“This does no harm,” he said to the guard captain. “As long as they behave in a seemly way.” To the humans he spoke in Wunderlander, a little abruptly. “Continue to serve well. I shall rule in Chuut-Riit’s tradition.”
All is . . . tolerable, he thought decisively as he stalked away. We have suffered loss, setbacks, yes, a defeat of sorts. The monkeys of Sol have bought time with their antics; they will gain more before this is done. They have widened a dangerous rift in our ranks. But with time and effort, all will be well.
He looked up uneasily. So long as no new factor intervenes.
Chapter 8
Three billion years before the birth of the Buddha, the thrint ruled the galaxy and ten thousand intelligent species. The thrint were not great technologists or mighty warriors; as a master race, they were distinctly third-rate. They had no need to be more. They had the Power, an irresistible mental hypnosis more powerful than any weapon. Their tnuctipun slaves had only cunning, but in the generations-long savagery of the Revolt, that proved nearly enough to break the Slaver Empire. It was a war fought without even the concept of mercy, one which could only end when either the thrint or tnuctipun species were extinct, and tnuctipun technology was winning . . . But the thrint had one last use for the Power, one last command that would blanket all the worlds that had been theirs. It was the most comprehensive campaign of genocide in all history, destroying even its perpetrators. It was not, however, quite complete. . . .
“Master! Master! What shall we do?”
The Chief Slave of the orbital habitat wailed, wringing the boneless digits of its hands together. It recoiled as the thrint rounded on it, teeth bared in carnivore reflex. There was only a day or so to go before Suicide Time, when every sophont in the galaxy would die—and the message would be repeated automatically for years. The master of Orbital Supervisory Station Seven-1Z-A did not intend to be among them. Any delay was a mortal threat, and this twelve-decicredit specimen dared—
“DIE, SLAVE!” Dnivtopun screamed mentally, lashing out with the Power. The slave obeyed instantly, of course. Unfortunately, so did several dozen others nearby, including the Zengaborni pilot who was just passing through the airlock on its way to the escape spaceship.
“Must you always take me so literally!?” Dnivtopun bellowed, kicking out at the silvery-furred form that lay across the entrance-lock to the docking chamber.
It rolled and slid through a puddle of its body wastes, and a cold chill made Dnivtopun curl the eating-tendrils on either side of his needle-toothed mouth into hard knots. I should not have done that, he thought. A proverb from the ancient “Wisdom of Thrintun” went through his mind; haste is not speed. That was a difficult concept to grasp, but he had had many hours of empty time for meditation here. Forcing himself to calm, he looked around. The corridor was bare metal, rather shabby; only slaves came down here, normally. Not that his own quarters were all that much better. Dnivtopun was the youngest son of a long line of no more than moderately successful thrint; his post as Overseer of the food-producing planet below was a sinecure from an uncle.
At least it kept me out of the War, he mused with relief. The tnuctipun revolt had spanned most of the last hundred years, and nine-tenths of the thrint species had died in it. The War was lost . . . Dnivtopun appreciated the urge for revenge that had led the last survivors on the thrint homeworld to build a psionic amplifier big enough to blanket the galaxy with a suicide command, but he had not been personal witness to the genocidal fury of the tnuctipun assaults; revenge would be much sweeter if he were there to see it. Other slaves came shuffling down the corridor with a gravity-skid, and loaded the bodies. One proffered an electropad; Dnivtopun began laboriously checking the list of loaded supplies against his initial entries.
“Ah, Master?”
“Yes?”
“That function key?”
The thrint scowled and punched it. “All in order,” he said, and looked up as the ready-light beside the liftshaft at the end of the corridor pinged. It was his wives, and the chattering horde of their children.
SILENCE, he commanded. They froze; there was a slight hesitation from some of the older males, old enough to have developed a rudimentary shield. They would come to the Power at puberty . . . but none would be ready to challenge their Sire for some time after that. GO ON BOARD. GO TO YOUR QUARTERS. STAY THERE. It was best to keep the commands simple, since thrint females were too dull-witted to understand more than the most basic verbal orders. He turned to follow them.
“Master?” The thrint rotated his neckless torso back towards the slave. “Master, what shall we do until you return?”
Dnivtopun felt a minor twinge of regret. Being alone so much with the slaves, he had conversed with them more than was customary. He hesitated for a moment, then decided a last small indulgence was in order.
BE HAPPY, he commanded, radiating as hard as possible to cover all the remaining staff grouped by the docking tube. It was difficult to blanket the station without an amplifier helmet, but the only one available was suspect. Too many planetary Proprietors had been brain-burned in the early stages of the War by tnuctipun-sabotaged equipment. Straining: BE VERY HAPPY.
They were making small cooing sounds as he dogged the hatch.
“Master—” The engineering slave sounded worried.
“Not now!” Dnivtopun said.
They were nearly in position to activate the Standing Wave and go faster than light; the Ruling Mind had built up the necessary .3 of lightspeed. It was an intricate job, piloting manually. He had disconnected the main computer; it was tnuctipun work, and he did not trust the innermost programs. The problem was that so much else was routed through it. Of course, the Zengaborni should be at the board; they were expensive but had an instinctive feel for piloting. Now, begin the phase transition . . .
“Master, the density sensor indicates a mass concentration on our vector!”
Dnivtopun was just turning toward the slave when the collision alarm began to wail, and then—
—discontinuity—
Chapter 9
“Right, give me a reading on the mass detector,” the prospector said; like many rockjacks, he talked to the machinery. It was better than talking to yourself, after all. . . .
He was a short man for a Belter, with the slightly seedy run-down air that was common in the Alpha Centauri system these days. There was hunger in the eyes that skipped across the patched and mismatched screens of the Lucky Strike; the little torchship had not been doing well of late, and the kzin-nominated purchasing combines on the asteroid base of Tiamat had been squeezing harder and harder. The life bubble of his singleship smelled, a stale odor of metal and old socks; the conditioner was not getting out all of the ketones.
Collaborationist ratcat-loving bastards, he thought, and began the laborious manual setup for a preliminary analysis. In his mother’s time, there would have been automatic machinery to do that. And a decent life-support system, and medical care that would have made him merely middle-aged at seventy, not turning gray and beginning to creak at the joints.
Bleeping ratcats. The felinoid aliens who called themselves kzinti had arrived out of nowhere, erupting into the Alpha Centauri system with gravity-polarizer-driven ships and weapons the human colonists could never match, could not have matched even if they had a military tradition; and humans had not fought wars in three centuries. Wunderland had fallen in a scant month of combat, and the Serpent Swarm asteroid belt had followed after a spell of guerrilla warfare.
He shook his head and returned his attention to the screens; unless he made a strike this trip, he would have to sell the Lucky Strike, work as a sharecrop-prospector for one of the Tiamat consortia. The figures scrolled up.
“Sweet Finagle’s Ghost,” he whispered in awe. It was not a big rock, less than a thousand meters ’round. But the density . . . “It must be solid platinum!”
Fingers stabbed at the board; lasers vaporized a pit in the surface, and spectroscopes probed. A frown of puzzlement. The surface was just what you would expect in this part of the Swarm: carbonaceous compounds, silicates, traces of metal. A half-hour spent running the diagnostics made certain that the mass-detector was not malfunctioning either, which was crazy.
Temptation racked him suddenly, a feeling like a twisting in the sour pit of his belly. There was something very strange here; probably very valuable. Rich, he thought. I’m rich. He could go direct to the ratcat liaison on Tiamat. The kzin were careful not to become too dependent on the collabo authorities. They rewarded service well. Rich. Rich enough to . . . Buy a seat on the Minerals Commission. Retire to Wunderland. Get decent medical care before I age too much.