Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII by Larry Niven (novels to read for beginners txt) 📕

He was roaring commands for return fire into his helmet speaker as he came.

Some viewing screens blanked out, but enough remained in the dim-red glare of the emergency lights for Zraar-Admiral, as he reached the bridge, to see wreckage exploding into Space on sensor-screens.

And flaring on one bank of screens and then another was a Thing: an alien craft shaped nothing like either the monkey-ship they had destroyed or the still distant Writing Stick. Its bizarre asymmetrical configuration was dominated by what appeared to be colossal triple-banked turreted weapons-systems. Rail guns? The real lasers that had slashed Tracker? Trap!

The battleship shuddered again as broadsides of missiles blasted away from it. Surging odors of blood and battle, natural and manufactured, filled the air. There was a new scream from an internal klaxon. Zraar-Admiral leapt up onto the battle-drum, striking it so that its Sthondat-hide chambers boomed and reverberated. The Day! The Day at last!

“We have been boarded! There is fighting on the boat-deck!” Weeow-Captain shrieked.

On the boat-deck! But there was the enemy, in Space!

“Monkeys? Identify the enemy instantly!”

“I don’t know, Dominant One. The sensors are being jammed.”

“Where is Telepath? Why is he not on the bridge?”

“Dominant One, perhaps the live-meat monkeys have become feral and attacked him like rogue Jotok. He was their keeper.”

Trap! Trap! Zraar-Admiral would betray no panic to his officers, but again Tracker blazed in his mind. Did the live-meat monkeys on the boat-deck know the rarity and value of Telepath, that they had singled him out? Or had they attacked him because he was the smallest and weakest Kzin aboard? But monkeys attacking Kzin! And at this moment! Trap! Trap! Had the live-meat monkeys been deliberately planted in Gutting Claw for the purposes of the real attackers?

With battle-shielding activated real Space could not be seen, but visual-display screens were aflame with missile explosions and the multi-colored bars of beam-weapons. And in the middle of it all the enemy warship, with its weird configuration and monstrous weapons. It appeared untouched by the star-hot claws of destruction slashing at it. Kzin gravity technology and the investigation of ancient Slaver stasis-boxes had led to various theories of force-fields. Did the enemy have them? Beams burned at it like solid light. Banks of ready-lights flashed and flashed again as salvoes of missiles were discharged, launchers re-loaded too fast for even Kzin eyes to follow and new salvoes discharged again in barrage, exploding in a nova-like vortex of fratricide.

Suddenly the enemy ship’s image disappeared. Its shields collapsed at last? A cloaking device?

There was another series of flashes, then the enemy’s outline alone reappeared. The outline reduced to a skeleton, then a scroll of numbers. Behind them on the screen there were images of stars again, as the Kzinti missile explosions roiled away into empty Space.

“A false spoor!” cried Systems Controller. “There was no enemy ship! It was an image in the computer! A worm in its guts!” Human and Kzin physiology and technology had led, in an example of convergent evolution that would have interested a philologist, to the same imagery for the same situation.

“Our own computer was infected. Liver-worm within it! A rRrarrknarraraaw seed! There was no enemy ship, but an image generated here! Dominant One, the back-up computers have now found this anomaly and killed it.”

No enemy ship. Not The Day, but . . . a monkey-trick! He had struck the drum for Nothing! Snarling, slaver spraying from his jaws and fangs, Zraar-Admiral gathered himself to leap at the lying screen. Again he controlled himself: what good would it do to expend his rage upon machinery?

Not The Day. But there remained a real enemy indeed! Who had done this thing? Were the remaining monkeys loose?

Weeow-Captain punched up a diagram of Gutting Claw’s entrails. There was no lie here: the boat-deck was in chaos: flames, a gravity-reaction.

“Forward!” roared Zraar-Admiral, “I lead my Heroes!” Anything else would be unthinkable. The warriors of his personal guard leapt to him.

“Lead us, Feared Zraar-Admiral!” they cried.

* * *

“They are coming!” cried Telepath. “The diversion did not hold them!” The Dominant One’s mind was on him like a tidal-wave of lava.

The image of HMS Nelson was gone from the monitor.

“No time! No time!”

“Go!” Rick shouted. Selina stared at him, uncomprehending for a moment as he turned to the gravity-motor again.

“I will delay them! Selina, run! Fly!”

She hesitated. “I order you!” He whirled upon Telepath. “Go!” he roared.

He leapt away from the boat, and ran to the gravity-motor, spinning the focus-controls. The gravity-field tightened to a thin tube. A storm-wind roared through compartment and corridor. The Kzin attack force burst in.

Zraar-Admiral leading the way, the armored Kzin advanced against the howling whirlwind, clutching at claw-holds.

Rick aimed the gravity-motor and threw the model ship into the vortex of its field, tightening its beam and increasing its force towards maximum with two blows on the control-surfaces.

Zraar-Admiral, braced against the pressure with every atom of his gigantic strength, saw for an instant the image of the enemy warship hurtling at him with colossal kinetic energies. Impact. There was a multi-colored flash as Zraar-Admiral disintegrated. The Kzin by him were smashed against the bulkheads by the force of the explosion, one beam-rifle firing at full charge. Fragments of metal and Kzin were hurled at bullet-speeds.

Another cache of charges for small-arms ammunition exploded in sympathetic detonation. Rick was knocked back by the blast. He rolled across the deck, then rose hunched over broken ribs and stepped forward. The surviving Kzin were getting to their feet. He advanced to meet them bare-handed.

The field of the gravity-planer slashed across the boat-deck in a snake-shaped pattern of random destruction, dragging flame-filled atmosphere in a roaring typhoon behind it. Then a shot from a trooper’s beam-rifle smashed the gravity-weapon. The embryonic fire-storm vanished in an instant. Automatic jets of inert gas smothered the remaining fires. There was a sudden echoing silence. The armored troopers, products of superb training and discipline, did not scream and leap. They fanned out almost slowly, surrounding Rick on the deck and Telepath and