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

Telepath punched in the order to release the locks on the main doors, a complex, multi-staged process.

Selina stared helpless from the port as the Kzin closed in. Rick still stood facing them. Others were leveling their weapons at the barge, coolly, without haste now. Then Rick raised one arm, pointed to his sleeve and to the Happy Gatherer’s boat. Selina nodded. She raised a hand to him and they looked at each other for a moment. She activated a sensor-point and shouted an order into a fragment of lattice on her sleeve. Aboard Happy Gatherer’s boat an attitude jet fired, turning the boat so that it was parallel to the barge. Kzin leapt back from the clouds of flaring gas. She shouted an emergency override code and a second order. The boat’s main engine fired, vaporizing everything organic and unprotected on the deck. Flame washed towards the barge. Missile warheads exploded in the same instant. The boat itself flew through the hangar to explode against the main doors, blowing them into Space.

Flame and air blasted into vacuum. Other doors flashed shut, activated by emergency triggers.

Aboard the barge neither Selina nor any other human could have moved fast enough. Telepath fired the retaining bolts and kicked in the motor. Propelled by both its own oversized gravity-planer and the explosion of air from the boat-deck, the barge shot into Space, the edge of a fireball just behind it.

Telepath leapt to the weapons console. Even had he wished, there was no time for arming nuclear warheads but he was firing all that could be brought to bear of the barge’s other weapons into the cavity of the docking bay.

Even if Selina knew the controls, her hands could not have matched the eye-blurring speed of Telepath’s claws. To venture near him would only have invited injury. She climbed to the upper viewing bubble and looked back. Behind them, the battleship’s boat-deck was a glowing crater, venting rose-colored fog and incandescent debris. Gutting Claw had been hurt.

But the battleship was growing rapidly smaller as the barge accelerated away. Biggest of the smaller vessels carried aboard, it had oversized gravity-engines, not only to give it the best speed in the fleet, but also so that it could act as a tug. Now Gutting Claw was a red star among the stars. Telepath, firing the weapons, flying the ship and needing all his alertness, had no time to read the minds of Gutting Claw’s officers, but no beams or missiles flashed out to destroy the craft: perhaps in the damage and confusion, the flight of the barge had not yet been noticed.

Telepath activated defenses: a cloud of metallic dust, a small robot craft generating a false signature, computer-stabilized mirrors which might in theory reflect a laser back to its source.

Selina became aware again of the sound of the gravity motor all about them. It was a moment of relative tranquility, even if only the tranquility of exhaustion. Gutting Claw was no longer in visual range: the inferno in the boat-deck could not be seen, possibly because the battleship had turned its wounded side away from any possible enemy.

“You are brave for a monkey,” Telepath said to her at last.

“And you are brave for a Telepath.”

“Do not grieve for the Rick-monkey too much.” Telepath said. “It too was brave at last and the bearded monkey-god will take its soul. We could have done nothing to help it . . .

“I know the liquid discharged from your eyes is a sign of grief,” he added after a moment, “but you are affected by something else I do not understand. We are companions, monkey who is not quite a monkey, Kzin who is not quite a Kzin. Should I not try to comfort you?”

Admiral’s Barge

I was outcast now from all of the Kzin species that I knew. But I had slashed the deepest wound that any Telepath had struck in all the centuries of our hidden and so far largely futile war.

Still no beams leapt out from Gutting Claw. According to the screens before my eyes, no missile-signatures were detected by the instruments.

I cast back now to read the minds aboard the ship. Weeow-Captain spitting and shrieking orders to damage-control parties, junior officers and sergeants leading Heroes against fires where robotics had failed. Rage and shame of Damage-Control Officer in his cabin flinging himself at a cabin-door warped shut by explosions. Zraar-Admiral’s remaining Kzinretts yammering in his harem as explosions rocked them and sirens screamed and toxic fumes poured through ventilation ducts. Gutting Claw had not been closed up at battle-stations when the alarms went. Yes, though we could conquer by sheer power and ferocity, we were unused to alien ways of war. But what had they been taught at damage-control courses? Of disasters, a fire out of control in a loaded capital ship’s hangar-deck calls for the greatest Heroism!

I caught, briefly before I broke contact, death-agonies of a troop of Heroes propelled suddenly into vacuum. There was worse agony to leap at me from other minds: as well as the gravity-motor gun, Weapons Officer had been developing a hydrofluoric acid spray as a way of hosing monkeys out of trees on “Earth.” The tanks ruptured and a mist of acid flowed up ducts and corridors, penetrating tissue instantly to devour bones from within. Too late other armored doors and emergency air-locks were crashing shut. Gutting Claw was truly in a space-battle at last, against chemical demons from its own guts. The boat-deck and all access ways to it were sealed off now.

Feared Zraar-Admiral was plainly dead. Though I had seen him die I had hardly believed it, but he could not have survived. It is said among Telepaths that the very greatest of them can contact the minds of the dead, but I dared not try that. I had not wished to betray him or be a spy upon him, and he had paid me compliments, but he had destroyed First Telepath, my teacher and only friend, my leader