“A fine lot of youngsters,” Conservor said, a little wistfully; such as he maintained no harem, although they were privileged to sire offspring on the mates of others at ritual intervals. “Very well-behaved for their age.”
Chuut-Riit threw himself down and pulled a flask out of his hunter’s pack, pouring it into broad shallow bowls the others held out. The strong minty-herb scent of the liquor filled the air, along with the pleasant scent of fresh-killed meat, grass, trees. The Viceroyal hunting preserve sprawled over hundreds of kilometers of rich land, and the signs of agriculture had almost vanished in the generation since the conquest. It was a mixed landscape, the varying shades of green from Terra, native Wunderlander reddish-gold, and here and there a spot of kzin orange. The animals were likewise diverse: squat thickset armored beasts from homeworld, tall spindly local forms like stick-figures from a cartoon, Earth-creatures halfway between.
We fit in as well as anything, Chuut-Riit thought. More, since we own it. The kzinti lay sprawled on their bellies, their quarter-ton of stocky muscle and dense bone relaxed into the grass. Bat-wing ears were fully extended and lips were loosened from fangs in fellowship; all here were old friends, and sharing a kill built trust at a level deeper even than that.
The kzinti governor sank his fangs into a haunch, rearing back and shaking his head until a two-kilo gobbet pulled loose. He threw back his head to bolt it—kzinti teeth were designed for ripping and tearing, not chewing—and extended the claws on one four-digit hand to pick bits of gristle from his teeth.
“Rrrrr, yes, they’re promising,” he said, nodding to the boil of cubs around the table where the human nurse was cutting chunks of rib from a porker. “The local servants are very good with infants, if you select carefully.”
“Some kzintosh is very glad of that!” Staff-Officer joked, making a playful-protective grab at his crotch.
The others bristled in mock-fear-amusement. Kzinti females were useless for child-rearing beyond the nursing stage, being subsapient and speechless; the traditional caregiver for youngsters was a gelded male. Such were usually very docile, and without hope for offspring of their own tended to identify with any cubs they were exposed to. Still, it was a little distasteful to modern sensibilities; one of the many conveniences of alien slaves was their suitability for such work. Humans were very useful. . . .
“Speaking of which, Traat-Admiral, tell me again of your protégé’s pet.”
Traat-Admiral lapped at his cup for an instant longer and belched. “Yiao-Captain. He swears this human of his has found an astronomical anomaly worth investigating.” A sideways flick of the head, a kzin shrug. “I sent him to that ancestor-forsaken outpost in . . . urrrr, Skogarna, to test his patience.” The word was slightly derogatory, in the Hero’s Tongue . . . but among Chuut-Riit’s entourage they were working to change that.
“Good hunting up there,” Staff-Officer said brashly, then touched his nose in a patently insincere apology when the older males gave him a glare.
“Chhrrrup. As you say. Worth dispatching a Swift Hunter to investigate, at least . . . which brings us to the accelerated Solward surveillance.”
“To receive quickly the news of the Fourth Fleet’s triumphant leap upon the humans?” Conservor asked.
The tip of his tail twitched. The others could sniff the dusty scent of irony. For that matter, it would be better than a decade before the news returned; worst-case analysis and political realities both demanded that the years ahead be spent readying a Fifth Fleet.
A part of Chuut-Riit’s good humor left him. Moodily, he drew his wtsai and used the pommel of the knife to crack a thighbone.
“Grrf,” he muttered; sucking marrow. His own tail thumped the ground. “I await inconclusive results at best.” They all winced slightly. Four fleets; and the home system of the monkeys was still resisting the Eternal Pack. Chuut-Riit’s power here was still new, still shaky; it had been necessary to ship most of those who resented a homeworld prince as governor off with the Fourth Fleet. Since they also constituted the core of policy resistance to his more cautious strategy, that had considerable political merit as well.
“No, it is possible that the wild humans will attempt some countermeasure. What, I cannot guess—they still have not made extensive use of gravity polarizer technology, which means we control interstellar space—but my nose is dry when I consider the time we have left them for thought. A decade for each attack . . . They are tricky prey, these hairless tree-swingers.”
* * *
“God, what have you done to her?” Jonah asked, as they grabbed stanchions and halted by the viewport nearest his ship.
The observation corridor outside the central graving dock of the base-asteroid was a luxury, but then, with a multimegaton mass to work with and unlimited energy, the Sol-system military could afford that type of extravagance. Take a nickel-iron rock. Drill a hole down the center with bomb-pumped lasers. Put a spin on the resulting tube, and rig large mirrors with the object at their focal points; the sun is dim beyond the orbit of Mars, but in zero-G you can build big mirrors big. The nickel-iron pipe heats, glows, turns soft as taffy, swells outward evenly like cotton candy at a fair; cooling, it leaves a huge open space surrounded by a thick shell of metal-rich rock. Robots drill the tunnels and corridors, humans and robots install the power sources, life-support, gravity polarizers . . .
An enlisted crewman bounced by them horizontal to their plane of reference, sketching a sloppy salute as he twisted, hit the corner feetfirst, and rebounded away. The air had the cool clean tang that Belters grew up with, and an industrial-tasting underlay of ozone and hot metal: the seals inside UNSN base Gibraltar were adequate for health but not up to Belt civilian standards. Even while he hung motionless and watched the technicians gutting his ship, some remote corner of Jonah’s mind noted that again. Flatlanders had a nerve-wracking tendency to make-do solutions.
My ship, he thought.
UNSN Catskinner hung in the vacuum chamber, surrounded by the flitting shapes of spacesuited repair workers, compuwaldos, and robots; torches blinked blue-white, and a haze of detached fittings hinted the haste of the work. Beneath it the basic shape of the Dart-class attack boat showed, a massive fusion-power unit, tiny life-support bubble, and the asymmetric fringe of weapons and sensors designed for deep-space operation.
“What have you done to her?” Jonah said again.
“Made modifications, Captain,” Raines replied. “The basic drive and armament systems are unaltered.”
Jonah nodded grudgingly. He could see the clustered grips for the spike-pods, featureless egg-shaped ovoids, that were the basic weapon for light vessels, a one-megaton bomb pumping an X-ray laser. In battle they would spread out like the wings of a raptor, a pattern thousands of kilometers wide slaved to the computers in the control pod; and the other weapons, fixed lasers, ball-bearing scatterers, railguns, particle-beam projectors, the antennae for stealthing and beam-deflection fields.
Unconsciously, the pilot’s hands twitched; his reflexes and memory were back in the crashcouch, fingers moving infinitesimally in the lightfield gloves, holos feeding data into his eyes. Dodging with fusion-powered feet, striking with missile fists, his Darts locked with the kzinti Vengeful Slashers in a dance of battle that was as much like zero-G ballet as anything else. . . .
“What modifications?” he asked.
“Grappling points for attachment to a ramscoop ship. Battleship class, technically, although she’s a one-off, experimental; they’re calling her the Yamamoto. The plan is that we ride piggyback, and she goes through the Wunderland system at high Tau, accelerating all the way from here to Alpha Centauri, and drops us off on the way. They won’t have much time to prepare, at those speeds.”
The ship would be on the heels of the wave-front announcing its arrival. She called up data on her beltcomp, and he examined it. His lips shaped a silent whistle; big tanks of onboard hydrogen, and initial boost from half the launch-lasers in the solar system. There was going to be a lot of energy behind the Yamamoto. For that matter, the fields a ramscooper used to collect interstellar matter were supposed to be fatal to higher life forms.
Lucky it’s just us sods in uniform, then, he thought sardonically, continuing aloud: “Great. And just how are we supposed to stop?” At .90 light, things started to get really strange. Particles of interstellar hydrogen began acting like cosmic rays. . . .
“Oh, that’s simple,” Raines said. For the first time in their brief acquaintance, she smiled. Damn, she’s good looking, Jonah thought with mild surprise. Better than good. How could I not notice?
“We ram ourselves into the sun,” she continued.
Several billion years before, there had been a species of sophonts with a peculiar ability. They called themselves (as nearly as humans could reproduce the sound) the thrint; others knew them as Slavers. The ability amounted to an absolutely irresistible form of telepathic hypnosis, evolved as a hunting aid in an ecosystem where most animals advanced enough to have a spinal cord were at least mildly telepathic; this was a low-probability development, but in a universe as large as ours anything possible will occur sooner or later. On their native world, thrintun could give a subtle prod to a prey-animal, enough to tip its decision to come down to the waterhole. The thrint evolved intelligence, as an additional advantage. After all, their prey had millions of years to develop resistance.