Bondarevsky shook his head. “Not stupid,” he said. “You may have just proved that we can get along with the Cats…if we find a common cause that’s good enough.”
“Yeah, maybe so. They’re not near as bad as they’re portrayed in the propaganda back home, either. Sure, they’re tough, and they don’t think like we do, but there’re a few of them I’d gladly trust my life to. Have, in fact, several times over the last few months.” Graham took another long swig from his cup. “Anyway, their leader turned out to be this youngster, Murragh. He came out to meet me on the open field away from the crash site, and even though he tried to bluster he sounded like a scared kid even through the computer translation. I think it had all been just too much for him to take in, the fight, the mess planetside, his first command…he seemed relieved to find out he didn’t have to fight to the death like a hero out of one of the Kilrathi Codices. We struck a deal. Both sides would share the resources we had available-our manpower and their wreckage, basically-and we agreed that we’d pledge to let the other side return home if our side was the one that found us first. There’ve been a few clashes, of course, but I’ve seen as much fighting between members of the same species, human against human or Cat against Cat, as I’ve seen between the two groups. Mostly we don’t have time for that crap. We’re too busy trying to keep everybody alive.“
Bondarevsky frowned. “You could have some problems with your deal, Graham,” he said quietly. “The Landreichers might not think they have to honor an agreement struck between Cats and Terrans. Neither group’s too high on their list of favorites right about now.”
“You don’t think there’ll be trouble, do you?” Graham put down his cup and stared at Bondarevsky as if he’d grown another head. “I’ve given my word, sir. And that means everything to these people.”
“I’ll do what I can. I’ve had…a certain amount of experience making Max Kruger do the right thing. But it might take some time. Help me explain it to the Cats when we’re organizing the evacuation.”
“But what’s the trouble? The war’s over, isn’t it?”
“You’re pretty well up on current events for a castaway, aren’t you?” Bondarevsky asked, eyeing him with interest.
“We managed to put together a hypercast receiver out of comm systems from the destroyer and our shuttles. Not a very good one, and we never had hopes of getting enough power to rig a transmitter planetside, but we could pick up traffic from both sides of the border when the atmospherics were just right and all our fingers were crossed. We heard about Kilrah.”
“Any trouble?”
“Some mutterings. Fortunately the bulk of the able-bodied Kilrathi were Cadre from the carrier, hand-picked specialists loyal to the hrai of Nokhtak. They didn’t care a whole hell of a lot for Thrakhath or the Emperor, and the general consensus seemed to be that whatever those two had brought down on Kilrah was their own damned fault. Some of the survivors from the fighter crews and the destroyer were a little less philosophical. Several killed themselves, messy show and I thought that might get the others going but Murragh calmed ’em down. He’s got a great future in politics, that kid. Knew just how to push their buttons.“
“Well, the war is over, at least as far as the Confederation’s concerned. But there’s a Kilrathi warlord named Ragark stirring up trouble on the border, and the Landreich’s getting ready to fight back. So around here things haven’t changed much, peace treaty or not, and your Cats will be treated as hostiles no matter how cooperative they’ve been with you.” Bondarevsky sipped his own tea. “Like I said, I’ll do what I can. Your bunch sounds reasonable. I doubt they’ll want to throw in with Ragark. But if we can get back to business, tell me this. What were you people doing making runs out to that derelict with your shuttle missing half its systems?”
Graham shrugged. “Scavenging run. We used to make them regularly, gathering up supplies and gear we thought we could use planetside. One by one, though, our shuttles have been giving out on us. Even with the junk we’ve brought back from the flight decks of the Karga we can’t keep a proper maintenance schedule on them, and spending so much time exposed to the brown dwarf’s weird radiation, even with shields, has taken its toll on our electronics. The bird we were on this morning was the last one running, and it took over a month to get it back in service after we tore apart all the others for spare parts. We don’t have decent sensors, a working commlink, or any of the original weapons mounts. We had to do our course calculations on a jury-rigged Kilrathi wrist computer and then feed the data into the navigation system manually, and at that we had to hope our figures for the Karga’s orbit were close enough to put us in the ballpark.“
“You thought there was something on board valuable enough to take that kind of risk? I’d’ve thought you would have stripped all of the important stuff a long time back.”
“He’s a big ship,” Graham answered, using the Kilrathi masculine pronoun for the carrier without even seeming to notice. “And the most important thing was to try to get our transmitter back on-line.”
Bondarevsky remembered the report of a garbled signal picked up from the hulk when Vision Quest first investigated the system. “So you did get a hypercast system up and running.”
“Well, not very successfully, I’m afraid,” Graham said. “Had to cobble the whole thing together to run off of one of the emergency power circuits, and we could never get enough juice into it to do much. The background radiation pretty much jammed the signal most of the time, and the transmitter went down a few days after we got it running anyway. But by that time we weren’t flying anything, so there wasn’t much we could do about it.”
“Couldn’t you get the mains back on-line to get the power you needed?” Bondarevsky asked. If a Confederation engineer working with Kilrathi Cadre couldn’t even bring one of the primary generators back on-line to supply power for a comparatively minor subsystem, it looked more doubtful than ever that the Karga could be salvaged as a spaceworthy fighting ship.
“Never tried,” Graham said. “Nobody wanted to take the risk.”
“Risk?”
“Yeah. Look, the Cats rigged that carrier to blow. Computer self-destruct system. As far as Druvakh-that’s the Cadre Computer Officer-could tell, the computer went off-line a few seconds before detonation. There’s a good chance that the destruct command will kick in if the computer net reboots, so we’ve been staying as far away from the power and computer systems as possible. Even then, it’s scary, let me tell you. You don’t know what might make some back-up system kick in and start the countdown up right at the point where the computers crashed. Hell, didn’t you guys have that figured out yet? You were on board him.“
“You mean that thing is ready to blow?” Bondarevsky surged to his feet, hastening across the wardroom to the intercom terminal near the door. He stabbed at the keyboard, entering the code combination with savage haste. A face appeared on the screen.
“Comm Duty Officer,” the man said, sounding bored.
“This is Bondarevsky,” he said. “Get me a channel to Admiral Richards on the derelict, pronto.”