by Larry Niven
If it came to hard-edged hands, Cuiller would bet on the woman. Growing up in a near-weightless environment, she had the reach on Jook and was strong from an early life of wrestling rock drills and mandibles. The navigator once boasted that he had never lifted anything heavier than a booktape, a fork, or a squinch racquet.
“I guess not, Cap’n.” Jook shook his head.
“Any time, boy,” Krater said into his ear.
“Cut some slack, Lieutenant,” Cuiller told her. “…And that’s not a suggestion.”
“Yes, sir.” And still she did not relax the position of her limbs.
“Now, Lieutenant! Make space!”
Her hands flexed out of their semi-rigid, thumbs-in shape and her arms came down. Krater pirouetted a half-meter away from the navigator.
“That’s better…Sarah, I think you ought to take that ’cycler apart and find out why it’s making you sick. Adjust it to your own taste specs, if you like.”
“If that means I’ve got to clean out his shit, Captain—”
“It means you’ll tend to the equipment, Lieutenant. Your turn on the roster.”
She glared at him, then lifted her chin. “Aye, sir.”
“Jook, take station forward and get me a report on our mission profile to date.”
“That I can tell you at once. We’re only—”
“With a detailed threat analysis, based on all reported contacts logged throughout the Chord. Don’t rush yourself. Do it right. Work on saving our asses.”
“But, sir! We know the kzinti aren’t coming through here. That cyber projection is just—”
“Just the reason we’re out here. But I don’t want you taking an expert system’s analysis on faith. Do your own homework. Down in the library. Move it.”
“Aye, Cap’n.”
With Jook and Krater moving in different directions, on assignments that would occupy each of them for an hour or more, Cuiller could relax for a bit—unless Gambiel wanted to pick a fight, too. The commander drifted back up to the control yoke.
“Get it all settled?” Gambiel asked.
“Not that it’s your business,” Cuiller said shortly.
“Sorree!”
Nyawk-Captain awakened slowly. He spat the rusty taste of fear out of his mouth as soon as his brain had caught up with local reality and he could herd the monkeys back to their secret hiding places.
He checked the navigational repeaters at his station, verifying that Weaponsmaster had not let them drift off course during his watch at helm. No, Cat’s Paw was still headed far out into neutral space, away from the network of manned patrols and passive trip-monitors that the humans maintained along their nearer borders with a much-reduced Patriarchy.
The course his ship was following had evolved among the Patriarch’s closest strategists. These were kzinti so highly placed that each one had a full name, and it was death ever to speak of them as mere “strategists,” even in the aggregate. Except that they and their counsels were secret, and thus Nyawk-Captain and his crewmates could not know their names, and so could never speak of them. Clever.
Their plan, like its origins, was a similarly constructed puzzle, a series of boxes within boxes for the humans to discover and open. This was not perhaps as satisfying for Nyawk-Captain and the other kzinti as a scream and a leap, nor as honorable as one massive attack. But it was more likely to win results under the current circumstances.
A plan almost worthy of Hanuman.
Cat’s Paw and three other, similarly enhanced interceptors were moving secretly out into space that the humans had not yet explored. There, unobserved, each would soon turn and find its own path back into human space. Each would pass through a different sector, and the timing of their entries would be staggered, too, just enough to appear to human strategists as individual attacks. The humans would dismiss these transits as the movement of renegade kzinti, secret traders and raiders, and so not responsible to the Patriarchy and the humiliating papers that had been signed after Most Recent War.
Each interceptor would make an isolated attack against a single human world. The Paw at Margrave, the others simultaneously at Gummidgy, Canyon, and Silvereyes. With the new weapons they now carried, they could do a massive amount of planetary damage. Of course, the Paw would have to move very quickly through the Lambda Serpentis system—and find the Margravians very much asleep—if they were to be successful and still escape with their lives into deep space on the far side of the system.
But escape was not important. Survival was not important. Timing was everything.
The suddenness and brutality of the attacks would awaken the humans’ highest strategists to a possible military action. But an action falling where? To meet it, the humans would spread their fleet. “Trying to cover all the bases” was the human phrase his orders had referenced. It had the smell of a sports term, and true kzinti did not practice sports.
While the humans dispatched their ships and spent their resources investigating and healing the four damaged worlds, the kzinti Last Fleet would be riding behind only one of the interceptors. Just how far depended on the humans’ calculated reaction time and the reports of brave kzinti agents among the survivors on those shattered worlds. When human strength was at maximum dispersal, the Last Fleet would overwhelm the patrol screen, engulf the target planet, consolidate, and move on. The fleet would take two, three, perhaps even four key colony worlds before the humans could regroup and mount a defense. But by that time momentum and purpose would be riding with the kzinti. Confusion and alarm would be hindering the humans.
As a plan it was flawless.
As an actual attack, it just might work.
But timing would be everything.
On the seventy-first day, and twenty-four light-years into the unknown…
Uncharted but not unknown, Cuiller reminded himself. A thousand, a million times over the millennia, humankind had looked outward toward this sector and seen its stars—stars now hidden in the Callisto’s Blind Spot Some of these stars, judging by their lines in the mass pointer were even bright enough to be visible from Earth. But no one had taken a survey mission through here. Not after bumping into the kzinti coming the other way.
“Captain…” from Jook at the comm down by the pointer. “We’re going to graze the singularity limits of a star—”
“Initiating evasive.”
“No, wait. The mass says it’s a sol-type, G1. We might drop in for a look.”
“Again?”
“I’ve got some scatter that might be planets,” Jook said hopefully.
“Or another fully developed Oort cloud?”
“Well, we can’t know till we look…”
“We’ve got a mission to perform, Hugh,” Cuiller told him.
“Survey data is valuable, sir”
The commander sighed. Jook was right. And it was time for them to drop in and see some stars in visible light for a change, if only for an hour or so.
“Very well. Sing out when it’s time to decouple the hyperdrive.”
“Now!…sir.”
Cuiller hit the switches on reflex. It wouldn’t do any good to wander into a singularity. Stars bloomed in the nothingness beyond the wide window stripes in the ship’s surface covering.
“Which direction?” he asked.
“Off our port bow and now rolling up at, uh, 230 degrees.”
The commander looked and saw a bright yellow bead, big enough to begin showing a disk.
“Start plotting the planets, or whatever they are. I’ll wake Lieutenant Krater and get her on the console.”
“I’m awake,” she said, rolling out of her sleeping cocoon. “I felt the ship acquire momentum.”
“Jook’s got another possible planet. Give it the once over, will you, Sally? Full spectrum.”
“Gotcha.”
The crew settled into their workstations, except for Gambiel. Cuiller let the weapons officer go on sleeping, held in reserve against a probable long watch when they wer
e underway again.
After ten minutes, both Jook and Krater spoke at once.
“Hello!”
“I’ve got—”
“One at a time,” Cuiller ordered.
“I’ve found a planet,” the navigator said. “One body, no moons. It has an equatorial radius of about 3,400 kilometers, about the same as Mars. But it’s got a lot higher mass, pulls about point-seven-nine gee. We can move around easily enough, but if there’s an atmosphere it’s going to be dense and hot. The planet is far enough out from the primary for water to go liquid but not start icing down.”
“Spectral analysis says there’s atmosphere,” Krater confirmed. “Sixty-eight percent nitrogen. Twenty-two percent oxygen. Nine percent water vapor—so the air is pretty steamy, too. The rest is traces. We can breathe, unless we find pockets of poison gas or spores or something…But that’s not the big news. I’ve got a hard return!”
“On deep radar?” Jook asked eagerly.
“Of course. I thunked your planet once just for luck. And the return shows either a chunk of neutronium, or—”
“You weren’t scanning at the core?” Cuiller asked quickly.
“Naw, it shows up right near the surface.”
“Well, well.”
“You’re not going to make us go down there, are you, Captain?” Jook asked, inserting a mock whine in his voice. “You know we’ve got a mission to complete, with lots of phantom kzinti to chase.”
“Stow it, Hugh.” Cuiller grinned. “Give me a vector to the planet Sally, when we get close enough, localize that hard return for the navigational console and send it to Hugh…We make one pass over it in low orbit, Hugh, to get a fix on landing sites, and then we head in. Right? Look sharp, everybody. We could be going home rich.”
“Aye, sir!” from both of them.
From more than ten million kilometers out, they could see with the naked eye that the planet’s disk was unbroken. It showed a pale green atmosphere, banded with broad strips of white.
“Looks like a gas giant,” Cuiller said uneasily.
“No way, Cap’n,” Jook answered. “We definitely have rock.”
The green was the color of dilute free chlorine—lots of it. On a hunch, Cuiller asked Krater to recheck the spectralysis, which was taken by comparing incident light from the G-type primary with sunlight reflected off the planet.
“I do get some dropout lines for chlorine,” she said. “But not enough to color the atmosphere like that. The machine still says what it’s got is breathable.”
From a million kilometers away, they could see little more.
“The green is probably chlorophyll,” Krater observed. “We’re looking at grass fields, swamps, taiga, or all three.”
“Should be greener then,” said Gambiel, who was awake by now and at his forward station.
“Remember all the H2O in the air,” she told him. “We’re looking through a mile or two of light haze. A lot of reflectance there.”
“Oh.”
The haze appeared to deepen and grow whiter as they locked into an orbit. “More scatter effect,” Krater called it.
“Do you have any features around our deep return?” Cuiller asked.
“Captain, you’re looking at a billiard ball,” Jook announced. “I’m doing a navigational scan in the point one-meter range, and the spherical deviation is nil. A trifling amount of oblateness. Otherwise smooth. I mean, a rise of fifty meters would be a mountain range down there.”
“Then we can set down anywhere,” Cuiller summarized.
“Well…” Jook hesitated.
“Give me a fix on that deep radar pattern, Hugh,” Cuiller told him, “and I’ll kill the orbit.”
“You’ve got it, Cap’n. Deceleration point coming up in two minutes.”
“Sally, do you see any change in that pattern?”
“No, what you’re looking at is just what we’ve had from the first, allowing for scale change. I read the return image as just about a meter in any dimension.”
“Better all the time…You’ll have to reel in the whip now,” he told her.
Because a General Products hull blocked all radiation outside the visible spectrum, Callisto communed with her environment through a trailing string of antennas and sensors that wound on a reel in her tail section. The sensor string would not survive the buffeting of an atmospheric entry. “Aye, Captain.” Krater keyed the proper contacts.
“All right, people,” Cuiller called out, “strap in.”
He counted the whirs and clicks as the crew pulled out the gravity webbing and made themselves fast at station. Cuiller fastened himself down last.
“One minute to mark,” from Jook. “You going to take this one in manually?”
“I need the practice,” Cuiller said.
“Easier to let the computers do it…”
Cuiller thought about that, looking down at the nearly white curve of the horizon. “We’ve got room to play around, surely.”
“All right…Mark!”
The commander closed a series of switches, engaging the external ion engine. The ship vibrated, and Cuiller felt his body sway forward against the retaining strands.
Callisto glided down in a long curve. Her forward quadrant glowed where the external ceramic coating—which deflected laser attacks tuned in visible light—covered the impervious General Products surface. The hull itself remained serenely clear, except for a buffeting layer of ionized air.
At 2,000 meters above the surface, Cuiller terminated the ion drive and brought her gliding around on inertial thrusters, maneuvering under his own eye-hand coordination. He glanced at the repeater from Krater’s station.
“I’m going to set down about two kilometers from that reflection,” he announced. “Not too far to walk, but not close enough to disturb it.”
No comment from the crew, which he took for agreement. As Callisto cut through the mist, the planet’s surface was revealed as a deep and startling green. Cuiller was reminded of pictures he’d seen of Ireland but then amended that. This was bright enough to be an enhanced color graphic of Ireland, with overdrive on the yellow and cyan pigments. Jook had not overstated the flatness. Even from a hundred meters up, Cuiller could not see any hill or wrinkle higher than two or three meters. No valleys either. And no boulders, trees, rivers, lakes, nor any other feature. Just a deep and rustling green vegetation.
“Settling in,” he said, killing forward motion and dropping the lift smoothly toward a steady seven-point-seven-three meters per second, just enough to counter local gravity. When the greenery—it looked like large and feathery leaves—reached up to touch the clear window in the hull’s underside, he backed the thrusters down to zero and switched them off.
“Captain!” Jook called out. “Check your navigational radar!”
“What? Oh shit!” He saw the 120-meter discrepancy immediately.
The leaves flared back around the window below and revealed lighter green strings of moss and the wet black bark of tree branches. Between them, Cuiller could see more layers of green and black strands, receding indefinitely, with nothing solid under them.
He got his hands back on the switches for the inertial thrusters and initiated a restart. But before he could key in the full sequence, Callisto’s tail, weighted down with the unbalanced mass of the hyperdrive engine, broke through the surface.
It happened too fast. Cuiller was still thrusting on the ship’s long axis, but Callisto was now falling nearly vertically. He tried to correct—and only pushed her backward into a tangle of branches and vines. Their springiness absorbed the horizontally vectored thrust for ten meters of travel, then rebounded, shoving Callisto down her own hole.
They all felt the shock when the stern contacted firm ground at last. No one cried out, but someone among the crew gave an involuntary gasp. Cuiller, glancing down the spindle into the maze of machinery, could see a subtle misalignment. Internal structures had shifted. He could also hear things falling, plink and clunk, along th
e hull. Not all of them were personal effects shaken out of the sleeping cocoons.
The bow and the forward band of windows, around the control yoke, were still angled above the leaflayer, exposed in misty sunlight. Cuiller’s fingers were dancing over the switches, trying to get thrust under them and lift clear. But the ship was sliding, changing orientation too fast. He and Gambiel watched the world rotate and sag as the hull’s weight found paths of least resistance among the branches and vines. Callisto swung and turned, walked and slid. A green gloom rose up around their window. Cuiller quit trying with the controls and lifted his hands clear.
“Hang on, people!”
Finally, only the forward tip of the spindle was caught in the branches, and they were slipping away to the left and right, passing Callisto side to side, as they got out of the way of her mass. In two more seconds, the ship was free and fell a hundred meters at the bow along her own length.
Wham!
More clatter came up from the hull behind Cuiller, but then his ear caught a louder groan. At first he thought it came from one of his crew, until Cuiller realized that one of the weapons pods, located forward of the control yoke, was moving. Right before the commander’s and tactical officer’s widening eyes, it turned on its own axis and fell through the open space ten centimeters in front of their toes. Severed conductors in a cable tray snapped and fizzled before the automatic extinguishers kicked in with a chill cloud of carbon dioxide.
The ship rolled almost 180 degrees in settling, and the weapons pod swung back, now poised above them. It caught up on the lateral strut that braced Cuiller’s and Gambiel’s watch-keeping station, and it stopped moving.
“Everybody Sit tight till the ship quiets down,” the commander ordered. They were all hanging by their ears now.
“I got nowhere to go,” Gambiel breathed beside him.
The infrastructure creaked and groaned, but nothing more came loose.
“Let’s try to get damage reports before we shut down.”
“Aye, Captain,” the crew called back raggedly.
In the space of two minutes, they had logged the ship’s status—weapons, propulsion, sensors, life support—at their various duty stations. Callisto had lost that forward weapons pod for certain, and the sensor whip was not reporting, even from its reeled-in position. Two portside thrusters were impaired, if not inoperable. The recycling system had lost function. Auxiliary power was down by three charge cells. And the ship was oriented horizontally in a 170-degree roll—standing on their heads, as it were.
