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 Man-sun 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. “Gis-Captain, give orders that I am to be disturbed by no one.”
His youthful kzinrret, 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 of the snail’s pace of light, the Patriarch’s awareness of what was happening on his border was more than thirty years out of date. Chuut-Riit had general orders and made his decisions without consulting Kzin-home; in essence he was a traveling Patriarch. When the diameter of the Patriarchy was a whole lifetime, field commanders had broad authority. They did what they did and reported when they could. Once an obligation was assumed, they honored it or they trained their sons to honor it.
Chuut-Riit came to the boundary of the Patriarchy on a hunch generated by electromagnetic spoor. Rumors. Strange signals. With hardly more than hints picked up at a hunting match, he had set out from W’kkai as if his nose could read a wind of scent from across the interstellar reaches. A new starfaring species?
Four years closer, at Ch’Aakin, he learned that his nose was good. An obscure little border fortress circling R’hshssira had mustered a fleet of irregulars, attacked and actually conquered one of their worlds. Tree-bred omnivores with ten fingers. It was a major victory. Who would have thought
