True to form, Brobding Shaeffer immediately began to pass on the latest gossip—while Yankee was still standing. He was ensconced in a cushioned crescent overlooking the well, his lips happily assaulting his nose in a pincers maneuver, long arm happily around a young lady. “I just got it straight from the ISC Adjunct that Sourface Jenkins considers your mission to be a direct violation of Eighth Fleet territory. A pointed insult. He was raving at 3D soccer last night that a mutineer has been given sweeping authority in his bailiwick.”
“And here I thought he was happy,” Yankee said sarcastically. “The last time we talked, he was grinning like a kzin.”
“Sit down. Meet Chloe.” Shaeffer turned to Chloe and jerked a thumb at his friend. “That’s Yankee. He’s a mutineer.”
Yankee sat down. “Knock it off.”
“That sounds like a real adventure!” exclaimed Chloe with the skill of a young woman who has read about how to get a man talking. There was an artificial spring to her loose black curls. She was either a naive twenty-year-old on her first date or else a very sophisticated sixteen-year-old pretending to be twenty. Brobding could be trusted to date underage girls or to get caught in his spacesuit without underpants or to drink too much in Tigertown. The girl, and she was a girl, continued to stare at Yankee. She actually batted her eyes. “Well?”
“Just another war story,” grumbled Yankee.
“Tell us. I’ve never asked you what happened,” said Brobding. “I’m too polite.”
“That’s what I like about you.”
“Aren’t you going to tell us?” Chloe sighed. “Please, I’m a navy brat and I like war stories.”
“What can I bribe you with?” she flirted.
“A ship, sweetheart.” He smiled kindly and she chewed her lip.
That was when Brobding announced happily that he had brought in a kzin mechanic from Aarku to sham some of the black art of gravitic drive maintenance. “I’ll be taking him back with me to Procyon.”
“I hope you have a rage-proof cage,” mused Yankee.
“Don’t need one. He lost his legs in the war. That’s the deal; he helps us. We grow him a new pair of legs.”
“Are you sure he’s going to buy that? Kzin wear their wounds proudly.”
Brobding grinned. “They’re not all the same. This one would be humiliated to ask a kzin for legs. He’d never do it—even though he wants legs now more than life. He’s old. But he reasons that humans have no honor—so he can ask us. He comes from Ch’Aakin. We’ll send him back home once Brozik’s boys are through pumping his brains.”
Yankee remembered that Ch’Aakin was a neighbor of Procyon—nine light years. It was a lousy M2 star, not worth a gold-plated lead napoleon. The crashlanders had tried to take it during the war—it was too near for comfort—but Ch’Aakin had turned into a bloodbath and one of the defeats the navy didn’t like to talk about.
The next evening Yankee was invited to the naval mess for dinner. There he had to endure a different kind of formality. The gray bulkhead walls were decorated with stiffly mounted brass portholes salvaged off the bottom of Earth’s Pacific, and, at the head of the main table, a coral encrusted propeller from some ancient pursuit plane which had overshot its mother carrier. These were flatlanders, importing their ties to Earth. The officers were seated by rank, their placeholders Chinese ivory military weapons.
Yankee had hoped it might be an informal gathering to break down whatever obstacles were impeding an unorthodox intelligence mission. Instead it was an ambush.
“The Clandeboye articles” had not been published in major datamags. Nevertheless they had been widely circulated and frequently condemned. Often the critics had read only other reviews. His dinner critics were ruthless. They wanted to prove to him that he was wrong, that the UNSN patrols had a vise grip on kzinti space.
Every single man at the dinner had combat experience from the ferocious thirteen-year offensive that had followed the Battle of Wunderland. An average of four percent of their ships had been destroyed on every mission. These were the hardened survivors, some of them brilliant combat officers, some of them just lucky men. None of them had a good reason to discount kzinti strength, yet all of them did.
It chilled him. This was the core of the navy that would have to repel the next kzinti attack. The hyperdrive performed some strange perversion on men’s minds. It gave them the illusion that they commanded space. Yankee remembered Vice Commander Yoni Marshall’s parable about the fleas who rode first class on Earth’s supersonic aircraft, thinking they were lords of every nook and cranny of the Earth—the same Marshall who had taught him three-dimensional attack strategy, the same Marshall who died with the attack forces trying to penetrate the defenses of Down.
“The UNSN patrols don’t even cover the top end of the Patriarchy!” Yankee exclaimed in frustration.
“They don’t have to,” said a confident rake eight years his senior.
While Yankee politely listened to the nonsense the man was using to justify his statement, he had his own thoughts. He had been further into kzinti space than any officer here. There were worlds out there. There was a rumored world called Warhead that the kzinti had controlled since about the time of Genghis Khan. The UNSN didn’t even know where it was and wouldn’t even know that it existed except for a quirky case history in one of Chuut-Riit’s volumes on military strategy.
Yet Warhead was the forward base in a subluminal war being conducted against the Pierin that was still going on as of this very moment. Who were the Pierin? The kzinti warriors fighting that battle probably hadn’t yet noticed a Man-Kzin war. The kzinti had been interstellar warriors since before man had beaten his first iron swords from red metal, since before bronze, since before Ur, since maybe before even beer. That was a lot of time in which to build a network of bases.
How many kzinti worlds were out there? How many kzinti armed rocks hidden in interstellar space? How many miserable little kzinti fortress worlds like Hssin? How many factory worlds? Hundreds? Thousands? No one knew.
These young men who had lost so many comrades could not even admit that they had been fought to a standstill. The hyperdrive was a great logistics and transport weapon. It had allowed the reintroduction of blitzkrieg warfare. The UNSN had been able to surround and isolate the main kzinti worlds. But the hyperspace singularity which enclosed every stellar mass in a “forbidden zone” was as good as any medieval wall at stopping a hypershunt-equipped invader.
In the wicked days before the ARM, horse cavalry might sweep across a thousand miles of Earth and lay siege to the mightiest cities of a domain—but the horses couldn’t walk through walls. A mechanized Wehrmacht might race across the steppes of Russia in tank and armored halftrack and truck and motorcycle—but it couldn’t take the streets of Stalingrad, where tank and armored car and truck were useless.
In thirteen years the human hyperdrive fleets had done brilliantly at smashing kzinti interstellar trade. That didn’t make much difference. The Patriarchy had long ago adjusted itself to supply lines that moved at 80 percent the speed of light. Send off to Kzin for a replacement part and it might arrive half a century later. As a consequence, even a kzinti minor outpost was a more-or-less self-sufficient manufacturing center. A kzinti attack force was a lumbering, ill-supplied adventure. But a kzinti-defended star under siege was almost invulnerable.
The gravitic acceleration of kzinti warcraft allowed them to outmaneuver anything the humans had been able to field, and almost every class of kzinti warcraft was superior to its human counterpart inside the singularity. Long range beam-weapon duels were ineffective; at subluminal beam velocities an ablative shielded kzinti vessel could dodge faster than the response time of the beam generator. Intelligent missiles were the best way to get through but they were very subluminal and could be picked off by alert defense crews.