Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

are. Kzinti on the attack like to tell their enemies their Names, if they've got them. I'm going to call them up. That can't do any harm. And in the meantime we're closing with them. Stand by to help Hawkins at the main guns, Michael. "

"There! There!" Cumpston's finger stabbed at a new light on the screen, a light that triggered a howling audio alarm-system. "That's the signature of a kzinti warship all right. A big one. Coming in fast . . . a heavy cruiser at least."

"Got it!"

"It still doesn't make sense," Cumpston said. "It's not a coherent attack. A cruiser, a fighter, a boat . . ."

"Who knows why the pussies do anything? I thought I knew them, but this . . ."

"I thought I knew them, too. Some of them, anyway."

Both men looked at the clock. At the rate they were closing, both knew they probably had very little time to live. Waiting for reinforcements was not an option. They had alerted the ground and orbital defenses. Now all they could do was cause as much damage as possible to the kzinti strike-force before it hit the planet. Both had seen the silent annihilation of space-battles many times before. Small craft were dropping from the Tractate Middoth: flying bombs to either destroy by detonation or to pump X-ray lasers.

"I'm getting another signature!" Guthlac's voice was tense but controlled. "Another ship!" Then he gasped, spat a curse. "The bastard is HUGE!

"My God! It's the first attack on Wunderland all over again! A single giant carrier."

"Better cloaked."

"It would be. They've had sixty-six years to improve the technology. Well, it looks like the war's on again for young and old, as they say. I'm sorry, Arthur."

"I'm sorry too." Then, "Michael . . ."

"Yes?"

"Gale's down there."

"I know. Arthur, do what you have to do. We're soldiers."

"How does a Hero's Death appeal to you?"

"I don't think we've got much choice. It's been on the cards a long time." His finger ran down rows of switches. The lights of armed firing-circuits glowed. The leading kzin craft, the smallest, was getting close. It was already in range. Small, but capable of carrying a stick of multi-megatonners of its own. Deal with it, then turn to the great carrier. If Tractate Middoth survived that—and it would not—the cruiser next.

"Ssstop!" Karan's nonhuman voice jolted them. She was standing, trembling. She had pulled out the plasma injector. She appeared to be holding herself upright by her extended claws dug into the fabric of a seat-cover. Her eyes had a strange, unfocused look. She appeared still half conscious, possibly delirious. Just what we need, thought Guthlac, going into battle against hopeless odds with a delirious kzinrret loose in the ship.

"Vaemar! Vaemar is there!"

"How do you know?"

"Karan knows! I know."

A delirious kzinrret. Was oxygen-starvation affecting her brain? But all kzinti had a sense from which the talent of the telepaths was made. Among nontelepaths it was extremely limited and did not work to cross the distances of space. But . . . Karan was Karan. And, Guthlac thought, Vaemar was Vaemar. Neither of them were ordinary kzinti.

"The locators are dead," said Guthlac. "They say nothing. But this is close to the last position we had from them!"

"That's not a ship! It's a moving moon!"

"Vaemar is there! He comes!" Karan screamed.

"The boat must have picked us up," said Cumpston, "but it's not firing at us. It's taking evasive action, all right, but it seems to be evading the fighter."

"Shall we try a com-link?"

"Yesss!" Karan leapt as she spoke. Not a great leap for a kzin, at least not one in good shape, but she was between the two men at the command console. Albert Manteufel sprang from his chair, drawing a pistol, but Guthlac motioned him back. In any event, gunplay within a spaceship was seldom a good idea. Karan spun to face them, claws out and jaws in the killing gape. Her knife was out, though the hand she held it in was trembling.

Cumpston and Guthlac were veterans of many battles in space as well as on the ground, battles often faster than thought, in a realm where only certain instincts and intuitions given to a few could offer hope of survival, controlling machine-enhanced reflexes beyond the frontiers of the purely physical, swifter and more subtle than any dance of bodies or equations. Both knew, too, the potential treachery of instinct. They stayed their hands now, as Karan operated the com-link to the flying, twisting speck on the screen. Weak as she was, her claws flashed too fast for the humans to follow, and much too fast for them to interfere with.

There on a screen was the cockpit of the gig. Flying it were Vaemar and Dimity. Karan collapsed.

* * *

"A dreadnought!" With shriek of ecstasy and blood lust Kzaargh-Commodore leapt onto the great kz'eerkt-hide battle-drum, sending its call booming throughout the ship. Was this what Chorth-Captain had somehow achieved? Already Night-Lurker had identified Chorth-Captain's fighter and gig. How had he done it? And what were the fighter and gig doing? Distracting the monkeys before the dreadnought's terrible slash ripped the guts out of their planet? But it mattered not. "The Patriarch's battle-fleet has joined us!" This was no time for thoughts of how so mighty a consort might have penetrated so deep into the Centauri system and so close to Wunderland undetected, nor for the unworthy thought that so mighty a consort would take most of the glory from a mission that a moment before had been a matter of lone heroism. His crew of Heroes roared an equally enthusiastic response. That they might be perhaps less concerned with Kzaargh-Commodore's glory and more with their own suddenly enhanced chances of survival was not a thought for that moment either. Night-Lurker barrelled in, closing with the strange gigantic vessel.

Bigger than all but the biggest dreadnoughts. And camouflaged as Night-Lurker itself had been. The minds of the great strategists of the Patriarch's General Staff had thought like his own.

There was