lipped mouth. Was he missing some procedure-landing gear, hull integrity, something important? Cuiller threw the switches that the kzin had indicated.
The cabin was immediately filled with the buzz of an open comm circuit. An anxious kzinti face peered out of the screen directly ahead. It warbled a growl at them, and its eyes grew suddenly large.
Before the kzin in the chair could respond, Krater lunged forward, grabbed the Fiddle, and began pressing all its keys. Their kzinti captive went rigid and trembled with induced catatonia.
Cuiller frantically turned all the switches on the section of control board he’d just used, scrambling them with random settings. Finally, the alien face faded out in a blaze of static.
“Our captive was faking submission,” he observed.
“I’m sorry, Jared,” she said apologetically. “I don’t know enough about the Fiddle to make him do anything more than twitch. Can we fly this ship alone?”
“I think I could pick out the star pattern surrounding Lambda Serpentis,” Cuiller said. “We can probably bend a vector in that direction. And, given a few tries with this comm system, I think we can call out those segments of the U.N. fleet stationed at Margrave.”
“Who was it that he contacted?” Sally asked.
“His commanding officer?” Cuiller suggested. “Some flight dispatcher back in kzinti space?”
“The face on that comm screen appeared almost instantly, didn’t it? So the relay time was virtually nil. Whoever it was is damn close, Captain. Closer than kzinti space.”
“Kzin… self-named Lehruff,” Fellah offered. “Admiral.”
“I was tricked into opening a comm-circuit directly into the entire kzinti command structure,” Cuiller said. “Now the entire Patriarchy is going to know something damn peculiar has happened aboard this ship.”
“Damned bad,” from Fellah.
“Well, not much we can do about it now,” Cuiller said. “Except run like hell and call for reinforcements.”
“Agreed,” Krater said.
“We travel,” Fellah said. “Be here ‘long, long time.’ In this small space,” he observed thoughtfully. “Enough food here? Hey, Sally?”
“Don’t worry, Fellah,” she assured him. “We won’t eat a sentient species.”
Fellah waved a paw at the recumbent kzin. “Does he?”
“Time lies with we-us. Our side,” the Whitefluff growled sternly to Nyawk-Captain. “You… risk. With Lehruff Damn bad doings.”
“I know it,” the kzin growled in return, idly making gestures at a disused bank of controls that the Fluff could demonstrate to the humans as a pretext for making conversation. The human male cautiously worked the sliders, unaware that he was just opening and cycling the ship’s atmosphere vanes. “I thought it was an opportunity worth the taking,” Nyawk.-Captain explained.
“Risk to be taking! Do not again.”
“Why not?”
“Human the Sally will use maximum setting. Painstick cripples. It also kills.”
Nyawk-Captain eyed the device where it was stuck to the main panel, aimed at him. After his trick with the comm-circuits, the woman had readjusted its settings. For a brief time, the Painstick had left him dazed and trembling.
And this had been good, Nyawk-Captain thought now. The experience had shown him the weapon’s unique flaw. Continuous exposure, even at the highest settings, allowed an active brain to become acclimatized to the effect. Like a patch of skin under abrasion, his mind was developing the neural equivalent of a callus. After a span of hours he had found himself able to shape coherent thoughts and activate useful synapses around the offending signals. He still did not have much control-not enough to slip the bonds of his couch, turn upon the humans, and rend them to bloody fragments. But his head was definitely growing clearer and his limbs felt more his own.
“On this… heading, at this… velocity,” Fluff groped for the navigational terms in the Hero’s Tongue, “Lehruff catches us?’
“What? No, his fleet is still a day or more behind us.”
“All along way to Margrave?”
“He was going there already.”
“But these humans, we-they get there first,” Fluff concluded. “Humans have their own fleet at Margrave?”
“Yes, there will be a battle. Not as grand as the one we kzinti had planned, but enough still to-”
“Humans have the Painstick. Soon all humans have it. Some will learn better than human the Sally.” Fellah spat in a particularly suggestive manner.
Now that was a bad thought. Nyawk-Captain envisioned bands of raucous monkeys armed with copies of the Painstick. They were cutting down armed kzinti in mid-leap and marching them off as twitching zombies. He saw the males of the Patriarchy reduced to the status of shivering, voiceless females… And the Fluff was right. These two humans would get to Margrave ahead of the Last Fleet and call out their Navy. They would certainly have time to turn the Painstick over to their high command, who would remove it from the battle theater for study and duplication. The Patriarchy might win this coming Battle of Margrave, and still lose their souls for eternity.
Could Nyawk-Captain stop them? Could he give these humans not just useless instructions but damaging ones? Could he dupe them into disabling Cat’s Paw, so that Lehruff would draw even with them and take everyone aboard his flagship? That would deliver the Painstick neatly to Lehruff and then to the Patriarchy.
Or, barring that, might Nyawk-Captain trick the humans into destroying this ship?
Unlikely… His stupid (yes, it was stupid!) attempt with the communications switch had alerted the human male to Nyawk-Captain’s potential for trickery. The humans would be doubly careful with every command he suggested now. Only those with no effect-like their current twiddling of the atmosphere vanes-would escape that scrutiny.
However, Nyawk-Captain might be able to slow them up. He could cut their lead ahead of the Last Fleet. Then Lehruff would overtake and
… But no. Even if that one glimpse over the comm-circuits had alerted Lehruff to some kind of disturbance aboard the Paw, the old kzin still had his orders. He would only follow the interceptor down to Margrave and let the Cat’s Paw make its feinting run, as planned. Lehruff knew how to do his duty, even if things he saw in a flash of broken communications might trouble his eyes.
Then Nyawk-Captain knew what he had to do.
His only worry was his failing strength. At their current speed, it would be many days before the human fleet stationed at Margrave came out to take possession of the fleet. Until that time, the two humans would keep him bound, physically and mentally, or so they thought. They would loosen the bonds only to feed him and take instruction in ship operations. But even then, the woman had discovered intravenous supplements among the medical supplies, and these bad diagrams to guide a nonmedical kzin in an emergency. The woman had rigged drip equipment above his crash-couch and was running the tasteless liquids into the vein at Nyawk-Captain’s neck.
His flesh would soon be melting away. Eventually his atrophied muscles would be as weak as the humans’ own. He would be weak as a kzitten when they finally released him -but maybe that would be enough.
“Tell the human to stop his adjustments,” he instructed Fluff. “We’ve bad enough nonsense for one watch.”
The little animal nodded and turned away to make his soft and useless mouthings.
Nyawk-Captain relaxed and composed his mind, exploring new pathways around the Painstick’s ingrained signals. He prepared himself for a continued stream of idle days.
For twenty days Jared Cuiller had been surreptitiously monitoring the approach of the kzinti warfleet behind them and relaying his observations ahead to the human fleet that bad sailed from Margrave on his alert. He had also hoped to renew with Sally the intimacy they had derived from that one long kiss among the treetops. But the quarters in the captured interceptor were too cramped, the kzin was too restless, and Fellah too keenly observant.
“Maybe later.” Sally had smiled, when he first shyly proposed it. “We’ll have lots of time.”
But would they? He thought dismally of the major battle that was brewing, with a war surely to follow. As Cuiller made his observations of the kzinti fleet, he dared probe in their direction for no more than a few seconds. And still these peeks accounted for hundreds of obvious warships and other massed vessels. When the two forces
