Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - X

by Hal Colebatch

  “It was quick. The Outsider ship dropped its cloak. Grew into something huge on the screens, travelling at comet speeds, then with other blips streaming away from it. It was a carrier, full of war craft.

  ”Our ships didn’t last long. The Outsider craft could make turns without losing velocity, where ours had to maneuver with attitude jets. No answers to our signals, no negotiations. That time, none of ours even lasted long enough to get off a shot.

  “The only thing that saved the rest of our ships was the distances of space. That and the orbiting laser stations. The outsiders evidently didn’t know what those were, and came in range. They had good people on the stations, used to picking off meteors.

  “We had fusion-pumped lasers to fire in the paths of meteors, as well as the big cannons. But meteors move in predictable lines. They hit several of that first flight of the Outsider ships before the Outsiders realized what was happening and began jilling around.

  “At .8 lightspeed and more, with inertialess turns, they easily evaded any bombs or beams we could throw at them except at short range. The stations went on fighting and got a couple more, but they were all destroyed in a week. Suicide attacks by our ships did no better.

  “Then we found at least one sane thing had been done…or I suppose it was sane: The Serpent Swarmers had been alerted, and they came in strong. They always said their meteor defenses were faster and better than ours, and they proved it over the next few weeks.

  “But the real point was, the Swarmers had ramjets with them, which we’d never use so close to a planet, and they used the ramscoop fields as weapons. They also had a tactic of turning away with really large attitude jets that they had lashed on and using their drive flames like swords. A lot of them were robots—humans couldn’t stand the G-forces. They made a sweep too fast for the outsiders to dodge, but it was the ramscoops that saved us.

  “We didn’t know if the ramscoop fields would affect the Outsiders like other chordates, but they did. The Outsiders had learned not to attack from behind, and seemed to prefer head-on attacks anyway. They’d come barreling in, and until they wised up the Swarmers had a real turkey-shoot. A squadron of Outsider ships that passed through a ramscoop field was suddenly manned by dead Outsiders.”—He gave an odd laugh.—“Or inside-out-siders as we called them. Look at one and you’ll see why.

  “Off Tiamat a Wunderland–Serpent Swarm force boarded one of these dead squadrons. They had no time to find out the principles of their drive, though we know it affects gravity fields. But the Swarmers learned to fly the ships and use their weaponry, and they counterattacked. They destroyed more Outsider ships and even damaged the mother-carrier.

  “That bought us time. The mother-carrier hauled off and we had a few weeks’ breathing space.”

  “We didn’t know any of this,” I told him.

  “None of the craft we captured and used survived the attack on the carrier,” he went on. “But at least with what we had learned from them we were able to duplicate some of their more esoteric weapons—things like bomb-missiles whose detonation, as well as pumping lasers, could be lethal across a huge globe of space, for example. They have a heat-induction ray but we don’t understand it. It’s too slow for a military weapon anyway.

  “We learned another tactic that cost them a lot of ships: strap big attitude jets on our craft and use them to spin like catherine wheels with the main reaction drives still firing. Not only did it give us better maneuverability, but it turned the reaction drive into a swinging sword even they could hardly dodge. We couldn’t do it with manned ships—the inertial forces were too great—but we did it with drone craft. We began to win some more. If we’d had more motors, and more craft, and more resources, and more time…but that stopped them for a while.

  “We studied their tactics, and an odd thing was, some of their behavior seemed almost as amateurish as ours. More than once they came straight at us, in an undeviating line, when a straight-on attack was the one thing we could meet with a good chance of hitting them. At the Second Battle of Tiamat’s Lead Trojan, their big ships came at us in a column. It looked pretty frightening, seeing ship after ship closing with us like that—but what it meant was that we could hardly miss them. It was as if they were unimaginative. Or inexperienced. It didn’t make sense.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. Something that might have been a meteor but probably wasn’t streaked by far above. The scattered wreckage of the crashed ship had just about burned itself out.

  “It might make sense,” said Dimity. “Maybe they are inexperienced. At least in dealing with humans…” Her face went slack in a way that I had seen before.

  “We took it for granted that space-traveling races would be too intelligent and civilized to fight,” she said. “Perhaps we were nearly right. What if peaceful, civilized space-traveling races are the norm? Or were the norm. There may not be any others left now.

  “Given that, the Kzin wouldn’t have much experience of war. You need a fighting enemy to teach you to fight. What if when they meet other races they simply devour them. There’s no more fight than there is between a tigripard and a lamb.”

  “One of the first human ships out of Sol that they attacked was able to beat them,” Kleist said. “It used a com-laser as a weapon. Some of us in the Meteor Guard actually think aspects of our missile technology are as good as theirs or better. It suggests they come from a much cleaner system than this.

  “Or sometimes it seemed as if they were not in control of their own minds,” he went on. “Sometimes they seemed undisciplined. We analyzed our own successful tactics, and realized that when we had been, almost unconsciously, provoking them to attack, baiting them, they would often leap and take the bait. Our ace pilots had been doing that, it seemed, by instinct. Someone said it was the instinct of the monkey to tease the leopard.

  “At other times they would stalk us like cats. A particularly weird thing was that one of the larger enemy command ships had behaved at times as if its crew or something aboard it could actually read our minds. When that ship was destroyed the tactical efficiency of the rest fell off appreciably.

  “We salvaged more of their wreckage, and began to study their drive and everything else. We were putting improvements into our ships. Reinforcements were coming from Wunderland and the Swarm. We got more confident.

  “There was even talk of finding where they had come from and chasing them—counterattacking. We thought we had a superweapon in the ramscoop.

  “Then they came back. If they had been inexperienced, they had learned from experience like us. They’d got more cunning.

  “They avoided ramscoops, and seemed to flee from them. That lured us in. Then we found it was a trick. They generated magnetic fields of their own to distort ramscoop fields, or simply dropped things into them.

  “We know they had taken human prisoners and perhaps they had learned things from them. Not just in space. When we killed one of their ships and boarded it we found bodies of human civilians from Wunderland.

  “Apparently the Outsiders have been landing scouts in small cloaked ships for some time.”

  “I’m surprised. If they are so aggressive, why didn’t they just attack in force?”

  “Cats stalk their prey. They study the ground before they pounce. It’s after the pounce begins that their control goes. This may be the same thing. Some of the humans they took had kept hidden records, hidden in their cages. Apparently the Kzin didn’t care. Why should they? They aren’t nice reading.

  “Our eggheads are puzzled. These creatures are something out of a nightmare: cruel, man-eating, killing, but with science that is in so many ways ahead of ours. It shouldn’t have happened, but it has. I’m told there have been quite a lot of suicides among our eggheads…Oh yes, and from the prisoners’ notes we found out why they sometimes behaved as if they could read our minds. They can.”

  “What!”

  “They can. Or a few of them can. Apparently it’s rare. But you can tell when they a
re doing it: a sudden violent headache. It also explains how they came to know our languages so quickly—which they do.”

  That hit me like a physical blow, though it took me a few moments to realize why.

  “Can it be resisted?” asked Dimity.

  “Don’t know. The prisoners we know they tried it on were terrorized, injured, starving, tortured already. In no shape to resist. Anyway, that’s the war, and it’s been going on for weeks…I don’t know how long…I think it’s nearly over now.”

  “We’ve heard nothing of this,” I said again. “We’ve been told nothing.”

  “What was the point of telling?”

  “It might have meant better war production.”

  “I think so. Others thought it would lead to ‘a collapse of civilian morale.’ I think it was their own morale that was actually collapsing. They said there was as much material getting up to us as could be reasonably expected.”

  I remembered my speed-reading of the last few weeks, and the attempted defense of Singapore in the Second World War. As the Japanese advanced down the Malay Peninsula towards it, the defending general had refused to construct field defenses in case they lowered the spirits of the civilians. It had not been a good decision.

  “If people knew too much, I gather, it was feared they would simply flee into the hills, or mob the slowboats,” he went on. “And then there was that…that one brief shining moment…when it looked as if we were winning.

  “There was another matter too, which we found out late in the day: Some of our politicians minimized the threat because they hoped to enlist the Kzin as allies for their own factions in our internal disputes here.”

  I wished I could have said I found that unbelievable, but I knew too much.

  “Maybe, if we could have duplicated their drive,” he went on, “got factories into production, maybe if we had had a few more months, or a year, we could have fought them on equal terms. As it is…

  “Wunderland is their prime target, of course. Anyway, the Swarm is more difficult to subdue. Dozens of inhabited asteroids, with defenses now. But we haven’t much left here. Those drives and weapons are too good for us. And they’ve got reinforcements too. More of the big carrier ships have arrived.”

  “They could hardly have been alone,” said Dimity. “With drives like that and what we know about them from Sol. Where there was one ship there would be more coming…”

  “Tell me,” she asked him, “Is there any suggestion, any indication, that they may have got through the light-barrier?”

  “No. They get close to the speed of light. They can match velocities with any of our ships, and of course they are much more maneuverable.”

  “Could they have a superluminal drive in outer space and drop into subluminal close to star systems?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve not been in a position to observe. There’s no evidence of it. Anyway it’s impossible. Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I only saw a bit of what was happening. I’m just a meteor jockey. The fighting was spread all over the system.”

  “You must have learned a bit about these creatures. Language, that sort of thing?”

  “A bit.” The pilot took a red disk from a pocket. “It’s here, what we know. The spoken language is hard to understand, even with a computer, at present impossible to imitate, although some people are trying. The written is a little easier, at least when it’s not in war code. It’s another of those things we might have got better at with time.”

  “Can I play it?”

  He shrugged and passed it to her. “I don’t see why not. But what do you intend to do now?”

  “Repair the car as soon as I can,” I said.

  “You can’t show a light or heat source. They’re still around up there.”

  “Well, we can’t trek very far on foot, and we can’t stay here. In any case, there are almost certainly a group of aliens in the Hohe Kalkstein caves. We know there’s one.”

  “Kzin,” he said. He pronounced it differently, a snarling cough it made my vocal chords ache just to hear. “They are called Kzin. Plural and possessive kzinti, we think.”

  “Oh yes, I know.”

  Kleist’s nervous excitement was running down now. We were all pretty beaten up, and he and I sank into a sort of doze. Dimity had earphones on, and was playing the disk, staring at the screen. More than once I saw dark shapes, too sharp-edged to be cloud, driving high and silent across the luminous bands of the Swarm and the Milky Way, and more sliding lights that might have been meteors.

  Chapter 12

  “If I am the Scourge of God, you must be truly wicked.”

  —Attributed to Genghis Khan

  I woke in daylight. Modern cars have complex machinery and neither Dimity nor I were practical mechanics.

  “I guess we’re walking out of this one,” said Kleist. He added: “That’s a Spacers’ joke. It’s got a bit threadbare lately.”

  Repairing the car was an even longer job than I thought. I soon saw that without Kleist we would never have done it. We hoped the daylight heat reflected on the rocks of the mesa would mask what we were doing. We spent most of that day and the next working on the fuel line and its feeder controls, freezing when we saw flying things. We kept a watch in the direction of the Hohe Kalkstein, but though we thought we saw some distant activity on the escarpment nothing emerged from it to come our way. We also thought we saw an ordinary air-car flying well to the north close to the ground, but had no safe way of trying to signal it. It never came back. Alpha Centauri A had set by the time we were finished, Alpha Centauri B rising and casting long shadows in the purple twilight. And in the direction of the escarpment our glasses were definitely picking up lights and movement.

  Where to go? I had tried to get Dimity away from Munchen partly to protect her from rioting and chaos and also to protect her knowledge. But there seemed no obvious safer haven now. Kleist insisted he must get back to Munchen, which in any case was the planetside center of the defense effort. (Had it been stupid of us to place our defense headquarters in our major city? I wondered, and came to the conclusion that it had been very stupid indeed.) Then Dimity recalled something.

  “You said ‘mob the slowboats.’ What did you mean?”

  “The old slowboats are still intact,” Kleist said. “The Kzin haven’t bothered with them for some reason, at least they hadn’t a few days ago, and I saw them in the sky last night. Presumably because they are deactivated they don’t see them as a threat, or a high-priority target. But they are being reactivated. We’re getting people out.”

  That they could be reactivated had been firm policy, and every Wunderlander knew it. It was part of our history that when humanity’s first interstellar colony was established, the pioneers laid down that the huge spaceships would be kept fully fueled and ready to fly if some unforeseen disaster on the new planet compelled evacuation. They were still there. Closed down and in orbit they required little maintenance, but it had been necessary at first to resist a temptation to cannibalize them. By the time it was obvious that we were here to stay and in any case the population had grown far too big to evacuate, we had factories supplying everything we needed without them. Besides, we might always want to get to Proxima or Alpha Centauri B. Why break up expensive assets unnecessarily?

  “Do the Kzin know that?” asked Dimity.

  “I think so. Their mind-readers know a lot…During the breathing-space, the happy time after the Swarm reinforcements came, we got crews and fuel into them,” he said. “It seemed the unforeseen disaster was well and truly upon us, and we could at least get several thousand people away. They’re virtually useless as warships, anyway.”

  “Where would they go?”

  “Back to Sol, I guess. Sol System should have been able to cobble together better defenses than we have. They’ve had more time and they’ve more people and factories, and their Belt has good technology, even if flatlanders think like sheep.”

  “Wo
uldn’t the…Kzin just destroy the slowboats?”

  “They haven’t so far. But maybe it’s a cat-and-mouse game. We found in one of our own old texts—Sun Tzu’s Art of War—that an enemy should always be left with an apparent escape route as a disincentive to fighting with the courage of despair. But they’re hard to understand. They fight without any concept of mercy, but they’ve also pulled their punches a few times. They could have smashed Wunderland’s cities from space, or vaporized the major bases in the Swarm, but they’ve held off. They seem to be trying to do as little damage to infrastructure as possible. We don’t know why.”

  “What do you know,” asked Dimity, “about their concept of humans?”

  “Very little.”

  “You say they have no interest in negotiation. Do they accept surrenders?”

  “They have, yes. They have taken human prisoners. We think…It’s horrible and bizarre, but we think they eat them unless they’ve promised otherwise.”

  “When do they do that? Promise otherwise, I mean.”

  “Perhaps sometimes if the humans have useful skills. Once or twice when humans have been in relatively strong positions they have bargained and seem to have kept their bargains. But that hasn’t been often.”

  “So they don’t look on humans simply as vermin to be exterminated?”

  “That’s hard to say. We’ve got a little of their language. Their word for human is kz’eerkt, which seems to mean ‘monkey.’ There must be monkeys or analogs on their homeworld. They refer to our ships as ‘monkeyships.’” Kleist closed his eyes for a moment and frowned as if remembering something difficult.

  “There was one odd incident: One of our ships was cut off and surrounded by a kzin squadron. It had expended its major weapons and the kzin boarded it. It was a big ship, a Swarm passenger liner originally, and they fought from cabin to cabin for days. At the end the surviving humans made a last stand on the bridge deck. Some of the com-links were still working and broadcasting what was happening to the fleet. We saw and heard the last fight when the kzin broke through.