The Man-Kzin Wars 12

I: Silent Partners

Quartermaster noticed the Named were getting upset again, and quietly set his subordinates and their slaves to checking fabrication procedures and inventory. A few days later, his guess proved right, but far beyond his expectations: Commandant's Voice announced that a Hthnarrit would soon be arriving on Fuzz, bringing a fleet to be supplied.

This was exciting. Quartermaster had never seen a Patriarch's Companion, nor met anyone who had. He signed out a disintegrator to keep the landing field clear, it being seeding time again, but otherwise stayed out of the way and let his staff do their jobs. Clearing the field was the only entertaining part anyway—the tufty airborne seeds that everything threw out burned spectacularly when their molecules started breaking up.

When Gnyr-Hoth's own ship had set down, and all formal courtesies had been exchanged, the Companion's first question was, “Who arranged the fireworks display while we landed?”

“Oh, that was only Quartermaster clearing debris off the field,” replied Hur-Commandant. “The local plant life produces large amounts of fuzzy seeds on a regular basis. He ignites them with a disintegrator.”

“Clever. Take us to him.” Gnyr-Hoth turned to pick out a couple of kzintoshi from his entourage, waved the rest onward, and turned back to say, “Which way?”

Hur-Commandant hadn't earned his partial Name by being slow to adapt. “That building, Gnyr-Hoth.” He was extremely startled when the Hthnarrit immediately began sprinting toward it, but promptly followed suit.

Quartermaster saw the group approaching, had no idea why, and told his staff, “Disperse throughout the warehouse. Fabrication Chief, if I'm in trouble, you're in charge. Wait in the office.”

“Yes, sir.—They don't seem hostile, sir.”

“Thanks,” said Quartermaster, who had no ziirgah sense at all. “Go anyway.” He turned to face the door as his deputy left. When the Hthnarrit entered, Quartermaster came to attention and saluted, then waited to be addressed.

Gnyr-Hoth didn't particularly look like one of the 2,048 deadliest kzinti alive. He was a little smaller than average, not very heavy, and had no interesting scars… though that last fact suggested that most of the scars from his duels had been left on other, larger, kzintoshi. He set his feet very lightly, as if concerned about damaging the concrete floor, and his movements were almost decorative. “You're Quartermaster?” he said, having noted Quartermaster's inspection.

“Sir, I am.”

“Tell me what you're thinking. Be informal.”

“I… was wondering if you'd ever danced in a play, sir.”

Hur-Commandant's ears folded about halfway shut. (But nobody else seemed disturbed.)

Gnyr-Hoth didn't object to the implication that he might have been employed, and as an entertainer at that. “No. One of my combat instructors sent me to a school for dancers. I was walking too loudly. Innovative teacher, won the Name Kchula.”

Quartermaster's ears opened wide with surprise for a moment, then he went back to rigid attention.

“Remain informal, Quartermaster. You knew him?”

“Possibly, sir. The exec of our division on Chunquen-aga was Named Kchula. He had very dark stripes, and a little hole just near the bottom of the fan of his left ear, sir.”

“I'm flattered he never had it fixed. It was as close as I ever got—lost my temper with him one day. Worst beating I ever had. You were Second Battle Specialist of the 4416th Infantry?”

“Why, yes, sir. Were you there?”

“No, in those days I was in the Grand Admiral's Guard. But that's a distinctive scar, and everyone in the sector heard about the Hero who fought on with the hole in his head. Tough opponents there, constantly practicing.”

“That was you?” Hur-Commandant asked in astonishment.

“Yes, sir,” Quartermaster replied, the scar between his right eye and ear suddenly itching horribly.

“Why don't you have a Name?” Hur-Commandant wondered.

“After I got out of regeneration I had no urge to fight, sir,” Quartermaster said. “Some kind of brain damage.”

One of the Hthnarrit's entourage spoke: “He needs to scratch.”

“Go ahead,” Gnyr-Hoth said.

Quartermaster scratched the scar gratefully and thoroughly, and took the opportunity to inspect the new speaker surreptitiously.

This one was built the way Quartermaster had expected a Patriarch's Companion to be: heavily muscled, one of the biggest kzintoshi he'd ever seen—except that his eyes were faintly bloodshot with purple capillaries. A telepath.

A remarkably healthy telepath, and not a timid one, either.

Gnyr-Hoth said, “Do you still hunt, at least?”

Both local kzinti acquired identical disgruntled tail droops. “The biggest prey here is smaller than my head,” Quartermaster said.

“Unless you count God's Hairballs,” Hur-Commandant joked.

“Count what?” exclaimed Gnyr-Hoth.

“A local animal that settles in one spot at maturity,” said Quartermaster. “They seem to have a lure scent for food, or something. Basically a big pile of hair, about this high, like God's been grooming without brushes and hasn't been getting any fat in his diet. Horrkkk.”

Amused, Gnyr-Hoth said, “Edible?”

Telepath suddenly whirled about, and looked all around frantically. Gnyr-Hoth whipped out sidearm and w'tsai, ready to kill the detected foe, but after a few moments Telepath straightened up and said, “I'm sorry, sir. I don't know what made me do that.”

“Better wrong than surprised,” Gnyr-Hoth said. “So, are they good meat?” he resumed as he put away his weapons.

“I've never had any, but I understand the flavor is disgusting,” Quartermaster said.

“I seem to recall reports that the initial settlement had some food-poisoning cases, too,” Hur-Commandant tossed in.

“Urr, well, we should be bringing you some better prey in a few years. Scouts have discovered new aliens. When this fleet is refitted it'll be taking one of their worlds. Shouldn't be hard, they keep trying to talk rather than fight,” Gnyr-Hoth said. “They're some kind of primate, so they should taste pretty good.”

“Will we be getting them as slaves?” Quartermaster said hopefully. “Primates have good hands.”

“What was that?” Telepath screamed, making everyone but Gnyr-Hoth leap a considerable distance into the air. Telepath began lashing out wildly, as if blind.

Gnyr-Hoth swept a foot under Telepath's legs, knocked him down, rolled him over, tore open Telepath's medical kit, selected a pressure hypo, and administered it. Telepath stopped thrashing almost at once, and Gnyr-Hoth rose and said sadly, “He was really good, too. Very sensitive… Perhaps that's why he broke so young.”

Quartermaster gestured for his staff, and a Kdatlyno came up with a cart and loaded Telepath onto it. “Medical, now,” said Quartermaster, and the slave departed at full speed.

What did you do that for? one Grog asked the one who'd acted.

He kept noticing whenever we had to make adjustments. Besides, those new aliens may be worth getting to know, the latter Grog told her. They seem to like to talk to new people, and we could certainly use some good hands.

What does that have to do with—began the first, then stopped as her neighbor revealed her plan. Oh, I get it.

Yes, he'd have noticed the little altered spots in everyone else's memories, no matter how often we made him forget.

I'd better pass this on, the first commented. Someone may land with one of those mind readers at one of the bases we can't reach from here.

Good thinking.

Quartermaster's top crew went through the biggest vessel, sure to be designated the flagship, with exacting care, bringing everything up to specifications. The ships had been collected from all over the Empire, and each had been whatever could be spared from a given station. Most needed considerable attention.

He went through the ship continuously, inspecting the work himself. He carried a gamma-ray annealing beamer, to restore temper to spot welds.

Down in the auxiliary power room, which had required commendably little work, he checked what his Jotoki had done, squirming between monocrystal support struts to get a look at the fusion waste disposal manifold. It was fine. He got back out and looked over the struts, which were naturally in perfect shape—they couldn't be repaired onsite, only replaced, and the old ones recast. They had to be all one piece.

Quartermaster took his annealer and directed it about a third of the way up one of the main struts, causing the monocrystal to separate into trillions of microscopic domains, like ordinary metal. In a space battle, the struts had to be utterly rigid. Now, though, the proper shear stress would tear the strut, rip the manifold, spray plasma through the power room, and with any luck blow the bottom third of the ship clean off.

It could be years before it happened, but there were other things that could be done to other spaceships. Things that would increase casualties. Things that would give the primate-type aliens a chance. They couldn't be all the same, or somebody would notice the pattern. Somebody out of range.

Out of range of what? Quartermaster suddenly wondered. Then he remembered the manifold was fine, and he had many more inspections to make.

There was a war on, and everyone had his part to do.

II: Donderbeck

Like everyone else, she'd learned in school that it had been centuries since humans were uncivilized enough to commit murder.

When she joined the ARM she learned different.

The information wasn't all that useful at first.

“That's him?” said Lancaster.

“That's him, ma'am,” Dr. Fisher told the ARM agent. “Please be cautious. We were ordered not to sedate him… not that he responds that well to drugs anyway—”

“Yes, I need him alert,” she said absently, still a little incredulous. “All right, let me in. I'll be jamming the pickups, so don't come rushing in in a panic.”

“We could just shut them off,” he said, startled.

“Only the ones you know about.”

“You think someone may have bugged us?” he exclaimed.

“I have no idea. I don't care. As I say, I'll be jamming the pickups. Doors, please.”

In an era when anything was fixable, Ralston Muldoon was extraordinarily ugly: crooked and protruding teeth, popeyes, a nose that looked smashed to one side, an asymmetrical skull. He was sitting with his hands carefully folded, looking at the table before him.

When Lancaster came into the room, Muldoon turned his eyes toward her, looked her down and up, and glanced at several different areas, then settled on her face. Lancaster was in the habit of looking people over in just that way herself, and she developed the sudden conviction that Muldoon now knew exactly how she was armed, what she could do unarmed, and where she depilated. “Hello, Ralston,” she said, and showed her ident. “Agent Lancaster, ARM.”

“Strange,” he said. (Later in her career she was to reflect often on the fact that this was the first thing she ever heard him say.) “I'm brought in without explanation, then kept waiting for several hours with nothing to occupy my mind, and I'm greeted by my given name by someone who gives only her surname. It's as if someone in the loop thinks dominance needs to be established, which would only make sense if I had something remotely resembling a negotiating posture. How do you do, Agent Lancaster?”

Was he humoring her? Humor him back. “My name's Karen, if you prefer,” she said.

“Thanks. Though I doubt we'll be seeing one another socially.”

She thought over the secondary implications of that remark while she was spraying fogger on the observation mirror, then sat in the chair on the other side of the table and said, “Muldoon—” he nodded appreciatively—“one of the colony worlds has encountered a carnivorous animal, very strong and fast, that doesn't go into shock when injured. All the lethal weapons in ARM records are designed for killing Terran animals, and the situation is getting worse. You're the only weapon design expert we know. What do you want that we can give you?”

He looked into her eyes for several seconds, but wasn't focused on them. Then he said, “Two errors of fact. First, every lethal weapon more complex than a fist ax was designed primarily for killing humans, not animals. Second—well, A, you said 'encountered,' not 'discovered'; B, the only way any animal can't be dealt with by present weapons is if the survivors come looking for revenge; and C—appropriately—the time lag between here and the nearest colony makes the cover story you were assigned absurd. Someone has met intelligent aliens, in space, and they're warlike. The lack of shock is not good news. It suggests hundreds of generations of practice at mechanized warfare. You need a donderbeck. I'd like pencil and paper.”

He must have been hard to take, for the staff here: He reasoned very like an ARM. “Certainly. Anything else?”

“I meant now.”

He'd surprised her again. She got both out of her carryall, and he began drafting, smoothly and swiftly.

“What's a donderbeck?” she asked, after a minute or so of watching precision diagrams appear.

“Something I thought of but never needed. Easy to make. Here.” He turned the drawing with hands that had become shaky once more. “The breech mechanism is from the Thompson, an early twentieth-century light machine gun. The round casings are cast nitrocellulose, no debris, nothing to eject. Solid propellant continues accelerating the rounds after they leave the barrel. The slugs are clusters of glass needles in a teflon matrix, each needle tipped with a heavy metal. I recommend tungsten.”

“Uranium's cheaper.”

“You'll be needing uranium for other things. The needles strike a target, the metal punches through armor, the needles slide out of the matrix and diverge, and the glass shatters as they tumble. That'll tear things up. Huge holes. If these folks don't have physical shock, they must have circulatory cutoffs, so this should trap a lot of their blood where it's no use to their brains. Knock 'em down and keep 'em there. What do the aliens look like?”

“Uh, large feline bipeds, eight feet and up. Here.” She got out a display flat and passed it over.

He looked at it. “Ears like dragons.”

“Dragons?”

“Mythical creatures. They were in the library the cops confiscated, if you're curious. I'll need to see autopsy data for further designs.”

“We've made anatomical diagrams.”

“Those will help, but I mean the autopsy films.”

“Can you handle that? Never mind,” she said, remembering who she was talking to.

“I'll manage,” he said, not unkindly. “I'll need to be undrugged for a few days while I work on this, and I could do with a fabricating shop and a remote operating system for it.”

“Why remote?”

“To save time. Otherwise someone will argue about whether I should be handling weapons. This way, I won't be.”

“Good point. Anything you want for yourself?”

He thought. “One thing they might not take back, after I'm done, is a manual shutoff for my chair. I really hate being whisked off somewhere by remote control, and it's not as if the staff here has too many inmates to look after to send someone to get me.”

“The ARM could get you out of that chair,” she said. “That's actually something I'm authorized to offer.”

“I won't take transplants,” he replied. “Organ banks are morally wrong.”

Her mouth fell open. “This from someone who by the age of nineteen had methodically assassinated a hundred and sixty-two people?”

Muldoon shrugged. “As far as you know.”

“You mean there were more?” she said, aghast.

“No,” he said, and made an odd soft sound that turned out to be laughter. (There was something wrong with his larynx, too.) “Sorry. I killed a hundred and thirty-one people for being needlessly cruel. I wasn't myself. The rest were sloppy kills, where people died in great pain or took more than a few minutes to die. Those weren't mine.” He spoke with quiet, regal pride.

“Didn't you ever tell anyone?”

“Such as who? The police and prosecutor certainly knew already; they were using me to clear their files. Besides, I thought a couple looked like they'd been done by police officers, and I had no particular desire to be found hanged in my cell.”

Lancaster absorbed this, narrowing her eyes. There were going to be some fresh investigations. Then she said, “There are nontransplant procedures—regenerative—available in limited cases.”

“They won't be limited for long, I think. You'll need them for soldiers.”

He was right. “I guess you'll be the first. Do you need anything else right now?” she said.

“Dinner. High thyroid, I'm always hungry.”

“I'll see to it,” she said, and left.

They could fix him up. Without transplants.

Ralston reached up and felt the dents in his skull through his thinning gray hair. He hummed through his nose, a children's song from a more realistic time:

It felt good to be needed.

III: Second Front

Ucomo was what his friends called him. Among the Smart People, one's full name was essentially a capsule biography, and as Ucomo was unusually Smart his full name was getting pretty long.

He was working on an interesting intercept when Dabak, his longtime facilitator and good friend, let himself in and took a deep breath. “Ucomo, the air in here is overburdened with carbon dioxide, and moist enough for a Stupid. This cannot be good for your health, nor by extension your rest, your work, or your consequential prosperity. I am opening the blackout screen.” Dabak went to the office window, exposed the outside view, gasped, and said, “I am closing the blackout screen.” Once he had done so, he took a moment to recover, then turned and said, “You should get an office that doesn't have a view of the moon, so you can get some fresh air in.” After a pause, Dabak added, “I hate that thing.”

“Not really,” Ucomo remarked. “Oras, our ancestral homeworld, is in almost the same orbit as a similar body, Agad, and every few hundred orbits whichever one is closer to their sun catches up with the other. They interact gravitationally, the closer speeds up and moves into a wider orbit, the other slows and moves in, and they separate for a few hundred more orbits. During each period of interaction, conditions on Oras are beyond belief, and that's just the precursor of a massive climatic shift.

“Unfortunately, this means that you and I are descended from ancestors whose response to the sight of a nearby body in half-phase was never to remain calm and await developments. Since every colony world has a moon, we have blackout screens at every window.”

“Are you recording?” Dabak said anxiously.

“Constantly, but that conclusion was already known.”

“Too bad, it sounded lucrative.”

“It was. What did your Mother think of my strategic plan?”

“She sent me with an invitation to donate.”

Startled, Ucomo picked up a currycomb and said, “How much?” as he began instinctively to brush himself out.

“I would suppose however much you normally produce,” Dabak said.

Ucomo gestured as if to throw and exclaimed, “I mean what's the bid, you fish!”

Wriggling with satisfaction—he was almost never able to get a joke in on Ucomo—Dabak said, “No bid. You're invited to donate.” At Ucomo's gasp, he added, “I also overheard her discussing how much her latest brood of sons could be lent for bids when you turn female. She's very impressed with you.”

“I don't know if I want to be a Mother myself,” Ucomo reflected. “It takes up so much time.”

“Everyone says that, but we keep settling more planets, don't we? You'll just do what the Founding Mother did and look for the Smartest mates.—What's wrong?”

“All her mates must have been Stupids. I don't know how a Mother can stand talking to anyone but another Mother. We must all seem like Stupids to them.”

“I doubt that's their primary interest in us anyway,” Dabak observed.

It was a good point. Only the survivors of male-phase competition became Mothers. Typically about one male out of every eight or nine born lived long enough to resume development, so everyone was descended from Mothers who had preferred to be continuously pregnant. “Did your Mother send a container?”

“No. I believe she intends to invite you home.”

“What, like a war hero?” Ucomo said, flustered.

“If that plan works, you are a war hero. And how's your analysis coming?”

Ucomo was immediately all business. “The kzinti are still unaware that we can monitor their message lasers by observing trace effects on interstellar dust and gas. Their encryption remains uninspired. I believe I've figured out why they always call us Smart; the prisoners they take naturally address one another formally, being mutual strangers at peace with one another, and kzinti speech lacks the overtones needed to distinguish the word Ally” [pi'rrin] “from the word Smart” [Pierin]. “Given that the words undoubtedly have a common origin, this is not unreasonable.”

“It certainly makes more sense than the theory that they're being polite,” Dabak agreed. “Is there any sign that the kzinti can monitor us?”

“I believe there would be no sign if they could,” Ucomo said. “To combine clarity with brevity our communications are in Ancestral mode. We are descended from creatures that spent some time living in shallows, before the oceans became too dangerous, and our brains still possess structures designed to grasp 3-D sonar pulses. This is why it's so difficult for most males to express a thought unless it's completely formed, but it also means that we get far more information out of holographic data than any alien could. If they broke our encryption, the kzinti would obtain only linear and visual information from our messages. Even their sonar-using slaves use it primarily for vision equivalence. Incidentally, I'm convinced the kzinti believe our females are nonsentient, like theirs.”

Dabak went rigid with amazement, and stayed immobile for at least ten heartbeats. Then he said, “Why?”

“Because they never see them.”

“They never see them for the same reason we never see their Patriarch!”

“Of course. But it's well for an enemy to have false beliefs. Oh, and they've found another alien race. Quite numerous, apparently. A fleet is being assembled to invade one of the aliens' planets, and since the force we face is the largest they have deployed, it will be contributing the largest number of ships. I intend to recommend to your Mother that we strike just as the convoy is formed, to maximize disruption.”

“What are the aliens like?” Dabak wondered.

“I couldn't find anything about that. The annoying thing about spying on carnivores is they don't give enough information to each other, either. However, 'the enemy of my enemy is my weapon,' after all. Whatever else they're like, they're useful.”

“True,” Dabak said. “Well, maybe they can keep the kzinti distracted for a few years.”