There were rumors that Fleet Command had considered sending a single missile at Euclid’s Lasso to terminate its journey to Proxima whose inhabitants would then have obligingly died off without the kzin having to lift a paw in further effort. But, probably because the leaders wanted kzin violence to be seen as deliberate rather than arbitrary, this path had not been chosen, and now hn-Pilot’s two ships were trailing along in the Lasso’s wake, ensuring that its contents, as well as their recipients, were benign. Initial intelligence had established that there was no military presence out at Proxima, and so there had been no reason to waste the resources or time journeying out to officially subjugate it. But now that complete investiture of the main system was imminent, the higher and the mightier had decided that the time had come for Proxima’s humans to meet, and make appropriate gestures of obeisance to, their new kzin masters.
rr-Pilot pointed at the Incisor-Yellow’s sensor blip. “Now he’s too close. He’s not going to earn a Name for piloting this way.”
hn-Pilot could not keep his fur from spasmodically rippling at the sardonic quip. Not only was ms-Pilot botching the simple job of staying in formation, but Names were not earned for simple tasks like piloting, any more than they were for running swiftly or shooting straight. Perhaps, if one were to pilot the Patriarch’s own cubs to safety through a swarm of enemy fighters, then, maybe, the honor and achievement would be great enough to earn a Name of one’s own. But the monotony of the daily routine reminded both of them just how far away they were from such glory. Worse still, since each smallship had two pilots, the kzin had been compelled to resort to differentiator-prefixes. These subvocal sounds distinguished one from another just as numbers might have. For the Pilots, rr-, ms-, zh-, and himself, hn-, nothing highlighted the lack of a personal Name so much as having to use these tags.
hn-Pilot watched as the second craft in his formation now drifted too close. “Incisor-Yellow, maintain the correct distance and attitude.”
There was no reply, but the blip moved back to the correct distance. Then, a hesitant message: “Incisor-Red, I am detecting some out-gassing from Lasso’s outer ring of cargo containers. Do you confirm?”
hn-Pilot glanced at the sensor plot, saw no gross abnormalities; he tightened the scan field while increasing resolution. Sure enough, there was a modest cloud of gas and minor debris vectoring away from the Lasso, the signatures emanating from each compass point of its round, head-on profile. hn-Pilot grunted, aimed the viewers at the closest sensor return, and increased the magnification to maximum.
He saw a diminishing puff of vapor and small parts-a metal plate, and possibly the cap-heads of several explosive bolts-rushing away down the sides of the Lasso. It was a strange visual effect: since the Lasso was counterboosting, the debris was already moving faster than the slowing ship from which it had been expelled, and so, as the detritus swept outward, it also “fell forward,” in the subjective parlance of both human and kzin’s spacefarers.
hn-Pilot toggled the ship-to-ship. “Incisor-Yellow, did you see what that rubbish was? Did something fail on the human craft?”
“I do not think so. The signatures were simultaneous and at perfectly equidistant intervals. In each case, it looked like a short explosive burst, and then modest debris. I could make out nothing more.”
Reducing the screen’s magnification, hn-Pilot stared suspiciously at the human craft. Its primary hull was an immense, central cylinder for large-volume cargo items. Its bow-currently facing Incisor-Red-also housed the guidance and robotic elements of the craft.
This main hull was ringed by tubular containers, giving it the appearance of being a baton girdled by a tightly packed bandolier of long metallic frankfurters. Loaded with smaller cargo items, these containers were detachable: the Proximan communities swapped tubes of ore for tubes loaded with comestibles and other essential trade goods. But having four of these containers malfunction simultaneously, and in a cruciform pattern, did not sound like an accident; it sounded like a prelude to-
“Sabotage!” yowled rr-Pilot as the sensor plot was suddenly choked with a spreading cone of small, dense signatures spraying out from each of the four ruptured tubes. However, at second glance, it was evident that this growing debris cloud was not really a cone: it was a funnel. And the only way to escape the junk rushing at them was-
hn-Pilot pointed urgently. “Get into the open space-there, at the center of the funnel.”
rr-Pilot growled, complied-and with one sharp jerk, they were in the eye of the scree-storm, unscathed. Incisor-Yellow was not so lucky: judging from the com-chatter and the hull’s now-wavering course, its portside gravitic polarizer drive had been damaged and the crew-section breached. The craft was losing atmosphere, and a piece of junk the size of a small ball-bearing had punctured the bridge, killing the co-pilot where he sat.
“What treachery is this?” rr-Pilot’s growl was low, with a hard, fast vibratory underbuzz: the sound of a barely suppressed kill instinct.
hn-Pilot was still trying to make sense of the ambush. Clearly, the humans had preprogrammed this event into Lasso’s automatic routines. But why here, so far inside the Proxima system? And why an explosion of junk, jetting out of the four containers that had obviously been sealed with illegal explosive bolts? To destroy the kzin escorts, yes, perhaps, but then why not ensure that the spread pattern would create a full cone of debris, rather than this empty-cored funnel? Simply moving to the hull’s lengthwise center-line had allowed the two kzin craft to escape the worst effects of the-
“hn-Pilot, there is more activity.”
He looked up at rr-Pilot’s tone: puzzlement edged with dread. The dense, encircling halo of debris was beginning to fall forward around them, but less quickly, according to the scanners. That meant that the Lasso had stopped counterboosting, and they were matching speed to maintain distance-but why was the human craft not continuing to decelerate?
The answer was in rr-Pilot’s next report: “Lasso is tumbling, commander.”
A tumble meant that the human ship’s engines were no longer slowing her, so the debris would stay with all the craft slightly longer, now, continuing to hem them in. Indeed, the human ship’s spin about its considerable longitudinal axis would ultimately bring it end-over-end, so that the fusion drive would be in a position to exert forward thrust.
Or, in other words, the drive’s exhaust plume would rotate straight back into the faces of the two debris-encircled kzin smallships.
hn-Pilot saw it before the others. “One-eighty tumble and counterboost-max gees! Now! Do it now!”