Shit Head must have known he couldn’t climb down the ladder fast enough to catch me. So he did what must have been the natural thing to do. He imitated my actions. But he hadn’t played spin dive as a kitten.
Shit Head dove from the top of the tubeway aiming directly for me. He didn’t have zero-g reflexes, so his jump imparted a spin to his body and he did a slow tumble as he arced downward. But, more importantly, he didn’t know how to compensate for the ship’s spin. He was jumping in the spinward direction and so as his body was moving downward and toward the ladder, the ship’s rotation was moving the ladder away from him. The result was that he followed a graceful curve downward and not towards the point he had aimed for. He quickly realized he was in trouble, though I’m sure he didn’t know why. His arms and legs started flailing, but they couldn’t help him.
He slammed backward against the safety cage just below me and the force of his impact made him rebound back into the empty air of the tubeway. He tumbled until he hit on the far side of the tubeway less than twenty meters above the floor. He plummeted downward like Galileo’s proverbial cannon ball. The fluctuating forces must have been confusing but he was trying to get his feet underneath him. Everything he did just made things worse.
In a matter of seconds it was over. The thrashing kzinti hit the floor of the tubeway head first with the sickening crack of breaking bones. He collapsed into a motionless heap as a pool of purple-red blood formed around him.
Silently I lowered myself down the last few meters of the ladder and went over to my silent tormentor. The scent of wet ginger and copper-scented blood, mixed with the foul smell from when his sphincter muscles had released, filled the air. I glanced up the tubeway and remembered One Ear. I better get Shit Head out of sight in case One Ear had heard anything and came looking to see what was the matter.
I grabbed the dead kzinti by the arms and started pulling him out of sight, leaving behind a trail of drying kzinti blood. Once clear of the tubeway I released his arms and they fell limply to the deck, his long fur sticking to me with the glue of his drying blood. I stared down at his lifeless body and thought about what I had just done.
I felt like some sort of obscenity. I wanted to run and hide. To never be seen by anyone ever again. Perhaps I hadn’t killed another human, but that was splitting a fine philosophical line. That kzinti had been an intelligent creature with his own hopes, dreams and aspirations. What right did I have to take his future away from him? I was ashamed because Tom could bear witness to what I had done.
And then I realized just what I had done. I had gone up against a creature much larger than myself, who saw humans as nothing more than slaves or quick meals, and beaten it. Those damn rat-cats weren’t invincible. They could be defeated. One down and how many to go? It didn’t matter. There was one less kzinti on our ship than there had been a few minutes ago and soon there’d be even fewer.
I removed anything from Shit Head that looked useful, like his long sharp knife and his handgun. The knife looked like a short sword in my hand. I remembered seeing films of athletes using swords for touching competitions, the sharp blade of this knife made it obvious that the touching of swordplay could have a meaning far beyond points and medals. The handgun was a mystery I didn’t have a good idea about how to use it, though I’d seen just how devastating it could be. I’d take it and hope I could figure out how to use it when the need arose.
Tom came stumbling down the corridor carrying the medkit, his shirt hanging in bloody tatters while he pressed one hand against the ragged cuts that raked across his chest. I had thought Shit Head chased me half-way round the ship but I guess in the excitement I hadn’t realized how short the chase had been.
“Is he… dead?” Tom’s question came out haltingly as he slid down to the floor of the corridor.
I just nodded. “How are you doing?” I asked afraid of the answer.
“The cuts are painful, but not deep,” Tom said slowly. “Ib, go on without me. I’m just going to slow you down.”
“No way. We’re in this together. What do you need to keep going?”
“Just give me a painkiller and put something on these cuts to stop the bleeding. But make it quick, we’ve got to get away from here before the kzinti figure out what happened.”
“Okay, but you’ve got to give me a hand. I don’t know how to use any of this stuff,” I said as I sat down next to him and opened the medkit. Tom blinked at me in pain as he started to point to things in the medkit.
Following his directions I pulled out an analgesic hypo and gave it to him. I spread a coagulant accelerator over the ragged cuts and then pulled bandages over his wounds. I didn’t have time to shave the hair from his chest and didn’t want to think about how much it would hurt when the bandages ripped out those hairs later. If we survived until later.
I put an arm under Tom to support his weight and we turned spinward and headed for the Command Deck. Disgusted with myself, I said, “I can’t believe I did what I did. I feel so… unclean.”
“You did what you had to do, not what you wanted to. Don’t ever forget that.”
We walked in silence, as quickly as we could manage, down the empty corridors. Our hearts were pounding in our chests as we expected at any minute to run into our remaining kzinti guard. We were moving away from the rooms where Slave Master and Fritz were staying. One Ear was in another part of the ship. But still, every unexpected sound or shadow made us jerk in fear. In a few minutes we were going through the wrecked door of the Command Deck. Tom looked at it wistfully, “I guess we can’t use that to keep them out.”
“It didn’t work the first time,” I replied. “Now quick, I’m going to set you up here at the Captain’s position and have you monitor our friends.” I helped Tom lower himself into the tattered chair. The grimace on his face might have been from pain or might have been from knowledge of what had happened to the last occupant of this seat. I tapped a few commands to the computer and the displays brought up the autocam images, searching for the kzinti. Slave Master and Fritz couldn’t be seen. They must be in their rooms. One Ear was still down by the coldsleep chambers carrying the bag those two kzinti had given him. Its shape did not reveal the horror of its contents. Maybe One Ear was picking out tomorrow’s dinner or perhaps he was just following today’s security route.
I sat down at the Engineer’s station, every minute expecting my head to erupt with the head splitting pain of Fritz’s mind reading but it never came. Maybe that meant we still had the element of surprise. My hands danced over the controls activating the Bussard field generators. The computer kept trying to run diagnostics but I kept overriding it. Time was of the essence. Everything would have to work. If it didn’t we would be dead. There wasn’t time to make sure the equipment was ready. I’d have to trust my jury-rigged repairs.
“No one’s moved. I think they don’t know what’s happened.”
“Good. Just keep watching. We’re almost ready. But once things start happening, we’re going to have to move fast.”
I reached for the VR helmet and data gloves as the computer finished its final checks on the field generators. It thought everything was ready, but what else could it think? I’d forced it to step over every safety check. If there was a problem we might not know about it until our ship turned into a small nova. I slipped on the data gloves and helmet, plugged them in the VR console and then slapped down the display lenses as I activated the VR system.
Suddenly my perspective changed. I was a disembodied entity floating in space, seeing Obler’s Paradox hanging motionless against the stars. A few quick commands and data windows came up surrounding it. A few more quick selections and I saw the ship surrounded by the neon blue electromagnetic flux lines from the field generators. They were dim and held close against the ship, which is as it should be since they were only operating at flight idle. The electric yellow hydrogen flux density contours appeared, but I ignored them. Right now I wasn’t interested in propulsion.