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

the cramped gray bulkheads of a warship, in chains, eating ice cream. She did not know that she was being deviously questioned. She did not know that this was a substitute for torture, that the answers to his questions were vital to him. Was she a seer? Could she see the future? Could she tell Trainer-of-Slaves of events between 2415 and 2420 that weren’t permitted yet at Alpha Centauri?

The five voices that came from the five lung slits in the arms weren’t human, but they knew harmony and each word was enunciated with passionate clarity though the accent was no sound that she’d ever heard in her short life.

“When the night is cold

and my arms are bold

and you are very far away…”

It was the song they’d been singing everywhere at the time her graduation prom, at the end of High School, when the two year Military Academy course was just a kid’s dream. She had to cry. She tried not to, but that only made the bawling worse when it came. Charlie was dead. Prakit was dead. Those tough thugs in the hold, so gung ho to kill kzin, were wasted. Her mission had failed. She had failed her Dad. And she didn’t have the least idea about what to do with a seven-foot tall kzin who courted her with a five-armed singing comedian.

“Humans cry when the ice cream is good,” she sniffed to cover herself.

“Berries, ptui!” said Trainer-of-Slaves.

“I think too much,” continued Nora, wiping her face.

“That can be corrected,” said Trainer-of-Slaves. “I have done the experiments.”

“How did you learn these songs?”

“You animals do not keep radio silence.”

“You listen to that? All the way out here?”

“In past-gone hour, I watch beastly halo, Blaze of Glory!”

She wasn’t crying anymore. She was grinning. “Lots of kzin killing in that one. I loved it! You monsters killed my beloved Dad. That holo won an award for its acting. Passion, the spirit of mankind that you’ll never crush!”

Won an award. She was predicting the future. In November 2415 Blaze of Glory had only been nominated for an award, one of sixteen. “Bad acting,” said Trainer-of-Slaves. “Monkey in kzin-suit, too slow. Wrong emotions. Liver was sick.”

He pulled the lieutenant-animal further into the conversation, letting her vent her anger at the kzinti. When she was angry she leapt before she thought. Three more times he caught her predicting the future.

By then he was sure.

He reported his suspicions immediately to Grraf-Hromfi, though the timelag between the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch and the main body of the Pride was still too great for conversation.

Trainer’s old mentor took the news well. His return message read: “So the old warrior can still sniff out a different scent. A superluminal drive is exciting. But it compromises our whole strategic position. We’ll have to react quickly. Keep me informed.”

In the vast hangar in the belly of the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch Trainer drove his Jotoki slaves in their dissection of the wreck. How could such a little thing, lost in the spotlights of the hangar, bring back the awful fear he thought he had lost forever? He paced around the hangar, looking down at the alien shape, keeping his feet inside the local gravitic field of the catwalk. His liver was telling him to run in panic. He was no longer the mighty Hero willing to take on the whole Man-system, and after conquering it, to ride elephants to the hunt with monkeys carrying his bedding and his equipment and his kzinrretti in palanquins.

He returned to Lieutenant Argamentine in the middle of the day and opened the autodoc coffin, waking her, to ask her his question directly. “You came here faster than light!” he accused.

She smiled at him without showing her teeth. There were dimples in her furless cheeks. “That’s not for me to say.”

The answer terrified him and he went away.

With a superluminal drive the animals could penetrate the Patriarchy with impunity. Every system would be isolated, on its own, unable to call on nearby warriors for aid. Heroism would be a sham. A newborn kit could kill his father with unopened eyes. In the face of such unnaturalness, run! The Fifth Fleet should run, should disperse, should hide!

Kzin warriors are taught to obey orders on penalty of death. But it is also instinct for them to create their own orders. A superior officer might be only light-hours away but the skirmish will be decided in minutes. The General Staff might be only light-days away, but battles can be decided in hours. The Patriarch who orders a warrior to the borderspaces, gives his order only once. After that the warrior makes his own orders for a lifetime and trains his sons to train his grandsons to report back that the mission has been accomplished.

The Patriarch requires obedience, but the ruthless Emperor of Light executes all warriors who are not their own Chief of Staff.

Trainer-of-Slaves’s internal Chief of Staff was telling him to flee. How can I be such a coward? He thought he had conquered cowardice. He’d tried so hard! Desperately he recalled words that Grraf-Hromfi had once tossed away casually—almost unaware of their profound wisdom—words which had found a fertile home in Trainer’s mind: “To flee one’s duty is cowardice, but to flee while retaining a grip on duty can be the act of a Hero!” Perhaps his mentor would condone fleeing in this extreme case. The thought that he might have an ally in his fear was comforting.

Trainer vowed by his grandfather that wherever he fled, he would bring duty with him. He was in turmoil. He had conquered fear only to be trapped by his own prey. Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig was running on the surface of Hssin with no place to go, every door guarded by the enemy.

He knew that this little engine mounted in the wreck of a tiny ship was the most valuable asset in the whole of the Patriarchy. The entire Fifth Fleet must be devoted to protecting it. If a hundred thousand Heroes died in its