The Earth vessel was traveling at just over seventy percent of light-speed, seemingly alone in the vast darkness of interstellar space. Physics had begun to compress the usually unchanging starfield forward and aft of the ship, distorting the one rock-steady constant of space travel. Relativity Doppler-shifted the stars directly in front of the Sun-Tzu into a handful of blazing blue diamonds, while Sol was reduced to a dull red gleam behind them, lost in the hellish wash of the antimatter drive.
In the back of his mind, he saw the hand from the Dream on his shoulder, brown and leathery, knuckles the size of walnuts. Alien, but still familiar. He shivered, pushing the memory away with effort.
One thing could always exorcise his demons, Bruno reflected, and keyed the ship commlink. He hoped that the captain was in the mood for a bit of banter.
“Carol, you there?” Bruno licked his lips a bit nervously, waiting for the reply. Sometimes the emptiness around the ship wore her down as well.
There was a faint crackle over the deck speakers, static born from the relativistic impact of bits of interstellar dust against the eroding forward edge of the Sun-Tzu.
“No, I’m lying on a beach in Australia.” Her voice on the commlink was clear, immediate, though she was half a kilometer away on the other side of the iceball that was the interstellar warship.
He smiled despite himself at her flippant tone. A good sign. “You couldn’t find Australia on a map.”
“Map, schmap. I saw it once through a scope out Ceres way. Big brown-and-tan dot in the Pacifist Ocean.”
“That’s Pacific Ocean.” She was baiting him a little, Bruno knew. Belter impudence against Flatlander tradition.
Carol’s tone remained airy, unimpressed. “Big diff, Flatlander. Looked like a dog turd, actually.”
“What would a Belter know about dogs?” he replied, amused.
“Saw one once, in a Luna zoo. Wear their hearts on their sleeves, don’t they?” Pause. “Okay, okay, Mr. Precise. They wear their hearts on their forelegs. Happy?”
“Ecstatic. Anyway, we so-called Flatlanders bred dogs that way. Who wants a pet that’s hard to read?”
“Explain cats, then.”
“Ummm—point conceded.” Bruno smiled again, the beaked face and sad liquid eyes of the Dream receding still further with Carol’s banter. The captain of the Sun-Tzu was better therapy than all the psychists with whom Bruno had worked downside on Earth.
Her conversation was filled with typical Belter logic and twisty changes in subject. Practical, ever looking for the loophole. But then, he reminded himself, Carol had smuggled a cargo or three past the goldskin UN police back in the Belt.
Before the kzin came, and everything changed.
“Turds,” Carol’s voice continued on the commlink in a patently false academic tone, “are a subject I know—I worked recycler maintenance for years before earning my pilot chip.” There was a pause for effect. “And of course, I worked with men a lot.”
“You have such a winning grasp of the language,” Bruno sniffed in mock insult. “And oh so diplomatic, too.” He could feel the worry lines around his scalp scars smooth. He had taken this momentary break to snap out of his mood, and it was working gloriously.
Carol was not to be outdone, however. “You should talk. What’s next—flowers?”
“Well, flowers spring forth from turds…”
She snorted. “An overstretched metaphor, and poorly chosen besides. I was hoping this talk of flowers was turning to romance.” A wounded pause. “Are you attempting to romance me, shipmate? You should read my poetry sometime.”
“What? All these years together and you’ve been writing poetry in secret?”
“Ummm. You’re surprised an old smuggler like me can have a secret or two, Tacky?”
“No, pleased. Not that you’re old. But maybe you have crannies and crevices I haven’t explored yet.”
“I hope that’s a metaphor, you primate.”
“I guess it is—whatever a metaphor might be. Besides, you are the boss. I wouldn’t want to be too forward with a superior officer.”
Carol ignored his sally. “A lady has to keep some of her crannies entirely metaphorical.” Again she paused for an overdone dramatic effect. “After all, Sun-Tzu is a bit on the small side.”
He laughed. Concerns about privacy from a Belter? “I’m more interested in their, ah…”
“Capacity? Circumference? Hard to put such matters in my usual dainty, ladylike fashion.” Her tone had become arch, as usual. There was a pleased purr behind her smoky voice.
“I can’t wait to see your ladylike poetry. What’s the file name?”
“Hey, not so fast. Don’t be so forward. A mere few years of squishy carnal intimacy and already you want to caress my lines with your invasive vision? Get your disorderly Flatlander patriarchal eye tracks all over them?”
Bruno felt a glow of anticipation. “Okay, you can recite them. Tonight, in the Honeymoon Suite. A private performance.”
“I’ll have to recite them from memory, shipmate. They aren’t written down.”
He could almost see the laugh lines on her startanned face, and shifted deliciously in his crash couch. “Sounds like imaginary poetry to me. Mere mouth music.”
“A base canard! You’ll pay for that—tonight, me bucko.”
“Okay, but remember, it’s my turn to be on top. Recital or no recital.” Bruno’s worries seemed far away while he thought about Carol.
“Huh! Try to perform your macho acts while I recite poetry?” Mock hurt crept into her tone. “Art is seldom appreciated!”
“It’s that bad, huh?”
“Ooooh! You better not trust my mouth tonight, O critic!”
“Was that ‘trust’ or ‘thrust’?” He paused. “Either way, I was so looking forward to—”
“Hey,” Carol interrupted. “No fair trying to get me hot, Flatlander.”
“Whaddaya mean, ‘trying’? Sounds like I’ve already done it.” Bruno enjoyed the role-playing that took both of them away from the gritty realities of Sun-Tzu and Project Cherubim.
Carol’s tone became accusatory. “More swinging-dick arrogance. You think you can tell that I’m, uh, excited—over the commlink?”
“Well, okay, you Belter pirate. Deny it.”
“No deal. But hey, luv, got to break off. Things need doing here. Romance and recycler maintenance don’t mix, do you scan? But thanks for the, ah…interlude.”
Bruno sighed. Carol was right. Playtime was over. “Aye-aye, Skipper. There’s work here, too. ’Bye.”
No point in telling Carol yet of his dark suspicions. Time to get back to work. The image-sharpening program was about to deliver up again. He sighed.
Some fuzziness in his thinking. Slight, but it was there. Bruno had become increasingly reliant on the tranquilizers dispensed by the Sun-Tzu’s autodoc. And if Carol knew that he was still having the Dream, she would up the dosage. That was all right with Bruno, up to a point. The mood modifiers helped as the dark gap yawned ever wider between ship and home. He felt both alone—despite Carol—and stealthily watched. But that wasn’t a side effect of the drugs. Nor of the nightmare he called the Dream.
For despite the seeming emptiness of the Deep surrounding the Sun-Tzu, Bruno knew in his soul that the black vacuum also held kzin warships.
He blinked at the summary display on the holoscreen in front of him. The data hinted at his diminished mind. Always he felt the familiar itch in his neck, reminding him that he was not Linked. Connected to the Sun-Tzu’s computer, he would not need to interpret the orderly ranks and files of complex data before him.
He would know.
Bruno yearned for that feeling. Reading the screens was like doing arithmetic by counting with his fingers. But for now, he had to crawl, knowing that sometime not too far off—soon, soon, he thought longingly—he would be able to fly again.
With a grimace, he self-consciously used the time-consuming verbal commands and a dataglove to communica
te with the shipboard computer. Slow, clunky, inefficient. Bruno ran several diagnostics to be certain of his earlier observations, then asked a few terse questions of the computer, sketching graphs and recalling database log entries with small, precise gestures of his dataglove-clad right hand.
Bruno didn’t like the confirmatory datastream scrolling across one of the open holoscreen windows hanging in midair in front of him. The observations were not conclusive, but they still disquieted him.
There were several possible explanations for the transient gravity waves the Forward mass detector had picked up during the last watch. The signals were faint, but Bruno had finally proven they were definitely not due to sensor malfunction.
Bruno frowned. One interpretation of the signals was that the Sun-Tzu was not alone in deep space, and that one or more kzinti ships were moving on a slow intercept vector toward the Earth vessel.
They were nearly a third of the way to the Wunderland colony at Alpha Centauri. Relativity being what it was, the kzin could not possibly have detected the Sun-Tzu and launched spacecraft in response. Bruno’s worried frown deepened.
The signals could be stragglers of the Kzinti Third Fleet returning to Alpha Centauri—defeated once again by launching lasers, brave Belter pilots, and plain ol’ Finagle’s Luck. But no one at UN Space Command had suspected that there were any retreating alien vessels, after dozens of suicide attacks by the catlike aliens in near solar space.
Bruno bit his lip and sighed deeply, flexing his shoulders and back against the tension he was feeling. The crash couch holding him whirred softly, adjusting itself minutely to his changing contours. Useful, but nothing compared with Carol’s massages.
Or worse still, he mused, the mystery blips could be part of an invading Fourth Fleet on its way to Sol. Bruno thought about that possibility for a moment, the dataglove receptors suddenly cold against his fingertips, and called up the sketchy kzin technology database menu. He pulled his right hand from the dataglove while he waited, wearily stretching his tired finger joints.
He thought again of the hand in the Dream. Carol’s hand changed forever by the virus from another solar system. Bruno shoved the thought away. There was work to do.
Looking at his hands, he noticed they were still sweaty, with the usual half-moons of grime under the fingernails. It seemed impossible to rid the starship of grit and dirt. In a way, it was reassuring to Bruno: a gleaming high-tech vessel like the Sun-Tzu was redolent with the ancient smells of burnt oil, old meals and human sweat. Dust collected in corners of the navigation deck, a homey touch. He wondered idly if the kzin had to put traps in their ventilators to keep them from being clogged with shed fur. The thought made him smile a little. He hoped it was true, and that the aliens choked on it.
Bruno slipped the dataglove back onto his aching hand, and selected several subaddresses in the accessed database. In a few moments, he had downloaded and decompressed the files describing various models of the kzinti spacedrive, and how they related to actual observations during the three waves of kzin attacks on Sol. Fuzzy logic judgment subroutines began comparing models against the incoming data, sifting interpretations and displaying the goodness of fit. Bruno knew he had to be fairly certain that the mystery blips were kzin warcraft rather than some natural phenomenon, before he went any further.
Everyone in the UN Command knew the story of The Jinxian Who Cried Bandersnatch. Bruno wanted to be sure.
Irrationally aggressive as the kzin initially seemed, the last attack had cost humanity most of Ceres, Pallas, Titan Base, hundreds of Belter warships, dozens of laser batteries, and the interstellar launcher on Juno. The battle had been closer than most people believed, Bruno knew from Most Secret reports out of Geneva: a small flotilla of carefully stealthed kzinti craft had been intercepted and destroyed a mere half million kilometers from Earth herself.
Plain dumb luck, again.
It was doubtful that luck would be enough to keep the kzin monsters at bay indefinitely. The ratcats keep learning. They keep getting better, more subtle, with every attack wave. The First Fleet the kzin had launched against Sol had been destroyed by the Strather Array of launching lasers on Mercury. Gigawatt lasers and smart mirrors were formidable indeed against targets unprepared for them.
By the time the Second Fleet had arrived six years later, the kzinti had learned to shield their magnetic monopoles, making the alien warships difficult to detect, let alone burn. Some of the battles had then been ship to ship, and lopsided battles at that; Belter fusion-pinch drives were no match for the kzin vessels, somehow able to accelerate at hundreds of gees without the slightest respect for the laws of Newton. Still, the humans too were learning with each encounter, and the aliens were defeated again.
The Third Fleet arrived seven years after that, and had almost broken the improved system-wide defenses. No scream-and-leap strategy that time from the kzin warships, but the more dangerous approach of feint-and-pounce. It had been close indeed. Sol was still furiously rebuilding her shattered perimeter defenses, Belters and Flatlanders working together without argument.
The kzinti strategies just didn’t make sense, Bruno thought, biting his lip in thought and looking at the holoscreen. Flickering images crawling across the floating window like tiny technicolored insects. He had to be absolutely certain before he notified the captain of the Sun-Tzu.
Data swiftly uncoiled in four dimensions, and Bruno tried to fit it as well as possible to UN Tactical Team predictions. Analytical parameters changed with each model the computer retrieved from the relevant files, and smooth graphical surfaces rippled and curved in response. Bruno made occasional changes in the modeling subroutines, tweaking an assumption here or there as human intuition suggested. As he worked, he tapped his shipshoes against the deck, which softly thrummed with the continual actinic thrust of the antimatter drive.
These ratcats are crazy, he thought. They’ve gotta be the weirdest damn things in the galaxy.
Bruno was quite sure of that.
• OUTSIDERS ONE
Surprise-concern. Sense the waning along the emergent force-vectors in zone {^/~}. Alerts have been raised within all Four Aspects of the Nexus.
Distraction. This recent phenomenon has been noted by this local-node. Compensation is initiated. Imminent action-tree analysis is under consideration.
Concern. The other-node had presumptive control of such incursions! There is major instability of precious plasma density along this most vital zone. Field-line integrity is threatened! What is the nature of this abomination?
Confidence. Transmitting update data-packet from this local-node to the other-node.
Consideration. Received. Analysis initiated. Amplification and clarification requested from the other-node.
Explanation. The hotworld craft shall soon converge. Their ritual violence will once more be worked upon this precious sector of obliging expanse. Observe and contemplate. Interaction with the Focus is minimized.
Confusion. There seems no point to hotlife’s endless offshoot energies. A wise evolution, Pattern-Shaper, would contain or damp such wasteful vigor to more distributed ends.
Confidence. The other-node mistakes evolution in these hotworld motes as possessing purpose. This is a commonly held illogic concerning myriad hotlife forms. Review prior net-entries {**%##}. Recall that hotlife shaping is but reaction to stochastic and chaotic forces.
Agreement. Creation squanders its rich and various wonders on such insignificant motes. To what end? The true point of Creation lies within the One Mind of the Radiant Masters who know the Way.
Zealotry. Only the Divine Radiants—and such as this local-and-other nodes, {-+-+-}, that serve them—have deep cosmic purpose from this reality and the Other. All else is insignificant, mere passing minor disorder within the Great Pattern.
Distress. These hotworld craft, with their spewing forth of debris and disordering of stately and stable force-patterns, cannot but be irritants to the Great Design of the Divine Radiants. Rec
all that a Great Construct was once under consideration for this region-space; clearly, this geometry remains sacred to the still-silent Masters. This local-node argues in all high seriousness for the extermination of the hotlife motes—all of them.
Surprise. Does the other-node fall so easily into heretical traps? Consult the High Texts for complete arguments and debate frozen into lattice. The other-node recommendation must be considered by the High Ones, those that speak for the long-silent Radiants. This local-and-other nodes are but Watchers, long patient sentinels and vigilant agents.
Truculence. Yet node-agents can act where prior accepted precedent exists. The Net contains ample examples of necessity under similar circumstance.
Authority. Abide, impatient node-and-agent. Observe and serve, as is the highest Purpose of such mere matter. This local-and-other nodes were constructed to be agents in the world of condensed matter.
Outrage. But the hotworld motes are vermin! They interfere and meddle with concerns older than their very Pattern.
Agreement. Truth. Their ends shall come, as all such motes have over long eons. This local-and-other nodes remain, and carry out Purpose.
Disagreement-impatience. This local-and-other nodes recently acted, atomizing the fleets of hotworld vermin fleeing galactic Center in nearby vector-zone {^*/~}. Those vermin were little different than found in one of the motes under observation. Even as mere sentinels, this local-and-other nodes dealt swiftly with the threat to the Great Design of the Masters.
Anger-regret. Recall that such unilateral and intemperate action led to the abomination of Treaty with the heretical cousins, the {^^^///}! This local-and-other nodes lost much authority and autonomy.
Fury-agreement. Foul heretics! The feral ones have spurned the wisdom of the High Ones, and the Divine Radiants. Instead, their myriad node-links consort with hotlife vermin such as these irritating motes!
Reflection-worry. Truth. This local-node would feel more assured if contact could be restored directly with the Divine Radiants. Their insights would—