Man-Kzin Wars IV by Larry Niven (graded readers .txt) 📗

seat, Long-Reach. I’ll need your brains in due time.”

Long-Reach hunkered down on his undermouth, petulantly. He was muttering along internal channels to himselves that he was Weapons-Operator. That started an argument among the arms about who was to take charge of the camera missiles.

“The line-of-flight cuts right past the A-star,” said Trainer. “They’ll already be dead. The starwind is fierce at that distance. It will have hit them like your father’s claw.” Kr-Captain seemed unconvinced and so Trainer used an analogy from a virtual horror-adventure they had both lived together under shared eye-caps. “It’s like a hurricane wind in your sails.”

Kr-Captain bared his fangs. He didn’t like being reminded of that horror-story world covered with water, trying to survive in the company of five war-stranded Heroes on board a fleeing sloop in typhoon weather. His liver was still recovering. “I will not repeat myself again! We shall assume that the monkeys are alive, you miserable fur-tick fleeing-the-skin-of-a-dying-sthondat!”

“As you command, brave Hero!”

“Now how shall we kill them? It was you who took out my particle-beamer for this test!” The thought of being disarmed put him back on the edge of anger. Not even a nuke. “Shall I slash at them with my wtsai as they zip past?”

“This combat couch is very uncomfortable, revered Hero,” muttered short(arm). Listening to himself gave Long-Reach perversely practical ideas. “We could toss my combat couch at the enemy.”

“Silence!” roared Kr-Captain.

Trainer-of-Slaves was looking around the cockpit for things that might be ripped out. “Gold dust is what we need, but your honor-bearing wtsai blade is powerful enough to destroy even the most invincible monkey battleship.”

Long-Reach gave a good imitation of a kzin “hisssss” of profound inspiration. “We leave our noble Hero on the line-of-flight, waving his wtsai. He leaps,” said short(arm). “He strikes!” exclaimed freckled(arm). Then a chorus of arms imitated the spits and snarls of a kzin fight. Skinny(arm) intoned the denouement, “In one blow the enemy ship disintegrates in a blaze of shame! and ever afterwards Kr-Hero radiates bluely from the honor roll of the Patriarch!”

Discreetly, fast(arm) gripped a rod on the back of Trainer-of-Slaves’s combat couch in case he had to yank Long-Reach to a safer place.

His lips twitching, Kr-Captain eyed his more yellow-orange than red-orange kzin companion. “Where did you find this five course lunch?”

“We’ve been together since Hssin. He really is a good mechanic.”

“We seem to have reached a consensus,” grumbled the Captain. “Some massive object left along the line-of-flight.”

“Perhaps not massive. If we sprinkled gold dust in its path, each grain of dust carries the impact energy of a medium nuclear strike,” said Trainer.

Kr-Captain did not believe him. Kzin are not used to combat passes at relativistic speeds. But he did the calculation on his screen. The numbers convinced him. “A little dust in the monkey’s path and—nuclear fireball! Easy.”

“Not so easy,” moaned big(arm). Long-Reach had been consulting among himselves. “It is not just a bigger high-velocity kinetic impact,” stated the practical fast(arm). “We now pass into a new realm of the unimaginable where our intuition fails,” expostulated the expansive short(arm).

At relativistic speeds, kinetic impact becomes a cosmic ray shower.

Visibly, Alpha Centauri began to creep across the glittering heavens toward Man-sun. The stars shimmered unnaturally through the strengthening polarizer field. Long-Reach, as “honorary” Weapons-Operator, busied himself with a simple project. He removed cameras from missiles. Then he built two makeshift warheads out of bottled oxygen and half their water rations and a few grams of tungsten-carbide grinding powder from his toolkit.

The Flayer-of-Monkeys was well equipped with sensors. Seventeen hours from their rendezvous it began to pick up the ramscoop which had an “apparent velocity” of 120 lightspeeds. Electronic amplification constructed a foreshortened image. The scoop was gone. That was a shock. Trainer-of-Slaves thought, at first, that it had been “burnt-off” during the close flyby of A-star, but when he had the Flayer’s data-link rotate the image to a side view, he saw that the funnel was simply folded-in to a vastly reduced scoop area so that its magnetic field was being used only to protect the crew. In the high mass regions around Alpha Centauri they had simply “furled their sails”!

From a standstill, Flayer aimed and directed its missiles down the line-of-flight toward the oncoming UNSN ramscoop which was now occulting Man-sun. The makeshift warheads bled a lethal mist of oxygen and ice-coated tungsten. Then Flayer moseyed down the line, away from the ramscoop, bleeding its helium coolant, its cabin nitrogen reserve, plus a bottle of argon—and for good measure the talcum powder that Kr-Captain used to bathe his fur. They returned at full acceleration, stopped, rolled and dropped to the side, rotating to face the coming action. Trainer-of-Slaves mounted the salvaged cameras.

“All they have to do is dodge!” complained Kr-Captain, who was an expert at sixty-g maneuvers.

“They are blind in front. Their course is laser-true. Do you know how much lateral-thrust energy it would take to deflect them a whisker’s breadth? They don’t command that kind of energy. They are committed!”

The Heroes strapped in to do the warrior’s greatest duty—wait.

Half an hour later the nameless ramscoop, its mission still a mystery to its attackers, zipped by, moving faster than any explanation can describe what the eye saw.

The first missile missed.

The second missile ticked through an edge of the folded scoop, ionizing into a fireball genie that lashed a flaming arm out after the ramscoop—too late, too slow.

The ramscoop plowed ahead into the mist.

Valiantly the magnetic field tried to cope with the overload but wasn’t equipped to handle the dust or the oxygen. Superconductors overheated. Electrical resistance began to vaporize the surface of the scoop…

Meanwhile hydrogen and oxygen and tungsten, helium and nitrogen and argon, even talcum powder, were ionizing on impact to become tiny superdense nuclear projectiles sleeting through what to a nucleus is mostly empty space: the bulkhead, the air, the life support, the instruments, the protein, the fusion engine, hardened lead-tungsten radiation barriers, everything and on out to the other side, leaving behind ionized trails as spoor.

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