“I know, sir, but if they did they’d fiddle with the tuft.”
“Why?”
“They fiddle with everything, sir.—I have five possible destinations, Gnyr-Captain.”
This was simultaneously annoying and a relief; he’d expected thirty-two or forty. “Name them.”
“From most to least dangerous: first, he could return to his own system.”
“Suicide.”
“Just being thorough, sir. Next, the asteroid belt of Gunpoint.”
“How is that dangerous?”
“As the system nearest Sol it’s ruled from Earth. There are rebels in the asteroids who want to overthrow the governors, and they’d want the ship, but they might save money by killing him and taking it.”
That sounded remarkably sensible. “Humans would do that? They’re usually so scrupulous in matters of trade.”
“Not with each other, sir. In fact, the humans most concerned with dealing honorably with other species often treat their fellow humans like sthondats.”
“Why?”
“I’ve never even heard a theory, sir. It’s one of those human things.”
“Ftah. Proceed.”
“Third is Fuzz. Fourth is Warhead. I judge them nearly equal in danger. I don’t know whether human telepaths go insane on Fuzz; on the other hand, though Warhead is closer to Kzin, it presents logistical difficulties for invasion—”
“I know about Warhead,” Gnyr-Captain said sharply. He had had ancestors there—might still have, in stasis. “Fifth?”
“Home,” Manexpert said in human speech.
“Never heard of it.”
“A colony destroyed by an unidentified disease, which was still active during later visits. We may assume the prey has a pressure suit, and colony relics would include repair materials—”
“He’s there,” Gnyr-Captain said with certainty.
“It is least likely, sir—I see, playing a double game?”
Gnyr-Captain’s ears cupped.
“Human phrase, sir. Their strategies often—”
“Manexpert,” Gnyr-Captain interrupted, surprising himself with his mildness, “go groom, and get some rest, and rinse yourself with that polymer solvent or whatever it is you like so much. But first tell Navigator where to find Huwwng—that world.”
“Home, sir?” Manexpert enunciated.
“Yes. I don’t know how you can reproduce that monkey howling. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir. You get used to the taste after a few years, sir,” Manexpert said, and saluted, and closed the door.
Gnyr-Captain squinted at the closed door for a full minute, trying to make sense of that.
III
Within a week of landing, Peace was sick. Not with the plague; with rage. She’d done the first repairs with parts in storage, then done a full rundown on ship’s systems to see about cannibalizing anything redundant.
The autodoc had a telomerizing subsystem—it could restore one cell’s chromosomes to a youthful condition. It also had the capacity for full brain transplant. Which had been used. Repeatedly.
She should have realized. Boosterspice will not restore fertility; Peace had “never met” her father because she never had one. She’d been gestated as a supply of spare parts. Her thyroid had been kept low to make her easy to catch. And what a funny pun her name was!
Jan had been sentenced to twelve years, and had been due out…about now, in fact. Peace was nearing the end of her fertility; Jan would have had to hurry to get her brain put into the spare in time to bear a replacement. The spare brain would be thrown away, of course, and Jan Corben would be reported as suffering a sad accident.
It came to Peace suddenly that the kzinti invasion had saved her life.
When she finally got her hysterical laughter under control, she was very calm.
She thought.
She called up the manual-operations checklist on the computer, started a test run, and while it was fully occupied did a physical disconnect between the overseer system and the airlock, the gravity planer, the fusion tube, and the autodoc. She resisted temptation: she used a cutting laser. An axe would have been less accurate.
This done, she used a handheld computer to check the autodoc programs, and found that they were indeed not what the ship’s computer had said they were. She found the programs used on Jan, copied them to crystal storage, and simply replaced the old crystals with the new ones. She traced circuit paths, found other storage media with programs inside, and destroyed them. Then she used the autodoc.
When she awoke, the first thing she realized was that the kzinti would come looking for her.
Repairs would have to wait. She needed weaponry. The computer would know everything that could be made from materials on hand; it could make a list while the autodoc made up a pressure suit. She’d have to get the parts fabricators outside.
It happened this way:
She was out rigging a sluice for the refiner’s waste dust—it ate the local soil, but needed a lot of it—when she began wondering what was wrong with the trees, just past where the original shoreline had been. Ship’s equipment included two crawlers; Jan, of course, had believed in having a spare. Peace drove out to the treeline to cut samples, then brought them back only to realize that the analysis had to be done by the autodoc. She thought, then had the computer isolate everything not needed in stasis. Each system and each compartment had its own field generator. Jan must have been really rich at some point. Then she took the samples in, staying in her suit the whole time as she couldn’t very well decontaminate without destroying the samples, and ran them through the doc. It might just be some local blight, but if not…
It wasn’t. The trees had been tailored to take up useful elements—not well enough to kill the trees, but well enough to make it worthwhile to use their ashes instead of the local soil. Peace could have done it with Cockroach’s facilities, but it would have taken too long for the trees to grow. One of the previous expeditions must have been badly wrecked, and done the work before the plague killed them.
Cheerfully, Peace had the computer sterilize the ship’s interior while she was still in it; of course she wore her pressure suit. When the cycle was completed she left, of course to load equipment before moving the ship.
And the computer of course no longer had any control over the interior of the airlock.
A trace of dust got into the ship from the airlock.
When she came back, of course she had the airlock clean off her suit before she went in to the control cone. She moved the ship over to the trees, then went back out to set things up—instead of soil being dug up, trees would have to be cut and burned. She used a few pounds of metal foil to make up a huge funnel on legs, then put it in stasis and set it over the intake hopper. The machinery she set to cutting up trees and dumping the chunks in the funnel, and she used a laser at wide aperture to char some from underneath, through the hole, to get them burning. It took some time; they were green, and kept going out. Finally the fire was going, though, and ashes started falling into the hopper. Burning wood, too, but the mechanism of the refiner was built to do worse than that itself.
And when she came in, of course it was only natural that she felt hot, and wanted to sleep.
Before she drifted off, it occurred to her that the fat was just going to be replaced by muscle if she had to work like this. She’d be awfully strong by the time the kzinti showed up.
Pleased, she settled into the sleep of the despicable. (It is of course the innocent whose rest is uneasy; true villains slumber undisturbed by anything but an occasional chuckle.)
The gas giant had the usual litter of moons. Fury landed on one, refueled, and took off immediately. The prey ship had been found within hours, in stasis—perfect reflection, no neutrino output. What Gnyr-Captain had wanted to do was plunge in, grab the crew (probably only one, but they could be lucky), return to Kzin at once, see to it Manexpert got a Name, and if permitted make helpful suggestions to the prey’s tor
turers before being executed for disobedience. Fathers would wean their sons on the tale of Gnyr-Avenger for 512s of years. It was a proud and public thing, to be a kzin.
Unfortunately, records of its departure indicated the old courier ship was just a touch too big to fit into the destroyer’s hold. They would have to land, wrap it in a net, disable its stasis, and take it home. And the prey might not even be inside! Bringing back the ship, with its useful arms features, would be honorable enough to save his crewkzin from execution along with Gnyr-Captain, but Manexpert would probably never get his Name. The thought shamed Gnyr-Captain. “Take us near the prey, planer only, and hover,” he told First Flyer.
Approaching the planet was disturbing. Clearly it had undergone asteroid bombardment, but the targets had obviously been cities (and oceans, judging by the oversized icecaps), in what must have been a deliberate attempt to destroy the population. Industrial areas, certainly, but what kind of monster would a conqueror have to be to incinerate a potential labor force?
The prey had landed near the only remaining town, some kind of coastal industrial facility. It couldn’t have housed more than two or three 512s of humans from the size of it, but parts of it were warm. Somebody must indeed have been using colony facilities to try to repair the ship, an excellent sign. They couldn’t have had much success, judging by the amount of equipment that was lying around in pieces.
“Find them,” Gnyr-Captain told Strategy Officer.
“Yes, sir.—Look for pressure suits,” he told Second Tactician. (Naturally First Tactician was standing by with the landing party.) “Batteries may be chemical instead of electronic. Also look for gaps or rings in the neutrino background; someone may have put a conical reflector into stasis.”
“There’s a human-sized warm spot among those leafless trees, sir,” said Second Tactician.
“No, their suits are well-insulated, and would show up as a small very hot spot. Must be an animal.”
“Yes, sir. It’s just that it was moving from one metallic object to another—”
“Animals mark things.”
Gnyr-Captain looked properly impatient, though privately he agreed; he’d once seen a ftheer do that to an electric fence. It was surprised.
Unexpectedly, Power Officer signaled. “Gnyr-Captain, the feeder lines to the fusion tubes will not operate.”
Gnyr-Captain grumbled, then said, “Is our storage fully charged?”
“Yes, sir, but as I cannot find a cause I thought it might be some form of—”
And the lights went out.
The next word would have been “attack.”
Manexpert had been seething. He had found the prey, he should be in the assault party! Instead he was bound in his crash fooch, protected like a kitten. The explanation, that he was too valuable to become a target, just made him feel worse. Kittens got explanations; warriors took orders.
It didn’t occur to him that the landing party didn’t want him—his fellow kzinti were afraid of his unpredictability. If it had, he would have been much happier. As it was, he was merely bitter about missing all the excitement.
Suddenly the cabin gravity went to free fall. What was Gnyr-Captain doing? And if the lights were out to save power for whatever it was, shouldn’t the gravity be shut off, to local ambient?
It occurred to him that he couldn’t hear the ripping of the gravity planer. The significance of this hit him just before the planet did.
The kzinti ship fell perhaps a hundred feet, at first. (The ground sloped.) A human ship would have been less damaged, for the counterintuitive reason that it would have had a thinner hull: the hull would have done some crumpling, taking up the shock of impact. The kzinti ship had over half an inch of hullmetal, which is held together by both covalent and metallic bonding, and is as resilient as unmodified matter can get. In vacuum this is a good thing.
A hundred feet up, it is a very bad thing indeed, at least when all failsafes have suddenly lost power. The ship bounced, repeatedly. Interior partitions and supports of hullmetal have their critics at such times as well.
Manexpert could hear other kzinti moving about. They must have been the landing party, which would have been padded in their armor; there was no reason to think anyone else’s crash field had worked either. He couldn’t see out his right eye, and that side of his head felt huge and hot. He couldn’t feel anything below his shoulders, either.
There was a little bit of light coming from somewhere to the right. Either the hull had finally cracked—unlikely—or the assault party had cut their way out of the bay when the airlock didn’t work. For some unknown but long time, there were extended periods of silence, interrupted by bursts of warcries blended with multiple stutters of slug gunfire. Eventually Manexpert’s head began to hurt, and he ignored everything else in his efforts to keep from screaming.
When the pain suddenly faded, he noticed the light had grown brighter. He was also humiliated to realize that for at least several minutes he had been uttering milkmews, like an infant whose mother has left him alone.
He could smell something living nearby. It smelled something like a human, but more acidic, and lacking any trace of fear or anger. “Do you speak Wunderlander?” said a voice with an unidentifiable accent, in that language. Manexpert managed to turn his head a little. The owner of the voice moved courteously into Manexpert’s field of vision.
Superstitious fears, whose existence he had never suspected, choked him. This was a monster out of legend. Enormous joints and hard fatless flesh, like someone skinned and rendered down; big ears, permanently cupped to detect the slightest footstep; huge nose for sniffing prey; complete lack of hair or teeth; a hide mottled in shades of brown, with dark-brown speckles, ideal grassland camouflage; and, for all its swollen, deformed head and freakish face, the casual precision and lack of waste motion of the perfect hunter.
“Do you speak English?” it tried. That ragged beak was responsible for the accent.
Kzinti do not go into physical shock when injured, so Manexpert had nothing to compare his mental state with; but the fact was, he was suffering from such a bad case of shock that he couldn’t have recalled how to speak Hero if the Patriarch had offered him a daughter to ch’rowl.
“Too bad,” it said, and raised Gnyr-Captain’s treasured antique machine gun into view. It had once been carried into battle by a Patriarch’s Companion, and Manexpert knew himself to be the ship’s last survivor.
“You’re—” Manexpert tried to translate a word into English, then gave up and said the word in Hero—“Fury, aren’t you?” He said it badly, being unable to get out that much volume.
It lowered the sidearm and said, “My name is Peace.”
Kzinti had learned that word from humans, but there was a certain conceptual gap. Almost no kzin could have grasped the notion of “a situation wherein nobody wants to fight,” and Manexpert was not among that minority. He understood the word as most did, as referring to the condition that was being described whenever the term was applied: “human victory.”
“We only wanted slaves this time,” Manexpert said, despairing.
Peace blinked. And blinked a second time. Then it said, “Your skull is fractured and your neck is broken, and your body is only kept from bleeding out by the wreckage crushing it. I’m going to take the whole mass and put you in stasis until I get your ship’s autodoc fixed.”
“How will you get the equipment in here?” Manexpert wondered.
“I have it already,” Peace said, and picked up a slightly-wrinkled but perfectly reflective shield. It adjusted something, and the shield was just aluminum foil, barely thick enough to support its own weight. So simple. “I brought more foil just in case,” it added, then gave him another injection.
Peace had had an enormous amount of time to think, even without considering her new speed of thought and ability to sleep in sectors—like a dolphin, but better.
The amount of manipulation that had been going on vastly exceeded anyone’s wildest sus
picions.
She had awakened with her memory fully organized, and her first thought was: I was right all along. Peace woke dehydrated, and weak with lack of food, but not hungry. She had eaten anyway. A lifetime of subjugation and thyroid deficiency had kept her depressed and overweight; she was accustomed to eating whether she was hungry or not. While she ate, she called up the excessively long intron sequences recorded from the mining trees, decrypted them, and read the Truesdale account, learning all that was known about Protectors.
Or rather, all that was believed about Protectors. Some of it was obviously wrong.
A couple of million years back, according to Jack Brennan, a Belter who’d become a Protector, a race called the Pak had sent a colony ship to Earth from the galactic core. The Pak became sentient only after years of reproductive maturity, as a result of eating a root that started smelling good to them when their hormone balance began to screw up. This root did not grow right on Earth, so the Pak protectors died out. Brennan said it was of starvation.
And that was a lie.
The Pak breeders were Homo habilis, and they were ancestors of the human race, which could eat things that would make a dog go blind. They could eat dogs, for that matter. Protectors weren’t limited to eating tree-of-life, as Brennan called it; it was just what they needed to keep regenerating, and digesting disease germs, and so forth. Some of them must have lasted centuries.
When Brennan had been telling this fable, he had already made his plans to steal a Pak Protector’s ramship and convince the UN ARM that he was doomed. They wouldn’t interfere with his manipulation of human society if they didn’t believe he existed. On the trip back to Brennan’s ship, from which Phssthpok had kidnapped him before realizing he was family, Brennan had refused to allow one of his companions, Lucas Garner, to smoke, on the grounds that he, Brennan, had to act to keep the man healthy. This was well after the time of Pasteur, so it was known by then that a viral disease such as cancer could not be contracted by smelling burning leaves; Brennan had been ensuring that the 184-year-old paranoid would be too exasperated to think things through.