“About a five-minute transmission lag either way, at the present positions. A longer chain-of-command lag, I’ll bet. Leave the intercom on for me, please, but just for the sake of my curiosity. You can talk to them as well as I can.”
“There isn’t a lot to say,” Carita agreed.
Yoshii was in the galley when he heard the computer-generated voice: “Werlith-Commandant addressing you directly. Identify yourselves.”
“Carita Fenger, Juan Yoshii, of the ship Rover, stuck on Prima—on Planet One. Your crew has seen us. I suppose they realize our plight. We’re being… swallowed. Please take us off. If your vessel here can’t do it, please dispatch one that can. Over.”
Silence hummed and rustled. Yoshii kept busy.
He was returning when the voice struck again: “We lost two boats with a total of eight heroes aboard before we established the nature of the peril. I will not waste time explaining it to you. Most certainly I will not hazard another craft and more lives. On the basis of observations made by the crew of Sun Defter, if you keep energy output minimal you have approximately five hundred hours left to spend as you see fit.”
A click signaled the cutoff.
Werlith-Commandant had been quite kindly by his lights, Yoshii acknowledged.
He entered the control cabin. “I’m sorry, Carita,” he said.
She rose and went to meet him. Starlight guided her through shadows and glinted off her hair and a few tears. “I’m sorry too, Juan,” she gulped.
“Now let’s both of us stop apologizing. The thing has happened, that’s all. Look, we can try a broadcast that maybe they’ll pick up in Shep, so they’ll know. They won’t dare reply, I suppose, but it’s nice to think they might know. First let’s eat, though, and have a couple of drinks, and talk, and, and go to bed. The same bed.”
He lowered his tray to the chart shelf “I’m exhausted,” he mumbled.
She threw her arms around him and drew his head down to her opulent bosom. “So’m I, chum. And if you want to spend the rest of what time we’ve got being faithful, okay. But let’s stay together. It’s cold out there. Even in a narrow bunk, let’s be together while we can.”
The sun in the screen showed about half the Soldisc at Earth. Its light equaled more than 10,000 full Luna’s, red rather than off-white but still ample to make Secunda shine. The planetary crescent was mostly yellowish-brown, little softened by a tenuous atmosphere of methane with traces of carbon dioxide and ammonia. A polar cap brightened its sintered northern hemisphere, a shrunken one the southern. The latter was all water ice, the former enlarged by carbon dioxide and ammonia that had frozen out. These two gases did it everywhere at night, most times, evaporating again by day in summer and the tropics, so that sunrises and sunsets were apt to be violent. Along the terminator glittered a storm of fine silicate dust mingled with ice crystals.
The surface bore scant relief, but the slow rotation, 57 hours, was bringing into view a gigantic crater and a number of lesser neighbors. Probably a moon had crashed within the past billion years; the scars remained, though any orbiting fragments had dissipated. A sister moon survived, three-fourths Lunar diameter, dark yellowish like so many bodies in this system.
Thus did Tregennis interpret what he and Ryan saw as they sat in Rover’s saloon watching the approach. Data taken from afar, before the capture, helped him fill in details. Talking about them was an anodyne for both men. Markham entered. Silence rushed through like a wind.
“I have an announcement,” he said after a moment.
Neither prisoner stirred.
“We are debarking in half an hour,” he went on. “I have arranged for your clothing and hygienic equipment to be brought along. Including your medication, Professor.”
“Thank you,” Tregennis said flatly.
“Why shouldn’t he?” Ryan sneered. “Keep the animals alive till the master race can think of a need for them. I wonder if he’ll share in the feast.”
Markham’s stiffness became rigidity. “Have a care,” he warned. “I have been very patient with you.”
During the 50-odd hours of 3-g flight—during which Hraou-Captain allowed the polarizer to lighten weight—he had received no word from either, nor eye contact. To be sure, he had been cultivating the acquaintance of such kzinti among the prize crew as deigned to talk with him. “Don’t provoke me.”
“All right,” Ryan answered. Unable to resist: “Not but what I couldn’t put up with a lot of provocation myself, if I were getting paid what they must be paying you.”
Markham’s cheekbones reddened. “For your information, I have never had one mark of recompense, nor ever been promised any. Not one.” Tregennis regarded him in mild amazement. “Then why have you turned traitor?” he asked.
“I have not. On the contrary—” Markham stood for several seconds before he plunged. “See here, if you will listen, if you will treat me like a human being, you can learn some things you will be well advised to know.” Ryan scowled at his beer glass, shrugged, nodded, and grumbled, “Might as well.”
“Can you talk freely?” Tregennis inquired.
Markham sat down. “I have not been forbidden to. Of course, what I have been told so far is quite limited. However, certain kzinti, including Hraou-Captain, have been reasonably forthcoming. They have been bored by their uneventful duty, are intrigued by me, and see no immediate threat to security.”
“I can understand that,” said Tregennis dryly.
Markham leaned forward. His assurance had shrunk enough to notice. He tugged his half-beard. His tone became earnest: “Remember, for a dozen Earth-years I fought the kzinti. I was raised to it. They had driven my mother into exile. The motto of the House of Reichstein was ’Ehre-’ well, in English, ’Honor Through Service.’ She changed it to ’No Surrender.’ Most people had long since given up, you know. They accepted the kzin order of things. Many had been born into it, or had only dim childhood memories of anything before. Revolt would have brought massacre. Aristocrats who stayed on Wunderland—the majority—saw no alternative to cooperating with the occupation forces, at least to the extent of preserving order among humans and keeping industries in operation. They were, apt to look on us who fought as dangerous extremists. It was a seductive belief. As the years wore on, with no end in sight, more and more members of the resistance despaired. Through the aristocrats at home they negotiated terms permitting them to come back and pick up the pieces of their lives. My mother was among those who had the greatness of spirit to refuse the temptation. ’No Surrender.’”
Ryan still glowered, but Tregennis said with a dawn of sympathy, “Then the hyperdrive armada arrived and she was vindicated. Were you not glad?”
“Of course,” Markham said. “We jubilated, my comrades and I, after we were through weeping for the joy and glory of it. That was a short-lived happiness. We had work to do. At first it was clean. The fighting had caused destruction. The navy from Sol could spare few units; it must go on to subdue the kzinti elsewhere. On the men of the resistance fell the tasks of rescue and relief.
“Then as we returned to our homes on Wunderland and many others for the first time in our lives—we found that the world for whose liberation we had fought, the world of our vision and hope, was gone, long gone. Everywhere was turmoil. Mobs stormed manor after manor of the ’collaborationist’ aristocrats, lynched, raped, looted, burned—as if those same paroles had not groveled before the kzinti and kept war production going for them! Lunatic political factions rioted against each other or did actual armed combat.