“And what’s the lesson of this: leave nothing to chance, never underestimate your enemy. If they had posted sentries at the bubble-domes, the humans would never have lived to bring their weapons to bear. Never stop thinking.”
“Thinkin’ is all very well, but how are ye to get yer claws in your money again?” another voice growled. “Ye’ll never dare visit Ka’ashi ever more, I’m sure of it. An’ what if ye run into some old comrades what didn’t do so well?”
“Ha,” said Silver, “we shall move in different worlds in more senses than one, though to be sure Ka’ashi is a whole planet. Who knew we had landed there, until we chose to show ourselves? But we don’t need it. Like I said, thanks to the hyperdrive there are plenty of worlds—kzin worlds—that we can set ourselves up on.
“An’ there’s another thing. There was those as feared Gra-Prompyh, and those who feared Skel, and more who feared K’zarr. But K’zarr hisself was feared of me, an’ good sense he showed there, ye may lay to it. And K’zarr’s crew was the roughest crew in space, be sure of it, and the demons in hell would ha’ feared to sail wi’ K’zarr. But when I was quartermaster, they was lambs, they was. No, ye be safe in any ship I run, be sure of it. Ye see I’ve done well. So can you.”
“Well, Master Silver, I had me doubts about this venture when ye first broached it, but now I’ll take yer arm in my claws and you do the same to me, and we’ll seal it with the drop o’ blood.”
“And a brave, smart kzin ye be, and a finer figure for a warrior o’ fortune I never did see.”
I realized I had been overhearing the corruption of one of the few loyal kzin on board, maybe the last of them. But another kzin came in to the room.
“Vaarth is square,” Silver said to the newcomer.
“Ah, I knowed Vaarth was square,” came the voice of Claws. “Vaarth is no fool. But lookee here, Silver, what I want to know is how long afore we take the ship? I’ve had it to here wi’ S’maak-Captain. I want to feel my wtsai turn in his belly and see his eyes go glazed over an’ that black tongue of his coming out.”
“Claws, ye’ve a deal o’ courage, but yer head is of no account whatever, and never was. Now hear what I say. Any time ye can report to the Captain’s bridge, ye take it, and ye keep a weather eye out for all ye can see. I needs t’ know all I can ’bout the Valiant. So ye’ll stay sober and respectful fer as long as I tell ye, d’ye hear?”
“Well I don’t say no, do I? What I say is: when?”
“The last possible minute I can manage it, that’s when,” Silver told him. “We got a first-rate spacer takin’ us where we want t’go, and if ’twere up to me, I’d have him bring us halfway back too. No, when we make planetfall is the right time. That’s when we take out the first-class passengers. Those cursed kits ha’ the run o’ the ship, they’s even got K’zarr’s memo pad data in they’s phones, demons take them. When we are neatly parked next t’ the treasure, when the Doctor and the Lord Orion and the Judge have made their choices of the most valuable bits, that’s when we strike, d’ye hear me?”
“Allright, Silver, I know’s ye got a good head on yer. But how are we gunna take over the ship? And how d’ye know for sure she’s not listenin’ to us this very minute?”
“Oh she is, she is, but she’s hearing something different from what we’re saying, Claws, and ye may lay to that. Disgustin’ breach o’ regulations it is too, there’s privacy laws on Earth that ban placin’ microphones in secret, but Valiant had them installed under directions from the captain. Shockin’ lack o’ trust, and illegal too on Earth, but Ka’ashi is where she’s registered, and Ka’ashi don’t ha’ so many human laws yet.”
“Well, ye’re the Hero wi’ a head on yer, nary a doubt,” Claws growled. “But how are we to take a ship? She’ll ha’ many defenses, no doubt.”
“Ye don’t doubt I ha’ a plan for that too, d’ye?”
“No, Silver, but I’m impatient, d’ye see.”
“So ye are, like all fools at all times!” Silver’s voice rose in a snarl. “Ye’d be drunk even now were it to you. I don’t know why I’m fool enough to sail wi’ ye and the other sthondats.”
“Easy all, Silver, who’s a crossin’ ye?” Claws sounded fearful.
“An’ how many great ships have I seen taken? An’ how many brisk Heroes drying in the sun, and spoutin’ blood into hard vacuum, watching it freeze into scarlet icicles as it went? And all for this same hurry, when a little patience would ha’ saved them. Too much rum, when a little o’ water and blood would ha’ done better.”
“Aah, ye’ve the manner of a priest on ye, Silver, what’s wrong wi’ a little relaxation betimes? There’s others could hack a program as well as ye who had the time for some diversions.”
“And where are they now, Claws? Tell me that. Gra-Prompyh could do that, and Skel. But where are they? Gone to the Death Demons, that’s where. And K’zarr, he were a Hero of Heroes. But where’s K’zarr now?”
The younger kzin’s voice, Vaarth, broke in: “When we do lay them athwart, those passengers, what d’we do wi’ them?”
“Ah, there’s the kzin wi’ a sharp mind to cut to the bone o’ things!” Silver said admiringly. “What would ye think then? Do we leave them alive on the planet maybe wi’ a little food and drink? That would ha’ been the way of it under Raarkar kzin. Or do we cut them down? That would ha’ been what K’zarr did, or Skel.”
“Skel was the hero fer that,” said Claws. “If ever a sharp set o’ fangs came to port, ’twere old Skel.”
“Right you are,” said Silver. “Sharp and ready. But I’m a lordling, so what say I? Well, says I, dooty is dooty, mates. I give my vote: death. When I’m a lordling for real, I don’t want some lawyer t’ come calling, no, nor the human ARM, nor the Patriarch’s forces neither, nor that kz’zeerkt-loving Vaemar that calls himself Riit and the little army the monkeys allow him. ‘Wait’ is what I says, but when we’ve done waiting, why, let the flesh rip!”
“Ye’re a true warrior, Silver,” Claws rumbled.
“Ye will say so when the time comes. But I make one claim, that is to the Lord Orion. I wants t’ take him apart meself. Ye can ha’ the Captain an’ Vaarth can ha’ the Doctor and the Judge and the kits for his pleasure, but I wants the Lord Orion fer meself,” Silver purred at the thought, as did Vaarth. I trembled in horror.
“Ye’re sure that we can take over the ship, Silver?” Claws asked.
“Wi’ a little help from those kits, indeed I can. And no trouble they’ll be, I promise ye.”
“But ye’re banned from the bridge, Captain’s orders.”
“What will his orders be worth when he’s dead?” Silver asked. “To be sure, it’s an inconvenience. But I ha’ me own little sensors installed on the bridge, thanks to Arrow, before he became a risk in consequence. Well, he’s gone. Most of him. Still a wee bit left in the meat-locker, I believe, ha! An’ the door’s not fully closed, push it to, or he’ll rot afore we gets to finish him.”
The door was pushed against me and locked me in again. I could hear nothing. I tried to phone Marthar, but nothing worked inside the locker, it was all metal and shielded. And the lights were out.
I was frantic that a crew-kzin would come in and find me before Valiant noticed I had gone missing. So when the door started to open, I hid behind a meat-rack, although the intruder would almost certainly have caught my scent. If nothing else, I probably stank of cigar-smoke from the Judge or pipe-smoke from the Doctor. A familiar face peered in.
“Peter, come out. We’ve only got a few minutes before Valiant will have to release them. They’re on a practice drill of some sort.” Marthar was friendly again, which meant more to me than the actual words for a moment. I stumbled out into her arms. She picked me up, threw me over a shoulder and ran from the empty room, pushing the door of the meat-locker closed behind her. We shot out, far faster than I could go on my own, and didn’t stop until we were in the elevator heading up. Then she put me down and I turned to face her. I hugged her
around her middle.
“Thanks, Marthar. I’m sorry we quarreled.” I looked up at her.
“Silly, you can’t think I’d worry about what a monkey says, can you? Anyway, it’s Valiant you should thank. She keeps us all covered, full time after Arrow disappeared, and when you vanished suddenly she started me off to let you out. She guessed what had happened from what she knew of where you were and where the meat-locker is, and sent me off. Then she stopped me. I was going down in the lift and she stopped it, and then explained why by showing me the translation she was picking up from your phone. She decided that it would be better to collect as much data as possible. So now everyone knows all about it. Except the crew, I hope.”
I sighed with relief. “Well I’m glad I don’t have to remember it all and tell people, they’d never believe me. Are we going to keep it a secret from the crew? I don’t think I could ever look at Silver the same way again, and I expect he’d notice.”
“I’m sure he would. The likes of Silver live by noticing how beings look at them. But we’ll be making planetfall soon, and I guess lessons are suspended until after we’re down. And then at least we’re forewarned about what to expect.”
“But how are we going to manage? We can’t lock them all up, there isn’t room, and anyway, how would we run the ship?”
“I don’t know. But Daddy and the Judge will figure out something. I don’t know about the Doctor, I think he’s still in shock. He liked Silver.”
“So did I. Or at least, I liked the Hero I thought he was.”
“He makes me ashamed of my kind.”
When Rarrgh-Hero and the Judge had been talking together, I had heard the Judge address him as “You old villain” or “You old teufel.” That had plainly been said with affection, as Marthar sometimes called me “chimpy.” But there was no trace of affection in my feelings for Silver now.
Marthar ran her claws through my hair very gently as if she was combing it. “I suppose he’s a mixture like all of us. He’s learned how to look civilized, but doesn’t want to be civilized. I can relate to that.”
I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, but later I did.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When we got out of the elevator we found everyone waiting for us at the usual table. Everyone means the Judge, Doctor Lemoine, Orion-Riit and S’maak-Captain, who was sitting stiffly at the end of the table, unsure of the social niceties of sharing a table with Orion and the humans. It also turned out that there was an invisible being present, Valiant, herself.
“Over here, kits,” Orion commanded, and pushed out seats for us, a small one for me and a bigger one for Marthar.
We sat down and I opened my mouth to speak until the Judge stopped me.
“Valiant, can we be sure we are competely isolated here? It occurs to me that we may be bugged.”
“No information released in this meeting will travel beyond those present,” Valiant answered. The voice sounded as if she were somewhere on the table. “Peter is carrying a recording device which would have revealed the events following his entering the meat-locker when it was quizzed. I shall delete the relevant passages now. The device is presently inoperative.”
So that unspeakable swine had taken advantage of me to listen in on everything I discussed with Marthar. I hated the wicked devil. That was private, he had no right to do anything so slimy.
“Can you destroy the thing now, Valiant?” Marthar asked the ship. She was clearly every bit as angry as I was.
“Not so fast, we may be able to use it for misinformation,” her father stopped her. “Think, child, don’t just react.” She growled, but accepted the idea. Her eyes gleamed as she started thinking about how to get her own revenge on Silver by deceiving him. This was now warfare, and deception was a part of warfare that kzin could be very good at. They learned it from us.
“You have all seen the transcript of what I overheard when I was in the meat-locker?” I asked.
“And heard the original,” Orion said. “The translation got the rough ideas right. There were nuances concerning you two which I’ll not expand upon. Just kill the turncoat Vaarth as soon as you get a chance, so you do so undetected.”
“Well, S’maak-Captain, you were right and I was wrong, and I apologize to you for it,” Doctor Lemoine said. “It looks as if we’re in a pretty pickle, which would have been even worse but for your relocating the weapons. The question is, what do we do? Since you have been right so far, you should give us your orders, sir.”
S’maak looked at Orion, who nodded. “My lord, men, we have but one advantage, perhaps two. The obvious one is that we know their plans and they don’t know we know. The only other advantage we have is the ship, Valiant, which is now in a position to defend herself better against whatever hell those pirates plan. Tactically, the sooner we take out Silver, the better. He is clearly the only one of them with brains, and I would advise assassinating him immediately. With those brains blown over the floor, the rest will fold.”
“That’s making us as bad as them,” Doctor Lemoine protested. S’maak just looked at him and said nothing. I was of two minds. Just killing Silver seemed cowardly. It would presumably be done by Valiant, remotely, using one of the myriad of ship weapons I knew she had. She could send out a flying dart, hunt down Silver and get it into his head before exploding the thing. There were other, even more horrible things she could do. A cloud of pirana-nanobots could hit him in mid-stride and leave his pink bones tumbling to the deck. He could be spaced, he could wind up in the food supply, or he could be used to provide raw material for the kzin autodocs. It made me sick to think of it.
“No, it isn’t, Doctor,” Marthar objected. “I don’t know how you can say that. I know you humans are prone to sqeamishness, but saying there’s a moral equivalence between taking out a murderous menace to decent creatures and taking out the creatures themselves is really, really stupid. There’s no such equivalence. It’s like saying that cutting out a cancer is every bit as bad as the cancer growing and killing off healthy cells. Speaking as a healthy cell and a decent legal entity, I say wipe him out. And take Vaarth and Claws out at the same time. Show them who’s in charge. Sometimes”—she turned to the humans—“our kzin honor is mistaken for mercy. Let there be no opportunity for such a mistake now.”
“I must say, the logic of the situation seems unassailable. Also, I own to a feeling that it is cowardly to kill him so,” Orion said in his deep voice. “I would prefer to kill him myself. Also, he is the one at present holding the others back.”
“Killing him would alert the crew to the fact that we know their plans, Dominant One,” S’maak objected. “Of course it would be out of the question for you to fight him. It would do him far too much honor to die under your wtsai. I should face him myself if I thought him worthy of my own wtsai, but I do not. My opinion is that he and most of the crew are scum and do not deserve even the combat pits. I would put them down as animals not worthy of the hunt. I would grant them no Fighters’ Privileges.”
Doctor Lemoine set his face obstinately. He didn’t like being outargued by a kzinrett child, and he had seen the flicker of approval on S’maak-Captain’s face when Marthar had spoken. The Captain might have been rearranging his opinions about the wit of a chit of a kit.
“You are in command, S’maak-Captain,” the Judge put in. “Even the good Doctor acknowledges that, and if you decide to simply destroy Silver, I doubt anyone here would dispute your right to do so. Yet it is a dreadful waste; I hate to see an intelligent being destroyed so cavalierly. Time was when I myself might have been judged guilty and disposed of in just such a manner, but for fortune and Rarrgh-Hero, who had a sense of honor as deep as a well.”
“Suppose we destroy Silver,” the Doctor argued. “Are we then to trust the rest of the scum to take us home? Who will arise as leader in his place? We do not know, and better the teufel you know than one you do not,” he pointed out. “I daresay we shall be running without a full complement whatever h
appens. We can’t just destroy the lot, we need them.”
There was a silence while everyone chewed on this.
“Well, Sire, I need orders,” S’maak-Captain said eventually, turning to Orion. “Do we put down on this planet? Do we kill Silver and others before or afterwards? If necessary, we could return home with a skeleton crew, providing we do not land. If we land we shall need the crew to cooperate, and also when we lift. If we could be sure they would not strike before we are ready, we could get back into space first and then take out the half of them. Valiant could get us back to Alpha Centauri under those conditions, is that not so?”
“True, S’maak-Captain,” Valiant answered smoothly. “We would need assistance at the end of the journey, but a parking orbit would present no great problems. The bigger problem is what plans Silver has for corrupting my programming. There must be some such plan, and it is imperative to stop him before he implements it. If I monitor him carefully, I should be able to identify the precise threat before it can be put into effect. It would be harder if he were to be disposed of, some of his lieutenants might be willing to proceed with the plan, and I might not identify the threat until it is too late.”
“Have you any ideas of what such a plan might be?” the Judge asked.
“It must involve replacing a substantial part of the command chips. They are not easy to get to, and I have strengthened my defenses in all the ways I could devise. But organic life makes for some creative solutions which do not yield to easy analysis,” Valiant admitted.
“It seems clear that if Silver must be murdered, then it should not be until we have landed, or until we have decided to return home without landing,” the Doctor said.
“Not murdered, Doctor. The word you want is executed,” Marthar corrected him sweetly. “But we mustn’t just give up now we’re practically within sight of the treasure. Of course we land. Then we take out Silver and a few others. Then we explain what is going to happen to any of the rest of them if they misbehave.” She turned to S’maak. “S’maak-Captain, I apologize for being rude to you the last time we met. You have more sense than anyone else here, including Daddy. You see things straight and you see them clear.”