The Man-Kzin Wars 07

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Bruno watched Carol's fingers on the fire-control console with some surprise. It was a delicate, deadly ballet she danced, one hand in a dataglove making delicate adjustments, while the other hand punched and stroked keypads.

In retrospect, it made sense to Bruno that Carol was skilled at battle stations; after all, she was twice a combat veteran. But Bruno had been spoiled by the absolute certainty of Linkage. While Transcended, he simply made things happen with a thought. He didn't actually have to do anything at all. He knew, Bruno frowned. Every time he had thought of Linkage since emerging from the autodoc tank, he had developed a pounding headache. Strange images with mixed sensoria intruded. He felt as if he could somehow taste colors, and feel sounds. It was frightening, but somehow familiar. Bruno had convinced himself that the incidents were a by-product of his macrocircuit neuronal matrices rerouting around the nerve damage.

Or, he thought grimly, it could just be the brain damage itself.

He firmly put that thought from his mind; it was unproductive at present. On the holoscreen, Bruno saw the icon of the kzin singleship moving in little jerks and starts across the idealized starscape. Carol kept trying to center the fire-control cursor in front of the presumed path of the alien ship before activating the hugely powerful gas lasers powered by Dolittle's deceleration.

"C'mere, you little ratcat," she crooned to herself. "Just hold course a bit longer… " She missed again. The kzin singleship was closer.

"You want me to try to Link up?" he asked without thinking, even as the pounding in his skull began anew.

Carol didn't even look away from the holoscreen. "Tacky, dear," she said in a distracted tone, "you don't even want to think about attaching that interface socket in your neck to anything with electrical current in it – not until we can do a full autodiagnostic on the rig.”

She was right. Linkage might kill him now.

He just hated feeling stupid and slow. He used to be so much more. Not just a human…

"No," Carol continued, "you just let old Mumma Carol take care of our little ratcat infestation." She paused for a moment, stretching her fingers luxuriously. "I have whacked more than one kzin singleship in my deep dark past.”

"So we have a chance?”

"You want to bet every credit in inventory on it, shipmate." Carol slapped his arm with her free hand and went back to work.

Bruno busied himself by reviewing Dolittle's diagnostics and spare-parts inventory. If he and Carol survived this dogfight, maybe he really could cobble together some kind of coldsleep chamber. If not, they faced slow asphyxiation in their own waste gases when the recyclers finally failed.

"Heads up," Carol cried, scoring another hit with the main laser array. Bruno saw the cloud of vaporized ship-material fluoresce in the aftermath of the laser light. "Ah, taxes take ablation shielding," she swore bitterly as the kzin icon emerged from the cloud under full acceleration, apparently undamaged.

Bruno saw something. "What's that?" he asked, using his own dataglove to point into the holoscreen. A tiny blinking point of light was moving swiftly toward them.

Carol clucked at her too-focused attention and opened a realtime window in the holoscreen. She magnified and amplified ambient starlight for illumination. A small, glittering globe flew toward them across the relativity-squashed starscape.

"Bomb?" Bruno asked.

Carol shook her head. "I'm getting no readings other than faint and indeterminate electronics leakage. No fissionables, fusion materials, monopoles.”

"How fast?”

"It's coming in at just under a hundred KPS, relative." She smiled tightly. "Let's see how whatever it is likes a little light on the subject." She started to place the fire-control cursor over the icon representing the mysterious globe in the tactical window of the holoscreen.

"Wait!" Bruno exclaimed, pointing at the realtime window.

As they both watched in surprise, the globe smoothly separated into two hemispheres. The half globes whirled around one another almost too swiftly for the eye to see, then began to slow as the distance between the two hemispheres increased.

"It looks like a bolo," Bruno breathed, remembering his history chips. "The two pieces have to be connected by something. Can't you resolve it?”

Carol shook her head. "Negatory, Tacky. Are you sure that there is something between them?”

Bruno was very sure. Physics was physics, after all. "How else can they be swinging around one another so quickly?”

"You have a point. But it's getting pretty close to us now." Carol set the fire-control cursor directly between the two whirling objects, which were over a kilometer apart now. "Firing full power burst.”

For a moment, the entire distance between the two hemispheres blazed with a brilliant green line that hurt the eye, almost too thin to see. It vanished instantly. Enhancing infrared did not show anything, either.

Bruno swore another nonsensical path Buford Early had taught him, something about water birds and sex. "Carol," he said tensely, "I have a bad feeling we are dealing with monomolecular filament. Shoot for either of the hemispheres, now!”

It took several full-power shots to convince Carol that even the enormous power of their laser array was being leached away by the apparent superconductivity of the filament material, only one molecule thick. The hemispheres seemed to be as invulnerable as the invisible filament between them. Seconds after a direct hit, the slowly twirling hemispheres had cooled to ambient temperatures.

"You had best maneuver us out of the way," Bruno told her as the alien whirligig drew closer to Dolittle. "That filament will pass right through the hull like a cutting laser through aluminum veneer.”

"Damn!" Carol's face was a mask of concentration.

But as Bruno had feared, the twirling hemispheres were guided, not simply ballistic. Further, Carol occasionally had to blast the laser battery at the kzin singleship, which fired off several laser bolts of its own at Dolittle. Damage had been minimal, since the kzin singleship had clearly been designed for close-quarter battles, but the diversion did seriously degrade her performance with regard to what had become the main threat.

Bruno again felt the headache, thinking how he might have handled this situation in Linkage. The ship was after all designed to be operated by a Linker. He stoked up the fusion drive to full power, trying to maneuver Dolittle. The superconductive wings could not be used for course changes, only deceleration or long, slow turns. His course changes were minimal, due to the ungainliness of the wings.

The strange enemy weapon grew closer to Dolittle.

With a sinking feeling, Bruno noticed that the kzin singleship was silent, keeping its distance.

"Impact coming up," Carol sang out. She roughly swung the ship on its axis.

The twirling hemispheres missed Dolittle, but neatly sheared off the starboard superconductive wing. In one window of the holoscreen, Bruno had a glimpse of the severed gossamer assembly twisting and falling away into the darkness. Half the green telltale status lights on the command console flashed red.

"Close," Carol breathed.

"Carol, the wing was the target of that weapon, not the ship proper.”

Carol wiped sweat from her brow, and did not look away from the holoscreen.

"Sure, Tacky," she said evenly. "The ratcat wants us intact. To take us apart piece by piece.”

"Lasers still operational?”

"Yes, at half power," Carol replied, and raised a jet black eyebrow.

Neither of them mentioned the larger problem. With one of the superconductive wings gone, it would be nearly impossible for Dolittle to decelerate to nonrelativistic speeds in a straight line. They would be turning to port as they slowed.

Carol fired another laser blast at the icon of the kzin singleship, while Bruno scratched his interface socket idly. He powered up particle-beam and X-ray pump bomblets. The laser array powered by their remaining superconductive wing was their major weapon, but Bruno wanted all of Dolittle's armament available at Carol's whim.

He smiled to himself. Carol was actually doing quite well, considering that Dolittle was supposed to be piloted by a non-brain-damaged and fully Linked Bruno Takagama.

Suddenly, their crash couches tightened around them as the universe seemed to jerk and twist violently

– then relax again. Alarms buzzed and whooped in the tiny cabin of Dolittle. Alert windows automatically opened on the main holoscreen, displaying schematics and updated diagnostics.

"Censored dammit," Carol shouted, her hands freezing on her console for a moment in sheer Belter reflex. "What's going on?" Even as she spoke, her hands were dancing across her console to look for the answer.

Carol fell silent as she stared at the forward holoscreen windows. Almost as an afterthought, she slammed a keypad with her fist, silencing the alarms.

Bruno did not believe the readings, nor the screen.

"Carol," he said softly, in wonder. He shook his head.

"Bruno," she replied in flat tones, looking at the realtime forward window in the holoscreen, "would you please tell me what you are seeing?" He could hear her swallow over the low rustle of the ventilation system. "I want to know if I am going schitz.”

"Our velocity appears to no longer be zero point seven C," Bruno said, staring openly at the normal-appearing starscape, not squashed or altered by relativistic speeds. "The superconductive wing batteries are no longer drawing significant power, again suggesting that our velocity is no higher than zero point one C." He paused. "That means the weapons systems are inoperable.”

Carol shrugged at Bruno's last comment, her fingers dancing across her console. "Worry about that later, Bruno. Putting fusion drive on standby," she said crisply, as the sensation of gravity faded. Then, the dropping elevator sensation of free fall. "Is the kzin singleship still there?”

"Yes," he replied, still dazed. "It appears to be in the same position, relative to us, as before the… incident." Bruno watched the datastream next to the kzin icon in the Tactical window for a moment. "It does not appear to be maneuvering. It's stationary… as we are, apparently.”

Still feeling very odd, Bruno busied himself with collecting and analyzing the last few minutes of shipboard time. After a moment, Carol reached across and pinched his arm, very hard.

"Bruno!”

"Yes?" he answered politely.

With trembling claws, the captain warmed up the strained gravitic polarizer and put the weapons panel on standby Within a few moments, Rrowl-Captain would finish his scream-and-leap, weapons firing, and destroy the monkey vessel. Then he would deal with these meddling intruders.

A yowling alarm tone halted Rrowl-Captain's ready claw poised over the initiate keypad.

He looked up with a snarl, and saw many octal-squared of nightmare black shapes blotting out the stars, living creature flying through empty space toward Sharpened-Fang.

Magnification and vector analysis showed the hordes to originate from the intruder moon-ship. The intruder aliens were even uglier than Jotoki, Rrowl-Captain realized with a hiss of distaste. Thick central stalks surrounded by an octal-and-half of sinuous tendrils – yet bearing tools and wearing harnesses.

Powerful or not, Rrowl-Captain could not let these aliens threaten a Hero's vessel, nor his own plans. He reoriented the weapons panel and prepared to fire.