Larry Niven - Choosing Names

There was a murmur of agreement.

Paul and Rick turned to Selina again. “You won’t want to come, of course.”

“I certainly do want to come,” said Selina. “You’ve convinced me.” Get off the major target! The voice was screaming far in the back of her mind.

The crew of the Happy Gatherer scattered with final instructions.

Selina’s Space-suit was standard issue, geochronically linked to the ship’s planar logic lattices, with large pockets in the arms and legs. There was nutrient under high pressure in waist-cylinders, boot-caches and other compartments, and the suit recycled moisture. The lonely Belter rock-jacks might have had it differently, but in Earth’s history of this sort of Space-flight such things had seldom been needed: in an emergency you were usually near help or dead. She could think of nothing more she needed to take. She slipped her good-luck charm, the model ship, into one pocket.

Gutting Claw

Space-suited figures were leaving the enemy ship. Further magnifications brought them into clear view. A port opened and a boat put out. The monkeys made no attempt to conceal their approach. The enemy ship in arrogance or threat was actually shining lights upon them.

The EV aliens moved towards Gutting Claw with small reaction jets. One, who I felt Feared Zraar-Admiral mentally marking with his own urine, was ahead of the others. Unless there was something very peculiar about those compact, long limbed bodies, they carried no weapons.

“Telepath! What is happening!”

“Sire, I detect no warlike intent. But if Tracker was somehow deceived, I cannot be sure…”

“AT! What sort of tactic is this?”

“I don’t understand it, Feared Zraar-Admiral.”

“Are they going to attack us with those jets?”

“Feared Zraar-Admiral, I do not know, but they are far too small to do any damage to the hull. They are maneuvering jets only. That boat is powered by chemical rockets on the same principle. We detect no radio-actives in it. They still appear to me to be completely unarmed.”

Fight them! I caught Weeow-Captain’s mind. What are you waiting for, you old fool? Kill now! Then a blur. Noyouaremymentoroldfriend… I broke that very perilous contact.

“They are small creatures.”

“And the creatures that killed Tracker were also small. Telepath!”

“Sire, still all my skills tell me they have no weapons.”

“Do they seek to take us prisoner?”

“They seek to meet us. Sire, that must be the reason.”

“I want live specimens,” Zraar-Admiral said. “Telepath, is there anything useful in that ship?”

“No, Dominant One. In general the technology is primitive. The creatures have a number of gadgets and devices we do not possess, and their reaction-drive technology is of course developed, but that is all in their minds and can be extracted. The drive is inferior to ours and the materials are insignificant.”

He turned to Weapons Officer.

“Destroy the ship as soon as the EV kz’eerkti and the boat are far enough away not to be involved. Watch sharply for monkey-tricks!”

The battle proved kittens’-play. Under the converging beams the enemy ship’s life-system area melted almost at once. Its fusion plant should have destabilized with a major explosion but the drive was idling and probably some monkey used its dying moments to shut off the fuel-feed in an attempt to save its fellows. Cowards. We knew little of such drives but knew a Hero would have pointed the ship at his enemy and turned off the fusion-shield. I thought of Lord Dragga-Skrull and his last historic order: “The Patriarch knows every Hero will kill eights of times before dying heroically!”

The weedy creatures made no attempt at attack, resistance, or even evasion. The final explosion was visually fierce but of no consequence. Gutting Claw was heavily shielded.

Watching the blue-white glare fading on the screen Zraar-Admiral regretted that the business had been so easy. There had been relatively little honor gained. Whatever had happened to Tracker, these omnivore apes, like previously-encountered aliens, had nothing to match Kzin weaponry. But that disappointment also held rich promise—of worlds ripe for the taking by his squadron alone.

“Weeow-Captain!”

“Sire!”

“You have the enemy ship’s course recorded?”

“Indeed, Sir!”

“It is, I declare, a Patriarch’s Secret. When we have avenged Tracker we will follow that course to its home.”

“Yes, Sire. They came in a straight line from their first appearance. They seem to have made no attempt to hide their point of origin, if they have changed course since their original take-off Telepath will take the course from their minds.” They took it for granted that I could do such things, and that I would, at whatever cost to myself. “In any event there will probably be records in the surviving boat.”

“They will have destroyed those by now.”

“I wonder. Their behavior is so strange… perhaps they are a death-worshipping cult…”

“Telepath was not deceived.” Zraar-Admiral did not try to hide the contemptuous rage in his voice. He knew all his officers shared it. “They can’t fight at all.”

Perhaps, despite the similarities in her Telepath’s report and my own, Tracker had encountered something different to these leaf-eaters. That led to another consideration: as a matter of honor, Zraar-Admiral could not turn aside from the pursuit of an enemy known to be dangerous, and against whom vengeance was owed, to attack the soft targets of this monkeydom. We were on the trail of Tracker’s killer and that account would have to be settled first. That should not take long, however. Zraar-Admiral turned to Weeow-Captain.

“When the prisoners are inboard I shall look at them. Bring my gold armor”—this was hardly a ceremonial occasion but it was what the protocol of Fleet Standing Orders declared for first meetings with conquered prey—“detail two more infantry squads for my escort.”

The monkeys had been secured and breathed Kzin air. So we could breathe their air. The monkeydom extended, as I had reported, over several industrialized worlds. Feared Zraar-Admiral could claim the biggest continent of the homeworld for himself. And a Full Name, certainly. A Full Name for Weeow-Captain, too. Partial names for others. Many others, if Zraar-Admiral indulged. Vast fiefdoms. Smells of names, riches, glory, conquest! Perhaps some of the monkeys’ less-advanced sub-species would put up a fight on the ground. If so, there could be rich rewards for the most Heroic and ferocious of the infantry troopers. Partial names and estates might not be beyond the claws of outstanding Sergeants.

Nothing, of course, for Telepath. Except burn-out.

Twelve humans and thirty-four Kzin stared at each other in the ruddy light of the great hangar-deck. One squad of eight flanked the prisoners. Zraar-Admiral, with Telepath at his feet, stood at the head of his Guard squads.

Zraar-Admiral saw Simianoids with considerable variations of skin-colors and strangely limited and irregular hair-growth. Their general morphology at least suggested the theory of common life-form seeding by the Ancients. They stood two-thirds of his height and would carry, he judged, a third of his body-weight or less. Some were leaking red liquid, presumably circulatory fluid, where marines had torn their skin in stripping away their space-suits. Frail as well as ugly, he thought. Spindly limbs with puny muscles, branch-grasping monkey-hands, with those five long fingers and tiny, useless horny tips that could not be called claws. Foreheads higher than many kz’eerkti species on Kzin, which was only to be expected. No tails, oddly enough. How did they counter-balance when running on branches or leaping between trees?