Man-Kzin Wars III by Larry Niven (love novels in english txt) 📗

Jonah realized with a sudden shock that he was being weighed. For trustworthiness, and possibly for expendability.

“Of course not,” the general said. “The risk is too great. Remember the Sea Sculpture?”

Jonah concentrated. “Oh, the thingie in the Smithsonian? The Slaver?”

“Why do you think they were called that, Captain?” Early spent visible effort controlling impatience.

“I . . . ” Suddenly, Jonah realized that he knew very little of the famous exhibit, beyond the fact that it was an alien in a spacesuit protected by a stasis field. “You’d better do some explaining, sir.”

Several of the others stirred uneasily, and Early waved them back to silence. “He’s right,” he said regretfully, and began.

* * *

“Murphy,” Jonah muttered when the older man had finished. “That thing is a menace.”

Early nodded jerkily. “More than you realize. That artifact is a ship. There may be more than one of the bastards on it,” he said, using another of his archaic turns of phrase. “Besides which, the technology. We’ve had three centuries of trying, and we’ve been able to make exactly three copies of their stasis field; as far as we can tell, the only way that thing could work is by decoupling the interior from the entropy gradient of the universe as a whole . . . ”

Jonah leaned back, his toes hooked comfortably under a line, and considered the flatlander. Then the others, his head cocked to one side consideringly.

“It isn’t just you, is it?” he said. “The whole lot of you are ARM types. Most of you older than you look.”

Early blinked, and took the stogie from between his teeth. “Now why,” he said softly, “would you think that, Captain?”

“Body language,” Jonah said, linking his hands behind his back and staring “up”. The human face is a delicate communications instrument, and he suspected that Early had experience enough to read entirely too much from it. “And attitudes. Something new comes along, grab it quick. Hide it away and study it in private. Pretty typical. Sir.”

“Captain,” Early said, “you Belters are all anarchists, but you’re supposed to be rationalists too. Humanity had centuries of stability before the Kzinti arrived, the first long interval of peace since . . . God, ever. You think that was an accident? The way humankind was headed in the early atomic era, if something like the ARM hadn’t intervened there wouldn’t be a human race now. Nothing we’d recognize as human. There are things in the ARM archives . . . that just can’t be let out.”

“Oh?” Jonah said coldly.

Early smiled grimly. “Like an irresistible aphrodisiac?” he said. “Conditioning pills that make you completely loyal forever to the first person you see after taking them? Things that would have made it impossible not to legalize murder and cannibalism? Damned right we sit on things. Even if there weren’t aliens on that ship, it would have to be destroyed; there’s neither time nor opportunity to take it apart and keep the results under wraps. If the pussies get it, we’re royally screwed.” Jonah remained silent. “Don’t look so apprehensive, Captain. You’re no menace, no matter what you learn.”

“I’m not?” Jonah said, narrowing his eyes. He had suspected . . .

“Of course not. What use would a system of secrecy be, if one individual leak could imperil it? How do you think we wrote the Sea Statue out of the history books as anything but a curiosity? Slowly, and from many directions and oh, so imperceptibly. Bit by bit, and anyone who suspected—” he grinned, and several of the others joined him “—autodocs exist to correct diseases like paranoia, don’t they? In the meantime, I suggest you remember you are under military discipline.”

* * *

“Uncle, that established the limits of control,” the technician said to Shigehero Hirose.

Silent, the oyabun nodded, watching the multiple displays on the Murasaki’s bridge screens. There were dozens of them; the Murasaki was theoretically a passenger hauler, out of Tiamat to the major Swarm habitats and occasionally to Wunderland and its satellites. In actuality, it was the Association’s fallback headquarters, and forty years of patient theft had given it weapons and handling characteristics equivalent to a kzinti Vengeful Slasher-class light cruiser. He reflected on how much else of the Association’s strength was here, and felt a gripping pain in the stomach. Still water, he thought, controlling his breathing. There were times when opportunity must be seized, despite all risk.

“Attempt communication on the hailing frequencies,” he said, as that latest singleship stopped in its elliptical path around the asteroid and coasted in to assume station among the others under Markham’s control. Or the alien’s, Hirose reminded himself. “But this time, we must demonstrate the consequences of noncompliance. Execute East Wind, Rain.”

The points of light on the screens began to move in a complicated dance, circling the asteroid and its half-freed alien ship.

“Ah,” the Tactics officer said. “Uncle, see, Markham is deploying his units without regard to protecting the artifact.”

Pale fusion flame bloomed against the stars, a singleship power core deliberately destabilized; it would be recorded as an accident, at Traffic Control Central on Tiamat. If that had been a human or kzinti craft, everyone aboard would have been lethally irradiated.

“But,” the oyabun observed, “notice that none of his vessels moves beyond a certain distance from the asteroid. This is interesting.”

“Uncle . . . those dispositions are an invitation to close in, given the intercept capacities we have observed.”

“Do so, but be cautious. Be very cautious.”

“Accelerating,” Jonah Matthieson said. “Twenty thousand klicks and closing at 300 kps relative.”

The asteroid was a lumpy potato in the screen ahead; acceleration pressed him back into the control couch. Almost an unfamiliar sensation; this refitted singleship had no compensators. But it did have a nicely efficient fusion drive, and he was on intercept with one of Markham’s boats, ready to flip over and decelerate toward it behind the sword of thermonuclear fire.

“Hold it, you cow,” he muttered to the clumsy ship. His sweat stank in his nostrils. Show your stuff, Matthieson, he told himself. Singleships no better than this had cut the kzinti First Fleet to ribbons, when the initial