Man-Kzin Wars IV (Man-Kzin Wars Series Book 4) by Larry Niven

Author:Larry Niven [Niven, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780671720797
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2018-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

(2420 A.D.)

Detection-Orderly-Two summoned Grraf-Hromfi immediately, rousing him from a curled sleep. Hromfi was not the kind who made life miserable for warriors who interrupted his rest. A Hero on duty had the obligation to wake the dead if he felt it in the interest of the Patriarchy. The Commander of the Third Black Pride appeared at the Command Room, naked in his copper red fur except for slippers, grumpy, but not angry.

Analysis began promptly, without preliminaries. The small object had appeared in the heavens out of nowhere, near Rh’ya in the House of the Fanged God’s kzinrretti—the Pleiades. Only light-hours away. Very anomalous gravity pulse. That had set off the alarms. It was also a neutrino source.

Another strange event.

The Third Black Pride was up to full strength. Its Commander ordered a discreet reconnaissance probe. If the mystery pulse came from a small ship, he wanted it captured for interrogation. Quickly. And not destroyed.

Instantly, he chose for the mission three pilots he could trust: the first an old warrior with gray in his pelt who had flown Scream-of-Vengeance fighters for Chuut-Riit since he was a kit, the second a wild-eyed Hssin barbarian who liked to pick the meat out of his fangs and comb his mane before he leaped, and the third, Grraf-Hromfi’s most promising son.

They, in turn, were shaken out of their sleep. Each hastily donned goggles so that he could receive his orders. “The intruder is to be disabled, not vaporized!” growled their Commander. “And while I have your attention: a warning.” He shifted into the menacing tense of the Hero’s Tongue to jolt their livers. “Our instruments tell us that this object appeared out of nowhere. Instruments can be deceived. The best kzin minds can be deceived. However, regardless of how irrational the concept, expect the object to defend itself by vanishing into nowhere. Attack without warning! Disable it immediately! Prisoners are to be taken! If it is an automatic ship, the brain is to be salvaged!”

While the three crews scrambled, he called ahead to make sure that Fighter Command was ready to equip them with Screamers modified by Trainer-of-Slaves. He wanted them to have whatever edge he could supply.

Grraf-Hromfi’s nose was beginning to sniff the oddness of an alien technology lurking about. On the borderlands of the Patriarchy that could be extremely dangerous. But how to put these enigmatic pieces together? He thought of the wooden puzzles of the kzin Conundrum Priests of W’kkai. Eight ways there were to put any puzzle together, and seven of those ways always left an awkward shape protruding.

In the meantime, decisions never waited for a finished puzzle.

How had that unnaturally fast ramscoop dropped off agents? No obvious mode of deceleration suggested itself. At an incoming velocity near lightspeed any agent would have carried the energy of a continent-smashing bomb; the energy from any kind of capsule-braking would have been observed. And how had they penetrated Chuut-Riit’s security to juggle creche feeding procedures so that Chuut-Riit had to face his own ravenously hungry sons behind locked doors? It seemed like magic.

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