Larry Niven: The Man-Kzin Wars 06

The simple-minded Grraf-Nig would never be persuaded to believe in a power shift from Kzin to W’kkai. Never. Not by wit. Not by cunning. Not by torture.

You had to be of W’kkai-belong to a family that had been grossly tithed for a thousand years by the Patriarchs of Kzin, be master of a colorful art that balanced ferocity, be superior-to understand Si-Kish’s ambition.

(2436 A.D.)

The lights flickered. General Lucas Fry’s eye was distracted from the tiny framed face for a moment. Why were they switching over to Gibraltar’s emergency power source? But before he had time to fret, the regular power returned. Then he had to reach out and catch the miniature, which had drifted away from him. He did so with the economical ease of a born Belter who never made unnecessary gestures in space. But there was a thoughtfulness in his reach-as if to snare all that he had ever lost. It had been her only vanity to have commissioned a tiny painting of herself as a gift to him before she shipped out for the Battle of Wunderland.

Just another ship’s crew missing in action so long ago. It had been sixteen years since the rout of the kzinti at Alpha Centauri. Had it really been so long? He still remembered the scent of her full flatlander hair the little auburn ringlet she pulled before asking one of her impudent questions. Missing-in-Action. He thought he had forgotten her-deaths are forgotten in a war with so many deaths. Now he had been reminded.

An item in a report had been bothering General Fry for weeks.

It was just a fragment from the frozen memory of a cadaverous kzin warship that had drifted aimlessly in Centauri space to be discovered only recently for intelligence analysis. Perhaps, if it had not been for his unhealed love, he would not even have noticed this trivial detail buried in a routine document Gibraltar’s computer had long ago broken some of the old kzinti war code. The deciphered minutiae, quaint and chauvinistic, read like a commendation list given by Julius Caesar to his centurions, useless to any practical reader who found it.

It praised kzin warriors-all Heroes had to be honored for their deeds, even in the middle of a desperate battle. That was the way of war: take a moment here and there to praise vanished warriors for their immortal deeds of courage, which would go unremembered soon enough.

That kind of detail was all that the Gibraltar team had been able to abstract from the records of the wreck. The really sensitive information had been prudently expunged during the death-throes of the warship. Supply lists, orders, codes, command lines, strategy, contingency plans- all had been erased. But true warriors did not erase the deeds of revered warriors. Warriors sang the songs of their Heroes from skeletal mouths buried in trenches and the floating hulks of war. Heroes were immortal-so Heroes believed.

It was heroism that had caught the attention of General Fry in one sudden adrenaline rush… an ambiguous line in the role of commendations referred to the intrepid capture of a UNSN scoutship… and the capture of a single, unnamed prisoner.

Can a heroine rise from her grave? Hope kept jumping out of the strangest places. There was no hope, of course. A man could deal with Killed-in-Action. There was no way to deal with Missing-in-Action.

Only one UNSN ship was unaccounted for in Centauri space-the hyperdrive scoutship Shark. General Fry had a moment of grief, a dropped tear on the report. Nora had been the Shark’s observer. He thought he had forgotten her by now. He thought it strange that he should still remember her so vividly. Until today, he hadn’t looked at her miniature in years, but he had known exactly where he had hidden it from his latest girlfriend.

His emotions had their priorities all wrong, he knew. It was the capture of an operational hyperdrive vessel by kzinti warcraft sixteen years ago that was his primary intellectual concern. Had this been a brief kzinti victory, wiped out by the carnage of the battle that followed the capture? Or had the UNSN’s superluminal scout somehow made its way back to the techcenters of the Patriarchy? A missing soldier was irrelevant compared with the terrifying vision of a hyperdrive-equipped kzinti naval armada. Still, uppermost in his mind were thoughts of a charming woman and schemes to hold her again in his arms.

“Major Yankee Clandeboye to see you, sir!” said the sergeant’s voice from the speaker tacked to the bulkhead wall.

The appointment was for the hour-and would have been scheduled days earlier but physics permitted no hypershunt travel this close to a sun. A glance at his chronometer showed ten seconds to the hour. “Send him down. Better not take the usual route; the grunts are moving machinery”

Clandeboye was a find-even though the search to uncover suitable candidates for this mission placed him a distant last in a field of twelve. General Fry reordered the list to place him as first choice. Clandeboye alone was the cousin of Lieutenant Nora Argamentine. He must have known her well because it was his recommendation that had taken Nora off clerical duties on Earth and sent her out to the asteroids for combat training with Intelligence.

The old note, resurrected from the archives, had been ambivalent-a reluctance to recommend her for dangerous duty was in it, but also an intense admiration. (Nora had probably done some of her blatant arm-twisting on that one. Fry could almost hear her voice speaking to Yankee: “I want that assignment! You’re going to do this for me.” Then coyly, while she fiddled with her ringlet, “I’ll be good at it! You’ll be proud that you recommended me!”)

The machine expert that had done the personnel search had placed Major Clandeboye dead last for good reasons. His record was uneven. It was clear he would never make it above major in spite of his talents. But none of these faults appeared to be fatal. Lucas Fry was a master Machiavellian who never assumed that he was dealing with perfect people. Strengths were essential but weaknesses provided the pressure points from which to manipulate a man.

His record:

The measurements of Major Clandeboye’s administrative accomplishments gave him high marks but the officers he worked for were hostile in their appraisal.

There was a peculiar mutiny charge against Major Clandeboye two years before the end of the war, in September 2431. It had never gone to court. The evidence in his ship’s automatic log was damning-clearly he had refused to carry out direct orders-but none of his superior officers remained alive to testify against him and the survivors of the Virgo Volunteers he brought back with him had flatly refused to do so.

Even though Major Clandeboye had mutinied, his automatic log suggested that he had fought brilliantly after Commander Shimmel’s fleet had been destroyed and it was too late for him to carry out his support role.

Major Clandeboye was under probation for a recent fistfight unbecoming of an officer.

For footnotes to the official file, General Fry always tapped the gossip mills. The major was rumored to be a stiff-necked moralist. No, he would not approve of a curmudgeon general having an infatuated dalliance with a young lieutenant half his age while he abused his power to give her what she wanted. (She had wanted danger.) The trouble with moralists, who were always right, was that they weren’t always good at taking orders that disagreed with their consciences. Moralists were hotbeds of mutiny. They took their orders from a higher authority.

The number one rule for manipulating a moralist was to use him as a channel to interview his “higher authority,” then to speak to him in the language of that authority.

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