Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII (Man-Kzin Wars Series Book 8) Read online

  “The doc wasn’t programmed for war,” said Steve. “How could it have been? It was doing the job it was programmed to do on Earth: to identify neurosis and relieve the symptoms while the neurosis cured itself. If it identified a psychosis like paranoia it would treat it. And it had no way of telling if that neurosis or paranoia was justified. You might say its job was to unfit us for war, and we achieved what we did in spite of it. We’re not used to this. I knew we weren’t used to physical pain. We turned away from it. I should have realized we weren’t used to any kind of pain. The doc was only doing its job by deadening it. But, Selina, you didn’t see it either.”

  “You’re forgetting. Your doc gave me a going-over as soon as I got aboard. Filled me with stuff. I didn’t ask what. Like you, I’m still the creature of our culture.”

  “Another thing. Relativity. With time-dilation effects we will be there even sooner from our point of view.”

  Words like a low upon a wound.

  “Another thing. Those two Kzin ships got behind us. It’s against the odds that that would happen again. We can’t expect our weapon to be any use at the next encounter.”

  “It we had a Kzin gravity-engine we could turn and fight them. Or use the ramscoop-field, if it affects them like other chordates.”

  “If . . .”

  “If we had a gravity-engine we could turn and run. Head for the colonies on the other side of Space. Or head back to Earth . . . Warn them in person if they have ignored the messages . . . Pity about the physics.”

  There was no need to spell out what the physics were. They all knew that with the Angel’s Pencil’s forward velocity the turn-around time ruled it out.

  “Why talk of impossibilities? We haven’t a gravity-engine.”

  Despair filled the room like fog. It was not hard to imagine, once the obvious had been spelt out, what their reception at Epsilon Eridani would be. Think! Think! Selina told herself. Think like a Kzin! Think like Telepath.

  “We do have a gravity-engine,” she said. “The barge is a tug. It could turn us. With the delta-v we have plus the gravity-engine we could turn quite tightly and still keep enough velocity for the ramscoop to function. The Kzin use the gravity-fields to shield themselves from acceleration effects. We could do the same. The gravity-motor is damaged but we can repair it. Even with losing some delta-v that would give us the capacity to maintain constant one-G acceleration. In a year we would be back to .8 Light . . . or run our own drive and the Kzin engine together. If we can control the gravity-field we can accelerate as fast as may be without medical problems.”

  They looked at her as though they might not be dead meat. Then Steve said:

  “We can’t use a gravity-engine. We sent Earth all the specifications we could of the first ship’s engine. It is still stowed here in pieces.”

  “Then we have two. Even better!”

  “No. Hear me out, Selina. The engine we have was also initially damaged by our laser, although we salvaged all we could of it. We can describe most of the parts. We can film them and transmit the pictures. If Earth and the Belt believe us they can duplicate them. That’s all we can do. A steam engineer of five hundred years ago could have described the shape of the parts of a Bussard Ramjet, but do you think he could have understood it from that? I’m not saying repairing and operating them is beyond our intelligence but the technology is too different, given the time we’ve got.

  “We have two damaged engines that we don’t know how to repair. We don’t even know how to make the tools to work on them. Even if we had an engine in one piece we can’t understand it. We can’t operate it. It’s like trying to build the Dean Drive. Tanj! Maybe it is the Dean Drive, or its descendant.

  “Ours has melted parts, yours has holes in it. They have massive energy-containment fields and if we were to activate them without those fields fully functioning . . . well, that would be that.

  “Oh, I grant you that perhaps we could learn, given years and research facilities and skilled teams. But we are a small specialized crew, and our colonists are frozen embryos. How many years do we have? We are getting deeper into Kzin space every moment.”

  “Then it lies with Telepath and me,” Selina said. “He had Weapons-Officer’s knowledge. If he still has that, we have a chance.”

  “If he still has it?”

  “Telepathically-acquired knowledge decays much quicker than ordinary memories. Telepaths would go mad much more quickly otherwise. But he was in Weapons-Officer’s mind not long ago.

  “I have some of it, thanks to the Bridge . . . Weapons Officer was working on gravity-motors. Between us we may be able to retrieve something.”

  She was speaking in a peculiar mumbling monotone now, with the grating Kzin accent surfacing in it.

  “But this makes it a bigger, harder thing than I thought. Rearranging his chemistry to cure his addiction—or to stop the withdrawal syndromes killing him—is complex enough, but it’s something the Kzin autodoc and I may be able to do, if I can give him psychic support through it. He/we knew that—Kzin reparatory medicine is good. But to do it without scrambling his addict-acquired memories as well . . . If I can reach him, talk him through it, you might say . . . but it’s much more than that . . . I haven’t the human words . . . But to cure him of his addiction without breaking the bridge . . . I feel it can be done—Telepaths have secrets and I know some of them now. But it’s not going to be easy.”

  “If he’s still alive.”

  “He’s still alive. If he were dead I can assure you I would know.”

  Jim suppressed a shudder. This woman’s bonding to the cat made him physically disturbed.

  Selina’s face was changing now. Color was draining from it. Her features were twisting into something like the Leonine Mask of leprosy. “But he’s sick. He’s very sick. He’s in great pain . . . He’s not strong enough. Urrr.”

  “What should we do?”

  “I must go back to the barge,” said Selina. “I should be as close to him as possible.”

  Admiral’s Barge

  Stars whirled above me. I entered a new space: a bowl like the arena at the training-crèche. And the cliffs. I stood about it, and I knew they were minds to which I must cling.

  The cliff of Zraar-Admiral’s mind. I clutched it, knowing he was dead, and felt my claws pass through empty air, as when they had tried, long ago at the crèche, to make a fighter of me. But they had taken me from the other kits and let me live, like the science-geniuses and other despised ones, for they saw that I was a Telepath (“You may be the greatest of us.” First Telepath had said, one sleep-time aboard Gutting Claw).

  Something held me then. Was it something from Zraar-Admiral’s mind? Had I indeed touched the Dead?

  “You are the closest to a warrior . . . hold yourself like a warrior then . . . fight like a warrior. Earn the compliment I paid you.”

  Was it he? What was that other mind that held me like the mind of First Telepath? Or Karan?

  “The way we were made was not the only way.”

  I could not tell. Were they all come from Telepath’s poor sick mind?

  And then, in the cliffs and tunnels, the running white lattices, and bare plain and the grass that was both the orange of Kzin and the green of Earth, I saw Selina coming towards Telepath, towards me, bending above me, and felt her holding me. And somewhere a yellow sun was rising.

  GALLEY SLAVE

  Jean Lamb

  Copyright © 1998 by Jean Lamb

  Dr. Marybeth Bonet swore softly to herself as she tried to get two different sets of computer codes disentangled from each other. If Lt. Thomas Dalkey hadn’t been so handsome, she would have killed him. He was navigator of the Cormorant, a heavily armed packet ship patrolling the edges of the solar system against the enemy. He’d earned a number of medals for courage and heroism defending human space against the sudden invaders. Unfortunately, he had also had the brilliant idea of tying the autochef into the main computer so it could be programmed from the bridg
e in emergencies. Why didn’t people read the manual?

  She was used to this kind of thing. This wasn’t the first time she’d had to fix these little problems, especially since she’d designed a lot of the food programs in the first place. Admittedly, Dalkey hadn’t complained about the eternal diet of waffles the autochef now seemed to favor. He’d asked for help only when the roast beef and gravy sequence had showed up in the star charts. As a civilian expert, she was more used to hearing grumbling about the food.

  Marybeth had three main options. One was to exercise her global search and destroy option and restore both computers to their original configuration through manual recovery procedures. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible in the middle of this mission, or she would never have been sent out here from Terra in the first place. The giant felines that called themselves the kzinti were an ever-present threat. As she thought about them, she bit her lip with anger. The human race had finally learned how to live with itself—and they came. They had disrupted everything in less than a generation. She glanced down at the knife she wore in its sheath on her thigh. Even that was a sign how far the kzinti had driven the humans out of their new Garden of Eden. Anything she could do to make the aliens pay was worth it. Granted, humans now had decent gravity systems on ship since adapting stolen kzinti ones—but it was a poor trade.

  Her second option was to make Tom’s plan work without disrupting either system. There wasn’t enough time, though. She copied off his preliminary attempts, in case she could do something with them once she was back. The idea itself wasn’t so bad, but the execution needed work. Marybeth proceeded as swiftly as she could on her third option, which was to delete any extraneous material from both systems. She had already designed an override sequence to allow the autochef to accept new menu items now, while Dalkey had nearly cleaned out the nav computer. Unfortunately, the override sequence was rather unwieldy. If there was enough memory left, she could boil it down into a macro, or even install it to the normal add menu, then dump it once it was no longer needed.

  Marybeth closed down her work, sighed, then stripped in the small changing room next to the even tinier shower. If she was going to get sweaty, she’d rather do it with Tom Dalkey, and not slaving over a hot autochef! All the crew members had shown interest in her when she’d transferred to the Cormorant. Being recognizably female helped, though she sometimes wondered if that was an absolute requirement on a ship starved for new faces. Still, as a pale office blob she rarely got such attention except on temporary duty jaunts, and she enjoyed it.

  The only one she felt anything for, surprisingly enough, was Tom Dalkey, the handsome, dark-skinned navigator who’d caused the problem in the first place. It’d started as pure pheromones, but she wondered if it could be something more eventually. She’d liked the way he smiled at her when he ducked his head to get into the galley, and had learned to like everything else about him, too. She grinned to herself as she hung up the knife in its sheath by her clothes. She’d had to “accidentally” forget it three times before Tom got brave enough to proposition her.

  Her smile faded. Another social change chalked up to the kzinti. Leaving the Golden Age had put a lot of women right back where they’d started. Warrior instinct expressed itself at home as well as out in space. A compromise made in the region once known as the Pacific Northwest was to allow only women to have knives sharp enough to cut durasteel, easily spotted by the blue-green tinge of the metal on their edges, as if the rattlesnake sheath wasn’t enough. Fortunately the gossip shows adored focusing on the custom, while Detective Darla Dagger was the most popular character on Cascade Cop. It certainly saved time explaining things.

  Marybeth snickered when she remembered the combination hygiene and knife-fighting class she and her friends had taken as young adolescents, known as “The Miracle of Life and How to Avoid It.” The Alderson boy had been lucky to lose only two fingers when he’d picked on the class wimpette after her first lesson. All the girls had thrown Jenny Hooks a party, once she and the boy had gone through the inquiry process. Jenny could have lost her right to carry the knife for up to three years if she’d done it maliciously. Marybeth remembered hearing about a woman who’d lost it for life after killing someone in a robbery.

  She gently patted the knife’s hilt and draped her clothes over it. The one time she’d had to use it to defend herself, she’d thrown up afterwards. It still beat knowing she was at the mercy of anyone stronger than she was. Besides, the court had cleared her completely.

  And it made wanting someone all that much more fun when she knew it was her idea!

  She smiled to herself as she squeezed into the shower tube and turned on the water. If she positioned herself just right, the jets hit exactly where she meant them to. A pity these things weren’t big enough for two! Marybeth fantasized what she and Tom were going to do when the computers were all tucked in their beds. The hot, soapy water rushed over her body . . .

  She heard an enormous bang. The shower’s emergency seal whirred shut. Marybeth hit her head hard on a sprayer as a jolt sent her into the wall. Some of the water turned pink as it ran into the recycler. The small compartment tilted all the way to the side, then righted itself. Just as well it was so small. The walls helped support her. She felt sick and dizzy as the gravity wobbled and she lost consciousness.

  After a time, the door opened. A furred, clawed nightmare glared at her. She shrieked and hysterically cowered in the little room she had. An enormous, tufted paw reached in. She attacked it with her teeth and fingernails as she felt herself being pulled out. She got in one good bite, mostly a mouthful of fur, then was flung toward the bulkhead. She barely covered her head with her arms before she hit.

  Marybeth collapsed as soon as she slid to the floor. Something warm and wet trickled down her shoulders. Perhaps if she played dead . . . She lay with her face against the bulkhead. She heard screams and blaster fire. She just lay there for a while. The noise moved away. She moved her head carefully and cautiously looked around. Nobody was there. She stood up slowly. The walls kept blurring in front of her. She felt better when she closed her eyes and felt her way along. The galley was close. She knew her way around it well.

  Marybeth opened her eyes when she turned the corner. An enormous furry horror with a ratlike tail squatted on the floor and gnawed on something. Something red and white. A few cloth scraps were by its feet. They were blue. The kzin picked up a watch, sniffed it, and tossed it on the floor. It was gold, like the one Tom Dalkey was so proud of. He’d gotten it from his father when he’d graduated.

  Part of her understood what had happened. She ducked into an empty storage locker and moaned softly to herself. Then she curled up into a ball and fled into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  Ship-Captain of the Claw conferred with his officers, as impatient as ever. Syet, the ship’s telepath, still had a headache from helping the others track down stray humans on the captured ship. Mental contact with ordinary humans was bad enough, but the human-rett in heat had been disgusting. He’d heard rumors that the alien females were always that way, but hadn’t believed them till now. No wonder their enemies were outbreeding the Hero’s Race.

  Of course, the others of his own kind despised him no matter how he suffered in order to help them. Part of it was jealousy. Fewer demands and more allowances were made in training.

  It was only right, though, that even without prowess in combat he was allowed to think of himself with a Name rather than just a title. That was necessary when several minds met. He was rather proud of his. Syet was the position of a cocked ear of a hunter listening for his prey, and there was no one better at that than him. Oh, he took full advantage of his position—he’d be a fool not to. In return, though, he pushed his abilities to the breaking point when needed. Few of his fellow telepaths bore the touch of alien minds as well as he did. Those he knew spent most of their waking time in the bottle or taking dreamdust.

  Syet began listening to the conference with
all his ears again. The captain was ranting as usual about their glorious conquest. As if twenty humans could stand up to a squad of the Hero’s Race! Still, the Cormorant was a valuable prize. Much knowledge would be gathered about human capabilities once the ship was returned to be examined. The captain might get half a Name once he returned. That was sufficient reason to be proud.

  The captain then ordered Argton-Weaponsmaster to command the prize crew to return the captured vessel to the main fleet. Ship-captain also ordered Syet to go along, ostensibly to take what remaining mental impressions he could from the ship. The real reason was much simpler. The weaponsmaster was ambitious and from a noble line, and might take the ship on a foolish suicide mission. Syet knew he was supposed to prevent it somehow. He could have told the captain it was hopeless. Argton despised all telepaths, and any suggestion from one was as good as a command to do the opposite. Unfortunately, that didn’t remove the responsibility. The weaponsmaster was unpleasant, even compared to most of his highly-placed kinsmen. He didn’t blame the captain for wanting to get rid of him for a short time. In a serious emergency, the telepath could make contact with one of his mind-fellows on a picket ship just outside the human solar system. It’d cost him a day’s blinding headache—or his life, if Argton caught on. Yet his duty to the Hero’s Race was more important.

  Ship-Captain added, “Keep an eye on the rett Argton Weaponsmaster found. She might be useful.”

  Syet thought it was a mistake leaving her alive, but said nothing. He was supposed to advise the captain, even when it was unwelcome, but he was no fool, either.

  The captain narrowed his eyes as if he knew what Syet thought anyway. “You yourself told me what impressions you got from her,” he said. “She’s certainly not a threat. Prize vessel duty is usually dull. The crew should be amused by her, and she might be trainable enough for some of the easier maintenance duties. If we get her to the main fleet alive, we could use her to get some of the prisoners to cooperate. If it doesn’t work out, her meat should be tender enough, but you’d better have good reasons before you or anyone else disposes of her.”