Only when this runt of a stillborn star was hugely round in the sky did they spot a whole ship. It rose over the roiling reds of R’hshssira, clearly of kzinti design, spherical, huge, motherly, with all the grappling accouterments of a floating drydock. The Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch. They knew what they were looking for.
The Wunderkind captain kept weapons trained from a distance while adjusting velocity
“Wrong radiation characteristics for an active ship,” said one of Yankee’s men from the sensor couch.
The captain was now asking for suggestions. He craned his head toward Yankee. “How close do you want to get?”
“It’s all right to keep your distance. No hurry. She looks dead. But I’m not assuming she is dead.” She could be dead but boobytrapped. He was hoping for crazy luck, hoping that the Shark would be there in the Bitch’s womb. He didn’t expect that kind of luck.
They tried hailing the ship on all kzinti communication frequencies. Nothing. If she wasn’t dead, she was playing dead.
“We could send our kzin over,” came a voice in their helmet phones.
“Not a chance!” Yankee snapped. “That hairy fighting machine stays confined!” He sent over two marines in armor with robot inspection ants, little hand-sized creatures that were programmed with the curiosity to crawl everywhere and record everything.
They were three hours reaching the ship and boarding. It was routine-but the long suspense kept everyone on edge and on alert.
“All their shuttles are gone,” reported one marine in a tinnyvoice. Five minutes later the second marine reported that there was no Shark and no air. That was the last move they made for eight hours while the robo-ants sniffed about, crawled in holes, zoomed down corridors, disassembled light fixtures and air ducts. Bits of news came in from ant sensors. No food stores. Hibernation locks empty. Fuel tanks empty. Atmosphere rechargers dead. Gravitic polarizers dead. The ship had been abandoned.
Only then did Yankee take the trip himself. His team’s headlamps found things that the robo-ants were not programmed to sense. In the airlock, which had no air to recycle, some desiccated leaves turned out to be Jotok fodder. On the floor of the empty spacesuit locker, Yankee found a kzin’s currying brush, worn out at one end, still clogged with kzin fur.
Bolder penetration took them for a quick glide along cold corridors of unhoused pipes and snaking power cables and gravityless catwalks. Their marine escorts loped ahead of them, lamps off, weapons ready, covering each other, signaling them forward, signaling them to freeze. When the group came to the unpowered bridge, its outer-armor was rolled open to the sky with interior layout illuminated dandy by the ruddy rays of R’hshssira. White beamlight from human heads moved silhouettes across the command center. It was jerry-rigged for operation by one kzin. Interesting. The ship had been ordered into battle with a full crew.
A scanning search by beamlight across the shadows found a porcelain fragment of a long-necked bird that had once been part of a unique Wunderland piece-a war trophy which had not survived the war. Navigation instruments were set up ready to be used. The team’s kzinti electronics expert found the command brains, wiped. In the snack-bar there wasn’t even a stick of kzinti jerky. Monkey curiosity caused Yankee to punch a button that normally provided drink. Nothing. But underneath the tap was the top of a human child’s skull that had been converted to a drinking cup.
Moving on, they located the main machine shops. Some of the tools had been ripped out. The quality of the tools was amazing. But that’s the way the kzinti fought. They couldn’t call home for spare parts. They had to build them while the battle was going on. These tools weren’t instruments for mass production. They were versatile, designed to turn out one of a kind of anything.
“Hey, sir. Come here. Some of this stuff isn’t kzinti scrap.”
He swung his beam toward the stalls and went in. They were looking at racks for old parts to be rebuilt or replaced.
His engineer was pointing with his beam. “These neatly cataloged pieces are right off the Shark. They’re badly damaged pieces. Frame, not motor. The Shark must have taken some heavy hits. It wouldn’t be operational after that kind of damage.”
“Could the crew have survived?”
“Dunno. You can die by breathing a rose petal into your windpipe and you can be standing in just the right place when a nuke goes off. The Shark was the smallest hyperdrive ship made. There would be injuries.”
He was trying to imagine his cousin under attack. She had survived. His kzin had verified that. But how much did the kzinti know about healing humans? How much did they care? How long would an injured prisoner last? A day? A week? Sixteen years?
Reluctantly he turned back to the tools. He loved his cousin. Still she wasn’t his primary concern-never forget the hypershunt. The tools all about him were of extraordinary sophistication; given clever hands, were they enough to rebuild a hyperdrive motor? He doubted it, but you never knew.
Leave that question for a later team. Now there was a ship to explore.
They explored. One tiny room was equipped as a torture chamber. A hot needle of inquiry Restraints. Nerve-stim. Stretchers. Desocketers. A strip skin-flayer. He had to leave the room in a rage. Poor Nora. Then, in what had once been a storage area, human-sized cages were locked together. His horror increased.
In another place they found slave quarters with the kind of climbing-bar furniture you might associate with tree dwellers. Jotoki again. Yankee nodded. ‘That solves the mystery of how one kzin could operate a ship like this. He had a Jotoki crew. Does anyone know anything about those beasts?”
“Major Clandeboye, sir.” The voice of one of the marines resonated from his phones. “On your starboard, sir. Take a look at this.”
It looked like a prison. It hadn’t been built with the ship. Extra plates had been welded into place, armor plating. The surface was plastered with alarm electronics.
“Well, well, well,” said Yankee. “Whatever fiend was held in there was something that terrified the fur off a kzin.” He laughed. “Maybe we shouldn’t open it.”
“There’s no air in there, sir. Nothing could be alive.”
“If it would scare a kzin, maybe it doesn’t need air.”
“Sir, this is no time for ghost stories. I’m edgy enough as it is.”
One of the marines replied, a touch of a smile to his voice. “Nothin to worry a man. By the size of the room- whatever’s in there-it just cain’t be no bigger’n ten kzin, if that”
“Can you crack it?” Yankee asked his electronics man. He was staring at the floor-to-ceiling lock.
The men waited silently, listening to each other breathe over the phones while their expert probed with his instruments.
“Sorry sir. That’s secure. From both sides. Maybe it’s not a jail. Maybe it’s a vault. We need a safe cracker. Gonna have to bring in some torches.”
A weapons man popped over from the frigate and cut a neat hole out of the door, leaving hinges and lock in place. The width of the cut was less than a millimeter and its depth was regulated by a sonic signal so that the electron cutting beam wouldn’t fly what was inside. Yankee made the mistake of having to look in first. He was rudely moved out of the way by a marine sergeant. “Sir, where there’s monsters, its my job to show head.” He took a peek in, weapon at the ready. “Finagle’s Dropping Jaw!” was all the sergeant could say.
Yankee got the second look. It was a woman’s boudoir.
He just stood there in the hole not believing what he was seeing. It’s her, he thought.