“Fix him,” was the order that came with this surprise delivery.
Jenni, slightly less happy than she had been, agreed to try.
Human voices wakened him.
The listener remembered the explosion. He remembered how the bulkhead had come at him, how he’d held up his hands, claws extended in a vain attempt to stop armored metal from smashing into him. There had been pain, then darkness. He’d thought he was dead.
When he came around, he wished he were dead. This wasn’t because of the pain, although that was considerable. However, a warrior of the Patriarchy did not admit pain as a consideration in matters of life and death.
No. What made him wish he were dead was the voices.
Later, the listener would realize he was hearing through the open communications unit on his suit’s helmet, the default setting of which was to fasten on any active channel. At the time, he was not capable of such coherent thought. He simply heard voices, human voices, speaking Interworld, a language he had learned because it was always useful to know what your enemy was saying.
“We’re down in what looks like a combination engineering and gunnery deck, Captain. It’s a real mess.”
“Survivors?”
The captain’s voice was strong and firm, but its pitch and timber identified it as female. The concept of a female as captain of what must be a warship was still a strange one.
“Doubt it, Cap. Looks as if someone set off explosives. What didn’t boil away from contact with vacuum has painted the walls with fur and guts.”
The listener felt pleased at this confirmation that he might indeed be dead. He was even more pleased that the self-destruct had worked. The Patriarchy’s policy was that neither ships nor crew should be taken. As the Patriarchy knew from experience, much could be learned even from a damaged ship or an uncooperative prisoner.
Reassured that he was dead, the listener drifted on background waves of alien speech, not even trying to understand what was being said. Then an excited burst of speech roused him.
“Captain! We may have found a live one! He’s buried under a bulkhead. Looks like it came down and protected him from the worst of the explosion. He doesn’t look good, but the telltales on his suit show live.”
“Careful! He may be playing dead to lure you in.”
A coarse laugh, a sound that didn’t express humor as much as disbelief.
“Maybe, but it’s not going to do him much good. The bulkhead kept him from getting smeared, but he’s not a pretty sight.”
“Can you capture him?”
“Well, Captain, I don’t think he’s going to be running anywhere anytime soon. In fact, I doubt he’s going anywhere under his own power for a long time-if ever.”
The listener felt himself being shifted. Pain shot through him.
Human hands lifted him. Something was attached to his suit. He felt himself being moved, but try as he might, he could not break free. Had they actually gone to the trouble of restraining him? He felt a surge of pride that they recognized him for the danger he was.
He was aware of being examined as he felt a sequence of jolts of pain so acute that he lost his ability to follow the alien language. Words washed over him. Some at least, he thought, were directed at him.
Human voices had wakened him. Now, smothered by their babble, grateful for the darkness that claimed him, he drowned.
“The prisoner was found after a battle,” the man from Intelligence explained, leaning in a proprietary fashion against the large freeze unit that now dominated her largest lab.
After he had come to stay at the research station, the man had told Jenni to call him “Otto Bismarck.” This was so obviously a pseudonym that Jenni still tended to think of him as “the man from Intelligence,” or “MFI,” transformed into “Miffy” for short.
She thought the name gave the man a certain distinction he otherwise completely lacked. He was so neutral in appearance as to be completely forgettable: brown eyes, light-brown skin, brown hair cut to average length, average build, average height, average features. The one thing that would set him apart in a crowd was his exceptional physical conditioning, but Jenni had no doubt that Miffy could make himself look soft and flabby if the need arose.
Miffy went on. “Usually a kzinti crew suicides and a self-destruct takes out the ship. Best as we can reconstruct, this one would have followed protocol, but he was already down and out. Between his suit-he was wearing a hardened vac suit-and the bulkhead, he survived. The self-destruct did take out key areas of the ship, but not the compartment this one was in.”
Jenni nodded. Taking this as encouragement, Miffy continued.
“The ship’s doctor was worried she couldn’t keep the prisoner alive, so they popped him in a freeze unit. It wasn’t built to hold a kzin, but the hope was his suit would take up the slack. Best as we can tell, it did. At least the telltales haven’t shifted to indicate a deceased occupant.”
Jenni didn’t ask how the man from Intelligence knew which indicators meant what. Knowing things like that was part of his business.
“If you can read that suit panel, I’ll need a translation,” she said, “as well as anything else you’ve learned about the suits, what they do, how the hardened variety differs from the standard.”
She pretended not to notice how Miffy stiffened. She could almost hear him saying, “That information is classified, released on a Need To Know basis only.” Then as clearly, his automatic conservatism was immediately countered by the realization that if anyone “Needed to Know,” it was the doctor that Intelligence hoped could save this improbable patient.
Miffy cleared his throat to swallow his automatic response. “I’ll have the information downloaded to your terminal at once.”
Jenni studied the figure in the freeze unit, wondering how severe his injuries were, if she could even bring him out of the freeze without killing him in the process.
“How much time do I have?” she asked.
“As much as you need,” Miffy said. “Of course, the sooner we can talk to him, the better, the more lives that may be saved.”
Jenni nodded again. “I’ll do what I can.”
“That’s all we can ask.”
Fiddle-faddle, Jenni thought. You do realize that what you’re asking for is little short of a miracle?
The kzin came conscious. As soon as he was certain he was alive, he tried to kill himself.
This proved to be impossible since he was strapped down so securely he could hardly move a finger. However, he felt better for having made the attempt.
Now that he had resolved that he could not kill himself, the kzin set about assessing his surroundings without giving away that he was conscious. Knowing how sight-dependent humans were, he did not open his eyes. His ears were slack against the pillow on which his head rested. He struggled against the impulse to unfurl them in order to hear better.
Sound told the kzin that he was the only creature breathing in the room, but it was likely there were several recorders, both visual and audio, trained on him. He attempted to hold his breath and learned that his breathing was being mechanically assisted. After ascertaining that, he next isolated the sounds of several devices and tried to guess what they did.
When he shifted, he heard one device begin to beep more rapidly. This was the sound he had heard when he had attempted to kill himself upon waking. A monitor of some sort. Likely he would have company soon.
The kzin flared his nostrils. Most of the scents meant nothing to him, registering as vaguely “medical.” He sought the scents of urine and feces, for both would tell him something about his condition. He caught neither. This indicated that he was probably being fed via tubes, the nutrients carefully calculated so that his waste production was minimal.
That was interesting. He had not thought humans knew enough about kzinti biology to devise such formulas. Perhaps they had been able to analyze what was contained in his vac suit. That wasn’t good. He wondered what else they had captured.