The engines thrummed softly and I could hear Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist hissing and spitting from the control cockpit forward. The sour-spicy smell of anger filled the cabin. I tried to ignore the angry sounds. At least this gravitic polarizer didn’t give me a hammering headache.
Victrix had been left just outside the kzin vessel, under heavy guard. I had told the kzinti by tightbeam that the fusion point generators were different than those used in the Swarm, and that I was bringing a sample for their Alien-Technologists to study.
Which was true, in a manner of speaking.
At the same time, I told Kraach-Captain that I could not torture information out of the humans onboard.
Feynman. Nor could I determine how to shut the system down myself. I needed expert help. I suspected sabotage, and booby traps, as well.
Jacobi didn’t trust me, but Kraach-Captain saw me as a reliable beast-slave. The kzin thought that he understood the nature of the leash around my neck. Still, he had brought Jacobi along to keep an eye on me.
Up front, Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist sat huddled over their thinscreens. They snarled arguments about the ramscoop fields and our route through the tangled web of force. Kzin do not care for close quarters, and the differential in rank made Kraach-Captain temper quite short. It was his place of honor as Conquest Hero, though, to board and deactivate Feynman in person. I believed that he would have insisted on this, even if I had reported it possible to shut down the slowboat by myself.
None of this would work without the kzin worship of the Warrior Heart. Gamble after gamble after gamble, but the only game in town…
Jacobi and I could see little from where we were packed next to one another in the back of the ratcat fighter. He smelled sour with fear, sweaty. What had broken in the kzin fighter to turn him into what he had become? I ignored him as best I could, and looked at the dots-and-comma script of the kzin language on various pieces of ratcat tech in my field of vision.
“Kenneth,” he whispered to me quietly.
I didn’t look at him. Instead I continued to scan the interior of the spacecraft, lit in garish orange. I doubted that any humans had seen as much of kzinti spacecraft as the two of us had over the last few months.
I for one didn’t understand much of what we had seen. Kraach-Captain had kept us in a largish cabin during the trip out to Feynman, with our own supplies and autodoc.
The occasional trip outside the cabin looked like the kzin fighter ship around us: cavernous spaces, orange lit. Oddly shaped devices, flickering thinscreens. Could that kind of information ever be of use? I shook my head, trying to make sense of the alien spaces around me. I was a singleship pilot and part-time smuggler, not a genius.
Jacobi’s voice was an insistent whisper, like a pesky insect. “Did you find your mother, boy?”
Now I turned and looked at him “Yeah,” I grated. Stay in character “I did what I must. I do not thank you for it.”
Jacobi nodded. “In the coming years, Kenneth,” he replied, “you will come to see that I had your best interests at heart.” Jacobi started to reach out to me, perhaps to pat my arm.
My expression stopped him cold, as I studied his ruined face, and smiled like a kzin. “I give you respect of sorts, Jacobi, even as a traitor. Because of the scars you earned fighting the kzin. But don’t push me.”
Outrage glinted in his eyes. “And what are you? A saint?”
“I am nothing like you, Jacobi. Nothing. Now seal it and lock it down, before I see how long it would take Kraach-Captain to get back here and pull my hands from around your miserable throat.”
He fell silent.
The rest of the trip was quiet, except for more unintelligible snarling arguments in the Hero’s Tongue from the command cockpit. From Jacobi I could have found out what Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist were saying, but I think that I understood the gist. Irritation seems quite universal among sentient beings.
I had left the outer airlock open when I had departed Feynman in Victrix. That way the kzin crew tunnel mechanism could adapt and seal the two vessels together. We were instructed to leave our helmets open and to come along. The old kzin was clearly impatient, ready to get started on the real job.
Kraach-Captain paused for a moment before we left the kzin airlock He bent nearly double and put his face near mine, rasped, “Think of your cubs and your mate. Their fate is in your hands.”
“I know that, Kraach-Captain.” I studiously looked to one side of his huge eyes.
He coughed and spat in reply, then he and Alien-Technologist herded us into Feynman. Alien-Technologist had a complicated device clipped to his forearm. It beeped at intervals.
I felt a heavy weight on my shoulder. A four-fingered black hand squeezed like a vise. “Lead us to the control lair,” Kraach-Captain rumbled. I walked them along the main ring corridor. The kzinti had to stoop. I thought that I heard Alien-Technologist hiss-spit something at Kraach-Captain, who coughed kzin laughter in reply Perhaps a joke about the edibility of the passengers in cryosuspension.
I lead them into the cramped control room, feeling the tension build. I pointed to the sleeping bodies on the floor. Careful, careful…
“Your sources of information, Kraach-Captain” I said. “They altered the ship systems such that I cannot turn off the ramscoop.”
Kraach-Captain sniffed through his open faceplate, looking around the control room. “We will deal with them in a moment,” he rasped. “Show us these ship systems.”
I smoothly called up the various subroutines on the main viewscreen. Jacobi was leaning over my shoulder to see better. First, the safety interlocks. Since the fusion drive used interstellar matter swept up by ramscoop fields, shutting the fields down was a delicate matter. I showed them encrypted block after encrypted block at every step of the shutdown commands. The kzinti rumbled and hissed their impatience. Claws tapped at keypads as they called up diagnostic subroutines far more quickly than I had expected.
I snuck a glance at the chronometer above the central console. It was almost time.
Kraach-Captain turned to me. “Prepare one of these for interrogation.” A claw flicked at the three sleeping bodies.
I carefully lifted the body of my mother, and moved to put her in a chair.
“No,” thundered Kraach-Captain. “That one would be too fragile.” He hissed and spat at Alien-Technologist, who yowled in reply.
Jacobi looked thoughtful. “Dominant One, may I speak?”
A careless wave of unsheathed claws.
“It could be,” Jacobi continued, “that an older human would be a better choice. Heroes have… ah, a tendency to overestimate human tolerances. The writhings of a young male might be misinterpreted as defiance.” He carefully looked away.
“Hrrrr mused Kraach-Captain. “You could well be right, cull. Prepare her.”
I moved to tie my mother down in the chair.
There was a sudden broad-band squeal across all commlink frequencies. The two aliens shrieked in pain and surprise at the sound. It was loudest from the huge wristband on Alien-Technologist. Kraach-Captain looked at the main viewscreen in time to see a multicolored bloom of ionized gas fluorescing where his vessel waited.
The kzin stared at the screen, not breathing. The cloud of gas glowed, changing from blue to yellow to reddish as it cooled and expanded. Behind their backs, quick as an eyeblink, my mother shot from the chair into the corridor, bounding in the low gravity.
Kraach-Captain’s impressive ears drooped suddenly, then folded tightly into knots. The orange ruff visible around his helmet seal puffed out in rage. “Death Cry;” he growled past thin black lips.
The old kzin turned and looked at me, smiling like a… like a kzin. “What have you done?”
I looked him back in the eye, carefully moving to one side. “The fusion-point generator I brought back in Victrix was sabotaged. It just fried the inside of your troopship, Kraach-Captain.”
Alien-Technologist started to snarl something, but Kraach-Captain slashed a gesture for quiet. His claws unsheathed, he gathered himself to leap. Nervously I prepared myself as best I could to dodge the elderly kzin’s attack.