The Man-Kzin Wars 04

translated as something like Overseer of Inferiors, or Animal Manipulator. Perhaps he had a chemical hold on them? Perhaps he was an expert at some kind of hypnotic conditioning? No matter. The irrational loyalty was there. She remembered the day she had attacked Mellow-Yellow, ready to die, because he was cruel to children, and Long- Reach had been watching her with four eyes. If she had hurt Mellow-Yellow, Long-Reach would have killed her.

It was a strange bargain. If she protected their master (from her cage?), the Jotok were hers.

Was it a good bargain? It was dangerous to have naive allies. Were they as naive as they seemed? Were they treacherous? How much did the kzin trust their slaves? How reliable were these Jotoki? What skills did they have? What skills did she have? What weapons did she have? Nothing. She knew the formula for a nerve gas that would kill kzin and was harmless to men, but even given the equipment, she wouldn't have known how to manufacture it. This whole situation wasn't part of her Gibraltar Base training.

No, it wasn't a good bargain, but it was the only bargain she had.

“I'm no match for a kzin,” she said. She wanted them to tell her something.

“You have military mind. We have arms. Ship is our playground.”

They began to feed her more often. They cleaned cages and when they moved her to a new cage, she found a ship map on the floor. She was surprised that they controlled the cage locks. They were trusted. Or was it just that Mellow-Yellow trusted them and in the heat of battle that kzin's duties had not been fully reapportioned? Why was he in disgrace?

Her allies came up with vicious little plans. They had molecular trip-wire that they could set up that would cut a kzin's legs off. They knew how to rig a gravity floor plate into a booby trap that would grab a kzin in a sudden six-g field. But when she tried to plan with them, she understood why they needed her. What they didn't have was an overall strategic sense. When one starts a battle, it sets off an avalanche of activity. The good commander is able to predict where the avalanche will go, and have his responses already in place.

She could make detailed plans, but could they follow orders? Can a slave follow orders? She was willing to bet that they could.

Some of the events she wasn't going to be able to predict. So far as Nora knew, the human hyperfleet was already fighting at Alpha Centauri. That was one wild card—she could be vaporized by her comrades before the mutiny even started. On the other hand, the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch was the most sluggish ship of the Third Black Pride and so would reach its new station many days later than the maneuverable elements of its squadron. If the mutiny could be carried out before they reached the battle, their chances were much better. Haste was in order.

Lieutenant Nora Argamentine did not expect to survive the mutiny, so she was optimizing her strategy for maximum kzin kill. She wanted as many kzin dead as possible before the inevitable moment when her plans fell apart. Meticulously, with the information the slaves gave her, she targeted every kzin on board the Bitch. Mellow-Yellow was at the bottom of the list. He could be killed by flooding his hibernation cell with liquid nitrogen but not while she still needed her Jotoki allies.

They were able to manufacture her nerve gas. That surprised her at first until she remembered what Mellow-Yellow had been doing to the children. He had some kind of grant' to do 'medical research' on humans. No, she was not going to spare that one.

The Jotoki fiends even cobbled together hand weapons. They had a spaceman's usual devout respect for high-velocity projectiles and high-energy cutting tools. The result was a launcher for a concussion pellet that could hemorrhage a kzin's insides but wouldn't damage bulkheads.

The Bitch's manufacturing shop was designed for interstellar war. You didn't fly in spare parts to an interstellar battle, you tooled up for anything, on the spot, at a moment's notice and burped out one-of-a-kind items. It was incomprehensible to Nora that such facilities could be trusted to slaves, but then she wasn't a kzin.

The attack began in the dorm. The airseal bulkheads sealed without triggering alarms gas flooded the rooms, stayed, and was flushed out the airseal bulkheads unlocked. A gas-killed kzin looks like he's asleep except that he's not breathing.

Jotoki who were not already at their stations on regular jobs began to move to their assigned position. The Command Center was gassed.

Hrith-Master Officer was comprehending what was happening to him—at the same time his nervous system was failing to obey his order to sound a gas alarm. The officer farthest from the air purifier did issue that alarm before he died.

The surviving kzinti moved efficiently into their battle armor, which was gas-proof alert, thoroughly alarmed, and ready for action. They were primed for orders, and they got them: “Battle Stations!” That was the wrong order. The ship was being attacked internally, not from an external threat. “Boarding Stations!” would have been a better order. “Damage Containment!” might have worked. Even “Abandon Ship!” would have collected them into a defensible position. “Battle Stations!” just dispersed them to known destinations, along known routes, across Jotok devised booby traps. A Jotok, in a rack-held Ztirgor, picked off the kzin who tried to pass through the anger.

Lieutenant Argamentine was master-minding the battle from a tiny munitions closet which had been jury- rigged into the Bitch's main communications net, finally wearing trousers and a shirt she'd ordered her Jotoki allies to make for her, plus an ugly kzin oxygen mask, retailored for her head. She knew the jig was up when a kzin commando team retook the Command Center, killing the occupying Jotoki, and cut off her contact.

They could trace her location.

She evacuated instantly, taking the best position she could, facing down both legs of an L-shaped corridor, her only weapon the improvised concussion-pellet launcher. Hunkering behind her portable stun-gun barricade, she knew that this was where she was going to die. She wondered what the kids would think when they came out of sedation. She was damned if she wanted to die in a cage.

Without warning, a stun-bolt ripped down the corridor, covering the advance of a kzin clean-up team.

The barricade hardly did any good at all. She felt the bolt hit her back, probably from a bounce off a wall, numbly noting that her fingers were now so frozen that she could hardly fire off the concussion rounds one at the lead kzin, one at the kzin behind, and one for good measure at the blind bend from whence they had appeared. The blasts went off. She was suddenly deaf and her paralyzed legs refused to propel her out of the way but she saw the disabled kzinti carried toward her down the gravityless corridor. She felt the thuds on the wall as she was buried in kzin armor.

When a little girl studied war, odd things stuck in her memory. Now she was remembering the fragment of a twentieth century Frenchman's letter from a hospital near Reims describing how he had spent four days buried with eight dead comrades on top of him in a shell-destroyed trench.

The duty of a soldier is to wait. And while one is waiting, paralyzed, life goes on. Three Jotok raced around the corner, chattering in their pseudo-Hero's Tongue. Efficient hands rolled the kzinti over, removed their helmets and slit their throats. They stripped the corpses of weapons, piled the armored bodies in a neat barricade for Nora, reloaded her launcher, and propped her up facing down the L. Two of the beasts skittered away. The third remained just long enough to give her a shot of paralysis antidote effective for a kzin but no better than a bee sting for a human. Hands rearranged her trousers, and then he, too, was gone.

The duty of a soldier is to wait, soaked in the blood of an enemy, fingers unable to fire, praying that the fingers will come back to life before it is necessary to kill again.

Daddy had been burned alive.

Eventually Long-Reach arrived, arguing with himselves about how to help Nora. Three Jotoki carried her away for a bath by multitudinous arms. While her mouth was still only able to make the noises of a baby trying to discipline its tongue, she learned of their impossible victory.

Lieutenant Argamentine couldn't speak her joy but her eyes could leak. If General Fry could see me now, naked and being bathed by monster slaves!

Long-Reach was combing out her hair with three hands, caressing the auburn richness of it, fluffing it, adding proteins to it to give body. He knew how to take care of a pelt!

“Did… Mellow… Yellow… survive?”

“Slept through it all. Like a kit.”

Nora grinned to herself. One to go! A half an hour later, when she could speak coherently, she suggested the