Man-Kzin Wars XII, Larry Niven [readnow .TXT] 📗

kzintoshi he'd ever seen—except that his eyes were faintly bloodshot with purple capillaries. A telepath.

A remarkably healthy telepath, and not a timid one, either.

Gnyr-Hoth said, "Do you still hunt, at least?"

Both local kzinti acquired identical disgruntled tail droops. "The biggest prey here is smaller than my head," Quartermaster said.

"Unless you count God's Hairballs," Hur-Commandant joked.

"Count what?" exclaimed Gnyr-Hoth.

"A local animal that settles in one spot at maturity," said Quartermaster. "They seem to have a lure scent for food, or something. Basically a big pile of hair, about this high, like God's been grooming without brushes and hasn't been getting any fat in his diet. Horrkkk."

Amused, Gnyr-Hoth said, "Edible?"

Telepath suddenly whirled about, and looked all around frantically. Gnyr-Hoth whipped out sidearm and wtsai, ready to kill the detected foe, but after a few moments Telepath straightened up and said, "I'm sorry, sir. I don't know what made me do that."

"Better wrong than surprised," Gnyr-Hoth said. "So, are they good meat?" he resumed as he put away his weapons.

"I've never had any, but I understand the flavor is disgusting," Quartermaster said.

"I seem to recall reports that the initial settlement had some food-poisoning cases, too," Hur-Commandant tossed in.

"Urr, well, we should be bringing you some better prey in a few years. Scouts have discovered new aliens. When this fleet is refitted it'll be taking one of their worlds. Shouldn't be hard, they keep trying to talk rather than fight," Gnyr-Hoth said. "They're some kind of primate, so they should taste pretty good."

"Will we be getting them as slaves?" Quartermaster said hopefully. "Primates have good hands."

"What was that?" Telepath screamed, making everyone but Gnyr-Hoth leap a considerable distance into the air. Telepath began lashing out wildly, as if blind.

Gnyr-Hoth swept a foot under Telepath's legs, knocked him down, rolled him over, tore open Telepath's medical kit, selected a pressure hypo, and administered it. Telepath stopped thrashing almost at once, and Gnyr-Hoth rose and said sadly, "He was really good, too. Very sensitive. . . . Perhaps that's why he broke so young."

Quartermaster gestured for his staff, and a Kdatlyno came up with a cart and loaded Telepath onto it. "Medical, now," said Quartermaster, and the slave departed at full speed.

What did you do that for? one Grog asked the one who'd acted.

He kept noticing whenever we had to make adjustments. Besides, those new aliens may be worth getting to know, the latter Grog told her. They seem to like to talk to new people, and we could certainly use some good hands.

What does that have to do with—began the first, then stopped as her neighbor revealed her plan. Oh, I get it.

Yes, he'd have noticed the little altered spots in everyone else's memories, no matter how often we made him forget.

I'd better pass this on, the first commented. Someone may land with one of those mind readers at one of the bases we can't reach from here.

Good thinking.

Quartermaster's top crew went through the biggest vessel, sure to be designated the flagship, with exacting care, bringing everything up to specifications. The ships had been collected from all over the Empire, and each had been whatever could be spared from a given station. Most needed considerable attention.

He went through the ship continuously, inspecting the work himself. He carried a gamma-ray annealing beamer, to restore temper to spot welds.

Down in the auxiliary power room, which had required commendably little work, he checked what his Jotoki had done, squirming between monocrystal support struts to get a look at the fusion waste disposal manifold. It was fine. He got back out and looked over the struts, which were naturally in perfect shape—they couldn't be repaired onsite, only replaced, and the old ones recast. They had to be all one piece.

Quartermaster took his annealer and directed it about a third of the way up one of the main struts, causing the monocrystal to separate into trillions of microscopic domains, like ordinary metal. In a space battle, the struts had to be utterly rigid. Now, though, the proper shear stress would tear the strut, rip the manifold, spray plasma through the power room, and with any luck blow the bottom third of the ship clean off.

It could be years before it happened, but there were other things that could be done to other spaceships. Things that would increase casualties. Things that would give the primate-type aliens a chance. They couldn't be all the same, or somebody would notice the pattern. Somebody out of range.

Out of range of what? Quartermaster suddenly wondered. Then he remembered the manifold was fine, and he had many more inspections to make.

There was a war on, and everyone had his part to do.

II: Donderbeck

Like everyone else, she'd learned in school that it had been centuries since humans were uncivilized enough to commit murder.

When she joined the ARM she learned different.

The information wasn't all that useful at first.

"That's him?" said Lancaster.

"That's him, ma'am," Dr. Fisher told the ARM agent. "Please be cautious. We were ordered not to sedate him . . . not that he responds that well to drugs anyway—"

"Yes, I need him alert," she said absently, still a little incredulous. "All right, let me in. I'll be jamming the pickups, so don't come rushing in in a panic."

"We could just shut them off," he said, startled.

"Only the ones you know about."

"You think someone may have bugged us?" he exclaimed.

"I have no idea. I don't care. As I say, I'll be jamming the pickups. Doors, please."

In an era when anything was fixable, Ralston Muldoon was extraordinarily ugly: crooked and protruding teeth, popeyes, a nose that looked smashed to one side, an asymmetrical skull. He was sitting with his hands carefully folded, looking at the table before him.

When Lancaster came into the room, Muldoon turned his eyes toward her, looked her down and up, and glanced at several different areas, then settled on her face. Lancaster was in the habit of looking people over in just that way herself, and she developed the sudden conviction that Muldoon now knew exactly how she was armed, what she