“Grace Agostinho's beauty is all on the outside. And there's a girl hiding somewhere on Newduvai that those deserters never did catch. In a few years she'll be— Well, you'll meet her someday.” Locklear put an arm around Ruth's waist and grinned. “The truth is, Ruth thinks I'm pretty funny-looking, but some things you can learn to overlook.”
At the clearing, Ruth hopped from the pinnacle first. “Ruth will fix place nice, like before,” she promised, and walked to the cabin.
“She's learning Interworld fast,” Locklear said proudly. “Her telepathy helps — in a lot of ways. Scarface, do you realize that her people may be the most tremendous discovery of modern times? And the irony of it! The empathy these people share probably helped isolate them from the modern humans that came from their own gene pool. Yet their kind of empathy might be the only viable future for us.” He sighed and stepped to the turf. “Sometimes I wonder whether I want to be found.”
Standing beside the pinnacle, they gazed at the Anthony Wayne. Scarface said, “With that warship, you could do the finding.”
Locklear assessed the longing in the face of the big Kzin. “I know how you feel about piloting, Scarface. But you must accept that I can't let you have any craft more advanced than your scooter back on Kzersatz.”
“But— Surely, the pinnacle or my own lifeboat?”
“You see that?” Locklear pointed toward the forest.
Scarface looked dutifully away, then back, and when he saw the sidearm pointing at his breast, a look of terrible loss crossed his face. “I see that I will never understand you,” he growled, clasping his hands behind his head. “And I see that you still doubt my honor.”
Locklear forced him to lean against the pinnacle, arms behind his back, and secured his hands with binder tape. “Sorry, but I have to do this,” he said. “Now get back in the pinnacle. I'm taking you to Kzersatz.”
“But I would have—”
“Don't say it,” Locklear demanded. “Don't tell me what you want, and don't remind me of your honor, goddammit! Look here, I know you don't lie. And what if the next ship here is another Kzin ship? You won't lie to them either, your bloody honor won't let you. They'll find you sitting pretty on Kzersatz, right?”
Teetering off-balance as he climbed into the pinnacle without using his arms, Scarface still glowered. But after a moment he admitted, “Correct.”
“They won't court-martial you, Scarface. Because a lying, sneaking monkey pulled a gun on you, tied you up, and sent you back to prison. I'm telling you here and now, I see Kzersatz as a prison and every tabby on this planet will be locked up there for the duration of the war!” With that, Locklear sealed the canopy and made a quick check of the console readouts. He reached across to adjust the inertia-reel harness of his companion, then shrugged into his own. “You have no choice, and no tabby telepath can ever claim you did. Now do you understand?”
The big Kzin was looking below as the forest dropped away, but Locklear could see his ears forming the Kzin equivalent of a smile. “No wonder you win wars,” said Scarface.
THE CHILDRENS HOUR
Jerry Pournelle & SM. Stirling
“We want you to kill a Kzin.”
The general didn't seem to be joking. Captain Jonah Matthieson frowned and reminded himself that flatlanders were odd. Damned odd. He ran his hand down the short-cropped black crest that was his concession to military dress codes. Even by Belter standards Jonah was tall, and if he'd stood straight he would have made a fine figure of a soldier, but he stood in the alert crouch Belters learn early. Matthieson's green slanted eyes showed little amusement as they flickered over General Buford Early's developing paunch. “Well… that's more or less what I've been doing.”
The general's expression didn't change, but he took a box of cheroots from his desk, offered one perfunctorily, and lit his own with a lighter built into what looked to be a genuine Kzin skull. “Gracie. Display. A-7, schematic,” Early said through a cloud of thick smoke.
The rear wall of the cubicle office lit with a display of hatchmarked columns. Jonah stared without comprehension.
“That's been boiled down to make it easier to see,” the general said. “Ships, weapons, casualties, for both sides. Think of it as battle intensity and duration.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Now look at it this way. Gracie: time sequence, phased.” The screen changed to show four separate matts. “Captain, this is the record of the four fleets the Kzin have sent since they took Wunderland and the Alpha Centauri system, forty-two years ago. Notice anything?”
Jonah shrugged. “We're losing.” The war with the felinoid aliens had been going on since before his birth — since humanity's first contact with them, sixty years before. Interstellar warfare at sublight speeds was a game for the patient.
“Fucking brilliant, Captain!” The general was short, black, and balding, and carried a mass of muscle that was almost obscene to someone raised in low gravity. He looked to be in early middle age, which depending on how much he cared about appearances, might mean anything up to a century and a half these days. “Yeah. We're losing. Their fleets are getting bigger and their weapons are getting better. We've made some improvements, too, but not as fast as they have.”
Jonah nodded. There wasn't any need to say anything.
“What do you think I did before the war?” the general demanded.
“I have no idea, sir.”
“Sure you do: ARM bureaucrat, like all the other generals,” Early said. “Well, I was. But I also taught military history in the ARM Academy. Damn near the only Terran left who paid any attention to the subject.”
“Oh.”
“Right. We weren't ready for wars, any of us. Terrans didn't believe in them. Belters didn't either; too damned independent. Well, the goddamn pussies do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. Everyone knows that. Now think about it, Captain. We're facing a race of carnivores with a unified interstellar government of completely unknown size, organized for war. They started ahead of us, and now they've had Wunderland and its belt for better than a generation. If nothing else, at this rate they can eventually swamp us with numbers. Just one set of multimegatonners getting through to Earth—”
The general puffed on his cigar with short, vicious breaths.
Jonah shivered inside himself at the thought: all those people dependent on a single life-support system. He wondered how flatlanders had ever stood it. Why, a single asteroid impact… The Belt was less vulnerable. Too much delta vee need to match the wildly varying vectors of its scores of thousands of rocks; its targets were weaker individually, but vastly more numerous and scattered.
He forced his mind back to the troll-like man before him, gagging slightly on the smell of the tobacco. Even with his rank, how does he get away with that on shipboard? He had thought that even on Earth, the filthy habit had died out. It must have been revived since the pussies came, like so many archaic customs.
Like war and armies, the Belter thought sardonically. The branch-of-service insignias on the shoulder of the flatlander's coverall were not ones he recognized. Of course, there were 18 billion people in the solar system, and most of them seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform these days; flatlanders loved playing dress-up. Comes of having nothing useful to do most of their lives, he supposed.
“So every time it gets harder,” Early said. “First time was bad enough, but they really underestimated us. Did the next time, too, but not so badly. They're getting better all the time. This last one that was bad.” General Early pointedly eyed the ribbons on Jonah's chest. Two Comets, and the unit citation his squadron of Darts had earned when they destroyed a Kzin fighter-base ship.