Man-Kzin Wars III by Larry Niven (good short books TXT) 📕

to convince yourself that you were serving the greater good by giving in. Smoothing over the inevitable, since it did look like the kzinti were winning.

Jonah shook himself out of the trance and flipped himself over. I’ve got to watch this tendency to depression, he thought sourly. Finagle, I ought to be bouncing for joy!

Instead, he felt a grey lethargy. His feet drifted into contact with the edge of the slideway, and he began moving slowly forward; more rapidly as he edged toward the center. The air became more quiet. There was always a subliminal rumble near the ends of Tiamat’s cylinder, powdered metals and chemicals pumping into the fabricators. Now he would have to contact the Nipponese underworlder who had smuggled them from Tiamat to Wunderland in the first place, what had been his name? Shigehero Hirose, that was it. An oyabun, whatever that meant. There was the data they had downloaded from Chuut-Riit’s computers, priceless stuff. He would need a message-maser to send it to Catskinner; the ship had been modified with an interstellar-capacity sender. And—

“Hello, Captain.”

Jonah turned his head, very slowly. A man had touched his elbow. Stocky, even by flatlander standards, with a considerable paunch. Coal-black, with tightly curled wiry hair; pure Afroid, not uncommon in some ethnic enclaves on Wunderland but very rare on Earth, where gene-flow had been nearly random for going on four hundred years. General Buford Early, UN Space navy, late ARM. Jonah gasped and sagged sideways, a grey before his eyes like high-G blackout. There was another Flatlander but Jonah barely noticed. Early slipped a hand under his arm and bore him up with thick-boned strength. Archaic, like the man; he was . . . at least two centuries old. Impossible to tell, these days. The only limiting factor on how old you might be was when you were born, after medicine started progressing fast enough to compensate for advancing age . . .

“Take it easy,” Early said.

Eyes warred with mind. Early was here; Early was sitting in his office on Gibraltar Base back in the Solar System.

Jonah struggled for breath, then fell into the rhythm taught by the Zen adepts who had trained him for war. Calm flowed back. Much knowledge of war had fallen out of human culture in three hundred years of peace, before the kzinti came, but the monks had preserved a great deal. What UN bureaucrat would suspect an old man sitting quietly beneath a tree practicing and preserving dangerous technique? Jonah spoke to himself: Reality is change. Shock and fear result from imposing concepts on reality. Abandon concepts. Being is time, and time is Being. Birth and death is the life of the Buddha. Then: Thank you, roshi.

The men at either elbow guided him to the slower edge-strip of the slideway and onto the sidewalk. Jonah looked “ahead,” performed the mental trick that turned the cylinder into a hollow tower above his head, then back to horizontal. He freed his arms with a quiet flick and sank down on the chipped and stained poured-rock bench. That was notional in this gravity, but it gave you a place to hitch your feet.

“Well?” he said, looking at the second man.

This one was different. Younger, Jonah would say; eyes do not age or hold expression, but the small muscles around them do. Oriental eyes, more common. Both of them were in Swarm-Belter clothing, gaudy and somehow sleazy at the same time, with various mysterious pieces of equipment at their belts. Perfect cover, if you were pretending to be a modestly prosperous entrepreneur of the Serpent Swarm. The kzinti allowed a good deal of freedom to the Belters in this system; it was more efficient and required less supervision than running everything themselves. That would change as their numbers built up, of course.

“Well?” he said again.

Early grinned, showing strong and slightly yellowed teeth, and pulled a cheroot from a pocket. Actually less uncommon here than in the Solar System, Jonah thought, gagging slightly. “You didn’t seriously think that we’d let an opportunity like the Yamamoto raid go by and only put one arrow on the string, did you, Captain? By the way, this is my . . . associate, Watsuji Hajime.” The man smiled and bowed. “A member of the team I brought in.”

“Another stasis field?” Jonah said.

“We did have one ready,” Early said. “We like to have a little extra tucked away.”

“Trust the ARM,” Jonah said sourly.

The UN’s technological police had been operating almost as long as humans had been in space. Their primary function was to suppress technologies which had dangerous consequences . . . which turned out to be most technologies. For a long time they had managed to make Solar humanity forget that there had even been such things as war or weapons or murder. That was looked back upon as a Golden Age, now, after two generations of war with the kzinti; privately, Matthieson thought of it as the years of Stagnation. The ARM had not wanted to believe in the kzinti, not even when the crew of the Angel’s Pencil had reported their own first near-fatal contact with the felinoids. And when the war started, the ARM had still dealt out its hoarded secrets with the grudging reluctance of a miser.

“It’s for the greater good,” Early replied.

“Sure.” That you slowed down research and so when the kzinti hit us they had technological superiority? For that matter, why had it taken a century and a half to develop regeneration techniques? And millions of petty criminals—jaywalkers and the like—had been sliced, diced and sent to the organ banks before then. Ancient history, he told himself. The Belters had always hated the ARM . . .

“Certainly for the greater good that you’ve got backup, now,” Early continued. “We came in with a slug aimed at a weapons fabrication asteroid. The impact was quite genuine . . . God’s my witness—” he continued.

He’s old all right.

“—the intelligence we’ve gathered and beamed back is already worth the entire cost of the Yamamoto. And you and Lieutenant Raines succeeded beyond our hopes.”

Meaning you had no