Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“You are a great man, judge. I could never fill your shoes. But I will do all that I can. If you will give me mercy, then I will try to earn it.”

“Right, then ya can find Ruat, our sheriff, an’ ya can tell him I have appointed ya his clerk, so ya can learn the ropes. Have to get ya one o’ them starry things made up for ya to wear. Ya might have t’ explain what a clerk is. He’s a kzin, an’ still learnin’ stuff.”

The former senator swallowed. Well, the kzin could only eat him, he thought. He squared his shoulders. This was a new life, a promise, something shiny and wonderful had this moment opened up before him. He had been forced to look into his own soul, and seen the wretched smallness of it. He was more than lucky to have a second chance, and he wasn’t going to mess this one up. If a kzin sergeant could have a sense of honor as deep as a well, then a man could at least try to equal that.

by Matthew Joseph Harrington

The UNSN carrier Yorktown had been an experiment which might not be repeated.

A colony ramship, started by Skyhook Enterprises and completed just before the end of the First War, had been fitted with hyperdrive and gravity compensators at the beginning of the Second, making it the largest warship humans had ever constructed. Much of its interior was hangar space for singleships sheathed in superconductor, which allowed them to go through a ramfield without scrambling the pilot’s nerve impulses. The carrier’s mission had been to: a) accelerate to relativistic speed, b) reach the kzin home system in hyperdrive, c) reenter normal space, d) wreak multiple kinds of havoc with the Yorktown ’s drive and field as they decelerated through the system, e) drop off its singleships to destroy targets of opportunity, f) take a close turn around the star with the field stirring up flares, g) pick up the singleships, h) accelerate out of the system, and i) go into hyperdrive as soon as they were out of the singularity.

They had gotten as far as “a.” Then they were spotted by the battleship, which had possibly been scouting ahead for an invasion; the kzinti were a little less reckless than they’d been in the First War.

Captain Persoff had the Yorktown take evasive action as the kzin fired weapons and began matching course, but a ramship is not built to dodge. Over the intercom, Monstro, as the commander of the fighters was known, said, “We can take him out, Captain. Get in close untouched and slice him into chum.”

“Then you’d better,” said Persoff.

They had only been waiting for the order. Forty dolphins locked, loaded, and launched.

The kzinti had sixty-four fighter ships and the best tracking systems in Known Space. Out of forty targets, they got two. They were completely unprepared for an enemy that maneuvered instinctively in three dimensions. They quickly altered their tactics to attempt to ram the Yorktown . The fact that getting within a thousand miles of the carrier would be fatal only meant that they aimed very carefully. The Yorktown ’s beam weapons were diversions of the main drive, and none of the kzinti got within fifty miles except as vapor.

The kzinti had learned the Lesson of the Laser in the First War, and the outer layer of their ship was water tanks. It vented steam wherever it was perforated, and this not only kept the damage from penetrating further, it acted to diffuse and disperse later attacks.

On the other hand, water vapor also interfered with the kzin sensors as it cooled and formed ice crystals, and after about an hour of battle, Captain Persoff began moving the Yorktown closer to the kzin ship. At a thousand miles the ramfield would wreck an unprotected nervous system, but the kzin ship was well-shielded from that, judging by the uniformity of the venting. However, at half that range, the ram drive itself could be aimed with precision, and the only effect of the superconductive sheathing would be to make sure the kzinti all roasted at the same time.

The kzinti realized what was happening just before the carrier got into aiming range of the ramship. The enemy’s fusion drive suddenly lit up, but apparently enough damage had been done that this was a bad idea: most of the conical aft segment turned white and evaporated.

Half the universe turned bright blue, and the other half vanished.

You don’t put a man who isn’t a plasma engineer in command of a fighting ramship. You don’t. Not if you want your ship back. Persoff opened the ramfield constriction to minimal power production, just enough for life support and the gravity planer, and began easing the ship over to the singleships one by one.

The dolphins were all dead, killed by synchrotron radiation from the relativistic protons being diverted by the ramfield. When the kzin ship had exploded, something must have happened to its gravity planer, and it and everything else in the ramfield, inside some unknown but significant level of ram flux, had been accelerated in the direction it had been aimed. What was left of the kzin ship was glowing by its own light, which suggested some of its ammo had gone up after the powerplant blew.

Captain Persoff was moving in on the last one when Astrogator Conreid announced, “I’ve worked out our speed and heading, if you want them.”

“Can’t hurt,” Persoff said.

“Speed is approximate, calculated by comparing the wavelength of that glow dead ahead with the microwave background of the universe. We’re operating at a tau factor of about fifty to one, which works out to a velocity of point nine nine nine eight C. At full impulse,” like most math types, he loathed describing the effect of a gravity planer as “thrust,” “we can decelerate to zero in about five hundred and seventy-nine days, give or take one. That’s our time. By then we’ll be about forty lightyears away from Earth. Our heading was a little trickier, since nothing looks right, but my best guess is we can steer enough to pass our target about 200 AU out. I can’t figure out a way for us to get closer without risking the field collapsing. Moscow Motors overdesigned the scoop as a matter of habit, but the ramfield was never expected to have to deal with flux at this speed. One of the little private-sized ships they were building toward the last could have done it, but of course one of those would have been useless on a mission like this. However, we can hit them dead on if we jump laterally in hyperspace. Drop out just outside the singularity, dump most of the water since we won’t be needing it now-” He didn’t seem to notice the instant hostility of the rest of the bridge crew at the callous remark; the better sort of technical brain tends to miss these details-“hit it with the drive to disperse it widely, and let it spread through the kzin home system ahead of us.”

Persoff nodded, had a grabber bring in the final singleship, and said, “If we don’t mind dying before we see if we hit anything. When we came out of hyperspace we’d have hydrogen inside the ramfield, moving at a whisper short of lightspeed relative to us. Allowing for mass change, I’d say over a microgram within the ship itself. Secondary radiation from collisions should come to about half a million rads.”

“Aw, crap,” said Conreid. “Here I thought I had a way for the fins to strike one last blow. I know Monstro would have wanted to.” Someone with normal empathy would have looked depressed. The astrogator looked really annoyed.

“So where do we come to rest?” Persoff said.

“Not real sure. There’s a little cluster of stars in that direction that we’ll have to pick our way through, and it’s hard to tell what’s beyond them. Old kzin charts we got in the First War don’t show any missions that way, probably because the stars are too blue to suit them. Captain, may I suggest we get those singleships back?”