Man-Kzin Wars XIV (17 page)

“Oh. Okay. A little over fifteen days uphill from the source, then,” Kershner said.

“You worked that out just like that?” Persoff said.

“Hell, no,” Kershner said. “But I remember how long it was supposed to take us to ramp up to this speed.” He freed the patch, put it on, opened a flask, drained it, and said, “Then what?”

There had been complaints about Kershner’s manner from officers all through the trip. Hesitant ones. He’d been one of the corpsicles revived for training duty in the First War, and no one was entirely certain whether his behavior was due to an attitude problem or a touch of thawing damage—what the ARM called Ice on the Mind, and the corpsicles, even less politely, called Freezer Burn.

Some of them had been known to milk it for all it was worth. It would have been easier to deal with if so many of them hadn’t been the best in the world at something or other. Kershner, for example, had an intuitive grasp of hyperspatial relationships that rivaled that of Carmody herself. The odd part was that he wasn’t that much of a mathematician.

“Then we do it,” Persoff said.

“Okay.”

Kershner earned his pay as they came out of hyperspace. In a civilized system there would be beacons and beams providing constant, clear, insistent instructions about where the inhabited sites were and how to match course. This place just had the one repeating beacon, which wasn’t even enough to ascertain the plane of the ecliptic.

Nor, indeed, the extent of the local Oort halo. Something—just what wasn’t clear on the films afterward, but it must have been rock—sheared away a chunk of the outermost ram ring about three seconds after they returned to normal space. When they were checking, the tapes also showed that Kershner had them back in hyperspace something like a hundred and forty milliseconds after the alarm sounded, and they came out again a couple of seconds after that.

“We still have deflection,” Persoff told his crew after checking, “but that ring has to be rebuilt before we can collect fuel. We’ve got enough to make rendezvous, and what the planer can collect will run the ship while we make repairs. Kershner, that was some sweet piloting.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Kershner said, barely audible over the sound of his suit recycler starting up.

“Need anything?”

“Maybe new kidneys? I think I’ve ruined mine.”

Conreid found the beacon again, assessed its motion from the frequency changes, beat drums, burned incense, and gave an opinion of where the ecliptic was which proved to be accurate to within a tenth of a percent.

The planet was weird. It was Earth-like, but lower in density, and had a thicker atmosphere and no moon, and according to what was believed about planetary development that was just wrong. Earth had had much of its lightweight crust knocked off by a major collision, the debris had formed Luna, and the excess atmosphere had been stored as carbonates while things cooled. Just to make things more confusing, this place had too much nitrogen, about twice as much as Earth. Almost half as much as Venus.

There were huge icecaps, a lot of shallow ocean, and not much land. All of the land was islands, and all the islands had volcanoes, with the solitary exception of one big equatorial one. The source of the beacon was in synchronous orbit over that.

The source was colossal.

As they approached it kept getting bigger. It must have been half a mile long, not even counting the big spikes sticking out of each end. There was a hole in the side that the
Yorktown
would have just fitted into. Persoff, unable to find anything like it in the database, finally called Tokugawa as they were maneuvering for a better view of one of the spikes, to have him look at the images they were getting of it. He couldn’t believe humans had ever built a ship that big.

At his first glance the history buff screamed, “Get us away from that!”

Persoff had the planer at thirty gees before Tokugawa could inhale for the explanation. It was too late. This spike was a railgun longer than the
Yorktown
, and it threw one rock.

Drill called for everyone to be in suits for maneuvers, and the planer had moved the ship somewhat, but six men died when the rock hit, and most of one end of the ship was sheared off. It was the end the ram was attached to.

Persoff wrecked the railgun with a plasma shot and set about the serious business of getting them onto that island. There was no way they could stay in space to repair the ship. Half of the bio converter had gone with the ram.

He took his time setting the ship down, which was the best part about gravity planers: you could land a ship that was open to space. The bad news about the landing site was also the good news: almost all the island was covered by trees, in perfect rows, which meant that there were definitely people who thought like humans here. Kzinti liked loose forests with large clearings, Jotoki liked groves with pools in the middle, and the sonar-using Kdatlyno kept trees widely separated when they allowed them around at all.

Up close, the trees were mostly pines, which implied humans again; someone else might have taken over a world with a human ship orbiting it, but no race that wasn’t from Earth could stand the smell.

The
Yorktown
’s planer cut out just as they settled, and everyone and everything aboard gave a little bounce as the lower local gravity took over. Persoff froze, then said, “Emery, what was that?”

“I don’t know, Captain, but half my board just went black,” she replied. “The cutoff point . . . looks to be just about where that shot hit us.”

“Sweet reason. We just made it. Tokugawa, what was that ship? —Tokugawa?”

“He hit his head when he fell, sir,” said his assistant, Fiester.

“Tanj. How is he?”

“I got him to sick bay right away. He was doing well when I left.”

“Good grief, how fast were you moving? We just got down.”

“No, sir, not just now; he fainted when they shot at us.”

“Fainted?”

“Passed out? Went all pale and blotchy—”

“I’m familiar with the procedure. Sick bay, this is the captain, connect me with Tokugawa.”

“He’s not well, sir,” said Meier.

“Now, Doctor,” he told her.

“Doctors,” Kershner muttered.

“Sorry I funked, sir,” Tokugawa said.

“I gather you had reason? What is that ship, anyway?”

“It’s the Galaxias, sir. Built by Sinclair Enterprises in 2164. It was supposed to be the first manned ramship.”

“I never heard of it.”

“No, sir, it was headed in this general direction and disappeared in a big flash of light. It just dropped out of the news, and references to it disappeared.”

“That’s weird.”

“Not really. The UN didn’t want any bad publicity for the colony ships, and the ARM had draconian powers over the media even then. It was an experimental design, too. Had a whopping big Sinclair accelerator as part of its drive.”

“I would think they’d have noticed pretty quickly that it doesn’t really reduce inertia,” Persoff remarked.

“Not from outside the field,” Tokugawa agreed. “The thing is, they mounted the generator on a spike that extended way in front of the ship, and used the field as a nonmagnetic ramscoop. Everything went in just fine, but when it tried to get out the aft side of the field, it slowed way down and gathered at the middle. That was what got fed into the fusion drive. Worked great in the tests, and they kept solid objects out of the path with an early version of the medium ionizer all later ramships use, a big blue laser aimed forward from inside the field. Came out as X rays, vaporized everything. I guess the kzinti noticed the laser, attacked, and got fried like the ones we met. I was afraid that was the end pointed at us. Instead we got the exhaust accelerator.”

“Why was it so big?”

“Generation ship, sir. They were planning to go outside the plane of the galaxy and terraform planets, setting down colonies every century or so. The starting crew was three hundred, and they meant to expand to six thousand on each leg, retaining the best gene patterns in the crew for the next trip. They had embryo banks, seeds, bacteria, the works, mostly in stasis. They must have used the accelerator on the planet,” he added.

Persoff frowned. “Explain?”

“They couldn’t have had much choice about where to stop. The planet here would have been the right distance from the primary, but with no collision and no moon it would have been more like Venus or the lowlands of Plateau. If they separated the landing vessels and stocked them as lifeboats, they could have expanded the accelerator around the planet, so it radiated heat five hundred times as fast as it absorbed it. Let me see—Doctor, this computer link doesn’t work.”

“You’re injured,” came her voice.

“My hand is fine. See?” There was an exclamation and the sound of a smack. “Ow. Thanks. Now, yes, nine or ten years would be enough time for the carbonates to form, then they’d have the field timed to shut off, and seed algae and so forth.”

“You sound like you were there.”

“Oh, it’s an old idea. John Smith, an exile on Mars, came up with it before the First War as a way of terraforming Venus. He wanted to leave part of the atmosphere out to let the nitrogen boil off, then add water, and helium to keep the water from breaking down, like Jinx has.”

In spite of the urgency of the situation, Persoff had to ask, “Where was he going to get that much water?”

“Callisto.”

“The Jovian moon? The ships would roast in Jupiter’s radiation belts.”

“No ships. He wanted to hit Venus with Callisto. Ion thrusters. For some reason he couldn’t get the UN interested in moving a planet almost as big as Mars past Earth’s orbit.”

Kershner made a noise Persoff would normally have considered medically alarming, and put his face on his control board. Persoff was trying not to grin himself. “I would think not.”

“No. Anyway, Smith should be happy to hear it works, if we can get the news to him.”

“He’s still alive?”

“Was when we left. He’s one of those people who does really well in low gee. Has some weird medical condition that prevents osteoporosis, actually has to have excess calcium cleaned out of his cells on a regular basis. I’ve heard it suggested that’s inherited from our Pak ancestors.”

Persoff was not about to get into that can of worms. “Thanks. So the survivors planted these trees. Good.”

“Trees? Good lord, that’s a lot of trees. —Sir, we didn’t damage any, did we?” Tokugawa sounded badly worried.

“No. You think they’re sacred or something?”

“The Galaxias complement were handpicked, so I doubt they’d have fallen that far back, but I’m sure they’re deeply revered.”

“Well, it’s not as if we have to cut them all down or something,” Persoff said. “Get some rest. I have to check on my ship.” He signed off and said, “Damage and system reports.”

“What do you mean, we have to cut them all down?”

McCabe, the strongest man aboard, and conceivably the strongest anywhere who wasn’t from Jinx, hunched in on himself as if expecting to be hit. “The only way we can get off this planet is a launch catapult, sir. The planer is fried, and a lot of the hull is unsound. What we have to do is cobble together something that’ll get a work crew up to that hulk in orbit and strip the accelerator field generator for parts. That should allow us to fix the planer up there. The thing is, we don’t have the resources to construct an aerodynamic vehicle in less than years. We have to go straight to space all at once. No room to launch on fusion drive, because the ram’s shot, so we’d have to use the singleships for thrust, and they’re so hot the backwash would slaughter everything for miles. And they can fuse protons, so we sure can’t launch from the water. So we have to slap something together and fling it up there and leave the main fusion plant on the ground.”

“How many years would an aerospace ship take?” Persoff said.

“That depends on how many local inhabitants there are, and how fast they can learn. If they’re as smart as the Shogun says—”

“Who?”

“Uh, Tokugawa, sir. It’s kind of a running joke in Supply.”

“Go on.”

“If they’re that smart, I’d say we can have an infrastructure in place in ten years. Otherwise we’re looking at a couple of generations while we get the population up.”

“And building a spaceship would be faster than that?”

“We’ve already got spaceships, sir,” McCabe said. “They’re just not built to fly inside an atmosphere. I was going to use three fighter drives to let the orbiter maneuver in space. —And then of course we’ll also have to reassemble the
Yorktown
.”

Persoff sighed. Then he frowned, looked straight up, and stared very hard at the ceiling, as if seeing through it. Slowly, he said, “How long would it take to install the hyperdrive in a ship that still has a working ram?” He looked at the storesmaster again.

McCabe gaped at him, then pulled out a flaptop, unrolled it, and began working the problem out. “We’d have to do hull and systems repairs to the hulk at the same time, but it’s still less than the time we’ll spend building the catapult,” he finally said. “Maybe ten percent of what it’ll take to refit our own ship. Which we could put aboard and repair there.”

“Get together with Curtis in Engineering and work out what you need to do.” When McCabe winced, Persoff said, “What’s wrong?”

“He yells all the time.”

“That’s because he won’t accept a transplant for his hearing problem. He was running the communications in Munchen during the Hollow Moon incident. The pulse, when it went up, blew out one eardrum. Stayed at his post with blood running down his neck and the gain turned up for the other ear, so it screwed that one up too. They patched the drum, but if he ever sounds like he’s really angry, just ask to see his medals. That should keep him distracted for about half an hour.”

“He’s that proud of them?”

“There’s that many. Since you’ve got clearance for this mission, I’ll authorize you to hear the story of what really happened. Don’t ask him unless you want to hear it all, and really don’t ask unless you want to know something you won’t ever be able to tell anyone. I had to learn it to assess his value for this mission, and I wish I hadn’t. Go see him now.”