“In ships designed to travel at point-eight lightspeed? From behind? Remember the Human Lesson. That is a very effective reaction drive they are using.”
A deep ticking sound came from his throat, and Traat-Admiral’s ears laid back instinctively. The thought of trying to maneuver past that planetary-length sword of nuclear fire . . .
Chuut-Riit paused to let the thought sink home before continuing: “This has been a startling tactic. We assumed that possession of the gravity polarizer would lead the humans to neglect further development of their so-efficient reaction drives, as we had done; hr’rrearow t’chssseee mearowet’aatrurrte, this-does-not-follow. We must prepare countermeasures, investigate the possibility of ramscoop interstellar missiles . . . At least they did not strike at this system’s sun, or drop a really large mass into the planetary gravity well.”
The fur of the kzin on Throat-Ripper’s bridge lay flat, sculpting the bone-and-muscle planes of their faces.
“Indeed, Chuut-Riit,” Traat-Admiral said fervently.
“A series of polarizer-driven missiles, with laser-cannon boost, deployed ready to destabilize ramscoop fields . . . In any case, you are ordered to break off action, assist with emergency rescue efforts, detach two units with interstellar capacity to shadow the intruder until it leaves the immediate vicinity. Waste no more Heroes in futility; instead, we must repair the damage and redouble our preparations for the next attack on Sol.”
“As you command, Chuut-Riit, although it goes against the grain to let the leaf-eating monkeys escape, when the Fifth Fleet is so near completion.”
The governor rose, letting his weight forward on hands whose claws slid free. He restrained any further display of impatience. I must teach him to think. To think correctly, he must be allowed to make errors.
“Its departure has already been delayed. Will losing further units in fruitless pursuit speed the repairs and modifications which must be made? Attend to your orders!”
“At once, Chuut-Riit!”
The governor held himself impressively immobile until the screen blanked. Then he turned and leaped with a tearing shriek over the nearest wall, out into the unnatural storm and darkness. A half-hour later he returned, meditatively picking bits of hide and bone from between his teeth with a thumb-claw. His pelt was plastered flat with mud, leaves, and blood, and a thorned branch had cut a bleeding trough across his sloping forehead. The screens were still flicking between various disasters, each one worse than the last.
“Any emergency calls?” he asked mildly.
“None at the priority levels you established,” the computer replied.
“Murmeroumph,” he said, opening his mouth wide into the killing gape to get at an irritating fragment between two of the back shearing teeth. “Staff.”
One wall turned to the ordered bustle of the household’s management centrum. “Ah, Henrietta,” he said in Wunderlander. “You have that preliminary summary ready?”
The human swallowed and averted her eyes from the bits of something that the kzin was flicking from his fangs and muzzle. The others behind her were looking drawn and tense as well, but no signs of panic. If I could recognize them, the kzin thought. They panic differently. A Hero overcome with terror either fled, striking out at anything in his path, or went into mindless berserker frenzy.
Berserker, he mused thoughtfully. The concept was fascinating; reading of it had convinced him that kzin and humankind were enough alike to cooperate effectively.
“Yes, Chuut-Riit,” she was saying. “Installations Seven, Three, and Twelve in the north polar zone have been effectively destroyed, loss of industrial function in the seventy-five to eighty percent range. Over ninety percent at Six, the main fusion generator destabilized in the pulse from a near-miss.” Ionization effects had been quite spectacular. “Casualties in the range of five thousand Heroes, thirty thousand humans. Four major orbital facilities hit, but there was less collateral damage there, of course, and more near-misses.” No air to transmit blast in space. “Reports from the asteroid belt still coming in.”
“Merrower,” he said, meditatively. Kzin government was heavily decentralized; the average Hero did not make a good bureaucrat, that was work for slaves and computers. A governor was expected to confine himself to policy decisions. Still . . . “Have my personal spaceship prepared for lift. I will be doing a tour.”
Henrietta hesitated. “Ah, noble Chuut-Riit, the feral humans will be active, with defense functions thrown out of order.”
She was far too experienced to mistake Chuut-Riit’s expression for a smile.
“Markham and his gang? I hope they do, Henrietta, I sincerely hope they do.” He relaxed. “I’ll view the reports from here. Send in the groomers; my pelt must be fit to be seen.” A pause. “And replacements for one of the bull buffalo in the holding pen.”
The kzin threw himself down on the pillow behind his desk, massive head propped with its chin on the stone surface of the workspace. Grooming would help him think. Humans were so good at it . . . and blowdryers, blowdryers alone were worth the trouble of conquering them.
* * *
“Prepare for separation,” the computer said. The upper field of the Catskinner’s screen was a crawling slow-motion curve of orange and yellow and darker spots; the battle schematic showed the last few slugs dropping away from the Yamamoto, using the gravity of the sun to whip around and curve out toward targets in a different quarter of the ecliptic plane. More than a few were deliberately misaimed, headed for catastrophic destruction in Alpha Centauri’s photosphere as camouflage.
It can’t be getting hotter, he thought.
“Gottdamn, it’s hot,” Ingrid said. “I’m swine-sweating.”
Thanks, he thought, refraining from speaking aloud with a savage effort. “Purely psychosomatic,” he grated.
“There’s one thing I regret,” Ingrid continued.
“What’s that?”
“That we’re not going to be able to see what happens when the Catskinner and those slugs make a high-Tau transit of the sun’s outer envelope,” she said.
Jonah felt a smile crease the rigid sweat-slick muscles of his face. The consequences had been extrapolated, but only roughly. At the very least, there would be solar-flare effects like nothing this system had ever witnessed before, enough to foul up every receptor pointed this way. “It would be interesting, at that.”
“Prepare for separation,” the computer continued. “Five seconds and counting.”
One. Ingrid had crossed herself just before the field went on. Astonishing. There were worse people to be crammed into a Dart with for a month, even among the more interesting half of the human race.
Two. They were probably going to be closer to an active star than any other human beings had ever been and survived to tell the tale. Provided they survived, of course.
Three. His grandparents had considered emigrating to the Wunderland system; he remembered them complaining about how the Belt had been then, everything regulated and taxed to death, and psychists hovering to resanitize your mind as soon as you came in from a prospecting trip. If that’d happened, he might have ended up as a conscript technician with the Fourth Fleet.
Four. Or a guerrilla: the prisoners had mentioned activity by “feral humans.” Jonah bared his teeth in an expression a kzin would have had no trouble at all understanding. I intend to remain very feral indeed. The kzin may have done us a favor; we were well on the way to turning ourselves into sheep when they arrived. If I’m going to be a monkey, I’ll be a big, mean baboon, by choice.
Five. Ingrid was right, it was a pity they wouldn’t be able to see it.
“Personally, I just wish that ARM bastard who volunteered me for this was here—”
—discontinuity—
“Ready for separation, sir,” the computer said.
Buford Early grunted. He was alone in the corvette’s control room; none of the others had wanted to come out of deepsleep just to sit helplessly and watch their fate decided by chance.
“The kzinti aren’t the ones who should be called pussies,” he said. Early chuckled softly, enjoying a pun not one human in ten million would have appreciated. Patterns of sunlight crawled across his face from the screens; the Inner Ring was built inside the hull of a captured kzinti corvette, but the UNSN—and the ARM—had stuffed her full of surprises. “I don’t know what the youth of today is coming to.”
At that he laughed outright; he had been born into a family of the . . . even mentally, he decided not to specify . . . secret path. Born a long, long time ago, longer even than the creaking quasi-androids of the Struldbrug Club would have believed; there were geriatric technologies that the ARM and its masters guarded as closely as the weapons and destabilizing inventions people knew about.
Damn, but I’m glad the Long Peace is over, he mused. It had been far too long, whatever the uppermost leadership thought, although of course he had backed the policy. Besides, there was no real fun in being master in the Country of the Cows; Earthers had gotten just plain boring, however docile.