presented. But they are small targets and they do not present when Claw is head-on.
“What can we do?”
“Keep your laser on the target but do not fire yet. You must let her get closer. And we must make her turn.”
Admiral’s Barge
There was Gutting Claw. With radar, infra-red and sense enhancers and my own senses guiding me I could find the hull now. The human ship was no problem to find on the end of its vast column of exhausted hydrogen.
The vented material that Claw had trailed like a bloodstain had tapered away. The hull was cooler with fires under control, and the hangar area had been sealed off. The motors were undamaged, and the weapons capacity was still colossal.
Time moved slowly. But the Selina’s chatter with the Writing Stick humans became instantaneous as the distance between us decreased.
The barge’s computer and weapons-systems could not be over-ridden from Gutting Claw. It had been the Admiral’s own. I armed a fusion-missile and fired it at the Claw. Beams and anti-missiles converged on it and destroyed it. Another. It got no closer. I sent a stream of ball-bearings at the Claw. Its meteor defenses could cope with that but it took up more computer capacity. They must have identified the signature of the barge’s motor now. They had some idea of who was attacking them. Rage on the bridge was moving out of control.
The blind noseless fools! Never to think what an enemy a Telepath might make! They had no conception that I was reading the minds of Weeow-Captain and the whole bridge and attack-team! It was easy after the minds of aliens. They might have felt pain in their brains-I had no time for the subtle dance-but the Claw’s lifesystem was still full of noxious fumes which would explain that.
Weeow-Captain’s rage engulfed him now. I punched up the visual comlink to Claw’s bridge. He saw me. He would not understand Telepath insults, so I did my best with ordinary Kzintosh ones. But coming from a Telepath at all, they must have been shattering.
“Eat vegetable matter from the dung of the Sthondat that ch’rowled your mother! You seek only to ch’rowl the female monkey!” I snarled at him. “Where is Weapons Officer, you wonder? His cinders float in Space, but see, his ears hang from Telepath’s belt! And from my belt hangs the path to the monkey home-worlds! Try to take them if you dare! Come and fight me! Fight Telepath, if you dare, Coward-Captain!”
The screen went blank as Weeow-Captain leapt at it. He had less control than Zraar-Admiral. My last picture was of his fangs. And Gutting Claw was turning towards us. I was already breaking contact. No Telepath could long stand that intensity of rage and hatred tearing directly at his own mind. I sent the rest of my missiles on their way. If some by chance got through the battleship’s defenses, so much the better. But no missiles or beams were fired back at us yet. Weeow-Captain still wanted us alive.
Gutting Claw and the human ship were much less than a light-second apart now. One flash of thought to Selina, one command from me, one word from her. Gutting Claw had turned its bow away from the human ship now, and had at that moment no attention to spare for it. The loss of Zraar-Admiral and many other officers was like a brain-wound for it.
There were the Claw’s missiles! I fired our anti-missiles. They would probably stop the first wave, but the first wave only. The humans would have to be quick.
In the darkness of Space ahead and a little below us a green nova-like light flared, impossibly bright. Then there was another light-spot in space, another incandescent green star.
Cutting Claw was hit side on. I felt it in my mind as the laser hit the bridge, then it began a slow slicing move into the hull. But it still took armored bulkheads and the massive bulk of the main gravity-engines and their containment-fields long seconds to melt. I had told them Tracker had been far more lightly built. It was moving out of the laser’s field: the green star that was Gutting Claw faded. Then the ravaged containment-fields failed and it exploded.
There was agony in my head. It was the Death. I had burned my brain too much. But when I died Selina would lose all my knowledge of piloting the barge. Honor demanded I get her to her fellow-monkeys… fellow- humans.
Green light flashing! A missile fired from the Claw in its last seconds still alive and heading towards us.
I had to leap again, to trigger our remaining anti-missiles. A huge, blinding explosion, too close. The stars spun, the meteor-defenses activated. There was an indescribable sound as something hit the bulk of the gravity- motor behind us. I thought that bulk had saved us but then came the dreadful howl of air escaping from an hull- puncture. I struggled with a meteor-patch. On the dials lights and wave-bands were showing engine malfunction. Power would be gone in a few heat-beats. Think quickly! From Selina’s mind I snatched what no Kzin astrogator trained on gravity-motors would have had ready enough: a knowledge of inertial forces sufficient to turn the barge with the last of its power and align its course towards the human ship.
I had done what I could. My claws slipped on the control panel. I saw them tearing strips from it as my muscles began to convulse. Then pain… pain…
“I think your cat is dying,” said Steve Weaver. As he saw her face he added: “I can’t be sure. I’m only a human doctor.”
The human and Kzin seals could not interface, of course, but four of the Angel’s Pencil’s crew had crossed in suits.
There had been embraces, greetings, some explanations between the humans. Telepath lay on the floor of the barge, not curled like a sleeping cat, but with his limbs sprawled out, violet eyes a quarter open, unseeing, breathing irregularly.
Selina stared at the Pencil’s crew around her. Her movements were like the twitches of a cornered and desperate feline. A hunted animal, thought Steve.
“Yes,” said Selina, “Dying with withdrawal from addiction, perhaps from burn-out. But that is not all.
“Kzin normally have no guilt about killing each other, if requirements of honor have been met. Young males kill each other often. Death-duels are a recognized way of advancement. Telepath has been trying to convince himself that he owed nothing by way of comradeship or had any other obligation to the crew of Gutting Claw, who had treated him like dirt. He loved and feared the Admiral, but it was not by his hand that the Admiral died, even if he had set up the situation. But he is not quite convincing himself. The tragedy of all Telepaths: too complex and vulnerable to be a Kzin, psychically damaged and then forced into a life that worsens all that damage. He’s always been neurotic and now he’s going mad. He’ll die unless I can save him.”
Let it die, then, thought Jim. Another cat less in the Universe.
“He’s been trying to shield me from what he is going through. That is weakening him also. He feels an obligation to me. Once they accept them the Kzin take their obligations seriously.”
“Well, what can you do?” asked Steve. “I can’t treat it. Nor can our autodoc.”
“There’s a doe here. Put him in that. He’s beyond resisting if you lift him. If I stay in touch with him, whether I’m here on in the Pencil I feel… I don’t know… After all, we owe him something. But…”-There were tears again suddenly on the sunken skin below her eyes-”I’d rather like to get aboard a monk… a human ship again.”
I was Telepath. I was in the medical unit of Zraar-Admiral’s barge. It was a scene of wide cold plains. The grass tall so a hunter must stand of hind legs to see above it, even a hunter used to growing on all fours. Scrabbling slopes of red sandstone, of scree, of red ironstone. There were distant mountains and somehow there were also forests, with leaping arboreal animals. Cliffs. Ironstone walls. I knew I was looking at a planet I had never seen: Old Kzin, as it had once been.
But now tunnel after tunnel was opening to me, opening and expanding to flash away. I saw scene after scene in a lattice-work.
Barer landscapes, stony heath. The strange landscape of dreams, clearer than I had seen it before. It was a great plain I wandered now. Alone? Or was someone with me? Zraar-Admiral? Karan? Selina? Gullied stone now, rock ridges, red under a red sky. Deeper gullies, rising about me, turning to caves, to tunnels…
Karan? Karan? Was she here? I felt her presence surely.
Recognition like a membrane tearing! I saw the blackness of the birthing burrow. And then a sudden light and what seemed a memory of the Harem. Karan was with me, grooming me as I played and kicked with my tiny, clumsy feet. I felt her tongue rasping at my fur. Then the grooming stopped and I lay back, full of contentment. The last contentment I would know.
