Bigs bristled, swelling up to a third again his size; his ears folded back.
“They are monkeys,” he growled back; the sound was a steady urrreeuueeerree beneath the modulations of his words. The Menacing Tense in Imperative Mode.
“That monkey crawled into the darkness to rescue you as you lay helpless,” Spots said; he stood higher, unwilling to let Bigs’ height give him dominance. All eight claws on his hands were out. “Blood for blood.”
They began to circle, tails rigid. “What of our duty to the Patriarch?” Bigs spat.
“Our first duty to the Patriarch is to be Heroes,” Spots replied. “Heroes do not break their solemn oath!”
They both sank on their haunches for the final leap. Then Bigs let his fur fall and looked aside.
“There is a true trail among the prints of your words,” he admitted with sullen reluctance. Earth rumbling and the walls closing around—“If the monkey… if Jonah-human refuses to let us leave with the data, I will challenge him to honorable single combat.”
Spots straightened suspiciously; he sniffed with his jaw open and licked his nose for a second try.
“I smell reservations. They smell stronger than a dead kshat,” he warned. “Be sure, I will not permit less. No under-the-grass killing. And if you duel Jonah-human, you must preserve his head for the Ancestral Museum of our line.”
“Agreed. We shall all act as Heroes. Even the Jonah-human.”
Spots’ pelt rippled in a shrug. “We quarrel over the intestines of a prey that grazes yet,” he said. “So far, all we have is an impenetrable mystery.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“What did you do?” Spots demanded, springing back and bruising his tail against a timber upright. He rubbed at it absently, eyes locked on the tnuctipun spacecraft with the same intent longing that they might have fixed on a zianya bound in the blood trough of a feasting table.
“I did nothing,” Bigs said.
Jonah grunted, and Hans whistled softly. For the better part of a week, nothing. And now the stasis field had vanished, seemingly of its own accord.
The hull had turned… translucent, as well. Much of the interior seemed to be packed solid with equipment of various sorts; none of it familiar, although he thought he recognized something like the wave-guides of a gravity polarizer. If it’s that small, and can lift this ship, it’s better than anything we or the kzin can make, he thought. Nothing this size could make space on its own—the power-plant alone would be too large—and nothing this size could possibly mount a superluminal drive, from what little was publicly known about them. On the other hand, nothing humans or kzinti knew would stand three billion years of immersion in liquid metal, either.
“Tnuctipun,” he whispered, awed. In the center of the forward bulge was a capsule, and inside that he could dimly see the outline of a body inside a cocoon of tubes and wires.
Small, was his first thought. He knew from his time on the thrintun ship Ruling Mind that tnuctipun were small; they had built that thrintun vessel, and many of the crawlspaces were too cramped for a human to enter. Long limbs in proportion to the body, and twelve digits, longer and more jointed than human fingers. Another indication; there was a rough correlation between manual dexterity and the length of time a species had been sentient. Dolphins and bandersnatch were exceptions, of course. Overall he thought it would come to about his waist standing erect, but the arms were as long as his. A single nostril in the long snout, ahead of an even longer swelling of braincase; a pattern of holes on either side of the head that might correspond to ears, or might not; two large eyes and a smaller one set where the forehead would be if there was one. The eyelids closed side-to-side rather than up and down.
I’m the first human ever to see a tnuctipun, Jonah thought, slightly dazed. He stepped forward, acutely conscious of the smell of his own sweat, of the ginger scent of the kzin. They were staying well back; not that they were more fearful than he, just less driven by curiosity.
“It’s hurt,” he said, peering closely with his hands on the absolute smoothness of the hull; it was an odd sensation, the palms always trying to slip away.
Whatever the tnuctipun was floating in was liquid, and reddish blood was hazing the egg-shaped chamber; it thinned and flowed away as he watched. An autodoc, he realized. Doubling as a pilot’s crash couch. Some small scoutcraft and atmosphere flyers used that arrangement, with a high-oxygen liquid for breathing. A body with open air spaces inside it was much more vulnerable to acceleration than one whose lungs were solidly filled with incompressible liquid. Why bother if they had gravity polarizers? he wondered. Then: ah. Gravity waves were detectible, and the ones from a polarizer much more so than the natural variety. A clandestine operations craft, no doubt. The tnuctipun had probably been a spy, and the ship designed to slip onto thrintun-held planets during the war of the Revolt. Jonah was willing to bet a great deal that the hull material was superlatively stealthed, as well as near-as-no-matter invulnerable.
“You realize what this means?” he said, looking at the others. “It means we four are potentially the richest beings in known space.”
“Means we could all lose our heads, hearts and testicles when the gov’mint gets its claws on us,” Hans said dourly. The kzin both snapped their jaws shut: We are meat.
“We certainly are if Markham or the ARM get hold of us,” Jonah mused.
And the bleeping ARM wouldn’t even use this stuff particularly now we’re beating the pussies. At that thought his head came up, raking his eyes across the kzin. Both returned his glance blandly, looking aside in carnivore courtesy. The Patriarchy would use it, he knew. Kzinti had never been able to afford antitech prejudice; they had less natural inventiveness than humans to begin with. Tanj. And we were ready to kill each other over gold, much less this.
A voice spoke in his ear, in the Hero’s Tongue: “What did you do?”
Jonah jumped backwards; then he noticed everyone else around the spacecraft had done likewise; the Kzinamaratsov brothers were whirling in place, trying to find whatever was speaking beside their ears.
“It’s hurt,” the voice said, in Wunderlander with a trace of Sol Belt accent. The wet sound of kzin jaws closing on air followed.
The kzin were bristling. “Haunted weapons,” Spots said, snapping twice.
“Translator program,” Jonah said. “The systems are active, if not the pilot. It’s trying to talk to us.” It was vibrating the air beside their ears somehow, not too startling compared to the rest of the technology.
“That is beyond my parameters,” the computer said. “I must consult my operator before I can make further judgments.”
Jonah opened his mouth to reply, and found himself croaking. A startled glance outside showed darkness.
“We’d better knock it off for a while,” he said. Nerve wracking work.
Especially when the translator program had spent an hour trying to find out which side they were on in the tnuctipun-thrintun war; it seemed to have a bee in its bonnet about that, understandably enough. He strongly suspected that it also had a self-destruct subroutine, and would engage it if it ‘thought’ that they were part of a thrint slave-species. The type of suicide bomb available to a culture whose basic energy source was matter conversion did not bear thinking of. You could tell a good deal about the people who designed an infosystem by talking to one of their programs, and there was a pristine ruthlessness to this one that even the kzin found chilling.