Man-Kzin Wars XIV (16 page)

THE UNSN CARRIER
YORKTOWN
had been an experiment which might not be repeated.

A colony ramship, started by Skyhook Enterprises and completed just before the end of the First War, had been fitted with hyperdrive and gravity compensators at the beginning of the Second, making it the largest warship humans had ever constructed. Much of its interior was hangar space for singleships sheathed in superconductor, which allowed them to go through a ramfield without scrambling the pilot’s nerve impulses. The carrier’s mission had been to: a) accelerate to relativistic speed, b) reach the kzin home system in hyperdrive, c) reenter normal space, d) wreak multiple kinds of havoc with the
Yorktown
’s drive and field as they decelerated through the system, e) drop off its singleships to destroy targets of opportunity, f) take a close turn around the star with the field stirring up flares, g) pick up the singleships, h) accelerate out of the system, and i) go into hyperdrive as soon as they were out of the singularity.

They had gotten as far as “a.” Then they were spotted by the battleship, which had possibly been scouting ahead for an invasion; the kzinti were a little less reckless than they’d been in the First War.

Captain Persoff had the
Yorktown
take evasive action as the kzin fired weapons and began matching course, but a ramship is not built to dodge. Over the intercom, Monstro, as the commander of the fighters was known, said, “We can take him out, Captain. Get in close untouched and slice him into chum.”

“Then you’d better,” said Persoff.

They had only been waiting for the order. Forty dolphins locked, loaded, and launched.

The kzinti had sixty-four fighter ships and the best tracking systems in Known Space. Out of forty targets, they got two. They were completely unprepared for an enemy that maneuvered instinctively in three dimensions. They quickly altered their tactics to attempt to ram the
Yorktown
. The fact that getting within a thousand miles of the carrier would be fatal only meant that they aimed very carefully. The
Yorktown
’s beam weapons were diversions of the main drive, and none of the kzinti got within fifty miles except as vapor.

The kzinti had learned the Lesson of the Laser in the First War, and the outer layer of their ship was water tanks. It vented steam wherever it was perforated, and this not only kept the damage from penetrating further, it acted to diffuse and disperse later attacks.

On the other hand, water vapor also interfered with the kzin sensors as it cooled and formed ice crystals, and after about an hour of battle, Captain Persoff began moving the
Yorktown
closer to the kzin ship. At a thousand miles the ramfield would wreck an unprotected nervous system, but the kzin ship was well-shielded from that, judging by the uniformity of the venting. However, at half that range, the ram drive itself could be aimed with precision, and the only effect of the superconductive sheathing would be to make sure the kzinti all roasted at the same time.

The kzinti realized what was happening just before the carrier got into aiming range of the ramship. The enemy’s fusion drive suddenly lit up, but apparently enough damage had been done that this was a bad idea: most of the conical aft segment turned white and evaporated.

Half the universe turned bright blue, and the other half vanished.

You don’t put a man who isn’t a plasma engineer in command of a fighting ramship. You don’t. Not if you want your ship back. Persoff opened the ramfield constriction to minimal power production, just enough for life support and the gravity planer, and began easing the ship over to the singleships one by one.

The dolphins were all dead, killed by synchrotron radiation from the relativistic protons being diverted by the ramfield. When the kzin ship had exploded, something must have happened to its gravity planer, and it and everything else in the ramfield, inside some unknown but significant level of ram flux, had been accelerated in the direction it had been aimed. What was left of the kzin ship was glowing by its own light, which suggested some of its ammo had gone up after the powerplant blew.

Captain Persoff was moving in on the last one when Astrogator Conreid announced, “I’ve worked out our speed and heading, if you want them.”

“Can’t hurt,” Persoff said.

“Speed is approximate, calculated by comparing the wavelength of that glow dead ahead with the microwave background of the universe. We’re operating at a tau factor of about fifty to one, which works out to a velocity of point nine nine nine eight C. At full impulse,” like most math types, he loathed describing the effect of a gravity planer as “thrust,” “we can decelerate to zero in about five hundred and seventy-nine days, give or take one. That’s our time. By then we’ll be about forty lightyears away from Earth. Our heading was a little trickier, since nothing looks right, but my best guess is we can steer enough to pass our target about 200 AU out. I can’t figure out a way for us to get closer without risking the field collapsing. Moscow Motors overdesigned the scoop as a matter of habit, but the ramfield was never expected to have to deal with flux at this speed. One of the little private-sized ships they were building toward the last could have done it, but of course one of those would have been useless on a mission like this. However, we can hit them dead on if we jump laterally in hyperspace. Drop out just outside the singularity, dump most of the water since we won’t be needing it now—” He didn’t seem to notice the instant hostility of the rest of the bridge crew at the callous remark; the better sort of technical brain tends to miss these details—“hit it with the drive to disperse it widely, and let it spread through the kzin home system ahead of us.”

Persoff nodded, had a grabber bring in the final singleship, and said, “If we don’t mind dying before we see if we hit anything. When we came out of hyperspace we’d have hydrogen inside the ramfield, moving at a whisper short of lightspeed relative to us. Allowing for mass change, I’d say over a microgram within the ship itself. Secondary radiation from collisions should come to about half a million rads.”

“Aw, crap,” said Conreid. “Here I thought I had a way for the fins to strike one last blow. I know Monstro would have wanted to.” Someone with normal empathy would have looked depressed. The astrogator looked really annoyed.

“So where do we come to rest?” Persoff said.

“Not real sure. There’s a little cluster of stars in that direction that we’ll have to pick our way through, and it’s hard to tell what’s beyond them. Old kzin charts we got in the First War don’t show any missions that way, probably because the stars are too blue to suit them. Captain, may I suggest we get those singleships back?”

“I had intended to. What’s your reason?”

“We can use the engines as laser cannon on the way back.”

“Mr. Conreid, I like the way you think, but there’s every chance we’ll have to strip them for parts. The ramfield is just barely handling deflection, and we’ll be nursing it pretty carefully for the next twenty months.”

Conreid nodded. “In that case, sir, we should dump the water as soon as possible.”

“Less mass to decelerate, good thinking.”

“That too, sir, but what I had in mind was smashing the crap out of anything in our way.”

Persoff blinked. “Such as what, that the drive laser won’t vaporize?”

Conreid spread his hands, palms up. “Such as whatever the
Eva Peron
ran into. Their matrix ionizer was as good as ours is, and they weren’t going as fast.”

“Persuasive. All departments report.”

One by one, he heard from everyone at their battle stations that the ship was intact and no further enemies were available. The last was hyperdrive systems, and Kershner told him, “I don’t think we can use the hyperdrive or the hyperwave at all, sir.”

“Explain.”

“The mass of everything else in the universe has increased by a factor of fifty and a bit. At this speed, a rock that’s normally small enough to ignore turns into a boojum, coming on too fast to spot when we charge up. The hyperwave is even more fussy than the drive when it comes to general background gravity, and it’s my belief it’ll be wrecked if we turn it on. Also, we’d have to record a message and play it back slowly for them to understand it, and I honestly have no idea what relativistic effects do to whatever the hyperwave medium is anyway. I also don’t know if our tau factor would carry over in hyperspace, or what the transition effects are if it doesn’t.”

“Recommendations?”

“Let’s not find out.”

Persoff nodded. “Stand down to Condition Yellow and prepare to jettison water.” He thought about it. “Astrogator, that water will spread out enough for some of it to go through the kzin system, won’t it?”

“Yes, sir.” Conreid suddenly smiled, which he rarely did. “Ought to screw things up a little.”

“Or a lot. Our combat pilots are getting burial in space. Work out the trajectory that gives them the best chance of going through the system. The funeral will be at the start of the midwatch.”

The chance of attracting someone’s attention with the com laser wasn’t even discussed. Nobody would be wasting time monitoring a frequency that was less than two percent of normal.

The funeral necessarily took place while they were at Alert stations, as the ship was still in constant danger and would be until they at least managed to get below about point eight C. That wouldn’t be until they were well past kzin space. On the bright side, aside from a few rare and lightly-armed antique courier ships, the kzin didn’t have anything that could catch them on the way through. As long as it didn’t run into anything, the
Yorktown
was safe enough.

It rankled. Kzinti weren’t the only ones who’d changed their viewpoint during the First War. They had become more prudent as the reckless ones charged into overwhelming enemy fire, but humans had become more aggressive as the conciliatory ones were eaten.

Persoff established training drills in combat and ships’ systems. Not everybody was qualified to learn everything, but all of them were capable of learning something, and knowing more would make them better fighters. Someone—he never found out who, but he suspected it was Tokugawa, who in addition to his other duties was a historian—put up a sign in the rec room that said:

KILL KZINTI. KILL KZINTI.

KILL MORE KZINTI.

IF YOU LEARN A NEW JOB

YOU WILL BE BETTER

AT KILLING THE ORANGE FREEMOTHERS.

It had a profound effect on enrollment in the classes being offered.

A bigger problem was the ratio of sixty-eight men to nine women, which led to some serious fights until Persoff bluntly ordered the women to set up a rota of when they would and would not be available to any particular man. One man had to go into the ship’s organ bank before this was accepted, but after that there were no more fights—or attempted rapes.

His own partner of choice was Newmar, the ship’s master at arms, who had astonishing balance and a relaxed attitude about fidelity—which was good, because he had to pay some attention to each of the other women now and then or risk the appearance of favoritism.

The mission was never intended to last more than eight weeks. Holding the ship and crew together for more than a year and a half was a strain he’d never anticipated.

He got the remaining seventy-six of them through alive, and sane, as far as he could tell.

Persoff declared a celebration when they got down to point eight C, which was their intended cruising speed. In the midst of it, Potter, the communications officer on duty, interrupted him with the news that he was picking up a radio signal from a nearby system—transmitted on what, allowing for Doppler effects, must have started as a one-meter frequency. “It’s got to be from humans, sir.”

“What does it say?”

“Well, that’s a problem. It’s some kind of dot-dash system I’m not familiar with. Short groups, repeated.”

“What would they say if it were Morse code?”

“‘
OSO OSO OSO,’ over and over.”

People of merely high intelligence need not apply for special missions, and Persoff had not been made the leader of this crew for nothing. “It sounds like someone trying to send an SOS who doesn’t know Morse.”

Potter was no slouch himself. “Good grief. Got the dots and dashes reversed.”

“Exactly. I’ll be there at once. Call Conreid and Kershner and tell them to join me on the bridge.”

Conreid showed up barefoot, and Persoff forbore to ask what he’d interrupted. Kershner had been sleeping, and was wearing a bandolier of flasks of tea. When he arrived he was foggily opening a nicotine patch. “You can smoke if you want,” Persoff told him.

“Can’t stand the smell,” Kershner said, glaring at the patch as he worked the adhesive layer off one corner. “I just want the IQ boost.”

“Oh. We’re getting a signal from human beings in a system—how far away?”

“About two lightyears,” Potter said, “almost lateral to our course.”

“Right. I want you two to plot a course that’ll take us through hyperspace and come out at a point that’ll bring us to a halt in that system when we’re done decelerating.”