Things were peaceful enough-the kzinti had a gym to work off their energy and aggression, Charrgh-Captain forbade death duels among the relatively small crew, and foodmakers in private quarters avoided the most common source of fights-but it was still like walking through a cage of tigers.
They spent some time with Charrgh-Captain on the bridge, familiarizing themselves further with the ship-it was the instinct of any spacer to do that, though they couldn't really hope to know more than the rudiments of the systems. Especially since they were wary of touching meters or control panels or interrupting kzinti watchstanders. Both made as sure as they could that the other kzinti were reminded as often as possible, by the sight of the three of them together, that they were under Charrgh-Captain's protection-the Patriarch's protection, if it came to that.
Sometimes-not very often-Charrgh-Captain was in the mood to talk; sometimes, when he wished to relax, even to joke and share a drink and reminiscences, or game with them in his suite; but the other kzinti were not companions from a past adventure, and it soon became abundantly clear that, for some reason, they had no particular inclination to socialize with representatives of the most terrible enemy their race had ever known.
As far as Richard could tell, none of the other kzinti spoke Interworld. He thought it unwise to try to press conversation upon them in either his insulting, monkey-mangled attempt at the Heroes' Tongue, or in what was still known in the Patriarchy (of which this ship was a part) as the slaves' patois. The windows were opaqued and there was nothing to be gained by looking through them anyway, except possibly madness-the blind-spot effect of looking upon hyperspace affected kzinti every bit as badly as it did humans. In their cabin there were entertainments.
Telepath, however, visited them; as often, they surmised, as he thought they could tolerate him. They played chess and card games with him sometimes, never developing the violent headache which would have warned them he was cheating. He won routinely at chess, but card games that involved bluffing were something of a kzinti handicap. He could easily sense their emotions when one of them had a good hand; it was the idea of folding-surrendering-that so often threw him.
They had brought some old-fashioned jigsaw puzzles. He enjoyed them hugely, and could assemble them with blur-quick movements-except for the one that was all-white. That kept him poring over the pieces for hours at a time. They gathered he had no possessions or pastimes of his own. Anything a telepath had that another kzin fancied, the other kzin would take as a matter of course. Once he surprised them by bringing them a model of a kitten he had carved from some kind of wood-surprised them doubly, as they hadn't realized that sculpture was so strongly nonvisual. (Kzinti paintings could be incomprehensible to human perceptions.) Sometimes he told them about his life, including the fact, which also surprised them, that he had kits. Both Richard and Gay, as reserve officers, filed his information away, though they felt slightly uncomfortable about doing so. Mostly he took their company, games, and talk as a preliminary and aid to relaxation and sleep, and their cabin as a refuge from the other kzinti.
There came the indescribable moment, the discontinuity as the ship dropped out of hyperspace. The ports became transparent again, and stars reappeared. Strange stars. Then there were planets. They swung past two ringed gas giants, with the families of moons and Trojan-point asteroids that had first attracted kzinti miners to this system. They fell toward the system's heart, and toward a small inner planet.
It was not unlike Mars. A red surface suggested oxygen locked in iron. There were eroded stumps of mountains and what might have been seas a billion years previously. There was a tenuous atmosphere, mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, which for breathing purposes might as well have been a vacuum, but which sufficed to stir winds and dust clouds, and slowly traveling processions of crescent dunes. Kzinti instruments had detected no life but microbes. There were small icecaps. A small but bright sun gave good light.
With hyperdrive, this was not far beyond the existing borders of kzin-settled space. If the kzinti ran out of better planets, and humans let them, they could probably kzinform it one day. Despite the broad streaks of anarchy in their government, and a bureaucracy which depended largely on inefficient and unreliable slaves, they were capable of great constructive feats when they put their minds to it.
At present they had an application before the human worlds to mine the gas giants' moons: on probation after four major and several minor wars launched against humans, the Patriarchy was now under close observation in any effort to expand its territories. The kzinti had lost all the wars, of course. If they had won one, there would have been no more after it.
The stasis box, its general position already known, was easy to locate with deep-radar, and easy to uncover. Cunning Stalker simply hovered over it, holding position with a gravity generator, and ran its reaction drive on very low power so as to blow the dust away.
The mirror surface of the stasis box was revealed about fifty feet down. Magnification brought the image of the exposed section into the control center. Whether it had been deliberately buried there, or it and the planet had collided in the remote past, or it had once been housed in some installation whose metal was now coloring the sand, there was no way of telling. There were curves of vitrified rock that might be the last traces of the rimwall of an ancient impact crater-not necessarily related. Anyway, unanswerable speculations as to how it got there were of no importance at all, beside the question of what it might contain.
Deep-radar showed it was spherical-unusual-and about twenty feet in diameter. Far smaller than the last one, but still huge for a stasis box. All aboard Cunning Stalker knew it was quite big enough to contain live Slavers.
The box was now uncovered. A "mining robot" (which bore a remarkable resemblance to a Third War automated sapper) was landed next to it; it burrowed beneath the box with a disintegrator, emerged a few minutes later, and rose to be picked up. Cunning Stalker moved aside, and a fusion charge blew the stasis box off the planet.
They had to catch it before it fell back; it didn't reach escape speed. The charge had been meant to accomplish that, so the box was significantly more massive than expected. This might be good or bad: it could mean the box was packed solid, with no room for inhabitants, or it could mean that there was extremely heavy equipment inside, which suggested weapons-and someone to use them.
The box was towed to high orbit, and the ship's fusion drive was aimed at it and kept hot. Charrgh-Captain, Slaverexpert, Telepath, two troopers, and the humans took the gig over to it. (The "gig" had oversized gravity compensators and a remarkably heavy layer of hullmetal lining its nose, almost as if it was meant to be used to ram a hole in something.) Slaverexpert fired a parcel of fine black material at it: superconductor. The fabric wrapped around the box, formed a closed surface, turned silver briefly, and rolled itself back up into the parcel. "Clever," Gay murmured.
"The dropcloth is Pierin emergency firefighting equipment," Charrgh-Captain remarked. "I don't think they had this in mind."
The container's surface was still seamless, but had acquired a creamy hue. Richard had been watching the views from the scanners around the box, and he said, "Where's the cutoff switch?"
Slaverexpert, who had never previously spoken unless directly addressed, startled Richard by saying, "True." In Interworld.
"Explain," commanded Charrgh-Captain.
"These were designed to be opened easily, Charrgh-Captain. A panel would be spring-loaded, to break the conductive surface when the field was interrupted. The stasis has ended, but the surface is still seamless."