Man-Kzin Wars IV Larry Niven (ink ebook reader .txt) 📖

for himself but for the wretched animal. Ssis was only playing, having fun, but the beast didn’t know that. Trainer reached a hand up, trying to think of something to growl at his companion that would restrain him.

The terrified boy, unable to retreat, charged with his spear. “Die Zeit ist um! Rattekatze!”

Ssis whacked him aside with unsheathed claws, but instead of picking himself up and running, the animal charged again with berserk energy, spearless. His body rebounded from the massive bulk of the moving kzin. He no longer had a face.

“No sense of humor,” said Ssis-Captain, rolling the corpse onto its back with his foot.

Trainer-of-Slaves lowered his hand. They were so frail! He stooped over the youngling-beast to check for signs of life, the heady blood-odor stimulating his hunger. “He’s dead!” There was no help for it. They stripped the clothes off the body and took turns ripping it apart with their fangs. What they left was a pile of bloody bones, half the flesh still uneaten, the braincase smashed open for the delicacy within.

One day later a grim Herrenmann arrived at the kzin base desperately trying to hold his rage within a propitiative framework. Yiao-Captain greeted him, at first not reading Peter Nordbo’s state of mind. The hints of rebellion only raised Yiao-Captain’s ire. Nordbo shifted his argument. Gerning was a small town. If the taxpayers were hunted, who would pay the taxes?

“I have supplied your base faithfully. How can I collect your tithe if this goes on?”

“I will conduct an investigation.” Yiao opened a switch on his desk. “Data-Sergeant. Get me information. Who was hunting yesterday?”

Later Yiao had Ssis-Captain and Trainer-of-Slaves ordered to his office. He left them standing at attention. His mouth was twitching around its fangs. “You have been guests here at this base,” he growled, making it plain that they no longer were. “I have let you roam freely. You have been serving in cramped quarters and I have sympathy for those who do their duty under trying circumstances. You have no authority to kill my taxpayers. Nor any reason. The woods abound with lower game.” Contemptuously, the tip of Yiao’s naked tail flicked back and forth. “This youngling you attacked, was that the best test of your prowess that you could find? Next you’ll be devouring suckling kits.”

Yiao-Captain let the warriors stand while he attended to other matters. Finally he pulled out papers for Ssis-Captain. “You have been recalled to the fleet immediately. I have seen to it that you will not return to the surface of Wunderland. You’ll have to do your hunting on Man-home. I hear that there they have a surplus of taxpayers.”

He had even worse words for Trainer-of-Slaves. “And I have investigated you, too. You have been toadying around the base seeking a fighting position in the Fourth Fleet, slithering behind the command of those who have been appointed to consider the staffing of the Fleet. You have a record of cowardice. Your presence aboard a fighting ship would endanger its Heroes. I have seen to it that you are being recalled to your duties at Fortress Aarku, immediately.”

CHAPTER 15

(2402–2403 A.D.)

When the Fourth Fleet convoys began to assemble, stripping Centaurian space of its slaves and Heroes and warcraft, the Fortress Aarku became a tomb smelling of the Jotoki pens burrowed into the rock. The trained slaves were gone. The maintenance hangars were empty.

After wonderland, Aarku was a coffin.

Trainer-of-Slaves suffered for another year at Alpha Centauri B. He tried to keep his contraband kzinrret happy, but she missed the flirtations of the warriors who were on their way to Man-sun and became moody and demanding. She did not comprehend the war. She only knew that she had been abandoned. She wanted attention. She rubbed against Trainer while he was trying to work. When he rebuffed her, she took to stalking his personal Jotoki and actually killed one of his trainees. When Long-Reach discreetly approached his master for help, they decided to store her away in a hibernation coffin and only bring her out when Trainer felt the craving.

Months after the Fourth Fleet was gone, remnants of the Third Fleet began to arrive at Alpha Centauri. Hangers at Aarku filled. Polarizers improperly maintained for a decade needed a fully stripped overhaul, but more than that there was much old battle damage too drastic to have been repaired in transit.

Trainer-of-Slaves personally crawled through the last of the stragglers. Eight survivors out of a crew of forty had brought it home, three of them dying of injuries en route. Inspection showed that The Vindictive Memory had taken a near fatal internal explosion. The ship’s command sector had been pierced in three places by x-ray bolts. Space desiccated kzin were still trapped in one compartment. In the main gunnery turret three carbonized kzin lay melded to their weapons. The ship was not salvageable.

It was enough to chill the liver. Trainer-of-Slaves was reminded that he was afraid of death. How had he let Ssis-Captain mesmerize him with dreams of valor?

Orders relieving him of his duties at Aarku came as an electric surprise.

Some young son of a noble name had annoyed Chuut-Riit and was being given the Aarku assignment as penance. Even though Trainer was to be allowed three personal slaves, the new post didn’t look appetizing—the commission involved a permanent position, not on Wunderland or Tiamat, but in deep space. Another dead-end for a coward? Yet the commission script bore the seal of the Fifth Fleet.

The tiny ship that brought him out, all gravitic drive and no armor or armament, was called a Ztirgor after a long-legged browser of Kzin that could run and dodge skillfully through brush and hills but had no other defense against attack. They were two light-days out, a six day trip by Ztirgor at 70 Kzin gravities of acceleration with a turn-around velocity a third that of light. Alpha Centauri had been reduced from suns to a coruscant pair of stars in Andromeda.

* * *

They were drifting in