been busy with duels. Political chaos.
Regrettably, border barbarians were uneducated in honor! They thought of duels and Ascendancy as honor. They thought of death as Opportunity. They knew nothing of the honor of Loyalty After Death.
Leaving them to their own murders was a warm, meaty idea, but impractical. The Fifth Fleet needed Wunderland as its supply base. They couldn't use Hssin. It was extra light-years away and Hssin kzin were all related by blood and. warrior oaths to the original Centauri Conquest Heroes anyway.
The ramscoop attack, itself, had done little damage-but it had brought hundreds of honest slaves to a state of feral defiance. Now open defiance was spreading like a plague as the squabbles among the kzin became public knowledge. Ferals had even attacked the Gerning base from space and put its detectors out of commission for three days, long enough to land supplies for some of the renegade animals.
Grraf-Hromfi was in a bad mood because he was just back from a political tour of Wunderland estates. He had picked the most obsequious of the power hungry back-stabbers first, cleverly led them to state the claims they believed to be true, challenged them to a duel for false claims, and killed them. After three such contests of honor, the rest of the Wunderkzin learned more quickly the value of careful reason. The power hungry always made the same mistake they built their True Case, the case they were willing to defend in public, upon false logic.
Detection-Orderly-Two appeared at the oval bulkhead door of the Command Center of the Sherreks Ear. 'Sire! May I have your attention again?'
Grraf-Hromfi glanced up. The orderly mock-slashed his face sharply. 'You look like you've just bested your father at arm-tug. Found something new? I hope not another of those objects.'
'No, Sire, not in this system. But I have something for you to consider, if you will, sir. May I use your data- link?' Without even waiting for assent, he switched on the wall screen and spat-hissed commands to the retrieval slavecrystal. Ribbons of telemetering appeared. 'These are mystery signals which the Second Black Pride has been relaying to us from Mansun for analysis. They started arriving about three months ago, off and on. We have never been sure that they weren't noise, or the artifact of some instrument malfunction.'
'You've found something there besides noise?'
'Yes, sir! They all have the same signature as our mysterious visitor. I did a comparison. It came out at the seven-eights confidence level excellent- considering that the signals we have are only whiskers above the noise jiggles. The Patriarch’s Nose has been seeing-what we have been seeing but just inside their maximum range.
'And 4.3 years ago,' muttered Grraf-Hromfi. 'We must never the lightlag. A lot can happen in five years. The Fifth Fleet has doubled in that time. Who knows what cunning they have been up to at Man-sun.'
'What do you think the mystery object is, sir?'
'A scout.'
'Do you think they've found a way to travel at lightspeed, sire'
'We'll find out. All detection squads are on full battle alert?'
'Yes, Sire!'
Grraf-Hromfi was now very worried. Was the pulseobject a visitor from Man-sun? He turned up the gravity in the Command Room so that he could pace. On impulse he called Trainer-of-Slaves for a goggle-to-goggle conference. 'You paw around with those agonized shrieks-and-spits of demented mathematicians? Their water- hole tracks describing unified field theory?' The virtual image of Trainer-of-Slaves hung in the air like a ghost, fixed in position.
'Dominant Sire, I've inflicted some of that torture upon myself, yes. Do you want an opinion on that
'What would this sudden appearance of mass mean?'
'You are suggesting that the pulse tells of the creation of mass out of nothing?' asked Trainer. 'Yes.'
'That's impossible, sir. My opinion of the pulse…'
'Mate yourself to a sthondat! I didn't ask your opinion, Eater-of-Grass, I asked what it meant!'
'To avoid your insults, I will tell you what you wish to hear. Any mass passing through the light barrier would appear as if it had been created out of nothing.'
'But this one wasn't moving at relativistic speeds.'
'Light barriers can be stationary. I refer you to the work of Ssrkikn-the-Juggler: 'The Event Horizons o…' '
'Yes, yes, yes. Can mass pass through an event horizon?'
'Mass pops out of black holes all the time but it can't bring any information with it. Your faster-than-light ship would fry its occupants down to their unreadable parts. You couldn't find out where they came from not even the direction..
'You think we'll have a simpler explanation for this pulse?'
'I do, but my opinion is worthless beside your own, Lord Commander!'
'In a few days I may have the object for you to examine if it doesn't play hide-the-copper-penny with us, or worse, put us in cages for some alien zoo! In the meantime I suspect that our visitor may be from Man-home. I want prisoners. There may be injuries in the attack. You are our veterinarian. Take a Ztirgor with that autodoc Chuut-Riit gave you, and follow the attack force. Do not attack. Your only function will be to handle human casualties.'
Grraf-Hromfi broke the contact and lifted his goggles above his eyes. His ears were folded and buried, his lips trembling over fangs. He didn't like to wait!
CHAPTER 21
(2420 A.D.)
The United Nations Space Navy Shark materialized at a radius of 335 AU, some 50 billion kloms behind Alpha Centauri the location picked to keep them hidden from kzin eyes which might be watching Sol. There was minimal danger at this distance but UNSN Lieutenant Nora Argamentine was still filled with the dangerous excitement of her first combat patrol. She had a special reason for wanting revenge against the kzin.
'It's looking okay, Charlie. Clear field,' she said. The detectors were in the green.
Charlie was captain. Prakit was hyperdrive engineer. The other two in the cramped cargo capsule didn't belong. They were special forces, checking out the fate of the Yamamoto, silent, untalkative, to be dropped off in their tiny torchship if a closer approach was possible, their mission to kill Chuut-Riit if that ratcat had survived the attempt on his life by Captain Matthieson and Lieutenant Raines. Efficient killers.
Once she got her telescope operational they'd be looking at Wunderland. The Yamamoto's relativistic pellets should have left marks perhaps not visible from this distance. They intended to move much closer, in stages.
Nora was not so sure that the Yamamoto had even passed through Alpha Centauri yet. It might still be hell bent on its mission, delayed by a patch of low density interstellar gas or a magnetic field breakdown or tanj knew what kind of trouble. The arrival time of a ramscoop was not highly predictable. Raines and Matthieson would be shocked by the level of technological progress since 2409. Wonderland might be liberated before they even arrived!
Prakit fussed over his hyperdrive unit, tuning it up for the next jump. Nora could turn around to encourage him, but there wasn't room for her to help him. She reached out a fist and banged him affectionately on his helmet with her wrist, grinning at him because he was so sober.
'Betsy giving you trouble?'
'New, Betsy s just a baby. If I feed her every four hours and bounce her on my knee, she calms down.'
Betsy was a new crashlander model and they were lucky to have her. We Made It had been in the hyperspace-shunt engine business two years earlier than Earth, having bought the technology from incomprehensibly alien spacewanderers. The quality of the product from Procyon was better than Earth's for all of Earth's vaunted technological superiority and the UNSN crews fought over every shipment from Crashlanding City.
This model could make the transition between relativistic and quantum modes in half an hour when it was fined-tuned. When it wasn't fined-tuned, when Prakit couldn't get the hyperwave functions of the atoms into the proper phase relationship, Betsy just wavered and whined and if you were looking at her you'd feel as if pieces of
