“Boring this isn’t, no jive,” he said, watching the disk of Alpha Centauri grow. “About—”
—discontinuity—
“Greow-Captain, there is an anomaly in the last projectile!”
“They are all anomalies, Sensor-Operator!” The commander did not move his eyes from the schematic before his face, but his tone held conviction that the humans had used irritatingly nonstandard weapons solely to annoy and humiliate him. Behind his back, the other two kzin exchanged glances and moved expressive ears.
The Slasher-class armed scout held three crewkzin in its delta-shaped control chamber: the commander forward and the Sensor and Weapons operators behind him to either side. There were three small screens instead of the single larger divisible one a human boat of the same size would have had, and many more manually activated controls. Kzin had broader-range senses than humans, faster reflexes, and they trusted cybernetic systems rather less. They had also had gravity control almost from the beginning of spaceflight; a failure serious enough to immobilize the crew usually destroyed the vessel.
“Simply tell me,” the kzin commander said, “if our particle-beam is driving it down.” The cooling system was whining audibly as it pumped energy into its central tank of degenerate matter, and still the cabin was furnace-hot and dry, full of the wild odors of fear and blood that the habitation-system poured out in combat conditions. The ship shuddered and banged as it plunged in a curve that was not quite suicidally close to the outer envelope of the sun.
Before Greow-Captain a stepped-down image showed the darkened curve of the gas envelope, and the gouting coriolis-driven plumes as the human projectiles plowed their way through plasma. Shocks of discharge arched between them as they drew away from the kzin craft above, away from the beams that sought to tumble them down into denser layers where even their velocity would not protect them. Or at least throw them enough off course that they would recede harmlessly into interstellar space. The light from the holo-screen crawled in iridescent streamers across the flared scarlet synthetic of the kzin’s helmet and the huge lambent eyes; the whole corona of Alpha Centauri was writhing, flowers of nuclear fire, a thunder of forces beyond the understanding of human or kzinkind.
The two Operators were uneasily conscious that Greow-Captain felt neither awe nor the slightest hint of fear. Not because he was more than normally courageous for a young male kzin, but because he was utterly indifferent to everything but how this would look on his record. Another uneasy glance went between them. Younger sons of nobles were notoriously anxious to earn full Names at record ages, and Greow-Captain had complained long and bitterly when their squadron was not assigned to the Fourth Fleet. Operational efficiency might suffer.
They knew better than to complain openly, of course. Whatever the state of his wits, there was nothing wrong with Greow-Captain’s reflexes, and he already had an imposing collection of kzin-ear dueling trophies.
“Greow-Captain, the anomaly is greater than a variance in reflectivity,” the Sensor-Operator yowled. Half his instruments were useless in the flux of energetic particles that were sheeting off the Slasher’s screens. He hoped they were being deflected; as a lowly Sensor-Operator he had not had a chance to breed—not so much as a sniff of kzinrret fur since they carried him mewling from the teats of his mother to the training creche. “The projectile is not absorbing the quanta of our beam as the previous one did, nor is its surface ablating. And its trajectory is incompatible with the shape of the others; this is larger, less dense, and moving” . . . a pause of less than a second to query the computer . . . “moving as if its outer shell were absolutely frictionless and reflective, Greow-Captain. Should this not be reported?”
Reporting would mean retreat, out to where a message-maser could punch through the chaotic broad-spectrum noise of an injured star’s bellow.
“Do my Heroes refuse to follow into danger?” Greow-Captain snarled.
“Lead us, Greow-Captain!” Put that way, they had no choice; which was why a sensible officer would never have put it that way. Both Operators silently cursed the better diet and personal-combat training available to offspring of a noble’s household. It had been a long time since kzin met an enemy capable of exercising greater selective pressure than their own social system. His very scent was intimidating, overflowing with the ketones of a fresh-meat diet.
“Weapons-Operator, shift your aim to the region of compressed gases directly ahead of our target, all energy weapons. I am taking us down and accelerating past red-line.” With a little luck, he could ignite the superheated and compressed monatomic hydrogen directly ahead of the projectile, and let the multimegaton explosion flip it up or down off the ballistic trajectory the humans had launched it on.
Muffled howls and spitting sounds came from the workstations behind him; the thin black lips wrinkled back more fully from his fangs, and slender lines of saliva drooled down past the open neckring of his suit. Warren-dwellers, he thought, as the Slasher lurched and swooped.
His hands darted over the controls, prompting the machinery that was throwing it about at hundreds of accelerations. Vatach hunters. The little quasi-rodents were all lower-caste kzin could get in the way of live meat. Although the anomaly was interesting, and he would report noticing it to Khurut-Squadron-Captain. I will show them how a true hunter—
The input from the kzin boat’s weapons was barely a fraction of the kinetic energy the Catskinner was shedding into the gases that slowed it, but that was just enough. Enough to set off chain-reaction fusion in a sizable volume around the invulnerably-protected human vessel. The kzin craft was far enough away for the wave-front to arrive before the killing blow:
“—shield overload, loss of directional hhnrrreaw—”
The Sensor-Operator shrieked and burned as induction-arcs crashed through his position. Weapons-Operator was screaming the hiss of a nursing kitten as his claws slashed at the useless controls.
Greow-Captain’s last fractional second was spent in a cry as well, but his was of pure rage. The Slasher’s fusion-bottle destabilized at almost the same nanosecond as her shields went down and the gravity control vanished; an imperceptible instant later only a mass-spectroscope could have told the location as atoms of carbon and iron scattered through the hot plasma of the inner solar wind.
—discontinuity—
“Shit,” Jonah said, with quiet conviction. “Report. And stabilize that view.” The streaking pinwheel in the exterior-view screen slowed and halted, but the control surface beside it continued to show the Catskinner twirling end-over-end at a rate that would have pasted them both as a thin reddish film over the interior without the compensation fields. Gravity polarizers were a wonderful invention, and he was very glad humans had mastered them, but they were nerve-wracking.
The screen split down the middle as Ingrid began establishing their possible paths.
“We are,” the computer said, “traveling twice as fast as our projected velocity at switchoff, and on a path twenty-five degrees further to the solar north.” A pause. “We are still, you will note, in the plane of the ecliptic.”
“Thank Finagle for small favors,” Jonah muttered, working his hands in the control gloves. The Catskinner was running on her accumulators, the fusion reactor and its so-detectable neutrino flux shut down.
“Jonah,” Ingrid said. “Take a look.” A corner of the screen lit, showing the surface of the sun and a gigantic pillar of flare reaching out in their wake like the tongue of a hungry fire-elemental. “The pussies are burning up the communications spectra, yowling about losing scout-boats. They had them down low and dirty, trying to throw the slugs that went into the photosphere with us off-course.”
“Lovely,” the man muttered. So much for quietly matching velocities with Wunderland while the commnet is still down. To the computer: “What’s ahead of us?”
“For approximately twenty-three point six light-years, nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Hard vacuum, micrometeorites, interstellar dust, possible spacecraft, bodies too small or nonradiating to be detected, superstrings, shadowmatter—”
“Shut up!” he snarled. “Can we brake?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, this will require several hours of thrust and exhaust our onboard fuel reserves.”
“And put up a fucking great sign, ‘Hurrah, we’re back’ for every pussy in the system,” he grated. Ingrid touched him on the arm.
“Wait, I have an idea. . . . Is there anything substantial in our way, that we could reach with less of a burn?”
“Several asteroids, Lieutenant Raines. Uninhabited.”
“What’s the status of our stasis-controller?”
A pause. “Still . . . I must confess, I am surprised.” The computer sounded surprised that it could be. “Still functional, Lieutenant Raines.”
Jonah winced. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?” he said plaintively. “Another collision?”
Ingrid shrugged. “Right now, it’ll be less noticeable than a long burn. Computer, will it work?”
“Ninety-seven percent chance of achieving a stable Swarm orbit. The risk of emitting infrared and visible-light signals is unquantifiable. The field switch will probably continue to function, Lieutenant Raines.”