Man-Kzin Wars V

by Larry Niven

  Something moved. Out of the tail of her eye, off to the right, she detected a pattern shift. From her undergraduate biology, Krater knew that human peripheral vision worked best at perceiving motion—a relic of primate development, both as hunter and prey. So, if she could sense something moving, it was moving.

  "Just the wind," she whispered to herself. And yet she knew that the motion had been localized. If it had been wind, the whole canopy would be surging around her now.

  She turned her head slowly, swinging her nose centimeter by centimeter to the right. She did not dart with her eyes, but shifted them only in slow blinks. But before she could begin facing the whatever-it-was, the radio strapped at her wrist crackled.

  "Sally, are you all right?" in Cuiller's voice. The leaves off her right shoulder swirled with movement, as the something there darted quickly, but whether lunging or withdrawing, she couldn't tell.

  Krater had no time to fool with the hand-laser attached at her belt but instead slapped the release on her cable reel. She dropped three meters in near freefall. On the way, she bobbled and almost lost the field kit. Finally she caught it, snapped it closed, and slipped it back in her pocket. The kit would digest the vegetable sample and report later.

  "I'm fine," she called into the radio, although her voice was shaky.

  "You shouldn't just head off like that, Sally," Cuiller said. His tone was masked by the tinny quality of the transmission.

  "I wanted some samples."

  "Well, next time, ask first. Please?"

  "Yes, sir. I'd like to come down now—with your permission."

  "Do so."

  She toggled the reel to unwind. In a few seconds her feet broke through the lowest layer of leaves into clear air.

  The canopy above her did tremble then, like a breeze fluttering its lower edges. But Krater could swear that no wind had stirred since she climbed up there. She stared into the overgrowth, looking for anything that might be poking through and . . . reaching for her.

  Nothing.

  To rest her eyes, she looked away to the middle distance. From where she hung, about three meters below the canopy proper, the spaced tree trunks were just beginning to branch out into the flying buttresses and arching vaults that supported the greenery. The view was almost what a medieval mason might have seen, working in a sling up near a cathedral's ceiling and looking out between the stone pillars. Except these pillars were green and alive—and all were suddenly swaying.

  Expecting to see the ripples of an earthquake, she looked down at the forest floor, scanning the barren ground there. That was when she saw the iceberg, moving off to one side.

  "Captain . . ." She kept her eyes on the shape.

  "Right here, Sally."

  "Can you see me?"

  "I do. You're just below where you went up, aren't you?"

  "Yeah, still on the same grapple point. Now, do you see my arm?" She pointed it at the white object. "Follow that line and tell me what you see."

  "Trees and deepening gloom. What do you see?"

  "A white shape. And it's moving."

  "Jared!" It was Gambiel, on another radio channel. "I can see it, too, from here." Had the weapons officer also wandered away from the commander? Krater wondered.

  "Then you're closer, Daff," from Cuiller.

  "Sally? How big would you say it is?" from Gambiel.

  "I don't know. It's about . . . oh, six or seven trees off. Say a hundred and fifty meters over the ground. But it seems to be . . . squeezing between the trunks. That would make the thing more than twenty-five meters wide, wouldn't it? And I'd guess it's at least five or six times that long—but I can't see all of the creature."

  "Can you see its head?" Daff asked.

  "No. And I won't swear that it has one."

  "Not important," Gambiel said. "I know what it is anyway."

  "Bandersnatch?" from Cuiller.

  "Yes, Captain. You've seen them before?"

  "Once, on Jinx. They're intelligent—and harmless."

  "Right. Sally? Which way is it moving? I can't tell from down here."

  "Back the way we came, looks like," she said. "Roughly parallel to our path."

  "I'll call Jook," Cuiller said. "Alert him, so he doesn't do anything rash if it shows up at the ship. And Sally, why don't you come down and join us now?"

  "Aye, Captain." She paid out line and dropped toward the forest floor.

  Her feet touched the ground near where Cuiller was standing, finishing his call back to the ship. Gambiel walked up a moment later. She showed him the dye on the line and explained her reasoning. He nodded thoughtfully.

  "But how do I recover the grapple?" she asked, looking up into the trees. "We can't afford to lose one each time one of us goes up and comes down."

  The weapons tech reached over to her harness, locked the takeup reel, and thumbed the cover off a protected red stud on the control panel. He pushed it—unconsciously shoving her backward with his latent strength. "Step back and bend your knees," he said.

  She did so, and a moment later something fell out of the canopy. When it hit the ground, she recognized her grapple, with the barbs folded in.

  "Radio-controlled unlocking device," Gambiel said. "Don't use it while you're hanging around . . . Well, reel it in."

  Krater started the winder motor.

  "Slowly!" Gambiel ordered. "Or you'll catch that thing right in the tits."

  She slowed the winding and watched the folded grapple tumble and walk across the scoured dirt toward her. When it was a meter out, she braked the reel, picked up the grapple, and tucked it into her belt loop.

  "Now what?" she asked.

  "Now, we go on," Cuiller replied, pointing the way toward their objective, the calculated position of the deep radar's return image.

  * * *

  Hugh Jook was wedged under—or now over, rather—the forward control yoke. He was bent around the station-keeping stirrups, stretching as far as he could go with one leg immobilized by the bubble cast. In one hand Jook held a collection of electronics chips, all banded and tagged with alphanumerics to show what each circuit was supposed to do. In the other hand was a socket-puller. He was poking into the guts of the overturned weapons pod, hoping to get enough response from it for the ship's computer to run a diagnostic. Then it would be thumbs up or thumbs down: reconnect and rebrace the unit, or bleed away its residual charge, cut it apart with a hand-laser, and dump it out on the ground.

  With his head inside the access panels, he never saw the Bandersnatch approach Callisto, even though the main window stripe was right behind his ear and oriented up toward the trees. His first sign of trouble was the lurch the ship took as the white beast nuzzled it.

  "Yo!" he sang out and straightened up.

  The exposed hull scritched and squeaked under the impact of the Bandersnatch's sensory bristles. Jook looked out into a squash of thick white tubules, like a pot's view of a scrub brush at work. Although nothing there looked like an eye, he had the uncanny feeling the giant was peering in at him.

  "Leave it alone, and it will leave you alone," Cuiller had told him, when the ground party had called in their sighting of a Bandersnatch. "Nothing on its body is small enough, or delicate enough, to be harmed by our short-range weapons. And there's nothing much it can do to the ship, even if it sits on the hull."

  "Right," Jook had agreed over the radio and dismissed the threat. Besides, Bandersnatchi were known to be harmless—and quite intelligent.

  But now, with the mass of pallid flesh pushing against the side of Callisto, he wasn't so sure.

  Jook unbent himself, steadied with his hands against the jostling that the hull was taking, and tried to reach the panels of the control yoke. He had no intention of opening hostilities, but he hoped the beast would survive the scatter from Callisto's ion drive when he departed the scene.

  A couple of times he got his fingers up on the buttons for the engine initiation sequence. But each time he tried to key it, the ship lurched and
his hand slipped. Then it didn't matter, because the natural light coming through the window faded entirely. The Bandersnatch was riding up over the ship. It was too late to break away, even at full thrust.

  Jook's ears popped.

  That had to be a pressure variation, but he hadn't keyed any changes in the atmospheric specs. He looked around. The main hatch, above him and now thirty-five degrees off local vertical with the hull's current orientation, had worked open—falling inward. The hatch panel was fabricated of aligned-crystal vanadium steel. It was set in a vanadium-steel rim and keyed into the standardized opening in their General Products hull by lipping it both inside and out. Short of a patch of GP monomolecule itself, the hatch was the strongest possible seal that human technology could devise. And yet the Bandersnatch had punched it out like a baby poking his thumb through a piecrust.

  Ripples of the Bandersnatch's white underside ballooned into the opening. At first Jook thought it was just normal pressure expansion, the weight of the animal forcing its underside into a new cavity as the Bandersnatch settled its mass over the ship. But as he watched, the volume of white flesh inside the hatch grew. It began lapping around the cross bracing for the portside inertial thrusters and weapons pods. As the flesh made contact there, the Bandersnatch's belly vibrated and the metal began to scream.

  It also began to dissolve. Big, fuming drops of fluid wept from the point of contact and fell into the bilges. Wherever they touched, except on the hull material itself, that spot also started smoking and dissolving.

  Jook moved. He climbed along struts and down handholds, swinging his stiffened leg over obstacles and bashing it twice. The pain didn't slow him down. He made it past the waist, where his nominal duty station was, and kept on going, around the hyperdrive engine. In the rear, about as far forward from the tail as the main hatch was back from the bow, the hull had another opening. This one was smaller and fitted with an airlock. He thought briefly about hiding inside the lock, but he remembered it was constructed of the same vanadium steel that had failed in the main hatch. No, his only option was to climb through while that end of the ship was still uncovered by the creature's bulk, get to the ground before the Bandersnatch noticed him, and run like hell, or as fast as his bad leg permitted.

  To lower himself from the lock entrance, Hugh Jook pulled on a climbing harness and gathered up the grapple, launcher, line cassettes, and gas cartridges. Almost as an afterthought, he broke out a laser rifle and a personal radio.

  While dry-locking through, he punched up the radio and whispered into it.

  "Captain . . . !"

  Nothing, not even static.

  "Jared!"

  Still nothing.

  Of course—inside the lock even the strongest signal would be blocked. He'd have to wait until he was outside and clear before calling the ground party.

  The outer hatch opened, and Jook was looking up into a billowing wall of rough, white flesh. There was no time to set the grapple or pay out line. He levered himself up on the hatch coaming, scrambled over the ceramic hull surface trailing down toward the tail, got his good leg lowermost to take up his impact with the ground, and dropped.

  He fell over on his bad leg and cried out—then looked up to see if the Bandersnatch was interested in falling on top of him.

  It wasn't. Instead, it rolled back and forth over the hull, driving the bow down and bending out of plumb the trees that had wedged it right and left. The Bandersnatch worked its rasp deeper and deeper into the main hatch, and Jook could faintly hear the screech of breaking metal inside.

  Still, he didn't trust the white beast's absorption in its task. As soon as his breath was back, Jook picked himself up and hobbled into the next pentagonal clearing. There he set the line cassette in his grapple, loaded the gun, and fired up into the trees. After the few seconds it took to anchor and set the grapple, he was soaring up into the green vault.

  * * *

  "I can now give you more detailed information, sir, on the hardsight contacts."

  "Good, uff, Navigator. Uff. Continue."

  Nyawk-Captain ran full out, stretching his long muscles. At full extension, his forward-reaching claws just grazed the rack that held the brainbox of their long-range starfixer; his hind claws ticked against the panels of the weapons locker. He was exercising in a variable gravity field that could be rippled to simulate ground passing under his pads. At present, the field was going under him at twice his own body length every second. He had to stretch to keep up—or be shoved back into the locker.

  "We are definitely seeing two contacts, not one with a reflection," Navigator said. "The brighter return is the smaller—an absolute return of all radiation. That would indicate an infinite density, which I cringe to propose to you."

  "How big is this infinitely dense source?"

  "Small, Nyawk-Captain. No bigger than a kzin's torso."

  "And it orbits a star—is it dead star matter itself?"

  "No, sir. It does orbit a star, but on a planet. I now have a layered return shadowing this planet's lithosphere and iron core. The object is on the surface, or near to it. The second contact—"

  Nyawk-Captain growled him to silence. He then reached out in his stride and killed the gravity field, ending his run on a single, four-footed pounce into the middle of the exercise area. The cabin steamed with the heat of his exertions—but neither of his crew members would dare complain.

  Navigator held the thought and obeyed silence while his captain stretched in place and considered the implications of that hard return.

  Infinite density. Small volume. But not enough mass to push the object deep into the planet's gravity well. Those observations could lead to only one conclusion: a Thrintun storage container, protected by its own time-warping field.

  Honor and glory a full name and heirs, the personal friendship of the Riit, all would go to the discoverer of such a box. The artifacts concealed in those few that the kzinti had found in the past often yielded good weapons—or the clues to improving their own armaments.

  Navigator and Weaponsmaster would be having similar thoughts, Nyawk-Captain realized. It was time to distract them.

  "Continue," he grunted.

  "The second contact is bigger, but not as dense. It presents a volume suitable for a ship's hull—a small one, but still capable of supporting a crew, drive systems, and weapons. I hypothesize it is a Leaf-Eaters' hull, such as they make as gifts to the humans."

  "Is it near the other object?"

  "Almost on top of it."

  Nyawk-Captain casually ran a foreclaw into his mouth, probing the gaps between his teeth. It was a habit his father would not approve of, but it relieved stress while he thought.

  "Shall we alter course, sir?" Navigator prompted.

  Nyawk-Captain growled him into silence.

  The Last Fleet followed Cat's Paw with a lag of ten days and a leeway of two days. Those two days were calculated to allow Cat's Paw to make minor course corrections, take evasive action, and conduct a brief survey of Margrave's defensive positions before Nyawk-Captain began his attack run against the system. The ten days would allow the human forces time to reach their maximum dispersal, following the near-simultaneous attacks by Paw and the other outriders, before the fleet struck behind him.

  Timing was everything—but Nyawk-Captain knew he operated within a window of opportunity, not under split-second coordination . . . And what an opportunity was now presenting itself!

  He could, of course, contact the Last Fleet and request a delay in the planned attack. He would ask for enough time to allow him to alter course, stop, and retrieve the Thrintun box. A few days at most. But then, Nyawk-Captain would be honor-bound to explain his reasons to Lehruff, who was the commanding admiral. And Lehruff would want to share in the discovery.

  Of course, if he could move in and get out quickly enough, Nyawk-Captain might retrieve the box and still make his rendezvous with Margrave well ahead of the fleet. All honor and glory would then come to him alone,
when he eventually produced the Thrintun artifacts. His two crew members, being subordinates and inferiors in rank, would defer to him on the discovery. He might even share with them for form's sake—a sixteenth of the value for each would be a graceful gesture.

  Of course, if Nyawk-Captain contacted Lehruff, he would also have to report the General Products hull that lay in close proximity. It was one hull only and not a large one; such a vessel had low probability of preceding and leading a massive attack by the Leaf-Eaters and their human puppets. Yet that was how Lehruff might read it. He would then want confirmations. Analyses. Councils of war. He might even send other ships to investigate the contact. Reason for delay. And an excuse to take the prize from Cat's Paw.

  More likely that hull belonged to a lone prospector. Some renegade Leaf-Eater or human looking for wealth, mineral or otherwise, far beyond human Space. And finding it. Nyawk-Captain had to allow for the possibility of a fight. But it would be a short one. It would be over and Cat's Paw would be away in less than two days—their established margin for error and reconnaissance.

  He would chance it.

  "Alter course, Navigator. . . . Let us investigate this Leaf-Eater's hull which stands between us and victory."

  * * *

  "Jared!"

  Cuiller raised the radio to his mouth without even breaking stride. "Right here, Hugh."

  "It's eating the ship." The voice was so faint and breathy that Cuiller thought he must have missed part of the transmission.

  "Say again, please."

  "The Bandersnatch is eating our ship." Jook's words were louder and more distinct that time. Still crazy, though.

  "Wait one, Hugh," the commander said, He turned to his weapons officer. "You hear that?"

  Gambiel shook his head. "Heard it, but I don't believe it."

  "How would a Bandersnatch eat the hull?" Krater asked.

  "It's got a rudimentary mouth scoop," the Jinxian answered, "with a pretty solid rasp inside, like a snail's tongue. It can secrete digestive juices, too. But I don't know why it would want to."