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

badly damaged, the computer was heading for We Made It. Once Peace had gotten it to tell her anything, she discovered that this was because crashlanders: A) knew everything any human being knew about repairing spaceships; and, B) were still paying the Outsiders installments on the purchase of hyperdrive, and could thus be reasonably expected to possess a certain moral flexibility about reporting cash customers to ARM agents. So the trip wasn't all that mysterious in itself, either. However, Peace had plenty to occupy her mind, because she'd gotten these tidbits by locating and decrypting the ship's log. It was a long read, but better than the first week of the trip—the autodoc had been treating her for cataract formation, triggered by the sharp transient acceleration the kzinti grav lock had caused before the ship compensated. (It had been terrifying. She'd never heard of cataracts before—the genes for them had been on the UN Fertility Board's list from the day it was started.)

Slightly before arrival, she got through the password system, and thus was able to use the hyperwave, to warn humanity of the onset of the Fourth Kzinti War. She then discovered that the panic program was still active. Cockroach responded to the content of the messages by turning around and heading for a place to sit out the war unobserved, incidentally adding two months to the voyage.

Interstellar travel was turning out to be principally a pain in the ass.

The autodoc was amazingly old, programmed for her rather hyperactive mother, built into the kitchen, and stubborn as gravity. Peace put on close to three pounds a week. She had to turn up the cabin gravity just to keep it from all turning to fat. And she couldn't keep it above twelve meters or the autodoc just turned down her thyroid.

If Cockroach ended up picking a third destination, Peace was going to have no more contours than a bandersnatch by the time she arrived.

* * *

The Fury dropped out of hyperspace outside the Procyon singularity about forty-five hours after Cockroach had done so. There was a fleet. Fury returned to hyperspace for a few minutes of direction changes, then returned to normal space on a very different side of the gravity well.

Gnyr-Captain growled wordlessly to himself for a while. The habit was probably annoying, but so far no one had had the blood to say so. Then he said, "Technology Officer, was our prey in that fleet?"

"I believe not, Gnyr-Captain, but I am having the computer check my observation. . . . All craft in that fleet are of human manufacture."

Gnyr-Captain growled some more. "Strategy Officer, do you judge that humans would include such a ship in a war fleet if it were available?"

"Yes, sir," was the immediate reply. "Anyone would. Should I expound?"

"No." The ranking of Strategy Officer was a recent innovation, and this one was always trying to demonstrate his worth. Gnyr-Captain wished for about the 512th time that he had a Telepath, then opened a channel. "Manexpert to the bridge."

When Manexpert had buzzed, been admitted, and come to attention, Gnyr-Captain looked him over. That was about all the examining anyone could do. Manexpert habitually breathed through his mouth to control his expression, and groomed with some kind of fabric cleaner to minimize his scent. It was enough to thin your blood sometimes—it was very like talking to a holo of a kzin, but a holo that could smell you. Manexpert had explained, when ordered, that he had adopted the appearance of harmlessness from the humans he studied, on the grounds that it made it possible to surprise and defeat a superior warrior. His dueling record supported this theory.

"Manexpert," said Gnyr-Captain, "our prey is not in this system. Could he have been less damaged than he seemed, and changed course in hyperspace?" Then he waited; such questions always took time.

Manexpert's pupils dilated, his ears cupped, and his tail lashed. He stared at a spot on the bulkhead—which was in fact in about the same direction as the nearby star—and thought very hard for about two minutes, trying to think like a human. Then he resumed a more normal attitude and said, "Gnyr-Captain, regardless of his damage he did not know of our pursuit. If he had, by then he would have been terrified, so he would have attacked, taking advantage of his Red Age ship's superior acceleration."

"A reasoned response, made out of panic?" said Strategy Officer scornfully.

"Humans do it often," Manexpert replied, apparently unoffended. But then, who could know?

"Why?" said Gnyr-Captain, startled.

"I don't know, sir. I'm not sure even they know. My own theory is it's a way to be rid of the fear."

"Reflexively?" Gnyr-Captain said in disbelief.

"It isn't a widely-accepted theory, sir," Manexpert admitted.

"Good—Why wouldn't he stay in their primary shipbuilding system, if he wasn't aware of pursuit?"

"Because it's a very sensible place to go, sir," Manexpert replied. Close study of human thought had gotten him a reputation for strange comments, but this one stood out. He saw his commander's expression and hastily added, "He would realize that a hunter would expect him to go to the safest place possible, and he would expect a hunter to arrive there whether he saw pursuit or not, and therefore would avoid that place. You see, sir, humans seem to have evolved intelligence in order to become predators, which gives them—"

"If I want a lecture I'll catch a pierin!" Gnyr-Captain roared. "Where would he go instead?"

"By this reasoning, the last place a human with his fur straight—urr, hmf—who wasn't mad, I mean, would want to go."

"What, Kzin?"

"They're mad, sir, not idiots. Mostly. —I'm going to have to check my library to figure out just where that would be, Gnyr-Captain. Certainly someplace humans would consider dangerous."

"Go do it. Dismissed."

"Sir."

* * *

Peace watched the line in the middle of the mass detector lengthen to nearly the edge of the globe before dropping Cockroach into normal space. It was her second approach to the system; her first had only been to use the