Choosing Names

SLOWBOAT NIGHTMARE Warren W. James

Stark white cold. That was the first thing I noticed. That and the quiet sounds you learn to ignore while in space; the whisper of the air circulators, the hum from the electronic systems and the subsonic rumble of the drive. But there was something wrong with those sounds, like a chord with one note off-key.

The glassine shell of the autodoc was frosted over. I blinked my eyes wide open and saw nothing but milky whiteness and someone moving haltingly outside the ‘doc. I blinked some more and the milky shapelessness became individual strips of brightness on the ceiling.

My labored breathing puffed thin white clouds into the cold air as I felt a warm dry breeze start to blow into the autodoc. I became aware of the clean antiseptic smell of the autodoc’s interior, layered over with a stale metallic tang and a scent like that of sweaty grass mixed with ginger. My arms and legs were tingling, as if they had fallen asleep, while their muscles pulsed with the rhythmic contractions of electronically induced isometric exercises. I felt a sharp jerk and looked over to see a set of intravenous needles withdrawing themselves from my arm. How long had they been feeding me? Where was I? Sick or recovering from some accident? In some organlegger’s chop shop? My thoughts came as a jumble of memories and dreams. And then I remembered. The anticipation, the hopes, the dreamless sleep. I was on a starship bound for a colony world.

Would we find a world as perverse as the others the ramrobots had found? Like Mt. Lookitthat on Tau Ceti II, a sliver of inhabitable land on an otherwise uninhabitable world. Or a world where conditions were clement, but only for a few days out of the year, like what the Crashlanders found on Procyon IV.

For several hundred years humans had been sending unmanned interstellar probes, ramrobots, to find habitable environments in other star systems. And that they did. But showing true machine literal-mindedness, they couldn’t tell the difference between a habitable environment and a habitable world. As often as not, the worlds they found bore as much resemblance to their reports as the typical vacation destination resembled its tridee advertisements. Who knows how many colony ships finished their long interstellar trip with no way to return to Earth and only a marginal world to carve into a home. Would our voyage end differently?

Observations of Vega from the multi-kilometer fresnel lens telescopes at Persephone Station had indicated the existence of planets along with a large and densely populated disk of post-accretion debris. Those rocks had interested the Belt Science Commission enough to make them cough up half the UN Marks needed to send an unmanned probe to investigate further.

Ramrobot #124 had found that Vega’s fourth planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, had a moon that was larger than Mars with a thicker atmosphere. The scientists thought it would be inhabitable, although a bit cold and dry. But being a young planetary system, the gas giant was still glowing brightly in the IR and that would make the sub-primary parts of the moon quite bearable, if not downright comfortable. (Who cares that in a million years or so that gas giant would have cooled to the point to where it could no longer help keep the moon warm. Let the people of 1,957,811 AD worry about that problem.)

But what interested us Belters wasn’t that moon, but the extensive family of rocks circling Vega. Analysis of the ramrobot’s data showed that they were a rich combination of ice, rock, metal and carbon compounds. The stuff of life. Let the Flatlanders have what was at the bottom of that moon’s well; we Belters would have no problem carving out a civilization from the rich rocks surrounding Vega.

Well, at least that was the plan. But something seemed wrong and I didn’t think it was just the imaginings of my coldsleep-addled brain. If we had really arrived at Vega IVb, then the Med-Center should have been filled with glassine coffins being thawed out by the ship’s autodocs. I couldn’t see clearly, but I could tell that my coffin was the only one in the room.

With a click the restraints that had been holding my arms and legs in place retracted and I held my hands in front of my face. Their nails were long and clean. The pale pinkness of my skin surprised me, but then coldsleep wasn’t meant to be like dozing under a tropical sun. My face and scalp were itching and I touched my hand to my face to scratch but pulled it away in shock. Hair. On my face. On the side of my head. I had always worn my Belter’s crest trimmed short, but now it was lost in the confusion of fresh hair covering my head. How could this be? Hair doesn’t grow when your body is a corpsicle held at liquid nitrogen temperatures. When did my head have the time to become covered by a ragged stubble of hair?

“Still in coldsleep. There’s been a problem.” Tom tried to continue but a sound at the door stopped him and focused all of my attention on the other side of the room. The source of the sweaty grass and ginger scent was now obvious. Coming through the door was a creature that walked upright but looked like a cross between a tiger and a gorilla. (I remembered seeing both at the holozoo at Confinement Asteroid when I took my sister there in ‘57.) It must have been close to eight feet tall with long arms that ended in hands with four digits and a naked rat-tail twitching behind it. The creature was wearing rough-hewn clothing that looked like leather. Metal shapes with handles, ugly but vaguely familiar and sized for overly large hands, hung from a belt at its waist. As it looked at me I had the distinct impression that I knew what a frozen meal felt like when it got popped out of a microwave cooker.

A second creature came through the door and then a third. This last one was different. Smaller and unkempt. The others walked, no, make that strode, with an upright posture that bespoke an unquestioned belief in their authority. But this one? He (she? it?) walked slowly, hesitatingly, and with a slumped posture that screamed fear. The others had long orange-brown fur with variegated patterns of stripes that showed the obvious effects of frequent grooming. This one, his fur looked as unkempt as the unwelcome hair that covered my head. And his eyes. They were—sleepy? No, maybe not sleepy, but definitely strange.

The large one that had entered the Med-Center first turned to the others and snarled something that sounded like a group of gravel-throated cats having a fight. The others made hissing and spitting cat sounds back and damned if they somehow didn’t make them come out sounding deferential as they surrounded the autodoc. Tom was pressed against the side of the ‘doc, trembling.

The second creature, whose face had distinctive asymmetric stripes and dark markings around his eyes, looked down at me and then did the one thing I would have never expected. He spoke, in hard to understand and heavily accented Standard.

“This one knows how? Yesss? He must work.”

I almost passed out from the shock. Here we were between the stars, twenty-plus ship-years from the Belt, and aliens from who-knows-where just waltz into the Med-Center. And they speak Standard. No one ever told me that our first contact with outsiders would be like this.

Then I looked closer at the biggest outsider—the one who was eyeing me closely. And I saw them. Hanging from his belt. At least a half dozen, maybe more. Strung together on some kind of cord.

Ears.

Human ears.

That’s when I passed out.

When I woke up again I wasn’t in the autodoc, but lying on a waterbed in an empty room. From its size, about as large as a small walk-in closet back on Earth, I guessed it was the Captain’s quarters. I wondered what had happened to Jennifer, but I remembered those ears hanging from that outsider’s belt and decided I didn’t really want to know.

The image of a hungry tiger that walked like a gorilla made me want to fade back into black oblivion, but my fear of what might happen to me while unconscious kept me awake. I tried to sit up, but the room turned gray and started spinning around. Lying down seemed like a better idea. On the wall next to the bed the ready light of the intercom softly glowed green.

“Hey! What’s going on? Where is everybody?” I wasn’t sure who (or what) was going to answer.

Tom’s voice crackled over the intercom, “Relax. I’ll be right there.”

A few minutes later the door of the cabin slid open and Tom limped in carrying a medkit. “Take it easy. You’re weak and you’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Tom ignored my question as he rustled through his medkit and removed drinking bags, drug hypos and bottles of medicine. “Here, drink this and don’t interrupt.”

I swallowed the chalky pink juice from the drinking bag. It tasted worse than it looked. The burning sensation from a hypo pressed against my arm distracted me from further thoughts about Tom’s bartending skills. He tapped a touchpad near the bed and a memory plastic chair extruded itself from the adjacent wall. Tom sat down, composed his thoughts and began talking.

“Those aliens call themselves ‘kzinti,’ though I don’t know if they’re talking about their race or some sociopolitical subgrouping.”

“But what are they?” I asked. “Explorers? Scientists? What?”

Tom blinked at my question. “Not quite. They’re warriors.”

“That’s impossible! Who are they fighting?”

“Us,” Tom replied. “As near as I can tell, we’re at war with them.”

War.

There hadn’t been a war on Earth in dozens of generations. The last historically verifiable intergovernmental conflict had been before the time of Galileo. There were stories about misunderstandings and UN police actions, like the apocryphal stories about a global conflict involving genocide and nuclear weapons during the twentieth century. But even children knew that those were just fictions used to teach moral philosophy. Every child in the ARM sponsored school system learned that war was impossible for any advanced culture. Any civilization that lasted long enough to develop interstellar flight must have lasted long enough to outgrow their aggressive behavior. If they hadn’t, they would have killed themselves with their technology.

“I don’t believe you,” I said as I tried to think of some other explanation.

“You can believe me or not, but that doesn’t change the way the kzinti act.”

Silence filled the room until Tom continued. “Look, Ib, maybe we’re at war, maybe we’re not. Maybe these creatures are psychopaths escaped from a mental institute and they’re living out their delusional fantasies using stolen technology.”

Now that, I thought, made sense.

“But what matters is what’s happening here and now. They act like we’re at war, and they don’t take prisoners.”

I just stared. My mind didn’t want to accept star-traveling warriors. “But what do they want with us?”

Tom looked away as if in shame. “To them we’re just potential slaves.” Silence filled the room until Tom continued with his story.

“It happened a couple of weeks ago. We were six months out of Vega when we detected the approach of an unknown vessel at outrageous speeds and accelerations. We shut down the ramscoop so its magnetic field wouldn’t be a danger to the alien ship’s crew. Then we waited. The kzinti ship rendezvoused with us and just hung a few hundred kilometers off our nose, doing nothing at all.”

I interrupted, “How did they come across us? Random chance?”

“No,” Tom replied, “they were reconnoitering Vega when they detected our approach and came out to intercept us.”

I interrupted him again. “You’re telling me they were able to accelerate out to our position, come to a dead stop and then match our velocity for a rendezvous. Man, what kind of technology do they have?”

“I don’t know anything about their technology Jennifer thought it might be some kind of field drive, something where the drive forces operate on the entire ship and its contents equally. That way they could accelerate at hundreds of gravities and not feel anything.”

I was still having trouble believing this. First, hostile outsiders. No, make that hostile slave-taking outsiders. And now I find out that they have technologies that made our best ramships look like cloth and wood biplanes in an era of hypersonic jets. This really wasn’t the way that first contact was supposed to happen. Tom continued his story.

“The crew tried every communication scheme you could imagine. The kzinti never responded to any of them. Maybe they misunderstood us, but it sure seemed like they were just ignoring us. I wish that’s all they had done.”

Tom paused, remembering. I tried to imagine the hopes and anticipations of the crew. Lightyears from Earth, lightdays from a new star, and then they make first contact with the outsiders—the often imagined, more often imaginary, intelligent creatures from another world. Everyone knew this would be an epochal moment in human history. The fulfillment of many lifetimes of dreaming and imagining. Tom’s voice threatened to break as he told me the rest of the story.

“Then the kzinti sent over a couple of small craft and forced their way onto our ship. There was a fight, but we were outmatched. Most of the crew were killed in a matter of minutes. I was in the Med-Center and didn’t even have time to get to anyone who needed me.”

Tom’s eyes took on a distant, haunted, look. I didn’t want to think about the things he must have seen.

“Jennifer tried to restart the drive. I guess she hoped its magnetic field would kill the kzinti who were still on their ship. Maybe she wanted to use the drive’s exhaust as a weapon. Who knows? The kzinti broke into the control deck and killed her and the remainder of the crew. In the fighting our drive got damaged and it executed an auto-shutdown. But not before its magnetic field had destroyed the drive and most of the electronics on the kzinti warship as well as killing all its occupants.”

Warship. A word from our past. In school they had taught us that the last human warships were boats that plied the oceans with sails. The idea of a warship that could sail between the stars was almost unimaginable.

“Our ramscoop destroyed the drive on the kzinti ship?” I couldn’t bring myself to call it a warship. “How’s that possible?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m not an engineer.”

“Well, how badly was our drive damaged?”

“Ib. I keep telling you, I’m not an engineer. I can’t answer that question. That’s where you come in. We need someone who can repair the drive system and pilot us into orbit around Vega IVb.”

“Me? I’m just a singleship jockey, not a ramship pilot.”

“That may be, but you’re our best hope. The crew’s dead. I had to thaw out someone. There were… complications.”

“Complications?” I interrupted.

“You don’t want to know,” replied Tom. “You had to spend almost two weeks in the autodoc. Of all the people available you had the most… qualifications.”

“What qualifications?” I demanded.

“You’re the only Belter with an advanced degree in astroengineering.”

Tom was holding something back. What was it? “You can’t be serious. It’s been ages since I did any engineering. And all that was design work, not fixing stuff. That can’t be enough.”

“It better be enough.” He hesitated then continued. “I know you singleship pilots. You brag about being able to fix anything with nothing. If you can’t, we’re dead meat.”

I interrupted, “But…”

“But nothing. Our only chance for life is if you can fix the ship.” Tom’s eyes pleaded with me as we stared at each other. I’m not sure if I believed him. Finagle, I’m not sure he believed himself I thought of something else.

“How many kzinti are on our ship?”

“Not many. Just the boarding party that was behind our shields when Jennifer started the drive.”

I interrupted, “But then can’t we reason with them or…”

“You can’t reason with them,” Tom interrupted. “They don’t think like we do.” Depressed silence filled the room, until it was broken by Tom getting up to leave.

“I’m going to go and let you get some rest. Twenty years of coldsleep can really mess up your endocrine balance. I’d like to have you spend a couple more days in the ‘doc to let it sort out your biochemistry. But the kzinti won’t let me do that. Hell, they didn’t even want to let me check in on you today.”

Tom handed me a small vial filled with orange pills. “Here’s some medicine that the autodoc made up for you. Take two every eight hours. They should help you get back to normal.”

His eyes tried to tell me more than his words could convey, but I couldn’t understand him. “Take your medicine and rest. It’s important. I’ve convinced the kzinti that you won’t be able to do anything for a day or so. I don’t know how long I can stall them.”

Tom turned and headed for the door. As he did I noticed he had a pronounced limp that I didn’t remember from when we’d left the solar system.

“Tom, what happened to your leg?”

Tom grimaced as he slowly turned to face me. He leaned against the wall and lifted the leg of his pants. Where there should have been a sock covered leg was a gleaming titanium stump that disappeared into his shoe and up his pants leg.

“The kzinti have short tempers,” he said. “Don’t get them upset.”

I spent the rest of the day resting, eating and sleeping. I set a timer to go off every eight hours and when it chimed I took my medicine. Those pills must have been strong because taking them made my head feel light and put my whole body on edge. I would have been worried, but all my life I’d been taught to trust the ministrations of the autodocs. In any case, I spent a lot of time dozing off, waking up only when my nightmares of overgrown cats and the forgotten art of war caused me to jerk upright screaming.

The next morning came too soon. Was it morning? My time sense was really out of kilter. I woke without assistance and found that there was a small autochef in the room, though many of its meat items were logged as being unavailable. (Should I blame that on the kzinti also?) I had just finished eating a breakfast of eggs, toast and coffee without sausage when the door to my quarters slid open and two of the kzinti walked in. The larger of the two had to duck his head down to get through the doorway, but the smaller, disheveled one was slumped down so far that he didn’t need to duck. I recognized the larger of the two kzinti as the one who could speak Standard. He started talking without preamble.

“I am ‘Slave Master.’ I will speak slave language until you learn Hero’s Tongue. First, prove your worth. Solve ship problem. Then we treat you as worthy slave.”

“And how would you do that?” I asked.

“You will live.”

I didn’t have any response to that comment and the big cat stayed silent for a moment. I looked into his face, but his emotions—did he have any emotions, I wondered?—were a complete mystery to me. What was the meaning of his twitching ears? And should I be worried that he was showing me his teeth, or was that just his idea of a smile?

The rat-cat (that was all I could think of while I watched his naked tail flick back and forth) snarled something to the smaller, disheveled kzinti who shivered and seemed to pull into himself. He reached down into a bag he was carrying and took out a syringe with a gleaming silver needle. His stare went from the syringe to the larger kzinti and finally to me. The larger kzinti snarled at him again, I’d swear I could sense disgust in his snarl, and the small kzinti plunged the needle deep into his forearm. He shuddered and seemed to pull into himself even more, almost as if he was going into a trance, and then he looked at me.

It was like he was looking straight into my soul. His eyes sparkled with a life that I hadn’t seen before but his body still shivered and shook. I heard a low moaning growl come from deep in his throat. I felt a pressure building in my head. It might have been nervous anxiety from my fear of the upcoming interrogation.

“Now talk.” Slave Master stared at me. Somehow I didn’t think this was the time or place for the quick rejoinder or smartass remark.

“Okay. We’ll talk. About what?”

“No. Not ‘we talk.’ You talk. Can you fix ship?”

I started to frame an evasive answer, when my head exploded in pain and disorientation. It felt like I was falling down an infinitely deep hole while being hurled up toward an ever unreachable sky. I felt like I was spinning rapidly while being completely immobile. If not for decades of freefall reflexes I would have spewed my breakfast all over the kzinti and the four walls of the tiny room. (I didn’t think that would be a good career move.) Slowly the sensation diminished but never completely went away.

The disheveled kzinti sat in a corner of the room. Glowering at me. His eyes boring through me, while his body shivered almost uncontrollably. He haltingly growled something to Slave Master.

The larger kzinti stared at me and I watched in horror as thick black claws sprang from his four fingertips. He raised his clawed hand above my head, as if ready to bring it down in one swift killing move.

“Truth only. No lies. I will know.” He paused. “Understand?”

It was clear as a bell.

“Yes sir.”

He raised his hand higher. His fur was pulled back and lying flat across his face.

“Use proper form of address. Not Sthondat form. I am Slave Master. Not sir.” He lowered his face close to mine. I could watch each whisker on his muzzle twitch. I could smell the fetid odor of dead meat on his breath. One wrong answer and my scent would be added to his breath.

“Yes si—Yes. Slave Master.” I tried to make it sound respectful. Fear for your life can do that.

Slave Master slowly lowered his arms. His fur began to fluff out, his claws retracting slowly as he lowered his arms. “Now tell of your ship knowledge and repair skills.”

And so I tried to tell them what I hoped they wanted to know. If I promised more than I could deliver I knew I would die, but if I didn’t promise enough I knew I’d never get the chance to be proven wrong. I let them know that I’d have to make an inspection of the ship’s systems before I could decide on a course of action. That I might need to thaw out someone else from coldsleep to help me. (They didn’t like this idea.)

Although Slave Master knew some Standard there were big lapses in his technical vocabulary and at times we had to stop and work out language problems. He had me visualize things and describe them until finally he understood me. And all through this the disheveled kzinti sat there staring at me while my head felt like it was going to explode at any minute. By the time we were finished I was totally exhausted. (I think they knew this, but they didn’t care.) Luckily for me they seemed to have gotten what they needed. I hoped I had bought myself a few days of looking for options. Time to find hope in a hopeless situation.

Slave Master looked me in the eye. “We go now. Discuss. Churl-Captain will decide. Inspection and repairs later. Rest now. Eat. Prepare.” With that the two kzinti turned and left the room. The only thing remaining from their visit was the scent of sweaty grass and ginger and my fear of what would happen next.

I thought of staying up and planning, of plotting how I might work against them. But my head still ached. I thought it might have been from tension, but if it was, it was unlike any tension headaches I’d ever had before. It was nothing like that time when I was smuggling a shipment of luxury foodstuffs to a Flatlander science station on Enceladus and tried dodging a Goldskin patrol by hiding my ship in the braided ring of Saturn. By comparison that was a relaxed afternoon at Heisenberg’s Pub back at Ceres Base.

I stretched out on the waterbed to organize my thoughts and only ended up organizing my dreams.

Except that those dreams kept getting interrupted by nightmares where I was a mouse being chased by a tiger.

I woke up with my mind filled with half-formed imaginings and leftover nightmares. In my sleep I had imagined that our slowboat had been overrun by ferocious outsiders that looked like a fantasy image from an old flat film. (The kinds of films that the ARM thought they had suppressed, but which were popular humor among Belters in their singleships far from the patronizing protection of the ARM.) And then it hit me. This was no dream. These outsiders were real. And they weren’t a Saganesque fantasy of wise and peaceful creatures who wanted to guide us on the path to enlightenment. These were killers who thought of humans as nothing more than another race to be subjugated. I wanted to go back to sleep, to dream my way out of this nightmare, but I’d been sleeping too much the last couple of clays. (Why should I be so tired after spending twenty plus ship-years in coldsleep?)

I didn’t know how much time had passed since my last meeting with the kzinti, but I expected they’d be coming soon. Either to use me to repair the ship, or to dispose of me as a useless implement. In either case I needed to prepare myself. Breakfast was another meatless exercise in frustration but standing under the shower did more to refresh me than all of my sleeping from the last few days. I stared at my face as I dried off and thought about shaving off my beard and retrimming my hair into its Belter’s crest, but didn’t have the energy or inclination.

I didn’t have to wait long for my captors to come and fetch me. The door opened without warning and in walked Slave Master followed by the small disheveled kzinti. Slave Master growled at the smaller kzinti, who reached into his pouch without making a sound, pulled out his syringe and pressed it into his arm while staring at me. The look on his face made me want to take pity on him, but when I thought of what he and his kind had done to the crew of our ship, I hoped that whatever he was going to do was going to hurt him. Badly.

For a moment nothing happened. Then my head exploded in pain and disorientation. Slave Master looked at me without any concern for my condition and spoke without preamble. “You come now. Fix ship.”

“I need to go to the Command Deck so I can check out the ship first.”

The disheveled kzinti… I was going to have to come up with a name for him. Fritz. That would do. Fritz moaned a few sounds to Slave Master and then went back to glaring at me.

“We go. Obey or die.”

We went.

The ship’s curving corridors were empty as we made our way to the Command Deck. I hadn’t seen any other kzinti since the first day, but I knew they were around. I could smell them. And sometimes I heard their caterwauling sounds echoing down the air ducts as we walked through empty passageways scarred by burn marks and ragged holes.

The Command Deck was deserted, and its condition made it painfully obvious just how desperate our situation was. All around me was a scene of death and destruction. I remembered my friends who should be here, but who weren’t. I tried not to feel the pain of their absence. I didn’t do a good job of it.

The empty captain’s couch had a broken headrest, with long tears going down the sides of the couch with cushioning material hanging out in tatters. I didn’t want to bring myself to recognize the stains on the couch and the surrounding floor.

Many of the command and control displays were dark or showed digital static. Ragged holes in the control panels gave evidence that weapons of some kind had mindlessly destroyed the ship’s equipment. Rusty stains having little to do with iron oxide covered many of the panels. A few flickering lights on the consoles were the only sign that power and life still flowed through the controls. The kzinti paid no attention to any of this, but just stared at me. Waiting for me to do something. Slave Master growled something and I sat down at the Engineer’s station and went to work.

A few of the flat panel displays still functioned and I used them to bring up colored charts and rows of numbers showing the status of the ship’s systems. But the picture they gave me was simultaneously confusing, incomplete and over detailed. All I could access was raw data, with vast amounts missing, with no easy way to synthesize it into concise information about the ship’s status. If other people had been here we could have worked together to make sense out of this patchwork of data. But that wasn’t an option the kzinti would make available to me. I’d need to use the VR system to try and make sense of the jumbled data.

The data gloves and head mounted displays for the VR system were in a storage locker at the rear of the Command Deck. The kzinti didn’t do anything but watch as I got up and went to get them. They stiffened as I reached for the locker and Slave Master growled.

“I’m just getting some equipment I need.” I hoped they didn’t misinterpret my nervousness.

Slave Master growled over at Fritz, who stared at me. And my head wrenched in a fresh wave of pain. Fritz muttered something to Slave Master that sounded like a cat having a fit and the large kzinti appeared to relax.

I pulled out a set of data gloves and a head mounted display from the locker and carried them back to the Engineer’s station where I adjusted them to fit my hands and head. My custom gear would have fit better, but considering the situation these would do just fine. After I plugged them in they went through their diagnostics and beeped their readiness. I adjusted the audio volume to a level that would let me hear Slave Master if he spoke and the video display so it would leave a transparent image of the Command Deck overlaid behind the immersive VR display. I knew I couldn’t concentrate on the ship if the VR system left me wondering what the kzinti were up to.

Slave Master and Fritz were watching me intently. I don’t know if they had anything like VR. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but in any case, they didn’t move to stop me as I slid my hands into the data gloves and nestled the display unit over my head.

The audiophones were a warm softness on my ears. I could hear the empty echoes of silence and the ocean wave sound of the blood flowing through my ears. The data gloves fit my hands like, well, like gloves. They provided a tight pressure on my hand and I could feel the resistance of the force feedback sensors as I flexed my fingers. The watching kzinti became pale ghosts as I lowered the half-silvered visors of the head-mounted display and activated the VR program.

Windows filled with data appeared and floated in the virtual space in front of my face, superimposed on the scene of destruction in the Command Deck with the two kzinti watching me. This two-for-one visual display was disorienting and it would get even worse when I went full immersive. Hopefully, my freefall reflexes would help keep the conflicting visual cues from getting me too confused.

I moved my hands and brought up a window filled with display options. I selected a synthesized view of the ship along with overlaid options for displaying the status of various systems. It was time to go for a virtual walk and check things out. As the VR system executed my commands, the image of the Command Deck faded and a “god’s-eye” exterior view of our ship came into focus.

The view I saw might have been synthesized, but that didn’t make it any less impressive. Our ship, Obler’s Paradox, with its eight-hundred-foot truss work spine and assorted modules, was hanging motionless in space surrounded by millions of stars with a small orange craft attached to its side like a sinister parasite. A larger spherical ship hovered menacingly nearby.

Our ship appeared to be in surprisingly good shape, other than the obvious damage caused by the kzinti and the normal discolorations caused by solar radiation and thruster firings. At the rear was the fusion engine that could push us up to a good fraction of the speed of light and the magnetic field generators for the Bussard ramscoop. Directly ahead of them were a set of spherical tanks, used to hold hydrogen for use when we were moving at merely interplanetary speeds. Near the middle of the ship was the cylindrical pressurized module used to store the coldsleep tanks, as well as the equipment and supplies needed by the crew, along with a hydroponic garden that provided fresh vegetables and air. A rotating toroidal module provided a living space for the crew. Finally, at the front of the ship were the vacuum storage areas where we kept our singleships and other vacuum-safe equipment behind the flat micrometeoroid/thermal control panels. Covering everything were the smooth superconducting panels that protected the equipment and people from the effects of the drive’s intense magnetic fields.

As I studied the damage to our ship, I had the computer bring up data blocks and display them over the image of the ship. Gradually I built up my assessment of the ship. I zoomed in my view until I was staring at the field generators.

It looked like something heavy had smashed into them. Perhaps a small kzinti ship had been drawn into the field generators when Jennifer had activated our drive. Those field generators developed magnetic fields that were strong enough to draw in ionized hydrogen from hundreds of miles away when we were moving at a good fraction of the velocity of light. Careful tuning of the fields shunted aside anything that wasn’t interstellar hydrogen, but I doubt the designers had considered having to deflect something as large or as close as one of those kzinti spacecraft. If they contained anything remotely susceptible to magnetic fields they would have been grabbed and pulled directly into the field generators.

I had the ship’s computer apply an overlay showing the field strength of the drive and the flux density contours of the surrounding hydrogen. Instantly, the ship was surrounded by glowing neon yellow and blue contour lines. I reached out with my hands and felt the field lines. I pressed on them and gauged their strength with my fingers, the force feedback sensors pressing against my fingertips. Data displayed in overlaid windows showed the numerical data that confirmed the qualitative impressions formed by the force feedback system.

The asymmetries of the field showed that some, but not all, of the field generators were off-line. The ones that were on-line were only operating at the level needed to provide us with radiation protection by deflecting the interstellar medium away from the ship. They couldn’t feed hydrogen to the engine fast enough to slow us from our Einsteinian rush through space.

Things looked bad, but not unsaveable. There were some spare parts in the ship’s stores, but more importantly there was a lot of redundancy in the design of the drive. For the first time since I had been brought out of coldsleep I started to feel optimistic. Here was a problem I could deal with.

That thought focused my mind back on the kzinti. There they were, like ghosts at a funeral. There was a problem that I wasn’t sure I could fix.

My hands made motions in the air—I wondered what the kzinti thought of that—and the image of the ship and the stars vanished, only to be replaced by the image of the Command Deck and the waiting kzinti. With the flip of a switch the display went blank and I pushed the display lenses up away from my eyes.

Fritz was still staring at me as I tensed with anticipation of the head-splitting pain from his juju eyes but it never came, just a dull ache like the pain from a broken tooth before an autodoc could implant a fresh bud. Unpleasant; but I could live with it.

I looked Slave Master straight in the eyes. “The Bussard field generators are really munged. It’s going to take a lot of work to fix them.”

“You can fix?” The look in Slave Master’s eyes only allowed one answer.

“Yes. Given time and resources.”

“Do so.”

“How long will it take for your crew to get their equipment transferred from your ship to ours and how much mass will they be bringing?” I didn’t like the idea of the kzinti occupying our ship, but knowing how long it would take them to get their things moved over would give me an idea about how long I’d have to get the field generators back on-line.

“Heroes do not abandon their ship. You will transport Screaming-Hunter-Who-Leaps-From-Tall-Grass with your ship.”

I didn’t think he was joking, but I knew he couldn’t have any idea about the magnitude of the problem he was creating. We couldn’t just throw a rope to them and tow them. There was no place to attach their ship with the over-long name to Obler’s Paradox and even if there were, their ship might be compact, but I suspected it was massive. That ignorant overgrown excuse for a housecat had just over-constrained the problem. We’d be lucky if my jury-rigged repairs worked well enough to get just Obler’s Paradox to Vega. I was about to tell him that in just those tones when that familiar head-bursting feeling came back with a vengeance and I rethought the phrasing of my words.

Slave Master came and towered over me. “You cannot do?” His fur was flat against his face, the claws at the ends of his fingers were sliding out.

And then I noticed his ears. They had extended out like a pair of bat wings or small parasols. The image was almost—almost—funny. I would have laughed at the sight of those delicate ears on that huge orange tiger-gorilla, except I knew he didn’t have a sense of humor. And the pain in my head had become so great it was all I could do to grunt an answer.

“You ask too much. There’s no way to do what you ask. We’ll be unbalanced. Uncontrollable. And our drive is damaged. We don’t have the power to handle both ships.” I hoped he was reasonable.

He wasn’t.

“Heroes order, not ask. Worthy slaves obey, others die.” He paused for a moment then continued. “You can do?” His lips had pulled away from his teeth showing a set of impressive canines. Back on the other side of the room Fritz was pulling himself into a little orange ball. I knew there was only one answer.

“I’ll tr—” I reconsidered my answer. “I can do the job.”

Slave Master looked over to Fritz and growled something. Fritz growled back deferentially and the pain in my head subsided. Slave Master loomed over me as his fur relaxed and his claws retracted.

“Do so.”

I did.

There were several problems to be solved. First, reconfigure the Bussard field so I could get the drive working at partial power. I’d already given up on getting enough field generators up to run the engine at full power. Second, figure out how to attach that kzinti ship to the Paradox without making us so unbalanced that we’d be uncontrollable. Third, get the ship’s computer busy investigating the trajectory space available to us with a munged engine and find a way to get us safely into orbit around Vega IVb while carrying that kzinti ship. And fourth, figure out what to do about the kzinti. But this last problem was moot if I failed to solve the first three, so I put the kzinti out of my mind. Or at least as much as I could.

Actually, the third problem was the easiest because it wouldn’t take my full concentration. Just set up the problem on the ship’s computer and let it cogitate.

But first I’d have to get the kzinti to tell me how much their ship massed. This was a challenge to my descriptive skills but after an hour or so of working with Slave Master and Fritz I was able to get them to understand what I needed. Afterwards it felt like my head was going to fall apart but they had an answer for me a few minutes later. I was right. Their ship was massive. Carrying it was going to come close to doubling our mass.

I called up the trajectory programs and entered in everything I could think of. The program refused to take my inputs, interpreting the new ship mass as a user error. I overrode its objections and made it continue the process. I looked at the trajectory options it would investigate and made it open the option space even more. After a few hours of setting things up I turned the computer loose on the problem. The estimated time to solve the problem was not promising.

We might well fly right by Vega at point something c before the ship’s brain solved the problem. But that was something I could worry about later. Right now there were more pressing problems facing me. Two of them in fact, on the other side of the room.

Slave Master had an uncanny ability to stand motionless, watching me with intent hungry eyes, that reminded me of the way most Belters could hang motionless for hours on end. (That was a self protection reflex developed from living in the cramped quarters of a singleship, where one false arm movement could create chaos.) Or maybe he was just stupid and not easily bored. In any case, working must have been good for me because the juju headache that Fritz gave me was becoming just a dull ache, and a fading one at that.

I don’t know what I looked like, but Fritz looked like a wreck. He was shivering and shaking. His head was lolling from side to side. I wasn’t sure how to read Slave Master’s body language but he didn’t look like he enjoyed being next to Fritz. Maybe that disheveled kzinti had a case of big kitty bad breath. Or something.

It had been over eight hours since they had come to get me and they hadn’t let me have a chance to eat. I wondered what their physical limits were. I knew they didn’t care about mine, but I did. I looked directly at Slave Master.

“Slave Master. I have finished this part of the task. We must wait for the ship to answer my questions. It will take some time. May I eat before doing more work?”

Fritz saw the way I looked at Slave Master, cringed and moved away from the larger kzinti like he was afraid of what his response would be. What? Was it something I said? Slave Master looked me square in the eyes. “Slaves do not ask, they obey.”

I looked him back, square in his orange tinged brown eyes. “Well this slave won’t be able to obey much longer if he doesn’t get food.”

Angry ripples rolled through Slave Master’s thick muscles, but when it came to the kzinti everything they did looked angry. He growled something at Fritz who mewled something back. Now Fritz didn’t just look bedraggled, he looked positively frightened. And all the while he mewled at Slave Master his eyes were looking down, away from his superior’s face. I wonder what he said to Slave Master? The large kzinti eyed me hungrily. I hope he knew I was asking to be a diner, not dinner. Then it occurred to me, maybe my body language was saying things to contradict my words. I took a page from Fritz’s book, I averted my eyes to the floor.

“Slave Master. I could eat here. The autochef behind you could provide me with fruits and vegetables. I could serve you better if I could eat before working more.” I counted the red scuff marks on the decking while I waited for his answer.

I raised my eyes slightly when Slave Master starting talking and saw that both kzinti were shuddering, perhaps in revulsion. The large kzinti glared at me. “Heroes do not watch slaves debase themselves with slave food. Return to your den. You eat roots only there.”

Who was I to argue? We left.

The click of the door’s lock let me know that the kzinti didn’t trust me. So what? I didn’t trust them either. I walked over to the autochef and checked to see what it could make. It looked like it was going to be another meatless dinner so I made the best of it by ordering up spicy Bombay potatoes, ghobi sag, and a meatless vindaloo curry topped off by garlic naan bread, raita and chutney. I was glad the Flatlander company that had built this ramship had subsidiary offices in Newer Delhi. Flatlander food was the best there was and this, with the exception of the missing meat, was better than most shipfood.

In a few minutes the autochef beeped and I removed steaming trays of food from its interior. The scents made it easy to forget that the raw stock for this meal had been recycled through the crew innumerable times while Obler’s Paradox had flung itself through space toward Vega. I wanted to work while I ate so I tapped on a keypad and a memory plastic desk extruded itself from the wall.

The data display unit was buried in the wall above the freshly extruded desk. I sat down in front of it and started tapping on its keyboard. It was soon clear that I didn’t have the command passwords needed to use this device to control the ship’s systems from here, but I could use it to access the data records held in the ship’s computer. A few more minutes of work had the system pulling off archival records going back to our first encounter with the kzinti, including video feeds from various autocams.

I keyed a few more commands and was able to tell the computer to do a continuous scan of the current autocam outputs and store that information for later retrieval. I might not be able to do anything about the kzinti just yet, but now I’d know where they were and what they were doing.

That done, I started eating while the data display unit showed the archival records of humanity’s first contact with outsiders. The images played out just like Tom had described while the scent of garlic and garam masala wafted up from my plates.

The kzinti ship approached Obler’s Paradox at a high fraction of c and demonstrated unbelievable maneuvering capabilities. The numeric detail on the window next to the video feed looked like something from a tridee fiction. Accelerations like that should have flattened anything living and most things not. Surprisingly small, the ship was a compact orange sphere, with bumps, indentations and ugly cylindrical protrusions covering its surface. There weren’t any obvious exhaust ports for the drive, but then with something as advanced as they had, perhaps they didn’t need any. Covering much of its surface was writing that looked like a combination of scratches, commas and dashes that I imagined was the ship’s name.

I reviewed the hurried message that the crew had lasered back to Earth, knowing that it would not be read for several decades. Long after our problem was resolved, one way or the other. I ate the last of my spicy vindaloo—damn those mother-auditing kzinti for their theft of the meat from our storage lockers; I loved shrimp vindaloo—while I read the crew’s speculations about benevolent aliens and their hope for possible trade in knowledge and art. All of these said more about the crew than they would ever know. I paused the display while I finished my dinner, the image of the kzinti ship frozen against the stars while the minty yogurt of the raita cooled the spicy tingle of the vindaloo from my mouth. Then I restarted the program.

The images were from horrors long banished from human experience. Two small craft separated from the kzinti warship and moved at breathtaking speed to Obler’s Paradox. One attached itself to the side of our ship. Clouds of white vapor streamed into space when it blew holes in the outer hull and then internal cameras showed a crowd of vacuum-suited kzinti flooding into the ship. They rushed into the ship with their weapons raised—weapons designed to kill people; there hadn’t been anything like that outside of pornographic fiction in hundreds of years, maybe thousands—and went on a rampage.

Now I remembered why those things the kzinti wore from their belts looked so familiar. A few subjective years ago I had been desperate for cash and shipped out with a partner I didn’t know very well. Things went well until one day I stumbled onto his cache of pornographic vids filled with weapons and scenes of killing. He never figured out why I cut our mining trip short or why I never worked with him again. Those things on the kzinti’s belts were handheld weapons. Though those kzinti handguns would have looked like a rifle, yet another almost forgotten obscenity, if carried by a human.

One member of the kzinti boarding party ran into Jack Smithie near Emergency Airlock Three. He was slipping on his skinsuit and pulling on his biopack. The first kzinti to reach him didn’t ask any questions or slow down but just shot Jack where he stood, blowing a hole in his chest the size of a Belter’s helmet. Tanj, I didn’t know a human body contained so much blood.

That scene of death and destruction was repeated every time the kzinti encountered a human. They never even tried to communicate but just killed anyone that moved and blew open closed doors. On the tape I could hear the sound of the alarms wailing in the background. The intercom was alive with frantic confused messages. I toggled the display from camera to camera, randomly sampling the images of carnage, hoping that it was all a mistake. A confusion caused by our mutual alienness. But I knew it wasn’t.

The “prepare for freefall” klaxon sounded followed by the “acceleration stations” warning. I knew the kzinti couldn’t understand the alarms, so they were taken unawares a few minutes later when they lost their footing as the rotating section spun down and the centrifugal force that simulated gravity vanished. It was almost funny watching them slip and slide as their weight vanished. When the ring section went weightless the kzinti bounced off all the walls and flailed helplessly against the air. Whatever technology they had didn’t help them in freefall. They looked like a bunch of Flatlander honeymooners having their first experience in space. Some of the kzinti got violently sick in their suits and I hoped they choked on their own purple vomit. But as disoriented as they were, they just kept coming.

The display flashed to an image of the Command Deck. There was Jennifer in the Captain’s chair, her Flatlander hair exploding out around her head like an organic nebula. She was hammering at the controls as if her fervor could make the systems activate faster. Next to her, Nathan Long with his close-cropped red hair and short beard was racing his hands over the command console, reconfiguring systems, bringing things on-line and doing everything he could to give Jennifer what she wanted. Chi Lin, a Belter with whom I’d shared more than a few drinks back at Heisenberg’s, was at the Engineer’s station running the systems check faster than was right for any normal human. Joel Peltron worked the navigation console flying through displays, entering data, calculating the maneuvers to accomplish whatever Jennifer had ordered. Such fervored activity was seldom seen in space. In any emergency you were either dead or you had plenty of time to work the problem. This was one of the rare exceptions to that rule.

Then suddenly the door to the Command Deck blew inward with a cloud of smoke and debris. Orange-suited kzinti rushed in, their weapons drawn and pointing forward. Some of the kzinti were still disoriented by the freefall and they tumbled in rather than dove in, but there were too many of them and they were too determined. Their weapons spewed fire and smoke. Jennifer’s head exploded, coating her command chair with sickly red blood and masses of organic matter. Nathan tried to rise from his seat to fight back. Who knows what he was thinking, who among us had ever raised a fist in anger? (Answer: no one who could be cured by the autodocs. The ones who couldn’t were in the freezer banks back on Earth waiting for the psychists to come up with a cure for them.) Nathan never had a chance. He was cut in two by a long flat weapon wielded by one of the kzinti that went through him like a cutting laser goes through a fractured carbonaceous rock. The blood and ichor from the crew in the Command Deck filled the air with throbbing red spheres and quivering chunks of pink meat that only moments before had been my friends.

I couldn’t take any more. I slammed my fist down on the display’s off button. I wanted to rush out and kill the kzinti. I wanted to feel their bones break under my hands. I wanted to watch as I ran a cutting laser through their assembled masses, to divide them and divide them again into smaller and smaller pieces. I wanted… I wanted…

I wanted to be sick. I almost made it to the ‘fresher.

I woke up sometime later. I didn’t remember getting myself into bed, but I must have somehow. I felt weak and chilled. The sour taste of my sickness coated my mouth and the scent of my vomit laced the smell of the room. It was an odor that the life support system could not easily get rid of. And by Goddard’s ghost, the ship designers had been working that problem for a long time. I rose and went to clean up. The ‘fresher looked like it would need more cleaning than I would.

But that could wait. For now, cold water on my face and mouthwash was what I needed.

The timer chimed and I knew it was time for my medicine. I picked up the vial of pills that Tom had left for me and took a couple. I think I missed my earlier dose so I took another couple to compensate. The remnants of my dinner that were splashed over the ‘fresher reminded me that dinner hadn’t done me much good. But I didn’t feel like eating, so I set about cleaning up the mess I made.

I was ashamed of myself, for the thoughts I’d been feeling and for my desires to strike out and kill. Surely there had to be another way. All my life I’d been taught there was always an alternative to violence. I felt disappointment at myself for my inability to see any nonviolent ways to solve our problem. And my sadness for the friends I’d lost made me feel guilty for even being alive. By the time I’d finished cleaning up things I was past guilt and shame and was working myself well into self-pity. As I tossed the last of the soiled wash cloths into the clothing recycler I saw myself in the mirror. My head covered by a tangled mass of dirty brown hair, my Belter’s crest a mere patch of slightly longer and thicker hair. A ragged and unkempt beard covered my face. I looked a mess, but I didn’t care. Not now. Not after witnessing the senseless deaths of so many friends.

There was a knock on the door. I knew it wasn’t the kzinti. They didn’t bother to knock. The door opened to show Tom standing outside holding his portable medkit with a kzinti I didn’t recognize standing behind him.

“Ib, you okay?” said Tom. “I tried to get you over the intercom but you wouldn’t answer. It took me a while to convince Slave Master to let me check in on you.”

“No. No, I’m not okay.” Tom came in, the kzinti stayed out, and I told him the short version of what happened and about my shame.

“Don’t hold that against yourself. Your reaction to what happened was normal. I… I keep thinking there must have been something we could have done to prevent it.” Tom’s voice trembled, “We shouldn’t have let our hopes color our actions.”

“They always do.” I paused. “Why the medkit?”

He hesitated for a moment as if he was afraid of what to say next. “The medicine you’re taking can have some powerful side effects. You really shouldn’t take it without being in the autodoc, but Slave Master won’t let me do that. How about letting me check you out?”

I didn’t complain as he attached the sensors from the medkit to my body. He watched closely as the medkit began its diagnosis of my condition and then spoke softly. “Have you formed any conclusions about that disheveled kzinti?”

“You mean the one who looks like a programmer?” Tom grimaced at my comment. Then I remembered his wife had been a programmer and a member of our crew. I didn’t want to think about what had happened to her. I answered his question. “I think Fritz is a telepath.”

“Fritz?” Tom was taken aback for a moment then realized who I meant. “Oh, that’s what you’re calling him. I think of him as Argus, the creature from Greek mythology with a hundred eyes who saw everything. But yes, that was my conclusion also.”

“I don’t think he’s always telepathic. It’s only after he takes a drug of some kind. I get a hell of a headache when he’s reading my mind but in a few hours it goes away and he can’t read my mind anymore.”

“Those headaches near tore my head apart.” Tom watched the display of his medkit as it ran its diagnostics.

“Then they stopped. I haven’t had that kind of headache in two weeks.”

“Fritz stopped reading your mind?”

“I think so. It’s not likely he does it for fun, is it? They probably think of me as harmless. Just a doctor. Couldn’t make a weapon even if I knew what it looked like. Then again, that telepath probably feels crippled when he’s inside my head. Those kzinti look like they could be quadrupeds as easily as bipeds. Being inside me must feel like he’s always off balance—”

He appeared startled when the medkit started beeping, then he hit a few buttons and the beeping stopped. “Have you thought about what it means to deal with a telepath?” he said, looking up from the medkit.

“No. That’s not a problem I’ve ever had before,” I answered.

“When Argus reads your mind he can tell what you’re planning to do.”

“Tanj! You’re right.” I paused to take that thought in, then continued. “Maybe I could get away from them. Hide out somewhere in the ship. They don’t know it as well as I do. Then I might be able to do something about our predicament.”

“That wouldn’t work,” Tom continued. “Argus could read your mind, see the things you were seeing in real time and deduce where you were.”

“Are you sure he could do that?”

“I’m sure of it,” said Tom emphatically. “That’s how Slave Master learned our language. He had me look at things and Argus told him what I was thinking. It was a slow process but it worked. I’m just not sure how deep into our subconscious he can read or if he can only read the things we actively think about.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I pointed out. “Ever try and not think about something? You can’t do it. The act of trying to not think about something makes you think about it.”

“You’ve got a point there,” agreed Tom.

“I’ll have to act without planning and let Heisenberg take the consequences,” I concluded.

“Don’t try that. You’re outclassed physically and numerically. If you do anything, you’re going to have to out think them.” The medkit beeped and Tom silently stared at the display. Thinking.

His silence bothered me. “Well, am I okay?”

Tom picked his words carefully. “You’re not really recovered from the effects of coldsleep, but you’re getting better.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Those drugs you gave me leave me feeling… I don’t know… strange. Like I’ve never felt before.” I was more than a little worried. No one ever willingly endured the effects of drugs and medical treatment without the constant attention of an autodoc. I wouldn’t have felt less secure if Tom had been treating me by chanting and throwing powders into an open fire.

“Trust me. You’ll soon be as normal as two million years of evolution can make you. But just to be sure, I want you to start talking three pills every eight hours.”

If he thought that comment was going to make me feel better he was wrong. But I decided to just let it go. Tom looked at his wristchrono. “Slave Master doesn’t trust us. I’ve stayed here longer than I was supposed to. I 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 VR 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 VR 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 ‘bot 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 ‘bot’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 ‘bot 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 ‘bot from its anchor fittings and walked it over to the field generator assembly and started my detailed inspection.

Fortunately, the damage was not as bad as it had appeared from my first VR inspection. Several of the generators were badly damaged and wouldn’t be repairable, but the others looked like they could be repaired or operated using redundant systems. This was good news. I could reprogram the ship’s computer to stop looking at some of the more pessimistic trajectory options.

The repair work on the salvageable units was tedious but not, as it turned out, terribly difficult. I had to determine what components were damaged, check the ship’s spares inventory to see if replacements were available, then get them from storage and install them. If replacements were unavailable, then I had to see if I could circumvent the damage by using redundant systems or by reconfiguring the field.

I could have speeded up the process by activating several ‘bots and letting them bring the spare parts out from the stores locker using their self-guidance systems while I worked on the field generators. But for some reason I didn’t want to do that. Whenever I needed a spare part I walked the ‘bot I was using back to the dolly, rode back to the crew section, walked the ‘bot back to the cargo lock, went inside to the spares locker to get the parts and then reversed the process to get back to the rear of the ship to continue the repairs. I enjoyed the chance to relax when the ‘bot was making its trek up the ship’s spine.

And it wasn’t like Slave Master was from the Spacejack’s Guild; he couldn’t fine me for slacking or featherbedding.

The work went on for hours. I don’t know how many. I was able to almost forget about the kzinti and what they represented until my headache started to fade. I knew what that meant. Fritz was losing his ability to read my mind. I wondered if Slave Master would have me keep working once Fritz became blind to my thoughts.

My juju headache was almost completely gone as I piloted the ‘bot in through the cargo lock to get more repair parts. Slave Master quickly floated over to the ‘bot like it was a long lost friend, or a big piece of catnip. He stared down at the ‘bot and addressed it as if somehow I was “in” the ‘bot and not hanging weightless over at the VR workstation.

“End work. Continue later. Leave now.”

Who was I to argue? We left.

Back at the transfer hub, I let Slave Master go “down” the ladder to the spinning section before me. If I got lucky and he slipped and fell I wanted him below me, not above me. But no such luck. We entered the spinning section of the ship without incident.

I felt heavy and weighed down by the centrifugal force of the spinning section, but Slave Master seemed buoyed up by the surrogate gravity. I guess his people don’t have any equivalent to Belters. Slave Master escorted me back to my cabin and left with his daily admonition to eat and rest. Like I needed the encouragement.

I decided I needed a shower before I resigned myself to another meatless meal. For some strange reason I felt good about how the day had gone and about myself. I still didn’t have a solution to the kzinti problem, but I had made real progress on solving a problem I could deal with. I’d just take things one step at a time and deal with each problem in its turn. The kzinti would have their own turn before too long.

Looking at myself in the mirror of the ‘fresher I felt disgust over my appearance. My image wasn’t that of a Belter, it was a Flatlander wirehead or maybe VR addict. Enough was enough. What was I? Could there be any question?

I pulled a hair trimmer out from a drawer in the ‘fresher and ran it over my face and head, being careful to leave a belt of close cropped hair running across the top of my head. That done I used a bottle of depilatory cream to finish the job and before long my unruly tangle of hair was replaced by a neatly trimmed Belter’s crest. This was the best I’d felt since coming out of coldsleep or maybe even longer. Now if I could just do something about those censored kzinti.

The timer for my medicine chimed and I reached for the vial containing my pills. If three were good, maybe more were better. I’d start taking four each time.

I’d have to ask Tom to bring me more soon. At this rate I’d be running out of them in a few days. As I stepped into the shower I reflected on a job that had started well and on other jobs waiting to be done.

The next few days went by in a haze of routine. Each day consisted of talking my medicine, eating meatless meals and working. Each day Fritz would attach himself to my mind and read my thoughts while I worked on the Bussard field generators without thinking about anything else. And each evening when Fritz had gotten out of my head I would look for information that would help me do something about the kzinti, by reviewing the data files from our first contact with them along with any new information the autocams had picked up— though this information was sketchy because many of the autocams had been damaged when the kzinti had attacked the Paradox. Many times I had to guess where the kzinti were by knowing where they weren’t.

I became able to recognize each of the kzinti occupying our ship and even gave more of them names as I learned their habits. Like Snaggle Tail, who spent a lot of time examining the Command Deck and other engineering areas. Or Shit Head, with the distinctive brown patch at the top of his head, who seemed to draw guard duty more often than the other rat-cats and who spent more time prowling the corridor in front of my quarters than any of the other guards. The kzinti seldom ventured into the freefall areas of the ship and when they did they didn’t stay long. What they were doing there was always a mystery to me. All told, there were about two dozen kzinti occupying our ship though most of them spent as little time here as possible, flitting over in one of their small ships when they had something to do and then rushing back to their orange warship at the first opportunity.

Slave Master and Fritz were different. They had moved into a pair of unused crew quarters and seemed to have taken up permanent residence on Obler’s Paradox. Fritz spent most of his time in his quarters, only occasionally venturing out to roam the empty halls. Slave Master spent his nights in his quarters and his days watching me work. A couple of guards always prowled the ship, or stood watch as I worked, but they were rotated back to their own ship every few days to be replaced by two new guards.

Some nights I used the autocams to prowl the ship, reminding myself of what it was the kzinti were threatening. I looked at the empty crew spaces and tried not to think about my friends who should have been laughing and working as we approached Vega. Scanning the coldsleep lockers I thought of each of the two hundred colonists who shared the ship with me and tried to make them come alive in my memory. Jeff, with his love of old books and music; Louis, with his passion for chess; and Carol, with her love for practical jokes and puns. They and all the rest lived in my dreams, when they weren’t interrupted by nightmares of kzinti on a killing spree. I looked longingly into the vacuum hangar at the singleships that we planned to use to explore a new asteroid belt. My ship, Trojan Rover, was as bright and shiny as the day I had watched the cargo loaders latch it into position in the hanger bay twenty three ship-years ago back at Juno. Would I ever get to fly it under the light of a new sun?

The kzinti and I had established a working rhythm. A way of accommodating ourselves to our situation. And each day my resentment for Slave Master and Fritz and Shit Head and all the other named and unnamed kzinti grew larger. Each time I reviewed the data files my reaction became stronger and more focused on striking back at the kzinti. I no longer ran retching to the ‘fresher when I watched the scenes of death and destruction, but thought of ever more imaginative ways to pay them back for what they had done.

Each day it became harder to accept our fate, to not make my imagined payback real and strike out in revenge. But whenever I had those thoughts I remembered how easily the kzinti had overpowered the crew of our ship. And so I focused on the problems I could solve, the field generators, and tried—unsuccessfully—not to think about the problem that seemed to have no answer. But each day I grew more curt with the kzinti, less afraid that I’d offend them and incur their wrath. I should have been afraid of them. I knew the danger they represented, but I just didn’t worry about that any longer. They could kill me but that was all they could do. And I’m sure they knew that doing that would destroy their only hope of getting off this cosmic Flying Dutchman.

Fritz must have sensed my growing hatred for the kzinti, but if those rat-cats had done things like this before, then they must be used to being hated by now.

After almost a week of work, most done in freefall at the Telepresence Operations Center, I finished the last of the repairs to the field generators. I had them back up so that they should be able to feed hydrogen to the drive at seventy-eight percent of its maximum rated fuel flow rate. This was better than I had hoped for but I didn’t expect Slave Master to praise me for this accomplishment. I wasn’t disappointed. He took this information with a low growl and then asked about the remaining work. I explained that now I would have to finish reprogramming the field generators to make sure they could provide a stable ramscoop field. He seemed pleased when he learned that this could be done from the Command Deck and that he would have a reprieve from freefall for a few days.

We had arrived back at my quarters when the remnants of today’s juju headache let me know that I should tell him everything about the upcoming tests. So I reminded him that all of the kzinti would have to be onboard Obler’s Paradox when I did the tests since their ship couldn’t shield them from the deadly effects of the magnetic field generated by the Bussard field generators. He looked at me closely when I told him this; perhaps he thought I might have tried to hold back such information. But why bother? Fritz would have just read it from my thoughts when I was getting ready to run the tests. Still, there was something strange about the way he looked at me, like maybe I was more than just a potential meal on the hoof.

“You are becoming a worthy slave. The Patriarchy will reward you.”

I looked straight into his eyes and could read his irritation at my arrogance in, his body language. But I didn’t care. “Yas shu, massa. Serving yous what ah likes doing best.” I wondered if he, or Fritz, could catch the insult in my words. I guess not. He let me live.

The door clicked shut and my medicine timer chimed before Slave Master could respond to my arrogance and insult. Time for my pills and food, followed by more time spent reviewing the data files. Worthy slave indeed, I snorted as I dry swallowed five of Tom’s pills. Whatever they were, they were working. I felt better, or at least different, than I had ever felt before. But Fritz had hit me hard today with his mind reading tricks and I was really tired. I thought I’d lie down and rest for a few minutes before eating. Before I spent more time thinking about my hatred for the kzinti.

I awoke hours later unrefreshed and more tired than when I had laid down. But at least my headache had faded away. I knew there were things I should do, but I couldn’t remember them. I knew I had to prepare for something, but I couldn’t think of what it was. I wanted… I wanted this to be over. Hell, I wanted to be anywhere but here; even the bottom of a hole looked good from here. I punched an order into the autochef while I walked over to the ‘fresher to throw some water on my face in hopes that that would help clear the fuzz from my mind. It didn’t.

The autochef chimed and a handmeal popped out of the dispenser. But more important, a mug of steaming coffee accompanied it. I was ravenous as I bit into the handmeal. Then I stopped. A bacon, lettuce and tomato handmeal without the bacon? I had expected this but was still annoyed.

The meal took the edge off my discomfort but I was frustrated because right after eating was when I most missed my pipe. It had always helped me to relax and focus my thoughts. But the limited medical resources of a colony world could not be spared for the preventive doctoring that such a nonessential vice required. I had been forced either to give up my pipe or give up the stars. I chose the stars.

Then I remembered just what it was we had found out in the stars. Not our dreams but nightmares from our violent past. Contact with the kzinti had taken all the dreams of my youth, all the hopes of what we might find out in the stars, and made them a bitter taste in my mouth. What was the value of dreams, if reality was nothing but a nightmare?

I wanted to lash out and give back to the kzinti some of the pain that they had given me when they stole my dreams. But I couldn’t. Generations of socialization and chemical adjustment by psychists and autodocs had removed the violent streak from humanity. So I did the one thing I could do. I reviewed the data file from our first meeting with the kzinti. Feeding my anger, feeding my hate and looking for a way to solve our problem.

As I reached for the “on” button of the data display unit I noticed my vial of medicine. I couldn’t remember if I had taken them the last time my timer had chimed. What the hell, they were making me feel good. Taking more couldn’t hurt. I swallowed five of the pills with a coffee chaser while the memory plastic desk and chair extruded themselves from the wall, then I settled down to study the kzinti and the forgotten art of war.

I watched in numb horror as the now familiar images ran before my eyes. I fast forwarded through the initial confusion of the arrival of the kzinti, then slowed the pace of the images to focus on what they did and how they had done it. I studied how they aimed their weapons, carefully, not indiscriminately, making sure that each shot killed its target. I saw how they were confused by freefall. Some quickly learned to brace themselves when firing their weapons, while others never learned and went tumbling away in dramatic proof of Newton’s law of action and reaction.

I carefully studied their actions when the kzinti entered the Command Deck of the Paradox. I could recognize each and every one of their ugly faces. It was the largest one, Churl-Captain, who was first into the Command Deck. He was the one who had killed Jennifer. And just behind him came Slave Master, who disemboweled Chi Lin and then shot Joel Peltron through the face as his hands danced over the navigation board.

No matter what form my revenge took, I knew I would find something special for Slave Master. For the fear he had made me live under for the past week and for what he had done to my friends on that fateful day. I would be sure that whatever I did to him would be painful and very final. I trembled—either from fear or anticipation, I didn’t know which—as I envisioned killing that tiger that dared to walk like a man.

The violence of my thoughts frightened me. I knew if I got in an autodoc now I’d be out cold for weeks as its systems filled my blood with chemical agents designed to bring my violent impulses under control, to make me a safe and well balanced member of society. But right now I didn’t want to be balanced, well or otherwise. I didn’t want to be nonviolent. Right now I wanted to take back my ship and my future from those star-stalking tigers. By any means necessary.

I didn’t want to watch the aftermath of the slaughter on the Command Deck, so I switched to an exterior view of our ship on that fateful day. There was the kzinti boarding craft, sticking to Obler’s Paradox like an obscene growth. Hovering a few hundred feet away was another similar craft. I watched in delight as the magnetic fields from the Bussard generators grabbed that second ship and flung it away from the crew section. I knew that the kzinti craft was being drawn into our field generators but I didn’t care. I knew that the magnetic fields were killing the rat-cat crew of that ship and watched in perverse fascination as that ship slammed into the Bussard field generators at the rear of Obler’s Paradox. The destruction to a part of our ship was a small price to pay for the death of those damned invaders. The kzinti in that ship were dead and the damage of their passing was already fixed. Yes, it was a small price to pay.

Watching these images reinforced the unfamiliar feelings of anger and revenge that were racing through my mind. My body quivered with the unspent energy of my desire to strike back at the kzinti. I had never experienced anything like these feelings. I was surprised by my lack of fear over my unchecked desire to strike out at the kzinti. My mind knew that the smallest kzinti outweighed me by over two hundred fifty pounds. But my body didn’t care.

I felt myself tremble with frustration because try as I might I couldn’t think of any way to strike back at the kzinti without dying instantly. I felt desperation and depression because I knew there wasn’t anything I could do to change our fate. We were the product of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization and yet it all came down to this. Outsiders with technology far beyond ours could take away our future and there was nothing we could do about it. In frustration I turned back to the data display console and had it show me the latest images of what the kzinti had been doing.

It was easy to have the computer find the images of the kzinti using the frame-differencing algorithms used for data compression. In places where no kzinti had ventured, the successive frames showed no differences and the computer ignored them. But let a kzinti come into the scene, then the image matrices changed and the computer recorded the sequential pictures. It was trivial to keep a log of where the kzinti were. I found Slave Master and Fritz had gone to their quarters, though I wasn’t sure what they were doing there, since there weren’t any autocams in the private spaces. Shit Head was patrolling the corridor outside my room, but it looked like he was walking away to check out other parts of the ship. Good. I didn’t like him lurking around outside my cabin. One Ear—how did he lose his left ear?—was patrolling the corridors outside the transfer lock to the freefall section of the ship.

I didn’t expect to find any other kzinti on the ship at this time, since they kept to a roughly human diurnal cycle and most of them spent their “nights” back on their own ship. I guess it smelled better to them or maybe it was because our doors and other equipment were too small for their comfort. The normal complement of kzinti during the evening was just Slave Master, Fritz and two guards. Very seldom did I find other kzinti on the Paradox after the day’s work had been completed. But the computer was flashing an indication that one of the autocams in the freefall section was detecting a change in its image matrix. I tapped a key and the autocam from inside Coldsleep Chamber Number Three showed me its picture, a pair of kzinti floating weightlessly and inspecting the coldsleep coffins.

They stopped in front of one coffin and stared intently through its cloudy glassine cover. Then they did the unimaginable. They slid the coffin out of its place in the carefully designed arrangement of cryogenic storage units, started the pumps to remove the liquid nitrogen from the coffin and afterwards forced open its cover.

I tried to see who it was, to make out the identity of the person in the coffin. And then I saw the thick shock of flaming red hair cut in a Belter’s crest, the tall slender frame with improbably large breasts. It was Sara d’Lambert, a Belter with whom I’d spent several months in a three-person ship prospecting the Saturnian Trojan points for volatiles, rare earth elements and monopoles. I remembered the excitement of the discoveries we’d made, the friendship and camaraderie, the disagreements and reconciliations. I imagined the things we might have done but were now forever impossible.

No!!! Those mother-raping kzinti were making no pretense of trying to activate the thawing mechanism! They ripped away the restraints that had held Sara in place and stripped away the gold-foil mylar blankets that were wrapped around her. Flecks of ice and shredded gold mylar went tumbling into the frosty air of the coldsleep chamber.

The kzinti were reaching into Sara’s coffin and removing her from it. Clouds of fog formed around Sara’s liquid nitrogen temperature body as the remains of the restraining straps waved in the breeze of the air circulators like mindless snakes. Her nude form was obscenely stiff as the kzinti floated her weightless corpse toward the door of the coldsleep locker.

As they were about to reach the door of the coldsleep chamber One Ear entered the room. He eyed Sara’s body like she was nothing more than a piece of meat. The three kzinti’s mouths moved but I didn’t have the audio feed activated so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. (Like I could understand that growling spitting excuse for a language that they spoke.) One of the two kzinti who had pulled Sara from coldsleep turned and grabbed a bag that was floating near the door and pushed it over to One Ear who opened it like it was a Winter Solstice present.

From within the bag One Ear extracted something that horrified me more than anything I’d seen since coming out of coldsleep. It was a human leg, raggedly cut off at the thigh with a stump of bone projecting out from the raw red wound. One Ear eyed his gift hungrily and then put it back into its bag before pushing off into the corridor carrying it off for purposes my mind did not want to imagine.

I watched in horrified disbelief as the other two kzinti made their way with Sara toward one of the cargo locks where they had attached a docking collar for their boarding craft. I was thankful for the freefall since it would keep them from dropping Sara. At liquid nitrogen temperatures things don’t break when they fall, they shatter into millions of pieces. No matter what horrors might be in store for her, at least she would be spared the indignity of becoming a snapsicle. I watched in stunned silence as the two kzinti guided Sara’s body through the docking collar into their ship and then vanished through the hatch behind her.

The computer chirped and switched the display to an external camera. A small kzinti boarding craft undocked from Obler’s Paradox, slowly withdrew a few hundred meters and then pointed itself toward the kzinti warship and moved off without any trace of flame or exhaust. In minutes it was just another star lost in the darkness.

No!

This couldn’t be happening!

I screamed out in rage and fear. I threw my ‘cafe mug against the wall and watched the green intercom light wink out as my cup shattered against it. I gripped the plate that held the remnants of my meatless handmeal—damn those kzinti for forcing me to be a vegetarian—and threw it against the mirror over the ‘fresher. The mirror shattered into thousands of unsafe pieces with two large fragments hanging from the wall reflecting my image. My eyes were wide and my mouth pulled back in a rictus of anger. Sweat beaded on my forehead and my body quivered with the energy of unrequited hatred.

I screamed and leapt at the door of my room and pounded on its unmoving metal surface. I felt my hands pulling into the unfamiliar shape of fists and beat on the door with them like they were organic mallets. The door rattled under my fists but stayed closed in locked mockery of my anger.

I turned and looked around the room, trying to find something to use for a weapon. My back curled into an angry arch, the muscles of my arms bunched up in tension. I’ll teach those rat-cats the danger of fighting with humans over who’s at the top of the food chain! My eyes darted around the room but our oh-so nonviolent culture had made sure there weren’t any weapons.

I searched the room, tearing things apart in my search for something I could use to force the door open so I could get at those future-stealing kzinti. Something that I could use to put paid to the debt of pain the kzinti had laid upon us. Just give me a weapon and I’d teach those rat-cats to fear us. Give me the chance and I’d introduce the kzinti to the extinct Sabertooth Cat, African Lion and Bengal Tiger. I’m sure they could explain just how dangerous humans were.

My search for a weapon took me into the ‘fresher where my shoes crunched the broken glass from the mirror as I looked for anything that could be turned against the kzinti. The prick of a bit of glass through my soft ship shoe made me think of using the broken mirror as a weapon. Most of the pieces were too small but those two large pieces… They had potential.

I set about freeing those two large pieces of silvered glass from the wall and in a moment had two large sharp shards in my hands, ready to use on my enemies.

The sharp edges of the mirror fragments had cut my fingers, causing rivulets of blood to stain the arms of my flight suit, but I felt no pain. The feel of these weapons made me dizzy and delirious. I was the embodiment of Man the Hunter. The killing rage flowed through my veins and I knew the primal blood lust that our innumerable animal ancestors must have felt. And it felt good. Now all I had to do was find a way to get past the locked door.

“Ib! What’s the matter? I heard your screaming. The intercom’s broken. I didn’t know what to think. I had to tell Slave Master there was a medical emergency before he let me check in on you.” The words tumbled from Tom throat as he rushed up behind me and stood in the door of the ‘fresher. I turned to face him with those large shards of the mirror held in my hand. It took a moment of concentration for me to bring him into focus, to not lash out at this new sound source.

“Tom! Those kzinti are taking people out of coldsleep. Killing them and eating them. I’ve got to stop them. Get out of my way.” I pushed forward to get past Tom but he blocked my way.

“Don’t try it that way, Ib. You’ll just get killed and accomplish nothing.”

“Get out of my way,” I barked again, harshly this time. “I should have done this a long time ago. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“You couldn’t. No one could. Until now.” Tom looked at me with guilt in his eyes. Or was it fear?

“No one on this ship had the mindset needed to confront the kzinti,” he continued. “That type of person would have been labeled a schitz and kept back on Earth where they could be treated by the psychists.”

“What? You’re saying I’m schitz? Can’t be. I feel fine. Better than ever.”

“You weren’t schitz. Maybe you’re not even one now. I’m not sure. But you were almost borderline. Nothing serious. But close enough.”

“Close enough? For what?”

“Close enough that the right medicines could alter the chemical balance of your neural system. The techniques that cure a schitz can also be used to push the right person the other way. It took some careful reprogramming of the autodoc, but you’d be amazed at what a determined practitioner can do.”

“What? You made me schitz?”

“No. I keep telling you, not schitz. Just unbalanced. At least by the standards of our age. By the standards of any other time, you’d probably be considered perfectly normal. It’s our situation that’s abnormal, not you.”

“But why?”

“Because the rest of us are too conditioned, too well-balanced. We can’t even consider the possibility of using violence to accomplish anything. You were the only person who was borderline enough to be pushed over the edge. Pushed into becoming a warrior.” Tom looked away. He knew what he had done to me. He’d done it for the best of reasons. But now, like Doctor Frankenstein, he was afraid of his creation.

“But Ib, you can’t go off unprepared like this,” Tom continued. “You’ll be killed. Maybe your body has been pushed into being aggressive, but you don’t have any training as a fighter. You’ve got to fight with your brain, not your emotions.”

“Tom, if I think too much then Fritz will see what I’m planning and I’ll get killed just the same.”

“Well, at least take a minute and try to think of something you might use against them. Something you might have picked up in the last week. Some weakness or maybe some blind spot they have, something they don’t notice. I don’t know… Something. Just think before you act.” Tom stared at my bloody hands for a minute. “And put down those glass shards. They’ll just get you killed.”

His suggestion was reasonable. I dropped the pieces of the broken mirror to the floor and thought about what he had just said. There had to be some blind spot in the kzinti’s behavior. Something that I had seen during my nightly sessions reviewing what they had done. An idea tickled the back of my mind while Tom got out his medkit and went to work on my hands.

“First thing we’ve got to do is get out of here,” I said as Tom finished working on my hands. “Find someplace where they’ll have trouble finding us.” I walked past Tom, out of the ‘fresher and into my room. “But how do we get past that?” I said motioning to the locked door.

Tom looked at my bloody flight suit. “You’re doing a convincing imitation of a hurt crewmember. I can probably get them to let me take you down to the autodoc. After that,” he paused, “it’ll be up to you.”

A plan had begun to acquire form and substance in my imagination. Maybe not a great plan, but at least it was something. “Then let’s do it,” I answered, before my higher brain functions could kick in and convince me of the insanity of my plan.

Tom went to the door and rapped twice on it. The locked door slid open and Shit Head stared in at us. Tom pantomimed something and pointed at me as I tried to do my best imitation of a person in pain. The kzinti guard stared at me and growled as he removed the communications device from his belt and handed it to Tom. I caught snippets of his conversation with Slave Master, comments about an accident and my needing the attentions of the autodoc if I was going to be ready for tomorrow’s test of our drive system. Tom must have convinced him because more spitting growling sounds came from the communications device and Shit Head motioned us into the corridor.

I made a show of leaning on Tom as we walked in the down spin direction toward the Med-Center. Dead light strips, broken down doors and burn marks on the walls spoke silent volumes about the nature of the kzinti. It didn’t take long before we were passing an emergency equipment locker set into the wall.

This one seemed unused, its door closed and latched, but most importantly—it looked undamaged.

I counted my halting footsteps as we went past it. Turning my head I could see that Shit Head was still a couple of paces behind us. And then with what I hoped was a convincing cry of pain I fell to the floor taking Tom with me. Our kzinti guard couldn’t stop in time, his feet tangling with our rolling bodies—my flailing arms didn’t help his balance—and went tumbling to the floor.

Performing the fastest recovery in medical history, I leapt to my feet and dashed to the emergency equipment locker and twisted open its door. The locker contained a full set of tools for dealing with emergency situations, but nothing had been included for the problem facing us right now. I’d have to improvise.

Shit Head was rising from the floor as I pulled out a three-person vac-raft. This was nothing more than a fabric sphere that was large enough to hold three people in a pressurized environment while they waited for someone else to come and get them. But in its unpressurized condition it was just a limp hunk of Beta cloth fabric. I unzipped the vac-raft and threw it at Shit Head. I got lucky. His arms got entangled in the vac-raft’s open end and multiple hand holds.

His claws tore at the vac-raft and ripped long tears in it as ropes of fabric became entangled with his arms. I looked back into the locker and found a breathing mask with an oxygen bottle. I threw them at Shit Head but he batted them aside, though the reaction made him slip back onto the floor.

The oxygen bottle rolled down the corridor and Tom hurled it back at our guard’s head, which it hit with a satisfying thump. The kzinti lashed out with one free arm, leaving deep gashes in Tom’s chest and sending him tumbling down the corridor.

In a moment Shit Head would be free of the vac-raft. I was pulling out another one when I saw a heavy pry bar that was designed to open sealed doors during power failures. It was over a meter long and had a bulging torqueless ratchet on one end.

Turning back to Shit Head I saw that he was pulling out his communications device. This was not the time to let him call for reinforcements. I grabbed the pry bar and swung it with both hands. It connected with our guard’s arm with a weird snap like glass breaking under water, and the communications device went sliding down the corridor. Tom stepped on it, smashing it into a star of electronic debris.

I tried to bring the pry bar back down on our guard’s head, but he was rising from the floor and coming toward me with his injured arm dangling limply by his side. There wasn’t room to swing the pry bar again so I stabbed at him with it. The impact against his chest knocked the air out of his lungs and almost made me fall backwards. Shit Head swung his good arm against the metal tool and sent it flying out of my hands.

I snatched the weapon I’d dropped, turned and ran, hoping that Shit Head would ignore Tom and follow me. He did.

Running up-spin I could feel my synthetic weight increase slightly as my running speed added to the rotational velocity of the spinning crew section. It was a small effect and I could easily compensate for it. I didn’t think the kzinti chasing me was familiar enough with centripetal acceleration to do the same.

Shit Head lowered his body toward the floor as he chased me. At any moment I expected him to drop down and run on all fours. He was inhumanly fast and gaining on me.

I was holding the second vac-raft. My weapon. I did the only thing I could. I pulled the inflation tab on the vac-raft and tossed it behind me. It expanded to a size that almost filled the corridor. Shit Head ran into the inflated vac-raft and it bounced in front of him like a demented beach ball. He swung the claws of his uninjured hand and the vac-raft exploded with a loud pop. Again he lowered his body toward the floor and closed the gap between us. The raft clung to his claw and dragged behind him until he shook it loose. And then he screamed and leapt with his uninjured arm stretched out before him.

But he hadn’t counted on the effect running would have on his centripetal acceleration or on the fact the floor was gently curved, not flat. Those two small but significant differences between our ship and a planetary surface made him hit the deck sooner than he expected. He went sprawling behind me. That kzinti was ignorant but not stupid; I didn’t think he’d make that same mistake a second time. I had to think of something.

The entrance to one of the cargo transfer tubeways loomed ahead of us. I ran in. The tubeway was a hollow cylinder over six meters in diameter that stretched a hundred meters from the rim of the spinning part of the ship to the weightless transfer hub. A ladder surrounded by a safety cage made of wide spaced metal frames ran up the length of the tubeway and ended in the zero-g area. The lift was parked in the zero-g part of the ship and I didn’t have time to wait for it to come down to me. I ran over to the ladder and started climbing as if my life depended on it.

I had never gone up a ladder as fast as I did just then as I raced for the weightless part of the ship. I only hoped that One Ear had not heard the commotion and come to investigate. The thought of being trapped between two angry kzinti was the stuff of nightmares.

As I rose up the ladder I could feel my weight dropping as I got closer to the rotational axis of the spinning section and the centrifugal force was correspondingly lowered. The effective gravity had fallen to almost half of its normal value when I heard Shit Head enter the tubeway.

I hazarded a look below but did not slow my hurried journey upward. Shit Head saw me with his upraised eyes. In a moment he was on the ladder and following me upward. He was using his injured arm to help maintain his balance on the ladder. I hoped it hurt him. A lot.

Nearing the end of the ladder my effective weight had been reduced to almost nothing and I pulled myself upward in a continuous motion. A lifetime of zero-g reflexes helped me increase the distance between myself and the hungry carnivore that was chasing me. I thought about the times I had played weightless tag with my friends while growing up in orbital habitats in the Belt. Those games had seemed so important to us children, but the stakes were never as high as the game I was playing right now.

Then I thought of something. Spin diving. A Belter child’s game of chicken to see who could jump the farthest down the tubeway of a spinning habitat. If you played it safe you didn’t win, but if you tried to go too far you ran the risk of falling all the way down to the full gravity section of the habitat. The newsnet had carried occasional stories of spin dive games that had ended in deadly tragedy. It had been one of my favorite games while growing up.

As I popped out from the safety cage surrounding the ladder I glanced back down at Shit Head. He was rising rapidly but the lowered gravity was causing problems for his coordination. His pace was no better than it had been back at the lower, and much higher gravity, part of the climb. I chanced a look over at the large hatch leading out of the transfer hub and was relieved to find that One Ear was nowhere to be seen. Finagle must be a Belter because he was surely working on my side right now.

Shit Head was nearing the top of the ladder and his concentration was torn between me and the ladder that he gripped as if he was under full gravity.

I positioned my almost weightless body against the top of the tubeway and compressed my legs while I gauged my upcoming jump. I made a quick double check of the safety placards on the wall and reassured myself that I would be jumping spinward. Shit Head was reaching the top of the ladder when my legs exploded under me and I dove headfirst down the tubeway toward the spinning part of the ship.

A look of surprise raced across Shit Head’s face as I flashed through the air rapidly falling toward the other end of the hundred meter tube. He watched with focused concentration while my body followed a compound curve made up of the linear motion of my jump and the rotational motion of the tubeway.

I slammed into the safety cage just a bit below where I had wanted to land and held on tightly against the forces now pulling on me. Damn! I guess I wasn’t the spin diver I was in my youth. An effective gravity of over half-a-g tugged on my arms as I swung myself inside the safety cage and over to the ladder. I turned my head up to look at Shit Head. He had emerged from the safety cage and was watching me intently, trying to decide what to do next.

I slid down the smooth aluminum ladder so rapidly my hands were burning from the friction and my feet were tingling from tapping them against the rungs of the ladder as I controlled my fall. I felt my weight increase with every second. By now I was almost two-thirds of the way down the tubeway.

Shit Head must have known he couldn’t climb down the ladder fast enough to catch me. So he did what must have been the natural thing to do. He imitated my actions. But he hadn’t played spin dive as a kitten.

Shit Head dove from the top of the tubeway aiming directly for me. He didn’t have zero-g reflexes, so his jump imparted a spin to his body and he did a slow tumble as he arced downward. But, more importantly, he didn’t know how to compensate for the ship’s spin. He was jumping in the spinward direction and so as his body was moving downward and toward the ladder, the ship’s rotation was moving the ladder away from him. The result was that he followed a graceful curve downward and not towards the point he had aimed for. He quickly realized he was in trouble, though I’m sure he didn’t know why. His arms and legs started flailing, but they couldn’t help him.

He slammed backward against the safety cage just below me and the force of his impact made him rebound back into the empty air of the tubeway. He tumbled until he hit on the far side of the tubeway less than twenty meters above the floor. He plummeted downward like Galileo’s proverbial cannon ball. The fluctuating forces must have been confusing but he was trying to get his feet underneath him. Everything he did just made things worse.

In a matter of seconds it was over. The thrashing kzinti hit the floor of the tubeway head first with the sickening crack of breaking bones. He collapsed into a motionless heap as a pool of purple-red blood formed around him.

Silently I lowered myself down the last few meters of the ladder and went over to my silent tormentor. The scent of wet ginger and copper-scented blood, mixed with the foul smell from when his sphincter muscles had released, filled the air. I glanced up the tubeway and remembered One Ear. I better get Shit Head out of sight in case One Ear had heard anything and came looking to see what was the matter.

I grabbed the dead kzinti by the arms and started pulling him out of sight, leaving behind a trail of drying kzinti blood. Once clear of the tubeway I released his arms and they fell limply to the deck, his long fur sticking to me with the glue of his drying blood. I stared down at his lifeless body and thought about what I had just done.

I felt like some sort of obscenity. I wanted to run and hide. To never be seen by anyone ever again. Perhaps I hadn’t killed another human, but that was splitting a fine philosophical line. That kzinti had been an intelligent creature with his own hopes, dreams and aspirations. What right did I have to take his future away from him? I was ashamed because Tom could bear witness to what I had done.

And then I realized just what I had done. I had gone up against a creature much larger than myself, who saw humans as nothing more than slaves or quick meals, and beaten it. Those damn rat-cats weren’t invincible. They could be defeated. One down and how many to go? It didn’t matter. There was one less kzinti on our ship than there had been a few minutes ago and soon there’d be even fewer.

I removed anything from Shit Head that looked useful, like his long sharp knife and his handgun. The knife looked like a short sword in my hand. I remembered seeing films of athletes using swords for touching competitions, the sharp blade of this knife made it obvious that the touching of swordplay could have a meaning far beyond points and medals. The handgun was a mystery I didn’t have a good idea about how to use it, though I’d seen just how devastating it could be. I’d take it and hope I could figure out how to use it when the need arose.

Tom came stumbling down the corridor carrying the medkit, his shirt hanging in bloody tatters while he pressed one hand against the ragged cuts that raked across his chest. I had thought Shit Head chased me half-way round the ship but I guess in the excitement I hadn’t realized how short the chase had been.

“Is he… dead?” Tom’s question came out haltingly as he slid down to the floor of the corridor.

I just nodded. “How are you doing?” I asked afraid of the answer.

“The cuts are painful, but not deep,” Tom said slowly. “Ib, go on without me. I’m just going to slow you down.”

“No way. We’re in this together. What do you need to keep going?”

“Just give me a painkiller and put something on these cuts to stop the bleeding. But make it quick, we’ve got to get away from here before the kzinti figure out what happened.”

“Okay, but you’ve got to give me a hand. I don’t know how to use any of this stuff,” I said as I sat down next to him and opened the medkit. Tom blinked at me in pain as he started to point to things in the medkit.

Following his directions I pulled out an analgesic hypo and gave it to him. I spread a coagulant accelerator over the ragged cuts and then pulled bandages over his wounds. I didn’t have time to shave the hair from his chest and didn’t want to think about how much it would hurt when the bandages ripped out those hairs later. If we survived until later.

I put an arm under Tom to support his weight and we turned spinward and headed for the Command Deck. Disgusted with myself, I said, “I can’t believe I did what I did. I feel so… unclean.”

“You did what you had to do, not what you wanted to. Don’t ever forget that.”

We walked in silence, as quickly as we could manage, down the empty corridors. Our hearts were pounding in our chests as we expected at any minute to run into our remaining kzinti guard. We were moving away from the rooms where Slave Master and Fritz were staying. One Ear was in another part of the ship. But still, every unexpected sound or shadow made us jerk in fear. In a few minutes we were going through the wrecked door of the Command Deck. Tom looked at it wistfully, “I guess we can’t use that to keep them out.”

“It didn’t work the first time,” I replied. “Now quick, I’m going to set you up here at the Captain’s position and have you monitor our friends.” I helped Tom lower himself into the tattered chair. The grimace on his face might have been from pain or might have been from knowledge of what had happened to the last occupant of this seat. I tapped a few commands to the computer and the displays brought up the autocam images, searching for the kzinti. Slave Master and Fritz couldn’t be seen. They must be in their rooms. One Ear was still down by the coldsleep chambers carrying the bag those two kzinti had given him. Its shape did not reveal the horror of its contents. Maybe One Ear was picking out tomorrow’s dinner or perhaps he was just following today’s security route.

I sat down at the Engineer’s station, every minute expecting my head to erupt with the head splitting pain of Fritz’s mind reading but it never came. Maybe that meant we still had the element of surprise. My hands danced over the controls activating the Bussard field generators. The computer kept trying to run diagnostics but I kept overriding it. Time was of the essence. Everything would have to work. If it didn’t we would be dead. There wasn’t time to make sure the equipment was ready. I’d have to trust my jury-rigged repairs.

“No one’s moved. I think they don’t know what’s happened.”

“Good. Just keep watching. We’re almost ready. But once things start happening, we’re going to have to move fast.”

I reached for the VR helmet and data gloves as the computer finished its final checks on the field generators. It thought everything was ready, but what else could it think? I’d forced it to step over every safety check. If there was a problem we might not know about it until our ship turned into a small nova. I slipped on the data gloves and helmet, plugged them in the VR console and then slapped down the display lenses as I activated the VR system.

Suddenly my perspective changed. I was a disembodied entity floating in space, seeing Obler’s Paradox hanging motionless against the stars. A few quick commands and data windows came up surrounding it. A few more quick selections and I saw the ship surrounded by the neon blue electromagnetic flux lines from the field generators. They were dim and held close against the ship, which is as it should be since they were only operating at flight idle. The electric yellow hydrogen flux density contours appeared, but I ignored them. Right now I wasn’t interested in propulsion.

I increased the power to the field generators. The neon blue flux lines brightened but didn’t move. So far, so good. I moved my hands and shaped the field. It got larger and brighter. Better. My repairs had worked. There were some asymmetries in the field but they’d be controllable. I shrank the scale of the display until the Paradox was just a thin pencil outlined in blue hanging in space with the kzinti warship a small orange dot hanging silently a short distance away.

My hands moved controlling the magnetic field from the Bussard generators. The blue outline around the Paradox grew. I shaped it and molded it, growing it as fast as I dared. At one point a safety override beeped, but I forced the computer to ignore it and keep up the power to the Bussard field generators.

The neon blue magnetic field lines grew larger and brighter. I forced their shape into an asymmetrical ellipsoid pointed at the kzinti warship. I grew the field larger and larger until it was almost to the warship and then with a quick sweep of my hands the field encompassed the kzinti warship. I ramped up the strength of the drive until it was as powerful as the generators could make it. I constrained the field so it didn’t spread across hundreds of kilometers of space, but stayed focused on the kzinti ship, concentrating the killing strength of the magnetic field there.

I didn’t know how long it would take that field to kill the kzinti in their ship. Humans would have died almost instantly, but who knew about the kzinti? I made the field strength fluctuate within lethal limits while keeping the flux lines focused on the kzinti ship. That changing magnetic field should be inducing electrical currents in every conductor on that ship. I hoped it would destroy their remaining electrical equipment and keep them from sending a warning. Who knows, I might even get lucky, it might induce killing electrical fields in the conductive blood of the kzinti.

I felt as if I were a god, reaching out to kill the kzinti with the force of my will and the motions of my hands. I made the magnetic field fluctuate faster and wilder, from almost nothing to the largest field the generators could create in seconds. The induced electric fields made the kzinti ship glow with the stuttering light of electrical discharges. I forced the magnetic field to its maximum value and held it there.

And then the computer flashed an alert that I couldn’t ignore. My manhandling of the Bussard generators had overstressed a couple. I was going to have to shut down the field or risk destroying them completely. As I did so I hoped that our ship’s magnetic fields had been as lethal to the kzinti as they would have been to unprotected humans. Silently the neon blue flux lines collapsed back to a dim outline pressed tightly against our ship. The kzinti warship floated dark and motionless against the stars. I toggled off the VR system and pushed the lenses of the display helmet away from my eyes.

“There, that should have killed any kzinti that were on their ship,” I exclaimed more hopeful than certain. “If it didn’t, then I don’t know what we can do.”

“Uh oh,” Tom breathed nervously. “The guard is moving. I think they’ve gotten some warning.”

“Then it’s too late to be subtle,” I replied as I hit the emergency despin button on the Engineer’s command console. At once the shrieking sound of mechanical brakes and nutation dampers echoed through the ship and things lurched and tumbled as the rotating crew section quickly slowed to a stop. In a moment the familiar feeling of freefall enveloped us like a soothing warm bath. “How’s that for equalizing the playing field?” I said as I unplugged the VR devices. I didn’t waste time taking them off as I pushed over to get Tom.

“Come on! We’ve got to get out of here. It’s the first place they’ll look.” I glanced at the displays looking for One Ear. He was going toward one of the tubeways from the freefall section and headed our way. We had to hurry. I didn’t give Tom a chance to argue as I rushed him out into the corridor.

We traveled in long fast dives, pushing off from anything convenient and guiding ourselves with nudges from walls and ceilings. Tom’s missing leg wasn’t an impediment to his motion in freefall and soon we were approaching a tubeway to the weightless part of the ship. I motioned for Tom to stay back as I pulled out the gun I had taken from Shit Head.

In a swift move I pushed myself into the transfer lock and looked up the tubeway. There was One Ear fumbling in freefall. His eyes were focused on the ladder of the tubeway as he slowly pulled himself downward. He hadn’t noticed me. I raised the large kzinti gun and then remembered how unbraced kzinti had rebounded when they fired their guns.

I lodged myself against the “floor” of the transfer lock looking up the tubeway. One Ear was coming closer. Soon he’d look down and see me. I had to act quickly. I rested the gun against my stomach, pointing it up the tubeway and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

I held the gun in front of my face and stared at it wondering what I was doing wrong. There were a couple of small levers on the side of the gun. I moved them both and retook my aim just as One Ear looked down the tubeway toward me.

His eyes grew large, I don’t think he was expecting to see a human holding a kzinti gun down at the bottom of the tubeway. He started turning himself to face me, his arms tensing on the ladder. I knew he was going to come flying my way in an instant. I braced myself against the floor and wall of the transfer lock with the gun resting against my belly. I pulled the trigger.

All hell broke loose. A cacophony of noise exploded from the gun as a succession of explosions echoed in the transfer lock making my ears ring painfully. Thick clouds of acrid smoke quickly filled the tubeway. The gun fired rapidly without stopping, there was nothing I could do to control it, much less aim it. I tried to keep it pointed up the tubeway and hoped I’d hit One Ear. The gun bucked and thrust against my stomach, almost making me throw up from the pain and the pressure. High ringing ricochets echoed though the tubeway accompanied by the screaming sound of One Ear. But I couldn’t tell if his screams meant he’d been hit or if he was diving for me in a murderous rage. And then the gun stopped firing, though an empty clicking kept coming from it, and silence echoed through the transfer lock.

One Ear came flying toward me out of the haze of smoke that filled the tubeway. I pushed off from the floor just as he collided with me. I expected to be ripped apart by his claws, but his body just limply pressed mine into the floor of the passageway and then rebounded back up the tubeway. He was dead. It was luck, not my skill, that had done it, but I didn’t care. Another kzinti down and two more to go. I looked for One Ear’s gun but it wasn’t on him. I didn’t have time to go hunting for it.

Ducking back into the corridor I grabbed Tom. “Come on. We’ve got to keep moving. Got to get to a part of the ship they’re not familiar with.” I pushed Tom ahead of me into the tubeway and gave him a shove that got him floating up toward the freefall section of the ship. He didn’t need any further encouragement. He pulled himself up the ladder with quick strokes, making it hard for me to catch up to him. In a moment we were floating in the transfer hub to the freefall section of the ship.

“I’m going to stash you in safe place,” I said as I guided Tom down one of the corridors lit with red emergency lights. “Have you get in an emergency transfer suit and hide in an airlock with the outer door open. At least that way they won’t be able to get to you for a while.”

“But what about you?” Tom asked with ragged breath as we hurried.

“I’m not going to tell you. Fritz can’t read what you don’t know.” Our hurried motion brought us to Emergency Airlock Two. I pulled open one of the lockers and dragged out an emergency transfer suit made to Lunie proportions and pushed it over to Tom. “Put this on. Quick.”

The suit was designed to fit a wide range of individuals and provide minimum level of life support and mobility, not comfort. Tom spoke as I helped him get into the suit and adjust it. “Speaking of Argus. Why haven’t we felt his presence?” Tom grimaced as he wiggled into the emergency suit.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “He doesn’t seem able to read my mind for more than a few hours at a stretch and then he can’t read it, or least he never has, till the next day. Maybe it has something to do with that drug he takes. Maybe he’s in no shape to read our minds right now.”

Tom nodded, “He might be able to use an extra dosage of his drug to shorten his down time. Maybe he only reads you once a day to avoid overtaxing himself. Don’t bet on his not being able to read you now.” I nodded back to him as I grabbed the integrated helmet/biopack and slipped it over his shoulders and dogged the vacuum seals.

“Don’t worry. I’m counting on it.” Tom looked perplexed as I pushed him into the airlock but if he said any more I couldn’t hear him through the glassine shell of his suit helmet. I watched as the lights showed he was depressurizing the airlock and opening the outer door. Then I pushed off from the wall and went rushing away from the airlock.

The Telepresence Operations Center where I’d spent most of the last week was just a short distance down a cross corridor. As I went sailing through the corridor my whole body was tingling with nervous anticipation.

At any moment I expected a huge wall of orange fur to explode in front of me filled with angry claws and teeth. Each time I came to an intersection of corridors I expected to find Slave Master coming at me from the other direction. I had lost track of where he was once we had left the Command Deck and now I imagined him everywhere. I wondered how much longer I’d have before Fritz would be invading my head, finding out where I was and signing my death warrant. Only in the case of the kzinti, I was most likely to end up inside a kzinti and not inside an organ bank.

I sailed into the ready room outside the cargo lock. There was the familiar wall of racked telepresence ‘bots. Floating past them I slowed to hit their emergency activation buttons, watching as the wall of ‘bots came alive with blinking status lights and legs and manipulators moving in short test sequences. I grabbed one of the ‘bots and carried it over to the VR workstation while it activated itself. I jury-rigged an attachment for it, making sure its eyes were where my head would normally be. Silver tape and some ingenuity quickly had the ‘bot attached to the workstation with its legs and manipulators restrained and out of sight.

I was almost done but I forced myself to move faster. If Fritz invaded my mind now my actions would all be for nothing. I had to finish my preparations quickly. I picked up a pair of ‘bots and floated them over to near the door and pressed them against the wall, letting their magnetic feet hold them in place. I grabbed two more ‘bots, turned them upside down and gently pushed them toward the ceiling. They hit the ceiling and their magnetic grapples held them in place. The other ‘bots would have to wait. I grabbed two more ‘bots and hurried out the door with them. I almost forgot the VR console but I ducked back inside to grab one of the portable units that was sitting loosely on an air suction workbench.

That done I went back to my two ‘bots and dove down the corridor clutching them in my hands. If Fritz would just stay out of my mind for a few more minutes. If Slave Master would not show up too soon. If… If… If…

I opened my eyes and looked around the Cargo Lock Ready Room and could not believe my good fortune. I had managed to complete all my preparations without Fritz getting into my head. The chrono on the wall showed that less than fifteen minutes had passed since I had stopped the rotation of the crew section, plunging everything into freefall, and clearly announcing that I was free and coming after the kzinti.

Obler’s Paradox was a large ship and we had hidden in a part that was not familiar to the kzinti, but how much longer did they need to find us? How much longer before Fritz could take his drug and read my mind and see with my eyes and figure out where I was hiding? Hopefully soon. I didn’t want to wait anymore. I wanted this confrontation to be over. One way or the other. A shiver ran up my back and I told myself it was from anticipation, not chilly temperatures.

I brought up a display window showing me the outputs from the autocams. If they couldn’t find me maybe I’d give them some help. The computer quickly found Slave Master and Fritz in the Command Deck. The large kzinti looked angry, which for him was normal, but Fritz… He looked miserable. Normally he was disheveled but now he looked like death warmed over. No, I take that back. I’d seem corpses pulled out of vacuum that looked better than he did.

Fritz’s fur was matted and stuck out at strange angles, his eyes had purple tinged circles around them and his limp body floated listlessly. He looked like he was going to die, or at least fall asleep, at any moment.

The two kzinti were trying to make sense out of our ship’s displays and the silence from their ship. Maybe they needed some help. I selected an option from a virtual display and brought the intercom on-line with it set up so my voice would come out of every speaker on the ship.

“What’s the matter, Slave Master? Can’t figure out what happened?” My words echoed through the ship, even down here. It sounded like an angry god was everywhere. It was disconcerting. It was exactly what I wanted. “They’re dead. I killed them all. Just like I’m going to kill you.”

Slave Master let out a terrifying growl and his arms swung round in angry defiance of me. Fritz was cowering in a corner, trying to get away from his angry superior and from my voice. Slave Master ripped a display unit off its stand and threw it against the wall. It didn’t change anything.

“Slave of Humans. That’s what they’ll call you now. All of you kzinti together couldn’t beat two humans, and one of them was a cripple. How’s it feel to be defeated by a crippled eater of fruits and vegetables?”

Slave Master raged around the Command Deck. His anger didn’t make him anymore adept at getting around in freefall. He turned to Fritz and growled something. Fritz whimpered something back and Slave Master hit him backhanded sending him tumbling across the room. “Soon, Human,” Slave Master roared. “Soon you shall die. I will let you watch as I kill everyone on this ship and then you shall watch as I consume you, one limb at a time until you are dead.”

“Fat chance, coward. The only thing you’ll get to eat will be my shit. You’ll like it. It’s made from roots and vegetables.”

Slave Master roared in frustration and anger as he grabbed anything he could tear free and hurled it against the walls. Several times Fritz had to duck to avoid getting struck by flying equipment. Slave Master turned back to Fritz and growled at him, Fritz whimpered something but when Slave Master made a move toward him. Fritz dug into his pouch and pulled out his syringe. He plunged it into his arm. His body language showed he was afraid of what it would do, but it was clear he was more afraid of what Slave Master would do if he didn’t use his drug. I watched in anticipation of the headache that would announce Fritz’s presence in my head. But nothing happened.

“Slave of Humans. I grow tired waiting for you. Why not kill your telepath? He can’t read my mind. Must I tell you where to find me?”

Slave Master glared at Fritz who was shaking and shivering as he made erratic spitting sounds. I heard loud growls from Slave Master and could read the anger in his body language. Fritz hesitated. Slave Master rushed over to him and reached into his pouch and pulled out another syringe. Fritz was writhing beneath Slave Master, who forced another dose of the drug into Fritz.

And then there it was. The pain was diffuse and not as great as before, but I could feel it. Fritz was getting into my mind. Great. Now for the last part of the plan. I shut down all the virtual displays except one that showed me what the two kzinti were doing and concentrated on staring out at the ready room of the cargo lock and the Telepresence Operations Center. I made sure I looked at equipment and hardware we had been working with all week. Familiar items.

Things that would tell Fritz exactly where I was.

“Slave of Humans. You justly fear for your life. I will kill you and use your skin as a rug to warm my feet.” I wanted to have him irrationally angry. I wanted him to be in a rush to attack me. I wanted to drive him over the edge. It wasn’t a long trip.

Slave Master growled at Fritz who hissed something back to him. Slave Master pulled back his head and roared. He grabbed Fritz and pulled him out of the room. He knew where I was. He was coming to get me.

Good.

I watched in eager anticipation as the autocams tracked Slave Master and Fritz in their freefall rush through the ship. They gracelessly bounced off walls and ceilings as they made their way down the weightless corridors to the closest tubeway. They fumbled their way up the ladder, bumping into each other and knocking themselves away from the handholds. But graceless or not, clumsy or otherwise, you had to give them credit. They were on their way. Slave Master pulled ahead of Fritz and dove for the ready room of the cargo lock. I was waiting for him.

The large kzinti came into the room, roaring a challenge that I’d never understand, with his long knife drawn. Why he didn’t have his gun out I’ll never know.

Maybe it had something to do with honor, or maybe he just got excited and forgot. He flew toward the VR workstation with his eyes wide and mouth pulled open showing his long teeth.

I watched the expression on his face change from challenging anger to what I thought must have been confusion because he wasn’t seeing me as he rushed toward the VR workstation. In my place was an EVA ‘bot, strapped to the supports of the workstation.

Fritz might have known what I was seeing, but he didn’t know where I was.

Slave Master collided with the workstation and ripped it apart. The display turned to static as he destroyed the ‘bot. I toggled the display to another ‘bot.

The room turned upside down. I checked to see which ‘bot I had activated. It was one of the heavy duty EVA maintenance ‘bots that I had planted on the ceiling. I scanned the room. There was Fritz cowering near the doorway directly above the ‘bot I was controlling with Slave Master angrily sniffing the room in a fruitless search for me. He’d get his turn soon.

I moved my legs and the ‘bot exploded from the ceiling hurtling upward toward Fritz and landed on his back. I used a couple of manipulators to grab big chunks of Fritz’s fur. The telepath tried to shake me off, twisting and turning as he tried to dislodge me. But all he really succeeded in doing was getting himself separated from the floor and anything he could react against. He became a tumbling ball of matted orange fur floating in the middle of the room, screaming in pain or fear or both. And all the while my ‘bot was latched firmly to his back.

Slave Master saw this and rushed over, but he wasn’t fast enough. The ‘bot extended its laser cutting torch. I sighted on the back of Fritz’s head and set the torch at its highest continuous power setting. One which could have cut through aluminum like a flame goes through dry ice. I pulled the trigger. Fritz didn’t have a chance.

The laser was aimed at the base of his skull pointing up toward his brain. A pencil width tunnel opened up in Fritz’s head with the light from the laser shining incongruously through a hole in his forehead. The heat from the laser cauterized the wound so there was little blood to show for all the damage that was being done. In an instant the headache that had bedeviled me all week was gone, replaced by an unexpectedly sad emptiness.

And then Slave Master reached what was left of Fritz and ripped the ‘bot off his back and dashed it against the wall. The display filled with static. Scratch one more ‘bot. I had plenty of ‘bots.

I pulled up an option window and selected another ‘bot that I’d planted on the wall next to the door. I flipped off the intercom and routed my voice feed to the speakers on the ‘bot. “Hey, Slave of Humans. Here I am.” My voice echoed in the ready room. Slave Master jerked around at the sound and for a moment was confused.

I pushed off with my legs and the ‘bot went flying toward Slave Master, who grabbed a workbench and pulled himself out of the way of the ‘bot. I had to give him credit. He was learning quickly how to fight in freefall.

I jumped my presence to another ‘bot, activated its magnetic grapples and sent it walking across the floor toward Slave Master using its autonomous navigation capabilities. Again I routed my voice feed to this new ‘bot. “Here I am. Over here.”

I jumped my presence to another ‘bot. This one a small IVA model, used for doing repairs in out of the way places inside the ship, that was still racked in its storage cell on the wall. “Not there, here!” As Slave Master turned toward this new source for my voice I activated the ‘bot’s travel fans and made it zoom across the room toward him.

I jumped my presence back to the ‘bot that was walking toward Slave Master. “Here I am. Catch me if you can, you vegetable-eating coward.” Slave Master turned and roared at this insult, just as the IVA ‘bot collided with his back. I jumped my presence back to that ‘bot and grabbed onto his fur with its tiny manipulators. I increased the power to the ‘bot’s travel fans and pushed it hard against him so that his fur twisted into the fans. He shrieked as he twisted and turned, trying fruitlessly to reach around to his back to remove this aggravating attacker.

While he was distracted I jumped to a couple of more ‘bots in turn and had them activate their magnetic grapples and self-navigate toward the roaring mountain of orange fur in the center of the room. I jumped to a third ‘bot, another heavy duty EVA model like the one that had gotten Fritz. I activated its magnetic grapples and started it walking across the ceiling toward Slave Master.

I jumped to the light duty EVA ‘bot that was closest to Slave Master. “Here I am, Slave of Humans.” He turned to face the new attacker.

I jumped to a ‘bot on the other side of him. “No! Here I am.”

Jump again. “No, over here.”

Slave Master was a whirling mass of confusion. He kept turning to face my voice, but whenever he did, I changed positions. And all the while, the crowd of ‘bots was walking toward him on the floor and on the ceiling.

I jumped to the closest one, deactivated its magnetic grapples and with a twitch of my legs jumped the ‘bot directly onto Slave Master’s chest. I grabbed hold of his thick fur with the ‘bot’s manipulators.

I jumped over to the IVA ‘bot that was riding his back. I selected a drilling tool and howled my blood lust as I pressed the spinning drill against Slave Master.

He screamed in pain as it penetrated his skin. The agonized sound was surprisingly human and sent shock waves through my mind.

My actions horrified me. What kind of monster had I become? Then my mind flashed a memory of the sounds the Command Deck crew had made when they died and my doubts and fears became unimportant. I thought of all the people the kzinti had killed and would kill if they got the chance. I knew that I had to do for them what they could not do for themselves. I knew my actions would be as horrifying to my friends as anything the kzinti had done, but I forced that thought from my head as I did what I had to do.

By now Slave Master was a mass of bloody fur. Balls of his purple-red blood were drifting around the ready room looking like small purple planets. When those quivering spheres hit the walls they spread out like crimson amoebas. A thin film of kzinti blood that looked almost orange covered the walls of the ready room.

Slave Master twisted and squirmed as he fought his attackers but for every ‘bot he removed from his body I got another one attached to him. I would have felt sorry for him, but I remembered Sara and Jennifer and Nathan and Joel and all the others. Pity was something that didn’t apply to the kzinti. I activated more ‘bots.

He never knew which ‘bots were running autonomously and which ones were under my direction. He could kill individual ‘bots but there were always more and he couldn’t get to me. He screamed in anger or frustration or maybe pain. I know it wasn’t fear. You had to give him credit for that.

The heavy duty ‘bot had finished its trek across the ceiling and was standing directly above Slave Master. I jumped to this new ‘bot and routed my voice feed to it. I activated its cutting laser, which could only be focused on objects a few meters in front of it. Any farther and the beam was automatically defocused.

Slave Master was a bit farther away than desirable, but close enough for what needed to be done. I centered the laser’s aiming reticule on his forehead. Give it a second or two for the pattern recognition circuits to cut in and the laser would automatically stay focused on him as long as he stayed in range.

“Slave Master,” my voice echoed from above him with what I realized was a parting gift for his dignity. He looked up. “This is for Sara and everyone else.”

I fired the laser. A hole opened in his forehead and the light from the cutting laser passed through him, burning a smoldering hole in the floor. His body jerked and began a slow rigid tumble through the air of the Cargo Lock Ready Room, now nothing more than a lifeless relic from mankind’s first contact with outsiders.

I floated in an empty coffin in the chill air of the coldsleep chamber with wires and cables for my VR equipment running out through the partially closed hatch of the coffin. I wondered if Sara would appreciate the gesture.

Soon it would be time to recover Tom from the airlock. To let him know that the danger was gone and that he was safe. (But would he ever feel really safe having me around, knowing what he had turned me into?) And then it would be time to thaw the remaining people from coldsleep so we could make our way into a different future than the one we had been expecting.

But before I could feel safe I had to have another look at the kzinti warship. To make sure that it was really dead. I selected an exterior VR view and zoomed my perspective over to the kzinti ship. It was lifeless and dark. I knew that nothing alive could be found there anymore. Yes, the fight was really over and mankind had won this round.

But now that the nightmare was over I wondered what would become of us. Now that our dreams had been stolen by an enemy who wanted to rip our hearts out and have us for dinner. I knew what I had become and that the ‘docs could fix me. Just as I knew they shouldn’t.

I gazed at stars that were no longer pinpoints of light promising the joy of newly discovered knowledge. Each hid a potential enemy. I feared that some would make the kzinti look like docile house cats. In any case, this was the end of a peaceful and tame humanity. For some there still might be a measure of peace and tranquility, but not for myself or the others like me. Not for the ones selected by nature to be the warriors protecting the rest of humanity.

Element by element I turned off the VR display. I watched as the neon blue electromagnetic field lines from the Bussard ramscoop and the yellow hydrogen flux density contours vanished. Then the synthesized image of Obler’s Paradox and the kzinti warship disappeared, leaving only the stars. Staring at what was left of the VR display all I saw were the hard points of light from a million stars. And all I felt was stark white cold.