Shutdown protocol… time ticking by… tense glances… increases in radiation sleeting through the weakening magnetic shield… the relativistic world outside sliding by in multicolored splendor…
A final shudder rang the entire ship like an enormous bell. Thrust dropped to zero.
Now the plummeting elevator sensation of freefall sent Bruno's Flatlander stomach roiling. Except that they were falling through the interstellar emptiness at seventy percent of the speed of light itself.
A low tone snagged his attention, drew it back to the holoscreen. A soft voice calmly said, “Shutdown protocol is complete. Confinement within normal parameters. Chamber cooling protocol initiated.”
Bruno sucked in a deep breath and felt Carol let go of his hand, still tingling from the strength of her grasp. He leaned over and kissed her cheek firmly, as if in thanks.
“Drive shutdown is complete,” Carol said formally for the benefit of the ship's log. “Let's start planning.” She stretched her fingers within her own dataglove, warming up.
Bruno watched Carol's eyes become hard and narrow, the eyes of a survivor and combat veteran of the Second and Third Waves. Her face was neutral, as was her tone. “This is where all the heroic bullshit Early poured into your ears turns real.”
Bruno knew that she was thinking again of her ship-to-ship battles during the Second Wave. He had his Dream with which to battle; Carol had genuine memories of the War, sharp edged and immediate.
He reached over and took Carol's free hand. Such thoughts were never far from her. He remembered holding Carol after they had made love. They would lie with arms around each other, in the gentle darkness of the sleeproom, the only illumination from holoscreens showing the green riot of the Hanging Gardens in Confinement Asteroid. Carol's half-seen satisfied smile would fade, as she would first think about her wartime experiences, then talk of them. Sometimes she had wept as she recalled the horrors, her muscular body tensing in his arms as the memories gripped her, dragging her across years and billions of kilometers.
Memories of air gushing from the shattered helmet of an old friend, turning to glittering clouds of ice shards in the wan sunlight. The flash of a control board shorting out after a direct hit with a kzin particle beam. Worst of all, the ear-ringing clang of a railgun projectile hulling a ship, followed by the whining roar of escaping air. Bruno could only imagine the emotional impact of the deadly ballet of space warfare, the long periods of waiting and contingency planning punctuated by seconds of frenzied activity and terror. Carol compartmentalized her fears better than Bruno ever could. He accepted this.
She exhaled loudly, stuffing the past mentally away, and stretched her head back and forth to relieve the tension. She released his hand, and patted it gently.
“Don't you think that it's time?” Carol asked quietly, not looking at the Link clipped to the console in front of Bruno. “You can keep better track of the blips while Linked, and can oversee a faster start-up, can't you?”
Bruno nodded, reaching over to squeeze her hand again. She didn't respond. “I take it that you just gave an order?” he asked.
Carol turned and looked at him directly, harsh memories flitting like ghosts across the planes and angles of her face. “Yes,” she said simply, none of her sadness at giving the order evident.
Bruno nodded. He picked up the Link and inserted the plug into his neck socket, but couldn't keep his hand from trembling as he did so.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rrowl-Captain roared his anger, and the bridge crew of the Belly-Slasher fell instantly silent.
“Initiate contingency plan Krechpt,” he shrieked into the intership and shipboard intercoms.
The ripping-cloth sound of the gravity polarizers suddenly became much louder. The hull seemed to shift and waver randomly beneath them as the fabric of space itself bent and twisted. Rrowl-Captain turned away from the intercom, eyes flicking at once to his command-chair thinplate. Status reports marched across his tactical screen in the dots-and-commas script of the kzin. The two other ships under his command were following orders as expected, a portion of his furious mind noted, racing away from one another at the limits of their gravitic drives.
Rrowl-Captain turned to the source of the problem.
“Strategist,” he spat and snarled in the Hero's Tongue, whipping his naked pink tail in annoyance, “tell me why the monkeyship has deactivated its drive! They are far from turnover.” The cool, dry ship's air quickly filled with the captain's anger-smell, redolent with attack pheromones. His pelt, each hair erect with pent-up rage, gleamed under the bright orange illumination on the bridge.
The kzin in charge of predicting human battle behavior stood very straight and still, with only the slightest droop of his whiskers and half-folded ears to suggest his discomfort. He slapped retracted claws against face in salute. “Dominant One,” he began, “the humans must have detected us.”
Rrowl-Captain choked back an outraged shriek and barely contained his fury, his reply acid-etched with purring sarcasm.
“This I can perceive, O Master of Grass-Eating Slave Tactics! Please do not further strain your name-lacking honorless leaf-grazing mind by restating facts obvious to any true Hero with eyes and the Warrior Heart!”
The captain peered hopefully at the other kzin, who blinked twice at this insulting profanity. Still, he was experienced with his commander's black moods, and wisely kept silent, waiting respectfully.
Duty had battled honor in Rrowl-Captain's Warrior Heart constantly since the Third Fleet's destruction. He had kept shipboard discipline far more harsh and unyielding than considered routine for kzin warcraft. He chuffed air out through his nostrils in disgust, pleading silently with the One Fanged God for patience and wisdom.
His three ships had been part of the vanquished Third Fleet, defeated yet again by these hairless monkeys, using their leaf-eating tricks against noble Heroes. Rather than dying with honor in an attack on Man-home as his Warrior Heart had demanded, Rrowl-Captain had obeyed the final command of the Dominant Commander of the Third Fleet, Chsst-Admiral.
And in following his Duty, he had abrogated his Honor. It leaked from his very soul in shame. Rrowl-Captain's liver and heart never let him forget his dishonor.
The three scout-cum-warships under Rrowl-Captain's direct command — Pouncing-Strike, Spine-Cruncher, and his own Belly-Slasher — had been carefully tuned and stealthed before their departure from Man-sun back toward Ka’ashi, or as the monkeys called it in their whining mewl of a language, Alpha Centauri. Rrowl-Captain's mission was to use his three warcraft to probe the spaces between the two stars, observing the soulless monkeys from afar, and tightbeaming ahead the gigabytes of information collected during the defeat of the Third Fleet.
Chsst-Admiral, grizzled and radiation-scarred with the outward signs of his Warrior Heart, had been Rrowl-Captain's superior during the initial assault on Ka’ashi, long years before, and thus commanded respect and deference. Any kzin would follow the Dominant One of the Fleet into the Dark Pit itself.
Chsst-Admiral had convinced Rrowl-Captain that his own Warrior's Path would be to humbly aid the full scale Heroes' Vengeance promised by the Fourth Fleet. He had obeyed Chsst-Admiral's commands, subjugating his honor to Fleet discipline, but his agreement still reeked faintly of cowardice, of grass-on-breath.
Chsst-Admiral, of course, had showed vibrantly that his own heart and liver were a credit to the Patriarch in Castle Riit at far-off Kzin-home. He had died in the glorious suicide attack on the interstellar launcher on the moon of the large gas giant, which the monkeys called Juno.