Man-Kzin Wars - Anthology 11.pdf - Larry Niven - przemosta

Man-Kzin Wars XI

Table of Contents

THREE AT TABLE

GROSSGEISTER SWAMP

CATSPAWS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

TEACHER'S PET

III

WAR AND PEACE

THE HUNTING PARK

MAN-KZIN WARS XI

HAL COLEBATCH

AND

MATTHEW HARRINGTON

CREATED BY

LARRY NIVEN

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0906-6

ISBN-10: 1-4165-0906-2

Cover art by Stephen Hickman

First printing, October 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Man-Kzin wars XI / Hal Colebatch and Matthew Harrington ; created by Larry Niven.

p. cm.

Three at table / Hal Colebatch — Grossgeister Swamp / Hal Colebatch — Catspaws / Hal Colebatch

— Teacher's pet / Matthew J. Harrington — War and peace / Matthew J. Harrington — The hunting

park / Larry Niven.

ISBN 1-4165-0906-2 (hc)

1. Science fiction, American. 2. Kzin (Imaginary place)—Fiction. 3. Science fiction, Australian. 4. Space

warfare—Fiction. 5. War stories, Australian. 6. War stories, American. I. Title: Man-Kzin wars 11. II.

Title: Man-Kzin wars eleven. III. Colebatch, Hal, 1945- IV. Harrington, Matthew J. V. Niven, Larry.

PS648.S3M3753 2005

813'.0876208—dc22

2005019121

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Produced & designed by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH (www.windhaven.com)

Printed in the United States of America

THE MAN-KZIN WARS SERIES

Created by Larry Niven

The Man-Kzin Wars

The Houses of the Kzinti

Man-Kzin Wars V

Man-Kzin Wars VI

Man-Kzin Wars VII

Choosing Names: Man-Kzin Wars VIII

Man-Kzin Wars IX

Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War

Man-Kzin Wars XI

The Best of All Possible Wars

Also by Larry Niven

Fallen Angels (with Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn)

Three At Table

Hal Colebatch

To the memory of W. W. Jacobs

Arthur Guthlac, Wunderland, 2427 a.d.

I've been stupid , I thought. Being stupid on a strange planet is very often an effective way to be dead.

Even a planet as friendly to Man as Wunderland.

Stupid to go through fifty-three years of desperate war to die on Wunderland seven years after

Liberation in a bad storm, on a leave I've spent a long time looking forward to.

But maybe I won't die , I told myself then as the mud fell and slid about me. Maybe I'll look back on all

this one day and laugh. I've been in far worse places and survived. Keep climbing, disregard my

ankle and get above the flood-mark. Then climb higher. I didn't know then what I was climbing into.

* * *

I had set out from Gerning in an air-car for a day's lone hunting in the wilder country to the east. I hadn't

brought much in the way of food or clothes or even weapons. What's the point of a hunt with modern

gear that gives the game animals no chance? You might as well zap them by laser with the aid of a

satellite camera. I had an antique .22 rifle and a box of bullets and a handy little device copied from the

kzin trophy-drier for anything I wanted to freeze-dry and bring home.

There was a good autodoc in the air-car, of course, and a modern communication system. My

headquarters could get in touch with me, and I with them, at any time. I hoped they wouldn't.

A long, long time ago, I had been a museum guard on Earth. I had worn a quaint uniform and collected

banned scraps of militaria and had also dreamed of exploring distant worlds—had hoped more

realistically that with some saving and luck I might one day get a budget package holiday to the Moon to

remember for the rest of my life like some of my lucky fellows on the museum general staff. There had

been notions of glory and heroism, too remote, too impossible even to be called dreams, barely possible

to hint at even to my sister, the one human with whom I had in those days confided. Now, if I wore

uniform, it was different and had a star on the collar. But, more importantly for me at that moment, I had

humanity's first interstellar colony to make free with as a conqueror—well, as a Liberator, certainly—and

I didn't want to waste the experience.

A pity nobody at Gerning had told me about the weather. Apparently—that is the most charitable

explanation—it had never occurred to them that even a holidaying flatlander would be so ignorant or

stupid as not to know what those black-and-silver clouds building up in the west meant. The ramscoop

raid from Sol by the UNSN seven or eight years ago, shortly before the Liberation, had, it was said, as

well as causing terrible damage, upset the patterns of the weather. Storms in the storm-belt came earlier

and stronger. Something to do with the cooling and droplet-suspension effects of dust in the air. It was

expected that things would return to normal eventually. As I had been preparing to depart my hosts had

been more interested in laughing at a funny little thing called a Protean that had turned up in the

meeting-hall, a quaint and harmless Wunderland animal which had evolved limited powers of psi

projection and mimicry. That there were less harmless ones with psi powers I was to find out shortly.

Anyway, the clouds built slowly, and, like a cunning enemy, they gathered out of the west, behind me. I

took off near noon and three-quarters of the sky was clear. I flew low, not at even near full speed, over

the farmlands and woods, fascinated as always by what I saw below. Much of the time I left the car on

auto-pilot, and enjoyed being a rubber-necking tourist. With the kzin-derived gravity-motor, so much

more efficient than our old ground-effect lifts, I could vary the speed and height with the touch of a finger

on the controls. The car gave me a meal, and the day turned into afternoon.

I passed over human farms and little scattered villages and hamlets. The simple dwellings of people living

simple lives, far away from much government and from much of the twenty-fifth century. I knew many of

these people had originally settled here with the simple life in mind, but then the war and kzin occupation

had knocked their technology way back into the past anyway. Some of these settlements were again

prosperous, pleasant-looking places from the air, but there were some desolate ruins, relics of the war

and the occupation that had halved the human population of this planet. I passed over the scattered

wreckage of destroyed war-machines and the kzin base, and the great tracts that the kzinti had had go

back to wilderness as hunting preserves. Humans had often enough been the victims set running

hopelessly in those hunts . . . Many more had died under the kzinti in other ways.

But ghastliness was relative. The Gerning district had largely survived. After the first hideous butcheries

the local humans had learnt kzin ways, and their survival-rate had increased. They humbly avoided

contact with their overlords, abased themselves when they encountered them, and sweated on

diminishing land with deteriorating equipment to raise the various taxes that were the price of life. The

local kzinti, many attached to the big military base, had, apparently, not been quite like the creatures of

the dreadful Lord Ktrodni-Stkaa, and the local Herrenmann had been able to intercede with their

commanding officer occasionally. I had gathered that there were a few kzinti still living in remote bits of

the black-blocks around the area now, as well as solitude-seeking, eccentric or misfit humans.

Wunderland was sparsely enough populated that anyone who wished to be left alone could be.

There were herds of cows and sheep passing below. On Earth I'd never seen them free-ranging like this.

Wunderland creatures, too. There were a herd of gagrumphers, the big, six-legged things that occupied

an ecological niche similar to that of bison or elephants on Earth, moving in and out of the marvellous

multicolored foliage, red and orange and green. Then the human settlements thinned out, and I was

passing over forest again, and uneven ground with a pattern of gullies and water-courses below me, small

rivers low at the end of summer like silver ribbons. The roads were few and narrow.

This was what I had once dreamed of: the landscape below me could never be taken for Earth. Every

color and contour was different, some things slightly and subtly off, some grossly strange. And ahead of

me as I flew, on the eastern horizon, were the tall spires and pinnacles of great mountains,

low-gravity-planet mountains sharper and higher than anything Earth had to show, pale and almost surreal

against the blue and pink tints of the eastern sky.

I should have noticed how quickly it was getting dark. But there, below me, was something else: a

tigripard, the biggest felinoid—the biggest native felinoid—predator in this part of Wunderland. Their

numbers had built up during the kzin occupation, partly because of the general chaos and desolation, and

also because the kzinti found their fellow-felinoids rather good sport in the hunt and encouraged them,

and they remained a nuisance for these backwoods farmers with their still relatively primitive appliances

and equipment. What modern machinery the kzinti had not smashed or confiscated during the war had

largely become inoperative through lack of maintenance and the farmers were in many cases beginning

again from Square One. I saw some ancient farming robots sprawled broken like the corpses of living

things or, on one long-abandoned farmstead, jerking and grubbing uselessly through degraded

programmes that no longer made sense. The further one got from Gerning the fewer the little farms and

cottages were and the more backward they looked. Nothing like Earth farms.

The tigripard was a big one, worth a hunter's attention. But there was no sport or achievement in

shooting it from above. I followed it for a time, not approaching close enough to alarm it. That was

difficult. I guessed that in the last few decades all Wunderland creatures had become only too alert to

terror and destruction from the air. The tigripard was running down a long slope to lower-lying,

river-dissected, territory. A moving map on the instrument-panel gave me a general picture. I saw it leap

a river—a big leap, but the river was low. The human settlements were much sparser in this area but

there were still a few and there was still quite good grazing for animals. The locals should thank me for

ridding them of a dangerous piece of vermin, I thought. There was very little legal hunting on Earth—even

a UNSN general would find it hard to get a permit there—and I was a completely inexperienced hunter.

At least of things like this.

We were approaching a more deeply gullied, poorly vegetated area like a small badlands. The tigripard

turned into a gully and tracking it became more difficult. After a time I landed and, hefting my little rifle,

followed on foot.

That was the first first stupid thing: I was so used to military sidearms that could bring down a kzin or a

building, that sought their own targets, and could be used like hoses against kzin infantry if necessary, that

I took it for granted the .22 was all I needed. Another stupid thing: I was so used to thinking of my alien

enemies as eight-to-ten-feet-tall bipedal felines or blips on a radar screen that I found it hard to think of a

feline the size of a tigripard—even a big tigripard—as dangerous to me personally. It was quite a long

descent to the watercourse at the bottom. There was a small game-track at first but that petered out. The

gully's walls gradually rose above me, reducing my view of the sky.

I scrambled down to the bed of the watercourse, jumping easily further and further down in the low

gravity, looking for tracks in the damp sand and mud beside the stream. There were none. I pressed on,

into the next gully, almost like a small canyon. It wound and twisted and still the mud yielded nothing. I

Man-Kzin Wars - Anthology 11.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: