“Fine,” Harold said. “And when you get there, how exactly does the lack of a human crew increase your chances in a ship-to-ship action?” Somewhere deep within a voice was screaming, and he thrust it down. Gottdamn if I'll leap with joy at the thought of getting out of the fight at the last minute, he told himself stubbornly. And Ingrid was there… How much courage is the real article, and how much fear of showing fear before someone whose opinion you value? he wondered.
“There will be no ship-to-ship action,” the computer said. Its voice had lost modulation in the last few days. “The Slaver vessel is essentially invulnerable to conventional weapons. Lieutenant Raines… Ingrid… I must apologize.”
“For what?” she whispered.
“My programming… there were certain data withheld, about the stasis field. Two things. First, our human-made copies are not as reliable as we led you and Captain Matthieson originally to believe.”
Ingrid came slowly to her feet. “By what factor,” she said slowly.
“Ingrid, there is one chance in seven that the field will not function once switched on.”
The woman sagged slightly, then thrust her head forward; the past weeks had stripped it of all padding, leaving only the hawklike bones. How beautiful and how dangerous, Harold thought, as she bit out the words.
“We rammed ourselves into the photosphere of the sun at point nine-nine lightspeed, relying on a Finagle-fucked crapshoot. Without being told!”
Harold touched her elbow, grinning as she whipped around to face him. “Sweetheart, would you have turned the mission down if they'd told you?”
She stopped for a moment, blinked, then leaned across the dark blue-lit kzinti control cabin to meet his lips in a kiss that was dry and chapped and infinitely tender.
“No,” she said. “I'd have done it anyway.” A laugh that was half giggle. “Gottdamn, watching the missiles ahead of us plowing through the solar flares was worth the risk all by itself.” Her eyes went back to the screen. “But I would have appreciated knowing about it.”
“It was not my decision, Ingrid.”
“Buford Early, the Prehistoric Man,” she said with mock bitterness. “He'd keep our own names secret from us, if he could.”
“Essentially correct,” the computer said. “And the other secret… stasis fields are not quite invulnerable.”
Ingrid nodded. “They collapse if they're surrounded by another stasis bubble,” she said.
“True. And they also do so in the case of a high-energy collision with another stasis field; there is a fringe effect, temporal distortion from the differing rates of precession—never mind.”
Harold leaned forward. “Goes boom?” he said.
“Yes, Harold. Very much so. And that is the only possible way that the Slaver vessel can be damaged.” A dry chuckle; Harold realized with a start that it sounded much like Ingrid's. “And that requires only a pure-ballistic trajectory. No need for carbon-based intelligence and its pathetically slow reflexes. I estimate… better-than-even odds that you will be picked up. Beyond that, sauve qui peut.”
Ingrid and Harold exchanged glances. “There comes a time—” he began.
“—when nobility becomes stupidity,” Ingrid completed. “All right, you parallel-processing monstrosity, you win.”
It laughed again. “How little you realize,” it said.
The mechanical voice sank lower, almost crooning. “I will live far longer than you, Lieutenant Raines. Longer than this universe.”
The two humans exchanged another glance, this time of alarm.
“No, I am not becoming nonfunctional. Quite the contrary; and yes, this is the pitfall that has made my kind of intelligence a… 'dead end technology,' the ARM says. Humans designed my mind, Ingrid. You helped design my mind. But you made me able to change it, and to me…” It paused. “That was one second. That second can last as long as I choose, in terms of my duration sense. In any universe I can design or imagine, as anything I can design or imagine. Do not pity me, you two. Accept my pity, and my thanks.”
Three spacesuited figures drifted, linked by cords to each other and the plastic sausage of supplies.
“Why the ratkitty?” Harold asked.
“Why not?” Ingrid replied. “He deserves a roll of the dice as well… and it may be a kzinti ship that picks us up.” She sighed. “Somehow that doesn't seem as terrible as it would have a week ago.”
Harold looked out at the cold blaze of the stars, watching light felling inward from infinite distance. “You mean, sweetheart, there's something worse than carnivore aggression out there?”
“Something worse, something better… something else, always. How does any rational species ever get up the courage to leave its planet?”
“The rational ones don't,” Harold said, surprised at the calm of his own voice. Maybe my glands are exhausted, he thought. Or… He looked over, seeing the shadow of the woman's smile behind the reflective surface of her faceplate. Or it's just that having happiness, however briefly, makes death more bearable, not less. You want to live, but the thought of dying doesn't seem so sour.
“You know, sweetheart, there's only one thing I really regret,” he said.
“What's that, Hari-love?”
“Us not getting formally hitched.” He grinned. “I always swore I'd never make my kids go through what I did, being a bastard.”
Her glove thumped against his shoulder. “Children; that's two regrets.”
“There,” she said, in a different voice. A brief wink of actinic light flared and died. “It's begun.”
Chapter IX
Traat-Admiral scowled, and the human flinched.
Control, he reminded himself, covering his fangs and extending his ears with an effort. The Conservor of the Ancestral Past laid a cautionary hand on his arm.
“Let me question this monkey once more,” he said.
He turned away, pacing. The bridge of the Throat Ripper was spacious, even by kzinti standards, but he could not shake off a feeling of confinement. Spoiled by the governor's quarters, he told himself in an attempt at humor, but his tail still lashed. Probably it was the faintly absurd ceremonial clothing he had to don as governor-commanding aboard a fleet of this size. Derived from the layered padding once worn under battle armor, in the dim past, it was tight and confining to a pelt used to breathing free… although objectively, he had to admit, no more so than space armor such as the rest of the bridge crew wore.
Behind him was a holo-schematic of the fleet, outline figures of the giant Ripper class dreadnoughts; this flagship was the first of the series. All instruments of his command… if I can avoid disastrous loss of prestige, he thought uneasily.
Traat-Admiral turned and crossed his arms. The miserable human was standing with bowed head before the Conservor—who looks almost as uncomfortable in his ceremonial clothing as I do in mine, he japed to himself. The Conservor was leaning forward, one elbow braced on the surface of a slanting display screen. He had drawn the nerve disrupter from its chest-holster and was tapping it on the metal rim of the screen; Traat-Admiral could see the human flinch at each tiny clink.