“I can't wait to see your ladylike poetry. What's the file name?”
“Hey, not so fast. Don't be so forward. A mere few years of squishy carnal intimacy and already you want to caress my lines with your invasive vision? Get your disorderly Flatlander patriarchal eye tracks all over them?”
Bruno felt a glow of anticipation. “Okay, you can recite them. Tonight, in the Honeymoon Suite. A private performance.”
“I'll have to recite them from memory, shipmate. They aren't written down.”
He could almost see the laugh lines on her startanned face, and shifted deliciously in his crash couch. “Sounds like imaginary poetry to me. Mere mouth music.”
“A base canard! You'll pay for that — tonight, me bucko.”
“Okay, but remember, it's my turn to be on top. Recital or no recital.” Bruno's worries seemed far away while he thought about Carol.
“Huh! Try to perform your macho acts while I recite poetry?” Mock hurt crept into her tone. “Art is seldom appreciated!”
“It's that bad, huh?”
“Ooooh! You better not trust my mouth tonight, O critic!”
“Was that 'trust' or 'thrust'?” He paused. “Either way, I was so looking forward to…”
“Hey,” Carol interrupted. “No fair trying to get me hot, Flatlander.”
“Whaddaya mean, 'trying'? Sounds like I've already done it.” Bruno enjoyed the role-playing that took both of them away from the gritty realities of Sun-Tzu and Project Cherubim.
Carol's tone became accusatory. “More swinging-dick arrogance. You think you can tell that I'm, uh, excited — over the commlink?”
“Well, okay, you Belter pirate. Deny it.”
“No deal. But hey, luv, got to break off. Things need doing here. Romance and recycler maintenance don't mix, do you scan? But thanks for the, ah… interlude.”
Bruno sighed. Carol was right. Playtime was over. “Aye-aye, Skipper. There's work here, too. 'Bye.”
No point in telling Carol yet of his dark suspicions. Time to get back to work. The image-sharpening program was about to deliver up again. He sighed.
Some fuzziness in his thinking. Slight, but it was there. Bruno had become increasingly reliant on the tranquilizers dispensed by the Sun-Tzu's autodoc. And if Carol knew that he was still having the Dream, she would up the dosage. That was all right with Bruno, up to a point. The mood modifiers helped as the dark gap yawned ever wider between ship and home. He felt both alone — despite Carol — and stealthily watched. But that wasn't a side effect of the drugs. Nor of the nightmare he called the Dream.
For despite the seeming emptiness of the Deep surrounding the Sun-Tzu, Bruno knew in his soul that the black vacuum also held kzin warships.
He blinked at the summary display on the holoscreen in front of him. The data hinted at his diminished mind. Always he felt the familiar itch in his neck, reminding him that he was not Linked. Connected to the Sun-Tzu's computer, he would not need to interpret the orderly ranks and files of complex data before him.
He would know.
Bruno yearned for that feeling. Reading the screens was like doing arithmetic by counting with his fingers. But for now, he had to crawl, knowing that sometime not too far off — soon, soon, he thought longingly — he would be able to fly again.
With a grimace, he self-consciously used the time-consuming verbal commands and a dataglove to communicate with the shipboard computer. Slow, clunky, inefficient. Bruno ran several diagnostics to be certain of his earlier observations, then asked a few terse questions of the computer, sketching graphs and recalling database log entries with small, precise gestures of his dataglove-clad right hand.
Bruno didn't like the confirmatory datastream scrolling across one of the open holoscreen windows hanging in midair in front of him. The observations were not conclusive, but they still disquieted him.
There were several possible explanations for the transient gravity waves the Forward mass detector had picked up during the last watch. The signals were faint, but Bruno had finally proven they were definitely not due to sensor malfunction.
Bruno frowned. One interpretation of the signals was that the Sun-Tzu was not alone in deep space, and that one or more kzinti ships were moving on a slow intercept vector toward the Earth vessel.
They were nearly a third of the way to the Wunderland colony at Alpha Centauri. Relativity being what it was, the kzin could not possibly have detected the Sun-Tzu and launched spacecraft in response. Bruno's worried frown deepened.
The signals could be stragglers of the Kzinti Third Fleet returning to Alpha Centauri — defeated once again by launching lasers, brave Belter pilots, and plain ol' Finagle's Luck. But no one at UN Space Command had suspected that there were any retreating alien vessels, after dozens of suicide attacks by the catlike aliens in near solar space.
Bruno bit his lip and sighed deeply, flexing his shoulders and back against the tension he was feeling. The crash couch holding him whirred softly, adjusting itself minutely to his changing contours. Useful, but nothing compared with Carol's massages.
Or worse still, he mused, the mystery blips could be part of an invading Fourth Fleet on its way to Sol. Bruno thought about that possibility for a moment, the dataglove receptors suddenly cold against his fingertips, and called up the sketchy kzin technology database menu. He pulled his right hand from the dataglove while he waited, wearily stretching his tired finger joints.
He thought again of the hand in the Dream. Carol's hand, changed forever by the virus from another solar system. Bruno shoved the thought away. There was work to do.
Looking at his hands, he noticed they were still sweaty, with the usual half-moons of grime under the fingernails. It seemed impossible to rid the starship of grit and dirt. In a way, it was reassuring to Bruno: a gleaming high-tech vessel like the Sun-Tzu was redolent with the ancient smells of burnt oil, old meals and human sweat. Dust collected in corners of the navigation deck, a homey touch. He wondered idly if the kzin had to put traps in their ventilators to keep them from being clogged with shed fur. The thought made him smile a little. He hoped it was true, and that the aliens choked on it.
Bruno slipped the dataglove back onto his aching hand, and selected several subaddresses in the accessed database. In a few moments, he had downloaded and decompressed the files describing various models of the kzinti spacedrive, and how they related to actual observations during the three waves of kzin attacks on Sol. Fuzzy logic judgment subroutines began comparing models against the incoming data, sifting interpretations and displaying the goodness of fit. Bruno knew he had to be fairly certain that the mystery blips were kzin warcraft rather than some natural phenomenon, before he went any further.
Everyone in the UN Command knew the story of The Jinxian Who Cried Bandersnatch. Bruno wanted to be sure.
Irrationally aggressive as the kzin initially seemed, the last attack had cost humanity most of Ceres, Pallas, Titan Base, hundreds of Belter warships, dozens of laser batteries, and the interstellar launcher on Juno. The battle had been closer than most people believed, Bruno knew from Most Secret reports out of Geneva: a small flotilla of carefully stealthed kzinti craft had been intercepted and destroyed a mere half million kilometers from Earth herself.
Plain dumb luck, again.
It was doubtful that luck would be enough to keep the kzin monsters at bay indefinitely. The ratcats keep learning. They keep getting better, more subtle, with every attack wave. The First Fleet the kzin had launched against Sol had been destroyed by the Strather Array of launching lasers on Mercury. Gigawatt lasers and smart mirrors were formidable indeed against targets unprepared for them.