can’t stay any longer.” He packed up his medkit and prepared to leave. “Ib, just keep taking your medicine. You’ll be back to normal soon.”
I smiled weakly as the door opened and there was the kzinti guard standing outside. Tom smiled at me and then turned to leave. The kzinti guard hardly looked at me before he closed the door. ???
The next day started with my dual failure to find either the energy for personal grooming or a satisfactory meatless breakfast. There was nothing to do except wait for the inevitable arrival of Slave Master and Fritz.
The wait gave me time to think about our captors. They were a curious mixture of advanced technology and primitive values. So much for the idea that scientific advances lead directly to advances in ethics. And it was obvious that they were completely unfamiliar with things that every Belter and Lunie understood instinctively. Perhaps the kzinti had been using their advanced technologies for such a long time that they’d forgotten about the nuances of living on a spacecraft like the Paradox.
My thinking about our captors was interrupted when Slave Master arrived alone at my room. Had something happened to Fritz? One could only hope. Slave Master stood towering in the open doorway looking at me.
“Continue ship work,” he said. It was not a question.
“Sure. Where’s your little friend?”
Slave Master said nothing, but just lifted a small chrome box to his mouth and growled into it. Scratchy growls answered him from the box and then -the now-familiar feeling of Fritz splitting my head apart returned. Damn that mother-auditing Fritz! If I ever got my hands on him… The chrome box in Slave Master’s hand growled again and the large kzinti looked at me and made another cat sound into the box before he put it back into a pouch on his belt.
“You work now.”
You had to give him credit. He was a cat of few words. “I work yes. Today we start repairs.”
Slave Master interrupted. “Not ‘we.’ You. Heroes do not do slave work.”
Who was I to argue with him? I went to work.
The most important problem to solve was fixing the damage to the Bussard field generators because the thrust of the engine would depend on the size and power of the magnetic field feeding it ionized hydrogen. If I couldn’t get enough field generators back on line, then we wouldn’t have the thrust to carry the kzinti ship to Vega and then, I was sure, Slave Master, or more likely his captain, would make sure that I didn’t have to worry about anything else. Everything depended on my actually getting outside and fixing those field generators. If possible.
I headed for the non-spinning section of the ship. Slave Master didn’t say anything, he just followed me, his eyes boring holes in the back of my head. When we reached the transition lock he hesitated before getting in with me. The ladder “up” to the non-spinning section of the ship stretched above our head. We could have used the lift, but why make it easy for the kzinti? And anyway, I needed the exercise. I indicated that we had to go up the ladder and he followed me.
The rungs on the ladder were spaced conveniently for humans, but the kzinti’s long arms were constantly faced with the choice of making tiny little reaches or making big stretches. I hoped this was making his arms and legs get cramped. As we rose “up” the ladder I could feel our weight. decreasing and I glanced below me to watch the kzinti climbing behind me. His face was tight and his eyes focused on me like I was to blame for centrifugal force and its disorienting cousin, coriolis force. Tough.
By the time we had reached the rotational axis of the spinning section we were floating in a good approximation of freefall. The transfer hub connected to the non-spinning part of the ship was ringed by the four tubeways that formed the spokes going to the toroidal crew section and shared the slow rotation of that part of the ship. A large hatchway opened into the freefall parts of the ship, but the view was a bit disorienting, since the transfer hub was slowly rotating and the freefall section wasn’t.
I grabbed a handhold on the wall and watched Slave Master get his bearings. I might not be able to read his body language exactly, but I could tell he was uncomfortable. Great. Serves him right for being where he wasn’t wanted. I indicated a corridor through the open hatchway.
“We’ve got to go to the Telepresence Operations Center. It’s this way. Next to the cargo lock.” Slave Master said nothing. Looked like freefall had gotten the cat’s tongue.
We floated down the corridor until we went past one of the coldsleep chambers where fifty of our two hundred colonists floated in cryogenic stasis. I looked in through the frost covered window in the air-tight door. The individual coldsleep coffins were filled with liquid nitrogen and all the insulation in the world could not keep that cold from leaking out into the chamber. The lights in there were dim but I could see the banked rows of coffins. One on top of another, in neat rows and columns like an exercise in matrix math.
Then I noticed holes in the array of coffins. Several were missing. No wait, over a dozen were missing. A thought tickled the back of my mind, but it was too outrageous to consider. Then I looked back at Slave Master who was looking into the coldsleep chamber longingly. Hungrily. Just as if the coldsleep vault held nothing more than a bunch of frozen dinners.
I could learn to dislike the kzinti without much effort. The cargo lock was down the corridor and up a passageway. We drifted into the Cargo Lock Ready Room. The Telepresence Operations Center occupied one corner of the large and cluttered room, and Slave Master scanned the area with wary eyes as if he expected a trap. How he expected something like that was beyond me. My head was splitting from Fritz’s mind reading so he had to know I wasn’t planning anything. Maybe Slave Master was just naturally paranoid.
Several different types of telepresence ‘bots were racked on the wall of the ready room. I went over to an EVA workbot and tapped a self-diagnostic command into its keypad. While it ran through its self check I floated over to a locker and pulled out a full body VR suit. Slave Master never took his eyes off me and all the while one of his hands rested on the gun hanging from his belt and his other hand held the chrome communicator near his face. I tried to concentrate on what I was doing while growling sounds from the communicator reminded me that Fritz was telling Slave Master everything I saw and thought.
The ‘bot beeped its readiness as I finished putting on the VR bodysuit and pulled myself over to a ‘JR workstation. A harness assembly provided straps to hold my body in place while leaving me complete freedom to twist my torso or move my arms and legs without having to worry about bumping into anything or swimming myself out into the airlock The straps of the harness were a warm reassuring pressure around me as I slipped on the data gloves, the helmet and the foot sensors.
Tapping the controls on the ‘JR workstation I lowered the visor of my helmet without waiting to see if Slave Master had any comments and went full immersive with the ‘bot. There was a moment of disorientation as my visual perspective changed. The view was so real that it was easy to forget that it was coming from the sensors of a telepresence ‘bet and not directly from my own senses.
My eyes were now close to the ground and I could see the ‘bot’s spider-like legs stretching out In front of me. My legs felt the springiness of the ‘bet’s legs as the force feedback loop activated the solenoids in my suit. I selected a walk cycle for the ‘bot and moved my legs to control it, the eight legs of the ‘bot moving in synchronization with each swing of my legs. I could feel the sticky sensation of the ‘bot’s foot magnets sequentially activating and then releasing when its legs were raised. It was a strange yet reassuringly familiar sensation.
I could see Slave Master off in the corner of the Cargo Lock Ready Room and my own body strapped to the VR workstation, its legs moving in a strange mimicry of the motion of the ‘bot’s legs. I moved my hand and keyed a control for the cargo lock The inner door swung open and the ‘bet walked into the lock. The outer door cycled open as soon as the inner door closed and I was finally, in a virtual sense anyway, free of the ship.
Seeing the stars from the outside of a ship never fails to fill me with awe and wonder. So many actinic points of light spread out between expanses of black nothingness. So many things waiting to be discovered. And then I remembered the kzinti. Tanj!
The ‘bot moved easily outside the ship; after all, that was what it was designed to do. It only took a few minutes for me to walk the ‘bot from the side of the ship’s freefall module where the cargo lock was located to its base where the ship’s main truss was attached. Once there I grappled onto a transport dolly that could carry the ‘bot all the way to the rear of the ship.
As the dolly moved down the length of the ship’s truss I could stretch my legs and just enjoy the view. The gold foil-covered hydrogen tanks loomed large over my head as the crew section grew small behind me. In a few minutes the dolly pulled up to the rear of the ship where the Bussard field generators and fusion drive were located. After the dolly stopped I released the
