“What about food poisoning?” the captain teased.
“I’ll think about it.”
“We billet him in what amounts to a cage. When he’s out, he’s under guard.”
“He’ll escape. He’s going to try to kill us all and steal the ship.”
The captain laughed. “Not a chance.”
“Don’t count on it.”
Chapter 12
(2437 A.D.)
Grraf-Nig’s plan to steal the Shark and escape to Kzin was proceeding without a flaw. His team of W’kkai engineers had rebuilt the Shark to his specifications, saving the internal structures he was sure were necessary for the hyperfield build-up, replacing the rest with a kzinti design that was far in advance of any standard kzin technology. He’d been in maintenance at Wunderland, adept at implementing illegal ship modifications in fighters; he knew he had at his disposal the most deadly small fighting craft ever fielded by the kzinti. It would be able to outmaneuver any ship of the old W’kkai Standard Spec Attack Fleet. If it was in operational condition.
Cautious testing had uncovered only minor problems. Of course, there had, as yet, been no tests of the hyperdrive in the new configuration-all experimentation outside the singularity had to be carefully hidden from UNSN patrol surveillance. But the Shark’s new hyperspace performance did not really worry Grraf-Nig; he had spent thirteen years overhauling its motor. This particular hypershunt had brought him from Hssin to W’kkai and had never showed any of the instabilities of the W’kkai copies which were giving them so much trouble.
In the early tests of the modified Shark he’d always had an overdressed W’kkai warrior with him as test pilot. For “final” test (which was only number three in a series of eight-plus-one) he had managed to arrive early, by priority shuttle, bringing with him his Jotok slave, Long-Reach, “for a special pre-flight installation.” Some officer would be skinned alive for not noticing the irregularity.
The Shark was now loaded and flight-checked, minus only its perfumed Ship-Tester, who had been conveniently delayed on W’kkai but who was probably already puzzled by the special priority shuttle that had preceded him to the test craft. He would not yet be alarmed. The test sequence commands were to be delivered electromagnetically by the research station and could be overridden only by Ship-Tester and only in an emergency. So everyone thought.
By the time Ship-Tester was on his way, the five arms of Long-Reach had rewired the controls. It was too late to stop the escape.
Grraf-Nig turned his attention to the space around him. The research station was only a glint in the sky but W’kkai was still a large disk W’kkaisun was so large at a hundred light-seconds that it had to be blotted out by the sunscreens. He and Long-Reach had a lengthy maneuver ahead of them. Because the singularity around W’kkaisun extended out for three light hours it would take at least a day at maximum gravitic polarizer acceleration before they could disappear via hypershunt. They had a good chance to beat pursuit. A sphere three light hours in radius was an enormous volume to defend, and the W’kkai navy was of necessity deployed to defend priority installations, not to prevent defections.
The worst danger came from the fleet close to W’kkai, who would get their pursuit orders immediately with a minimum of light-lag delay. The improved Shark still had a twelve-g acceleration edge on the best of the Screams-of-Vengeance fighters available to intercept them. Grraf-Nig glanced warily at the brilliant point of light that was cold Hrotish, six times as massive as W’kkai with its important W’kkai-sized moon. There was a fleet there, too, and they were only six light minutes away.
Several “cones of escape” looked very good, though the desperado was not underestimating the risks. The Fanged God threw his bones carelessly. Grraf-Nig recalled the biggest coincidence of his lifetime-how he came to be testing illegal modifications of Kr-Captain’s Scream-of-Vengeance fighter at just the right time and place. Chance alone had placed them at a location from which they were able to destroy the human ramscoop Yamamoto as it passed through the Alpha Centauri system. Luck might be with them now-and it might not.
Briefly he relished his memories of Grraf-Hromfi, the greatest strategist he had ever known, the warrior he had honored by taking half his name. “Look before you leap,” reminded the master constantly. Grraf-Nig had programmed a randomly curving path through the cone of escape so that W’kkai sensors, handicapped by light-lag, would give an ever less accurate prediction of his real position.
A wary Hero scanned his instruments. He looked at the glint of the research station and looked straight at Hrotish before he grinned-and leaped. A rebuilt Shark shot off at an acceleration that human technology could not match.
Missile attack would be the best way to stop him, but he doubted that they would use it against their only reliably operational hypershunt motor. If they did, he had beam-armament and a very good “Weapons-Officer” in Long-Reach who had always played that part while they were illegally modifying fighter craft for the Fifth-Fleet’s Black Pride at Centauri. To call his slave “Weapons-Officer?” aloud would not do-but he could think it. Long-Reach’s five networked brains made him the fastest Weapons-Officer Grraf-Nig had ever met.
Beam attack was another danger but he did not doubt that he could sidestep any offensive beam-weapon launched against him, never having met a W’kkai warrior who understood beam evasion. He understood. He had been trained by Grraf-Hromfi, who had been trained by Chuut-Riit. Beam-weapons were a favorite of the humans, who had used them in ingenious fashions while defending themselves at Man-sun. Never one to overlook details, Chuut-Riit analyzed their monkey-tricks and formalized a defensive dance against them. The weakness of beam weapons was the light-lag. They were useful against fixed targets. They were useful for a long-distance surprise assault. They were useful for light-second infighting. Otherwise they could be defended against.
“Zap-p-p-p-p!” harmonized Long-Reach in an exclamation from the five mouths of his lunged arms. He had taken out his first closing missile with a beam bolt.
Grraf-Nig roared something in the Hero’s Tongue that translated roughly as, “Mate with sthondats!” Fortunately the robe-assassins were chasing them; none were attacking from the forward direction, which would have been really dangerous. He had been wrong about his comrades’ willingness to attack him with missiles. They weren’t going to limit themselves to boarding; they were killing mad. Manually he began to add fillips to the automatic evasions. Long-Reach got two more in a row, pause, then five, the last one right on their tail-blossoms as the polarizer fields collapsed. An individual missile had little chance of making it through-but Long-Reach could be overwhelmed. Grraf-Nig wished he was in fighter formation with several beams protecting their rear. This, however, was more exciting.
As quickly as it began, the missile attack ceased. That was good. As time passed, their pursuers’ ability to estimate their present position was seriously degrading. But Grraf-Nig watched his instruments with the intensity of a predator anticipating a flock of dangerous prey. It was to the advantage of a cluster of missiles to talk to each other and coordinate their attack for the same moment. The light-lag in the “talk” probably doomed that kind of blow, but any possibility had to be watched for.
When it came, the second missile attack was of an entirely different kind. The missiles began to detonate in front of them. It was a strategy of desperation since their pursuers knew only where they had been. If the explosion erupted behind them, it posed no danger. If it was just beyond them, the fireball of fragments presented too small a cross-section to be dangerous. And if the warhead detonated too far ahead of them, the fireball was too diffuse to do damage when they passed through it. After all, the kzin had been traveling through interstellar space at eighty percent of light-speed for thousands of years. The fierce gravitic polarizer fields that they used to move their ships were quite good enough to protect them from normal interstellar debris.