Rrowl-Captain snarled again at his lost honor, his memories like salt packed into a claw-slashed nose. He had dueled with two octals of other Heroes during his command, and Rrowl-Captain fingered their notched ears at his trophy belt in proud memory. The duels made him feel momentarily like a credit to his long-dead father and his mourned litter-brother, as well as the Riit Patriarch Himself.
Yet the taste of cowardice, like that obtained by chewing roots and leaves, returned all too soon. With half his attention, Rrowl-Captain watched Strategist waiting silently, eyes averted yet forward, clearly ready for the attack. The other kzin believed that his commander would rend him limb from limb.
This was not a surprise to the master of the Belly-Slasher. It had happened often enough in the past on this command bridge, after all.
But Rrowl-Captain could afford to lose no more competent officers, particularly with this new monkey threat. He mastered his fury for the moment, and concentrated again on the issue at hand. Chsst-Admiral had ordered Rrowl-Captain's ships to act as observers in the long grass of deep space, attacking nothing. They were to prepare the way for the Fourth Fleet. And he had done so, at great cost to his honor and digestion.
Yet this human ship, traveling from Man-home to the Ka’ashi system, was too rich a prize for any kzin to resist. Stealthed and invisible, Rrowl-Captain's ships had stalked from afar the queer monkey spacecraft for many watches, studying it. Its reaction drive was a shockingly efficient blaze of plasma and hard gamma radiation. Alien-Technologist had even suggested that the monkeys had developed a contramatter spacedrive, impossible as that seemed.
But it was much more than a spacedrive, at least to a kzin with the true Warrior Heart! Such a device could be used to incinerate whole continents from orbit, like some enormous Flenser of Judgment out of forgotten myth. A fearsome weapon, sure to gain for its discoverer the approval of the Riit Patriarch Himself, and all that such approval would mean.
Finally, Rrowl-Captain could wait no longer, and had moved his trio of warcraft slowly toward the monkeyship, preparing to capture this rich prize. Then the alien craft's drive had shut down! His tail lashed again in frustration.
It would have been simple to capture the monkeyship had the humans not detected them. The only question would have been how many Heroes' lives to spend in minimizing harm to the ship and its contents. Perhaps the best plan would have been a large boarding party with kinetic penetration aids in reserve… Or Belly-Slasher or one of his brother ships could have simply hammered the human craft with kinetic energy bombs, then landed some boarding parties of Heroes in the confusion.
Such an approach would have done much to salve the wounded Honor of Rrowl-Captain.
The lethal wash of gamma radiation and ionized gas pushing the monkeyship through space would have effectively prevented communication with the other monkeys at Man-home. The monkeys would simply think that their new vessel had failed, having hit some interstellar debris at nearly six eighths light-speed.
Conquest-Governor would surely welcome Rrowl-Captain back to Wunderland, bearing such a rich prize. Honor, slaves, a place on the Governor's Council, landholdings, and kzinretti would have been his! Perhaps his own hunting park. Almost certainly a full Name!
But this savory morsel had been snatched from his closing jaws by cowardly incompetence! Rrowl-Captain's killing teeth ached with the loss.
The fury within his thwarted Warrior Heart, never far below the surface, boiled anew. Rrowl-Captain lifted his massive head and roared his frustration, slashing at the air in front of him with angry claws. The entire bridge crew slapped sheathed claws across faces in submissive salute.
Rrowl-Captain grumbled and pushed his thinplate aside. He bolted upright to his full height of nearly three meters, like a bipedal tiger on anabolic steroids, and stalked the bridge as if he were seeking prey in a hunting park. The crew held their collective breaths, motionless, waiting to see who would be the captain's target.
He padded silently up to Strategist, his voice now very calm and therefore particularly dangerous. The captain of the kzinti warship looked Strategist rudely in the eyes, kzin to kzin, in barely veiled challenge. His tail slowly moved from side to side, in sly counterpoint to his words.
“So tell me, kzin-without-a-name, how the primitive monkeys, these humans, are able to detect our gravitic polarizers?” His contained fury revealed itself in a rictus grin of needle-sharp carnivore teeth.
Strategist choked back his own growl of challenge, saying nothing. Rrowl-Captain contained a cough of approval.
“They can detect our monopoles, true. Quite true.” The captain tapped the other kzin's broad chest twice with an unsheathed claw as he spoke, a profound insult to any Hero.
Strategist gurgled, trembling with the kzin combination of fear and rage.
“Yet this is no great surprise,” Rrowl-Captain half purred, “as the pitiful monkeys use monopoles themselves extensively and are therefore familiar with their properties. This is why we shield them from monkey instrumentation, as the smallest unblooded kitten could surmise.” His tail flicked.
Strategist gulped, gasped. In a thin, flat voice he started to speak. “Dominant One, it would seem —”
“It would seem,” Rrowl-Captain interrupted silkily, “that you would insult my intelligence, to claim that these pitiful monkeys can understand the workings of gravitic polarizers, yet still fly through space balanced on hot exhaust fumes?” He displayed his teeth in a wide grin, then picked between them with a sharp claw tip in derision and insult.
Rrowl-Captain watched Strategist take a deep breath at the offensive slur to his ancestors, and twitched his tail with some satisfaction. There were some advantages to leadership after all.
“These are monkeys,” he continued, scorn dripping from every growling syllable of the Heroes' Tongue. “These nameless and honor-lacking humans are leaf-eating vermin…” he railed suddenly, again beginning to lose control. He wiped drool from his thin black lips with the back of a furred hand.
Rrowl-Captain's anger concealed from his Heroes what he held secret in his heart of hearts: the gut-wrenching terror of entire fleets boiled to vapor by lasers that filled the sky, lasers everywhere, crewed by the seemingly puny monkeys. The horrible sensation of wishing to hide from enemies, to run from danger! His liver once more turned to water as the alien emotion gripped him.
For a moment, Rrowl-Captain's eyes saw nothing but the awful green blaze of laser light filling the universe, his nostrils swarming with the odor of his own hidden cowardice, like the smell of a grazing animal.
The scent of prey.
The madness receded after a moment. Rrowl-Captain spat onto the deck and mumbled, half to himself. “Just big hairless ch'tachi, monkeys, with their inefficient fusion drives and puny lasers and particle beams…”
The deck was silent, his crewkzin looking intently at the tapestry covered floorplates.
He stopped, moistening a now dry nose-pad with his tongue carefully, trying to control his conflicting emotions.
Breath steamed from his mouth in the chill air of Belly-Slasher. The captain's hairless, ratlike tail stood straight out in a posture of angry challenge.
Strategist looked straight ahead, his violet eyes unreadable. After a respectful pause, he saluted again with sheathed claws and averted eyes. “Dominant One, I do not believe the humans can detect our gravitic polarizers under normal conditions; it must be that one or more of the polarizers are unbalanced.”