“Chuut-Riit feared something like this,” he said. “And Conservor thinks that he was right to fear.” At the other’s startlement: “Oh, no, not these beings particularly. It is a joke of the God that we find this thing in the middle of a difficult war. But something terrible was bound to jump out of the long grass sooner or later. The universe is so large, and we keep pressing our noses into new caves . . .” He shrugged. “Enough. Now—”
* * *
Chuut-Riit’s sons lay stomach to earth on the path before the dais of judgment and covered their noses. Traat-Admiral looked down on their still-gaunt forms and felt himself recoil. Not with fear, at least not the fear of an adult kzin. Vague memories moved in the shadowcorners of his mind: brutal hands tearing him away from Mother, giant shapes of absolute power . . . rage and desire and fear, the bitter acrid smell of loneliness.
Wipe them out, he thought uneasily, as his lips curled up and the hair bulked erect on neck and spine. Wipe them out, and this will not be.
“You have committed the gravest of all crimes,” he said slowly, fighting the wordless snarling that struggled to use his throat. There was an ancient epic, Warlord Chmee at the Pillars. He had seen a holo of it once, and had groveled and howled like all the audience and come back washed free of grief, at the last view of the blind and scentless Hero. And these did not sin in ignorance, nor did they claw out their own eyes and breathe acid in remorse and horror.
“To overthrow one’s Sire is . . . primitive, but such is custom; to slay him honorably, even . . . But to fall upon him in a pack and devour him! And each other!”
The guilty ones seemed to sink farther to the raked gravel of the path before him; he stood like a towering wall of orange fur at the edge of the pavilion, the molten-copper glow of his pelt streaked with scar-white. Like an image of dominance to a young kzin, hated and feared and adored. Not that the armored troopers behind him with their beam-guns hurt, he reflected. Control, he thought. Self-control is the heart of honor.
“Is there any reason you should not be killed?” he said. “Or blinded, castrated, and driven out?”
Silence then, for a long time. Finally, the spotted one, who had spent longest in the regeneration tank, spoke.
“No, Dominant One.”
Traat-Admiral relaxed slightly. “Good. But Chuut-Riit’s last message to us spoke of mercy. If you had not acknowledged your crime and your worthlessness, there would have been no forgiveness.
“Hear your sentence. The fleets of the Patriarchy in this system are journeying forth against . . . an enemy. You have all received elementary space-combat training.” Attacks on defended asteroids often involved boarding, by marines in one-kzin suits of stealthed, powered vacuum armor. “You will be formed into a special unit for the coming action. This is your last chance to achieve honor!” An honorable death, of course. “Do not waste it. Go!”
He turned to Hroth-Staff-Officer. “Get me the readiness reports,” he said, and spoke the phrase that opened the communication line to the household staff. “Bring two saucers of tuna ice cream with stolychina vodka,” he continued. “I have a bad taste to get out of my mouth.”
Chapter 14
“How did he manage it?” Jonah Matthieson muttered.
The hauler the party from the Sol system had been assigned was an unfamiliar model, a long stalk with a life-bubble at one end and a gravity-polarizer drive as well as fusion thrusters. Introduced by the kzinti, no doubt; they had had the polarizer for long enough to be using it for civilian purposes. With a crew of half a dozen the bubble was very crowded, despite the size of the ship, and they had set the internal gravity to zero to make best use of the space. The air smelled right to his Belter’s nose: a pure neutral smell with nothing but a slight trace of ozone and pine, something you could not count on in the Alpha Centauri system these days. Certainly less nerve-wracking than the surface of Wunderland, with its wild smells and completely uncontrolled random-process life-support system.
A good ship, he thought. Nothing like the surprise-stuffed kzin corvette that Early had brought, but that was part of the oyabun’s fleet now, with enough UN personnel to teach locals. This must be highly automated, doing the rounds of the refineries and hauling back metals and polymer sacks of powders and liquids. What clung to the carrying fields now looked very much like a cargo of singleships, being delivered to rockjacks at some other base asteroid; he had been respectfully surprised at the assortment of commandeered weapons and jury-rigged but roughly effective control systems.
General Early looked up from his display plaque. “Not surprising, considering the state things are in,” he said. “Organized crime does well in a disorganized social setting. Like any conspiracy, unless the conspiracy is the social setting.”
Like the ARM, Jonah thought sourly. And what conspiracies control the conspiracies?
“It’s a Finagle-damned fleet, though,” he said aloud. “Don’t the pussies care?”
“Not much, I imagine,” Early said. Jonah could see the schematics for the rest of their flotilla coming up on the board. “So long as it doesn’t impact on their military concerns. They’d clamp down soon enough if much went directly to the resistance, of course. Or their human goons would, for fear of losing their positions. The pussies may be great fighters, but as administrators they’re worse than Russians.”
What’re Russians? Jonah thought. Then, Oh. Them. “Surprising they tolerate so much corruption.”
Early shrugged. “What can they do? And from what we’ve learned, they expect the tame monkeys to be corrupt, except for the household servants. If we weren’t goddam cowards and lickspittles, we’d all have died fighting.” He smiled his wide white grin and stuck a stogie in the midst of it—unlit, Jonah saw thankfully. The schematics continued to roll across the screen. “Ahhh, thought so.”
“Thought what?”
“Our friend Shigehero is playing both ends against the middle,” Early said. “He’s bringing along a lot of exploratory stuff as well as weaponry. A big computer, by local standards. Wait a second. Yes, linguistic-analysis hardware too. The son of a bitch!”
Silence fell. Jonah looked at the others, studied the hard set of their faces.
“Wait a second,” he said. “There’s an ancient alien artifact, and you don’t think it should be studied?”
Early looked up, and Jonah realized with a sudden shock that he was being weighed. For trustworthiness, and possibly for expendability.
“Of course not,” the general said. “The risk is too great. Remember the Sea Statue?”
Jonah concentrated. “Oh, the thingie in the Smithsonian? The Slaver?”
“Why do you think they were called that, Captain?” Early spent visible effort controlling impatience.
“I . . .” Suddenly, Jonah realized that he knew very little of the famous exhibit, beyond the fact that it was an alien in a spacesuit protected by a stasis field. “You’d better do some explaining, sir.”
Several of the others stirred uneasily, and Early waved them back to silence. “He’s right,” he said regretfully, and began.
“Murphy,” Jonah muttered when the older man had finished. “That is a menace.”
Early nodded jerkily. “More than you realize. That artifact is a ship. There may be more than one of the bastards on it,” he said, in another of his archaic turns of phrase. “A breeding pair, if we’re really unlucky. Besides which, the technology. We’ve had three centuries of trying, and we’ve barely been able to make two or three copies of their stasis field; as far as we can tell, the only way that could work is by decoupling the interior from the entropy gradient of the universe as a whole . . .”
Jonah leaned back, his toes hooked comfortably under a line, and considered the flatlander. Then the others, his head cocked to one side consideringly.
“It isn’t just you, is it?” he said. “The whole lot of you are ARM types. Most of you older than you look.”
Early blinked, and took the stogie from between his teeth. “Now why,” he said softly, “would you think that, Captain?”
“Body language,” Jonah said, linking his hands behind his back and staring “up.” The human face is a delicate communications instrument, and he suspected that Early had experience enough to read entirely too much from it. “And attitudes. Something new comes along, grab it quick. Hide it away and study it in private. Pretty typical. Sir.”
“Captain,” Early said, “you Belters are all anarchists, but you’re supposed to be rationalists too. Humanity had centuries of stability before the kzin arrived, the first long interval of peace since . . . God, ever. You think that was an accident? The way humankind was headed in the early atomic era, if something like the ARM hadn’t intervened there wouldn’t be a human race now. Nothing we’d recognize as human. There are things in the ARM archives . . . that just can’t be let out.”