A glittering rootlet flew across the strangeness of hyperspace toward them; now large, then small… but always somehow closer. The kzin tried to dodge the oncoming object, but with no success.
It sliced through the shining veil of the force-shield with no effort, and slammed into the hull of Greater Vengeance.
A rupture tore the deck. Dozens of golden tentacles invaded the crewbubble. Guardian bellowed fury and became a blur of motion, edged helmets slicing, unable to use energy weapons in the close confines of the cabin.
Tentacles burst from another breach in the deck, and the kzin saw Guardian being pulled apart by arms of implacable strength.
Rrowl-Captain shrieked, throwing himself toward the fallen puppeteer. All three legs and both necks were being pulled in different directions. He slashed at the golden tentacles with claws, but the shiny arms were not marked.
Rrowl-Captain was surprised to see the puny human hammering on one of the tentacles with a strut from the ruptured deck.
The Guardian puppeteer burst apart like a carcass dropped from a height. A fountain of alien blood spilled across the cabin, but Rrowl-Captain saw something glitter strangely. He could see the electronics built into its broken heads and torn body of the soldier-puppeteer.
The coward grass-eaters didn't even trust their defenders, Rrowl-Captain thought, shocked. A half-living thing, half machine. Like the little monkey-human.
Rrowl-Captain leaped back toward his station.
A golden tentacle stabbed down from the ceiling, into his command console. Everything exploded in a flare of greenish light.
Rrowl-Captain lay on his side, back broken. His legs were numb, useless. The force-shields kept the blazing nothingness of hyperspace from consuming them for now, but he could feel the ship shift and turn as the Zealot spacecraft pulled them into its central bulk.
No chance for a clean death, to honor the One Fanged God.
At least he had done battle.
The human knelt next to him, afraid to touch Rrowl-Captain.
“It doesn't look good,” the monkey mewled, voice as flat as any machine. “We did our best, though.”
The human with the impossible name was speaking English; the translators were no longer working. Still, the kzin had a slave-owner's knowledge of the puny language.
Rrowl-Captain coughed a chuckle. “You not coward,” he managed in his broken English. “Even with machine ch'rowling your brain, you almost Hero.”
“Hero?” the human repeated.
“Yes,” he coughed with blood instead of humor. “Warrior Heart not give up.”
The human eyes held his own. “Be still. It will be over soon.”
Rrowl-Captain reached up and took the human's hand. The small pink fingers vanished into his huge black grasp.
“Take Name,” he spat.
“I don't understand,” replied the human with the impossible name.
“Take Name of C'mef.” A spasm passed through his body. He turned his head and vomited noisily. The taste was foul as defeat.
The human said nothing.
“Someday,” Rrowl-Captain hissed in a whisper, “Heroes and monkeys fight together, as we now.” He closed his eyes. “If not we eat you and your offspring first.”
The kzin thought that he felt the human squeezing his hand in response.
A roar filled the cabin as the force-shield failed. He opened his eyes and saw a black shape reaching for them, silhouetted against the bright muddled insanity of hyperspace.
The shape seemed to have many arms and a flexible, squirming bulk. To the kzin, it had the fearful dark face of the old Stalker in the Night from long ago. Green laser light blazed behind it.
Eyes open this time, Rrowl-Captain screamed defiance at it in the name of his litter-brother. He had found his Warrior Heart.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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The sky was wine dark, Homeric.
The sun beat down mercilessly, an unforgiving foe on the field of battle.
Theosus (Bruno) stood tall, his shadow stark and black against the hard packed soil. He lifted his spatha to the sky with a muscular arm — salute! Yellow light ran like butter down the glittering blade. The bronze chain mail he wore moved warmly against his skin in the hot afternoon. Scents of dust and iron blood stung his nose and made his eyes smart.
Theosus (Bruno) looked around for the foe he knew he must face. It was his Fate.
But I'm not an ancient soldier, his mind started to object. The thought whirled away, like Rrowl-Captain's body parts had before everything went blank. When the Zealot spacecraft had attacked, destroying even the cyborg Guardian puppeteer.
The images swept from his mind, flying away, like… birds? Theosus (Bruno) shook his head.
Suddenly, Colonel Buford Early was standing before Theosus (Bruno), carrying a pike. The head of the pike blazed like a sun, making him squint in pain. The UN Space Navy uniform the image of the other man wore was matched by a legionnaire's helmet.
“Son,” the old man's face rasped, “your very thoughts betray you. I can read you like a book.” Early's features began to sag and melt, then reform, like hot wax.
“So can other things, and more closely than any book,” added a new voice from behind him.
Theosus (Bruno) turned quickly, his own plumed helmet almost falling from his head. Carol Faulk stood there, hair incongruously long and red, a flowing gown covering her Belter-thin body.
“Carol?” he asked incredulously, his mind in two places at once, thirty centuries and thousands of light-years apart.
“Less, and yet more,” the figure replied cryptically. Her hair changed color, became black, then shortened to the familiar Belter crest. In an instant it reverted to its earlier state. Her eyes kept changing color, as did her skin.
“Why am I here?” Theosus' (Bruno's) mind hurt, like the time he had hung upside down in a crashed aircar, with a crushed skull, and… and…
Even those thoughts and images flew away, leaving a gaping hole in his mind. His thoughts probed gingerly around the ragged holes in his memory, like a tongue exploring the hole left by a missing tooth.
A tooth ripped from his jaw against his will.
The figure of Buford Early spoke again. “Your thoughts are no longer your own, son. Protect them, until it is Time. The center cannot hold, boy, unless you make it.”
Theosus (Bruno) was puzzled. A few verses of Yeats' poetry seemed to leap from his brow like birds, flapping away like his other thoughts. Vanishing into the green clouds and blue humming air.
Were all of his thoughts going in the same direction? What did it mean? Theosus (Bruno) could not be certain. Was he losing his mind?
“Nothing is being lost, Tacky,” whispered the Carol figure in his ear, though she was standing some distance away. “Your thoughts are being taken, read, analyzed.”
“Why?” he managed, confused, looking from one to the other of the two shifting figures. He could no longer remember how Carol smelled, or where they had met.
His mind was being taken from him, a bit at a time. Theosus (Bruno) would have to stop whatever was doing this to him. Before he lost all of the contents of his mind.
And there was something more he had to do.
“Where?” he repeated.