Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (13 page)

“Yes,” sighed hn-Pilot. “Yes, I do. I want to make sure you are performing your duties properly, rr-Pilot. That’s part of my job as commander.”

rr-Pilot’s ears retracted a millimeter more, quivering. “And are you quite satisfied with my performance?”

“It is too early to say. I haven’t completed observing you, yet.” hn-Pilot made the sardonic amusement clear in his voice. He saw rr-Pilot’s jaw sag open, the points of needle-like teeth showing: the kzin “smile” was a prelude to either combat, or at least, readiness to engage in it. hn-Pilot leaned even more of his weight into the chair, which groaned under his mass. “What? Do you disapprove of my command prerogatives? You’re not challenging me, are you, rr-Pilot?” Said in the mildest of tones, it was a sarcastic gauntlet waved in the air between them.

“I do not question your command, or its prerogatives. But your scent is overpowering, hn-Pilot.”

“As am I.” He felt rr-Pilot’s body tensing against that boast, but neither the circumstances nor his physical position made resistance prudent. Since the in-flight monitors were running, there would be plentiful evidence that he had initiated violence which could endanger the mission. And besides, rr-Pilot was seated, facing away from his commander, who was already on his feet, behind him, eyes and claws ready. rr-Pilot’s ears folded back fully, taut, then relaxed: he had found a mutually acceptable path out of the confrontation: “hn-Pilot, you might want to use some of your power to tell ms-Pilot of
Incisor-Yellow
to keep properly formed up on us: he is drifting wide, again.”

The comment not only defused their own tense situation, but was inarguably true: in the sensor scope, the blip signifying their brother craft was allowing the gap between them to widen. hn-Pilot toggled the ship-to-ship: “
Incisor-Yellow
, eyes on the trail! Do you sleep even as you stalk?”

ms-Pilot’s response was bored, but the blip indicating his ship began to close the distance: “Surely, this is not stalking. It seems to me that we are simply dragging our paws from one dry watering hole to another.”

Which hn-Pilot had to admit was a most adequate description of their current mission: to escort the human robot transport—
Euclid’s Lasso
—on its first post-invasion cycle from the main Centauri system to its distant trinary component Proxima, and back again. Why they were loping dutifully after this pointless, brainless beast of a hull was beyond hn-Pilot’s comprehension. It shipped food and other necessary supplies out to the sparse human population of the Proxima system; it returned with their marginal ore finds. So far as he could tell, the human miners of Proxima had a rather desperate paw-to-maw existence, and were strategically and economically insignificant due to both their poverty and astrographic position.

But that was hardly any of his concern. hn-Pilot, like the rest of his species, was of the opinion that there was nothing to be gained in trying to improve the productivity of slave races through intervention. Such intervention always—
always
—cost more than it was worth. This was the result of language barriers, of radically different approaches to similar problems, and of the inevitable resentment of the enslaved locals. But just as often, it was because those same locals knew their own systems better than the conquerors did. As long as the tribute required was paid promptly and in full, the slaves could use whatever methods worked best.

And so it was here. However, with the invasion now in its fifth month, the kzin were admittedly having more trouble than they had expected. When originally encountered in deep space, the humans had not only proven to be (mostly) leaf-eaters, but thoroughly unacquainted with the waging of war. Only later did it become evident that their societal ignorance of fighting and violence was a recent phenomenon, a consequence of three-century-old mandates promulgated by their government back in the Sol system.

But, for reasons of which hn-Pilot had no awareness, and in which he had less interest, these pacifistic lessons—despite having been imposed pervasively and powerfully by their homeworld—had been less completely embraced by the humans of Alpha Centauri. The humans of its one habitable planet, Wunderland, and the even less conformist Belter population that was densest on the much-modified planetoid, Tiamat, had all shown surprising will, innovation, and tenacity in their resistance to the kzin. However, their desperate attempts to hold back the Fleet were coming to an end, according to the routine updates hn-Pilot had been receiving. Tiamat had been thoroughly pacified now, and the belt known as the Serpent Swarm was secure enough that the Fleet no longer had to worry about surprise attacks upon its rear while pressing the offensive against the main world.

Apparently, the leaf-eaters had built their doomed defensive sphere around Wunderland in order to buy time to launch four generation ships—immense slower-than-light arks—that they were readying there. hn-Pilot did not understand that: only a tiny fraction of the system’s inhabitants would be able to flee on those craft. But evidently it was a project which held great significance for the humans: they had fought tenaciously for five months now. It was, therefore, obvious that they were capable of recalling much of the Warrior’s wisdom that they had forgotten. hn-Pilot and many, if not most, other kzin, took this as a mixed omen. It meant the humans had enough spine and courage to be a truly useful and self-directing slave race. But it also meant that they had a primal nature that, once awakened, remembered the bloody lessons of their evolutionary struggles. Although omnivores, they had nonetheless proven to be the apex predators of their own world. In consequence, they promised to be the most useful slave race in the kzin stable, but also the one in which lurked the greatest seeds of danger. They would have to be watched closely.

And hence, this largely pointless mission: to monitor the
Euclid’s Lasso
, even though it was simply a robot barge, riding its plume of fusion fire from the Serpent Swarm belt of the main system out to the binary. It began its journey by almost dancing into the gravitic clutches of Alpha Centauri B before the slingshot effect of sweeping close to that orange star’s mass sent it on its way with an extra boost, out into the cold and the dark. Accelerating for weeks, it finally reached eighteen percent the speed of light and then cut engines, coasting onward toward the small red dot that was its destination: Proxima Centauri. Where, four months later, it arrived after more weeks of counterboosting that slowed it just enough for rendezvous with the Proximans’ own intrasystem cycling robot ship. That smaller automated craft swung perpetually between the Proximans’ various cargo transfer points and a trajectory which enabled it to mate and exchange payloads with
Euclid’s Lasso
. After which, the bigger intersystem vessel began its return journey to Alpha Centauri, starting the same process all over again.

There were rumors that Fleet Command had considered sending a single missile at
Euclid’s Lasso
to terminate its journey to Proxima whose inhabitants would then have obligingly died off without the kzin having to lift a paw in further effort. But, probably because the leaders wanted kzin violence to be seen as deliberate rather than arbitrary, this path had not been chosen, and now hn-Pilot’s two ships were trailing along in the
Lasso
’s wake, ensuring that its contents, as well as their recipients, were benign. Initial intelligence had established that there was no military presence out at Proxima, and so there had been no reason to waste the resources or time journeying out to officially subjugate it. But now that complete investiture of the main system was imminent, the higher and the mightier had decided that the time had come for Proxima’s humans to meet, and make appropriate gestures of obeisance to, their new kzin masters.

rr-Pilot pointed at the
Incisor-Yellow
’s sensor blip. “Now he’s too close. He’s not going to earn a Name for piloting this way.”

hn-Pilot could not keep his fur from spasmodically rippling at the sardonic quip. Not only was ms-Pilot botching the simple job of staying in formation, but Names were not earned for simple tasks like piloting, any more than they were for running swiftly or shooting straight. Perhaps, if one were to pilot the Patriarch’s own cubs to safety through a swarm of enemy fighters, then, maybe, the honor and achievement would be great enough to earn a Name of one’s own. But the monotony of the daily routine reminded both of them just how far away they were from such glory. Worse still, since each smallship had two pilots, the kzin had been compelled to resort to differentiator-prefixes. These subvocal sounds distinguished one from another just as numbers might have. For the Pilots, rr-, ms-, zh-, and himself, hn-, nothing highlighted the lack of a personal Name so much as having to use these tags.

hn-Pilot watched as the second craft in his formation now drifted too close. “
Incisor-Yellow
, maintain the correct distance and attitude.”

There was no reply, but the blip moved back to the correct distance. Then, a hesitant message: “
Incisor-Red
, I am detecting some out-gassing from
Lasso
’s outer ring of cargo containers. Do you confirm?”

hn-Pilot glanced at the sensor plot, saw no gross abnormalities; he tightened the scan field while increasing resolution. Sure enough, there was a modest cloud of gas and minor debris vectoring away from the
Lasso,
the signatures emanating from each compass point of its round, head-on profile. hn-Pilot grunted, aimed the viewers at the closest sensor return, and increased the magnification to maximum.

He saw a diminishing puff of vapor and small parts—a metal plate, and possibly the cap-heads of several explosive bolts—rushing away down the sides of the
Lasso
. It was a strange visual effect: since the
Lasso
was counterboosting, the debris was already moving faster than the slowing ship from which it had been expelled, and so, as the detritus swept outward, it also “fell forward,” in the subjective parlance of both human and kzin’s spacefarers.

hn-Pilot toggled the ship-to-ship. “
Incisor-Yellow
, did you see what that rubbish was? Did something fail on the human craft?”

“I do not think so. The signatures were simultaneous and at perfectly equidistant intervals. In each case, it looked like a short explosive burst, and then modest debris. I could make out nothing more.”

Reducing the screen’s magnification, hn-Pilot stared suspiciously at the human craft. Its primary hull was an immense, central cylinder for large-volume cargo items. Its bow—currently facing
Incisor-Red—
also housed the guidance and robotic elements of the craft.

This main hull was ringed by tubular containers, giving it the appearance of being a baton girdled by a tightly packed bandolier of long metallic frankfurters. Loaded with smaller cargo items, these containers were detachable: the Proximan communities swapped tubes of ore for tubes loaded with comestibles and other essential trade goods. But having four of these containers malfunction simultaneously, and in a cruciform pattern, did not sound like an accident; it sounded like a prelude to—

“Sabotage!” yowled rr-Pilot as the sensor plot was suddenly choked with a spreading cone of small, dense signatures spraying out from each of the four ruptured tubes. However, at second glance, it was evident that this growing debris cloud was not really a cone: it was a funnel. And the only way to escape the junk rushing at them was—

hn-Pilot pointed urgently. “Get into the open space—there, at the center of the funnel.”

rr-Pilot growled, complied—and with one sharp jerk, they were in the eye of the scree-storm, unscathed.
Incisor-Yellow
was not so lucky: judging from the com-chatter and the hull’s now-wavering course, its portside gravitic polarizer drive had been damaged and the crew-section breached. The craft was losing atmosphere, and a piece of junk the size of a small ball-bearing had punctured the bridge, killing the co-pilot where he sat.

“What treachery is this?” rr-Pilot’s growl was low, with a hard, fast vibratory underbuzz: the sound of a barely suppressed kill instinct.

hn-Pilot was still trying to make sense of the ambush. Clearly, the humans had preprogrammed this event into
Lasso
’s automatic routines. But why here, so far inside the Proxima system? And why an explosion of junk, jetting out of the four containers that had obviously been sealed with illegal explosive bolts? To destroy the kzin escorts, yes, perhaps, but then why not ensure that the spread pattern would create a full cone of debris, rather than this empty-cored funnel? Simply moving to the hull’s lengthwise center-line had allowed the two kzin craft to escape the worst effects of the—

“hn-Pilot, there is more activity.”

He looked up at rr-Pilot’s tone: puzzlement edged with dread. The dense, encircling halo of debris was beginning to fall forward around them, but less quickly, according to the scanners. That meant that the
Lasso
had stopped counterboosting, and they were matching speed to maintain distance—but why was the human craft not continuing to decelerate?

The answer was in rr-Pilot’s next report: “
Lasso
is tumbling, commander.”

A tumble meant that the human ship’s engines were no longer slowing her, so the debris would stay with all the craft slightly longer, now, continuing to hem them in. Indeed, the human ship’s spin about its considerable longitudinal axis would ultimately bring it end-over-end, so that the fusion drive would be in a position to exert forward thrust.

Or, in other words, the drive’s exhaust plume would rotate straight back into the faces of the two debris-encircled kzin smallships.

hn-Pilot saw it before the others. “One-eighty tumble and counterboost—max gees! Now! Do it now!”

But as the last word left his wet, spittle-spraying mouth, the blinding blow-torch tail of the
Lasso
’s fusion drive completed its one-hundred-eighty degree spin: hn-Pilot watched a literally blinding sun rise swiftly into his viewscreen—

—a split second before he and every other object in the two-ship kzin escort were stripped down into subatomic particles by the shaft of blue-white radiance that shot almost fifty kilometers behind the
Euclid’s Lasso
.