Jacobi was buying legs and a face. What had I bought? I was delivering my children’s children, and their children, into slavery to the kzin. But at least they would be alive. There comes a time, I realized, to do what is right. Not what is best, actually. Nor what one would prefer to do.
What is right.
I thought of slavery and defeat and my family. Of honor. Of empty platitudes about freedom versus the harsh reality of a frost-rimed severed hand in a cryobox. I thought of orange striped shapes flashing through a forest, pursuing human children.
My children.
It was time to send for Kraach-Captain and his Heroes, to turn Feynman into a Trojan Cat full of kzin hardware, soldiers, and weapons. To help that Trojan Cat prepare to break the back of the defense perimeter around Sol, to allow the next kzin fleet to destroy and conquer as they had at Wunderland. But at least I was not helping the aliens in exchange for a new pair of legs, no.
I was better than Jacobi… yet a tiny voice jibed in my head. Nicht wahr? How, exactly?
My body seemed on autopilot as I walked away from the sleeping bodies, down the main ring corridor. The holocube felt very heavy in my inner pocket as I walked back to the airlock and I re-entered the singleship. My fingers automatically went so far as to orient Victrix’s signal laser correctly. I could tightbeam the message directly.
My fingers paused. First, it would take me some time to unravel the shipboard instructions for shutting down the ramscoop fields and fusion drive.
In my mind’s eye, I could see the kzin armada breaking the back of Sol. Tightening their grip over all of human space like a clenching fist. I could see my great-great-grandchildren, close-mouthed slaves in some kzin household, wielding blowdriers and brushes on their indolent predator masters.
Just another slave race, eventually no better than a degenerate Jotok.
The image sickened me. I could imagine those future generations reviling my name in private, slaves whispering to other slaves in low voices while their masters slept. Tiny humans scurrying around huge kzin households, secretly cursing the names of the humans who had sold their birthright, their future. My descendants would not remember them. But I did. The hated names flowed easily over the tongue, echoing in my mind.
Arnold.
Quisling.
Chien.
Easterhouse.
Upton-Schleisser.
I turned away from the commset. Quickly, not thinking any more, I left my singleship. Back into Feynman. I walked to the three lying in a drugged stupor. I looked down at them, emotions warring within me.
My wife, my children: they would die if I failed, yes. All life’s sweetness, gone.
But they would at least know that I, husband and father—and most of all, human—finally believed in things larger than myself.
One human can make a difference, no matter what people like Jacobi said.
And perhaps it was not too late.
I made my decision. Swearing gently, I reached into my pouch for the antidote ampoules to the nerve gas. My fingers shook a little, but I ignored it. I stabbed my mother’s wrinkled neck with the drug and waited for her to wake up.
This was going to be hard. Owning up to who you are usually is.
My mother had been right, damn her stern soul. Once a Herrenmann, always a Herrenmann.
She coughed once, her eyes fluttering, and tried to sit up.
When she finally became coherent, I told her everything.
Chapter Four
Punica Fides
Go out like a rocket, boy, not like a fizzled, wet match.
My mother had said that. It had a certain dark ring that appealed to me.
Once again I made the journey from the kzin troopship to Feynman, across the Deep between stars. This time, though, I did so in a small kzin fighter, not my tiny singleship Victrix. The ship interior was huge, orange-lit, built on a scale for kzin. The air was cold and dry, making my sinuses ache. I moved unobtrusively to one of the gunners’ stations, the straps at their tightest ludicrously loose on me. Jacobi was strapped in across from me. I refused to look at him.
The engines thrummed softly and I could hear Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist hissing and spitting from the control cockpit forward. The sour-spicy smell of anger filled the cabin. I tried to ignore the angry sounds. At least this gravitic polarizer didn’t give me a hammering headache.
Victrix had been left just outside the kzin vessel, under heavy guard. I had told the kzinti by tightbeam that the fusion point generators were different than those used in the Swarm, and that I was bringing a sample for their Alien-Technologists to study.
Which was true, in a manner of speaking.
At the same time, I told Kraach-Captain that I could not torture information out of the humans onboard Feynman. Nor could I determine how to shut the system down myself. I needed expert help. I suspected sabotage, and booby traps, as well.
Jacobi didn’t trust me, but Kraach-Captain saw me as a reliable beast-slave. The kzin thought that he understood the nature of the leash around my neck. Still, he had brought Jacobi along to keep an eye on me.
Up front, Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist sat huddled over their thinscreens. They snarled arguments about the ramscoop fields and our route through the tangled web of force. Kzin do not care for close quarters, and the differential in rank made Kraach-Captain temper quite short. It was his place of honor as Conquest Hero, though, to board and deactivate Feynman in person. I believed that he would have insisted on this, even if I had reported it possible to shut down the slowboat by myself.
None of this would work without the kzin worship of the Warrior Heart. Gamble after gamble after gamble, but the only game in town…
Jacobi and I could see little from where we were packed next to one another in the back of the ratcat fighter. He smelled sour with fear, sweaty. What had broken in the kzin fighter to turn him into what he had become? I ignored him as best I could, and looked at the dots-and-comma script of the kzin language on various pieces of ratcat tech in my field of vision.
“Kenneth,” he whispered to me quietly.
I didn’t look at him. Instead I continued to scan the interior of the spacecraft, lit in garish orange. I doubted that any humans had seen as much of kzinti spacecraft as the two of us had over the last few months.
I for one didn’t understand much of what we had seen. Kraach-Captain had kept us in a largish cabin during the trip out to Feynman, with our own supplies and autodoc.
The occasional trip outside the cabin looked like the kzin fighter ship around us: cavernous spaces, orange lit. Oddly shaped devices, flickering thinscreens. Could that kind of information ever be of use? I shook my head, trying to make sense of the alien spaces around me. I was a singleship pilot and part-time smuggler, not a genius.
Jacobi’s voice was an insistent whisper, like a pesky insect. “Did you find your mother, boy?”
Now I turned and looked at him “Yeah,” I grated. Stay in character. “I did what I must. I do not thank you for it.”
Jacobi nodded. “In the coming years, Kenneth,” he replied, “you will come to see that I had your best interests at heart.” Jacobi started to reach out to me, perhaps to pat my arm.
My expression stopped him cold, as I studied his ruined face, and smiled like a kzin. “I give you respect of sorts, Jacobi, even as a traitor. Because of the scars you earned fighting the kzin. But don’t push me.”