immediately. The United Nations Space Command is attacking kzin military and industrial targets in the Alpha Centauri system. Evacuate areas-' The screen split to scroll the same message in English and two more of the planet's principal languages. The door burst open and a squad of Munchen Polizei burst through.
'Scheisse!' Montferrat shouted, rising. He froze as the receiver in his uniform cap began a hissing and snarling override-transmission in the Hero's Tongue. Yarthkin relaxed and smiled as the policeman sprinted for the exit. He cocked one eye towards the ceiling and silently flourished Montferrat's last glass of schnapps before sending it down with a snap of his wrist.
“Weird,' Jonah Matthieson muttered, looking at the redshifted cone of light ahead of them. Better this way. This way he didn't have to think of what they were going to do when they arrived. He had been a singleship pilot before doing his military service. You could do software design anywhere there was a computer system, of course, and miners had a lot of spare time. But his reflexes were a pilot's, and they included a strong inhibition against high-speed intercept trajectories.
This was going to be the highest speed intercept of all time… The forward end of the pilot's cabin was very simple, a hemisphere of smooth synthetic. For that matter, the rest of the cabin was quite basic as well; two padded crashcouches, which was one more than normal, an autodoc, an autochef, and rather basic sanitary facilities. That left just enough room to move… in zero gravity. Right now they were under one-G acceleration, crushingly uncomfortable. They had been under one-G for weeks, subjective time; the Yamamoto was being run to flatlander specifications.
' Compensate,' Ingrid said. The view swam back, the blue stars ahead and the dim red behind turning to the normal variation of colors. The dual-sun Centauri system was dead 'ahead,' looking uncomfortably close. 'We're making good time. It took thirty years coming back on the slowboat, but the Yamamoto's going to put us near Wunderland in five. Five objective, that is. Probably right on the heels of the pussy scouts.'
Jonah nodded, looking ahead at the innocuous twinned stars. His hands were on the control-gloves of his couch, but the pressure-sensors and light-fields were Off, of course. There had been very little to do in the month-subjective since they left the orbit of Pluto other than accelerated learning with RNA boosters. He could now speak as much of the Hero's Tongue as Ingrid. Enough to understand it, kzin evidently didn't like their slaves to speak much of it; slaves weren't worthy. He could also talk Belter English with the accent of the Serpent Swarm,
Wunderland's dominant language, and the five or six other tongues prevalent in the many ethnic enclaves… sometimes he found himself dreaming in Pahlavi or Croat or Amish pletterdeisz. Thank God it wasn't going to be a long trip; with the gravity polarizer and the big orbital lasers to push them up to ramscoop speeds, and no limit on the acceleration their compensators could handle…
We must be at a high fraction of the speed of a photon by now, he thought. Speeds only robot ships had achieved before, with experimental fields supposedly keeping the killing torrent of secondary radiation out…
'Tell me some more about Wunderland,' he said. Neither of them were fidgeting, Belters didn't; this sort of cramped environment had been normal for their people since the settlement of the Sol-system Belt three centuries before. It was the thought of how they were going to stop that had his nerves twisting.
'I've already briefed you twenty times,' she replied, with something of a snap in her tone. Military formality wore thin pretty quickly in close quarters like this. 'All the first-hand stuff is fifty-six years out of date, and the nine-year-old material's all in the computer if you really want it. You're just bored.'
No, I'm just scared shitless. 'Well, talking would be better than nothing. Spending a month strapped to this thing has been even more monotonous than being a rockjack. You were right, I'm bored.'
'And scared.'
He looked around. She was lying with her hands behind her head, grinning at him.
'Okay, I'm scared, too. Among other reasons because we will start this mission utterly dependent on the intervention of outside forces; the off switch is exterior to the surface of the effect.' It had to be; time did not pass inside a stasis field.
'The designers were pretty sure it'd work.'
'I'm sure of only two things, Jonah.'
'Which are?'
'Well, the first one is that the designers aren't going to be diving into the photosphere of a sun at. 99 lights.'
'Oh.' That had occurred to him, too. On the other hand, it really was easier to be objective when your life wasn't on the line… and in any case, it would be quick. 'What's the other thing?'
Her smile grew wider, and she undid the collar catch of her uniform. 'Even if it has to be in a gravity field, there's one thing I want to experience again before possible death.'
Much later, they commanded the front screen to stop mimicking a control board. Now the upper half was an unmodified view of the Alpha Centauri system. The lower was a battle-schematic, dots and graphs and probability-curves like bundles of fuzzy sticks.
The Yamamoto was going to cross the disk of the Wunderland system in subjective minutes, mere hours even by outside clocks. With her ramscoop fields spreading a corona around her deadly to any life form with a nervous system, and the fusion flare a sword behind her half a parsec long; nothing could stop her and only beam- weapons stood a chance of catching her, even messages were going to take prodigies of computing power to unscramble. Her own weapons were quite simple; quarter-ton iron eggs. When they intercepted their targets at. 99 C, the results would be in the gigaton-yield range.
Jonah's teeth skinned back from his teeth and the hair struggled to raise itself along his spine. Plains ape reflex, he thought, smelling the rank odor of fight-flight sweat trickling down his flanks. Your genes think you're about to tackle a Cape buffalo with a thighbone club. His fingers pressed the inside of the chair seat in a complex pattern.
'Responding,' said the computer in its usual husky contralto.
Was it imagination that there was already more inflection in its voice? And what did that really signify? Consciousness in a computer was not human consciousness, even though memory and drives were designed by humans… it possessed free will, unless he or Ingrid used the override keys, and unless the high command had left sleeper drives. Perhaps not so much free will; a computer would see the path most likely to succeed and follow it. Still, he supposed, he did the same, usually.
How would it be to know that you were a made thing, and doomed to encysted madness in six months or less?
Nobody had ever been able to learn why. He had speculated to himself that it was a matter of time; to a consciousness that could think in nanoseconds, that could govern its own sensory input, what would be the point of remaining linked to a refractory cosmos? It could make its own universe, and have it last forever in a few milliseconds. Perhaps that was why humans who linked directly to a computer system of any size went irretrievably catatonic as well…
'Detection. Neutronic and electromagnetic-range sensors.' The ship's system was linked to the hugely powerful but sub-conscious level machines of the Yamamoto. 'Point sources.'
Rubies sprang out across the battle map, moving as he watched, swelling up on either side and pivoting in relation to each other. The fire-bright point source of Alpha Centauri in the upper screen became a perceptible and growing disk. Jonah's skin crawled at the sight.
This was like ancient history, air and sea battles out of Earth's past. He was used to maneuvers that lasted hours or days, ships and fleets matching relative velocities while the planets moved slowly and the sun might as well be a fixed point at the center of the universe… Perhaps when gravity polarizers were small and cheap enough to fit in Dart-class boats it would all be like this.
'The pussies have the system pretty well covered,' he said.
'And the Swarm's Belters,' Ingrid replied. Jonah turned his head, slowly, at the sound of her voice. Shocked, he saw a glistening in her eyes. 'Home… 'she whispered. Then more decisively: 'Identification. Human-range sensors. Discrete.'
Half the rubies flickered for a few seconds. Ingrid continued to Jonah: 'This is a messy system; more of its mass is in asteroids and assorted junk than yours. Belters use more deep-radar and don't rely on telescopes as much. The pussies couldn't have changed that. They'd cripple the Swarm's economy and destroy its value.' Slowly. 'That's the big station on Tiamat. They've got a garrison there, it's a major shipbuilding center, was even,
