she swallowed, 'fifty years ago. Those others are bubble-worlds… More detectors on Wunderland than there used to be, and in close orbit. At the poles, and that looks like a military-geosynchronous setup.'
Jonah thought briefly what it would be like to return to the Sol-Belt after fifty years. Nearly a third of the average lifetime, longer than he had been alive-if he ever got home. The Yamamoto could expect to see Sol again in twenty years objective, allowing time to pass through the Alpha Centauri system, decelerate and work back up to a respectable Tau value. The plan-in-theory was for him and Ingrid to accomplish their mission, rejoin the Catskinner, boost her out in the direction of Sol, turn on the stasis field again-and wait to be picked up by UNSN craft. About as likely as getting back by putting our heads between our knees and spitting hard.
'Ships,' the computer said in its dispassionate tone. 'Movement. Status, probable class and dispersal cones.
Color-coded lines blinked over the tactical map. Columns of print scrolled down one margin: coded velocities and key-data. Hypnotic training triggered bursts into their minds, crystalline shards of fact, faster than conscious recall. Jonah whistled.
'Loaded for bandersnatch,' he said. There were a lot of warships spraying out from bases and holding orbits, and that was not counting those too small for the Yamamoto's detection systems; their own speed would be degrading signal drastically. Between the ramscoop fields, their velocity, and normal shielding there was very little that could touch them, but the kzin were certainly going to try.
'Aggressive bastards,' he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tactical display. It took courage, individually and on the part of their commander to put themselves in the way of the Yamamoto. Nobody had used a ramscoop ship like this before; the kzin had never developed a Bussard-type drive, they had had the gravity polarizer for a long time, and it had aborted work on reaction jet systems. But they must have made staff studies, and they would know what they were facing. Which was something more in the nature of a large-scale cosmic event than a ship. Mass increases with velocity: by now moving only fractionally slower than a laser beam, the Yamamoto had the effective bulk of a medium-sized moon.
That reminded him of what the Catskinner would be doing shortly, and the Dart did not have anything like the scale of protection the ramscoop warship did. Even a micrometeorite… Alpha Centauri was a black disk edged by fire in the upper half of the screen.
'Projectiles away,' the computer said. Nothing physical, but an inverted cone of trajectories splayed out from the path of the Yamamoto's Highly-polished chrome-tungsten-steel alloy slugs, that had spent the trip from Sol riding grapnel-fields in the Yamamoto's wake. Wildly varying albedo, from fully-stealthed to deliberately reflective; the Catskinner was going to be rather conspicuous when the Slaver stasis field's impenetrable surface went on. Now the warship's magnetics were twitching the slugs out in sprays and clusters, at velocities that would send them across the Wunderland system in mere hours. It would take the firepower of a heavy cruiser to significantly damage one, and there were a lot of slugs. Iron was cheap, and the Yamamoto grossly overpowered. 'You know, we ought to have done this before,' Jonah said. The sun-disk filled the upper screen, then snapped down several sizes as the computer reduced the field. A sphere, floating in the wild arching discharges and coronas of a G-type sun. 'We could have used ramrobots. Or the pussies could have copied our designs and done it to us.'
'Nope,' Ingrid said. She coughed, and he wondered if her eyes were locking on the sphere again as it clicked down to a size that would fit the upper screen. 'Ramscoop fields. Think about it.'
'Oh. ' When you put it that way, he could think of about a half-dozen ways to destabilize one; drop, oh, ultra- compressed radon into it. Countermeasures… luckily, nothing the kzin were likely to have right on hand.
'For that matter,' she continued, 'throwing relativistic weapons around inside a solar system is a bad idea. If you want to keep it.'
'Impact,' the computer said helpfully. An asteroid winked, the tactical screen's way of showing an expanding sphere of plasma. Nickel-iron, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon-compounds, some of the latter kzin and humans and children and their pet budgies.
'You have to aim at stationary targets,' Ingrid was saying. 'The very things that war is supposed to be about seizing. Blowing them up is as insane as fighting a planetside war with fusion weapons and no effective defense. Only possible once.'
'Once would be enough, if we knew where the kzin home system was.' For a vengeful moment he imagined robot ships fiddling into a sun from infinite distances, scores of lightyears of acceleration at hundreds Of G's, their own masses raised to near-stellar proportions. 'No. Then again, no.'
“I’m glad you said that,' Ingrid replied. Softly: I wonder what it's like, for them out there.'
'Interesting, ' Jonah said tightly. 'At the very least, interesting. '
'Please, keep calm,' Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, for the fourth time. 'For Finagle's sake, sit down and shut up!'
This one seemed to sink in, or perhaps the remaining patrons were getting tired of running around in circles and shouting. The staff were all at their posts, or preventing the paying customers from hitting each other or breaking anything expensive. Several of them had police-model stunners under their dinner jackets, like his; hideously illegal, hence quite difficult to square. Not through Claude-he was quite conscientious about avoiding things that would seriously annoy the ratcats-but there were plenty lower down the totem pole who lacked his gentlemanly sense of their own long-term interests.
Everyone was watching the screen behind the bar again; the UNSN announcement was off the air, but the Munchen news service was slapping in random readouts from all over the planet. For once the collaborationist government was too busy to follow their natural instincts and keep everyone in the dark, and the kzin had never given much of a damn, the only thing they cared about was behavior. Propaganda be damned.
The flatlander warship was stiff beaded in system; from the look of things they were going to use the sun for a whip-round. He could feel rusty spaceman's reflexes creaking into action. That was a perfectly sensible ploy; ramscoop ships were not easy to turn. Even at relativistic speeds you couldn't use the interstellar medium to bank. Turning meant applying lateral thrust; it would be easier to decelerate, turn and work back up to high Tau-unless you could use a gravitational sling, like a kid on roller-skates going hell-for-leather down a street and then slapping a hand on a lamppost.
He raised his glass to the sometime mirror behind the bar. It was showing a scene from the south polar zone with its abundance of ratcat installations; kzin were stuck with Wunderland's light gravity, but they preferred a cooler, drier climate than humans. The first impact had looked like a line of light drawn down from heaven to earth, and the shockwave flipped the robot camera into a spin that had probably ended on hard, cold ground.
Yarthkin grinned, and snapped his fingers for the waitress. He ordered coffee, black, and a sandwich.
'Heavy on the mustard, sweetheart,' he told the waitress. He loosened his tie and watched flickershots of boiling dust-clouds crawling with networks of purple-white lightning. Closer, into canyons of night seething up out of red-shot blackness, that must be molten rock… 'Sam.' The man at the musicomp looked up from trailing his fingers across the keyboard. It was configured for piano tonight-an archaism, like the whole setup. Popular, as more and more fled in fantasy what could not be avoided in reality, back into a history that was at least human. Of course, Wunderlanders were prone to that, the planet had been a patchwork of refugees from an increasingly homogenized and technophile Earth anyway. I've spent a generation cashing in on a nostalgia boom, Yarthkin thought wryly. Was that because I had foresight, or was I one of the first victim?
'Sir?' Sam was Krio, like McAndrews the doorman, although he had never gone the whole route and taken warrior scars. Many of the descendants of the refugees from Sierra Leone were traditionalists to a fault. just as tough in a fight, though. He'd been enrolled in the Sensor-Effector program at the Scholarium, been a gunner with Yarthkin in the brief war in space, and they had been together in the hills. And he had come along when Yarthkin took the amnesty, too. Even more of a wizard with the keys than he had been with a jazzer or a strakkaker or a ratchet knife. 'Play something appropriate, Sam. Stormy Weather.
The musician's face lit with a vast white grin, and he launched into the ancient tune with a will, even singing his own version translated into Wunderlander. Yarthkin murmured into his lapel to turn down the hysterical commentary from the screen, still babbling about dastardly attacks and massive casualties.
It took a man back. Humans were dying out there, but so were ratcats… Here's looking at you, he thought to the hypothetical crew of the Yamamoto. Possibly nothing more than A.I. and sensor-effector mechanisms, but he doubted it.
'Stormy weather for sure,' he said softly to himself. Megatons of dust and water vapor were being pumped into the atmosphere. 'Bad for the crops. ' Though there would be a harvest from this, yes indeed. I could have
