Locklear privately realized that Parker was right. And then Parker himself, who had turned half away from Scarface, made a discovery of his own. He discovered that, without moving one step, a Kzin could reach out a long way to stick the point of a wtsai against a man’s throat. Parker froze.
“If you shoot me, you are deader than chivalry,” Locklear said, propping himself up on an elbow. “Toss the pistol away.”
Parker, cursing, did so, looking at Scarface, finding his chance as the Kzin glanced toward the weapon. Parker shied away with a sidelong leap, snatching for his slung rifle. And ignoring the leg of Locklear who tripped him nicely.
As his rifle tumbled into grass, Parker rolled to his feet and began sprinting for the warship two hundred meters away. Scarface outran him easily, then stationed himself in front of the warship’s hatch. Locklear could not hear Parker’s words, but his gestures toward the wtsai were clear: there ain’t no justice.
Scarface understood. With that Kzin grin that so many humans failed to understand, he tossed the wtsai near Parker’s feet in pure contempt. Parker grabbed the knife and saw his enemy’s face, howled in fear, then raced into the forest, Scarface bounding lazily behind.
Locklear knocked the limb away from his cabin door and found Ruth inside with three others, all young females. He embraced the homely Ruth with great joy. The other young Neanderthalers disappeared from the clearing in seconds but Ruth walked off with Locklear. He had already seen the spider grenades that lay with sensors outspread just outside the cabin’s walls. Two gentles had already died trying to dig their way out, she said.
He tried to prepare Ruth for his ally’s appearance but, when Scarface reappeared with his wtsai, she needed time to adjust. “I don’t see any blood,” was Locklear’s comment.
“The blood of cowards is distasteful,” was the Kzin’s wry response. “I believe you have my sidearm, friend Locklear.”
They should have counted, said Locklear, on Stockton learning to fly the Kzin lifeboat. But lacking heavy weapons, it might not complicate their capture strategy too much. As it happened, the capture was more absurd than complicated.
Stockton brought the lifeboat bumbling down in late afternoon almost in the same depressions the craft’s jackpads had made previously, within fifty paces of the Anthony Wayne. He and the lissome Grace wore holstered pistols, stretching out their muscle kinks as they walked toward the bigger craft, unaware that they were being watched. “Anse; we’re back,” Stockton shouted. “Any word from Gomulka?”
Silence from the ship, though its hatch steps were down. Grace shrugged, then glanced at Locklear’s cabin. “The door prop is down, Curt. He’s trying to hump those animals again.”
“Damn him,” Stockton railed, and both turned toward the cabin. To Grace he complained, “If you were a better lay, he wouldn’t always be—good God!”
The source of his alarm was a long blood-chilling, gut-wrenching scream. A Kzin scream, the kind featured in horror holovision productions; and very, very near. “Battle stations, red alert, up ship,” Stockton cried, bolting for the hatch.
Briefly, he had his pistol ready but had to grip it in his teeth as he reached for the hatch rails of the Anthony Wayne. For that one moment he almost resembled a piratical man of action, and that was the moment when he stopped, one foot on the top step, and Grace bumped her head against his rump as she fled up those steps.
“I don’t think so,” said Locklear softly. To Curt Stockton, the muzzle of that alien sidearm so near must have looked like a torpedo launcher. His face drained of color, the commander allowed Locklear to take the pistol from his trembling lips. “And Grace,” Locklear went on, because he could not see her past Stockton’s bulk, “I doubt if it’s your style anyway, but don’t give your pistol a second thought. That Kzin you heard? Well, they’re out there behind you, but they aren’t in here. Toss your parabellum away and I’ll let you in.”
Late the next afternoon they finished walling up the crypt on Newduvai, with a small work force of willing hands recruited by Ruth. As the little group of gentles filed away down the hillside, Scarface nodded toward the rubble-choked entrance. “I still believe we should have executed those two, Locklear.”
“I know you do. But they’ll keep in stasis for as long as the war lasts, and on Newduvai—Well, Ruth’s people agree with me that there’s been enough killing.” Locklear turned his back on the crypt and Ruth moved to his side, still wary of the huge alien whose speech sounded like the sizzle of fat on a skewer.
“Your ways are strange,” said the Kzin, as they walked toward the nearby pinnace. “I know something of Interworld beauty standards. As long as you want that female lieutenant alive, it seems to me you would keep her, um, available.”
“Grace Agostinho’s beauty is all on the outside. And there’s a girl hiding somewhere on Newduvai that those deserters never did catch. In a few years she’ll be—Well, you’ll meet her someday.” Locklear put an arm around Ruth’s waist and grinned. “The truth is, Ruth thinks I’m pretty funny-looking, but some things you can learn to overlook.”
At the clearing, Ruth hopped from the pinnace first. “Ruth will fix place nice, like before,” she promised, and walked to the cabin.
“She’s learning Interworld fast,” Locklear said proudly. “Her telepathy helps—in a lot of ways. Scarface, do you realize that her people may be the most tremendous discovery of modern times? And the irony of it! The empathy these people share probably helped isolate them from the modern humans that came from their own gene pool. Yet their kind of empathy might be the only viable future for us.” He sighed and stepped to the turf. “Sometimes I wonder whether I want to be found.”
Standing beside the pinnace, they gazed at the Anthony Wayne. Scarface said, “With that warship, you could do the finding.”
Locklear assessed the longing in the face of the big Kzin. “I know how you feel about piloting, Scarface. But you must accept that I can’t let you have any craft more advanced than your scooter back on Kzersatz.”
“But—Surely, the pinnace or my own lifeboat?”
“You see that?” Locklear pointed toward the forest.
Scarface looked dutifully away, then back, and when he saw the sidearm pointing at his breast, a look of terrible loss crossed his face. “I see that I will never understand you,” he growled, clasping his hands behind his head. “And I see that you still doubt my honor.”
Locklear forced him to lean against the pinnace, arms behind his back, and secured his hands with binder tape. “Sorry, but I have to do this,” he said. “Now get back in the pinnace. I’m taking you to Kzersatz.”
“But I would have—”
“Don’t say it,” Locklear demanded. “Don’t tell me what you want, and don’t remind me of your honor, goddammit! Look here, I know you don’t lie. And what if the next ship here is another Kzin ship? You won’t lie to them either, your bloody honor won’t let you. They’ll find you sitting pretty on Kzersatz, right?”
Teetering off-balance as he climbed into the pinnace without using his arms, Scarface still glowered. But after a moment he admitted, “Correct.”
“They won’t court-martial you, Scarface. Because a lying, sneaking monkey pulled a gun on you, tied you up, and sent you back to prison. I’m telling you here and now, I see Kzersatz as a prison and every tabby on this planet will be locked up there for the duration of the war!” With that, Locklear sealed the canopy and made a quick check of the console readouts. He reached across to adjust the inertia-reel harness of his companion, then shrugged into his own. “You have no choice, and no tabby telepath can ever claim you did. Now do you understand?”
The big Kzin was looking below as the forest dropped away, but Locklear could see his ears forming the Kzin equivalent of a smile. “No wonder you win wars,” said Scarface.
THE CHILDREN’S HOUR
Jerry Pournelle & S.M. Stirling
* * *
Copyright © 1989 by Jerry Pournelle & S.M. Stirling
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Authors’ Dedications:
Steve Stirling:
To Jan, with love
To Farrell McGovern, for lending me his computer when mine broke down—amici ex machina.
To Jerry Pournelle, for being a fascinating collaborator, an interesting conversationalist, a thoughtful host, and a thorough gentleman.
Jerry Pournelle:
To Steve Stirling, who seems determined to ruin my reputation for irascibility.
Chapter I
“We want you to kill a Kzin.”
The general didn’t seem to be joking. Captain Jonah Matthieson frowned and reminded himself that flatlanders were odd. Damned odd. He ran his hand down the short-cropped black crest that was his concession to military dress codes. Even by Belter standards Jonah was tall, and if he’d stood straight he would have made a fine figure of a soldier, but he stood in the alert crouch Belters learn early. Matthieson’s green slanted eyes showed little amusement as they flickered over General Buford Early’s developing paunch. “Well…that’s more or less what I’ve been doing.”
The general’s expression didn’t change, but he took a box of cheroots from his desk, offered one perfunctorily, and lit his own with a lighter built into what looked to be a genuine Kzin skull. “Gracie. Display. A-7, schematic,” Early said through a cloud of thick smoke.
The rear wall of the cubicle office lit with a display of hatchmarked columns. Jonah stared without comprehension.
“That’s been boiled down to make it easier to see,” the general said. “Ships, weapons, casualties, for both sides. Think of it as battle intensity and duration.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Now look at it this way. Gracie: time sequence, phased.” The screen changed to show four separate matts. “Captain, this is the record of the four fleets the Kzin have sent since they took Wunderland and the Alpha Centauri system, forty-two years ago. Notice anything?”
Jonah shrugged. “We’re losing.” The war with the felinoid aliens had been going on since before his birth—since humanity’s first contact with them, sixty years before. Interstellar warfare at sublight speeds was a game for the patient.
“Fucking brilliant, Captain!” The general was short, black, and balding, and carried a mass of muscle that was almost obscene to someone raised in low gravity. He looked to be in early middle age, which depending on how much he cared about appearances, might mean anything up to a century and a half these days. “Yeah. We’re losing. Their fleets are getting bigger and their weapons are getting better. We’ve made some improvements, too, but not as fast as they have.”
Jonah nodded. There wasn’t any need to say anything.
“What do you think I did before the war?” the general demanded.
“I have no idea, sir.”
“Sure you do: ARM bureaucrat, like all the other generals,” Early said. “Well, I was. But I also taught military history in the ARM Academy. Damn near the only Terran left who paid any attention to the subject.”
“Oh.”
“Right. We weren’t ready for wars, any of us. Terrans didn’t believe in them. Belters didn’t either; too damned independent. Well, the goddamn pussies do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. Everyone knows that. Now think about it, Captain. We’re facing a race of carnivores with a unified interstellar government of completely unknown size, organized for war. They started ahead of us, and now they’ve had Wunderland and its belt for better than a generation. If nothing else, at this rate they can eventually swamp us with numbers. Just one set of multimegatonners getting through to Earth—”
The general puffed on his cigar with short, vicious breaths.
Jonah shivered inside himself at the thought: all those people dependent on a single life-support system. He wondered how flatlanders had ever stood it. Why, a single asteroid impact…The Belt was less vulnerable. Too much delta vee need to match the wildly varying vectors of its scores of thousands of rocks; its targets were weaker individually, but vastly more numerous and scattered.
He forced his mind back to the troll-like man before him, gagging slightly on the smell of the tobacco. Even with his rank, how does he get away with that on shipboard? He had thought that even on Earth, the filthy habit had died out. It must have been revived since the pussies came, like so many archaic customs.
Like war and armies, the Belter thought sardonically. The branch-of-service insignias on the shoulder of the flatlander’s coverall were not ones he recognized. Of course, there were 18 billion people in the solar system, and most of them seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform these days; flatlanders loved playing dress-up. Comes of having nothing useful to do most of their lives, he supposed.
“So every time it gets harder,” Early said. “First time was bad enough, but they really underestimated us. Did the next time, too, but not so badly. They’re getting better all the time. This last one—that was bad.” General Early pointedly eyed the ribbons on Jonah’s chest. Two Comets, and the unit citation his squadron of Darts had earned when they destroyed a Kzin fighter-base ship.
“As you know. You saw some of that. What you didn’t see was the big picture—because we censored it, even from our military units. Captain, they nearly broke us. Because we underestimated them. This time they didn’t just ‘shriek and leap,’ they came in tricky, fooled us completely when they looked like retreating…and we know why.”
He spoke to the computer again, and the rear wall became a holo image. Centered in it was a woman wearing lieutenant’s stripes and the same branch-badges as the general. Tall, slender, and paler-skinned than most, she was muscular in the fashion of low gravity types who exercise. When she spoke it was in Belter dialect.
“The subject’s name was Esteban Cheung Jagrannath,” the woman said. The screen split, and a battered-looking individual appeared beside her. Jonah’s eye picked out the glisten of sealant over artificial skin, the dying-rummy pattern of burst blood vessels from explosive decompression, the mangy look of someone given accelerated marrow treatments for radiation overdose. That is one sorry-looking son of a bitch. “He claims to have been born in Tiamat, in the Serpent Swarm of Wunderland, twenty-five subjective years ago.”
Now I recognize the accent, Jonah thought. The lieutenant’s English had a guttural quality despite the crisp Belter vowels; descendants of Belters who migrated to the asteroids of Alpha Centauri talked that way. Wunderlander influence.
“Subject is a power-systems specialist, drafted into the Kzin service as a crewman on a corvette tender—” the blue eyes looked down to a read-out below the pickup’s line of sight “—called—” Something followed in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero’s Tongue.
“Roughly translated, the Bounteous Mother’s Teats. Tits took a near-miss from a radiation-pulse bomb. The Kzin captain didn’t have time to self-destruct; the bridge took most of the blast. She was a big mother—” the general blinked, snorted “—so a few of the repair crew survived, like this gonzo. All humans, as were most of the technical staff. We found a few nonhuman, nonKzin as well, but they were all killed. Pity.”
Jonah and the flatlander nodded in unconscious unison. The Kzin empire was big, hostile, not interested in negotiation, and contained many subject species and planets; and that was about the limit of human knowledge. Not much background information had been included in the computers of the previous fleets, and very little of that survived; vessels too badly damaged for their crews to self-destruct before capture usually held little beyond wreckage.
The general spoke again. “Gracie, fast-forward to the main point.” The holo-recording blurred ahead. “Captain, you can review at your leisure. It’s all important background, but for now…” The general signed and the recording returned to normal speed.
“…the new Kzin commander arrived three years before they left. His name’s Chuut-Riit, which indicates a close relation to the…‘Patriarch,’ that’s as close as we’ve been able to get. Apparently, Chuut-Riit’s first or
der was to delay the departure of the fleet.” A thin smile. “Chuut-Riit’s not just related to their panjumandrum; he’s an author, of sorts. Two works on strategy: Logistical Preparation As The Key to Victory In War, and Conquest Through The Defensive Offensive.”
Jonah shaped a soundless whistle. Not your typical Kzin. If we have any idea of what a typical Kzin is like. We’ve only met their warriors, coming our way behind beams and bombs.
The lieutenant’s image was agreeing with him. “The pussies find him a little eccentric as well; according to the subject, gossip had it that he fought a whole series of duels, starting almost the moment he arrived and held a staff conference. The new directives included a massive increase in the fleet’s support infrastructure, and he ordered and supervised a complete changeover in tactics, especially to ensure that accurate reports of the fighting got back to Wunderland.”
The flatlander general cut off the scene with a wave. “So.” He folded his hands and leaned forward, the yellowish whites of his eyes glittering in lights that must be kept deliberately low. “We are in trouble, Captain. So far we’ve beaten off the pussies because we’re a lot closer to our main sources of supply, and because they’re…predictable. Adequate tacticians, but with little strategic sense, less even than we had at first, despite the Long Peace. The analysts say that indicates they’ve never come across much in the way of significant opposition before. If they had they’d have learned from it like they are—damn it!—learning from us.
“And in fact, what little intelligence information we’ve got, a lot of it from prisoners taken with the Fourth Fleet, backs that up; the Kzin just don’t have much experience of war.”
Jonah blinked. “Not what you’d assume,” he said carefully.
A choppy nod. “Yep. Surprises you, eh? Me, too.”