The kzin twitched his ears, laughing as he had not laughed since he came semi-conscious in the wrecked kzinti war craft. Dr. Anixter had provided him with the means to send out the code that would open the hanger doors, but now he used Miffy’s own unit. If the humans could trace the device’s signature, it would further seal Miffy’s doom, further ruin his reputation.
Miffy understood. He began to keen in wordless panic.
The kzin watched as the hanger doors slid smoothly open. The navigation program read the stars and told him he was closer to a contested border than he had dared imagine. He entered in the command to launch. The scout ship slid out into the void.
Now was the time for decision. Did he wheel the scout ship around and crash into the base or did he attempt to get himself and his very interesting prisoner home again? Before he had seen no value in his continued life, but now…Not only did he have what he himself had learned, he had a very special prisoner. His status would go up.
The equation had changed in favor of life…of that strange intangible, hope.
As the kzin set his course, he knew his escape was not certain, but at least he would die free, not a prisoner, no longer a captive. Miffy had fallen silent, foam flecking his lips, his eyes wild and bloodshot as he contemplated his future.
The kzin wondered. Had Dr. Anixter all but sent Miffy to the hanger? Had she manipulated the situation so that not only would the kzin have a hostage and a prize, but also a reason to escape rather than wreck both himself and the base? He wouldn’t be surprised if she had.
Two types of teeth…If he survived the journey home, he would need to try and explain about humans and their two types of teeth.
Jenni napped until she was awakened by the klaxons. Without leaving her bunk, she activated a subroutine that would put some interesting information into Miffy’s files, information that indicated how deeply he had feared the kzinti, how he had contemplated changing sides if by doing so he could buy a position as a collaborator working under kzinti masters.
Miffy would not be the first human to do this. He would not be the last.
She’d had to keep this final touch until late in the game, for Miffy must not be permitted to see these interesting additions to his files in advance. Now, however, either he was dead, taken by the kzinti, or, at the very least, a base commander who had just permitted his most valuable prisoner to attempt an escape.
Miffy’s protestations of innocence would not hold up, especially since Jenni would be there to gently explain how this quite fit the psychological pattern of a man who chose to name himself Otto Bismarck.
Belting her fluffy pink robe over her flowered pajamas, Jenni moved toward the door, reacting just as she would if this was an emergency she knew nothing about. As she hurried out, she swallowed a smile, knowing that now was not the time to show her teeth.
PICK OF THE LITTER
♦ ♦ ♦
Charles E. Gannon
2367 CE: Proxima Centauri System, Outer Belt
With the bright red disk of Proxima Centauri growing quickly in his forward screens, hn-Pilot rose from the kzin smallship’s co-pilot seat. He stretched as much as was possible for an eight-foot felinoid in a cramped cockpit.
The second helmsman—rr-Pilot, who was currently flying the tiny craft—sniffed deeply as his nominal commander twisted his spine to work out the kinks of a long immobile watch. “Boredom has its own scent, evidently.”
hn-Pilot stopped in mid-stretch: rr-Pilot’s undeniably accurate observation was also borderline insolence. But then again, hn-Pilot’s authority was borderline as well: neither had true Names, only differentiation-prefixes, and, therefore, his superiority in rank and seniority was marginal. They were also closely matched in height, weight, and speed, so neither one could be confident of victory in a formal challenge. rr-Pilot’s oblique challenge was, therefore, quite canny: without contesting hn-Pilot’s official command status, he signaled that he would not accept any matching assumptions regarding personal dominance.
hn-Pilot’s fur rippled faintly: the kzin expression of modest mirth or amusement. rr-Pilot was stalking his objective—status—with all the canny indirection that hn-Pilot would have used, had their situations been reversed. Which was good: aggressiveness was the hallmark of any worthy Hero. But, inversely, if hn-Pilot did not effectively respond to this subtle challenge, it would mean he was too docile: doubly so, since he was technically the commander of the smallship dubbed Incisor-Red.
hn-Pilot finished his interrupted stretch in a leisurely fashion and then stooped forward, resting his arms down on the back of rr-Pilot’s seat with a jarring thump. He tilted his weight forward; the seat shifted and squealed in protest.
He watched as rr-Pilot’s pink, white-ribbed, scalloped-edged ears half-folded back against this neck fur: annoyance, readiness to fight if further provoked. rr-Pilot asked, “Do you need to remain in that place?”
“Yes,” sighed hn-Pilot. “Yes, I do. I want to make sure you are performing your duties properly, rr-Pilot. That’s part of my job as commander.”
rr-Pilot’s ears retracted a millimeter more, quivering. “And are you quite satisfied with my performance?”
“It is too early to say. I haven’t completed observing you, yet.” hn-Pilot made the sardonic amusement clear in his voice. He saw rr-Pilot’s jaw sag open, the points of needle-like teeth showing: the kzin “smile” was a prelude to either combat, or at least, readiness to engage in it. hn-Pilot leaned even more of his weight into the chair, which groaned under his mass. “What? Do you disapprove of my command prerogatives? You’re not challenging me, are you, rr-Pilot?” Said in the mildest of tones, it was a sarcastic gauntlet waved in the air between them.
“I do not question your command, or its prerogatives. But your scent is overpowering, hn-Pilot.”
“As am I.” He felt rr-Pilot’s body tensing against that boast, but neither the circumstances nor his physical position made resistance prudent. Since the in-flight monitors were running, there would be plentiful evidence that he had initiated violence which could endanger the mission. And besides, rr-Pilot was seated, facing away from his commander, who was already on his feet, behind him, eyes and claws ready. rr-Pilot’s ears folded back fully, taut, then relaxed: he had found a mutually acceptable path out of the confrontation: “hn-Pilot, you might want to use some of your power to tell ms-Pilot of Incisor-Yellow to keep properly formed up on us: he is drifting wide, again.”
The comment not only defused their own tense situation, but was inarguably true: in the sensor scope, the blip signifying their brother craft was allowing the gap between them to widen. hn-Pilot toggled the ship-to-ship: “Incisor-Yellow, eyes on the trail! Do you sleep even as you stalk?”
ms-Pilot’s response was bored, but the blip indicating his ship began to close the distance: “Surely, this is not stalking. It seems to me that we are simply dragging our paws from one dry watering hole to another.”
Which hn-Pilot had to admit was a most adequate description of their current mission: to escort the human robot transport—Euclid’s Lasso—on its first post-invasion cycle from the main Centauri system to its distant trinary component Proxima, and back again. Why they were loping dutifully after this pointless, brainless beast of a hull was beyond hn-Pilot’s comprehension. It shipped food and other necessary supplies out to the sparse human population of the Proxima system; it returned with their marginal ore finds. So far as he could tell, the human miners of Proxima had a rather desperate paw-to-maw existence, and were strategically and economically insignificant due to both their poverty and astrographic position.
But that was hardly any of his concern. hn-Pilot, like the rest of his species, was of the opinion that there was nothing to be gained in trying to improve the productivity of slave races through intervention. Such intervention always—always—cost more than it was worth. This was the result of language barriers, of radically different approaches to similar problems, and of the inevitable resentment of
the enslaved locals. But just as often, it was because those same locals knew their own systems better than the conquerors did. As long as the tribute required was paid promptly and in full, the slaves could use whatever methods worked best.
And so it was here. However, with the invasion now in its fifth month, the kzin were admittedly having more trouble than they had expected. When originally encountered in deep space, the humans had not only proven to be (mostly) leaf-eaters, but thoroughly unacquainted with the waging of war. Only later did it become evident that their societal ignorance of fighting and violence was a recent phenomenon, a consequence of three-century-old mandates promulgated by their government back in the Sol system.
But, for reasons of which hn-Pilot had no awareness, and in which he had less interest, these pacifistic lessons—despite having been imposed pervasively and powerfully by their homeworld—had been less completely embraced by the humans of Alpha Centauri. The humans of its one habitable planet, Wunderland, and the even less conformist Belter population that was densest on the much-modified planetoid, Tiamat, had all shown surprising will, innovation, and tenacity in their resistance to the kzin. However, their desperate attempts to hold back the Fleet were coming to an end, according to the routine updates hn-Pilot had been receiving. Tiamat had been thoroughly pacified now, and the belt known as the Serpent Swarm was secure enough that the Fleet no longer had to worry about surprise attacks upon its rear while pressing the offensive against the main world.
Apparently, the leaf-eaters had built their doomed defensive sphere around Wunderland in order to buy time to launch four generation ships—immense slower-than-light arks—that they were readying there. hn-Pilot did not understand that: only a tiny fraction of the system’s inhabitants would be able to flee on those craft. But evidently it was a project which held great significance for the humans: they had fought tenaciously for five months now. It was, therefore, obvious that they were capable of recalling much of the Warrior’s wisdom that they had forgotten. hn-Pilot and many, if not most, other kzin, took this as a mixed omen. It meant the humans had enough spine and courage to be a truly useful and self-directing slave race. But it also meant that they had a primal nature that, once awakened, remembered the bloody lessons of their evolutionary struggles. Although omnivores, they had nonetheless proven to be the apex predators of their own world. In consequence, they promised to be the most useful slave race in the kzin stable, but also the one in which lurked the greatest seeds of danger. They would have to be watched closely.
And hence, this largely pointless mission: to monitor the Euclid’s Lasso, even though it was simply a robot barge, riding its plume of fusion fire from the Serpent Swarm belt of the main system out to the binary. It began its journey by almost dancing into the gravitic clutches of Alpha Centauri B before the slingshot effect of sweeping close to that orange star’s mass sent it on its way with an extra boost, out into the cold and the dark. Accelerating for weeks, it finally reached eighteen percent the speed of light and then cut engines, coasting onward toward the small red dot that was its destination: Proxima Centauri. Where, four months later, it arrived after more weeks of counterboosting that slowed it just enough for rendezvous with the Proximans’ own intrasystem cycling robot ship. That smaller automated craft swung perpetually between the Proximans’ various cargo transfer points and a trajectory which enabled it to mate and exchange payloads with Euclid’s Lasso. After which, the bigger intersystem vessel began its return journey to Alpha Centauri, starting the same process all over again.
There were rumors that Fleet Command had considered sending a single missile at Euclid’s Lasso to terminate its journey to Proxima whose inhabitants would then have obligingly died off without the kzin having to lift a paw in further effort. But, probably because the leaders wanted kzin violence to be seen as deliberate rather than arbitrary, this path had not been chosen, and now hn-Pilot’s two ships were trailing along in the Lasso’s wake, ensuring that its contents, as well as their recipients, were benign. Initial intelligence had established that there was no military presence out at Proxima, and so there had been no reason to waste the resources or time journeying out to officially subjugate it. But now that complete investiture of the main system was imminent, the higher and the mightier had decided that the time had come for Proxima’s humans to meet, and make appropriate gestures of obeisance to, their new kzin masters.
rr-Pilot pointed at the Incisor-Yellow’s sensor blip. “Now he’s too close. He’s not going to earn a Name for piloting this way.”
hn-Pilot could not keep his fur from spasmodically rippling at the sardonic quip. Not only was ms-Pilot botching the simple job of staying in formation, but Names were not earned for simple tasks like piloting, any more than they were for running swiftly or shooting straight. Perhaps, if one were to pilot the Patriarch’s own cubs to safety through a swarm of enemy fighters, then, maybe, the honor and achievement would be great enough to earn a Name of one’s own. But the monotony of the daily routine reminded both of them just how far away they were from such glory. Worse still, since each smallship had two pilots, the kzin had been compelled to resort to differentiator-prefixes. These subvocal sounds distinguished one from another just as numbers might have. For the Pilots, rr-, ms-, zh-, and himself, hn-, nothing highlighted the lack of a personal Name so much as having to use these tags.
hn-Pilot watched as the second craft in his formation now drifted too close. “Incisor-Yellow, maintain the correct distance and attitude.”
There was no reply, but the blip moved back to the correct distance. Then, a hesitant message: “Incisor-Red, I am detecting some out-gassing from Lasso’s outer ring of cargo containers. Do you confirm?”
hn-Pilot glanced at the sensor plot, saw no gross abnormalities; he tightened the scan field while increasing resolution. Sure enough, there was a modest cloud of gas and minor debris vectoring away from the Lasso, the signatures emanating from each compass point of its round, head-on profile. hn-Pilot grunted, aimed the viewers at the closest sensor return, and increased the magnification to maximum.
He saw a diminishing puff of vapor and small parts—a metal plate, and possibly the cap-heads of several explosive bolts—rushing away down the sides of the Lasso. It was a strange visual effect: since the Lasso was counterboosting, the debris was already moving faster than the slowing ship from which it had been expelled, and so, as the detritus swept outward, it also “fell forward,” in the subjective parlance of both human and kzin’s spacefarers.
hn-Pilot toggled the ship-to-ship. “Incisor-Yellow, did you see what that rubbish was? Did something fail on the human craft?”
“I do not think so. The signatures were simultaneous and at perfectly equidistant intervals. In each case, it looked like a short explosive burst, and then modest debris. I could make out nothing more.”
Reducing the screen’s magnification, hn-Pilot stared suspiciously at the human craft. Its primary hull was an immense, central cylinder for large-volume cargo items. Its bow—currently facing Incisor-Red—also housed the guidance and robotic elements of the craft.
This main hull was ringed by tubular containers, giving it the appearance of being a baton girdled by a tightly packed bandolier of long metallic frankfurters. Loaded with smaller cargo items, these containers were detachable: the Proximan communities swapped tubes of ore for tubes loaded with comestibles and other essential trade goods. But having four of these containers malfunction simultaneously, and in a cruciform pattern, did not sound like an accident; it sounded like a prelude to—
“Sabotage!” yowled rr-Pilot as the sensor plot was suddenly choked with a spreading cone of small, dense signatures spraying out from each of the four ruptured tubes. However, at second glance, it was evident that this growing debris cloud was not really a cone: it was a funnel. And the only way to escape the junk rushing at them was—
hn-Pilot pointed urgently. “Get into the open space—there, at the center of the funnel.”
rr
-Pilot growled, complied—and with one sharp jerk, they were in the eye of the scree-storm, unscathed. Incisor-Yellow was not so lucky: judging from the com-chatter and the hull’s now-wavering course, its portside gravitic polarizer drive had been damaged and the crew-section breached. The craft was losing atmosphere, and a piece of junk the size of a small ball-bearing had punctured the bridge, killing the co-pilot where he sat.
“What treachery is this?” rr-Pilot’s growl was low, with a hard, fast vibratory underbuzz: the sound of a barely suppressed kill instinct.
hn-Pilot was still trying to make sense of the ambush. Clearly, the humans had preprogrammed this event into Lasso’s automatic routines. But why here, so far inside the Proxima system? And why an explosion of junk, jetting out of the four containers that had obviously been sealed with illegal explosive bolts? To destroy the kzin escorts, yes, perhaps, but then why not ensure that the spread pattern would create a full cone of debris, rather than this empty-cored funnel? Simply moving to the hull’s lengthwise center-line had allowed the two kzin craft to escape the worst effects of the—
“hn-Pilot, there is more activity.”
He looked up at rr-Pilot’s tone: puzzlement edged with dread. The dense, encircling halo of debris was beginning to fall forward around them, but less quickly, according to the scanners. That meant that the Lasso had stopped counterboosting, and they were matching speed to maintain distance—but why was the human craft not continuing to decelerate?
The answer was in rr-Pilot’s next report: “Lasso is tumbling, commander.”
A tumble meant that the human ship’s engines were no longer slowing her, so the debris would stay with all the craft slightly longer, now, continuing to hem them in. Indeed, the human ship’s spin about its considerable longitudinal axis would ultimately bring it end-over-end, so that the fusion drive would be in a position to exert forward thrust.