Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“I had intended to. What’s your reason?”

“We can use the engines as laser cannon on the way back.”

“Mr. Conreid, I like the way you think, but there’s every chance we’ll have to strip them for parts. The ramfield is just barely handling deflection, and we’ll be nursing it pretty carefully for the next twenty months.”

Conreid nodded. “In that case, sir, we should dump the water as soon as possible.”

“Less mass to decelerate, good thinking.”

“That too, sir, but what I had in mind was smashing the crap out of anything in our way.”

Persoff blinked. “Such as what, that the drive laser won’t vaporize?”

Conreid spread his hands, palms up. “Such as whatever the Eva Peron ran into. Their matrix ionizer was as good as ours is, and they weren’t going as fast.”

“Persuasive. All departments report.”

One by one, he heard from everyone at their battle stations that the ship was intact and no further enemies were available. The last was hyperdrive systems, and Kershner told him, “I don’t think we can use the hyperdrive or the hyperwave at all, sir.”

“Explain.”

“The mass of everything else in the universe has increased by a factor of fifty and a bit. At this speed, a rock that’s normally small enough to ignore turns into a boojum, coming on too fast to spot when we charge up. The hyperwave is even more fussy than the drive when it comes to general background gravity, and it’s my belief it’ll be wrecked if we turn it on. Also, we’d have to record a message and play it back slowly for them to understand it, and I honestly have no idea what relativistic effects do to whatever the hyperwave medium is anyway. I also don’t know if our tau factor would carry over in hyperspace, or what the transition effects are if it doesn’t.”

“Recommendations?”

“Let’s not find out.”

Persoff nodded. “Stand down to Condition Yellow and prepare to jettison water.” He thought about it. “Astrogator, that water will spread out enough for some of it to go through the kzin system, won’t it?”

“Yes, sir.” Conreid suddenly smiled, which he rarely did. “Ought to screw things up a little.”

“Or a lot. Our combat pilots are getting burial in space. Work out the trajectory that gives them the best chance of going through the system. The funeral will be at the start of the midwatch.”

The chance of attracting someone’s attention with the com laser wasn’t even discussed. Nobody would be wasting time monitoring a frequency that was less than two percent of normal.

The funeral necessarily took place while they were at Alert stations, as the ship was still in constant danger and would be until they at least managed to get below about point eight C. That wouldn’t be until they were well past kzin space. On the bright side, aside from a few rare and lightly-armed antique courier ships, the kzin didn’t have anything that could catch them on the way through. As long as it didn’t run into anything, the Yorktown was safe enough.

It rankled. Kzinti weren’t the only ones who’d changed their viewpoint during the First War. They had become more prudent as the reckless ones charged into overwhelming enemy fire, but humans had become more aggressive as the conciliatory ones were eaten.

Persoff established training drills in combat and ships’ systems. Not everybody was qualified to learn everything, but all of them were capable of learning something, and knowing more would make them better fighters. Someone-he never found out who, but he suspected it was Tokugawa, who in addition to his other duties was a historian-put up a sign in the rec room that said:

KILL KZINTI. KILL KZINTI.

KILL MORE KZINTI.

IF YOU LEARN A NEW JOB

YOU WILL BE BETTER

AT KILLING THE ORANGE FREEMOTHERS.

It had a profound effect on enrollment in the classes being offered.

A bigger problem was the ratio of sixty-eight men to nine women, which led to some serious fights until Persoff bluntly ordered the women to set up a rota of when they would and would not be available to any particular man. One man had to go into the ship’s organ bank before this was accepted, but after that there were no more fights-or attempted rapes.

His own partner of choice was Newmar, the ship’s master at arms, who had astonishing balance and a relaxed attitude about fidelity-which was good, because he had to pay some attention to each of the other women now and then or risk the appearance of favoritism.

The mission was never intended to last more than eight weeks. Holding the ship and crew together for more than a year and a half was a strain he’d never anticipated.

He got the remaining seventy-six of them through alive, and sane, as far as he could tell.

Persoff declared a celebration when they got down to point eight C, which was their intended cruising speed. In the midst of it, Potter, the communications officer on duty, interrupted him with the news that he was picking up a radio signal from a nearby system-transmitted on what, allowing for Doppler effects, must have started as a one-meter frequency. “It’s got to be from humans, sir.”

“What does it say?”

“Well, that’s a problem. It’s some kind of dot-dash system I’m not familiar with. Short groups, repeated.”

“What would they say if it were Morse code?”

“‘OSO OSO OSO,’ over and over.”

People of merely high intelligence need not apply for special missions, and Persoff had not been made the leader of this crew for nothing. “It sounds like someone trying to send an SOS who doesn’t know Morse.”

Potter was no slouch himself. “Good grief. Got the dots and dashes reversed.”

“Exactly. I’ll be there at once. Call Conreid and Kershner and tell them to join me on the bridge.”

Conreid showed up barefoot, and Persoff forbore to ask what he’d interrupted. Kershner had been sleeping, and was wearing a bandolier of flasks of tea. When he arrived he was foggily opening a nicotine patch. “You can smoke if you want,” Persoff told him.

“Can’t stand the smell,” Kershner said, glaring at the patch as he worked the adhesive layer off one corner. “I just want the IQ boost.”

“Oh. We’re getting a signal from human beings in a system-how far away?”

“About two lightyears,” Potter said, “almost lateral to our course.”

“Right. I want you two to plot a course that’ll take us through hyperspace and come out at a point that’ll bring us to a halt in that system when we’re done decelerating.”

“Oh. Okay. A little over fifteen days uphill from the source, then,” Kershner said.

“You worked that out just like that?” Persoff said.

“Hell, no,” Kershner said. “But I remember how long it was supposed to take us to ramp up to this speed.” He freed the patch, put it on, opened a flask, drained it, and said, “Then what?”

There had been complaints about Kershner’s manner from officers all through the trip. Hesitant ones. He’d been one of the corpsicles revived for training duty in the First War, and no one was entirely certain whether his behavior was due to an attitude problem or a touch of thawing damage-what the ARM called Ice on the Mind, and the corpsicles, even less politely, called Freezer Burn.

Some of them had been known to milk it for all it was worth. It would have been easier to deal with if so many of them hadn’t been the best in the world at something or other. Kershner, for example, had an intuitive grasp of hyperspatial relationships that rivaled that of Carmody herself. The odd part was that he wasn’t that much of a mathematician.

“Then we do it,” Persoff said.

“Okay.”

Kershner earned his pay as they came out of hyperspace. In a civilized system there would be beacons and beams providing constant, clear, insistent instructions about where the inhabited sites were and how to match course. This place just had the one repeating beacon, which wasn’t even enough to ascertain the plane of the ecliptic.