Man-Kzin Wars IV (Man-Kzin Wars Series Book 4) Read online

Ignoring the youth’s sputterings, Chuut-Riit continued with his line of reasoning. “Yes, there is a just balance. However, my young Hero, you have done me harm and owe me recompense. I have lost a warrior for my Fourth Fleet. You have won this unusual tournament fairly and so you must join my service. I will be assigning you to Traat-Admiral who is building for me an elite corps I choose to call the Fifth Fleet.” He nodded to his Admiral. “Doesn’t he have just the qualities we need?”

  Long afterward, a dazed Trainer-of-Slaves was still pondering the consequences of Jotoki who murdered kzin, barely able to keep his attention on the hunt. Fortunately the hunt seemed forgotten. Long-Reach was nowhere to be found, hiding probably. Should he execute Long-Reach? Should he bring up the perils of slavery to Chuut-Riit? Yes, that’s what he should do. The coward in him shuddered.

  Kasrriss-As appeared from the direction of Burr Crevasse. “The body has been removed. Since there are fewer of us, I suggest an immediate resumption of the chase before twilight overtakes us.”

  “Your arm looks bad.” Chuut-Riit’s voice carried a fatherly tone. “No need to follow us. There will be other hunts.”

  “This hunt is my responsibility.”

  But he couldn’t keep up. They stalked and killed the wounded man-beast first. Before the lights dimmed they had the young one cornered. The animal’s wailing cries of rage turned to screams before Chuut-Riit tore the body apart. Trainer shared in the feast when it was his turn to gnaw and rip at the carcasses. What else could he do? At least the meat was delicious.

  He spent half the night wandering in the forest.

  Later Trainer-of-Slave’s found his three personal Jotoki cowering in their stalls. How could he talk to them about their crime? Shouldn’t he just destroy them? Shouldn’t he speak to Jotok-Tender? When he remembered the giant musing about the depth of the loyalty found in a Jotok properly adopted, his heart curdled; was that what was meant? Murder? Had Jotok-Tender known all along?

  Long-Reach was huddled arms, head hidden by arm stalks, eyes barely peeping out of their armor, silent. As the kzin master of these slaves he had to say something. Yet how could he even mention such a crime? It was too horrible! “I’m angry!” His fangs were bared in a grin. “You disobeyed my instructions! Specifically, I told you to protect the man-beasts, and what were you doing instead?—you were watching over me. The man-slaves were lost! I take care of myself! I’m a warrior! I’m a Hero! Do not violate the wishes of a Hero! Obey!”

  The subject was never mentioned again.

  CHAPTER 11

  (2399–2401 A.D.)

  The warships of the Patriarchy were large but cramped. Sub-light supply lines don’t exist in an interstellar empire. Every need of a conquest had to be thought of by the Ordnance-Officer and brought along. The storage took space. Hydrogen took space. Purifiers filled the ship with ducts. The hibernation vaults took space. Machine shops took space. The gravitic drives and their shielding alone took up half the space in the ship.

  No savanna-roaming kzin could ever have created, or imagined, such a claustrophobic horror of passageways and pipes and tiny rooms, where even the ceilings had to be used for storage and the doors stayed locked for years. But long ago, as mercenaries, the kzinti had fallen into this hell-in-heaven as penance for their sin of impatience.

  Light took two and a half years to travel between the R’hshssira infrared dwarf and the Alpha Centauri binary. Kzin warships spent more than three years on the same journey. Chuut-Riit’s flagship, from the first scent of man-animal rumor, had given seventeen years to this single mission.

  The voyages were grueling. Without their hibernation coffins, touchy and argumentative warriors lacked tolerance for the time-gulf between stars. Trainer-of-Slaves would have none of that. He took ship duty for himself. All his life he had been bound to an essentially uninhabitable rock of a rapidly dying star. How could he not stay awake to relish his adventure?

  To prepare himself for Wunderland, he devoured the written sagas of Kzin. After all, his race had been born on a planet. Roaming a planet with breathable winds was a kzin’s natural maskless state. Wasn’t it truth that Wunderland was desirable because it was so Kzinlike?

  He followed the patricidal tragedy of Warlord Chmee at the Pillars, almost squeezing the wetness out of his fur after the Storm at the Pillars. When the Hero blinded himself in remorse, he stopped reading—he wanted to see Kzin-home, first, before he searched his soul.

  There were many sagas. He imagined himself with Rgir’s pride in the Mooncatcher Mountains. He felt the drifting snow and vapor breath at warcamp in the Rungn Valley.

  And there were heroic poems. He listened to the boiling-fat sounds from the Poems of Eight Voyages as he recited them aloud, marveling at plains of waving grass, at a winter wind whose chill claws could ice a Patriarch’s fur to the white of age.

  The sagas always spoke of the wind. The hunter’s wind. Death’s wind. The howling wind. Sweetgrass wind. The seasalt wind. The wind of many messages. Running with the wind. Wunderland had winds, too, he thought.

  Trainer-of-Slaves soon found the confined spaces of the warship intolerably full of smells that machine-made winds never took away. Nor was a diet of meat-biscuit conducive to an even humor. He snarled. His temper was short. He had a broad comment to cover every ship deficiency.

  One warrior became irritated enough at this ire to grasp him by the vest, repeatedly shoving him against a bulkhead. “Let my ears hear more of your foul insults! I’m here to inspire your mouth! I demand more!” Finally Deck-Officer interfered and ordered them both to the Vault, where they were antifreezed and stacked with five hundred other suspended Heroes.

  * * *

  All trips come to an end. The Vault was unloaded at the grimy Fortress Aarku orbiting Alpha Centauri B and when Trainer awoke he wondered why he had ever left Hssin. Aarku was only nine-hundred kilometers in diameter and it didn’t even have amenities like a poisonous atmosphere. The Fortress itself had been started as a major installation a generation ago after the invasion, and then left unfinished. It was a “strategic position” thought up by an admiral who didn’t have to live there.

  Alpha Centauri B would have been an outer planet if it had massed a thousand times less. Instead, it had grown into a healthy orange-tinged star, but with only three quarters of A’s mass and a quarter of A’s luminosity. The two stars orbited each other with a period of eighty years, coming as close as eighty-eight light-minutes and moving away from each other as far as 280 light-minutes.

  They had disrupted the formation of one another’s outer planets, leaving nothing circling A but Wunderland and three dense inner worlds, plus the myriad rocks of the Inner Swarm. A ring of rubble surrounded B that included ten major asteroids. In between lay the bulk of the Serpent’s Swarm buzzing in an intricate dance of resonance rings, pseudo-trojan orbits, high inclination orbits, and other exotic solutions to the problems posed by forced cohabitation with two major stars. There were vast gaps in the Swarm where no asteroid could survive without being pumped into another orbit.

  To view the Wunderland on which he had expected to serve, Trainer-of Slaves had to tune up the base’s electronic telescope and blot out the blinding spear of Alpha Centauri A. His unit was stationed about as far away from its forests and grasslands and mountains as they could be sent, dashing his dreams of loping over the surface of a planet under an open sky.

  War was war. Each warrior had his own emplacement and his own fight. Trainer’s fatalistic companions had a saying that even the rocks around Centauri B had their duties. His duties were to turn out slaves for the engine rooms of the Fourth Fleet. The conditions in the hastily prefabricated tunnels were appalling. He was stuck with his smelly Jotok cages, with his wire-mesh runs and masses of Jotok babies crawling all over each other without enough space and never enough wind to carry away the smell. Hssin seemed like paradise.

  A berth on the Fourth Fleet began to seem more and more desirable. He began to dream about Man-home. If he coul
dn’t have Wunderland, then why not Earth? Earth, too, had winds and an open sky. The winds had fascinating names culled from Wunderland libraries. Nor’easter. The icy candela of the Andes Mountains. Trade winds. The dry chinook wind that blew down the slopes of the Rocky Mountains after depositing all its moisture on the western slopes. Mediterranean sirocco. Whirlwind. Tempest.

  Trainer-of-Slaves began to take a personal interest in the fate of the Fourth Fleet. He was too busy with Jotoki, and too far away from the center, to face politics from a crouch. But he followed Chuut-Riit’s duels and celebrated every win. The locals were resisting the economic burden of preparing a new fleet. They made loud claims about the ferocity with which the Third Fleet would slash the Solar System, though that battle must already have been fought and won or lost.

  Chuut-Riit was adamant that the burden continue. It was, he told his Heroes, the Patriarch’s policy that in any war a backup fleet was always in preparation to follow a battle-fleet, no matter how sure the battle-fleet’s victory. That was the only way a slow-motion interstellar crusade could be fought. Better to send expensive reinforcements to a victory won years ago than penniless faith-in-victory to a defeat. The kzin had a saying, “Don’t count your fingers when your claws are sheathed.”

  Alpha Centauri B was a favored space for Fourth Fleet maneuvers. As a result, Trainer-of-Slaves met many gung-ho captains who had driven their gravitic-polarizers past normal specifications and needed urgent maintenance. They liked him because his crews did a good job. They also liked him because he served Jotok meat and that was a treat hard to come by.

  Ssis-Captain took a special liking to Trainer-of-Slaves. They shared an avid interest in Earth. It was he who introduced card-tricks to Trainer’s slaves. The monkeys used a peculiar set of plastic symbols, five plus an octal of cards in a suit, with four suits. The Captain never ceased to flap his ears while Long-Reach did his five-handed shuffle, rotating half the deck clockwise and the other half counterclockwise while sitting on his mouth. He didn’t like to play poker with Long-Reach, though, because the Jotok always took the pot.

  On one run in from the A star, Ssis-Captain brought in some Wunderland musical instruments and they put together a combo, a rather cacophonous effort. Creepy managed the twelve string banjo with three hands, Long-Reach played the drums and did harmony with all five lungs, while Joker handled the cymbals and xylophone. Trainer-of-Slaves did his imitations of Heroic Poetry on the kazoo.

  “I’ve got to have you animals on the Blood of Heroes! Do you want to pledge honor to my ship? I’ll pledge all of you! We’ve got to be playing together when we march under the Arc de Triomphe in Berlin!”

  “The Arc de Triomphe is in Moscow,” corrected Trainer-of-Slaves righteously.

  “You must be wrong. The red monkeys got out of that war early. I distinctly remember that the Arc de Triomphe was built by French-beasts to honor the victory of their Kaiser at Berlin. The High French Conquest Commandant Hitler marched under it with his whole army when he defeated the Huns. I’ve seen the daguerreotype!”

  On another trip Ssis-Captain smuggled in a kzinrret inside an old polarizer housing. She was a beauty with a luminous red sheen to her fur and streaks of tan in her nose, but she wasn’t at all pleased with the ride and studied them both from sulky, undecided eyes.

  “Jriingh, meet your new mounter.”

  “My hero,” she purred.

  Trainer-of-Slaves was horrified. “You stole an illustrious one’s wife? Or worse, a daughter?”

  Ssis-Captain’s ears flapped while he rumbled in his throat. “He gave her to me. She’s a little terror. She spits and hisses at his wives and fights with them. She kept chasing his favorite off into the woods of his estate where he couldn’t find her. She boxes the heads of his daughters and tries to take his sons down under the bridge.”

  “An ideal mother for great fighting Heroes!”

  “It didn’t work that way. All her sons got killed as kits in rage-fights. Crazy, the lot of them. Her mate backhand-cuffed her often enough, without profit, but he’s too soft-clawed to kill her. I reasoned that you and I could solve his problem.”

  “Do you suppose the man-beastesses give their males as much trouble as ours?”

  “Worse! A manrret is smart enough to pick the lock on her door!”

  Jriingh stepped gracefully from the polarizer housing, haughtily exploring her new abode, sniffing warily. She was half the size of a male kzin and probably twice as agile. She snapped up a baby Jotok that had escaped from its wire run, and swallowed five arms in one bite and then peered into the smelly tank, pondering ways to catch more.

  “She’s being boarded on the Blood of Heroes, of course.”

  “Against regs. You’ll have to keep her.”

  “It’s against regs to keep her here, too.” Trainer-of-Slaves was beginning to feel angry.

  “Hr-r, yet you do have the space, a corner somewhere with a lock and key.”

  “But I won’t be able to keep her pheromones out of the air!”

  “You won’t have to. That’s the whole beauty of this sally.”

  “I’m supposed to give this little hissing terror the run of the place?!”

  “It’s not a problem. She likes males. She just doesn’t like females. Fix up a room. Give her some nice things. We’ll run a beneath-the-grass pride to keep her happy. Let her keep your feet warm. We need a beneath-the-grass pride out here: card-tricks, music, war stories, ch’rowl. Do you think a Conservor will come here and give you a lecture on the One True Way of Honor and the nature of the Furry God?”

  Trainer-of-Slaves settled into himself—giving way just a little. He was not used to such camaraderie and he liked it. Yes, he wanted to conquer Earth with this warrior and own a huge hunting preserve in the Amazon next to France with hundreds of pink, tailless slaves tending to his animals. Of course, Long-Reach would always be his top slave.

  * * *

  For two years High Conquest Commander Chuut-Riit had been caught in the snare of a painful power struggle. Then the first news from Man-sun burst from the lightbeams, 4.3 years after the fact: the Kzin had dealt a great surprise victory in the first skirmish. The Third Fleet was positioning itself for battle.

  Wunderland kzinti forgot all else. Even Chuut-Riit paused. Infighting died. The Radio-Operators became the Heroes of the Moment, drifting in space at the instruments of their huge antennae pointed at Man-sun.

  The good news did not last.

  By the end of the month the extent of the disaster was evident. Trainer-of-Slaves was outraged at the man-beasts. Kzinti became morose. They grinned more often, thoughts of monkeys on their minds. And Chuut-Riit’s situation changed dramatically. There was no longer any question that he was Governor of Alpha Centauri. There was no longer any opposition to his design for the Fourth Fleet, or to his date of launching.

  Trainer put in for a transfer to the Blood of Heroes.

  CHAPTER 12

  (2402 A.D.)

  Ssis-Captain arrived at Fortress Aarku with a new uniform, slightly non-standard. The padded under-armor vest was a too-rich shade of mauve with sapphire blue trimmings. The buttons on his epaulets were Wunderland jade from mines in the Jotun Range. The eight-pointed captain’s star radiated from a real diamond. Pagoda style three-quarter sleeves were of the satin one might find on a kzinrret’s bed. The arcuate leather cuffs of the undershirt, setting for his chronometer/comp, were tooled from high quality kz’eerkt—the tanned hides of Wunderland criminals, selected to be without blemish or lash mark.

  “Impressive,” said Trainer-of-Slaves.

  “I am determined that you shall have your fleet rating!” Ssis was flicking the tip of his tail back and forth in agitation as he paraded to show off his tailoring.

  “Hr-r. Yet I have sworn enemies who would make it difficult.”

  “Harrgh! I have proper papers here for you that will make it all easy, letters of introduction and recommendation.” He began to purr. “And a pass to Wunderland! I don�
�t dance around, I just leap right in. They have to give you to me. I need you.”

  “Friend, I shall be satisfied with the trip to Wunderland.”

  “Not after you’ve served as my gunner!” The elegant captain lifted his bushy head and with a great grin emitted a spitting-yowling imitation of the sounds of battle. “We’re going to carve up some asteroids on the way in. Great sport.”

  Trainer-of-Slaves decided that he could leave Long-Reach in charge of polarizer repairs, and took his chief slave on a tour of the shop. One giant field-generator was suspended in the light gravity of Aarku while two of the five-armed Jotoki slaves worked to replace its laminated planars.

  Long-Reach stood proudly on four wrists while pointing with his fifth arm. “This unit will be ready for testing in two days,” said skinny(arm). “I am honored by your trust in me, brave master,” interrupted short(arm), checking various screens by taking control of three eyes. “All will go well with the polarizer repairs. We are expecting another unit for overhaul at the end of the day. And my duties among the juveniles?”

  Trainer-of-Slaves trusted Long-Reach with all but one thing—the Jotok transients. “Just keep the life support functional. Change the filters again.” It would never do to have one of those curious five-armed, five-brained fledglings fixate upon a mature Jotok as parent. “Third-Teacher-of-Slaves will be in charge. Your first duty is to the shop.”

  “You will be traveling to Wunderland? The crew has checked over the engines of the Blood of Heroes from finger-tip to elbow. They hum. Do tell Ssis-Captain to stay within specs.”

  The gravitic polarizer was the foundation stone of the Patriarchy and of warrior military superiority. In its stationary version it made artificial gravity possible, but its most useful application was as the reactionless space drive which allowed vehicles to accelerate in “free fall”: one gravity for the lumbering freighters, sixty or seventy gravities for the faster military warships.

  These kzin craft bewildered the Wunderland defenders at the time of the 2367 A.D. conquest. They darted about with incredible velocity and acceleration changes, yet ejected no reaction mass, and didn’t seem to need refueling even after maneuvers that would have exhausted the tanks of a torchship. The kzin warships could be goaded and provoked and then harassed like a bull in Old Spain, they could be burned, but they couldn’t be chased. They didn’t seem to obey the laws of physics.