by Larry Niven
"All right, Jared," she agreed. "But we have a problem: only two laser rifles and three kzinti to kill."
"Two," Fellah said. "Kzin the Daff fought, died soon after."
"How do you know that for sure?" Krater asked. "You were with me all the time, and I didn't see that."
"His mind . . ." The animal paused significantly. "Gone."
"And not back to his ship, either," Cuiller summed up. "That's good news, Sally. . . . Ahh-gahhh," he yawned. "It makes the odds a little more even." Cuiller finished sleepily, finally succumbing to the painkillers. His arm felt a long way away.
"Those are armed kzinti you're talking about," Sally protested. "With a functioning warship to boot."
He was already halfway down the well of sleep, but Cuiller roused. "Then the trick," he said easily, "will be to separate them from their ship . . . before they can take off." He yawned again.
The forest around him darkened as if with the flu of night, and Krater caught him as he fell into it as into a bed.
* * *
"In any human army, that would be a field piece," Cuiller observed.
After sleeping, recuperating, and moving on, he and Krater now hung inside the canopy, lost in the shadows of the curving, vaulting branches that ascended from one of the trunks. They looked down through holes in the greenery that they opened—slowly, naturally, like a riffle of wind—with their dangling toes. They were suspended above the kzinti ship, with a horizontal offset of less than fifty meters.
Cuiller studied the vessel with a pair of binoculars, working them one-handed. One of the kzinti was climbing on the outside, naked except for a beltful of tools, working with a mechanical fitting against the curve of the hull. The other, in full armor, stood watch. That one's visored helmet moved across regular arcs of the canopy surrounding the ship, and each time he panned toward them, Cuiller let the veil of leaves slide smoothly into place.
It was the kzin's massive rifle that had caught the commander's attention: some kind of pulsed energy weapon.
"Can you sense them, Fellah?" he asked the small creature snuggled into Sally Krater's arms. "How close are they to finishing repairs, hey?"
Fellah raised his head and looked gravely down, past their toes. He appeared to consider. "Repair Soon."
Cuiller realized that the alien's exposed white hair would make an effective aiming point for that cannon. And that gave him an idea.
"I think I can improve our odds with one shot," he told Krater.
"How?"
"First, by splitting our positions and halving our vulnerabilities. I want you and Fellah to maneuver off to the west, around the ship. Put about twenty degrees of radial separation between us."
"But then what are you going to do?"
"I think I can pick off the kzin who's doing the work. Without breaking my cover."
"You'll get killed!" Sally said, alarmed. "That other one, in the armor—with the weapon he's carrying, all he has to do is bear close on you. And poof!"
"It's a big jungle."
"He can take bigger sweeps with that thing," she said.
"Sure, but I'll have time to get him with my second shot. In case he does a sweep, however, I want you in an alternate position. . . . You can offer a diversion or something."
"I don't want you to risk yourself—sir! Look, why not wait for a Bandersnatch to come along? That'll really keep him busy."
"Because long before then the kzinti'll be all finished up and ready to lift ship."
"All right, Jared," she said coolly. "If you won't listen to reason, we'll do it your way. But give me time to get in position."
"Ten minutes?"
"Time enough. But not a minute sooner, you hear?"
"A full ten minutes, I promise."
With a baleful look, she withdrew higher into the canopy, taking Fellah with her. Soon he could hear only the faint whirr of her rig's winder motor.
As he waited, Cuiller spread the leaves below him and practiced taking aim with his rifle. Holding it steady in his right hand did not work, and he could not find a point of purchase on the cloth sling covering his left arm. Then he figured out a solution.
Cuiller worked his winder and rose into the forest cover until he could get his feet under him. Paying out slack, he took a loop of the fluorescent-dyed monofilament and wrapped it around the rifle housing. He would have to control the rifle's tendency to lever up and slip the loop as he put his weight on the line, but he could do that with his right elbow. The only other danger was that the monofilament might cut into the weapon's barrel and tear it apart. A calculated risk.
Sally's time limit was still a minute short of coming up when Cuiller lowered himself back into firing position. He had no intention of letting her offer any kind of diversion and so becoming a target herself.
Cuiller moved the rifle around, holding it steady with his armpit on the stock, sighting down the pips, to the forehead of the unarmed kzin. His body was tending to pivot on the looped line, so he braced his feet against the springy branches, the same ones that made up his concealment Then he gathered his concentration, breathed out slowly, and—
A spear of blue-white light stabbed down from twenty degrees away to his left and opened the kzin's skull. She had fired first!
The kzin on guard wheeled and sighted his field piece back in the direction from which the beam had come—toward Sally!
Bobbling slightly on his line, Cuiller shifted his aim faster, immediately found a good side-on view of the aiming figure, and fired at the breech of the kzin's rifle.
The weapon exploded.
* * *
When his weapon's energy packs discharged all at once, Nyawk-Captain was thrown backward. The eyeshield of his visor flared white but saved his vision from flying shrapnel. His whiskers were singed below the limits of its protection, however, and the insides of his arms hurt terribly. He smelled and tasted burned hair.
Only when he tried to rise did he understand how critically the blast had injured him. His upper limbs moved slowly, and some of the armor's joints worked not at all. Molten metal from the exploding weapon had locked them, dripping even as far as the knee flexor on his right side. He rolled in the dirt, trying to break out of the imprisoning bodysuit. The shell clasps up his belly line were sticking, too.
With a mammoth, flexing spasm of his back, he brought the armor upright on its knees and started to limp toward the ship's hatchway and the relative safety inside the hull. There he would also find tools to help him get free of the imprisoning suit. With every step he took, Nyawk-Captain expected more energy pulses to blast away the ablative surface and heat the steel shell over his back.
When he got his locked paws on the hatch coaming, he remembered the impossible squeeze that moving into and out of the airlock had been, even with fully functioning armor. He wasn't going to make it.
He was beating the suit's belly against hullmetal, trying to break the clasps free, when one of the humans dropped out of the trees on a thin, purple wire and put the projector of a laser rifle against his forehead. A small, fluffy white animal which curled under one of its arms jumped free and scrambled into the ship.
Nyawk-Captain, staring into the human's glaring eyes, did not dare move.
After a second, the white animal came out with the Thrintun artifact held in its jaws. Nyawk-Captain remembered leaving the device on the ship's workbench for his and Navigator's further study. As the animal emerged, a second human—this one more wounded than the first—came down on another wire and also leveled its rifle.
The first human put aside its own weapons, took the alien artifact from the White fluff, and aimed it at Nyawk-Captain's forehead instead.
* * *
Krater tried various settings on the Fiddle and watched with a clinical eye as the kzin twitched and went into convulsions. She settled on one which left it trembling and hypnotized inside its steel restraints.
"This process can either be painful or not," Cuiller explained to the kzin slowly in
Interworld. "I don't think it understands, Sally," he said finally.
"Well, if I let up with this thing," she proposed, "he might be able to nod or something. Want to try it?"
"No thanks. You keep him under." Cuiller turned back to the kzin and said conversationally, "Now, we need to borrow your ship, Kitty I'm going to burn you out of that armor, and you're going to cooperate—one way or another."
Cuiller studied the latches down the suit's front. They were gobbed with metal and streamers of burned plastic. He placed the projector of his laser alongside the middle one and fired a short burst. The clasp flew off into the dirt. He repeated with the other two, and the clamshell halves of the belly plate sagged apart. The commander then laid the rifle against the soft, reddish fur underneath.
"Slowly," he told the kzin.
The warrior shrugged massively, withdrawing its arms from the crabbed gauntlets, vambraces, rerebraces, and pauldrons. It divided its attention between Cuiller's aim with the rifle and Krater's hold on the Fiddle.
Krater twisted something, and the kzin's eyes crossed. Its hands moved sideways, too fast for Cuiller to react. He almost opened the massive chest with a burst before he understood that the Fiddle had prompted that sudden movement.
"Keep working on it," Cuiller told her, "I think you're getting somewhere. I hope he's either captain or navigator of this interceptor, because that's the only way he'll be able to help us."
Then inspiration struck.
"Hey, Fellah!" Cuiller called.
The tiny alien was dwarfed by the huge warcat, but he glanced up at the commander with some confidence.
"Talk to the kzin," Cuiller told him. "Get inside his mind. See words—say words. Tell him we need his ship, need him. Take us to Margrave. Tell him Margrave. He can do it the easy way or hard. But one way or another, he's going to take us to Margrave."
Fellah looked at Cuiller with his big, dark eyes gleaming out from among the white hair. The commander sensed that the alien understood what he meant. After a moment, Fellah turned to the kzin and began to growl and spit in a timbre that was no more suited to his delicate, curling tongue than Interworld was.
* * *
Through his sudden pain and the sensory confusion that the Thrintun artifact had thrust upon him, Nyawk-Captain was catching only a fraction of the humans' speech and understanding even less. Still, the gestures with the rifle were significant. He did hear the word "Margrave," which as the proper name for a human-dominated planet was common to both Interworld and his own language.
Then the Whitefluff began speaking in the Hero's Tongue.
"Thinskins take you. We-they put you . . . at disadvantage."
Nyawk-Captain stopped trying to override the nerve-scrambles that imprisoned him and listened closely.
"True enough," he growled.
"You are with . . . luck."
"Be careful how you tease me, Fluff. I might still regain enough control with just one fingerpad to squash you."
"Be silent. I-Fellah help you."
"Why should you help a kzin when you travel with the humans?"
"They prison me, too."
"True enough. So. What do you propose?"
"Human the Sally works the . . . Painstick. She does it badly, yes? You are more aware now, yes?"
Nyawk-Captain suddenly saw the opportunity before him. The alien artifact, the Painstick, impeded his actions more or less as the human woman varied the intensity and direction of its strange power. The eerie music still gave Nyawk-Captain a headache but, as the human woman fretfully twisted and fingered the device, its nerve signals were less paralyzing to him than they had been at first. Eventually he might work free of it and be able merely to simulate a body under external control. Then, if he could keep from retching, he would pretend to do what they wanted—until they were both distracted.
"I see your meaning, yes," he told the Fluff. "What do you suggest?"
"They want you take . . . ship and them. Go to place called 'Margrave.' You know this?"
"Yes, I know Margrave. My crew and I were headed there, before we landed here." And, with luck and at the human's own prompting, Nyawk-Captain told himself, Cat's Paw might still arrive there right on schedule.
"Play along," the Whitefluff told him. "Pretend pain. Be docile. Be watchful, too."
"Yes. Until the moment."
"I tell you when," the tiny alien advised.
The human male interrupted them with "[Something unintelligible] Margrave?"
The Fluff looked back and answered with "[More nonsense sounds] Margrave."
Nyawk-Captain nodded his head vigorously in the human gesture signaling agreement. Then, still twitching his arms in random and mechanical ways, he climbed slowly out of the armor's greaves and cuisses.
The work Navigator had been performing on the hull when he died was related only to the sensors for defensive weapons—useful but not essential systems, now. Nyawk-Captain's mission could proceed without them.
The kzin's stomach lurched and staggered with a change of balance as human the Sally tried a new twist with the artifact. The device was still making him do strange things and feel unusual sensations, some pleasant but most merely irritating. It was infuriating to occasionally lose control, but he could learn to live with that. He could even feel himself beginning to like the human female, just a little.
The other human went through the airlock first, keeping his rifle leveled on Nyawk-Captain's throat. The kzin let him. When he wanted, when the time was right, he would take away that toy before the human could fire it.
* * *
Cuiller backed the kzin into the central crash-cradle and made it sit down. While he held the rifle to its forehead, Sally used the couch's cloth straps and mechanical braces to bind the kzin. She left one forearm and paw free to work the instruments at its station. However, a brief and sweeping study of the control layout had convinced Cuiller that at least two people were needed to pilot the interceptor.
Once the kzin was secured, Krater stepped up to the main panel and fastened the Fiddle to a cleared space with a wad of stickum from her pack. She arranged it so the Fiddle's presumed working end pointed at the captive's forehead.
Cuiller inspected the arrangement. "I hope long-term exposure to that thing isn't going to render him incapacitated, or dead."
"We could do worse," she suggested.
Fellah sat quietly on the deckplates, where Cuiller hand set him down.
"Okay, Fellah, tell him we need to start the main polarizers and lift ship. He'll tell you how, and you translate for us. Or, I guess, you can just point at whatever controls we should attend to next."
The alien absorbed this and began spitting in the Hero's Tongue. Cuiller and Krater settled into the two remaining kzinti couches and tried to adapt the crash webbing to their smaller bodies.
With pantomime gestures and low growls, the kzin instructed Fellah in takeoff procedures. Then he relayed the instructions in a series that went, "Push this, pull that, turn this one until red line comes up here, do not move until this disk turns blue."
Working one-handed, Cuiller hit switches and verniers in the indicated order. The airlock closed, the board lit up, and somewhere back of them the world stiffened and shifted as the gravity polarizers kicked in.
On one of the screens, he watched the landing site and Callisto's battered hull dwindle and then disappear in a wash of green. In another second the green foliage was gone, dissolving in a flutter of hazy light that turned a chlorine-tinted white as the ship, still accelerating, rose above the limb of the planet.
"Good-bye, Beanstalk," Krater called cheerfully.
"Good-bye, Daff and Hugh," Cuiller added soberly. "They were good shipmates."
"Amen to that."
As they cleared atmosphere, the kzin turned back to Cuiller directly and gestured with its free paw toward controls on the panel in front of it.
The commander studied the almost-glazed eyes and the string of dribble at the corner of
the kzin's black-lipped mouth. Was he missing some procedure—landing gear, hull integrity, something important? Cuiller threw the switches that the kzin had indicated.
The cabin was immediately filled with the buzz of an open comm circuit. An anxious kzinti face peered out of the screen directly ahead. It warbled a growl at them, and its eyes grew suddenly large.
Before the kzin in the chair could respond, Krater lunged forward, grabbed the Fiddle, and began pressing all its keys. Their kzinti captive went rigid and trembled with induced catatonia.
Cuiller frantically turned all the switches on the section of control board he'd just used, scrambling them with random settings. Finally, the alien face faded out in a blaze of static.
"Our captive was faking submission," he observed.
"I'm sorry, Jared," she said apologetically. "I don't know enough about the Fiddle to make him do anything more than twitch. Can we fly this ship alone?"
"I think I could pick out the star pattern surrounding Lambda Serpentis," Cuiller said. "We can probably bend a vector in that direction. And, given a few tries with this comm system, I think we can call out those segments of the U.N. fleet stationed at Margrave."
"Who was it that he contacted?" Sally asked.
"His commanding officer?" Cuiller suggested. "Some flight dispatcher back in kzinti space?"
"The face on that comm screen appeared almost instantly, didn't it? So the relay time was virtually nil. Whoever it was is damn close, Captain. Closer than kzinti space."
"Kzin . . . self-named Lehruff," Fellah offered. "Admiral."
"I was tricked into opening a comm-circuit directly into the entire kzinti command structure," Cuiller said. "Now the entire Patriarchy is going to know something damn peculiar has happened aboard this ship."
"Damned bad," from Fellah.
"Well, not much we can do about it now," Cuiller said. "Except run like hell and call for reinforcements."
"Agreed," Krater said.
"We travel," Fellah said. "Be here 'long, long time.' In this small space," he observed thoughtfully. "Enough food here? Hey, Sally?"
"Don't worry, Fellah," she assured him. "We won't eat a sentient species."
