“Oh?” Calm, silky.
Strategist held his breath while Rrowl-Captain continued to stare at him, then finished, whiskers still twitching. “Unbalanced gravitic polarizers… will leave a faint graviton signature on mass-detection instruments.”
Rrowl-Captain stood stock-still for a moment, thinking deeply. His fur, bristling with rage moments before, relaxed deceptively. The master of the Belly-Slasher began to groom himself thoughtfully, smoothing back his luxurious orange-red pelt with the back of an absently licked hand.
“Urrr… yes,” Rrowl-Captain agreed. “It would be difficult for these humans to detect us near light-speed by any other method, considering their primitive technology.”
A hanging silence, as quiet as the moment before stalked prey is caught with killing jaws. In a single lithe bound the Captain leaped back to his command chair — and sat. Lounged. “Unbalanced gravitic polarizers,” he hissed softly to himself. Pupils dilated and contracted as he considered implications.
And the cause.
Strategist gave another deferential salute — unnoticed — and then sat heavily at his station. The bridge crew remained silent, guessing with secret relief what would come next. They became calmer, waiting for the inevitable, not looking away from their thinplates.
Rrowl-Captain smiled widely, but not with humor. “Engine-Tinker,” he purred over the shipwide commlink, “do the memory of the Conquest Heroes of Wunderland the favor of reporting to your humble captain. I have some questions concerning your last routine balancing of the gravitic polarizers.”
He chuckled low in his throat as he examined his right hand, back first, then the leathery palm. Rrowl-Captain extended his four black claws deliberately, one at a time. He began stropping them methodically on the worn, centimeter-thick Kdatlyno-hide arms of his command chair.
Minutes passed slowly as the captain purred a kit's hunting tune to himself, the sounds of his sharpening claws loud on the command bridge. Rrowl-Captain directed the kzin named Communication-Officer to tightbeam Strategist's information to Pouncing-Strike and Spine-Cruncher, and take compensatory action. Still purring throatily, Rrowl-Captain reviewed his strategy regarding the monkeyship, making a few notes on his personal logscreen in the dots-and-commas script of the kzin. A new approach to dealing with the monkeyship occurred to him…
The crew did not dare look up from their stations as the access door to the bridge irised open silently. Rrowl-Captain lifted his lambent gaze from his thinplate, like a hunter rising from tall grasses. A hunter done with stalking, and ready to finish the hunt.
The technician entered limp-tailed, crawling on his belly toward the command chair. The air seemed to grow thick and cloying as the captain began to growl, the image of a knife-toothed smile in his voice.
Rrowl-Captain screamed and leaped.
The crew relaxed slightly at their stations, their batlike ears folded tightly against the wet rending sounds on the bridge. They were familiar with their captain's routine, having experienced it before. Shipboard discipline would relax slightly for a time, and full attention could be placed on capturing the monkeyship.
Also, there would be opportunities. Engine-Tinker's second would shortly be promoted, of course.
CHAPTER FIVE
Snick-click.
Carol Faulk looked at Bruno's anxious face as he plugged the thick interface cable into the socket set in the left side of his neck. He looked almost wistful. She was half able to hide the wince she felt as she heard the sharp metallic sounds of the locking connector mechanism holding the cable firmly in place to his neck.
Leech, she thought to herself, irrationally cursing the computer. But there was worse to come.
Carol particularly hated the next part.
With the cable hanging from his neck like a heavy-bodied electronic lamprey, Bruno smiled a little at her, a bit self-consciously. Much as she hated the knowledge, she knew that his expression was one of half-hidden anticipation.
“Would you do the honors?” he asked her quietly.
Bruno had little choice; due to its long-term risks, full Linkage was a command decision, and as such required Carol's direct and active approval. The ship sighed and muttered all around them now that the Sun-Tzu was in free-fall and the ever-present thrumming of the constant-boost drive was silent; a white noise of hissing ventilators and the muted clicking of servo-mechanisms filled her ears. Dust from the corners drifted on the ventilator's breeze, glittering like tiny multicolored stars where it floated into the holoscreen projection beams.
Carol nodded, molding her lips into the confident smile that she knew her lover wanted to see. She verbally told the computer to begin the full Linkage protocol, then repeated the approval two times, in standard confirmation procedure. Finally, she thumbed her console pad, entering the command into the Sun-Tzu's permanent log.
Bruno's crash couch extruded padded restraints, gently pinning his arms, legs, neck and midsection. He said nothing, eyes forward on the holoscreen starscape. Or maybe he was looking beyond the starscape, she wondered. Closing her eyes for a moment, Carol leaned over and kissed Bruno's cheek. She could feel the muscles in his face smile in response to her through her lips. Carol settled back into her own crash couch.
“It'll be all right,” he whispered. “I'm not like any other Linker, remember?”
Carol nodded. “You betcha, sport.”
He certainly wasn't like any other Linker; Bruno was much more. Carol didn't want to lose that.
The computer chimed and informed the navigation deck in its cool electronic voice that full computer-neural net Linkage was commencing. A window in the Status section of the main holoscreen opened, reporting graphically the progress of Bruno's Linkage with the Sun-Tzu's main computer.
Carol grimaced as Bruno's interface booted him up, and sent him into the usual violent convulsions. He bucked and shook, the restraints holding him firmly in place. Spittle shook from his open mouth, floating in tiny droplets in the microgravity.
She wanted to hold him, but held herself back. It couldn't help Bruno now.
“Ah! Aahhhh!” A hypospray swiveled out of his neckrest, striking at his neck like a rattlesnake, and hissed some medicinal compound into his jugular vein. It seemed to calm him after a few moments, though he still twitched and murmured in seeming pain as his mind felt its way into the complex data architecture of the Sun-Tzu's computers.
Or, as Carol suspected, his mind was dragged kicking and screaming to silicon rates of speed, like some kind of terrible mental whiplash.
Linkage, she reminded herself, was painful, no matter what Linkers said before or after the event. They never seemed to remember very much about the process of Linking and un-Linking; the pain and convulsions and time spent convalescing in the autodoc afterwards.
It was all worth it to the Linker. They only remembered Transcendence. Becoming One with the All.
The human mind, Linked to a sixth-generation macroframe array, was capable of the straight numerical number-crunching ability of the computer alone, of course. But the Linker was much more than a lightning calculator, able to balance a World Bank's worth of credit accounts in nanoseconds. The Linked human mind could also access the analog judgment subroutines, of fuzzy logic and hard syntax, with a sureness that non-AI silicon alone could never generate.
Yet a human mind in full communion with such a computer did not think in a linear, machinelike fashion. Far from it.