A scar gaped along half its length: the gap where Hecate's cabin had been. The rest of the hull had been mounted alongside a silver sausage, one of their captors' ships. It flew three hundred meters distant, keeping pace with their own captor. A slender spine projected aft. The drive flame was a faint violet-white glow running along the spine.
Hecate's severed cabin rode the flank of another such sausage. From inside they could see almost nothing of that: just a silver membrane bulging with fluid, centimeters away, and a rigid cabin forward.
But they saw Hecate's host ship well enough. Freddy had set their remaining telescope to following it. The sausage was banded with color-coded lines and chains of handholds and catwalks, and Moties. The maze ran round Hecate, too. Moties in pressure suits moved over the hull like lice
They found the lightsail, Freddy's spinnaker. In minutes they had spread several acres of silver film to inflate ahead of the nose.
"That won't add much to the thrust," Jennifer said. "Why..."
"Why not? It's there," Terry Kakumi said. "Blink and it's a signal device, blink again and it's heat shielding. They do love to fiddle."
"It'll heat their cabin some," Freddy said.
Hecate rotted before their eyes. Engineers and tiny Watchmakers stripped away sections of hull and plated them over their own ship. They found automated cameras at nose and tail and amidships, an officially approved model, all identical, which the Moties seemed to find confusing. Hecate's fuel tank they studied and then left intact. They worked inside the cut end until the Engineer was able to pull loose a glass tank festooned with tubing- "Dammit. That's our sewage recycling system," Freddy said.
"We'll starve."
"We have the goodies locker," Jennifer said. "A week's supplies, maybe."
"It's a double time limit. Will the sewage crowd us out before we starve for lack of basic protocarb? Stay tuned."
The men were edgy, talking to distract themselves. But Jennifer was calm, even happy, cradling a six-kilogram alien who clung to her with three arms, watching her face intently, sometimes trying to imitate the sounds she made. And Glenda Ruth... was frightened when she thought about it, and frustrated, and uncomfortable; and alive as never before, playing a game she'd begun learning in the cradle.
She worked on Freddy's back, running her thumbs along basic shoulder muscles, probing deep. Freddy subsided with a grunt of unwilling satisfaction. He asked, "Do you suppose they'll keep the data cubes? I've got some good recordings of the battle."
Hecate dwindled. They took half the hull to make a curved mirror to relay light from the light-sail. Kilometers of wiring went into the nose of the captor craft. A small craft arrived from somewhere else; some of the wiring, four cameras, and all of Hecate's little attitude jets went aboard; the Engineer pilot traded places with a replacement, and away it went.
The Moties exposed Hecate's drive; moved it aft; set it to firing.
Then they were all over it, tuning, testing. Presently their own drive went off, leaving Hecote's running.
"Something of a compliment," Glenda Ruth said. Freddy nodded.
Jennifer asked, "Does it bother you? Hecate..."
Freddy's shoulders set hard. He said, "Not all that much. A racing yacht, we change anything at the slightest excuse. The idea's to win. It's not like"-to Glenda Ruth-"not like your dad losing his battleship, his first command."
"He still flinches if you mention MacArthur." Glenda Ruth resumed trying to soften the knots in Freddy's shoulders.
They could hear the rustling. Engineers and Watchmakers were moving over the surface of their own life bubble. What was happening out there?
"Then again, Hecate is where you and I got together. I do hate-"
"The bed's quite safe."
His tension softened. "We get it back from Balasingham, we can build a ship around it."
The Mediator pup looked into Jennifer's eyes and said, distinctly. "Go eat." Jennifer let go, and the pup pushed off from Jennifer's chest, setting her rotating, sailing unerringly to impact the Engineer.
The cabin was aswarm with Moties. The Warrior would remain in place for minutes at a time, then bound about the cabin like a spider on amphetamines, and presently come to rest again. The Engineer and three skinny half-meter Watchmakers, and a slender creature with a harelip and long, delicate fingers and toes, had reshaped the hole in the cabin wall into an oval airlock. The Engineer had found the safe near the cabin's forward cone, tapped at the code readout, then left it alone. Now the Moties had peeled the cabin walls away and were going through the air and water regeneration systems. From time to time there came a whiff of chemical strangeness.
"Too many of them. They'll strain the air changers," Freddy said.
"I think that one's a doctor," Jennifer said. "Look at the fingers. And the Motie nose is in the roof of the mouth. That thing's got enhanced smell and surgeon's fingers. There was a Doctor caste on Mote Prime."
"Maybe several."
"Right. And between them, the Doctor and the Engineer are going to decide how to keep us alive. I've got to say I don't like that."
Now the three Watchmakers were moving about the cabin drawing green lines. They squeezed the stuff out of what the Navy would have called ration tubes. The patterns weren't complex enough to be writing. The Watchmakers covered the walls with lines and curves, and presently converged where the sewage recycling system had been.
Freddy asked, "Why not, Jennifer? The way you and Glenda Ruth talk, these Moties can do anything, including keep humans healthy."
"But it's all very basic, isn't it? Nothing like the castle they built for us on Mote Prime."
"It's a battle fleet, not a city," Glenda Ruth said.
Terry Kakumi snapped, "It's a poor little pathetic battle fleet. Look at them, Jennie. Tiny little ships, mostly tank, big cabins because there are too many of the buggers, motors that do a meter per sec squared at best. What's left for weapons? Are they supposed to make them on the spot?
"What would a real fleet be like, Jennie? Rape my lizard, what couldn't we build with Motie Engineers at the Yards? They're church-rat poor. We've been captured by BuReloc transportees! They're stripping our car and fixing our life support with borrowed chewing gum and string!"
Jennifer giggled. "Bag ladies with borrowed chewing gum. I love it!"
Glenda Ruth felt herself bristling, as if these were her Moties. But she could feel it: Terry was right. "What can we do?"
"Talk to them, Glenda Ruth. Tell them we're worth the price of their last coin," Terry said. "Tell them to pull the pea out from all those mattresses, I'm just a pathetic mass of bruises. Explain ransom to them. Or they'll let us strangle."
She said, "These don't talk. We'll have to wait."
The new East India Mediator was old, as old as Eudoxus, with gray streaks at the muzzle and along the flanks. She was escorted into the chamber by a Warrior and a younger Mediator, who both left quickly.
When she was presented to Horace Bury, the trader flinched. Chris Blaine moved closer and saw what the Motie was carrying. "A newborn?" he asked, and watched Bury relax. Of course Bury took it for a Watchmaker.
The aged Mediator examined the humans and turned toward Bury radiating delighted surprise. "Excellency! I had never dared hope to meet you in person, even when it became known that you were again in the Mote system. I have thought long on the name I would give myself and have chosen Omar rather than something more pretentious. It is my greatest pleasure finally to meet you."
Bury bowed slightly. "I am pleased to have had such apt students."
"And my new apprentice. We have not chosen a name, but-"
"You presume," Eudoxus said. "We too have new apprentices, and we are eager to introduce them to His Excellency."
Of course." Omar turned to Wordsworth and began to speak.