Only when he tried to rise did he understand how critically the blast had injured him. His upper limbs moved slowly, and some of the armor's joints worked not at all. Molten metal from the exploding weapon had locked them, dripping even as far as the knee flexor on his right side. He rolled in the dirt, trying to break out of the imprisoning bodysuit. The shell clasps up his belly line were sticking, too.
With a mammoth, flexing spasm of his back, he brought the armor upright on its knees and started to limp toward the ship's hatchway and the relative safety inside the hull. There he would also find tools to help him get free of the imprisoning suit. With every step he took, Nyawk-Captain expected more energy pulses to blast away the ablative surface and heat the steel shell over his back.
When he got his locked paws on the hatch coaming, he remembered the impossible squeeze that moving into and out of the airlock had been, even with fully functioning armor. He wasn't going to make it.
He was beating the suit's belly against hullmetal, trying to break the clasps free, when one of the humans dropped out of the trees on a thin, purple wire and put the projector of a laser rifle against his forehead. A small, fluffy white animal which curled under one of its arms jumped free and scrambled into the ship.
Nyawk-Captain, staring into the human's glaring eyes, did not dare move.
After a second, the white animal came out with the Thrintun artifact held in its jaws. Nyawk-Captain remembered leaving the device on the ship's workbench for his and Navigator's further study. As the animal emerged, a second human—this one more wounded than the first—came down on another wire and also leveled its rifle.
The first human put aside its own weapons, took the alien artifact from the White fluff, and aimed it at Nyawk-Captain's forehead instead.
* * *
Krater tried various settings on the Fiddle and watched with a clinical eye as the kzin twitched and went into convulsions. She settled on one which left it trembling and hypnotized inside its steel restraints.
"This process can either be painful or not," Cuiller explained to the kzin slowly in Interworld. "I don't think it understands, Sally," he said finally.
"Well, if I let up with this thing," she proposed, "he might be able to nod or something. Want to try it?"
"No thanks. You keep him under." Cuiller turned back to the kzin and said conversationally, "Now, we need to borrow your ship, Kitty I'm going to burn you out of that armor, and you're going to cooperate—one way or another."
Cuiller studied the latches down the suit's front. They were gobbed with metal and streamers of burned plastic. He placed the projector of his laser alongside the middle one and fired a short burst. The clasp flew off into the dirt. He repeated with the other two, and the clamshell halves of the belly plate sagged apart. The commander then laid the rifle against the soft, reddish fur underneath.
"Slowly," he told the kzin.
The warrior shrugged massively, withdrawing its arms from the crabbed gauntlets, vambraces, rerebraces, and pauldrons. It divided its attention between Cuiller's aim with the rifle and Krater's hold on the Fiddle.
Krater twisted something, and the kzin's eyes crossed. Its hands moved sideways, too fast for Cuiller to react. He almost opened the massive chest with a burst before he understood that the Fiddle had prompted that sudden movement.
"Keep working on it," Cuiller told her, "I think you're getting somewhere. I hope he's either captain or navigator of this interceptor, because that's the only way he'll be able to help us."
Then inspiration struck.
"Hey, Fellah!" Cuiller called.
The tiny alien was dwarfed by the huge warcat, but he glanced up at the commander with some confidence.
"Talk to the kzin," Cuiller told him. "Get inside his mind. See words—say words. Tell him we need his ship, need him. Take us to Margrave. Tell him Margrave. He can do it the easy way or hard. But one way or another, he's going to take us to Margrave."
Fellah looked at Cuiller with his big, dark eyes gleaming out from among the white hair. The commander sensed that the alien understood what he meant. After a moment, Fellah turned to the kzin and began to growl and spit in a timbre that was no more suited to his delicate, curling tongue than Interworld was.
* * *
Through his sudden pain and the sensory confusion that the Thrintun artifact had thrust upon him, Nyawk-Captain was catching only a fraction of the humans' speech and understanding even less. Still, the gestures with the rifle were significant. He did hear the word "Margrave," which as the proper name for a human-dominated planet was common to both Interworld and his own language.
Then the Whitefluff began speaking in the Hero's Tongue.
"Thinskins take you. We-they put you . . . at disadvantage."
Nyawk-Captain stopped trying to override the nerve-scrambles that imprisoned him and listened closely.
"True enough," he growled.
"You are with . . . luck."
"Be careful how you tease me, Fluff. I might still regain enough control with just one fingerpad to squash you."
"Be silent. I-Fellah help you."
"Why should you help a kzin when you travel with the humans?"
"They prison me, too."
"True enough. So. What do you propose?"
"Human the Sally works the . . . Painstick. She does it badly, yes? You are more aware now, yes?"
Nyawk-Captain suddenly saw the opportunity before him. The alien artifact, the Painstick, impeded his actions more or less as the human woman varied the intensity and direction of its strange power. The eerie music still gave Nyawk-Captain a headache but, as the human woman fretfully twisted and fingered the device, its nerve signals were less paralyzing to him than they had been at first. Eventually he might work free of it and be able merely to simulate a body under external control. Then, if he could keep from retching, he would pretend to do
