I'd best not say that. “We're the only other live passengers. The modules between are cargo, so these,” I stamped on a door, “don't currently open on anything.”
“If you are not a ship's officer,” the Kzin asked, “what is your place on the bridge?”
I said, “Outbound Enterprises was getting ready to freeze me. Shashter cops pulled me out. They had questions regarding a murder.”
“Have you killed?” His ears flicked out like little pink fans. I had his interest.
“I didn't kill Ander Smittarasheed. He took some cops down with him, and he'd killed an ARM agent. ARMs are—”
“United Nations police and war arm, Sol system, but their influence spreads throughout human space.”
“Well, they couldn't question Smittarasheed, and I'd eaten dinner with him a few days earlier. I told them we met in Pacifica City at a water war game… anyway, I satisfied the law, they let me loose. I was just in time to board, and way too late to get myself frozen and into a cargo module. Outbound Enterprises upgraded me. Very generous.
“So Milcenta and Jenna—my mate and child are frozen in one of these,” I stamped on a door, “and I'm up here, flying First Class at Ice Class expense. My cabin's a closet, so we must be expected to spend most of our time in the lobby. In here.” I pushed through.
This trip there were two human crew, five human passengers and the aliens. The lobby would have been roomy for thrice that. Whorls of couches and tables covered a floor with considerable space above it for free fall dancing. That feature didn't generally get much use.
An observation dome exposed half the sky. It opened now on a tremendous view of the Nursery Nebula.
Under spin gravity, several booths and the workstations had rolled up a wall. There was a big airlock. The workstations were two desk-and-couch modules in the middle.
Hans and Hilde Van Zild were in one of the booths. Homers coming back from Fafnir, they held hands tightly and didn't talk. Recent events had them extremely twitchy. They were both over two hundred years old. I've known people in whom that didn't show, but in these it did.
Their kids were hovering around the workstations watching the Captain and First Officer at work, asking questions that weren't being answered.
We'd been given vac packs. More were distributed around the lobby and along the corridor. Most ships carry them. You wear it as a bulky fanny pack. If you pull a tab, or if it's armed and pressure drops to zero, it blows up into a refuge. Then you hope you can get into it and zip it shut before your blood boils. Heidi Van Zild looked around. “Oh, good! You brought them!” The little girl snatched up two more vac packs, ran two steps toward us and froze. The listing said Heidi was near forty. Her brother Nicolaus was thirty; the trip was his birthday present. Their parents must have had their development arrested. They looked the same age, ten years old or younger, bright smiles and sparkling eyes, hair cut identically in a golden cockatoo crest. It's an attitude, a lifestyle. You put off children until that second century is running out. Now they're precious. They'll live forever. Let them take their time growing up. Keep them awhile longer. Keep them pure. Give them a real education. Any mistake you make as a parent, there will be time to correct that too. When you reverse the procedure and allow them to reach puberty they'll be better at it.
I know people who do that to kittens.
Some of a child's rash courage is ignorance. By thirty it's gone. The little girl's smile was a rictus. Aliens were here for her entertainment; she would not willingly miss any part of the adventure, but she just couldn't make herself approach the Kzin or his octopus servant. The boy hadn't even tried. First Officer Quickpony finished what she'd been doing. She stood in haste, took the vacuum packs from Heidi and handed them to the aliens. “Fly-By-Night, thank you for coming. Thank you, Mart. You'd be Paradoxical?”
The woman's body language invited a handshake, but the Jotok didn't. “Yes, we are Paradoxical, greatly pleased to meet you.”
The Kzin snarled a question in the Heroes' Tongue. Everybody's translators murmured in chorus, “Is this the bridge?”
Quickpony said, “Bridge and lobby, they're the same space. You didn't know? We wondered why you never came around.”
“I was not told of this option. There is merit in the posture that one species should not see another eat or mate or use the recycle port. But, LE Quickpony, your security is a joke! Bridge and passengers and no barrier? When did you begin building ships this way?”
Captain Preiss looked up. He said, “Software flies us. I can override, but I can disable the override. Hijackers can't affect that.”
“What of your current problem? Did you record the Kzin's demand?” The Captain spoke a command.
A ghostly head and shoulders popped up on the holo-stage, pale orange but for two narrow, lofty black eyebrows. “I am Mee-rowreet. Call me Envoy. I speak for the Longest War.”
My translator murmured, “Mee-rowreet, profession, manages livestock in a hunting park. Longest War, Kzin term for evolution.”
The recording spoke Interworld, but with a strong accent and flat grammar. “We seek a fugitive. We have destroyed your gravity motors. We will board you following the Covenants sworn at Shasht at twenty-five naught five your dating. Obey, never interfere,” the ghost head and voice grew blurred, “give us what we demand. You will all survive.”
“The signal was fuzzed out by distance,” Captain Preiss said. “The ship came up from behind and passed us at two hundred KPS relative, twenty minutes after we dropped out of hyperdrive. It's ahead of us by two light-minutes, decelerated to match our speed.”
I said, speaking low, “Pleasemadam,” alerting my pocket computer, “seek interstellar law, document Covenants of Shasht date twenty-five-oh-five. Run it.”
Fly-By-Night looked up into the dome. “Your intruder?”
We were deep into the Nursery Nebula. All around were walls of tenuous interstellar dust lit from within. In murky secrecy, intersecting shock waves from old supernovae were collapsing the interstellar murk into hot whirlpools that would one day be stars and solar systems. Out of view below us, light pressure from something bright was blowing columns and streams of dust past us. It all took place in an environment tens of light-years across. Furious action seemed frozen in time.
We had played at viewing the red whorl overhead. In IR you saw only the suns, paired protostars lit by gravitational collapse and the tritium flash, that had barely begun to burn. UV and X-ray showed violent flashes and plumes where planetesimals impacted, building planets. Neutrino radar showed structure forming within the new solar system.
We could not yet make out the point mass that would bend our course into the Tao Gap and out into free space. Turnpoint Star was a neutron star a few miles across, the core left by a supernova. But stare long enough and you could make out an arc on the sky, the shock wave from that same stellar explosion, broken by dust clouds collapsing into stars.
My seek system chimed. I listened to my wrist computer:
At the end of the Fourth Man-Kzin War, the Human Space Trade Alliance annexed Shasht and renamed the planet Fafnir, though the long, rocky, barren continent kept its Heroes' Tongue name. The Covenants of Shasht were negotiated then. We were to refrain from booting Kzinti citizens off Fafnir. An easy choice: they prefer the continent, whereas humans prefer the coral islands. They were already expanding an interstellar seafood industry into Patriarchy space. In return, and having little choice, the Patriarch barred himself, his clan and all habitats under his command, all others to be considered outlaw, from various acts. Eating of human meat… willful destruction of habitats… biological weapons of certain types… killing of Legal Entities, that word defined by a long list of exclusions, a narrower definition than in most human laws.
Futz, I wasn't a Legal Entity! Or I wouldn't be if they learned who I was.