Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (16 page)

Well, of course; they had to shut down the fusion plant so that their on-off power pulses would come through as the Scout’s Tapping. The output of a live fusion plant would have drowned out the fluctuations in the smaller energy signature, much as the roar of nearby waterfalls had, in primeval times, made the original Scout’s Tapping useless. But, from a cold restart, that same fusion plant would take some time before rebuilding to optimal output.

On the main plot, the small vermillion speck of the Raker was gamely trying to come about and intercept the three, leaf-green lancets bearing down on
Guardant Ancestor
. Thrarm-Captain felt his gorge rise in frustration: frustration at not turning to fight, at failing to lend his aid and firepower to the stricken Raker, and above all, at not having immediately offered to rescue his fellow Heroes.

zh-Sensor started: “The Raker is firing beams and missiles—many missiles! Large-warhead drones, evidently. Two human craft have slowed their approach, and one has been damaged and broken off. The drones are slowing, though—”

Thrarm-Captain narrowed his eyes, felt his vocal chords vibrating, quaking, as he held back a scream of impotent rage. “Those are not drones. They were his lifeboats.”

“Thrarm-Captain, the lead human craft has been hit and destroyed. The second is damaged, but now reapproaching.” zh-Sensor blinked at his relays. “And—and you were correct, Thrarm-Captain; the Raker discharged its escape pods and lifeboats along with its missiles—”

“—thereby making it look, for a moment, like it had superior armament. Which disrupted the coordination of the human attack. Buying more time for us, but dooming themselves when the humans resume their attack. And see, they do so even now. This time, the leaf-eaters will finish the job. And the crew of the Raker has no way left to escape.”

But the Raker’s fusion drives surged to life and it discharged its beam weapons in the same moment that two human missiles hit the spindly hull, along with a brace of x-ray laser bursts.

The lasers hit the Raker’s tankage sections, but without any free oxygen, the result was simply a profound out-gassing of most of the remaining fuel. The human missiles, however, hit the gunnery decks, which fell suddenly and ominously silent. The interior explosions seemed a bit smaller than Thrarm-Captain might otherwise have expected, but for all he knew, the Raker’s racks were dry, and one of the human warheads might have been a dud. Either way, the Raker was now all but dead: fuel already low, and its systems evidently failing, the fusion plant died out again.

But the brief fire by the kzin ship’s full-powered beams had destroyed one of the two persistent attackers, the last of which now the last flinched back, withdrawing along with the first one the Raker had injured. Powering its gravitic polarizer drive from capacitors only, the Raker struggled to come back about and keep up with the rearguard—but would clearly not be able to do so much longer.

“More Scout’s Tapping in power pulses,” zh-Sensor murmured. “They send ‘
Hsna’zhao
.’”

The ancient
Kzanzh
byword of resolve, even in death,
hsna’zhao
meant, roughly, “on with the hunt!” It was the exhortation of a dying Hero to his living companions: to fight on, to not risk themselves by tarrying beside one who was already as good as dead.

Thrarm-Captain growled: he could take no more of this. “Helm, distance to the van?”

“Twenty-two light-seconds, Thrarm-Captain.”

Good: they could afford a little time. “Reduce acceleration to one-half. Hold steady so the Raker can come alongside.”

zh-Sensor looked up: contending emotions warred in his eyes. “Thrarm-Captain, I mean no insolence. I simply remind you of the protocols.”

The kzin captain reared to his full height. “Since the Raker appeared on our screens, I have chased my tail around that very issue, zh-Sensor. I can abide these overcautious dictates no longer. This is clearly one of our own craft, crippled, but brave in our defense. The humans attacked it and they destroyed one of the leaf-eaters’ smallships: we saw it with our own eyes. And they speak our language, know our Tapping, act as we would ourselves.”

“A clever foe might learn all these things.”

“Yes, they might, but to squander such a ploy here, in the midst of this chaos? No. That is not possible. And they have no way of knowing what we carry on board
Guardant Ancestor
, so we may safely set aside suspicions that this is a trap laid especially for us. Which leaves only one reasonable explanation: that every second we waste debating the obvious, our brothers remain in mortal danger of another attack like the last.”

zh-Sensor’s hide rippled sharply, once. Clearly, he had wanted to go to the aid of their fellow Heroes every bit as much as his captain. The captain turned toward his Helm and, as he gave instructions for allowing the Raker to dock, thought
it is good to lead Heroes worthy of their title.

* * *

The kzin troopers, beamers held in a comfortable assault carry, straightened when Thrarm-Captain came around the bend in the main passageway. The squad leader made the stylized submission gesture that was a salute among them. “Thrarm-Captain, we had no word that you would be joining—”

“I sent no word: I did not wish to disturb your preparations. But I wish to see the Raker’s crew for myself.”

The squad leader’s eyes narrowed. “Uncertainty persists regarding their identity?”

“Uncertainty will persist until I have seen their commander, have accepted his salute, and have had you search every cubic meter of his ship. Which we will evacuate and then scuttle. But I am equally eager to be the first to welcome him: if it was mine to bestow upon him, I would give him a Name.”

“Sir!” The squad leader stood very straight, almost presented arms.

The floor jarred softly under their broad, well-padded feet. “Hard dock completed,” announced the junior squad leader, who checked his wrist comp. “The hardwire links are mated, but still no coherent data, and no video-feed from the Raker’s airlock. Their commo system is down, apparently.”

Reasonable
, thought Thrarm-Captain,
but in no way reassuring
. “Visual check?”

The junior squad-leader had undogged the inner hatch of the
Guardant Ancestor
, entered its airlock, hunkered down to peer through the small, thick-paned porthole that should have looked through a similar window into the airlock of the Raker. “Again, no visuals, Thrarm-Captain. The glass is smoke-smudged, and it appears that their airlock has only one emergency light functioning.”

“Are they sending
anything
through the docking hardwire?”

“Yes, sir. They are pulsing it in the Scout’s Tapping. They are asking if our side is secure, sir. They have no sensor function to determine that the hard dock is complete, or that we stand ready on our side.”

Again, perfectly reasonable, given the circumstances. And again, not in the least bit reassuring.
“Seal for vacuum ops.” Thrarm-Captain’s own actions suited his orders. “First Squad, force manual entry into the Raker. Stand ready to attack or assist.”

The kzinti so instructed loped into
Guardant Ancestor
’s airlock, worked at the manual access to the Raker’s outer airlock door, gave up, popped an access plate in its surface, revealing, among other things, a simple hand-crank. The largest of them spun the crank while the others waited. The door eventually gapped a bit, allowing the others to wedge in pry-bars and open it fully.

“The Raker is outgassing, even here in the airlock,” one of them reported, consulting his paw-held sensor.

“Atmosphere?”

“Standard, but a lot of hydrogen mixed in. They must have fuel leaks throughout the ship.”

A leak which Thrarm-Captain didn’t want entering his own ship any longer than necessary. Hydrogen’s flammability was the least of his worries: it’s monoatomic ability to undermine solids—metals, synthetics, composites—by simply passing through them led to a condition called brittlization. After enough exposure, gaskets disintegrated, steel sheeting crumbled like desiccated plastic. “Move quickly, then. What about their inner airlock door?”

“Battle damage, but I can hear someone pounding behind it.”

“How bad is the damage?”

“Bad enough, Thrarm-Captain.”

“That answer is no answer, Corporal. Tell me what needs to be done to open the door and how long it will take.”

“Beam-torch: three minutes, maybe four.”

“Then do it, and quickly.”

“At the run, Thrarm-Captain.”

Within seconds, the sparking glow of a beam-torch flickered inside the airlock. Satisfied, Thrarm-Captain caught the squad leader’s eye and made a grasping “to-me” hand gesture. The kzin noncom came immediately.

Thrarm-Captain leaned their space helmets together. He muted his radio feed and said, “This concerns me, squad leader.”

“The amount of time this is taking, or the possibility of treachery?”

“Both. I want you to summon two more squads to this area, but do not deploy them around the airlock. Keep them back, in staggered positions, protecting all junctures, all the way back to the main passageway and command bulkheads.”

“Yes, Thrarm-Captain.” And then the troop leader was gone, already summoning in the squads and preparing a defensive network with multiple fallback positions.

Thrarm-Captain toggled his radio open again. “zh-Sensor: report.”

“We are now twenty-four light-seconds behind the van. This puts us abreast of the leading elements of the rearguard, now.”

“Yes. And the Raker?”

“Sir, no activity at all, except that its power output continues to diminish steadily.”

“The human ships?”

“The ones which attacked the Raker fell back and have merged into the front rank of the leaf-eating harriers that are pushing us before them. But nothing else: no sign of heavier human hulls inbound.”

“Very well. Inform me at once of any changes.”

“Yes, Thrarm-Captain. I will—”

That was when, with a shrill screech of high-pressure atmosphere, the beam-torch team cut through the Raker’s inner airlock door: a brief wash of low-pressure flame flared up as it did. The operator quickly switched off the torch.

“What the Patriarch’s entrails just happened?” demanded Thrarm-Captain, instinctively moving closer to the source of the surprise.

“Thrarm-Captain, the atmosphere on the other side of the door is under tremendous pressure.” The high-pitched keening of the in-pouring gases almost made his report inaudible.

At that moment, a toxicity alarm started yowling and the specialist with the wrist comp looked up sharply. “Thrarm-Captain, the gas from the Raker: it’s pure hydrogen. Coming in at a rate of—”

But Thrarm-Captain wasn’t listening: he no longer needed to. He was too busy damning his own gullibility and rapping out orders: “Torch team, immediate return to our hull. Seal our hatches behind you. Bridge, jettison the emergency docking ring—”

The world seemed to tear itself apart around him. Before the torch team could exit the Raker’s shattered airlock, its inner door was blasted off its hinges with terrible force, killing two of the team outright, disabling a third.

Following that blast so quickly that it seemed to be part of the same event, flame came gushing into the companionways of
Guardant Ancestor
. The first roaring rush of white fire was the hydrogen combusting, knocking the kzinti down or spilling them sideways against walls and bulkheads. But hard on its heels came a thicker yellow-orange conflagration: clearly, a pressurized fuel-air explosive gas was being pumped in at immense pressure, right behind the hydrogen. The unit patches on the kzinti’s spacesuits began to burn. The battery of the beam-torch cooked off, detonating with a blue-white flash and a double-toned thunder-clap.

zh-Sensor’s voice was screaming reports as Thrarm-Captain picked himself up off the deck. “Launches from the Raker. More lifepods—no, not lifepods. Can’t be: they are maneuvering, moving straight toward our hull—”

Of course. The leaf-eaters are going to
cut
their way into my ship: why use an existing door when you can make your own?
“zh-Sensor, engage the pods with all weapons; they are breaching craft.”

“Trying, Thrarm-Captain. They are too close; our weapons will not bear.”

That’s when the shooting started. The screaming buzz of a human heavy-coil gun was audible through Thrarm-Captain’s supposedly sound-proof faceplate, along with images of hellish carnage. The squad leader, who had been racing around the corner toward the airlock, caught a full flight of the electromagnetically propelled four-millimeter, tungsten-cored, steel needles. One moment he was there; the next, a vaguely bipedal mist of plasma and body parts was falling backward, a diffusing red smear. Following close behind him, a newly arrived junior squad leader was blown aside by just two of the projectiles, each one opening up a red crater on the left side of his torso.

Thrarm-Captain had his own handgun up as a reflective object rolled swiftly past the tee-intersection where the two kzinti had been riddled. Thrarm-Captain sent three fast rounds after it, may have hit the device, which, he now discerned, resembled a large metal ball propelled by four roller-rings on interpenetrated axes.

The full implications of what Thrarm-Captain was witnessing sunk in. The leaf-eaters were on his ship, with specialized combat ’bots. Somehow they knew what he was carrying, why his ship was built for defense not offense. It was impossible to conceive of
how
they had learned it, but they had, and their intent was now clear: they did not want to destroy his ship; they wanted to take it.

Unthinkable.

Thrarm-Captain had his mouth open to order his bridge crew to override all local controls and autoseal all bulkhead doors when there was a muffled blast from aft; the lights flickered and the faintly crackling carrier-tone of the command-channel died away. It came back after a moment, along with approximately half of the lights.

zh-Sensor’s words were tinny in the helmet’s compromised speakers: “Thrarm-Captain, power in Engineering is out. Apparently the humans have already sent some automated EMP bombs on ahead to—”