“But then what are you going to do?”
“I think I can pick off the kzin who’s doing the work. Without breaking my cover.”
“You’ll get killed!” Sally said, alarmed. “That other one, in the armor-with the weapon he’s carrying, all he has to do is bear close on you. And poof!”
“It’s a big jungle.”
“He can take bigger sweeps with that thing,” she said. “Sure, but I’ll have time to get him with my second shot. In case he does a sweep, however, I want you in an alternate position… You can offer a diversion or something.”
“I don’t want you to risk yourself- sir! Look, why not wait for a Bandersnatch to come along? That’ll really keep him busy.”
“Because long before then the kzinti’ll be all finished up and ready to lift ship.”
“All right, Jared,” she said coolly. “If you won’t listen to reason, we’ll do it your way. But give me time to get in position.”
“Ten minutes?”
“Time enough. But not a minute sooner, you hear?”
“A full ten minutes, I promise.”
With a baleful look, she withdrew higher into the canopy, taking Fellah with her. Soon he could hear only the faint whirr of her rig’s winder motor.
As he waited, Cuiller spread the leaves below him and practiced taking aim with his rifle. Holding it steady in his right hand did not work, and he could not find a point of purchase on the cloth sling covering his left arm. Then he figured out a solution.
Cuiller worked his winder and rose into the forest cover until he could get his feet under him. Paying out slack, he took a loop of the fluorescent-dyed monofilament and wrapped it around the rifle housing. He would have to control the rifle’s tendency to lever up and slip the loop as he put his weight on the line, but he could do that with his right elbow. The only other danger was that the monofilament might cut into the weapon’s barrel and tear it apart A calculated risk.
Sally’s time limit was still a minute short of coming up when Cuiller lowered himself back into firing position. He had no intention of letting her offer any kind of diversion and so becoming a target herself.
Cuiller moved the rifle around, holding it steady with his armpit on the stock, sighting down the pips, to the forehead of the unarmed kzin. His body was tending to pivot on the looped line, so he braced his feet against the springy branches, the same ones that made up his concealment Then he gathered his concentration, breathed out slowly, and A spear of blue-white light stabbed down from twenty degrees away to his left and opened the kzin’s skull. She had fired first!
The kzin on guard wheeled and sighted his field piece back in the direction from which the beam had come-toward Sally!
Bobbling slightly on his line, Cuiller shifted his aim faster, immediately found a good side-on view of the aiming figure, and fired at the breech of the kzin’s rifle.
The weapon exploded.
When his weapon’s energy packs discharged all at once, Nyawk-Captain was thrown backward. The eyeshield of his visor flared white but saved his vision from flying shrapnel. His whiskers were singed below the limits of its protection, however, and the insides of his arms hurt terribly. He smelled and tasted burned hair.
Only when he tried to rise did he understand how critically the blast had injured him. His upper limbs moved slowly, and some of the armor’s joints worked not at all. Molten metal from the exploding weapon had locked them, dripping even as far as the knee flexor on his right side. He rolled in the dirt, trying to break out of the imprisoning bodysuit. The shell clasps up his belly line were sticking, too.
With a mammoth, flexing spasm of his back, he brought the armor upright on its knees and started to limp toward the ship’s hatchway and the relative safety inside the hull. There he would also find tools to help him get free of the imprisoning suit. With every step he took, Nyawk-Captain expected more energy pulses to blast away the ablative surface and heat the steel shell over his back.
When he got his locked paws on the hatch coaming, he remembered the impossible squeeze that moving into and out of the airlock had been, even with fully functioning armor. He wasn’t going to make it.
He was beating the suit’s belly against hullmetal, trying to break the clasps free, when one of the humans dropped out of the trees on a thin, purple wire and put the projector of a laser rifle against his forehead. A small, fluffy white animal which curled under one of its arms jumped free and scrambled into the ship.
Nyawk-Captain, staring into the human’s glaring eyes, did not dare move.
After a second, the white animal came out with the Thrintun artifact held in its jaws. Nyawk-Captain remembered leaving the device on the ship’s workbench for his and Navigator’s further study. As the animal emerged, a second human-this one more wounded than the first-came down on another wire and also leveled its rifle.
The first human put aside its own weapons, took the alien artifact from the White fluff, and aimed it at Nyawk-Captain’s forehead instead.
Krater tried various settings on the Fiddle and watched with a clinical eye as the kzin twitched and went into convulsions. She settled on one which left it trembling and hypnotized inside its steel restraints.
“This process can either be painful or not,” Cuiller explained to the kzin slowly in Interworld. “I don’t think it understands, Sally,” he said finally.
“Well, if I let up with this thing,” she proposed, “he might be able to nod or something. Want to try it?”
“No thanks. You keep him under.” Cuiller turned back to the kzin and said conversationally, “Now, we need to borrow your ship, Kitty I’m going to burn you out of that armor, and you’re going to cooperate-one way or another.”
Cuiller studied the latches down the suit’s front. They were gobbed with metal and streamers of burned plastic. He placed the projector of his laser alongside the middle one and fired a short burst. The clasp flew off into the dirt. He repeated with the other two, and the clamshell halves of the belly plate sagged apart The commander then laid the rifle against the soft, reddish fur underneath.
“Slowly,” he told the kzin.
The warrior shrugged massively, withdrawing its arms from the crabbed gauntlets, vambraces, rerebraces, and pauldrons. It divided its attention between Cuiller’s aim with the rifle and Krater’s hold on the Fiddle.
Krater twisted something, and the kzin’s eyes crossed. Its hands moved sideways, too fast for Cuiller to react. He almost opened the massive chest with a burst before he understood that the Fiddle had prompted that sudden movement.
“Keep working on it,” Cuiller told her, “I think you’re getting somewhere. I hope he’s either captain or navigator of this interceptor, because that’s the only way he’ll be able to help us.”
Then inspiration struck.
“Hey, Fellah!” Cuiller called.
The tiny alien was dwarfed by the huge warcat, but he glanced up at the commander with some confidence.
“Talk to the kzin,” Cuiller told him. “Get inside his mind. See words-say words. Tell him we need his ship, need him. Take us to Margrave. Tell him Margrave. He can do it the easy way or bard. But one way or another, he’s going to rake us to Margrave.”
Fellah looked at Cuiller with his big, dark eyes gleaming out from among the white hair. The commander sensed that the alien understood what he meant. After a moment, Fellah turned to the kzin and began to growl and spit in a timbre that was no more suited to his delicate, curling tongue than Interworld was.
Through his sudden pain and the sensory confusion that the Thrintun artifact had thrust upon him, Nyawk-Captain was catching only a fraction of the humans’ speech and understanding even less. Still, the gestures with the rifle were significant. He did hear the word “Margrave,” which as the proper name for a human-dominated planet was common to both Inter-world and his own language.
Then the Whitefluff began speaking in the Hero’s Tongue.