“It must be a bonanza for you, selling exit-permits to the Swarm,” Harold continued. Outside the base-asteroid of Tiamat, the Belters were much more loosely controlled than the groundside population. “And exemptions from military call-up.”
Montferrat smiled and leaned back, following the schnapps with lager. “There must be regulations,” he said reasonably. “The Swarm cannot absorb all the would-be immigrants. Nor can Wunderland afford to lose the labor of all who would like to leave. The kzin demand technicians, and we cannot refuse; the burden must be allocated.”
“Nor can you afford to pass up the palm-greasing and the, ach, romantic possibilities—” Yarthkin began.
“Alert! Alert! Emergency broadcast!” The mirror behind the long bar flashed from reflective to broadcast, and the smoky gloom of the bar’s main hall erupted in shouted questions and screams.
The strobing pattern of light settled into the civil-defense blazon, and the unmistakable precision of an artificial voice. “All civilians are to remain in their residences. Emergency and security personnel to their duty stations, repeat, emergency and security personnel to their—”
A blast of static and white noise loud enough to send hands to ears, before the system’s emergency overrides cut in. When reception returned the broadcast was two-dimensional, a space-armored figure reading from a screenprompt over the receiver. The noise in Harold’s Terran Bar sank to shocked silence at the sight of the human shape of the combat armor, the blue-and-white UN sigil on its chest.
“—o all citizens of the Alpha Centauri system,” the Terran was saying. In Wunderlander, but with a thick accent that could not handle the gutturals. “Evacuate areas of military or industrial importance immediately. Repeat, immediately. The United Nations Space Command is attacking kzinti military and industrial targets in the Alpha Centauri system. Evacuate areas—” The broadcast began again, but the screen split to show the same message in English and two more of the planet’s principal languages. The door burst open and a squad of Munchen Polezi burst through.
“Scheisse!” Montferrat shouted, rising. He froze as the receiver in his uniform cap began hissing and snarling override-transmission in the Hero’s Tongue. Yarthkin relaxed and smiled as the policeman sprinted for the exit. He cocked one eye towards the ceiling and silently flourished Montferrat’s last glass of schnapps before sending it down with a snap of his wrist.
* * *
“Weird,” Jonah Matthieson muttered, looking at the redshifted cone of light ahead of them. Better this way. This way he didn’t have to think of what they were going to do when they arrived. He had been a singleship pilot before doing his military service; the Belt still needed miners. You could do software design anywhere there was a computer system, of course, and miners had a lot of spare time. His reflexes were a pilot’s, and they included a strong inhibition against high-speed intercept trajectories.
This was going to be the highest-speed intercept of all time.
The forward end of the pilot’s cabin was very simple, a hemisphere of smooth synthetic. For that matter, the rest of the cabin was quite basic as well; two padded crashcouches, which was one more than normal, an autodoc, an autochef, and rather basic sanitary facilities. That left just enough room to move—in zero gravity. Right now they were under one-G acceleration, crushingly uncomfortable. They had been under one-G for weeks, subjective time; the Yamamoto was being run to flatlander specifications.
“Compensate,” Ingrid said. The view swam back, the blue stars ahead and the dim red behind turning to the normal variation of colors. The dual-sun Centauri system was dead ahead, looking uncomfortably close. “We’re making good time. It took thirty years coming back on the slowboat, but the Yamamoto’s going to put us near Wunderland in five point seven. Objective, that is. Probably right on the heels of the pussy scouts.”
Jonah nodded, looking ahead at the innocuous twinned stars. His hands were in the control-gloves of his couch, but the pressure-sensors and lightfields were off, of course. There had been very little to do in the month-subjective since they left the orbit of Pluto. Accelerated learning with RNA boosters, and he could now speak as much of the Hero’s Tongue as Ingrid—enough to understand it. Kzin evidently didn’t like their slaves to speak much of it; they weren’t worthy. He could also talk Belter-English with the accent of the Serpent Swarm, Wunderland’s dominant language, and the five or six other tongues prevalent in the many ethnic enclaves . . . sometimes he found himself dreaming in Pahlavi or Croat or Amish Pletterdeisz. It wasn’t going to be a long trip; with the gravity polarizer and the big orbital lasers to push them up to ramscoop speeds, and no limit on the acceleration their compensators could handle . . .
We must be nipping the heels of photons by now, he thought. Speeds only robot ships had achieved before, with experimental fields supposedly keeping the killing torrent of secondary radiation out. . . .
“Tell me some more about Wunderland,” he said. Neither of them were fidgeting. Belters didn’t; this sort of cramped environment had been normal for their people since the settlement of the Sol-system Belt three centuries before. It was the thought of how they were going to stop that had his nerves twisting.
I’ve already briefed you twenty times,” she replied, with something of a snap in the tone. Military formality wore thin pretty quickly in close quarters like this. “All the first-hand stuff is fifty-six years out of date, and the nine-year-old material’s in the computer. You’re just bored.”
No, I’m just scared shitless. “Well, talking would be better than nothing. Spending a month strapped to this thing is even more monotonous than being a rockjack You were right, I’m bored.”
“And scared.”
He looked around. She was lying with her hands behind her head, grinning at him.
“I’m scared too. The offswitch is exterior to the surface of the effect.” It had to be; time did not pass inside a stasis field.
“The designers were pretty sure it’d work.”
“I’m sure of only two things, Jonah.”
“Which are?”
“Well, the first one is that the designers aren’t going to be diving into the photosphere of a sun at point-nine lights.”
“Oh.” That had occurred to him too. On the other hand, it really was easier to be objective when your life wasn’t on the line . . . and in any case, it would be quick. “What’s the other thing?”
Her smile grew wider, and she undid the collar-catch of her uniform. “Even in a gravity field, there’s one thing I want to experience again before possible death.”
* * *
“Overview, schematic, trajectory,” Traat-Admiral commanded. The big semicircle of the kzinti dreadnought’s bridge was dim-lit by the blue and red glow of screens and telltales, crackly with the ozone scents of alerted kzintosh; Throat-Ripper was preparing for action.
Spray-fans appeared on the big circular display-screen below his crash couch. Traat-Admiral’s fangs glinted wet as he considered them. The ship would pass fairly near Wunderland, and quite near Alpha Centauri itself. Slingshot effect was modest with something moving at such speeds, but . . . ah, yes. The other two suns of this cluster would also help. Still, it would be a long time before that vessel headed back towards the Sol system, if indeed that was their aim.
What forsaken-of-ancestors trick is this? he wondered. Then: Were those Kfraksha-Admiral’s last thoughts?
He shook off the mood. “Identification?”
“Definitely a ramscoop vessel, Dominant One,” Riesu-Fleet-Operations said. “Estimated speed is approximately .9071 c. In the 1600 kilokzinmass range.”
About the mass of a light cruiser, then. His whiskers ruffled. Quite a weight to get up to such a respectable fraction of c, when you did not have the gravity polarizer. On the other paw, the humans used very powerful launch-boost lasers—useful as weapons, too, which had been an unanticipated disaster for the kzinti fleets—and by now they might have the gravity polarizer. Polarizer-drive vessels could get up to about .8 c if they were willing to spend the energy, and that was well above ramscoop initial speeds.
“Hrrr. That is considerably above the mass-range of the robot vessels the humans used”—for scouting new systems and carrying small freight loads over interstellar distances. They used big slowboats at .3 c for colonization and passenger traffic. “Fleet positions, tactical.”
The screen changed, showing the positions of his squadrons, stingfighter carriers and dreadnoughts, destroyers and cruisers. Most were still crawling across the disk of the Alpha Centauri system, boosting from their ready stations near replenishment asteroids or in orbit around Wunderland itself. He scowled; the human probe was damnably well stealthed for something moving that fast, and there had been little time. His own personal dreadnought and battle-group were thirty AU outside the outermost planet, beginning to accelerate back in toward the star. The problem was that no sane being moved at interstellar speeds this close to high concentrations of matter, which put the enemy vessel in an entirely different energy envelope.