CHAPTER NINETEEN
Rrowl-Captain, eyes wide in fear, stared at his status viewscreen. He shrieked anger and surprise, then retched painfully with his growing sickness. The spasms subsided after a moment.
Time was growing very short indeed.
What power could have instantaneously stopped both Sharpened-Fang and his cowardly monkey prey dead-still in interstellar space? Kinetic potential was awesome at near luminal velocities. He didn't know the method, but clearly, the new and unknown spacecraft was the culprit.
The intruder vessel was the size of a small moon, and looked more like a crowded city than a spacecraft. Magnification showed spires and squarish buildings, open areas and domes, tiny motes of light that moved above and through the huge construct. Thin spidery webs extending from the main body of the vessel glowed incandescently in high infrared, bleeding off waste heat into interstellar space. Instruments showed that the moon-ship kept an ambient temperature of forty divisions above Total Cold.
Rrowl-Captain bared his aching fangs, slowly. Monkeys could not have built this ship. Nor could kzin, even as favored sons of the One Fanged God. No race Rrowl-Captain knew of could construct such a vessel.
Perhaps the intruders had intervened on the monkeys' behalf. Rrowl-Captain coughed again, spitting blood.
Memories of greenish light flared in the back of his mind. It would explain much.
He snarled as he pulled out another handful of fur with his blistered fingers. He gulped a few more of his antiradiation capsules, struggling to keep them inside his traitor belly, though the capsules only slowed the inevitable.
No, thought Rrowl-Captain on further reflection, the intruder spacecraft was not intervening on the side of the human monkeys. If that had been their alien intention, surely Rrowl-Captain and Sharpened-Fang would even now be mingled as thoroughly dispersed vapor. That was as clear as the fangs in his own jaws.
The intruders were simply meddlers.
Rrowl-Captain consulted his thinplate console. The forward screen revealed the monkeyship hanging dead in space. Even dying of radiation sickness, the captain smiled and rumbled in kzin humor. If the monkeys were not moving, then their power source was inactive.
Meddlers or no meddlers, Rrowl-Captain was going to complete his ceremonial kill. He would be unable to place human ears on his trophy loop, but he would accomplish a task almost as tasty. A final delicacy, in honor of his litter-brother.
With trembling claws, the captain warmed up the strained gravitic polarizer and put the weapons panel on standby. Within a few moments, Rrowl-Captain would finish his scream-and-leap, weapons firing, and destroy the monkey vessel. Then he would deal with these meddling intruders.
A yowling alarm tone halted Rrowl-Captain's ready claw poised over the initiate keypad.
He looked up with a snarl, and saw many octal-squared of nightmare black shapes blotting out the stars, living creatures flying through empty space toward Sharpened-Fang.
Magnification and vector analysis showed the hordes to originate from the intruder moon-ship. The intruder aliens were even uglier than Jotoki, Rrowl-Captain realized with a hiss of distaste. Thick central stalks surrounded by an octal-and-half of sinuous tendrils — yet bearing tools and wearing harnesses.
Powerful or not, Rrowl-Captain could not let these aliens threaten a Hero's vessel, nor his own plans. He reoriented the weapons panel and prepared to fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Like Bruno, Carol was still dazed by the sudden appearance of the titanic alien ship that had somehow halted them in space and now held position, motionless, ten thousand kilometers to starboard. She slowly turned to Bruno, who appeared to be recovering from the shock of the past few minutes. At least he was reviewing data instead of staring blankly at the strangely unshifted stars in the holoscreen.
“Where is the ratcat ship?”
Her lover shook his head slightly, tapped on a few keypads. A red circle appeared in the holoscreen. “Just under two hundred kilometers dead ahead, right where it was when things got… well, weird.”
Weird was the right word, Carol thought. How could Dolittle go from 0.7 C to dead stop in a second?
She peered at the portion of the holoscreen indicating the kzin singleship for a moment or two, looking for activity. “Looks like the ratcat isn't moving, either.”
“Maybe it's just as surprised by recent events as we are.”
Carol mulled that one over, then decided to change the subject. She put an autowatch subroutine on the kzin singleship that would set off alarms if the ratcat vessel moved or showed activity. Carol then highlighted the huge alien ship.
“Well, Bruno,” she asked brightly, “what do you think?”
Bruno could not tear his eyes from the holoscreen windows. “Like you said, Captain-my-captain. It's the size of a moon.”
“A small moon.”
“Sure. But what's the point of a spacecraft a hundred kilometers across?”
Bruno had made a good point, Carol thought. Further, the alien vessel looked more like a city or hive of insects than a spacecraft. There were what appeared to be buildings and domes across its broad and complex expanse. It was baroque and ornate, like some windup Victorian Christmas tree ornament out of a history chip.
“Notice the weblike structures?” Bruno indicated a portion of the realtime magnified view of the moon-ship. “Look at them in IR.”
In infrared, the complex webs all over the moon-ship were hundreds of degrees warmer than the rest of the vessel.
“Heat exchangers?” she asked.
Bruno nodded. “I'm betting that they are particularly hot now, after… stopping us a bit ago. That must have taken a lot of energy.”
Carol noticed flocks of tiny lights moving around the spires of the gigantic alien ship. “What are those?”
“No idea,” Bruno replied, tweaking the image enhancers. Magnification did not help, only revealing blurred glowing shapes that darted and swooped like living things around upper portions of the moon-ship.
Bruno finally asked the question. “What do we do?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “Let them make the first move.” Carol reached over and stroked his arm gently. “Face it, Tacky. Whatever they are, they're much more powerful than me and thee. They could swat us to paste anytime. I would rather wait, peacefully, to see what they want with us.”
Bruno nodded slowly.
“I just feel stupid and helpless,” he finally said, looking away. “I used to know almost everything.”
“But only when you were part machine. I like you better as a human.” She moved his lips into a smile with her fingers and was rewarded by the real thing.
“Carol?” Bruno gestured at the holoscreen with a nervous finger.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The kzin ship is getting visitors.”
Long-range scanning showed at least one hundred small objects flying toward the kzin singleship from the huge alien vessel. Extreme magnification showed vague dusky shapes with many arms flitting across the starry blackness. They rotated smoothly as they flew, arms stretched out radial fashion for stability.
“Those must be our new friends,” Bruno commented.
Carol said nothing, biting her lip. They would get some idea of the new aliens' intentions from their actions toward the kzin singleship. They must have been moving very quickly to be so close to the ratcat vessel.