Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - VII

by Hal Colebatch, Mark O Martin, Gregory Benford, Paul Chafe

  Linked, Bruno could see the All. Was part of it.

  Without it, he was only Bruno. The pale memory of Transcendence filled his mind with wild glory he could only dimly remember with an unenhanced mind. He felt himself sigh a little in regret, and hoped that Carol wouldn’t notice.

  He felt her kiss him lightly, drawing him back to the here and now. She knew him that well after all, Bruno thought with a slight smile. Carol was the only person he had ever met who did not make him feel as alien as a kzin.

  But she didn’t care for the Linked version of Bruno, he thought sadly. She could not experience the Truth, as he could. Carol thought full Linkage was little different than what would happen to Carol and their other crewmates when she opened the cryovial at Wunderland.

  But that would drive them farther apart, not closer together. Perhaps, Linked, he could find a way…

  Bruno shoved the shadows of Transcendence from his mind and concentrated on less direct communication with the main computer. He murmured more commands, and flexed his fingers adroitly within the dataglove.

  The relativity-squeezed view of the starfield in front of the Sun-Tzu crawled, oozing color, displaying their destination as it would appear at nonrelativistic velocities. Alpha Centauri shone clearly within a blinking green circle directly in front of them. He pointed to the raw numbers within the numeric section of the holoscreen, fingers stabbing through the light display, and showed Carol how they related to the multicolored graphic analysis he and the computer had constructed. Much of the data was actually informed guesswork and deduction, since all information was limited to light-speed—and the putative kzinti ships and the Sun-Tzu were both traveling at close to 0.7 lights.

  He whispered more commands while Carol looked on, whistling impatiently. Belters didn’t fidget; they whistled or hummed. Worse still, they sometimes sang. Bruno grunted in triumph as a small red blur appeared within the starfield holo, below and to the right of their destination.

  “Right there, boss,” he said flatly, pointing a blunt finger at the floating image. The holographic red blur began to blink, as a window filled with scrolling data opened next to the displayed image graphic.

  “Tracking us?”

  “Seems likely.”

  “Ahead of us, keeping constant distance?”

  “I think so.” Bruno fought to keep his answers succinct and precise.

  “And they are kzin spacecraft?” Carol chewed her lip. “How many?”

  Bruno shrugged. “Who else would be out here in the Deep Black? I’d say there is more than one ship, less than ten.”

  “How I love your engineering-style vagueness.”

  He ignored the jibe and continued. “Flanking us, I figure, running a bit ahead. Slow vector toward us—like a cautious intercept.”

  “Seems funny. Not kzinlike. How close are they?”

  He pointed to the data window next to the red blur. “About seven light-minutes away.”

  The blinking red blur looked harmless enough from an implied distance of over a hundred million kilometers, but at these speeds…

  Dolittle,” she murmured.

  Both Bruno and Carol knew that the Sun-Tzu was not prepared for an interstellar dogfight. Once they launched Dolittle and entered the Wunderland system, Carol and Bruno could carve up kzin craft by the dozens. But the one-shot Dolittle would remain berthed for several more years, until they were nearer the Centauri system.

  “This far out from Wunderland? Chancy at best.”

  “Still, we might have a chance—if that red blur represents just a few scoutships.”

  “Maybe.” Bruno’s tone was skeptical. “We do carry some weaponry…”

  “And we’re captained by a combat veteran.”

  Bruno gave her a look. “Too bad we can’t hit them with our massive egos.”

  Carol’s tone became sweet. “Well save it as a last resort. Then we’ll use yours, Tacky. Look, let’s keep assuming that the damned blip is a ratcat ship.” Carol’s eyes fixed beyond the holoscreen. “Why the slow vector to intercept? Any kzin vessel out here, with their reactionless drives, could intercept us within hours.”

  Silence stretched out between them.

  “I have good news and bad news,” he replied softly, instead of answering directly.

  “Well?” Carol’s tone held a trace of impatience.

  Bruno was still studying the datastreams marching across the holoscreen. “The good news is that they think we can’t see them.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Ratcats make banzai raids, right?” Bruno waited for Carol’s nod. “They wouldn’t sit out there, waiting, if they thought we could see them. They would attack.”

  “And the bad news?” Still the impatient captain.

  “Yeah, that.” Bruno chose his words carefully. “Almost anything we do will tip them off that we can see them. There would be no reason to change our routine in deep space. If we change our routine, they might hit us with everything they’ve got.”

  “Ummm. Cat…and mouse.”

  He smiled a lopsided grin that went no deeper than his thinned lips. “Boss, I think they want to board us.”

  Carol nodded abruptly. “Right. Otherwise they would just crack us like a rotten egg.”

  “What poetic imagery.” Greatly daring while she was in Captain Mode, he took her hand.

  She ignored him and pursed her lips in thought. “But they are underway in our direction, from Sol toward Wunderland. They would have to be Third Fleet stragglers, right?”

  Bruno picked his words very carefully. “Not necessarily. Could be Fourth Fleet.” He rubbed his thumb across the smooth back of Carol’s hand. It was reassuringly warm to his touch. At least she didn’t seem frightened.

  “In which case…” she prodded.

  “They could have seen us and looped around. Don’t forget that spacedrive of theirs.” He shrugged. “Third or Fourth Fleet, doesn’t matter. The point is, I think they want our ship.”

  “And us, too, maybe.”

  Without humor, he added, “That is, if they are kzin warcraft. They could be something even worse.”

  Carol grunted. “You’re such an optimist.”

  “Probably as good at optimism as you are at poetry.”

  She frowned a little, and shook her head. “Wouldn’t make any sense, to waste that much delta vee and time…”

  “But Captain-my-captain,” he replied, half smiling at his pet name for her, a twinge of normalcy amid the nervous tension of the navigation deck, “they can pull hundreds of gees, remember. Take ’em just a couple weeks after we pass them to decelerate, turn around and reaccelerate up to relativistic speeds.”

  Carol shook her head at the concept of accelerating from a standstill to seventy percent of light-speed—in a week. To a Belter, that idea must smack of magic. “Plus extra time to maneuver around the drive wash.”

  Bruno blinked, then grinned widely. “That’s right. The drive wash is hard gamma and plasma.”

  She smiled without mirth. “That’s the joke, my loyal crew: When is a weapon not a weapon?”

  “When it is a spacedrive,” he replied. “Angel’s Pencil taught us that.”

  “It could cook the kzin through and through, their precious reactionless drive and all.” Carol bared her teeth, white in the dim light of the holoscreens.

  The Sun-Tzu’s backwash was a plume of ionized hydrogen and hard radiation, jabbing behind it like an enormous scythe. In the high interstellar vacuum, it bristled with blue-white ferocity, fully a tenth as long as the solar system was wide.

  Bruno’s mood sobered. The cranky antimatter drive had its limitations as a weapon; it was difficult to orient, slow to start or shut down, and very hard to maintain. They would have to shut it down to re-aim it—the stabilizers couldn’t be overridden without reprogramming while the drive was quiet.

  Could the Sun-Tzu stop the kzinti in interstellar space, with inferior weapons and almost no maneuverability? The ship had n
ever been designed for warfare. All Sun-Tzu was designed to do was quickly deliver Dolittle and crew—and the cryovial with its Finagle-damned virus—to Wunderlander space. Antimatter drive or not, the kzinti ships could literally run rings around the Sun-Tzu.

  The Sun-Tzu was mostly ice. Water was an effective if imperfect shield against both the relativistic impact of dust particles lancing in from forward, and the harnessed hell of the experimental antimatter drive aft. It looked far larger than it was. Thus, it could give some protection against kzin weaponry.

  Up to a point.

  But first things first, Bruno reminded himself. Fooling around with the drive while it was on would certainly be suicidal. They would have to shut it down and reorient the entire ship. That would give them added doses of radiation, because they would lose the added deflecting power of the drives hundred-kilogauss magnetic fields.

  Even with those fields, their cumulative radiation doses slowly edged up, watch by watch, inexorably. Eventually, the autodoc would be unable to repair the continual cellular damage of sleeting atomic fragments and piercing photons.

  He felt a jarring sense of disloyalty, even though he knew it was irrational. Part of Bruno said: This was not the mission. They were supposed to go to Wunderlander space, with Bruno fully Linked into the Dolittle’s computers, and Carol and the revived crew of the Sun-Tzu sealed away in the cargo compartment with the opened cryovial.

  Then he would lose Carol forever, but not to another man or woman. To a virus older than the human race. But in a way, they would never be closer.

  Bruno felt dizzy, and wished that Carol wasn’t in the next crash couch, so he could pop a few mood modifiers from his autodoc. His emotions lurched, trying to keep up with his logic. Carol finally squeezed Bruno’s hand hard and held his eyes with hers.

  “I think our best bet is to get the drive pointed at your little red blur,” she said, pointing at the holoscreen. “That will answer the question once and for all. If your little blip moves in response, we’ll have our answer. Natural phenomena in deep space don’t maneuver around drive wash.”

  Bruno nodded, part of him marveling at the easeful beauty of how her facial muscles moved. How would she look after the virus did its work? The Dream repeatedly showed him a portion of that awful truth: hairless, domed forehead, elongated jaw without teeth, leathery skin like armor. But Carol’s eyes would be unchanged, looking sadly at him from her virus-altered face.

  He yanked himself back into the factual, crisp present. Time enough for worry later. “Uh, right, you’re the boss. But if there are ratcats out there, I’ll bet they have thought about that particular scenario, and have some nasty contingency plans.”

  “What else is new?” Carol rapped, her tone cold as cometary ice.

  A slow silence passed between them. It was her play now.

  “Begin shutdown subroutine,” she formally told the computer, repeating the command twice more for verification. Another window in the holoscreen opened, displaying the shutdown procedure, complete with schematics and data analyses. Step by step, the silicon mind of the Sun-Tzu strengthened the magnetic bottle confining the glittering deadly cloud of anti-hydrogen, and increased power to the ionizing lasers that kept the fuel in manipulable form.

  At the same time, the computer slowly decreased the inflow of normal matter—scavenged up from the interstellar gas in their path, mixed with the ices of the Sun-Tzu’s iceball hull—which created the harnessed Hell inside the reaction chamber. It was a delicate, slow-motion ballet of electronics and engineering, carefully balanced and monitored.

  A slight miscalculation, and the Sun-Tzu would become a pocket nova in ten microseconds.

  Bruno watched the on-line shutdown telemetry with all his attention, wishing mightily that he was Linked. The itch had become a craving that burned in his neck socket. But then, if he were Linked, he would not have Carol’s immediate warmth. Nor would he care. And right now he needed her contact and comradeship more than anything.

  Even more than Linkage, he told himself confidently.

  He could feel Carol’s hand squeezing his own almost to the point of pain. Many minutes passed as the computer balanced each incremental decrease in normal matter infall with increases in magnetic confinement and ionization. The holoscreen displayed the slow process as a series of inexorable discrete events. Neither Bruno nor Carol said anything as they watched and waited, but the joint pressure of their laced fingers was reassuring, the affectionate comfort of skin contact.

  A homey and human thing, pitted against an alien threat.

  The steady thrumming of the drive slowly decreased with each step in the shutdown protocol. Decreasing thrust was scarcely noticeable from moment to moment, but Bruno felt a heady lightening.

  Shutdown protocol…time ticking by…tense glances…increases in radiation sleeting through the weakening magnetic shield…the relativistic world outside sliding by in multicolored splendor…

  A final shudder rang the entire ship like an enormous bell. Thrust dropped to zero.

  Now the plummeting elevator sensation of freefall sent Bruno’s Flatlander stomach roiling. Except that they were falling through the interstellar emptiness at seventy percent of the speed of light itself.

  A low tone snagged his attention, drew it back to the holoscreen. A soft voice calmly said, “Shutdown protocol is complete. Confinement within normal parameters. Chamber cooling protocol initiated.”

  Bruno sucked in a deep breath and felt Carol let go of his hand, still tingling from the strength of her grasp. He leaned over and kissed her cheek firmly, as if in thanks.

  “Drive shutdown is complete,” Carol said formally for the benefit of the ships log. “Let’s start planning.” She stretched her fingers within her own dataglove, warming up.

  Bruno watched Carol’s eyes become hard and narrow, the eyes of a survivor and combat veteran of the Second and Third Waves. Her face was neutral, as was her tone. “This is where all the heroic bullshit Early poured into your ears turns real.”

  Bruno knew that she was thinking again of her ship-to-ship battles during the Second Wave. He had his Dream with which to battle; Carol had genuine memories of the War, sharp edged and immediate.

  He reached over and took Carol’s free hand. Such thoughts were never far from her. He remembered holding Carol after they had made love. They would lie with arms around each other, in the gentle darkness of the sleeproom, the only illumination from holoscreens showing the green riot of the Hanging Gardens in Confinement Asteroid. Carol’s half-seen satisfied smile would fade, as she would first think about her wartime experiences, then talk of them. Sometimes she had wept as she recalled the horrors, her muscular body tensing in his arms as the memories gripped her, dragging her across years and billions of kilometers.

  Memories of air gushing from the shattered helmet of an old friend, turning to glittering clouds of ice shards in the wan sunlight. The flash of a control board shorting out after a direct hit with a kzin particle beam. Worst of all, the ear-ringing clang of a railgun projectile hulling a ship, followed by the whining roar of escaping air. Bruno could only imagine the emotional impact of the deadly ballet of space warfare, the long periods of waiting and contingency planning punctuated by seconds of frenzied activity and terror. Carol compartmentalized her fears better than Bruno ever could. He accepted this.

  She exhaled loudly, stuffing the past mentally away, and stretched her head back and forth to relieve the tension. She released his hand, and patted it gently.

  “Don’t you think that it’s time?” Carol asked quietly, not looking at the Link clipped to the console in front of Bruno. “You can keep better track of the blips while Linked, and can oversee a faster start-up, can’t you?”

  Bruno nodded, reaching over to squeeze her hand again. She didn’t respond. “I take it that you just gave an order?” he asked.

  Carol turned and looked at him directly, harsh memories flitting like ghosts across the planes and angles of her face. “Y
es,” she said simply, none of her sadness at giving the order evident.

  Bruno nodded. He picked up the Link and inserted the plug into his neck socket, but couldn’t keep his hand from trembling as he did so.

  • CHAPTER FOUR

  Rrowl-Captain roared his anger, and the bridge crew of the Belly-Slasher fell instantly silent.

  “Initiate contingency plan Krechpt,” he shrieked into the intership and shipboard intercoms.

  The ripping-cloth sound of the gravity polarizers suddenly became much louder. The hull seemed to shift and waver randomly beneath them as the fabric of space itself bent and twisted. Rrowl-Captain turned away from the intercom, eyes flicking at once to his command-chair thinplate. Status reports marched across his tactical screen in the dots-and-commas script of the kzin. The two other ships under his command were following orders as expected, a portion of his furious mind noted, racing away from one another at the limits of their gravitic drives.

  Rrowl-Captain turned to the source of the problem.

  “Strategist,” he spat and snarled in the Hero’s Tongue, whipping his naked pink tail in annoyance, “tell me why the monkeyship has deactivated its drive! They are far from turnover.” The cool, dry ships air quickly filled with the captain’s anger-smell, redolent with attack pheromones. His pelt, each hair erect with pent-up rage, gleamed under the bright orange illumination on the bridge.

  The kzin in charge of predicting human battle behavior stood very straight and still, with only the slightest droop of his whiskers and half-folded ears to suggest his discomfort. He slapped retracted claws against face in salute. “Dominant One,” he began, “the humans must have detected us.”

  Rrowl-Captain choked back an outraged shriek and barely contained his fury, his reply acid-etched with purring sarcasm. “This I can perceive, O Master of Grass-Eating Slave Tactics! Please do not further strain your name-lacking honorless leaf-grazing mind by restating facts obvious to any true Hero with eyes and the Warrior Heart!”