Donald Kingsbury: The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Why did this misfit even stay in the UNSN? That was the key to working with him.

The man had written articles for the extremely conservative Belter Factnet and one ranting article for the datarag of the Isolationist Party of Wunderland. Fry could understand why his views had annoyed his fellow officers. With his temperament he might have become a flatlander media firebrand and gone far with the unpopularity of his opinions, but as a military man it was suicide to be so outspoken. However sympathetic Fry was to those who feared a kzinti resurgence, he had no use for the young major’s bluntness in deriding the patrols and the peacekeeping.

Clandeboye belonged to the small minority of officers who believed that the kzinti had not been trounced in the recent war and would return with a terrible ferocity—a preposterous belief while mankind’s hypershunt ships patrolled kzin space with impunity. The UN’s Amalgamated Regional Militia had imposed a three-hundred-year peace on a fractiously warring mankind, until mass-man hardly understood war, and the navy in alliance with ARM had no reason to believe that they couldn’t do the same with the kzinti. Everyone, except maybe Clandeboye and the Wunderlanders, assumed that this was exactly what would happen.

The major’s viewpoint was preposterous, certainly, but his speculation about the strength and determination of a humbled Patriarchy was an alternate scenario that should be taken seriously. No harm in that. Hannibal’s march through Europe’s Alps had also been preposterous from a Roman point of view. The generals at Pearl Harbor had rejected the preposterous notion that the blips on their radar could be Japanese warcraft from a disappeared fleet.

Fry was coming to the conclusion that the way to this miscreant’s heart was to give him help with his eccentric ideas. (With friendly guidance, of course.) Wasn’t this pariah a man in desperate need of allies? Fry would, of course, stay in the shadows of the bunker while he played his multiple games. It was prudent to cultivate officers inclined to plan for a resurgent Patriarchy. A card up the old sleeve. Cover all bets. A Clandeboye with power might even be useful in the Belter effort to take out General Buford Early, a flatlander who needed a little cement in his jets.

What about mutiny? At first sight this disgraceful mutiny thing seemed to disqualify Clandeboye completely from a sensitive mission. But the more Fry investigated the inquest, the more fascinated he became. Men are loyal to an officer for a reason. The inquest had not found out why. Clandeboye might carry the psychological nature of a mutineer—a man who always thought he was being put upon—but none of the men who sided with him even remotely fitted that profile. There were other aberrations. It was highly irregular that the inquest had come to the conclusion of mutiny, had placed that in the major’s record—and then refused to prosecute him. Here was a rich arsenal of weapons available to Fry, stacked both against Clandeboye and his enemies. It was a situation that could be worked both ways.

What particularly attracted Fry was his candidate’s brilliance under fire. The man could improvise against the kzinti faster than a computer. That was rare. There was no record at all of Shimmel’s brilliance.

When all items in the major’s record were weighed against Lucas Fry’s purpose, the fisticuff fight was the blackest mark against Clandeboye. These fights had become too common of late, as if young soldiers had taken out-of-control kzinti kits as their role models. Why admire the ferocity of the enemy you had just defeated? Modern youth was becoming incomprehensible. Human males of Fry’s generation, even as children, had not settled their differences by physical combat. In space, with a vacuum on the other side of the bulkhead, such behavior was deadly. It seemed that war had been short-circuiting the morals of the young; fist makes right, it told them. So Clandeboye liked to fight, did he? Well, he could, and would, be nailed to the rack and stretched for that one.

To Lucas Fry it was self-evident that the ability to clobber someone did not make one right. If men had destroyed the kzinti war machine, that was a matter of survival, not of rightness. Fry had gone into the war as an adult, already knowing that. But the younger men and women had seen the war won by force and not by philosophy. They did not have the long view of history. Force seemed dominant to them; they had been born into it.

How does one pass one’s wisdom on to the children? (To men as mature as Fry, 66, men as young as Clandeboye, 47, were still children.)

His parents, he reflected, had been horrified when he left the goldskins for the military. They had tried to teach him that the kzin could be handled nonviolently. They had implored him to study man’s history to understand where violence led. He had ignored them. Now he had his own wisdom to teach—force must be balanced with compassion. But he had no children of his own to listen.

They had been killed in the war. He had only his cadre of young officers.

He wasn’t going to let Clandeboye’s temper disqualify him. A man’s weaknesses could be turned to advantage. Weakness was non-Medusan—if a man could look at weakness directly, he became strong; if he dared look at his failings only obliquely through a mirror, he became ossified. Fry was sure enough of his role as a martinet to believe that he could teach the sons of Zeus and Danae to face their Medusas without a mirror.

The heavy bulkhead door swung in, enough to let the sergeant’s head through. “We found a way down past the kitchens. I didn’t let your boy get lost.”

In person, Major Yankee Clandeboye turned out to be a rumpled flatlander who had a flatlander’s unbalanced way of giving a snappy salute in freefall. He was slightly awkward and ill-at-ease. He did not have the charisma of a commanding officer. He had too much hair; it even covered his ears. No matter—one did not judge flatlanders by their size, color of skin, grace, or cleanliness. They had other virtues.

“You’ll be wondering why I hauled you in from Egeria. Convince me that you are the right man for my mission and I have a high enough priority rating to get your transferal processed immediately. We’re in Intelligence here; I suspect you already know that.”

“Sir, I’m happy in Training,” drawled Yankee with a quizzical grin.

Fry appraised his recruit. This Yankee was going to be a man who sniffed his soup before he drank it. “A negotiator, are you? Why would you be happy in Training, for Finagle’s sake?”

“I don’t see a more important job than training elite fighters. With all due respect to ARM, sir, I think we did a very sloppy job in the war. We won more by wild good luck than with steady competence. Chuut-Riit was assassinated—Buford’s what-the-hell shot-in-the-dark. The Outsiders happened by at just the right time to sell us the decisive hyperdrive. By chance we woke up a Slaver from his billion year sleep just in time to disorganize the kzinti before our attack. That’s a lot of luck.”

“In war one seizes luck and uses it!”

“Agreed. But after the Battle of Wunderland it was thirteen years of slugging. Our luck was dry and our leadership mediocre, begging your pardon, sir.”

“Have you read Chumeyer’s Tactics of Interstellar War ?”

“Of course Chumeyer was a genius! He demolished the Patriarch’s supply lines and communications brilliantly. Yet his book is already obsolete. That was the last war! Chumeyer had hyperdrive ships and surprise against lumbering kzinti transports who had yet to hear about the Battle of Wunderland! We owe the war to Chumeyer. Yet his victories were in interstellar space. What about the assaults on kzinti strongholds? We have to go back to the Great War of 1916 to find parallels to such stupidity. Many heroes; staggering casualties; ill-trained leaders. For the next war we dare not depend on luck. We’ll need better discipline, much better discipline. We’ll need planning and a radically new strategy. It’s the training we do now that will forge the navy we’ll need sooner than any of you veterans think.”