The Man-Kzin Wars 02

“For that matter,” she continued, “throwing relativistic weapons around inside a solar system is a bad idea. If you want to keep it.”

“Impact,” the computer said helpfully. An asteroid winked, the tactical screen's way of showing an expanding sphere of plasma. Nickel-iron, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon-compounds, some of the latter kzin and humans and children and their pet budgies.

“You have to aim at stationary targets,” Ingrid was saying. “The very things that war is supposed to be about seizing. Blowing them up is as insane as fighting a planetside war with fusion weapons and no effective defense. Only possible once.”

“Once would be enough, if we knew where the kzin home system was.” For a vengeful moment he imagined robot ships fiddling into a sun from infinite distances, scores of lightyears of acceleration at hundreds of G's, their own masses raised to near-stellar proportions. “No. Then again, no.”

“I’m glad you said that,” Ingrid replied. Softly: “I wonder what it's like, for them out there.”

“Interesting,” Jonah said tightly. “At the very least, interesting.”

“Please, keep calm,” Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, for the fourth time. “For Finagle's sake, sit down and shut up!”

This one seemed to sink in, or perhaps the remaining patrons were getting tired of running around in circles and shouting. The staff were all at their posts, or preventing the paying customers from hitting each other or breaking anything expensive. Several of them had police-model stunners under their dinner jackets, like his; hideously illegal, hence quite difficult to square. Not through Claude — he was quite conscientious about avoiding things that would seriously annoy the ratcats — but there were plenty lower down the totem pole who lacked his gentlemanly sense of their own long-term interests.

Everyone was watching the screen behind the bar again; the UNSN announcement was off the air, but the Munchen news service was slapping in random readouts from all over the planet. For once the collaborationist government was too busy to follow their natural instincts and keep everyone in the dark, and the kzin had never given much of a damn, the only thing they cared about was behavior. Propaganda be damned.

The flatlander warship was stiff beaded in system; from the look of things they were going to use the sun for a whip-round. He could feel rusty spaceman's reflexes creaking into action. That was a perfectly sensible ploy; ramscoop ships were not easy to turn. Even at relativistic speeds you couldn't use the interstellar medium to bank. Turning meant applying lateral thrust; it would be easier to decelerate, turn and work back up to high Tau — unless you could use a gravitational sling, like a kid on roller-skates going hell-for-leather down a street and then slapping a hand on a lamppost.

He raised his glass to the sometime mirror behind the bar. It was showing a scene from the south polar zone with its abundance of ratcat installations; kzin were stuck with Wunderland's light gravity, but they preferred a cooler, drier climate than humans. The first impact had looked like a line of light drawn down from heaven to earth, and the shockwave flipped the robot camera into a spin that had probably ended on hard, cold ground.

Yarthkin grinned, and snapped his fingers for the waitress. He ordered coffee, black, and a sandwich.

“Heavy on the mustard, sweetheart,” he told the waitress. He loosened his tie and watched flickershots of boiling dust-clouds crawling with networks of purple-white lightning. Closer, into canyons of night seething up out of red-shot blackness, that must be molten rock…

“Sam.” The man at the musicomp looked up from trailing his fingers across the keyboard. It was configured for piano tonight — an archaism, like the whole setup. Popular, as more and more fled in fantasy what could not be avoided in reality, back into a history that was at least human. Of course, Wunderlanders were prone to that, the planet had been a patchwork of refugees from an increasingly homogenized and technophile Earth anyway. I've spent a generation cashing in on a nostalgia boom, Yarthkin thought wryly. Was that because I had foresight, or was I one of the first victim?

“Sir?” Sam was Krio, like McAndrews the doorman, although he had never gone the whole route and taken warrior scars. Many of the descendants of the refugees from Sierra Leone were traditionalists to a fault. Just as tough in a fight, though. He'd been enrolled in the Sensor-Effector program at the Scholarium, been a gunner with Yarthkin in the brief war in space, and they had been together in the hills. And he had come along when Yarthkin took the amnesty, too. Even more of a wizard with the keys than he had been with a jazzer or a strakkaker or a ratchet knife.

“Play something appropriate, Sam. Stormy Weather.”

The musician's face lit with a vast white grin, and he launched into the ancient tune with a will, even singing his own version translated into Wunderlander. Yarthkin murmured into his lapel to turn down the hysterical commentary from the screen, still babbling about dastardly attacks and massive casualties.

It took a man back. Humans were dying out there, but so were ratcats… Here's looking at you, he thought to the hypothetical crew of the Yamamoto. Possibly nothing more than A.I. and sensor-effector mechanisms, but he doubted it.

“Stormy weather for sure,” he said softly to himself. Megatons of dust and water vapor were being pumped into the atmosphere. “Bad for the crops.” Though there would be a harvest from this, yes indeed. I could have been on that ship, he thought to himself, with a sudden flare of murderous anger. I was good enough. There are probably Wunderlanders aboard her; those slowships got through. If I hadn't been left sucking vacuum at the airlock, it could have been me out there!

“But not Ingrid,” he whispered to himself. “The bitch wouldn't have the guts.” Sam was looking at him; it had been a long time since the memory of the last days came back. With a practiced effort of will he shoved it deeper below the threshold of consciousness and produced the same mocking smile with which he had faced the world for most of his adult life.

“I wonder how our esteemed ratcat masters are taking it,” he said. “Been a while since the ones here've had to lap out of the same saucer as us lowlife monkey-boys. I'd like to see it, I truly would.”

“… estimate probability of successful interception at less than one-fifth,” the figure on the screen said. “Vengeance Fang and Rampant Slayer do not respond to signals; Lurker at Waterholes continues to accelerate at right angles to the elliptic. We must assume they were struck by the ramscoop fields.”

The governor watched closely; the slight bristle of whiskers and rapid open-shut flare of wet black nostrils was a sign of intense frustration.

“You have leapt well, Traat-Admiral,” Chuut-Riit said formally. “Break off pursuit.” A good tactician, Traat- Admiral; if he had come from a better family, he would have a double name by now. And he would have a double name, when Earth was conquered, a name and vast wealth. One percent of all the product of the new conquest, since he was to be in supreme military command of the Fifth Fleet. That would make him founder of a Noble Line, his bones in a worship shrine for a thousand generations. Chuut-Riit had hinted that he would send several of his daughters to the admiral's harem, letting him mingle his blood with that of the Patriarch.

“Chuut-Riit, are we to let the… the… omnivores escape unscathed?” The admiral's ears were quivering.

A rumble came from the space-armored figures that bulked in the dim orange light behind the flotilla commandant. Good, the planetary governor thought. They are not daunted.

“Your bloodlust is commendable, Traat-Admiral, but the fact remains that the human ship is traveling at velocities which render it… it is at a different point on the energy gradient, Traat-Admiral.”

“We can pursue as it leaves the system!”

“In ships designed to travel at .8 lightspeed? From behind? Remember the Human Lesson. That is a very effective reaction drive they are using.” A deep ticking sound came from his throat and Traat-Admiral's ears laid back instinctively. The thought of trying to maneuver past that planetary length sword of nuclear fire…

Chuut-Riit paused to let the thought sink home before continuing: “This has been a startling tactic. We assumed that possession of the gravity polarizer would lead the humans to neglect reaction drives, as we had done, hrrrearow echssseee nwaroweeaatrurrre, this-does-not-follow. We must prepare countermeasures, investigate the possibility of ramscoop interstellar missiles… at least they did not strike at this