Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

And so it was here. However, with the invasion now in its fifth month, the kzin were admittedly having more trouble than they had expected. When originally encountered in deep space, the humans had not only proven to be (mostly) leaf-eaters, but thoroughly unacquainted with the waging of war. Only later did it become evident that their societal ignorance of fighting and violence was a recent phenomenon, a consequence of three-century-old mandates promulgated by their government back in the Sol system.

But, for reasons of which hn-Pilot had no awareness, and in which he had less interest, these pacifistic lessons-despite having been imposed pervasively and powerfully by their homeworld-had been less completely embraced by the humans of Alpha Centauri. The humans of its one habitable planet, Wunderland, and the even less conformist Belter population that was densest on the much-modified planetoid, Tiamat, had all shown surprising will, innovation, and tenacity in their resistance to the kzin. However, their desperate attempts to hold back the Fleet were coming to an end, according to the routine updates hn-Pilot had been receiving. Tiamat had been thoroughly pacified now, and the belt known as the Serpent Swarm was secure enough that the Fleet no longer had to worry about surprise attacks upon its rear while pressing the offensive against the main world.

Apparently, the leaf-eaters had built their doomed defensive sphere around Wunderland in order to buy time to launch four generation ships-immense slower-than-light arks-that they were readying there. hn-Pilot did not understand that: only a tiny fraction of the system’s inhabitants would be able to flee on those craft. But evidently it was a project which held great significance for the humans: they had fought tenaciously for five months now. It was, therefore, obvious that they were capable of recalling much of the Warrior’s wisdom that they had forgotten. hn-Pilot and many, if not most, other kzin, took this as a mixed omen. It meant the humans had enough spine and courage to be a truly useful and self-directing slave race. But it also meant that they had a primal nature that, once awakened, remembered the bloody lessons of their evolutionary struggles. Although omnivores, they had nonetheless proven to be the apex predators of their own world. In consequence, they promised to be the most useful slave race in the kzin stable, but also the one in which lurked the greatest seeds of danger. They would have to be watched closely.

And hence, this largely pointless mission: to monitor the Euclid’s Lasso , even though it was simply a robot barge, riding its plume of fusion fire from the Serpent Swarm belt of the main system out to the binary. It began its journey by almost dancing into the gravitic clutches of Alpha Centauri B before the slingshot effect of sweeping close to that orange star’s mass sent it on its way with an extra boost, out into the cold and the dark. Accelerating for weeks, it finally reached eighteen percent the speed of light and then cut engines, coasting onward toward the small red dot that was its destination: Proxima Centauri. Where, four months later, it arrived after more weeks of counterboosting that slowed it just enough for rendezvous with the Proximans’ own intrasystem cycling robot ship. That smaller automated craft swung perpetually between the Proximans’ various cargo transfer points and a trajectory which enabled it to mate and exchange payloads with Euclid’s Lasso . After which, the bigger intersystem vessel began its return journey to Alpha Centauri, starting the same process all over again.

There were rumors that Fleet Command had considered sending a single missile at Euclid’s Lasso to terminate its journey to Proxima whose inhabitants would then have obligingly died off without the kzin having to lift a paw in further effort. But, probably because the leaders wanted kzin violence to be seen as deliberate rather than arbitrary, this path had not been chosen, and now hn-Pilot’s two ships were trailing along in the Lasso ’s wake, ensuring that its contents, as well as their recipients, were benign. Initial intelligence had established that there was no military presence out at Proxima, and so there had been no reason to waste the resources or time journeying out to officially subjugate it. But now that complete investiture of the main system was imminent, the higher and the mightier had decided that the time had come for Proxima’s humans to meet, and make appropriate gestures of obeisance to, their new kzin masters.

rr-Pilot pointed at the Incisor-Yellow ’s sensor blip. “Now he’s too close. He’s not going to earn a Name for piloting this way.”

hn-Pilot could not keep his fur from spasmodically rippling at the sardonic quip. Not only was ms-Pilot botching the simple job of staying in formation, but Names were not earned for simple tasks like piloting, any more than they were for running swiftly or shooting straight. Perhaps, if one were to pilot the Patriarch’s own cubs to safety through a swarm of enemy fighters, then, maybe, the honor and achievement would be great enough to earn a Name of one’s own. But the monotony of the daily routine reminded both of them just how far away they were from such glory. Worse still, since each smallship had two pilots, the kzin had been compelled to resort to differentiator-prefixes. These subvocal sounds distinguished one from another just as numbers might have. For the Pilots, rr-, ms-, zh-, and himself, hn-, nothing highlighted the lack of a personal Name so much as having to use these tags.

hn-Pilot watched as the second craft in his formation now drifted too close. “ Incisor-Yellow , maintain the correct distance and attitude.”

There was no reply, but the blip moved back to the correct distance. Then, a hesitant message: “ Incisor-Red , I am detecting some out-gassing from Lasso ’s outer ring of cargo containers. Do you confirm?”

hn-Pilot glanced at the sensor plot, saw no gross abnormalities; he tightened the scan field while increasing resolution. Sure enough, there was a modest cloud of gas and minor debris vectoring away from the Lasso , the signatures emanating from each compass point of its round, head-on profile. hn-Pilot grunted, aimed the viewers at the closest sensor return, and increased the magnification to maximum.

He saw a diminishing puff of vapor and small parts-a metal plate, and possibly the cap-heads of several explosive bolts-rushing away down the sides of the Lasso . It was a strange visual effect: since the Lasso was counterboosting, the debris was already moving faster than the slowing ship from which it had been expelled, and so, as the detritus swept outward, it also “fell forward,” in the subjective parlance of both human and kzin’s spacefarers.

hn-Pilot toggled the ship-to-ship. “ Incisor-Yellow , did you see what that rubbish was? Did something fail on the human craft?”

“I do not think so. The signatures were simultaneous and at perfectly equidistant intervals. In each case, it looked like a short explosive burst, and then modest debris. I could make out nothing more.”

Reducing the screen’s magnification, hn-Pilot stared suspiciously at the human craft. Its primary hull was an immense, central cylinder for large-volume cargo items. Its bow-currently facing Incisor-Red -also housed the guidance and robotic elements of the craft.

This main hull was ringed by tubular containers, giving it the appearance of being a baton girdled by a tightly packed bandolier of long metallic frankfurters. Loaded with smaller cargo items, these containers were detachable: the Proximan communities swapped tubes of ore for tubes loaded with comestibles and other essential trade goods. But having four of these containers malfunction simultaneously, and in a cruciform pattern, did not sound like an accident; it sounded like a prelude to-