The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 10

(2436-7 A.D.)

When Major Yankee Clandeboye tried to organize an expedition to Hssin he discovered just how many naval officers he had alienated. He had full authority to mount such an expedition, but it took more than authority; it took cooperation. Whatever request he made was referred to some other naval department. Clearly Admiral Jenkins was not cooperating.

From the scuttlebutt he learned that Admiral Jenkins, in command of the Eighth Fleet based at Wunderland, had been involved in a running internecine war with General Fry for years, a covert war involving character assassination by secret ballot, redirected supplies, gerrymandering, reluctance to share ideas and innovations, officer sidelining-and an overt war over budgets and weapons procurement. They had policy quarrels, philosophical differences, and they belonged to competing power blocs. A sort of simmering truce had been in place since their last open conflict during the invasion of Down.

One informant thought it was funny. “He actually enjoys his little wars. Keeps about six or seven fronts going at the same time. He once tried to have Buford Early court-martialed. Didn’t succeed but sure kept the volcanoes puffing.”

“Admiral Jenkins did that?” Yankee was incredulous.

“No. General Fry.”

“And the ARM just lets my boss get away with it?”

“What can they do? Fry has goldskin roots. The goldskins and ARM collaborate reluctantly. You know, Belter and flatlander rivalry.”

“And I thought I was unpopular!”

The higher authorities of the ARM had done their best to keep such disputes compartmentalized. Yet the very structure of the Amalgamated Regional Militia exacerbated such conflicts. The ARM had never been designed to wage war against the kzin or mediate between alien races. For 350 years it had shaped itself to find and suppress military technologies rather than to use them. The ARM’S military response to the kzinti had been hastily cobbled together out of the wrong pieces of bureaucracy.

Yankee’s men suggested that they bypass Jenkins and go back to Sol and pick up a ship. Besides the fact that this option put a ten-light-year (thirty-day) dogleg detour into the Hssin trip, it wasn’t the kind of failure that Clandeboye had the courage to pass on to Fry to fix-the old game player had doubtless moved him into this hotseat quite deliberately.

He was left crawling from rumor factory to rumor factory, grasping at wild stories for some kind of lever into his problem. Perhaps, he thought ironically, he could lay charges of mutiny against Jenkins. Good idea; bad odds. It was in such a mood that he accepted Brobding Shaeffer’s invitation to dinner at Tiamat’s Star Well. Brobding was always a good source of gossip.

The Star Well was more formal than Yankee liked, complete with a flatland headwaiter with black suit and oyster-sized turquoise jacket buttons who actually escorted him to the Shaeffer table on one of the tiers overlooking the well. His eyes fell off the rim-down to the beginning of the universe. It was vaguely disconcerting to know that a structural failure in the “skin” would suck him through the floor into an even better view of the stars. If you hadn’t noticed that Tiamat was rotating, its motion was brilliantly obvious here; the constellation of Pavo was just slipping across the bottom of the well. He recognized Peacock from his days as starstruck navigator. Binary giants, period 11.7 days. Minds were filled with such useless detail.

True to form, Brobding Shaeffer immediately began to pass on the latest gossip-while Yankee was still standing. He was ensconced in a cushioned crescent overlooking the well, his lips happily assaulting his nose in a pincers maneuver, long arm happily around a young lady. “I just got it straight from the ISC Adjunct that Sourface Jenkins considers your mission to be a direct violation of Eighth Fleet territory. A pointed insult. He was raving at 3D soccer last night that a mutineer has been given sweeping authority in his bailiwick.”

“And here I thought he was happy,” Yankee said sarcastically. “The last time we talked, he was grinning like a kzin.”

“Sit down. Meet Chloe.” Shaeffer turned to Chloe and jerked a thumb at his friend. “That’s Yankee. He’s a mutineer.”

Yankee sat down. “Knock it off.”

“That sounds like a real adventure!” exclaimed Chloe with the skill of a young woman who has read about how to get a man talking. There was an artificial spring to her loose black curls. She was either a naive twenty-year-old on her first date or else a very sophisticated sixteen-year-old pretending to be twenty Brobding could be trusted to date underage girls or to get caught in his spacesuit without underpants or to drink too much in Tigertown. The girl, and she was a girl, continued to stare at Yankee. She actually batted her eyes. “Well?”

“Just another war story,” grumbled Yankee.

“Tell us. I’ve never asked you what happened,” said Brobding. “I’m too polite.”

“That’s what I like about you.”

“Aren’t you going to tell us?” Chloe sighed. “Please, I’m a navy brat and I like war stories.”

“What can I bribe you with?” she flirted.

“A ship, sweetheart.” He smiled kindly and she chewed her lip.

That was when Brobding announced happily that he had brought in a kzin mechanic from Aarku to sham some of the black art of gravitic drive maintenance. “I’ll be taking him back with me to Procyon.”

“I hope you have a rage-proof cage,” mused Yankee.

“Don’t need one. He lost his legs in the war. That’s the deal; he helps us. We grow him a new pair of legs.”

“Are you sure he’s going to buy that? Kzin wear their wounds proudly.”

Brobding grinned. “They’re not all the same. This one would be humiliated to ask a kzin for legs. He’d never do it-even though he wants legs now more than life. He’s old. But he reasons that humans have no honor-so he can ask us. He comes from Ch’Aakin. We’ll send him back home once Brozik’s boys are through pumping his brains.”

Yankee remembered that Ch’Aakin was a neighbor of Procyon-nine light years. It was a lousy M2 star, not worth a gold-plated lead napoleon. The crashlanders had tried to take it during the war-it was too near for comfort-but Ch’Aakin had turned into a bloodbath and one of the defeats the navy didn’t like to talk about.

The next evening Yankee was invited to the naval mess for dinner. There he had to endure a different kind of formality. The gray bulkhead walls were decorated with stiffly mounted brass portholes salvaged off the bottom of Earth’s Pacific, and, at the head of the main table, a coral encrusted propeller from some ancient pursuit plane which had overshot its mother carrier. These were flatlanders, importing their ties to Earth. The officers were seated by rank, their placeholders Chinese ivory military weapons.

Yankee had hoped it might be an informal gathering to break down whatever obstacles were impeding an unorthodox intelligence mission. Instead it was an ambush.

The Clandeboye articles” had not been published in major datamags. Nevertheless they had been widely circulated and frequently condemned. Often the critics had read only other reviews. His dinner critics were ruthless. They wanted to prove to him that he was wrong, that the UNSN patrols had a vise grip on kzinti space.

Every single man at the dinner had combat experience from the ferocious thirteen-year offensive that had followed the Battle of Wunderland. An average of four percent of their ships had been destroyed on every mission. These were the hardened survivors, some of them brilliant combat officers, some of them just lucky men. None of them had a good reason to discount kzinti strength, yet all of them did.

It chilled him. This was the core of the navy that would have to repel the next kzinti attack. The hyperdrive performed some strange perversion on men’s minds. It gave them the illusion that they commanded space. Yankee remembered Vice Commander Yoni Marshall’s parable about the fleas who rode first class on Earth’s supersonic aircraft, thinking they were lords of every nook and cranny of the Earth-the same Marshall who had taught him three-dimensional attack strategy, the same Marshall who died with the attack forces trying to penetrate the defenses of Down.

“The UNSN patrols don’t even cover the top end of the Patriarchy!” Yankee exclaimed in frustration.

“They don’t have to,” said a confident rake eight years his senior.

While Yankee politely listened to the nonsense the man was using to justify his statement, he had his own thoughts. He had been further into kzinti space than any officer here. There were worlds out there. There was a rumored world called Warhead that the kzinti had controlled since about the time of Genghis Khan. The UNSN didn’t even know where it was and wouldn’t even know that it existed except for a quirky case history in one of Chuut-Riit’s volumes on military strategy.

Yet Warhead was the forward base in a subluminal war being conducted against the Pierin that was still going on as of this very moment. Who were the Pierin? The kzinti warriors fighting that battle probably hadn’t yet noticed a Man-Kzin war. The kzinti had been interstellar warriors since before man had beaten his first iron swords from red metal, since before bronze, since before Ur, since maybe before even beer. That was a lot of time in which to build a network of bases.

How many kzinti worlds were out there? How many kzinti armed rocks hidden in interstellar space? How many miserable little kzinti fortress worlds like Hssin? How many factory worlds? Hundreds? Thousands? No one knew.

These young men who had lost so many comrades could not even admit that they had been fought to a standstill. The hyperdrive was a great logistics and transport weapon. It had allowed the reintroduction of blitzkrieg warfare. The UNSN had been able to surround and isolate the main kzinti worlds. But the hyperspace singularity which enclosed every stellar mass in a “forbidden zone” was as good as any medieval wall at stopping a hypershunt-equipped invader.

In the wicked days before the ARM, horse cavalry might sweep across a thousand miles of Earth and lay siege to the mightiest cities of a domain-but the horses couldn’t walk through walls. A mechanized Wehrmacht might race across the steppes of Russia in tank and armored halftrack and truck and motorcycle-but it couldn’t take the streets of Stalingrad, where tank and armored car and truck were useless.

In thirteen years the human hyperdrive fleets had done brilliantly at smashing kzinti interstellar trade. That didn’t make much difference. The Patriarchy had long ago adjusted itself to supply lines that moved at 80 percent the speed of light. Send off to Kzin for a replacement part and it might arrive half a century later. As a consequence, even a kzinti minor outpost was a more-or-less self-sufficient manufacturing center. A kzinti attack force was a lumbering, ill-supplied adventure. But a kzinti-defended star under siege was almost invulnerable.

The gravitic acceleration of kzinti warcraft allowed them to outmaneuver anything the humans had been able to field, and almost every class of kzinti warcraft was superior to its human counterpart inside the singularity. Long range beam-weapon duels were ineffective; at subluminal beam velocities an ablative shielded kzinti vessel could dodge faster than the response time of the beam generator. Intelligent missiles were the best way to get through but they were very subluminal and could be picked off by alert defense crews.

The siege record was poor. Down and Hssin were the only clear victories.

The assault on Down had been a massive surprise attack on a world whose star was so small that its singularity extended only to eighteen AU, less than the distance to Uranus. It was an anomalous outpost, sitting well inside human space, farther from Kzin than any other known world of the Patriarchy, poorly supplied, lightly taxed, underdeveloped and underpopulated. Still the warriors there had destroyed a quarter of the human fleet sent against them before being exterminated.

Yankee listened patiently. An officer whose place was held by a charging armored battle-elephant of the finest carved ivory began reminiscing about his elite unit’s landing on Down while he neglected his plum chicken-but not his slivovitz. “I was caught in the tower with no way to get down and my best cover man was blown ass overhead into the canal where he was stuck in his disabled armor. He couldn’t run so he just sat there popping off every ratcat as they jumped over the canal while I was shitting bricks because if they got him, I was dead meat. He swatted about a dozen of them, one by one, coming over the rise because they couldn’t see him.”

Yankee was reminded of the gambler who enthusiastically gave his audience a blow-by-blow account of how he won a hundred “big ones” early that morning-while forgetting to tell them about the thousand “big ones” he had just dropped at the tables. The kill ratio on the ground at Down had been three men for each kzin. Victors don’t remember details like that.

Down had been considered important because it was behind human lines. That was nonsense. It had zero strategic importance. Probably it had been a target of frustration. None of the bigger worlds were falling, so get the weakest one.

On the other hand, the conquest of Hssin in 2422 had been an absolute necessity It was only two light years from Wunderland and 5.3 light years from Sol and had been the original staging area of the kzinti thrust at humanity’s heart. Theoretically it made an easy target. R’hshssira was a failed star with a singularity that extended out only eight AU, less than the distance to Saturn. Alpha Centauri was a mere week away by hypershunt, an optimal staging area from which to supply the assault. Yet fierce Hssin warriors managed to destroy a third of the UNSN fleet before the Wunderland marines were able to carve out their first beachhead.

Thirteen years on the offensive. Two victories. Thousands of kzinti starships destroyed in interstellar space. Hundreds of raids. Dozens of unsuccessful sieges. Stalemate. The MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty had given both sides what they needed. The Patriarchy needed a breathing space. Humanity needed to stop beating its head against a stonewall. To call it a human victory was wishful thinking.

What humanity wasn’t doing was using the time that the Treaty gave them.

The dinner served its purpose. It reconvinced the hosts that they had won the war and were maintaining the peace. It convinced Major Clandeboye that he wasn’t going to get to Hssin by orthodox means. His hosts were gentlemen. Having been victorious over their guest verbally, they toasted him with Verguuz. He raised his glass, too, wondering who these cardboard men were. They had no substance. He was never going to get to know them. It left him with a kind of desperate despair.

When men are desperate they wander alone, deep in thought Yankee took the long way home. He was already outside his apartment door before he noticed that Chloe was waiting for him, huddled on the hallway’s red carpet, arms around her legs. “Chloe!” He stuck his thumb in the lock and it opened. “Hi,” she said. She followed him inside.

“It’s past your bedtime, young lady.”

“Good idea,” she replied demurely, “let’s go to bed.” With the tiniest of smiles she watched the shock hit his face. She waited just exactly the right amount of time.

“Gotcha!” she triumphed. Then with a bob of her springy black hair she went to his console and called up the codes for a tinkly kind of beating music that he didn’t understand. “Cornucopia,” she said byway of explanation. He didn’t understand that either.

“Where’s Brobding?” was all he could think to ask.

“I never go out with a man again after he’s let me ‘tuck the George.’ How could I ever respect him?”

“Uh… what was that? I think I missed something.”

“What’s the flatlander word for it?” she asked in a tone that left him wondering if he was being teased or not.

“I think I should be taking you home.”

“You’re saying that through clenched jaws. I think you need a relaxing massage… all the way down your back to your bum.”

“Strangling a few people I know is the only thing that would relax me right now,” he growled. Since he was looking directly into her eyes she became momentarily frightened. That upset him to the point of hasty denial. “Not you!” He laughed at himself to put her at ease. “Actually you have a pretty neck. Breaking would ruin it. What I mean is: I don’t need a massage. What I need is to get you home before it is too late… before your curfew”

“I just got here. You’re throwing me out already?”

“Yes.”

“No. I’m here to interview you for the school paper. You have to tell me about the mutiny. I’m writing you up.

“No, you’re not.”

“Then could we take a shower together instead?”

“Young lady, I have to tell you something about myself. I don’t need any more trouble. I’m up to a giraffe’s eyeballs in zoo-doo already.”

“What’s a giraffe?”

“It’s just an expression. An extinct animal, I think”

“I’m no trouble. I swear I’ve never ever gotten a man pregnant; cross my heart.”

“Your father is probably a chief petty officer with shoulders this wide. Petty officers enjoy making pulp out of me. They’re not supposed to hit majors, but with me they get away with it-and I get blamed. It looks terrible on my record.”

“That’s all very well and good but my father is not a petty officer. He’s a rear admiral.”

Yankee grabbed for her wrist “Young lady, you are going home right now!”

“No-I’m-not!”

“Yes you are.”

“Nope.”

“I may carry you every millimeter of the way.”

“In that case it’s a deal. But we have to take a long detour so you can buy me an ice cream. There isn’t any good ice cream place between here and home.”

“If that’s the best deal I can get.”

So he took her home and bought her ice cream. He asked her if her father ever worried about her. He was too busy, she replied. Well, didn’t her mother ever worry about her? No. Chloe was born on Tiamat just months before a mob liberated it from the kzinti during the Great Battle. Her mother was an axe-wielding member of the mob and had been killed. Chloe still wore her iron wedding ring on a chain about her neck.

“Ah, so you’re all of sixteen,” he said gently.

“No. I’m going-on-seventeen,” she replied stiffly.

Yankee was quite willing to drop her at her door and run but she dragged him inside to meet her father. “Daddy! I got him! Don’t blame me if it took all night! He wasn’t home!” In a quieter voice to Yankee she said, “Now you’ll have to tell me about the mutiny. Daddy’s going to wring it out of you.”

A bony but handsome Wunderlander appeared in a spidersilk bathrobe. He shook hands in the old flatlander custom. “I see you survived my little teufel. She was raving about you at breakfast this morning. The Clandeboye. I think it was a diversion so I wouldn’t question her about that no-good crashlander she’s taken a fancy to, but no matter. I decided it was time we met”

“Make him tell us about the mutiny, Daddy.”

“All in good time.” He dismissed his daughter impatiently and refocused his attention on Yankee. “I’ve been hearing that you want to take a ship to Hssin? Is that true?”

“It’s an Intelligence matter.”

“I, too, want to take a ship to Hssin but lack the authority. I have the clearance to look at your orders if you wish to show them to me. It is possible that we might strike a deal.”

Puzzled, Yankee brought out his infocomp.

Rear Admiral Blurnenlhandler talked while he perused. ‘Well, well, well,” he smiled. “I have ships but no orders. You have orders but no ship.” He grumbled, continuing to read the fine print. “Now this is what I call an airtight order. If you commandeered one of my ships, I don’t see how I could refuse you. I might be upset; I might be enraged at the imposition, but I couldn’t refuse you.” His eyes twinkled. “Of course, nil want a favor in return, just a gentlemen’s agreement, mind you; nothing in writing.”

“And Jenkins?”

“Jenkins has made suggestions on this matter-but I don’t believe a suggestion has ever earned the same weight as an order, now has it? Let me be plain-off the record Jenkins is a foreigner. I am of the Wundervolk; my family has served the Nineteen Families for centuries. Jenkins serves the ARM. I’ve sworn loyalty to the ARM-but my heart lies with the security of Wunderkind. Let’s assume for my peace of mind that there is no higher contradiction between my sworn loyalties. Loyally to Wunderland, even loyalty to the ARM, doesn’t require me to kiss the seat of Jenkins’ power. Do we understand each other?”

“I’m sworn to carry out my naval duties. My orders are clear” It was Yankee’s polite way of saying that he was not interested in exceeding his authority

“Of course. Let me tell you where my interest lies. Hssin calls up a special dread in my heart. Many powerful Wundervolk feel as I do. Hssin, the ARM tells us, has been destroyed. I believe them because I was there. But has it been reinfested? Jenkins scoffs at the idea. Kzinti supply ships long en route to Hssin have been intercepted and destroyed. There have been flyby patrols. These quickie patrols have found nothing. What does that mean? There are thousands of places to hide on a planet. If you were given the assignment, could you hide yourself on Hssin?”

“I don’t think it would be difficult I intend to find out”

“What you intend to do on that planet does not interest me. It’s an Intelligence matter I don’t want to know about. The favor that I’m going to ask you does interest me and will ensure my full cooperation. I want a thorough study done of Hssin. When we left it in ‘22 there was not a kzin left alive on that world. When you leave it I want to be sure that the same is true.”

“I’m bringing a kzin with me. I had to make a deal.”

“You’ll be bringing him out again. Right?”

“The deal is that if he comes with me, I’ll rubberstamp Markham’s repatriation release. He wants passage to Kzin.”

“And good riddance. I don’t expect you to find kzinti on Hssin. If you do I don’t care if you kill them or bring them out with you-so long as Hssin is dead when you leave it I’ll send ten Wunderland marines with you, experienced men, men who were there. If they give it a clean bill of health, I’ll believe you when you say you’ve done the job. This is a gentlemen’s agreement. No orders, no talk, no paperwork.”

Yankee did a quick scan for catches. He didn’t like to take on high risks without careful evaluation, but sometimes an immediate call was the only way. “It’s a deal.”

The admiral was smiling. “Not so fast. I don’t put one of my ships in the hands of a coward. You’ll have to tell me about your mutiny.”

“Yes,” said Chloe enthusiastically. “Adventure time!”

“What are you doing here?” Yankee groaned. “It’s your bedtime. Scram.”

“No. I made a deal with my father.”

Trapped. “It’s simple.” Yankee was angry now. “I disobeyed orders.”

The admiral paused. “There’s more to the story.” It was a command.

“We were horsing around in the kzinti backwoods where no man had dared go before. We didn’t know anything. We were looking around for signs of life. At 59 Virginis we found it. A major kzin world. Commander Shimmel planned a deep probing raid. Surprise was assumed. No electromagnetic message could have told them that they had a hyperspatial enemy. Shimmel went in. I held my wing back against orders. His twelve ships disappeared. The official story is that the kzin got him because I wasn’t there to cover him. What I think is that Shimmel rammed his ships into the singularity I think his officers followed him against the wall out of blind loyalty I didn’t. I told him his math was suspect, he was cutting it too fine. He got mad and ordered me in. I dallied. When he disappeared I was pretty freaked and went in, on my own calculations, at my own entrance point, and tried to find him. I didn’t find anybody. The kzin found me and the wing had to fight its way out again.”

“Why didn’t you trust his calculations? He had standard UNSN computers and standard code. We all used the same code.”

“A commander has discretion about how fine he’s going to cut it. You trust the code. I don’t. For Finagle’s sake, nobody understands that stuff. It’s all ad hoc. Its rules of thumb. The simplest rule of thumb is that the singularity is a sphere with radius, in AU, of thirty-six times the root of the mass of the star in solar masses. Would you bet your ship on that? Damn right you wouldn’t. The code takes a thousand things into consideration to come up with a better answer. Do you trust that answer? I don’t I know it’s not based on a theoretical understanding of hyperspace. It’s based on experience and a bit of mumbo-jumbo distilled out of that incomprehensible manual the Outsiders sold us. When I was training at We Made It, one of the trainees walked his ship into the wall. He was using the then current code. What we found of him was a string of vapor three AUs long. The motor is probably still in hyperspace. Who knows? Scared me out of my mind. I studied singularities. Made up my own rules of thumb, and I’m damned if anybody will tell me not to use them. Yes, they are conservative rules but I’m still alive.”

“Your loyalty to yourself is greater than your loyalty to the navy?”

“Daddy! You promised to be diplomatic! It was part of our deal!”

Yankee couldn’t help himself. He rose to the bait “Em more loyal to the navy than you can imagine, sir if I had my way men like Jenkins and Buford Early would be composting the slat of the newest recruits. With shovels!”

“So you think there is a time when a loyal officer must disobey orders?”

“I couldn’t say. I wasn’t thinking at the time. I was reacting. It was a judgment call. I was trying to keep my men alive to fight the kzinti. Going through the wall didn’t make sense on any counts. Sometimes you have to sacrifice-but it has to count. When I came home I found a poem. I know it by heart. 1854. October twenty-fifth. The Battle of Balaclava. Tennyson. The British were better at obeying orders than I’ll ever be.” He closed his eyes.

“ ‘Forward the Light Brigade!

Charge for their guns,’ he said;

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred…

“Someone had blunder’d;

Theirs not to make reply.

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Cannon to the right of them

Cannon to the left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came through the jaws of Death

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.”