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

was on the floor writhing in pain, his ear and the side of his head swelling with auto-suggestion injury.

Fixer offered his gloves to the observers and they were unlocked. He had not harmed Telepath, and had not received so much as a scratch himself. Fixer had acquitted himself; he still wore Kfraksha-Admiral’s stink, but he was not the lowest of the kzinti on Sons Contend With Bloody Fangs.

* * *

“The humans obviously have a way of tracking our ships, yet they do not have the gravity polarizer…” Kfraksha-Admiral sat on his curved bench, legs raised, black-leather fingers clasped behind his thick neck, seeming quite casual and relaxed. “What is our weakness, that they spy on us and can aim their miserable adapted weapons upon us?”

Fixer’s turmoil was not apparent. He knew the answer—but of course he could not give it. He had to maneuver this conversation to determine if the commander was asking a rhetorical question, or testing him in some way.

“By our drives,” he suggested.

“Yes, of course, but not by spectral signatures or flare temperatures, for in fact we do not use our fusion drives when we enter the system. And without polarizer technology, gravitational gradient warps cannot be detected … short of system wide detectors, which these animals do not have, correct?”

Fixer rippled his fur in agreement.

“No. They detect not the effects of our drives, but the power sources themselves. It is obvious they have discovered magnetic monopoles. I have suspected as much for years, but now plans are taking shape…”

Fixer-Halloran was relieved, and horrified, at once. This was indeed how kzinti ships were tracked; in fact, it was a little slow of the enemy not to have thought of it before. The cultural scientists back on Ceres had been puzzled as well; the kzinti had a science and technology more advanced than the human, but they seemed curiously inept at pure research. Almost as if the knowledge had been pasted onto a prescientific culture…

Every Belter prospector had monopole detection equipment; mining the super-massive particles was a major source of income for individual Belters, and for huge Belt corporations. Known monopole storage centers and power stations were automatically compensated for in even the cheapest detector. In an emergency, a detector could be used to determine position in the Belt—or anywhere else in the solar system—by triangulation from those known sources. An unknown—or kzinti—monopole source set detectors off throughout the solar system. And the newly-converted propulsion lasers could then be locked onto their target…

“This much is now obvious. It explains our losses. Do you concur?”

“This is a fact,” Fixer said.

“And how do you know it is a fact?” Kfraksha-Admiral challenged.

“The lifeship from War Loot is not powered by monopoles. I survived. Animals would not distinguish monopole sources by the size of the vessel—they would attack all sources.”

Kfraksha-Admiral pressed his lips tight together and twitched whiskers with satisfaction. “Precisely so. We must have patience in our strategies, then. We cannot enter the system using our monopole-powered gravity polarizers. But there is the ghost star … if we enter the system without monopoles, and without approaching the gas-giant planets, where we might be expected… We can enter from an apparently empty region of space, unexpectedly, and destroy the animal populations of many worlds and asteroids. This plan’s success is my sinecure. Many females, much territory—glory. We are moving outward now to pass around the ghost star and gain momentum.”

Fixer-Halloran again felt a chill. Truly, without the monopoles, the kzinti ships would be difficult to detect.

Fixer pressed his hands together before his chest, a sign of deep respect. Kfraksha-Admiral nodded in condescending fashion.

“You have proven valuable, in your own reluctant, rankless way,” he acknowledged, staring at him with irises reduced to pinpoints in the wide golden eyes. “You have endured humiliation with surprising fortitude. Some, our more enlightened and patient warriors, might call it courage.” The commander drew a rag soaked in some pale liquid from a bucket behind his bench. He threw it at Fixer, who caught it.

The rag had been soaked in diluted acetic acid—vinegar. “You may remove my mark,” Kfraksha-Admiral said. “Henceforth, you have the status of full officer, on my formal staff, and you will be in charge of interpreting the alien technologies we capture. Your combat with Telepath … has been reported to me. It was not strictly honorable, but your forbearance was remarkable. In part, this earns you a position.”

* * *

Fixer now had status. He could not relax his vigilance, for he would no longer be under the commander’s protection, but he could assume the armor of a true billet; separate quarters, specific duties, a place in the ritual of the kzinti flagship. Presumably the commander would not grant permission for many challenges, and as a direct subordinate he would count as one of the commander’s faction, who would retaliate for any unprovoked attack.

The Sons Contend With Bloody Fangs had pulled its way out of the sun’s gravity well at a prodigious four-tenths of the speed of light, faster than was safe within a planetary system, and was racing for the ghost star a hundred billion kilometers from the sun. Sol was now an anonymous point of light in the vastness of the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy; the outer limits of the solar system were almost as far behind.

The commander’s plans for the whiplash trip around the ghost star were secret to all but a few. Fixer was still not even certain what the ghost star was—it was not listed under that name in the libraries, and there was obviously a concept he was not connecting with. But it was fairly easy to calculate that to accomplish the orbital maneuvers the commander proposed, the ghost star would have to be of at least one-half solar mass. Nothing that size had ever been detected from Earth; it was therefore dark and absolutely cold. There would be no perturbed orbits to give it away; its distance was too great.

So for the time being, Fixer assumed they