“Lambs to the slaughter,” said Leonie.
“There are weapons,” said Cumpston. “Dimity says sound affects them. Fly over a sonic drone.”
“It wouldn’t penetrate.”
“Our people have police sonics.”
“So did the police they grabbed. Protectors are tough. Sonics may discomfort them but I don’t think they’ll stop them for more than seconds. We might render them unconscious with directed sonics if we knew their brainwaves. Unfortunately we don’t know and haven’t time to find out. Shouting at them won’t be good enough.”
“There are a lot of other things. Nerve gas. Spectrum radiation.”
“They’re coming with the troops. Unfortunately a lot of our nerve gas supplies are kzin-specific and as for the rest—well, there are the human hostages.”
“If they have intelligence—and they do—they’ll be dispersing now.”
“You’ve got weapons here.”
“Most of them are for use in space. We can blast away at the limestone while they organize. It won’t be long before they’re shooting back at us.”
Dimity Carmody’s fingers had been running over a keyboard on the main control console. “Arthur,” she said. “Take us up higher. Fast. Put some southwest in it.”
“How high?”
“Just keep going.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain in a minute.”
The Tractate Middoth rose, drawing away from the caves. Higher.
Below them, from first one and then scores of openings, smoke and fire jetted from the escarpment and the limestone plain above it. The profile of the ground seemed to bulge. A fireball erupted, and another, and as they watched the whole scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein went sliding down into ruin.
“Fly!” roared Guthlac. The Tractate Middoth flashed away.
There was another explosion and a greater fireball, incandescent, blue-and-white-cored, burst from the seething ruin. It boiled into the sky, transforming into an orange-and-black cumulus, hideous and obscene to the watchers in the Tractate Middoth as they raced desperately upward into the clean stratosphere and away. Other fireballs followed.
“I kept the code numbers and detonation keying for the nukes,” said Dimity. “They were in Vaemar’s computer. It’s all over now. There was nothing else to do.”
“I’ll call defense HQ,” said Guthlac. “They’ll need to get decontamination teams to work fast. And before they signal a retaliatory strike on every kzin ship and world in reach.”
“But why didn’t you say what you were going to do?” asked Vaemar.
“I didn’t see why you should all have the responsibility. It’s all gone now. Protectors, Morlock, ferals, hostages, the whole cave system and countless species. A swathe of human farms and hamlets. Your rapid reaction teams. Your militia. A bewildered Protector who wondered about God. Did you want to live with that?”
Dimity looked up into Vaemar’s eyes and read his expression.
“I am very close to being a Protector,” she told him.
She put his great hand with its terrible razor claws on her forearm.
“Skin,” she said. “Not fur.”
Chapter 15
“I pronounce you man and wife,” said the abbot. “You may kiss the bride.”
Hand in hand, Arthur and Gale Guthlac walked from the monastery chapel, surrounded by their friends. Each in turn came to them and laid a wreath around their necks, the three intertwined colors of vegetation from three worlds that grew on Wunderland now: red, green and orange. Gale’s children had arrived from the Serpent Swarm. Guthlac’s crew had no swords as would once have been ceremonially drawn to make an arch for the couple to pass under, but they presented arms.
“Have you heard from Early?” Rykermann asked Cumpston as they crossed the garth.
“Yes. He didn’t betray much emotion about what happened. It’s a fait accompli, anyway. And the Protectors are gone. ARM is busy with other things. I imagine they are things that include us, and the Wunderkzin. But I’m tired of being one of ARM’s catspaws.”
“I should think there have been worse jobs than becoming Vaemar’s friend,” said Rykermann. “Even if he does thrash you on the chessboard.”
“I hope I’ll always be Vaemar’s friend,” said Cumpston. “But I feel a change in the whole course of my life is coming upon me.”
“For what reason.”
“I don’t know. Just a feeling. Something very new.”
“I didn’t know you were foresighted.”
“Neither did I.”
“I sense certain things too,” said Rykermann. “Dimity…Vaemar…whatever bond is between those two will not be broken.”
Arthur Guthlac, Gale, the abbot and two of the monks were laughing together at something. Orlando and Tabitha had lost little time after the ceremony in wriggling and clawing out of their ornate formal garments and were leaping through the long grass together after flutterbyes. Nurse, who, it had been decided, was indispensable whatever he charged, carried a bag of buttons for their claws.
“So it begins, perhaps,” said Rykermann. Now, with Leonie’s hand in his, he realized that he was looking at Dimity without hopeless pain and longing. Not because of what she had done, nor indeed because he loved her any the less, but because his love for Leonie filled his heart, suddenly, strangely, and with a depth and fullness he had never known before. She had been near death with him many times, but this time, watching her enter the Protectors’ caves with only Raargh, as he himself prayed desperately over a console of screens, had been different.
“Strange,” he said. “This was where it all began so many years ago. I had flown out here because the monks had sighted a strange creature, a big catlike thing that didn’t fit into the ecology.” He remembered giving the strange orange hair he had found to Leonie, his graduate student, to dissect. Thinking of her as she had been in those days, he realized something else. Her walk was as it had been then, no longer clumsy.
“So it begins,” echoed Colonel Cumpston, as he followed, escorting Dimity. His gaze wandered to Vaemar, resplendent in gold armor and shimmering cloak and sash of Earth silk, who, with Karan, Raargh and Big John, was pointing to one of the monastery fishponds. The juvenile Jotok he had helped save in Grossgeister Swamp were growing and joining. Orlando had fished one from a pond and was waving it playfully at Albert Manteufel. Don’t pretend to be scared, Albert! Cumpston tried to telepath him. Don’t pretend to run! But Guthlac’s pilot was a veteran and knew better than to do any such thing. A growl from Raargh and a gesture at his proud new possession—a second ear-ring for his belt, there being no room for more ears left on the first—and the kitten snapped to attention. Another growl and warning cuff from Karan and the Jotok was restored to the water.
“Hope. Perhaps joy. Perhaps, truly…peace. For this little world at least,” Cumpston said. As with Guthlac and Rykermann, many lines of strain and weariness seemed to have gone from his face. Reports from far-flung ships and bases were that the peace was holding. At this moment, for this moment at least, humans and the kzinti Empire were sharing a universe.
The group of friends drew together. Vaemar drew Rykermann aside for a moment.
“You love her, I know,” he said.
“Yes,” said Rykermann. He had never heard a kzin use the word “love” before, and wondered what Vaemar’s conception of it was. But he knew who he meant.
“I think I understand,” said Vaemar. “I say that to you alone. Speak it to no other human. She has taught me a little of that…but she must go her own way.”
“I know,” said Rykermann. They drifted apart in the flow of the company.
Dimity had known Cumpston since her return to Wunderland eight Earth-years previously. He and Vaemar had made the counterattack that had relieved their desperately outnumbered group in the fight against the mad ones. But now it was as if she saw him for the first time: a hardened warrior and leader, yet a man whose kindness and patience had done as m
uch as any to bring peace to this tortured planet. That unnatural blend of human qualities that made up the knight.
The wedding party drifted through the monastery gates into the meadow spangled and starred with its multicolored flowers. Brightly-colored creepers covered the last few outlines of what had once been a refugee shantytown. Two pavilions had been set up, food laid out for two different feasts, and a couple of great kzin drums. There would be dancing later. Orlando and Tabitha were looking forward to that.
Vaemar again approached Rykermann and Leonie as they walked. His eyes followed Rykermann’s to Dimity, her hand moving to take the colonel’s.
“I know she had to do what she did,” he said. “I know more about the Pak, the Protectors, now. There was no choice.” He muttered something about a dream that Rykermann did not hear clearly.
“We humans have come a long way from the Pak,” said Rykermann. “How far will we go? What will we become?”
And then: “What will we all become.”
“That, I think,” said Vaemar, “is a very good question.”
TEACHER’S PET
Matthew Joseph Harrington
I
PLEASANCE: 70 Ophiuchi AB-I (A-II/B-V), located in Trojan relationship to its binary suns, Topaz and Amethyst. Orbital distance from either star 20.8 A.U. Principal source of heat geothermal. Gravity: .93. Diameter: 6510 miles. Rotation: 27 hours 55 minutes. Year: 12263 standard days. Axial inclination
Pleasance’s crops are grown under artificial lighting, as natural illumination comes to about 0.5% of Earth’s. The climate does not vary with latitude, and qualifies as warm temperate. Constant low-level vulcanism is found everywhere on the planet, both land and sea. Almost all of Pleasance’s warmth is due to release of massive fossil heat by outgassing of carbon dioxide and helium; the carbon dioxide is taken up by native oceanic life with great efficiency. Local lifeforms are killed by excess light, however.
The planet has the distinction of being the only known habitable world whose orbit is outside its system’s singularity, so that ships may reach it within minutes after leaving hyperspace.
As a result of its founders’ propensities, Pleasance’s culture is legalistic to a possibly excessive degree…
Peace Corben’s mother was this old: she had met Lucas Garner.
The name had not been Corben, then, and the real name wasn’t in the records Peace had found in Cockroach’s computer. Possibly the old woman hadn’t seen any reason to include it; more likely, given her paranoia, she’d feared its discovery by hostile parties.
Like everything else she’d tried to be, Jan Corben had been a great paranoid. The ship was a fine example.
It looked like a mining ship designed by a cube director. An old Belter drive guide protruded from a wallowing hog of a hull. The lifesystem seemed to be mostly windows. The cardinal points bristled with important-looking, redundant instruments. Some of the windows had curtains. It was ludicrous. It was all a lie.
The “windows” were viewscreens, showing the universe whatever the pilot pleased. Most of the “instruments” were antipersonnel weapons with proximity triggers. The “drive guide” was a gamma-ray laser; the actual drive had come with the hull, which was that of a First War kzin courier ship. The gravity planer developed six hundred gravities—twenty times the limit now allowed by treaty. A little bubble in the nose and three behind the central bulge were all that showed of the real instrument packages, which were in four General Products #1 hulls to enable them to survive events that required the rest of the ship to use one or more stasis fields. There was a fusion drive, but it was for the oversized attitude jets. When acting in concert with the gyros, which were also oversized, they could turn the ship a full 360 degrees in any plane in 1.2 seconds, coming to a dead stop; faster for smaller adjustments, of course. This aimed the laser anywhere. There was a suitfitter in the autodoc; what the suit locker held was powered armor. All this had been accumulated over the course of three Wars’ time, and consistently upgraded as technology progressed. The latest addition, barely older than Peace herself, was a top-of-the-line hyperdrive motor, custom-built by Cornelius Industries of We Made It.
That last may have been a mistake. There were laws about product safety, and since you could more or less smooth out the convolutions in your brain thinking of what could result from a faulty hyperdrive, there was a strict schedule of warranty inspections. During one of these, some Helpful Citizen had apparently noticed one of the other features. The old woman had still been in Rehab when the kzinti bombed Pleasance.
When Peace had stolen the ship—trivially easy, in the panic—her first act had been to go after her mother. Rehabilitation included work therapy, to the point where there were economically vital companies that would go broke if every law were obeyed. The camps were guarded and organized as thoroughly as bases for conscript troop training.
Doubtless that was why the kzinti had bombed them so heavily.
Peace was circling over Camp Fourteen for the fourth time, scanning for any rubble that might be loose enough to hold survivors, when it became apparent that the invaders had realized that their order-of-battle included no antiques. (The hull display had been altered to Heroes’ Script that translated as something like Unthinking Lunge, a not-atypical ship’s name. Probably curtained windows would have attracted attention sooner.) Cockroach’s hull was coated with superconductor under the screen layer, but the lasers aimed at it were designed for planetary assault. It got very warm inside before Peace found the panic button.
It was a good panic button. It had a routine for almost anything. Inundation by laser fire didn’t even call up lesser subroutines.
Cockroach turned on its head, the lifesystem went into stasis, and the hull became a perfect reflector. It was textured with optical corners. Most of the kzinti ships lost their paint and a little hullmetal before their lasers switched off, but the one nearest the azimuth was lined up with Cockroach’s drive guide. The planer held the ship immobile while the stinger fired, and a stream of ultrahard gamma rays ran back up the beam coming from the orbiting flagship. All the oscillating electrons in the flagship laser’s pulse chamber suddenly left it at relativistic speeds. Kzin weaponcraft was amazing, but it wasn’t magic: the insulators blew, and dense random currents scrambled every circuit they touched—a category which included nervous systems. Survivors didn’t suffer, as the effect opened the circuit of the stasis on the mirror at the back of the laser, and the gamma beam punched through into a fuel preheater. This opened a channel between the main fusion plant and a deuterium tank. After that—
Well, there wasn’t really a flagship after that.
Peace didn’t learn of the flagship’s destruction until days later. She merely saw the ground leap up at her, then saw it further off and receding, then saw it much further off and receding a lot faster, obscured by a glowing smoke ring. (Cockroach had gone back into stasis to pass through the fireball.) More trouble followed, figuratively and literally.
The portmaster at Arcadia had been unwilling to keep a fully-fueled warship at her field, and had had Cockroach’s tanks drained. The ship could and did extract deuterium from ambient water vapor, but there wasn’t much built up by the time of the attack, and the gravity planer was using that up right smartly. Fortunately—from the computer’s viewpoint—there was an excellent source of very pure hydrogen barely a quarter-radian off the ship’s present course. Unfortunately—for Peace’s nerves—it was Lucifer: 70 Ophiuchi B-IV, a gas giant larger but less massive than Jupiter. Cockroach accelerated toward it for slightly over half an hour, leaving a fuel reserve that would have fit inside a coffee urn, and spent the next twenty-six hours and change in free flight.
Torpedoes could have been upgraded to catch th
e ship; this was not even contemplated. The invasion’s flag officer, who was now interacting with Pleasance’s magnetic field, had been Hthht’-Riit, bravest son of the Patriarch. It was he who had come up with the plan of taking over remote human worlds first and working their way in, a strategy which might actually have succeeded if he’d remained alive to keep the fleet from making sudden lunges. As it was, the rest of the shipmasters didn’t want the human pilot vaporized: they wanted “him” kept alive for as long as possible, while they expressed their extreme disappointment.
It took seven hours of screaming and spitting to cram a fuel tank large enough into a 25G assault boat; kzinti do not work and play well with others. They were not stupid—less so with every War they lost—and they knew it had to be done if they wanted to flyby and yoke before the human could refuel. A 20G destroyer, say, could never have done it in time.
The assault boat was closing the gap at three thousand miles per second when it finally got close enough to throw on a gravity yoke. The boat’s radiator blossom instantly turned sheer white. Cockroach’s gamma cannon was detected starting up, but this was deemed of far less concern than the heat-exchange situation: hitting at this range would have required a miracle, and not a small one. Humans simply weren’t that good.
They were notoriously demented. This one was no exception. The human ship wasn’t on an atmosphere-skimming path, it was aimed for the center of the disk. By the time their velocities were matched, slowing the pursuer and speeding up the prey, no further effort could be spared to bring them together yet, as the boat was engaged in hauling them both aside to save the human ship’s crew.
Cockroach, aboard which Peace Corben had finished having conniptions hours ago, fired its gamma laser into Lucifer’s atmosphere and went immediately into stasis. The shot heated a large volume to electrons and stripped nuclei, but did not suffice to ignite fusion. It took the impact, a few milliseconds later, of the relativistic byproducts of the gamma-generating blast to do that. The atmospheric fusion blast was brief, and didn’t do much more than UV-ionize a tremendous volume of hydrogen around it, which expanded until it was cool enough to recombine. This created, then uncreated, a discontinuity about the size of Earth’s Moon in Lucifer’s magnetic field.