with kits of wrong father.'
Freckled(arm) made an interjection to correct an aspect of short( arm)'s terrible English grammar.
'Are you going to stay around for another English lesson?' asked Nora. She didn't really want this strange creature to go. The torture was demoralizing her.
'No. Must go. Mellow-Yellow in trouble,' lamented Long-Reach. 'Bad, bad, bad,' commented three of his arms in a round-robin.
'I haven't seen him for a while.' Was she better off with Mellow-Yellow or Redfur?
A pause while the vocoder sorted out the conversation. 'We are all doomed by death,' said its speaker. 'A big battle,' kibitzed skinny( arm). 'Ship has been recalled to Alpha Centauri,' intoned big(arm).
She decided to exact some intelligence of her own. 'Why are they interested in Thrintun slavers?'
'What?' Long-Reach consulted the vocoder and drew a blank.
'One-eyed scaly monsters who take over minds. They died in a war with the tnuctipun billions of years ago. I've just had my memory forcibly refreshed,' she said ruefully.
'Kzin worry about free-will,' said Long-Reach. 'All the time, worry. Warrior fetish. Always must be in control. Didn't you feel the wave of intrusion? Myselves went right to the kitchen and made up hot soup for Mellow-Yellow, then wondered why I do this. Pleasant feeling to serve others. Kzin no like.'
Suddenly Nora was remembering an impulse of feeling that had overwhelmed her just days ago. Devotion. An enormous need to help someone. She had supposed it was something Mellow-Yellow had put in her food to make her tack. 'There's a Slaver loose down there?'
'Was. Big explosion, hour ago here, days ago there. Don't know what's happening today. Tomorrow we find out. We're all doomed.'
'Are you a slave?' she asked, curious about the creature's response. She found out that his vocoder couldn't translate the word for him, and she couldn't explain it to him. The nearest he could come was the English word 'friend.' As in 'only friend.'
Redfur the Torturer didn't come back. But a delegation of four Jotoki did. They seemed ill at ease in their body motions. It was impossible for her to stop trying to read expressions off the belly-faces that sat on their mouths even though she knew they weren't faces. The shoulder-mounted eyes watched her. They wanted something. They gave her a delicate dish of stuffed leaves that tasted like Greek Dolmades, vine leaves, almost as if it were a ceremony. Another presented her timidly with green and red garters for her elbows and knees.
They were bargaining! 'Yes?' she asked, gently, not knowing what to do with her revelation.
'Our master wished to take this ship out of the battle,' intoned their translator, which had been carefully pre- programmed.
'An interesting idea,' replied Nora, warily.
The four were talking among themselves in a spitting language that sounded like a corruption of the Hero's Tongue. Finally the translator spoke again. 'Your race and the kzinti are enemies.'
'Perhaps someday…'
The translator wasn't listening to her. It continued. 'Men kill kzinti. Kzinti kill men. Is this not so?'
'It's war.'
'You are military man,' said Long-Reach, impatient with the machine. 'Your ice cream desire is to kill all kzin. I understand mankind.'
No you dons, she thought while she twiddled with her curl.
'We work, side together, like many arms.'
What she was hearing sounded like mutiny. It also sounded like they had an exaggerated respect for her powers. A naked woman with garters was a threat to no one. 'I have been deranged and you will notice that I am locked behind bars.'
Long-Reach opened the cage and quickly closed it. 'Bargain,' he said. 'We make bargain.' She could hear the tremor in his voices, and she was sure she could see his arms shaking. He was terrified. She could almost see him running. The tremors came from inhibiting the flight.
'What can I do for you?'
'You kill all kzin, but one. We free Mellow-Yellow. Bargain? Mellow-Yellow live.'
'I'm quite willing to let Mellow-Yellow live,' she lied. She almost saw the four of them relax. 'What makes you think I might be able to kill all kzin?'
'Ferocious monkey warriors defeat kzin. We know. Monkey squash kzinships. We repair. We scrape kzin off wall.'
Were they thinking that if they let her out of her cage she might not settle for anything less than the death of all kzin on board? As if she had a hope of hilling even one of the behemoths! It hadn't slipped her notice that her interrogator had two sets of human ears casually attached to his belt.
'Mellow-Yellow live. Bargain?' Long-Reach repeated.
Why were these creatures so bonded to Mellow-Yellow? Why was he different from the others? His name translated as something like Overseer of Inferiors, or Animal Manipulator. Perhaps he had a chemical hold on them? Perhaps he was an expert at some kind of hypnotic conditioning? No matter. The irrational loyalty was there. She remembered the day she had attacked Mellow-Yellow, ready to die, because he was cruel to children, and Long-Reach had been watching her with four eyes. If she had hurt Mellow-Yellow, Long-Reach would have killed her.
It was a strange bargain. If she protected their master (from her cage?), the Jotok were hers.
Was it a good bargain? It was dangerous to have naive allies. Were they as naive as they seemed? Were they treacherous? How much did the kzin trust their slaves? How reliable were these Jotoki? What skills did they have? What skills did she have? What weapons did she have? Nothing. She knew the formula for a nerve gas that would kill kzin and was harmless to men, but even given the equipment, she wouldn't have known how to manufacture it. This whole situation wasn't part of her Gibraltar Base training.
No, it wasn't a good bargain, but it was the only bargain she had.
'I'm no match for a kzin,' she said. She wanted them to tell her something.
'You have military mind. We have arms. Ship is our playground.'
They began to feed her more often. They cleaned cages and when they moved her to a new cage, she found a ship map on the floor. She was surprised that they controlled the cage locks. They were trusted. Or was it just that Mellow-Yellow trusted them and in the heat of battle that kzin's duties had not been fully reapportioned? Why was he in disgrace?
Her allies came up with vicious little plans. They had molecular trip-wire that they could set up that would cut a kzin's legs off. They knew how to rig a gravity floor plate into a booby trap that would grab a kzin in a sudden six-g field. But when she tried to plan with them, she understood why they needed her. What they didn't have was an overall strategic sense. When one starts a battle, it sets off an avalanche of activity. The good commander is able to predict where the avalanche will go, and have his responses already in place.
She could make detailed plans, but could they follow orders? Can a slave follow orders? She was willing to bet that they could.
Some of the events she wasn't going to be able to predict. So far as Nora knew, the human hyperfleet was already fighting at Alpha Centauri. That was one wild card she could be vaporized by her comrades before the mutiny even started. On the other hand, the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch was the most sluggish ship of the Third Black Pride and so would reach its new station many days later than the maneuverable elements of its squadron. if the mutiny could be carried out before they reached the battle, their chances were much better. Haste was in order.
Lieutenant Nora Argamentine did not expect to survive the mutiny, so she was optimizing her strategy for maximum kzin kill. She wanted as many kzin dead as possible before the inevitable moment when her plans fell apart. Meticulously, with the information the slaves gave her, she targeted every kzin on board the Batch. Mellow- Yellow was at the bottom of the list. He could be killed by flooding his hibernation cell with liquid nitrogen but not while she still needed her Jotoki allies.
They were able to manufacture her nerve gas. That surprised her at first until she remembered what Mellow-Yellow had been doing to the children. He had some kind of 'grant' to do 'medical research' on humans. No, she was not going to spare that one.
The Jotoki fiends even cobbled together hand weapons. They had a spaceman's usual devout respect for
