The Man-Kzin Wars 02

“I'm sure of only two things, Jonah.”

“Which are?”

“Well, the first one is that the designers aren't going to be diving into the photosphere of a sun at .99 lights.”

“Oh.” That had occurred to him, too. On the other hand, it really was easier to be objective when your life wasn't on the line… and in any case, it would be quick. “What's the other thing?”

Her smile grew wider, and she undid the collar catch of her uniform. “Even if it has to be in a gravity field, there's one thing I want to experience again before possible death.”

Much later, they commanded the front screen to stop mimicking a control board. Now the upper half was an unmodified view of the Alpha Centauri system. The lower was a battle-schematic, dots and graphs and probability- curves like bundles of fuzzy sticks.

The Yamamoto was going to cross the disk of the Wunderland system in subjective minutes, mere hours even by outside clocks. With her ramscoop fields spreading a corona around her deadly to any life form with a nervous system, and the fusion flare a sword behind her half a parsec long; nothing could stop her and only beam-weapons stood a chance of catching her, even messages were going to take prodigies of computing power to unscramble. Her own weapons were quite simple; quarter-ton iron eggs. When they intercepted their targets at .99 C, the results would be in the gigaton-yield range.

Jonah's teeth skinned back from his teeth and the hair struggled to raise itself along his spine. Plains ape reflex, he thought, smelling the rank odor of fight-flight sweat trickling down his flanks. Your genes think you're about to tackle a Cape buffalo with a thighbone club. His fingers pressed the inside of the chair seat in a complex pattern.

“Responding,” said the computer in its usual husky contralto.

Was it imagination that there was already more inflection in its voice? And what did that really signify? Consciousness in a computer was not human consciousness, even though memory and drives were designed by humans… it possessed free will, unless he or Ingrid used the override keys, and unless the high command had left sleeper drives. Perhaps not so much free will; a computer would see the path most likely to succeed and follow it. Still, he supposed, he did the same, usually.

How would it be to know that you were a made thing, and doomed to encysted madness in six months or less?

Nobody had ever been able to learn why. He had speculated to himself that it was a matter of time; to a consciousness that could think in nanoseconds, that could govern its own sensory input, what would be the point of remaining linked to a refractory cosmos? It could make its own universe, and have it last forever in a few milliseconds. Perhaps that was why humans who linked directly to a computer system of any size went irretrievably catatonic as well…

“Detection. Neutronic and electromagnetic-range sensors.” The ship's system was linked to the hugely powerful but sub-conscious level machines of the Yamamoto. “Point sources.”

Rubies sprang out across the battle map, moving as he watched, swelling up on either side and pivoting in relation to each other. The fire-bright point source of Alpha Centauri in the upper screen became a perceptible and growing disk. Jonah's skin crawled at the sight.

This was like ancient history, air and sea battles out of Earth's past. He was used to maneuvers that lasted hours or days, ships and fleets matching relative velocities while the planets moved slowly and the sun might as well be a fixed point at the center of the universe… Perhaps when gravity polarizers were small and cheap enough to fit in Dart-class boats it would all be like this.

“The pussies have the system pretty well covered,” he said.

“And the Swarm's Belters,” Ingrid replied. Jonah turned his head, slowly, at the sound of her voice. Shocked, he saw a glistening in her eyes. “Home…” she whispered. Then more decisively: “Identification. Human-range sensors. Discrete.”

Half the rubies flickered for a few seconds. Ingrid continued to Jonah: “This is a messy system; more of its mass is in asteroids and assorted junk than yours. Belters use more deep-radar and don't rely on telescopes as much. The pussies couldn't have changed that. They'd cripple the Swarm's economy and destroy its value.” Slowly. “That's the big station on Tiamat. They've got a garrison there, it's a major shipbuilding center, was even,” she swallowed, “fifty years ago. Those others are bubble-worlds… More detectors on Wunderland than there used to be, and in close orbit. At the poles, and that looks like a military-geosynchronous setup.”

Jonah thought briefly what it would be like to return to the Sol-Belt after fifty years. Nearly a third of the average lifetime, longer than he had been alive — if he ever got home. The Yamamoto could expect to see Sol again in twenty years objective, allowing time to pass through the Alpha Centauri system, decelerate and work back up to a respectable Tau value. The plan-in-theory was for him and Ingrid to accomplish their mission, rejoin the Catskinner, boost her out in the direction of Sol, turn on the stasis field again — and wait to be picked up by UNSN craft. About as likely as getting back by putting our heads between our knees and spitting hard.

“Ships,” the computer said in its dispassionate tone. “Movement. Status, probable class and dispersal cones.”

Color-coded lines blinked over the tactical map. Columns of print scrolled down one margin: coded velocities and key-data. Hypnotic training triggered bursts into their minds, crystalline shards of fact, faster than conscious recall. Jonah whistled.

“Loaded for bandersnatch,” he said. There were a lot of warships spraying out from bases and holding orbits, and that was not counting those too small for the Yamamoto's detection systems; their own speed would be degrading signal drastically. Between the ramscoop fields, their velocity, and normal shielding there was very little that could touch them, but the kzin were certainly going to try.

“Aggressive bastards,” he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tactical display. It took courage, individually and on the part of their commander to put themselves in the way of the Yamamoto. Nobody had used a ramscoop ship like this before; the kzin had never developed a Bussard-type drive, they had had the gravity polarizer for a long time, and it had aborted work on reaction jet systems. But they must have made staff studies, and they would know what they were facing. Which was something more in the nature of a large-scale cosmic event than a ship. Mass increases with velocity: by now moving only fractionally slower than a laser beam, the Yamamoto had the effective bulk of a medium-sized moon.

That reminded him of what the Catskinner would be doing shortly, and the Dart did not have anything like the scale of protection the ramscoop warship did. Even a micrometeorite… Alpha Centauri was a black disk edged by fire in the upper half of the screen.

“Projectiles away,” the computer said. Nothing physical, but an inverted cone of trajectories splayed out from the path of the Yamamoto. Highly-polished chrome-tungsten-steel alloy slugs, that had spent the trip from Sol riding grapnel-fields in the Yamamoto's wake. Wildly varying albedo, from fully-stealthed to deliberately reflective; the Catskinner was going to be rather conspicuous when the Slaver stasis field's impenetrable surface went on. Now the warship's magnetics were twitching the slugs out in sprays and clusters, at velocities that would send them across the Wunderland system in mere hours. It would take the firepower of a heavy cruiser to significantly damage one, and there were a lot of slugs. Iron was cheap, and the Yamamoto grossly overpowered.

“You know, we ought to have done this before,” Jonah said. The sun-disk filled the upper screen, then snapped down several sizes as the computer reduced the field. A sphere, floating in the wild arching discharges and coronas of a G-type sun. “We could have used ramrobots. Or the pussies could have copied our designs and done it to us.”

“Nope,” Ingrid said. She coughed, and he wondered if her eyes were locking on the sphere again as it clicked down to a size that would fit the upper screen. “Ramscoop fields. Think about it.”

“Oh.” When you put it that way, he could think of about a half-dozen ways to destabilize one; drop, oh, ultra-compressed radon into it. Countermeasures… luckily, nothing the kzin were likely to have right on hand.