The Man-Kzin Wars 04

CHAPTER 21

(2420 A.D.)

The United Nations Space Navy Shark materialized at a radius of 335 AU, some 50 billion kloms behind Alpha Centauri the location picked to keep them hidden from kzin eyes which might be watching Sol. There was minimal danger at this distance but UNSN Lieutenant Nora Argamentine was still filled with the dangerous excitement of her first combat patrol. She had a special reason for wanting revenge against the kzin.

"It's looking okay, Charlie. Clear field," she said. The detectors were in the green.

Charlie was captain. Prakit was hyperdrive engineer. The other two in the cramped cargo capsule didn't belong. They were special forces, checking out the fate of the Yamamoto, silent, untalkative, to be dropped off in their tiny torchship if a closer approach was possible, their mission to kill Chuut-Riit if that ratcat had survived the attempt on his life by Captain Matthieson and Lieutenant Raines. Efficient killers.

Once she got her telescope operational they'd be looking at Wunderland. The Yamamoto's relativistic pellets should have left marks perhaps not visible from this distance. They intended to move much closer, in stages.

Nora was not so sure that the Yamamoto had even passed through Alpha Centauri yet. It might still be hell bent on its mission, delayed by a patch of low density interstellar gas or a magnetic field breakdown or tanj knew what kind of trouble. The arrival time of a ramscoop was not highly predictable. Raines and Matthieson would be shocked by the level of technological progress since 2409. Wonderland might be liberated before they even arrived!

Prakit fussed over his hyperdrive unit, tuning it up for the next jump. Nora could turn around to encourage him, but there wasn't room for her to help him. She reached out a fist and banged him affectionately on his helmet with her wrist, grinning at him because he was so sober.

"Betsy giving you trouble?"

"New, Betsy s just a baby. If I feed her every four hours and bounce her on my knee, she calms down."

Betsy was a new crashlander model and they were lucky to have her. We Made It had been in the hyperspace-shunt engine business two years earlier than Earth, having bought the technology from incomprehensibly alien spacewanderers. The quality of the product from Procyon was better than Earth's for all of Earth's vaunted technological superiority and the UNSN crews fought over every shipment from Crashlanding City.

This model could make the transition between relativistic and quantum modes in half an hour when it was fined-tuned. When it wasn't fined-tuned, when Prakit couldn't get the hyperwave functions of the atoms into the proper phase relationship, Betsy just wavered and whined and if you were looking at her you'd feel as if pieces of retina were peeling off the back of your eyeball. Prakit didn't mind.

"She's fastened down," he'd say.

"If you guys need to stretch your legs just stick them up here!" Nora joked, shouted into the hold at the "special forces." Argamentine was a good-natured woman who liked to take care of her men even if that wasn't the style of military women. Her father had been fried in the Battle of Ceres during the Fourth Kzin Invasion when she was a teenager, and somehow she could never give enough love or hate enough.

"We've got lots of room. There's room for you down here," said the first killer because there wasn't.

"Are we there yet! Are we there yet!" cried the other holler.

Nora fixed her two commandoes ration crackers with a little smuggled Camembert, and passed her gift down the "hole. "Don't get crackers in your belly"

Charlie and Nora spent more than a day between naps taking photos and scanning the volume of space they wanted to move to, about 50 AU farther in. Nora spent a few moments off duty just gazing at the Serpent's Swarm through the electronic image amplifier. "God, Charlie, you've got to take a look at their Belt!" There was no hurry about tasks and no frantic priorities. They were making a very cautious approach. It took only about five minutes to move across 50 AU in hyperspace, but they didn't want to jump into a nest of kzin, not when they needed a minimum of 30 minutes to set up another jump.

Sometimes she had nightmares sleeping in the cockpit. As a teenager on the Iowa farm-city she had imagined such a cockpit around herself at dusk while the stars rose above the trees, imagining herself killing kzin before they got to Daddy, wondering where he was, what he was doing out there and if he was safe. It had been a nightly ritual, murdering imaginary kzin.

Charlie woke her up with a gentle nudge. "Bandits, at eight o'clock, twenty degrees high. Hey, Prakit, get us the tanj out of here!"

Lieutenant Argamentine was instantly awake and reading the flowing graphics on her screen. She asked her machine questions and the graphs changed in response. "Bandits coming in fast. The doppler reading shows a deceleration of sixty-four g's. Three fighters. They carry the Scream-of-Vengeance signature. That's the fighter that got my Dad."

"How much time have we got?" Charlie's voice was rapid-fire, impatient with chatter.

"Easy, Charlie. This is a different war. We aren't fighting the last war. They are hours away and we'll never have to engage them." Daddy had had no choice in a fighter with only a fraction of their maneuverability. "We have time for coffee and crullers." But she was nervously straightening a strand of curly hair. "I used to play this game with my little sister when she was three. I'd let her almost catch me then I'd disappear." She turned around to smile at Prakit. "How are you doing?"

"I'm doing! I'm doing," snapped Prakit.

The phase-change built up while Prakit counted off the minutes. They fell into a silence of suspense. War was waiting for those few seconds of action. "We love you, Betsy," said Nora when she couldn't stand the suspense any more.

"Shut up. Let Prakit work."

The hyperdrive suddenly went into a vibration that built up over three seconds and then died. Prakit cursed. "She just reset."

"Plenty of time," said Lieutenant Argamentine.

"I'm going to take five to make an adjustment. We don't want Betsy to burp again."

Charlie was thinking of defensive action now. He rolled the Shark so that the jet of its piggy-back torchship was pointed toward the Screamers.

"It won't do any good," said Nora. "Those devils are maneuverable enough to get out of the way of anything."

Charlie called down to his special forces. "We're under attack. Get ready to fire the torch. When I call for fire, fire!"

"We're going to be out of here!" said Prakit.

This time, as the phase-change built up, nobody broke the silence. Nora stared at the engine even while the sight of it started to "peel" the rods off the back of her eyeballs. Go! she prayed. But the Shark stayed suspended, agonizingly. Too long.

Betsy shuddered and reset.

"I should rebuild her," said Prakit frantically.

"You had all day!" snarled Charlie. "Time?" He was asking Nora how much time they had to live.

"They're still decelerating. Looks like a boarding. If they decide to take us alive, Betsy will have time. If they decide to make a fast pass, we are dead meat."

"Suits sealed," said Charlie. He meant helmets and gloves. They were already wearing airtights under their uniforms.

"Can't!" Prakit's voice was frantic. "I can't afford to be encumbered. I'm taking her up manually. I can shave off minutes that way. I can keep her in the canyon. I've done it before. The autoguide has been hitting the walls. Shouldn't happen."

They began a third countdown. "Can we do a short tunneling? Charlie was looking for straws.

"Doesn't work that way. Don't talk to me."

They waited. Again. Finally Charlie could wait no more. "Attention. All crew. I'm arming the self-destruct." If they got into hyperspace, each officer knew how to deactivate it before it blew. If they didn't…

They waited. The kzin continued to close.

"Down below. Get your torch primed." Charlie turned to Nora. "You and I are going to practice keeping our ass aimed at the kzin."

"There are two bandits coming in. One is doing a boarding maneuver, the other seems to be setting up a fast flyby." Nora twisted that ringlet of hair with her free hand, then found she needed both hands for her combat duties.

"And the third?"

"Hanging back. He'll be able to board or kill."

"We'll practice wiggling our ass between the two lead Screamers.' The Shark began to oscillate between two points the aiming precision-controlled by the ship's computer.

They waited.

"We're going to make it," Prakit said, calm certainty in his voice.

"Fire!" screamed Charlie to his torchmen.

Fire blazed out at the dancing kzin, seeking while the Screamers avoided. The countdown continued.

A lurch as the torchship was blown away. Nora saw it cartwheeling across the heavens before it detonated. A moment later the cabin took a hit. She didn't see Prakit sucked into space, helmetless. Her faceplate was triggering to opaque on cue from the explosive glare while actinic light burned the unshadowed half of her uniform. In the instant of death's visitation she saw, not the father's battle doom which had until now, never left her mind, but a baby sister running toward her with ruffles around the bottoms of her tiny pant…

The Hssin barbarian had already flashed past. The second Screamer dropped from 60 g's down to a fraction o…and was only nudging the alien object as the old warrior jumped out with a backpack into the hole that had been opened for him. He knew what he was looking for, but it took him precious seconds to find it. He slapped the backpack down. Its electrogravitic vibrators cut a clean hole through the floor and the backpack disappeared at 230 g's carrying an amputated hunk of the Shark with it. The battlearmored Gunner leapt into the cockpit with two airbags, and in a choreographed economy of gesture the old Hero and his Gunner each stuffed a body into a bag, and then hunkered down, waiting for the explosion.

Chuut-Riits warrior was grinning through his faceplate. "Maybe the acceleration killed it." But no the destruct bomb lit up the underside of the Screamer and the wreckage of the Shark.

The engine was intact. Give that wild Hssin barbarian credit he could shoot straight! While the old warrior was examining the salvage, Hromfi's son drifted to within hailing distance. The veteran Hero made hand signals to Hromfi's Son: Where was that laggard, Trainer-of-Slaves?

Double arm motions signaled back: On his way.

The Ztirgor rolled and locked onto the bottom of the old warrior's Screamer. Its insides had been stripped out to accommodate the autodoc. The body airbags were delivered efficiently and opened. Messy. Trainer-of-Slaves had a choice. There was room for only one prisoner in the autodoc. He chose the manmale because he was a male, then changed his mind because the male was dead, space-boiled blood clotting a neck wound, half his back carbonized to the bone. The female would have to do after all, the man-females were intelligent and information could be tortured out of them.

He didn't know if the autodoc could save her. He slashed away the remains of the green UNSN uniform with his claws. He slit, and then peeled off, the air tights. Some of the melted flesh came with it. He didn't know what to do with the bra, trying various techniques of puzzle-solving to unleash it, then in exasperation cut it off. The rest was easy.

The first time Lieutenant Argamentine rose out of her dark delirium she was proud that she knew exactly where she was she was in the womb-like care of an autodoc. She could feel it all around her and, if she moved her right side, she could feel the needles and the jell. But where was the autodoc?

Memories were elusive. When she struggled with their vapors she saw corncobs cooking in their husks in a bonfire. That didn't seem right. It was too distant. She saw a starving man in a red shirt selling cow dung. Damn! She wanted to remember yesterday! What had happened to her?

She struggled to remember where she was, almost getting it and then forgetting. General Fry! A flash! That was the right clue! The sudden jubilation of knowing. But then it all went away. All she could remember about General Fry was being caught naked in a space-hammock with him by a laughing Colonel who wrapped them around and around in their netted prison.

But that was it! Revelation! Sobs of relief! She was at the hospital in Gibraltar Base and the Shark had blown up trying to jump to Alpha Centauri. She faded back into delirium with a desperate need to tell her baby sister that she was all right, and when she woke up again she was talking to General Fry, not sure that the conversation wasn't a dream, trying to convince him that he should still let her go out to fight the kzinti.

The delirium went away. The autodoc became more real. She could feel herself healing. She slept normally. She knew her life signs were good. They would open the box and talk to her. General Fry loved her and he would be there when they opened the box, tenderness in his flinty old eyes. Maybe not. Maybe just a nurse.

When the box opened it was a kzin face staring down at her, tall, massive, hairy, fangs as large as the wolfs in Little Red Riding Hood. It was the first kzin face she had ever seen. She still remembered nothing.

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" the ratcat asked. "Ich spreche nicht sehr gut."

Had the kzinti conquered Germany? Had the Fifth Invasion begun just as the Shark launched for Wunderland? She was still certain that she was in the Solar System.

The yellow-orange monster brought out a portable translator which began to recite the same phrase in many languages. Finally the cultured electronic voice asked, "What languages do you speak?"

"English," she said.

"My English also is very nasty," spat-hissed the kzin. "Might be machine help us. I learn English. You teach?"

"Thomas Alva Edison!" she swore in utter amazement.

"Brain injury," he growled. "I am decorous and able veterinarian. Skilled with female brains." His ears unfolded proudly. "Much experimentation. Fix all animals."

He set the autodoc to raise her to a sitting position and then held out a dish for her, a stemmed sherbet glass with a spoon. Nora noticed that she was ravenously hungry. Her kzin continued to babble without making much sense. "Please be decorous slave and clean cage," he said. He held a spoonful of his gift to her mouth.

It was vanilla ice cream flavored with chunks of fish.