The Admiral had asked the same questions of himself until the answers shone-but he let the Voice’s staff feel that they were giving him a good workout. What they didn’t understand was that the attack against the man-beasts was a feint. It was an opening gambit not meant to defeat anyone.
Neither human nor kzin understood what Si-Kish had winnowed from his assiduous analysis. The man-beasts were artificially strong. The Patriarchy was artificially weak. The purpose of his fleet was not to conquer the humans in a bloody interstellar battle but to reestablish the Patriarchy’s nervous system and trade. Then the galaxy’s Heroes could turn to crush the monkeys and reduce them to useful slavery.
In the middle of a particularly tail-thumping debate, the spotlights swung to the Voice’s gallery. It was time for the assembled multitude of male kzinti to rise. They rose as one. Two petite kzinretti rushed in through the balcony curtains-his favorite dancer and another-placing a magnificent helmet upon his head. He stood-the Voice of the Patriarch for all to see. Then the lights dimmed upon him but brightened everywhere in all of the galleries, allowing the dominated kzinti standing there to be seen by their Voice as they gifted their master with the slash- across-face salute. The kzinretti, half his size, were at his feet, and he was tickling his favorite behind the ears, contented by the accolade of his subject males.
The mood of discussion and contest was over, as suddenly as it had begun, broken in the middle of an important argument. The Voice remained pensive under his grandiose helmet. When the entertainment resumed he watched kzinretti stalk across a stage of fog boiling from witches’ pots. He glanced at Si-Kish. “Let me watch.” He was no longer interested in war. He brought out his seal and electronically imprinted all of the programs with his approval. He had established to his satisfaction that the conflict was in competent hands. Let the hierarchy of hierarchs vex over the details.
That was the breakthrough for Si-Kish. The rest of the evening could be conducted as a mop-up operation. He tuned his ear/nose implant to the high command codes and asked for a status report while his eyes watched the kzinretti stalk a brilliantly feathered beast through the fog. The online reports came in, sector status at a time. The greatest resistance was coming from the Production Hierarch. An amused warrior admiral preened his ears. The geezers in production would be balking at abandoning their standards, some of which were thousands of years old.
Quietly he backed out of the gallery, into the corridors of the Leaping Palace, still listening to what were essentially battle reports. He left the Palace by the Northern High Entrance, feeling the need for a walk alone. It had been three Kzin days since sunset and the air was frigid. His breath steamed. The hair around his mouth frosted. Even some snowflakes were drifting. He passed through a narrow-walled street of cut stone laid out like a carryon, night-flowers blooming through the cracks. He was not yet willing to call for transportation.
He could go anywhere in the city to reinforce his minions, but he should probably go into the catacombs of the Production Hierarch and bring his full prestige to bear His whole plan for W’kkai’s dominance of the Patriarchy depended upon the rapid deployment of new standards throughout a Patriarchy so starved and desperate for hyperdrive technology that they would abandon their age-old commitment to Kzin technology.
Standards never supported the most advanced technology, and standards which could only be promulgated at 80 percent of the speed of light were lifetimes behind what could be done. Kzin was crippled in that its power depended upon standards that were not good enough to fight the man-beasts. W’kkai had no such constraints. With a hyperdrive fleet it could promote its technology to Meerowsk, to Hrooshpith-Pithcha, even to Ch’Aakin or Warhead, faster than Kzin could keep up. And where the center of trade was, there would sit the new Patriarch.
A daunting dream-with a single suck-fly in Si-Kish’s eat.
W’kkai’s physicists had not yet built their first hypershunt motor.
The High Admiral hated to channel all his hopes through one kzin. The failure of that one kzin was too dangerous. And it galled him in the liver where it hurt that his one kzin, Grraf-Nig, wasn’t a known W’kkaikzin but an outer barbarian who, the Fanged God help him, needed a valet to dress him properly and, worse, whose loyalty to the reigning Patriarch was set into him with the mindlessness of a berserker to whom distant Kzin was some kind of mythical warrior’s Valhalla.
The simple-minded Grraf-Nig would never be persuaded to believe in a power shift from Kzin to W’kkai. Never. Not by wit. Not by cunning. Not by torture.
You had to be of W’kkai-belong to a family that had been grossly tithed for a thousand years by the Patriarchs of Kzin, be master of a colorful art that balanced ferocity, be superior-to understand Si-Kish’s ambition.
Chapter 4
(2436 A.D.)
The lights flickered. General Lucas Fry’s eye was distracted from the tiny framed face for a moment. Why were they switching over to Gibraltar’s emergency power source? But before he had time to fret, the regular power returned. Then he had to reach out and catch the miniature, which had drifted away from him. He did so with the economical ease of a born Belter who never made unnecessary gestures in space. But there was a thoughtfulness in his reach-as if to snare all that he had ever lost. It had been her only vanity to have commissioned a tiny painting of herself as a gift to him before she shipped out for the Battle of Wunderland.
Just another ship’s crew missing in action so long ago. It had been sixteen years since the rout of the kzinti at Alpha Centauri. Had it really been so long? He still remembered the scent of her full flatlander hair the little auburn ringlet she pulled before asking one of her impudent questions. Missing-in-Action. He thought he had forgotten her-deaths are forgotten in a war with so many deaths. Now he had been reminded.
An item in a report had been bothering General Fry for weeks.
It was just a fragment from the frozen memory of a cadaverous kzin warship that had drifted aimlessly in Centauri space to be discovered only recently for intelligence analysis. Perhaps, if it had not been for his unhealed love, he would not even have noticed this trivial detail buried in a routine document Gibraltar’s computer had long ago broken some of the old kzinti war code. The deciphered minutiae, quaint and chauvinistic, read like a commendation list given by Julius Caesar to his centurions, useless to any practical reader who found it.
It praised kzin warriors-all Heroes had to be honored for their deeds, even in the middle of a desperate battle. That was the way of war: take a moment here and there to praise vanished warriors for their immortal deeds of courage, which would go unremembered soon enough.
That kind of detail was all that the Gibraltar team had been able to abstract from the records of the wreck. The really sensitive information had been prudently expunged during the death-throes of the warship. Supply lists, orders, codes, command lines, strategy, contingency plans- all had been erased. But true warriors did not erase the deeds of revered warriors. Warriors sang the songs of their Heroes from skeletal mouths buried in trenches and the floating hulks of war. Heroes were immortal-so Heroes believed.
It was heroism that had caught the attention of General Fry in one sudden adrenaline rush… an ambiguous line in the role of commendations referred to the intrepid capture of a UNSN scoutship… and the capture of a single, unnamed prisoner.
Can a heroine rise from her grave? Hope kept jumping out of the strangest places. There was no hope, of course. A man could deal with Killed-in-Action. There was no way to deal with Missing-in-Action.
Only one UNSN ship was unaccounted for in Centauri space-the hyperdrive scoutship Shark. General Fry had a moment of grief, a dropped tear on the report. Nora had been the Shark’s observer. He thought he had forgotten her by now. He thought it strange that he should still remember her so vividly. Until today, he hadn’t looked at her miniature in years, but he had known exactly where he had hidden it from his latest girlfriend.
His emotions had their priorities all wrong, he knew. It was the capture of an operational hyperdrive vessel by kzinti warcraft sixteen years ago that was his primary intellectual concern. Had this been a brief kzinti victory, wiped out by the carnage of the battle that followed the capture? Or had the UNSN’s superluminal scout somehow made its way back to the techcenters of the Patriarchy? A missing soldier was irrelevant compared with the terrifying vision of a hyperdrive-equipped kzinti naval armada. Still, uppermost in his mind were thoughts of a charming woman and schemes to hold her again in his arms.
“Major Yankee Clandeboye to see you, sir!” said the sergeant’s voice from the speaker tacked to the bulkhead wall.
