Man-Kzin Wars V by Larry Niven (people reading books txt) 📕

acceleration than one whose lungs were solidly filled with incompressible liquid. Why bother, if they had gravity polarizers? he wondered. Then: ah. Gravity waves were detectible, and the ones from a polarizer much more so than the natural variety. A clandestine operations craft, no doubt. The tnuctipun had probably been a spy, and the ship designed to slip onto thrintun-held planets during the war of the Revolt. Jonah was willing to bet a great deal that the hull material was superlatively stealthed, as well as near-as-no-matter invulnerable.

"You realize what this means?" he said, looking at the others. "It means we four are potentially the richest beings in known space."

"Means we could all lose our heads, hearts and testicles when the gov'mint gets its claws on us," Hans said dourly. The kzin both snapped their jaws shut: We are meat.

"We certainly are if Markham or the ARM get hold of us," Jonah mused.

And the bleeping ARM wouldn't even use this stuff, particularly now we're beating the pussies. At that thought his head came up, raking his eyes across the kzin. Both returned his glance blandly, looking aside in carnivore courtesy. The Patriarchy would use it, he knew. Kzinti had never been able to afford antitech prejudice; they had less natural inventiveness than humans to begin with. Tanj. And we were ready to kill each other over gold, much less this.

A voice spoke in his ear, in the Hero's Tongue: "What did you do?"

Jonah jumped backwards; then he noticed everyone else around the spacecraft had done likewise; the Kzinamaratsov brothers were whirling in place, trying to find whatever was speaking beside their ears.

"It's hurt," the voice said, in Wunderlander with a trace of Sol Belt accent. The wet sound of kzin jaws closing on air followed.

The kzin were bristling. "Haunted weapons," Spots said, snapping twice.

"Translator program," Jonah said. "The systems are active, if not the pilot. It's trying to talk to us." It was vibrating the air beside their ears somehow, not too startling compared to the rest of the technology.

* * *

"That is beyond my parameters," the computer said. "I must consult my operator before I can make further judgments."

Jonah opened his mouth to reply, and found himself croaking. A startled glance outside showed darkness.

"We'd better knock it off for a while," he said. Nerve wracking work.

Especially when the translator program had spent an hour trying to find out which side they were on in the tnuctipun-thrintun war; it seemed to have a bee in its bonnet about that, understandably enough. He strongly suspected that it also had a self-destruct subroutine, and would engage it if it 'thought' that they were part of a thrint slave-species. The type of suicide bomb available to a culture whose basic energy source was matter conversion did not bear thinking of. You could tell a good deal about the people who designed an infosystem by talking to one of their programs, and there was a pristine ruthlessness to this one that even the kzin found chilling.

No wonder the Revolt wiped out intelligent life, he thought. They had had to take a datalink out and show the ship's system the stars before it really seemed to believe them about the length of time that had passed. At that, it was probably fortunate that the pilot was still comatose. The computer had limited autonomy; it was very powerful, right up with the great machines that ran the UN Space Navy from Gibraltar Base in the Sol Belt, but not a true personality, as far as he could tell. Neither human nor kzinti designers had ever been able to make a really sentient system that did not go catatonic within months. Evidently the ancient world of the Slaver Empire had been no more successful. At least the AI was completely logical; Finagle alone knew what a conscious but traumatized tnuctipun would do on realizing it was the only member of its species left in a universe changed beyond recognition.

Jonah shivered again. That did not bear thinking about either. When the Yamamoto dropped him and Ingrid Raines off into the kzin-occupied Alpha Centauri system two years ago they had decelerated by using a stasis field—one of the few the UN had been able to make—and skidding through the photosphere of the star. A little, little mistake and they would have spent the next several billion years in stasis themselves—until Alpha Centauri went nova, perhaps. Then the invulnerable bubble of not-time might have been flung out, eventually to land on a planet. To wait while intelligent life arose or arrived, then be opened. He swallowed, mind exploring the concept the way a tongue might probe at a sore tooth. At that, there would have been two of us, he thought. And I'd still have gone off the deep end.

Jonah was preoccupied enough not to notice the extra figure at the campfire, as he walked downslope to the tents. Spots and Bigs had better senses; he looked up sharply at their angry hisses of territorial violation.

"You all seemed to be busy," Tyra Nordbo said, crouched by the fire. "So I thought I'd help myself to some of this coffee."

With her free hand, she pitched something small and heavy out into the firelight. All of them recognized the material. After a moment, they recognized the shape; the hole in the rear section of the tnuctipun ship's hull matched it exactly.

* * *

"No, of course I haven't reported back to Herrenmann Montferrat," Tyra said. "How could I? The government—which means the ARM, remember—is monitoring all frequencies and all the cable and satellite links. There is still a state of military emergency on, you know."

Jonah relaxed slightly; out of the corner of his eye, he could see Spots and Bigs doing likewise, the ruffs of fur around their throats and shoulders sinking back to the level of the rest of their pelts. Their eyes stayed locked on the young woman, ominously steady, glints of silver and red in the gathering dark against the