Carol snorted laughter. “You've been scanning datachips of Early's history lectures again, haven't you? That term hasn't been in use for two hundred years.”
“How would you know?” A sly grin crossed Bruno's face.
She squeezed his biceps hard. “You always know how to make me laugh, lover. Thanks for bringing my good mood back.”
They said nothing for a time.
“Any time now, isn't it?” Bruno asked calmly.
“That's a big affirmative.”
There was a soundless flash behind their eyelids as the radiation front struck Dolittle. Radiation sleeted through the magnetic fields surrounding the ship, the hull walls, the long, slushed deuterium tank, and their own bodies — all in a microsecond.
“Well,” Bruno remarked, “you always show me the most interesting places, my dear.”
Carol ignored his nervous humor and pored over the holoscreen datastream in the biotelemetry window. After a moment, Bruno began to help her.
Finally, she sighed with relief. Their cumulative doses were high, but not quite lethal. Their prompt doses would ensure a slight fever and nausea, easily handled by drugs from the autodoc.
“It looks like we'll live,” Carol said.
“For a while.” Bruno's tone was quiet and somber.
“No more Project Cherubim. And we aren't going to make it to Wunderland or Home, are we?”
“Doubtful. Maybe we can rig up a couple of coldsleep bunks from the autodoc spare parts. We sure don't have a decade's worth of recycler or supply capacity.” He brightened a bit. “Maybe another Earth ship will find us while we're in coldsleep.”
“Or a kzin warcraft, more likely,” she reminded him. “We could wake up a piece at a time.”
Again, silence hung thick in Dolittle.
“All of it was for nothing,” Bruno finally said, his tone black and dead.
“No,” she replied firmly. “Not for nothing. You and I got together, love.”
He squeezed her hand in agreement.
“And,” Carol pointed out, “we waxed three ratcat ships in the bargain. Maybe two hundred kzin flash-fried to vapor. That must be worth something on the scorechip.”
Bruno's face was suddenly slack, a bit like his Linked expression. Concern flashed through Carol's mind.
“What is it, Tacky?” she asked lightly, keeping the worry from her voice.
“I hope that we took out all the kzin ships.”
Carol gestured at the holoscreen. “Sure we did. Look at the fireworks.” The antimatter explosion was immense, brilliantly colored. It occurred to her that the garish cloud would eventually be visible across light-years.
“Can we be certain?” Bruno's tone was odd, a little machinelike.
“Is that a prediction, that we didn't get them all?” she inquired, frowning.
“I don't think that I can link anymore, so I'm just guessing. Maybe I'm just worried.” His tone and facial expression were back to normal.
Carol leaned over and rubbed her stiff strip haircut against his cheek. “You will never guess how attractive I find a simple human guess, my friend.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rrowl-Captain scented his own death in the cramped singleship fighter. He closed his nostrils from the stench of unchallenging prey. The kzin knew that he had taken more than a lethal dose of radiation in the detonation of the monkeyship. The captain was far from the medical tank in the wreckage of Belly-Slasher, and the supplies aboard the singleship were minimal.
There had been little time to plan an escape.
Alien-Technologist's warning had come late, too late. Rrowl-Captain and his crew had engaged Belly-Slasher's gravity polarizers at maximum acceleration, but were only a few hundred kilometers from the human spacecraft when the contra-matter containment fields had failed. Damage had been heavy: his precious spacecraft hulled and broken, his crew torn and bloody and mostly dead. The One Fanged God had inexplicably spared Rrowl-Captain of all but the radiation exposure.
His mind filled with the memories of mewling Heroes in agony — blinded, seared, poisoned by monkey treachery. Even those crewkzin still breathing would, like Rrowl-Captain, soon die of the radiation taint in their blood and bone.
His dreams of regaining his honor and reward, his Warrior Heart, were shattered by monkey perfidy and cowardice.
Rrowl-Captain had managed to seal his space armor in the confusing aftermath of the explosion. He had picked his way through the twisted wreckage of Belly-Slasher, down black corridors filled with the drifting corpses of his Heroes — or worse, the crewkzin not yet dead. Eventually, he had reached a still-intact singleship fighter, Sharpened-Fang. The small warcraft lacked the strong gravitic protective fields of larger kzin spacecraft, and was not designed for individual near-luminal travel.
He had little to lose. And nothing to gain but a Hero's final vengeance.
Rrowl-Captain knew that he was dying, as he held back the wrenching pain he felt in his innards. It was like shards of broken glass, grinding deep; like the sharp teeth of some enemy at his liver, chewing. The epithelial lining of his stomach and intestines had loosened, leading to the violent nausea of lethal radiation poisoning. He could literally feel the blisters rising on his body, as radiation-outraged skin layers began to die. Fur began to fall from his pelt in handfuls.
Rrowl-Captain hawked and spat blood onto the tiny deck, to mix with the pool of drying vomit already left there. He knew his time was short. At least he had a chance to show his honor, his Warrior Heart, before he met the One Fanged God. The memory of his dead litter-brother would demand nothing less.
Rrowl-Captain would take these despicable monkeys as his honor-slaves into the Hunting Ground Beyond.
He peered into the singleship thinplate screen with damaged eyes, searching. Finally, Rrowl-Captain found the human escape vessel. The coward-vessel had wrapped huge magnetic fields around itself, according to his instruments. Rrowl-Captain snarled as he altered Sharpened-Fang's course, his mouth dry and scratchy. The air tasted of death and failure, and his very fangs were loosening in his head.
The escaping monkeyship with its queer gossamer wings could not maneuver, and the fusion drive seemed minimal. All that the human ship seemed capable of was magnetic deceleration and minor course corrections. His thinplate screen analysis indicated an impressively high level of deceleration, in fact. The stresses upon the little spacecraft must be tremendous, he mused, hissing in readiness to do battle.
Rrowl-Captain increased Sharpened-Fang's velocity, pushing the gravitic polarizers to their safety limits, and beyond. The ripping-cloth noise of the drive began to sound like a predatory scream, filling his folded ears. Purple warning lights flashed on the control console and warning tones yowled. His head pounded as the fabric of space itself twisted savagely. The monkeyship grew larger on his screen. Rrowl-Captain readied his weapons panel, his black claws clicking on keypads.
Something nagged at the captain. What, he wondered, could these craven monkeys do with the waste energy from deceleration? Only by draining energy at enormous rates could the strange vessel take significant advantage of magnetic deceleration. The ship was small, and would have little need for prodigious energy sources…
Green hell suddenly filled Rrowl-Captain's thinplate viewscreen, which went blank in a frying crackle of circuit overload.
He keened in surprise and fear. Alarms shrieked in the tiny cabin. Ablative microconstruction in the hull of the singleship vaporized and shoved Sharpened-Fang violently to one side, out of the deadly beam of the humans' laser weaponry. Secondary sensors and viewscreens came smoothly on-line.