The Man-Kzin Wars 04

reliably obeisant.

An inner-world kzin, however territorial, was used to the formalisms of hierarchical command, but out here in the wilds a less disciplined breed of kzinti were notorious for the way they fought over and defended the spoils of their adventuring; crass in their willingness to defy a messenger of the Patriarch if he gave any appearance of weakness. The Patriarch was thirty years distant by lightbeam and forty years distant by ship.

The Hssin fleet might have responded arrogantly. The Conquest Heroes of Hssin were brothers of the Conquest Heroes of Wunderland. They could have ignored, or even ordered an attack on the Victory at S'Rawl after all, it was a mere command warcraft heavy with electronics but deficient in armaments. But would the Hssin household of Kasrriss-As have dared such disdain, knowing who was to follow Traat-Admiral?

No action was taken against the Victory at S'Rawl. Space traffic control was relinquished with grinless self- restraint.

Ships began to drift into the R'hshssira System in ones and twos, every few hours, over months, the transports with their time-suspended warriors, the warcraft, the auxiliaries—all that Chuut-Riit had been able to exhort, to tempt, to command from five systems. No ship debarked a single warrior to Hssin, taking orbit instead in a great ring around red R'hshssira. To awe Hssin at a distance, that was Traat-Admiral's intention.

In time Chuut-Riit himself arrived, his flagship a spherical dreadnought of the Imperial Ripper class larger than anything that the barbarians of Hssin had ever seen, the first new battle design from Kzin in centuries, ominous, weapons-laden. These out-world adventurers of the borderlands would fawn all over him for its specifications and he would sell those details for a price.

During the six days it took for the gravitic drive field of the Throat Ripper to collapse from a cruising speed of six-eighths light down to the velocity of R'hshssira, Chuut-Riit had been in post-hibernation training massage, fight simulation, strenuous amusements with a favorite Kzinrett. Hibernation was good for neither muscle tone nor quick reflex. Swift repairs to the physique, he never neglected.

Most confrontations Chuut-Riit handled with a logic that cowed his foes, but if that failed he used wit before falling back on an awesome rage that could subdue opposition with the sheer stench of his anger. Still, he liked to be in prime physical shape for those times when it was necessary to bloody an irrational enemy with fang or claw.

The work den adjacent to his stateroom was small, paneled along one wall by holographic savanna mismatched to the ceiling pipes. Above his data-link hung a modern pulse-laser and an antique crossbow. The floor beside the data-link provided place for but a single kdatlyno-hide rug—this one bare along an edge, old, a trophy of his first hunt as a servitor of the Prime Household. In those days, having more strength than sense, he had aligned himself with a Patriarch who was too young to have remained alive long, but live he did, to grow old and perish while Chuut-Riit served him as military trouble-slasher, first on Kzin, and then among the stars where the endless years of hibernation had slowed his aging.

He was not old but (having outlived his regal pridemate) he felt his age. He remembered things vividly that his subordinates knew of only through the distortion of imaging and writing. These kits thought of the Asanti Wars as one battle and knew nothing of the treason of Grrowme-Kowr. They purred of the Long Peace, as if there had been no battles before they were weaned. Unshared memories made a kzin feel old, old, old.

Ah, though perhaps not as old as the Riit crossbow. Chuut-Riit had on his electronic spectacles and was staring at it Jotok light-alloy, forged by kzin ironmongers, inlaid with blueshell by a semi-professional kzin artist. The leather strapping had been replaced but all else was original.

It was w'tsai his grandfather that this crossbow was the weapon of choice carried into space by the first Riit ancestor hired to battle off-planet. The family genealogy traced him back through to the household of one of the almost mythical Riit Patriarchies, but the truth was probably less romantic—perhaps he was a game-keeper at some distant hunting reserve who scandalized his household (even endangered their lives) by vowing fealty to the Jotok infidels.

Those spider-armed monsters arrived with wealth and magic. They had swords of fire and gravitic machinery and dreams of hiring mercenaries to conquer them a stellar empire, preferring someone else to do their dying for them. In the aftermath of the siege of the Patriarch's castle and his ignoble defeat, Jotok wealth could have bought these spacefaring animals any number of wretched kzinti.

This crossbow and a letter (written in what competent historians had charitably called an 'illiterate' hand) were all that remained of the ancestor. The letter was a wonderful attempt at trying to describe stars to a kzin father who was convinced that the stars were the souls of Great Heroes embedded in the Fanged God's Dome.

The Riit medallion engraved into the crossbow was supposed to have been the family mark since prehistorical time. Popular notion held that it was a stylized carnivore's grin, but Chuut-Riit's careful historical research had shown that it was really the shoulder patch assigned by the Jotoki to their elite kzin warriors. It represented a dentate leaf. The dots and comma motto that surrounded the medallion was, however, a later addition “From Mercenary to Master.”

The most invidious sentiment that Chuut-Riit had ever heard was voiced while he was recruiting support for his armada at Ch'Aakin. “If these monkeys put up such a fanatical fight, we should hire them to do battle for us, to be killed in our place. It is time we enjoyed the Long Peace we have created. If a master is truly a master, he can buy life for himself and death for his servants.” Said by a fop who had never challenged his father to combat, a fop who owned his share of Jotok slaves yet had never seen the forest-buried ruins of the Jotok worlds, looted by trusted orange mercenaries.

Chuut-Riit was both a mathematician and a historian. He was a student of the rise of the Jotok Empire. It had attained less than an eighth the size of the modern Kzin Patriarchy, yet could still teach important contemporary lessons. How had their purely commercial fleets developed, to such a fine art, logistic battle support over interstellar distances?

Once the Jotok had been military geniuses.

The ancient kzin commanders, using deadly ships thoughtfully supplied by the Jotok, had been enthusiastic plunderers—the language of their teachers was destroyed, lost even to the surviving Jotoki. Nothing but the melancholic forests and foggy lakes remained. For his studies, Chuut-Riit was forced to rely on secondhand kzin texts by kzin warriors who had never mastered Jotoki five-stream grammar. Only with the aid of queuing theory, delay-prediction analysis, intent-result resolution, did the anecdotal fragments provide insight into Jotok military strategy.

The Jotok should have won any war that pitted them against their strategically immature hirelings, except that at the time of the confrontation kzinti warriors were already the mainstay of the Jotok military. The Jotok overwhelmingly preferred commerce to military service. Why that was so was a deep puzzle to Chuut-Riit, but the records that would have answered his questions could not be found in kzin archives. If one had lifetimes to rummage in all the distant place…

Enough reverie. He had work to do before he went planetside.

The armada was closer now to Wunderland than it had ever been, with the Alpha Centauri binary effulgent in the heavens of R'hshssira. A very bright Mansun was the new central jewel of the constellation the kzinti called The Water Bird. Hssin Tracker files would contain the most recent information about the Man-Hero war, even if the news was years behind the current situation. He called up everything that Hssin Central Command was willing to transmit.

Assessing only the bulk of the material and its general nature, he began to ferret out a list of the Hssin staff responsible for tracking. He marked off five names from Chief Intelligence Officer to Spoor Level Collator, then contacted them personally, checking their answers against each other's statements. He wanted to know that he had everything. He was polite, firm, to the point, and appreciative. That was the way to secure cooperation.

He tapped the phone link. “Gig-Captain, give orders that I am to be disturbed by no one.”

His youthful Kzinrett, Hasha, stuck her head through the oval door, huge yellow eyes lambent with appeal, sensing that he was busy, testing her welcome. He gently purred to her a few simple words of encouragement in the Female Tongue. She did not qualify as a taxing distraction. “My Hero,” she replied traditionally, then slunk to his side where he stroked the back of her neck while he growled and spat information out of his data-link, organizing it on his spectacles. She was well trained and said nothing, but she let her tail flirt with him. Sometimes his other fingers flicked purposefully over the command plate.

He was not here on the direct orders of the Patriarch. There was no time for that in an emergency. Because