It was a tense time aboard the sole surviving kzin warship.
The waiting was taking a toll on him and the crew of Belly-Slasher. Ventilators poured out dry-conditioned air in a stiff, cold breeze, attempting to dilute the scream-and-leap pheromones that every crewkzin was emitting in quantity. Intellect remained locked in battle with instinct and kzinti hormones. At least until there were actual enemies to battle with wit and claws.
Agitated and filled with frustration, many of the crewkzin had begun to lose discipline. So far Rrowl-Captain had only to riffle his new and significantly larger trophy belt loop as a reminder. He bared teeth in satisfied memory of his reinforced dominance.
Rrowl-Captain had then lightly reminded his impatient crew of the clever p’charth of Kzin-home. The beast feigned death as a technique for luring its prey close enough to spit swift-acting neurotoxin into surprised scavenger faces. The Teachings of the One Fanged God used the p’charth as a parable of the dangers of certitude in battle: “The Wise Hero ensures that Prey is not Predator cloaked by the Long Grass of Wit or Trickery; some claws can slash deeply as well as run swiftly.”
In so calming his crew, he calmed himself.
“Navigator,” Rrowl-Captain snarled.
The kzin in question looked up from his console and thinscreen, facial fur matted from intense concentration. Rrowl-Captain chose to overlook the other kzin’s lack of grooming for the moment.
“Dominant One!” Navigator replied with only a trace of distraction present in his hiss-and-spit syllables.
“Report on progress,” the captain rasped, gentling his tone slightly. It must be frustrating, he reflected, for a Hero to stalk numbers within bloodless computer memory. Like leaping, fangs agape, into enemies composed of mere fog and shadow.
“Leader,” the other kzin rumbled in low respectful tones, “look to the forward thinscreen.” A schematic of the monkey spacecraft, huge and rounded like an icy asteroid, appeared. Magnetic lines of force, which swept the interstellar medium from the alien ship’s path, were added to the diagram. The route of Belly-Slasher was a circuitous line threading the deadly tongues of magnetic force toward the bow of the monkeyship.
“Hrrr…” Rrowl-Captain growled, musingly. “Your attention to careful and precise duty is duly noted and will be well rewarded. We cannot afford to lose this prize to monkey tricks or treachery, despite our impetus to complete our conquest and celebrate a successful hunt.”
The other kzin’s orange-and-black ruff lifted with pride at Rrowl-Captain’s words of praise. “It would not have been possible, Dominant One, without the aid of Alien Technologist.” He paused, scratching with a careless claw beneath his whiskers reflectively. “The monkeys do not make sense, Leader. It is difficult to understand their design philosophy. If we only had a Telepath—”
Rrowl-Captain snorted dismissal. “Indeed; we do not. Placing dream-fangs on prey does not fill a Hero’s belly nor honor the Great Web of Existence.” He paused. “These monkeys are, as you say, different from Heroes, different from Kdatlynos, different from Chunquen, different even from our loyal Jotoki. The One Fanged God made slaves in different forms to serve our different needs.”
“As you say, Leader,” Navigator agreed, obedience stiffening his spine.
“Even an unblooded kitten could set fangs in such facts.” Rrowl-Captain dismissively changed the subject as obvious. He gestured at the forward thinscreen with a sharp black claw. “Your attention to detail in adroitly taking us through the magnetic force-lines is especially noteworthy.”
Navigator put sheathed claws to face in recognition of the compliment. “It was as you commanded, Dominant One. Alien-Technologist and I stalked fact and hypotheses in our planning. The monkeys do not use our gravitic polarizers so they do not have force shielding, as we do; they must rely on primitive magnetic fields for protection.” His tone burred contempt.
“Yet these fields are of great power,” Rrowl-Captain rumbled low in warning. “Do not underestimate monkey tricks. They may lack honor seen in the light of the Teaching of the One Fanged God, but such strategies can still slash the most noble Hero’s tail in two through overconfidence.”
“As you command,” the other kzin deferred with a hiss. He highlighted the path of Belly-Slasher on the thinscreen schematic with a few claw slashes at his console; they were moments from rendezvous with the large airlock structure identified earlier by Alien-Technologist.
“There are no signs of activity from the target?” Rrowl-Captain inquired.
“No, Leader. Only the contra-matter drive and the magnetic-field equipment appear to be functioning optimally. No laser ranging or microwave emissions. Nothing.” Navigator purred in thought. “Perhaps the monkeys were killed by life-support failure or some other catastrophe, only leaving a few automated subsystems in order?”
Rrowl-Captain licked his nostrils with a disbelieving tongue. What did his unconscious mind scent? “Surely life-support systems were adequately shielded.”
“Spine-Cruncher’s monopole weapon was of high power and delivered most skillfully, Dominant One. The human-monkeys must not have shielded themselves properly, other than drive and field waveguides. Or perhaps random chance intervened.”
“‘Even the sharpest and most skillful fang can break,’” the captain of Belly-Slasher quoted from the Teachings of The One Fanged God. The other kzin blinked agreement. Random chance too often ruled the universe.
Rrowl-Captain hissed in worry. He had expected some kind of monkey trick during Belly-Slasher’s tense voyage to the bow of the alien spacecraft, but the huge ship had wallowed through space without response, seemingly without guidance or crew. No railguns, no lasers, no particle beams, no missiles.
Nothing.
The monkeyship was like a pilotless ghost vessel, its fearsome idling reaction drive swinging randomly through a small angle. It tasted like victory, yet the savor was not quite as satisfying as Rrowl-Captain had anticipated. Bloody, but not hot and fresh.
Clearly, the contra-matter drive was extremely dangerous, and required many safeguards. Such a protected subsystem could have easily survived the magneto-electrical pulse. Perhaps the magnetic shielding was assigned such a priority, as well. The monkeys, after all, did not think like Heroes. His reasoning had the tang of fangs-on-fact, logic. Still, Rrowl-Captain had the distinct feeling of enemy eyes upon him. He felt his ruff rising involuntarily.
“Return to your station,” he ordered Navigator peremptorily. The other kzin slapped claws to face and turned back to his console.
Rrowl-Captain reflected on his own seemingly brave words. He again saw the greenish light of monkey lasers in his mind’s eye, filling the sky, shaming his Warrior Heart and slashing bits from his liver. Pushing the grass-eating vision to the back of his mind, he leaped back to his command chair and sat.
“Preparing for rendezvous,” Navigator announced over the ship commlink.
“Alert Alien-Technologist in his quarters,” the captain of Belly-Slasher hissed to Apprentice-to-Communications, who leaped to his clumsy feet nervously. “Tell him, by my order, to assemble his team at the starboard airlock in space armor, along with their equipment.” The young kzin huddled next to the commlink, and hissed and spat his Leader’s orders.
Rrowl-Captain settled back in his command chair, listening to the ripping-cloth sound of the gravity polarizers slowly decrease. Belly-Slasher cautiously approached the alien vessel, halting a few lengths of kzin-leaps above the other ship’s icy pitted hull.
The forward viewscreen showed the relativity-distorted universe around them, lonely points of velocity-squeezed light and black empty spaces. Energetic particles from the interstellar medium impacted the magnetic field surrounding the alien vessel from time to time, producing colorful aurora flickers of ghostly light.
We are so far from our lairs, here between the stars, he mused. Far from our kittens and kzinrretti.
Rrowl-Captain gestured to his personal Jotoki servant which rushed forwar
d to offer a placating delicacy with the fingerlets at the end of its warty slave arm: a still-wriggling slice of k’chit from the vivarium on board. The captain bolted the warm flesh whole, hardly chewing. The act of consuming, of at least his gullet doing battle with some kind of adversary, served to slow his breathing. Rrowl-Captain took the cloth his Jotok was now offering, and cleaned tangy blood from his jaws, mollified for the moment.
“Rendezvous complete,” Navigator rasped over shipwide commlink.
Rrowl-Captain leaped to his feet and purred readiness. He stalked toward the hatchway, tail held high with anticipation.
It was at last time to complete the hunt.
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bruno blinked at the painfully bright shipboard lights stabbing at his eyes, and coughed in reflex as the mask lifted away from his face. Remote sensors withdrew delicately from his body. He looked past the rising top of the autodoc, and through blurry eyes saw Carol Faulk gazing down at him.
From what Bruno could see from his position, it looked as though they were in Dolittle. It seemed to hurt a little to think, to remember. He blinked several times to clear moist grit from his eyes. He shook his head to clear his mind, which felt slow and clogged; it didn’t help.
Bruno was without a clue, most of his recent memories apparently gone. Burned away by something horrible.
“Come on, shipmate,” Carol said lightly, helping him out of the autodoc tank. To Bruno, it felt as if the ship was running under about a half gee of acceleration. Thick fluid dripped from his body as she carefully toweled him off. He tried to crane his painfully stiff neck to look at the forward holoscreen, just a few meters away in the cramped cabin. His eyesight was still too muzzy to read the status window from that distance, but the overall forward view showed a relativistic starscape.
Bruno drew in his breath sharply, fuzzy thinking or not, when he realized that Sun-Tzu was nowhere in sight.
He tried to say something, to ask the obvious questions. Carol would not reply to his half-grunted attempts at questions. She continued to towel him thoroughly dry, batting aside his still-clumsy hands when he tried to stop her.
“Hmm,” she commented in a falsely suggestive tone, drying a few of his more sensitive areas. “Looks like you could use a bit of toning exercise in some of these muscle groups. And I know just where, when, and how, shipmate.”
Bruno woozily realized that Carol was jollying him along, trying to divert his attention from something important. His lips felt dry and cracked, his mouth tasted like bitter medicine and old leather. He knew something terrible was wrong.
“What’s going on?” he managed to force past numb lips. His voice was a rusty croak. “Quit messing around. I think there is something wrong with me.” Black spots circled at the edges of his vision like buzzing insects.
Carol said nothing, but hugged him very tightly for a moment. She let go abruptly, then finished drying him a little more roughly than he would have liked. His skin, tingling, began to feel more normal. Some of the cobwebs started to fade from his mind. Carol helped him into a jumpsuit coverall, ignoring all attempts by Bruno to induce her into talking.
It must be bad, Bruno thought to himself slowly. His mind was clearing a bit more. Some bad memories began to surface, still indistinct. He shivered.
With an arm around him, Carol lowered Bruno into his crash couch and punched the armrest keypad with unnecessary force. He felt the straps of his crash couch tighten around him. Carol sat in the crash couch next to him, strapped herself in, then turned and looked at Bruno directly.
That was when Bruno became truly frightened. Carol had tears in her eyes. Carol.
“Okay,” he managed in a calm tone. “Go on, tell me. My crash couch autodoc has sedatives.” He struggled to find something humorous to say. “Don’t tell me. You’ve found somebody new.”
Carol ignored the joke. Her face was ashen, with deep lines Bruno had never really noticed before. “You know about the EMP bomb?” she asked quietly.
Bruno felt a burning memory of the horrible black light rise unwillingly in his memory and made a face. He nodded, forcing himself to concentrate.
“You unplugged me,” Bruno said simply.
“Yes. Though it was more like tearing your wires out of the console by hand.” She looked away and brushed tears from her face, clearly embarrassed. “The electromagnetic pulse would have killed you, Tacky. Fried your brain. Inductance almost burnt you out, anyway.”
“I know.” His brain still felt full of ashes and old scar tissue. “You did the right thing.” Bruno’s thoughts were slow, clogged. In his fuzzy memory, he could see the pandemonium on the navigation deck of Sun-Tzu as the enemy EMP struck the hull. Echoes of miniature lightning bolts shot from the console to his now-missing interface cable. The pale past edge of a horrible pain sliced into his recall. He reached up and touched the Linker socket in his neck, which felt somehow charred, still hot to his touch.
Which was impossible, of course.
“The autodoc says you have some brain damage.” Carol’s words were now studied and clipped, her tone clinical. She was not looking at him. “Your electronic prostheses are trying to compensate for the damage.” Carol looked terrible, he realized. What else was wrong?
Bruno forced a smile, again feeling his dry lips crack.
“Well, enough about me,” he said brightly. “What else has been happening while I’ve been on vacation?”
She said nothing, eyes glinting in the bright lighting of the tiny cabin.
Finally, Bruno took a more serious tone.
“Captain-my-captain,” he told her quietly, “there wasn’t anything else you could have done. I would have died for sure if the full charge had hit my chipware.” He shrugged a little, forcing bravado into his voice. “We don’t even know how bad the…damage is. Either I can be fixed or I can’t.” He took her hand in his. “We’ll find out together.”
Carol smiled a little, as much tired as sad, then told him everything. The images were nightmarish, confirming Bruno’s high opinion of her abilities. Carrying his convulsing body down long darkened corridors to Dolittle. Powering down all major shipboard systems in decoy, and setting up the confinement-field booby trap for the kzin invaders—a project she had set up long ago during a paranoid watch period. Launching Dolittle and fleeing the Sun-Tzu.
Bruno scratched some flaky material away from his cheek. “How long till Sun-Tzu goes up?”
Carol gestured to the holographic display in the main screen, which had reached zero.
Her smile was as feral as any kzin’s. “They have about three hours now. The confinement fields will appear normal for a time, then asymptotically degrade to catastrophic failure. And they won’t know it until it’s much too late—unless they have direct feeds from the core.”
Bruno raised an eyebrow, curious.
“I set up a false telemetry system. If they tap into what looks like the core telemetry data feed, they’ll read that the core is humming along just copacetic and fine.” She thinned her lips into a cold smile. “Until the confinement fields fail and they fry, of course.”
“Clever,” he managed, pleased. “Can they stop it?”
“I don’t think so.” She shook her head, counting reasons off on her fingers as she went. “Not unless they are experts in complex systems and cryptography. First, they have to find out the obvious telemetry feed is a decoy. Then they have to locate the correct cable routings without our diagnostic equipment. Finally, they have to learn subsystem architecture and gain control over the field coils and ionizing lasers.”
“All in a few hours,” Bruno replied. “No way.”
He reached across and touched Carol’s hand. His own fingers still didn’t want to move, and felt old and clumsy.
“How did you get everybody out of the suspension chambers into the cargo bay?” he asked, tilting his head toward the sealed door at the rear of the tiny cabin.
Carol looked down at her console and said nothing.
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“You left them,” Bruno said flatly.
She nodded, still looking down. “There wasn’t any choice,” Carol replied calmly, her captain voice surfacing again. The deepening lines on her face showed what that decision had cost her.
Bruno’s head whirled. He and Carol had known all twenty-nine of the men and women in coldsleep. Trained with them, drunk with them, argued with them, studied with them. They all had names, hobbies, favorite drinks, games.
Now they were ratcat food.
Carol whistled through her teeth tunelessly for a moment, then reached over and squeezed his shoulder. “Bruno,” she said seriously, “you know perfectly well that I couldn’t have saved them. And they will be avenged very soon.”
It occurred to Bruno that Carol had made decisions like this many times in the past, during her Second Wave piloting, and as a Third Wave squadron commander. Decisions that saved or took lives.
“Does it ever get easier?” he asked, finally.
She knew what Bruno meant. “You remember each one of them, every waking moment of your life.”
He sighed. Gingerly, he forced slow and shaky fingers into a dataglove and looked carefully at the holoscreen. He had to—
Suddenly, Bruno looked over at the coiled and clipped interface cable at the side of the control console. He felt something tear in his mind and heart.
What if I can’t Link anymore? Bruno thought wildly. His heart seemed to hammer in his chest, and he took several deep breaths to calm himself. Give it time, he repeated over and over again to himself, like a mantra.
“What is it?” Carol asked, trying not to notice where Bruno had been looking.
“Nothing,” he said harshly. “Could you please bring me up to date?”
Carol took the hint and walked him through the status windows. He was still mentally slow, but he could follow the events since the EMP bomb had hit the Sun-Tzu.
Linked, I could—He shoved the thought out of his mind, and focused his attention on the small holoscreens above the main console. Ordered arrays of numbers marched across his line of sight, complex diagrams flowed and blinked; sterile representations of their life-and-death situation. Their lives as a column of glowing numbers.