We must strike in passing, he thought; he could feel the claws slide out of the black-leather-glove shapes of his hands, pricking against the rests in the gloves of his space armor.
“Dominant One,” Riesu-Fleet-Operations said. The tone in his voice and a sudden waft of spoiled-ginger scent brought Traat-Admiral’s ears folding back into combat position, and his tongue lapped across his nose instinctively. “Separation . . . No, it’s not breaking up . . . We’re getting relay from the outer-system drone sentinels, Traat-Admiral. The human ship is launching.”
“Launching what?”
“Traat-Admiral . . . ahhh. Projectiles of various sorts. Continuous launch. None over one-tenth kzinfist mass.” About twenty grams, in human measurements—but stealthing could be in use, hiding much larger objects in the clutter. “Some are buckshot arrays, others slugs. Spectroscopic analysis indicates most are of nickel-iron composition. Magnetic flux. The human ship is using magnetic launchers of very great power for initial guidance.”
Traat-Admiral’s fur went flat, then fluffed out to stand erect all over his body.
“Trajectories!” he screamed.
“Ereaauuuu—” the officer mewled, then pulled himself together. “Dominant One, intersection trajectories for the planet itself and the following installations—”
Alarm klaxons began to screech. Traat-Admiral ignored them and reached for his communicator. Chuut-Riit was not going to be happy, when he learned of how the humans replied to the Fourth Fleet.
Chuut-Riit had told him that some humans were worthy of respect. He was beginning to believe it.
* * *
Raines and Jonah commanded the front screen to stop mimicking a control board; beyond a certain level fear-adrenaline was an anti-aphrodisiac. Now the upper half was an unmodified view of the Alpha Centauri system; the lower was a battle schematic, dots and graphs and probability-curves like bundles of fuzzy sticks. The Yamamoto was going to cross the disk of the Wunderland system in subjective minutes, mere hours even by outside clocks, with her ramscoop fields spreading a corona around her deadly to any life-form with a nervous system, and the fusion flare a sword behind her half a parsec long, fed by the fantastically rich gas-field that surrounded a star. Nothing but beam-weapons stood a chance of catching her, and even messages were going to take prodigies of computing power to unscramble. Her own weapons were quite simple: iron eggs. Velocity equals mass; when they intercepted their targets, the results would be in the megaton-yield range.
Jonah’s lips skinned back from his teeth, and the hair struggled to raise itself along his spine. Plains ape reflex, he thought, smelling the rank odor of fight/flight sweat trickling down his flanks. Your genes think they’re about to tackle a Cape buffalo with a thighbone club. His fingers pressed the inside of the chair seat in a complex pattern.
“Responding,” said the computer in its usual husky contralto.
Was it imagination that there was more inflection in it? Conscious computer, but not a human consciousness. Memory and instincts designed by humans . . . free will, unless he or Ingrid used the override keys. Unless the high command had left sleeper drives. Perhaps not so much free will; a computer would see the path most likely to succeed and follow it. How would it be to know that you were a made thing, and doomed to encysted madness in six months or less? Nobody had ever been able to learn why. He had speculated to himself that it was a matter of time; to a consciousness that could think in nanoseconds, that could govern its own sensory input, what would be the point of remaining linked to a refractory cosmos? It could make its own universe, and have it last forever in a few milliseconds. Perhaps that was why humans who linked directly to a computer system of any size went catatonic as well. . . .
“Detection. Neutronic and electromagnetic-range sensors.” The ship’s system was linked to the hugely powerful but subconscious level machines of the Yamamoto. “Point sources.”
Rubies sprang out across the battle map, and they moved as he watched, swelling up on either side and pivoting in relation to each other. A quick glimpse at the fire-bright point source of Alpha Centauri in the upper screen showed a perceptible disk, swelling as he watched. Jonah’s skin crawled at the sight; this was like ancient history, air and sea battles out of Earth’s past. He was used to maneuvers that lasted hours or days, matching relative velocities while the planets moved slowly and the sun might as well be a fixed point at the center of the universe . . . perhaps when gravity polarizers were small and cheap enough to fit in Dart-class boats, it would all be like this.
“The pussies have the system pretty well covered,” he said.
“And the Swarm’s Belters,” Ingrid replied. Jonah turned his head, slowly, at the sound of her voice. Shocked, he saw a glistening in her eyes.
“Home . . .” she whispered. Then more decisively: “Identification, human-range sensors, discrete.”
Half the rubies flickered for a few seconds. Ingrid continued to Jonah: “This is a messy system; more of its mass in asteroids and assorted junk than yours. Belters use more deep-radar and don’t rely on telescopes as much. The pussies couldn’t have changed that much; they’d cripple the Swarm’s economy and destroy its value to them.” Slowly. “That’s the big station on Tiamat. They’ve got a garrison there, it’s a major shipbuilding center, was even”—she swallowed—”fifty years ago. Those others are bubbleworlds . . . More detectors on Wunderland than there used to be, and in close orbit. At the poles, and that looks like a military-geosynchronous setup.”
“Enemy action. Laser and particle-beam weapons.” Nothing they could do about that. “Enemy vessels are detonating high-yield fusion weapons on our anticipated trajectory.”
Attempting to overload the ramscoop, and unlikely to succeed unless they had something tailored for it, like cesium gas bombs. The UNSN had done theoretical studies, but the pussies were unlikely to have anything on hand. This trick was not in their book, and they were rather inflexible in tactics.
Of course, if they did have something, the Yamamoto would become a rather dangerous slug of high-velocity gas in nanoseconds. Catskinner might very well survive, if the stasis field kicked in quickly enough . . . in which case her passengers would spend the next several thousand years in stasis, waiting for just the right target to slow them down.
“Home,” Ingrid said, very softly.
Jonah thought briefly what it would be like to return to the Sol-Belt after fifty years. Nearly a third of the average lifetime, longer than Jonah had been alive. What it would be like, if he ever got home. The Yamamoto could expect to see Sol again in twenty years objective, allowing time to pass through the Alpha Centauri system, decelerate and work back up to a respectable Tau value. The plan-in-theory was for him and Ingrid to accomplish their mission and then boost the Catskinner out in the direction of Sol, turn on the stasis field again and wait to be picked up by UNSN craft.
About as likely as doing it by putting our heads between our knees and spitting hard, he thought sardonically.
“Ships,” the computer said in its dispassionate tone. “Movement. Status, probable class and dispersal cones.”
Color-coded lines blinking over the tactical map. Columns of print scrolling down one margin, coded velocities and key-data; hypnotic training triggered bursts into their minds, crystalline shards of fact, faster than conscious recall. Jonah whistled.
“Loaded for bandersnatch,” he said. There were a lot of warships spraying out from bases and holding-orbits, and that was not counting those too small for the Yamamoto’s detection systems: their own speed would be degrading signal drastically. Between the ramscoop fields, their velocity, and normal shielding, there was very little that could touch the ramscooper, but the kzin were certainly going to try.
“Aggressive bastards,” he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tactical display. Getting in the way of the Yamamoto took courage, individually and on the part of their commander. Nobody had used a ramscoop ship like this before; the kzin had never developed a Bussard-type drive; they had had the gravity polarizer for a long time, and it had aborted work on reaction jet systems. But they must have made staff studies, and they would know what they were facing. Which was something more in the nature of a large-scale cosmic event than a ship. Mass equals velocity: by now the Yamamoto had the effective bulk of a medium-sized moon, moving only a tenth slower than a laser beam.
That reminded him of what the Catskinner would be doing shortly—and the Dart did not have anything like the scale of protection the ramscoop warship did. Even a micrometeorite . . . Alpha Centauri was a black disk edged by fire in the upper half of the screen.
“Projectiles away,” the computer said. Nothing physical, but another inverted cone of trajectories splayed out from the path of the Yamamoto. Highly polished chrome-tungsten-steel alloy slugs, which had spent the trip from Sol riding grapnel-fields in the Yamamoto’s wake. Others were clusters of small shot, or balloons, to transmit energy to fragile targets; at these speeds, a slug could punch through a ship without slowing enough to do more than leave a small glowing hole through the structure. Wildly varying albedos, from fully-stealthed to deliberately reflective; the Catskinner was going to be rather conspicuous when the Slaver stasis field’s impenetrable surface went on. Now the warship’s magnetics were twitching the kinetic-energy weapons out in sprays and clusters, at velocities that would send them across the Wunderland system in hours. It would take the firepower of a heavy cruiser to significantly damage one, and there were a lot of them. Iron was cheap, and the Yamamoto grossly overpowered.