We were only a half light-year out from Sol, but it took me a moment to find that bright point among so many other suns. Somehow it looked no warmer than the other brilliant dots. Probably my imagination.
The more immediate target was obvious. A finger pointed straight at it—a radiant finger a hundred thousand klicks long.
The slowboat was huge, even by the standards of the kzin troopship that had carried me across four light-years. Distant stars glittered coldly around the image-enhanced shape on the viewscreen. It was a relief to see a starscape not distorted and squashed by relativity, fore and aft. The Doppler shift was almost imperceptible at 10 percent of lightspeed.
I felt an itching sensation all over my body, but I didn’t look away from the viewscreen to scratch. My little singleship had to be within their sensor range by now, and the crew had no way to determine if I was friend or foe.
I waited to die. I almost hoped for it.
No such luck, of course. Not that I was special. All of humanity was running out of luck.
Goosing the viewscreen magnification up a bit, I studied the target across two hundred kilometers of deep space. The slowboat was a fat cylinder sitting on the hard white blaze of a fusion drive. Even with the jury-rigged gravitic polarizer, it had taken me an hour to maneuver far around the deadly plume of the drive wash pushing the R. P. Feynman back to Sol. Getting anywhere near that column of fusion fire would have fried me thoroughly.
Reaction drives can be effective weapons, in direct proportion to their power. Such was the kzinti lesson, according to rumors overheard from the singed-tailed ratcats returning from at least two attempts on Sol. I frowned. If only…
Too bad Centauri system hadn’t gotten more large fusion drive units in place a few decades back, when the kzin first arrived. Things might have gone very differently for both Serpent Swarmer and Wunderlander. My whole life would have been different, and I would never have ended up here and now.
The singleship control board began to ping. That meant the first faint lines of magnetic force were brushing by the main sensory array of my singleship. I keyed up a false color display of the magnetic field structure at the front and flank of Feynman. Stark crimson lines stretched across my viewscreen into a huge and intricate pattern.
The ramscoop field reached invisible fingers outward for hundreds of kilometers, an invisible throat. It funneled interstellar hydrogen and icy dust microparticles into the fusion drive section at the core of the slowboat. Anything with a slight electrical charge, the mags picked up and gobbled.
Like any good Belter, I sat very still and studied the viewscreen with great care, trying to find a clear path through the closely packed field lines. The ramscoop fueling the slowboat wasn’t a big belcher, like the unmanned ramrobots that could run up to nearly 0.9 lights. This one was pushing hard to make 0.1. The exhaust plume’s ion excitations showed it was at ram-limited cruising velocity.
Slowboat, indeed, despite its incandescent power scratching across the starscape. It was ridiculous, compared to the kzin spacedrive. A trip time of forty years, Wunderland to Sol.
Which is why the passengers in there were stacked up in cryo like canned goods. It had been a long way back, this close to Sol. The Feynman crew must have traded off cruise watches with their sleepers through several shifts now.
Desperate people. And they weren’t going to make it. The slowboat looked to be in good shape on extreme mag. The awake crew must have done repairs on the fly; the slowboats were meant for one-way trips, Earth to Wunderland.
And Feynman looked old. Pitted, blotchy. Even the most recent of the colony ships had orbited Wunderland, empty and ignored, for over fifty years.
It had been a near thing, getting all of the old colony slowboats repaired, crewed, and on emergency boost outsystem. Prole and Herrenmann and Belter, working together for once, before the ratcats arrived in victory. But all three of the slowboats had made it. The kzin made only a half-hearted attempt to stop them.
And for what? I reminded myself bitterly. The rest of us had lost almost everything—rights, dignity, property, countless lives—to let a few Herrenmannen lords and ladies run away from the kzin.
And I knew that better than most. Knew it in my guts.
Feynman’s magnetic funnel was not as lethal as a ramrobot’s, but plenty dangerous to any living thing with a notochord. I would have to be careful, maneuvering closer to the plasma tongue. Mag vortices curled and licked and ate each other there. High turbulence. It could reach out with rubber fingers and strum this little ship like a guitar string. At 0.1 lights, not recommended by the manufacturer.
As if anybody, even a kzin, had ever tried this before.
The navigational computer held my position relative to Feynman as I studied the field line intensifies more closely and plotted a weaving path through the invisible macramé of magnetic force. The ripping-cloth sound of the gravitic polarizer muted to a low crackle. I rubbed my forehead for a moment, then inhaled deeply. The kzin had installed a minimal space drive in my singleship, nothing like their warships or transports. It warped space unevenly the unbalanced gravitic emissions always giving me a splitting headache.
It was show time.
I took a long sip of tepid water from my suit collar nipple. I cleared my throat and keyed the omnidirectional commlink.
“Feynman, Feynman,” I sang out crisply forcing a professional tone into my voice. “This is Free Wunderland Navy emissary spacecraft Victrix. Code Ajax. Do you copy?”
The lie felt thick and bitter on my tongue, like bad coffee. Trojan Horse or Judas Goat would have been better names for my peaceful-looking converted singleship. I steeled myself. No Wunderlander, ground pounder or Belter, owed these running cowards a thing.
It still didn’t feel right. It never would.
But I had little choice. I had my reasons for serving the kzin. Four of them, in fact.
But I’m no Jacobi.
I had been telling myself that for months, over and over, like a mantra.
Again I waited for my sensors to bleat their alarms. That would be the first warning as the slowboat’s signal laser blasted my singleship to vapor. The only warning, maybe a half-second of it.
No reply to my transmission. Just a faint lonely hiss over the shipboard commlink. Backwash emission at the plume’s plasma frequency. The stars looked very far away, cold and uncaring. Sol looked warm, unreachable. Why had we ever left her?
I repeated the transmission. Nothing. I set the commlink to autorepeat, left the receiver volume amped, and waited. I peeled a ration bar, and chewed the fibrous lump slowly. Swallowed. Tried not to think about the damned ratcat holo in my pocket, and my four good reasons to serve the kzin.
I took another bite, the ration bar even more tasteless than usual. Slave fodder. Monkeyfood.
Maybe the crew were all dead and had left the slowboat on autopilot. Yet repairs and modifications had been carried out on the old colony ship at some point after its escape. The scope image enhancers showed fresh-looking weld stains, jury-rigged antennas, replaced flux generators with sloppy seals.
They were in there, all right; sitting fat and happy while the rest of us were slaves to the damned ratcats.
I crumpled the ration bar peel in anger. First trouble insystem, and the Herrenmann ruling elite abandoned their high and mighty code of honor. They ran back to their Solward brethren, like any common Prole.