Nyawk-Captain decided to take his prize, the Thrintun artifact, and return to Cat’s Paw in order to continue his mission. Success, victory, and lasting honor were all still possible!
After a stumbling kilometer, Cuiller finally collapsed into the leaf layer, half-afraid-but only half- that his body would find its way through to the long fall. His arm throbbed now with the pain and swelling of the break. He could feel a raw heat creep up to his neck from the wounds in his chest. Was he developing a fever?
“Sally…”
“Wait here, Jared.” Krater settled him across a solid branch and dug the remains of their autodoc out of her pack. She held up a vial of painkiller. “I’m guessing about the dosage,” she said, breaking open a needle and injecting twenty cc’s of clear fluid.
A few minutes after the shot, Cuiller roused himself. Already he was feeling warm and gauzy and… better.
“I should see to your arm,” Krater said.
“What’re you… gonna to do?”
“Set it, splint it, wrap it.”
“D’you ever-?“
“No.”
She examined his left arm, which angled slightly outward about halfway above the elbow. Before he could offer further advice, she gently extended the arm, placed her left palm against the front of his shoulder, curled her right thumb under his elbow, wrapped her fingers over his forearm, and-pulled.
White fire boiled up in his arm and he could actually feel the ends of bone clicking together. Then Cuiller passed out.
When he came to, Krater had already cut up one of the pack-frames with a laser and made L-shaped splints with it. She had used the pack straps to bind it to his arm and tied the pack-cloth into a sling. Now she was cutting his uniform away from the puncture marks in his chest and dabbing them with an astringent.
“Sorry I’ve got nothing for bandages,” she said. “But these holes don’t look that deep.”
“S’all right.”
“What do you think the kzin was trying to do?”
“Kill us,” he said with authority
“Then why did it leave so suddenly? With us not dead.”
“I don’t… Just before it pushed me, I seem to remember dropping the Fiddle.”
“It went through the leaves,” Krater agreed, “and fell.” “And the kzin went after it-as if he knew it was valuable.”
“Do you think he found it?”
The foliage around them rustled, and both humans tensed for a renewed attack. As Cuiller tried to lever himself more erect he stirred sharp pains in his arm and shoulder. Krater stilled him with her hand.
“It’s Fellah,” she said, pointing toward the small animal as it crept out of the leaf-cover near their feet. “The big cat must have scared him badly, too,” she concluded.
“Other kzin… it’s gone,” Fellah said.
“Did you see it go?” Sally asked. “I mean, how do you know?”
The Pruntaquilun raised its head, closed its eyes, and seemed to sniff the alt But Cuiller, who was watching closely, did not see the creature’s nose even twitch. Fellah’s attention was focused further back, behind his eyes, inside his skull.
“Gone,” Fellah confirmed.
“How does he know that?” Sally asked Cuiller.
“Well, how does he speak Interworld?” he asked in return. “Fellah must have some kind of telepathic sense, either innate or engineered. And it would certainly be a useful quality in a singer and entertainer, to read the minds, the emotional states of his audience. His language ability had improved remarkably just from being around us.”
“You’re saying he senses the kzin telepathically.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“He found his way right to us, didn’t he?”
“Okay, how ‘bout it, Fellah?” she asked playfully. “Do you read minds?” The Pruntaquilun looked at her seriously. “See words. Hear words.” It wiggled a shrug again.
“What is the kzin going to do next?” Cuiller asked.
“Kzin is gone.”
“Gone back to its ship? Gone from the planet? Where did it go?”
“Gone.”
Krater shook her head. ‘Jared, he doesn’t know anything about the ship, remember? And he probably doesn’t have much conception of planets and astronavigation.”
“Gone far.” Fellah said with a nod. “With prize for Admiral Lehruff. Continue his mission.”
“What’s that?” Cuiller said, fighting the fog of painkilling drugs in his head.
“Cat’s Paw… Mission to Margrave.”
“He’s reading the kzin’s thoughts directly,” Cuiller told Krater.
The linguist nodded. “I suppose we would, too-if we were a defenseless little dog hiding from those giant cats ”
“This could prove the Navy’s theories,” Cuiller went on. “Cat’s Paw. That’s probably some kind of inciting action, a deception or a fake, like a feint against a mousehole.”
“I think maybe you’re reading too much-”
“And what else would an interceptor-class warship be doing this far out?”
“On patrol? Like us?”
“Not with that kzin’s mission so deeply ingrained in his mind that Fellah can read it this clearly.”
“Kzinti are particularly dutiful,” Krater pointed out. “And this one is dutifully heading back toward Margrave. You heard that part, didn’t you, Sally?”
“Yes. That much was clear.”
“Then we have to stop him. Even if we can’t get off this planet ourselves, we have to keep that kzin pinned here.”
“Why?” she asked.
“it has the Slaver’s device, doesn’t it? That’s the power to control human and other minds, to make them do anything a kzin would want them to… Think about that for a minute.”
“All right, Jared,” she agreed. “But we have a problem: only two laser rifles and three kzinti to kill.”
“Two,” Fellah said. “Kiln the Daff fought, died soon after.”
“How do you know that for sure?” Krater asked. “You were with me all the time, and I didn’t see that.”
“His mind…“ The animal paused significantly. “Gone.”
“And not back to his ship, either,” Cuiller summed up. “That’s good news, Sally… Ahh-gahhh,” he yawned. “It makes the odds a little more even.” Gullet finished sleepily, finally succumbing to the painkillers. His arm felt a long way away.
“Those are armed kzinti you’re talking about,” Sally protested. “With a functioning warship to boot.”
He was already halfway down the well of sleep, but Cuiller roused. “Then the trick,” he said easily, “will be to separate them from their ship… before they can take off.” He yawned again.
The forest around him darkened as if with the flu of night, and Krater caught him as he fell into it as into abed.
“In any human army, that would be a field piece,” Cuiller observed.
After sleeping, recuperating, and moving on, he and Krater now hung inside the canopy, lost in the shadows of the curving, vaulting branches that ascended from one of the trunks. They looked down through holes in the greenery that they opened-slowly, naturally, like a riffle of wind-with their dangling toes. They were suspended above the kzinti ship, with a horizontal offset of less than fifty meters.
Cuiller studied the vessel with a pair of binoculars, working them one-handed. One of the kzinti was climbing on the outside, naked except for a beltful of tools, working with a mechanical fitting against the curve of the hull. The other, in full armor, stood watch. That one’s visored helmet moved across regular arcs of the canopy surrounding the ship, and each time he panned toward them, Cuiller let the veil of leaves slide smoothly into place.
It was the kzin’s massive rifle that had caught the commander’s attention: some kind of pulsed energy weapon.
“Can you sense them, Fellah?” he asked the small creature snuggled into Sally Krater’s arms. “How close are they to finishing repairs, hey?”
Fellah raised his head and looked gravely down, past their toes. He appeared to consider. “Repair Soon.”
Cuiller realized that the alien’s exposed white hair would make an effective aiming point for that cannon. And that gave him an idea.
“I think I can improve our odds with one shot,” he told Krater.
“How?”
“First, by splitting our positions and halving our vulnerabilities. I want you and Fellah to maneuver off to the west, around the ship. Put about twenty degrees of radial separation between us.”