Their plan, like its origins, was a similarly constructed puzzle, a series of boxes within boxes for the humans to discover and open. This was not perhaps as satisfying for Nyawk-Captain and the other kzinti as a scream and a leap, nor as honorable as one massive attack. But it was more likely to win results under the current circumstances.
A plan almost worthy of Hanuman.
Cat’s Paw and three other, similarly enhanced interceptors were moving secretly out into space that the humans had not yet explored. There, unobserved, each would soon turn and find its own path back into human space. Each would pass through a different sector, and the timing of their entries would be staggered, too, just enough to appear to human strategists as individual attacks. The humans would dismiss these transits as the movement of renegade kzinti, secret traders and raiders, and so not responsible to the Patriarchy and the humiliating papers that had been signed after Most Recent War.
Each interceptor would make an isolated attack against a single human world. The Paw at Margrave, the others simultaneously at Gummidgy, Canyon, and Silvereyes. With the new weapons they now carried, they could do a massive amount of planetary damage. Of course, the Paw would have to move very quickly through the Lambda Serpentis system-and find the Margravians very much asleep-if they were to be successful and still escape with their lives into deep space on the far side of the system.
But escape was not important. Survival was not important. Timing was everything.
The suddenness and brutality of the attacks would awaken the humans’ highest strategists to a possible military action. But an action falling where? To meet it, the humans would spread their fleet. “Trying to cover all the bases” was the human phrase his orders had referenced. it had the smell of a sports term, and true kzinti did not practice sports.
While the humans dispatched their ships and spent their resources investigating and healing the four damaged worlds, the kzinti Last Fleet would be riding behind only one of the interceptors. Just how far depended on the humans’ calculated reaction time and the reports of brave kzinti agents among the survivors on those shattered worlds. When human strength was at maximum dispersal, the Last Fleet would overwhelm the patrol screen, engulf the target planet, consolidate, and move on. The fleet would take two, three, perhaps even four key colony worlds before the humans could regroup and mount a defense. But by that time momentum and purpose would be riding with the kzinti. Confusion and alarm would be hindering the humans.
Ma plan it was flawless.
Man actual attack, it just might work.
But timing would be everything.
On the seventy-first day, and twenty-four light-years into the unknown…
Uncharted but not unknown, Cuiller reminded himself; A thousand, a million times over the millennia, humankind had looked outward toward this sector and seen its stars-stars now hidden in the Callisto’s Blind Spot Some of these stars, judging by their lines in the mass pointer were even bright enough to be visible from Earth. But no one had taken a survey mission through here. Not after bumping into the kzinti coming the other way.
“Captain…“ from Jook at the comm down by the pointer. “We’re going to graze the singularity limits of a star-”
“Initiating evasive.”
“No, wait. The mass says it’s a sol-type, G1. We might drop in for a look.”
“Again
“I’ve got some scatter that might be planets,” Jook said hopefully.
“Or another fully developed Oort cloud?”
“Well, we can’t know till we look…
“We’ve got a mission to perform, Hugh,” Cuiller told him.
“Survey data is valuable, sir”
The commander sighed. Jook was right. And it was time for them to drop in and see some stars in visible light for a change, if only for an hour or so.
“Very well. Sing out when it’s time to decouple the hyperdrive.”
“Now!… sir.”
Cuiller hit the switches on reflex. It wouldn’t do any good to wander into a singularity. Stars bloomed in the nothingness beyond the wide window stripes in the ship’s surface covering.
“Which direction?” he asked.
“Off our port bow and now rolling up at, uh, 230 degrees.”
The commander looked and saw a bright yellow bead, big enough to begin showing a disk.
“Start plotting the planets, or whatever they are. I’ll wake Lieutenant Krater and get her on the console.”
“I’m awake,” she said, rolling out of her sleeping cocoon. “I felt the ship acquire momentum.”
“Jook’s got another possible planet. Give it the once over, will you, Sally? Full spectrum.”
“Gotcha.”
The crew settled into their workstations, except for Gambiel. Cuiller let the weapons officer go on sleeping, held in reserve against a probable long watch when they were underway again.
After ten minutes, both Jook and Krater spoke at once.
“Hello!”
“I’ve got-”
“One at a time,” Cuiller ordered.
“I’ve found a planet,” the navigator said. “One body, no moons. It has an equatorial radius of about 3,400 kilometers, about the same as Mars. But it’s got a lot higher mass, pulls about point-seven-nine gee. We can move around easily enough, but if there’s an atmosphere it’s going to be dense and hot The planet is far enough out from the primary for water to go liquid but not start icing down.”
“Spectral analysis says there’s atmosphere,” Krater confirmed. “Sixty-eight percent nitrogen. Twenty-two percent oxygen. Nine percent water vapor-so the air is pretty steamy, too. The rest is traces. We can breathe, unless we find pockets of poison gas or spores or something… But that’s not the big news. I’ve got a hard return!”
“On deep radar?” Jook asked eagerly.
“Of course. I thunked your planet once just for luck. And the return shows either a chunk of neutronium, or “You weren’t scanning at the core?” Cuiller asked quickly.
“Naw, it shows up right near the surface.”
“Well, well.”
“You’re not going to make us go down there, are you, Captain?” Jook asked, inserting a mock whine in his voice. “You know we’ve got a mission to complete, with lots of phantom kzinti to chase.”
“Stow it, Hugh.” Cuiller grinned. “Give me a vector to the planet Sally, when we get close enough, localize that hard return for the navigational console and send it to Hugh… We make one pass over it in low orbit, Hugh, to get a fix on landing sites, and then we head in. Right? Look sharp, everybody. We could be going home rich.”
“Aye, sir!” from both of them.
From more than ten million kilometers out, they could see with the naked eye that the planet’s disk was unbroken. It showed a pale green atmosphere, banded with broad strips of white.
“Looks like a gas giant,” Cuiller said uneasily.
“No way, Cap’n,” Jook answered. “We definitely have rock.”
The green was the color of dilute free chlorine -lots of it. On a hunch, Cuiller asked Krater to recheck the spectralysis, which was taken by comparing incident light from the G-type primary with sunlight reflected off the planet.
“I do get some dropout lines for chlorine,” she said. “But not enough to color the atmosphere like that. The machine still says what it’s got is breathable.”
From a million kilometers away, they could see little more.
“The green is probably chlorophyll,” Krater observed. “We’re looking at grass fields, swamps, taiga, or all three.”
“Should be greener then,” said Gambiel, who was awake by now and at his forward station.
“Remember all the H20 in the air,” she told him. “We’re looking through a mile or two of light haze. A lot of reflectance there.”
The haze appeared to deepen and grow whiter as they locked into an orbit. “More scatter effect,” Krater called it.