Jean Lamb
Galley Slave
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 until 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 nav 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.
Marybeth closed down, sighed, then stripped in the small changing room next to the even tinier shower. If she was going to get sweaty, she’d rather do it with Tom Dalkey, and not slaving over a hot autochef! All the crew members had shown interest in her when she’d transferred to the Cormorant. Being recognizably female helped, though she sometimes wondered if that was an absolute requirement on a ship starved for new faces. Still, as a pale office blob she rarely got such attention except on temporary duty jaunts and she enjoyed it.
The only one she felt anything for, surprisingly enough, was Tom Dalkey, the handsome, dark-skinned navigator who’d caused the problem in the first place. It’d started as pure pheromones, but she wondered if it could be something more eventually. She’d liked the way he smiled at her when he ducked his head to get into the galley, and had learned to like everything else about him, too. She grinned to herself as she hung up the knife in its sheath by her clothes. She’d had to ‘accidentally’ forget it three times before Tom got brave enough to proposition her.
Her smile faded. Another social change chalked up to the kzinti. Leaving the Golden Age had put a lot of women right back where they’d started. Warrior instinct expressed itself at home as well as out in space. A compromise made in the region once known as the Pacific Northwest was to allow only women to have knives sharp enough to cut durasteel, easily spotted by the blue-green tinge of the metal on their edges, as if the rattlesnake sheath wasn’t enough. Fortunately the gossip shows adored focusing on the custom, while Detective Darla Dagger was the most popular character on Cascade Cop. It certainly saved time explaining things.
Marybeth snickered when she remembered the combination hygiene and knife-fighting class her and her friends had taken as young adolescents, known as “The Miracle of Life and How to Avoid It”. The Alderson boy had been lucky to lose only two fingers when he’d picked on the class wimpette after her first lesson… All the girls had thrown Jenny Hooks a party, once her and the boy had gone through the inquiry process. Jenny could have lost her right to carry the knife for up to three years if she’d done it maliciously. Marybeth remembered hearing about a woman who’d lost it for life after killing someone in a robbery.
She gently patted the knife’s hilt and draped her clothes over it. The one time she’d had to use it to defend herself, she’d thrown up afterwards. It still beat knowing she was at the mercy of anyone stronger than she was. Besides, the court had cleared her completely.
And it made wanting someone all that much more fun when she knew it was her idea!
She smiled to herself as she squeezed into the shower tube and turned on the water. If she positioned herself just right, the jets hit exactly where she meant them to. A pity these things weren’t big enough for two! Marybeth fantasized what she and Tom were going to do when the computers were all tucked in their beds. The hot, soapy water rushed over her body…
She heard an enormous bang. The shower’s emergency seal whirred shut. Marybeth hit her head on a sprayer as a jolt sent her into the wall. Some of the water turned pink as it ran into the recycler. The small compartment tilted all the way to the side, then righted itself. Just as well it was so small. The walls helped support her. She felt sick and dizzy as the gravity wobbled.
The door opened. A furred, clawed nightmare glared at her. She shrieked and hysterically cowered in the little room she had. An enormous, tufted paw reached in. She attacked it with her teeth and fingernails as she felt herself being pulled out. She got in one good bite, mostly a mouthful of fur, then was flung towards the bulkhead. She barely covered her head with her arms before she hit.
Marybeth collapsed as soon as she slid to the floor. Something warm and wet trickled down her shoulders. Perhaps if she played dead… She laid down with her face against the bulkhead. She heard screams and blaster fire. She just laid there for a while. The noise moved away. She moved her head carefully and cautiously looked around. Nobody was there. She stood up slowly. The walls kept blurring in front of her. She felt better when she closed her eyes and felt her way along. The galley was close. She knew her way around it well.
Marybeth opened her eyes when she turned the corner. An enormous furry horror with a rat-like tail squatted on the floor and gnawed on something. Something red and white. A few cloth scraps were by its feet. They were blue. The kzin picked up a watch, sniffed it, and tossed it on the floor. It was gold, like the one Tom Dalkey was so proud of. He’d gotten from his father when he’d graduated.
Part of her understood what had happened. She ducked into an empty storage locker and moaned softly to herself. Then she curled up into a ball and fled into unconsciousness.
Ship-Captain of the Claw conferred with his officers, as impatient as ever. Syet, the ship’s telepath, still had a headache from helping the others track down stray humans on the captured ship. Mental contact with ordinary humans was bad enough, but the human-rett in heat had been disgusting. He’d heard rumors that the alien females were always that way, but hadn’t believed them till now. No wonder their enemies were outbreeding the Hero’s Race.