Some of a child's rash courage is ignorance. By thirty it's gone. The little girl's smile was a rictus. Aliens were here for her entertainment; she would not willingly miss any part of the adventure, but she just couldn't make herself approach the Kzin or his octopus servant. The boy hadn't even tried. First Officer Quickpony finished what she'd been doing. She stood in haste, took the vacuum packs from Heidi and handed them to the aliens. 'Fly-By- Night, thank you for coming. Thank you, Mart. You'd be Paradoxical?'
The woman's body language invited a handshake, but the Jotok didn't. 'Yes, we are Paradoxical, greatly pleased to meet you.'
The Kzin snarled a question in the Heroes' Tongue. Everybody's translators murmured in chorus, 'Is this the bridge?'
Quickpony said, 'Bridge and lobby, they're the same space. You didn't know? We wondered why you never came around.'
'I was not told of this option. There is merit in the posture that one species should not see another eat or mate or use the recycle port. But, LE Quickpony, your security is a joke! Bridge and passengers and no barrier? When did you begin building ships this way?'
Captain Preiss looked up. He said, 'Software flies us. I can override, but I can disable the override. Hijackers can't affect that.'
'What of your current problem? Did you record the Kzin's demand?' The Captain spoke a command.
A ghostly head and shoulders popped up on the holo-stage, pale orange but for two narrow, lofty black eyebrows. 'I am Mee-rowreet. Call me Envoy. I speak for the Longest War.'
My translator murmured, 'Mee-rowreet, profession, manages livestock in a hunting park. Longest War, Kzin term for evolution.'
The recording spoke Interworld, but with a strong accent and flat grammar. 'We seek a fugitive. We have destroyed your gravity motors. We will board you following the Covenants sworn at Shasht at twenty-five naught five your dating. Obey, never interfere,' the ghost head and voice grew blurred, 'give us what we demand. You will all survive.'
'The signal was fuzzed out by distance,' Captain Preiss said. 'The ship came up from behind and passed us at two hundred KPS relative, twenty minutes after we dropped out of hyperdrive. It's ahead of us by two light- minutes, decelerated to match our speed.'
I said, speaking low, 'Pleasemadam,' alerting my pocket computer, 'seek interstellar law, document Covenants of Shasht date twenty-five-oh-five. Run it.'
Fly-By-Night looked up into the dome. 'Your intruder?'
We were deep into the Nursery Nebula. All around were walls of tenuous interstellar dust lit from within. In murky secrecy, intersecting shock waves from old supernovae were collapsing the interstellar murk into hot whirlpools that would one day be stars and solar systems. Out of view below us, light pressure from something bright was blowing columns and streams of dust past us. It all took place in an environment tens of light-years across. Furious action seemed frozen in time.
We had played at viewing the red whorl overhead. In IR you saw only the suns, paired protostars lit by gravitational collapse and the tritium flash, that had barely begun to burn. UV and X-ray showed violent flashes and plumes where planetesimals impacted, building planets. Neutrino radar showed structure forming within the new solar system.
We could not yet make out the point mass that would bend our course into the Tao Gap and out into free space. Turnpoint Star was a neutron star a few miles across, the core left by a supernova. But stare long enough and you could make out an arc on the sky, the shock wave from that same stellar explosion, broken by dust clouds collapsing into stars.
My seek system chimed. I listened to my wrist computer:
At the end of the Fourth Man-Kzin War, the Human Space Trade Alliance annexed Shasht and renamed the planet Fafnir, though the long, rocky, barren continent kept its Heroes' Tongue name. The Covenants of Shasht were negotiated then. We were to refrain from booting Kzinti citizens off Fafnir. An easy choice: they prefer the continent, whereas humans prefer the coral islands. They were already expanding an interstellar seafood industry into Patriarchy space. In return, and having little choice, the Patriarch barred himself, his clan and all habitats under his command, all others to be considered outlaw, from various acts. Eating of human meat… willful destruction of habitats… biological weapons of certain types… killing of Legal Entities, that word defined by a long list of exclusions, a narrower definition than in most human laws.
Futz, I wasn't a Legal Entity! Or I wouldn't be if they learned who I was.
Quickpony projected a virtual lens on the dome. I'd finish listening later. The Kzinti ship and its boat, vastly magnified, showed black with the red whorl behind them. There was enough incident light to pick out some detail. For a bare instant we had seen the intruder coming up behind us, just as our drive juddered and died and left us floating. After it slowed to a relative stop, a boat had detached. The approaching boat blocked off part of the ship. Gamma rays impacting their magnetic shields made two arcs of soft white glow. Ship and boat bore the same glowing markings.
The ship was moving just as we were, its drive off, falling through luminous murk toward Turnpoint Star at a tenth of lightspeed.
First Officer Helm said, 'Odysseus' security systems can deal with hijackers, but they're just not much use against an armed warship. Is that what we're seeing?'
'I see a small warship designed for espionage and hunting. I don't know the make. My knowledge is too old. The name reads Sraff-zisht.' My translator said, 'Stealthy mating.'
Fly-By-Night continued, 'Captain, I can't see, are there magnetic moorings on Sraff-zisht?'
'No need. Those big magnets on the boat would lock to the ship's gamma ray shielding.'
'The boat is armed, the ship is not? There is no bay for the boat? Understood. Leave the boat in hiding among asteroids. Land an unarmed converted cargo ship on any civilized world. Yes?'
'Speculative,' Preiss said.
'Do you recognize the weapon?'
'No. I assume it's what burned out our thrusters… our gravity motors.' I sat and dialed a cappuccino. The Kzin joined me, dwarfing the booth. I dialed another with double milk, thinking he ought to try it.
The other passengers shrank back a little and waited. Any human being knows how to fear a Kzin.
I said, speaking low, 'Pleasemadam, seek Heroes' Tongue references, stealthy mating, literal, no reference to rape.' There had to be a way to narrow that further. I guessed: 'Seek biological references only. Run it.'
Fly-By-Night tasted the cappuccino.
Captain Preiss said, 'Why would they be interested in us?'
'In me. The boat is close.' Fly-By-Night sipped again. 'Do you know of the Angel's Pencil?'
The Kzin was speaking Interworld as smoothly as if he'd grown up with the language. Some of us gaped. But his first words to me had been Interworld, after I startled and angered him… and he liked cappuccino.
Fly-By-Night said, 'Angel's Pencil was a slowboat, one of Sol system's slower-than-light colony craft. Four hundred years ago, Angel's Pencil sent word of our coming. Sol system was given years to prepare. My ancestor Shadow contrived to board Pencil after allying himself with a human captive, Selena Guthlac. He and she joined their crew.'
'That must have been one futz of a makeup job,' Nicolaus Van Zild said.
'He had to stoop and keep his ears folded, and depilate! Whose story is this, boy?' Nicolaus grinned. The Kzin said, 'Angel's Pencil's crew had already destroyed Tracker. They later destroyed Gutting Claw, the first and second kills of the First War, not bad for a ship with no intended armaments. 'Pencil was forced to pass through Patriarchy space before they found a world to settle. None of those ramscoop ships were easy to turn, and none were built for more than one voyage. We were ninety light-years from Earth. One hundred and six years had passed on Earth.'
I asked, 'We?'
'Gutting Claw's Telepath, later named Shadow, is our first sire. Pencil rescued six females from the Admiral's harem. Our species have lived together on Sheathclaws for three hundred years. We remained cut off. Any message laser aimed at human space would pass through the Patriarchy. We spoke with no sapient species, we did not even know of faster-than-light travel, until…”Fly-By-Night looked up.
Stealthy-Mating's boat had arrived. We were looking directly into an obtrusively large electromagnetic
