supersonic aircraft, thinking they were lords of every nook and cranny of the Earth-the same Marshall who had taught him three-dimensional attack strategy, the same Marshall who died with the attack forces trying to penetrate the defenses of Down.
“The UNSN patrols don’t even cover the top end of the Patriarchy!” Yankee exclaimed in frustration.
“They don’t have to,” said a confident rake eight years his senior.
While Yankee politely listened to the nonsense the man was using to justify his statement, he had his own thoughts. He had been further into kzinti space than any officer here. There were worlds out there. There was a rumored world called Warhead that the kzinti had controlled since about the time of Genghis Khan. The UNSN didn’t even know where it was and wouldn’t even know that it existed except for a quirky case history in one of Chuut-Riit’s volumes on military strategy.
Yet Warhead was the forward base in a subluminal war being conducted against the Pierin that was still going on as of this very moment. Who were the Pierin? The kzinti warriors fighting that battle probably hadn’t yet noticed a Man-Kzin war. The kzinti had been interstellar warriors since before man had beaten his first iron swords from red metal, since before bronze, since before Ur, since maybe before even beer. That was a lot of time in which to build a network of bases.
How many kzinti worlds were out there? How many kzinti armed rocks hidden in interstellar space? How many miserable little kzinti fortress worlds like Hssin? How many factory worlds? Hundreds? Thousands? No one knew.
These young men who had lost so many comrades could not even admit that they had been fought to a standstill. The hyperdrive was a great logistics and transport weapon. It had allowed the reintroduction of blitzkrieg warfare. The UNSN had been able to surround and isolate the main kzinti worlds. But the hyperspace singularity which enclosed every stellar mass in a “forbidden zone” was as good as any medieval wall at stopping a hypershunt-equipped invader.
In the wicked days before the ARM, horse cavalry might sweep across a thousand miles of Earth and lay siege to the mightiest cities of a domain-but the horses couldn’t walk through walls. A mechanized Wehrmacht might race across the steppes of Russia in tank and armored halftrack and truck and motorcycle-but it couldn’t take the streets of Stalingrad, where tank and armored car and truck were useless.
In thirteen years the human hyperdrive fleets had done brilliantly at smashing kzinti interstellar trade. That didn’t make much difference. The Patriarchy had long ago adjusted itself to supply lines that moved at 80 percent the speed of light. Send off to Kzin for a replacement part and it might arrive half a century later. As a consequence, even a kzinti minor outpost was a more-or-less self-sufficient manufacturing center. A kzinti attack force was a lumbering, ill-supplied adventure. But a kzinti-defended star under siege was almost invulnerable.
The gravitic acceleration of kzinti warcraft allowed them to outmaneuver anything the humans had been able to field, and almost every class of kzinti warcraft was superior to its human counterpart inside the singularity. Long range beam-weapon duels were ineffective; at subluminal beam velocities an ablative shielded kzinti vessel could dodge faster than the response time of the beam generator. Intelligent missiles were the best way to get through but they were very subluminal and could be picked off by alert defense crews.
The siege record was poor. Down and Hssin were the only clear victories.
The assault on Down had been a massive surprise attack on a world whose star was so small that its singularity extended only to eighteen AU, less than the distance to Uranus. It was an anomalous outpost, sitting well inside human space, farther from Kzin than any other known world of the Patriarchy, poorly supplied, lightly taxed, underdeveloped and underpopulated. Still the warriors there had destroyed a quarter of the human fleet sent against them before being exterminated.
Yankee listened patiently. An officer whose place was held by a charging armored battle-elephant of the finest carved ivory began reminiscing about his elite unit’s landing on Down while he neglected his plum chicken-but not his slivovitz. “I was caught in the tower with no way to get down and my best cover man was blown ass overhead into the canal where he was stuck in his disabled armor. He couldn’t run so he just sat there popping off every ratcat as they jumped over the canal while I was shitting bricks because if they got him, I was dead meat. He swatted about a dozen of them, one by one, coming over the rise because they couldn’t see him.”
Yankee was reminded of the gambler who enthusiastically gave his audience a blow-by-blow account of how he won a hundred “big ones” early that morning-while forgetting to tell them about the thousand “big ones” he had just dropped at the tables. The kill ratio on the ground at Down had been three men for each kzin. Victors don’t remember details like that.
Down had been considered important because it was behind human lines. That was nonsense. It had zero strategic importance. Probably it had been a target of frustration. None of the bigger worlds were falling, so get the weakest one.
On the other hand, the conquest of Hssin in 2422 had been an absolute necessity It was only two light years from Wunderland and 5.3 light years from Sol and had been the original staging area of the kzinti thrust at humanity’s heart. Theoretically it made an easy target. R’hshssira was a failed star with a singularity that extended out only eight AU, less than the distance to Saturn. Alpha Centauri was a mere week away by hypershunt, an optimal staging area from which to supply the assault. Yet fierce Hssin warriors managed to destroy a third of the UNSN fleet before the Wunderland marines were able to carve out their first beachhead.
Thirteen years on the offensive. Two victories. Thousands of kzinti starships destroyed in interstellar space. Hundreds of raids. Dozens of unsuccessful sieges. Stalemate. The MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty had given both sides what they needed. The Patriarchy needed a breathing space. Humanity needed to stop beating its head against a stonewall. To call it a human victory was wishful thinking.
What humanity wasn’t doing was using the time that the Treaty gave them.
The dinner served its purpose. It reconvinced the hosts that they had won the war and were maintaining the peace. It convinced Major Clandeboye that he wasn’t going to get to Hssin by orthodox means. His hosts were gentlemen. Having been victorious over their guest verbally, they toasted him with Verguuz. He raised his glass, too, wondering who these cardboard men were. They had no substance. He was never going to get to know them. It left him with a kind of desperate despair.
When men are desperate they wander alone, deep in thought Yankee took the long way home. He was already outside his apartment door before he noticed that Chloe was waiting for him, huddled on the hallway’s red carpet, arms around her legs. “Chloe!” He stuck his thumb in the lock and it opened. “Hi,” she said. She followed him inside.
“It’s past your bedtime, young lady.”
“Good idea,” she replied demurely, “let’s go to bed.” With the tiniest of smiles she watched the shock hit his face. She waited just exactly the right amount of time.
“Gotcha!” she triumphed. Then with a bob of her springy black hair she went to his console and called up the codes for a tinkly kind of beating music that he didn’t understand. “Cornucopia,” she said byway of explanation. He didn’t understand that either.
“Where’s Brobding?” was all he could think to ask.
“I never go out with a man again after he’s let me ‘tuck the George.’ How could I ever respect him?”
“Uh… what was that? I think I missed something.”
“What’s the flatlander word for it?” she asked in a tone that left him wondering if he was being teased or not.
“I think I should be taking you home.”
“You’re saying that through clenched jaws. I think you need a relaxing massage… all the way down your back to your bum.”
“Strangling a few people I know is the only thing that would relax me right now,” he growled. Since he was looking directly into her eyes she became momentarily frightened. That upset him to the point of hasty denial. “Not you!” He laughed at himself to put her at ease. “Actually you have a pretty neck. Breaking would ruin it. What I mean is: I don’t need a massage. What I need is to get you home before it is too late… before your curfew”
“I just got here. You’re throwing me out already?”
“Yes.”
“No. I’m here to interview you for the school paper. You have to tell me about the mutiny. I’m writing you up.
