'Yes, sir. -Look for pressure suits,' he told Second Tactician. (Naturally First Tactician was standing by with the landing party.) 'Batteries may be chemical instead of electronic. Also look for gaps or rings in the neutrino background; someone may have put a conical reflector into stasis.'
'There's a human-sized warm spot among those leafless trees, sir,' said Second Tactician.
'No, their suits are well-insulated, and would show up as a small very hot spot. Must be an animal.'
'Yes, sir. It's just that it was moving from one metallic object to another-'
'Animals mark things.'
Gnyr-Captain looked properly impatient, though privately he agreed; he'd once seen a ftheer do that to an electric fence. It was surprised.
Unexpectedly, Power Officer signaled. 'Gnyr-Captain, the feeder lines to the fusion tubes will not operate.'
Gnyr-Captain grumbled, then said, 'Is our storage fully charged?'
'Yes, sir, but as I cannot find a cause I thought it might be some form of-'
And the lights went out.
The next word would have been 'attack.'
Manexpert had been seething. He had found the prey, he should be in the assault party! Instead he was bound in his crash fooch, protected like a kitten. The explanation, that he was too valuable to become a target, just made him feel worse. Kittens got explanations; warriors took orders.
It didn't occur to him that the landing party didn't want him-his fellow kzinti were afraid of his unpredictability. If it had, he would have been much happier. As it was, he was merely bitter about missing all the excitement.
Suddenly the cabin gravity went to free fall. What was Gnyr-Captain doing? And if the lights were out to save power for whatever it was, shouldn't the gravity be shut off, to local ambient?
It occurred to him that he couldn't hear the ripping of the gravity planer. The significance of this hit him just before the planet did.
The kzinti ship fell perhaps a hundred feet, at first. (The ground sloped.) A human ship would have been less damaged, for the counterintuitive reason that it would have had a thinner hull: the hull would have done some crumpling, taking up the shock of impact. The kzinti ship had over half an inch of hullmetal, which is held together by both covalent and metallic bonding, and is as resilient as unmodified matter can get. In vacuum this is a good thing.
A hundred feet up, it is a very bad thing indeed, at least when all failsafes have suddenly lost power. The ship bounced, repeatedly. Interior partitions and supports of hullmetal have their critics at such times as well.
Manexpert could hear other kzinti moving about. They must have been the landing party, which would have been padded in their armor; there was no reason to think anyone else's crash field had worked either. He couldn't see out his right eye, and that side of his head felt huge and hot. He couldn't feel anything below his shoulders, either.
There was a little bit of light coming from somewhere to the right. Either the hull had finally cracked-unlikely- or the assault party had cut their way out of the bay when the airlock didn't work. For some unknown but long time, there were extended periods of silence, interrupted by bursts of warcries blended with multiple stutters of slug gunfire. Eventually Manexpert's head began to hurt, and he ignored everything else in his efforts to keep from screaming.
When the pain suddenly faded, he noticed the light had grown brighter. He was also humiliated to realize that for at least several minutes he had been uttering milkmews, like an infant whose mother has left him alone.
He could smell something living nearby. It smelled something like a human, but more acidic, and lacking any trace of fear or anger. 'Do you speak Wunderlander?' said a voice with an unidentifiable accent, in that language. Manexpert managed to turn his head a little. The owner of the voice moved courteously into Manexpert's field of vision.
Superstitious fears, whose existence he had never suspected, choked him. This was a monster out of legend. Enormous joints and hard fatless flesh, like someone skinned and rendered down; big ears, permanently cupped to detect the slightest footstep; huge nose for sniffing prey; complete lack of hair or teeth; a hide mottled in shades of brown, with dark-brown speckles, ideal grassland camouflage; and, for all its swollen, deformed head and freakish face, the casual precision and lack of waste motion of the perfect hunter.
'Do you speak English?' it tried. That ragged beak was responsible for the accent.
Kzinti do not go into physical shock when injured, so Manexpert had nothing to compare his mental state with; but the fact was, he was suffering from such a bad case of shock that he couldn't have recalled how to speak Hero if the Patriarch had offered him a daughter to ch'rowl.
'Too bad,' it said, and raised Gnyr-Captain's treasured antique machine gun into view. It had once been carried into battle by a Patriarch's Companion, and Manexpert knew himself to be the ship's last survivor.
'You're-' Manexpert tried to translate a word into English, then gave up and said the word in Hero-'Fury, aren't you?' He said it badly, being unable to get out that much volume.
It lowered the sidearm and said, 'My name is Peace.'
Kzinti had learned that word from humans, but there was a certain conceptual gap. Almost no kzin could have grasped the notion of 'a situation wherein nobody wants to fight,' and Manexpert was not among that minority. He understood the word as most did, as referring to the condition that was being described whenever the term was applied: 'human victory.'
'We only wanted slaves this time,' Manexpert said, despairing.
Peace blinked. And blinked a second time. Then it said, 'Your skull is fractured and your neck is broken, and your body is only kept from bleeding out by the wreckage crushing it. I'm going to take the whole mass and put you in stasis until I get your ship's autodoc fixed.'
'How will you get the equipment in here?' Manexpert wondered.
'I have it already,' Peace said, and picked up a slightly-wrinkled but perfectly reflective shield. It adjusted something, and the shield was just aluminum foil, barely thick enough to support its own weight. So simple. 'I brought more foil just in case,' it added, then gave him another injection.
Peace had had an enormous amount of time to think, even without considering her new speed of thought and ability to sleep in sectors-like a dolphin, but better.
The amount of manipulation that had been going on vastly exceeded anyone's wildest suspicions.
She had awakened with her memory fully organized, and her first thought was: I was right all along. Peace woke dehydrated, and weak with lack of food, but not hungry. She had eaten anyway. A lifetime of subjugation and thyroid deficiency had kept her depressed and overweight; she was accustomed to eating whether she was hungry or not. While she ate, she called up the excessively long intron sequences recorded from the mining trees, decrypted them, and read the Truesdale account, learning all that was known about Protectors.
Or rather, all that was believed about Protectors. Some of it was obviously wrong.
A couple of million years back, according to Jack Brennan, a Belter who'd become a Protector, a race called the Pak had sent a colony ship to Earth from the galactic core. The Pak became sentient only after years of reproductive maturity, as a result of eating a root that started smelling good to them when their hormone balance began to screw up. This root did not grow right on Earth, so the Pak protectors died out. Brennan said it was of starvation.
And that was a lie.
