Man-Kzin Wars XIV (13 page)

“Meaning it was shot down in atmosphere.”

“And look there!” said Sarah. Towards the nose of the great wreck, lights were burning behind several ports.

“The foward part is still air-tight.” With strong modern alloys, designed for years in space, that was not particularly surprising.

“Could there be . . . anyone alive in there, do you think?” asked Sarah.

“It’s not impossible. Those ships had mighty rugged life-support systems. It’s been a long time, but the old design was expecting to be in space for decades.”

“Try calling them up.”

The results were ambiguous. No answer came, but a finely tuned motion-detector reported movement. Something was in there, about the size of a man.

“If he’s been down there all these years he’s not likely to be keeping a watch on the instruments,” Leonie said. “He’s not likely to be very sane, for that matter.”

“We can’t just leave things like this,” said Nils. “We’ll have to go in now, and find out. But we’d better go armed.”

“We’ll need cutting torches to clear the growth off the airlock controls anyway,” said Leonie. “And to cut away any evidence we find.”

“I think we should take a couple of beam rifles as well.”

Their suits were designed for space but worked equally effectively under water. Von Höhenheim, who was too bulky for athletics, remained in the tender. A quick pass of the torch was enough to clear the growth off one of the derelict’s forward airlocks. They stepped into the airlock and the water cycled away. The first thing that caught their eyes on the bridge was a translucent tank attached to an instrument console. It was nearly empty and the skeleton of a dolphin fitted with artificial hands lay on the floor. They removed their helmets.

“Kzin! I smell kzin!” Nils brought his beam-rifle to the ready. Almost without thinking, he and Leonie had gone into a back-to-back crouch, the muzzles of their weapons sweeping each exit from the lock. Leonie, still clumsy on her new legs, moved too fast and fell sideways. Sarah picked her up.

“That thing we saw on the motion detector,” she said, “I’m sure that wasn’t a kzin. It was too small.”

“I don’t care. Can’t you smell them? Maybe it was a small kzin.”

Violent headaches hit them. The Rykermanns recognized them at once.

“Telepath probing! That explains it! There is a telepath here!” Leonie screwed up her face and pressed her hands to her head.

“For God’s sake! Rarrgh! Tell it we mean no harm! Tell it the war is over on this planet!” and then: “Tell it we have come to rescue it!”

The humans had expected no results. Nils and Leonie had to consciously override their training in such a situation and not think about eating vegetables (or—one of their teachers had been a Hindu—the capering monkeys of Hanuman), a drill designed to overwhelm a kzin telepath with nausea.

To their surprise, the humans felt their headaches subsiding. From one of the corridors a kzin emerged: small, bedraggled, a typical specimen of the kzin telepaths taken under the Patriarchial regime at birth and forcibly addicted to the
sthondat
-lymph drug, though perhaps looking somewhat better than the typical telepath that kzin commanders tended to use to destruction. Like all telepaths, language was no trouble for it. Its Wunderlander was fluent and colloquial and it spoke as close an approximation of human speech as its vocal arrangements would allow it.

“Don’t hurt me!” it cried, falling face-downward in the posture of total submission.

“You have nothing to fear from us. Who are you and what are you doing here?” asked Nils, keeping the creature covered. This telepath was indeed small for a kzin, and plainly no fighter, but even so unwarlike an example of the kzin species would be able to dismantle a tiger—or a human—faster than the eye could follow. And their ability to inflict instant, paralyzing pain on the brain’s receptor centers gave them an additional weapon.

“I was telepath aboard the cruiser
Man’s Bone-Shredder
,” the telepath told them, rising slowly. “Dominant One, there was a battle and I was taken prisoner. I was put aboard this ship.”

That made sense, Nils thought. Telepaths were too useful to waste. They could be a mighty asset and it had been found that many had no cause to be loyal to the Patriarchy.

“Approaching Ka’ashi, we were pursued by ships of the Patriarchy, but evaded them. Then this ship was hit by a missile fired from the ground, and crashed. I had been placed in a restraining web so I was the only survivor of the impact.”

“How did you know the missile came from the ground?”

“I read the captain’s mind.”

“Where are the bodies of the captain and crew?”

“I ate them. The bones are in there.” He gestured to a closed door. I arranged them according to rank and dressed them in their uniforms. Do you wish to see them?”

The humans shuddered.

“It was all I could do to show my respect and gratitude,” the telepath went on. “Apart from that there is a supply of rations. But I am glad that I have been found. I knew I was under water, but not how deep.”

“Have any records survived?”

“I did not touch the computer’s records. I am not familiar with human mechanisms and there were no survivors to teach me. I feared to touch the wrong controls. I read from your minds that the war is over on this planet, and the Patriarchy has been defeated. I am glad. My kind warred in secret against the Patriarchy as we might. I hope you will take me to be with others of my kind.”

“It’s a wonder you survived all that time, and a greater wonder you are still sane,” Leonie told him.

“My caste has had long experience of living on the edge of sanity,” the telepath told her drily. “And I have less than six months’ food left. I should have had to take a chance on surviving the airlock naked before long. I have found comfort in isolation, but I should have been obliged to forsake this place soon.”

The ship must have been retrofitted with the hyperdrive, Nils realized, and prudence would have made them provide food for a full crew for several years in case it failed. And two years of food for a full crew would have enabled a single individual to survive this time. And yes, solitude would have been better than company for a telepath. The pain of other minds would have been far worse.

“We will need to get a kzin-sized suit down to you,” Leonie said.

The telepath nodded. Kzin did not easily show emotion in front of humans.

“Tell us,” said Stan. “You read the captain’s thoughts at the end?” Leonie was prying out the bridge recorder.

“Only in flashes. I dared not distract him or the other humans. For the ship to lose all control and crash, I thought I would be lost too. I huddled in the restraining web. We ran long and far before the missile caught us, with many evasions. The captain was clever, but not clever enough.”

“But you picked up something.”

“Of course.”

“Say on. Tell us all you know.”

“The missile’s signature identified it as a
Hero’s Slashing Claw
.”

A short-range ground-to-air missile, barely capable of reaching the fringes of space. Though they could not be sure, Nils and Leonie thought they had been issued by the Patriarchy to KzinDiener forces. To prevent their misuse by humans, the later models had had identifiable radiation signatures, though whether the keys identifying these still existed was another matter.

Greg and Sarah returned to the surface and brought down a kzin spacesuit from the car. It was far too big to fit the telepath well, but it was adequate for a short, one-way trip.

“I don’t trust von Höhenheim,” said Nils. “If he is not entirely kosher, the recorder might be proof of that. I think I’ll keep it out of his way until we’re all snugged down and ready to leave. And don’t let him know this kzin is a telepath.”

“He
looks
like a telepath.”

“If von Höhenheim asks, tell him the kzin has been eating badly lately. Also, he looks too well-grooomed for a telepath. I suppose because he hasn’t had to use the telepath sense for a while.”

Feeling there was nothing to be gained by alienating the telepath, they asked him if there were any possessions he wished to take with him, but there were none. Nils and Leonie had by this time made a watertight bundle of all the bridge recorders, and they returned to the surface. Rarrgh, who was trying to follow Vaemar in being a modern Wunderkzin, tried not to treat the telepath too contemptuously.

“You had better collect the kits,” Nils told Rarrgh. Orlando and Tabitha, under Nurse’s anxious eyes, had been playing in the sandhills above the beach.

“We must come back when we have time and examine this place,” said Leonie. Storms had piled the margin of the sea with all manner of flotsam and jetsam, including the carapace of some large crustacean.

Nils also walked down to the tidal zone. It was hard to remember that he had been a professor of biology once. No one paid attention to Senator von Höhenheim. He quietly reentered the car. A shot from its dorsal gun-turret fused the sand to glass, barely in front of the human party’s feet.

Nils wasted no time in demanding to know what was the meaning of this. He brought Leonie down with a flying tackle and rolled with her down the side of the dune. The others did the same.

“Bring out the kittens,” von Höhenheim ordered through the loud-hailer as the car rose and hovered above them.

“What do you want with them?” asked Nils into his com-link.

“Hostages. They are two of the most valuable beings on this planet. Can you imagine the consequences if their Sire were presented with their fried carcasses?”

“I can imagine what the kzin would do to
you
. And the human government wouldn’t stop them.”

“I saw you bury something when you came ashore. It may have been the bridge-recorder. I will trade it for the kits’ lives.”

“And what about our lives?”

“Killing you would not be useful to me.”

“I’m glad you have enough sense to see that.”

“I have a private island with a laboratory and autodocs. It is equipped with memory-editing facilities. Agree to have your memories of what has happened here wiped, and you will be returned to Munchen unharmed.”

Nils did not believe him for a second. But his head was buzzing. It was not the full tiger-headache of a telepath’s probe against resistance, but he recognized it. He thought at the telepath, “
Do you understand what has happened? Make a circle in the sand if you do
.”

The telepath made a circle.

“
Help us, and Chuut-Riit’s son will be under a life-debt to you. Use the Telepath’s Weapon
.”

The telepath injected himself with a spray he had concealed in a pocket of the vest-like garment he wore.

“What are you doing?” boomed von Höhenheim.

The telepath went limp. His eyes rolled up. He struck at the human’s pain centers with all his force.

The car jerked sideways in the air, suddenly out of control. Rarrgh made a mighty leap up onto the wing, his prosthetic arm smashing through one of the skin-fittings—a refuelling port, The car slewed further and came down hard. Rarrgh had pulled himself onto the wing or he would have been crushed beneath it. They dragged von Höhenheim out unconscious after closing down the engines. Stan’s people had video-recorded the entire episode. This included Tabitha racing to Rarrgh and pulling bits of wreckage off him and licking his face while mewing frantically; Orlando had been a poor second. When the footage was shown in Munchen, Karan and Vaemar watched it with enormous satisfaction: it certainly looked as if the female kit had bred true. With any reasonable luck, so would Arwen, although it would be years before they could be sure. And all the kits were safe.

“What do we do with the bastard?” Stan raged. “That business of trying to take a hostage and promising us a memory-wipe is as good as a confession! It’s gone out on television, and most of our audience want to know why he’s still alive.”

“Due process,” Nils answered phlegmatically. “He’s under house arrest, but the legal guys are still trying to formulate a charge. Threatening a couple of kzin kits doesn’t look enough, we have to get to motive. And he’s had the sense to say absolutely nothing. Or his lawyers have told him to stay silent.”

Stan pondered. “I think I know how to nail him,” he said at last. “There’s the emails from his sidekick, Deep Throat. It has to be Grün. He’s been hinting at enough to send them both down. It’s time he came good. Or bad, in this case.”

Von Höhenheim faced Grün. He had been allowed to return to his old office while wearing an anklet that told police where he was, and he had found Grün there waiting for him, and sitting in
his
chair.

“Good to see you, Senator,” Grün had said cockily. He stood and made way for von Höhenheim, with a little bob that was loaded with irony.

“And may I say how disappointed I am that you are under house arrest for trying to steal the records of the warship you were responsible for shooting down.”

“Bah. They have nothing on me that cannot be explained,” von Höhenheim snorted. “So I was planning to kidnap two kzin kittens. That was on the television, I saw it. The question is why? Do you doubt that a good lawyer will have a dozen explanations which redound to my credit? Oh, an illegality perhaps, but one a great many humans will have sympathy for when my lawyer explains my motives. And they don’t have any kzin on jury duty, so I expect to get a good deal of sympathy. And my lawyers have already ensured that I shall not have to go before a telepath; the argument advanced was that my well-known hostility to kzin would lead to not being able to trust the telepath’s findings. And the court bought it.”