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

“Real,” it muttered. “I am real.” The haunted eyes turned on him. “You burn,” it choked. “Fire in the air around you. You burn with terror!” Panting breath. “I saw the God, human. Saw Him sowing stars. It was forever. Forever! Forever!” It howled again, then caught itself, shuddering.

Harold felt his cheeks flush. Something, he thought. I have to say something, gottdamn it.

“Name?” he said, his mouth shaping itself clumsily to the Hero’s Tongue.

“Kdapt-Captain,” it gasped. “Kdapt-Captain. I am Kdapt-Captain.” The sound of its rank-name seemed to recall the alien to something closer to sanity. The next words nearly a whisper. “What have I done?”

Kdapt-Captain shut his eyes again, squeezing. Thin mewling sounds forced their way past the carnivore teeth, a sobbing miaow-miaow, incongruous from the massive form.

“Schiesse,” Harold muttered. I never heard a kzin cry before, either. “Sedate him, now.” The sounds faded as the kzin lost consciousness.

“War sucks,” Ingrid said, coming closer to lay a hand on his shoulder. “And there ain’t no justice.”

Harold nodded raggedly, his hands itching for a cigarette. “You said it, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m going to break out another bottle of that verguuz. I could use it.”

Ingrid’s hand pressed him back towards the deck. “No you’re not,” she said sharply. He looked up in surprise.

“I spaced it,” she said flatly.

“You what?” he shouted.

“I spaced it!” she yelled back. The kzin whimpered in his sleep, and she lowered her voice. “Hari, you’re the bravest man I’ve ever met, and one of the toughest. But you don’t take waiting well, and when you hate yourself verguuz is how you punish yourself. That, and letting yourself go.” He was suddenly conscious of his own smell. “Not while you’re with me, thank you very much.”

Harold stared at her for a moment, then slumped back against the bulkhead, shaking his head in wonder. You can’t fight in a singleship, he reminded himself. Motion caught the corner of his eye; several of the screens were set to reflective. Well . . . he thought. The pouches under his eyes were a little too prominent. Nothing wrong with a bender now and then . . . but now and then had been growing more frequent. Habits grow on you, even when you’ve lost the reasons for them, he mused. One of the drawbacks of modern geriatrics. You get set in your ways. Getting close enough to someone to listen to their opinions of him, now that was a habit he was going to have to learn.

“Gottdamn, what a honeymoon,” he muttered.

Ingrid mustered a smile. “Haven’t even had the nuptials, yet. We could set up a contract—” she winced and made a gesture of apology.

“Forget it,” he answered roughly. That was what his herrenmann father had done, rather than marry a Belter and a Commoner into the sacred Schotmann family line. Time to change the subject, he thought. “Tell me . . . thinking back, I got the idea you knew the kzinti weren’t running this ship. The computer got some private line?”

“Oh.” She blinked, then smiled slightly. “Well, I thought I recognized the programming, I was part of the team that designed the software, you know? Not many sentient computers ever built. When I heard the name of the ‘kzinti’ ship, well, it was obvious.”

“Sounded pretty authentic to me,” Harold said dubiously, straining his memory.

Ingrid smiled more broadly. “I forgot. It’d sound perfectly reasonable to a kzin, or to someone who grew up speaking Wunderlander, or Belter English. I’ve been associating with flatlanders, though.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Only an English-speaking flatlander would know what’s wrong with kchee’uRiit maarai as a ship-name.” At his raised eyebrows, she translated: Gigantic Patriarchal Tool.

Chapter VIII

“Now will you believe?” Buford Early said, staring into the screen.

Someone in the background was making a report; Shigehero turned to acknowledge, then back to face the UN general. “I am . . . somewhat more convinced,” he admitted after a pause. “Still, we should be relatively safe here.”

The oyabun’s miniature fleet had withdrawn considerably further; Early glanced up to check on the distances; saw that they were grouped tightly around another asteroid in nearly matching orbit, more than half a million kilometers from the Ruling Mind. The other members of the UN team were still mostly slumped, grey-faced, waiting for the aftereffects of the thrint’s mental shout to die down. Two were in the autodoc.

“Safe?” Early said quietly. “We wouldn’t be safe in the Solar System! That . . . thing had a functioning amplifier going, for a second or two at least.” Their eyes met, and shared a memory for an instant. Drifting fragments of absolute certainty; the oyabun’s frown matched his own, as they concentrated on thinking around those icy commands.

Early bared his teeth, despite the pain of a lip bitten half through. It was like sweeping water with a broom; you could make yourself believe they were alien implants, force yourself too, but the knowledge was purely intellectual. They felt true, and the minute your attention wandered you found yourself believing again . . . “Remember Greenberg’s tape.” Larry Greenberg had been the only human ever to share minds with a thrint, two centuries ago when the Sea Statue had been briefly and disastrously reanimated. “If it gets the amplifier fully functional, nothing will stand in its way. There are almost certainly fertile females in there, too.” With an effort as great as any he had ever made, Early forced his voice to reasonableness. “I know it’s tempting, all that technology. We can’t get it. The downside risk is simply too great.”

And it would be a disaster if we could, he thought grimly. Native human inventions were bad enough; the ARM and the Order before them had had to scramble for centuries to defuse the force of the industrial revolution. The thought of trying to contain a thousand years of development dumped on humanity overnight made his stomach hurt and his fingers long for a stogie. Memory prompted pride. We did restabilize, he thought. So some of the early efforts were misdirected. Sabotaging Babbage, for example. Computers