The bite of a stimulant slapshot in my neck brought me to my senses. My shipsuit and helmet were gone. I was dressed in a standard falling jumper. My right arm throbbed badly, but I could see a ratcat field dressing on the wound. The bandage was easily three times larger than necessary; medicine on a kzin-sized scale. Bindings cut into my ankles and wrists, holding me securely to a packing crate.
I looked up and saw Jacobi seated on air a few meters away, a thin line mooring him in place against the ventilator breeze. We were in a small storage room, with glaring mining lights. The cold air smelled of oil and steel. And of kzin, of course. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. It didn’t help.
“Jacobi,” I said as calmly as I could, my neck still stinging from the drug, “I had no idea that you were a pussy-kisser collabo.”
He made no reply, just stared at me. It was hard to read any expression on the ruins of his face. When I was a boy, Tomas Jacobi had been a leader among the Serpent Swarmers during the kzin invasion. His forces had held back the invasion troopships from Tiamat for most of a week. Then his lifebubble had been lasered open during the final assault, searing his face and giving him decompression scars. Later, Jacobi had become one of the major smugglers in the Swarm and a supplier to the Resistance. A criminal, but a human criminal.
Just like me.
How could he of all people become a collaborationist?
Jacobi’s eyes were ice blue, and peered impassively from the runnels and scars of his face. He made a clucking sound with his tongue. In my years of dealing with Jacobi, he had always tried to act like a kindly uncle to me. I knew better.
“Kenneth, Kenneth,” he said softly “there is no reason to be insulting. I had to make sure that you didn’t leave suddenly didn’t I? An impression had to be made on my, ah, employers as well. In any event, I tended to your wound myself. No real harm done.”
I kept all expression from my face, my tone level. “Valve that sewage. You sold me out to the kzin.” I took a deep breath, thinking of my family. “You might as well kill me, Jacobi. I won’t go collabo and work for the damn ratcat tabbies.”
“Hush.” He made a throat-cutting gesture with his free hand. “Kraach-Captain speaks Belter Standard, Wunderlander, Jotok, and Principle knows what else. Do not insult his honor or his person.” He looked sternly at me out of that ruined face. “As for selling anyone out, I do not need to justify my decisions to a petty small-time smuggler.”
I allowed my expression to show how I felt then and Jacobi sighed in exasperation. He reached down with a free hand and untied his mooring line. Both of his legs were missing; another legacy from the kzin armory He reached out to a wall-ring, pushed off, and floated down next to me. His grip was very strong. Jacobi’s mouth was centimeters from my ear.
“Kenneth, my friend,” he whispered, “you are to be taken before Kraach-Captain. So this can go one of two ways after I untie you. The first is for you to overpower me, which would not be difficult for you. Yet if you do, what will you then do?”
“Break your neck”
“And then? There are over fifty Heroes here on Blackjack Will you fight them all? And if so, to what purpose?”
He paused for a moment, looking at me carefully. It was that look he used when dickering over contraband cargoes. Shrewd and knowing. I said nothing.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “I can call a few Heroes to escort you to Kraach-Captain personally. But I do not wish to do so. It is better, more dignified, that we go to the Captain together. Better for both of us. Surely you would prefer to go under your own power, not as an unconscious lump carried by kzinti guards.” Jacobi waited for my response, scarred lips twisted.
Finally, I nodded curtly Deftly, Jacobi untied my bonds. I grasped a wall ring to keep from floating off the deck in the tiny gravity of Blackjack. He gestured me to follow, and pushed off for the doorway.
“Just tell me one thing,” I asked Jacobi’s back. “‘Why would you work for the ratcats? You have spent your entire life fighting them. And even if you are a traitor by nature, still they crippled you, Finagle take it!”
His back stiffened at my words, but he did not reply.
We carefully leaped from wall-ring to wall-ring through the corridors of the minehead station. The legless Jacobi was graceful in the microgravity, using just the tips of his fingers to correct each jump. As I followed him from handhold to handhold, I swallowed back my anger and tried to think of away out of this. Nothing occurred to me.
The low-gray conditions might become yet another problem in considering options and choices. Kzinti hated microgravity, having used gravitic polarizers for centuries; once their monopole-laden ships returned to Blackjack, they could provide some artificial gravity.
Kzinti didn’t deal well with the fluid buildup caused by microgravity; they got a little… short tempered, even for kzinti.
It was a silent five-minute trip to the unused comm center. Jacobi knocked once, the hatch opened, and I followed him into a large room. The ceilings were tall enough to allow a kzin to stand upright. Three kzinti in full space armor stood guard at the doorway, weapons glittering in the orange filtered lamps. As we passed them they hissed softly.
A very large table was fixed to the floor in the center of the room. Clips held holocubes and data platters in neat arrays within easy reach of the obviously high-ranking kzin who sat there working, giving no sign that we had been noticed. Jacobi and I crouched motionless in front of the table, eyes averted, waiting. I could feel the collective gaze of the kzinti at the door on me. The air was cold and very dry.
Finally, one of the guards growled softly.
The kzin behind the makeshift desk looked up from a portable thinscreen display, and blinked at us. His black nose sniffed wetly in our direction. Enormous violet eyes held mine for a moment, weighing and judging. His short muzzle was shot with gray, and I could see the ridged battle scars on his face and arms. Very old for a kzin. There were no old, stupid kzinti.
Jacobi began to hiss and spit in the falsetto human version of the kzin language. I wasn’t surprised that he knew it, given recent events. But the kzin at the desk bared his teeth and roared for silence. The room seemed to echo for a moment.
“Better,” the seated alien rasped in passable Belter Standard. His voice was octaves lower than human. “Except under necessity, humans should not defile the Hero’s Tongue. No Warrior Heart. No honor. I tell you when to speak” He paused. We remained silent. Satisfied, he continued.
“I am named Kraach-Captain,” the old kzin grated. His eyes speared me. “How are you called, slave who may soon be meat?”
“I am called Kenneth Upton-Schleisser,” I said slowly, knowing better than to meet the kzin’s eyes directly. My word choice was intentional to a kzin, names are earned, not given.
“Sssoo,” Kraach-Captain rambled. “It is as the legless monkey says. The Jacobi beast is as without honor as legs, but at least on this occasion truth issues from his slave mouth. Your two fathers, they fight Heroes when we first come to Ka’ashi?” I shook my head, not understanding. The old kzin finally snarled a hissing oath and gestured at Jacobi with a careless hand, claws glittering.
Jacobi leaned close and whispered in my ear “Kraach-Captain means your father and mother, Kenneth. Kzin females aren’t sentient
“I know that,” I interrupted loudly, still feeling confused. I shut my mouth abruptly as one of the guards growled a warning behind me. I could smell fear-sweat on the other man.
“Don’t do that again. They expect me to have explained all of this to you.” Jacobi urged me to continued silence with a hard glare. “Explaining details to slaves is a duty for slaves, not for a Hero. Now, listen carefully. They know about your father and mother, Kenneth, but their females aren’t intelligent, so I told them-”
“I get it,” I whispered back, cutting Jacobi’s explanation short. I was not interested in whatever bizarre rationale had led to gender morphing of my female parent.
I took a deep breath, feeling a familiar almost comforting anger rise in my guts, partially displacing the roil of emotions already churning there. My parents. Henry Upton had been a good rockjack Belter in the Swarm, a humanitarian interested in promoting better Swarm- Wunderland relations. It worked so well that he had married the ice queen Herrenmann daughter of the First Family Helga Schleisser. I had been their only child, five years old
