“Damn,” he said. One word to cover it all.
The Kzinti yowrling had been so much a part of the background that he didn’t notice it until it stopped. After a moment the boss Kzin stepped in front of him, moving slowly and carefully, and curled protectively around his left side.
“You are awake.”
“Obviously.”
One massive four-clawed hand held the tnuctip weapon, still at the computer setting. The Kzin held it up. “You found a new setting on this. Tell me how to reach it.”
“I can’t,” said Jason. “I found it by accident and lost it the same way.”
“That is a shame. Do you realize we have nothing to lose?”
Jason studied the violet eyes, fruitlessly. “What do you mean?”
“Either you will tell me of your own free will, or you can be persuaded to tell, or you cannot. In any case, we have no reason not to remove your mate’s arm.”
He turned and spoke in the Kzinti tongue. The other aliens left the room.
“We will be leaving this world in an hour.” The boss Kzin turned and settled his orange bulk carefully in a Kzinti contour couch, grunting softly with the pain of movement.
He meant it. His position was too simple for doubt. The boss Kzin had a tnuctip weapon to take back to Kzin, and he had two human captives. The humans were of no use to him. But he had great use for Jason’s knowledge. What he offered was a simple trade: knowledge for the meat on their bones.
“I can’t talk,” said Jason.
“All right,” Anne-Marie said dully.
“I can’t.” The cone form was too powerful. Its beam must set up spontaneous mass conversion in anything it touched. And he couldn’t explain. The boss Kzin might hear him, and the Kzinti didn’t know just what they were after.
“All right, you can’t. We’ve had it. How did they get you?”
“I got stupid. While the boss Kzin was talking to me, one of the others snuck up and used a sonic.”
“The seventh setting—”
“I didn’t have time to figure anything out. There isn’t enough air to carry sound out there.”
“I didn’t think of that. How’s Nessus?”
“Still free.”
The boss Kzin broke in. “We will have it soon. The puppeteer has no place to hide and nothing with which to fight, not even the inclination. Do you expect it to rescue you?”
Anne-Marie smiled sourly. “Not really.”
The other Kzinti returned, carrying things. There were pieces of indecipherable Kzinti equipment, and there was a medkit from the emergency doc in the Court Jester. They set it all down next to the police web and went to work.
One piece of Kzinti equipment was a small tank with a pump and a piece of soft plastic tubing attached. Jason watched them wrap the tubing three or four times around Anne-Marie’s upper arm. They joined the other end to the pump and started it going.
“It’s cold,” she said. “Freezing.”
“I can’t stop them,” said Jason.
She shivered. “You’re sure?”
He gave up. He opened his mouth to shout out his surrender. The boss Kzin raised his furry head questioningly—and Jason’s voice stopped in his throat.
He’d used the hidden setting just once. For only an instant had the blue beam touched the horizon, but the explosion had damn near killed him. Obviously the hidden setting was not meant to be used on the surface of a planet.
It could be used only from space. Was it meant to destroy whole worlds?
But Anne-Marie hurt!
She said, “All right, you’re sure. Jay, don’t look like that. Jay? I can grow a new arm. Relax! Stop worrying about it!” The anguish in Jason’s face was like nothing she’d ever seen.
The burry voice said, “She will never reach an autodoc.”
“Shut up!” Jason screamed.
Soft Kzinti noises entered the silence. One of the Kzinti left: the pilot, the one with a white streak. The others talked. They talked of cooking, Kzinti sex, human sex, Beta Lyrae, how to hunt puppeteers, or how to turn a sphere inside out without forming a cusp. Jason couldn’t tell. They used no gestures.
Anne-Marie said, “They could have planted a mike on us.”
“Yah.”
“So you can’t tell me what you’re hiding.”
“No. I wish I spoke Wunderlander.”
“I don’t speak Wunderlander. Dead language. Jay, I can’t feel my arm any more. There must be liquid nitrogen in this tube.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help.”
“It is not working,” said Chuft-Captain.
“It should work,” said Slaverstudent. “We may not get results with the first limb. We probably will with the second. The second time, they will know that we mean what we threaten.” He looked thoughtfully at the prisoners. “Also, I think we should eat our meals in here.”
“They know that limbs can be regrown.”
“Only by human-built machines. There are none here.”
“You have a point.”
“It will be good to taste fresh meat again.”
Flyer returned. “Chuft-Captain, the kitchen is programmed.”
“Good.” Chuft-Captain incautiously shifted his bulk and tensed all over at the pain. It would have been nice if he could have put pressure bandages around his ribs. The ribs had been set and joined with pins, but he could not use pressure bandages; they would remind his crew of what had happened. He would be shamed.
Kicked by a puppeteer.
“I have been thinking,” he said. “Regardless of what the human tells us, we must take the tnuctip relic to Kzin as quickly as possible. There I will drop you, Slaverstudent, along with the weapon and the freeze box containing Telepath. Flyer, you and I will return here for the herbivore. He cannot be rescued in that time. He will be easy to find. A sight search will find him unless he digs a hole, in which case we may use seismographs.”
“He will have a month to anticipate.”
“Yes. He will.”
“Can you understand me?”
Three pairs of Kzinti eyes jerked around. The voice had belonged to none of them. It sounded foreign, artificial.
“Repeating. Can you understand me?”
It was the gun speaking. The tnuctip weapon.
“It’s learned their language,” said Jason. And all the hope drained out of him.
“It’ll tell them where to find that setting you were trying to hide.”
“Yah.”
“Then tell me this, Jay.” She was on the edge of hysteria. “What good will it do me to lose my arm?”
Jason filled his lungs and shouted. “Hey!”
Not one Kzin moved. They hovered around the weapon, all talking at once.
“Hey, Captain! What sthondat was your sister?”
They all jerked around. He must have pronounced the word right.
“You must not use that word again,” said the boss Kzin.
“Get this thing off my wife’s arm!”
The boss Kzin thought it over, spoke to the pilot. The pilot manipulated the police web to free Anne-Marie’s arm, using a cloth to protect his hand while he removed the cold, deadly tube. He turned off the pump, readjusted the police web, and went back to the discussion, which by then had become a dialogue. The boss Kzin had shut the others up.
“How’s your arm?”
“Feels dead. Maybe it is. What were we biding, Jay?”
He told her.
“Ye gods! And now they’ve got it.”
“Could you use an anesthetic?”
“It doesn’t hurt yet.”
“Let me know. They’re all through torturing us. They may eat us, but it’ll be all at once.”
The computer was doing most of the talking.
A Kzin was holding up the tnuctip cap, the one they’d found in the stasis box. The computer spoke.
He held up the small metal object that might have been a communicator. The computer spoke again.
The
boss Kzin spoke.
The computer spoke at length.
The boss Kzin picked up the weapon and did things to it. Jason couldn’t see what. The Kzin was facing away from him. But the weapon writhed. Jason snarled in his throat. He commonly used curses for emphasis. He knew no words to cover this situation.
The boss Kzin spoke briefly and left, cradling the weapon. One of the others followed: the expert on Slavers. Jason caught one glimpse of the weapon as the boss Kzin went through the door.
The Kzin with the white stripe, the pilot, remained.
Jason felt himself starting to shake. The weapon, the soft, mutable weapon. When the boss Kzin had left the room, he’d carried a gun handle attached to a double cone with rounded bases and points that barely touched.
He didn’t understand.
Then his eyes, restlessly searching the room as if for an answer, fell on the empty stasis box. There was a tnuctip cap and a small metal object that registered in hyperspace and a preserved Slaver hand.
It began to make sense.
Did the computer have eyesight? Obviously. The Kzinti had been showing it objects from the stasis box.
Take a computer smart enough to learn a language by hearing it spoken for an hour. Never mind its size; any sentient being will build a computer as small as possible, if only to reduce the time lag in thinking with impulses moving at lightspeed or less. Let the computer know only what its tnuctipun builders had taught it, plus what it had seen and heard in this room.
It had seen a tnuctip survival kit. It had seen members of a species it did not recognize. The unfamiliar beings had asked questions which made it obvious that they knew little about tnuctipun, and that they could not ask questions of a tnuctip. They didn’t speak the tnuctip language. They were desperately anxious for details about a tnuctip top-secret weapon.
Obviously they were not allies of the tnuctipun.
They must be enemies. In the Slaver War there had been, could be, no neutrals.
He said, “Anne.”
“Still here.”
“Don’t ask questions, just follow orders. Our lives depend on it. See that Kzin?”
“Right. You sneak up on him from behind; I’ll hit him with my purse.”
“This is not funny. When I give the word, we’re both going to spit at his ear.”
“You’re right. That’s not funny.”
“I’m in dead earnest. And don’t forget to compensate for low gravity.”
“How are you going to give the word with a mouthful of saliva?”
“Just spit when I do. Okay?”
Jason’s shot brushed the Kzin’s furry scalp. Anne-Marie’s caught him square in the ear. The Kzin came to his feet with a howl. Then, as both humans cleared their throats again, the Kzin moved like lightning. The air stiffened about their heads.
The Kzin contemptuously returned to his crouch against a wall.
It became hard to breathe.
Blinking was a slow, excruciating process. Talking was out of the question. Warm air, laden with CO2, did not want to dissipate. It stayed before their faces, waiting to be inhaled again and again. The Kzin watched them struggle.
Jason forced his eyes closed. Blinking had become too painful. He tried to remember that he’d planned this, that it had worked perfectly. Their heads and bodies were now entirely enclosed by the police web.
Now here’s my plan.
“The puppeteer ran east,” said Chuft-Captain. And he turned west. He didn’t want to kill the puppeteer without knowing it.
The weapon was hard and awkward in his hand. He was a little afraid of it, and a little ashamed of being afraid: a hangover from that awful moment when the weapon spoke. There were ghost legends among the Kzinti. Some of the most fearsome spoke of captured weapons haunted by their dead owners.
Nobles weren’t supposed to be superstitious, not out loud.
A computer that could learn new languages was logical. The only way, to reach the setting for the matter-conversion beam had been to ask the computer setting, and that was logical too. A matter-conversion beam was a dangerous secret.
Briefly, Chuft-Captain wondered about that. It seemed that for an honorable Kzin every recent change was a change for the worse. The conquest of space had ended when Kzinti met humans. Then had come the puppeteers with their trade outposts; any Kzin who attacked a puppeteer invariably found himself not harmed physically, but ruined financially. No Kzin could fight power like that. Would the tnuctip weapon reverse these changes?
There had been a time, between the discoveries of atomic power and the gravity polarizer, when it seemed the Kzinti species would destroy itself in wars. Now the Kzinti held many worlds, and the danger was past. But was it? A matter-conversion beam…
There is no turning away from knowledge.
Haunted weapons…
He stopped on a rise of permafrost some distance from the ship. By now half the sky was blood red. An arm of the hydrogen spiral was sweeping across the world, preparing to engulf it. Hours or days from now the arm would pass, moving outward on the wings of photon pressure, leaving the world with a faintly thicker atmosphere.
But we’ll be long gone by then, Chuft-Captain thought. Already he was looking ahead to the problem of reaching Kzin. If human ships caught the Traitor’s Claw entering Kzin’s atmosphere, the Kzinti would clearly be violating treaty rules. But they weren’t likely to be caught, not if Flyer did everything right.
“Chuft-Captain, this setting has no gunsight.”
“No? You’re right, it doesn’t.” He considered. “Perhaps it was meant only for large targets. A world seen from close up. The explosion was fierce.”
“Or its accuracy may be low. Or its range. I wonder. Logically the tnuctipun should have included at least a pair of notches for sighting.”
Something’s wrong. The danger instinct whispered in his ear. “Superstition,” he snarled, and raised the weapon stiffly, aiming well above the horizon. “Let us find the answer,” he said.
In this area of Cue Ball the ice had melted and refrozen. It was as flat as a calm lake.
Nessus had stopped at the edge. He’d faced around, stopped again, held the pose for several minutes, then faced back and started across the flat, red-tinged ice. Muscles rippled beneath his pressure suit.
It wasn’t as if he expected to help his human employees. They had gotten themselves into this. And he had neither weapons nor allies nor even stealth to aid him. A human infantryman could have crawled on his belly, but Nessus’ legs weren’t built that way. On a white plain with no cover he had to trot upright, bouncing gaily in the low gravity.
His only weapon was his hind leg.
Thinking that, he remembered the jarring impact as he had planted his foot in the Kzin’s side. Two hundred and forty pounds of charging puppeteer applied over five square inches of clawed space boot. The shock wave had jarred up through thigh and hip and spine, jerked at his skull and continued along the necks to snap his teeth shut with a sharp double click. Like kicking a mountain, a soft but solid mountain.
The next instant he was running, really terrified for the first time in his life. But behind him the Kzin had vented a long whistling scream and folded tightly around himself…
Nessus went on. He’d trotted across the frozen lake without seeing Kzinti or Kzinti ship. Now the ice was beginning to swell and dip. He’d reached the periphery of the blast area. Now there was a touch of yellow light ahead. Small and faint, but unmistakably yellow against the pink ice.
Ship lights.
He went on. He’d never know why. He’d never admit it to himself.
Thock! Hind boot slamming solidly into hard meat. Whistling shriek of agony between sharp-filed carnivore teeth.
He wanted to do it again. Nessus had the blood lust.
He went up a rise, moving slowly, though his feet wanted to dance. He was weaponless, but his suit was a kind of defense. No projectile short of a fast meteorite could harm him. Like a silicone plastic, the
pressure suit was soft and malleable under gentle pressures, such as walking, but it instantly became rigid all over when something struck it.
He topped the rise.
The ship lights might have come from the Court Jester. They didn’t. Nessus saw the airlock opening, and he charged down the slope so the next rise hid him from view.
The Kzinti ship was down. They must have landed with the gravity polarizer; otherwise he would have seen them. If they had then captured Jason on foot, he might still be alive. He might not. The same went for Anne-Marie.
Now what? The Kzinti ship was beyond this next rise of ice. At least one Kzin was outside. Were they looking for him? No, they’d hardly expect him here!
He had reached the trough between the two swells. They were long and shallow and smooth, like waves near an ocean shoreline.
The top of the swell behind Nessus suddenly sparkled with harsh blue-white sunlight.
Nessus knew just what to do, and he did it instantly. No point in covering his cranial bulge with his necks; he’d only get his larynxes crushed. The padding would protect his brain, or it wouldn’t. He folded his legs under him and tucked his heads tight between his forelegs. He didn’t have to think about it. The puppeteer’s explosion reflex was no less a reflex for being learned in childhood.
He saw the light, he curled into a ball, and the ground swell came. It batted him like a beach ball. His rigid, form-fitting shell retained his shape. It could not prevent the ground swell from slamming him away, nor his brain from jarring under its thick skull and its extra padding.
He woke on his back with his legs in the air. There was a tingly ache along his right side and on the right sides of his necks and legs. Half his body surface would be one bruise tomorrow. The ground still heaved; he must have been unconscious for only a moment.
He clambered shakily to his feet. The claws were an enormous help on the smooth ice. He shook himself once, then started up the rise.
Suddenly and silently the Kzinti ship topped the rise. A quarter of a mile down the swell it slid gracefully into space in a spray of ice. It was rotating on its axis, and Nessus could see that one side was red hot. It skimmed through the near-vacuum above the trough, seeming to drift rather than fall. It hit solidly on the shallow far rise and plowed to a stop.