other kzinti.
There came the indescribable moment, the discontinuity as the ship dropped out of hyperspace. The ports became transparent again, and stars reappeared. Strange stars. Then there were planets. They swung past two ringed gas giants, with the families of moons and Trojan-point asteroids that had first attracted kzinti miners to this system. They fell toward the system's heart, and toward a small inner planet.
It was not unlike Mars. A red surface suggested oxygen locked in iron. There were eroded stumps of mountains and what might have been seas a billion years previously. There was a tenuous atmosphere, mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, which for breathing purposes might as well have been a vacuum, but which sufficed to stir winds and dust clouds, and slowly traveling processions of crescent dunes. Kzinti instruments had detected no life but microbes. There were small icecaps. A small but bright sun gave good light.
With hyperdrive, this was not far beyond the existing borders of kzin-settled space. If the kzinti ran out of better planets, and humans let them, they could probably kzinform it one day. Despite the broad streaks of anarchy in their government, and a bureaucracy which depended largely on inefficient and unreliable slaves, they were capable of great constructive feats when they put their minds to it.
At present they had an application before the human worlds to mine the gas giants' moons: on probation after four major and several minor wars launched against humans, the Patriarchy was now under close observation in any effort to expand its territories. The kzinti had lost all the wars, of course. If they had won one, there would have been no more after it.
The stasis box, its general position already known, was easy to locate with deep-radar, and easy to uncover. Cunning Stalker simply hovered over it, holding position with a gravity generator, and ran its reaction drive on very low power so as to blow the dust away.
The mirror surface of the stasis box was revealed about fifty feet down. Magnification brought the image of the exposed section into the control center. Whether it had been deliberately buried there, or it and the planet had collided in the remote past, or it had once been housed in some installation whose metal was now coloring the sand, there was no way of telling. There were curves of vitrified rock that might be the last traces of the rimwall of an ancient impact crater-not necessarily related. Anyway, unanswerable speculations as to how it got there were of no importance at all, beside the question of what it might contain.
Deep-radar showed it was spherical-unusual-and about twenty feet in diameter. Far smaller than the last one, but still huge for a stasis box. All aboard Cunning Stalker knew it was quite big enough to contain live Slavers.
The box was now uncovered. A 'mining robot' (which bore a remarkable resemblance to a Third War automated sapper) was landed next to it; it burrowed beneath the box with a disintegrator, emerged a few minutes later, and rose to be picked up. Cunning Stalker moved aside, and a fusion charge blew the stasis box off the planet.
They had to catch it before it fell back; it didn't reach escape speed. The charge had been meant to accomplish that, so the box was significantly more massive than expected. This might be good or bad: it could mean the box was packed solid, with no room for inhabitants, or it could mean that there was extremely heavy equipment inside, which suggested weapons-and someone to use them.
The box was towed to high orbit, and the ship's fusion drive was aimed at it and kept hot. Charrgh-Captain, Slaverexpert, Telepath, two troopers, and the humans took the gig over to it. (The 'gig' had oversized gravity compensators and a remarkably heavy layer of hullmetal lining its nose, almost as if it was meant to be used to ram a hole in something.) Slaverexpert fired a parcel of fine black material at it: superconductor. The fabric wrapped around the box, formed a closed surface, turned silver briefly, and rolled itself back up into the parcel. 'Clever,' Gay murmured.
'The dropcloth is Pierin emergency firefighting equipment,' Charrgh-Captain remarked. 'I don't think they had this in mind.'
The container's surface was still seamless, but had acquired a creamy hue. Richard had been watching the views from the scanners around the box, and he said, 'Where's the cutoff switch?'
Slaverexpert, who had never previously spoken unless directly addressed, startled Richard by saying, 'True.' In Interworld.
'Explain,' commanded Charrgh-Captain.
'These were designed to be opened easily, Charrgh-Captain. A panel would be spring-loaded, to break the conductive surface when the field was interrupted. The stasis has ended, but the surface is still seamless.'
Gay, who had gotten curious and was having a look, said, 'It isn't. It's split in half. Look, there.' She pointed at one of the screens. The seam was at an inconvenient angle, so nobody else had noticed it.
And it hadn't been as big. The split was getting wider.
'Battle stations,' Charrgh-Captain said. Still in Interworld, addressing the two humans-kzinti routine was Battle Stations. The Guthlacs got to their couches and strapped in.
'Sir,' Telepath said dopily, drugged with sthondat-lymph extract, 'I detect no life.'
'You can't read Slaverexpert, either,' Charrgh-Captain replied.
'No, sir, but I can tell where he is.'
'Noted. Slaverexpert, report.'
'The only energy I detect is heat, in amounts consistent with being present before stasis began, plus the separation of the shell. Shall I deep-radar?'
'Yes. Display the results.'
The image on the humans' screens was divided into wedge-shaped compartments, almost all full of materials slightly denser than water. One held even denser material, probably metallic, in boxes. 'It looks like an orange designed by ARMs,' Richard said.
Charrgh-Captain, relieved of tension, snorted amusement. 'An orange? The fruit?'
'Sure. Armor-plated for safety, big so it's easy to find, opens automatically when ripe.'
'So what's all the metal?' Gay chuckled, pointing at the last wedge.
Slaverexpert spoke up. 'Emergency escape pods for the seeds?' After a moment of utter silence, he looked up to find everyone else staring at him-even Telepath. 'Sorry, sir,' he said faintly to Charrgh-Captain, and looked back down at his instruments in a marked manner.
'We'll examine that section before taking the box in tow,' Charrgh-Captain said.
Probably the best thing about working in space with kzinti was that they had been doing it for so long. Lighting, for instance. Humans, even those in the mining industries, tended to put up one or two bright lights, and wear one or two smaller lights on their helmets, producing sharp-edged shadows and a nagging conviction that something was hiding just out of sight. Here, though, Second Trooper strewed fistfuls of little spheres toward the partitions: where they hit, they stuck, and presently began to glow gently. They had frosted surfaces, so the light was diffuse. The kzinti suits also had multiple lights: a couple at each wrist, and two rows of three each down the torso, where things would be held to work on them. A light under the chin illuminated things directly ahead.
The Guthlacs were given clusters of faint blue lights to strap onto their suits, which in conjunction with standard kzinti lighting gave them a spectrum they could use easily. The amount of thought and preparation this implied was extremely flattering: They were being extended enormous courtesy. Richard found himself wondering if Charrgh-Captain had known all along that human-model food dispensers included a toilet.
There wasn't much time to dwell on this. The parcels were full of gadgets.
Most of them were pretty straightforward power tools: drills, saws, hammers, trimmers, shapers, diggers, a couple of amazingly elaborate grippies, and something that Gay and Slaverexpert tentatively labeled, after much consultation, as a handheld turret lathe. 'These must have been for the use of a slave race,' said Slaverexpert. 'They are too large for Tnuctipun hands, and Thrintun would rather starve than toil.' He sounded troubled.
'What's wrong?' said Richard.
'There is something familiar about the workmanship. Disturbing.'
'What would this be?' Charrgh-Captain said, holding up a thing that included a short spike, a knife, a crank, and little spring-loaded rollers. 'It hardly seems useful as a weapon.'
Slaverexpert took it and turned it over a few times. 'I am open to any suggestion,' he said, baffled.
'It looks…' Richard began, then said, 'Nah, crazy.'
'So?' said Charrgh-Captain.
'Good point. Well, it looks like an apple peeler. A good one, too.'
'It does, doesn't it?' Gay agreed.
