whispering to other slaves in low voices while their masters slept. Tiny humans scurrying around huge kzin households, secretly cursing the names of the humans who had sold their birthright, their future. My descendants would not remember them. But I did. The hated names flowed easily over the tongue, echoing in my mind.
Arnold.
Quisling.
Chien.
Easterhouse.
Upton-Schleisser.
I turned away from the commset. Quickly, not thinking any more, I left my singleship. Back into Feynman. I walked to the three lying in a drugged stupor. I looked down at them, emotions warring within me.
My wife, my children: they would die if I failed, yes. All life’s sweetness, gone.
But they would at least know that I, husband and father-and most of all, human-finally believed in things larger than myself.
One human can make a difference, no matter what people like Jacobi said.
And perhaps it was not too late.
I made my decision. Swearing gently, I reached into my pouch for the antidote ampoules to the nerve gas. My fingers shook a little, but I ignored it. I stabbed my mother’s wrinkled neck with the drug and waited for her to wake up.
This was going to be hard. Owning up to who you are usually is.
My mother had been right, damn her stern soul. Once a Herrenmann, always a Herrenmann.
She coughed once, her eyes fluttering, and tried to sit up.
When she finally became coherent, I told her every- thing.
Chapter Four Punica Fides
Go out like a rocket, boy, not like a fizzled, wet match.
My mother had said that. It had a certain dark ring that appealed to me.
Once again I made the journey from the kzin troopship to Feynman, across the Deep between stars. This time, though, I did so in a small kzin fighter, not my tiny singleship Victrix. The ship interior was huge, orange-lit, built on a scale for kzin. The air was cold and dry, making my sinuses ache. I moved unobtrusively to one of the gunners’ stations, the straps at their tightest ludicrously loose on me. Jacobi was strapped in across from me. I refused to look at him.
The engines thrummed softly and I could hear Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist hissing and spitting from the control cockpit forward. The sour-spicy smell of anger filled the cabin. I tried to ignore the angry sounds. At least this gravitic polarizer didn’t give me a hammering headache.
Victrix had been left just outside the kzin vessel, under heavy guard. I had told the kzinti by tightbeam that the fusion point generators were different than those used in the Swarm, and that I was bringing a sample for their Alien-Technologists to study.
Which was true, in a manner of speaking.
At the same time, I told Kraach-Captain that I could not torture information out of the humans onboard.
Feynman. Nor could I determine how to shut the system down myself. I needed expert help. I suspected sabotage, and booby traps, as well.
Jacobi didn’t trust me, but Kraach-Captain saw me as a reliable beast-slave. The kzin thought that he understood the nature of the leash around my neck. Still, he had brought Jacobi along to keep an eye on me.
Up front, Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist sat huddled over their thinscreens. They snarled arguments about the ramscoop fields and our route through the tangled web of force. Kzin do not care for close quarters, and the differential in rank made Kraach-Captain temper quite short. It was his place of honor as Conquest Hero, though, to board and deactivate Feynman in person. I believed that he would have insisted on this, even if I had reported it possible to shut down the slowboat by myself.
None of this would work without the kzin worship of the Warrior Heart. Gamble after gamble after gamble, but the only game in town…
Jacobi and I could see little from where we were packed next to one another in the back of the ratcat fighter. He smelled sour with fear, sweaty. What had broken in the kzin fighter to turn him into what he had become? I ignored him as best I could, and looked at the dots-and-comma script of the kzin language on various pieces of ratcat tech in my field of vision.
“Kenneth,” he whispered to me quietly.
I didn’t look at him. Instead I continued to scan the interior of the spacecraft, lit in garish orange. I doubted that any humans had seen as much of kzinti spacecraft as the two of us had over the last few months.
I for one didn’t understand much of what we had seen. Kraach-Captain had kept us in a largish cabin during the trip out to Feynman, with our own supplies and autodoc.
The occasional trip outside the cabin looked like the kzin fighter ship around us: cavernous spaces, orange lit. Oddly shaped devices, flickering thinscreens. Could that kind of information ever be of use? I shook my head, trying to make sense of the alien spaces around me. I was a singleship pilot and part-time smuggler, not a genius.
Jacobi’s voice was an insistent whisper, like a pesky insect. “Did you find your mother, boy?”
Now I turned and looked at him “Yeah,” I grated. Stay in character “I did what I must. I do not thank you for it.”
Jacobi nodded. “In the coming years, Kenneth,” he replied, “you will come to see that I had your best interests at heart.” Jacobi started to reach out to me, perhaps to pat my arm.
My expression stopped him cold, as I studied his ruined face, and smiled like a kzin. “I give you respect of sorts, Jacobi, even as a traitor. Because of the scars you earned fighting the kzin. But don’t push me.”
Outrage glinted in his eyes. “And what are you? A saint?”
“I am nothing like you, Jacobi. Nothing. Now seal it and lock it down, before I see how long it would take Kraach-Captain to get back here and pull my hands from around your miserable throat.”
He fell silent.
The rest of the trip was quiet, except for more unintelligible snarling arguments in the Hero’s Tongue from the command cockpit. From Jacobi I could have found out what Kraach-Captain and Alien-Technologist were saying, but I think that I understood the gist. Irritation seems quite universal among sentient beings.
I had left the outer airlock open when I had departed Feynman in Victrix. That way the kzin crew tunnel mechanism could adapt and seal the two vessels together. We were instructed to leave our helmets open and to come along. The old kzin was clearly impatient, ready to get started on the real job.
Kraach-Captain paused for a moment before we left the kzin airlock He bent nearly double and put his face near mine, rasped, “Think of your cubs and your mate. Their fate is in your hands.”
“I know that, Kraach-Captain.” I studiously looked to one side of his huge eyes.
He coughed and spat in reply, then he and Alien-Technologist herded us into Feynman. Alien-Technologist had a complicated device clipped to his forearm. It beeped at intervals.
I felt a heavy weight on my shoulder. A four-fingered black hand squeezed like a vise. “Lead us to the control lair,” Kraach-Captain rumbled. I walked them along the main ring corridor. The kzinti had to stoop. I thought that I heard Alien-Technologist hiss-spit something at Kraach-Captain, who coughed kzin laughter in reply Perhaps a joke about the edibility of the passengers in cryosuspension.
I lead them into the cramped control room, feeling the tension build. I pointed to the sleeping bodies on the floor. Careful, careful…
“Your sources of information, Kraach-Captain” I said. “They altered the ship systems such that I cannot turn off the ramscoop.”
Kraach-Captain sniffed through his open faceplate, looking around the control room. “We will deal with them in a moment,” he rasped. “Show us these ship systems.”
I smoothly called up the various subroutines on the main viewscreen. Jacobi was leaning over my shoulder to see better. First, the safety interlocks. Since the fusion drive used interstellar matter swept up by ramscoop fields,
