anyway.
'We learned another tactic that cost them a lot of ships: strap big attitude jets on our craft and use them to spin like catherine wheels with the main reaction drives still firing. Not only did it give us better maneuverability, but it turned the reaction drive into a swinging sword even they could hardly dodge. We couldn't do it with manned ships-the inertial forces were too great-but we did it with drone craft. We began to win some more. If we'd had more motors, and more craft, and more resources, and more time… but that stopped them for a while.
'We studied their tactics, and an odd thing was, some of their behavior seemed almost as amateurish as ours. More than once they came straight at us, in an undeviating line, when a straight-on attack was the one thing we could meet with a good chance of hitting them. At the Second Battle of Tiamat's Lead Trojan, their big ships came at us in a column. It looked pretty frightening, seeing ship after ship closing with us like that-but what it meant was that we could hardly miss them. It was as if they were unimaginative. Or inexperienced. It didn't make sense.'
We sat in silence for a moment. Something that might have been a meteor but probably wasn't streaked by far above. The scattered wreckage of the crashed ship had just about burned itself out. 'It might make sense,' said Dimity. 'Maybe they are inexperienced. At least in dealing with humans… ' Her face went slack in a way that I had seen before.
'We took it for granted that space-traveling races would be too intelligent and civilized to fight,' she said. 'Perhaps we were nearly right. What if peaceful, civilized space-traveling races are the norm? Or were the norm. There may not be any others left now.
'Given that, the Kzin wouldn't have much experience of war. You need a fighting enemy to teach you to fight. What if when they meet other races they simply devour them. There's no more fight than there is between a tigripard and a lamb.'
'One of the first human ships out of Sol that they attacked was able to beat them,' Kleist said. 'It used a com- laser as a weapon. Some of us in the Meteor Guard actually think aspects of our missile technology are as good as theirs or better. It suggests they come from a much cleaner system than this. 'Or sometimes it seemed as if they were not in control of their own minds,' he went on. 'Sometimes they seemed undisciplined. We analyzed our own successful tactics, and realized that when we had been, almost unconsciously, provoking them to attack, baiting them, they would often leap and take the bait. Our ace pilots had been doing that, it seemed, by instinct. Someone said it was the instinct of the monkey to tease the leopard.
'At other times they would stalk us like cats. A particularly weird thing was that one of the larger enemy command ships had behaved at times as if its crew or something aboard it could actually read our minds. When that ship was destroyed the tactical efficiency of the rest fell off appreciably.
'We salvaged more of their wreckage, and began to study their drive and everything else. We were putting improvements into our ships. Reinforcements were coming from Wunderland and the Swarm. We got more confident.
'There was even talk of finding where they had come from and chasing them-counterattacking. We thought we had a superweapon in the ramscoop.
'Then they came back. If they had been inexperienced, they had learned from experience like us. They'd got more cunning.
'They avoided ramscoops, and seemed to flee from them. That lured us in. Then we found it was a trick. They generated magnetic fields of their own to distort ramscoop fields, or simply dropped things into them.
'We know they had taken human prisoners and perhaps they had learned things from them. Not just in space. When we killed one of their ships and boarded it we found bodies of human civilians from Wunderland.
'Apparently the Outsiders have been landing scouts in small cloaked ships for some time.'
I'm surprised. If they are so aggressive, why didn't they just attack in force?'
'Cats stalk their prey. They study the ground before they pounce. It's after the pounce begins that their control goes. This may be the same thing. Some of the humans they took had kept hidden records, hidden in their cages. Apparently the Kzin didn't care. Why should they? They aren't nice reading. 'Our eggheads are puzzled. These creatures are something out of a nightmare: cruel, man-eating, killing, but with science that is in so many ways ahead of ours. It shouldn't have happened, but it has. I'm told there have been quite a lot of suicides among our eggheads… Oh yes, and from the prisoners' notes we found out why they sometimes behaved as if they could read our minds. They can.'
'What!'
'They can. Or a few of them can. Apparently it's rare. But you can tell when they are doing it: a sudden violent headache. It also explains how they came to know our languages so quickly-which they do.' That hit me like a physical blow, though it took me a few moments to realize why.
'Can it be resisted?' asked Dimity.
'Don't know. The prisoners we know they tried it on were terrorized, injured, starving, tortured already. In no shape to resist. Anyway, that's the war, and it's been going on for weeks… I don't know how long… I think it's nearly over now.'
'We've heard nothing of this,' I said again. 'We've been told nothing.'
'What was the point of telling?'
'It might have meant better war production.'
'I think so. Others thought it would lead to 'a collapse of civilian morale.' I think it was their own morale that was actually collapsing. They said there was as much material getting up to us as could be reasonably expected.'
I remembered my speed-reading of the last few weeks, and the attempted defense of Singapore in the Second World War. As the Japanese advanced down the Malay Peninsula towards it, the defending general had refused to construct field defenses in case they lowered the spirits of the civilians. It had not been a good decision.
'If people knew too much, I gather, it was feared they would simply flee into the hills, or mob the slowboats,' he went on. 'And then there was that… that one brief shining moment… when it looked as if we were winning.
'There was another matter too, which we found out late in the day: Some of our politicians minimized the threat because they hoped to enlist the Kzin as allies for their own factions in our internal disputes here.'
I wished I could have said I found that unbelievable, but I knew too much.
'Maybe, if we could have duplicated their drive,' he went on, 'got factories into production, maybe if we had had a few more months, or a year, we could have fought them on equal terms. As it is… 'Wunderland is their prime target, of course. Anyway, the Swarm is more difficult to subdue. Dozens of inhabited asteroids, with defenses now. But we haven't much left here. Those drives and weapons are too good for us. And they've got reinforcements too. More of the big carrier ships have arrived.'
They could hardly have been alone,' said Dimity. 'With drives like that and what we know about them from Sol. Where there was one ship there would be more coming…
'Tell me,' she asked him, 'Is there any suggestion, any indication, that they may have got through the light- barrier?'
'No. They get close to the speed of light. They can match velocities with any of our ships, and of course they are much more maneuverable.'
'Could they have a superluminal drive in outer space and drop into subluminal close to star systems?'
I don't know. We've not been in a position to observe. There's no evidence of it. Anyway it's impossible. Why do you ask?'
'Nothing.'
'I only saw a bit of what was happening. I'm just a meteor jockey. The fighting was spread all over the system.'
'You must have learned a bit about these creatures. Language, that sort of thing?'
'A bit.' The pilot took a red disk from a pocket. 'It's here, what we know. The spoken language is hard to understand, even with a computer, at present impossible to imitate, although some people are trying. The written is a little easier, at least when it's not in war code. It's another of those things we might have got better at with time.'
'Can I play it?'
