Rrowl-Captain licked his nostrils with a disbelieving tongue. What did his unconscious mind scent? “Surely life-support systems were adequately shielded.”
“Spine-Cruncher's monopole weapon was of high power and delivered most skillfully, Dominant One. The human-monkeys must not have shielded themselves properly, other than drive and field waveguides. Or perhaps random chance intervened.”
“'Even the sharpest and most skillful fang can break',” the captain of Belly-Slasher quoted from the Teachings of The One Fanged God. The other kzin blinked agreement. Random chance too often ruled the universe.
Rrowl-Captain hissed in worry. He had expected some kind of monkey trick during Belly-Slasher's tense voyage to the bow of the alien spacecraft, but the huge ship had wallowed through space without response, seemingly without guidance or crew. No railguns, no lasers, no particle beams, no missiles.
Nothing.
The monkeyship was like a pilotless ghost vessel, its fearsome idling reaction drive swinging randomly through a small angle. It tasted like victory, yet the savor was not quite as satisfying as Rrowl-Captain had anticipated. Bloody, but not hot and fresh.
Clearly, the contra-matter drive was extremely dangerous, and required many safeguards. Such a protected subsystem could have easily survived the magneto-electrical pulse. Perhaps the magnetic shielding was assigned such a priority, as well. The monkeys, after all, did not think like Heroes. His reasoning had the tang of fangs-on-fact, logic. Still, Rrowl-Captain had the distinct feeling of enemy eyes upon him. He felt his ruff rising involuntarily.
“Return to your station,” he ordered Navigator peremptorily. The other kzin slapped claws to face and turned back to his console.
Rrowl-Captain reflected on his own seemingly brave words. He again saw the greenish light of monkey lasers in his mind's eye, filling the sky, shaming his Warrior Heart and slashing bits from his liver. Pushing the grass-eating vision to the back of his mind, he leaped back to his command chair and sat.
“Preparing for rendezvous,” Navigator announced over the ship commlink.
“Alert Alien-Technologist in his quarters,” the captain of Belly-Slasher hissed to Apprentice-to-Communications who leaped to his clumsy feet nervously. “Tell him, by my order, to assemble his team at the starboard airlock in space armor, along with their equipment.” The young kzin huddled next to the commlink, and hissed and spat his Leader's orders.
Rrowl-Captain settled back in his command chair, listening to the ripping-cloth sound of the gravity polarizers slowly decrease. Belly-Slasher cautiously approached the alien vessel, halting a few lengths of kzin-leaps above the other ship's icy pitted hull.
The forward viewscreen showed the relativity-distorted universe around them, lonely points of velocity-squeezed light and black empty spaces. Energetic particles from the interstellar medium impacted the magnetic field surrounding the alien vessel from time to time, producing colorful auroral flickers of ghostly light.
We are so far from our lairs, here between the stars, he mused. Far from our kittens and kzinretti.
Rrowl-Captain gestured to his personal Jotoki servant which rushed forward to offer a placating delicacy with the fingerlets at the end of its warty slave arm: a still-wriggling slice of k'chit from the vivarium on board. The captain bolted the warm flesh whole, hardly chewing. The act of consuming — of at least his gullet doing battle with some kind of adversary — served to slow his breathing. Rrowl-Captain took the cloth his Jotok was now offering, and cleaned tangy blood from his jaws, mollified for the moment.
“Rendezvous complete,” Navigator rasped over shipwide commlink.
Rrowl-Captain leaped to his feet and purred readiness. He stalked toward the hatchway, tail held high with anticipation.
It was at last time to complete the hunt.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bruno blinked at the painfully bright shipboard lights stabbing at his eyes, and coughed in reflex as the mask lifted away from his face. Remote sensors withdrew delicately from his body. He looked past the rising top of the autodoc, and through blurry eyes saw Carol Faulk gazing down at him.
From what Bruno could see from his position, it looked as though they were in Dolittle. It seemed to hurt a little to think, to remember. He blinked several times to clear moist grit from his eyes. He shook his head to clear his mind, which felt slow and clogged; it didn't help.
Bruno was without a clue, most of his recent memories apparently gone. Burned away by something horrible.
“Come on, shipmate,” Carol said lightly, helping him out of the autodoc tank. To Bruno, it felt as if the ship was running under about a half gee of acceleration. Thick fluid dripped from his body as she carefully toweled him off. He tried to crane his painfully stiff neck to look at the forward holoscreen, just a few meters away in the cramped cabin. His eyesight was still too muzzy to read the status window from that distance, but the overall forward view showed a relativistic starscape.
Bruno drew in his breath sharply, fuzzy thinking or not, when he realized that Sun-Tzu was nowhere in sight.
He tried to say something, to ask the obvious questions. Carol would not reply to his half-grunted attempts at questions. She continued to towel him thoroughly dry, batting aside his still-clumsy hands when he tried to stop her.
“Hmm,” she commented in a falsely suggestive tone, drying a few of his more sensitive areas. “Looks like you could use a bit of toning exercise in some of these muscle groups. And I know just where, when, and how, shipmate.”
Bruno woozily realized that Carol was jollying him along, trying to divert his attention from something important. His lips felt dry and cracked, his mouth tasted like bitter medicine and old leather. He knew something terrible was wrong.
“What's going on?” he managed to force past numb lips. His voice was a rusty croak. “Quit messing around. I think there is something wrong with me.” Black spots circled at the edges of his vision like buzzing insects.
Carol said nothing, but hugged him very tightly for a moment. She let go abruptly, then finished drying him a little more roughly than he would have liked. His skin, tingling, began to feel more normal. Some of the cobwebs started to fade from his mind. Carol helped him into a jumpsuit coverall, ignoring all attempts by Bruno to induce her into talking.
It must be bad, Bruno thought to himself slowly. His mind was clearing a bit more. Some bad memories began to surface, still indistinct. He shivered.
With an arm around him, Carol lowered Bruno into his crash couch and punched the armrest keypad with unnecessary force. He felt the straps of his crash couch tighten around him. Carol sat in the crash couch next to him, strapped herself in, then turned and looked at Bruno directly.
That was when Bruno became truly frightened. Carol had tears in her eyes. Carol.
“Okay,” he managed in a calm tone. “Go on, tell me. My crash couch autodoc has sedatives.” He struggled to find something humorous to say. “Don't tell me. You've found somebody new.”
Carol ignored the joke. Her face was ashen, with deep lines Bruno had never really noticed before. “You know about the EMP bomb?” she asked quietly.
Bruno felt a burning memory of the horrible black light rise unwillingly in his memory and made a face. He nodded, forcing himself to concentrate.