The Man-Kzin Wars 04

CHAPTER 20

(2420 A.D.)

Detection-Orderly-Two summoned Grraf-Hromfi immediately, rousing him from a curled sleep. Hromfi was not the kind who made life miserable for warriors who interrupted his rest. A Hero on duty had the obligation to wake the dead if he felt it in the interest of the Patriarchy. The Commander of the Third Black Pride appeared at the Command Room, naked in his copper red fur except for slippers, grumpy, but not angry.

Analysis began promptly, without preliminaries. The small object had appeared in the heavens out of nowhere, near Rh’ya in the House of the Fanged God's Kzinretti the Pleiades. Only light-hours away. Very anomalous gravity pulse. That had set off the alarms. It was also a neutrino source.

Another strange event.

The Third Black Pride was up to full strength. Its Commander ordered a discrete reconnaissance probe. If the mystery pulse came from a small ship, he wanted it captured for interrogation. Quickly. And not destroyed.

Instantly, he chose for the mission three pilots he could trust. the first an old warrior with grey in his pelt who had flown Scream-of-Vengeance fighters for Chuut-Riit since he was a kit, the second a wild-eyed Hssin barbarian who liked to pick the meat out of his fangs and comb his mane before he leaped, and the third, Grraf-Hromfi's most promising son.

They, in turn, were shaken out of their sleep. Each hastily donned goggles so that he could receive his orders. "The intruder is to be disabled, not vaporized!" growled their Commander. "And while I have your attention: a warning." He shifted into the menacing tense of the Hero's Tongue to jolt their livers. "Our instruments tell us that this object appeared out of nowhere. Instruments can be deceived. The best kzin minds can be deceived. However, regardless of how irrational the concept, expect the object to defend itself by vanishing into nowhere. Attack without warning! Disable it immediately! Prisoners are to be taken! If it is an automatic ship, the brain is to be salvaged!"

While the three crews scrambled, he called ahead to make sure that Fighter Command was ready to equip them with Screamers modified by Trainer-of-Slaves. He wanted them to have whatever edge he could supply.

Grraf-Hromfi's nose was beginning to sniff the oddness of an alien technology lurking about. On the borderlands of the Patriarchy that could be extremely dangerous. But how to put these enigmatic pieces together? He thought of the wooden puzzles of the kzin Conundrum Priests of W'kkai. Eight ways there were to put any puzzle together, and seven of those ways always left an awkward shape protruding.

In the meantime, decisions never waited for a finished puzzle.

How had that unnaturally fast ramscoop dropped off agents? No obvious mode of deceleration suggested itself. At an incoming velocity near lightspeed any agent would have carried the energy of a continent-smashing bomb; the energy from any kind of capsule-braking would have been observed. And how had they penetrated Chuut-Riits security to juggle creche feeding procedures so that Chuut-Riit had to face his own ravenously hungry sons behind locked doors? It seemed like magic. Of course it wasn't.

But now an unauthorized ship that wrote its own unique gravity pulse. Could it be that the ramscoop hadn't delivered the agents? Was there a new player? He remembered Yiao-Captain's visit and his infectious insistence that they point their long distance antenna toward a possible "alien" artifact. Another orphaned piece of the puzzle that "protruded."

This was indeed a time of troubles. After the launch of the three Screamers, Grraf-Hromfi brooded briefly on the other troubles while he did his warrior's duty, waiting…

… troubles enough to incline Grraf-Hromfi to leap off for Man-sun immediately and let these slashing Wunderkzin rip their own faces apart. Octals of the kzin nobility, who had been chafing under the rule of the outsider Chuut-Riit, had seized the assassination as license for them to seize power. Traat-Admiral's claws had been busy with duels. Political chaos.

Regrettably, border barbarians were uneducated in honor! They thought of duels and Ascendancy as honor. They thought of death as Opportunity. They knew nothing of the honor of Loyalty After Death.

Leaving them to their own murders was a warm, meaty idea, but impractical. The Fifth Fleet needed Wunderland as its supply base. They couldn't use Hssin. It was extra light-years away and Hssin kzin were all related by blood and. warrior oaths to the original Centauri Conquest Heroes anyway.

The ramscoop attack, itself, had done little damage-but it had brought hundreds of honest slaves to a state of feral defiance. Now open defiance was spreading like a plague as the squabbles among the kzin became public knowledge. Ferals had even attacked the Gerning base from space and put its detectors out of commission for three days, long enough to land supplies for some of the renegade animals.

Grraf-Hromfi was in a bad mood because he was just back from a political tour of Wunderland estates. He had picked the most obsequious of the power hungry back-stabbers first, cleverly led them to state the claims they believed to be true, challenged them to a duel for false claims, and killed them. After three such contests of honor, the rest of the Wunderkzin learned more quickly the value of careful reason. The power hungry always made the same mistake they built their True Case, the case they were willing to defend in public, upon false logic.

Detection-Orderly-Two appeared at the oval bulkhead door of the Command Center of the Sherreks Ear. "Sire! May I have your attention again?"

Grraf-Hromfi glanced up. The orderly mock-slashed his face sharply. "You look like you've just bested your father at arm-tug. Found something new? I hope not another of those objects."

"No, Sire, not in this system. But I have something for you to consider, if you will, sir. May I use your data-link?" Without even waiting for assent, he switched on the wall screen and spat-hissed commands to the retrieval slavecrystal. Ribbons of telemetering appeared. "These are mystery signals which the Second Black Pride has been relaying to us from Mansun for analysis. They started arriving about three months ago, off and on. We have never been sure that they weren't noise, or the artifact of some instrument malfunction."

"You've found something there besides noise?"

"Yes, sir! They all have the same signature as our mysterious visitor. I did a comparison. It came out at the seven-eights confidence level excellent- considering that the signals we have are only whiskers above the noise jiggles. The Patriarch’s Nose has been seeing-what we have been seeing but just inside their maximum range.

"And 4.3 years ago," muttered Grraf-Hromfi. "We must never the lightlag. A lot can happen in five years. The Fifth Fleet has doubled in that time. Who knows what cunning they have been up to at Man-sun."

"What do you think the mystery object is, sir?"

"A scout."

"Do you think they've found a way to travel at lightspeed, sire"

"We'll find out. All detection squads are on full battle alert?"

"Yes, Sire!"

Grraf-Hromfi was now very worried. Was the pulseobject a visitor from Man-sun? He turned up the gravity in the Command Room so that he could pace. On impulse he called Trainer-of-Slaves for a goggle-to-goggle conference. "You paw around with those agonized shrieks-and-spits of demented mathematicians? Their water-hole tracks describing unified field theory?" The virtual image of Trainer-of-Slaves hung in the air like a ghost, fixed in position.

"Dominant Sire, I've inflicted some of that torture upon myself, yes. Do you want an opinion on that

"What would this sudden appearance of mass mean?"

"You are suggesting that the pulse tells of the creation of mass out of nothing?" asked Trainer. "Yes."

"That's impossible, sir. My opinion of the pulse…"

"Mate yourself to a sthondat! I didn't ask your opinion, Eater-of-Grass, I asked what it meant!"

"To avoid your insults, I will tell you what you wish to hear. Any mass passing through the light barrier would appear as if it had been created out of nothing."

"But this one wasn't moving at relativistic speeds."

"Light barriers can be stationary. I refer you to the work of Ssrkikn-the-Juggler: 'The Event Horizons o…' "

"Yes, yes, yes. Can mass pass through an event horizon?"

"Mass pops out of black holes all the time but it can't bring any information with it. Your faster-than-light ship would fry its occupants down to their unreadable parts. You couldn't find out where they came from not even the direction..

"You think we'll have a simpler explanation for this pulse?"

"I do, but my opinion is worthless beside your own, Lord Commander!"

"In a few days I may have the object for you to examine if it doesn't play hide-the-copper-penny with us, or worse, put us in cages for some alien zoo! In the meantime I suspect that our visitor may be from Man-home. I want prisoners. There may be injuries in the attack. You are our veterinarian. Take a Ztirgor with that autodoc Chuut-Riit gave you, and follow the attack force. Do not attack. Your only function will be to handle human casualties."

Grraf-Hromfi broke the contact and lifted his goggles above his eyes. His ears were folded and buried, his lips trembling over fangs. He didn't like to wait!