light.
But once he crossed the singularity evading the UNSN patrol was going to be a special challenge. There was only one hyperspace warship out there now but the monkeys had hyperwave radio and could quickly call in reinforcements from light years away. Surely its captain had sat bolt upright at that fireworks display of flak and might already be calling for help. It didn’t matter that his patrol ship was on the other side of the singularity-in a hop, skip, and jump he could be on top of the Shark. The UNSN had perfected the art of hunting down and killing the gravitic ships of the kzinti in interstellar space.
None of this was in the manuals-not even Chuut-Riit’s manuals. Grraf-Nig needed to give his moves heavy thought in the few hours of peace left to him. The major problem with equipping a hypershunt ship like the Shark with a gravitic drive was that the gravitic polarizer, when in use, created its own hyperspace singularity He was going to have to collapse his gravitic field before he disappeared into hyperspace-an action that was equivalent to decelerating down to his rest velocity. If he burst through the singularity at twenty percent of light speed. He’d be vulnerable to the UNSN for a full day before he could evade them by hypershunt.
He began his deceleration early. It was risky. On the other claw, it meant that the W’kkai fleet would overshoot him and, while penetrating the singularity in front of him, become a decoy fleet masking his escape-if they didn’t find and kill him before the UNSN found and killed them. It was a melee he hoped wasn’t going to start a new war-no world of the Patriarch was ready for that yet!
By the time the Shark passed through the singularity; much later than his original planning, he was still traveling fast-but slow enough so that he was flying into a swarm of W’kkai warriors. His sensors began to pick up more and more of them until he located twenty at about maximum range. It wasn’t the formation he expected to see. There were already four UNSN warships on the scene. Neither fleet was attacking the other. Both were wary and moving in defensive array. Because of light-lag he was well behind on the true situation.
It looked like the monkeys were holding back in a blocking formation, waiting for reinforcement. It looked like the W’kkai fleet was well on the way to a conservative interception which would not threaten the UNSN warships. Such precautions were all in the Shark’s favor. Grraf-Nig began to pick up frantic bits of communication between Hero and Man-beast.
He was being sold as a renegade. The W’kkai commander was giving the beasts permission to vaporize him, promising no retaliation if they did. They were offering to take out the Shark themselves if the United Nations would stand aside. All the niceties of the MacDonald-Rishshi treaty were being observed. Only the light-minutes were keeping the opponents from each other’s throats.
Grraf-Nig was enormously relieved. He had timed everything perfectly. His luck as a survivor had held. Before anyone could get to them, the Shark would disappear into hyperspace and reappear alone inside an interstellar sphere of stars.
The gravitic field died. The Shark had come to rest relative to its starting frame of reference-minus the velocity of escape from W’kkai’s orbital distance. Grraf-Nig wiggled his ears and cut in the phase-change for the hypershunt build-up. Nothing happened.
For a stunned moment the giant kzin thought that Long-Reach had made a mistake when he rewired the controls, but Long-Reach himself had no such doubts. He had worked with this motor a good part of his life. Instantly he was at the motor housing and hit the clamps. The housing popped away and floated off to the wall. A cast iron dummy of the correct weight and balance sat where the hypershunt should have been.
It was something to think about-but death was only minutes away. There was no time to yowl in anguish. There was no time even to curse High Admiral Si-Kish’s paranoia.
Outward from W’kkaisun, the UNSN waited. The W’kkai fleet was moving in on their renegade cautiously-of course, cautiously because they already knew that the Shark couldn’t escape into hyperspace.
“Battle stations!” Grraf-Nig screamed at Long-Reach. A second later they were moving at full acceleration toward W’kkai. There was no escape. No matter how frantically his mind panicked through the alternatives, there was no reasonable way out. It was either fight to an honorable death or suffer the humiliation of surrender. He sat at the controls, brilliantly evading attack, but numb. He could no longer think of himself as the noble Grraf-Nig. He remembered a terrible day from his past when a gang of Hssin kits had cornered him for an easy kill-and he had saved his life by eating grass. What honor was there for a kit out to prove his warrior skills who carried the ears of a grass-eater on his belt?
Grass-Eater negotiated the surrender of the Shark through electronic static and violent maneuvers. He knew they wanted to save the ship because it was the prototype of a deadly fighter that was intended to spearhead W’kkai ambition, but he wasn’t sure they would spare his life once the Shark was secure. It didn’t matter. Better that W’kkai should triumph over Kzinhome with a reinvigorated Patriarchy than for Heroes to languish as the slaves of squabbling monk’s. Let them have their prototype.
There wasn’t room enough for a warrior to board the Shark. Long-Reach and his defeated master met their captors in space and were taken back to a warship. The slave disappeared into its slave quarters; the mortified one was stripped inside the airlock. Undressed, a warrior of W’kkai was a nameless animal without power. No W’kkai Hero among those who had captured him called him by name. He had no name. They could not even look at him.
Chapter 13
(2437 A.D.)
The landing party came down at dawn in the plains outside of what they all called Fort Hssin. In his brief glimpse of Hssin’s ruins from high descent, Yankee had seen the widespread damage; sections of the city were crumpled or gone-but from the ground it looked almost whole. The ruddy light of a huge R’hshssira on the horizon had been further reddened by an oblique passage through the poisonous air, the general gloom and the low angle of their landing site obscuring the injury to the sprawling, once airtight buildings. A steady wind was whipping a thin drift of snow in the direction of the city and the dawn-bright mountains.
“Godforsaken place.”
They had maps of Hssin made by the naval force that destroyed it, and they could run these 3D plots inside their helmets along with marine battle films of the ground assault, keyed to the battle locations. Still, once they had slipped into the city through the breached atmospheric barrier, they were lost tourists in a huge necropolis without any friendly local residents to set them straight-only mummified kzinti who lay in the dark where they had suffocated.
The size of the rooms and corridors was intimidating- built for two-hundred-kilogram, two-and-a-half-meter- tall kzinti. War damage an obstacle to mobility. One grisly room contained racks of improvised hospital beds for badly wounded warriors who had died with their masks on, waiting for medical help that never came, now preserved for posterity. Some of the roofs were open to the sky, exposed corridors drifting in snow. Some corridors looked down into a well of rubble. Yankee’s beamlight caught the upside down head of a kzin grinning at them from a hole in a half-collapsed ceiling. One corridor was filled with the fallen wreckage of four stories. Some of the caverns that Yankee wanted to explore were declared off-limits by the team’s cautious structural engineer.
“Nobody could be living here now!” exclaimed one of Yankee’s companions.
“You’re a flatlander.” Yankee’s eyes and lamp were picking out the details of the strange kzinti air seals with the fascination of a man who had spent half his life in the Belt and in spaceships. “When you’ve lived in space a while you know a city like this is so compartmentalized against failure that even several blowouts won’t knock it out of commission. Life support could be restored in pieces of it I wouldn’t want the job. But it could be done. That’s what we’re looking for.”
They found nothing. They were afraid to call in their kept kzin, afraid the devastation would send him into a rage, but he had passed through this city with Chuut-Riit’s armada and knew the ways of kzin when they were forced to live together. They needed his insight.
In one of the least damaged of Hssin’s public spaces Clandeboye set up an inflatable command center, hardly more than a balloon with portable airlock and life support and communications interfaces. He added instruments that allowed him to follow Hwass by remote sensing, then brought down the kzin and let him loose with his marine
