Kzin feared falling.
“Alien-Technologist,” he rasped, mastering his fear after several deep breaths.
The kzin made an awkward microgravity leap to Rrowl-Captain's side from across the tunnel, using a reaction pistol judiciously, and snapped a suit bolt onto a nearby crossbar. The captain was impressed, but refused to show it.
“Command me,” Alien-Technologist said without bravado, clearly as nervous in the tunnel as his captain.
“Lead your party to the inner airlock and secure this monkeyship.”
“At once, Dominant One!”
Rrowl-Captain watched with grudging admiration as the octal of Heroes under Alien-Technologist's command rappelled down the tunnel. The figures in space armor swiftly became smaller as they descended, using secured lines and reaction pistols.
Lifting one wrist, he clumsily punched up the shipboard commlink with gloved fingers. Static hissed and fizzed in his ears.
“Command me!” growled-and-spat the low reply from Navigator on the command bridge.
“Status.”
“The monkeyship continues to operate as before. Drone remotes have been dispatched to all major sectors of the outer hull.” Navigator's tone sounded confident and full of Heroic pride. “No sign of traps or trickery.”
“Open a telemetry channel to my portable thinplate.”
“At once!” came Navigator's reply.
Rrowl-Captain unfolded his personal thinplate and accessed data downloaded from Belly-Slasher. Status reports stalked one another across the thinplate under the captain's gaze. The alien spacecraft was indeed running as if derelict, with only the contra-matter drive and magnetic field arrays operational. No beacons, no navigational control.
He spent some time reviewing the data, running a tongue over his sharp teeth in thought, waiting for the remote drones to complete their scans.
“Dominant One,” crackled his headset in Alien Technologist's voice, “we have secured the alien ship as you commanded.”
“Did you find monkey bodies?”
“Yes,” came the reply with a pleased growl. “We have found nearly four octals of the humans in artificial hibernation.” There was a pause. “The maintenance subsystems appear to be both intact and functional.”
Rrowl-Captain knew what Alien-Technologist was thinking. Fresh, living monkey meat. Saliva washed his fangs in anticipation. He rasped his rough tongue across thin black lips. Ship rations were not always pleasing to a Noble Hero's palate. Still, first things first.
“Do you mean that this ship was piloted by machines?”
“All hibernation couches are occupied.”
Rrowl-Captain wanted to stretch his batwing ears in confusion and not a little suspicion. The monkeys relied very heavily indeed on untrustworthy automation, true. But to leave such a fearsome reaction drive under automated control smacked of madness.
They do not think like Heroes, the captain reminded himself yet again. No alien thinks like a Hero. But what kind of artificial mind could have directed such an uncanny defense?
“Have you found their command bridge?” he finally rasped.
A tone of pride entered the hissing voice in his helmet. “We have, Leader. The room has not been touched, and is waiting for you.”
Repressing a shudder, Rrowl-Captain attached a belt loop to the guide lines left by his boarding party, and slid down the monkeyship access shaft in one slow, nightmare fall. From time to time, he fired his own reaction pistol to slow his dreamlike descent, barely suppressing his mews of fear as the tunnel walls slid past. When he finally reached the bottom of the tunnel, his posture ensured that none of the crewkzin dared look his way as he entered the inner airlock.
The interior was cramped, narrow. Lights were strung down empty corridors, spreading clear orange illumination into dark corners. Rrowl-Captain could hear hiss-and-spit conversation from engineers and specialists bent over alien equipment. He had known that the monkeys were puny, but his back complained painfully as he stooped under several hatch fittings. It would have been better to stalk these alien corridors on all fours, but space armor prevented that posture.
The captain rudely cuffed a low-ranking kzin apprentice standing guard. “Nameless One,” he rumbled, “direct me to the monkey command bridge.”
The other kzin saluted smartly and led his captain down one darkened corridor to a small area equipped with two tiny acceleration chairs and accompanying consoles. The nameless kzin saluted and stood at the hatchway, waiting for further instructions.
The captain of Belly-Slasher ceremonially urinated at all four cardinal points of the monkeyship command bridge, marking it as kzin territory.
And Rrowl-Captain's property in the Name of the Riit Patriarch of Kzin-home.
He examined the console carefully, looking at the burnt and damaged equipment clearly caused by the magneto-electrical pulse. He sniffed delicately at a heavy fiber-optic cable that had been torn from some kind of socket. He sniffed the broken end of the cable again, more thoroughly.
Something was wrong, Rrowl-Captain knew with a start, his ruff rising in alarm within his space armor. Containing a snarl, he swiftly looked from side to side, half expecting the very walls to burst open with hordes of laser-wielding monkeys.
Fangs did not fit into this wound channel as they should.
He whirled suddenly and sniffed at the empty acceleration chairs. The scent was very fresh.
The captain began to growl low in his throat.
“Alien-Technologist,” Rrowl-Captain hissed into his commlink.
“Leader!” came the reply in his helmet.
“Where are you at present?”
“I am studying the contra-matter drive. Dominant One, the brute force of the monkey technology, without artifice or subtlety, is astounding. Brute force primitives. They have wrestled contra-particles into a high vacuum chamber, and —”
“Enough,” the captain interrupted. “Tell me again that all of the hibernation chambers are occupied.”
“It is so, Dominant One. This spacecraft, for all its apparent size, is quite tiny — an iceball with a small life-bubble deep inside.”
Rrowl-Captain blinked in thought, staring at the empty chairs and savoring the scents he had found on them. “Is it possible,” he hissed, “that two of the monkeys have but recently entered hibernation?”
There was a short pause.
“No, Leader. Even with alien machinery, it is clear that all of the hibernation chambers have been occupied for several years.”
“Report to me at once,” Rrowl-Captain shrieked. He punched up Navigator in Belly-Slasher on his commlink and spat syllables quickly, issuing orders and demanding information.
It took some time to prove what Rrowl-Captain's nose had suspected. There had indeed been two monkeys alive and warm inside the iceball of a spacecraft not long before Rrowl-Captain's boarding party entered. There were no bodies, and all of the hibernation chambers were in long-term use.
Even an unblooded kitten could set fangs into these facts: The two monkeys were hiding or had fled.
Judicious use of Alien-Technologist's sonic echo-thumper sounded the walls of the monkeyship, and after some search found an empty shipbay, hidden behind a false bulkhead. Instruments detected residual radiation from a fusion drive lining what was clearly a collapsed escape tunnel through reinforced ice.
Navigator's instruments aboard Belly-Slasher, using the remote drones and Alien-Technologist's growing intuition of monkey ways, found a magnetic anomaly receding quickly from them. It was decelerating very rapidly indeed, and seemed to have originated from the derelict monkeyship.
“Why are the honorless leaf-eaters running and not fighting?” Rrowl-Captain growled in anger and frustration. “Why would they flee, and leave the defenseless bodies of their comrades to us?”
Kzin never let their fellow Heroes become prey.
Alien-Technologist averted his eyes, folded ears against skull inside his helmet. “Because they cannot
win, Leader, and flee witlessly before Noble Heroes.”
The captain slashed claws in rebuke at the other kzin's lickspittle foolishness. “Hardly,” he rasped angrily. “This event reeks of monkey trickery.” He paused a moment in carnivorous thought. Think like a duplicitous monkey, he reminded himself with vast distaste.
“The contra-matter drive is stable?”
“Yes, Leader. We have tapped into the monkey telemetry cables, and found the confinement fields steady.”
There was a snarl of static over the commlink from Navigator, still aboard Belly-Slasher. “Dominant One, I do not mean to intrude, but there is an anomalous finding —”
“Report,” Rrowl-Captain growled.
“Remote drones near the reaction drive section show increasing levels of radioactivity,” the tiny voice finished.
The darkened monkey corridor seemed to whirl around Rrowl-Captain and close in on him like an implacable enemy's claws. He felt a growl growing within his throat.
“You have no other manner,” he hissed slowly to the other kzin standing before him, “to determine the status of the reaction drive than what the monkeys wish us to know?” Alien-Technologist looked at his captain blankly.
“Leader, I do not understand. These are standard telemetry lines linking the contra-matter drive directly to these navigation consoles… hrrrrr,” he said, falling silent in thought.
Rrowl-Captain barely contained his fury. “Confirm the status of the contra-matter drive at once. Directly. In person if necessary. I feel enemy eyes upon us, and scent danger.” Rrowl-Captain repressed the desire to slash an ear from the monkey-trusting Alien-Technologist for his trophy loop. “In the meantime, the rest of the crew not associated with you will return to Belly-Slasher.”
Rrowl-Captain snorted his displeasure at Alien-Technologist, who hung bouncing in the microgravity like a toothless kitten's prey-toy. He ignored the other kzin's humbled salute and turned to leave the navigation chamber abruptly.
The captain would lead Belly-Slasher on a diverting exercise, a small hunt for the escaped monkeys, who would rather run than fight. Perhaps by the time he had returned with his trophies, Alien-Technologist and his crew would have truly secured the monkeyship prize. He entered the access tunnel, and hooked the guide line to a reinforced loop on his battle armor. Rrowl-Captain snarled and leaped upward in the microgravity, toward the outer airlock, firing his reaction pistol downward for added emphasis.
He never looked down.
Rrowl-Captain entered Belly-Slasher, feeling the comforting artificial gravitation firm beneath his taloned boots once more. Suddenly, slurred hisses of Alien-Technologist yowled over the commlink in a frenzied rush of harsh syllables.
He could not make out the words, but the tone was clear: Fear. Warning.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Carol grinned widely as the holoscreen overloaded with Sun-Tzu's incandescent death.
Flash — blank — and the display reset, showing the horrific radiance of the matter-antimatter explosion in muted colors.
“Bang,” said Bruno softly.
The cloud of plasma and radiation that had once been Sun-Tzu began to spread out in a complex, fluorescence-colorful pattern. Magnetic fields and relativistic impacts with the interstellar medium made the cloud look like a living thing crawling under a microscope.
Carol leaned over and kissed him with sudden passion.
“As usual,” she murmured into his ear, nuzzling gently, “you have a gift for understatement.” She ran the back of her hand very softly across her lover's face. “Would you accept the intention, if not the act?”
Carol was gratified to see a genuine smile on Bruno's face.
“Well,” he replied, “the situation being what it is, I suppose that I can understand your position.”
She winked at him, gave a sly smile. “We'll discuss positions later,” she whispered, and turned back to the holoscreen.
That is, she thought, if we aren't puking our guts out from radiation poisoning. She knew that Bruno was thinking much the same thing. Their flirting words were both supportive and diverting.
And, despite the danger they faced, fun besides.
Carol had already done as much as she could until the bulk of the radiation arrived, triumphant yet harmful messenger heralding the death of the ratcats. And, much as she hated to think about it, from the deaths of almost thirty of her friends and crewmates, frozen in coldsleep. People for whom she had been responsible, as captain of Sun-Tzu.
She had carefully tuned the superconductive wings of Dolittle to maximize magnetic deflection of the incoming wave of charged particles. Also, Carol had turned the ship sternward to the spreading bloom of Sun-Tzu's death, using the long fuel tank as additional shielding. There was nothing else to do but wait.
While they waited for the radiation front to strike Dolittle, Carol reviewed the autodoc data. Bruno seemed to have recovered well physically from his trauma aboard Sun-Tzu. The wrenching of 'manual de-Linkage' — she frowned at the antiseptic term — left little to no physical damage. Stimulants and mood modifiers kept his mental state relatively calm and normal.
As Bruno had said, his electronic prostheses would repair the brain damage — or not. There was nothing either of them could do about it. She didn't want to die alone, without him. She remained silent for long moments.
“Okay,” Bruno sighed, “as usual, the Captain will speak when the Captain pleases. Blessed be the Name of the Captain.”
“Next you'll be praising me as 'from whom all blessings flow'.” She smiled, despite herself. He knew her well.
“A little much, perhaps.”
“Flattery will get you anywhere, cabin boy.”
“Sounds like sexual harassment to me,” Bruno replied in mock outrage, batting his eyelashes at her outrageously.
Carol snorted laughter. “You've been scanning datachips of Early's history lectures again, haven't you? That term hasn't been in use for two hundred years.”
“How would you know?” A sly grin crossed Bruno's face.
She squeezed his biceps hard. “You always know how to make me laugh, lover. Thanks for bringing my good mood back.”
They said nothing for a time.
“Any time now, isn't it?” Bruno asked calmly.
“That's a big affirmative.”
There was a soundless flash behind their eyelids as the radiation front struck Dolittle. Radiation sleeted through the magnetic fields surrounding the ship, the hull walls, the long, slushed deuterium tank, and their own bodies — all in a microsecond.
“Well,” Bruno remarked, “you always show me the most interesting places, my dear.”
Carol ignored his nervous humor and pored over the holoscreen datastream in the biotelemetry window. After a moment, Bruno began to help her.
Finally, she sighed with relief. Their cumulative doses were high, but not quite lethal. Their prompt doses would ensure a slight fever and nausea, easily handled by drugs from the autodoc.
“It looks like we'll live,” Carol said.
“For a while.” Bruno's tone was quiet and somber.
“No more Project Cherubim. And we aren't going to make it to Wunderland or Home, are we?”
“Doubtful. Maybe we can rig up a couple of coldsleep bunks from the autodoc spare parts. We sure don't have a decade's worth of recycler or supply capacity.” He brightened a bit. “Maybe another Earth ship will find us while we're in coldsleep.”
“Or a kzin warcraft, more likely,” she reminded him. “We could wake up a piece at a time.”
Again, silence hung thick in Dolittle.
“All of it was for nothing,” Bruno finally said, his tone black and dead.
“No,” she replied firmly. “Not for nothing. You and I got together, love.”
He squeezed her hand in agreement.
“And,” Carol pointed out, “we waxed three ratcat ships in the bargain. Maybe two hundred kzin flash-fried to vapor. That must be worth something on the sco
rechip.”
Bruno's face was suddenly slack, a bit like his Linked expression. Concern flashed through Carol's mind.
“What is it, Tacky?” she asked lightly, keeping the worry from her voice.
“I hope that we took out all the kzin ships.”
Carol gestured at the holoscreen. “Sure we did. Look at the fireworks.” The antimatter explosion was immense, brilliantly colored. It occurred to her that the garish cloud would eventually be visible across light-years.
“Can we be certain?” Bruno's tone was odd, a little machinelike.
“Is that a prediction, that we didn't get them all?” she inquired, frowning.
“I don't think that I can link anymore, so I'm just guessing. Maybe I'm just worried.” His tone and facial expression were back to normal.
Carol leaned over and rubbed her stiff strip haircut against his cheek. “You will never guess how attractive I find a simple human guess, my friend.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rrowl-Captain scented his own death in the cramped singleship fighter. He closed his nostrils from the stench of unchallenging prey. The kzin knew that he had taken more than a lethal dose of radiation in the detonation of the monkeyship. The captain was far from the medical tank in the wreckage of Belly-Slasher, and the supplies aboard the singleship were minimal.
There had been little time to plan an escape.
Alien-Technologist's warning had come late, too late. Rrowl-Captain and his crew had engaged Belly-Slasher's gravity polarizers at maximum acceleration, but were only a few hundred kilometers from the human spacecraft when the contra-matter containment fields had failed. Damage had been heavy: his precious spacecraft hulled and broken, his crew torn and bloody and mostly dead. The One Fanged God had inexplicably spared Rrowl-Captain of all but the radiation exposure.
His mind filled with the memories of mewling Heroes in agony — blinded, seared, poisoned by monkey treachery. Even those crewkzin still breathing would, like Rrowl-Captain, soon die of the radiation taint in their blood and bone.
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