killing teeth ached with the loss.
The fury within his thwarted Warrior Heart, never far below the surface, boiled anew. Rrowl-Captain lifted his massive head and roared his frustration, slashing at the air in front of him with angry claws. The entire bridge crew slapped sheathed claws across faces in submissive salute.
Rrowl-Captain grumbled and pushed his thinplate aside. He bolted upright to his full height of nearly three meters, like a bipedal tiger on anabolic steroids, and stalked the bridge as if he were seeking prey in a hunting park. The crew held their collective breaths, motionless, waiting to see who would be the captain's target.
He padded silently up to Strategist, his voice now very calm and therefore particularly dangerous. The captain of the kzinti warship looked Strategist rudely in the eyes, kzin to kzin, in barely veiled challenge. His tail slowly moved from side to side, in sly counterpoint to his words.
'So tell me, kzin-without-a-name, how the primitive monkeys, these humans, are able to detect our gravitic polarizers?' His contained fury revealed itself in a rictus grin of needle-sharp carnivore teeth.
Strategist choked back his own growl of challenge, saying nothing. Rrowl-Captain contained a cough of approval.
'They can detect our monopoles, true. Quite true.' The captain tapped the other kzin's broad chest twice with an unsheathed claw as he spoke, a profound insult to any Hero.
Strategist gurgled, trembling with the kzin combination of fear and rage.
'Yet this is no great surprise,' Rrowl-Captain half purred, 'as the pitiful monkeys use monopoles themselves extensively and are therefore familiar with their properties. This is why we shield them from monkey instrumentation, as the smallest unblooded kitten could surmise.' His tail flicked.
Strategist gulped, gasped. In a thin, flat voice he started to speak. 'Dominant One, it would seem – “
'It would seem,' Rrowl-Captain interrupted silkily, 'that you would insult my intelligence, to claim that these pitiful monkeys can understand the workings of gravitic polarizers, yet still fly through space balanced on hot exhaust fumes?' He displayed his teeth in a wide grin, then picked between them with a sharp claw tip in derision and insult.
Rrowl-Captain watched Strategist take a deep breath at the offensive slur to his ancestors, and twitched his tail with some satisfaction. There were some advantages to leadership after all.
'These are monkeys,' he continued, scorn dripping from every growling syllable of the Heroes' Tongue. 'These nameless and honor-lacking humans are leaf-eating vermin… ' he railed suddenly, again beginning to lose control. He wiped drool from his thin black lips with the back of a furred hand.
Rrowl-Captain's anger concealed from his Heroes what he held secret in his heart of hearts: the gut- wrenching terror of entire fleets boiled to vapor by lasers that filled the sky, lasers everywhere, crewed by the seemingly puny monkeys. The horrible sensation of wishing to hide from enemies, to run from danger! His liver once more turned to water as the alien emotion gripped him.
For a moment, Rrowl-Captain's eyes saw nothing but the awful green blaze of laser light filling the universe, his nostrils swarming with the odor of his own hidden cowardice, like the smell of a grazing animal.
The scent of prey.
The madness receded after a moment. Rrowl-Captain spat onto the deck and mumbled, half to himself. 'Just big hairless ch'tachi, monkeys, with their inefficient fusion drives and puny lasers and particle beams… “
The deck was silent, his crewkzin looking intently at the tapestry covered floorplates.
He stopped, moistening a now dry nose-pad with his tongue carefully, trying to control his conflicting emotions.
Breath steamed from his mouth in the chill air of Belly-Slasher. The captain's hairless, ratlike tail stood straight out in a posture of angry challenge.
Strategist looked straight ahead, his violet eyes unreadable. After a respectful pause, he saluted again with sheathed claws and averted eyes. 'Dominant One, I do not believe the humans can detect our gravitic polarizers under normal conditions; it must be that one or more of the polarizers are unbalanced.”
'Oh?' Calm, silky.
Strategist held his breath while Rrowl-Captain continued to stare at him, then finished, whiskers still twitching. 'Unbalanced gravitic polarizers… will leave a faint graviton signature on mass-detection instruments.”
Rrowl-Captain stood stock-still for a moment, thinking deeply. His fur, bristling with rage moments before, relaxed deceptively. The master of the Belly-Slasher began to groom himself thoughtfully, smoothing back his luxurious orange-red pelt with the back of an absently licked hand.
'Urrr… yes,' Rrowl-Captain agreed. 'It would be difficult for these humans to detect us near light-speed by any other method, considering their primitive technology.”
A hanging silence, as quiet as the moment before stalked prey is caught with killing jaws. In a single lithe bound the Captain leaped back to his command chair – and sat. Lounged. 'Unbalanced gravitic polarizers,' he hissed softly to himself. Pupils dilated and contracted as he considered implications.
And the cause.
Strategist gave another deferential salute – unnoticed – and then sat heavily at his station. The bridge crew remained silent, guessing with secret relief what would come next. They became calmer, waiting for the inevitable, not looking away from their thinplates.
Rrowl-Captain smiled widely, but not with humor. 'Engine-Tinker,' he purred over the shipwide commlink, 'do the memory of the Conquest Heroes of Wunderland the favor of reporting to your humble captain. I have some questions concerning your last routine balancing of the gravitic polarizers.”
He chuckled low in his throat as he examined his right hand, back first, then the leathery palm. Rrowl-Captain extended his four black claws deliberately, one at a time. He began stropping them methodically on the worn, centimeter-thick Kdatlyno-hide arms of his command chair.
Minutes passed slowly as the captain purred a kit's hunting tune to himself, the sounds of his sharpening claws loud on the command bridge. Rrowl-Captain directed the kzin named Communication-Officer to tightbeam Strategist's information to Pouncing-Strike and Spine-Cruncher, and take compensatory action. Still purring throatily, Rrowl-Captain reviewed his strategy regarding the monkeyship, making a few notes on his personal logscreen in the dots-and-commas script of the kzin. A new approach to dealing with the monkeyship occurred to him…
The crew did not dare look up from their stations as the access door to the bridge irised open silently Rrowl- Captain lifted his lambent gaze from his thinplate, like a hunter rising from tall grasses. A hunter done with stalking, and ready to finish the hunt.
The technician entered limp-tailed, crawling on his belly toward the command chair. The air seemed to grow thick and cloying as the captain began to growl, the image of a knife-toothed smile in his voice.
Rrowl-Captain screamed and leaped.
The crew relaxed slightly at their stations, their batlike ears folded tightly against the wet rending sounds on the bridge. They were familiar with their captains routine, having experienced it before. Shipboard discipline would relax slightly for a time, and full attention could be placed on capturing the monkeyship.
Also, there would be opportunities. Engine-Tinkers second would shortly be promoted, of course.
The Man-Kzin Wars 07
CHAPTER FIVE
Snick-click.
Carol Faulk looked at Bruno's anxious face as he plugged the thick interface cable into the socket set in the left side of his neck. He looked almost wistful. She was half able to hide the wince she felt as she heard the sharp metallic sounds of the locking connector mechanism holding the cable firmly in place to his neck.
Leech, she thought to herself, irrationally cursing the computer. But there was worse to come.
Carol particularly hated the next part.
With the cable hanging from his neck like a heavy-bodied electronic lamprey, Bruno smiled a little at her, a bit self-consciously. Much as she hated the knowledge, she knew that his expression was one of half-hidden
