Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - V Read online

  HUMANS ARE FULL OF SURPRISES…

  * * *

  Even though the human was now unarmed, its stance was not that of prey. He was actually challenging…

  Human and kzin confronted each other with a long stare. The kzin seemed to be focusing on the Hellflare tattoo. Maybe the warcat did understand its meaning.

  The kzin screamed and leaped directly at Gambiel.

  Gambiel lifted his left foot from the entangling vines, straightened his right leg and—hoping he wouldn’t screw himself right down into the criss-crossed foliage—performed a perfect veronica around the swinging left paw. Its claws extended five centimeters outside the flashing orange blur. As the furred flank passed, Gambiel struck backhanded at the third skeletal nexus. He heard as much as felt the joint crack.

  The kzin’s scream rose an octave in pitch.

  The warrior came back on attack with a feint. Gambiel ignored the stroke but still countered with a twisting punch. It found only air and a whisk of fur.

  In two more exchanges, the kzin absorbed one painful blow, and Gambiel took a raking that opened his right arm and shoulder to the bone. As he was trying to press back the flap of flayed skin, he felt a jet of arterial blood. The fourth claw had struck higher on his neck than he thought.

  The kzin, sensing imminent victory, prepared its last charge.

  Gambiel then made the decision that had loomed over his entire life for so long. He would not step aside again. He met the charge full on—with a stopkick whose perfect focus on the center of the kzin’s skull was one-half centimeter longer than the warcat’s reach. His blow cracked that skull a half-second before the eight claws swung across his torso in converging slices.

  MAN-KZIN WARS V

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1992, by Larry Niven

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  ISBN: 0-671-72137-2

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First Printing, October 1992

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  CONTENTS

  IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING, Jerry Pournelle & S.M. Stirling

  HEY DIDDLE DIDDLE, Thomas T. Thomas

  IN THE HALL

  OF THE

  MOUNTAIN KING

  •

  Jerry Pournelle

  S.M. Stirling

  Copyright © 1992 by Jerry Pournelle & S.M. Stirling

  • PROLOGUE

  Durvash the tnuctipun knew he was dying. The thought did not bother him overmuch—he was a warrior of a peculiar and desperate kind and had never expected to survive the War—but the consciousness of failure was far worse than the wound along his side.

  Breath rasped harsh between his fangs. Thin fringed lips drew back from them, flecked with purple blood from his injured airsac. Unbending will kept all fourteen digits splayed on the rough rock; the light gravity of this world helped, as well. Cold wind hooted down from the heights, plucking at him until he came to a crack that was deep enough for a leg and an arm; the long flexible fingers on both wound into irregularities, anchoring him. He turned his head back down into the valley and closed both visible-light eyes, opening the third in the center of his forehead and straining against the dark into the depths of the valley. Yes. Multiple heat-sources in the thrintun-size range, and there were no large endothermic animals on this world. Nothing but thrintun and their slaves and foodyeast in the oceans and huge bandersnatch worms to convert it into protein.

  Light-headed, Durvash giggled at that. There had been bandersnatch on this world, until the supposedly nonsentient worms had all turned on their thrint masters one day. Just as the sunflowers that guarded Slaver estates had all focused their beams inward. A thousand other surprises had happened that day; two centuries before Durvash was born, at the beginning of the War. The Slavers had never suspected, never suspected that the tnuctipun engineers had devised a barrier against their telepathic hypnosis, never suspected that the tnuctipun fleet that vanished into space when the Slavers found their homeworld would return one day. Thrint were fewer now.

  So are tnuctipun, he thought, sobering; it did not do to depend on Slaver stupidity anymore. Most of the very stupid ones had died early in the conflict, along with a dozen thrintun slave species. The survivors were desperate. The information he had weaseled out of the base on this world was proof of that.

  Durvash continued scanning, straining his eye up into the lower electromagnetic spectra. Over a dozen thrintun were toiling up the slopes below him. They had slave trackers—a species of borderline sapience but very sensitive noses—and hand weapons, and a powered sled with limited flight capabilities. He drew his sidearm, a round ball of energy with a handle, and whispered to it. The tool writhed and settled into a pistol-shape; he spoke instructions and an aiming-grid opened out above it. The map of the valley showed geological fault lines, but he would have to be very careful.

  A word marked a spot on the map. “Twenty nanoseconds,” he said, and turned to jam his head against the rock and squeeze all three eyes shut. Holding the weapon behind him he pulled the trigger. It would fire only for the specified time, on the specified spot…whuump. CRACK. Hot air blasted at him, slamming him back and forth, until broken shards of bone in his thorax gnawed at the edges of his breathing-sac. Automatic reflex clamped his nostril shut and made him want to curl into a ball, but tnuctipun had evolved as arboreal carnivores on a world of very active geology. They had a well-founded instinct about hanging on tight when the ground shook. Then rock groaned all around him, loud enough almost to drown out the sound of a falling mountainside across the valley, megatons of mass avalanching down on the river and the thrint hunters.

  Total matter-energy conversion is a very active thing, even if only for twenty nanoseconds in a limited space.

  Instinct kept his digits clamped tight on rock and weapon. When he woke again, he thought it was night for a moment. Then he realized it was only blackness before his eyes, and the pain began. It came and went in waves, in time to the thundering in his resonator membranes; his neck hurt from the loudness of it. Durvash spat blood and phlegm and growled deep in his throat. He crawled up the rock, crawled and crawled until he left a broad dark smear on the stone, fresh trail for the thrint hunters that would follow. He almost missed the cover of his hidehole.

  Opening it was more pain, the pain of full consciousness to tap out the code sequence. By the time he reached the end of the tunnel bored through the mountain and sank into the control chamber of the tiny spaceship, he was whimpering for his mother. He made it, though, and slapped a palm down on the controls. Medical sensors sedated him and began the process of healing as best they could; other machines activated remote eyes and prepared to lift off as soon as practical.

  I made it, he knew, as pain lifted and darkness drifted down. Compensators whined as the ship lifted. We can stop Suicide Night.

  Halfway around the planet a single unwinking eye looked down on a display. A hand like a three-fingered mechanical grab touched controls.

  “Launch a Godfist at these coordinates,” the thrint officer rasped, his tendrils clenched tight to his mouth in determination.

  “Master—” the three-armed slave technician said in agitation. A Godfist was a heavy bombardment wea
pon, a small spaceship in itself with a high-level computer, and well-armed for self-defense. The warhead held nearly a kilogram of antimatter. After it landed there would be very little left of the continent.

  OBEY, the thrint commanded. The Power clamped down brutally; the Slaver could feel the technician’s acute desire to be elsewhere.

  I wish I were elsewhere too, the thrint thought bitterly, watching the Godfist lift on the remote screens. I wish I were at the racetrack or with a female. I wish I were small and back home with Mother.

  “What does it matter?” he said to the air. “We’re all going to die anyway.” In about twenty years; the garrison here was to withdraw and leave only the foodyeast-supervisor quite soon. Dubious if they would make it to the next thrint-held system, anyway. The Power was of little use in a space battle against shielded tnuctipun vessels. “At least this powerloss-sucking tnuctipun spy will die before us.”

  As it turned out, he was wrong.

  • CHAPTER ONE

  Mixed crowd tonight, Harold thought, as he watched Suuomalisen’s broad and dissatisfied back push through the crowd and the beaded curtain over the entrance. Sweat stained the fat man’s white linen suit, and a haze of smoke hung below the ceiling as the fresher system fought overstrain. The screened booths along the walls and the tables around the sunken dance-floor were crowded, figures writhing there to the musicomp’s Meddlehoffer beat, a three-deep mob along the long brass-railed bar. Blue uniforms of the United Nations Space Navy, gray-green of the Free Wunderland forces, gaudy-glitzy dress of civilian hangers-on and the new civilian elite of ex-guerrillas and war profiteers grown rich on contracts and confiscated collabo properties. Drinking, eating, talking, doing business ranging from the romantic to the economic, or combinations; and most were smoking as well. Some of the xenosophont customers would be uncomfortable in the extreme; Homo sapiens sapiens is almost unique in its ability to tolerate tobacco.

  Tough, he decided. Outside the holosign would be floating before the brick: HAROLD’S TERRAN BAR: A WORLD ON ITS OWN. Below that in lower-case print: humans only. The fat man had chosen to ignore that in his brief spell as quasi-owner, and Harold agreed with the decision. The sign had been a small raised finger to the kzinti during the occupation years; now that humans ruled the Alpha Centauri system again, anyone who could pay was welcome. There were even a depressed-looking pair of kzin in a booth off at the far corner, the hiss-spit-snarl of the Hero’s Tongue coming faintly through their privacy screen. That was the only table not crowded, but quarter-ton felinoid carnivores did not make for brash intrusion.

  But it’s a human hangout, and if the aliens don’t like it, they can go elsewhere, he decided.

  “Glad to see the last of him, boss,” the waitress said, laying a platter and a stein in front of him. “I’d rather work for a kzin.”

  “Good thing you didn’t have to, then,” Harold said, a grin creasing his basset-hound features between the jug ears. Suuomalisen had bought under the impression—correct—that Harold was on the run from the collaborationist government, right towards the end of the kzinti occupation. He had also been under the impression—false—that he was buying a controlling interest; in fact, the fine print had left real control with a consortium of employees. He had been glad to resell back to the original owner, and at a tasty profit for Harold.

  Akvavit, beer chaser, and plate of grilled grumblies with dipping sauce called; he added a cigarette and decided the evening was nearly complete.

  “Completely complete,” he murmured, as his wife joined him; he stood and bowed over a hand.

  “What’s complete?” she said. Ingrid Schotter-Yarthkin was tall, Belter-slim; the strip-cut of her hair looked exotic above the evening gown she wore to oversee the backroom gambling operation.

  “Life, sweetheart.”

  “At seventy-three?” she said; Wunderland years, slightly shorter than Terran. She had been only two years younger than he when they were growing up in the old Wunderland before the ratcat invasion. Now, time-dilation and interstellar cold sleep had left her less than half his biological age. “Middle-aged spread already?”

  “I’m spreading myself thin, personally,” Claude Montferrat-Palme said, sliding in to join them.

  Harold grunted. The ex-policeman was thin, with the elongated build and mobile ears of a purebred Wunderland Herrenmann. He also wore the asymmetric beard favored by the old aristocracy.

  “Seems sort of strange to be back to private life,” Harold said musingly.

  Claude shuddered. “Count it lucky we weren’t put before a court,” he said.

  “Speak for yourself.”

  Claude winced slightly; he had been police chief of Munchen under the kzinti occupation. Resister before Wunderland surrendered to the invaders, then a genuine collaborator; someone had to hold society together, to get whatever was possible from the kzin. Earth was losing the war. But then—

  Then Ingrid came back, with the Belter captain, and Claude’s world came apart. His help to the resistance had been effective, and timely enough to save him from a firing squad. Not timely enough to save his job as police commissioner, of course. Harold was tarred with the edge of the same brush; anyone who made money under the occupation was suspect in these new puritanical days, as were the aristocrats who had perforce cooperated with the alien invaders. There was irony for you…especially considering how the commons had groveled to the kzin, and worked to keep their war factories going during the invasions of Sol System. Double irony for Harold, since he was a Herrenmann’s bastard and so never really accepted by his lather’s kindred. That might have changed if folk knew exactly what Harold and Ingrid and that Sol-Belter Jonah Matthieson had done out in the Serpent Swarm.

  It would be too an exaggeration to say that the three of them—well, they three plus Jonah Matthieson—had won the war; but it wouldn’t be too large an expansion of the truth to say that without them the war would have been lost.

  “Heroes are not without honor,” Claude said. “Save in their own countries. Perhaps we should write a book to tell our true story.”

  “Sure,” Harold said. “That would really make that ARM bastard happy. Right now he’s happy, but—”

  Claude’s knowing grin stopped him. “Yes, of course. No books.” He shrugged. “So we know, but no one else does.”

  And at that General Early had been tempted to make all four of them vanish, no matter their service to the UN. There would have been no trials. Freedom or a quiet disappearance, and for some reason—perhaps Early really had some human emotions—they’d been turned loose with their memories more or less intact.

  They all frowned; Harold thoughtfully, looking down at the wineglass he rolled between his palms.

  “I don’t like it,” Ingrid said. “Oh, I don’t miss the fame—more trouble than it’s worth, we’d have to beat off publicity-seekers and vibrobrains with clubs. I don’t like General Buford Early—remember, I worked for him back in Sol System”—Ingrid had escaped the original kzin attack on Alpha Centauri and made the twenty-year trip back to Sol in suspended animation—“and I don’t like the ARM getting a foothold here. What did our ancestors come here for, if not to get away from them?”

  Both men nodded agreement. In theory, the ARM were the technological police of the United Nations, charged with keeping track of new developments and controlling those that menaced social peace. That turned out to be all new technology, and the ARM had grown until it more-or-less set UN policy. For three centuries they had kept Sol System locked in pacifistic stasis, to the point where even the memory of conflict was fading and a minor scuffle got people sent to the psychists for “repair.” That placid changelessness and the growing sameness of life in the overcrowded, overregulated solar system had been a strong force behind the interstellar exodus.

  The ARM had kept Solar humanity from making ready after the first kzinti warship attacked a human vessel, right up to the arrival of the First Fleet from conquered Alpha Centauri. The operators of th
e big launch-lasers on Mercury had had to virtually mutiny to fight back, even when the kzin battlecruisers started beaming asteroid habitats.

  “I don’t like the way Early’s so cozy with the new government,” Harold growled.

  “In the long run, luck goes only to the efficient,” Claude said, and the others nodded again, because it wasn’t hard to guess his train of thought.

  The war was ended by pure luck: the weird aliens who sold the faster-than-light spacedrive to the human colonists on We Made It had really won the war for Sol. The kzin Fifth Fleet would have crushed all resistance, if there had been time for it to launch from Alpha Centauri and cover the 4.3 light-years at .8c. Chuut-Riit, the last kzin Governor, had been a strategic genius; even more rare in his species, he never attacked until he was ready. Fortunately for humanity, that Chuut-Riit hadn’t lived to send that fleet.

  It had been Buford Early’s idea to send in an assassin team with the scoopship Yamamoto’s raid as a cover. Jonah, and Ingrid, and an intelligent ship that had gone insane. A mad scheme, one that shouldn’t have worked, but it was all Earth could try—and it had worked. Was General Early a military genius, or incredibly lucky?

  Now the hyperdrive would open the universe to Man. The problem was that it eliminated the moat of distance; the hyperwave, the communications version of the device, gave contact with Earth in mere hours. Cultures grown alien in centuries of isolation were thrown together…and serious interstellar politics became possible once more, and ARM General Buford Early was right in the middle of it all.

  “I thoroughly agree,” Claude said. “He’s got Markham under his thumb, and a number of others. It’s already unwise to cross him.”

  “As Jonah found out,” Ingrid sighed.

  Harold felt a prickle of irritation. True, Ingrid had chosen him—when both Claude and the Sol-Belter were very much available—but he didn’t like to be reminded of it. Even less he didn’t want to be reminded that she and Jonah had been lovers as well as teammates. It hadn’t helped that the younger man refused all help from them, later.