Man-Kzin Wars III by Larry Niven (good short books TXT) 📕

Numbly, he realized that it was their cabin baggage, packed into a pair of fiberboard canyons. For an insane instant he felt an impulse to tell them to be careful; he had half a crate of best Donaublitz verguuz in there . . . He glanced aside at Ingrid, seeing a dancing tension under the surface of cheerful calm. Gottdamn, he thought. If I didn’t know better—

“Right, cross and dog the airlock from the other side, you two.” Sweat gleamed on the officer’s face; he was a Swarm-Belter, tall and stick-thin. He hesitated, then ran a hand down his short-cropped crest and spoke softly. “I’ve got a family and children on Tiamat,” he said in an almost-whisper. “Murphy’s unsanctified rectum, half the crew on the Marlene are my relatives . . . if it were just me, you understand?”

Ingrid laid a hand on his sleeve, her voice suddenly gentle. “You’ve got hostages to fortune,” she said. “I do understand. We all do what we have to.”

“Yeah,” Harold heard himself say. Looking at the liner officer, he found himself wondering whether the woman’s words had been compassion or a beautifully subtle piece of vengeance. Easier if you called him a ratcat-lover or begged, he decided. Then he would be able to use anger to kill guilt, or know he was condemning only a coward to death. Now he can spend the next couple of years having nightmares about the brave, kind-hearted lady being ripped to shreds.

Unexpected, fear gripped him; a loose hot sensation below the stomach, and the humiliating discomfort of his testicles trying to retract from his scrotum. Ripped to shreds was exactly and literally true. He remembered lying in the dark outside the kzinti outpost, back in the guerilla days right after the war. They had caught Dagmar the day before, but it was a small patrol, without storage facilities. So they had taken her limbs one at a time, cauterizing; he had been close enough to hear them quarrelling over the liver, that night. He had taken the amnesty, not long after that . . .

“Here’s looking at you, sweetheart,” he said, as they cycled the lock closed. It was not cramped; facilities built for kzin rarely were, for humans. A Slasher-class three-crew scout, he decided. Motors whined as the docking ring retracted into the annular cavity around the airlock. Weight within was Kzin-standard; he sagged under it, and felt his spirit sag as well. “Tanjit.” A shrug. “Oh, well, the honeymoon was great, even if we had to wait fifty years and the relationship looks like it’ll be short.”

“Hari, you’re . . . sweet,” Ingrid said, smiling and stroking his cheek. Then she turned to the inner door.

“Hell, they’re not going to leave that unlocked,” Harold said in surprise. An airlock made a fairly good improvised holding facility, once you disconnected the controls via the main computer. The Wunderlander stiffened as the inner door sighed open, then gagged as the smell reached him. He recognized it instantly, the smell of rotting meat in a confined dry place. Lots of rotting meat . . . oily and thick, like some invisible protoplasmic butter smeared inside his nose and mouth.

He ducked through. His guess had been right, a Slasher. The control deck was delta-shaped, two crash-couches at the rear corners for the sensor and weapons operators, and the pilot-commander in the front. There were kzinti corpses in the two rear seats, still strapped in and in space armor with the helmets off. Their heads lay tilted back, mouths hanging open, tongues and eyeballs dry and leathery; the flesh had started to sag and the fur to fall away from their faces. Behind him he heard Ingrid retch, and swallowed himself. This was not precisely what she had expected . . .

And she’s got a universe of guts, but all her fighting’s been done in space, he reminded himself. Gentlefolk’s combat, all at a safe distance and then death or victory in a few instants. Nothing gruesome, unless you were on a salvage squad . . . even then, bodies do not rot in vacuum. Not like ground warfare at all. He reached over, careful not to touch, and flipped the hinged helmets down; the corpses were long past rigor mortis. A week or so, he decided. Hard to tell in this environment.

A sound brought his head up, a distinctive ftttp-ftttp. The kzin in the commander’s position was not dead. That noise was the sound of thin wet black lips fluttering on half-inch fangs, the ratcat equivalent of a snore.

“Sorry,” the screen in front of the kzin said. “I forgot they’d smell.”

Ingrid came up beside him. The screen showed a study, book-lined around a crackling hearth. A small girl in antique dress slept in an armchair before a mirror; a white-haired figure with a pipe and smoking jacket was seated beside her, only the figure was an anthropomorphic rabbit . . . Ingrid took a shaky breath.

“Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann,” she said. “Meet . . . the computer of Catskinner.” Her voice was a little hoarse from the stomach-acids that had filled her mouth. “I was expecting something . . . like this. Computer, meet Harold.” She rubbed a hand across her face. “How did you do it?”

The rabbit beamed and waved its pipe. “Oh, simply slipped a pseudopod of myself into its control computer while it attempted to engage me,” he said airily, puffing a cloud of smoke. “Not difficult, when its design architecture was so simple.”

Harold spoke through numb lips. “You designed a specific tapeworm that could crack a kzinti warship’s failsafes in . . . how long?”

“Oh, about two point seven seconds, objective. Of course, to me, that could be any amount of time I chose, you see. Then I took control of the medical support system, and injected suitable substances into the crew. Speaking of time . . . ” The rabbit touched the young girl on the shoulder; she stretched, yawned, and stepped through a large and ornately framed mirror on the study wall, vanishing without trace.

“Ah,” Harold said. Sentient computer. Murphy’s phosphorescent balls, I’m glad they don’t last.

Ingrid began speaking, a list of code-words and letter-number combinations.

“Yes, yes,” the rabbit