The Man-Kzin Wars 04

Ssis-Captain arrived at Fortress Aarku with a new uniform, slightly non-standard. The padded underarmor vest was a too-rich shade of mauve with sapphire blue trimmings. The buttons on his epaulets were Wunderland jade from mines in the Jotun Range. The eight-pointed captain's star radiated from a real diamond. Pagoda style three-quarter sleeves were of the satin one might find on a kzinretti bed. The accurate leather cuffs of the undershirt, setting for his chronometer/comp, were tooled from high quality kz'eerkt the tanned hides of Wunderland criminals, selected to be without blemish or lash mark.

“Impressive,” said Trainer-of-Slaves.

“I am determined that you shall have your fleet rating!” Ssis was flicking the tip of his tail back and forth in agitation as he paraded to show off his tailoring.

“Hr-r. Yet I have sworn enemies who would make it difficult.”

“Harrgh! I have proper papers here for you that will make it all easy, letters of introduction and recommendation.” He began to purr. “And a pass to Wunderland! I don't dance around, I just leap right in. They have to give you to me. I need you.”

“Friend, I shall be satisfied with the trip to Wunderland.”

“Not after you've served as my gunner!” The elegant captain lifted his bushy head and with a great grin emitted a spitting-yowling imitation of the sounds of battle. “We're going to carve up some asteroids on the way in. Great sport.”

Trainer-of-Slaves decided that he could leave Long-Reach in charge of polarizer repairs, and took his chief slave on a tour of the shop. One giant field-generator was suspended in the light gravity of Aarku while two of the five-armed Jotoki slaves worked to replace its laminated planers.

Long-Reach stood proudly on four wrists while pointing with his fifth arm. “This unit will be ready for testing in two days,” said skinny(arm). “I am honored by your trust in me, brave master,” interrupted short(arm), checking various screens by taking control of three eyes. “All will go well with the polarizer repairs. We are expecting another unit for overhaul at the end of the day. And my duties among the juveniles?”

Trainer-of-Slaves trusted Long-Reach with all but one thing—the Jotok transients. “Just keep the life support functional. Change the filters again.” It would never do to have one of those curious five-armed, five brained fledglings fixate upon a mature Jotok as parent. “Third-Teacher-of-Slaves will be in charge. Your first duty is to the shop.”

“You will be traveling to Wunderland? The crew has checked over the engines of the Blood of Heroes from finger-tip to elbow. They hum. Do tell Ssis-Captain to stay within specs.”

The gravitic polarizer was the foundation stone of the Patriarchy and of warrior military superiority. In its stationary version it made artificial gravity possible, but its most useful application was as the reactionless space drive which allowed vehicles to accelerate in “free fall”: one gravity for the lumbering freighters, sixty or seventy gravities for the faster military warships.

These kzin craft bewildered the Wunderland defenders at the time of the 2367 A.D. conquest. They darted about with incredible velocity and acceleration changes, yet ejected no reaction mass, and didn't seem to need refueling even after maneuvers that would have exhausted the tanks of a torchship. The kzin warships could be goaded and provoked and then harassed like a bull in Old Spain, they could be burned, but they couldn't be chased. They didn't seem to obey the laws of physics.

For years after that terrible six months, war-impoverished professors from the Munchen Scholarium gathered in the cafes along Karl-Jorge Avenue in Old Munchen, writing equations and speculating with preposterous assumptions while they sipped their schnapps. Research equipment can be confiscated. Equations and speculation are free. When Alpha Centauri B was in the night sky, wan but brighter than any streetlight, each new theory about kzin technology was carried like an epidemic between the sidewalk cafes until second sunset when the nightlife of Munchen died.

Given that a reactionless drive did exist they eventually sketched out the beginning of an understanding that had a sound theoretical footing by the time Chuut-Riit arrived as governor. The human mind, unlike the kzin mind, is obsessed with resolving the contradictions between what it observes and what it thinks it should be seeing.

Momentum did not appear to be conserved by the reactionless kzin ships, but the gravitic field equations upon which the polarizer was based invoked negative space curvature, a necessary element of any reactionless space drive. Normal intuitions about momentum fail in the presence of negative curvature momentum then has a direction opposite velocity but the equations of momentum conservation still hold.

Trainer-of-Slaves took up his gunner's berth on the Blood of Heroes. He was outfitted with mask-goggles. They imposed diagrams upon his visual field which supplied all that he might need to know while firing. During check-down he had time to make simulation runs with his goggles feeding him the dangers of a virtual world. It gave the liver a jolt to kill monkeyships even if they were only program-generated ghosts.

The five spherical ships of the hunter-pack drifted into position. There was ear-bulb chatter as the captains readied themselves for the three light-hour sweep from Alpha Centauri B across to Alpha Centauri A, roughly the equivalent of a run from the distance of Uranus to Man-home. The Serpent's Swarm would give the sweep realism, though it contained hundreds of times the mass and debris of the Solar Belt.

Because of this plethora of asteroids, the Kzin Training Command was able to designate as many target asteroids as it pleased without disrupting the economy of the Swarm. Fourth Fleet attack-training stressed destruction of the kind of asteroid defensive installations which the monkeys used extensively to protect the north and south approaches to Man-home.

At maximum acceleration the Blood of Heroes could make the three-light-hour trip from B to A in less than two days at a turn-around velocity a tenth the speed of light, but this was not common practice because of the density of maker in the Centauri System which created field energy losses.

The gravity polarizer of the kzin high-velocity drive contained a natural mechanism to protect the ship from impact by gas and micrometeoroids. The offending particle was violently accelerated as it entered the field while, at the same time, the ship reacted to the added mass by recoiling. In the exchange, field energy was re-converted to mass. The particle size was not critical unequal masses accelerate at the same rate within any gravitic field.

Unfortunately, atoms impacting into a polarizer's field generated a weak electromagnetic interaction which drained field energy into radiation. Inside a planetary system this could have been a serious problem if high velocities had been desirable. Between the stars, where high velocities are desirable, kzin ships weren't able to travel much above eighty percent of light speed through normal densities of interstellar gas without bleeding to death from 'blue shine.'

While a gravity polarizer was accelerating it converted mass to energy, when it decelerated it converted that same energy back to mass. Its power requirements were orders of magnitude less than a torchship, needing power only to make up for the losses involved in field interactions with the local media.

The hunting pack was practicing the standard maneuver. Come in high over the Swarm, then aback down through it at a moderate velocity. There was much bantering back and forth between the offensive team and the defensive team during an 'engagement' debriefing. All kzin insults weren't delivered in anger—the real meaning lay in the inflections of the spit-hisses. Ssis-Captain was fond of calling his opponents baboons because they had been ordered to “think like monkeys.” Amiably they dubbed him 'Kshat-Lunch,' referring to a herbivore who was known to eat offal.

It took them twelve days, not two, to work their way across the Swarm on patrol/attack status, instruments scanning at full vigilance. The Blood of Heroes recorded static from the Tiamat industrial world: instructions to some lonely Rockjack in his torchship, calls for part replacements, a medical emergency. Doppler shifts alerted monitors.

Of the man-ships they saw only glimmers flicking across detection screens. Somewhere among the stones armed feral humans grubbed about, plotting revenge but the Blood of Heroes saw none, though its instruments were looking. These sullen beasts were mostly no more of a nuisance than fur-ticks but they made good target practice when found. On this run the Heroes sparred only with tumbling rubble.

Trainer-of-Slaves was an experienced gunner by the time they reached the cloud-streaked globe of Wunderland. He was not yet an experienced politician.

CHAPTER 13