The Man-Kzin Wars 07 by Larry Niven

Author:Larry Niven
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: kzin
ISBN: 9780671876708
Publisher: Baen
Published: 1995-06-01T03:00:00+00:00

·CHAPTER TWELVE

Carol Faulk touched a keypad and felt her crash couch shudder in response. Dolittle shot down the darkened escape tunnel toward the outer hull of Sun-Tzu.

Carol activated the escape bay doors. She goosed the fusion drive, already warmed and ready at the first sign of potential hostilities. Explosive bolts blew silently in vacuum, the hatch flew into fragments, and the long spindle shape of Dolittle was suddenly free in space.

Now. Yes! Her hands on the helm keypads of a spacecraft, Carol felt in command again. No longer helpless and unable to fight. The starscape was still relativistically squashed and distorted, but at least she had some control over her fate.

And Bruno's.

Dolittle flashed away from the dying Sun-Tzu. They had less than an hour before her quickly set booby trap activated, and antimatter containment gently and fatally shut down.

Dolittle had to be far away indeed from Sun-Tzu by then.

Carol called up the autodoc remote diagnostic on screen above her console. The autodoc sensors were already attached to Bruno in many places, and medical robots were swarming over and in his body, doing everything possible to heal his damage. Flashing red lights indicated his serious condition.

"C'mon, Tacky," she whispered. "You have to pull through.”

There had been little choice when she pulled his plug in the Sun-Tzu. Bruno's brain was certainly damaged by what she had done, and even more from the EMP induction. But had Bruno remained fully Linked and directly connected to the computer net by electrical conductors, the electromagnetic pulse would have burned his brain to ashes.

Bruno: sick or dead. Those had been her choices.

Carol kept the bulk of the Sun-Tzu between Dolittle and the kzin warship that was even now approaching the earth vessel, bent on boarding and conquest. The idea of ratcats leaping down the abandoned corridors of Sun-Tzu, finding the cryogenically suspended bodies of her crewmates, felt like a violation. But perhaps she would get her revenge after all.

She would give her doomed sleeping crewmates a real Viking funeral, a far piece indeed from Scandinavia.

Carol smiled grimly. The ratcats will get a surprise in fifty-eight minutes, she thought to herself. A caution worried her. How long will it take for the kzin to analyze the command programs, and begin diagnosing drive activity?

Dolittle's vector was straight and true. Carol was a good pilot, even by the seat of her jumpsuit, and Dolittle's basic fusion drive was familiar. You didn't need to be part computer to fly the little warship.

By now, the ratcat craft was close enough to Sun-Tzu to hide Dolittle's escape behind the bulk of the earth spacecraft. Every second would translate into merciful, shielding distance when the antimatter containment system failed.

When she was a thousand kilometers from the Sun-Tzu, still undetected and unchallenged, Carol unfurled the great superconductive wings of Dolittle.

Forty minutes left now.

The vast wings of Dolittle caught at the magnetic fields between the stars, like a fledgling bird in an updraft. A conductor moving rapidly through a magnetic field generated electrical current. The current, tapped, delivered deceleration force.

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