Then a spaceship landed on the thrint homeworld. Its crew immediately became slaves; absolutely obedient, absolutely trustworthy, willing and enthusiastic slaves. Operating on nervous systems that had not evolved in an environment saturated with the Power, any thrint could control dozens of sophonts. With the amplifiers that slave-technicians developed, a thrint could control an entire planet. Slaves industrialized a culture in the hunting-band stage, in a single generation. Controlled by the Power, slaves built an interstellar empire covering most of a galaxy.
Slaves did everything, because the thrint had never been a very intelligent species, and once loose with the Power they had no need to think. Eventually they met, and thought they had enslaved, a very clever race indeed, the tnuctipun. The revolt that eventually followed resulted in the extermination of every tool-using sentient in the Galaxy, but before it did the tnuctipun made some remarkable things. . . .
* * *
“A Slaver stasis field?” he said. Despite himself, awe showed in his voice. One such field had been discovered on Earth, then lost, one more on a human-explored world. Three centuries of study had found no slightest clue concerning their operating principles; they were as incomprehensible as a molecular-distortion battery would have been to Thomas Edison. Monkey-see monkey-do copies had been made, each taking more time and expense than the Gibraltar, and so far exactly two had functioned. One was supposedly guarding UNSN headquarters, wherever that was.
“Uh-mmm, give the captain a big cigar, right the first time.”
Jonah shuddered, remembering the flatlander’s smoke. “No, thanks.”
“Too right, Captain. Just a figure of speech.”
“Call me Jonah. We’re going to be camped enough on this trip without poking rank-elbows in each other’s ribs.”
“Jonah. The Yamamoto skims through the system, throwing rocks.” At .90 of c, missiles needed no warheads. The kinetic energies involved made the impacts as destructive as antimatter. “We go in as an offcourse rock. Course corrections, then on with the stasis field, go ballistic, use the outer layer of the sun for braking down to orbital speeds.”
Nothing outside its surface could affect the contents of a Slaver field; let the path of the Catskinner stray too far inward and they would spend the rest of the lifespan of the universe at the center of Alpha Centauri’s sun, in a single instant of frozen time. For that matter, the stasis field would probably survive the re-contraction of the primal monobloc and its explosion into a new cosmic cycle. . . . He forced his mind away from the prospect.
“And we’re putting in a Class-VII computer system.”
Jonah raised a brow. Class-VII systems were consciousness-level; they also went irredeemably insane sometime between six months and a year after activation, as did any artificial entity complex enough to be aware of being aware.
“Our . . . mission won’t take any longer than that, and it’s worth it.” A shrug. “Look, why don’t we hit a cafeteria and talk some more. Really talk, you’re going to have briefings running out of every orifice before long, but that isn’t the same.”
Jonah sighed, and stopped thinking of ways out of the role for which he had been “volunteered.” This was too big to be dodged, far and away too big. Two stasis fields in the whole Sol system; one guarding United Nations Space Navy HQ, the other on his ship. His ship, a Dart-Commander like ten thousand or so others, until this week. How many Class-VII computers? Nobody built consciousness-level systems anymore, except occasionally for research; it simply wasn’t cost-effective. Build them much more intelligent than humans and they went non-comp almost at once; a human-level machine gave you a sentient with a six-month lifespan that could do arithmetic in its head. Ordinary computers could do the math, and for thinking people were much cheaper. It was a dead-end technology, like direct interfacing between human neural systems and computers. And they had revived it, for a special purpose mission.
“Shit,” Jonah mumbled, as they came to a lock and reoriented themselves feet-down. There was a gravity warning strobing beside it; they pushed through the air-screen curtain and into the dragging acceleration of a one-G field. The crewfolk about them were mostly flatlander now, relaxed in the murderous weight that crushed their frames lifelong.
“Naacht wh’r?” Ingrid asked. In Wunderlander, but the Sol-Belter did not have to know that bastard offspring of Danish and Plattdeutsch to sense the meaning.
“I just realized . . . hell, I just realized how important this must all be. If the high command were willing to put that much effort into this, willing to sacrifice half of our most precious military asset, throw in a computer that costs more than this base complete with crew . . . then they must have put at least equal effort into searching for just the right pilot. There’s simply no point in trying to get out of it. Tanj. I need a drink.”
* * *
“Take your grass-eater stink out of my air!” Chuut-Riit shrieked. He was standing, looking twice his size as his orange-red pelt bottled out, teeth exposed in what an uninformed human might have mistaken for a grin, naked pink tail lashing. The reference to smell was purely metaphorical, since the conversation was ‘cast. Which was as well, he was pouring aggression-pheromones into the air at a rate that would have made a roomful of adult male kzin nervous to the point of lost control.
The holo images on the wall before him laid themselves belly-down on the decking of their ship and crinkled their ears, their fur lying flat in propitiation.
“Leave the recordings and flee, devourers of your own kittens!” screamed the kzinti governor of the Alpha Centauri system. The Hero’s Tongue is remarkably rich in expressive insults. “Roll in your own shit and mate with sthondats!” The wall blanked, and a light blinked in one corner as the data was packed through the link into his private files.
Chuut-Riit’s fur smoothed as he strode around the great chamber. It stood open to the sky, beneath a near-invisible dome that kept the scant rain of this area off the kudlotlin-hide rugs. They were priceless imports from the home world; the stuffed matched pair of Chunquen on a granite pedestal were souvenirs acquired during the pacification of that world. He looked at them, soothing his eyes with the memory-taste of a successful hunt, at other mementos. Wild smells drifted in over thin walls that were crystal-enclosed sandwiches of circuitry; in the distance something squalled hungrily. The palace-preserve-fortress of a planetary governor, governor of the richest world to be conquered by kzin in living memory. Richest in wealth, richest in honor . . . if the next attack on the human homeworld was something more than a fifth disaster.
“Secretariat,” he rasped. The wall lit.
A human looked from a desk, stood and came to attention. “Henrietta,” the kzin began, “hold my calls for the rest of the day. I’ve just gotten the final download on the Fourth Fleet fiasco, and I’m a little upset. Run it against my projections, will you?” Most of the worst-case scenarios he had run were quite close to the actual results; that did not make it much easier to bear.
“Yes, Chuut-Riit,” he said—No, God devour it, she, I’ve got to start remembering human females are sentient. At least he could tell them apart without smelling them, now. Even distinguish between individuals of the same subspecies. There are so many types of them!
“I don’t think you’ll find major discrepancies.”
“That bad?” the human said.
The expression was a closed curve of the lips; the locals had learned that baring their teeth at a kzin was not a good idea. Smile, Chuut-Riit reminded himself. Betokening amusement, or friendliness, or submission. Which is it feeling? Born after the Conquest Fleet arrived here. Reared from a cub in the governor’s palace, superbly efficient . . . but what does it think inside that ugly little head?
“Worse, the ——”—he lapsed into the Hero’s Tongue, since no human language was sufficient for what he felt about the Fourth Fleet’s hapless Kfraksha-Admiral—”couldn’t apply the strategy properly in circumstances beyond the calculated range of probable response.”
It was impossible to set out too detailed a plan of campaign, when communication took over four years. His fur began to bristle again, and he controlled his reaction with a monumental effort of will. I need to fight something, he thought.
“Screen out all calls for the next sixteen hours, unless they’re Code VI or above.” A thought prompted at him. “Oh, It’s your offspring’s naming-day next week, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Chuut-Riit.” Henrietta had once told him that among pre-Conquest humans it had been a mark of deference to refer to a superior by title, and of familiarity to use names. His tail twitched. Extraordinary. Of course, humans all had names, without having to earn them. In a sense, they’re assigned names as we are rank titles, he thought.