Man-Kzin Wars XII by Larry Niven (books you have to read .TXT) 📕

Wrath of God Incarnate; and he was going to go through with it. He had courage she'd never dreamed of as a breeder, and she loved him for it more than she'd loved any other human who'd ever lived.

"I know. Come on," she said, removing the contact helmet: "I'll buy you lunch."

Shleer had the disruption helmet finished in two days. He tried it out the only way he could, as befit a Hero: on himself. He put it on and hit the switch.

Everyone went away. The quiet was unbelievable.

He immediately switched it off and got moving out of the harem, in case the effect had been noticed.

It hadn't. In the Residence they had other things on their minds.

HOW CAN THEY MOVE THAT FAST? Gnix Screamed at the Patriarch, who staggered.

"Speed field," slurred Rrao-Chrun-Rrit. "Reduced inertia, almost five hundred and twelve times as fast as normal."

Aircraft had dropped into the atmosphere all over the planet, swarms of them, moving at something like two million miles an hour in all directions.

Suddenly they were in a ring, converging on the Patriarch's Palace.

DO SOMETHING!

The Patriarch opened the master panel of his fooch and tapped a switch.

The incoming craft slowed to about Mach 6 on the monitor system, and the palace defenses began shooting them down.

WELL DONE. . . . WHAT DID YOU DO?

"I accelerated us as well. The system was installed three hundred years ago, after we found signs that someone had gotten in undetected."

IF THEY WERE "UNDETECTED," HOW DID YOU FIND SIGNS?

"Things worked better, like food dispensers and data retrieval."

One of the craft hit the palace, not far from Rritt's Past.

A pilot hurtled out in a suit of powered armor, and began charging in through automatic defensive fire. Pieces of armor were jettisoned as lasers heated them intolerably—which was possibly their principal reason for existing. The pilot got a long way before the armor was down to a single flexible suit. That was black, coated with superconductor, and appeared to be venting coolant whenever lasers touched it.

The lasers made contact less often with each passing minute. The pilot was fast, almost invisibly so on the security screens. A funny-looking human.

Gnix detected recognition in two nearby minds. One was the Patriarch, whose perplexing and repetitive thought was Peace. The other was Darfoor.

Darfoor was terrified out of his mind, and he was thinking assassin, assassin! Gnix Told him, COME HERE. TELL ME WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS THING.

"I made them," whimpered the Tnuctip. "The tarkodun were too stupid to follow instructions, and we were told to make them smarter. We gave them a third stage of life. They have brains Thrintun can't control all at once. They're smarter than anything else, and they live forever, and we made them to kill you. They gave us the hyperjump and disintegrator and stasis field when we asked for ways to disrupt your lives. We're all going to die."

SHUT UP. STAY PUT AND ATTEND UNTIL I TELL YOU OTHERWISE. FIGHTING SLAVES, STOP THAT THING!—NOT YOU, CHIEF SLAVE.

On the screen, the assassin came into Rrit's Past at high speed, faster than a Hero's charge. Companions were still assembling in its path, and it produced a needlegun and shot them all. There was respectable return fire, but there was impact armor under the superconductor, and the assassin was either immune to stunners or shielded somehow. The needles got through all the armor the Companions had, but apparently didn't tumble—none of them began vomiting blood, anyway; they just fell asleep at once.

A Companion in powered armor was beyond the next archway. He fired a staggered laser array—and none of it hit. The assassin had turned sideways and bent backward and tilted its head, and all the beams passed it by. Then the assassin fired the needlegun into the wrist control of the armor, and the armor fell off. The Companion drew his wtsai and leapt even as the armor was hitting the ground, and the assassin dodged the blade and hit him with both hands, one on either side of the rib cage. The Companion fell, gasping. He wasn't dead or dying, but he wasn't going to be getting up until someone came with a medikit and pulled back his dislocated rib joints, where the assassin had caved them into his lungs.

The assassin got to where the stuffed alien stood on a pedestal and hesitated for an instant. That was enough for the lasers to slice up the needlegun. The assassin ran on.

A section of the monitoring system went dead, just as the assassin was getting to it.

HOW DID IT DO THAT? Gnix demanded.

"It couldn't have," the chief slave replied. "It could be damage from the crash."

FIND THAT THING!

"There are Heroes massing in its only path."

The statue looked like a six-legged Jotok. Given its imposing size, it was a religious image, probably based on a real individual; each Jotoki limb had its own brain lobe, so a six-legged Jotok would have been far smarter than usual, and probably also a holy cripple. Certainly a legend.

From above came a voice, speaking Flatlander: "Hey. Protector. Up here."

There was a half-grown kzintosh hanging by one foot. "I know a shortcut," he said.

An army could be heard ahead—could be smelled ahead.

After the youngster had been hauled into the duct and the hatch closed, he said, "There's one Thrint and four Tnuctipun. Rrao-Chrun-Rrit is obeying as slowly as feasible. And," he said, "and he is my father, so—"

"Alive if any chance exists," the Protector said, and sniffed. "Harem? Right. Stay someplace safe."

"Felix said Protectors liked jokes."

"Felix?"

"Felix Buckminster. Former technology officer on the Fury. I'm a Patriarch's Son."

"Okay, but be inconspicuous."

The kzintosh wrapped a piece of metal mesh around his head and touched a switch. "The Thrint won't notice me. Felix taught me a lot."

"Good for him." The Protector wriggled down the duct, came out the access hatch, and pretty well ran along the ceiling loops to the wall handholds. It went down the wall and was working out the door mechanism before Shleer was all the way out of the