The roar continued. My sight was foggy… no. The cabin was thick with fog. Fly-By-Night clawed his refuge wall, which had gone slack. We had air! I still didn't have time to free Fly-By-Night because—there he was! Envoy was back at the controls. I was braced to leap when a white glare blazed from his hand.
He had the gun.
I changed my jump. It took me behind the cannon. Two projectiles punched into the wall behind me. I swiped the w'tsai in a wide slash across Fly-By-Night's vacuum refuge, and continued falling toward the shower/toilet. Packer couldn't ignore Ragnarok forever.
The door opened in my face and I chopped vertically. Packer was naked. His left hand was on the door lock so I changed the cut, right to catch his free hand, his claws and the iron w'tsai he'd been holding. He whacked me hard but the blow was blunt. I spun once and crashed into Envoy and slashed.
Glimpsed Paradoxical behind him, braced myself and slashed. Paradoxical was firing anesthetic needles. The Kzin wasn't fighting back. I didn't see the implication so I kept slashing.
“Mart! LE Mart! Beowulf!”
I screamed, “What?” Disturbing me now could… what? Before me was a drifting cloud of blood and butchered meat. Paradoxical had stopped firing needles into it. Behind me, Fly-By-Night was on Packer's back, gnawing Packer's ear and fending off the hand that still had claws. Packer beat him with the blunted hand. They both looked trapped. Packer couldn't reach Fly-By-Night, but Fly-By-Night dared not let go.
I approached with care. Packer's arms were busy so he kicked to disembowel me. I chopped off what I could reach. Kick/slash, kick/slash. When he slowed down I killed him.
The air was thick with blood globules and red fog. We were breathing that futz. I got a cloth across my face. Fly-By-Night was snorting and sneezing. Paradoxical had placed meteor patches where Envoy had fired at me, but now he floated limp, maybe dying. I put him into the refuge and got him to zip it. Fly-By-Night went to the controls. Minutes later we had gravity. All the scarlet goo settled to the floor and we could breathe.
I had gone berserk. Never happened before. My mind was slow coming back. Why was there air?
Air. Think now: I slashed Envoy's suit open. He pressurized the cabin to save his life. Paradoxical must have come out then. The Jotok's needles knocked Envoy out despite pressure armor… why? Because Paradoxical was putting needles into flesh wherever I'd slashed away the Kzin's armor. And of course I hadn't got around to releasing Fly-By-Night until late…
I safed the blade. “Fly-By-Night? I believe this is yours.”
He took it gingerly. “No witness would have guessed that,” he said, and handed it back. “Clean it in the waterfall.”
Kzinti custom: never borrow a w'tsai. If you do, return it clean. Waterfall? He meant the big box. The word was a joke. I found a big blanket made of sponge, a tube attached. When I wrapped it around the w'tsai, it left the blade clean. I tried it on myself. The blanket flooded me with soapy water, then clean water, then sucked me dry. Weird sensation, but I came out clean.
The toilet looked like an oval box of sand with foot- and handholds around it, though the sand stayed put. Later.
A pressure suit was splayed like a pelt against the wall for easy access. There was a status display. I couldn't read the glowing dots-and-commas, but the display must have told Packer there was air outside, and he'd come charging out. I was starting to shake.
I emerged from the waterfall box into a howling gale. The blood was all gone. I couldn't even smell it. Fly-By-Night and Paradoxical were at the kitchen wall feeding butchered meat into the hopper.
“This kind of thing must be normal on Patriarchy spacecraft,” Fly-By-Night said cheerfully. “Holes in walls and machinery, blood and corpses everywhere, no problem. This hopper would hold a Great Dane… a big dog, Mart. The cleanup subsystem is running smooth as a human's arse.” He saw my shivering. “You have killed. You should feed. Must your meat be cooked? I don't know that we have a heat source.”
“Don't worry about it.”
“I must. I'm hungry!” Fly-By-Night smiled widely. “You wouldn't like me hungry, would you?”
“Futz, no!” A Sheathclaws local joke? I tried to laugh. Shivering. Paradoxical was crawling over one of the control panels. “This kitchen was mounted separately. It is of Shashter manufacture, perhaps connected to the orange underground. It will feed slaves.” It tapped at a surface, and foamy green stuff spilled into a plastic bag. Pond scum? It tapped again and the wall generated a joint of bloody meat. Again: it hummed and disgorged a layered brick.
A handmeal. While Paradoxical sucked at his bag of pond scum and Fly-By-Night devoured hot raw meat, I ate three handmeal bricks. They never tasted that good again.
Fly-By-Night had kept Packer's ears, one intact and one chewed to a nub, and Envoy's, both intact. These last he offered to me. “Your kill. Mart, I can dispose of—”
I took them. My kill.
We had taken the boat. Now what?
Fly-By-Night said, “The hard part will be persuading Meebrlee-Riit that all is well here.” His voice changed. “Dominant One, all runs as planned but for the Telepath's behavior. Cowed by fear, he has soiled his refuge. Shall we clean him? It might be a trick—”
Funny stuff. I was still shivering. “That's very good, I can't tell the difference, but Meebrlee-Riit or Tech might.”
“Guide me.”
“I can't find the hologram stage.”
Fly-By-Night touched something. This whole side of the main weapon became a window, floor to dome, a gaudy panorama across orange veldt into a city of massive towers. We'd been prisoned on the other side of it.
I said, “Tanj! He'll see every hair follicle. All right, I'm still thrashing around here. We've got Packer's pressure suit. The orders were to leave the, ah, prisoners in vacuum and falling. Try this “Whenever Meebrlee-Riit calls, Packer is in the waterfall room.” We hadn't heard enough of Packer's speech to imitate Packer.
“LE Fly-By-Night, you're Envoy. You're in the pressure suit, we're in the vac refuges. We'll have to change the markings on the suit. I'd say Envoy's move is to wait patiently for his Alpha Officer to call.” I didn't like the taste of this. “He could catch us by surprise.”
“I should find an excuse to call him.”
“Anything goes wrong, you give us air instantly. Paradoxical, have you found an emergency air switch?”
“Here, then here.”
“Stet. Envoy, what's wrong with your voice?”
“Nothing,” said Fly-By-Night.
“Well, there had better be.”
“Stet,” the Kzin said. “And we don't really want vacuum, do we? Let's try this instead. I'm calling because we're not in vacuum, and my voice—”
And his tale was better than mine, so we worked on that.
We spent some time looking those controls over, trying a few things. We found air pressure, air mix, emergency pressure, cabin gravity, thrust. Weapons would be harder to test. There were controls you could hit by accident without killing anyone, and that was done with virtual control panels. Weapons and defenses were hardwired buttons and switches, a few of them under locked cages, all stiff enough but big enough that I could turn them on or off by jabbing with the heel of my hand. Paradoxical couldn't move those at all.
The hologram wall was the telescope screen too. Paradoxical got us a magnificent view back into the Nursery Nebula, all curdles and whorls of colored light. It found Odysseus a light-hour behind us, under spin and falling free with no sign of motive power, only a chain of corridor lights and the brighter glow of the lobby. That didn't tell us if they still had hyperdrive. They couldn't use it yet.
Ahead was nothing but distant stars. We had to be approaching flat space, where Stealthy-Mating could jump to hyperdrive.
Fly-By-Night was wearing Envoy's pressure suit. The markings were right. He would keep the right sleeve hidden. We had cut off part of the helmet, raggedly, to obscure his features. Now Fly-By-Night tapped at the kitchen wall. It disgorged a soft, squishy, dark red organ that might have been a misshapen human liver. He smeared blood over his face and chest, then into the exposed ear. My shivering became a violent shudder. Fly-By-Night looked at me in consternation. “LE Mart? What's wrong?”