Larry Niven's Man-Kzin Wars II by Dean Ing Jerry Pournelle SM Stirling

Author:Dean Ing, Jerry Pournelle, SM Stirling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter II

“Please, keep calm,” Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, for the fourth time. “For Finagle’s sake, sit down and shut up!”

This one seemed to sink in, or perhaps the remaining patrons were getting tired of running around in circles and shouting. The staff were all at their posts, or preventing the paying customers from hitting each other or breaking anything expensive. Several of them had police-model stunners under their dinner jackets, like his; hideously illegal, hence quite difficult to square. Not through Claude—he was quite conscientious about avoiding things that would seriously annoy the ratcats—but there were plenty lower down the totem pole who lacked his gentlemanly sense of their own long-term interests.

Everyone was watching the screen behind the bar again; the UNSN announcement was off the air, but the Munchen news service was slapping in random readouts from all over the planet. For once the collaborationist government was too busy to follow their natural instincts and keep everyone in the dark, and the kzin had never given much of a damn, the only thing they cared about was behavior. Propaganda be damned.

The flatlander warship was still headed insystem; from the look of things they were going to use the sun for a whip-round. He could feel rusty spaceman’s reflexes creaking into action. That was a perfectly sensible ploy; ramscoop ships were not easy to turn. Even at relativistic speeds you couldn’t use the interstellar medium to bank. Turning meant applying lateral thrust; it would be easier to decelerate, turn and work back up to high Tau—unless you could use a gravitational sling, like a kid on roller-skates going hell-for-leather down a street and then slapping a hand on a lamppost.

He raised his glass to the sometime mirror behind the bar. It was showing a scene from the south polar zone with its abundance of ratcat installations; kzin were stuck with Wunderland’s light gravity, but they preferred a cooler, drier climate than humans. The first impact had looked like a line of light drawn down from heaven to earth, and the shockwave flipped the robot camera into a spin that had probably ended on hard, cold ground.

Yarthkin grinned, and snapped his fingers for the waitress. He ordered coffee, black, and a sandwich.

“Heavy on the mustard, sweetheart,” he told the waitress. He loosened his tie and watched flickershots of boiling dust-clouds crawling with networks of purple-white lightning. Closer, into canyons of night seething up out of red-shot blackness, that must be molten rock…

“Sam.” The man at the musicomp looked up from trailing his fingers across the keyboard. It was configured for piano tonight—an archaism, like the whole setup. Popular, as more and more fled in fantasy what could not be avoided in reality, back into a history that was at least human. Of course, Wunderlanders were prone to that, the planet had been a patchwork of refugees from an increasingly homogenized and technophile Earth anyway. I’ve spent a generation cashing in on a nostalgia boom, Yarthkin thought wryly. Was that because I had

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