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

kind of capsule-braking would have been observed. And how had they penetrated Chuut-Riit’s security to juggle creche feeding procedures so that Chuut-Riit had to face his own ravenously hungry sons behind locked doors? It seemed like magic. Of course it wasn’t.

But now—an unauthorized ship that wrote its own unique gravity pulse. Could it be that the ramscoop hadn’t delivered the agents? Was there a new player? He remembered Yiao-Captain’s visit and his infectious insistence that they point their long distance antenna toward a possible “alien” artifact. Another orphaned piece of the puzzle that “protruded.”

This was indeed a time of troubles. After the launch of the three Screamers, Grraf-Hromfi brooded briefly on the other troubles while he did his warrior’s duty, waiting…

…troubles enough to incline Grraf-Hromfi to leap off for Man-sun immediately and let these slashing Wunderkzin rip their own faces apart. Octals of the kzin nobility, who had been chafing under the rule of the outsider Chuut-Riit, had seized the assassination as license for them to seize power. Traat-Admiral’s claws had been busy with duels. Political chaos.

Regrettably, border barbarians were uneducated in honor! They thought of duels and Ascendancy as honor. They thought of death as Opportunity. They knew nothing of the honor of Loyalty After Death.

Leaving them to their own murders was a warm, meaty idea, but impractical. The Fifth Fleet needed Wunderland as its supply base. They couldn’t use Hssin. It was extra light-years away and Hssinkzin were all related by blood and warrior oaths to the original Centauri Conquest Heroes anyway.

The ramscoop attack, itself, had done little damage—but it had brought hundreds of honest slaves to a state of feral defiance. Now open defiance was spreading like a plague as the squabbles among the kzin became public knowledge. Ferals had even attacked the Gerning base from space and put its detectors out of commission for three days, long enough to land supplies for some of the renegade animals.

Grraf-Hromfi was in a bad mood because he was just back from a political tour of Wunderland estates. He had picked the most obsequious of the power hungry back-stabbers first, cleverly led them to state the claims they believed to be true, challenged them to a duel for false claims, and killed them. After three such contests of honor, the rest of the Wunderkzin learned more quickly the value of careful reason. The power hungry always made the same mistake—they built their True Case, the case they were willing to defend in public, upon false logic.

Detection-Orderly-Two appeared at the oval bulkhead door of the Command Center of the Sherrek’s Ear. “Sire! May I have your attention again?”

Grraf-Hromfi glanced up. The orderly mock-slashed his face sharply. “You look like you’ve just bested your father at arm-tug. Found something new? I hope not another of those objects.”

“No, Sire, not in this system. But I have something for you to consider, if you will, sir. May I use your data-link?” Without even waiting for assent, he switched on the wall screen and spat-hissed commands to the retrieval slavecrystal. Ribbons of telemetering appeared. “These are mystery signals which the Second Black Pride has been relaying to us from Man-sun for analysis. They started arriving about three months ago, off and on. We have never been sure that they weren’t noise, or the artifact of some instrument malfunction.”

“You’ve found something there besides noise?”

“Yes, sir! They all have the same signature as our mysterious visitor. I did a comparison. It came out at the seven-eighths confidence level—excellent, considering that the signals we have are only whiskers above the noise jiggles. The Patriarch’s Nose has been seeing what we have been seeing—but just inside their maximum range.”

“And 4.3 years ago,” muttered Grraf-Hromfi. “We must never forget the lightlag. A lot can happen in five years. The Fifth Fleet has doubled in that time. Who knows what cunning they have been up to at Man-sun.”

“What do you think the mystery object is, sir?”

“A scout.”

“Do you think they’ve found a way to travel at lightspeed, sire?”

“We’ll find out. All detection squads are on full battle alert?”

“Yes, Sire!”

Grraf-Hromfi was now very worried. Was the pulse-object a visitor from Man-sun? He turned up the gravity in the Command Room so that he could pace. On impulse he called Trainer-of-Slaves for a goggle-to-goggle conference. “You paw around with those agonized shrieks-and-spits of demented mathematicians? Their water-hole tracks describing unified field theory?” The virtual image of Trainer-of-Slaves hung in the air like a ghost, fixed in position.

“Dominant Sire, I’ve inflicted some of that torture upon myself, yes. Do you want an opinion on that pulse?”

“What would this sudden appearance of mass mean?”

“You are suggesting that the pulse tells of the creation of mass out of nothing?” asked Trainer.

“Yes.”

“That’s impossible, sir. My opinion of the pulse…”

“Mate yourself to a sthondat! I didn’t ask your opinion, Eater-of-Grass, I asked what it meant!”

“To avoid your insults, I will tell you what you wish to hear. Any mass passing through the light barrier would appear as if it had been created out of nothing.”

“But this one wasn’t moving at relativistic speeds.”

“Light barriers can be stationary. I refer you to the work of Ssrkikn-the-Juggler: ‘The Event Horizons of…’ ”

“Yes, yes, yes. Can mass pass through an event horizon?”

“Mass pops out of black holes all the time but it can’t bring any information with it. Your faster-than-light ship would fry its occupants down to their unreadable parts. You couldn’t find out where they came from—not even the direction.”

“You think we’ll have a simpler explanation for this pulse?”

“I do, but my opinion is worthless beside your own, Lord Commander!”

“In a few days I may have the object for you to examine—if it doesn’t play hide-the-copper-penny with us, or worse, put us in cages for some alien zoo! In the meantime I suspect that our visitor may be from Man-home. I want prisoners. There may be injuries in the attack. You are our veterinarian. Take a Ztirgor with that autodoc Chuut-Riit gave you, and follow the attack force. Do not attack.