The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 5

(2436 A.D.)

Yankee Clandeboye had nostalgic waves of emotion on his return to interstellar duty even though he was stationed at a different star and the war had been over for three years. He was ever the provincial flatlander gawking at the new sights. Then it had been the brilliant white dwarf companion beside Procyon in the sky of We Made It, now it was Beta Centauri floating beside Alpha from the viewports of Tiamat. Only a flatlander connected by megayear ties to Earth would be awed to be a tourist in a binary system.

The Wundervolk, having suffered during the war as slaves of the kzinti, treated him differently than had the crashlanders-they carried their slave history as a kind of martyrdom that allowed them to feel they had won the war all by themselves. They almost resented the presence of UNSN personnel. He could sense it in the way they handled his requests for information. The aloofness of Interworld Space Commissioner Markham was typical.

Yankee’s UNSN Intelligence team were all Belters and they had set up shop in Alpha Centauri’s Serpent Swarm, on the asteroid Tiamat where his men were comfortable because it had originally been tunneled and tamed by Belter colonists. Yankee promised himself a side trip to more earthlike Wunderland but there was work to do first, sorting through the wreckage of kzinti warships, checking the reasoning of other teams but with eyes primed for a different theme.

On his tenth day in Tiamat, in a mood of angry frustration, he ran into an old crashlander friend from the era of his Virgo mission. The man was unmistakable, a seven-foot-tall albino, slender with almost skeletal limbs stooping in an archway that was too small for him.

“Brobding!” He wasn’t sure it was his friend Brobding Shaeffer-all crashlanders looked alike to him, and when the pale eyes stared at him without comprehension, he was sure he had made a mistake until a sudden smile cupped the large nose.

“Yankee! Didn’t recognize you-all flatlanders look alike to me! I thought you were rotting in irons!”

“They didn’t know how to pin my sins on me!”

“Finagle is sending you on another wild chase?” The Virgo mission had jumped off from the naval yards of Procyon’s We Made It. Yankee remembered the underground warrens of Crashlanding City and had become fond of his albino mechanics and the tall willowy women who liked to touch a real flatlander. In those days of war, not so very long ago, the nervous crashlanders took very good care of the soldiers who defended them. “Where to this time?”

“You could call it a wild chase; I hope not as far as the nether regions of Virgo.”

“Then you like it here among our Wunderland hosts?”

“Not really,” mused Yankee ruefully. “They’re all so sure they won the war single-handed-don’t seem to appreciate the part Sol and We Made It played in their liberation.”

“But they make good Verguuz.”

“Haven’t tried it. Hear that it’s like a hand grenade that sneaks upon you with a sugar coating.”

“I know a place. It has authentic antique Landholder artifacts on the walls glorifying the good old days before the invasion when Landholders were Landholders and the yolk, respectful.”

That was how they came to find themselves in one of Tiamat’s after-hours trunkshuppen, sipping Verguuz and reminiscing about old times. The crashlanders had fought the war from a different perspective than the Wundervolk. Unknown to man or kzin the outpost world of We Made It had been settled inside the nominal kzinti frontier. When the small We Made It colony woke up 300 years later to the fact that they were behind the lines of an interstellar war, they appreciated allied comrades in arms like Major Yankee Clandeboye. The camaraderie was still there.

Eventually the talk, now slightly voluble, turned to the kzinti.

The Patriarchy had once probed Procyon, Yankee informed Brobding conspiratorially (drawing upon his new Intelligence sources). The probes returned with a negative report about a nasty F5 star sixteen times as brilliant as Kzin, almost a subgiant, its only usable planet having an axis in the orbital plane which made for unacceptable seasonal violence. The planet was uninhabitable.

“They fielded smarter probes than ours,” the crashlander commented wryly. “When was this?”

“Long ago. At about the time we humans were questioning the validity of our early interplanetary efforts. I’ve read some of the old texts.” He sipped his Verguuz from a goblet blown from green glass. “The wisemen of the time were sure that an interstellar civilization would be benevolent.” He began to grin. “Sometimes the wisemen were monkey-arrogant in the belief that humanity was alone in the universe and invulnerable behind the light-speed barrier. You should read their proofs that we are alone in the universe. All of these proofs seem to be based on the statistical analysis of a sample of one.”

They both had a laugh at the expense of their naive ancestors.

Yankee continued. “Fortunately for you guys, the frontier kzin lost interest in Procyon-or your original slowboat would have walked into a kzinti outpost hungry for skinny slaves to brush their fur.”

“Lucky for you, you mean,” retorted Brobding, trying to fit his legs under the little table. “What if the Outsiders had arrived to sell their hyperdrive tech to the kzinti!”

It was the luck of the draw for the crashlanders. When the Conquest Warriors attacked the fourth human slowboat bound for We Made It, their exploring warfleet had already bypassed Procyon. Strangely they had never probed Centauri, a binary that promised to be barren. There were so many stars-and a sub-light culture moves slowly. The kzinti literally stumbled into the resource and slave-rich Alpha Centauri system. A shock to both sides.

Yankee was very mellow as he twirled the stem of his goblet, staring at the luminous play of light on the bubble flaws in the glass. “But you haven’t told me why you are here. I thought you were happy wenching in the warrens of Crashlanding City? Here you can’t even kiss a woman. You’d need two of them, one standing on the back of the other!”

“Then I’ll have to settle for a kzinrett-if they are willing to stoop down to kiss me! That’s not so far from the truth. I’m here trying to make some sense out of kzinti gravitic designs.” Brobding Shaeffer was a hypershunt engineer. He did not have any formal training. Hyperspace technology had come so suddenly to We Made It that anyone with talent at understanding the weird technology had advanced rapidly in Stefan Brozik’s organization. There were no degrees in hyperspace engineering.

“What’s a hyperspace illiterate like you doing trying to understand gravities? You don’t have any training in gravities, either.”

Brobding laughed. “Maybe that’s why Brozik sent me. Kzinti gravities is hairy stuff. Living through the cloistered life of orthodox physics schooling seems to pile up sand dunes that my esteemed colleagues can’t seem to wade out of. I’m the wind that scours the dunes down to bedrock.”

“Ah. The Devil’s Bellows.” The crashlanders had dozens of names for their winds.

“Yak”

“So you’re here sticking your screwdriver into the various gravitic devices that the kzinti left lying around, are you? If you learn anything, tell me. I’ve become a kind of military historian. I’m raking over the coals of the war to figure out why we lost so many battles when we had the decisive weapon. It always seems to turn on the fact that their gravitic ships were able to operate to advantage inside the hyperspace singularity.”

“Brozik thinks so, too, He’s been building hyperdrive experimental ships equipped with salvaged kzinti gravitic drives.”

“I could have used one of those! Hypershunt or no, try running from a ratcat who is closing in on you at sixty gees! Scares the be-jesus out of you!” Yankee had done space battle with kzinti warriors at light-minute distances which was as close as he ever wanted to get. “I hear the kzinti drive is a Murphy to duplicate.”

“It’s the energy containment.”

“Not much to learn at Centauri,” mused Yankee. “Wunderland physics went to hell during the war. The Scholarium was decimated. First the kzin. Then ARM. Wunderland lost five of its top physicists during the assault on Down.”

“Brozik told me to talk to the experts. I was thinking of chatting it up with some of the resident kzin. Must be some of their gravitic technicians left around.”

“You’re braver than I am.” Talking to a kzin whisker-to-whisker was unthinkable to Yankee.

The crashlander was grinning no his large nose about to fall into the devil’s charm of his smile. “If you are into pub-crawling we could move on to Tigertown.”

The hero of the Battle of 59 Virginis paled. Tiamat’s Tigertown was kzin territory only nominally under human law. It was even policed by kzin. Not a place for the innocent.

There should have been no kzinti left in the Wunderland system; kzinti do not surrender. But wars only laugh at the rules of heroes. There are always survivors. A culture based on strict rules of bravery has its disgraced combatants, its failures, its eccentrics. Kzinti were wounded-to recover consciousness in human hospitals. Young kzin, who considered the Centauri system as home, had taken over the families of their heroic departed patriarchs. Kdaptists, deranged by humiliation, were using Centauri as a safe haven in which to formulate a new religion. There were kzinti who knew that however hard life was under human domination, they dared not go home.

Many of them had no home to go to. Some had found a niche on Wunderland-some skill, a human contact, the hope of reconquest kept them there. But most, upon release from the POW camps, had collected among their kind on Tiamatin a volume of the asteroid that had been outfitted for kzin during their fifty-three-year rule of the Serpent Swarm. Tigertown.

“Come on,” said Brobding, “I know a place.”

Yankee had always liked to pub-crawl with his albino friend. But this wasn’t the maze underground of Crashlanding City where twists and turns led to secret pleasures known only to the natives. He hesitated. He was afraid of the kzin. He wanted to stay in his seat. He had led the team that built a waldo kzin and he knew exactly the strength of a kzin and his temperament and quickness in a fight, and he had teleoped that simulated kzin against two humans, nearly killing them while all the time restraining the force he had at his command.

Brobding was looking at Yankee now, waiting, the minutest smile on his face. “When you see a grin, just apologize quickly.”

Yankee got up and followed. The two of them, alone, were going into Tigertown. Why am I doing this? He thought-but couldn’t stop himself