Jonah stiffed. 'Well, this is all very interesting, general, but-'
'-what's it got to do with you?' The flatlander leaned forward again, tapping paired thumbs together. 'This Chuut-Riit is a first-class menace. You see, we're losing those advantages I mentioned. The Kzin have been shipping additional force into the Wunderland system in relays. Not so much weapons as knocked-down industrial plants and personnel. Furthermore, they've got the locals well organized. It's become a fully industrialized, system-wide economy, with an earth-type planet and an asteroid belt richer than Sol's. The population's much lower-hundreds of millions instead of nearly twenty billion-but that doesn't matter much.'
Jonah nodded in his turn. With ample energy and raw materials, the geometric-increase potential of automated machinery could build a war-making capacity in a single generation. Faster than that, if a few crucial administrators and technicians were imported, too. Earth's witless hordes were of little help to Sol's military effort. Most of them were a mere drain on resources-not even useful as cannon fodder in a conflict largely fought in space.
'So now they're in a position to outproduce us. We have to keep our advantages in operational efficiency. '
'You play Go with masters, you get good,' the Belter said.
'No. It's academic whether the pussies are more or less intelligent than we. What's intelligence, anyway? But we've proven experimentally that they're culturally and genetically less flexible. Man, when this war started we were absolute pacifists-we hadn't had so much as a riot in three centuries. We even censored history so that the majority didn't know there had ever been wars! That was less than a century ago, less than a single lifetime, and look at what we've done since. The pussies are only just now starting to smarten up about us.'
'This Chuut-Riit sounds as if he's… A shit. Sir. '
A wide white grin. 'Exactly. An exceptionally able ratcat. The Kzinti are less prone to either genius or stupidity than we are; they don't tolerate eccentrics, duel them to death, usually. But here they've got a goddamn genius in a position to knock sense into their heads.
'He has to go.'
The flatlander stood and began striding back and forth behind the desk, gesturing with the cigar. Something more than the stink made Jonah's stomach clench.
'Covert operations is another thing we've had to reinvent, just lately. We need somebody who's good with spacecraft… a Belter, because the ones who settled the Serpent Swarm belt of Wunderland have stayed closer to the ancestral stock than the Wunderlanders downside. A good combat man who's proved himself capable of taking on Kzin at close quarters. And someone who's good with computer systems, because our informants tell us that is the skill most in demand by the Kzin on Wunderland itself.'
The general halted and stabbed toward Jonah with the hand that held the stub of burning weeds. 'Last but not least, someone with contacts in the Alpha Centauri system.'
Jonah felt a wave of relief A little relief, because the general was still grinning at him.
'Sir, I've never left-,,
An upraised hand halted him. 'Gracie. Tell Lieutenant Raines we're ready for her.'
A woman came in and saluted smartly, first the general and then Jonah; he recognized her from the holo. 'I'd like you to meet Captain Matthieson.'
'God, what have you done to her?' Jonah asked the tall lieutenant as they grabbed stanchions and halted by the viewport nearest his ship. The observation corridor outside the central graving dock of the base-asteroid was a luxury, but then, with a multi-megaton mass to work with and unlimited energy, the Sol-system military could afford that type of luxury. Take a nickel-iron rock. Drill a hole down the center with bomb-pumped lasers. Put a spin on the resulting tube, and rig large mirrors with the object at their focal points; the sun is dim beyond the orbit of Mars, but in zero-G you can build awfully big mirrors. The nickel-iron pipe heats, glows, turns soft as taffy, swells outward evenly, like cotton candy at a fair. Cooling, it leaves a huge open space surrounded by a thick shell of metal-rich rock. Robots drill the tunnels and corridors. Humans and robots install the power sources, life- support, gravity polarizers…
An enlisted crewman bounced by them horizontal to their plane of reference, sketching a sloppy salute as he twisted, hit the corner feet first and rebounded away. The air had the cool clean tang that Belters were used to, but with an industrial-tasting underlay of ozone and hot metal; the seals inside UNSN base Gibraltar were adequate for health but not up to Belt civilian standards. Even while he hung motionless and watched the technicians gutting his ship, some remote corner of Jonah's mind noted again that flatlanders had a nerve- wracking tendency to tolerate jury-rigged and barely adequate solutions. Simple self-respect demanded that the air one breathed be clean, damn itl UNSN Catskinner hung in the vacuum chamber, surrounded by the flitting shapes of space-suited repair workers, compu-waldos and robots, torches that blinked blue-white, and a haze of detached fittings that hinted at the haste of the work. Beneath the mods and clutter the basic shape of the Dart- class attack boat still showed: massive fusion-power unit, tiny life-support bubble, asymmetric fringe of weapons and sensors designed for deep-space operation.
'What have you done to my ship?' Jonah asked again.
'Made some necessary modifications, Captain,
Raines replied. 'The basic drive and armament systems are unaltered.' Jonah nodded grudgingly. He could see the clustered grips for the spike-pods, featureless egg-shaped ovoid's, that were the basic weapon for light vessels, a one-megaton bomb pumping an X-ray laser. In battle they would spread out like the wings of a raptor, a pattern thousands of kilometers wide slaved to the computers in the control pod. The other weapons remained as well: fixed lasers, ball-bearing scatterers, railguns, particle-beam projectors, the antennae for stealthing and beam-deflection fields.
Unconsciously, the pilot's hands twitched; his reflexes and memory were back in the crashcouch, fingers moving infinitesimally in the lightfield gloves, holos feeding data into his eyes. Dodging with fusion powered feet, striking with missile fists, his Darts locked with the Kzinti Vengeful Slashers in a dance of battle that was as much like zero-G ballet as anything else…
'What modifications?' he asked.
'Grappling points for attachment to a ramscoop ship. Experimental. They're calling it the Yamamoto. The plan is that we ride piggyback until we reach the Wunderland system at high tau, having accelerated all the way. We drop off just this side of Alpha Centauri. They won't have much time to prepare for us at those speeds.' The ship would be on the heels of the wave-front announcing its arrival.
'Great,' he said sarcastically. 'And just how are we supposed to stop?' 'Oh, that's simple,' Raines said. For the first time in their brief acquaintance, she smiled. Damn, she's good looking, Jonah thought with mild surprise. Better than good. How could I not notice?
'We ram ourselves into the sun.'
Several billion years before, there had been a species of sophonts with a peculiar ability. They called themselves (as nearly as humans could reproduce the sound) the Thrint; others knew them as Slavers. The ability amounted to an absolutely irresistible form of telepathic hypnosis, evolved as a hunting aid in an ecosystem where most animals advanced enough to have a spinal cord were at least mildly telepathic. This was a low-probability development, but in a universe as large as ours anything possible will occur sooner or later. On their native world, Thrintun could give a subtle prod to a prey-animal, enough to tip its decision to come down to the waterhole. The Thrint evolved intelligence as an additional advantage. After all, their prey had millions of years to develop resistance.
Then a spaceship landed on the Thrint homeworld. Its crew immediately became slaves. Absolutely obedient, absolutely trustworthy, willing and enthusiastic slaves. Operating on nervous systems that had not evolved in an environment saturated with the Power, any Thrint could control dozens of sophonts. With the amplifiers that slave-technicians developed, a Thrint could control an entire planet. Slaves industrialized a culture in the hunting- band stage in a single generation; controlled by the Power, in a few generations more slaves built an interstellar empire covering most of a galaxy.
Slaves did everything, because the Thrint had never been a very intelligent species, and once loose with the Power they had no need to think. Eventually they met, and thought they had enslaved, a very clever race indeed, the tnuctipun. The revolt that eventually followed resulted in the extermination of every tool-using sentient in the Galaxy, but before it did the tnuctipun made some remarkable things…
'A Slaver stasis field?' he said. Despite himself, awe showed in his voice. One such field had been discovered
