She led them up the gangplank and into a chaotic ARM ship. Canyon medics gently ushered his nervous females toward the coldsleep caskets. “This is the I Love Lucy. I had our techs cannibalize your shuttle and moved over a kzinti autodoc and autokitchen. They’re in the process of installing your command console to this ship so you can pilot it.”
Bobcat looked around at the blue-garbed officers working with haste on the small ship and was entirely unimpressed. “Thank you,” he said politely, sinking into the command chair. Fussy medics descended upon him, hooking tubes and cables from the autodoc to his long-abused body. The acute pain of the wound dulled.
Varsha instantly felt his dismay and added, “Trust me, this is all part of my cunning monkey plan. There is another ship exactly like this one primed to take off in minutes. These old ships are hardened against invasive kzinti scans. Yearrl-Captain won’t know which one to pounce on and he won’t act within Canyon space, anyway. They’ll respect the Covenant of 2505.”
Bobcat noticed his orange female being put under the freezer. “Bring me the kit!” he howled at the medics while trying to get up from the chair, but pain and pushy doctors held him down. “When I tell him of our fight for freedom, I want to say he sat right here on the bridge!” A tall, reluctant female medic handed him the tiny ebon kitten. Bobcat thought with great shock that this was the first time he’d ever held a kit.
“That only gives me a fifty-fifty chance. Those aren’t wonderful odds.”
Varsha rapidly checked the tech’s work. These local kids are good, she thought and turned back to Bobcat, “Can’t you telepathically nudge Yearrl-Captain toward the Sun Wukong, like I did with you during the gas attack?”
“I cannot. Will you help?”
“Hmmm, that complicates things a bit, but I’ll think of something.”
“I can guide you through his mind, but I cannot deposit any thoughts.”
“Anyway, I should mention that we’re not going to give you an incredibly expensive hyperdrive ship. ARM isn’t a charity and no amount of telepathic manipulation on my part will change that. The faster-than-light section of the ship will separate from the crew subdivision once it has reached its destination and return to its point of origin, leaving you to navigate the system with a fusion drive alone.”
“Despite my many considerable talents, piloting in hyperspace is not one of them.”
“I thought of that. The I Love Lucy is a coldsleep troop transfer ship; you just punch in the target location, go to sleep, and it wakes you up when you get there. Are you going to tell me where you’re going? I’ve been trying to pick it from your brain since the restaurant and all I’m getting is a vague idea that alludes to something like the Promised Land.”
“What do you know about the Angel’s Pencil?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
He sensed her ignorance. “Angel’s Pencil was part of the first wave of human colonization about two hundred years ago. It had the misfortune of running into two kzinti warships and plunging deeper into Patriarchy space. Somehow, this slow and antiquated vessel managed to destroy the two ships. Then it disappears. Its ion trail goes cold, but no debris was ever found. The Dripping Crimson Saber was sent to investigate the wreckage of the Gutting Claw, and it found a defiant message from the Gutting Claw’s Telepath to its Captain recorded on the ship’s surviving backup computer.
“On the surface, it was a tirade of insults and challenges and a clear declaration of treason. The telepath had sided with the humans and escaped. The official Patriarchy statement was that the Angel’s Pencil and its weak telepath ally were obliterated beyond any detectable trace. The techs however deduced that they cut off the Angel’s messy fusion drive and were then towed by the captured kzin barge using its faster and untraceable gravity-engine to another location. The Dripping Crimson Saber’s Telepath also perceived a hidden vibrational message embedded within the recording. It said, Brother Telepaths, an opportunity presented itself and I pounced. I have taken a harem and I will earn a Name. I challenge you to join me.
“Over the years this account has become legend, Agent Khan. Their secret location has grown into some kind of mythical sanctuary for our kind, although I don’t know of any telepath that has heeded the call.”
“Because they don’t know the exact location! You don’t know that these humans didn’t just shoot this telepath in the head the second they were clear of the Patriarchy.”
“Come now, Agent Khan, you know as well as I do that these humans went against their instincts and helped Gutting Claw’s Telepath just as you are helping me now.”
“You still don’t know where you’re going!” She felt that all of this had been for nothing. She should have probed deeper into his desperate delusional mind. When had kzinti become the dreamers and humans the cold realists?
“I have a spoor of a theory. Telepaths have a penchant for the symbolic. If Gutting Claw’s Telepath wanted us to follow him as his message suggests, he’d give us an emblematic sign post. If he towed them, he certainly had some say in their destination. I believe they went to 46 Leonis Minoris.”
“The lesser lion, the eunuch?” She grasped the archaic human imagery from his mind.
“Are feeble telepaths not lesser lions? Unable to breed, are we not eunuchs?” He flushed with emotion.
Varsha sensed that these blasphemous ideas had been percolating within him for a long time. She also had to admit that they carried a sort of mystical logic; the reasoning of a drug-crazed telepath.
One of the fresh-faced medics that a second ago had waved diagnostic instruments around the kzinretti, now approached and broke the spell, bringing them back to the slow pace of the material plane. “Two of the yellow females are pregnant. I suggest they go into coldsleep before takeoff. I’d hate for them to get jostled around.”
This rolled over Bobcat like a sudden storm. The concept of being a sire was so remote, so impossible, that the actual fact rocked him. Varsha felt squalls of equal parts joy and fear crashing down on him.
She turned to the expecting females and spoke in the closest approximation of their proto-Heroes’ Tongue her vocal cords allowed, “First, let me just say it’s an honor to finally meet intelligent kzinretti, and congratulations, you’re going to be mothers.” She gently stroked their cheeks, then turned to Bobcat and said in the same language so the females could understand, “Well done, champ!”
He said nothing for a while as his own personal paradigm shifted toward the paternal. “We have to get out of here,” he rumbled at last.
“Right. The Sun Wukong is taking off in three minutes, and I want the I Love Lucy to be ready to launch right along with it,” she barked, and all the techs ended their last-minute fretting.
Bobcat placed a massive paw on Varsha’s shoulder. “Thank you, Agent Khan. I give you my word that I will name my first female kitten after you.”
She smiled warmly. “You know, I’ve been giving some thought as to why kzinti telepaths are born scrawny.”
“Enlighten me.” His spotted, rust-colored fur bristled at the mention of such a delicate subject. He removed his paw from her shoulder.
Varsha continued enthusiastically, “I believe there’s a battle for nourishment in the kzinrett’s womb, between the kzin body, which is a high-maintenance, calorie-hogging machine, and a telepath’s developing brain, which also demands more energy than most. Inevitably, the brain wins out at the cost of a fully developed body.”