The Man-Kzin Wars 03 Read online

  "This is a prey that doubles back on its own trail," the sage admitted. He paused for a long time, and Traat-Admiral joined in the long slow rhythm of his breathing. The older kzin took a pouch from his belt, and they each crumbled some of the herb between their hands and rubbed it into their faces; it was the best, Homeworld-grown and well-aged. "My son, this is a time for remembering."

  Another long pause. "Far and far does the track of the kzinti run, and faint the smell of Homeworld's past. We Conservors remember; we remember wars and victories and defeats… once we thought that Homework! was the only world of life. Then the Jotok landed, and for a time we thought they were from the God, because they had swords of fire that could tumble a Patriarch's castle-wall, while we had only swords of steel. Our musket-balls were nothing to them… Then we saw that they were weak, not strong, for they were grass-eaters. They lured our young warriors, hiring them to fight wars beyond the sky with promise of fire-weapons. Many a Sire was killed by his sons in those times!"

  Traat-Admiral shifted uneasily, chirring and letting the tip of his tongue show between his teeth. That was not part of the racial history that kzinti liked to remember.

  The sage made the stretching motion that was their species' equivalent of a relaxed smile. "Remember also how that hunt ended; the Jotok taught their hired kzinti so much that all Homeworld obeyed the ones who had journeyed to the stars… and they listened to the Conservors. And one nightfall, the Jotok who thought themselves masters of kzin found the flesh stripped from their bones; are not the Jotok our slaves and foodbeasts to this very night? And a hundred Patriarchs have climbed the Tree since that good night."

  The sage nodded at Treat-Admiral's questioning chirrup. "Yes, Chuut-Riit was another like that first Patriarch of all Kzin. He understood how to use the Conservor's knowledge; he had the warrior's and the sage's mind, and knew that these humans are the greatest challenge the Kzin have faced since the Jotok's day." The Conservor brooded. "This he was teaching to his sons. The humans must have either great luck, or more knowledge than is good, to have struck at us through him. The seed of something great died with Chuut-Riit."

  "I will spurt that seed afresh into the haunches of Destiny, Conservor," Traat-Admiral said fervently.

  "Witless Destiny bears strange kits," the sage warned. He seemed to hesitate a second, then continued: "You seek to unite your warriors as Chuut-Riit did, in an attack on the human home-system that is crafty-cunning, not witless-brave. Good! But that may not be enough. I have been evaluating your latest intelligence reports, the ones from our sources among the humans of the Swarm."

  Traat-Admiral tossed his head in agreement; that always presented difficulties. The kzinti had had the gravity polarizer from the beginnings of their time in space, and so had never colonized their asteroid belt. It was unnecessary, when you could have microgravity anywhere you wished, and hauling goods out of the gravity well was cheap. Besides that, kzinti were descended from plains-hunting felinoids, and while they could endure confinement they did so unwillingly and for as short a time as possible. Humans had taken a slower path to space, depending on reaction-drives until after their first contact with the warships of the Patriarchy. There was a whole human subspecies who lived on subplanetary bodies, and they had colonized the Alpha Centauri system along with their planet-dwelling cousins. Controlling the settlements of the Serpent Swarm had always been difficult for the kzinti.

  "There is nothing definite, as yet," the Conservor said. "Much of what I have learned is useful only as the absence of scent. Yet it is incontestable that the feral humans of the Swarm have made a discovery."

  "tttReet?" Traat-Admiral said enquiringly.

  The Conservor's eyelids slid down, covering the round amber blanks of his eyes; one was milky-white from an old injury that had left a scar across the massive socket and down the side of his muzzle. He beckoned with a flick of tail and ears, and the commander leaned close, signaling the guards to leave. His hands and feet were slightly damp with anxiety as they exited in a smooth drilled rush; it was a fearsome thing, the responsibilities of high office. One must learn secrets that burdened the soul, harder by far than facing lasers or neutron-weapons. Such were the burdens of which the ordinary Hero knew nothing.

  "Long, long ago," he whispered, "Kzinti were not as they are now. Once females could talk."

  Traat-Admiral felt his batwing ears fold themselves away beneath the orange fur of his ruff as he shifted uneasily on the cushions. He had heard rumors, but obscene, he thought. The thought of performing ch'rowl with something that could talk, beyond the half-dozen words a kzinti female could manage… obscene. He gagged slightly.

  "Long, long ago. And Heroes were not as they are now, either." The sage brooded for a moment. "We are an old race, and we have had time to… shape ourselves according to the dreams we had. Such is the Ancestral Past." The whuffling twitch of whiskers that followed did kzinti service for a grin. "Or so the encoded records of the oldest verses say. Now for another tale, Traat-Admiral. How would you react if another species sought to make slaves of Kzin?"

  Traat-Admirals own whiskers twitched.

  "No, consider this seriously. A race with a power of mental command; like a telepathic drug, irresistible. Imagine kzinti enslaved, submissive and obedient as mewling kits."

  The other kzin suddenly found himself standing, in a low crouch. Sound damped as his ears folded, but he could hear the sound of his own growl, low down in his chest. His lower jaw had dropped to his ruff, exposing the killing gape of his fangs; all eight claws were out on his hands, as they reached forward to grip an enemy and carry a throat to his fangs.

  "This is a hypothetical situation!" the Conservor said quickly, and watched while Traat-Admiral fought back towards calm. The little nook behind the commander's dais was full of the sound of his panting and the deep gingery smell of kzinti rage. "And that reaction… that would make any kzin difficult to control. That is one reason why the race of Heroes has been shaped so. And to make us better warriors, of course. In that respect perhaps we went a little too far."

  "Perhaps," Traat-Admiral grated. "What is the nature of this peril?" He bent his muzzle to the heated bourbon and milk and lapped thirstily.

  "Hrrrru," the Conservor said, crouching. "Traat-Admiral, the race in question-the Students have called them the Slavers-little is known about them. They perished so long ago, you see; at least 2,000,000 years." He used the Kzin-standard measurement; their home-world circled its sun at a greater distance than Terra did Sol. "Even in vacuum, little remains. But they had a device, a stasis field that forms invulnerable protection and freezes time within; we have never been able to understand the principle and copies do not work, but we have found them occasionally, and they can be deactivated. The contents of most are utterly incomprehensible. A few do incomprehensible things. One or two we have understood, and these have won us wars, Traat-Admiral. And one contained a living Slaver; the base where he was held had to be missiled from orbit."

  Traat-Admiral tossed his head again, then froze. "Stasis!" he yowled. "Hero?"

  " Stasis! How else-the monkey ship, just before Chuut-Riit was killed! It passed through the system at .99 C; we thought, how could anything decelerate? By collision! Disguised among the kinetic-energy missiles the monkeys threw at us as they passed. Chuut-Riit himself said that the ramscoop ship caused implausibly little damage, given the potential and the investment of resources it represented. It was nothing but a distraction, and a delivery system for the assassins." His fur laid fiat. "If the monkeys in the Solar System have the stasis technology." The sage meditated for a few moments, "he'rrearow't'chsssece mearoweet'aatrurree," he said: This does not follow. Traat-Admiral remembered that as one of Chuut-Riit's favorite sayings, and yes, this Conservor had been among the prince's household when he arrived from Kzin. "If they had it in quantity, consider the implications. For that matter, we believe the Slavers had a faster-than-light drive."

  Stasis fields would make nonsense of war
… and a faster-than-light drive would make the monkeys invincible, if they had it. The other kzin nodded, raising his tufted eyebrows. Theory said travel fester than lightspeed was impossible, unless one cared to be ripped into subatomic particles on the edges of a spinning black hole. Still, theory could be wrong; the kzinti were a practical race, who left most science to their subject species. What counted was results.

  "True. If they had such weapons, we would not be here. If we had them—" He frowned, then proceeded cautiously. "Such might cause… troubles with discipline."

  The sage spread his hands palm up, with the claws showing slightly. With a corner of his awareness, Traat-Admiral noted how age had dried and cracked the pads on palm and stubby fingers.

  "Truth. There have been revolts before, although not many." The Patriarchy was necessarily extremely decentralized, when transport and information took years and decades to travel between stars. It would be fifty years or more before a new prince of the Patriarch's blood could be sent to Wunderland, and more probably they would receive a confirmation of Treat-Admiral's status by beamcast. "But with such technology… it is a slim chance, but there must be no disputes. If there is a menace, it must be destroyed. If a prize, it must fall into only the most loyal of hands. Yet the factions are balanced on a w'tsai's edge."

  "chrrr. Balancing of factions is a function of command."

  Traat-Admiral's gaze went unfocused, and he showed teeth in a snarl that meant anticipated triumph in a kzin. "In feet, this split can be used." He rose, raked claws through air from face to waist. "My thanks, Conservor. You have given me a scent through fresh dew to follow."

  Chapter III

  This section of the Jotun range had been a Montferrat-Palme preserve since the settlement of Wonderland, more than three centuries before; when a few thousand immigrants have an entire planet to share out, there is no sense in being niggardly. The first of that line had built the high eyrie for his own; later population and wealth moved elsewhere, and in the end it became a hunting lodge. At the time of the kzin conquest it had been the only landed possession left to the Montferrat-Palme line, which had shown an unfortunate liking for risky speculative investments and even riskier horses.

  "Old Claude does himself proud," Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, as he and Lieutenant Ingrid Raines walked out onto the verandah that ran along the outer side of the house.

  The building behind them was old weathered granite, sparkling slightly with flecks of mica; two stories, and another of half-timbering, under a strake roof. A big rambling structure, set into an artificial terrace on the steep side of the mountain; below the slope turn-bled down to a thread-thin stream in the valley below, then rose in gashed cliffs and dark-green forest ten kilometers away. The gardens were extensive and cunningly landscaped, an improvement of nature rather than an imposition on it. Native featherleaf, trembling iridescent lavender shapes ten meters tall, gumblossom and sheenbark and lapisvine. Oaks and pines and fran-gipani from Earth, they had grown into these hills as well… The air was warm and fragrant-dusty with summer flowers.

  "It's certainly been spruced up since we… since I saw it last," she said, with a catch in her voice.

  Harold looked aside at her and shivered slightly. Ingrid Raines had been born two years before him, but he was a greying fifty-odd, while she… she was exactly as he remembered her. Belter-tall and fair-skinned, slimly muscular and green-eyed, with black hair worn in spaceborn fashion that shaved all the scalp save for a strip from forehead to neck.

  She had spent most of the intervening decades in coldsleep, at a high fraction of lightspeed; he had lived every minute of them here on Wunderland, lived hard and without the best anti-senescent treatments. While she went to Sol with the last shipload of refugees, joined the UN forces that fought off the kzinti Fourth Fleet. Came back with a smooth-mannered systems engineer and trained killer named Jonah Matthieson and knocked off the Big Tabby, Chief Ratcat Chuut-Riit himself, with the nastiest piece of combined software sabotage and kzinti psychology he could imagine.

  Matthieson. Now there was a case. Genius class programmer. Humorless, like a Swarmer, but not like a Swarmer. A Belter. Earth's asteroid civilization was like Wunderland's, but different. Matthieson was about thirty, biological. Chronological would be older, of course, given he'd come across four light-years. Anyway, not old enough for anti-senescence to make much difference. Smoothly handsome, in an angular Belter way; also tough and smart. A calm angry man, the dangerous type. Dreadfully attractive while you were no prize

  even as a young man, he told himself. Ears like jugs, eyes like a basset hound and a build like a brick outhouse. Nearly middle-aged at only sixty, for Finagles sake. Spent five years as an unsuccessful guerilla and the rest as a glorified barkeep.

  A little more than that. Harold's Terran Bar was well known in its way. Had been well known. Had been his…

  "A lot more populous, too," she was saying. "Why on earth would anyone want to farm here? You'd have to modify the machinery."

  There had always been a small settlement in the narrow sliver of valley floor, but it had been expanded. Terraces of vines and fruit trees wound up the slopes, and they could hear the distant tinkle of bells from the sheep and goats that grazed the rocky hills. A waterfall tumbled a thousand meters down the head of the valley, its distant toning humming through rock and air. Men and men's doings were small in that landscape of tumbled rock and crag. A church-bell rang far below, somewhere a dog was barking, and faint and far came the hiss-scream of a downdropper, surprising this close to human habitation. The air was cool and thin, though not uncomfortably so to someone born on Wunderland; .61 gravity meant that the drop-off in air pressure was much less steep than it would have been on Earth.

  "Machinery?" Harold moved up beside her. She leaned into him with slow care. He winced at the thought of kzin claws raking down her side… maybe I've been a bit uncharitable about Jonah , he thought. The two of them came through the kzinti hunt alive, until Claude and I could pull her… them out. That took some doing. "They're not using machinery, Ingi. Bare hands and hand-tools."

  Her mouth made a small gesture of distaste. "Slave labor? Not what I'd have thought of Claude, however he's gone downhill."

  Harold laughed. "Flighters, sweetheart. Refugees. Kzinti've been taking up more and more land; they're settling in, not just a garrison anymore. It was this or the labor camps; those are slave labor, literally. And Claude grubstaked these people, as well as he could. It's where a lot of that graft he's been getting as Police Chief of München went." And the head of the capital city's human security force was in a very good position to rake it in. "I was surprised too. Claude's been giving a pretty good impression of having Helium II for blood, these past few years."

  A step behind them. "Slandering me in my absence, old friend?"

  The servants set out brandy and fruits and withdrew. They were all middle-aged and singularly close-mouthed. Ingrid thought she had seen four parallel scars under the vest of one dark slant-eyed man who looked like he came from the Sulinesian Islands.

  "There are Some Things We Were Not Meant to Know," she said. Claude Montferrat-Palme was leaning forward to light a cheroot at a candle. He glanced up at her words and caught her slight grimace of distaste, and laid down the cheroot. He had been here a week, off and on, but that was scarcely time to drop a habit he must have been cultivating half his life.

  "Correct on all accounts, my dear," he said. Claude always was perceptive.

  "It's been wonderful talking over old times," she said. With sincerity, and a slight malice aforethought. They were considerably older times for the two men than for her. "And it's… extremely nattering that you two are still so fond of me." But a bit troubling, now that I think about it. Even if you can expect to live two centuries, carrying the torch for four decades is a bit much.

  Claude smiled again. He had classic Herrenmann features, long and bony; in his case, combined with dark hair and eyes and an indefinable air of elegance
, even in the lounging outfit he had thrown on when he shed the München Polizei uniform.

  "Youth," he said. And continued at her enquiring sound, "My dear, you were our youth. Hari and I were best friends; you were the… girl… young woman for which we conceived the first grand passion and bittersweet rivalry." He shrugged. "Ordinarily, a man either marries hera ghastly fete involving children and facing each other over the morning papaya-or loses her. In any case, life goes on." His brooding gaze went to the high mullioned windows, out onto a world that had spent two generations under kzinti rule.

  "You…" he said softly. "You vanished, and took the good times with you. Doesn't every man remember his twenties as the golden age? In our case, that was literally true. Since then, we've spent four decades fighting a rear-guard action and losing, watching everything we cared for slowly decay… including each other."

  "Why Claude, I didn't know you cared," Harold said mockingly. Ingrid saw their eyes meet. Surpassing the love of women , she thought dryly. And there was a certain glow about them both, now that they were committed to action again. Few humans enjoy living a life that makes them feel defeated, and these were proud men. "Don't tell me we wasted forty years of what might have been a beautiful friendship."

  " Chronicles of Wasted Time is a title I've often considered for my autobiography, if I ever write it," Claude said. "Egotism wars with sloth."

  Harold snorted. "Claude, if you were only a little less intelligent, you'd make a great neo-romantic Byronic Hero."

  "Childe Claude? At this rate she'll have nothing to do with either of us, Hari."

  The other man turned to Ingrid. "I'm a little surprised you didn't take Jonah," he said.

  Ingrid looked over to Claude, who stood by the huge rustic fireplace with a brandy snifter in his hand. The Herrenmann raised a brow and a slight, well-bred smile curved his asymmetric beard.