydrogen, stasis shutting down on impact—the blast would punch through thick hullmetal, and the surplus neutrons from the destroyed atoms would flood a ship’s interior. “What a stupid concept,” Buckminster said. “That’d ruin everything but the hull. You’d have to rebuild the ship almost completely for any sort of prize.”

  “Though it is an excellent killing device,” Peace said.

  “If that’s all you want.”

  “It’s all he wants, and it’s his ship.”

  “It’s still stupid. What if he had a chance at a better ship?”

  Peace shrugged—which, given the swollen joints of a Protector’s shoulders, was a very emphatic gesture—and said, “I doubt he intends to live long enough for it to matter.”

  “Urr,” Buckminster growled, which from a kzin qualified as tactful acknowledgment.

  “I agree it’s unusually stupid,” Peace added, aware that he might not have understood that.

  They searched the ship without finding further portable weapons, which made some sense if he was on a suicide mission—he’d hardly go back for more. The only question was, what was he doing here? “Did he say what he was doing here?” she said, realizing Buckminster wouldn’t mention it unless it came up—small talk was “monkey chatter” to kzinti, and Peace judged this was not an unfair assessment. It probably did derive from primate chattering.

  “No, he wanted to know what I was doing here.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I was a deserter.”

  Peace, who had never thought of it in exactly that phrasing, blinked once. Then she said, “What did he say to that?”

  “Eventually, ‘Oh.’ Then he locked me away in my dank and lonely prison.”

  “Uh huh,” said Peace, who judged that if a delay in her trip had extended Buckminster’s durance vile to six months he’d have gotten too fat to sneak back i
nto his cell. “Okay, let’s see what’s behind the fake bulkhead.”

  Buckminster did a good job of hiding his surprise when she opened the wall, though it took him a while to realize that that partition had had no fixtures, fittings, or access panels on either side, and therefore had no reason for existing in a one-man ship.

  The interior was a shrine. Correction: a monument. There were pictures of three women, two men, and several children at progressing ages, but there were also single pictures of 51 other humans, almost all male, each with a neat black X inked onto the forehead. Peace recognized 22 of them as officials during the kzinti occupation, and had seen news stories about two of those and four of the other 29, reporting their accidental deaths. All six had struck her as being well-concealed homicides. It seemed probable that the entire 51 were dead collaborators, who had all contributed in some way to the deaths of the psychist’s spouses and children.

  Buckminster got it almost as soon as she did. “I’m impressed,” he said. “It’s hard to kill one human being without being found out. I still can’t understand how you can tolerate the constant monitoring.”

  He didn’t mind her monitoring him, so she said, “With humans it’s actually less unpleasant if it’s a stranger doing it.”

  “Oh, thanks, now it makes perfect sense.”

  “Glad I could help.”

  They blinked at each other—a grin was inappropriate for him, and impossible for her, though the broad gash of her beak partook of a certain cheerful senile vacuity—and closed the place back up before leaving. “Cleaning robot?” Buckminster said as they passed through the airlock.

  “Sure. Have to tweak the programming.”

  “I’ll do that. You can get to work on your new ship.”

  Peace nodded, pleased with his intelligence. Obviously, things had gone well with the Outsider: she’d come back. “Have you decided what to do after I leave?”

  “Go to Home and make a fortune as a consulting ecologist with what you’ve taught me, then start a family somewhere else. Sårng would be good.”

  “Don’t know it,” she was startled to realize.

  “No reason to, it’s at the far end of kzinti space. Atmosphere’s a couple of tons per square inch, they’ve been trying to kzinform it from floating habitats for about a thousand years, I think it was. I thought I could move things along.”

  Peace shook her head. “That’ll mostly be carbon dioxide. Even without the impact and combustion of hydrogen for oceans, there’s millennia of red heat latent in carbonate formation.”

  Removing his suit, Buckminster was nodding. “I had an idea from Earth news. Transfer booths are getting cheap enough for something besides emergencies, so I thought: refrigeration.” He looked at her quizzically. “I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but are you aware that you hop up and down when you hear a new idea you really like?”

  “Yes. Were you thinking convection, or Maxwell’s Demon?”

  “Both in one step. Transmitter in the atmosphere, receiver in orbit. Only the fast molecules get transmitted, the rest are pushed out and fresh let in. Dry ice comes out near true zero, slower than orbital speed, and falls in eccentric orbit to make a shiny ring. Less heat arriving, and the gas returns to the atmosphere very gradually for slow heat release. You’re doing it again.”

  “I know. Suggestion: send all the molecules in the transmitter, and draw the momentum shortage from the adjacent atmosphere. Faster turnover, massive downdraft, more hot air comes in from the sides.”

  Buckminster thought about it. Then he carefully hung up his suit, turned back to her—and hopped up and down.

  Buckminster had the cleaner on monitor when Peace came up and said, “He’s ready to come out. Want to be there?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” she said, and went off to the autodoc.

  She’d naturally set it so Corky didn’t wake up until it was opened, so the first thing he saw was a Protector. He stared, appalled—she was something of a warning notice for “Don’t Eat Spicy Foods At Bedtime”—and then, astoundingly, said, “You’re Jan Corben’s little girl?”

  Widening her eyes was just about her only option in facial expressions. “Now how did you arrive at that?” she exclaimed.

  “You have her eyes,” he said.

  “It didn’t actually work out that way,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not unless you can come up with a really good reason for breaking into my home.”

  She watched him catch up. “Protector,” he said to himself, just grasping it. Then he said, “Where were you during the War?”

  She scooped him out of the autodoc, shut it, and plunked his bare behind down on the lid, stingingly hard. “You are an invader in my home,” she said, looking up at him. “You may now explain yourself to my full satisfaction.”

  “You can’t kill a human breeder,” he said skeptically.

  “You’re not a relative. Even if you were, invasive brain readout wouldn’t damage your testicles.”

  For the first time he looked worried. “I thought it was a kzinti base. I wanted to steal a ship.”

  Peace blinked, then said, “Buying a ship would be recorded. You wanted to attack their home planet.”

  “To land. And kill the Patriarch.”

  Peace blinked again, then touched her caller and said, “Buckminster, come to the kitchen. You have to hear this.”

  “Four minutes,” came the reply.

  She hauled Corky off the ’doc by his elbow, and walked to the kitchen still holding his arm. He stumbled a few times, then got his feet under him. She was exasperated enough to contemplate changing step just to louse him up, but refrained, as it would be waste work to haul him the rest of the way. She had the floor produce a seat, stuck him in it, and dispensed a few small dishes. “Eat,” she said.

  “What is this stuff?” he said suspiciously.

  “Stewed rat heads, giant insect larvae, and assorted poisonous plants.”

  He scowled, but got the message—don’t be ridiculous—and began eating. Presently he said, “This is wonderful.”

  “Good, that’ll be the neurotoxins kicking in.”

  He scowled again, shut up, and ate.

  Buckminster came in soon, got something hot with alcohol in it, took a good gulp, and said, “What is it I have to hear?”

  “This fellow came to this kzinti base, that we’re in, here, to steal a ship, to take to Kzin. Guess what he wanted to do there?”

  Buckminster shrugged. “Assassinate the Patriarch?”

  “Right.”

  Buckminster took another gulp and said, “No, really.”

  “Really.”

  Kzinti rarely laugh, and it is even rarer for a human to be present when it happens; but the sound was similar enough to human laughter for Corky to stop eating and scowl. “What’s so funny about it?”

  Buckminster had an analytical mind, for an evolved creature, so he sat down and made a serious attempt to answer. “Many years ago,” he said, “when I was first allowed out, still almost a kitten, I used to hunt…birds, sort of…out on the grounds. I was very good at it. Some were bigger than I was, and all of them wanted their meat even more than I did, but I devised snares and weapons and brought them down. All but one. It was big, and kept going by higher than I could shoot an arrow, and I was never able to find the right bait to lure it down. However, it had very regular habits, so I built a sort of giant crossbow thing—”

  “Ballista,” said Peace.

  “Thanks. A ballista, to shoot at it. Just to get the range, at first. As it turned out, I only got to fire it once. The shot landed in a neighbor’s grounds, stampeding some game. I was too little to know yet that there was a world outside my sire’s estate, which included things like other estates. And orbital landing shuttles.”

  It took Corky a few moments to realize: “You were trying to shoot down a spaceship.”

  “With a crossbow. Yes.”

  “And my plan reminds
you of that.”

  “Vividly. Almost perfectly.” Buckminster was chuckling again.

  Corky had been getting himself carefully poised for the last couple of minutes. Now he launched himself over the edge of the table at Buckminster.

  Buckminster threw the rest of his drink on the table.

  Corky’s right foot came down in the liquid, and he spun sideways and tumbled the rest of the way. Buckminster swung his mug into Corky’s hip, knocking him aside, and Corky slid past him off the edge of the table. He hit the ground about four feet away—then six feet away—then seven—then he rolled a few more feet. After that he tried to get up a few times, but kept slipping.

  Buckminster got up and dispensed himself a towel, refilled his mug, and said, “You want a drink? It’ll reduce bruising.” The reply he got wasn’t articulate enough to be obscene. The kzin flapped one ear, and went to mop up his first drink.

  When Corky had finally managed to get as far as sitting upright on the floor, Peace—who’d seen it coming and known she didn’t need to move—said, “Buckminster and I have been working together, and working out together, for years. He’s a strategic minimalist, and he’s got enough cyborg enhancements that I hardly have to hold back. If he’d been holding your previous rude remarks against you, he might have been mean enough to let you actually use that Hellflare nonsense on him, and shatter your bones in the process.”

  Buckminster tossed the towel at the trash and told Corky, “What’s on you is your problem. Likely to remain so, judging from your past habits. Do you use a name, or just mark things?”

  Corky scowled again, evidently his default expression, but said, “Doctor Harvey Mossbauer.”

  “Doctor?” Buckminster exclaimed in disbelief. “What kind of a doctor are you supposed to be?”

  “I’m a psychist.”

  Buckminster was speechless for the fifth time in the twenty-eight years Peace had known him, and that was counting when she’d first met him and shot him in the head. “He really is,” Peace confirmed. “My mother was one of his inmates. She called him Corky. One of her puns.” Buckminster looked unenlightened, so she added, “Moss grows on trees. ‘Bauer’ is Wunderlander for ‘farmer.’ A moss farmer would be a tree. Cork is a kind of tree bark.”