“I recognize this star,” he said now. “Amazing. I really should have suggested this stop myself. Had I not been so depressed, I certainly would have. Thank you, Jason.”
“My pleasure, sir.” Jason Papandreou really sounded as though he’d invented the gaudy display just to cheer up a down-in-the-mouths puppeteer. Nessus cocked a sardonic head at him, and he hastily added, “We’ll be on our way again whenever you’re ready.”
“I’ll scan with deep-radar,” Anne-Marie said helpfully.
Jason laughed. “Can you imagine how many ships must have scanned this system already?”
“Just for luck.”
A moment later there was a beep.
Anne-Marie yelped.
Jason said, “I don’t believe it.”
“Two in one trip!” his wife caroled. “Jay, that’s some sort of record!”
It was. Using deep-radar had been more of a habit than anything else. A deep-radar on high setting was an easy way to find Slaver stasis boxes, since only stasis fields and neutron stars would reflect a hyperwave pulse. But Beta Lyrae must have been searched many times before. Searching was traditional.
Nessus turned from the window. “I suggest that we locate the box, then leave it. You may send a friend for it.”
Jason stared. “Leave it? Are you kidding?”
“It is an anomaly. Such a box should have been found long since. It has no reason to be here in the first place. Beta Lyrae probably did not exist a billion and a half years ago. Why then would the Slavers have come here?”
“War. They might have been running from a tnuctip fleet.”
Anne-Marie was sweeping the deep-radar in a narrow beam, following the smoky spiral, searching for the tiny node of stasis her first pulse had found.
“You hired my ship,” Jason said abruptly. “If you order me to go on, I’ll do it.”
“I will not. Your species has come a long way in a short time. If you do not have prudence, you have some workable substitute.”
“There it is,” said Anne-Marie. “Look, Jay. A little icy blob of a world a couple of billion miles out.”
Jason looked. “Shouldn’t be any problem. All right, I’ll take us down.”
Nessus said nothing. He seemed alert enough, but without the nervousness and general excitability that would have meant the onset of his manic stage. At least Beta Lyrae had cured his depression.
The Traitor’s Claw was under the ice. Ice showed dark and deep outside her hexagonal ports. In lieu of sight her crew used a mechanical sense like a cross between radar and X-ray vision. The universe showed on her screens as a series of transparent images superimposed: a shadow show.
Four Kzinti watched a blob-shaped image sink slowly through other images, coming to a stop at a point no different from any other.
“Chuft-Captain, they’re down,” said Flyer.
“Of course they’re down.” Chuft-Captain spoke without heat. “Telepath, how many are there?”
“Two human.” There was a quiet, self-hating resignation in Telepath’s speech. His tone became disgust as he added, “And a puppeteer.”
“Odd. That’s a passenger ship. A puppeteer couldn’t need all that room.”
“I sense only their presence, Chuft-Captain.” Telepath was pointedly reminding him that he had not yet taken the drug. He would do so only if ordered. Without an injection of treated extract of sthondat lymph, his powers were low. Little more than the knack for making an accurate guess.
“One human has left the ship,” said Flyer. “No, two humans.”
“Slaverstudent, initiate hostilities. Assume the puppeteer will stay safely inside.”
The planet was no bigger than Earth’s moon. Her faint hydrogen atmosphere must have been regularly renewed as the spiral streamer whipped across her orbit. She was in the plane of the hydrogen spiral, which now showed as a glowing red smoke trail cutting the night sky into two unequal parts.
Anne-Marie finished tucking her hair into her helmet, clamped the helmet to her neck ring, and stepped out to look around.
“I dub thee Cue Ball,” she said.
“Cute,” said Jason. “Too bad if she’s named already.”
They moved through the ship’s pressure curtain, Jason toting a bulky portable deep-radar. The escalladder carried them down onto the ice.
They moved away, following the dark image in the deep-radar screen. Jason was a head shorter than his wife and twice as wide; his typical Earther’s build looked almost Jinxian next to hers. He moved easily in the low gravity. Anne-Marie, bouncing like a rubber clown, kept pace with him only by dint of longer legs and greater effort.
Jason was standing right over the image of the stasis box, getting ready to mark the ice so they could dig for it, when the image quietly vanished.
A sharp crack jerked his head around. He saw a cloud of steam explode into the near-vacuum, a cloud lit from below by a rosy light. Anne-Marie was already sprinting for the ship in low flying leaps. He turned to follow.
A form like a big roly-poly man shot through the light into what must by then have been a cloud of tiny ice crystals. It was a Kzin in a vac suit, and the thing in its hands was a police stunner. It landed running. Under the conditions its aim was inhumanly accurate.
Jason collapsed like a deflating balloon. Anne-Marie was pinwheeling across the ice, slowly as dreams in the low gravity. The Kzin ignored them both. It was using a jet backpac to speed it along.
The ship’s heavy, flush-fitting door started to close over the pressure curtain. Too slowly. Jason clung to consciousness long enough to see the Kzin’s backpac carry it up the escalladder and through the pressure curtain. His mind hummed and faded.
Present in the crew’s relaxroom were two humans, one puppeteer, and a Kzin. The Kzin was Chuft-Captain. It had to be that way, since the prisoners had not yet had the chance to refuse to talk. Chuft-Captain was a noble, entitled to a partial name. Had he not been alone with the prisoners, he would have been showing fear. His crew watched the proceedings from the control room.
The puppeteer lifted a head at the end of a drunkenly weaving neck. The head steadied, stared hard. In Kzin he said, “What is the purpose of this action?”
Chuft-Captain ignored him. One did not speak as an equal to a puppeteer. Puppeteers did not fight, ever. Hence they were mere herbivorous animals. Prey.
The male human was next to recover from the stunners. He stared in consternation at Chuft-Captain, then looked around him. “So none of us made it,” he said.
“No,” said the puppeteer. “You may remember I advised—”
“How could I forget? Sorry about that, Nessus. What’s happening?”
“Very little at the moment.”
The male looked back at Chuft-Captain. “Who’re you?”
“You may call me Captain. Depending on future events, you are either my kidnap victims or my prisoners of war. Who are you?”
“Jason Papandreou, of Earth origin.” The human tried to gesture, perhaps to point at himself, and found the electronic police-web binding him in an invisible grip. He finished the introductions without gestures.
“Very well,” said Chuft-Captain. “Jason, are you in possession of a stasis box, a relic of the Slaver Empire?”
“No.”
Chuft-Captain gestured to the screen behind the prisoners. Telepath nodded and switched off. The prisoner had lied; it was now permissible to bring in help to question him.
It had been a strange, waiting kind of war.
Legally it was no war at all. The Traitor’s Claw showed in the Kzinti records as a stolen ship. If she had been captured at any time, all the Kzinti worlds would have screamed loudly for Chuft-Captain’s head as a pirate. Even the ship’s name had been chosen for that eventuality.
There had never been a casualty; never; until now, a victory. A strange war, in which the rules were flexible and the dictates of personal honor were often hard to define and to satisfy. Even now … What does one do with a captured pup
peteer? You couldn’t eat him; puppeteers were officially a friendly power. A strange war. But better than no war at all. Perhaps it would now get better still.
The Kzin had asked one question and turned away. A bad sign. Apparently the question had been a formality.
Jason wriggled once more against the force field. He was embedded like a fly in flypaper. It must be a police web. Since the last war the Kzinti worlds had been living in probationary status. Though they might possess and use police restraint-devices, they were allowed no weapons of war.
Against two unarmed humans and a puppeteer, they hardly needed them.
Anne-Marie stirred. Jason said, “Easy, honey.”
“Easy? Oh, my neck. What happened?” She tried to move her arm. Her head, above the soft grip of the police web, jerked up in surprise; her eyes widened. And she saw the Kzin.
She screamed.
The Kzin watched in obvious irritation. Nessus merely watched.
“All right,” said Jason. “That won’t do us any good.”
“Jay, they’re Kzinti!”
“Right. And they’ve got us. Oh, hell, go ahead and scream.”
That shocked her. She looked at him long enough to read his helplessness, then turned back to the Kzin. Already she was calmer. Jason didn’t have to worry about his wife’s courage. He’d seen it tested before.
She had never seen a Kzin; all she knew about them she had heard from Jason, and little of that had been good. But she was no xenophobe. There was more sympathy of feeling between Anne-Marie and Nessus than there was between Nessus and Jason. She could face the Kzin.
But Jason couldn’t read the puppeteer’s expression. It was Nessus he was worried about. Puppeteers hated pain worse than they feared death. Let the Kzin threaten Nessus with pain and there was no telling what he’d do. Without the puppeteer they might have a chance to conceal the stasis box.
It might be very bad if the Kzinti got into a stasis box.
A billion and a half years ago there had been a war. The Slavers, who controlled most of the galaxy at the time, had also controlled most of the galaxy’s sentient species. One such slave species, the tnuctipun, had at last revolted. The Slavers had had a power like telepathic hypnosis, a power that could control the mind of any sentient being. The tnuctipun slaves had possessed high intelligence, higher technology, and a slyness more terrifying than any merely mental power. Slavers and tnuctipun slaves alike, and every sentient being then in the galaxy, had died in that war.
Scattered through known and unknown space were the relics of that war, waiting to be found by species which had become sentient since the war’s end. The Slavers had left stasis boxes, containers in stasis fields, which had survived unchanged through a billion and a half years of time. The tnuctipun had left mutated remnants of their biological engineering: the Frumious bandersnatch of Jinx’s shorelines; the stage tree, which was to be found on worlds scattered all across known space; the tiny cold-world sunflower with its rippling, reflective blossoms.
Stasis boxes were rare and dangerous. Often they held abandoned Slaver weapons. One such weapon, the variable-sword, had recently revolutionized human society, bringing back swordplay, and dueling on many worlds. Another was being used for peaceful ends; the disintegrator was too slow to make a good weapon. If the Kzinti found a new weapon, and if it were good enough…
Their Kzinti captor was a big one, thought Jason, though even a small one was a big one. He stood eight feet tall, as erect as a human on his short hind legs. The orange shade of his fur might have been inconspicuous to a Kzin’s natural prey, but to human eyes it blazed like neon. He was thick all over, arms, legs, torso; he might have been a very fat cat dipped in orange dye, with certain alterations. You would have had to discount the naked-pink ratlike tail; the strangely colored irises, which were round instead of slitted; and especially the head, rendered nearly triangular by the large cranial bulge, more than large enough to hold a human brain.
“The trap you stumbled into is an old one,” said the Kzin. “One ship or another has been waiting on this world since the last war. We have been searching out Slaver stasis boxes for much longer than that, hoping to find new weapons…”
A door opened and a second Kzin entered. He stayed there in the dilated doorway, waiting for the leader’s attention. There was something about his appearance…
“But only recently did we hit upon this idea. You may know,” said their orange captor, “that ships often stop off to see this unusual star. Ships of most species also have the habit of sending a deep-radar pulse around every star they happen across. No student of Slavers has ever found method behind the random dispersion of stasis boxes throughout this region of space.
“Several decades ago we did find a stasis box. Unfortunately it contained nothing useful, but we eventually found out how to turn the stasis field on and off. It made good bait for a trap. For forty Kzin years we have waited for ships to happen by with stasis boxes in their holds. You are our second catch.”
“You’d have done better finding your own boxes,” said Jason. He had been examining the silent Kzin. This one was smaller than their interrogator. His fur was matted. His tail drooped, as did his pointed ears. For a Kzin the beast was skinny, and misery showed in his eyes. As certainly as they were aboard a fighting ship, this was not a fighting Kzin.
“We would have been seen. Earth would have acted to stop our search.” Apparently dismissing the subject, their interrogator turned to the smaller Kzin and spat out an imitation of cats fighting. The smaller Kzin turned to face them.
A pressure took hold of Jason’s mind and developed into a sudden splitting headache.
He had expected it. It was a strange thing: put a sane alien next to an insane one, and usually you could tell them apart. And Kzinti were much closer to human than were any other species; so close that they must at one time have had common microbe ancestors. This smaller Kzin was obviously half crazy. And he wasn’t a fighter. To be in this place at this time, he had to be a trained telepath, a forced addict of the Kzinti drug that sent nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand Kzinti insane and left the survivor a shivering neurotic.
He concentrated on remembering the taste of a raw carrot—just to be difficult.
Telepath sagged against a wall, utterly spent. He could still taste yellow root munched between flat-topped teeth. Chuft-Captain watched without sympathy, waiting.
He forced himself to speak. “Chuft-Captain, they have not hidden the stasis box. It may be found in a locker to the left of the control room.”
Chuft-Captain turned to the wall screen. “See to it. And get the puppeteer’s pressure suit. Then seal the ship.”
Flyer and Slaverstudent acknowledged and signed off.
“The relic. Where did they find it?”
“Chuft-Captain, they did not. The stasis box was found in deep interstellar space, considerably closer to the Core, by a ship of the Outsiders. The Outsiders kept it to trade in known space.”
`What business did the prisoners have with the Outsiders?”
“The puppeteer had business with them. It merely used the humans for transportation. The humans do not know what business it was.”
Chuft-Captain spit in reflex fury, but of course he could not ask a Kzin to read the mind of a herbivore. Telepath wouldn’t, and would have to be disciplined; or he would, and would go insane. Nor could Chuft-Captain use pain on the puppeteer. He would get the information if it was worthless; but if the puppeteer decided it was valuable, the creature would commit suicide.
“Am I to assume that the Outsiders did in fact sell the, relic to the prisoners?”
“Chuft-Captain, they did. The sum was a puppeteer’s recorded word of honor for fourteen million stars in human money.”
“A lordly sum.”
“Perhaps more than lordly. Chuft-Captain, you may know that the Outsiders are long-lived. The male human has speculated that they intend to return in one or more thousands of years, when the
recording of a puppeteer’s voice is an antique worth eights of times its face value.”
“Urrr. I shouldn’t stray into such byways, but … are they really that long-lived?”
“Chuft-Captain, the Outsider ship was following a starseed in order to trace its migratory pattern.”
“Urrr-rrrr!” Starseeds lived long enough to make mating migrations from the galactic core to the rim and back, moving at average speeds estimated at point eight lights.
A patterned knock. The others entered, wearing pressure suits with the helmets thrown back. Flyer carried the puppeteer’s pressure suit, a three-legged balloon with padded mittens for the mouths, small clawed boots, an extra bulge for a food pouch, and a hard, padded shield to cover the cranial hump. Slaverstudent carried a cylinder with a grip-notched handle. Its entire surface was a perfectly reflecting mirror: the sign of the Slaver stasis field.
The prisoners, the human ones, were silently glaring. Their post-telepathy headaches had not helped their dispositions. Telepath was resting from the aftereffects of the drug.
“Open it,” said Chuft-Captain.
Slaverstudent removed an empty cubical box from the table, set the stasis box in its place, and touched a pressure-sensitive surface at the table’s edge. The cylinder ceased to be a distorting mirror. It was a bronzy metal box, which popped open of its own accord.
The Kzin called Slaverstudent reached in and brought out:
A silvered bubble six inches in diameter, with a sculptured handle attached. The handle would not have fit any gripping appendage Chuft-Captain knew of.
A cube of raw meat in something like a plastic sandwich wrap.
A hand. An alien hand furnished with three massive, clumsy-looking fingers set like a mechanical grab. It had been dipped in something that formed a clear, hard coating. One thick finger wore a chronometer.