by Larry Niven
A synthesized kzin voice snarled something in his ear about ground proximity—some warning mode that he could doubtless override if he knew how and had time to do it. For now it was just a distraction. The movement of the courier ship had drawn the attention of the Tzaatz, and now they shifted fire. More crystal iron slugs caromed off the transpax, aimed this time, not stray shots, and a couple of times the panes flickered black as they damped out a visible spectrum laser pulse. He could feel the heat coming off them despite the superconductor film that dumped it to the Swiftwing’s frame. A couple more hits and he’d lose a pane, mag armor or not, and that would be the end of that.
So don’t take hits, torque the thrusters around, spin the ship so its back is pointing at the enemy, thrusters to full rear, spike the power to emergency and down again. The courier shot forward as though from a mag launcher and he felt his weight surge sickeningly as the artificial gravity compensated. The spin was still on the ship and he quickly brought the thrust back to vertical and guided it higher as it spun toward the perimeter fence. As he came back facing the way he had come he could see the results of his efforts: a container stack sent flying like a giant had kicked it, broken crates strewn two hundred meters. He couldn’t see if he’d managed to hit any of the Tzaatz, but the flying cargo must have at least distracted them. At least there was no incoming fire for the moment. He considered trying the trick again, but time was not on his side and the thrusters were an imprecise weapon even in skilled hands, which his most certainly were not.
So get Ayla, get her hands on the controls and get out of here. Wobbling and bouncing, he set a course for the control tower.
“Cherenkova, Tskombe, what’s your status?”
“We’re still here.” Her voice crackled on the com. “Incoming fire has stopped for now. You be careful with that thing.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“Just don’t break it.”
Movement on the edge of the spaceport caught his eye. He keyed transmit. “You’ve got combat cars coming in from the southwest.”
“Acknowledged. We’re moving farther south now, before the ratcats here get reorganized.”
Tskombe threw a worried glance at the incoming dots, four of them, getting big fast. The tower was coming closer, but he’d put a lot of distance between it and him when he’d pulsed the drive. He resisted the impulse to crank on more speed. He lacked the finesse to bring the courier down where he wanted to; he’d have to accept the slow approach if he was going to get close to Ayla.
He looked up. The cars were coming too fast—they’d be there before he was. Blue-white lines lanced across the sky at him, air ionized to plasma by their lasers. No choice then, but take it carefully. He edged up the power, felt the Swiftwing surge forward. His brief flight had taken him over a kilometer and a half across the spaceport. Below slaves and kzinti alike were watching, not yet understanding who was who in the battle now in progress.
Handle the combat cars first. The Swiftwing’s AI had a self-defense mode. He hunted the control panel, flipped up a safety cover, slapped the toggle. A series of canisters chugged into the air, arcing over his head toward the combat cars. Five hundred meters distant they blossomed into silver dust clouds, some of them hitting the ground first, leaving long silver streaks behind them. What was that about? Do the kzinti consider that a weapon? No, those were dusters, packed with aluminum microspheres designed to frustrate laser beams. The dust was too fine to disperse quickly in atmosphere; the defense systems were set for space. He slapped another toggle for ground mode and cursed an AI that could pick up threats just by tracking optical flow but couldn’t tell if it was in space or on the ground unless you told it. Hydraulics hummed as the turrets swung into position, then incandescent lines stabbed at the incoming combat cars. One fireballed and fell, but the others ducked down, hugging the ground and getting below Tskombe’s line of fire. The stricken vehicle hit a liquid oxygen bubble at speed, triggering a fire that splashed white hot, igniting whatever it touched to burn explosively. Below him the onlookers started running for cover, belatedly realizing the danger.
There was a plan. Target the bubbles and wreak absolute havoc. Some would be full of hydrogen, which burned hot but rose too quickly to do much damage, but almost anything would burn in contact with lox. A few ruptured oxygen bubbles would keep the Tzaatz well occupied. Except the AI didn’t recognize the bubbles as threats and Tskombe was overloaded with piloting as it was. He had no chance at all of putting the weapons on manual, even if he could figure out how to do that, which was far from certain.
It occurred to him that the enemy were now Tzaatz and not kzinti. I have shifted my paradigm. Brasseur would be proud. He pushed the thought away. Just fly, get Ayla on board, get on the weapons and then the enemy would be anyone downrange. He refocused on the control tower, coming up now too quickly, and eased the power back. Not enough. He eased it more, scanned for her hiding place.
“Four hundred meters in front of you.” Her voice was clear. She was reading his mind. “Reference the loader bay. We’re right there.”
He scanned the horizon, found the bay, nudged the controls slightly left to bring it down. The combat cars were still out of sight, down below buildings. They’d have to slow down to maneuver there, and the ship’s guns were a match for them. Seconds to go now. He cut power, grounded the ship, skidding sideways into a parked loader and sending the wreckage careening into another one further down. Jotoki cargo slaves were fleeing in every direction, along with a few kzinti overseers who had no idea what was going on. He was a hundred meters from the bay where Ayla was, not great flying but close enough. Loading ramp down. He looked for the switch, remembered he’d already overridden life support to keep it extended.
“Okay, the ramp is down. Go!”
“Coming…” She was already running, her breathing heavy in the microphone. A hundred meters—ten seconds for an Olympic sprinter, maybe fifteen for Ayla. “Tanj!” She was panting, and she’d stopped.
“What?”
“We’ve got ground troops coming in.” A hail of crystal iron slugs rang off the hull to underline her words. Tskombe looked around, picked up a two-sword of Tzaatz in battle armor and grav belts, shooting at the ship with mag rifles from behind some cargo haulers.
“Where are you?”
“We’re moving south to the control tower, out of the line of fire.”
The AI wasn’t shooting back. Why not? Some mode somewhere was letting it ignore small targets. “Have they seen you?” He fumbled with the controls while he spoke, trying to change the AI settings.
“I don’t think so. They’re all focused on you.”
Tskombe breathed out. Ayla couldn’t run through the firestorm to get on board, but as long as no one saw her she’d be safe. I should be worried about Kefan, too. He wasn’t, not in the same way. She is my mate now. That simple fact made a tremendous difference. He assessed the situation. He was safe enough for a few seconds. The light weapons couldn’t hurt the ship, unless the gunners got lucky. He keyed his beltcomp. “Hang tight, I’ll take care of them.” Even as he said it a warning horn sounded and the damage control panel lit up. They’d hit something external and the computer snarled something about pitch sensors. No time to worry about that; forget the AI, get the guns under manual control and start taking names. It took more time than he had to figure out the command sequences, but he got the bottom turret responding and a targeting graticule on the viewscreen. There would be a way to change the spectral response, pick out moving targets, but there was no time to find it. He swung the graticule around until it intersected the leftmost hauler, fired, traversed to the next one, fired, traversed again, walking the fire through the enemy position, leaving a trail of burning wreckage behind him. The fire slackened, but more slugs rang off the hull. Another caution light came on and the computer snarled another warning.
Most of the two-sword must be dead by now, but the survivors were still shooting, though they stood no chanc
e at all against a starship with mag armor engaged. His weapons were light for a ship, more than heavy for ground combat. Don’t they give up?
The transpax flared white and went dark, the heat from the blocked laser bolt hitting him like a physical blow. If the mag armor hadn’t been on the panes would have blown in and killed him. No hand-carried beamer would do that; the combat cars were on the scene. The AI traversed the top turret and fired at a threat it could understand, and an explosion blossomed two thousand meters away at the edge of the cargo area. This is getting out of hand. Another combat car popped up, fired and dropped down again before the AI could target it. While the top turret was still slewing to track it another popped up and down, this one closer. The only consolation was that the quick exposures were too short for the Tzaatz gunnery systems too, and their beams went wide.
That would change as they worked their way closer. The courier was a big target, and they were small and agile. The closer they got the more accurate they’d be, and the larger the angles his turrets would have to move through to engage them. He was running out of time. Another hail of crystal iron penetrators reminded him that there were still ground troops out there.
So, get the ship as close to Ayla as he dared, shield her with its mass from the small arms, get her on board, and get the hell out of there. He put another series of bolts into the troops around the haulers, slapped the bottom turret back to AI control, and grabbed the controls. The Swiftwing lurched into the air and slid toward the loading bay. He finessed it around, trying to get the ramp pointing toward Ayla and the nose pointing at the enemy. He almost had it when a terrific impact slammed the ship to the ground, the horizon jolting sideways and coming to rest lopsided. The AI snarled about thruster failure and Cherenkova was screaming in his ear. “Tanks! They’ve got tanks!” An explosion near the loading bay cut her off and when she came back on the air she was coughing. “Kefan just got hit. Go! Quacy! Take off!”
“Get aboard!”
“I can’t get to the ship. Just go! They don’t know we’re here.”
He couldn’t see the tanks, but another heavy impact rolled the little ship. If he was going to leave it had to be now.
He keyed the transmitter. “I’m not going without you.”
“Tanj it, Quacy, Kefan is dead! They’re going to kill me shooting at you! Get out of here!”
Another explosion cut her off and he knew she was right. If she was going to survive he had to get the fire away from the immediate area. The Tzaatz had too many forces on the ground now. Still he hesitated a long second, long enough for another tank round to slam the Swiftwing sideways. The damage control panel flashed like a Christmas tree and the computer announced the destruction of the top turret. There was no other option. He slammed the thrust levers to emergency and the acceleration kicked him back hard. The courier spiraled upward, the horizon canting crazily sideways as he fought to compensate for the damaged thruster. His ears popped suddenly and painfully, blinding him with sudden agony. Somewhere there was a stability augmentation mode that would let the computer do it for him, but it was all he could do to keep the ship roughly level. All the training he’d done to learn how to fly an orbital insertion was out the window. This would be a power-wasting direct ascent launch.
The synthesized voice was saying something, distant through his throbbing, ringing ears. Probably important. He listened closer. Pressure warning? What pressure? He felt lightheaded, trying to understand what was going on. Hydraulics? Hydrogen feed? What other pressures were important on a Swiftwing? Coolant? He checked the indicators but they were level. Were they? He peered closer, trying to figure that out should be easy, just a glance, but his head was muzzy and his eyes wouldn’t focus. Why was that? The sky outside was turning from blue to purple.
The pain in his ears suddenly made sense. Cabin pressure! He found the toggle for the boarding ramp override, stared at it for a long moment to make sure it was the right one, and flipped it closed. There was a whine behind him and the sudden hiss of air. His ears popped again and he breathed deep. A stupid mistake, and nearly fatal. How high was he? The instrument panel said three five-hundred-twelves and seven sixty-fours in whatever the kzinti units were, the eights and ones figures spinning up too fast to read. High enough that the sky was already fading from purple to black. He breathed deep, feeling better. Hypoxia gave you two minutes before unconsciousness at best.
Dammit, Ayla, you’re the pilot. Kzinhome was invisible behind him but its defense systems hadn’t chopped him out of the sky so at least the transponder codes must be correct. Outside the stars were bright and hard. He was out of the atmosphere, on his way out of orbit. A Swiftwing did over a hundred gravities reacting against Kzinhome’s mass—less with one thruster out of action, but still far more than the four a combat car was capable of. The violent oscillations died down as Kzinhome’s mass receded behind him. The TSTD integral was turning from a plane to a point. He breathed deep again and edged the nose down to pick up orbital speed, then started to slide the thrust vector around into line with Kzinhome’s rotation vector. Despite the ragged takeoff his power profile wasn’t too far out of line. He wasn’t about to be stranded in deep space, as long as he didn’t make any more mistakes. Skin heating had been right at maximum though. Thank Finagle he hadn’t ripped the seals off the loading ramp. He dialed back thrust and called up the navigation screen to set up his boost profile to the singularity’s edge. His beltcomp held Crusader’s orbital data.
A chime chimed and the com screen lit up to show a kzin in space armor. “Swiftwing eight four two, I am Fourth-Flight Leader. Identify cargo and destination.” Fourth-Flight Leader sounded bored, a routine check, but when Tskombe looked at the screen the kzin’s eyes widened. He snarled something unintelligible, reached for a control, and the screen went blank again. The kzin had seen an enemy alien in the cockpit, and that was all the identification he needed.
So much for his fears about the transponder codes. Now a fighter pilot somewhere knew who he was. So what to do about that? He looked out the transpax, but of course Fourth Flight was invisible against the hard black, even if they were inside his field of view. They would know where he was, though, and they’d be plotting their intercept this very instant, as well as informing the rest of the kzinti defenses about his location. It would take the fighters some time to close. They had no lasers, but an orbital battle station could vaporize just about anything it could see, and there had to be more than one that had a line of sight to him right now. Do the Rrit or the Tzaatz control them now? It didn’t matter; either was liable to shoot at a fleeing human in a stolen ship. Adrenaline surged and he yanked the controls hard over, wasting power. There had to be an evasive action mode in the AI.
What was it Ayla had told him? It was hard to get close to a planet, much easier to get away. He hoped fervently that she was right. He shoved the thrusters to emergency again. He had no hope of navigating to rendezvous with Crusader, if Crusader was even still waiting at the singularity’s edge. He had to simply get out of the system and get into hyperspace. He’d have time on the boost to figure out the hyperdrive, if he didn’t get shot out of the sky first.
Keep the thrusters on full, and keep a wiggle on the control column to keep the battle stations off target. He didn’t even bother trying to bring up the sensor systems to get his single surviving turret ready. Even if he could make predictive targeting work, his weapons lacked the power to be effective against an orbital fortress. Unfortunately the reverse was not true, and the only defense he had was hard maneuver and distance. He might get one of the fighters, if they got close enough, but the AI’s close defense routines could do that for him, hopefully. Almost as an afterthought he flipped the defense environment toggle back to space.
A data window appeared, projected holographically on the transpax and covered in combat icons. The huge but visibly shrinking sphere must be Kzinhome; the rest were mysterious. One of the icons blinked, and at the same time he heard the now familiar ch
unk chunk chunk of dusters being launched. Moments later silver spheres blossomed in front of him, getting rapidly bigger as the Swiftwing overtook them. Suddenly one of them flared sun bright as an invisible laser beam blasted aluminum dust into energized ions. He had a single panicked second of adrenaline surge as it exploded past. They were shooting at him. Desperately he twitched the controls back and forth in what he hoped was a random and unpredictable pattern. At the same time hydraulics whined and the AI announced it was targeting something. Fourth Flight must be close behind, maybe already launching missiles.
So how far out were the battle stations? It didn’t really matter; he had no idea where they were, no idea what tactics to employ if he did know where they were. There was a wide difference between theory and practice, and all he knew was that every second he kept accelerating put them farther behind. The fighters could chase him, might catch him yet with their superior acceleration, but they had limited power reserves. If he could run far enough fast enough they would have to give it up and go home. Then the worry would be warships, cruisers and destroyers on patrol high up in the gravity well. They’d have his course information and they had both the power and the drives to intercept him. If he got caught by as much as a scout ship he’d die; it was that simple.
