The Man-Kzin Wars 04

warning when he was about to attack, and Fixer-of-Weapons was being driven to emotional extremes.

The kzin laid back his ears in furious misery. “I have done nothing to deserve such treatment,” he growled. He believed he was being detained on a kzinti fleet flagship. Halloran, had he truly been a kzin, would have preferred human capture to kzinti detention. I can’t say I like the ratcat, he thought, with a twinge of guilt, quickly suppressed. But you've got to admit he's about as tough as he thinks he is.

“That is for your superiors to decide,” Halloran-Kzin said. “You behaved with suspected cowardice, you allowed an invasion cruiser to be disabled and captured—”

“I was not Kufcha-Captain! I cannot be responsible for the incompetence of my commander.” Fixer-of- Weapons rose to his full two hundred and twenty centimeters, short for a kzin, and flexed against the imaginary bonds. The muscles beneath the smooth-furred limbs and barrel chest were awesome, despite weight loss under weeks of captivity. “This is a travesty! Why are you doing this to me?”

“You will tell us exactly what happened, step by step, and how you allowed animals—plant-eaters—to capture War Loot.”

Fixer-of-Weapons slumped in abject despair. “I have told, again and again.”

Halloran-Kzin showed no signs of relenting. Fixer-of-Weapons lashed his long pink rat-tail, sitting in a tight ball on the floor, swallowed hard and began his tale again, and again Halloran used the familiar litany as a cover to probe the kzin's inner thoughts.

If Halloran was going to be a kzin, and think like one for days on end, then he had to have everything exactly right. His deception would be of the utmost delicacy. The smallest flaw could get him killed immediately.

Kzinti, unlike the UN Space Navy, did not take prisoners except for Intelligence and culinary purposes.

Fixer-of-Weapons finished his story. Halloran pulled back from the kzin's mind.

“If I have disgraced myself, then at least allow me to die,” Fixer-of-Weapons said softly.

That's one wish you can be granted, Halloran thought. One way or another, the kzin would be dead soon; his species did not survive in captivity.

Halloran exited the cell and faced three men and two women in the antechamber. Two of the men wore the new uniform—barely ten years old—of the UN Space Navy. The third man was a Belter cultural scientist, the only one in the group actually native to Ceres, dressed in bright lab spotter orange. The two women Halloran had never seen before; they were also Belters, though their Belter tans had faded. All three wore the broad Belter Mohawk. The taller of the two offered Halloran her hand and introduced herself.

“I'm Kelly Ysyvry,” she said. “Don't bother trying to spell it.”

“Y-S-Y-V-R-Y,” Halloran said, displaying the showoff mentality that had made his social life so difficult at times.

“Right,” Ysyvry said, unflappable. “This,” she nodded at her female companion, “is Henrietta Olsen.”

Colonel Buford Early, the shortest and most muscular of the three men, nodded impatiently at the introductions; he was an Earther, coal-black and much older than he looked, something Ultra Secret in the ARM before the war. Early had recruited Halloran four years ago, trained him meticulously, and shown remarkable patience toward his peculiarities.

“When are you going to be ready?” he asked Halloran.

“Ready for what?” Halloran asked.

“Insertion.”

Halloran, fully understanding the Colonel's meaning, inspected the women roguishly.

“I'm confused,” he said, smiling.

“What he means,” Ysyvry said, “is that we're all impatient, and you've been the stumbling block throughout this mission.”

“What is she?” Halloran asked Early.

“We are the plunger of your syringe,” Henrietta Olsen answered. “We're Belter pilots. We've been getting special training in the kzinti hulk.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Halloran said. He glanced back at the hatch to the cell airlock. “Fixer-of-Weapons will be dead within a week. I can't learn any more from him. So… I'm ready for a test.”

Early stared at him. Halloran knew the Colonel was restraining an urge to ask him, Are you sure?, after having displayed such impatience.

“How do you know Fixer-of-Weapons will die?” the black man said.

Halloran's smile stiffened. He disliked being challenged. “Because if I were him, and part of me is, I would have reached my limit.”

“It hasn't been an easy assignment,” the cultural scientist commented.

“Easier for us than Fixer-of-Weapons,” Halloran said, smirking inwardly as the scientist winced.

There would be many problems, of course. Halloran would never be as strong as a kzin, and if there were any sort of combat, he would quickly lose…

Halloran, among the kzinti, thinking himself a kzin, would have to carefully preprogram himself to avoid such dangerous situations, to keep a low profile concomitant with his status, whatever that might be. That would be difficult. A high-status kzin had retainers, sons, flunkies, to handle status-challenges; many of the retainers picked carefully for a combination of dim wits and excellent reflexes. An officer with recognized rank could not be challenged while on a warship; punishments for trying included blinding, castration, and execution of all descendants—all more terrible than mere death to a kzin. Nameless ratings could duel as they pleased, provided they had a senior's permission… and Halloran-Kzin would be outside the rank structure, with no protector.

Fixer-Halloran, when he returned to the kzinti fleet, would likely find all suitable billets on other vessels filled. To regain his position and keep face among his fellows, he could not simply “fit in” and be docile. But there were more ways than open combat to gain social status.

The kzinti social structure was delicately tuned, though how delicately perhaps not even the kzinti understood. Halloran could wreak his own kind of havoc and none would suspect him of anything but overweening ambition.

All of this, he knew, would have to be accomplished in less than three hundred hours: just twelve days. His body would be worn out by that time. Bad diet—all meat, and raw at that, though digestible, with little chance for supplements of the vitamins a human needed and the life of a kzin did not produce; mental strain; luck running out.

He did not expect to return.

Halloran's hope was that his death would come in the capture or destruction of one or more kzinti ships.

The chance for such a victory, however negligible it might be in the overall strategy of the war, was easily worth one's life, certainly his own life.

The truth was, Halloran thought he was a thorough shit, not of much use to anyone in the long run, a petty dilettante with an unlikely ability, more a handicap than an asset.

Self-sacrifice would give him a peculiar satisfaction: See, I'm not so bad.

Nobility of purpose.

And something deeper: to actually be a kzin. A kzin could be all the things Halloran had trained himself not to be, and not feel guilty about it. Dominant. Vicious. Competitive.

Kzinti were allowed to have fun.

The short broadcast good-byes to his friends and relatives on Earth, as yet un-assailed by kzinti:

His father, now one hundred and twenty, he was able to say farewell to; but his grandfather, a Struldbrug and still one of the foremost collectors of Norman Rockwell art and memorabilia, was unavailable.

He disliked his father, yet respected him, and loved his grandfather, but felt a kind of contempt for the man's sentimental passion.

His grandfather's answering service did not know where the oldest living Halloran was. That brought on a sharp tinge of disappointment, against which he quickly raised a shield of aloofness. For a moment, a very young Lawrence—Larry—had surfaced, wanting, desperately needing to see Grandpa. And there was no room for such active sub-personalities, not with Fixer-of-Weapons filling much of his cranium. Or so he told himself, drowning the disappointment as an old farmer might have discarded a sack of unwanted kittens.