The Man-Kzin Wars 04

CHAPTER 19

(2414 – 2419 A.D.)

"Why don't we go!" He stooped through the oval bulkhead door, trying to tromp out his anger. But in the light artificial gravity he had to hold on to the handrails to make the floor shake.

His Jotoki scattered before his voice and busied themselves with what they thought would please him. Some went to their sleeping frameworks and hid.

Trainer-of-Slaves was eager to launch toward Mansun to avenge the Fourth Fleet. He had expected action after a ten year wait and buildup. His liver demanded an explosion of Heroism raging out toward the enemy star. He was tired of waiting, waiting, waiting with nothing to claw but the claw-sharpening "bark" in his miserably small stateroom. He was restless. His blood told him to make something happen…

But the implacable, immovable, unmoving Chuut-Riit thought differently. Waiting wasn't waiting, said his bulk, grinning at his foes. Waiting was planning. The size of the defeat had sobered him. May the Fanged God not lose patience with his inaction!

Grraf-Hromfi conceded in one of his seminars that the Wunderland Admiralty was reassessing top strategy. Chuut-Riit had cynically expected the Fourth Fleet to fail because of its arrogant commanders, but he had also expected it to demoralize the monkey hive and drastically weaken human military capability. Now Chuut-Riit was opting for a few more years of preparation. He wanted Centaurian industry built up to the point where it could keep an interstellar supply line filled. And he needed that extra crop of warriors that more time would provide.

In the meantime the Third Black Pride kept track of Sol through the distant transmissions of the First and Second Black Pride communication warships. Those scoutships of the Fifth Fleet had remained in place, well away from the battle zone undetected as of 4.3 years ago keeping their vigil out where Mansun was only the brightest star in the heavens.

A steady flicker and hiss of messages came through to be filtered and cleaned and analyzed by the kzinti spoor specialists back in the Centaurian system. Fuzzy pictures of UNSN Gibraltar Base. Specks that looked like a fleet moving in the asteroid belt. Some new markings on Mercury. The trace of search beams scanning the skies. Non-military beamcasts giving the tone and morale of the monkey civilization. Better and better maps of the cities of Earth.

Trainer-of-Slaves often flipped through the images. He gave only a glance to one of the earliest post-battle transmissions. It was a single crude picture of a vehicle being assembled in the asteroid belt. The scale markings indicated enormous size but its size was deceptive. Most of the structure seemed to be a flimsy magnetic funnel one of the monkey ramscoops of no military utility. To be noted and ignored. Perhaps it was to be an emissary to one of their local allies.

Months later there was a second flurry of activity when more pictures of the ramscoop came through. Now it was equipped with massive disposable hydrogen tanks and was actually being launched toward Alpha Centauri! To what possible purpose? This time Trainer noticed the furor only because Grraf-Hromfi used the item as the inspiration for a seminar lecture on human technology.

Trainer-of-Slaves was not to recall that seminar for another five years. Immediately when he left the briefing room other worries occupied his mind. He had a sick Jotok to tend and he was in the middle of a card game that he was losing to Long-Reach.

In that five years the Fifth Fleet doubled in size. The effort caused great hardship among the vassals of Wonderland, more than Chuut-Riit thought prudent to impose. Such stress created an alarming increase in feral activity. But there was no help for it. Extraordinary war efforts always cause hardship, both among slave and Hero. Sacrifices had to be made for the Long Peace, always. Peace did not exist without war to impose it.

Trainer-of-Slaves developed a lucrative sideline. It did not pay off in coin, but it paid off in favors. His Jotoki became experts at modifying warships and fighter craft to better than standard performance. This was not particularly difficult to do.

"Kr-Captain, your Screener now gives us a perfect check-down. But I do know ways its performance could be improved." While unbinding the terrified zianya who was to be their dinner, Trainer paused to let his message sink in. It was against regulations to make non-standard changes. Waiting without comment, he watched Kr-Captain tear out his hunk of flesh to an anguished animal cry. Trainer was not going to mention the subject of irregular modifications again.

"I'll take any edge," said Kr-Captain, blood on his Jaws.

"Of course, any alteration can be re-standardized."

"A laudable way to deal with fussy bureaucrats."

"Useful too, in case non-standard parts are unavailable during an emergency."

"When might such work be done?"

To avoid equipment chaos, standardization had been rigidly imposed since the time of the first interstellar Patriarchs. All improvements, by decree, had to come out of Kzin-home. In a subluminal empire, sixty light-years in diameter, new standards diffused slowly.

Brilliant innovations built to serve a need during the heat of some local war tended to die in the files. First the innovation had to reach Kzin-home. Then it had to be tested by a bureaucracy which considered itself to be the sole font of all change--and was understaffed. The ideas that lived often took ten or fifteen generations to become the new standard authorized by the High Admiralty, not because the Admiralty was particularly senile, but because the pace of light from star to star was pitiably slow.

Still, many such battle-tried ideas could be found hibernating within the labyrinthine network of lairs inside the data-links. Finding them took maze-tracking skills, and battle-cunning to know what was wanted, and an engineering background to know what was possible. Having fanatically loyal Jotoki technicians also helped.

The Flayer-of-Monkeys was a three-kzin fighterscout. They were well away from the Sherrek's Ear, testing the illegal modifications, when they got an emergency message. "Flayer. Flayer. Flayer. Record. Record. Record." Kr-Captain was at the leading point of the delta-shaped control chamber. He switched on his combat communications memory. Trainer-of-Slaves happened to be riding in the Sensor's harness, and Long-Reach was uncomfortably seated on his mouth in the Weapons-Operator chair, peering at his instruments. He was used to maintaining them, not reading them.

Sherrek's Ear continued urgently. "Acknowledge and Execute. Time Lag too Long for Confirmation. Will Repeat Message. Ramscoop Coming Through. Intercept and Destroy. Flayer is only Warcraft in Combat Range. Repeat: Intercept and Destroy. Ramscoop Coming in Much Faster than Predicted."

The excited kzin controller spat out a number. "We See Target: Three Octal-squared Light-days Out, Coming In. Real Position: Passing A-star; Perhaps Already Outbound. Possible Collision A-star. If So:

Cancel Intercept. Now Read Coordinates for Flayer Intercept."

They were given a position which placed Man-sun almost in occultation with Alpha Centauri A, on a circle surrounding A at a point thirty degrees north-east of a reference longitude through Kzin-sun. If they couldn't intercept within forty-seven hours, the ramscoop would escape.

"…We Assume You Are Unarmed. Destroy-mode Your Choice. Message Will Now Repeat. Flayer. Flayer…"

A startled Kr-Captain swung his outer antenna toward the Sherrek's Ear. "Flayer Ack. Will Intercept. Flayer Ack. Flayer Ack. Moving out." He switched off the comm they were too far away to carry on a conversation pulled down his goggles, and took a brief look at the heavens while he rolled Flayer-of-Monkeys in the direction of the line joining Man-sun and Alpha Centauri A, now separated by about seven degrees.

"We've got to close up Man-sun and the A-star. That's shaving the hairs. Hope your juiced-up polarizer really will do octal-squared g's. What the sthondat is a ramscoop?"

"Hey, two missiles!" said long-Reach's short(arm) after checking the weapons readout.

"Camera missiles," snarled Kr-Captain, lolling his tongue. "For maneuvers."

Trainer-of-Slaves was suddenly remembering Grraf-Hromfi's long forgotten seminar on ramscoops. "I know what a ramscoop is."

"Good. Whatever it is, can we kill it? We're disarmed." They were already accelerating at sixty-three g's, yet it would be hours before they began to see Alpha Centauri creeping across the starfield. Kr-Captain turned to calculating orbits on his screen. They were going to have to cross the line-of-flight of the man-thing at ninety degrees. "We have just enough time to decelerate and stop on their line-of-flight. Should we stop or do a flying pass?"

All of Grraf-Hromfi's lectures on tactics crowded into Trainer's thoughts. Think before you leap. "Stop if we can. We get one try. We don't want our fire crossing the line-of-flight at an angle not at those velocities."

The old seminar room on the Sherrek's Ear was filling Trainer's imagination. The smell of frame-beryllium and old fur. The wet sniff of algae. But especially that room five years ago. Grraf-Hromfi was the same benevolent tyrant that he had always been, mane a bit scraggly. His halo mockup of the ramscoop floated to one side and he held his shamboo pointer tipped with slashtooth tusk that he liked to jab into his bolos and sometimes into the bellies of his less attentive listeners.

"We do not know its intention," the ghost-memory was saying to Trainer. "It is probably coming to sniff spoor around our boundaries. It cannot have an attack capability."

Trainer tried to reevaluate was that still true? And drew a blank.

"It cannot defend itself."

Yes, thought Trainer, its speed* its only defense, running like a fangless herbivore.

"The most interesting fact that this mockup reveals about the United Nations Space Navy is that they have not as of four years ago, I repeat learned how to build an interstellar-grade gravity polarizer. Otherwise they would not be launching such a massive low-performance device. The magnetic funnel" he pointed "is used to collect interstellar hydrogen for the reaction drive. Can any of you tell me its major constraint?"

There had been silence in the classroom. Today it was the silence of interception through soundless space.

Trainer remembered himself prompting, mischievously, "Ask Long-Tooth. He knows."

Long-Tooth-Son of Grraf-Hromfi jumped out of his reverie. "Honored patriarch, a ramscoop is too slow."

"Its acceleration is too feeble," corrected the father. "And why is that?"

Long-Tooth cast Trainer a venomous look for getting him into this dialog. "There's not much hydrogen for it to use."

"How much?"

"Sire! I don't know."

"Trainer-of-Slaves?"

"Please accept my surrender if I am wrong. Between here and Man-sun the density is about an octal-squared to four-octal-squared hydrogens per fistful of space."

Grraf-Hromfi again passed the slashtooth tusk of his pointer through the fuzzy holographic ramscoop in front of him. The spout of its funnel was burdened by racks of spherical tanks. "They need these huge hydrogen tanks to prime their reaction engines since they can't collect much hydrogen at low speeds. The tanks will be dropped off once they are moving fast enough to devour more than starvation rations of the interstellar hydrogen."

He was grinning at monkey folly. "They can't collect much at high speeds either in spite of the fact that the main funnel collector surface seems to be about as large as the Patriarch's private hunting estate. Their maximum speed is a quarter that of light if they use a ramjet design. With a more sophisticated flow-through design they are only limited by relativistic effects which are considerable. I doubt a top velocity beyond a half-lightspeed."

…and you were wrong… The Flayer was at the center of a sphere of stars, intercepting some manthing that was coming at them close to the velocity of light.

"At really high speeds they would have to know how to burn proton cosmic rays an unpleasant diet." Grraf-Hromfi got an amused ripple of ears when he added that this might be to the taste of a herbivore.

… yes, and the monkeys have managed to thrive on that unpleasantly lethal die…

"Those are engineering details and I presume they can be mastered. Ramscoops are a primitive solution and we've never used them, so we know little of the details. The major problem is not an engineering one it is a flaw in the concept. A fusion funnel cannot attain high accelerations, first because it is fuel starved, and second because reaction drives produce inertial acceleration. How do you build a gossamer funnel that can take even one gravity of inertial acceleration?"

…but at a fifth of a gravity, year after year…

Grraf-Hromfi did not mention in his lecture that a fighting kzin warship could accelerate at sixty gravities with the pilot floating in his cockpit and thus reach its maximum cruising speed in about five days, because all of his officers knew that. "How long would it take this funny-funnel to attain six-eighths the velocity of light?"

"Six months?" ventured a bored officer who leaped to conclusions before.

"More like eight-ten years with most of that time spent at low velocity. When will it reach Alpha Centauri?"

"About the time the Fifth Fleet has occupied Manhome," said Long-Tooth-Son with a grin for the poor beasts.

…but it is here and the Fifth Fleet hasn't even started yet…

"That's a reasonable estimate. I'd like to remind you that these pictures are more than four years old."

…it took them only nine plus years to get here…

"The monkey-funnel is already out of range of both the First and Second Black Pride. But even after all this time" the 4.3 years the Pride's message took to reach Alpha Centauri "the ramscoop will still be close to Man-sun and just beginning its journey. It is not something we'll ever have to worry about. We'll keep an automatic tracker looking for it that's our duty but I doubt if we'll ever sniff it again. The monkeys will decelerate and sulk around outside Alpha Centauri well out of our range."

So even Grraf-Hromfi could be dead wrong.

Trainer-of-Slaves did a calculation on the Sensor's data-link. The automatic tracker had detected the first trace of the ramscoop two-hundred light-days out yet years earlier than expected. Which meant that its maximum speed was far higher than kzin engineers had anticipated.

Kr-Captain finished his trajectory plot and put the Flayer-of-Monkeys on automatic. Turnaround was in twenty-three hours. "Sherrek's Ear gave us orders to be creative." He meant that they were unarmed.

"Best little mechanic in the galaxy sitting right beside me," said Trainer-of-Slaves.

"So how are we going to kill this what-ever-it-is?"

"We may not have to. Grraf-Hromfi proved that a monkey can't stay alive in a ship moving at that speed cosmic sleeting."

"Give old red-mane an ear," he purred sarcastically. "We don't have to fight because the enemy has already suicided! A nice philosophy until a monkey leaps out of the funeral pyre." He returned to a commander's inflected spits and growls. "We shall assume they have a gravity polarizer shield and are still alive."

"A gravity shield is the same as a gravity drive. Then they wouldn't need a ramscoop."

"What's a ramscoop?"

"A magnetic funnel that collects interstellar hydrogen and ejects helium as reaction mass."

"Is a monkey going to stand at a porthole and shoot arrows at us?" Kr-Captain flapped his batwing ears.

"Maybe the magnetic field protects them," suggested Long-Reach, two arm-slits speaking in unison.

"Slave! Shut up," growled Kr-Captain.

"Does he play cards?" whispered the arm nearest the relaxed ears of Trainer-of-Slaves.

"Don't eat your seat, Long-Reach. I'll need your brains in due time."

Long-Reach hunkered down on his undermouth, petulantly. He was muttering along internal channels to himselves that he was Weapons-Operator. That started an argument among the arms about who was to take charge of the camera missiles.

"The line-of-flight cuts right past the A-star," said Trainer. "They'll already be dead. The starwind is fierce at that distance. It will have hit them like your father's claw." Kr-Captain seemed unconvinced and so Trainer used an analogy from a virtual horror-adventure they had both lived together under shared eyecaps. "It's like a hurricane wind in your sails."

Kr-Captain bared his fangs. He didn't like being reminded of that horror-story world covered with water, trying to survive in the company of five warstranded Heroes on board a fleeing sloop in typhoon weather. His liver was still recovering. "I will not repeat myself again! We shall assume that the monkeys are alive, you miserable fur-tick fleeing-the-skin-of-a-dying-sthondat! "

"As you command, brave Hero!"

"Now how shall we kill them? It was you who took out my particle-beamer for this test!" The thought of being disarmed put him back on the edge of anger. Not even a nuke. "Shall I slash at them with my w'tsai as they zip past?"

"This combat couch is very uncomfortable, revered Hero," muttered short(arm). Listening to himself gave Long-Reach perversely practical ideas. "We could toss my combat couch at the enemy."

"Silence!" roared Kr-Captain.

Trainer-of-Slaves was looking around the cockpit for things that might be ripped out. "Gold dust is what we need, but your honor-bearing w'tsai blade is powerful enough to destroy even the most invincible monkey battleship."

Long-Reach gave a good imitation of a kzin "hisssss" of profound inspiration. "We leave our noble Hero on the line-of-flight, waving his w'tsai. He leaps," said short(arm). "He strikes!" exclaimed freckled(arm). Then a chorus of arms imitated the spits and snarls of a kzin fight. Skinny(arm) intoned the denouement, "In one blow the enemy ship disintegrates in a blaze of shame! and ever afterwards Kr-Hero radiates bluely from the honor roll of the Patriarch!"

Discretely, fast(arm) gripped a rod on the back of Trainer-of-Slaves combat couch in case he had to yank Long-Reach to a safer place.

His lips twitching, Kr-Captain eyed his more yelloworange than red-orange kzin companion. "Where did you find this five course lunch?"

"We've been together since Hssin. He really is a good mechanic."

"We seem to have reached a consensus," grumbled the Captain. "Some massive object left along the line-of-flight."

"Perhaps not massive. If we sprinkled gold dust in its path, each grain of dust carries the impact energy of a medium nuclear strike," said Trainer.

Kr-Captain did not believe him. Kzin are not used to combat passes at relativistic speeds. But he did the calculation on his screen. The numbers convinced him. "A little dust in the monkey's path and nuclear fireball! Easy."

"Not so easy," moaned big(arm). Long-Reach had been consulting among himselves. "It is not just a bigger high-velocity kinetic impact," stated the practical fast(arm). "We now pass into a new realm of the unimaginable where our intuition fails," expostulated the expansive short(arm).

At relativistic speeds, kinetic impact becomes a cosmic ray shower.

Visibly, Alpha Centauri began to creep across the glittering heavens toward Man-sun. The stars shimmered unnaturally through the strengthening polarizer field. Long-Reach, as "honorary" Weapons-Operator, busied himself with a simple project. He removed cameras from missiles. Then he built two makeshift warheads out of bottled oxygen and half their water rations and a few grams of tungsten-carbide grinding powder from his toolkit.

The Flayer-of-Monkeys was well equipped with sensors. Seventeen hours from their rendezvous it began to pick up the ramscoop which had an "apparent velocity" of 120 lightspeeds. Electronic amplification constructed a foreshortened image. The scoop was gone. That was a shock.

Trainer-of-Slaves thought, at first, that it had been "burnt-off' during the close flyby of A-star, but when he had the Flayer's data-link rotate the image to a side view, he saw that the funnel was simply folded-in to a vastly reduced scoop area so that its magnetic field was being used only to protect the crew. In the high mass regions around Alpha Centauri they had simply "furled their sails"!

From a standstill, Flayer aimed and directed its missiles down the line-of-flight toward the oncoming UNSN ramscoop which was now occulting Man-sun. The makeshift warheads bled a lethal mist of oxygen and ice-coated tungsten. Then Flayer moseyed down the line, away from the ramscoop, bleeding its helium coolant, its cabin nitrogen reserve, plus a bottle of argon and for good measure the talcum powder that Kr-Captain used to bathe his fur. They returned at full acceleration, stopped, rolled and dropped to the side, rotating to face the coming action. Trainer-of-Slaves mounted the salvaged cameras.

"All they have to do is dodge!" complained Kr-Captain, who was an expert at sixty-g maneuvers.

"They are blind in front. Their course is laser-true. Do you know how much lateral-thrust energy it would take to deflect them a whisker's breadth? They don't command that kind of energy. They are committed!"

The Heroes strapped in to do the warrior's greatest duty wait.

Half an hour later the nameless ramscoop, its mission still a mystery to its attackers, zipped by, moving faster than any explanation can describe what the eye saw.

The first missile missed.

The second missile ticked through an edge of the folded scoop, ionizing into a fireball genie that lashed a flaming arm out after the ramscoop too late, too slow.

The ramscoop plowed ahead into the mist.

Valiantly the magnetic field tried to cope with the overload but wasn't equipped to handle the dust or the oxygen. Superconductors overheated. Electrical resistance began to vaporize the surface of the scoop…

Meanwhile hydrogen and oxygen and tungsten, helium and nitrogen and argon, even talcum powder, were ionizing on impact to become tiny superdense nuclear projectiles sleeting through what to a nucleus is mostly empty space the bulkhead, the air, the life support, the instruments, the protein, the fusion engine, hardened lead-tungsten radiation barriers, everything and on out to the other side, leaving behind ionized trails as spoor.

A few of these "cosmic rays" collided with the relativistically massive nuclei of the ramscoop, scattering, smashing nuclei into a spray of particle fragments. Mesons flashed into gamma rays and gave birth to muons. Muons lived out their leisurely lives and died. Positrons blinked into existence. Anti-matter screamed out of collisions. Wildly exotic nuclei spat out particles in a desperate search for a new equilibrium. Neutrons bounced and bled into space.

But it was the energy of the stripped electrons that destroyed the monkeys' ramscoop. The ship was essentially transparent to the impacting nuclei but opaque to the electrons. The kinetic energy of the electrons was instantly transformed to heat.

The flare blazed, then was gone at near lightspeed, doppler-shifting into the red. It had left them. Inertia is implacable. What is moving continues to move.

The UNSN vessel was destined to travel on through the universe as a dense cosmic ray packet, slowly disintegrating and falling apart from its contact with the interstellar medium, from collisions with gases and particles. Billions of years later, in some distant galaxy, scientists might note its passing as an increase in the cosmic ray count from some strange quadrant of the sky. There would be theories about the high metallic content of the rays.

On the return of the Flayer-of-Monkeys to the Sherrek's Ear, they learned of the ramscoop's mission a bombing run. From a great distance it had launched precision pellets at specific targets. The relativistic pellets carried the wallop of a nuclear blast.

UNSN spoor was dated and their gunner's accuracy terrible. Whole areas of the arctic zone had been blasted without a single kzin or human casualty because there was nothing there. One lucky hit on a kzin base had killed four thousand Heroes. The human-beasts had taken gruesome casualties, only five percent of which were military related. A miss had impacted the ocean and created a tidal wave that had rolled over four seaside communities.

Kr-Captain was furious. "Why didn't we get it before it attacked!"

Alas, warriors were always reminded of the fortunes of war. Only the Black Prides carried the really long distance detection equipment. Both the Tigripard s Ear of the Fourth Black Pride and the Patriarch's Nose of the Fifth Black Pride had detected the ramscoop two days before the Sherrek's Ear had sniffed the electromagnetic scent, but each was almost two light-days from the line-of-flight. By lightbeam they didn't have time to warn Alpha Centauri, and by their fastest fighters, they didn't have time to intercept. The ramscoop was following too closely behind its own electromagnetic arrival notice.

Sherrek's Ear, though it was behind Alpha Centauri, was stationed only eight light-hours from the line-of flight. Even then, interception would have been difficult had the Flayer not been out on a maintenance run in the right direction.

Grraf-Hromfi gave a diagnostic lecture. Think before you leap. Never underestimate an enemy. He was furious at himself for assuming that no ramscoop could fly faster than half lightspeed. He was so furious that he set up a whole day of tournament to clean his liver of rage, taking on all comers.

Only months later they learned the covert mission of the ramscoop when Chuut-Riit was assassinated.