The kzin ran for his life until, gradually, the fireballs of “flak” faded as the Shark’s probable position began to be smeared over too vast a volume to make a scatter-shot attack plausible. But new attackers would now be converging from the sides. Long-Reach was keeping track of the pursuers with a Weapons-Officer’s wide-angle telescopic sensors.
“Eleven pursuers visible,” said one of Long-Reach’s arms.
Grraf-Nig was more worried about what was coming from the direction of Hrotish than he was about the group that had already fired on him. But nothing happened. They lost track of their pursuers by outrunning them. That was unnerving, not to know where the enemy was, or whether they were accelerating headlong into a trap. They continued maximum evasion shifts as a precaution.
After uneventful hours, he began a methodical re-programming of the escape. They had lost him, but he knew exactly where he was—by now well above the thin asteroid ring of W’kkaisun. He had a good idea of where each W’kkai warship had been at the beginning of his escape and what their probable moves would be. His computations (based on pre-escape intelligence, probably inadequate) showed him that there were five warships up ahead that he need worry about, one of them a carrier of eight fast Scream-of-Vengeance fighters. If they made contact with him, his advantage would be hours of acceleration lead time. They could only attack him in a single fast flyby. It would be like stealing mother’s milk. He’d be moving at something like an eighth the velocity of light.
But once he crossed the singularity evading the UNSN patrol was going to be a special challenge. There was only one hyperspace warship out there now but the monkeys had hyperwave radio and could quickly call in reinforcements from light years away. Surely its captain had sat bolt upright at that fireworks display of flak and might already be calling for help. It didn’t matter that his patrol ship was on the other side of the singularity—in a hop, skip, and jump he could be on top of the Shark. The UNSN had perfected the art of hunting down and killing the gravitic ships of the kzinti in interstellar space.
None of this was in the manuals—not even Chuut-Riit’s manuals. Grraf-Nig needed to give his moves heavy thought in the few hours of peace left to him. The major problem with equipping a hypershunt ship like the Shark with a gravitic drive was that the gravitic polarizer, when in use, created its own hyperspace singularity. He was going to have to collapse his gravitic field before he disappeared into hyperspace—an action that was equivalent to decelerating down to his rest velocity. If he burst through the singularity at twenty percent of light speed. He’d be vulnerable to the UNSN for a full day before he could evade them by hypershunt.
He began his deceleration early. It was risky. On the other claw, it meant that the W’kkai fleet would overshoot him and, while penetrating the singularity in front of him, become a decoy fleet masking his escape—if they didn’t find and kill him before the UNSN found and killed them. It was a melee he hoped wasn’t going to start a new war—no world of the Patriarch was ready for that yet!
By the time the Shark passed through the singularity; much later than his original planning, he was still traveling fast—but slow enough so that he was flying into a swarm of W’kkai warriors. His sensors began to pick up more and more of them until he located twenty at about maximum range. It wasn’t the formation he expected to see. There were already four UNSN warships on the scene. Neither fleet was attacking the other. Both were wary and moving in defensive array. Because of light-lag he was well behind on the true situation.
It looked like the monkeys were holding back in a blocking formation, waiting for reinforcement. It looked like the W’kkai fleet was well on the way to a conservative interception which would not threaten the UNSN warships. Such precautions were all in the Shark’s favor. Grraf-Nig began to pick up frantic bits of communication between Hero and Man-beast.
He was being sold as a renegade. The W’kkai commander was giving the beasts permission to vaporize him, promising no retaliation if they did. They were offering to take out the Shark themselves if the United Nations would stand aside. All the niceties of the MacDonald-Rishshi treaty were being observed. Only the light-minutes were keeping the opponents from each other’s throats.
Grraf-Nig was enormously relieved. He had timed everything perfectly. His luck as a survivor had held. Before anyone could get to them, the Shark would disappear into hyperspace and reappear alone inside an interstellar sphere of stars.
The gravitic field died. The Shark had come to rest relative to its starting frame of reference—minus the velocity of escape from W’kkai’s orbital distance. Grraf-Nig wiggled his ears and cut in the phase-change for the hypershunt build-up. Nothing happened.
For a stunned moment the giant kzin thought that Long-Reach had made a mistake when he rewired the controls, but Long-Reach himself had no such doubts. He had worked with this motor a good part of his life. Instantly he was at the motor housing and hit the clamps. The housing popped away and floated off to the wall. A cast iron dummy of the correct weight and balance sat where the hypershunt should have been.
It was something to think about—but death was only minutes away. There was no time to yowl in anguish. There was no time even to curse High Admiral Si-Kish’s paranoia.
Outward from W’kkaisun, the UNSN waited. The W’kkai fleet was moving in on their renegade cautiously—of course, cautiously because they already knew that the Shark couldn’t escape into hyperspace.
“Battle stations!” Grraf-Nig screamed at Long-Reach. A second later they were moving at full acceleration toward W’kkai. There was no escape. No matter how frantically his mind panicked through the alternatives, there was no reasonable way out. It was either fight to an honorable death or suffer the humiliation of surrender. He sat at the controls, brilliantly evading attack, but numb. He could no longer think of himself as the noble Grraf-Nig. He remembered a terrible day from his past when a gang of Hssin kits had cornered him for an easy kill—and he had saved his life by eating grass. What honor was there for a kit out to prove his warrior skills who carried the ears of a grass-eater on his belt?
Grass-Eater negotiated the surrender of the Shark through electronic static and violent maneuvers. He knew they wanted to save the ship because it was the prototype of a deadly fighter that was intended to spearhead W’kkai ambition, but he wasn’t sure they would spare his life once the Shark was secure. It didn’t matter. Better that W’kkai should triumph over Kzinhome with a reinvigorated Patriarchy than for Heroes to languish as the slaves of squabbling monk’s. Let them have their prototype.
There wasn’t room enough for a warrior to board the Shark. Long-Reach and his defeated master met their captors in space and were taken back to a warship. The slave disappeared into its slave quarters; the mortified one was stripped inside the airlock. Undressed, a warrior of W’kkai was a nameless animal without power. No W’kkai Hero among those who had captured him called him by name. He had no name. They could not even look at him.