One almost had to be raised as the spoiled son of a W’kkai lord to have the energy to deal with female demands.
Her response to his musings, obviously cast in her direction, came as a tilt of the head and a raunchy smell from the erect fur of her haunches. A female always understood something but never what was meant. Absently he turned his great orange-yellow head out over the ridge and the bushes that clung there in the wind. He flapped his fan-like ears. He spoke forcefully to the God of Air and Wind and Smell. “With my own eyes I found the W’kkai star in the firmament and dreamed, wishing myself here.” His voice chose for its message the Mocking Tense with which the Hero’s Tongue derided victims.
First he had escaped from Hssin to Wunderland, joining the armada of Chuut-Riit. Then after the disastrous Battle of Wunderland, after slinking back to Hssin at less than light speed with a captured UNSN scout, he had scrabbled through its war-smashed ruins for twelve years, talking to ghosts—like he talked to his wives now— repairing the damaged hyperdrive unit, despairing of a second chance to escape gloomy R’hshssira, rejoicing when the opportunity came. Rejoicing when he reached fabled W’kkai.
That which is possessed is never as important as that which is lacking. Had it always been thus? In brief reverie he flashed on a peaceful hunt through the forested caves and domes of Hssin’s Jotok Run, a day he could never have again. He remembered his passion to escape the claustrophobic horror that had once been his birth world, but the memory no longer carried passion. It only reminded him of a smelly UNSN cabin stuffed with slaves and a cantankerous hypershunt motor and the irony of picking W’kkai as his destination. Nothing was easy.
The trouble he had taken to get himself transferred from that prison to this prison!
The warrior Grraf-Nig was more and more certain that the Lords of W’kkai were holding him as a guest prisoner—and didn’t want him to know about it. He had tested his hypothesis delicately, in ways too subtle for his enemies to detect. Grraf-Nig had expected better—he had expected adulation, exposed throats even—but he had arrived here with mere slaves, with Jotoki and human slaves, not a warrior among them, and so he should have anticipated an unpleasant fate. No matter that he had also arrived with an extraordinary prize of his; one of the humans’ fearsome spacedrives that shunted their ships through hyperspace.
It wasn’t enough. To the W’kkaikzin he was Trainer-of-Slaves, though they did not dare call him that to his face. His claws unsheathed. He suspected that once his stolen machine had been duplicated by W’kkai’s naturalists and engineers, he would be no more than chopped zianya liver, an outcast kzin who had wandered into the wrong hunting park. W’kkai was not his territory. He had no territory.
Hssin was irretrievably gone.
His mouth twitched to show his fangs while he recalled how Hssin had been destroyed by the raping monkeys. He owed it to those tree apes to blacken the stars with a fleet that would convert every human warren into a hunting park. But his plan was going awry.
The W’kkai thought it would be their fleet breaking the blockade and humbling mankind. Well and good—but they also thought it would be their grand fleet which would humble the present Patriarch. They thought a reinvigorated Patriarchy would rise from the grass of W’kkai. They were dreaming a monopoly of hyperdrive power. He could taste it; he could smell it. They were dreaming of dominance for W’kkai. There it was, a raw wound: the need to dominate, coexistent with the necessity to submit—the bane of all kzinti.
Ships of the Patriarch had been collecting taxes from the W’kkaisun system for longer than humankind had known the nature of their sky and—for as long—the nobles of W’kkai had resented parting with those taxes. Why should the culturally superior world of W’kkai deliver their wealth to degenerate Father Eaters! Now W’kkai physicists were examining the only hyperdrive ship in kzinti claws. For the first time in their history they had the longer swipe. And Grraf-Nig was in an ideal position to catch glimpses of their response. They were recklessly planning to build a fleet of warships that the Patriarch’s admirals couldn’t match. They were, in fact, building it.
Self deceivers! Only once during the war had they fought! Their local naval collision with a light reconnaissance of fighting ships from Procyon during the Humiliation had been bloated into an Epic Saga. The haughty W’kkai Warriors of this minor skirmish, led by Si-Kish, remembered themselves as the Heroes who had saved W’kkai. In fact they were losers. Had they witnessed the Battle of Wunderland they would not be so eager to throw together their fleet of hyperdrive ships and defy the infamous MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty without even bothering to inform the Patriarch whose very life might be sacrificed by their impetuousness.
In a universe of sub-light warships, it was the duty of a Conquest Commander to act independently, of necessity informing the Patriarch of his heroic deeds only later through laggard time; at sub-light speeds the Patriarch could not be involved in time-sensitive decisions. But Grraf-Nig was uneasy about applying such a doctrine to a battlespace dominated by hypercraft. It seemed to him that warfare had been redefined.
Grraf-Nig found himself strangely loyal to the Patriarch. Why? He didn’t know. On the tiny frontier backworld of Hssin, the Patriarch had been a distant myth. Nobody on Hssin had ever shown their throats to the Patriarchy, they’d hardly been touched by taxes, and they had been blind to its splendor until the fleet of Chuut-Riit had passed through on the way to Wunderland. Still, distant as Kzin had always been, a lowly slave-trainer could not help but envisage W’kkai ambition as the most terrible of treasons.
The whole problem had been a moot point as long as it was impossible to build a hyperdrive shunt Grraf-Nig and his Jotoki technicians had had a hard enough time just repairing and tuning the one motor they had captured. He had assumed that it would take generations of secret probing to learn how to build a copy. He had pictured a covert network of kzin worlds dedicated to the task, secretly running physicists back and forth through the human blockade in a united conspiracy directed by the Patriarch.
The brilliance of the W’kkai mathematicians had never occurred to Grraf-Nig, who knew mathematics but who was, himself, hardly more than a glorified gravity-polarizer mechanic. That they had been able to construct a working theory of hyperspace within a few years had astonished him. That engineers were already building hypershunt test beds was a stunning breakthrough.
Yet the advance was uneven. Grraf-Nig saw the superluminal technical march being grafted onto a conservative military strategy that had evolved over millennia against a constant background of subluminal transport—faster-than-light claws attached to slower-than-light minds. The Patriarch had to be told what was going on—and soon. Otherwise, another disaster.
Grraf-Nig had begun to toy with the details of an escape to Kzinhome. Yes, I will; no, I won’t. Visions of sharing zianya with the Patriarch alternated with his knowledge of W’kkai dungeons. Like any nascent schemer he dreaded the hard decisions.
How he would recapture the Shark or commandeer one of the newer experimental ships he didn’t know, so he began by dreaming about his piloting skills. It was probable that he would find the relevant kzin navigation tools denied him—but he had investigated the human navigational paradigm on Hssin before rebuilding Lieutenant Argamentine’s unnatural mind to the female-norm. Early on he had understood the necessity of deciphering the human navigation computer in order to steer his captured vessel to a friendly port. He doubted that his W’kkai allies were aware of the function of a certain coded box, so focused were they on the nature of the hyperdrive shunt.