“it has the Slaver’s device, doesn’t it? That’s the power to control human and other minds, to make them do anything a kzin would want them to… Think about that for a minute.”
“All right, Jared,” she agreed. “But we have a problem: only two laser rifles and three kzinti to kill.”
“Two,” Fellah said. “Kiln the Daff fought, died soon after.”
“How do you know that for sure?” Krater asked. “You were with me all the time, and I didn’t see that.”
“His mind…“ The animal paused significantly. “Gone.”
“And not back to his ship, either,” Cuiller summed up. “That’s good news, Sally… Ahh-gahhh,” he yawned. “It makes the odds a little more even.” Gullet finished sleepily, finally succumbing to the painkillers. His arm felt a long way away.
“Those are armed kzinti you’re talking about,” Sally protested. “With a functioning warship to boot.”
He was already halfway down the well of sleep, but Cuiller roused. “Then the trick,” he said easily, “will be to separate them from their ship… before they can take off.” He yawned again.
The forest around him darkened as if with the flu of night, and Krater caught him as he fell into it as into abed.
“In any human army, that would be a field piece,” Cuiller observed.
After sleeping, recuperating, and moving on, he and Krater now hung inside the canopy, lost in the shadows of the curving, vaulting branches that ascended from one of the trunks. They looked down through holes in the greenery that they opened-slowly, naturally, like a riffle of wind-with their dangling toes. They were suspended above the kzinti ship, with a horizontal offset of less than fifty meters.
Cuiller studied the vessel with a pair of binoculars, working them one-handed. One of the kzinti was climbing on the outside, naked except for a beltful of tools, working with a mechanical fitting against the curve of the hull. The other, in full armor, stood watch. That one’s visored helmet moved across regular arcs of the canopy surrounding the ship, and each time he panned toward them, Cuiller let the veil of leaves slide smoothly into place.
It was the kzin’s massive rifle that had caught the commander’s attention: some kind of pulsed energy weapon.
“Can you sense them, Fellah?” he asked the small creature snuggled into Sally Krater’s arms. “How close are they to finishing repairs, hey?”
Fellah raised his head and looked gravely down, past their toes. He appeared to consider. “Repair Soon.”
Cuiller realized that the alien’s exposed white hair would make an effective aiming point for that cannon. And that gave him an idea.
“I think I can improve our odds with one shot,” he told Krater.
“How?”
“First, by splitting our positions and halving our vulnerabilities. I want you and Fellah to maneuver off to the west, around the ship. Put about twenty degrees of radial separation between us.”
“But then what are you going to do?”
“I think I can pick off the kzin who’s doing the work. Without breaking my cover.”
“You’ll get killed!” Sally said, alarmed. “That other one, in the armor-with the weapon he’s carrying, all he has to do is bear close on you. And poof!”
“It’s a big jungle.”
“He can take bigger sweeps with that thing,” she said. “Sure, but I’ll have time to get him with my second shot. In case he does a sweep, however, I want you in an alternate position… You can offer a diversion or something.”
“I don’t want you to risk yourself- sir! Look, why not wait for a Bandersnatch to come along? That’ll really keep him busy.”
“Because long before then the kzinti’ll be all finished up and ready to lift ship.”
“All right, Jared,” she said coolly. “If you won’t listen to reason, we’ll do it your way. But give me time to get in position.”
“Ten minutes?”
“Time enough. But not a minute sooner, you hear?”
“A full ten minutes, I promise.”
With a baleful look, she withdrew higher into the canopy, taking Fellah with her. Soon he could hear only the faint whirr of her rig’s winder motor.
As he waited, Cuiller spread the leaves below him and practiced taking aim with his rifle. Holding it steady in his right hand did not work, and he could not find a point of purchase on the cloth sling covering his left arm. Then he figured out a solution.
Cuiller worked his winder and rose into the forest cover until he could get his feet under him. Paying out slack, he took a loop of the fluorescent-dyed monofilament and wrapped it around the rifle housing. He would have to control the rifle’s tendency to lever up and slip the loop as he put his weight on the line, but he could do that with his right elbow. The only other danger was that the monofilament might cut into the weapon’s barrel and tear it apart A calculated risk.
Sally’s time limit was still a minute short of coming up when Cuiller lowered himself back into firing position. He had no intention of letting her offer any kind of diversion and so becoming a target herself.
Cuiller moved the rifle around, holding it steady with his armpit on the stock, sighting down the pips, to the forehead of the unarmed kzin. His body was tending to pivot on the looped line, so he braced his feet against the springy branches, the same ones that made up his concealment Then he gathered his concentration, breathed out slowly, and A spear of blue-white light stabbed down from twenty degrees away to his left and opened the kzin’s skull. She had fired first!
The kzin on guard wheeled and sighted his field piece back in the direction from which the beam had come- toward Sally!
Bobbling slightly on his line, Cuiller shifted his aim faster, immediately found a good side-on view of the aiming figure, and fired at the breech of the kzin’s rifle.
The weapon exploded.
When his weapon’s energy packs discharged all at once, Nyawk-Captain was thrown backward. The eyeshield of his visor flared white but saved his vision from flying shrapnel. His whiskers were singed below the limits of its protection, however, and the insides of his arms hurt terribly. He smelled and tasted burned hair.
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
