The Man-Kzin Wars 04

CHAPTER 23

(2420 A.D.)

Long-Reach was in a panic argument with himselves. The ship was no longer a safe place. Mellow-Yellow was in danger. Mellow-Yellow was in hibernation. Kzin warriors were talking about slashing the throat of Mellow-Yellow for cowardice. They were rough with him when they put him away. After the battle they would take him out and kill him. Joker had heard them say so while he was relining the gravity walks. Long Reach felt grief in the tips of His thumb-fingers. No more card games. No more currying that fine pelt.

He felt an unexplainable desolation.

Fourteen Jotoki were directly bonded to Mellow-Yellow. In the slave quarters these fourteen bundled together, avoiding conversation even with Jotoki who were bonded to other Kzin. Arms entwined, they chattered and moaned and sifted thoughts among their brains. The need to help Mellow-Yellow was unsettling and painful because they could not help him. Disoriented, they set about their tasks mechanically, then returned to the slave quarters to share their agony.

Long-Reach knew that the man-beasts had to be fed, but while he went through the motions he was remembering another such terrifying time of threat long ago on another world. Simpler times. Only one kzin had been menacing Mellow-Yellow then, not a ship full. The challenge had taken place in the birth haven of Long-Reach among the trees and swamps and caverns that had nurtured himselves during the growing-up and were almost alive enough to come to his aid when he needed to call upon a glen or ridge between hill banks. The very land Lad helped him kill that other kzin.

Now there were only the cold corridors of a ship and pipes and snaking power lines and catwalks and patrolling warriors. Killing one kzin to save his master had been the most troubling horror of his life. To kill a whole shipload was unthinkable, enough to make his arms disconnect from each other and send him stumbling in an uncoordinated scramble of arm-legs.

Nevertheless, that is what he, himselves, was thinking.

Lieutenant Argamentine knew that her routine had been upset. That bizarre kzin who was called Mellow-Yellow by his five-armed followers disappeared to be replaced by a taciturn kzin who was larger and redder, whose only function seemed to be that of interrogator. He took her from her cage, never very gently, never so roughly that he hurt her. Together they rode a capsule to his tiny torture chamber. He questioned her. He brought her back to the charge of the slaves, forgetting her until the next time he needed to torture her.

She had grown up dealing with difficult people, including her father, and she had long ago developed a facility of manner with intractable personalities but this one fitted none of her patterns. He was disturbingly. He was impatient with chitchat. He was impossible to reason with about anything like her living conditions or the needs of the children. He was interested only in answers and he was impatient with devious answers.

When she did not give him what he wanted he turned immediately to torture, preferring agonizing nerve-slim to mutilation. But she got no feeling that he was interested in torture. He had an uncanny sensitivity, almost as if he was a latent telepath. When she didn't have answers to his questions, he blandly moved on to the next question. But if she did have answers and tried to withhold them, he became ruthlessly persistent.

Desperately, she tried to get an angle on him. He was curious about the strangest things.

"Sea Statue at UN Comparative Cultures Exhibit. You know?"

She knew, but like most flatlanders, she'd never really wanted to know much about the one-eyed Thrintun monster who lived inside, frozen in stasis. It was a story three hundred years old. She was tortured into remembering.

Had the Sea Statue been moved?

Had the Sea Statue been transported to Alpha Centauri?

Had the Sea Statue provided the principles of superluminal flight?

Were the UNSN officers in thrall?

War bred the strangest paranoia’s from its soup of deceptions, misinformation, misdirection, and poor communication. And lack of any cultural basis for understanding.

When she was thrown back into her cage after her last session, the silent children seemed to know that she was hurting and her mind half incoherent. They just held her. They were too numb, and too maltreated themselves, to be able to give her much. Finally the food came.

"You're late. We're starving," said Lieutenant Argamentine. She wasn't even ready to try to figure out a five-brained spider.

The three children were very quiet around Long-Reach. He fed them but he was also the chief lab technician in a place where they were mere lab animals. She couldn't read Long-Reach's emotions. He had no face. A mottled pot-belly where his face should have been. His eyes and arms were expressive but she didn't know how to read their mobility.

"Bean mash on kzinbones," said Long-Reach's translator with an appropriately apologetic melody. Short(arm) took umbrage with the vocoder and offered an English translation. "Not kzin bones! Shudder. Groundified bone and marrow, rolled to cracker shape. Bonding heated. Kzin rations for ship. Not kzin bones! Kzin not cannibals except with kits of wrong father."

Freckled(arm) made an interjection to correct an aspect of short( arm)'s terrible English grammar.

"Are you going to stay around for another English lesson?" asked Nora. She didn't really want this strange creature to go. The torture was demoralizing her.

"No. Must go. Mellow-Yellow in trouble," lamented Long-Reach. "Bad, bad, bad," commented three of his arms in a round-robin.

"I haven't seen him for a while." Was she better off with Mellow-Yellow or Redfur?

A pause while the vocoder sorted out the conversation. "We are all doomed by death," said its speaker. "A big battle," kibitzed skinny( arm). "Ship has been recalled to Alpha Centauri," intoned big(arm).

She decided to exact some intelligence of her own. "Why are they interested in Thrintun slavers?"

"What?" Long-Reach consulted the vocoder and drew a blank.

"One-eyed scaly monsters who take over minds. They died in a war with the tnuctipun billions of years ago. I've just had my memory forcibly refreshed," she said ruefully.

"Kzin worry about free-will," said Long-Reach. "All the time, worry. Warrior fetish. Always must be in control. Didn't you feel the wave of intrusion? Myselves went right to the kitchen and made up hot soup for Mellow-Yellow, then wondered why I do this. Pleasant feeling to serve others. Kzin no like."

Suddenly Nora was remembering an impulse of feeling that had overwhelmed her just days ago. Devotion. An enormous need to help someone. She had supposed it was something Mellow-Yellow had put in her food to make her tack. "There's a Slaver loose down there?"

"Was. Big explosion, hour ago here, days ago there. Don't know what's happening today. Tomorrow we find out. We're all doomed."

"Are you a slave?" she asked, curious about the creature's response. She found out that his vocoder couldn't translate the word for him, and she couldn't explain it to him. The nearest he could come was the English word "friend." As in "only friend."

Redfur the Torturer didn't come back. But a delegation of four Jotoki did. They seemed ill at ease in their body motions. It was impossible for her to stop trying to read expressions off the belly-faces that sat on their mouths even though she knew they weren't faces. The shoulder-mounted eyes watched her. They wanted something. They gave her a delicate dish of stuffed leaves that tasted like Greek Dolmades, vine leaves, almost as if it were a ceremony. Another presented her timidly with green and red garters for her elbows and knees.

They were bargaining! "Yes?" she asked, gently, not knowing what to do with her revelation.

"Our master wished to take this ship out of the battle," intoned their translator, which had been carefully pre-programmed.

"An interesting idea," replied Nora, warily.

The four were talking among themselves in a spitting language that sounded like a corruption of the Hero's Tongue. Finally the translator spoke again. "Your race and the kzinti are enemies."

"Perhaps someday…"

The translator wasn't listening to her. It continued. "Men kill kzinti. Kzinti kill men. Is this not so?"

"It's war."

"You are military man," said Long-Reach, impatient with the machine. "Your ice cream desire is to kill all kzin. I understand mankind."

No you dons, she thought while she twiddled with her curl.

"We work, side together, like many arms."

What she was hearing sounded like mutiny. It also sounded like they had an exaggerated respect for her powers. A naked woman with garters was a threat to no one. "I have been deranged and you will notice that I am locked behind bars."

Long-Reach opened the cage and quickly closed it. "Bargain," he said. "We make bargain." She could hear the tremor in his voices, and she was sure she could see his arms shaking. He was terrified. She could almost see him running. The tremors came from inhibiting the flight.

"What can I do for you?"

"You kill all kzin, but one. We free Mellow-Yellow. Bargain? Mellow-Yellow live."

"I'm quite willing to let Mellow-Yellow live," she lied. She almost saw the four of them relax. "What makes you think I might be able to kill all kzin?"

"Ferocious monkey warriors defeat kzin. We know. Monkey squash kzinships. We repair. We scrape kzin off wall."

Were they thinking that if they let her out of her cage she might not settle for anything less than the death of all kzin on board? As if she had a hope of hilling even one of the behemoths! It hadn't slipped her notice that her interrogator had two sets of human ears casually attached to his belt.

"Mellow-Yellow live. Bargain?" Long-Reach repeated.

Why were these creatures so bonded to Mellow-Yellow? Why was he different from the others? His name translated as something like Overseer of Inferiors, or Animal Manipulator. Perhaps he had a chemical hold on them? Perhaps he was an expert at some kind of hypnotic conditioning? No matter. The irrational loyalty was there. She remembered the day she had attacked Mellow-Yellow, ready to die, because he was cruel to children, and Long-Reach had been watching her with four eyes. If she had hurt Mellow-Yellow, Long-Reach would have killed her.

It was a strange bargain. If she protected their master (from her cage?), the Jotok were hers.

Was it a good bargain? It was dangerous to have naive allies. Were they as naive as they seemed? Were they treacherous? How much did the kzin trust their slaves? How reliable were these Jotoki? What skills did they have? What skills did she have? What weapons did she have? Nothing. She knew the formula for a nerve gas that would kill kzin and was harmless to men, but even given the equipment, she wouldn't have known how to manufacture it. This whole situation wasn't part of her Gibraltar Base training.

No, it wasn't a good bargain, but it was the only bargain she had.

"I'm no match for a kzin," she said. She wanted them to tell her something.

"You have military mind. We have arms. Ship is our playground."

They began to feed her more often. They cleaned cages and when they moved her to a new cage, she found a ship map on the floor. She was surprised that they controlled the cage locks. They were trusted. Or was it just that Mellow-Yellow trusted them and in the heat of battle that kzin's duties had not been fully reapportioned? Why was he in disgrace?

Her allies came up with vicious little plans. They had molecular trip-wire that they could set up that would cut a kzin's legs off. They knew how to rig a gravity floor plate into a booby trap that would grab a kzin in a sudden six-g field. But when she tried to plan with them, she understood why they needed her. What they didn't have was an overall strategic sense. When one starts a battle, it sets off an avalanche of activity. The good commander is able to predict where the avalanche will go, and have his responses already in place.

She could make detailed plans, but could they follow orders? Can a slave follow orders? She was willing to bet that they could.

Some of the events she wasn't going to be able to predict. So far as Nora knew, the human hyperfleet was already fighting at Alpha Centauri. That was one wild card she could be vaporized by her comrades before the mutiny even started. On the other hand, the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch was the most sluggish ship of the Third Black Pride and so would reach its new station many days later than the maneuverable elements of its squadron. if the mutiny could be carried out before they reached the battle, their chances were much better. Haste was in order.

Lieutenant Nora Argamentine did not expect to survive the mutiny, so she was optimizing her strategy for maximum kzin kill. She wanted as many kzin dead as possible before the inevitable moment when her plans fell apart. Meticulously, with the information the slaves gave her, she targeted every kzin on board the Batch. Mellow-Yellow was at the bottom of the list. He could be killed by flooding his hibernation cell with liquid nitrogen but not while she still needed her Jotoki allies.

They were able to manufacture her nerve gas. That surprised her at first until she remembered what Mellow-Yellow had been doing to the children. He had some kind of "grant" to do "medical research" on humans. No, she was not going to spare that one.

The Jotoki fiends even cobbled together hand weapons. They had a spaceman's usual devout respect for high-velocity projectiles and high-energy cutting tools. The result was a launcher for a concussion pellet that could hemorrhage a kzin's insides but wouldn't damage bulkheads.

The Bitch's manufacturing shop was designed for interstellar war. You didn't fly in spare parts to an interstellar battle, you tooled up for anything, on the spot, at a moment's notice and burped out one-of-a-kind items. It was incomprehensible to Nora that such facilities could be trusted to slaves, but then she wasn't a kzin.

The attack began in the dorm. The airseal bulkheads sealed without triggering alarms gas flooded the rooms, stayed, and was flushed out the airseal bulkheads unlocked. A gas-killed kzin looks like he's asleep except that he's not breathing.

Jotoki who were not already at their stations on regular jobs began to move to their assigned position. The Command Center was gassed.

Hrith-Master Officer was comprehending what was happening to him at the same time his nervous system was failing to obey his order to sound a gas alarm. The officer farthest from the air purifier did issue that alarm before he died.

The surviving kzinti moved efficiently into their battle armor, which was gas-proof alert, thoroughly alarmed, and ready for action. They were primed for orders, and they got them: "Battle Stations!" That was the wrong order. The ship was being attacked internally, not from an external threat. "Boarding Stations!" would have been a better order. "Damage Containment!" might have worked. Even "Abandon Ship!" would have collected them into a defensible position. "Battle Stations!" just dispersed them to known destinations, along known routes, across Jotok devised booby traps. A Jotok, in a rack-held Ztirgor, picked off the kzin who tried to pass through the anger.

Lieutenant Argamentine was master-minding the battle from a tiny munitions closet which had been jury-rigged into the Bitch's main communications net, finally wearing trousers and a shirt she'd ordered her Jotoki allies to make for her, plus an ugly kzin oxygen mask, retailored for her head. She knew the jig was up when a kzin commando team retook the Command Center, killing the occupying Jotoki, and cut off her contact.

They could trace her location.

She evacuated instantly, taking the best position she could, facing down both legs of an L-shaped corridor, her only weapon the improvised concussion-pellet launcher. Hunkering behind her portable stun-gun barricade, she knew that this was where she was going to die. She wondered what the kids would think when they came out of sedation. She was damned if she wanted to die in a cage.

Without warning, a stun-bolt ripped down the corridor, covering the advance of a kzin clean-up team.

The barricade hardly did any good at all. She felt the bolt hit her back, probably from a bounce off a wall, numbly noting that her fingers were now so frozen that she could hardly fire off the concussion rounds one at the lead kzin, one at the kzin behind, and one for good measure at the blind bend from whence they had appeared. The blasts went off. She was suddenly deaf and her paralyzed legs refused to propel her out of the way but she saw the disabled kzinti carried toward her down the gravityless corridor. She felt the thuds on the wall as she was buried in kzin armor.

When a little girl studied war, odd things stuck in her memory. Now she was remembering the fragment of a twentieth century Frenchman's letter from a hospital near Reims describing how he had spent four days buried with eight dead comrades on top of him in a shell-destroyed trench.

The duty of a soldier is to wait. And while one is waiting, paralyzed, life goes on. Three Jotok raced around the corner, chattering in their pseudo-Hero's Tongue. Efficient hands rolled the kzinti over, removed their helmets and slit their throats. They stripped the corpses of weapons, piled the armored bodies in a neat barricade for Nora, reloaded her launcher, and propped her up facing down the L. Two of the beasts skittered away. The third remained just long enough to give her a shot of paralysis antidote effective for a kzin but no better than a bee sting for a human. Hands rearranged her trousers, and then he, too, was gone.

The duty of a soldier is to wait, soaked in the blood of an enemy, fingers unable to fire, praying that the fingers will come back to life before it is necessary to kill again.

Daddy had been burned alive.

Eventually Long-Reach arrived, arguing with himselves about how to help Nora. Three Jotoki carried her away for a bath by multitudinous arms. While her mouth was still only able to make the noises of a baby trying to discipline its tongue, she learned of their impossible victory.

Lieutenant Argamentine couldn't speak her joy but her eyes could leak. If General Fry could see me now, naked and being bathed by monster slaves!

Long-Reach was coming out her hair with three hands, caressing the auburn richness of it, fluffing it, adding proteins to it to give body. He knew how to take care of a pelt!

"Did… Mellow… Yellow… survive?"

"Slept through it all. Like a kit."

Nora grinned to herself. One to go! A half an hour later, when she could speak coherently, she suggested the deliberation of Mellow-Yellow.

Long-Reach was uneasy. The other Jotoki became somber in their fear. "Not now. First we clean up ship. Blood! Dents! Awful mess!"

Big(arm) added somberly, "He must never know."

Freckled(arm) shivered. "The rage if he finds out…"

"Lie to a kzin, and it's the torture chamber for you," said Nora knowingly.

"The mutiny never happened!" said Long-Reach adamantly. "All is as it was."

The Jotoki knew enough about gravity polarizers to alter course. They were almost at turnover by the time of the revolt and were doing a quarter of the velocity of light. They didn't try to decelerate. They just changed direction with deep space as their only destination.

One team spaced the kzin corpses. Each corpse was ejected violently by the polarizer field in a transient restabilization of the ship's energy and momentum balance. Other teams cleaned and scrubbed and repaired. Long-Reach slaughtered all Jotoki who were bonded to deceased kzin, dressing and storing them for Mellow-Yellow's table.

For the first time in millennia, the ancient conquerors of the barbarian warlords of Kzin-home commanded their own warship.