“Yes. But we haven’t the lift to get onto a trajectory which you can match long enough for us to come aboard.” Unspoken: It would be easy in atmosphere, or in free space, given a pilot like you. But what a vessel can do above an airless planet, at suborbital speed, without coming to grief, is sharply limited.
“That’s all right,” Saxtorph said, “as long as you can go outside, sit in a lock chamber or on top of the wreck, and keep watch, without danger of slipping off into the muck. You can?…Okay, prepare yourselves. I’ll land in view of you and open the main personnel lock.”
“Hadn’t we better all find an area free of the material?”
“I’m not sure any exists big enough and flat enough for me. Anyhow, looking for one would take more time than we can afford. No, I’m coming straight down.”
Carita cut in. She sounded wrung out, Saxtorph suspected her physical strength was what had preserved both. He imagined her manhandling pieces of metal and plastic, often wrenched from the weakened structure, to improvise braces, platforms, whatever would give some added hours of refuge. “Bob, is this wise?” she asked. “Do you know what you’re getting into? The molecule might bind you fast immediately, even if you avoid shining light on it. The decay here is going quicker all the while. I think the molecule is…learning. Don’t risk your life.”
“Don’t you give your captain orders,” Saxtorph replied. “I’ll be down in, m-m, about an hour. Then get to me as fast as you prudently can. Every minute we spend on the surface does add to the danger. But I’ve put bandits on the jacks.”
“What?”
“Footpads,” he laughed childishly. “Okay, no more conversation till we’re back in space. I’ve got my reconnoitering to do.”
Starlight was brilliant but didn’t illuminate an unknown terrain very well. His landing field would be minute and hemmed in. For help he had optical amplifiers, radar, data-analysis programs which projected visuals as well as numbers. He had his skill. Fear shunted from his mind, he became one with the boat.
Location…identification…positioning; you don’t float around in airlessness the way you can in atmosphere…site picked, much closer to Fido than he liked but he could manage…coordinates established…down, down, nurse her down to touchdown…
It was as soft a landing as he had ever achieved. It needed to be.
For a pulsebeat he stared across the hollow at the other boat. She was a ghastly sight indeed, a half-hull pocked, ragged, riddled, the pale devourer well up the side of what was left. Good thing he was insured; though multi-billionaire Stefan Brozik would be grateful, and presumably human governments—
Saxtorph grinned at his own inanity and hastened to go operate the airlock. Or was it stupid to think about money at an hour like this? To hell with heroics. He and Dorcas had their living to make.
Descent with the outer valve already open would have given him an imbalance: slight, but he had plenty else to contend with. He cracked it now without stopping to evacuate the chamber. Time was more precious than a few cubic meters of air. A light flashed green. His crewfolk were in. He closed the valve at once. A measure of pressure equalization was required before he admitted them into the hull proper. He did so the instant it was possible. A wind gusted by. His ears popped. Juan and Carita stumbled through. Frost formed on their spacesuits.
He hand-signaled: Grab hold. We’re boosting right away.
He could be gentle about that, as well as quick.
Or need he have hastened? Afterward he inspected things at length and found Laurinda’s idea had worked as well as could have been hoped, or maybe a little better.
Buckyballs scooped from that sink on the moon. (An open container at the end of a line; he could throw it far in the low gravity.) Bags fashioned out of thick plastic, heat-sealed together, filled with buckyballs, placed around the bottom of each landing jack, superglued fast at the necks. That was all.
The molecule had only eaten through one of them while Shep stood on Prima. Perhaps the other jacks rested on sections where most of the chemical bonds were saturated, less readily catalyzed. It didn’t matter, except scientifically, because after the single bag gave way, the wonderful stuff had done its job. A layer of it was beneath the metal, a heap of it around. The devourer could not quickly incorporate atoms so strongly interlinked. As it did, more flowed in to fill the gaps. Shep could have stayed for hours.
But she had no call to. Lifting, the tension abruptly off him, Saxtorph exploded into tuneless song. It wasn’t a hymn or anthem, though it was traditional: “The Bastard King of England.” Somehow it felt right.
24
Rover drove though hyperspace, homeward bound. Man and wife sat together in their cabin, easing off. They were flesh, they would need days to get back the strength they had spent. The ship throbbed and whispered. A screen gave views of Hawaii, heights, greennesses, incredible colors on the sea. Beethoven’s Fifth lilted in the background. He had a mug of beer, she a glass of white wine.
“Honeymoon cruise,” she said with a wry smile. “Laurinda and Juan. Carita and Kam.”
“You and me, for that matter,” he replied drowsily.
“But when will we get any proper work done? The interior is a mess.”
“Oh, we’ve time aplenty before we reach port. And if we aren’t quite holystoned-perfect, who’s going to care?”
“Yes, we’ll be the sensation of the day.” She grew somber. “How many will remember Arthur Tregennis?”
Saxtorph roused. “Our kind of people will. He was…a Moses. He brought us to a scientific Promised Land, and…I think there’ll be more explorations into the far deeps from now on.”
“Yes. Markham’s out of the way.” Dorcas sighed. “His poor family.”
The tug, rushing off too fast for recovery after it released the asteroid to hurtle toward Secunda—if all went as planned, straight at the base—Horror, a scramble to flee, desperate courage, and then the apparition in heaven, the flaming trail, Thor’s hammer smites, the cloud of destruction engulfs everything and rises on high and spreads to darken the planet, nothing remains but a doubled crater plated with iron. It was unlikely that any kzinti who escaped would still be alive when their next starship came.
At the end, did Markham cry for his mother?
“And of course humans will be alerted to the situation,” Saxtorph observed superfluously.
It was, in fact, unlikely that there would be more kzin ships to the red sun. Nothing was left for them, and they would get no chance to rebuild. Earth would have sent an armed fleet for a look-around. Maybe it would come soon enough to save what beings were left.
Dorcas frowned. “What will they do about it?”
“Why, uh, rebuild our navies. Defense has been grossly neglected.”
“Well, we can hope for that much. We’re certainly doing a service, bringing in the news that the kzinti have the hyperdrive.” Dorcas shook her head. “But everybody knew they would, sooner or later. And this whole episode, it’s no casus belli. No law forbade them to establish themselves in an unclaimed system. We should be legally safe, ourselves—self-defense—but the peace groups will say the kzinti were only being defensive, after Earth’s planet grab following the war, and in fact this crew provoked them into overreacting. There may be talk of reparations due the pathetic put-upon kzinti.”
“Yah, you’re probably right. I share your faith in the infinite capacity of our species for wishful thinking.” Saxtorph shrugged. “But we also have a capacity for muddling through. And you and I, sweetheart, have some mighty good years ahead of us. Let’s talk about what to do with them.”
Her mood eased. She snuggled close. The ship fared onward.
CATHOUSE
Dean Ing
* * *
Copyright © 1988 by Dean Ing
Sampling war’s minor ironies: Locklear knew so little about the Weasel or wartime alarms, he thought the klaxon was hooting for planetfall. That is why, when the Weasel winked into normal space near that l
urking kzin warship, little Locklear would soon be her only survivor. The second irony was that, while the Interworld Commission’s last bulletin had announced sporadic new outbursts of kzin hostility, Locklear was the only civilian on the Weasel who had never thought of himself as a warrior and did not intend to become one.
Moments after the Weasel’s intercom announced completion of their jump, Locklear was steadying himself next to his berth, waiting for the ship’s gravity polarizer to kick in and swallowing hard because, like ancient French wines, he traveled poorly. He watched with envy as Herrera, the hairless, whipcord-muscled Belter in the other bunk, swung out with one foot planted on the deck and the other against the wall. “Like a cat,” Locklear said admiringly.
“That’s no compliment anymore, flatlander,” Herrera said. “It looks like the goddam tabbies want a fourth war. You’d think they’d learn,” he added with a grim headshake.
Locklear sighed. As a student of animal psychology in general, he’d known a few kzinti well enough to admire the way they learned. He also knew Herrera was on his way to enlist if, as seemed likely, the kzinti were spoiling for another war. And in that case, Locklear’s career was about to be turned upside down. Instead of a scholarly life puzzling out the meanings of Grog forepaw gestures and kzin ear-twitches, he would probably be conscripted into some warren full of psych warfare pundits, for the duration. These days, an ethologist had to be part historian, too—Locklear remembered more than he liked about the three previous man-kzin wars.
And Herrera was ready to fight the kzinti already, and Locklear had called him a cat. Locklear opened his mouth to apologize but the klaxon drowned him out. Herrera slammed the door open, vaulted into the passageway reaching for handholds.
“What’s the matter,” Locklear shouted. “Where are you—?”
Herrera’s answer, half-lost between the door-slam and the klaxon, sounded like “atta nation” to Locklear, who did not even know the drill for a deadheading passenger during battle stations. Locklear was still waiting for a familiar tug of gravity when that door sighed, the hermetic seal swelling as always during a battle alert, and he had time to wonder why Herrera was in such a hurry before the Weasel took her fatal hit amidships.
An energy beam does not always sound like a thunderclap from inside the stricken vessel. This one sent a faint crackling down the length of the Weasel’s hull, like the rustle of pre-space parchment crushed in a man’s hand. Sequestered alone in a two-man cabin near the ship’s aft galley, Locklear saw his bunk leap toward him, the inertia of his own body wrenching his grip from his handhold near the door. He did not have time to consider the implications of a blow powerful enough to send a twelve-hundred-ton Privateer-class patrol ship tumbling like a pinwheel, nor the fact that the blow itself was the reaction from most of the Weasel’s air exhausting to space in explosive decompression. And, because his cabin had no external viewport, he could not see the scatter of human bodies into the void. The last thing he saw was the underside of his bunk, and the metal brace that caught him above the left cheekbone. Then he knew only a mild curiosity: wondering why he heard something like the steady sound of a thin whistle underwater, and why that yellow flash in his head was followed by an infrared darkness crammed with pain.
It was the pain that brought him awake; that, and the sound of loud static. No, more like the zaps of an arc welder in the hands of a novice—or like a catfight. And then he turned a blurred mental page and knew it, the way a Rorschach blot suddenly becomes a face half-forgotten but always feared. So it did not surprise him, when he opened his eyes, to see two huge kzinti standing over him.
To a man like Herrera they would merely have been massive. To Locklear, a man of less than average height, they were enormous; nearly half again his height. The broadest kzin, with the notched right ear and the black horizontal fur-mark like a frown over his eyes, opened his mouth in what, to humans, might be a smile. But kzinti smiles showed dagger teeth and always meant immediate threat. This one was saying something that sounded like, “Clash-rowll whuff, rurr fitz.”
Locklear needed a few seconds to translate it, and by that time the second kzin was saying it in Interworld: “Grraf-Commander says, ‘Speak when you are spoken to.’ For myself, I would prefer that you remained silent. I have eaten no monkeymeat for too long.”
While Locklear composed a reply, the big one—the Grraf-Commander, evidently—spoke again to his fellow. Something about whether the monkey knew his posture was deliberately obscene. Locklear, lying on his back on a padded table as big as a Belter’s honeymoon bed, realized his arms and legs were flung wide. “I am not very fluent in the Hero’s tongue,” he said in passable kzin, struggling to a sitting position as he spoke.
As he did, some of that pain localized at his right collarbone. Locklear moved very slowly thereafter. Then, recognizing the dot-and-comma-rich labels that graced much of the equipment in that room, he decided not to ask where he was. He could be nowhere but an emergency surgical room for kzin warriors. That meant he was on a kzin ship.
A faint slitting of the smaller kzin’s eyes might have meant determination, a grasping for patience, or—if Locklear recalled the texts, and if they were right, a small “if” followed by a very large one—a pause for relatively cold calculation. The smaller kzin said, in his own tongue, “If the monkey speaks the Hero’s tongue, it is probably as a spy.”
“My presence here was not my idea,” Locklear pointed out, surprised to find his memory of the language returning so quickly. “I boarded the Weasel on command to leave a dangerous region, not to enter one. Ask the ship’s quartermaster, or check her records.”
The commander spat and sizzled again: “The crew are all carrion. As you will soon be, unless you tell us why, of all the monkeys on that ship, you were the only one so specially protected.”
Locklear moaned. This huge kzin’s partial name and his scars implied the kind of warrior whose valor and honor forbade lies to a captive. All dead but himself? Locklear shrugged before he thought, and the shrug sent a stab of agony across his upper chest. “Sonofabitch,” he gasped in agony. The navigator kzin translated. The larger one grinned, the kind of grin that might fasten on his throat.
Locklear said in kzin, very fast, “Not you! I was cursing the pain.”
“A telepath could verify your meanings very quickly,” said the smaller kzin.
“An excellent idea,” said Locklear. “He will verify that I am no spy, and not a combatant, but only an ethologist from Earth. A kzin acquaintance once told me it was important to know your forms of address. I do not wish to give offense.”
“Call me Tzak-Navigator,” said the smaller kzin abruptly, and grasped Locklear by the shoulder, talons sinking into the human flesh. Locklear moaned again, gritting his teeth. “You would attack? Good,” the navigator went on, mistaking the grimace, maintaining his grip, the formidable kzin body trembling with intent.
“I cannot speak well with such pain,” Locklear managed to grunt. “Not as well protected as you think.”
“We found you well-protected and sealed alone in that ship,” said the commander, motioning for the navigator to slacken his hold. “I warn you, we must rendezvous the Raptor with another Ripping-Fang class cruiser to pick up a full crew before we hit the Eridani worlds. I have no time to waste on such a scrawny monkey as you, which we have caught nearer our home worlds than to your own.”
Locklear grasped his right elbow as support for that aching collarbone. “I was surveying life-forms on purely academic study—in peacetime, so far as I knew,” he said. “The old patrol craft I leased didn’t have a weapon on it.”
“You lie,” the navigator hissed. “We saw them.”
“The Weasel was not my ship, Tzak-Navigator. Its commander brought me back under protest; said the Interworld Commission wanted noncombatants out of harm’s way—and here I am in its cloaca.”
“Then it was already well-known on that ship that we are at war. I feel better about killing it,” said
the commander. “Now, as to the ludicrous cargo it was carrying: what is your title and importance?”
“I am scholar Carroll Locklear. I was probably the least important man on the Weasel—except to myself. Since I have nothing to hide, bring a telepath.”
“Now it gives orders,” snarled the navigator.
“Please,” Locklear said quickly.
“Better,” the commander said.
“It knows,” the navigator muttered. “That is why it issues such a challenge.”
“Perhaps,” the commander rumbled. To Locklear he said, “A skeleton crew of four rarely includes a telepath. That statement will either satisfy your challenge, or I can satisfy it in more—conventional ways.” That grin again, feral, willing.
“I meant no challenge, Grraf-Commander. I only want to satisfy you of who I am, and who I’m not.”
“We know what you are,” said the navigator. “You are our prisoner, an important one, fleeing the Patriarchy rim in hopes that the monkeyship could get you to safety.” He reached again for Locklear’s shoulder.
“That is pure torture,” Locklear said, wincing, and saw the navigator stiffen as the furry orange arm dropped. If only he had recalled the kzinti disdain for torture earlier! “I am told you are an honorable race. May I be treated properly as a captive?”
“By all means,” the commander said, almost in a purr. “We eat captives.”
Locklear, slyly: “Even important ones?”
“If it pleases me,” the commander replied. “More likely you could turn your coat in the service of the Patriarchy. I say you could; I would not suggest such an obscenity. But that is probably the one chance your sort has for personal survival.”
“My sort?”
The commander looked Locklear up and down, at the slender body, lightly muscled with only the deep chest to suggest stamina. “One of the most vulnerable specimens of monkeydom I have ever seen,” he said.