by Larry Niven
“We can’t give him immunity, that’s a legal thing,” the technician objected.
Stan grinned wolfishly. “He may think I’ve got some sort of hold over a few judges or politicians. I’m not saying he’s altogether wrong about that. He must also think I’d use it to save him in exchange for solid information. That’s where he’s badly wrong. This guy has been a treacherous shit to everyone in sight, and he is going down. But I’m happy to let him think he’s in there with a chance; slime like this always feel they can con you into doing them some good. They’ll believe they can manipulate their way out of any mess. Let’s set him up to give us the real dope and then take them both down. So saith Stan the Man.”
“Why do you have it in for this von Höhenheim, Stan? He may have been a bastard once, but he’s not corrupt like so many of them.”
“Not so far as we know. And nailing ex-bastards is good television. Besides, I hate those kzin-worshipping creeps. Now, I gotta run.”
The car was large and well-outfitted, strongly armored and armed like the fighter-bomber it had once been, with dorsal and ventral gun-turrets as well as forward-firing guns. Only its bomb-load was missing, replaced by a variety of salvage gear, and the seats which had once held attack marines had been partly removed to provide some kzin-sized accommodation. Orlando and Tabitha, however, were kept in a suitably strengthened playpen under the eyes of Rarrgh and a well-armored human nurse. They would not be welcome tearing about the car in flight and did not take kindly to being strapped in. They were, however, contented enough, standing on their hind legs to peer out through a port at the terrain passing below.
Nils Rykermann had not been particularly happy about bringing them, but Vaemar had been insistent. He had given detailed instructions to watch for signs of intelligence on the female kit’s part. If she had inherited Karan’s intelligence, the implications could be significant. Anyway, Rarrgh came with the kits, and he would be an asset in the event of any trouble.
Just now Rarrgh was flying the car. He was remembering another flight, the day kzin resistance on the planet had ceased, and he had escaped with Vaemar and Jorg von Thoma from the remnants of the kzin garrison at Circle Bay Monastery.
“So what happened to Captain von Thoma?” Nils Rykermann asked him. “I was still recovering from having the Zrrow removed from my shoulder. Removing it killed the surgeon and nearly killed me. We still didn’t have proper autodocs deployed then. I missed all those months.”
“I swore to protect him on the last day,” said Rarrgh. “One of the last servants of the Patriarchy who remained loyal…I could not hand him over to the vengeance of your people. You shouldn’t have been able to remove the Zrrow at all. We only accepted your parole because you were wearing it,” he added.
“And because you put in a good word for me, I think,” said Nils.
“We had fought side by side against the Morlocks. You and Leonie had saved my life when I was helpless. As least Leonie did—she dug me out of the rockfall instead of blasting me. And I think I know how else you used your fighter’s privileges…”
“I swore to kill von Thoma many times during the war,” said Nils. “But later I grew sick of killing and vengeance. Leonie showed me other things. The abbot released me from my vows. He said they were not good vows anyway. Mind you, if I actually did see him again…I had relatives, and students, who went to the Public Hunts, thanks to his police…”
“I am still sworn to protect him, but I suppose after this time it can hardly hurt to tell you what happened. And I trust you,” said Rarrgh. “When we were a good way away from any human forces, I set him down, as I had promised him. He had basic survival equipment from the car. A food-and-water maker, a shelter-tent. I did not search him for weapons, but I imagine he had some concealed. He would have needed them in that country. When I checked it out later I found it was thick with tigrepards. They had multiplied without check during the Occupation, and the lesslocks were leaving their burrows. The fighting had destroyed many of their old food sources.”
“I feel sorry for them,” said Nils. “Like the Morlocks. They are unpleasant creatures, but they did us no harm till we attacked them.”
Rarrgh still had trouble understanding certain human emotions.
“It was war,” he said.
“Not their war.”
Rarrgh gestured through the window to a ruined homestead on the ground below. “That might well have been their work,” he said. “Of course, there might be other explanations…”
There was only the deep thrumming of the engines for a while.
“And there were other things,” said Rarrgh. “Beam’s Beasts, Advokats, Zeitungers…I thought he might not have survived. The Zeitungers were the worst.”
“I know. I had one brush with them. One brush was enough.”
“When I had established a secure and defensible bivouac for Vaemar and myself I went back to check on him, but he was gone. Whether he lived or died I know not. Later, when I was doing some work on the human farms, I tried to probe with a few questions. Some said they had seen a lone male human heading north, but there were many such wanderers then. There still are. Do you have a god that watches over travellers?”
“We have a saint. Saint Christopher.”
“Ah. For us, the brave traveller, who dares the unknown, comes under the attention of Amara, third male kit of the Fanged God. But he lives on the Traveller’s Moon, which orbits Kzin with the Hunters’ Moon. I am not sure how much attention he pays to the goings-on of this world.”
Senator von Höhenheim grunted. He had said relatively little so far, and had kept one wary eye on Rarrgh and the other on Stan and his two assistants. Below them the sea was shallowing and changing color.
“We must be getting close,” Sarah said.
A gong sounded. A light blinked on the control panel.
“There it is. A nuclear engine, leaking but not badly. Let’s get suited up.” Now the radar was focused on the shape of the ship. The warcraft’s sweeping lines, designed for high speed in atmosphere, were marred by obvious damage about two-thirds of the way down the hull. The after part had broken off and lay some distance away.
“That looks like a missile hit, all right.”
They landed the car on a shelving beach about half a kilometer from the rolling hulk.
The Rykermanns and the Rankins headed out to the wreck in a tender-boat. It had a translucent bottom, and diving was carried out through a central airlock. The high seas of Wunderland made this essential.
Had they been on a pleasure cruise there would have been plenty to watch. The seas of Wunderland teemed with life. Boisterous as the surface waves were, the sea a short distance down was tranquil.
The great curve of the Valiant’s tail-part rose before them, somehow menacing in its sheer size. Nils steered the tender to the stern of the wreck.
“Look!” he said, rather unnecessarily, pointing. A circular hole had been punched in the banks of exhaust ports. Stan’s people and an automatic camera on the tender were busily filming. Stan’s competitors were trying to get better shots.
“Heat-seeking missile, I’d guess,” Nils continued. “It must have got some way in before it detonated. Well, I guess there’s not much to tell who fired it. The missile itself would have been completely destroyed.”
“I would think,” said Stan, “that such a missile would not have been very effective in space, where there would have been no point in running a chemical motor anyway. It has locked onto its target too neatly. As far as I know, these blockade-runners had ramscoops, which they detached and left in orbit to pick up on return. For flight in atmosphere they had chemical rockets—and hot exhaust ports. Especially in a system as dusty as this one, there would have been too much danger of a ramscoop picking up particles, not to mention enemy tactics like dropping compressed radon into it. I’d say it was flying on chemicals.”
“Meaning it was shot down in atmosphere.”
“And look there!” said Sa
rah. Towards the nose of the great wreck, lights were burning behind several ports.
“The forward part is still air-tight.” With strong modern alloys, designed for years in space, that was not particularly surprising.
“Could there be…anyone alive in there, do you think?” asked Sarah.
“It’s not impossible. Those ships had mighty rugged life-support systems. It’s been a long time, but the old design was expecting to be in space for decades.”
“Try calling them up.”
The results were ambiguous. No answer came, but a finely tuned motion-detector reported movement. Something was in there, about the size of a man.
“If he’s been down there all these years he’s not likely to be keeping a watch on the instruments,” Leonie said. “He’s not likely to be very sane, for that matter.”
“We can’t just leave things like this,” said Nils. “We’ll have to go in now, and find out. But we’d better go armed.”
“We’ll need cutting torches to clear the growth off the airlock controls anyway,” said Leonie. “And to cut away any evidence we find.”
“I think we should take a couple of beam rifles as well.”
Their suits were designed for space but worked equally effectively under water. Von Höhenheim, who was too bulky for athletics, remained in the tender. A quick pass of the torch was enough to clear the growth off one of the derelict’s forward airlocks. They stepped into the airlock and the water cycled away. The first thing that caught their eyes on the bridge was a translucent tank attached to an instrument console. It was nearly empty and the skeleton of a dolphin fitted with artificial hands lay on the floor. They removed their helmets.
“Kzin! I smell kzin!” Nils brought his beam-rifle to the ready. Almost without thinking, he and Leonie had gone into a back-to-back crouch, the muzzles of their weapons sweeping each exit from the lock. Leonie, still clumsy on her new legs, moved too fast and fell sideways. Sarah picked her up.
“That thing we saw on the motion detector,” she said, “I’m sure that wasn’t a kzin. It was too small.”
“I don’t care. Can’t you smell them? Maybe it was a small kzin.”
Violent headaches hit them. The Rykermanns recognized them at once.
“Telepath probing! That explains it! There is a telepath here!” Leonie screwed up her face and pressed her hands to her head.
“For God’s sake! Rarrgh! Tell it we mean no harm! Tell it the war is over on this planet!” and then: “Tell it we have come to rescue it!”
The humans had expected no results. Nils and Leonie had to consciously override their training in such a situation and not think about eating vegetables (or—one of their teachers had been a Hindu—the capering monkeys of Hanuman), a drill designed to overwhelm a kzin telepath with nausea.
To their surprise, the humans felt their headaches subsiding. From one of the corridors a kzin emerged: small, bedraggled, a typical specimen of the kzin telepaths taken under the Patriarchial regime at birth and forcibly addicted to the sthondat-lymph drug, though perhaps looking somewhat better than the typical telepath that kzin commanders tended to use to destruction. Like all telepaths, language was no trouble for it. Its Wunderlander was fluent and colloquial and it spoke as close an approximation of human speech as its vocal arrangements would allow it.
“Don’t hurt me!” it cried, falling face-downward in the posture of total submission.
“You have nothing to fear from us. Who are you and what are you doing here?” asked Nils, keeping the creature covered. This telepath was indeed small for a kzin, and plainly no fighter, but even so unwarlike an example of the kzin species would be able to dismantle a tiger—or a human—faster than the eye could follow. And their ability to inflict instant, paralyzing pain on the brain’s receptor centers gave them an additional weapon.
“I was telepath aboard the cruiser Man’s Bone-Shredder,” the telepath told them, rising slowly. “Dominant One, there was a battle and I was taken prisoner. I was put aboard this ship.”
That made sense, Nils thought. Telepaths were too useful to waste. They could be a mighty asset and it had been found that many had no cause to be loyal to the Patriarchy.
“Approaching Ka’ashi, we were pursued by ships of the Patriarchy, but evaded them. Then this ship was hit by a missile fired from the ground, and crashed. I had been placed in a restraining web so I was the only survivor of the impact.”
“How did you know the missile came from the ground?”
“I read the captain’s mind.”
“Where are the bodies of the captain and crew?”
“I ate them. The bones are in there.” He gestured to a closed door. “I arranged them according to rank and dressed them in their uniforms. Do you wish to see them?”
The humans shuddered.
“It was all I could do to show my respect and gratitude,” the telepath went on. “Apart from that there is a supply of rations. But I am glad that I have been found. I knew I was under water, but not how deep.”
“Have any records survived?”
“I did not touch the computer’s records. I am not familiar with human mechanisms and there were no survivors to teach me. I feared to touch the wrong controls. I read from your minds that the war is over on this planet, and the Patriarchy has been defeated. I am glad. My kind warred in secret against the Patriarchy as we might. I hope you will take me to be with others of my kind.”
“It’s a wonder you survived all that time, and a greater wonder you are still sane,” Leonie told him.
“My caste has had long experience of living on the edge of sanity,” the telepath told her drily. “And I have less than six months’ food left. I should have had to take a chance on surviving the airlock naked before long. I have found comfort in isolation, but I should have been obliged to forsake this place soon.”
The ship must have been retrofitted with the hyperdrive, Nils realized, and prudence would have made them provide food for a full crew for several years in case it failed. And two years of food for a full crew would have enabled a single individual to survive this time. And yes, solitude would have been better than company for a telepath. The pain of other minds would have been far worse.
“We will need to get a kzin-sized suit down to you,” Leonie said.
The telepath nodded. Kzin did not easily show emotion in front of humans.
“Tell us,” said Stan. “You read the captain’s thoughts at the end?” Leonie was prying out the bridge recorder.
“Only in flashes. I dared not distract him or the other humans. For the ship to lose all control and crash, I thought I would be lost too. I huddled in the restraining web. We ran long and far before the missile caught us, with many evasions. The captain was clever, but not clever enough.”
“But you picked up something.”
“Of course.”
“Say on. Tell us all you know.”
“The missile’s signature identified it as a Hero’s Slashing Claw.”
A short-range ground-to-air missile, barely capable of reaching the fringes of space. Though they could not be sure, Nils and Leonie thought they had been issued by the Patriarchy to KzinDiener forces. To prevent their misuse by humans, the later models had had identifiable radiation signatures, though whether the keys identifying these still existed was another matter.
Greg and Sarah returned to the surface and brought down a kzin spacesuit from the car. It was far too big to fit the telepath well, but it was adequate for a short, one-way trip.
“I don’t trust von Höhenheim,” said Nils. “If he is not entirely kosher, the recorder might be proof of that. I think I’ll keep it out of his way until we’re all snugged down and ready to leave. And don’t let him know this kzin is a telepath.”
“He looks like a telepath.”
“If von Höhenheim asks, tell him the kzin has been eating badly lately. Also, he looks too well-groomed for a telepath. I suppose because he hasn’t had to use the telepath sense for a
while.”
Feeling there was nothing to be gained by alienating the telepath, they asked him if there were any possessions he wished to take with him, but there were none. Nils and Leonie had by this time made a watertight bundle of all the bridge recorders, and they returned to the surface. Rarrgh, who was trying to follow Vaemar in being a modern Wunderkzin, tried not to treat the telepath too contemptuously.
“You had better collect the kits,” Nils told Rarrgh. Orlando and Tabitha, under Nurse’s anxious eyes, had been playing in the sandhills above the beach.
“We must come back when we have time and examine this place,” said Leonie. Storms had piled the margin of the sea with all manner of flotsam and jetsam, including the carapace of some large crustacean.
Nils also walked down to the tidal zone. It was hard to remember that he had been a professor of biology once. No one paid attention to Senator von Höhenheim. He quietly reentered the car. A shot from its dorsal gun-turret fused the sand to glass, barely in front of the human party’s feet.
Nils wasted no time in demanding to know what was the meaning of this. He brought Leonie down with a flying tackle and rolled with her down the side of the dune. The others did the same.
“Bring out the kittens,” von Höhenheim ordered through the loud-hailer as the car rose and hovered above them.
“What do you want with them?” asked Nils into his com-link.
“Hostages. They are two of the most valuable beings on this planet. Can you imagine the consequences if their Sire were presented with their fried carcasses?”
“I can imagine what the kzin would do to you. And the human government wouldn’t stop them.”
“I saw you bury something when you came ashore. It may have been the bridge-recorder. I will trade it for the kits’ lives.”
“And what about our lives?”
“Killing you would not be useful to me.”
