Man-Kzin Wars V by Larry Niven (people reading books txt) 📕

what they wanted—until they were both distracted.

"I see your meaning, yes," he told the Fluff. "What do you suggest?"

"They want you take . . . ship and them. Go to place called 'Margrave.' You know this?"

"Yes, I know Margrave. My crew and I were headed there, before we landed here." And, with luck and at the human's own prompting, Nyawk-Captain told himself, Cat's Paw might still arrive there right on schedule.

"Play along," the Whitefluff told him. "Pretend pain. Be docile. Be watchful, too."

"Yes. Until the moment."

"I tell you when," the tiny alien advised.

The human male interrupted them with "[Something unintelligible] Margrave?"

The Fluff looked back and answered with "[More nonsense sounds] Margrave."

Nyawk-Captain nodded his head vigorously in the human gesture signaling agreement. Then, still twitching his arms in random and mechanical ways, he climbed slowly out of the armor's greaves and cuisses.

The work Navigator had been performing on the hull when he died was related only to the sensors for defensive weapons—useful but not essential systems, now. Nyawk-Captain's mission could proceed without them.

The kzin's stomach lurched and staggered with a change of balance as human the Sally tried a new twist with the artifact. The device was still making him do strange things and feel unusual sensations, some pleasant but most merely irritating. It was infuriating to occasionally lose control, but he could learn to live with that. He could even feel himself beginning to like the human female, just a little.

The other human went through the airlock first, keeping his rifle leveled on Nyawk-Captain's throat. The kzin let him. When he wanted, when the time was right, he would take away that toy before the human could fire it.

* * *

Cuiller backed the kzin into the central crash-cradle and made it sit down. While he held the rifle to its forehead, Sally used the couch's cloth straps and mechanical braces to bind the kzin. She left one forearm and paw free to work the instruments at its station. However, a brief and sweeping study of the control layout had convinced Cuiller that at least two people were needed to pilot the interceptor.

Once the kzin was secured, Krater stepped up to the main panel and fastened the Fiddle to a cleared space with a wad of stickum from her pack. She arranged it so the Fiddle's presumed working end pointed at the captive's forehead.

Cuiller inspected the arrangement. "I hope long-term exposure to that thing isn't going to render him incapacitated, or dead."

"We could do worse," she suggested.

Fellah sat quietly on the deckplates, where Cuiller hand set him down.

"Okay, Fellah, tell him we need to start the main polarizers and lift ship. He'll tell you how, and you translate for us. Or, I guess, you can just point at whatever controls we should attend to next."

The alien absorbed this and began spitting in the Hero's Tongue. Cuiller and Krater settled into the two remaining kzinti couches and tried to adapt the crash webbing to their smaller bodies.

With pantomime gestures and low growls, the kzin instructed Fellah in takeoff procedures. Then he relayed the instructions in a series that went, "Push this, pull that, turn this one until red line comes up here, do not move until this disk turns blue."

Working one-handed, Cuiller hit switches and verniers in the indicated order. The airlock closed, the board lit up, and somewhere back of them the world stiffened and shifted as the gravity polarizers kicked in.

On one of the screens, he watched the landing site and Callisto's battered hull dwindle and then disappear in a wash of green. In another second the green foliage was gone, dissolving in a flutter of hazy light that turned a chlorine-tinted white as the ship, still accelerating, rose above the limb of the planet.

"Good-bye, Beanstalk," Krater called cheerfully.

"Good-bye, Daff and Hugh," Cuiller added soberly. "They were good shipmates."

"Amen to that."

As they cleared atmosphere, the kzin turned back to Cuiller directly and gestured with its free paw toward controls on the panel in front of it.

The commander studied the almost-glazed eyes and the string of dribble at the corner of the kzin's black-lipped mouth. Was he missing some procedure—landing gear, hull integrity, something important? Cuiller threw the switches that the kzin had indicated.

The cabin was immediately filled with the buzz of an open comm circuit. An anxious kzinti face peered out of the screen directly ahead. It warbled a growl at them, and its eyes grew suddenly large.

Before the kzin in the chair could respond, Krater lunged forward, grabbed the Fiddle, and began pressing all its keys. Their kzinti captive went rigid and trembled with induced catatonia.

Cuiller frantically turned all the switches on the section of control board he'd just used, scrambling them with random settings. Finally, the alien face faded out in a blaze of static.

"Our captive was faking submission," he observed.

"I'm sorry, Jared," she said apologetically. "I don't know enough about the Fiddle to make him do anything more than twitch. Can we fly this ship alone?"

"I think I could pick out the star pattern surrounding Lambda Serpentis," Cuiller said. "We can probably bend a vector in that direction. And, given a few tries with this comm system, I think we can call out those segments of the U.N. fleet stationed at Margrave."

"Who was it that he contacted?" Sally asked.

"His commanding officer?" Cuiller suggested. "Some flight dispatcher back in kzinti space?"

"The face on that comm screen appeared almost instantly, didn't it? So the relay time was virtually nil. Whoever it was is damn close, Captain. Closer than kzinti space."

"Kzin . . . self-named Lehruff," Fellah offered. "Admiral."

"I was tricked into opening a comm-circuit directly into the entire kzinti command structure," Cuiller said. "Now the entire Patriarchy is going to know something damn peculiar has happened aboard this ship."

"Damned bad," from Fellah.

"Well, not much we can do about it now," Cuiller said. "Except run like hell and call for reinforcements."

"Agreed," Krater said.

"We travel," Fellah said. "Be here 'long, long time.' In this small space," he observed thoughtfully.