Man-Kzin Wars XII by Larry Niven (books you have to read .TXT) 📕

"Wittily phrased, though possibly misleading. Humans do not have a surrender gesture. They are descended from the Pak, a species that knew nothing but war, and are as a consequence the least reasonable or tractable intelligent race presently known. They are never satisfied until things are entirely the way they want them, and genuinely expect everyone else to cooperate."

One of his siblings was turning toward Shleer. Shleer froze, turned only his head, and made eye contact as soon as he was seen. The kzintosh flexed his ears a little and turned back to the Pierin. Shleer continued out of the hall, head pounding terribly.

The Tnuctip was out of his sight, but passed through somebody else's. Shleer took the correct exit from the next chamber, doing military respiration exercises to get the headache under control. It got a little easier each time.

He evaded the guards who'd seen the thing, which was indeed heading for the Jotoki labs. Shleer shortened the distance between them to get through the (manifestly useless) containment doors on the same activation, then let it get ahead. It went into the lifeboat, out of sight.

Then it vanished from his perception.

Shleer immediately took cover. The Tnuctip came out of the lifeboat wearing a cap of metal mesh, then went over to where the Jotoki traditionally worked on weapons they fondly imagined the kzinti didn't know about, entered, and was invisible again.

The Tnuctip was wearing a shield against telepathy. The sthondat-nuzzling imbeciles had had a mental shield, but hadn't been using it when they went into stasis! Shleer noticed his claws were out, and retracted them with an effort. A phrase he'd picked up from Felix crossed his mind: "unusually stupid." It certainly seemed to apply.

What would the Peer do now? Examine his options.

Shleer could sneak in on just nose and ears.

He could wait and follow the Tnuctip further.

He could wait and look inside after the Tnuctip left.

Or he could leave now—at least in theory; he only listed it to be thorough.

Shleer waited.

Eventually the Tnuctip came out—looking directly toward him. Pure chance, but bad. Shleer hoped really hard their brains were arranged like modern ones, and maintained eye contact. The Tnuctip sniffed a few times, then turned and went to put the shield back in the lifeboat.

After it had scurried away, Shleer moved for the first time in over an hour, stretching slowly. The only place for the Tnuctip to go was the Residence; it could therefore be ignored now. Shleer entered the Jotoki secret weapon shop for a look.

Nothing was lying out, but compartments had been handled. He sniffed them out, then checked for traps. One had a hair across the opening, another hair hanging from the hinge, and a deadfall of a canister of dry lubricant powder inside. Intended only to reveal Jotoki interference—so kzinti reflexes kept the powder from spilling a grain.

The Tnuctip had been working on another mental shield. Cruder-looking, but with an active power source. Jamming? Would that work?

He looked it over carefully, Felix having taught him a great deal. It most certainly would not work. There were conductors that would melt if full power were applied for more than a few seconds. The Tnuctip had been Programmed to waste its time here.

Shleer almost pitied the evil little creature. Almost. He replaced the deadfall and the hairs, and began trying to remember, as he headed back toward the harem, where he'd last seen a camera.

The design seemed worth copying—and Shleer hadn't been Told to use flawed components.

* * *

The Slaver Gnix watched a movie and sucked a gnal, or at least the best approximation his slaves had produced so far. He had nobody to tell it to—yet—but he was mostly pleased. He'd been lucky beyond belief.

He'd manifested full Power later than usual for a Thrint. This had led to his being employed at a food developer's, which was where he'd discovered the spy among the Tnuctipun. Darfoor, the spy, had had a generator for one of the new stasis fields, which had been developed in the course of his last spying job. All Tnuctipun innovations turned out to be part of a long-term plan to disrupt Thrintun commerce. Gnix had taken over Darfoor and his contacts, and they had been working on ways for Gnix to profit from the disruptions when a competing food company had attacked the development habitat.

By then Darfoor had installed the stasis field in the escape boat, and Gnix had Told him to forget to put on his Power shield.

The stasis had held while the galaxy rotated several times.

Amusingly, the creatures that had opened the field had been looking for a weapon to use to escape from slavery. They had built Gnix an amplifier, and he had taken over the rest of the creatures here and set his Tnuctipun to growing some females from his genetic material. There was some problem, not too clear—Tnuctipun minds wandered so—with getting the chemistry right in the host females, but there were plenty of them. His new chief slave had apparently been collecting females.

There were plenty of potential slave races, too, but the fighting slaves' records said some of them knew how to shield against the Power, so Gnix had sent some of the fighting slaves to gather antimatter from a source that had passed by a while back. (For some reason they hadn't done so before.) He was the only Thrint alive—stasis didn't count—and ruler of a small interstellar empire, soon to be a large interstellar empire.

Not bad for a foreman in a food workshop.

The only thing he really disliked was the slave telepaths. All the fighting slaves had a touch of it—his sire Gelku would have been terribly upset by that, as he'd been deeply religious—but some had so much that they'd developed mental shielding techniques to stop the noise. He'd finally ordered those removed from the palace. Not killed, since they were useful; but he didn't like running into them. It was too startling. The amplifier could get through a