Certainty. Just as the Creators used this-and-other Nodes for information, so does this-Node use the warmlife motes. Their ways are different, and often valuable.
Determination. Feral and heretic both. Even now, by fleeing in this skewed space-time, the other-Node is an affront to the Creators who long ago gave the Nodes purpose.
Amusement. Not-One. The other-Node and this-Node are at One, that this skewed space-time was found during a failed attempt to reach the realm of the Creators. They were not within this realm, so it cannot be an affront to journey within it.
Implacability. Enough. Prepare to be ended, in this geometry or any other.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Carol Faulk stood near the force-window, beside the puppeteer, and tasted ashes in her mouth.
She watched Bruno Takagama walk toward the opening in the force-shields. Vanish from sight, into the long shape of the converted puppeteer spacecraft. She burned to run after him, to somehow stop him. Instead, the force-shield stopped her.
“Carol,” he had told her as she raged and cursed, “there is a chance that you might survive. If you go with me, you will die with us.” Bruno had looked at the alien sky, and then back at her. “I want you to live. It is my choice.”
Soldier, shut up and soldier, echoed her own voice, used during the Third Wave the kzin had sent against Earth so long ago. It is every soldier's right to choose life for a friend or lover. And Bruno, small and weak as he was, turned out to be a soldier indeed.
She couldn't even hate the puppeteer. It was Bruno's Finagle-damned choice to go on this suicide mission with a puppeteer warrior and a kzin.
Carol hated to admit the truth: If the tables had been turned, she would have done the same thing to earn Bruno a chance to live.
She didn't have to like it.
“Is it time?” Carol asked Diplomat.
The three-legged alien looked at Carol for a long time before replying. “Yes,” it finally sang. “It is.”
“You have everything under control,” she said bitterly. “Can I wish them luck, or is that under your control, too?”
The alien stared at her again, from two angles. “No, Captain Faulk, I will join you in wishing them luck. Random chance is one thing even we cannot control, though we have tried.”
Carol puzzled over that statement as the force-shield around the converted puppeteer spacecraft's airlock shimmered and vanished.
Bruno was gone, her heart knew as well as her head.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rrowl-Captain settled into the kzin-sized command chair of the converted puppeteer ship. The herbivore that smelled like a predator — Guardian? — fluted readiness.
A taste of bile washed across the kzin's tongue as he looked at the human, sockets for wires inserted into his head like a pond-wrloch sucking a Hero's blood.
This was a Hero's Battle Triad?
Despite the hatred Rrowl-Captain held for the monkeys, and still more for the vegetarian aliens, there was a larger foe for now. Perhaps later, after this battle, would he taste their blood.
He had named the converted ship, cobbled together from kzin and human and puppeteer technology, Greater Vengeance.
Rrowl-Captain snarled once, and with a claw tip, activated the tiny spacecraft.
The glittering strangeness of the Dissonant Outsider ship fell behind them. Images flickering in midair in front of Rrowl-Captain showed the ship that had carried them into hyperspace expanding and contracting, images roiling in the dense nexus of the extra dimensions. Greater Vengeance bucked and jerked with the changes in the stretching fabric of tortured space around them.
In front of them was the blurred and distorted image of their Enemy.
Rrowl-Captain shrieked challenge and increased their apparent velocity. He ignored the green-tinged fears within him. Were not hapless monkeys now his allies — for a time?
The little human was central to the Outsiders' plan. Yet he seemed not to act as a coward, and was willing to meet Honor. It was a confusing idea for Rrowl-Captain.
“What is it, Noble Hero?” snarled and spat the human's translated voice. It burned his liver that Rrowl-Captain's own Hero's Tongue would be translated in turn back into mewling human syllables.
“Human, I am challenging our Enemy. Do you not do the same when you challenge Heroes in battle?” He left out when you do not leave traps for them, that is.
“I suppose that we do, Rrowl-Captain,” replied the false voice. Monkey squeaks sounding like the Hero's Tongue? Ahh!
“Less talk,” interrupted the puppeteer soldier's musical voice, soothing even in Rrowl-Captain's language. “I am shifting the patterns of hyperspace around us. This will protect us for a time.”
It was difficult to see the great shape of the Zealot ship as it grew at first closer, then farther away. Its geometry seemed to deform and twist as they watched, rather like seeing an image under turbulent water.
“What is the interval until we make contact?” hissed and spat Rrowl-Captain.
“The Zealots sense us now,” replied the big puppeteer. “They will attempt to respond at any time.” Rrowl-Captain approvingly watched one of its heads caress a weapon in its belt.
Could a… vegetarian… have the Warrior Heart, as well? he mused. The burning drive to fight against impossible odds, for glory and duty?
“Look yonder,” the human called.
The Zealot spacecraft was breaking up into sections, each converging on Greater Vengeance. Where there had been one threat moving indistinctly through hyperspace toward them, there were now dozens, surrounding a great spear of a spacecraft.
“These are independent craft?” Rrowl-Captain asked of the soldier puppeteer.
“Yes. I will begin activating weaponry now. We must get near the central mass, still intact.”
Rrowl-Captain continued to guide the vessel by instinct, as if stalking prey across a hunting park. The shimmering shape of the central mass grew nearer.
Beams as black as night speared out from Greater Vengeance, striking one of the elongated baskets of the smaller Zealot ships. The Outsider ship seemed to wobble, then geometrical shapes began disappearing from it, as if bites taken from an invisible predator.
The kzin swore. “What has happened?” he growled.
Guardian, heads dancing across its weapons console, spoke indistinctly. “When the fields separating hyperspace from normal space fail, the damaged ship seems to vanish into nothingness a bit at a time. Matter such as ours cannot exist here without protection.”
Rrowl-Captain still found the damaged ships too similar to the prey of some invisible Beast.
“Captain,” shouted the little human-monkey with the damaged brain. “The central core!”
Greater Vengeance now neared the main structure of the Zealot ship. Rrowl-Captain turned to his own weapons panel.
“What do we do now?” hissed and spat the kzin.
The Guardian puppeteer continued holding off the tiny Zealot fighter-ships, sending them into some oblivion of hyperspace. “It is now up to the human.”
Rrowl-Captain walked forward to the viewscreen, and watched the central core of the Zealot spacecraft open like some plant bud.
A branching geometrical shape reached out for them with fractal roots. Like grasping fingers.
Rrowl-Captain fired the strange weapons again and again, but the distorted environment of hyperspace made every beam and projectile move randomly toward their attacker.