“That would have been disrespectful.”
“But maiming him wasn’t?”
“No.”
Shadow’s Chariot had a small command bridge consisting of a plush, crescent-shaped couch hugging an intricate command console clearly designed for massive paws.
“I know why you’re so focused on this warship,” Dan said finally, plugging his data tablet into the barge’s control panel. All information on the warship immediately downloaded into the antique ship’s navigational computer. New charts and figures appeared on the surrounding screens.
“Do you?” Healer played at the controls and the long-atrophied gravity motors hummed to life.
“Yeah, you’re lonely.” Now that Dan had said it, he felt the waves of loneliness languorously rolling off his companion.
“Kzinti don’t require the complex social structures of primates.”
“Still, at your age you should already have a couple mates and a few kittens running around.”
The museum artifact that had lain dormant for a century achieved escape velocity in impressive defiance of inertia. Tight laser communiqués were pouring in from all over Angel’s Tome, particularly from Harp. They ignored them.
“I could say the same for you.”
“I do alright. I work at a university, have a dangerous Raoneer accent and drive a sexy car.”
A new red line had appeared on all the displays of the solar system, this one cutting a straight path directly toward the other wandering line of the warship.
“Really, the accent?” Healer’s ears flicked like the elongated thoracic ribs of the small gliding pangolins found all over the indigo canopies of Angel’s Tome.
“The females love it when I turn my S’s into Z’s and roll my R’s.”
“To be honest, since deceit is apparently physiologically impossible for me, I’m finding it difficult to find a compatible mate. They smell uncomfortably familiar to me.”
“That’s because they are,” Dan said, but noticed that Healer’s ears stopped flicking. He knew he had touched a sore spot. “Look, it isn’t a problem for other kzintosh. It’s got to be mental with you. I think because of your medical training, you know that genetically all kzinti on Sheathclaws are closely related, so it’s become a thing for you.”
“Possibly,” he said, scratching the tan fur on his chin. “Why did we stop being friends, Dan? I believe kzinti are better off with humans calling them out on their quirks.”
“You grew up too fast. You were out picking off wombadons while I was still picking my nose.”
“Perhaps there’s a harem of foreign kzinretti on that ship waiting to be rescued.”
“You know females aren’t allowed on warships.”
“Unless there’s an Admiral aboard.” Healer dialed up four scarlet meal bricks and demolished them in two gulps. “Hungry?”
“Yes, but I’d rather have a medium-rare steak and a glass of wine.”
Healer and Dan stopped talking a hundred kilometers away from the derelict, their radar bounced back a significant ping. They toggled the screens to video view. The blast-smeared, crimson ship looked like the jagged disc of a crab’s discarded carapace.
Shadow’s Chariot warily approached the drifting ghost ship and matched speeds with it. It was so immense that it could easily swallow their barge whole. A series of blackened commas and dots were emblazoned on its side.
“What is that, the ship’s name? What does it say?”
Healer looked at it for a moment and said, “I have no idea. My written Heroes’ Tongue is horrible. My instruments confirm that there are no life signs. Although, some basic system is still running because I can detect an active power flow.”
“Yeah, I’m not picking up any emotional activity at all.” He felt Healer’s deep disappointment and added, “But I wouldn’t if they were frozen. The good news is that the long-range communications antenna has been destroyed. The bad news is that all that mysterious machinery that seems to be part of their FTL also looks damaged.”
“Look there.” Healer highlighted the area on the screen. “That gash on the starboard side, that’s what killed it. If we can seal it, we can repressurize the whole upper deck and get access to the bridge.”
“Alright, I’m releasing a repair robot now.” Dan typed the instructions into his tablet. A fat robot the size of a pregnant wombadon jetted out from the underbelly of Chariot and proceeded to work on the fissure in a blur of quick and numerous articulate manipulators.
“I’m going to take us in. We can land in the hanger bay and simply walk to the bridge without excursion suits.”
“Is that wise?”
“Perhaps not, but I want to inspect the ship first before I tow it any closer to Sheathclaws.”
Healer sent ancient override codes from Shadow’s Chariot archives until one managed to coax the hanger bay doors open, then they deliberately burrowed into the wrecked craft, like a scavenger digging into a rotting carcass. The Chariot touched down in the cavernous boat deck amid rows of smaller, long dead fighters.
The repair robot finished spraying the gash with epoxy and Healer and Dan waited impatiently for the warship’s resurrected life support systems to slowly refill the chamber with atmosphere.
Righteous Manslaughter
“We have air outside,” Healer reported at last and grabbed a supply pack. “Let’s go. We can move behind the wave of life support activation.”
Dan grabbed a beam gun. It was manufactured for big dexterous paws, but he’d hunted with them extensively in his teens.
“You don’t think any frozen passengers we thaw might find the weapon a bit provocative?”
“Well, I was going to have claws and fangs genetically implanted, but I don’t think I could pull off the look.”
“Point taken.”
It took an arduous hour of trekking through murky, labyrinthine corridors and service tubes. The corpses of kzinti warriors, contorted by explosive decompression, were scattered everywhere. Healer stopped here and there, taking DNA samples from the bodies showing the least amount of cellular damage from space.
“The bridge should be through here. It’ll take a minute for the atmosphere to build up, then—”
A detonation of emotions shook Dan. He bashed the back of his head on the floor repeatedly and his limbs flailed about wildly. He vaguely felt Healer restrain him before he thrashed himself to death. With great effort, Dan pulled himself together and croaked, “There are kzinti here. Alive! It’s like they just sprang into existence, radiating rage, confusion and terror.”
Healer looked at the tablet that was slaved to Chariot’s sensor array and saw that seven individuals had suddenly appeared on the bridge. “Rest. I’m going to talk to them.”
“Talk to them?”
Healer ignored the protestation and punched up the bridge, relaying the signal through Chariot. Instantly, the furious face of a warrior showed on the screen. Three black stripes ran down his face like war paint. “Who is this?” he snarled.
“I am First Medic. Are you in need of medical assistance?”
“I am Tdakar-Commander. Our Captain Fnar-Ritt is a corpse honorably still at his post. There are six of us wounded Heroes and one telepath sheltering on the bridge.”
“And the Admiral?”
“There is no Admiral aboard Righteous Manslaughter. Fnar-Ritt was the highest ranking officer and now that honor falls on me.”
Healer felt a knot tighten in the pit of this stomach. There are no females here. All he could hope to accomplish now was boosting Sheathclaws’ general gene pool, if not his own. He pushed his loneliness aside and asked, “Where were you a second ago? My ship’s sensors failed to pick you up.”
“Obviously in stasis!” The stupid question roused suspicion in the commander. “First Tech tells me you are aboard an outdated Admiral’s Barge. Explain.”
“No, we are outside the bridge, but we’re relaying the transmission from the barge. We lost our ship in battle a
nd this was all that was available to us, but we continue to perform our duty of search and rescue.”
“What are you doing?” Dan whispered. He could feel the velvety footfalls of a powerful alien telepath prowling in his mind. He tried to push it out.
“Lying through my teeth, despite my neurological handicap,” Healer hissed to the side, then continued speaking to Tdakar-Commander. “Permission to enter the bridge and attend the crew?”
The commander scowled at Healer through narrowed blue eyes for a chilling moment, then barked, “Permission granted!”
“The telepath scanned us, but I don’t think he’ll report us. What’s the plan?”
“We go in there and I deal with the injured warriors. Since you’re the only one with any kind of active telepathic ability, you need to appeal to the telepath. Tell him that if everyone is to survive, he needs to mentally persuade all the warriors to cooperate.”
“Failing that?”
“We kill everyone in that room and clone them afterwards.”
When Dan didn’t reply, Healer allowed his ears and fur to sleek over with fear. “If I am permitted a moment of weakness, Dan, I dread these warriors may be too fierce for me. They are truly of the Heroic Race.”
“Trust me, it’s not their ferocity we should fear, it’s their philosophy. I sense nothing but utter contempt for humanity in that room.”
Healer forced his ears to ripple. “A barrel of bloodka would go a long way in pacifying them.”
“You’re a hypocrite.”
The door to the bridge slid open exuding the foul stench of kzinti blood and sweat. Seven badly injured creatures, miraculously still at their stations, all bared slobbering canines like dripping icicles. Dan was acutely aware that he was the only human in the room and reflexively held his heavy gun a little tighter.
“What is this pathetic kz’eerkt doing on my bridge? No filthy monkey slaves are permitted here!” Tdakar-Commander roared at the rude affront to his ship’s honor.
“He is not a slave. Daneel Guthlac is a valued companion. He’s here to help.”
The wounded warriors’ ears flapped like a flock of migrating pteranobats. Healer controlled his withdrawing lips and used the break in tension to begin examining the kzinti. Not one of them was older than the foolish youngster he had healed back at his hut.
Dan stayed focused on the empty-looking, shriveled kzin that sat in the far corner of the room. He looked like the many corpses they had passed on their way to the bridge. Slowly, the wraithlike kzin reached over to a stand near his couch and plucked a needle from a wide assortment of syringes arrayed like instruments of torture. He thrust it into his arm.
“Who…What, are you? I’ve examined both your minds and you are neither man nor kzin, but an abomination,” Manslaughter’s Telepath directed the thought toward Dan.
Dan, not used to direct mental communication, transmitted his response. “We come from a planet colonized by humans and an escaped kzin telepath. We’re here to offer you sanctuary.”
Healer cracked a leg of a kzintosh that had started to heal wrongly and set it right. The warrior only winced at the excruciating pain. He tore away sheets of charred flesh from the muscles of another Hero who had suffered third-degree burns over his body and drenched him in synthetic skin. All the while, he subtly delivered a mild sedative to each one. Tdakar-Commander watched him like a hungry predator. Healer-of-Hunters continued until all the wounded were taken care of. Then he warily moved toward Tdakar-Commander. “These warriors are mere kits. Their spots not yet faded.”
“The grand campaigns against the humans have left us scrounging for war-ready Heroes,” Tdakar-Commander replied, eying his motley assortment of bloodstained warriors. “These kits, as you call them, hail from all over the Empire: First Tech from a moon orbiting Hssin, Weapons Master from Ka’asai, Navigator from the habitats of Sårng, Chief Programmer from Shasht, Systems Controller from W’kkai. Young perhaps, but Heroes all.”
“Can it be that against all odds, in my desperation, I’ve landed us at the gates of paradise?” The telepath silently asked Dan, his body slouched lifelessly, as if his disembodied spirit had spoken.
“I wouldn’t call it paradise. It’s more a boondocks full of scared people who just want to hide. You’ll be safe there and free to earn a Name and a harem, but it’ll take hard work and cunning,” Dan thought back.
“You’ve got a serious gash running down your side,” Healer moved to look at the commander’s oozing scar.
“Do you think me a fool?” Tdakar-Commander unsheathed eight long, black claws. “Your strange accent and odor, your whole demeanor screams impostor, yet you know your craft well.”
“I really am a doctor.”
“I don’t doubt that, I doubt your Heroic nature.”
“Let’s cut the crap then, commander. I am not a Hero. In fact, I come from a world free of the Patriarchy, a world with wide wintry steppes and tundra the color of venous blood. Our multihued sky lights up under constant bombardment from our orange, subgiant sun. Strange and challenging beasts are plentiful for the cunning hunter and many of us have chosen to live as kzintosh were intended.”
“Are you telepathically calming the warriors?” Dan asked the telepath when he didn’t get a mental reply.
“Quit jabbering, monkey, I wish to hear more of this savage utopia,” the telepath snapped, without moving his jaw.
“It sounds glorious, Imposter, and I believe you. I can taste sharp, sylvan molecules rising from your fur. I would like very much to hunt on these alien moors, but I am bound by Honor to continue the war with humanity until we’re victorious or I die.”
“I can provide you and your warriors with two females each and enough land to lose yourselves in.”
Dan wasn’t getting anywhere with the telepath. “Can you psychically persuade Tdakar into coming to Sheathclaws? It should be easy, I can sense his desire to abandon this futile war and live the simple life of a hunter.”
“Tell me about this Maned God I read in your minds.”
“It’s nothing. A local superstition, a religious syncretism.” Dan failed to see how the question related to their immediate predicament.
“I see that Gutting Claw’s Telepath had a vision of the human’s Bearded God merged with the kzinti Fanged God.”
“It was a drug-induced hallucination.”
“I sincerely hope this Maned God is more merciful than the Fanged God.”
Suddenly, Dan felt something deeply wrong with Manslaughter’s Telepath. Years of suffering and drug abuse had left his mind critically scarred and twisted.
“My tormentors and slave masters will not lay a hind claw upon the soil of paradise.” It was the last coherent thought sent by the telepath. After that there was only mental static.
“I take it you will not give us any other choice?” Tdakar-Commander said to Healer.
Healer protracted his own claws, sharpened on the bones of animals far larger and less injured than Tdakar-Commander. “I’m sorry. I cannot allow you to escape and reveal our position, but your ship is severely damaged and you wouldn’t be able to leave even if I allowed you to.”
“A death-duel then.” Tdakar flipped out his gleaming wtsai with well-practiced elegance. “If I die, my warriors are ordered to stand down and retire to your primeval hunting park.” Tdakar’s tail moved in a way that subtly told Healer this was as far as he was willing to yield. At least the kit warriors under his command would have a better life.
“He’s mentally ill!” Dan screamed. “He’s going to kill them all!”
Tdakar plunged his blade into Healer’s gut. Healer let rip a terrible, shrill whine. He staggered as the skilled Hero pulled it cleanly out. Blinded by pain, Healer-of-Hunters lashed out instinctively, chomping down on Tdakar-Commander’s neck and pulverizing his spine. Steamy purple and orange blood gushed out of Tdakar’s yawning mouth, black nostrils and limp ears. His body went rigid, then fell into Healer’s arms. They both collapsed to the f
loor in a jumble of damp fur. For a second, Healer sat there, horrified.
“Do not mourn the good commander, Healer-of-Hunters. If you’d been born on another world, around another star, he’d have bound you in the unbreakable chemical shackles of the sthondat drug and enslaved you without a moment’s hesitation.” Manslaughter’s Telepath spoke verbally for the first time. His voice was harsh and raspy like mauve grass during the dry season. He lurched out of his couch and paced the bridge without taking his eyes off Healer. “These common brutes are not worthy of, what is it, Sheathclaws?” He bent over and took the sidearm from Fnar-Ritt’s burnt corpse.
“What are you doing?” was all Healer could say before his lips and ears pulled back in unrestrained rage.
“Calm yourself, Healer, I have a proposition for you. I can sense your lust for unrelated females. The Patriarch is desperate to breed more Heroes able to use a mass pointer for navigation, so he conceded two females aboard this ship, in Fnar-Ritt’s quarters. They were probably locked in a stasis field once that deck decompressed.”
He fired a shot at one of the young warriors, the tall, lanky one from Ka’asai, sending him sprawling over his console. “Allow me to cleanse this vessel of butchers and we can all go down to Sheathclaws victorious.” None of the other lame Heroes moved. The cadaverous telepath dulled their already distressed and anesthetized minds. Another beam ignited System’s Controller.
Dan felt Healer waiver. He’d have mates and DNA samples, his friend would have all the technology he wanted, and this poor wretched telepath would finally find refuge, but as he looked at the remaining spot-spangled adolescents frightened and vicious, he couldn’t let them be simply slaughtered. Was it his training as a doctor or had a century of living with humans infected this carnivore with crippling humanity? “No,” Dan heard his friend hiss through still-gritted, exposed teeth. He tried to push Tdakar off him.
“I’ve read your minds and I know their continued existence is not necessary for your mission to succeed. You can always grow them in a vat later. Is that not what you said?”
Healer could no longer speak, so Dan shouted for him, “This is murder! We had them sold! A simple push would’ve been enough!”