by Larry Niven
Conserver met the conqueror’s gaze with equanimity. “That is probably wise advice.”
“You begin to try my patience.”
“That holds no relevance to me. If you intend to kill me, leap. If not…” He flipped his ears. “I am in the middle of my meditation. I would have peace.”
“Tradition makes you immune to challenge.”
“You care no more about the Conserver Traditions than you do about the Dueling Traditions. Or any others.”
Conserver’s voice held contempt and for a long moment Kchula looked as though he would leap. Conserver subtly shifted his position to receive the attack. Kchula was large and strong, but he was used to having others do his killing for him. If he leapt, Conserver’s battle discipline would be enough to defeat him. It would be a simple solution—death for the usurper in a fair duel of his own choosing. But Kchula did not leap, precisely because he was used to having others do his killing for him. Conserver considered goading him further, but decided against it. Let the game play out, and see where it leads. Kchula needs something from me, and need is power.
“I would have your ears for that insult, Conserver, but you’re more use to me alive.”
“If you would take my ears for it then it is not an insult but a statement of fact.” Conserver waited while Kchula followed the logic chain through. “And what use do you have for me?”
Does he know of the destruction of the computer core? Kchula unconsciously snapped his jaw at the tenacity of the zitalyi; even now he could not consider the Citadel cleared of opposition, and every day brought another strike from deep in the bowels of the fortress. He was losing strakh before the Great Pride Circle, and that was something he could ill afford. He considered his prisoner for long heartbeats, weighing options. Rrit-Conserver met his gaze with equanimity. I must be open enough that his mind can engage our problems, but not so open that he knows how truly vulnerable we are now. “As you point out, your support will be invaluable in bringing stability to the Patriarchy. The sooner the Prides accept the new realities the less damage we will suffer. Squabbling profits no one. We face larger dangers now, and your mind is an essential weapon if our species is to survive them.” Threats will not shift this Conserver; let us see what flattery can do.
Rrit-Conserver remained impassive. “I am nothing but dangerous to you alive. You cannot change that, Kchula.”
“And why is that?”
“You seek to convince me I owe my loyalty to Second-Son-of-Meerz-Rrit. Even if you succeed at this I will owe no loyalty to you. The mind you desire to put to your uses will be directed against your rule.”
Kchula lashed his tail, annoyed. “You would support a spineless coward over a warrior of proven skill.”
“I am sworn to the Rrit.”
“And if this last of the Rrit should die?”
“There are many who share the blood of the Rrit.”
“Including Tzaatz Pride.”
“Your claim is far from strongest, Kchula.”
“And far from weakest. But Second-Son will not die yet, and your fealty belongs to him regardless of your personal feelings.”
“Perhaps.”
Kchula turned and paced the room, tail lashing. “The question of your survival becomes one of control.”
“I am a Conserver. You cannot control me.”
“Then I should kill you after all.”
Conserver made the gesture that meant irrelevant. “I will not serve you, Kchula-Tzaatz. You possess no lever that could so compel me.”
“You will serve Scrral-Rrit.” Kchula’s voice was harsh.
Rrit-Conserver turned a paw over and studied it. This was the critical moment. “So long as he proves to be worthy of the honor of the succession.” But Second-Son will not prove worthy.
Kchula lashed his tail. “That is enough for me. You have the freedom of the Citadel, as tradition demands. I will expect that you too will follow the traditions.” He turned and left.
Conserver resumed his meditative posture. Kchula-Tzaatz is a fool. He believes that I believe First-Son to be dead. Rrit-Conserver would serve Second-Son, which would satisfy the outward form of honor, and Kchula-Tzaatz would come to believe that he controlled Rrit-Conserver as he controlled Black-Stripe. But Pouncer would return, if he could, when he could. And on that day, Kchula-Tzaatz will learn that I do not serve him.
One must not judge everyone in the world by their qualities as a soldier, otherwise we should have no civilization.
—Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
Kefan Brasseur looked through Provider’s loft window at a steady rainfall. Until an opportunity to get a ship arose they were effectively confined to Provider’s home, and time had started to drag as the initial shock of the assault and their immediate fear of capture had worn off. Most days Brasseur spent his time practicing with his pistol and the magrifle, interspersed with attempts to get T’suuz to talk with him. They were consistent failures, this last attempt no more than the others. It was frustrating: A kzinrette with a behavior set like the one she had displayed during their escape was unheard-of, but now she showed no interest in anything but food, sleep, and baring her teeth at anyone who seemed to be bothering her brother.
He turned away from the window. Cherenkova and Tskombe were absorbed in their beltcomps. The military officers were almost as frustrating as T’suuz. True, their skills were important, but their single-minded obsession with getting off the planet was blinding them to the privilege they were enjoying as one of only a handful of humans to arrive on Kzinhome as anything other than a war trophy. They treated each other with exaggerated casualness. It was a courtesy they were paying him, perhaps, a cover for what was obviously a strong and growing sexual relationship. Brasseur sighed. He had long since grown bored of studying the games humans played with each other. The stakes were unvaryingly status, dominance, power, and sex, the strategies largely limited to blackmail, bribery, bluff, and betrayal. He had even less interest in playing them than in watching them. It was why he had chosen to study the kzinti. He could spend a lifetime here and never stop learning. T’suuz alone was fascinating.
“You saw her in the tunnel, on the way to Hero’s Square.” He carried on his train of thought aloud, not really addressing the words to anyone. “She spoke fluently, she fought, she planned. Kzinretti don’t do that.”
Tskombe looked up from a Swiftwing simulation run. “Well, she isn’t doing it anymore.”
“No one’s ever seen an intelligent kzinrette. This is revolutionary, and she won’t talk to me. She’s acting like a pet.”
Cherenkova looked up from her own simulation. “I’m sure she has her reasons.”
“If only I had more time…”
Their conversation was interrupted by a scream snarl from the central den: Pouncer’s voice, distorted in rage. The humans looked up to watch him. “My brother has assumed the Patriarchy! My father and my uncle are dead and my own brother has betrayed their blood to the Tzaatz!” He screamed as though tortured, his claws rigidly extended, his mouth a smile of fangs. “They have tamed him with a zzrou like a slave animal! He is not Rrit!” There was an inarticulate howl, and then what sounded like a war of wildcats, as the other kzinti snarled words unintelligible through the din.
Brasseur looked at the other two, closed his mouth. The tension in the air was palpable. He started to speak again, stopped, started. “We need to be leaving,” he said. “This is going to get out of control.”
From that point forward Brasseur put all his spare time into learning the Swiftwing’s systems as well. The courier only took two pilots, but getting into the spaceport would be risky, and they might not all make it. Every day Far Hunter, Provider, and—against everyone’s strong objections—a well disguised Pouncer went out to gauge the enemy’s strength and intentions. What they learned was not encouraging. The Tzaatz had firm control of the spaceport, and the space defense weapons were fully operational. All the knowledge they could bring on board would be hardly e
nough. He pored for hours over the details of hyperspace navigation and the mass reader. Hyperdrive had been traded to the inhabitants of the We Made It colony by the Outsiders and stolen from humanity by the kzinti. It was immediately apparent that there were serious gaps in the kzinti knowledge of the system. It required an aware mind to read the mass reader, the primary instrument, for some reason to do with the observer-collapse of quantum wave-functions that was glibly but incompletely explained in the automanual. It was suspected that this was related to the Blind Spot effect, which was a trance state induced by looking directly into hyperspace with the naked eye, another observer-collapse phenomenon. There were those who were immune to the Blind Spot, and those who could not make a mass reader work. The two were correlated, and there was an almost offhand remark that both effects were related to the Telepath’s Gift, another thing that was poorly understood but seemed to do with the collapse of quantum wave functions in hyperspace. That was interesting, as was the status of telepaths in kzinti society; he’d already written papers on that subject. Now was not the time, but one day the connection would be worth following up.
“Have you seen the Blind Spot?” he asked Ayla during a break in his study.
“Every pilot tries it once.”
“What’s it like?”
She shook her head. “You have to see it. Or not see it, which is the point. It can’t be described.”
He asked her what she knew about hyperspace, and her answers were almost verbatim what the kzinti automanual said. Evidently humanity knew little more than the kzinti. Brasseur found that frustrating too. Whoever had paid the Outsiders for the hyperdrive technology should have paid a little more for the science behind it.
Tskombe himself had advanced to singleship tactics, and again the learning curve steepened as he studied intercept curves and evasive maneuvering. At the infantry ranges he was used to, lasers traveled in straight lines and instantaneously hit their target. The hit probabilities were controlled by turret slew rates and target track precision, and the main problem was dealing with camouflage and spoofing. In space lasers dipped into gravity wells, defocused with distance and could take long seconds to reach targets that, at fifty or more gees of acceleration, could significantly alter their velocity vector in that time. As relative velocities became a significant fraction of the speed of light, relativity began to play a part and the math became truly horrendous. The ship’s artificial intelligence handled the details of predictive targeting, but it in turn had to be managed to give it the best chance of a successful shot. He began to learn the intricacies of the course funnel and thrust lines, and the simulations grew more complicated. Reactionless thrusters were not truly reactionless, of course, in strict obedience to the second law of thermodynamics, and the performance curves of different drives varied not only with the magnitude and relative direction of the local gravitational gradient but with the relative and absolute motion and rotational velocity of the mass that created the gradient, an effect known as frame dragging. The Swiftwing automanual gave scant coverage to those details, and Ayla downloaded a UNSN space combat text to his beltcomp from hers. The manual called the combined gradient total-spacetime-distortion or TSTD and described it with various derivatives and integrals of four-dimensional spacetime equations. Not only TSTD but its rate of change were important and the text referred to them frequently.
The entire subject began to give him headaches. The humans had decided to sleep and wake on Kzin’s twenty-seven-hour-thirty-six-minute day, and the minutiae of space combat began to invade his dreams as he lay beside Ayla after sex. After the desperate urgency of the first night their touches had become gentler, more intimate as they learned each other’s bodies. He found lying beside her afterward as rewarding as the act itself, a new experience for him. Despite the danger, Tskombe found he didn’t want their time on Kzin to end. It had to, though, and that meant he had to master space combat. The key was to set up conditions where your performance was better than your opponent’s, which required understanding not just TSTD and delta TSTD but the relative performance of your own ship and your adversary’s as those variables changed. At first it had seemed that the tremendous amount of thrust and power available to a ship gave it almost limitless options in maneuver. As his understanding grew he realized that in any given situation there were at most a handful of possible options, sometimes only one, and any time your opponent had narrowed you down to a single option your course became absolutely predictable and you became an easy target. As he developed a feel for the subject the odds stacked against them became clearer and he began to develop misgivings about the planned escape.
“I don’t see how we’re going to get away.”
Ayla looked up from the simulation she was running and cocked an ear. “Why is that?”
“Kzinhome has twenty-four orbital battle stations, plus all the ground defenses, plus the fleet in orbit, carriers, destroyers, cruisers, battleships even. The Rrit fleet is divided: some of them have fled, some are waiting to see what happens. Maybe they won’t shoot at a fleeing ship, or maybe they will. The Tzaatz fleet is up there too, and they’ll certainly shoot a fleeing ship. There’s a lot of firepower in the gauntlet we have to run.”
Cherenkova nodded. “Our Hero assures us we’ll have a valid transponder code.”
“And if it doesn’t turn out to be valid?”
“If we don’t get into orbit, we’re in trouble. If we do, it’s simple.”
“Not so simple. I never made a combat landing without the whole fleet going in first to suppress the space defenses. Landers are sitting ducks in low orbit and reentry. The ground weapons will have us bull’s-eyed from the spaceport perimeter to the transatmosphere, and from low orbit all the way to synchronous orbit those battle stations are going to have us in their sights.”
“My point exactly.”
“I don’t follow.”
“We aren’t making a combat landing, we’re making an escape. The flight regime is entirely different.”
“How so?”
“Because we’ll be accelerating the whole way out. Getting to the ground makes you a target because you have to slow down, get stable, slide into the atmosphere and decelerate for touchdown. Every step you become more and more predictable. Going the other way the search sphere gets bigger every second and you gain more freedom of maneuver. Once we’re out of the atmosphere we’ll have it made.”
“We’re going to be in range for light-seconds. They’ll send interceptors.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Far Hunter says a lot of the Rrit fleet has boosted out, gone privateer, basically. The Tzaatz have limited resources up there, and nobody knows who’s on what side. Confusion is our ally.”
Tskombe nodded. “We have to get a ship first.”
“That’s your department. You get me in the cockpit, I’ll get us home.”
Tskombe nodded, though he was troubled by that problem too. His department was not going well. Far Hunter was now going every morning to the spaceport, bringing fresh vatach and grashi to the Tzaatz guards, building strakh with them. Late in the evening he would return and make additions to the crude model of the spaceport that was growing in the back room, and the group would discuss ways of getting access to a Swiftwing. The Tzaatz guards were sloppy, but there were lots of them, and their rapsar sniffers made up for their lack of attention. In terms of a ground combat plan there was really only one option. They had to wait until Provider’s half brother Cargo Pilot told them a courier was prepped for launch, then Far Hunter would smuggle them in with a load of game. They would get to the edge of the parking apron, then the kzinti would cover the humans while the humans got on the ship, moving with deliberate stealth, but ready to kill anyone or anything that got in their way, slave or kzin or rapsar. They would key in the transponder code that Pilot gave them and take off. The kzin would come back out the way they had come in. Pouncer’s obligation would be discharged, the humans would be on their way home, and quite possibly there would
be an interstellar war. Tskombe couldn’t devote time to that thought. There wasn’t enough time to do what had to be done. He went over the basics of fire-and-movement with the others, modifying the tactics to account for the fact that the kzinti would be carrying crossbows. They did some simple drills in the forest, away from Provider’s neighbors. There was little other preparation they could make, and the attempt would be a gamble when the time came.
At that, it would not be the first time Quacy Tskombe had gambled his life; but now that Ayla was sharing his bed and his thoughts the stakes had become much higher. How long had it been since that first night? His beltcomp would tell him, but the length of time was nothing; it was the emotions that counted. They had become, what? Lovers? Partners? The labels didn’t really matter. They didn’t talk about the future. If they survived the escape attempt the exigencies of military careers would part them as soon as they handed in final reports on their mission. That was nothing new, and they both had kept their previous relationships shallow for that very reason. Now, without either of them having planned it, it was different, and he realized he was falling in love with Captain Ayla Cherenkova. That was a strange thought for him, more than a little disturbing. Quacy Tskombe had led the life of a nomad. The son of an infantry officer himself, he had never spent more than a year in the same place, moving with his father’s postings. He had gained entry to the academy at sixteen, and the four years he had spent there were the longest he had ever lived in one place. Sexual relationships for him were matters of convenience. He had learned not to get attached.
So what was different about Ayla Cherenkova, a woman even more focused on her career than he was? Perhaps it was their situation, stranded together on this hostile, alien world. Certainly that was what had brought them together, but she had trembled in his arms on the third day, allowed herself to be vulnerable with him, open the gates to the fear they had both been holding desperately inside. And after that things had changed. There was no awkwardness between them, no question but that they share the same chamber, the same frrch-skin bed, no question that they ended the day with sex, and Tskombe found to his amazement that it was not the rush of orgasm that drew him to her but the simple comfort of her touch, her voice, her scent.
