“Did I lay it on that thick? I guess I did. I want to tell Nora’s story but I’m also trying to use her as a political club.”
“Neither of the Noras would mind and you know it!”
“I’m not going to try for clearance. I’m not going to publish with a copyright. I’m going to make a thousand chip copies and hide them under rocks. Then I’m going to smuggle one copy to Earth and put it on the nets, free. The ARM can try to suppress the story. It will be like running around with cans of antiweed, spraying the dandelions.”
Chloe was wide-eyed. “Defy them? They haven’t let anyone write about Nora. They’ll kill you. They’ll put you in the brig. They’ll send you to the other side of Kzin. They’ll feed you tranquilizers!” What would become of Val? Happiness was supposed to last-at least forever. But it never did.
“Nah.”
“Nah!” she imitated angrily. “Why do I fall in love with brave men? I’m such a damn fool.”
“Chloe. Listen carefully to an old man’s advice. I’ve been in trouble since I was a kid. Suppressive people have one great weakness. They believe their own stories. They hint darkly at what they’ll do to you when you speak up. Naive people believe them and get afraid and, being afraid, suppress themselves. The suppressors are stupid enough to think that they are doing the suppressing. I don’t have anything to worry about from the ARM. I just have to dodge all those poor people who are afraid.”
“Will General Fry protect you?”
“Sure. And so will your father. The best people are my friends. You’d be surprised at how large that group has become.”
“After reading your story I feel brave myself. But I’m still one of those people who are afraid.”
“It’s okay. For us it’ll be a roller-coaster ride for a few years. Outrage and argument. No big deal. Then in about five years some poor schmuck will come back bloodied by an encounter with a kzinti hyperdrive warship. Then instantly, I’ll be a prophet and a hero. But it is Nora they’ll remember. When the going gets rough and the starscape is full of grinning kzinti and monkey-life looks hopeless, they’ll remember the Heroic Myth of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine, and they’ll say, ‘What the hell, if Nora could do a little kzin bashing, so can I.’ ”
“Why do you call it a myth? Yankee, she did all of those things.”
“Chloe. Look at me. All writers are liars. I’m a political writer. Humanity hasn’t been at war for hundreds of years. We’re short of heroes. We’re going to need them. So I took this story and built Nora up larger than life. I wrapped it around all the old archetypes. That’s a myth. My only excuse is that I was inspired. Stories just grow. This one will become humongous. I’m sorry to do it to my sweet Nora but I couldn’t help myself. Guys in cans being shot at by kzinti hypershunt dreadnoughts will take courage from this crazy story. That’s what myth is all about.”
TROJAN CAT
Mark O. Martin
Gregory Benford
·Chapter One Relativistic Hunt
We were only a half light-year out from Sol, but it took me a moment to find that bright point among so many other suns. Somehow it looked no warmer than the other brilliant dots. Probably my imagination.
The more immediate target was obvious. A finger pointed straight at it-a radiant finger a hundred thousand klicks long.
The slowboat was huge, even by the standards of the kzin troopship that had carried me across four light- years. Distant stars glittered coldly around the image-enhanced shape on the viewscreen. It was a relief to see a starscape not distorted and squashed by relativity, fore and aft. The Doppler shift was almost imperceptible at 10 percent of lightspeed.
I felt an itching sensation all over my body, but I didn’t look away from the viewscreen to scratch. My little singleship had to be within their sensor range by now, and the crew had no way to determine if I was friend or foe.
I waited to die. I almost hoped for it.
No such luck, of course. Not that I was special. All of humanity was running out of luck.
Goosing the viewscreen magnification up a bit, I studied the target across two hundred kilometers of deep space. The slowboat was a fat cylinder sitting on the hard white blaze of a fusion drive. Even with the jury-rigged gravitic polarizer, it had taken me an hour to maneuver far around the deadly plume of the drive wash pushing the R P Feynman back to Sol. Getting anywhere near that column of fusion fire would have fried me thoroughly.
Reaction drives can be effective weapons, in direct proportion to their power. Such was the kzinti lesson, according to rumors overheard from the singed-tailed ratcats returning from at least two attempts on Sol. I frowned. If only…
Too bad Centauri system hadn’t gotten more large fusion drive units in place a few decades back, when the kzin first arrived. Things might have gone very differently for both Serpent Swarmer and Wunderlander. My whole life would have been different, and I would never have ended up here and now.
The singleship control board began to ping. That meant the first faint lines of magnetic force were brushing by the main sensory array of my singleship. I keyed up a false color display of the magnetic field structure at the front and flank of Feynman. Stark crimson lines stretched across my viewscreen into a huge and intricate pattern.
The ramscoop field reached invisible fingers outward for hundreds of kilometers, an invisible throat. It funneled interstellar hydrogen and icy dust microparticles into the fusion drive section at the core of the slowboat. Anything with a slight electrical charge, the mags picked up and gobbled.
Like any good Belter, I sat very still and studied the viewscreen with great care, trying to find a clear path through the closely packed field lines. The ramscoop fueling the slowboat wasn’t a big belcher, like the unmanned ramrobots that could run up to nearly 0.9 lights. This one was pushing hard to make 0.1. The exhaust plume’s ion excitations showed it was at ram-limited cruising velocity.
Slowboat, indeed, despite its incandescent power scratching across the starscape. It was ridiculous, compared to the kzin spacedrive. A trip time of forty years, Wunderland to Sol.
Which is why the passengers in there were stacked up in cryo like canned goods. It had been a long way back, this close to Sol. The Feynman crew must have traded off cruise watches with their sleepers through several shifts now.
Desperate people. And they weren’t going to make it. The slowboat looked to be in good shape on extreme mag. The awake crew must have done repairs on the fly; the slowboats were meant for one-way trips, Earth to Wunderland.
And Feynman looked old. Pitted, blotchy. Even the most recent of the colony ships had orbited Wunderland, empty and ignored, for over fifty years.
It had been a near thing, getting all of the old colony slowboats repaired, crewed, and on emergency boost outsystem. Prole and Herrenmann and Belter, working together for once, before the ratcats arrived in victory. But all three of the slowboats had made it. The kzin made only a half-hearted attempt to stop them.
And for what? I reminded myself bitterly. The rest of us had lost almost everything-rights, dignity property countless lives-to let a few Herrenmannen lords and ladies run away from the kzin.
And I knew that better than most. Knew it in my guts.
Feynman’s magnetic funnel was not as lethal as a ramrobot’s, but plenty dangerous to any living thing with a notochord. I would have to be careful, maneuvering closer to the plasma tongue. Mag vortices curled and licked and ate each other there. High turbulence. It could reach out with rubber fingers and strum this little ship like a guitar string. At 0.1 lights, not recommended by the manufacturer.
As if anybody, even a kzin, had ever tried this before.
The navigational computer held my position relative to Feynman as I studied the field line intensifies more
