He did care for Carol, and wished her to be safe and happy. Some sign to her of his intentions would be good.
"We are improved now," Bruno told her proudly. Five seconds had passed in realtime since he had initiated the internal reprogramming.
"I… can see that," Carol replied. Tears still glinted in her eyes.
Biotelemetry subroutines reported Carol's strongly suppressed emotional state. Bruno tasted worry concerning the captain of the Sun-Tzu. A portion of his Mind considered Carol's recent behavior, and began an in-depth analysis.
The rest of Bruno looked outward for the alien threat, anxious to deal with the kzin. There was a universe to ponder.
Bruno sensed the other two kzin warships as tiny flaws in the fabric of space, glittering refractions from their inertialess spacedrives. One of the tiny wrinkles in space-time began accelerating rapidly, maneuvering nearer his drive wash.
"Initiating maneuvers," Bruno told Carol, who nodded jerkily and silently stared at the main holoscreen array.
He sent a low-resolution datadump to a holoscreen window, so that Carol could see the battle more clearly. Dimly, he felt a distraction; the odd, cool brush of Carol's tears drying on his fingers. Evaporative cooling? Bruno sensed the initiation of an increased emotional state in his biological component, and easily compensated for the decreased overall efficiency. If only he could eliminate the hormonal drivers, attain serenity -
"Can I help?" The words were tentative, small.
He felt the cybernetic equivalent of a smile. "No," he said simply in reply.
There was a pause. "I do have some experience in space battles." Carol's tone became slightly peevish.
"Yes. But I have full access to all UN Space Navy tactical and strategic files." He paused, searching his expanding internal database. "Including your own personal battle records and reports.”
Carol looked back at the holoscreen, her face seemingly neutral, breathing heavily. The latter confused Bruno: there had been no extreme maneuvering, nor any acceleration stresses. Another portion of his Mind accessed realtime biotelemetry and found Carol's blood pressure and heart rate elevated. Curious.
Bruno turned the Sun-Tzu. The kinesthetics were quick, zesty. He delicately slashed with the incandescent column of the antimatter reaction drive – a huge scythe scratching an actinic path of deadly light across the distorted starscape.
Yet the ability of Sun-Tzu to turn was limited by its great mass, and the reaction drives controlling its attitude. Several times, Bruno waved the deadly antimatter drive wash near the tiny vessels, an enormous flyswatter against pesky gnats. They dodged – but not by much. He switched vectors, pivoted the ship like a ballerina on an invisible fulcrum.
Much closer, good. But the two motes were still able to avoid the cutting sword he wielded. Bruno noted that one of the gnats was firing weapons against the Sun-Tzu. He could do nothing at this range. His iceball could not evasively weave and dart like the kzin vessels, and his drive wash took precious seconds to reorient. He sent a tendril of greater Mind again into his biological component. "Carol," he forced his human mouth to say, "prepare for weapon impacts.”
"I gathered," she replied without looking at his biological portion. Carol reached for the control pads to adjust her crash couch for greater security, but Bruno did it for her before her fingers actually touched the console.
Enemy laser bursts vaporized bits of the icy skin of his spacecraft. Railgun projectiles stitched deep craters toward his hull sensor pods. His biological senses reported the impacts as dull gonging notes ringing on the navigation deck, Bruno detected the second kzin ship accelerating on an indirect vector, possibly preparing for a hyperbolic approach past the Sun-Tzu, but at a distance too great to inflict significant damage.
Bruno calculated with crystalline immediacy that he could not maneuver the drive wash rapidly enough to threaten both alien warships at the same time.
He devoted more of his Mind to offensive and defensive systems, and subsystems instantly reprogrammed themselves at his whim. Sun-Tzu was not designed for battle; that was Dolittle's mission. Still, Bruno would use what tools were present. Vast quantities of power were tapped from the antimatter reaction chamber, and made available for other uses.
Bruno reached out with a finger of laser light, almost impaling one of the kzin spacecraft on a blazing spear of coherent radiation. Close, so close – Sun-Tzu's railgun batteries fired high velocity flocks of iron pellets in complex patterns toward the enemy vessels. The alien spacecraft dodged gracefully.
Simultaneously, he programmed and launched a dozen nuclear pumped X-ray laser bomblets. Pop, pop
– they plunged into the relativistic vortex and began firing.
Their bursts of radiation narrowly missed their targets. Why? He knew the answer even as the question formed: subminds reported with one electronic voice. A sour taste laced Bruno's sensorium, flitting shadows of human emotion. These were the best defenses human technology could field, but they were defeated by the chaos of relativistic plasma turbulence, the distorting refractions of light-speed, and the adroit skill of kzin pilots. Bruno knew that Sun-Tzu was outclassed here.
On some unquantifiable, illogical level, Bruno tasted danger inexorably approaching Sun-Tzu.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Carol Faulk felt helpless.
It was ironic, actually. She was a seasoned combat veteran, with experience in both singleships and as a commander of a battle squadron. She had hulled or fried many kzin ships, seen good friends die, made decisions that saved lives and won skirmishes.
All she could do now was sit and watch impotently while half-human monster piloted and operated the Sun-Tzu.
Yet it was a half-human monster who used to be her lover and friend. Carol pursed her lips at the painful irony.
For the hundredth time, she reminded herself that her opinion of words like 'monster' and 'alien' might change drastically after they reached Wunderlander space. At the end of the long voyage, when she opened the cryovial containing the virus with the odd name, Tree-of-Life. Maybe after the virus did its work she would understand Bruno better.
On the other hand, it did not look to Carol as if Project Cherubim would be a viable option, based on the holoscreen data scrolling past her line of sight. Not even halfway to Alpha Centauri, and the ratcats were already stalking them.
Bruno's lolling interface cable looked ever more leechlike to Carol. His eyes never moved from her as the holoscreen displays shifted, blinked, and changed. His face was utterly slack, eyes huge and staring, with the expanded pupils characteristic of brain-machine interfacing. Carol knew that the vast majority of Bruno's attention was not on her, no matter how he appeared to stare at her.
Bruno's attention was everywhere, all at once.
Carol blinked back tears, cursing herself for the show of weakness. It took a moment for Carol to force the emotion back down, deep inside her. She was a captain, after all Taking a deep breath and squaring her shoulders, Carol forced herself to accept the simple facts before her, to say the words inwardly: Bruno is getting worse, and faster than expected.
He was becoming more and more alien and machinelike. He had even told Carol that he was reprogramming his own brain, making himself a more efficient 'component'. I was becoming we as the man she knew diluted away inside the growing machine intelligence that controlled Sun-Tzu.
She bullied the subject from her mind with thoughts of duty and strategy. There was nothing to be done at present about her lover. If she and Bruno survived the battle under-way, there would be time to find a way to prevent the machine-generated madness from taking Bruno away from her. Maybe.