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

Slave Master and Fritz were watching me intently. I don’t know if they had anything like VR. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but in any case, they didn’t move to stop me as I slid my hands into the data gloves and nestled the display unit over my head.

The audiophones were a warm softness on my ears. I could hear the empty echoes of silence and the ocean wave sound of the blood flowing through my ears. The data gloves fit my hands like, well, like gloves. They provided a tight pressure on my hand and I could feel the resistance of the force feedback sensors as I flexed my fingers. The watching kzinti became pale ghosts as I lowered the half-silvered visors of the head-mounted display and activated the VR program.

Windows filled with data appeared and floated in the virtual space in front of my face, superimposed on the scene of destruction in the Command Deck with the two kzinti watching me. This two-for-one visual display was disorienting and it would get even worse when I went full immersive. Hopefully, my freefall reflexes would help keep the conflicting visual cues from getting me too confused.

I moved my hands and brought up a window filled with display options. I selected a synthesized view of the ship along with overlaid options for displaying the status of various systems. It was time to go for a virtual walk and check things out. As the VR system executed my commands, the image of the Command Deck faded and a “god’s-eye” exterior view of our ship came into focus.

The view I saw might have been synthesized, but that didn’t make it any less impressive. Our ship, Obler’s Paradox, with its eight-hundred-foot truss work spine and assorted modules, was hanging motionless in space surrounded by millions of stars with a small orange craft attached to its side like a sinister parasite. A larger spherical ship hovered menacingly nearby.

Our ship appeared to be in surprisingly good shape, other than the obvious damage caused by the kzinti and the normal discolorations caused by solar radiation and thruster firings. At the rear was the fusion engine that could push us up to a good fraction of the speed of light and the magnetic field generators for the Bussard ramscoop. Directly ahead of them were a set of spherical tanks, used to hold hydrogen for use when we were moving at merely interplanetary speeds. Near the middle of the ship was the cylindrical pressurized module used to store the coldsleep tanks, as well as the equipment and supplies needed by the crew, along with a hydroponic garden that provided fresh vegetables and air. A rotating toroidal module provided a living space for the crew. Finally, at the front of the ship were the vacuum storage areas where we kept our singleships and other vacuum-safe equipment behind the flat micrometeoroid/thermal control panels. Covering everything were the smooth superconducting panels that protected the equipment and people from the effects of the drive’s intense magnetic fields.

As I studied the damage to our ship, I had the computer bring up data blocks and display them over the image of the ship. Gradually I built up my assessment of the ship. I zoomed in my view until I was staring at the field generators.

It looked like something heavy had smashed into them. Perhaps a small kzinti ship had been drawn into the field generators when Jennifer had activated our drive. Those field generators developed magnetic fields that were strong enough to draw in ionized hydrogen from hundreds of miles away when we were moving at a good fraction of the velocity of light. Careful tuning of the fields shunted aside anything that wasn’t interstellar hydrogen, but I doubt the designers had considered having to deflect something as large or as close as one of those kzinti spacecraft. If they contained anything remotely susceptible to magnetic fields they would have been grabbed and pulled directly into the field generators.

I had the ship’s computer apply an overlay showing the field strength of the drive and the flux density contours of the surrounding hydrogen. Instantly, the ship was surrounded by glowing neon yellow and blue contour lines. I reached out with my hands and felt the field lines. I pressed on them and gauged their strength with my fingers, the force feedback sensors pressing against my fingertips. Data displayed in overlaid windows showed the numerical data that confirmed the qualitative impressions formed by the force feedback system.

The asymmetries of the field showed that some, but not all, of the field generators were off-line. The ones that were on-line were only operating at the level needed to provide us with radiation protection by deflecting the interstellar medium away from the ship. They couldn’t feed hydrogen to the engine fast enough to slow us from our Einsteinian rush through space.

Things looked bad, but not unsaveable. There were some spare parts in the ship’s stores, but more importantly there was a lot of redundancy in the design of the drive. For the first time since I had been brought out of coldsleep I started to feel optimistic. Here was a problem I could deal with.

That thought focused my mind back on the kzinti. There they were, like ghosts at a funeral. There was a problem that I wasn’t sure I could fix.

My hands made motions in the air—I wondered what the kzinti thought of that—and the image of the ship and the stars vanished, only to be replaced by the image of the Command Deck and the waiting kzinti. With the flip of a switch the display went blank and I pushed the display lenses up away from my eyes.

Fritz was still staring at me as I tensed with anticipation of the head-splitting pain from his juju eyes but it never came, just a dull ache like the pain from a broken tooth before an autodoc could implant a fresh bud. Unpleasant; but I could