“Arreowg. Yes. Yet . . . my mind does not return to all its accustomed patterns.” He brooded, twitching out his batwing ears. “Contemplating the stars, I am oppressed by their magnitude. Is the universe not merely greater than we imagine, but greater than we can imagine? We seek the Infinite Hunt, to shape all that is to the will of kzinkind. Yet is this a delusion imposed by our genes, our nature?” His pelt quivered as skin rippled in a shudder.
“Such thoughts are the food of leadership,” Conservor said. “Only the lowly may keep all sixteen claws dug firmly in the earth. Ever since the outer universe came to Homeworld, such as you have been driven to feed on strange game and follow unknown scents.”
“Hrrrr.” He flicked his tail-tip, bringing the discussion back to more immediate matters. “At least, I think that now my understanding of the humans becomes more intuitive. It would be valuable if others could undertake this course of meditation and knowledge-stalking as well. Traat-Admiral, perhaps?”
Conservor flared his whiskers in agreement. “To a limited extent. As much as his spirit—a strong one—can bear. Too long has the expansion of our hunting grounds waited here, unable to encompass Sol, fettering the spirit of kzin. Whatever is necessary must be done.”
“Rrrrr. Agreed. Yet . . . yet there are times, my teacher, when I think that our conquest of the humans may be as much a lurker-by-water threat as their open resistance.”
Chapter 1
“We want you to kill a kzin,” the general said.
Captain Jonah Matthieson blinked. Is this some sort of flatlander idea of a joke? he thought.
“Well . . . that’s more or less what I’ve been doing,” the Sol-Belter said, running a hand down the short-cropped black crest that was his concession to military dress codes. He was a tall man even for a Belter, slim, with slanted green eyes.
The general sighed and lit another cheroot. “Display. A-7, schematic,” he said. The rear wall of the office lit with a display of hashmarked columns; Jonah studied it for a moment and decided it represented the duration and intensity of a kzin attack: number of ships, weapons, comparative casualties.
“Time sequence, phased,” the senior officer continued. The computer obliged, superimposing four separate mats.
“That,” he said, “is the record of the four fleets the kzin have sent since they took Wunderland and the Alpha Centauri system, forty-two years ago. Notice anything?”
Jonah shrugged: “We’re losing.” The war with the felinoid aliens had been going on since before his birth, since humanity’s first contact with them, sixty years before. Interstellar warfare at sublight speeds was a game for the patient.
“Fucking brilliant, Captain!” General Early was a short man, even for a Terran: black, balding, carrying a weight of muscle that was almost obscene to someone raised in low gravity; he looked to be in early middle age, which, depending on how much he cared about appearances, might mean anything up to a century and a half these days. With a visible effort, he controlled himself.
“Yeah, we’re losing. Their fleets have been getting bigger and their weapons are getting better. We’ve made some improvements too, but not as fast as they have.”
Jonah nodded. There wasn’t any need to say anything.
“What do you think I did before the war?” the general demanded.
“I have no idea, sir.”
“Sure you do. ARM bureaucrat, like all the other generals,” Early said. The ARM was the UN’s enforcement arm, and supervised—mainly suppressed, before the kzin had arrived—technology of all types. “Well, I was. But I also taught military history in the ARM academy. Damn near the only Terran left who paid any attention to the subject.”
“Oh.”
“Right. We weren’t ready for wars, any of us. Terrans didn’t believe in them. Belters didn’t either; too damned independent. Well, the goddam pussies do.”
“Yes sir.” Goddam, he thought. This joker is older than I thought. It had been a long time since many in the Sol system took a deity’s name in vain.
“Right. Everyone knows that. Now think about it. We’re facing a race of carnivores with a unified interstellar government of completely unknown size, organized for war. They started ahead of us, and now they’ve had Wunderland and its belt for better than a generation. If nothing else, at this rate they can eventually swamp us with numbers. Just one set of multimegatonners getting through to Earth . . .”
He puffed on the cigar with short, vicious breaths. Jonah shivered inside himself at the thought: all those people, dependent on a single life-support system. . . . He wondered how flatlanders had ever stood it. Why, a single asteroid impact . . . The Belt was less vulnerable. Too much delta vee required to match the wildly varying vectors of its scores of thousands of rocks, its targets weaker individually but vastly more numerous and scattered.
He forced his mind back to the man before him, gagging slightly on the smell of the tobacco. How does he get away with that on shipboard? For that matter, the habit had almost died out; it must have been revived since the pussies came, like so many archaic customs.
Like war and armies, the Belter thought sardonically. The branch-of-service flashes on the shoulder of the flatlander’s coverall were not ones he recognized. Of course, there were 18 billion people in the solar system, and most of them seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform these days; flatlanders particularly, they loved playing dress-up. Comes of having nothing useful to do most of their lives, he thought. Except wear uniforms and collect knickknacks. There was a truly odd one on the flatlander’s desk, a weird-looking pyramid with an eye in it, topped by a tiny cross.
“So every time it gets harder. First time was bad enough, but they really underestimated us. Did the next time, too, but not so badly. They’re getting better all the time. This last one—that was bad.” General Early pointedly eyed the ribbons on Jonah’s chest. Two Comets, and the unit citation his squadron of Darts had earned when they destroyed a kzin fighter-base ship.
“As you know. You saw some of that. What you didn’t see was the big picture—because we censored it, even from our military units. Captain, they nearly broke us. Because we underestimated them. This time they didn’t just ‘shriek and leap.’ They came in tricky, fooled us completely when they looked like retreating . . . and we know why.”
He spoke to the computer again, and the rear wall turned to holo image. A woman in lieutenant’s stripes, but with the same branch-badges as the general. Tall and slender, paler-skinned than most, and muscular in the fashion of low-gravity types who exercise. When she spoke it was in Belter dialect.
“The subject’s name was Esteban Cheung Jagrannath,” the woman said. The screen split, and a battered-looking individual appeared beside her; Jonah’s eye picked out the glisten of sealant over artificial skin, the dying-rummy pattern of burst blood vessels from explosive decompression, the mangy look of someone given accelerated marrow treatments for radiation overdose. That is one sorry-looking son of a bitch. “He claims to have been born in Tiamat, in the Serpent Swarm of Wunderland, twenty-five subjective years ago.”
Now I recognize the accent, Jonah thought. The lieutenant’s English had a guttural overtone despite the crisp Belter vowels; the Belters who migrated to the asteroids of Alpha Centauri talked that way. Wunderlander influence.
“Subject is a power-systems specialist, drafted into the kzin service as a crewman on a corvette tender”—the blue eyes looked down to a readout below the pickup’s line of sight “—called—” Something followed in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero’s Tongue.
“Roughly translated, the Bounteous-Mother’s-Teats. Tits took a near-miss from a radiation-pulse bomb right toward the end. The kzin captain didn’t have time to self-destruct; the bridge took most of the blast. She was a big mother”—the general blinked, snorted—”so a few of the repair crew survived, like this gonzo. All humans, as were most of the technical staff. A few nonhuman, nonkzin species as well, but they were all killed. Pity.”
Jonah and the flatlander both nodded in unconscious union. The kzin empire was big, hostile, not interested in negotiation, and contained many subject species and planets; and that was about the limit of human knowledge. Not much background information had been included in the computers of the previous fleets, and very little of that survived; vessels too badly damaged for their crews to self-destruct before capture usually held little beyond wreckage.
The general spoke again: “Gracie, fast forward to the main point.” The holo-recording blurred ahead. “Captain, you can review at your leisure. It’s all important background, but for now—” He signed, and the recording returned to normal speed.
” . . . the new kzin commander arrived three years before they left. His name’s Chuut-Riit, which indicates a close relation to the . . . Patriarch, that’s as close as we’ve been able to get. Apparently, his first command was to delay the departure of the fleet.” A thin smile. “Chuut-Riit’s not just related to their panjandrum; he’s an author, of sorts. Two works on strategy: Logistical Preparation as the Key to Victory in War and Conquest Through the Defensive Offensive.”