The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 12

(2437 A.D.)

Grraf-Nig’s plan to steal the Shark and escape to Kzin was proceeding without a flaw. His team of W’kkai engineers had rebuilt the Shark to his specifications, saving the internal structures he was sure were necessary for the hyperfield build-up, replacing the rest with a kzinti design that was far in advance of any standard kzin technology. He’d been in maintenance at Wunderland, adept at implementing illegal ship modifications in fighters; he knew he had at his disposal the most deadly small fighting craft ever fielded by the kzinti. It would be able to outmaneuver any ship of the old W’kkai Standard Spec Attack Fleet. If it was in operational condition.

Cautious testing had uncovered only minor problems. Of course, there had, as yet, been no tests of the hyperdrive in the new configuration-all experimentation outside the singularity had to be carefully hidden from UNSN patrol surveillance. But the Shark’s new hyperspace performance did not really worry Grraf-Nig; he had spent thirteen years overhauling its motor. This particular hypershunt had brought him from Hssin to W’kkai and had never showed any of the instabilities of the W’kkai copies which were giving them so much trouble.

In the early tests of the modified Shark he’d always had an overdressed W’kkai warrior with him as test pilot. For “final” test (which was only number three in a series of eight-plus-one) he had managed to arrive early, by priority shuttle, bringing with him his Jotok slave, Long-Reach, “for a special pre-flight installation.” Some officer would be skinned alive for not noticing the irregularity.

The Shark was now loaded and flight-checked, minus only its perfumed Ship-Tester, who had been conveniently delayed on W’kkai but who was probably already puzzled by the special priority shuttle that had preceded him to the test craft. He would not yet be alarmed. The test sequence commands were to be delivered electromagnetically by the research station and could be overridden only by Ship-Tester and only in an emergency. So everyone thought.

By the time Ship-Tester was on his way, the five arms of Long-Reach had rewired the controls. It was too late to stop the escape.

Grraf-Nig turned his attention to the space around him. The research station was only a glint in the sky but W’kkai was still a large disk W’kkaisun was so large at a hundred light-seconds that it had to be blotted out by the sunscreens. He and Long-Reach had a lengthy maneuver ahead of them. Because the singularity around W’kkaisun extended out for three light hours it would take at least a day at maximum gravitic polarizer acceleration before they could disappear via hypershunt. They had a good chance to beat pursuit. A sphere three light hours in radius was an enormous volume to defend, and the W’kkai navy was of necessity deployed to defend priority installations, not to prevent defections.

The worst danger came from the fleet close to W’kkai, who would get their pursuit orders immediately with a minimum of light-lag delay. The improved Shark still had a twelve-g acceleration edge on the best of the Screams-of-Vengeance fighters available to intercept them. Grraf-Nig glanced warily at the brilliant point of light that was cold Hrotish, six times as massive as W’kkai with its important W’kkai-sized moon. There was a fleet there, too, and they were only six light minutes away.

Several “cones of escape” looked very good, though the desperado was not underestimating the risks. The Fanged God threw his bones carelessly. Grraf-Nig recalled the biggest coincidence of his lifetime-how he came to be testing illegal modifications of Kr-Captain’s Scream-of-Vengeance fighter at just the right time and place. Chance alone had placed them at a location from which they were able to destroy the human ramscoop Yamamoto as it passed through the Alpha Centauri system. Luck might be with them now-and it might not.

Briefly he relished his memories of Grraf-Hromfi, the greatest strategist he had ever known, the warrior he had honored by taking half his name. “Look before you leap,” reminded the master constantly. Grraf-Nig had programmed a randomly curving path through the cone of escape so that W’kkai sensors, handicapped by light-lag, would give an ever less accurate prediction of his real position.

A wary Hero scanned his instruments. He looked at the glint of the research station and looked straight at Hrotish before he grinned-and leaped. A rebuilt Shark shot off at an acceleration that human technology could not match.

Missile attack would be the best way to stop him, but he doubted that they would use it against their only reliably operational hypershunt motor. If they did, he had beam-armament and a very good “Weapons-Officer” in Long-Reach who had always played that part while they were illegally modifying fighter craft for the Fifth-Fleet’s Black Pride at Centauri. To call his slave “Weapons-Officer?” aloud would not do-but he could think it. Long-Reach’s five networked brains made him the fastest Weapons-Officer Grraf-Nig had ever met.

Beam attack was another danger but he did not doubt that he could sidestep any offensive beam-weapon launched against him, never having met a W’kkai warrior who understood beam evasion. He understood. He had been trained by Grraf-Hromfi, who had been trained by Chuut-Riit. Beam-weapons were a favorite of the humans, who had used them in ingenious fashions while defending themselves at Man-sun. Never one to overlook details, Chuut-Riit analyzed their monkey-tricks and formalized a defensive dance against them. The weakness of beam weapons was the light-lag. They were useful against fixed targets. They were useful for a long-distance surprise assault. They were useful for light-second infighting. Otherwise they could be defended against.

“Zap-p-p-p-p!” harmonized Long-Reach in an exclamation from the five mouths of his lunged arms. He had taken out his first closing missile with a beam bolt.

Grraf-Nig roared something in the Hero’s Tongue that translated roughly as, “Mate with sthondats!” Fortunately the robe-assassins were chasing them; none were attacking from the forward direction, which would have been really dangerous. He had been wrong about his comrades’ willingness to attack him with missiles. They weren’t going to limit themselves to boarding; they were killing mad. Manually he began to add fillips to the automatic evasions. Long-Reach got two more in a row, pause, then five, the last one right on their tail-blossoms as the polarizer fields collapsed. An individual missile had little chance of making it through-but Long-Reach could be overwhelmed. Grraf-Nig wished he was in fighter formation with several beams protecting their rear. This, however, was more exciting.

As quickly as it began, the missile attack ceased. That was good. As time passed, their pursuers’ ability to estimate their present position was seriously degrading. But Grraf-Nig watched his instruments with the intensity of a predator anticipating a flock of dangerous prey. It was to the advantage of a cluster of missiles to talk to each other and coordinate their attack for the same moment. The light-lag in the “talk” probably doomed that kind of blow, but any possibility had to be watched for.

When it came, the second missile attack was of an entirely different kind. The missiles began to detonate in front of them. It was a strategy of desperation since their pursuers knew only where they had been. If the explosion erupted behind them, it posed no danger. If it was just beyond them, the fireball of fragments presented too small a cross-section to be dangerous. And if the warhead detonated too far ahead of them, the fireball was too diffuse to do damage when they passed through it. After all, the kzin had been traveling through interstellar space at eighty percent of light-speed for thousands of years. The fierce gravitic polarizer fields that they used to move their ships were quite good enough to protect them from normal interstellar debris.

Nevertheless Grraf-Nig dodged cautiously among the fireballs, careful not to let himself be herded toward an ambush point. The adventure reminded him of a jerky video he had viewed on Wunderkind. The Revolutionary American Air Claw was bombing Hamburg in winged B-TwoEights+Ones, thousands strong. Hamburg’s Prince of Huns had been sending mercenaries to the English to fight on American soil, and the American man-beasts had become annoyed. Alarmed, the Hun animals tried to defend themselves by tossing exploding cylinders into the sky. But the berserker monkeys just flew through the black flak puffs yelling their Rebel cry of vengeance against the English, blowing up Huns along the way.

The kzin ran for his life until, gradually, the fireballs of “flak” faded as the Shark’s probable position began to be smeared over too vast a volume to make a scatter-shot attack plausible. But new attackers would now be converging from the sides. Long-Reach was keeping track of the pursuers with a Weapons-Officer’s wide-angle telescopic sensors.

“Eleven pursuers visible,” said one of Long-Reach’s arms.

Grraf-Nig was more worried about what was coming from the direction of Hrotish than he was about the group that had already fired on him. But nothing happened. They lost track of their pursuers by outrunning them. That was unnerving, not to know where the enemy was, or whether they were accelerating headlong into a trap. They continued maximum evasion shifts as a precaution.

After uneventful hours, he began a methodical re-programming of the escape. They had lost him, but he knew exactly where he was-by now well above the thin asteroid ring of W’kkaisun. He had a good idea of where each W’kkai warship had been at the beginning of his escape and what their probable moves would be. His computations (based on pre-escape intelligence, probably inadequate) showed him that there were five warships up ahead that he need worry about, one of them a carrier of eight fast Scream-of-Vengeance fighters. If they made contact with him, his advantage would be hours of acceleration lead time. They could only attack him in a single fast flyby. It would be like stealing mother’s milk. He’d be moving at something like an eighth the velocity of light.

But once he crossed the singularity evading the UNSN patrol was going to be a special challenge. There was only one hyperspace warship out there now but the monkeys had hyperwave radio and could quickly call in reinforcements from light years away. Surely its captain had sat bolt upright at that fireworks display of flak and might already be calling for help. It didn’t matter that his patrol ship was on the other side of the singularity-in a hop, skip, and jump he could be on top of the Shark. The UNSN had perfected the art of hunting down and killing the gravitic ships of the kzinti in interstellar space.

None of this was in the manuals-not even Chuut-Riit’s manuals. Grraf-Nig needed to give his moves heavy thought in the few hours of peace left to him. The major problem with equipping a hypershunt ship like the Shark with a gravitic drive was that the gravitic polarizer, when in use, created its own hyperspace singularity He was going to have to collapse his gravitic field before he disappeared into hyperspace-an action that was equivalent to decelerating down to his rest velocity. If he burst through the singularity at twenty percent of light speed. He’d be vulnerable to the UNSN for a full day before he could evade them by hypershunt.

He began his deceleration early. It was risky. On the other claw, it meant that the W’kkai fleet would overshoot him and, while penetrating the singularity in front of him, become a decoy fleet masking his escape-if they didn’t find and kill him before the UNSN found and killed them. It was a melee he hoped wasn’t going to start a new war-no world of the Patriarch was ready for that yet!

By the time the Shark passed through the singularity; much later than his original planning, he was still traveling fast-but slow enough so that he was flying into a swarm of W’kkai warriors. His sensors began to pick up more and more of them until he located twenty at about maximum range. It wasn’t the formation he expected to see. There were already four UNSN warships on the scene. Neither fleet was attacking the other. Both were wary and moving in defensive array. Because of light-lag he was well behind on the true situation.

It looked like the monkeys were holding back in a blocking formation, waiting for reinforcement. It looked like the W’kkai fleet was well on the way to a conservative interception which would not threaten the UNSN warships. Such precautions were all in the Shark’s favor. Grraf-Nig began to pick up frantic bits of communication between Hero and Man-beast.

He was being sold as a renegade. The W’kkai commander was giving the beasts permission to vaporize him, promising no retaliation if they did. They were offering to take out the Shark themselves if the United Nations would stand aside. All the niceties of the MacDonald-Rishshi treaty were being observed. Only the light-minutes were keeping the opponents from each other’s throats.

Grraf-Nig was enormously relieved. He had timed everything perfectly. His luck as a survivor had held. Before anyone could get to them, the Shark would disappear into hyperspace and reappear alone inside an interstellar sphere of stars.

The gravitic field died. The Shark had come to rest relative to its starting frame of reference-minus the velocity of escape from W’kkai’s orbital distance. Grraf-Nig wiggled his ears and cut in the phase-change for the hypershunt build-up. Nothing happened.

For a stunned moment the giant kzin thought that Long-Reach had made a mistake when he rewired the controls, but Long-Reach himself had no such doubts. He had worked with this motor a good part of his life. Instantly he was at the motor housing and hit the clamps. The housing popped away and floated off to the wall. A cast iron dummy of the correct weight and balance sat where the hypershunt should have been.

It was something to think about-but death was only minutes away. There was no time to yowl in anguish. There was no time even to curse High Admiral Si-Kish’s paranoia.

Outward from W’kkaisun, the UNSN waited. The W’kkai fleet was moving in on their renegade cautiously-of course, cautiously because they already knew that the Shark couldn’t escape into hyperspace.

“Battle stations!” Grraf-Nig screamed at Long-Reach. A second later they were moving at full acceleration toward W’kkai. There was no escape. No matter how frantically his mind panicked through the alternatives, there was no reasonable way out. It was either fight to an honorable death or suffer the humiliation of surrender. He sat at the controls, brilliantly evading attack, but numb. He could no longer think of himself as the noble Grraf-Nig. He remembered a terrible day from his past when a gang of Hssin kits had cornered him for an easy kill-and he had saved his life by eating grass. What honor was there for a kit out to prove his warrior skills who carried the ears of a grass-eater on his belt?

Grass-Eater negotiated the surrender of the Shark through electronic static and violent maneuvers. He knew they wanted to save the ship because it was the prototype of a deadly fighter that was intended to spearhead W’kkai ambition, but he wasn’t sure they would spare his life once the Shark was secure. It didn’t matter. Better that W’kkai should triumph over Kzinhome with a reinvigorated Patriarchy than for Heroes to languish as the slaves of squabbling monk’s. Let them have their prototype.

There wasn’t room enough for a warrior to board the Shark. Long-Reach and his defeated master met their captors in space and were taken back to a warship. The slave disappeared into its slave quarters; the mortified one was stripped inside the airlock. Undressed, a warrior of W’kkai was a nameless animal without power. No W’kkai Hero among those who had captured him called him by name. He had no name. They could not even look at him.