Louis nibbled cooked reeds and a root he’d microwaved in clay.
Puppeteers were dancing in a swirling rainbow. Louis watched with the others, then asked in Interspeak, “Are the pyrotechnics supposed to throw you off?”
“They are for loveliness. Louis, you must come to me.”
“How is it with the fearless vampire slayers?”
“I hear only voices. The cruisers have separated. Cruiser Two is gone to starboard with my webeye in the cargo shell. The Red Herders speak of an entity the male calls ‘Whisper.’ Tegger thinks Whisper has left them. Warvia thinks he dreamed. I think Whisper is our phantom protector. Louis, will you come?”
“We’ll have to reach terms—”
“I accept your contract—”
“You haven’t seen it!”
“I accept it provided you make no changes from this moment. As you’ve had no extortionate advantage, you will have written it fairly. My probe will arrive within twelve minutes.”
Louis looked at the sky. Nothing was visible yet. “Where will I pop out?”
“In your suite aboard Needle.”
Suite? It was one compartment, locked, that he had shared with a Kzin! “Contract pays me triple time during emergencies. Shall I arm myself?”
“Yes.”
“Sawur, get the children out of the water. Hindmost, land in the stream. Now, I remember crawling through the disk you mounted for refueling. It was pretty cramped.”
“I do learn, Louis! I’ve mounted a full-sized stepping disk on the side of the probe, big enough for you and your cargo plates, too.”
Louis thought,
Lose your hold on a variable-knife, the wire blade would cut whatever was close.
A violet-white light peeked above the cliff.
The refueling probe settled on fusion flame. The cavity in its nose, that was the refueling system: a filter to pass hydrogen ions, and a one-way stepping disk no wider than Louis’s hips. A much larger stepping disk had been mounted on its flank, a circular plate like an afterthought of a wing.
Weavers oohed and ahhed, then shied back from a wave of steam. The flame went out. As Louis glided above the probe, it splashed down on its flared motor, then rolled and toppled into the water.
The water dimpled above the stepping disk.
So: it was on. Louis cut the lift and dropped straight in. His peripheral vision caught a shadow leaping after him.
PART TWO — “DANCING AS FAST AS I CAN”
CHAPTER NINETEEN — THE KNOBBY MAN
Hot Needle of Inquiry had been built around a General Products #3 hull, with interior walls to separate the puppeteer captain from his alien crew. Currently the ship was more dwelling than spacecraft. Needle couldn’t exceed lightspeed because Louis Wu had cut the hyperdrive loose from its mountings, eleven years ago, for reasons that seemed good at the time. The ship itself had been embedded in magma during negotiations with the protector who had once been Teela Brown.
During that period and after, the Hindmost had deployed stepping disks through the ship and the Repair Center and elsewhere, too.
Louis expected to appear in the blocked-off crew quarters. The Hindmost hadn’t needed to suggest, maybe hadn’t dared to be overheard suggesting, that Louis come in
The floating plates come down hard. Louis caught the recoil with bent knees, but he was still knocked off balance. He shouted, “Something’s—”
Thousands of Pierson’s puppeteers shifted and swirled and kicked, stage left. It might have been distracting, but it wasn’t. Louis and Chmeee had learned to ignore that part of the ship. That was the Hindmost’s, and the wall wasn’t glass. It was the invulnerable stuff a General Products hull was made of.
But one two-headed, three-legged alien, his mane curled and bejeweled in formal fashion, was between the kitchen wall and a coffin as big as a transfer booth lying on its side.
A knobby old man in a floppy vest was running at the Hindmost, knees and elbows pumping.
A hidden stepping disk led to the Hindmost’s quarters. The Hindmost must be near or on it, Louis thought. He would be invulnerable there.
Instinct must have been too strong. The Hindmost turned his back instead.
It all happened very fast. Louis was still catching his balance. The Hindmost was spinning around, heads splayed wide apart, looking back, binocular vision with a baseline of three feet. Sighting on his target. His hind leg folded forward and shot straight back as the knobby man attacked.
The Hindmost’s kick was good, square on target. Louis heard a clank: the knobby man must have been wearing a chest plate. Armor or no, that kick would have knocked a normal hominid into a coma. The knobby man turned with the impact, feet off the floor, one hand on the Hindmost’s ankle to borrow its momentum as the Hindmost pulled back for another kick. The knobby man stepped past the hoof and slammed a fist down hard on the puppeteer’s bejeweled mane, where the two necks connected to the torso.
That was the Hindmost’s skull.
And Louis was bringing the flash around. Too slow, too clumsy, the stunned puppeteer was in the way. Something whacked his right wrist and sent the flashlight-laser flying. A metal ball? Another knocked the variable- knife spinning.
Louis flinched violently away from the spinning wire blade.
The Hindmost was down, curled into a ball, heads and long necks tucked between his forelegs. The floor was ankle deep in water. The fallen flash was submerged, but it sent a thread of light through Needle’s transparent hull and into the lava beyond.
The wire blade hadn’t cut Louis in two. Blind luck. But his hands and wrists felt shattered, he was way off balance, and the knobby man was coming at him. Protector!
Louis rolled off the stepping disk and into a corner and started to stand up. His right wrist was a sea of pain. The left was only numb.
In the space where he had been, something huge flicked in on all fours. It stood erect, as big as an orange bear, holding a small cannon in one huge hand.
The knobby man spun and ducked and swept Louis’s variable-knife past the big intruder… the Kzin. The Kzin’s weapon flew away with big clawed fingers still attached. The Kzin froze in a crouch, throttling a howl. The knobby man held the flash, too, in a clear threat.
“You don’t move,” it said. “Web Dweller, you don’t move, either. Louis Wu, you don’t move. Does your contract call for you to die?”
The knobby man’s lips had withdrawn from the gums; the gums had hardened almost to bone, and jawbone had grown through in a jagged pattern. His face was hard, almost a beak. He spoke with a breathy speech impediment, but in Interspeak. How would the knobby man have learned Interspeak? Eavesdropping on the Hindmost?
