Half an hour later the nameless ramscoop, its mission still a mystery to its attackers, zipped by, moving faster than any explanation can describe what the eye saw.
The first missile missed.
The second missile ticked through an edge of the folded scoop, ionizing into a fireball genie that lashed a flaming arm out after the ramscoop too late, too slow.
The ramscoop plowed ahead into the mist.
Valiantly the magnetic field tried to cope with the overload but wasn't equipped to handle the dust or the oxygen. Superconductors overheated. Electrical resistance began to vaporize the surface of the scoop…
Meanwhile hydrogen and oxygen and tungsten, helium and nitrogen and argon, even talcum powder, were ionizing on impact to become tiny superdense nuclear projectiles sleeting through what to a nucleus is mostly empty space the bulkhead, the air, the life support, the instruments, the protein, the fusion engine, hardened lead-tungsten radiation barriers, everything and on out to the other side, leaving behind ionized trails as spoor.
A few of these 'cosmic rays' collided with the relativistically massive nuclei of the ramscoop, scattering, smashing nuclei into a spray of particle fragments. Mesons flashed into gamma rays and gave birth to muons. Muons lived out their leisurely lives and died. Positrons blinked into existence. Anti-matter screamed out of collisions. Wildly exotic nuclei spat out particles in a desperate search for a new equilibrium. Neutrons bounced and bled into space.
But it was the energy of the stripped electrons that destroyed the monkeys' ramscoop. The ship was essentially transparent to the impacting nuclei but opaque to the electrons. The kinetic energy of the electrons was instantly transformed to heat.
The flare blazed, then was gone at near lightspeed, doppler-shifting into the red. It had left them. Inertia is implacable. What is moving continues to move.
The UNSN vessel was destined to travel on through the universe as a dense cosmic ray packet, slowly disintegrating and falling apart from its contact with the interstellar medium, from collisions with gases and particles. Billions of years later, in some distant galaxy, scientists might note its passing as an increase in the cosmic ray count from some strange quadrant of the sky. There would be theories about the high metallic content of the rays.
On the return of the Flayer-of-Monkeys to the Sherrek's Ear, they learned of the ramscoop's mission a bombing run. From a great distance it had launched precision pellets at specific targets. The relativistic pellets carried the wallop of a nuclear blast.
UNSN spoor was dated and their gunner's accuracy terrible. Whole areas of the arctic zone had been blasted without a single kzin or human casualty because there was nothing there. One lucky hit on a kzin base had killed four thousand Heroes. The human-beasts had taken gruesome casualties, only five percent of which were military related. A miss had impacted the ocean and created a tidal wave that had rolled over four seaside communities.
Kr-Captain was furious. 'Why didn't we get it before it attacked!'
Alas, warriors were always reminded of the fortunes of war. Only the Black Prides carried the really long distance detection equipment. Both the Tigripard s Ear of the Fourth Black Pride and the Patriarch's Nose of the Fifth Black Pride had detected the ramscoop two days before the Sherrek's Ear had sniffed the electromagnetic scent, but each was almost two light-days from the line-of-flight. By lightbeam they didn't have time to warn Alpha Centauri, and by their fastest fighters, they didn't have time to intercept. The ramscoop was following too closely behind its own electromagnetic arrival notice.
Sherrek's Ear, though it was behind Alpha Centauri, was stationed only eight light-hours from the line-of flight. Even then, interception would have been difficult had the Flayer not been out on a maintenance run in the right direction.
Grraf-Hromfi gave a diagnostic lecture. Think before you leap. Never underestimate an enemy. He was furious at himself for assuming that no ramscoop could fly faster than half lightspeed. He was so furious that he set up a whole day of tournament to clean his liver of rage, taking on all comers.
Only months later they learned the covert mission of the ramscoop when Chuut-Riit was assassinated.
CHAPTER 20
(2420 A.D.)
Detection-Orderly-Two summoned Grraf-Hromfi immediately, rousing him from a curled sleep. Hromfi was not the kind who made life miserable for warriors who interrupted his rest. A Hero on duty had the obligation to wake the dead if he felt it in the interest of the Patriarchy. The Commander of the Third Black Pride appeared at the Command Room, naked in his copper red fur except for slippers, grumpy, but not angry.
Analysis began promptly, without preliminaries. The small object had appeared in the heavens out of nowhere, near Rh’ya in the House of the Fanged God's Kzinretti the Pleiades. Only light-hours away. Very anomalous gravity pulse. That had set off the alarms. It was also a neutrino source.
Another strange event.
The Third Black Pride was up to full strength. Its Commander ordered a discrete reconnaissance probe. If the mystery pulse came from a small ship, he wanted it captured for interrogation. Quickly. And not destroyed.
Instantly, he chose for the mission three pilots he could trust. the first an old warrior with grey in his pelt who had flown Scream-of-Vengeance fighters for Chuut-Riit since he was a kit, the second a wild-eyed Hssin barbarian who liked to pick the meat out of his fangs and comb his mane before he leaped, and the third, Grraf-Hromfi's most promising son.
They, in turn, were shaken out of their sleep. Each hastily donned goggles so that he could receive his orders. 'The intruder is to be disabled, not vaporized!' growled their Commander. 'And while I have your attention: a warning.' He shifted into the menacing tense of the Hero's Tongue to jolt their livers. 'Our instruments tell us that this object appeared out of nowhere. Instruments can be deceived. The best kzin minds can be deceived. However, regardless of how irrational the concept, expect the object to defend itself by vanishing into nowhere. Attack without warning! Disable it immediately! Prisoners are to be taken! If it is an automatic ship, the brain is to be salvaged!'
While the three crews scrambled, he called ahead to make sure that Fighter Command was ready to equip them with Screamers modified by Trainer-of-Slaves. He wanted them to have whatever edge he could supply.
Grraf-Hromfi's nose was beginning to sniff the oddness of an alien technology lurking about. On the borderlands of the Patriarchy that could be extremely dangerous. But how to put these enigmatic pieces together? He thought of the wooden puzzles of the kzin Conundrum Priests of W'kkai. Eight ways there were to put any puzzle together, and seven of those ways always left an awkward shape protruding.
In the meantime, decisions never waited for a finished puzzle.
How had that unnaturally fast ramscoop dropped off agents? No obvious mode of deceleration suggested itself. At an incoming velocity near lightspeed any agent would have carried the energy of a continent-smashing bomb; the energy from any kind of capsule-braking would have been observed. And how had they penetrated Chuut-Riits security to juggle creche feeding procedures so that Chuut-Riit had to face his own ravenously hungry sons behind locked doors? It seemed like magic. Of course it wasn't.
But now an unauthorized ship that wrote its own unique gravity pulse. Could it be that the ramscoop hadn't delivered the agents? Was there a new player? He remembered Yiao-Captain's visit and his infectious insistence that they point their long distance antenna toward a possible 'alien' artifact. Another orphaned piece of the puzzle that 'protruded.'
This was indeed a time of troubles. After the launch of the three Screamers, Grraf-Hromfi brooded briefly on the other troubles while he did his warrior's duty, waiting…
… troubles enough to incline Grraf-Hromfi to leap off for Man-sun immediately and let these slashing Wunderkzin rip their own faces apart. Octals of the kzin nobility, who had been chafing under the rule of the outsider Chuut-Riit, had seized the assassination as license for them to seize power. Traat-Admiral's claws had
