Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - V

  Krater twisted something, and the kzin’s eyes crossed. Its hands moved sideways, too fast for Cuiller to react. He almost opened the massive chest with a burst before he understood that the Fiddle had prompted that sudden movement.

  “Keep working on it,” Cuiller told her, “I think you’re getting somewhere. I hope he’s either captain or navigator of this interceptor, because that’s the only way he’ll be able to help us.”

  Then inspiration struck.

  “Hey, Fellah!” Cuiller called.

  The tiny alien was dwarfed by the huge warcat, but he glanced up at the commander with some confidence.

  “Talk to the kzin,” Cuiller told him. “Get inside his mind. See words—say words. Tell him we need his ship, need him. Take us to Margrave. Tell him Margrave. He can do it the easy way or hard. But one way or another, he’s going to take us to Margrave.”

  Fellah looked at Cuiller with his big, dark eyes gleaming out from among the white hair. The commander sensed that the alien understood what he meant. After a moment, Fellah turned to the kzin and began to growl and spit in a timbre that was no more suited to his delicate, curling tongue than Interworld was.

  Through his sudden pain and the sensory confusion that the Thrintun artifact had thrust upon him, Nyawk-Captain was catching only a fraction of the humans’ speech and understanding even less. Still, the gestures with the rifle were significant. He did hear the word “Margrave,” which as the proper name for a human-dominated planet was common to both Interworld and his own language.

  Then the Whitefluff began speaking in the Hero’s Tongue.

  “Thinskins take you. We-they put you…at disadvantage.”

  Nyawk-Captain stopped trying to override the nerve-scrambles that imprisoned him and listened closely.

  “True enough,” he growled.

  “You are with…luck.”

  “Be careful how you tease me, Fluff. I might still regain enough control with just one fingerpad to squash you.”

  “Be silent. I-Fellah help you.”

  “Why should you help a kzin when you travel with the humans?”

  “They prison me, too.”

  “True enough. So. What do you propose?”

  “Human the Sally works the…Painstick. She does it badly, yes? You are more aware now, yes?”

  Nyawk-Captain suddenly saw the opportunity before him. The alien artifact, the Painstick, impeded his actions more or less as the human woman varied the intensity and direction of its strange power. The eerie music still gave Nyawk-Captain a headache but, as the human woman fretfully twisted and fingered the device, its nerve signals were less paralyzing to him than they had been at first. Eventually he might work free of it and be able merely to simulate a body under external control. Then, if he could keep from retching, he would pretend to do what they wanted—until they were both distracted.

  “I see your meaning, yes,” he told the Fluff. “What do you suggest?”

  “They want you take…ship and them. Go to place called ‘Margrave.’ You know this?”

  “Yes, I know Margrave. My crew and I were headed there, before we landed here.” And, with luck and at the human’s own prompting, Nyawk-Captain told himself, Cat’s Paw might still arrive there right on schedule.

  “Play along,” the Whitefluff told him. “Pretend pain. Be docile. Be watchful, too.”

  “Yes. Until the moment.”

  “I tell you when,” the tiny alien advised.

  The human male interrupted them with “[Something unintelligible] Margrave?”

  The Fluff looked back and answered with “[More nonsense sounds] Margrave.”

  Nyawk-Captain nodded his head vigorously in the human gesture signaling agreement. Then, still twitching his arms in random and mechanical ways, he climbed slowly out of the armor’s greaves and cuisses.

  The work Navigator had been performing on the hull when he died was related only to the sensors for defensive weapons—useful but not essential systems, now. Nyawk-Captain’s mission could proceed without them.

  The kzin’s stomach lurched and staggered with a change of balance as human the Sally tried a new twist with the artifact. The device was still making him do strange things and feel unusual sensations, some pleasant but most merely irritating. It was infuriating to occasionally lose control, but he could learn to live with that. He could even feel himself beginning to like the human female, just a little.

  The other human went through the airlock first, keeping his rifle leveled on Nyawk-Captain’s throat. The kzin let him. When he wanted, when the time was right, he would take away that toy before the human could fire it.

  Cuiller backed the kzin into the central crash-cradle and made it sit down. While he held the rifle to its forehead, Sally used the couch’s cloth straps and mechanical braces to bind the kzin. She left one forearm and paw free to work the instruments at its station. However, a brief and sweeping study of the control layout had convinced Cuiller that at least two people were needed to pilot the interceptor.

  Once the kzin was secured, Krater stepped up to the main panel and fastened the Fiddle to a cleared space with a wad of stickum from her pack. She arranged it so the Fiddle’s presumed working end pointed at the captive’s forehead.

  Cuiller inspected the arrangement. “I hope long-term exposure to that thing isn’t going to render him incapacitated, or dead.”

  “We could do worse,” she suggested.

  Fellah sat quietly on the deckplates, where Cuiller hand set him down.

  “Okay, Fellah, tell him we need to start the main polarizers and lift ship. He’ll tell you how, and you translate for us. Or, I guess, you can just point at whatever controls we should attend to next.”

  The alien absorbed this and began spitting in the Hero’s Tongue. Cuiller and Krater settled into the two remaining kzinti couches and tried to adapt the crash webbing to their smaller bodies.

  With pantomime gestures and low growls, the kzin instructed Fellah in takeoff procedures. Then he relayed the instructions in a series that went, “Push this, pull that, turn this one until red line comes up here, do not move until this disk turns blue.”

  Working one-handed, Cuiller hit switches and verniers in the indicated order. The airlock closed, the board lit up, and somewhere back of them the world stiffened and shifted as the gravity polarizers kicked in.

  On one of the screens, he watched the landing site and Callisto’s battered hull dwindle and then disappear in a wash of green. In another second the green foliage was gone, dissolving in a flutter of hazy light that turned a chlorine-tinted white as the ship, still accelerating, rose above the limb of the planet.

  “Good-bye, Beanstalk,” Krater called cheerfully.

  “Good-bye, Daff and Hugh,” Cuiller added soberly. “They were good shipmates.”

  “Amen to that.”

  As they cleared atmosphere, the kzin turned back to Cuiller directly and gestured with its free paw toward controls on the panel in front of it.

  The commander studied the almost-glazed eyes and the string of dribble at the corner of the kzin’s black-lipped mouth. Was he missing some procedure—landing gear, hull integrity, something important? Cuiller threw the switches that the kzin had indicated.

  The cabin was immediately filled with the buzz of an open comm circuit. An anxious kzinti face peered out of the screen directly ahead. It warbled a growl at them, and its eyes grew suddenly large.

  Before the kzin in the chair could respond, Krater lunged forward, grabbed the Fiddle, and began pressing all its keys. Their kzinti captive went rigid and trembled with induced catatonia.

  Cuiller frantically turned all the switches on the section of control board he’d just used, scrambling them with random settings. Finally, the alien face faded out in a blaze of static.

  “Our captive was faking submission,” he observed.

  “I’m sorry, Jared,” she said apologetically. “I don’t know enough about the Fiddle to make him do anything more than twi
tch. Can we fly this ship alone?”

  “I think I could pick out the star pattern surrounding Lambda Serpentis,” Cuiller said. “We can probably bend a vector in that direction. And, given a few tries with this comm system, I think we can call out those segments of the U.N. fleet stationed at Margrave.”

  “Who was it that he contacted?” Sally asked.

  “His commanding officer?” Cuiller suggested. “Some flight dispatcher back in kzinti space?”

  “The face on that comm screen appeared almost instantly, didn’t it? So the relay time was virtually nil. Whoever it was is damn close, Captain. Closer than kzinti space.”

  “Kzin…self-named Lehruff,” Fellah offered. “Admiral.”

  “I was tricked into opening a comm-circuit directly into the entire kzinti command structure,” Cuiller said. “Now the entire Patriarchy is going to know something damn peculiar has happened aboard this ship.”

  “Damned bad,” from Fellah.

  “Well, not much we can do about it now,” Cuiller said. “Except run like hell and call for reinforcements.”

  “Agreed,” Krater said.

  “We travel,” Fellah said. “Be here ‘long, long time.’ In this small space,” he observed thoughtfully. “Enough food here? Hey, Sally?”

  “Don’t worry, Fellah,” she assured him. “We won’t eat a sentient species.”

  Fellah waved a paw at the recumbent kzin. “Does he?”

  “Time lies with we-us. Our side,” the Whitefluff growled sternly to Nyawk-Captain. “You…risk. With Lehruff. Damn bad doings.”

  “I know it,” the kzin growled in return, idly making gestures at a disused bank of controls that the Fluff could demonstrate to the humans as a pretext for making conversation. The human male cautiously worked the sliders, unaware that he was just opening and cycling the ship’s atmosphere vanes. “I thought it was an opportunity worth the taking,” Nyawk-Captain explained.

  “Risk to be taking! Do not again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Human the Sally will use maximum setting. Painstick cripples. It also kills.”

  Nyawk-Captain eyed the device where it was stuck to the main panel, aimed at him. After his trick with the comm-circuits, the woman had readjusted its settings. For a brief time, the Painstick had left him dazed and trembling.

  And this had been good, Nyawk-Captain thought now. The experience had shown him the weapon’s unique flaw. Continuous exposure, even at the highest settings, allowed an active brain to become acclimatized to the effect. Like a patch of skin under abrasion, his mind was developing the neural equivalent of a callus. After a span of hours he had found himself able to shape coherent thoughts and activate useful synapses around the offending signals. He still did not have much control—not enough to slip the bonds of his couch, turn upon the humans, and rend them to bloody fragments. But his head was definitely growing clearer and his limbs felt more his own.

  “On this…heading, at this…velocity,” Fluff groped for the navigational terms in the Hero’s Tongue, “Lehruff catches us?”

  “What? No, his fleet is still a day or more behind us.”

  “All along way to Margrave?”

  “He was going there already.”

  “But these humans, we-they get there first,” Fluff concluded. “Humans have their own fleet at Margrave?”

  “Yes, there will be a battle. Not as grand as the one we kzinti had planned, but enough still to—”

  “Humans have the Painstick. Soon all humans have it. Some will learn better than human the Sally.” Fellah spat in a particularly suggestive manner.

  Now that was a bad thought. Nyawk-Captain envisioned bands of raucous monkeys armed with copies of the Painstick. They were cutting down armed kzinti in mid-leap and marching them off as twitching zombies. He saw the males of the Patriarchy reduced to the status of shivering, voiceless females…And the Fluff was right. These two humans would get to Margrave ahead of the Last Fleet and call out their Navy. They would certainly have time to turn the Painstick over to their high command, who would remove it from the battle theater for study and duplication. The Patriarchy might win this coming Battle of Margrave, and still lose their souls for eternity.

  Could Nyawk-Captain stop them? Could he give these humans not just useless instructions but damaging ones? Could he dupe them into disabling Cat’s Paw, so that Lehruff would draw even with them and take everyone aboard his flagship? That would deliver the Painstick neatly to Lehruff and then to the Patriarchy.

  Or, barring that, might Nyawk-Captain trick the humans into destroying this ship?

  Unlikely…His stupid (yes, it was stupid!) attempt with the communications switch had alerted the human male to Nyawk-Captain’s potential for trickery. The humans would be doubly careful with every command he suggested now. Only those with no effect—like their current twiddling of the atmosphere vanes—would escape that scrutiny.

  However, Nyawk-Captain might be able to slow them up. He could cut their lead ahead of the Last Fleet. Then Lehruff would overtake and…But no. Even if that one glimpse over the comm-circuits had alerted Lehruff to some kind of disturbance aboard the Paw, the old kzin still had his orders. He would only follow the interceptor down to Margrave and let the Cat’s Paw make its feinting run, as planned. Lehruff knew how to do his duty, even if things he saw in a flash of broken communications might trouble his eyes.

  Then Nyawk-Captain knew what he had to do.

  His only worry was his failing strength. At their current speed, it would be many days before the human fleet stationed at Margrave came out to take possession of the fleet. Until that time, the two humans would keep him bound, physically and mentally, or so they thought. They would loosen the bonds only to feed him and take instruction in ship operations. But even then, the woman had discovered intravenous supplements among the medical supplies, and these had diagrams to guide a nonmedical kzin in an emergency. The woman had rigged drip equipment above his crash-couch and was running the tasteless liquids into the vein at Nyawk-Captain’s neck.

  His flesh would soon be melting away. Eventually his atrophied muscles would be as weak as the humans’ own. He would be weak as a kzitten when they finally released him—but maybe that would be enough.

  “Tell the human to stop his adjustments,” he instructed Fluff. “We’ve had enough nonsense for one watch.”

  The little animal nodded and turned away to make his soft and useless mouthings.

  Nyawk-Captain relaxed and composed his mind, exploring new pathways around the Painstick’s ingrained signals. He prepared himself for a continued stream of idle days.

  For twenty days Jared Cuiller had been surreptitiously monitoring the approach of the kzinti warfleet behind them and relaying his observations ahead to the human fleet that had sailed from Margrave on his alert. He had also hoped to renew with Sally the intimacy they had derived from that one long kiss among the treetops. But the quarters in the captured interceptor were too cramped, the kzin was too restless, and Fellah too keenly observant.

  “Maybe later.” Sally had smiled, when he first shyly proposed it. “We’ll have lots of time.”

  But would they? He thought dismally of the major battle that was brewing, with a war surely to follow. As Cuiller made his observations of the kzinti fleet, he dared probe in their direction for no more than a few seconds. And still these peeks accounted for hundreds of obvious warships and other massed vessels. When the two forces came together, it was going to be a battle to remember.

  Too bad, in a way, that they wouldn’t be on hand to take part in it. But earlier he had arranged to rendezvous with an Empire-class supply ship somewhere on the human side of the conjectured clash point among the stars. The Navy would take this captured ship in tow and transfer off Jared and Sally’s prisoner and their prizes: a new sentient life form, a working stasis-box, and—best of all—a mechanical enhancement of the Slavers’ power. Rich prizes.

  In the many days that the two humans and Fellah had
to study the interceptor’s layout, Cuiller had worked out its flight sequencers to his own satisfaction. And now, within visual-contact distance of the globe comprising the human fleet, he shut down the gravity polarizers and let the ship drift forward at a considerable fraction of light-speed.

  “Cuiller to Sumeria,” he called, adjusting the comm panel. “Ready to match velocities.”

  The supply ship dropped out of the battle formation, dived below hyperspace, and showed up on one of the control board’s screens.

  “We’ll take you with magnetic grapples, Captain Cuiller,” the bridge officer informed him. And no, the rank he used was not a slip of the tongue, either: “Captain,” instead of “Lieutenant Commander.”

  Jared and Sally began powering down nonessential systems.

  “What about him?” she asked, pointing at the recumbent kzin.

  At first their captive had thrashed around, testing his restraints, but as the days wore on he had become increasingly silent, spending more and more time sleeping. Krater had changed his fluid bottles regularly, raking new ones from the food generator, which she had programmed from a card in the medical supplies. Now, as they approached the englobement, the kzin’s only response was an occasional yawn and whole-body shudder. She routinely wiped white drool from the fanged mouth as he lay there.

  “I guess we’ll have to untie him to make the transfer,” Cuiller said. “We knew that sooner or later we’d have to trust your control with the Fiddle alone.”

  He flexed his own left arm, which had begun to heal straight and painlessly. That was probably thanks in part to his new diet of rich, red meat which seemed to be the food machine’s only other setting.

  Krater unstuck the Fiddle from its place on the control panel, being careful to keep it oriented on the kzin’s head. Cuiller bent to undo the couch’s straps and braces. One by one he released the mechanical controls over their comatose enemy.

  Cuiller’s head was down near the backrest when he heard the couch squeak.

  “Jared! Look out!” Sally warned.