“We do have a gravity-engine,” she said. “The barge is a tug. It could turn us. With the delta-v we have plus the gravity-engine we could turn quite tightly and still keep enough velocity for the ramscoop to function. The Kzin use the gravity-fields to shield themselves from acceleration effects. We could do the same. The gravity-motor is damaged but we can repair it. Even with losing some delta-v that would give us the capacity to maintain constant one-G acceleration. In a year we would be back to .8 Light… or run our own drive and the Kzin engine together. If we can control the gravity-field we can accelerate as fast as may be without medical problems.”
They looked at her as though they might not be dead meat. Then Steve said:
“We can’t use a gravity-engine. We sent Earth all the specifications we could of the first ship’s engine. It is still stowed here in pieces.”
“Then we have two. Even better!”
“No. Hear me out, Selina. The engine we have was also initially damaged by our laser, although we salvaged all we could of it. We can describe most of the parts. We can film them and transmit the pictures. If Earth and the Belt believe us they can duplicate them. That’s all we can do. A steam engineer of five hundred years ago could have described the shape of the parts of a Bussard Ramjet, but do you think he could have understood it from that? I’m not saying repairing and operating them is beyond our intelligence but the technology is too different, given the time we’ve got.
“We have two damaged engines that we don’t know how to repair. We don’t even know how to make the tools to work on them. Even if we had an engine in one piece we can’t understand it. We can’t operate it. It’s like trying to build the Dean Drive. Tanj! Maybe it is the Dean Drive, or its descendant.
“Ours has melted parts, yours has holes in it. They have massive energy-containment fields and if we were to activate them without those fields fully functioning… well, that would be that.
“Oh, I grant you that perhaps we could learn, given years and research facilities and skilled teams. But we are a small specialized crew, and our colonists are frozen embryos. How many years do we have? We are getting deeper into Kzin space every moment.”
“Then it lies with Telepath and me,” Selina said. “He had Weapons-Officer’s knowledge. If he still has that, we have a chance.”
“If he still has it?”
“Telepathically-acquired knowledge decays much quicker than ordinary memories. Telepaths would go mad much more quickly otherwise. But he was in Weapons-Officer’s mind not long ago.
“I have some of it, thanks to the Bridge… Weapons Officer was working on gravity-motors. Between us we may be able to retrieve something.”
She was speaking in a peculiar mumbling monotone now, with the grating Kzin accent surfacing in it.
“But this makes it a bigger, harder thing than I thought. Rearranging his chemistry to cure his addiction—or to stop the withdrawal syndromes killing him—is complex enough, but it’s something the Kzin autodoc and I may be able to do, if I can give him psychic support through it. He/we knew that—Kzin reparatory medicine is good. But to do it without scrambling his addict-acquired memories as well… If I can reach him, talk him through it, you might say… but it’s much more than that… I haven’t the human words… But to cure him of his addiction without breaking the bridge… I feel it can be done—Telepaths have secrets and I know some of them now. But it’s not going to be easy.”
“If he’s still alive.”
“He’s still alive. If he were dead I can assure you I would know.”
Jim suppressed a shudder. This woman’s bonding to the cat made him physically disturbed.
Selina’s face was changing now. Color was draining from it. Her features were twisting into something like the Leonine Mask of leprosy. “But he’s sick. He’s very sick. He’s in great pain… He’s not strong enough. Urrr.”
“What should we do?”
“I must go back to the barge,” said Selina. “I should be as close to him as possible.”
Admiral’s Barge
Stars whirled above me. I entered a new space: a bowl like the arena at the training-crèche. And the cliffs.
I stood about it, and I knew they were minds to which I must cling.
The cliff of Zraar-Admiral’s mind. I clutched it, knowing he was dead, and felt my claws pass through empty air, as when they had tried, long ago at the crèche, to make a fighter of me. But they had taken me from the other kits and let me live, like the science-geniuses and other despised ones, for they saw that I was a Telepath (“You may be the greatest of us,” First Telepath had said, one sleep-time aboard Gutting Claw).
Something held me then. Was it something from Zraar-Admiral’s mind? Had I indeed touched the Dead?
“You are the closest to a warrior… hold yourself like a warrior then… fight like a warrior. Earn the compliment I paid you.”
Was it he? What was that other mind that held me like the mind of First Telepath? Or Karan?
“The way we were made was not the only way.”
I could not tell. Were they all come from Telepath’s poor sick mind?
And then, in the cliffs and tunnels, the running white lattices, and bare plain and the grass that was both the orange of Kzin and the green of Earth, I saw Selina coming towards Telepath, towards me, bending above me, and felt her holding me. And somewhere a yellow sun was rising.
GALLEY SLAVE
Jean Lamb
Dr. Marybeth Bonet swore softly to herself as she tried to get two different sets of computer codes disentangled from each other. If Lt. Thomas Dalkey hadn’t been so handsome, she would have killed him. He was navigator of the Cormorant, a heavily armed packet ship patrolling the edges of the solar system against the enemy. He’d earned a number of medals for courage and heroism defending human space against the sudden invaders. Unfortunately, he had also had the brilliant idea of tying the autochef into the main computer so it could be programmed from the bridge in emergencies. Why didn’t people read the manual?
She was used to this kind of thing. This wasn’t the first time she’d had to fix these little problems, especially since she’d designed a lot of the food programs in the first place. Admittedly, Dalkey hadn’t complained about the eternal diet of waffles the autochef now seemed to favor. He’d asked for help only when the roast beef and gravy sequence had showed up in the star charts. As a civilian expert, she was more used to hearing grumbling about the food.
Marybeth had three main options. One was to exercise her global search and destroy option and restore both computers to their original configuration through manual recovery procedures. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible in the middle of this mission, or she would never have been sent out here from Terra in the first place. The giant felines that called themselves the kzinti were an ever-present threat. As she thought about them, she bit her lip with anger. The human race had finally learned how to live with itself—and they came. They had disrupted everything in less than a generation. She glanced down at the knife she wore in its sheath on her thigh. Even that was a sign how far the kzinti had driven the humans out of their new Garden of Eden. Anything she could do to make the aliens pay was worth it. Granted, humans now had decent gravity systems on ship since adapting stolen kzinti ones—but it was a poor trade.
Her second option was to make Tom’s plan work without disrupting either system. There wasn’t enough time, though. She copied off his preliminary attempts, in case she could do something with them once she was back. The idea itself wasn’t so bad, but the execution needed work. Marybeth proceeded as swiftly as she could on her third option, which was to delete any extraneous material from both systems. She had already designed an override sequence to allow the autochef to accept new menu items now, while Dalkey had nearly cleaned out the nay computer. Unfortunately, the override sequence was rather unwieldy. If there was enough memory left, she could boil it down into a macro, or even install it to the normal add menu, then dump it once it was no longer needed.