The Man-Kzin Wars 07 Read online

  Memories of air gushing from the shattered helmet of an old friend, turning to glittering clouds of ice shards in the wan sunlight. The flash of a control board shorting out after a direct hit with a kzin particle beam. Worst of all, the ear-ringing clang of a railgun projectile hulling a ship, followed by the whining roar of escaping air. Bruno could only imagine the emotional impact of the deadly ballet of space warfare, the long periods of waiting and contingency planning punctuated by seconds of frenzied activity and terror. Carol compartmentalized her fears better than Bruno ever could. He accepted this.

  She exhaled loudly, stuffing the past mentally away, and stretched her head back and forth to relieve the tension. She released his hand, and patted it gently.

  "Don't you think that it's time?" Carol asked quietly, not looking at the Link clipped to the console in front of Bruno. "You can keep better track of the blips while Linked, and can oversee a faster start-up, can't you?”

  Bruno nodded, reaching over to squeeze her hand again. She didn't respond. "I take it that you just gave an order?" he asked.

  Carol turned and looked at him directly, harsh memories flitting like ghosts across the planes and angles of her face. "Yes," she said simply, none of her sadness at giving the order evident.

  Bruno nodded. He picked up the Link and inserted the plug into his neck socket, but couldn't keep his hand from trembling as he did so.

  ·CHAPTER FOUR

  Rrowl-Captain roared his anger, and the bridge crew of the Belly-Slasher fell instantly silent.

  "Initiate contingency plan Krechpt," he shrieked into the intership and shipboard intercoms.

  The ripping-cloth sound of the gravity polarizers suddenly became much louder. The hull seemed to shift and waver randomly beneath them as the fabric of space itself bent and twisted. Rrowl-Captain turned away from the intercom, eyes flicking at once to his command-chair thinplate. Status reports marched across his tactical screen in the dots-and-commas script of the kzin. The two other ships under his command were following orders as expected, a portion of his furious mind noted, racing away from one another at the limits of their gravitic drives.

  Rrowl-Captain turned to the source of the problem.

  "Strategist," he spat and snarled in the Hero's Tongue, whipping his naked pink tail in annoyance, "tell me why the monkeyship has deactivated its drive! They are far from turnover." The cool, dry ships air quickly filled with the captain's anger-smell, redolent with attack pheromones. His pelt, each hair erect with pent-up rage, gleamed under the bright orange illumination on the bridge.

  The kzin in charge of predicting human battle behavior stood very straight and still, with only the slightest droop of his whiskers and half-folded ears to suggest his discomfort. He slapped retracted claws against face in salute. "Dominant One," he began, "the humans must have detected us.”

  Rrowl-Captain choked back an outraged shriek and barely contained his fury, his reply acid-etched with purring sarcasm.

  "This I can perceive, O Master of Grass-Eating Slave Tactics! Please do not further strain your name-lacking honorless leaf-grazing mind by restating facts obvious to any true Hero with eyes and the Warrior Heart!”

  The captain peered hopefully at the other kzin, who blinked twice at this insulting profanity. Still, he was experienced with his commander's black moods, and wisely kept silent, waiting respectfully.

  Duty had battled honor in Rrowl-Captain's Warrior Heart constantly since the Third Fleet's destruction. He had kept shipboard discipline far more harsh and unyielding than considered routine for kzin warcraft. He chuffed air out through his nostrils in disgust, pleading silently with the One Fanged God for patience and wisdom.

  His three ships had been part of the vanquished Third Fleet, defeated yet again by these hairless monkeys, using their leaf-eating tricks against noble Heroes. Rather than dying with honor in an attack on Man-home as his Warrior Heart had demanded, Rrowl-Captain had obeyed the final command of the Dominant Commander of the Third Fleet, Chsst-Admiral.

  And in following his Duty, he had abrogated his Honor. It leaked from his very soul in shame. Rrowl-Captain's liver and heart never let him forget his dishonor.

  The three scout-cum-warships under Rrowl-Captain's direct command — Pouncing-Strike, Spine-Cruncher, and his own Belly-Slasher — had been carefully tuned and stealthed before their departure from Man-sun back toward Ka’ashi, or as the monkeys called it in their whining mewl of a language, Alpha Centauri. Rrowl-Captain's mission was to use his three warcraft to probe the spaces between the two stars, observing the soulless monkeys from afar, and tightbeaming ahead the gigabytes of information collected during the defeat of the Third Fleet.

  Chsst-Admiral, grizzled and radiation-scarred with the outward signs of his Warrior Heart, had been Rrowl-Captain's superior during the initial assault on Ka’ashi, long years before, and thus commanded respect and deference. Any kzin would follow the Dominant One of the Fleet into the Dark Pit itself.

  Chsst-Admiral had convinced Rrowl-Captain that his own Warrior's Path would be to humbly aid the full scale Heroes' Vengeance promised by the Fourth Fleet. He had obeyed Chsst-Admiral's commands, subjugating his honor to Fleet discipline, but his agreement still reeked faintly of cowardice, of grass-on-breath.

  Chsst-Admiral, of course, had showed vibrantly that his own heart and liver were a credit to the Patriarch in Castle Riit at far-off Kzin-home. He had died in the glorious suicide attack on the interstellar launcher on the moon of the large gas giant, which the monkeys called Juno.

  Rrowl-Captain snarled again at his lost honor, his memories like salt packed into a claw-slashed nose. He had dueled with two octals of other Heroes during his command, and Rrowl-Captain fingered their notched ears at his trophy belt in proud memory. The duels made him feel momentarily like a credit to his long-dead father and his mourned litter-brother, as well as the Riit Patriarch Himself.

  Yet the taste of cowardice, like that obtained by chewing roots and leaves, returned all too soon. With half his attention, Rrowl-Captain watched Strategist waiting silently, eyes averted yet forward, clearly ready for the attack. The other kzin believed that his commander would rend him limb from limb.

  This was not a surprise to the master of the Belly-Slasher. It had happened often enough in the past on this command bridge, after all.

  But Rrowl-Captain could afford to lose no more competent officers, particularly with this new monkey threat. He mastered his fury for the moment, and concentrated again on the issue at hand. Chsst-Admiral had ordered Rrowl-Captain's ships to act as observers in the long grass of deep space, attacking nothing. They were to prepare the way for the Fourth Fleet. And he had done so, at great cost to his honor and digestion.

  Yet this human ship, traveling from Man-home to the Ka’ashi system, was too rich a prize for any kzin to resist. Stealthed and invisible, Rrowl-Captain's ships had stalked from afar the queer monkey spacecraft for many watches, studying it. Its reaction drive was a shockingly efficient blaze of plasma and hard gamma radiation. Alien-Technologist had even suggested that the monkeys had developed a contramatter spacedrive, impossible as that seemed.

  But it was much more than a spacedrive, at least to a kzin with the true Warrior Heart! Such a device could be used to incinerate whole continents from orbit, like some enormous Flenser of Judgment out of forgotten myth. A fearsome weapon, sure to gain for its discoverer the approval of the Riit Patriarch Himself, and all that such approval would mean.

  Finally, Rrowl-Captain could wait no longer, and had moved his trio of warcraft slowly toward the monkeyship, preparing to capture this rich prize. Then the alien craft's drive had shut down! His tail lashed again in frustration.

  It would have been simple to capture the monkeyship had the humans not detected them. The only question would have been how many Heroes' lives to spend in minimizing harm to the ship and its contents. Perhaps the best plan would have been a large boarding party with kinetic penetration aids in reserve... Or Belly-Slasher or
one of his brother ships could have simply hammered the human craft with kinetic energy bombs, then landed some boarding parties of Heroes in the confusion.

  Such an approach would have done much to salve the wounded Honor of Rrowl-Captain.

  The lethal wash of gamma radiation and ionized gas pushing the monkeyship through space would have effectively prevented communication with the other monkeys at Man-home. The monkeys would simply think that their new vessel had failed, having hit some interstellar debris at nearly six eighths light-speed.

  Conquest-Governor would surely welcome Rrowl-Captain back to Wunderland, bearing such a rich prize. Honor, slaves, a place on the Governor's Council, landholdings, and kzinretti would have been his! Perhaps his own hunting park. Almost certainly a full Name!

  But this savory morsel had been snatched from his closing jaws by cowardly incompetence! Rrowl-Captain's killing teeth ached with the loss.

  The fury within his thwarted Warrior Heart, never far below the surface, boiled anew. Rrowl-Captain lifted his massive head and roared his frustration, slashing at the air in front of him with angry claws. The entire bridge crew slapped sheathed claws across faces in submissive salute.

  Rrowl-Captain grumbled and pushed his thinplate aside. He bolted upright to his full height of nearly three meters, like a bipedal tiger on anabolic steroids, and stalked the bridge as if he were seeking prey in a hunting park. The crew held their collective breaths, motionless, waiting to see who would be the captain's target.

  He padded silently up to Strategist, his voice now very calm and therefore particularly dangerous. The captain of the kzinti warship looked Strategist rudely in the eyes, kzin to kzin, in barely veiled challenge. His tail slowly moved from side to side, in sly counterpoint to his words.

  "So tell me, kzin-without-a-name, how the primitive monkeys, these humans, are able to detect our gravitic polarizers?" His contained fury revealed itself in a rictus grin of needle-sharp carnivore teeth.

  Strategist choked back his own growl of challenge, saying nothing. Rrowl-Captain contained a cough of approval.

  "They can detect our monopoles, true. Quite true." The captain tapped the other kzin's broad chest twice with an unsheathed claw as he spoke, a profound insult to any Hero.

  Strategist gurgled, trembling with the kzin combination of fear and rage.

  "Yet this is no great surprise," Rrowl-Captain half purred, "as the pitiful monkeys use monopoles themselves extensively and are therefore familiar with their properties. This is why we shield them from monkey instrumentation, as the smallest unblooded kitten could surmise." His tail flicked.

  Strategist gulped, gasped. In a thin, flat voice he started to speak. "Dominant One, it would seem — “

  "It would seem," Rrowl-Captain interrupted silkily, "that you would insult my intelligence, to claim that these pitiful monkeys can understand the workings of gravitic polarizers, yet still fly through space balanced on hot exhaust fumes?" He displayed his teeth in a wide grin, then picked between them with a sharp claw tip in derision and insult.

  Rrowl-Captain watched Strategist take a deep breath at the offensive slur to his ancestors, and twitched his tail with some satisfaction. There were some advantages to leadership after all.

  "These are monkeys," he continued, scorn dripping from every growling syllable of the Heroes' Tongue. "These nameless and honor-lacking humans are leaf-eating vermin... " he railed suddenly, again beginning to lose control. He wiped drool from his thin black lips with the back of a furred hand.

  Rrowl-Captain's anger concealed from his Heroes what he held secret in his heart of hearts: the gut-wrenching terror of entire fleets boiled to vapor by lasers that filled the sky, lasers everywhere, crewed by the seemingly puny monkeys. The horrible sensation of wishing to hide from enemies, to run from danger! His liver once more turned to water as the alien emotion gripped him.

  For a moment, Rrowl-Captain's eyes saw nothing but the awful green blaze of laser light filling the universe, his nostrils swarming with the odor of his own hidden cowardice, like the smell of a grazing animal.

  The scent of prey.

  The madness receded after a moment. Rrowl-Captain spat onto the deck and mumbled, half to himself. "Just big hairless ch'tachi, monkeys, with their inefficient fusion drives and puny lasers and particle beams... “

  The deck was silent, his crewkzin looking intently at the tapestry covered floorplates.

  He stopped, moistening a now dry nose-pad with his tongue carefully, trying to control his conflicting emotions.

  Breath steamed from his mouth in the chill air of Belly-Slasher. The captain's hairless, ratlike tail stood straight out in a posture of angry challenge.

  Strategist looked straight ahead, his violet eyes unreadable. After a respectful pause, he saluted again with sheathed claws and averted eyes. "Dominant One, I do not believe the humans can detect our gravitic polarizers under normal conditions; it must be that one or more of the polarizers are unbalanced.”

  "Oh?" Calm, silky.

  Strategist held his breath while Rrowl-Captain continued to stare at him, then finished, whiskers still twitching. "Unbalanced gravitic polarizers... will leave a faint graviton signature on mass-detection instruments.”

  Rrowl-Captain stood stock-still for a moment, thinking deeply. His fur, bristling with rage moments before, relaxed deceptively. The master of the Belly-Slasher began to groom himself thoughtfully, smoothing back his luxurious orange-red pelt with the back of an absently licked hand.

  "Urrr... yes," Rrowl-Captain agreed. "It would be difficult for these humans to detect us near light-speed by any other method, considering their primitive technology.”

  A hanging silence, as quiet as the moment before stalked prey is caught with killing jaws. In a single lithe bound the Captain leaped back to his command chair — and sat. Lounged. "Unbalanced gravitic polarizers," he hissed softly to himself. Pupils dilated and contracted as he considered implications.

  And the cause.

  Strategist gave another deferential salute — unnoticed — and then sat heavily at his station. The bridge crew remained silent, guessing with secret relief what would come next. They became calmer, waiting for the inevitable, not looking away from their thinplates.

  Rrowl-Captain smiled widely, but not with humor. "Engine-Tinker," he purred over the shipwide commlink, "do the memory of the Conquest Heroes of Wunderland the favor of reporting to your humble captain. I have some questions concerning your last routine balancing of the gravitic polarizers.”

  He chuckled low in his throat as he examined his right hand, back first, then the leathery palm. Rrowl-Captain extended his four black claws deliberately, one at a time. He began stropping them methodically on the worn, centimeter-thick Kdatlyno-hide arms of his command chair.

  Minutes passed slowly as the captain purred a kit's hunting tune to himself, the sounds of his sharpening claws loud on the command bridge. Rrowl-Captain directed the kzin named Communication-Officer to tightbeam Strategist's information to Pouncing-Strike and Spine-Cruncher, and take compensatory action. Still purring throatily, Rrowl-Captain reviewed his strategy regarding the monkeyship, making a few notes on his personal logscreen in the dots-and-commas script of the kzin. A new approach to dealing with the monkeyship occurred to him...

  The crew did not dare look up from their stations as the access door to the bridge irised open silently Rrowl-Captain lifted his lambent gaze from his thinplate, like a hunter rising from tall grasses. A hunter done with stalking, and ready to finish the hunt.

  The technician entered limp-tailed, crawling on his belly toward the command chair. The air seemed to grow thick and cloying as the captain began to growl, the image of a knife-toothed smile in his voice.

  Rrowl-Captain screamed and leaped.

  The crew relaxed slightly at their stations, their batlike ears folded tightly against the wet rending sounds on the bridge. They were familiar with their captains routine, having experienced it before. Shipboard disciplin
e would relax slightly for a time, and full attention could be placed on capturing the monkeyship.

  Also, there would be opportunities. Engine-Tinkers second would shortly be promoted, of course.

  ·CHAPTER FIVE

  Snick-click.

  Carol Faulk looked at Bruno's anxious face as he plugged the thick interface cable into the socket set in the left side of his neck. He looked almost wistful. She was half able to hide the wince she felt as she heard the sharp metallic sounds of the locking connector mechanism holding the cable firmly in place to his neck.

  Leech, she thought to herself, irrationally cursing the computer. But there was worse to come.

  Carol particularly hated the next part.

  With the cable hanging from his neck like a heavy-bodied electronic lamprey, Bruno smiled a little at her, a bit self-consciously. Much as she hated the knowledge, she knew that his expression was one of half-hidden anticipation.

  "Would you do the honors?" he asked her quietly.

  Bruno had little choice; due to its long-term risks, full Linkage was a command decision, and as such required Carol's direct and active approval. The ship sighed and muttered all around them now that the Sun-Tzu was in free-fall and the ever-present thrumming of the constant-boost drive was silent; a white noise of hissing ventilators and the muted clicking of servo-mechanisms filled her ears. Dust from the corners drifted on the ventilators breeze, glittering like tiny multicolored stars where it floated into the holoscreen projection beams.

  Carol nodded, molding her lips into the confident smile that she knew her lover wanted to see. She verbally told the computer to begin the full Linkage protocol, then repeated the approval two times, in standard confirmation procedure. Finally, she thumbed her console pad, entering the command into the Sun-Tzu's permanent log.