The Man-Kzin Wars 05

HEY DIDDLE DIDDLE
Thomas T. Thomas

“A kzinti warship!” Daff Gambiel called from the watch-keeping station at the mass pointer in the ship’s waist. “No—a whole fleet of them!” he corrected. “Dead ahead!”

Up near the control yoke Hugh Jook, Callisto’s navigator, spun on his own axis and dove toward the detector. He braked by grabbing a nearby stanchion and going into partial parabola around it. Once he stabilized, Jook studied the thin blue line that peeked out of the milky globe.

“Relax, Daff.” He sketched the line with his finger. “Is that what you’re excited about? Look at the mass actually showing there. Way too much for hull metal, even in a tight formation. That’s an asteroid.”

“So far out?” Gambiel said doubtfully.

“It’s a rogue. A rock that got perturbed from its orbit.”

“Perturbed enough to reach stellar escape velocity?” Gambiel still sounded unconvinced, but the Hellflare tattoo on the Jinxian’s blunt forehead glowed violently with the flush that was creeping up from his cheekbones. “I’d rather believe the Navy’s conclusions. They say it should be a fleet.”

“Coming through on gravity polarizers? Oh sure!” The navigator’s native Wunderlander superiority leaked out around the edges of his debating style. “And if they were accelerating, pointing away from us, then they would mask the gravity wave so thoroughly our detector wouldn’t budge. Pointed toward us, in braking mode, they’d show the shadow of a couple of solar masses.

“This line’s just right for a small iron or carbonate body.” The Wunderlander pulled his chin. “How it got here, and moving so fast—probably pulled out by the gravity well of a passing star or black hole… No kzinti need apply for that picture, however much you want to believe. Anyway, the Navy is dead wrong. We blasted the Patriarchy back to a collection of cinder worlds and a basketful of kittens in the Third War. They’re harmless.”

Jared Cuiller, commander of the Callisto, listened casually to this conversation. By now, it was going through its seventh or eighth cycle among his tiny four-person crew. They were thirty-six days out of Margrave and twelve light-years beyond the Chord of Contact between Known Space and the Patriarchy. Although his ship’s mission had come up fast, the debate behind it had been years in the making.

Over the decades since the Third Man-Kzin War, various industrial conglomerates had gone in to rebuild the shattered Kzinti homeworld and reconstruct the Patriarchy’s fractured system of colony and tribute planets along more market-oriented lines. The organized religions had sent in missions to introduce concepts of peace and love, equality and reciprocity—as far as they would go. The universities had sent archaeological and sociological study teams. All of these observers insisted that the Kzinti were pacified, if not exactly civilized. And the U.N. Peacekeeping Commission still controlled strictly the production facilities of Kzin and its colonies, as well as the goods they could buy and sell. So conventional wisdom said the Kzinti had neither the war spirit nor war making capability left in them.

But in the last six months, the Admiralty had convinced the U.N. politicians, the ARMs, and the Peacekeeping Commission that an anomaly existed in the economic and cultural profiles that these on-the-spot observers had sent back from the Patriarchy. The tactical-analysis computers at Naval HQ had found indications that this sudden docility among the kzinti was just a clever screen.

Or that’s what the dockyard scuttlebutt was saying. No one at Jared Cuiller’s lowly rank—lieutenant commander, with two years to go on the list for his next promotion—had ever been invited to read the Admiralty’s secret reports.

On the basis of HQ’s analysis, the Navy had received appropriations to restock its fleet, at least in part, and establish a cordon of patrol vessels around the Patriarchy to monitor and screen future kzinti activities. They had a huge volume of space to cover, and resources were still spread thinly. So Callisto was a General Products No. 2 hull bought at auction, stripped down to its keyway holes, and rebuilt up from the slippery monomolecular surface, inside and out. Cuiller knew that this was the hull’s fifth incarnation, but what their vessel had been before—scout ship, miner, or pleasure yacht—not a scrap of material remained to show. Now it was simply a slender, 200-meter-long spindle hastily fitted out with inertial thrusters, regenerative weapons, sensors and controls, sleeping cocoons and energy pods, and a massive hyperdrive engine, assigned a small scratch crew, and pressed into blockade-and-reconnaissance service—although the Navy preferred to say “deep-space survey.”

As to who was right in the debate, Jook or Gambiel, and whether the Patriarchy was indeed ready for another fight, Jared Cuiller wasn’t even trying to decide anymore. About the mass of the approaching body, the navigator probably knew more than Daff Gambiel. But about the warmaking capabilities of the Patriarchy, Cuiller would trust the weapons officer’s instincts over Hugh Jook’s. After all, the Jinxian had trained to take on the kzinti hand-to-hand.

But, then, maybe in this debate the more relaxed Jook was right. Gambiel’s Hellflare tattoo might be making him too eager for a fight. Cuiller tried to place himself in the mental state of a human male who had prepared most of his adult life for just one battle. To pit his entire strength in one synaptic burst against 200 kilograms of angry catflesh tipped with ten-centimeter claws. That would put unique stresses on anyone’s body and mind. After all, could a man be truly at ease knowing exactly how, if not when, he will die?

But, then, the tactical computers at HQ did back up Gambiel’s version. Jook was being too simplistic in thinking that the last war had cured the kzinti of their natural instincts. The universe was a perpetual challenge to the kzin psyche, pure and simple. It was there to be stalked and seized. And perhaps this time they would practice a more subtle form of stalking and less outright seizing.

No, Cuiller sighed, neither of his crewmen had the final answer. Nor, probably, did the technical experts at Naval HQ. And Cuiller himself didn’t, either. He was just going to follow fleet orders and see.

Nyawk-Captain dreamed of monkeys and his fingers twitched. He hung in the control cradle at his leading station aboard Cat’s Paw. The interior spaces of the former Scream of Vengeance-class interceptor were eaten up with extra ship’s stores and a station cradle for a third kzin. So the crew members had no private space to themselves at all and only a cruelly limited area where they could loosen their limbs—one at a time, in rotation. Otherwise they ate and slept while plugged into their panels. And dreamed there, too.

For most kzinti, if their dreams ever crossed the sweat-scent of human flesh or their minds played on the shallow softness of a human face, the experience was pleasurable. Then breath quickened, the tail twitched, ears fanned out, fingers and toes splayed slightly, and the tips of razor claws peeked involuntarily from behind black pads.

But when the monkeys danced in Nyawk-Captain’s dreams, his breath stopped, his tail went stiff and his fingers curled nervously, anchoring his bulk into the crash couch. Nyawk-Captain—reputed to be the best fighter pilot of his generation—in his secret dreams was terrified.

Years ago, during Most Recent War, he had been Tactician aboard a much larger vessel. His duties there had once required him to be present when Telepath peeled the brain of a human prisoner. This specimen also served as Tactician aboard his own human ship, although he had his own name, too. Chatterjee. While Telepath gnawed at the edges of Chatterjee’s awareness, seeking the plan of an expected attack, the human had thrown up unrelated memories and concepts as a screen. And Telepath had reported them faithfully. One of these memories—or perhaps it was simply an evasion—concerned a person called Hanuman.

This Hanuman was either a clan chief or a god, depending. Chatterjee did not make the distinction clear. Hanuman spoke and moved as a full-grown person, and yet he had a sense of morality more suited to a kzitten. He told lies and untrue stories for amusement. He played tricks on his enemies in battle, dodged their arrows, and routinely ambushed them instead of engaging them openly and honorably. Then he danced and laughed when they were discomfited.

From Chatterjee’s telling, filtered through Telepath’s own awareness, it was uncertain that Hanuman was even, in fact, a human Being. One part of him was otherness: pre-human or perhaps protohuman. Chatterjee sometimes called him a “monkey.” Monkeys, it seemed, had no true adulthood but lived and danced as lively, happy, cruel children all their lives. They screamed and threw things. They told lies, stole from each other, taunted their peers and inferiors, and made a joke of anything they could not desecrate or steal. They ate fruit out of the trees or the flesh of their dead, and copulated with great frenzy at any time.

These monkeys depicted an aspect of personal behavior that stayed in Tactician’s, later Nyawk-Captain’s, mind long after this Chatterjee was dead. Any creatures that could waste such a huge fraction of their lifetimes in frivolous, carefree, and even disgusting activities—and not die of them—must be very powerful indeed and have brain capacity to spare. They must be devastating.

This Hanuman, whom Chatterjee had revered as either leader or god, a man or a monkey, embodied for Nyawk-Captain all that was creative, lively, resourceful, and awful about the humans. This god had no fighting skills worth mentioning but instead defeated all his enemies by trickery. Low, unworthy—and devastating.

The interrogation incident had driven another nail of fear home into Nyawk-Captain’s brain. While this Chatterjee was a full human, he considered himself different from those around him, even from his shipmates. He thought of himself as “Hindu-human,” and seemed to be more Hindu than human in the shape of his life and thoughts.

Nyawk-Captain tried to imagine sapient beings who could endure diverging breeds and varieties—Hindu, Chinese, Belter, Lunatic, Russky, American, Wunderlander, Englishman, Jinxian—and not fight each other down to a single pride governed by a single patriarchic family! The fact that so many could live and work together, without continual killings, spoke to Nyawk-Captain of great inner resources, huge mental agility, varying strengths. Perhaps the humans had grown so cunning through learning to deal with the differences among themselves. Frightening thought! A race that did not need enemies to fight and test itself against, because it provided its own.

In Nyawk-Captain’s dreams, the monkeys danced and chattered, and he trembled.

The fifty-eighth day, and twenty light-years beyond Known Space…

“…not put your butts in the ‘cycler!”

Sarah Krater’s soprano voice rang out, echoing off hard surfaces of the ship’s interior and rising toward an unpleasant screech. From the context of her complaint, Jared Cuiller could identify without effort both her location and the object of her wrath. Callisto’s communications officer, linguist, and fourth crew member had cornered Hugh Jook in the cocoon that was fitted out for the combination ship’s head and recycler unit.

“Now, Sally,” the Wunderlander’s voice began in his usual, joking defense. “I’ve told you a dozen times that cocasoli is a perfectly harmless alkaloid derivative, which the ‘cycler absorbs completely. The carrier is a totally organic fiber which is likewise converted. You can’t be tasting it.”

“Wrong!” she barked. “It makes lime gel taste like wet leaves.”

“Then the machinery must be a tad out of adjustment.”

“I checked. It isn’t. If you would just not put your butts down the can—”

Which was where that conversation had started, Cuiller thought. It looked like time for him to intervene officially. The captain unhooked from the forward control yoke and exchanged glances with Gambiel, who was strapped in beside him.

“Better you than me,” the Jinxian said quietly.

Cuiller did not reply. But he took a leisurely pace, choosing his handholds carefully, as he worked his way downship.

Four people should not be asked to seal themselves in a glass bottle and venture beyond the magnetosphere of a G-type sun, he told himself. They should not have to hurl themselves through a dimension of the universe that had no dimension. And even though they dropped out of hyperdrive regularly to examine new systems, prepare charts, and leave probes, four people should not have to go for months with no other distractions than they could devise for themselves inside a crammed hull.

But four people was optimal minimum crew size, or so the Bureau of Personnel had ruled. Four was the minimum of personality variations, sleep cycles, pairs of hands, and skill levels required for an extended patrol A crew of four has the available brain capacity and viewpoints to interact as a population. And when disagreements arose, as now, four allowed for a referee, a judge and jury, or even an innocent bystander.

Four was the optimal minimum—if, Cuiller reminded himself; you had the right four.

It took a lot, Cuiller knew, to break through Jook’s easygoing persona. But even as a failed aristocrat, the Wunderlander had developed habits and tastes certain to bring out the worst side of people who had not enjoyed parallel advantages. Like Sarah Krater, who had been brought up under the strict air disciplines of a Belter mining cooperative. She would react instinctively against anyone who wanted to burn fibers and chemicals in the open, and draw the residue into his lungs, just for the psychological effects, no matter how harmless the substances under discussion.

Rather than change his behavior to suit her, Jook had simply adopted a light and laughing tone. His personal defense mechanism was to let others go their own way, and he only asked the same of them in return. Nothing seemed to bother him too much. And the navigator did have his good points. Jook was levelheaded and philosophical, with a bent for mathematics and ship propulsion technologies.

Krater, by contrast, was touchy and aggressive. A perfectionist in her work, she was always finicky about her personal surroundings and was quick to note the shortcomings of others. That sort of tightass was out of character for a trained xenobiologist. Perhaps greater perspective did not, as Cuiller had once thought, provide for greater tolerance. But then, Belters could be strange. She was also ambitious and, from her first day aboard had made clear that she did not intend to stay with “this bucket of a patrol ship” for very long. Krater wanted a command of her own, and to get that she would have to transfer aboard a bigger vessel and begin working her way up into the command structure. As Callisto had no formal wardroom and was not going in any direction that would win ship and crew much distinction—at least, not on a peacetime patrol—Krater’s frustrated ambitions spilled over into her personal contacts.

Double that frustration once she had learned that both Cuiller and Jook had served on those bigger ships and then been rotated down to Callisto. She was beginning to realize that accidents can happen in a Navy career, even hers.

And, much to the frustration of the three males in the crew, the willowy Belter had also announced her intention of keeping all her shipboard contacts purely professional. She was married to her career, she pointedly told them, and didn’t fool around on the side. But that was hard if you were a healthy young man sharing less than 12,000 cubic meters of mostly machinery-filled space with a healthy young woman whose eyes were a lovely shade of violet, whose cheekbones stood out above a full and pouting mouth, and whose long, blonde roostertail haircut begged to be stroked.

When Cuiller reached the cocoon’s dilated sphincter, he found Krater and Jook floating practically nose to nose. They were about three seconds from an exchange of blows.

“Do you two want to go back to the gym-bag and strap on the pads?” he asked.

Jook half-turned away at the sound, but Krater remembered her basic training and never took her eyes from the vacant point off her opponent’s left shoulder.

If it came to hard-edged hands, Cuiller would bet on the woman. Growing up in a near-weightless environment, she had the reach on Jook and was strong from an early life of wrestling rock drills and mandibles. The navigator once boasted that he had never lifted anything heavier than a booktape, a fork, or a squinch racquet.

“I guess not, Cap’n.” Jook shook his head.

“Any time, boy,” Krater said into his ear.

“Cut some slack, Lieutenant,” Cuiller told her. “… And that’s not a suggestion.”

“Yes, sir.” And still she did not relax the position of her limbs.

“Now, Lieutenant! Make space!”

Her hands flexed out of their semi-rigid, thumbs-in shape and her arms came down. Krater pirouetted a half-meter away from the navigator.

“That’s better… Sarah, I think you ought to take that ‘cycler apart and find out why it’s making you sick. Adjust it to your own taste specs, if you like.”

“If that means I’ve got to clean out his shit, Captain—”

“It means you’ll tend to the equipment, Lieutenant. Your turn on the roster.”

She glared at him, then lifted her chin. “Aye, sir.”

“Jook, take station forward and get me a report on our mission profile to date.”

“That I can tell you at once. We’re only—”

“With a detailed threat analysis, based on all reported contacts logged throughout the Chord. Don’t rush yourself. Do it right. Work on saving our asses.”

“But, sir! We know the kzinti aren’t coming through here. That cyber projection is just—”

“Just the reason we’re out here. But I don’t want you taking an expert system’s analysis on faith. Do your own homework. Down in the library Move it.”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

With Jook and Krater moving in different directions, on assignments that would occupy each of them for an hour or more, Cuiller could relax for a bit—unless Gambiel wanted to pick a fight, too. The commander drifted back up to the control yoke.

“Get it all settled?” Gambiel asked.

“Not that it’s your business,” Cuiller said shortly.

“Sorree!”

Nyawk-Captain awakened slowly. He spat the rusty taste of fear out of his mouth as soon as his brain had caught up with local reality and he could herd the monkeys back to their secret hiding places.

He checked the navigational repeaters at his station, verifying that Weaponsmaster had not let them drift off course during his watch at helm. No, Cat’s Paw was still headed far out into neutral space, away from the network of manned patrols and passive trip-monitors that the humans maintained along their nearer borders with a much-reduced Patriarchy.

The course his ship was following had evolved among the Patriarch’s closest strategists. These were kzinti so highly placed that each one had a full name, and it was death ever to speak of them as mere “strategists,” even in the aggregate. Except that they and their counsels were secret, and thus Nyawk-Captain and his crewmates could not know their names, and so could never speak of them. Clever.

Their plan, like its origins, was a similarly constructed puzzle, a series of boxes within boxes for the humans to discover and open. This was not perhaps as satisfying for Nyawk-Captain and the other kzinti as a scream and a leap, nor as honorable as one massive attack. But it was more likely to win results under the current circumstances.

A plan almost worthy of Hanuman.

Cat’s Paw and three other, similarly enhanced interceptors were moving secretly out into space that the humans had not yet explored. There, unobserved, each would soon turn and find its own path back into human space. Each would pass through a different sector, and the timing of their entries would be staggered, too, just enough to appear to human strategists as individual attacks. The humans would dismiss these transits as the movement of renegade kzinti, secret traders and raiders, and so not responsible to the Patriarchy and the humiliating papers that had been signed after Most Recent War.

Each interceptor would make an isolated attack against a single human world. The Paw at Margrave, the others simultaneously at Gummidgy, Canyon, and Silvereyes. With the new weapons they now carried, they could do a massive amount of planetary damage. Of course, the Paw would have to move very quickly through the Lambda Serpentis system—and find the Margravians very much asleep—if they were to be successful and still escape with their lives into deep space on the far side of the system.

But escape was not important. Survival was not important. Timing was everything.

The suddenness and brutality of the attacks would awaken the humans’ highest strategists to a possible military action. But an action falling where? To meet it, the humans would spread their fleet. “Trying to cover all the bases” was the human phrase his orders had referenced. It had the smell of a sports term, and true kzinti did not practice sports.

While the humans dispatched their ships and spent their resources investigating and healing the four damaged worlds, the kzinti Last Fleet would be riding behind only one of the interceptors. Just how far depended on the humans’ calculated reaction time and the reports of brave kzinti agents among the survivors on those shattered worlds. When human strength was at maximum dispersal, the Last Fleet would overwhelm the patrol screen, engulf the target planet, consolidate, and move on. The fleet would take two, three, perhaps even four key colony worlds before the humans could regroup and mount a defense. But by that time momentum and purpose would be riding with the kzinti. Confusion and alarm would be hindering the humans.

Ma plan it was flawless.

Man actual attack, it just might work.

But timing would be everything.

On the seventy-first day, and twenty-four light-years into the unknown…

Uncharted but not unknown, Cuiller reminded himself; A thousand, a million times over the millennia, humankind had looked outward toward this sector and seen its stars—stars now hidden in the Callisto’s Blind Spot Some of these stars, judging by their lines in the mass pointer were even bright enough to be visible from Earth. But no one had taken a survey mission through here. Not after bumping into the kzinti coming the other way.

“Captain…” from Jook at the comm down by the pointer. “We’re going to graze the singularity limits of a star—”

“Initiating evasive.”

“No, wait. The mass says it’s a sol-type, G1. We might drop in for a look.”

“Again—”

“I’ve got some scatter that might be planets,” Jook said hopefully.

“Or another fully developed Oort cloud?”

“Well, we can’t know till we look…”

“We’ve got a mission to perform, Hugh,” Cuiller told him.

“Survey data is valuable, sir.”

The commander sighed. Jook was right. And it was time for them to drop in and see some stars in visible light for a change, if only for an hour or so.

“Very well. Sing out when it’s time to decouple the hyperdrive.”

“Now!… sir.”

Cuiller hit the switches on reflex. It wouldn’t do any good to wander into a singularity. Stars bloomed in the nothingness beyond the wide window stripes in the ship’s surface covering.

“Which direction?” he asked.

“Off our port bow and now rolling up at, uh, 230 degrees.”

The commander looked and saw a bright yellow bead, big enough to begin showing a disk.

“Start plotting the planets, or whatever they are. I’ll wake Lieutenant Krater and get her on the console.”

“I’m awake,” she said, rolling out of her sleeping cocoon. “I felt the ship acquire momentum.”

“Jook’s got another possible planet. Give it the once over, will you, Sally? Full spectrum.”

“Gotcha.”

The crew settled into their workstations, except for Gambiel. Cuiller let the weapons officer go on sleeping, held in reserve against a probable long watch when they were underway again.

After ten minutes, both Jook and Krater spoke at once.

“Hello!”

“I’ve got—”

“One at a time,” Cuiller ordered.

“I’ve found a planet,” the navigator said. “One body, no moons. It has an equatorial radius of about 3,400 kilometers, about the same as Mars. But it’s got a lot higher mass, pulls about point-seven-nine gee. We can move around easily enough, but if there’s an atmosphere it’s going to be dense and hot The planet is far enough out from the primary for water to go liquid but not start icing down.”

“Spectral analysis says there’s atmosphere,” Krater confirmed. “Sixty-eight percent nitrogen. Twenty-two percent oxygen. Nine percent water vapor—so the air is pretty steamy, too. The rest is traces. We can breathe, unless we find pockets of poison gas or spores or something… But that’s not the big news. I’ve got a hard return!”

“On deep radar?” Jook asked eagerly.

“Of course. I thunked your planet once just for luck. And the return shows either a chunk of neutronium, or—”

“You weren’t scanning at the core?” Cuiller asked quickly.

“Naw, it shows up right near the surface.”

“Well, well.”

“You’re not going to make us go down there, are you, Captain?” Jook asked, inserting a mock whine in his voice. “You know we’ve got a mission to complete, with lots of phantom kzinti to chase.”

“Stow it, Hugh.” Cuiller grinned. “Give me a vector to the planet Sally, when we get close enough, localize that hard return for the navigational console and send it to Hugh… We make one pass over it in low orbit, Hugh, to get a fix on landing sites, and then we head in. Right? Look sharp, everybody. We could be going home rich.”

“Aye, sir!” from both of them.

From more than ten million kilometers out, they could see with the naked eye that the planet’s disk was unbroken. It showed a pale green atmosphere, banded with broad strips of white.

“Looks like a gas giant,” Cuiller said uneasily.

“No way, Cap’n,” Jook answered. “We definitely have rock.”

The green was the color of dilute free chlorine—lots of it. On a hunch, Cuiller asked Krater to recheck the spectralysis, which was taken by comparing incident light from the G-type primary with sunlight reflected off the planet.

“I do get some dropout lines for chlorine,” she said. “But not enough to color the atmosphere like that. The machine still says what it’s got is breathable.”

From a million kilometers away, they could see little more.

“The green is probably chlorophyll,” Krater observed. “We’re looking at grass fields, swamps, taiga, or all three.”

“Should be greener then,” said Gambiel, who was awake by now and at his forward station.

“Remember all the H20 in the air,” she told him. “We’re looking through a mile or two of light haze. A lot of reflectance there.”

The haze appeared to deepen and grow whiter as they locked into an orbit. “More scatter effect,” Krater called it.

“Do you have any features around our deep return?” Cuiller asked.

“Captain, you’re looking at a billiard ball,” Jook announced. “I’m doing a navigational scan in the point one-meter range, and the spherical deviation is nil. A trifling amount of oblateness. Otherwise smooth. I mean, a rise of fifty meters would be a mountain range down there.”

“Then we can set down anywhere,” Cuiller summarized.

“Well…” Jook hesitated.

“Give me a fix on that deep radar pattern, Hugh,” Cuiller told him, “and I’ll kill the orbit.”

“You’ve got it, Cap’n. Deceleration point coming up in two minutes.”

“Sally, do you see any change in that pattern?”

“No, what you’re looking at is just what we’ve had from the first, allowing for scale change. I read the return image as just about a meter in any dimension.”

“Better all the time… You’ll have to reel in the whip now,” he told her.

Because a General Products hull blocked all radiation outside the visible spectrum, Callisto communed with her environment through a trailing string of antennas and sensors that wound on a reel in her tail section. The sensor string would not survive the buffeting of an atmospheric entry. “Aye, Captain.” Krater keyed the proper contacts.

“All right, people,” Cuiller called out, “strap in.”

He counted the whirs and clicks as the crew pulled out the gravity webbing and made themselves fast at station. Cuiller fastened himself down last.

“One minute to mark,” from Jook. “You going to take this one in manually?”

“I need the practice,” Cuiller said.

“Easier to let the computers do it…”

Cuiller thought about that, looking down at the nearly white curve of the horizon. “We’ve got room to play around, surely.”

“All right… Mark!”

The commander closed a series of switches, engaging the external ion engine. The ship vibrated, and Cuiller felt his body sway forward against the retaining strands.

Callisto glided down in a long curve. Her forward quadrant glowed where the external ceramic coating—which deflected laser attacks tuned in visible light—covered the impervious General Products surface. The hull itself remained serenely clear, except for a buffeting layer of ionized air.

At 2,000 meters above the surface, Cuiller terminated the ion drive and brought her gliding around on inertial thrusters, maneuvering under his own eye-hand coordination. He glanced at the repeater from Krater’s station.

“I’m going to set down about two kilometers from that reflection,” he announced. “Not too far to walk, but not close enough to disturb it.”

No comment from the crew, which he took for agreement. As Callisto cut through the mist, the planet’s surface was revealed as a deep and startling green. Cuiller was reminded of pictures he’d seen of Ireland but then amended that. This was bright enough to be an enhanced color graphic of Ireland, with overdrive on the yellow and cyan pigments. Jook had not overstated the flatness. Even from a hundred meters up, Cuiller could not see any hill or wrinkle higher than two or three meters. No valleys either. And no boulders, trees, rivers, lakes, nor any other feature. Just a deep and rustling green vegetation.

“Settling in,” he said, killing forward motion and dropping the lift smoothly toward a steady seven-point-seven-three meters per second, just enough to counter local gravity. When the greenery—it looked like large and feathery leaves—reached up to touch the clear window in the hull’s underside, he backed the thrusters down to zero and switched them off.

“Captain!” Jook called out. “Check your navigational radar!”

“What? Oh shit!” He saw the 120-meter discrepancy immediately.

The leaves flared back around the window below and revealed lighter green strings of moss and the wet black bark of tree branches. Between them, Cuiller could see more layers of green and black strands, receding indefinitely, with nothing solid under them.

He got his hands back on the switches for the inertial thrusters and initiated a restart. But before he could key in the full sequence, Callisto’s tail, weighted down with the unbalanced mass of the hyperdrive engine, broke through the surface.

It happened too fast. Cuiller was still thrusting on the ship’s long axis, but Callisto was now falling nearly vertically. He tried to correct—and only pushed her backward into a tangle of branches and vines. Their springiness absorbed the horizontally vectored thrust for ten meters of travel, then rebounded, shoving Callisto down her own hole.

They all felt the shock when the stem contacted firm ground at last. No one cried out, but someone among the crew gave an involuntary gasp. Cuiller, glancing down the spindle into the maze of machinery, could see a subtle misalignment. Internal structures had shifted. He could also hear things falling, plink and clunk, along the hull. Not all of them were personal effects shaken out of the sleeping cocoons.

The bow and the forward band of windows, around the control yoke, were still angled above the leaflayer, exposed in misty sunlight. Cuiller’s fingers were dancing over the switches, trying to get thrust under them and lift clear. But the ship was sliding, changing orientation too fast He and Gambiel watched the world rotate and sag as the hull’s weight found paths of least resistance among the branches and vines. Callisto swung and turned, walked and slid. A green gloom rose up around their window. Cuiller quit trying with the controls and lifted his hands clear.

“Hang on, people!”

Finally, only the forward tip of the spindle was caught in the branches, and they were slipping away to the left and right, passing Callisto side to side, as they got out of the way of her mass. In two more seconds, the ship was free and fell a hundred meters at the bow along her own length.

Wham!

More clatter came up from the hull behind Cuiller, but then his ear caught a louder groan. At first he thought it came from one of his crew, until Cuiller realized that one of the weapons pods, located forward of the control yoke, was moving. Right before the commander’s and tactical officer’s widening eyes, it turned on its own axis and fell through the open space ten centimeters in front of their toes. Severed conductors in a cable tray snapped and fizzled before the automatic extinguishers kicked in with a chill cloud of carbon dioxide.

The ship rolled almost 180 degrees in settling, and the weapons pod swung back, now poised above them. It caught up on the lateral strut that braced Cuiller’s and Gambiel’s watch-keeping station, and it stopped moving.

“Everybody Sit tight till the ship quiets down,” the commander ordered. They were all hanging by their ears now.

“I got nowhere to go,” Gambiel breathed beside him. The infrastructure creaked and groaned, but nothing more came loose.

“Let’s try to get damage reports before we shut down.”

“Aye, Captain,” the crew called back raggedly.

In the space of two minutes, they had logged the ship’s status—weapons, propulsion, sensors, life support—at their various duty stations. Callisto had lost that forward weapons pod for certain, and the sensor whip was not reporting, even from its reeled-in position. Two portside thrusters were impaired, if not inoperable. The recycling system had lost function.

Auxiliary power was down by three charge cells. And the ship was oriented horizontally in a 170-degree roll-standing on their heads, as it were.

“I should try to get off a position report,” Krater said. “If that’s possible, with the antenna cable damaged—”

“Do what you can,” Cuiller told her. He swiveled around in the stirrups, hanging head down in the webbing, to observe the crew at their stations. “Anybody take injuries in that last fall?”

“Well… it’s my knee, you see,” Jook said. His webbing was loose enough that he had bashed his leg against the mass pointer. No damage to that piece of equipment, of course, but Jook’s knee was swelling rapidly. Otherwise the crew was shaken but unhurt. Cuiller directed Krater, who doubled as medical assistant, to help the navigator into the autodoc.

“Daff, take air samples,” he ordered. “And if it’s dean, pop the hatches. Let’s get outside and see where we are.”

The main entry hatch, normally oriented toward the underside of the hull, was now positioned near the top, Cuiller, Krater, and Gambiel climbed up handholds and over equipment bracing to reach it. Jook stayed inside, nursing his knee in a bubble cast foam-molded by the ‘doc. While they went outside, he would use the time to catalog and schedule their estimated repairs.

After levering themselves through the opening, the three crewmembers stood on the roughened ceramic surface and surveyed the landing site. Callisto lay on clear ground, angled slightly upward at the bow, where the hull was wedged between the smooth trunks of two trees. Those trees, and every other tree in view, supported a high forest canopy whose underlayer was more than ninety meters overhead.

Cuiller searched for the hole they must have made in passing through it but found nothing. No clearings punctuated the vaults of leaves and wailing moss that soared above them. The surrounding world was a uniform green gloom, without a splash of sunlight.

“Beanstalk,” Krater said suddenly. “That’s what we’ll call this planet.”

“What?” from Gambiel. “This patch, maybe. But who can say what’s going on in the next county over.”

“I can say,” she answered. “There is no ‘next county.’ We’ve been around this world once and taken a radar image of it. This is one huge, unbroken rainforest, girdling the planet, covering probably sixty percent of its surface.”

“Well, at the poles, then…” the weapons officer said, trailing off.

“There ought to be what?” Krater asked. “This planet’s rotational axis is perpendicular to its ecliptic So you won’t get seasonal temperature variations, as you do on Earth. You can expect the temperature to drop uniformly at the higher latitudes, because of the sun’s lower angle in the sky. But that only means that the rain-forest is going to peter out in low scrub, then mosses and lichens, and eventually frozen deserts. This planet dearly has no plate tectonics, which means not much in the way of topography ever formed here. So no mountain ranges, no valleys, no river floodplains, no oceanic heat sinks. That means there can’t be any weather.”

“What about Coriolis effects?” Cuiller asked. “You’d still have moving air masses, trade winds, horse latitudes—any planet that’s turning has them.”

“All right, I’ll agree to trade winds. But on a smooth ball like this, they sorted themselves out long ago. Even flows without much intermixing. That’s the cloud banding we saw from far out.”

“Hugh said he detected a smooth surface, and it was—even a hundred meters up in the treetops,” Cuiller said. “That’s what fooled me, I guess,” he added sheepishly. It was a close as a commanding officer could come to officially apologizing to his crew for that fiasco of a landing. “Daff, if you would rig a rope ladder or something like it, we can go down and check out the ground.”

“Aye, sir.” Gambiel climbed back down through the hatchway.

The commander looked off into the distance, a perspective of spaced tree trunks vanishing into a brownish-green mist. Something about the trees… He turned his head one way, then the other. He moved his head sideways, left then right, along the baseline of his shoulders. He widened that line by taking two steps to the side. As the angle changed, the trunks seemed to line up in a geometric pattern. And then the pattern faded out as he moved farther to one side or the other—

“Sally? Does it look to you like the trees are—”

“Lined up? Yeah, I was thinking that, too. They’re spaced in a matrix, actually.”

“Like an orchard,” he agreed.

“As if they had been planted on purpose. But it’s not a simple design of rows and columns. More like pentagrams or hexagons.”

Cuiller itched to get down and begin taking measurements.

Gambiel returned with a length of spare optic-fiber cable in which he’d tied small, tight knots at half-meter intervals. He anchored it inside the open hatchway and dangled the rest across the smooth curve of the hull. They all heard its trailing end thump on the ground.

“We might be needing that cable to make repairs,” Cuiller observed quietly.

The Jinxian stared at him. “We won’t. I checked with Jook.”

“Well,” he went on, “you might have brought up a spider rig from the EVA equipment.”

Gambiel turned to show his left shoulder, where three of the rigs hung like loops of uniform braid. “We have one each. And we’ll all need them.”

“What for?” Krater asked.

“Climbing.”

“Climbing where?”

Gambiel pointed over his head. “Deep radar was your station, Sally. You saw the return image. Whatever made it, it’s still up there.”

“In the treetops? But—”

The Jinxian turned toward his commander. “That was why you tried to land in the canopy. You were watching the deep display instead of the navigationals… Keeping your eye on the prize.”

“Well, yes…” Cuiller hesitated. Was that the cause of his error?

“Honest mistake,” Gambiel offered with a shrug.

Climbing down was not as easy as Cuiller had thought it would be. They had to go one at a time, walking backwards and paying out the knots hand over hand, until their bodies were laid out almost parallel to the ground. Then they rappelled from the ship’s side, slipping cautiously down the knotted cable until they were under the overhang. Finally they dragged their feet on the hard-packed ground to kill the final swing. Climbing back up was going to he harder and take longer.

With his heavyworld muscles, of course, Gambiel went up and down like a monkey.

Krater, who had the advantage of height and not much mass to go with it, seemed to step from the ship to the ground.

Cuiller, despite Beanstalk’s lighter gravity, still found it a workout.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” Krater asked, looking around when they had assembled under the bow. Gambiel scuffed the soil with the side of his cabin moccasin. The ground was smooth and crusted, like a section of sun-baked clay in exposed terrain. He turned over no ground cover, no dead leaves, no animal droppings or pieces of bark, nothing. They found no undergrowth, either, not even around the tree trunks. None of the vines that wove through the canopy reached down to the forest floor.

Cuiller walked over to the nearest trunk. It was at least two meters in diameter with a hard, scaly bark. He pried at the bark with his fingers but could not break off a piece. No room for invading insects, small birds, or snakes.

He looked up. The overhead leaves were as still as the underside of a green cloud. Of course, if any wind were stirring in the treetops, the sound and movement were cushioned by 30 meters of netted foliage.

Cuiller squatted down to examine the trunk’s base. The bark was scraped and scarred raw there, at least on the side facing him. The wounds went a third of the way around the bole and extended more than a meter up from the ground. They wept a thick, ruddy sap. He duck-walked along the trunk’s circumference and discovered that the cuts faded out into white, scraped wood, which looked almost dead. Beyond that, by another third of the circumference, was a patch of new, green bark—but even there he could see a pattern of parallel scrapes and gouges. Areas of sap, clean wood, and new growth alternated around the trunk.

Something had been abusing this tree on a regular basis, coming at it from all sides.

Cuiller stood up and walked toward the next tree, counting his paces as he went. He knew his stride was just less than a meter. Factoring the correction into his count gave him a distance of twenty-five meters between the two trees. He examined that base and found the same pattern of abuse.

He walked on to a third tree—again, covering just twenty-five meters—and saw the same thing. And he confirmed that the three trees were growing in a line.

On a hunch, he walked back to the second tree and sighted to the third. A patch of white wood there matched a similar patch here. In the same way, running sap faced sap on a tree sighted 120 degrees around the trunk’s circumference. Green bark matched green bark on yet another facing tree.

Cuiller went from tree to tree, always twenty-five meters, and found the same pattern of parallel scars.

Logic said that something 25 meters wide was being dragged through the forest here like a rake. And whatever it was, it swept up leaves, scored the tree trunks, clipped any undergrowth, and scoured the soil bare, compacting it to the consistency of a mud brick.

“Did you bring radios?” he asked Gambiel.

The weapons officer handed him a palm-sized unit Cuiller tuned and spoke into it.

“Hugh?”

“Right here, Jared. I can even see you through the window, sometimes.”

“How’s the knee?”

“Painkillers are kicking in.”

“Can you get up to the deep radar?”

“Not without a climb, but I can work the repeater at the comm.”

“Right. Give us a bearing to the return image, would you?”

“Just a sec… Ten degrees off the port bow, still at a range of two and a half kilometers. And, Captain—it’s above us now.”

“I know. In the treetops, right?”

“Well, the angle is right for it, anyway. But how would—”

“I think we’re going to find that everything interesting on this planet—which Sally has named ‘Beanstalk,’ by the way—is up in the forest canopy.”

“Alright. You’re leaving me with the ship?”

“Can you lift if you have to?”

“So long as you all are clear of the area, I can punch up the main ion engine, have her hot in ninety seconds, and scoot.”

“Do that, if you see anything.”

“What am I going to see, down here?”

“Somebody’s keeping the grounds swept nice and clean. Watch out for whoever it is.”

“Sure thing. Do you explorer types have weapons?” Gambiel overheard that. He turned his right hip toward Cuiller, exposing three hand-fitted variable lasers clipped to his belt. Over that same shoulder he carried a brace of laser rifles, which had a wider aperture and a longer beam pulse.

“We’ve got them.”

“What about food, water, thermal—”

“I’ve got my field test kit,” Krater spoke up. “And we’re all carrying a foodbar or two for snacking. Quit nagging, Mother-Hugh. We’ve only got two klicks of ground to covet.”

“Okay. Be back soon.”

“In two shakes,” Cuiller agreed and clicked off.

They headed out, walking easily between the trees on the bearing Jook had given them. After half a kilometer of parklike open space, they came upon their first patch of undergrowth. Green shoots, bushes, and saplings grew up in an uncleared area that was shaped like a pentagon. Cuiller noticed immediately that its points were anchored by five of the mature trees.

“Wait here,” he ordered, and began to wade into the greenery.

“Captain?” Gambiel called. When Cuiller turned, the Jinxian checked the charge on a hand weapon and tossed it to him.

Cuiller accepted it with a nod.

He pushed his way into the secondary growth, bending stalks and branches aside and wishing they had brought along a few simpler weapons, like machetes. Twenty-five paces in from the nearest tree, he found what he’d been expecting: a broken stump two meters wide and a fallen section of trunk. He looked straight up, hoping to find a patch of sky. The green vault was thinner here, perhaps lighter in color, but still unbroken. Most of the saplings around him, he noticed, had tough, straight boles with flat, branching crowns.

He thumbed the radio and spoke into it. “Hugh, watch out for the groundskeepers. They’re definitely intelligent.”

“How do you figure that?” Krater cut in, having caught him on the same channel.

Cuiller described what he saw. “Whoever it is that’s dragging the forest floor also knows enough to let a downed tree replace itself,” he concluded. “Otherwise the canopy would thin out and fall within a generation or two. This forest is being managed, and that smacks of intelligence to me.”

“You’re leaping ahead of yourself,” she said, putting on her professional xenobiologist’s hat. “A lot of natural phenomena could explain what you’ve got there.”

“Well—” Cuiller was unsure of his ground.

“I like Jared’s interpretation,” Gambiel said. “Anyway, let’s be prepared. Err on the side of intelligence.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jook put in, from the ship. “I’ll watch for them.”

“All right,” from Krater. “Have it your way. But don’t be disappointed if it’s a pack of grazing animals with picky appetites, some kind of stream flow, a toxic groundwort, or something.”

“We can deal with those,” Gambiel said.

“I’m coming out,” Cuiller told them, turning around in the patch of groundcover.

“Let’s start considering options,” the commander said when he was back on the swept floor with the others. He pointed at the spider rigs on the Jinxian’s shoulder. “How do these things work?”

Gambiel unslung them, laid two on the ground, and spread one in his flat hands.

“This is an adjustable five-point harness. Over the shoulders, around the waist, between the legs. The takeup reel with motor winder clips on here.” He thunked himself in the chest, just below the sternum. “The hand unit—” He picked up a gun-shaped object, “—launches the grapple with a gas charge that vents backward to stabilize your reaction. That’s because this rig was designed for freefall, remember.”

Cuiller picked up the grapple. It had a point and three spring-loaded tines—all sharpened. “We’d use a thing like this around vacuum gear?”

“The original head has a suction pad and magnets. This is a terrestrial modification.”

“Right.”

“What about drag from the trailing line?” Krater asked.

“For one thing, it’s all monofilament. Weighs about three grams to the kilometer. But you got to watch out—put it under tension and it’ll take your fingers off. Handle the line only with the winder, or with steel-mesh gloves.

“The other thing is, the line goes with the grapple, paying out from a cassette.” Gambiel showed them, taking one from his pocket. He fitted and locked the spindle-shaped cassette into the base of the grapple, drew out a meter or so of the nearly invisible line from its end, and clicked the grapple into the gas gun. “Attach the free end to a spare reel on your winder.” He took that from another pocket. “Fire the gun—” He pantomimed shooting up into the trees. “—and when the hooks are anchored, jerk it once to set a friction brake on the cassette. Then reel in and up you go.”

“What happens when all your line is wound in on the takeup reel?” Cuiller asked.

“You retrieve the grapple, discard both the old reel and cassette, fit new ones, take aim and fire again.” Gambiel shrugged.

“How much line in one setup?”

“Ten kilometers.”

“Okay. Simple enough. Let’s get into those harnesses now.”

“Why?” Krater asked, her eyebrows coming together. “Evasive action,” Cuiller answered. “If we meet anything down on the ground here, we may not be able to outrun it. Or outfight it. Our best course might be to disappear. Up into the treetops.”

The Jinxian nodded. “When you shoot, try to put the grapple as close to a main trunk as you can. Thicker branches there—more likely to hold your weight.”

“But the canopy held our whole ship pretty well,” Krater observed. “For a while.”

“True,” Gambiel said. “So, suit yourself.”

Cuiller stepped into the harness, found the adjustment points, and pulled them snug. He fitted the winder motor to his chest, figured out the simple lever controls for its reversible gearing, and clipped the first empty reel onto it. He put a cassette in the grapple, fed out a meter of the silk-like line, and found a loop at the harness belt’s left side to hold the grapple. The gun fitted into a flat holster on the right. The three of them divided up their supply of gas cartridges, cassettes, and reels.

“What happens when these run out?” Krater demanded, counting her share with her fingers.

“We won’t be here that long,” the commander said. He looked to Gambiel. “We still walking that way?” Cuiller pointed the direction, angling his hand around one side of the pentangle of underbrush.

The Jinxian paused, considered some inner sense, and nodded.

They walked along, deviating from a straight line only to pass around any trunks in their way.

“Whoop!” Krater shouted.

She suddenly floated away from Gambiel’s other side. Cuiller caught a glance of her white jumper flashing past and in front of them as she soared into the trees. She covered the ninety vertical meters in about twenty seconds, moving so quickly that at the end of her arc Krater barely had time to cock her feet up to reach for a toehold. The lieutenant disappeared into the canopy with the barest rustle of leaves.

“Serve her right if she cracks her head on a branch,” Gambiel said. “Should we follow her up?”

The commander pointed ahead. “Our goal is over that way. We’ll reach it faster walking on the ground.”

“We might lose her.”

“We’ve got visibility of what—?” He looked around. “A hundred meters down here? And less than ten meters up there in the leaves. If she gets lost, she can always drop down and we’ll spot her.”

“If we’re looking in the right direction.”

“She’ll probably scream or something,” Cuiller said.

“Yeah, she probably will.”

The two men walked on through the trees.

The sound came from Navigator’s panel. It was a strange burring—full of enough sonics to make a kzin’s neck ruff stand out from his chin. Nyawk-Captain searched his memory for a sound like it and finally decided it was not part of normal ship’s operation. Perhaps a malfunction? A small, 1st motor vibrating out of its bearings? But coming from inside the solid-state circuitry of the panel…? Then a wrinkle of memory surfaced, a significant detail from his early simulator drills with the Vengeance-class interceptor.

“You have a return from the hardsight,” he snarled over his shoulder.

“Wh-what-sir?”

“Wake up, root breath! Your station is active—and signaling you.”

“Ah, yes, Nyawk-Captain. I see that now. Sorry, sir.”

“Vigilance, Navigator. Now, describe the sighting.”

“It is still several light-hours distant…”

“Wake up, damn you! Give me facts in the order I need to know them. Is the anomaly along our prescribed course? Or somewhere off in the starfields?”

“The sighting’s deviation is… fourteen degrees from our projected—”

“So we would not otherwise have walked across it. Describe the contact.”

“Contact?”

Navigator’s surprise was genuine, because kzinti battle referents were precise. Passive objects might be “sighted.” Enemy vessels were a “contact.”

“What does your training say?” Nyawk-Captain replied. “This ship was designed to cruise with its hardsight range detector automatically probing along our forward path. Why else—if not to detect the Leaf Eaters’ improbable hulls?”

“To seek out Thrintun boxes?” Navigator replied brightly.

“Fool!” Nyawk-Captain spat.

“A witticism, sir! I abase myself.”

“For a Navigator who sleeps at station, you should have no comedy available to your mouth.”

“I humbly abase myself.”

“Describe the contact.”

“The hardsight return is in close proximity to a star, but not within its photosphere. So the contact is either in orbit itself or lodged on a planet—although the surrounding return is too weak to show such a body. There is one object… No, correction. At extreme gain I observe two contacts. One is sharp. The other is fainter and… fuzzy. It may be merely a reflection of the first. It certainly is close enough for that.”

“What are the dimensions?”

“At this range, Nyawk-Captain…”

“Is either one big enough to be a hull?”

“One of the reflections may be, but the distance…”

“Very well. Bend your fullest attention to refining your observations.”

“Shall we alter course? If we could draw nearer—”

“I will decide, when you give me further useful information.”

“As we move to pass that system, it’s possible that the two signals might show some degree of separation. From that we may learn—”

“Provide me with facts, Navigator.”

“Such is my only objective, Nyawk-Captain.”

“Very good. Be vigilant—and wakeful!”

Sally Krater hitched her feet up, pivoting about the liftpoint at her solar plexus, where the takeup reel whined and throbbed, After the soles of her moccasins broke through the leaf veils of the lower canopy, she slipped the clutch on the winding mechanism. The pull against her chest halted abruptly, but her mass continued to rise in a flattened arc. With Beanstalk’s reduced gravity, she slowly topped out, pitched forward to the length of her remaining line, and fell gently back through the leaves, swinging on the grapple anchored above her.

Krater suddenly realized that her back could be shattered against any heavy tree limb coming up behind her. She immediately dragged with her heels through the leaves, trying to kill her momentum. At this level, the greenery was dense but not cloying. The leaves were flat and veined, each about the size of her open hand. They clustered in billows around her, supported on springy whips that were either tiny branches or vines—she couldn’t yet say which. As Krater swung, her head, arms, and legs batted through masses of these leaves, stinging where her skin was exposed but not otherwise hurting her. When she looked down between her feet she could see random patches of brown ground. At the end of her last rising swing, she glimpsed in one of these patches two pale dots that might be Cuiller and Gambiel, far below and looking up.

Once her momentum was stopped and she hung straight down, she began to reel in slowly, rising meter by meter through the canopy. Within five meters she had reached the grapple, which had fallen across the first stout branch she had seen—up in what she wanted to call the canopy’s mid-level. She twisted slowly on her monofilament, conscious that the invisible strand ran just centimeters from her face. Any sudden motion, she realized, might clip her nose or an ear. She wondered how close she had come to cutting her own head off when she topped out and pitched after that first upward rush.

Krater’s thighpockets held a rescue kit, and from it she took a packet of fluorescent dye, suitable for marking a water landing. She broke it open and ran the exposed sponge lightly up and down the line, until it became a bright purple steak before her, like an etching laser flashing through smoke. With the remaining dye she reached up and soaked the line spindled in the grapple’s socket, then the slack taken up on the reel at her chest. She made a mental note to suggest this to Gambiel, when they got together again.

As she hung there, her mass started to spin lazily, and she put a hand against the branch above her to stop it. The sudden pressure dislodged something up there, and a stream of liquid cascaded down. It splashed off her shoulder and struck a bunch of leaves below and off to her left. She carefully tasted the drops clinging to her uniform: water; sweet and cool.

From her other pocket, she took out her field kit. It popped open and she keyed up the gas chromatograph and amino acid analyzer. The only samples within reach were that water and the leaves around her. Although she had no immediate plans to eat the leaves themselves, they would provide a clue to the nature of indigenous life on Beanstalk. The flora would reflect any general tendency toward toxins, heavy metals, or wrong-handed molecules. Balancing the kit on her raised knee, she tore a nearby leaf into bits and pressed them against the first sensor mesh. She dabbed a few of the drops that remained on her shoulder into the second mesh.

Something moved. Out of the tail of her eye, off to the right, she detected a pattern shift. From her undergraduate biology, Krater knew that human peripheral vision worked best at perceiving motion—a relic of primate development, both as hunter and prey. So, if she could sense something moving, it was moving.

“Just the wind,” she whispered to herself. And yet she knew that the motion had been localized. If it had been wind, the whole canopy would be surging around her now.

She turned her head slowly, swinging her nose centimeter by centimeter to the right. She did not dart with her eyes, but shifted them only in slow blinks. But before she could begin facing the whatever-it-was, the radio strapped at her wrist crackled.

“Sally, are you all right?” in Cuiller’s voice. The leaves off her right shoulder swirled with movement, as the something there darted quickly, but whether lunging or withdrawing, she couldn’t tell.

Krater had no time to fool with the hand-laser attached at her belt but instead slapped the release on her cable reel. She dropped three meters in near freefall. On the way, she bobbled and almost lost the field kit. Finally she caught it, snapped it closed, and slipped it back in her pocket. The kit would digest the vegetable sample and report later.

“I’m fine,” she called into the radio, although her voice was shaky.

“You shouldn’t just head off like that, Sally,” Cuiller said. His tone was masked by the tinny quality of the transmission.

“I wanted some samples.”

“Well, next time, ask first. Please?”

“Yes, sir. I’d like to come down now—with your permission.”

“Do so.”

She toggled the reel to unwind. In a few seconds her feet broke through the lowest layer of leaves into clear air.

The canopy above her did tremble then, like a breeze fluttering its lower edges. But Krater could swear that no wind had stirred since she climbed up there. She stared into the overgrowth, looking for anything that might be poking through and… reaching for her.

Nothing.

To rest her eyes, she looked away to the middle distance. From where she hung, about three meters below the canopy proper, the spaced tree trunks were just beginning to branch out into the flying buttresses and arching vaults that supported the greenery. The view was almost what a medieval mason might have seen, working in a sling up near a cathedral’s ceiling and looking out between the stone pillars. Except these pillars were green and alive—and all were suddenly swaying.

Expecting to see the ripples of an earthquake, she looked down at the forest floor, scanning the barren ground there. That was when she saw the iceberg, moving off to one side.

“Captain…” She kept her eyes on the shape.

“Right here, Sally.”

“Can you see me?”

“I do. You’re just below where you went up, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, still on the same grapple point. Now, do you see my arm?” She pointed it at the white object. “Follow that line and tell me what you see.”

“Trees and deepening gloom. What do you see?”

“A white shape. And it’s moving.”

“Jared!” It was Gambiel, on another radio channel. “I can see it, too, from here.” Had the weapons officer also wandered away from the commander? Krater wondered.

“Then you’re closer, Daff,” from Cuiller.

“Sally? How big would you say it is?” from Gambiel.

“I don’t know. It’s about… oh, six or seven trees off. Say a hundred and fifty meters over the ground. But it seems to be… squeezing between the trunks. That would make the thing more than twenty-five meters wide, wouldn’t it? And I’d guess it’s at least five or six times that long—but I can’t see all of the creature.”

“Can you see its head?” Daff asked.

“No. And I won’t swear that it has one.”

“Not important,” Gambiel said. “I know what it is anyway.”

“Bandersnatch?” from Cuiller.

“Yes, Captain. You’ve seen them before?”

“Once, on Jinx. They’re intelligent—and harmless.”

“Right. Sally? Which way is it moving? I can’t tell from down here.”

“Back the way we came, looks like,” she said. “Roughly parallel to our path.”

“I’ll call Jook,” Cuiller said. “Alert him, so he doesn’t do anything rash if it shows up at the ship. And Sally, why don’t you come down and join us now?”

“Aye, Captain.” She paid out line and dropped toward the forest floor.

Her feet touched the ground near where Cuiller was standing, finishing his call back to the ship. Gambiel walked up a moment later. She showed him the dye on the line and explained her reasoning. He nodded thoughtfully.

“But how do I recover the grapple?” she asked, looking up into the trees. “We can’t afford to lose one each time one of us goes up and comes down.”

The weapons tech reached over to her harness, locked the takeup reel, and thumbed the cover off a protected red stud on the control panel. He pushed it—unconsciously shoving her backward with his latent strength. “Step back and bend your knees,” he said.

She did so, and a moment later something fell out of the canopy. When it hit the ground, she recognized her grapple, with the barbs folded in.

“Radio-controlled unlocking device,” Gambiel said. “Don’t use it while you’re hanging around… Well, reel it in.”

Krater started the winder motor.

“Slowly!” Gambiel ordered. “Or you’ll catch that thing right in the tits.”

She slowed the winding and watched the folded grapple tumble and walk across the scoured dirt toward her. When it was a meter out, she braked the reel, picked up the grapple, and tucked it into her belt loop.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now, we go on,” Cuiller replied, pointing the way toward their objective, the calculated position of the deep radar’s return image.

Hugh Jook was wedged under—or now over, rather—the forward control yoke. He was bent around the station-keeping stirrups, stretching as far as he could go with one leg immobilized by the bubble cast. In one hand Jook held a collection of electronics chips, all banded and tagged with alphanumerics to show what each circuit was supposed to do. In the other hand was a socket-puller. He was poking into the guts of the overturned weapons pod, hoping to get enough response from it for the ship’s computer to run a diagnostic. Then it would be thumbs up or thumbs down: reconnect and rebrace the unit, or bleed away its residual charge, cut it apart with a hand-laser, and dump it out on the ground.

With his head inside the access panels, he never saw the Bandersnatch approach Callisto, even though the main window stripe was right behind his ear and oriented up toward the trees. His first sign of trouble was the lurch the ship took as the white beast nuzzled it.

“Yo!” he sang out and straightened up.

The exposed hull scritched and squeaked under the impact of the Bandersnatch’s sensory bristles. Jook looked out into a squash of thick white tubules, like a pot’s view of a scrub brush at work. Although nothing there looked like an eye, he had the uncanny feeling the giant was peering in at him.

“Leave it alone, and it will leave you alone,” Cuiller had told him, when the ground party had called in their sighting of a Bandersnatch. “Nothing on its body is small enough, or delicate enough, to be harmed by our short-range weapons. And there’s nothing much it can do to the ship, even if it sits on the hull.”

“Right,” Jook had agreed over the radio and dismissed the threat. Besides, Bandersnatchi were known to be harmless—and quite intelligent.

But now, with the mass of pallid flesh pushing against the side of Callisto, he wasn’t so sure.

Jook unbent himself, steadied with his hands against the jostling that the hull was taking, and tried to reach the panels of the control yoke. He had no intention of opening hostilities, but he hoped the beast would survive the scatter from Callisto’s ion drive when he departed the scene.

A couple of times he got his fingers up on the buttons for the engine initiation sequence. But each time he tried to key it, the ship lurched and his hand slipped. Then it didn’t matter, because the natural light coming through the window faded entirely. The Bandersnatch was riding up over the ship. It was too late to break away, even at full thrust. Jook’s ears popped.

That had to be a pressure variation, but he hadn’t keyed any changes in the atmospheric specs. He looked around. The main hatch, above him and now thirty-five degrees off local vertical with the hull’s current orientation, had worked open-falling inward. The hatch panel was fabricated of aligned-crystal vanadium steel. It was set in a vanadium-steel rim and keyed into the standardized opening in their General Products hull by lipping it both inside and out. Short of a patch of GP monomolecule itself, the hatch was the strongest possible seal that human technology could devise. And yet the Bandersnatch had punched it out like a baby poking his thumb through a piecrust.

Ripples of the Bandersnatch’s white underside ballooned into the opening. At first Jook thought it was just normal pressure expansion, the weight of the animal forcing its underside into a new cavity as the Bandersnatch settled its mass over the ship. But as he watched, the volume of white flesh inside the hatch grew. It began lapping around the cross bracing for the portside inertial thrusters and weapons pods. As the flesh made contact there, the Bandersnatch’s belly vibrated and the metal began to scream.

It also began to dissolve. Big, fuming drops of fluid wept from the point of contact and fell into the bilges. Wherever they touched, except on the hull material itself, that spot also started smoking and dissolving.

Jook moved. He climbed along struts and down handholds, swinging his stiffened leg over obstacles and bashing it twice. The pain didn’t slow him down. He made it past the waist, where his nominal duty station was, and kept on going, around the hyperdrive engine. In the rear, about as far forward from the tail as the main hatch was back from the bow, the hull had another opening. This one was smaller and fitted with an airlock. He thought briefly about hiding inside the lock, but he remembered it was constructed of the same vanadium steel that had failed in the main hatch. No, his only option was to climb through while that end of the ship was still uncovered by the creature’s bulk, get to the ground before the Bandersnatch noticed him, and run like hell, or as fast as his bad leg permitted.

To lower himself from the lock entrance, Hugh Jook pulled on a climbing harness and gathered up the grapple, launcher, line cassettes, and gas cartridges. Almost as an afterthought, he broke out a laser rifle and a personal radio.

While dry-locking through, he punched up the radio and whispered into it.

“Captain…!”

Nothing, not even static. “Jared!”

Still nothing.

Of course—inside the lock even the strongest signal would be blocked. He’d have to wait until he was outside and clear before calling the ground party.

The outer hatch opened, and Jook was looking up into a billowing wall of rough, white flesh. There was no time to set the grapple or pay out line. He levered himself up on the hatch coaming, scrambled over the ceramic hull surface trailing down toward the tail, got his good leg lowermost to take up his impact with the ground, and dropped.

He fell over on his bad leg and cried out—then looked up to see if the Bandersnatch was interested in falling on top of him.

It wasn’t. Instead, it rolled back and forth over the hull, driving the bow down and bending out of plumb the trees that had wedged it right and left. The Bandersnatch worked its rasp deeper and deeper into the main hatch, and Jook could faintly hear the screech of breaking metal inside.

Still, he didn’t trust the white beast’s absorption in its task. As soon as his breath was back, Jook picked himself up and hobbled into the next pentagonal clearing. There he set the line cassette in his grapple, loaded the gun, and fired up into the trees. After the few seconds it took to anchor and set the grapple, he was soaring up into the green vault.

“I can now give you more detailed information, sir, on the hardsight contacts.”

“Good, uff, Navigator. Uff. Continue.”

Nyawk-Captain ran full out, stretching his long muscles. At full extension, his forward-reaching claws just grazed the rack that held the brainbox of their long-range starfixer; his hind claws ticked against the panels of the weapons locker. He was exercising in a variable gravity field that could be rippled to simulate ground passing under his pads. At present, the field was going under him at twice his own body length every second. He had to stretch to keep up—or be shoved back into the locker.

“We are definitely seeing two contacts, not one with a reflection,” Navigator said. “The brighter return is the smaller—an absolute return of all radiation. That would indicate an infinite density, which I cringe to propose to you.”

“How big is this infinitely dense source?”

“Small, Nyawk-Captain. No bigger than a kzin’s torso.”

“And it orbits a star—is it dead star matter itself?”

“No, sir. It does orbit a star, but on a planet. I now have a layered return shadowing this planet’s lithosphere and iron core. The object is on the surface, or near to it. The second contact—”

Nyawk-Captain growled him to silence. He then reached out in his stride and killed the gravity field, ending his run on a single, four-footed pounce into the middle of the exercise area. The cabin steamed with the heat of his exertions—but neither of his crew members would dare complain.

Navigator held the thought and obeyed silence while his captain stretched in place and considered the implications of that hard return.

Infinite density. Small volume. But not enough mass to push the object deep into the planet’s gravity well. Those observations could lead to only one conclusion: a Thrintun storage container, protected by its own time-warping field.

Honor and glory, a full name and heirs, the personal friendship of the Riit, all would go to the discoverer of such a box. The artifacts concealed in those few that the kzinti had found in the past often yielded good weapons—or the dues to improving their own armaments.

Navigator and Weaponsmaster would be having similar thoughts, Nyawk-Captain realized. It was time to distract them.

“Continue,” he grunted.

“The second contact is bigger, but not as dense. It presents a volume suitable for a ship’s hull—a small one, but still capable of supporting a crew, drive systems, and weapons. I hypothesize it is a Leaf-Eaters’ hull, such as they make as gifts to the humans.”

“Is it near the other object?”

“Almost on top of it.”

Nyawk-Captain casually ran a foreclaw into his mouth, probing the gaps between his teeth. It was a habit his father would not approve of, but it relieved stress while he thought.

“Shall we alter course, sir?” Navigator prompted.

Nyawk-Captain growled him into silence.

The Last Fleet followed Cat’s Paw with a lag of ten days and a leeway of two days. Those two days were calculated to allow Cat’s Paw to make minor course corrections, take evasive action, and conduct a brief survey of Margrave’s defensive positions before Nyawk-Captain began his attack run against the system. The ten days would allow the human forces time to reach their maximum dispersal, following the near-simultaneous attacks by Paw and the other outriders, before the fleet struck behind him.

Timing was everything—but Nyawk-Captain knew he operated within a window of opportunity, not under split-second coordination… And what an opportunity was now presenting itself!

He could, of course, contact the Last Fleet and request a delay in the planned attack. He would ask for enough time to allow him to alter course, stop, and retrieve the Thrintun box. A few days at most. But then, Nyawk-Captain would be honor-bound to explain his reasons to Lehruff, who was the commanding admiral. And Lehruff would want to share in the discovery.

Of course, if he could move in and get out quickly enough, Nyawk-Captain might retrieve the box and still make his rendezvous with Margrave well ahead of the fleet. All honor and glory would then come to him alone, when he eventually produced the Thrintun artifacts. His two crew members, being subordinates and inferiors in rank, would defer to him on the discovery. He might even share with them for form’s sake—a sixteenth of the value for each would be a graceful gesture.

Of course, if Nyawk-Captain contacted Lehruff, he would also have to report the General Products hull that lay in close proximity. It was one hull only and not a large one; such a vessel had low probability of preceding and leading a massive attack by the Leaf-Eaters and their human puppets. Yet that was how Lehruff might read it. He would then want confirmations. Analyses. Councils of war. He might even send other ships to investigate the contact. Reason for delay. And an excuse to take the prize from Cat’s Paw.

More likely that hull belonged to a lone prospector. Some renegade Leaf-Eater or human looking for wealth, mineral or otherwise, far beyond human Space. And finding it. Nyawk-Captain had to allow for the possibility of a fight. But it would be a short one. It would be over and Cat’s Paw would be away in less than two days—their established margin for error and reconnaissance.

He would chance it.

“Alter course, Navigator… Let us investigate this Leaf-Eater’s hull which stands between us and victory.”

“Jared!”

Cuiller raised the radio to his mouth without even breaking stride. “Right here, Hugh.”

“It’s eating the ship.” The voice was so faint and breathy that Cuiller thought he must have missed part of the transmission.

“Say again, please.”

“The Bandersnatch is eating our ship.” Jook’s words were louder and more distinct that time. Still crazy, though.

“Wait one, Hugh,” the commander said. He turned to his weapons officer. “You hear that?”

Gambiel shook his head. “Heard it, but I don’t believe it.”

“How would a Bandersnatch eat the hull?” Krater asked.

“It’s got a rudimentary mouth scoop,” the Jinxian answered, “with a pretty solid rasp inside, like a snail’s tongue. It can secrete digestive juices, too. But I don’t know why it would want to.”

“Eat a General Products hull?” Krater repeated.

“Not possible,” Gambiel ruled.

“All right, stand to,” Cuiller ordered. “Ah, Hugh,” into the radio. “We’re coming back now. Take care of yourself and… don’t disturb the Bandersnatch, whatever it does.”

“Not on your life, Captain.”

“Let’s go,” Cuiller told his party. “And at the first sight of one of them—get up into the trees.”

They nodded and turned back on their trail. Without a word passing, they all broke into a jog.

As they went by the patch of young undergrowth with the fallen trunk in the middle, Cuiller began to understand it better. The “groundskeepers” were Bandersnatchi, which fed by cruising between the trees and scooping in whatever vegetable and animal matter fell from the canopy. They were intelligent enough to understand the ecology that supported their existence. They would be wary of a dead tree and leave space for a new to grow and continue the life of the forest. From that perspective, a Bandersnatch might attack the ship as a threat to the ecology—or even, marginally, in retaliation for any damage Callisto had done when it tried to land in the branches and fell through.

But Bandersnatchi were not known for immediate aggression. Rather, they had often exhibited heroic patience, dying in large numbers at the hands of less perceptive sentients before they would make their hurts known. On some planets they had even agreed to be hunted for human sport, accepting a calculated loss for the stimulation of the chase.

On the other hand, Bandersnatchi were a living relic of Slaver times, with germ plasm too massive to mutate and needs too simple to allow their race to die out totally. As possibly the galaxy’s oldest living intelligent species, they could well have purposes and prejudices wholly unknown to humans. Defense of territory might be one of their hidden prerogatives.

But still, an aggressive and vengeful Bandersnatch just did not fit the profile.

Yet the evidence which confronted them when they arrived at the landing site could not be talked away. Callisto lay fully against the ground, with two broken trees squashed under her bow. The ceramic outer coating was scuffed and abraded in long swathes and ragged patches. The paired metal horns at her tail, which had been fitted for external weapons and the ion drive, were now broken off and scattered in pieces over the forest floor. Every hatch cover and through-hull fitting had been knocked out.

Cuiller walked up to the main hatchway and stuck his head through. The smell was overpowering: a mixture of acids and ketones, spoiled plastics, burned metals, and what he could only describe as elephant vomit. Holding his breath against it, his eyes watering, he looked down the length of the interior, seeing with the light that came though the masked windows and the newly worn places. He looked for as long as he could, before the fumes drove him back. The hull was nearly cleaned out. A network of optical-quality glass fibers, apparently indigestible, had been discarded in one corner like a salt-encrusted fishnet. A few curling panels of fiberglass cloth, with the resins leached out, were all that remained from the sleeping cocoons. The hyperdrive engine, thruster pods, weapons pods, struts and bracing had completely disappeared—unless the sludge of reeking green bile that ran the length of the bottom curve were their only remains.

The General Products hull, of course, was not even scratched.

Cuiller beat his fist against it, just once, for no good reason.

“Where’s Hugh?” Krater asked.

They looked around. Cuiller actually hoped they wouldn’t—

“Up here!” the navigator called from a distance and dropped slowly out of the canopy, suspended in his climbing rig. His toes touched the ground and, favoring his stiff leg, he retrieved the grapple.

“Where did the Bandersnatch go?” Cuiller asked.

“South.” Jook pushed a thumb over his shoulder. “Right after lunch.”

“What did you manage to save from—all this?” The commander waved his hand around at the hull.

“Myself. A rifle. This harness.”

“Any food? Water?” Gambiel asked.

“No time.”

“Why didn’t you lift?” Cuiller asked. “As we agreed you would.”

“Again, no time. The thing was up on the hull before I even saw it. It had punched out the hatch and was chowing down on the infrastructure before I could get to the controls. Too late then.”

“You should have been watching for it. We called to warn you.”

“I was trying to repair the weapons module. And anyway, we both agreed Bandersnatchi wouldn’t harm the ship. What did you expect me to do?”

“All right. Conceded, we were both wrong.”

“Can we salvage anything?” Gambiel asked.

“See for yourself,” Cuiller gestured at the ship. “Take shallow breaths.”

“We’re marooned, aren’t we?” Krater asked as the Jinxian moved toward the hull.

“Yes. It’s almost as if the Bandersnatch wanted to make sure we couldn’t leave,” Cuiller said. “And we never did get off a position report. So no one will be coming for us, either.”

“I don’t—” Krater looked suddenly pale. “I mean, I didn’t—” She turned away and stood looking up into the trees.

“Not your fault, Sally,” the commander offered, but it sounded weak even in his own ears.

Cuiller went over to the abandoned cowling of the ion drive and started to sit down. He stopped and checked the surface for corrosive liquids. Finding none, he slumped on the bent metal.

“You’ve been up there, Sally,” he said quietly, waving at the treetops. “What do you deduce from your observations?”

“Oh! I took some samples.” She turned around and slipped the field kit out of her pocket. She opened it and keyed in a series of queries. The device beeped at her.

Jook drifted closer to listen. Soon he was sitting on the other side of the cowl, but with his back to Cuiller, looking away into the forest. His posture suggested depression and a sense of rejection by his companions. He’d snap out of it, Cuiller decided.

“There’s water up there,” Krater reported, “and the kit says nothing in it will harm us. The leaves—all that I got to test, so far—aren’t poisonous, but they’re no more nutritious than any other wad of cellulose and chlorophyll. There may be game up in the branches. At least, something played peek-a-boo with me up there. Whether it’s edible, or would find us so, I can’t tell. But the native ecology seems to be generally nonpoisonous. Bandersnatchi like it.”

“So we won’t die of thirst,” Cuiller summed up for her. “And we can hunt for long as the charges on our rifles hold out.”

“That’s about it,” she agreed.

Gambiel had come back from the ship. Cuiller noticed that when he joined their group he stood, not beside Krater, but across from her. The Jinxian glanced at her only occasionally while she reported, and he spent most of his time looking over her shoulder scanning the forest on the far side of the hull. When Cuiller thought of it, Jook’s chosen position—sitting behind and facing away from his commanding officer—was not a sign of psychological separation after all. He was watching Cuiller’s back.

Before, when the three of them had gone off into the trees, Cuiller and his crew had walked separately. They had raced off to look at sights that interested them, leapt freely up into the canopy, and generally acted like a cadet class on leave. Now they were more wary. That was good. It might save their lives—for as long as they might have on Beanstalk. It was time, right now, to give them some purpose.

“Daff, see what you can make from all the metal lying around out here. Cups or basins would be nice. A jar or canteen would be even better. But think twice before you do any cutting or pounding. Don’t attract visitors.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Sally, take a rifle and get up into the trees again. See if you can bring down one of your ‘peek-a-boo’ critters. They might be intelligent and in communication with the Bandersnatchi down here—”

“I don’t really think—”

“But if one of them holds still long enough, shoot it.”

“Captain, we don’t need to worry about hunting for food just yet.”

“Noted. But I want you to test the indigenous fauna before we eat up all our pocket rations. Anything you see like fruit or green shoots, collect them, too.”

“Yes, sir.”

She turned away and readied her grapnel launcher.

“You have any assignments for me?” Jook asked.

“If your leg is solid enough—”

“I might mention that our situation is hopeless, Captain.”

“So?”

“Our long-term prospects are terrible. We are all alone on a planet that’s never been charted, let alone visited by other humans. No one knows where we are—or probably much cares, because our mission had such a low priority to begin with. We are on the marches of kzinti territory—technically unclaimed but not likely to be unknown to them. We’ve got Bandersnatchi prowling around here, and suddenly they don’t like us, either. The best we can hope for is mere survival, but not much more. And, unless I miss my guess, even that’s a long shot unless we find some kind of vitamin supplements. We won’t last more than a couple of months hunting the local game in the treetops. So why should we do anything but give up, lie down, and die?”

“Because I said so,” Cuiller said grimly. “And I’m still in command.”

Jook straightened up. “Oh, well then, that’s different. What do you want me to do?”

“Follow Sally when she goes up. Take station behind her, and anything that tries to kill her—you kill it first.”

“Easy enough.” The Wunderlander stood up, kneaded the bubble cast for a moment, and readied his rig. “What are you going to do, Jared?”

“Get some exercise by kicking myself for landing us in this mess.”

“Fair enough.”

An hour later, Gambiel called the commander over to sort out a collection of gear he had recovered from the ground around the ship and from a few protected corners inside the hull. The weapons officer had already arranged his catch by classification.

In addition to various pieces of bent metal, he had found three battery packs for the lasers; a bucketful of damaged circuit chips that might be reworked into some kind of transmitter, given time and enough optic fiber; and half of the autodoc. What remained of the latter provided them with some unlabeled vials that might be painkillers, antibacterials, growth hormone, or vitamin supplements. The tags were all electronic, for use by the expert system that ran the ‘doc. It didn’t need to know English equivalents.

“So, that’s our inventory,” Gambiel said at last, corralling the glass vials.

Cuiller told him to hang on to them. Maybe Krater, with her background in biology, could tell the vials apart by smell or taste or something. He supposed she also knew enough basic anatomy to deal with sprains—like continued attention to Jook’s knee—and other manual medical techniques. If not, Cuiller had a little knowledge of first aid and could make do with bandage and splits in a pinch.

Gambiel had found nothing of the ‘cycler. So they had only the food in their pockets, unless Krater’s hunt was successful, or they figured out a way to bring down an adult Bandersnatch, or found a clutch of fresh buds.

“You want to try making a fire with that laser?” Cuiller asked.

“Burning what?”

“How much of a wedge do you think you could cut out of one of these trunks without knocking it down?”

“That’s green, sappy wood. Give off a lot of smoke.”

“We can stand it. None of us is going to smell too good in a day or two.”

“I was thinking of our white friends. They might be sensitive to fire under the canopy.”

“You’re right. I—”

The sound was on them before they could hear it: the rippling crackle of tortured atmosphere parting before a heavy body traveling faster than air molecules knew how to move. What they consciously heard was the dap of a sonic boom—the air moving back in the wake of whatever had snapped it apart—followed by echoes of that first, searing push against the atmosphere.

Cuiller looked up, expecting to see a contrail in the sky and finding only the green gloom of the canopy above them.

“That was a ship,” Gambiel said. “In a hurry, too.”

“Of course. Have any idea what kind?”

“I didn’t hear any reaction thrusters. They could be on gravity polarizers.”

“And this close to the Patriarchy’s back door… Can kzinti detect a General Products hull at long range?”

“The same way we go about finding a stasis-box,” Gambiel said. “Keep probing with deep radar and study the return images. Our hull comes up cloudier than a Slaver box, but still defined.”

“Ouch! Let’s get up into the trees.”

“What about these?” Gambiel pointed to the hoarded supplies.

“You take the batteries and medicines. I’ll take the circuit chips. Leave the scraps—no one’s going to eat them.”

The Jinxian began filling his pockets.

“Captain, what was that?” Jook called on the radio.

“Company. Daff and I are coming up to join you. Stay put and—until we know more—stay off the radio.”

In reply, Jook keyed the transmit twice. Two low bursts of static that could be read as “Aye-aye.”

Cuiller nodded silently at Jook’s quick and tactful thinking.

“The kzinti won’t be out of their ionization envelope yet,” Gambiel observed. “They can’t hear our radio transmissions yet.”

“Still…” Cuiller took out his grapple and launcher, hooked up a line cassette, and took aim overhead. “When we get up there, Daff, go as high as you can. You’re our best at identifying kzinti ships by their silhouette. See if you can spot and evaluate the newcomers.”

“Do my best.”

They fired their grapples and swung up through the leaves. As soon as Gambiel was stabilized on a limb near his grapple, he released it, aimed higher, shot, and slithered away after it. Cuiller surveyed the local jungle. Radio would carry to the kzinti, but not voice.

“Hugh!… Sally!” he shouted.

Cuiller looked around, parting clusters of flat leaves to stare into the next meter-wide pocket of air. He called again, stepped over to another branch, recovered and reshot his grapple, and swung on a short arc toward where he thought his navigator and communications officer had gone up.

“Sally!…”

“Captain, you’re scaring the game.” It was Krater’s voice, but she was invisible, screened by the foliage.

“Belay the hunting, we’ve got visitors.”

“I know. If you keep shouting like that, you’ll scare them, too.”

“Well, just hang on, because—”

“Heads up, everybody! Coming through!” Small and distant, Gambiel’s voice drifted down to them. It was followed immediately by the groan of branches being forced aside—much like the first passage Callisto had made through the treetops—accompanied by the sizzle of wet leaves burning. Cuiller could smell hot iron and dying vegetation.

The question was, where would the mass of the ship come down? If it was right over their heads, they’d never have time to get out of its way before the kzinti ship knocked them loose and crushed them among the collapsing vines and branches. But if it was coming off to one side or another, then any step might move them to safety—or take them into the line of trouble. No way to know…

“Hang on!” Cuiller called out, and braced himself.

The wall of leaves that defined the edge of his vision bulged inward and then dissolved in a golden tracery of sparks and incandescent veins. Beneath the fire was the scorching flank of a kzinti warship. Cuiller thought at first it was red-hot metal—or some ceramic, equally heated. Then, from the uniform coloring, he guessed the hemispheric section was simply painted red. It disappeared below before he had a chance to make up his mind. His one glance left the impression of a globular hull. From its chord, it seemed small. He guessed it was only fifteen or twenty meters in diameter. Then the gap in the trees closed on a blackened twist of branch and a fume of smoke.

Cuiller reset his grapple and lowered himself into the feathery bottom layer of the canopy to watch the kzinti ship land. From the whirr of winding motors that came to him through the leaves, he knew the rest of his crew had the same idea.

At this close range, the Leaf-Eaters’ special hull showed clearly on a radar scanner working at normal intensities. The spindle gleamed and sparkled under the weakly graded return of the foliage layer covering the planet that Navigator said was chart reference KZ-5-1010. Nyawk-Captain made an estimate of the hull’s size—more than 200 cubits in length—and, from this, confirmed the vessel type with Weaponsmaster.

Nyawk-Captain piloted an entry through the green layer, sliding among the interlaced branches and through the nets of vine. He counted on the residual heat in Paw’s hull to burn through, where the gravity polarizer could not break through, the entangling vegetation.

He wanted to place his ship at visual inspection distance from the strange hull. Among these closely spaced tree trunks, that meant landing practically on top of it—too near for evasive maneuvers. Cat’s Paw went down with every weapon fully charged, ready, and aimed. Yet his greatest weapon against the Leaf-Eater hulls, Nyawk-Captain knew, would be the gravity polarizer itself. At the first sign of hostility, he would use an acceleration forty times the pull of the kzinti homeworld to stomp anything inside that ship into paste.

When the last branches between him and the enemy ship had burned away, Nyawk-Captain focused his optics. The first thing his eyes registered were holes in the hull material. Then scrapings on its surface and the litter of metal pieces all around it. Finally, the trees that bent under its weight and the odd angle at which it lay among them. All of this, plus the total lack of reaction to his coming, gave Nyawk-Captain pause.

It was a dead ship, certainly. But how recently dead? And had its crew died in the accident that made it dead?

Given the Patriarchy’s reports on the indestructibility of the Leaf-Eater hulls, this vessel might have been killed many years and light-years from this spot, could have drifted over the distance of time and space and entered the planet’s atmosphere as unguided as a meteor, crashing among these trees. But then, Nyawk-Captain would expect some kind of cratering around the ship and more damage to the surrounding forest.

It might also have landed here long ago, and then the crew had suffered some accident. The ship would have deteriorated—all but the indestructible hull—under the force of time. But how would this version account for the trees crushed under the bows?

No, to tell the full story, he needed a personal reconnaissance of the derelict.

“Navigator, break out full body armor for both of us,” he ordered. “Weaponsmaster, you stay at post. Destroy any danger that may approach. We will neutralize this threat—if any threat remains here—before going on to take our prize.” The two crew members growled assent and went about their tasks.

Body armor came in a single articulated piece, like a hinged kzinti skin. It fitted solidly across the back, double-folded at the sides, and clasped with a tight seam up the belly. It was not designed as an environment suit, however, and covered only the backs and outer periphery of the arms, the fronts and sides of the legs. The attack surfaces. By rolling into a fetal crouch, a kzin wearing this armor could make himself practically invulnerable. The substructure was hardened steel, the surface an ablative material that would shed a ballistic slug or energy beam with equal facility. Of course, in that curled position, it could still be blown apart by explosives or melted with sufficient heat. But what kzin would crouch and wait that long, when he could fight?

Powered joints and solenoid-driven claws—connected to the kzin’s own muscles with feedback pads—increased the wearer’s strength and speed fivefold. The helmet’s visor was fitted with devices that increased the senses of sight, hearing, and smell; offered an air mask to protect against poison gases, dusts and pollens; and connected the wearer with his companions through laser and electromagnetic telemetry and communications.

The body armor offered wonderful enhancements for a warrior—at the cost of two disadvantages. Donning it, inside the cramped spaces of a Scream of Vengeance-class interceptor, required the skills of an acrobat. Maneuvering it into and through the ship’s tiny airlock required those same acrobatics combined with insufferable patience.

But, once he got his head into the open air, Nyawk-Captain hardly needed the helmet’s filter enhancements to answer his earlier questions. His head swam with the scent of a dozen different long-chain polymers, dissolved into organic soup. He knocked the filters’ sensitivity back three notches and took shallow breaths.

While Navigator finished his contortions and cycled the lock, Nyawk-Captain approached the abandoned hulk. His eyes quickly adjusted to the forest gloom and began noting details: the position of various metal pieces, the indentations they left in the ground, other impressions. As he moved toward the hull, another complex scent came up, fainter than the scream of broken plastics. Dirt, sweat, pheromones…

Humans! The ship had come here under a human crew. But Nyawk-Captain could smell no blood. So whatever had become of them, the crew had clearly survived the crash. He bent toward one of the marks in the ground and sniffed it. The odors clung to it, a human footprint.

Employing the suit’s visual enhancers, Nyawk-Captain traced others of these marks. All of them had a certain formal similarity, just as all kzinti paws were made to the same design. But there were variations in the size and depth of the impressions. He counted four separate sets of these prints, matching them with their right and left curves.

“What do you—?” Navigator began as he came up.

“Stay back!” Nyawk-Captain waved him away.

Placing his own pads carefully, he walked in circles, tracking each pair of prints. They moved back and forth over the crash site, now pausing and sinking fractionally into the hardened forest floor, now skimming and scuffing lightly over the dirt. Eventually, however, each track ended abruptly—a digging in with the toes, and then gone. Nyawk-Captain looked up, up, into the treetops. He knew little enough about human physiology, but he could guess that not even the sons of Hanuman could make such a leap. But where else, then, would they be?

“This is an empty hole, My Captain,” Navigator observed.

“But not too long empty. I can still smell them.”

“Yes, but what of it? This ship—the only hard contact in this system—cannot interfere with us. We have nothing to fear from naked humans, wherever they may have gone. We should immediately retrieve the Thrintun artifact and then leave here.”

“Well reasoned, Navigator, if not properly expressed for your superior officer’s ears. We still have the question of what could have caused such damage to this hull.”

“An academic inquiry, at best.”

“Perhaps. Still, we shall—”

The sound came softly at first, through the aural enhancers. Nyawk-Captain thought it might be the creep of the forest floor under thermal stresses. Standing among the lattice pattern of upright trunks, he could not at first place it. He swiveled his helmet to scan the background.

“Weapons—!” he tongued the comm switch, then let the call die in his throat. A gliding white shape, easily three or four times the bulk of his ship, had loomed behind and settled over Cat’s Paw. Its flesh would be blocking Nyawk-Captain’s radio pulse. And besides, Weaponsmaster should already be aware of his predicament.

“Best we find cover,” he told Navigator.

“Where?”

“In here,” Nyawk-Captain replied, and sprang toward the nearest kzin-sized hole in the Leaf-Eater hull.

They crouched against the inside curve of the spindle, gasping in the waves of resinous vapor that assailed their noses until they could fasten their masks. At the same time, the carborundum claws extruding from their armored feet tried for purchase on the slick surface in an effort to keep them from slipping into the fuming liquid that sloshed in the bilges. Through a scar in the alien hull’s outer coating, Nyawk-Captain watched the white mass writhing over his ship. He briefly caught the flash of a hard, crystalline edge under the Whitefood’s bulk. Something dripped off that edge.

Whatever Weaponsmaster decided to do, it were best he acted quickly. Nyawk-Captain was beginning to understand what processes had eaten away everything but the hull of this human ship.

Suddenly, the huge pale body trembled, bulged upward—then blossomed outward in a mist of blood. Bright, red drops of it coalesced on the transparent surface through which Nyawk-Captain was looking. These were followed by strings and streamers of red flesh that slid and fell out of the blood cloud.

When the dripping and pattering of raw flesh stopped, Nyawk-Captain and Navigator climbed out of their hiding place. The stench of organic chemicals had disappeared in the aroma of fresh, warm meat. Navigator swung up his visor and mask, pulled a gooey strand off the outside of the Leaf-Eater hull, and sucked it off his fingers.

“Delicious!”

Nyawk-Captain, who had been studying the flank of Cat’s Paw which emerged from the garland of meat and bones, stopped to try his own taste. After weeks of eating reconstituted meat and artificial proteins, the flavor was wonderful. Delicate, like grik-grik caught in mid-spring, so that the first flush of adrenaline barely touched it. Satisfying, like a haunch of oolerg that had been fed on grain and then run until the acids of fatigue had hilly flavored the meat. Sweet as… It was, Nyawk-Captain decided, whatever flavor he wanted it to be. That was how the Whitefoods had been engineered to taste.

“Enough. We waste time,” he told Navigator, then switched to the comm link. “Weaponsmaster? That was quick—”

“I abase myself, Nyawk-Captain!”

“Explain.”

“In dislodging the Whitefood, I used too much force for proximity to such an inert mass. I have damaged our ship.”

“Catalog the damages.”

“Primary and secondary lifting plates, short-range weapons, long-range communications, navigational and sensory antennas.”

“Can you effect repairs?”

“Eventually, if we carry the right spares.”

“Can you defend against another attack by the Whitefoods?”

“With warning—and I shall guard against their approach—the long-range weapons should be more than effective.”

“Begin working on the ship, then. Navigator will assist you. Out.”

“And what will you be doing while we repair the ship?” Navigator asked in a tone that bordered on insolence. “Sir.”

“I will go after the Thrintun box.”

“Yes, the box. That most important box. For which you have jeopardized our mission and put at risk an entire kzinti fleet!”

Nyawk-Captain felt his armor turning, almost of its own volition, to face this errant crew member. It was bending to assume a defensive crouch, conforming to his will almost without conscious command. “Do you have more to say?” he asked stiffly, fully expecting a shrill scream of challenge.

“No, Nyawk-Captain.”

“Then understand this. If we are late for the rendezvous, all three of us will be whistling vacuum—unless we have a suitable peace offering for Admiral Lehruff. That box is now our life. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Nyawk-Captain.”

“Good. You should start on your work. The ship must be ready to lift by the time I return.”

The chastened kzin began the process of climbing in through the airlock.

Nyawk-Captain tongued his comm switch. “Weaponsmaster. Give me bearing and range to the second hardsight contact.”

“Those systems are currently inoperative, sir.”

“Curse it,” Nyawk-Captain said mildly. “Can you rig a hand-held unit?”

“I can modify a ranging sight.”

“Do so at once, and pass it through the airlock.”

“Yes, sir, but I cannot guarantee its accuracy within a thousand cubits.”

“It need only give the container’s general direction and a sense of its proximity.”

“You will have that, at least, sir.”

While he waited for the new tool, Nyawk-Captain used the suit’s claw to cut fillets from the ring of blasted meat girdling Cat’s Paw.

Watching from his hanging point in the forest canopy, Cuiller almost cheered when the Bandersnatch slid over the dome of the kzinti ship. And he blinked back tears of rage mixed with envy when the kzinti weapons blew the creature apart. There, but for the few milliseconds that had padded Jook’s reaction time, might stand Callisto, ready to fly.

Cuiller noted that one kzin remained on guard outside the ship, clad in efficient-looking armor, while the other returned inside on some business. Then the first retrieved something through the hatch and headed off through the trees.

Although Cuiller’s sense of direction had suffered somewhat from remaining suspended in his spider harness, twisting among the branches, for almost an hour, he had no doubt what heading the kzin was taking. The Patriarchy possessed its own form of deep radar.

Time to begin thinking like a soldier, he told himself, instead of a tourist.

The first problem was to coordinate his team without radio transmissions or—given that the walking kzin’s armor was probably enhanced—too much shouting. He dropped cautiously down through the leaf screen into the clear space below the canopy. The whirr of his winder motor must have signaled the others, for first Krater, then Gambiel and Jook, also dropped into view.

“Now what, Boss?” Jook asked conversationally.

“We’re going to keep out of the Big Guy’s way, aren’t we?” from Krater.

“Not if we want to get that stasis-box,” Cuiller answered, trying not to whisper.

“Get it—and take it where?” Krater asked. “And how?”

“First things first.”

“What I can’t figure,” from Gambiel, “is why the Bandersnatchi on this planet are so hostile. It’s not their pattern. And they can’t evolve.”

“You’re assuming we’ve seen more than one specimen,” Cuiller said. “The one the kzinti blasted down there may be the same that ate Callisto, coming back for dessert. Anyway, that’s something to think about later. Right now, we’ve got a fully armed and alerted kzin on the loose… Did anyone see climbing gear on that body armor?”

“He doesn’t need it,” Gambiel replied. “With his power-driven claws, he can go up one of these tree trunks at a dead run.”

“How much does that suit weigh?” Cuiller asked.

“Seventy-five kilos.”

“That means kzin and suit together mass almost three hundred kilos.” Cuiller experimentally flexed his knees and pumped his back sharply—and bobbed like a toy on his almost invisible thread. “He won’t have much mobility among these springy branches and vines, will he?”

“Then he’d better pick exactly the right tree to climb,” Gambiel agreed.

“I have a decision to make,” the commander announced. “Do we all follow Kzin One and try to find the stasis-box ahead of him? Or does some part of our force stay here, to keep an eye on Kzin Two and the ship? Opinions?”

“Kzinti Two and Three,” Gambiel corrected.

“I thought this interceptor class was a two-man affair.”

Gambiel shrugged, and started his own bobbing dance. “Someone had to fight off the Bandersnatch from inside. It wasn’t done by automatics.”

“All right, then it’s three kzinti and a ship to divide among four pairs of eyes,” Cuiller noted.

“I think we should stay together;” Krater said. “And go for the box.”

“Reasons?”

“The other two kzinti wouldn’t be going anywhere except to follow the first,” she answered. “And the ship is staying put, too.”

“How do you know that?” Jook asked. “The kzinti might know a lot more about this world than we do. Those two could have a dozen interesting places to visit and things to do. After all, Beanstalk might be their private hunting preserve, or something.”

“Then the kzinti would have found the stasis-box long before this,” Krater countered. “And they wouldn’t have let the Bandersnatch surprise them. Anyway, that explosion damaged their ship.”

“How do you figure?” Cuiller asked.

“Wouldn’t that big a bang have knocked some widgets loose from our hull? And that kzinti sphere isn’t even from General Products.”

“Circumstantial evidence,” Jook scoffed.

“Besides which, from where I was sitting, I saw some pieces hanging loose.”

“I hate to interrupt this,” from Gambiel, softly, “but while we chatter, Kzin One is getting away.”

“Right,” Cuiller said. He made his decision. “We’ll all go. Fan out in line abreast, keeping a space of just one tree between each person. Stay hidden in the lower branches, if you can. And stay ahead of the kzin.

“We’ll follow our original vector. At half a klick out, everyone start sorting through the branches around your assigned tree grid. The first to find the stasis-box, takes it. If Kzin One interrupts while you’re doing that, kill him—if you can. Any questions?”

“Why don’t we just shoot Kzin One from up here?” Jook asked.

“That’s ablative armor,” from Gambiel.

“Oh, right.”

At Cuiller’s nod, they all wound up on their lines to get a foothold in the canopy. Alone among the greenery, the commander readied his grapple in the launcher and fired forward along their path—which was also the kzin’s. Around him he could hear the muffled chuff, flutter and thunk of similar activity.

Could Kzin One hear it too?

Swinging through the trees like a goddamn monkey! Trying to find the Slaver box by beating the bushes!

Angry thoughts swirled in Sally Krater’s head as she balanced her feet on a leaf-cloaked branch and got ready to fire her launcher. She held it tightly, aiming along the course that she and the others had been following.

She could hear them around her, moving quietly through the overbrush, each making no more sound than the wind or any other animal up here. Now and again, she did hear the prolonged whirr of a winder as one of them dropped into the lower layers and peeked out to make sure Kzin One was still on track.

Everyone was trying to move quietly—except Jook. With his bad leg and his natural clumsiness, he bumbled through the leaves, missed his footing on branches, snagged his line and cursed softly while freeing it. Not softly enough to remain unheard by his fellow crewmembers, but maybe softly enough to go unnoticed by the pair of augmented kzinti ears moving ninety meters below them.

After a kilometer of travel, Krater knew Cuiller had angled his track to intersect Gambiel’s and assigned the Jinxian to watch Jook’s movements and help him be quiet. Krater herself, veteran of too many biologists’ observation blinds, not to mention an early life in partial gravity, knew she was more graceful than any of them in this floating greenery.

But that did not keep the angry questions from buzzing about in her mind.

For instance, just how was any of them to know when they’d traveled the full two and a half kilometers to the Slaver box? Really! Cuiller was asking them to track accurately through the jungle while swinging around tree trunks and through shallow arcs, covering anywhere between twenty and fifty meters with each set of the grapple. In all that confusion, he expected them to stop within one or two trunks—a deviation of no more than fifty or seventy-five meters—from a predefined point. It couldn’t be done! And that was just one sign of how badly this expedition had gone to hell. Ever since Jook had lost the ship…!

Krater angled her launcher at forty-five degrees above the horizon—or where she thought the horizon might be, much as she was bouncing around inside a blob of green leaves. She fired.

Chuff-CLANG!

The grapple had flown five maybe six meters, stopped dead, and recoiled. Now she could hear it slithering, falling through the branches, its monofilament cutting a vertical slice through the jungle before her. She jigged frantically with her upper body—as much as she could without falling off her branch—trying to jerk on the grapple’s friction brake. If it failed to set, the grapple would fall all the way to the forest floor, signaling her presence to their clawed and armored shadow below. The monofilament caught and twanged on a stout branch. Krater could feel by the tension on the line that the brake had activated. She began winding in, breathing again.

What had the grapple hit up there? she wondered. Vine, branch, trunk, or “peek-a-boo” body part… anything in the projectile’s flight path should have absorbed the point and snagged its tines. Only a rock or—Krater wound the grapple up into her hand and reloaded the launcher. This time she aimed higher and shot.

Chuff! Flutter, THUNK!

She jerked the brake and began reeling in, walking off her branch, skimming the vines around the slash her line had made, touching the next branch with her tiptoes. Soon she was rising almost vertically, walking with hands and the points of her knees, up the side of the nearest main trunk. When the angle that the monofilament line made with the bark wall of the trunk began to shorten, she slowed the winder.

A woman’s face, her own face, stared back at her in a pool of distorted greenery. As her head moved or a breeze rippled the leaves around her, she saw a flash of bright silver. This reflection of the floating world and her own face peered out from a collar of encroaching bark in the side of the tree. Like a knot of polished metal buried in the wood.

She touched the mirror and quickly drew her fingers back. It was cold—colder than any metal would normally be, in this mild climate. Its inherent temperature was not low enough to freeze sap in the wood embedding the knot. Still, it was a chill so deep that the shock felt, to her probing fingertips, like unexpected heat. She thunked the surface with her knuckles and listened for any echo of a cavity beneath the silver skin. No sound came back. So either the object was solid—more than solid, because she could sense no resonance at all—or its insides were lodged in another dimension. A dimension turned by several degrees away from her local reality.

She had found the stasis-box.

Now, how to alert the others? Krater wished they’d worked out, in advance, a series of whistles or bird-calls to address this situation. As communications officer she suddenly realized that should have been her responsibility. Hmm… Well, how could she fix it up at this late date?

Sally Krater fingered the radio at her wrist. If not for the kzinti, she might try using that. But if their enemies were monitoring the electromagnetic spectrum, a radio call would be as damning as a shout. More directional, too. But perhaps… Krater clicked the unit off standby and tapped her finger lightly against the microphone in a rapid and ancient dance: dit, dah, dah, dah, pause, dit, dah, pause, dit, dah, dit…

“What is it?” from the speaker, before she could go on. She recognized Cuiller’s voice, low and guarded.

She brought the microphone to her lips. “Krater. I’ve found it.”

A pause, then: “Converge on Sally.” And that was all. Krater held her breath, waiting for an energy bolt to tear through the foliage below her. None came, but the chuff of launchers and whirr of winder motors was dosing in from either side.

Gambiel was the first to appear from her right, with his weapon at the ready. He saw the mirror in the tree and slowly strapped the rifle back over his shoulder. He touched the surface and did not draw back at the chill. “That’s it, alright,” he said.

Jook and Cuiller appeared from the left. They, too, examined the alien artifact.

“If that thing’s a billion years old,” Jook asked, “how did it get up in a tree? It should have been buried under layers of geological strata, then turned over two or three times by plate tectonics.”

“We’ve already figured out that this world doesn’t have ‘em, Hugh,” Gambiel said. “Plate tectonics, that is.”

“This rainforest ecology must be very old,” Krater observed. “As old as the Bandersnatchi and the other Slaver biota. The Bandersnatchi will have been tending this planet for a long time.

“It’s just possible,” she went on, “that the stasis-box was picked up by a young, growing tree. Those saplings back there looked strong enough to do it—if whatever’s inside the box isn’t too heavy. Then the box was absorbed into the tree trunk as the branches sprouted and spread out. Eventually, when the tree died, the box fell to the forest floor. And the next tree to rise in that place took it up again. Maybe the stasis-box did spend a million years or so underground, pulled down by the root structure. But sooner or later it always comes up.”

“Why?” from Cuiller.

“Because roots and other burrowing life turn the soil over. And in any scatter of small, loose stuff, the larger and heavier objects tend to rise… Have we seen any sign of streams yet, let alone rivers or lakes? Those are the forces that make sedimentary rocks—what you call ‘geological straw.’ But we haven’t seen them.”

“Well, not around here,” Jook said.

“And around here is where the box is, right?”

“I give up,” the navigator said. “You found it in a tree, so it must be possible.”

“We’d better get it out of the tree if we want to keep it,” Cuiller said. “Daff, can you cut it out with your rifle?”

“Not if you mind the top of this tree coming down.”

“Alternatives?”

“None I can see.”

“Start cutting.”

The Jinxian unslung his rifle and took aim two centimeters from the side of the mirror. The others, dancing on their monofilament tethers, swung back from the tree trunk.

Nyawk-Captain pulled the three claws of his left foot free from the firm wood as he touched the ground again. He shook them instinctively before remembering that it was sap, not blood, on his toes. Then he arched his foot in the special way that retracted the steel hooks into their sleeves. No sense in clogging them with dirt as he walked around.

He angled the navigational tool up into the trees again and pressed the improvised trigger. The tiny readout screen blossomed with a solid return. Somewhere above him was the Thrintun artifact, but his locator—modified from a missile’s ranging warhead—was too powerful for this close work. Nyawk-Captain sighed and turned toward his third and final tree trunk for climbing.

Both times before, he had gone up as far as the first heavy branchings. Then he had released his hold on the trunk and stepped out into the green world of the elevated rainforest. The foliage beneath him had been uniformly limber, sagging fearfully under the weight of his body and armor. He had made his way a few cautious steps in this treacherous environment—so unlike the rolling veldt of his ancestors. Every step bad required careful placement of all four paws on a firm bough, to avoid falling through. When he was fully clear of the trunk, he had raised his torso, balanced, and aimed his locator in the four cardinal directions.

By gauging the strength of the various returns, he had determined the general direction of the artifact. And by keeping his path down the last tree all along one side, without deviating around the intervening branches, he had maintained his sense of that direction. He was reasonably sure that the way to the artifact was up the tree he now addressed.

And if it was not, then he would start over again—right up until the time his crew had the Cat’s Paw repaired and he must continue with his mission to Margrave.

Nyawk-Captain extended the powered claws and began climbing. In his previous forays up into the canopy layer, he had perfected the technique, digging in with his hind claws for lift and using his front claws for balance. It was easier going up than coming down.

A stutter of blue-light pulses, of short and penetrating wavelength, flashed from the muzzle of Gambiel’s weapon. In a second, their original impact point in the tree trunk was obscured by smoke and steam.

“Don’t worry about touching the box’s perimeter,” Cuiller advised.

“I’m riding on it,” Gambiel replied. “The reflection helps.” He swung the rifle in a slow circle, keeping ahead of the billow of steam.

After about thirty seconds, he had made two circuits of the mirror’s face, going deeper each time. After the third pass, he shut off the weapon.

“We can pull it now.”

Gambiel gripped the outer circumference of the box, which was shaped like a keg with its flat end facing them.

At first, Krater expected Gambiel to draw back his hands from the residual heat, but of course the stasis-box absorbed the laser energy into another dimension. The Jinxian did, however, try to keep his knuckles away from the charred and smoldering wood surrounding it. He worked the box left, then right. He drew a slender knife and began digging around it. Krater saw the blade make a long drag against the side when his knife slipped, but it left no scratches and made no sound. Like cutting against glass with a feather. He worked on swinging the end with his hands again. It came free suddenly, like a stopper from a bottle.

“Light,” he said, surprised. “Must weigh about ten kilograms.”

“Empty?” Jook asked.

Gambiel started to shake it, then stopped in mid-motion with a frown.

Jook stifled a laugh. Whatever the box held, it held in stasis. The contents would not be rattling around in this time-frame.

“Not much mass, anyway,” the Jinxian said. He had been staring at the box in his hands, but in a flash his attention shifted to the tree trunk at the point his knee rested against it. He stuffed the keg under one arm and placed his free palm against the bark.

Krater tried to read his face and couldn’t. She swung closer to the tree and felt it, too.

A dull, rhythmic pounding was transmitted through the wood. She looked up, expecting to see the weakened top section bending over, dragging against branches as it started to topple on their heads. But, despite the deep wound in its side, the trunk wasn’t falling.

Still the pounding came.

“Kzin One has found our tree,” Gambiel whispered hoarsely.

“That’s him climbing?” asked Cuiller, who had also put a band on the wood.

“Yeah. But slowly. Methodical.”

“Right. Daff, you keep the box. Sally, stay with him. The two of you go east.” Cuiller pointed to establish direction. “Hugh, you and I go west to provide a diversion for them. Everybody try to keep out of the kzin’s way for at least a full day. Reassemble at noon tomorrow by Callisto’s hull—or, if the kzinti are still around, one kilometer south by the sun. Questions?”

They shook their heads.

“Go!” he hissed, pushing Krater’s shoulder.

The reel motors whined as they each rose away from the burn mark, toward the scattered anchor points of their own grapples.

Once he was inside the lowest levels of the green layer, Nyawk-Captain boosted the gain on his aural enhancers. He was listening for anything that might attack. On the ground, he could trust his senses of sight and smell to detect an enemy at great range. And his armor could deal with anything short of another rampaging Whitefood. Up in the foliage, however, screened by leaves and baffled by random breezes, those senses were next to useless. Only his steel ears would save him now.

Listening hard, he could hear twanging and huffing noises, with the clatter of leaves closing around solid bodies. Nyawk-Captain froze. But the noises were fading, he decided, moving off into the forest. Whatever lived up here perhaps had more to fear from a kzin than he from it.

Instead of stepping off on the lower branches, as he had before, this time Nyawk-Captain kept close to the main trunk of his tree. He intended to climb as high as he could, until the width of the bole was insufficient to support his weight.

He was still climbing on firm wood when he saw a burn mark in the tree. His head came up level with a hole big enough for a newborn kzitten to curl up inside. He touched the edges of the scar, crumbling the charcoal that coated them. It was still warm. He tasted his fingerpads. Fresh soot, with the scent of smoke still in it. As he watched, a tear of yellow sap rolled down and across the curve of the hole, confirming his suspicion.

He drew his locator from its belt clip and aimed down along his leg.

No return image.

He aimed up, past his helmet.

No image, either.

He aimed to the four cardinal points, in one case reaching around the tree trunk to aim for it.

East by the sun, he got a hard return, but nowhere as close to him as the bloom had been a few minutes ago.

The artifact was on the move—and going fast.

Nyawk-Captain did not think a Whitefood would have come to take it. He did not think a sudden burst of lightning had burned this hole. And he could think of no animal living in this world of green vines which might have control of such fire. Unless it was a form of superior monkey… the sons of Hanuman.

Certainly they had come here in the Leaf-Eater hull. They had not died with it. And, considering its present condition, they could not leave in it.

He began the long climb down to the forest floor. As he went, he sent a call to Cat’s Paw. It was time to get Weaponsmaster started on a wide-area sweep with those sensors they still possessed.

Daff Gambiel rested in the fork of a large branch, balancing the Slaver stasis-box on his knee. He and Krater had traveled eastward five kilometers by his own dead reckoning.

Now they were in disagreement about which way they had actually gone. So Krater had climbed higher into the overgrowth, to take bearings by the setting sun. Fine in theory—if she could keep her sense of direction while moving around in this leaf maze.

Gambiel was willing to bet she would get lost just coming down.

While he waited, he studied the stasis-box. One side had a flattened place with a dull-gray disk etched onto the mirrored surface. It was the only feature in an otherwise featureless object. It had to be the field actuator switch.

Gambiel considered it carefully. He knew he should wait on opening the box until the other team members could be present. They would all want to inventory the contents together. That way they could examine anything inside that might be fragile or valuable, offer witness of anything that might fall apart or evaporate, or try to protect each other against anything that might suddenly leap out and attack them.

But Cuiller and Jook might also have been captured by now. Or he and Krater might be captured anytime soon. Better to open the box now and know what it contained. Besides, even though it massed only ten kilos, the thing was too awkward to keep carrying around. Gambiel was tired of working his launcher one-handed, and no sling or belt he could rig would hold on to the box’s slick, mirrored surface. More to the point, if the kzinti were using deep radar—or any radar at this distance—the box was a sure signal of his and Krater’s location. So it made most sense to abandon it, unload and abandon it, now.

Without more thinking, he pressed down on the disk.

The box changed, its surface slowly becoming a cloudy gray. It was like watching a time-lapse video of silver tarnishing. When the transformation was complete, a crack appeared along the keg’s length and down each end-face.

Gambiel forced the crack open with his hands and found himself blinking into a pair of wide-set, liquid eyes. They belonged to a face that was part of a rounded body covered in soft, white hair that was trimmed in intersecting globes of fluff. He was reminded of pictures he once had seen of Earth dogs—useless, yapping, brainless pets. This animal, however, studied him with a wary expression and made no move to climb out of the stasis-box.

Gently, in case the animal should suddenly display teeth and snap at him, Gambiel felt around inside the box. He quickly found the remaining contents: a long tubular device that had a fretwork of keys and finger-holes, like a flute, but no mouth hole for blowing; and three patties of wrinkled, brownish material that looked like freeze-dried meat, each wrapped in a tight plastic sheath. Gambiel assumed the meat was some kind of food ration for the “dog.”

He set the stasis-box, with the animal still sitting patiently inside it, down among the interwoven vines of the canopy. It was the “flute” that drew his attention.

He held it up with the end pointing at his mouth, like a clarinet or recorder, and tried to fit his fingers to the keys and holes. It didn’t work for eight fingers and two thumbs. He frowned and looked down along the flute’s length, counting. Yes, it did have more than ten positions—thirteen, in fact—but the spacing was wrong for human hands. Not surprising, considering that a billion years ago humans had not evolved on Earth, nor much else, other than bacteria and blue-green algae.

He raised the flute again, and—

Yip!

The dog had barked at him. Gambiel looked down. The animal’s eyes had grown big and it was trying to shy away from him.

Daff shrugged and began pressing keys at random, still looking for a hole to blow through. He heard a faint and almost familiar strain of music. He stopped fingering. Instead of breaking off in the middle, the tune wandered away from the notes and faded in a burble of sound. If this was a flute, Gambiel decided, it was a defective one.

He set it aside and looked at the dog, which seemed to be going to sleep on him.

“Come here, Fellah.”

The dog immediately straightened up and jumped out of the case. It came directly to Gambiel, sure-footing its way across the vines, and rested its chin on his knee. It looked up at him with an attitude of rapt attention.

“Yeah, you’re a good Fellah, aren’t you? Bright little guy, too. You know I won’t hurt you… It’s a good thing we found you first, instead of those kzinti. They probably hate dogs—would if they had any in their Patriarchy, that is… And they’re big enough to do something about it, too… I figure they’d take you for a snack. You’re just about one bite to them.”

As he talked, the animal’s eyes slowly closed… falling asleep.

The darkness was beginning to grow around them, seeping in between the leaves, and Gambiel expected Krater to come down soon.

“Are you hungry, Fellah?” He picked up one of the meat patties and looked it over. No kind of heat tab or peel point in the wrapper. He drew his knife and slit around the edge.

The dog never lifted its head from his knee.

He pulled the plastic back and sniffed the patty. It smelled vaguely unpleasant, like dried meat saturated with chemical preservatives.

“You eat this stuff?” He offered it to the dog.

Fellah slid his chin off Gambiel’s leg and backed away. His eyes were still half closed and his head down between his shoulders. Gambiel knew very little about dogs, because they didn’t fare well in Jinx’s high gravity. But he decided the animal’s reaction was purely negative, a cross between “guilt” and “disgust.”

Gambiel shrugged and broke off a piece of the meat for himself. He put it in his mouth, let his saliva soak it for a moment, and began chewing. It had no flavor, like chewing on wood pulp. He rewrapped the patty, putting it and the others in his pocket.

“What the hell are you doing?” Krater asked as she brushed aside a branch and climbed the last few meters down to his level.

“Trying one of these meat pies.” He took them out and showed her.

“You opened the box!”

“Well, we can’t keep carrying it. The stasis-field makes us sitting ducks for the kzinti.”

“But you should have—”

“Asked your permission? Well, would you have agreed?”

“Of course not.”

“So why would I ask?” He shrugged.

“You should have thought it through, Daff. That’s a artifact from a ancient xeno-civilization, older than life on Earth. You have no way of understanding what’s inside there.”

“Sure I do. A little dog, a flute-thing that doesn’t work, and some rations that don’t have much taste. I tried them on the dog, but it doesn’t—”

“You tried them on the dog!”

“And ate some myself. But why does that upset you so?” Krater ignored his question. She turned to Fellah and was peering at the little animal, which had crawled backwards in among the leaves. Only its eyes and nose, three shiny black marbles among the fluffy white fur, peered out at her.

“It does look like a dog,” she said. “How big is it?”

“About five kilos.”

“Does it have four legs, a tail, all that?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen holos of dogs before.”

“And friendly?”

“Real friendly. I call him Fellah.”

Krater reached out a hand to it. “Come here, Fellah!”

The animal’s eyes grew wider and it backed farther into the foliage.

“Not that friendly,” Krater said.

“Well, he came to me.”

“Then you take care of him, because we have get moving. Our course is more—” She looked around their bubble of cleaning, swung her arm off to the right, “—that way.”

Gambiel stood and stuck the flute into his belt, taking care not to bend the keys. “Hey, Fellah!”

The clog came out of its leaf hole and jumped into his arms.

“He does seem to like you,” Krater admitted. Gambiel reached down for the dull-gray box, forced it shut—but with the field off—and juggled it under his left arm. “Going to be awkward,” he said, hitching the dog around into the crook of his right arm. “Would you…?”

Krater shook her head. “I’m having enough trouble moving myself through these vines. Put the dog and the other stuff back in the box, why don’t you?”

“He’ll suffocate.”

“Then turn the field back on.”

“And let the kzinti use it to track us?”

“Then we have to leave the box,” she said.

“The Navy will pay a high ransom for an operating stasis mechanism. Could be worth your pension and mine together.”

“Then leave the dog.”

“No, he’ll die up here. Starve to death, fall through to the forest floor, or get eaten by the kzinti. Besides, he could be valuable.”

“Well, you’re the one who opened the box in the first place.”

“We can leave the box,” Gambiel decided, setting it down on the vine mat. “Do you think you could find this place again?”

“No.”

“If I left it with the stasis-field turned on, we could locate it again, easily.”

“So could the kzinti.”

“Yeah. And that might distract them.”

“Then leave it,” she agreed.

“Is that the right decision, hey, Fellah?” he asked, hugging the little dog tighter under his arm.

It looked up at him with those big eyes, seeming to understand the question. It made a sound halfway between a chirp and a whine.

“Err-yupp!”

“Oh, brother!” Krater sighed.

He bent down and activated the flat disk. The cloudy surface of the box cleared to a hard, silvery shine in the fading light.

“Let’s get out of here,” Krater said.

It was too dark, really, to go swinging through the trees. But with the box set like a beacon behind them, Gambiel could see no alternative. He readied the grapple in its launcher and aimed left-handed.

Chuff!

“I need better field accuracy than this,” Nyawk-Captain said, handing his jury-built locator to Weaponsmaster.

The kzin took it and inspected the pirated missile circuitry. “Perhaps I can tune—”

“Is the ship’s radar back in commission yet?”

“Navigator and I were just making the final adjustments.”

“Give me a sweep of the area.”

“Yes, sir.”

While they fired up the repaired systems, Nyawk-Captain stretched, scratched, and got himself something to eat. He had learned it was easier to shed the armor outside the ship and work the airlock unencumbered. Bad policy if a ground force attacked while all of them were inside, but he didn’t think anything would come against the ship, except more Whitefoods. And Nyawk-Captain had made reconstruction of the short-range armaments a priority.

Munching a haunch of Mystery Meat—a Fleet ration consisting of amalgamated proteins and vitamins, pressed around a synthetic bone and inadequately rehydrated—he looked out through the open hatch. The armor stood sentinel there, and in more than just a symbolic sense. Before stepping out of it, he had keyed the enhancers for sound and scent, slaving them by radio circuit back into the ship’s sensors.

“Ready now, sir,” Navigator called.

“Locate the Thrintun box.”

“Two kilometers distant but at a new bearing—uhn, different from the one you took.”

“Which way?”

“North and east of here.”

“Weaponsmaster, get armor. We will go together to find it this time.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Ouch!” came a low sound in the utter blackness.

“What was that?”

“I hit my head on a branch.”

“Again?”

“Can’t we slow down?”

“Still three kzinti out there. Behind us.”

“One, you mean.”

“One that we saw.”

“The others are working on their ship.”

“Yes—last time we looked.”

“We’ll kill ourselves, swinging through these trees in the dark.”

“You want to walk? And put both feet through a hole?”

“We could stop for the night.”

“The kzinti would find us.”

“In this jungle, I couldn’t find us.”

“You don’t have their sense of smell.”

“Ow!”

“What now?”

“I barked my shin.”

“Well, do it quietly. They have ears, too.”

Nyawk-Captain aimed the locator up into the trees. The refinements Weaponsmaster had made in its circuits were amazing: they reduced the light bloom of any hardened return to a pinpoint, while stepping up the return image from woody branches and trunks into a ghost map of the tree world.

“I detuned everything else and made it selective for carbon,” Weaponsmaster had explained, the first time his captain had used it. “Carbon is a component in cellulose,” the kzin added.

“Very creative,” Nyawk-Captain had said.

Now, two kilometers from the ship, he aimed into the treetops again and took a reading. The artifact was right above them, almost aligned with the tree by which they were standing.

Nyawk-Captain turned his helmet light up the side of the tree. “The artifact is approximately ten cubits out from this trunk in—” He oriented himself against it and pointed. “—that direction.”

“Shall I climb for it?”

“Do so.”

In five minutes, the kzin returned with the storage box under his arm.

“It feels light, sir.”

“We’ll open it at the ship.”

“When they find it’s empty, what do you think they’ll do?”

“Come after us.”

“They’re already doing that.”

“So? Did you expect them to stop?”

“No, I guess not.”

Excitement overcame Nyawk-Captain. Rather than shed his armor and climb into the ship, he called on Navigator to come out with a strong worklight.

“Should not someone stay inside, sir? To guard against—”

“Come out here!”

Before Navigator could negotiate the airlock, Nyawk-Captain had the box on the ground and, in the light of their helmet lamps, had found the actuator stud.

The box turned from flashing mirror-brightness to a simple, luminous gray. A crack appeared along its top. Nyawk-Captain forced it apart with his hands. Navigator brought up the light and angled it down inside.

Nothing.

In all the records collected by the Patriarchy concerning Thrintun boxes, none had mentioned an empty box. Preserving fresh air was not a priority with any species.

Nyawk-Captain put the beak of his helmet into the space and inhaled deeply, with suit enhancers at full power. His own nose told him that some animal had once—briefly and forever—inhabited this space. The suit’s flicker display began cataloging a long list of organic chemicals: oils, hormones, enzymes, pheromones.

He inspected the interior with optical enhancers, and found three hairs—finer than those on any kzin’s pelt—and all without pigment. In daylight, they would be white.

“Is this a billion-year-old joke?” Navigator asked.

“No. The box was inhabited by a live animal,” Nyawk-Captain replied. “Too small to be a Thrint. Unlikely to be a Tnuctip.”

“But now we have nothing to show for our effort… and for the delay.”

“Do you have a problem with that?” Nyawk-Captain asked pointedly.

“No, sir. But now we should give full attention to repairing Cat’s Paw and resuming our flight to attack Margrave. The mission has not yet become problematical.”

“We still have time to find the contents of the box—and the humans who stole it.”

“Not with the sensory equipment we have at band.”

“Then use your skills as Navigator. Plot me a course. Use the Leaf-Eaters’ stripped hull as a starting point. One vector is defined by our first sighting of this box, now a burned-out hole in a tree. The second sighting point, where we actually found the box, yields another vector. Assume, to begin with, that the humans have no means of transport nor any logical destination other than the hull. Then give me their probable locus within those limits.”

“Right away, sir.”

“Narrow the field for me, Navigator, and we’ll find the thieves by using our native hunting instincts.” He turned to Weaponsmaster. “Can you readjust the circuits of that homing radar for a slightly different concentration of carbon?”

“It’s almost dawn.”

“How can you tell?”

“I think I can see my feet.”

“The brush does seem lighter.”

“Ouch! Damn it! I give up.”

“It’s probably safe to rest here.”

Without answering, Sally Krater released enough of the monofilament to allow her to sit on the branch that had tripped her. She let the rest of it float around her face—and didn’t care if it snagged on anything and cut off her nose.

“We may not be as far ahead of the kzinti as Jared and Hugh now are,” Gambiel said.

“How do you figure?”

“When we stopped to take bearings—”

“And open the box, remember.”

“—and open the box,” he agreed, “we lost valuable time. And we haven’t been making it up in the dark.”

“What can we do about that?”

“Listen!”

“How’s that going to—”

“Hush!”

Krater cocked her head and listened. Faintly, through the brush, she could hear a crashing and snapping of the greenery. It was behind them, coming along their back trail.

Gambiel thrust the flute-thing and the white dog into her arms. Before she could stop it, the dog jumped free. It started to run off in the opposite direction, then turned and looked back at her. A long, hard stare that seemed to be full of meaning.

“Go along, now,” the Jinxian told her.

“But you—”

“I’ll delay them. Go.”

Krater stood up and took in the slack monofilament.

“Come here, Fellah!” she called in a low voice.

The dog came up to her and stood on its hind legs, putting a paw on her knee. She scooped up the animal and hit her winder’s clutch. In less than a minute, she had gone twenty meters higher and thirty meters farther into the jungle canopy.

Gambiel turned about-face, called upon all his inner strength, his chi, and began his patient preparations. After a lifetime of training and development, he was finally going to fight a kzin in the flesh. It was likely to be wearing armor, he knew, but Gambiel had his laser rifle and the advantage of surprise.

He retrieved his grapple, loaded the launcher and fired straight up. The grapple thunked into solid wood ten meters overhead. Slowly, so as to make as little noise as possible, Gambiel raised himself off the stable branch layer where he and Krater had paused to rest and where a full grown kzin in armor would undoubtedly choose to walk. He stopped when he found a tunnel through the leaves that gave him an angle back to that stouter layer. His view crossed their earlier track through the area. Then he hung quietly, staring down and holding the rifle, at full charge, across his thighs. Gambiel made himself as still as a bow hunter waiting in the dawn above a game trail.

The kzin came into view, placing its feet with great care, advancing cautiously from limb to supporting limb. For all its mechanical encumbrance and the excess weight, the warrior was still moving incredibly smoothly. The body markings on this suit of armor were different from those on the kzin that Gambiel and the others had watched leaving the enemy ship the day before. (Had it been no longer than that?) This one was clearly a different member of the crew.

Gambiel raised the rifle with hypnotic slowness and sighted on the gap which showed orange fur between the jaw extender and the articulated breastplate—the place where a suit of human armor would have fastened a steel gorget.

His first pulse of coherent blue light, even masked by the gloom of the forest canopy, sent the kzin hurtling sideways. However, a flash of white smoke and a startled “Rowrrl!” told Gambiel that something tender had been burned.

Stumbling off balance, the kzin almost crashed through the unstable floor. Then it might have fallen ninety meters or more, to be painfully damaged if not killed. But the armored figure managed to right itself.

Gambiel lined up on the edge of his aiming hole and fired another pulse, seeking another tender spot. Instead, he touched the ablative surface of an armored gauntlet. It dissipated the energy in a spark of ceramic fragments, leaving only a small, white crater in the material. Then the kzin was up and moving forward, climbing over intervening branches, walking into the point source of the laser pulses. It was hunched over—not in pain, Daff knew, but only so that it offered the thicker material of the shoulder and neck plates to the oncoming fire.

Gambiel reeled in on his winder, moving higher as quickly as he could, and kicked backward to put himself beyond the kzin’s reach. His retreat was limited, however, by the set of his grapple.

The kzin was upon him too quickly and knocked the rifle aside. The weapon fell and disappeared through the green canopy floor.

Before the warrior could strike again, Gambiel hit the release latch on his climbing harness and dropped, on all fours, ten meters to the canopy’s base layer. He grasped with his hands and snagged with his feet among the vines. Once he knew he was not going to fall through, he raised his body in a wrestler’s crouch and looked up and around, ready to meet the kzin.

The kzin—too heavy to drop like that—climbed quickly down to his level and stopped, considering Gambiel. Daff could read its reactions. Even though the human was now unarmed, its stance was not that of prey. He was actually challenging the kzin. And the tattoo on Gambiel’s forehead might be familiar from kzinti training tapes. Somewhere they must have described a breed of humans so marked, who would actually fight barehanded.

The kzin appeared to reach a decision. Slowly and deliberately, gesturing to make itself understood, it keyed a release button. The armor sprang apart like a cracked crabshell. The kzin kicked the suit aside—and it, too, fell through the loose floor. Daff’s opponent raked its own flanks in a brief scratch. Gambiel visibly bent his knees into a deeper crouch, preparing to absorb the shock of the first attack across the springy floor layer. He dug in his toes and raised his hands in a defensive position.

Human and kzin confronted each other with a long stare. The kzin seemed to be focusing on the Hellflare tattoo. Maybe the warcat did understand its meaning.

The kzin screamed and leaped directly at Gambiel.

Gambiel lifted his left foot from the entangling vines, straightened his right leg and—hoping he wouldn’t screw himself right down into the criss-crossed foliage—performed a perfect veronica around the swinging left paw. Its claws extended five centimeters outside the flashing orange blur. As the furred flank passed, Gambiel struck backhanded at the third skeletal nexus. He heard as much as felt the joint crack.

The kzin’s scream rose an octave in pitch.

The warrior came back on attack with a feint. Gambiel ignored the stroke but still countered with a twisting punch. It found only air and a whisk of fur.

In two more exchanges, the kzin absorbed one painful blow, and Gambiel took a raking that opened his right arm and shoulder to the bone. As he was trying to press back the flap of flayed skin, he felt a jet of arterial blood. The fourth claw had struck higher on his neck than he thought.

The kzin, sensing imminent victory, prepared its last charge.

Gambiel then made the decision that had loomed over his entire life for so long. He would not step aside again. He met the charge full on—with a stop-kick whose perfect focus on the center of the kzin’s skull was one-half centimeter longer than the warcat’s reach. His blow cracked that skull a half-second before the eight claws swung across his torso in converging slices.

Disemboweled, the Jinxian’s body flew sideways and caught against a tree limb. He saw it arrest his flight but could feel nothing down there. Then his eyes darkened, a red mist creeping across his field of vision. But before the mist could raise the night, he saw the orange body stagger curl up, and disappear through a gap in the shrubbery.

The kzin did not even scream as it fell.

Hanging in her harness with just a toe-perch among the slender branches, Sally Krater listened carefully to the thrashing below her in the canopy. The fight that Gambiel was waging proceeded without cries or curses, just that one scream of challenge. If it was followed by heavy breathing and grunts of pain, she could not hear them.

The dog Fellah huddled in her arms, shivering against her chest. But occasionally it lifted its head and looked down. Then, by the tilting of its ears, she sensed the animal was following the action and weighing their chances of survival.

When the thrashing ceased, Krater released her winder and unclenched her toes, dropping down into the open vaults beneath the canopy layer and above the forest floor far below. Off to her right, about forty meters away, she saw an orange body drop through the leaves and tumble three times head over heels before it hit the hard ground. It lay there in a bundle of matted fur. Krater thought it was dead, until it twitched and moved a paw, raised itself and began to crawl.

Sally lifted herself into the cover of the leafs’ layer and watched. The kzin rose on its hind legs with painful, ungraceful jags of motion and started to walk away. Krater withdrew fully into the canopy. She consulted her sense of direction and moved back toward the place of the fight.

At first, all she could see were torn branches and a ruck of leaves, turned over to show their lighter undersides among splashes of blood. At the side of the clearing, however, she quickly spotted the Jinxian’s uniform. She set the dog down on a firm branch and moved quickly over the vines toward Gambiel.

His coverall was curiously flat, deflated. She touched his shoulder, to rouse him and turn him over, and the torn remains slumped apart, ripping the uniform fabric across the back.

Krater found his head, his eyes open and staring. She closed them with the edge of her hand.

Then there was nothing more she could do, no words to say, and no way to bury him. She gathered up the dog and continued moving toward the noon rendezvous.

“Fellah” they had called him, these beings that lived and moved separately, apart from the Discipline. “Fellah” was the word shape that came up in their blue-green minds and arrowed at him like yellow fire. “Fellah.” And they did not mean it unkindly.

As he lurched through the rushing trees, under the arm of the “Sally,” the Pruntaquilun Balladeer closed his eyes to the flying wind and the green leaves, and tightened his stomach against the surgings of sensation. He called up his latent powers of intellect and considered all that he had experienced since being packed into Guerdoth’s traveling case.

When the Master had prepared for a month’s stay at the hunting estates of his uncle, the Magistrate Alcuin, he had taken along his favorite Balladeer. And his baton, of course. Fellah knew what the device did and how it worked. As a Pruntaquilun, with his limited insight into other minds and his facility with courtly language, he was instrumental in the Master’s charades.

None other than Guerdoth’s favorite Balladeer could be trusted to help the Master conceal the shame of his Powerloss and so to survive. Thus, Fellah would observe and make stealthy inquiries with the edges of his mind, accumulating bits and shadings of thought from other Thrintun and from Slaves. Then he would sing of them to Guerdoth in an ancient tongue that only the Master understood. With Fellah’s espionage, and with the Baton, they cemented the impression among all who cared that Guerdoth still retained the Power and wielded it as a true Thrint.

But when the time-standing case had been opened, Fellah was arrived not at Alcuin’s estates but in a green world of wild, waving plants and among wild, unDisciplined beings. Except that the “Daff” had wielded Guerdoth’s Baton. Although he had used it inexpertly, still he made the commands to love and respect, to attend and obey. And he made them on Fellah himself.

Yet even as he made the commands, the Daff had not thought of himself as a Master. The word-image he used was “human.” Strange it was, however, that the shape of this thought in the Daff’s mind was not much different from the shape of “Thrint” in Guerdoth’s. It contained the same overtones of capability, of mastery of the expectation to control and order the world and time as one saw fit.

Similar thought-shapes had also been in the Sally’s mind—although not so strongly, not since that Other had come and destroyed the Daff. Fellah himself had known the Daff was dead in the instant his mind sparked and went black.

Fellah wished the Sally would use more and simpler words in her thinking about the death, so that he might absorb them and add to his picture of these new masters, the humans. He was putting together a sense of the pattern of their minds and their language with every thought he intercepted. But it was harder this way, starting without a grammar or even a coherent picture of the world into which he had emerged from the traveling case.

The Other who had killed the Daff had used still another word-image, “kzin.” It was brighter, more jaggedly lit with reddish-orange colors and blood scents, than the “human” in Daff’s and Sally’s minds. Yet “kzin” meant controller and shaper of destinies, too.

And nowhere, not along any of the dimensions among which Fellah cast his mind, did he find any echo now of “Thrint.” The glinting hard edges of their Power was gone from the universe, creating a black and peaceful vacuum, as if it had never been.

Fellah contemplated a universe without Discipline, without the ever-present puppet strings. He tried to decide if this emptiness was a good thing in itself.

He began to suspect it might be.

Nyawk-Captain found Weaponsmaster’s discarded armor through the emergency distress tone it was generating. From its position on the forest floor, with the helmet bent back and the visor digging a furrow in the dirt, he concluded that it had fallen out of the trees.

He studied the pattern of burn marks on the ablative surface. No blood or carbonized flesh on either, although the one at the throat smelled of burned hair. Clearly, Weaponsmaster had not been injured significantly while wearing the armor. Nor had he been wearing it when it fell.

Nyawk-Captain tilted his head back to study the underside of the roof layer. Nothing in its leaf pattern told him anything.

“My Captain!”

The voice was faint and coming from his left. Nyawk-Captain rose in a crouch and his armor prepared itself for violence.

Weaponsmaster limped forward from one of the rare patches of jungle growth on the forest floor. His gait reflected broken bones. He tended to circle to the right as he moved.

Weaponsmaster fell. Nyawk-Captain, moving toward him, caught his crewmate and lowered his body gently to the ground. Nyawk-Captain pawed at his belt for the field medical kit and began breaking ampoules of pain-reliever.

“Do not bother,” Weaponsmaster grunted. “My head is cracked and my life is at an end.”

“Did you fail? I found your armor. How did—?”

“One of the humans confronted me. He actually challenged me. It would have been dishonorable to meet a naked combatant in armor. So I shed mine. He fought well.”

Nyawk-Captain heard this explanation but hardly believed it. The sons of Hanuman were known to fight by deceit and trickery, not by challenge in an honorable contest. And they did not kill adult kzinti in naked combat. This was most odd!

“Did you kill him?” Nyawk-Captain asked, feeling sure of the answer.

“I do not know… Not for certain. But too much blood covers my paws, I think, for him to live.”

“Was he alone?”

“I saw one only.”

“That is never proof that there aren’t others.”

“I know. I failed you… should have—”

“Which way was it—were they—going?”

The word ended with a huge, jaw-cracking yawn. A gout of blood came up in Weaponsmaster’s throat, flowed over his tongue, and dripped between his teeth. The body went limp and, by reflex, the pink ears opened wide.

Nyawk-Captain smoothed them closed and lowered the great head to the ground.

Then the kzin considered his options. He had time, barely, to locate the humans, recover the contents of the Thrintun box, and still make his rendezvous at Margrave. But he would accomplish all this, he decided, even if it violated his margin for error on the mission. This was no longer just a matter of the box and its treasures. It was now an affair of honor.

“How far are we from the ship, do you figure?” Jook asked.

Cuiller looked up at his companion in surprise. “You’re the navigator.”

“Astrogation only. I’m a wreck in two dimensions.”

“But I thought you were keeping track…”

The Wunderlander shook his head and looked down at his hands, massaging the bubble cast around his knee.

“Well, we were turning left all the time,” Cuiller reasoned, “so we have to be somewhere south of Callisto.”

“But how far?”

“Can’t be more than two or three kilometers. We haven’t traveled more than five or six altogether. And that wasn’t in any kind of straight line.”

“Are we lost?”

“Umm.” Cuiller sucked his lips. “Which direction do you think the sun is?”

“Straight up.”

“Then we’re lost,” the commander admitted. “But later on, when the sun moves west, we could work our way east and attempt to locate Sally and Daff.”

“In this jungle, we could pass within forty meters of them and never know it.”

“I guess it’s time to try the radio.” Cuiller raised the wrist unit, powered it up, and clicked the send key a couple of times.

“Captain?” from the speaker.

“Is that you, Sally?”

“Yeah. Where are you?”

“Somewhere south of the ship,” he said. “I think.”

“Me too. How are we going to link up?”

Cuiller thought for a moment. “One from each party should climb a tall tree, get above the forest canopy.”

“It’s just me now. Daff is dead… What happens after I climb up there?”

“Burn some leaves or something with a rifle pulse. I’ll do the same.”

“All right. I’ll be watching for you. Out.”

Cuiller climbed while Jook stayed below. Daff was dead? As commanding officer, Cuiller would have pressed Krater for the details—except their messages had to be brief, to keep the kzinti from taking a radio fix. Anyway, Cuiller could well guess what had happened. One of the kzinti had caught up with them, and the Jinxian would not have run from that fight. Instead, with his lifetime of training, Daff had probably welcomed and invited it. And he had sent Krater on ahead, with the Slaver stasis-box, to safety.

Daff Gambiel had been a good man. Sober, quiet, strong, patient—and loyal. He never seemed to have much to say, but Cuiller knew the Jinxian was always working out problems in his head, so he would have the answers ready when needed. Callisto’s crew was diminished by his loss, more than they knew… Cuiller could only hope Gambiel was finally at peace with his line.

When he at last broke through the top layer, Cuiller felt like a swimmer in a great, green ocean. The treetops swelled like rolling waves above the lower branches and netted vines. The lazy winds pushed them back and forth, like the conflicting chop around a point of land. He clung to his bole with one hand and held down the fine sprouts of greenery with the other. To look east and west, he had to climb around the tree.

He gave Krater ten minutes to settle into her treetop, then faced east, unslung his weapon, and took aim at the nearest clump of leaves. Cuiller fired a long burst, circling it around to get a good fire going. Soon a puff of white smoke rose out of the canopy and blew raggedly away on the breeze.

He divided his time between watching that and looking out for any fires Krater might have set.

Nothing. “Captain,” from the radio again, softly. “I think I see smoke—or haze—about half a klick away. Try again.”

He burned a fresh patch upwind of the first.

“Got you. Be there in a bit.” Then the radio went dead.

Cuiller climbed back down to Jook’s level.

In half an hour, they heard her winder motor, coming through the trees. At the end of a long swing, Krater burst through a fan of leaves and settled on the branch next to Jook. She was strangely encumbered.

“Daff didn’t make it?” the commander asked gently. She shook her head. “We were followed by a kzin, who climbed up into the canopy. Daff fought a delaying action—and bought me time to get away.”

“Dead?” Jook asked.

“If he were alive, I wouldn’t have left,” she said defiantly.

“Sorry. I meant the kzin.”

“Daff hurt him badly, knocked him out of the trees. But he was still moving.”

After a pause, Cuiller asked, “Where is the stasis-box?”

“This is it.” Krater lifted the dog out of its curled-up position, snuggled in the crook of her arm, and held it out with her fingers under its chest and around its forelegs. “Daff opened the box and found this—we call him Fellah—plus a flute-thing and some dried rations.”

“I asked where the box was.”

“Back along our path. It was empty, and we couldn’t carry everything.”

“Why did you open it in the first place?”

“Daff opened it. The kzinti were tracking on the stasis field.”

“Oh… right.” Cuiller put a hand to his chin.

Hugh Jook had taken the animal from Krater and was examining it while Cuiller absorbed her report. The commander watched his navigator move the animal’s legs, feel around its eyes, look into its ears.

“Remarkably mammalian structure,” Jook murmured.

“I noticed that,” Krater said.

The Wunderlander felt the animal’s hindquarters and lifted its tail.

“Do not… touch,” the creature said in a halting approximation of Interworld. The sounds were thick as they wrapped around its long, pink tongue.

Jook dropped the dog. It landed on its feet amid the vines and glared over its shoulder at the startled navigator.

The three humans looked down at the animal, dumbstruck.

“You… you can talk?” Krater asked.

“Yes. You-you can talk,” it replied—and waited expectantly.

Cuiller tried to decide if he was hearing a ventriloquist’s trick or just some kind of mimicry, a parrot’s mindless repetition. But then, he thought back, the dog’s first fragmented sentence hadn’t just repeated their own words. It had been wholly unprompted, arising out of nothing the humans were saying. And the words had fit the physical circumstances. So Cuiller had to accept that the “dog” was reacting to its environment, verbally, in Interworld.

“Of course, we can talk,” Sally Krater went on patiently. “I was asking about you.” And she pointed at the creature.

“You?” it asked. “Ah… ‘You’ means this—?” The animal swiveled its broad head around, including its own body in the gesture. “Fellah?”

“That’s right. You’re Fellah, and I’m Sally.”

“Sal-lee. Daff. Yowiyargawsh. Fellah.”

“Your—?” Krater began, then shook her head.

“Other… that deaded the Daff. Younyargawsh named itself.”

“Oh, the kzin warrior.”

“Yes, kzin. Dead itself now. But other still to come. Find you-Sallee.” Fellah seemed to grow agitated. “Find you-human. Make dead too.”

“Excuse me,” Jook interrupted. “But what the hell are you?”

The creature paused. “You-Fellah means, is one, of-class Pruntaquilun. Named itself Coquaturia.”

“But what are you?” Jook insisted.

“You-Fellah is… sing-maker?” it answered, unsatisfied with the result. “Song-maker. You-Fellah is owned-thing of Thrint named itself Guerdoth. You-Sallee, you-human, are not owned-thing? Yes. You have no… no Discipline?”

“Of course we have discipline,” Cuiller responded quickly. “We’re a Navy survey team, after all. Without discipline we couldn’t perform—”

“Captain,” Sally Krater said quietly, putting a hand on his arm. “You’re going too fast. And I don’t think that it’s—that Fellah is questioning your authority.”

“Of course not,” Cuiller said stiffly.

The dog was staring hard at him. “You-Captain are Thrint?”

“Thrint? Are you calling me a Slaver?”

“You-Captain… you impose Discipline.” The creature exhibited a rippling motion that might have been a shrug. “Thrint.”

“There are no Thrintun anymore,” Krater said. “They died out—oh, a long, long time ago, while you were in the stasis-box that Daff opened.”

Fellah turned its head patiently and watched her speak, studied the way her mouth moved, as if trying hard to understand.

“Many Thrintun,” Fellah said gravely. “Too many to be deaded, to die soon… What means ‘long, long time’?”

“That’s an approximation of age,” Jook interposed. “Consider it to be a large part of the age of the universe itself. About one-fifteenth of that age.” Jook had to explain this using his hands. He waved his free hand all around, to indicate the universe at large. Then he flashed his spread fingers three times, curling them off each time with his other hand.

The animal seemed to absorb this, to think about it, and then looked stunned. “No Thrintun anymore. No Pruntaquila anymore. No universe anymore.” Fellah made a noise back in the throat that might have been a whimper or a moan.

“The universe is still here,” Sally said easily.

The creature just stared at her.

“Hey, are you hungry?” Krater suddenly asked. She pulled out of her pocket some plastic-wrapped patties, which looked to Cuiller like some kind of dried meat. “We found these in the stasis-box,” she explained to the commander. “Daff tried them but he thought the taste was pretty bland.” She offered part of one patty to Fellah.

The animal backed away.

“Tnuctipun,” it growled. “Head-stuff. Made dead, made cold, dry.”

“What?” Krater dropped the fragment, and it slid between the leaves. “Why were the Tnuctipun killed?”

“Secret.” Fellah turned away. “Big secret.”

“Kill them and freeze-dry their brains?” Cuiller wondered. “Why would a Slaver want to do that? It’s barbaric!”

“Maybe the Thrint wanted to preserve them,” Jook speculated. “Any sufficiently advanced technology would be able to reconstruct the brains later, rebuilding their RNA linkages through some kind of computer setup—and remember, the Tnuctipun were genetic engineers. Rendering the brain inert is like insurance. That way you could keep your pet scientist quiet, but you also keep him around in case you need him to make adjustments in whatever he built.”

From the position of Fellah’s head, Cuiller could see that the dog was listening closely. How much was he understanding?

“So what did these Tnuctipun build?” Cuiller asked. “Fellah himself?”

“Not likely,” Sally Krater offered. “Fellah said he was ‘of-class,’ part of a race, called the Pru… Pruntaquilun. But here!” She drew along, sticklike device out of her belt. “This was in the stasis-box, too.”

“What is it?” Cuiller asked, taking it from her.

“I don’t know. It looks like some kind of musical instrument.”

Fellah at first regarded it with keen-eyed interest, then turned his head away.

“Fellah?” the commander asked suddenly. “Do you know what this does?”

The animal looked back at him, reluctantly. “Stick thing.”

“But what did the Thrint do with it?”

“Point at head. Work fingers. Reach deep inside. Set mind in—”

“Is it something the Thrint used to fiddle about with your brains?” Jook asked, trying to overcome the word-hurdles for Fellah.

“Yes, fiddle. Itself name, Fiddle.”

“It’s the source of the Slavers’ power, then,” Jook went on eagerly, to his crewmates. “It has to be. And all this time we thought they were mentalists. But instead they had these shock-rod things. ‘Fiddle,’ he calls it.”

“My-Thrint,” Fellah said slowly, “my-master, used it, it was secret…”

“Of course it would be a secret,” Jook explained. “They would keep the existence of the Fiddle from their subject races, hiding it as a musical instrument or pretending it was something else benign. In that way they could maintain the myth of their innate power. And they would be willing to kill in order to preserve their secret—as those freeze-dried brains prove.”

Cuiller, who still held the Fiddle, brought it up near his face and fitted his fingers awkwardly to the keys. He pressed them in no particular order. And nothing happened.

“I can hear music,” Krater said. “Or, sort of. Anyway, it’s… silvery, like bells and woodwinds, far off.”

Cuiller tried a different pattern of fingering.

“Yeah, me too,” Jook said. “Kind of—”

Nyawk-Captain had been trailing the remaining human for hours, walking in his powered armor across the ground while the human swung invisibly through the high branches. His reworked radar easily tracked the quarry’s particular carbon pattern as it moved east then south, pausing occasionally to rest in the trees.

Twice he had to detour around the glimmer of large white shapes, which passed in the distance under the forest roof. They did not see or sense him, and each time Nyawk-Captain was able to regain the trail of the human’s passage.

After most of the morning, when the sun was high, the prey paused once more. This time, however, it joined two more pattern signatures that had been showing to the west of it. The monkey troupe was forming up.

Nyawk-Captain shed his bulky armor, left the locator beside it, and began climbing a nearby bole. By his calculations, he was almost under the humans as they paused in the forest canopy. He moved as quietly as he could, gripping with his forepaws around the trunk’s side and pushing with his feet and claws against the bark.

Arriving approximately at the humans’ level, and shielded by green fans from their sight, he extended his natural ears and listened to their ongoing conversation. He understood only the vaguest fragments of spoken Interworld but soon realized the humans were talking about the Thrintun and their long-ago time. He picked up the word for “master.”

Nyawk-Captain was preparing himself for the forward rush that would put an end to these human thieves and intruders on his mission—when he suddenly froze. Through a gap in the greenery he saw one of them pointing a wandlike object at him. And he could not move!

The human diddled its fingers, and Nyawk-Captain felt his paws twitch, his leg kick, his tail go stiff. Either the humans had recently developed a psychokinetic power unknown to the Patriarchy, or this was a display of power from the Thrintun artifacts they had discovered in the box. Experience and common sense suggested the latter.

As the device worked his body over, Nyawk-Captain could also feel his attitude toward the human holding it begin to change, becoming mellow and accepting. Nyawk-Captain hated that! After a few seconds, the human stopped diddling the keys of the device and turned away.

Nyawk-Captain was himself again.

Without the traditional challenging scream, he leaped through the wall of leaves and slashed left and right. One of the humans went down under his blows, flagging bloody strings of tissue. Nyawk-Captain paused only to shake fragments of meat and fabric off his paws.

The human holding the Thrintun device dropped it and rolled to one side. The artifact skittered through the leaves, up-ended, and dropped. The human reached for it.

Realizing its immediate value, Nyawk-Captain dove after it, pushing that human away with a forehand swipe that snagged cloth and skin. He fought his way down through twigs and vines, into the lower levels of the canopy.

Too late!

He could see the wand falling, spinning, finally striking the brittle soil of the forest floor.

Whatever the device might be, Nyawk-Captain’s instincts told him that by retrieving it he would preserve his honor and buy his way back into Admiral Lehruff’s good graces. He leapt for a nearby trunk and raced down it headfirst, moving just slower than terminal velocity. Nyawk-Captain did a diving roll across the ground and gathered up the fallen prize.

He paused only to stash it with his powered armor and then headed back up the tree to finish off the remaining humans.

Hugh Jook was messily dead, scattered in four pieces across the center of their clearing. Several meters away, Sally Krater crouched in fetal position with her hands locked around a tree limb. Fellah had disappeared.

The attack had broken Cuiller’s left arm, that much he could tell from its angle, although the onset of shock had spared him much pain yet. He also felt blood oozing from four puncture wounds in his upper chest. Possibly some cracked ribs, too.

Cuiller lifted himself and approached Krater slowly, not wanting to frighten her more. He spoke gently and touched her head, massaging her temples with his good hand.

“Lieutenant? Sally? Are you hurt?”

No response.

He began moving his palm in wide circles across the nape of her neck and shoulders.

“Sally. It’s all right. Time to wake up.”

“N-no-oh,” she moaned.

“Time to move, Sal.”

“It’ll come back!”

“No, no. The cat’s all gone. Come on now, wake up.” Cuiller reached for her hands, still clenched around the limb, and pulled on them gently. Reason began to return to her eyes. She straightened. Her fingers slipped loose. The hands fell inertly into her lap.

He lifted them with his good hand, and worked his stiff arm gently around her shoulders. He pressed it against her as much as he could without grating the ends of broken bone.

Sally slid close to him and nestled her face against his uniform collar. Her hands crept up, around his shoulders, locking behind his neck. Cuiller rubbed her back in slow, smooth circles, puffing her closer.

Sally’s mouth lifted. Her lips first touched the corner of his jaw, then moved south to find his own.

He kissed her for the first time, for a long time. Then the world began to catch up with them, and Cuiller pulled back just enough to look into her face.

“Hello,” he said, smiling.

“What happened?” She seemed newly awakened, disoriented, lost.

“We had a visitor. Kzinti kind. Are you hurt at all?”

“I—I don’t think so. You?”

“Some. Not a lot of pain yet.”

“Where’s Hugh?”

Cuiller glanced over his shoulder. “The kzin got him… He seems to be dead.”

Krater roused. “Seems to be…? Maybe I can—”

He pulled her back down and locked eyes with her. “You can’t, Sally.”

She sagged, leaning against his good arm. He caressed her once more.

“Come on,” he said. “We can’t stay here. That kzin may come again.”

“Where can we go?”

“Anywhere away from here. Back toward the ship. I don’t know.”

“Can you use the harness?”

“Not with this arm.”

Careful not to look directly at Jook’s remains, she began to feel for his pack and gather their scattered possessions and laser weapons.

“Then we’ll have to make slow time,” she said.

The two of them moved off quietly. Cuiller remembered to keep a hand over his chest wounds so as not to leave blood spoor.

The Elders of Pruntaquila, those inventors of language and studied readers of emotion, believed that bang is the process of becoming.

“And if I do not stay out of that orange monster’s reach,” Fellah muttered in himself, “then I will become lunch.”

He crept under and through the varied leaf layers, hiding after the kzin’s brutal attack. He spent a few solemn moments studying the remaining humans as they crouched in place, wasting time. Then he moved on, toward a place of greater distance and safety. And as he moved, Fellah considered all that the humans had been saying.

Clearly they did believe themselves the inheritors of the Thrintun Masters. In their own inverted language, this Interworld, they were both givers and receivers of Discipline. Their talk hinted at complex relationships and exchanges of Power in patterns that even a Balladeer had never contemplated. And yet they were not alone in their desire for control. That kzin had thought of himself as “free,” too.

Much had occurred in the “long, long time” since Guerdoth had packed Fellah away in the time-bending case. And that implied other things… If the Thrintun were all dead and these new creatures risen unpredictably in their place during these three-times-five unimaginable spans of time, then so were the Pruntaquila gone from this universe.

“I will have no mate,” Fellah said aloud, mournfully, in his native tongue. “I will leave none of my line. Nor any student. And I will make no mark on the future.” It was a dismal thought. For a brief span, Fellah considered offering himself up to the kzin’s claws.

Then something else occurred to him.

All his life he had known the straitjacket bindings of Thrintun Power and had endured the frivolous whims to which the Masters were prone. But in the few hours he had spent among these humans, even when they were threatened by the terrible kzin, he had felt uncertainty and… excitement! Fellah saw now that the iron course of Discipline, even when it was shaped as commands to love and respect, had been like a heavy weight on his mind. And that weight had been totally missing from his thoughts ever since the time-box was opened. Except for a brief moment when the Daff had used the Baton—or “Fiddle,” as it was called in Interworld—on him.

The only trace of Power now left in this universe was the Baton itself. And it was under control of the kzin. From what Fellah had seen, they were almost as clever as the humans. They certainly had the use of fire, metals, and other sophisticated technologies. And the awareness Fellah had tasted from mirrored a whole race, millions more like this one savage kzin, waiting beyond the distances between the stars.

They were intelligent enough to use the Baton, perhaps even to copy it, creating mind-weapons of unimaginable power. Although his experience of these creatures was limited, Fellah supposed it would not displease the kzinti to have worlds full of creatures such as the Sally and Cuiller commanded to jump on cue into their wide, waiting mouths.

Suddenly, Fellah’s mind firmed. There was indeed one thing he could do, one last gesture he could make, to leave his mark on the future.

Nyawk-Captain climbed quickly up into the canopy. He oriented himself on the remains of the one dead human.

No live ones presented themselves. He was sure, however, that at least one of the remaining two was wounded. How far could they have gone? He tried to smell them out, but the scent of the kill in the immediate area was too strong and distracting, the odors of the humans too similar and confusing. Nyawk-Captain had made a shallow box search of the area, and found nothing, before he remembered his carbon-pattern detector.

He returned to the ground, retrieved it, and sighted the locator back up into the leaf layer.

No return signal from any direction.

And that should not be surprising. By this time the humans, even slowed and wounded as they were, might have gone beyond the sensitivity of his locator. Though honor demanded an accounting, there was certain danger in carrying any plan of vengeance too far.

Nyawk-Captain decided to take his prize, the Thrintun artifact, and return to Cat’s Paw in order to continue his mission. Success, victory, and lasting honor were all still possible!

After a stumbling kilometer, Cuiller finally collapsed into the leaf layer, half-afraid—but only half—that his body would find its way through to the long fall. His arm throbbed now with the pain and swelling of the break. He could feel a raw heat creep up to his neck from the wounds in his chest. Was he developing a fever?

“Sally…”

“Wait here, Jared.” Krater settled him across a solid branch and dug the remains of their autodoc out of her pack. She held up a vial of painkiller. “I’m guessing about the dosage,” she said, breaking open a needle and injecting twenty cc’s of clear fluid.

A few minutes after the shot, Cuiller roused himself. Already he was feeling warm and gauzy and… better.

“I should see to your arm,” Krater said.

“What’re you… gonna to do?”

“Set it, splint it, wrap it.”

“D’you ever—?”

“No.”

She examined his left arm, which angled slightly outward about halfway above the elbow. Before he could offer further advice, she gently extended the arm, placed her left palm against the front of his shoulder, curled her right thumb under his elbow, wrapped her fingers over his forearm, and pulled.

White fire boiled up in his arm and he could actually feel the ends of bone clicking together. Then Cuiller passed out.

When he came to, Krater had already cut up one of the pack-frames with a laser and made L-shaped splints with it. She had used the pack straps to bind it to his arm and tied the pack-cloth into a sling. Now she was cutting his uniform away from the puncture marks in his chest and dabbing them with an astringent.

“Sorry I’ve got nothing for bandages,” she said. “But these holes don’t look that deep.”

“S’all right.”

“What do you think the kzin was trying to do?”

“Kill us,” he said with authority.

“Then why did it leave so suddenly? With us not dead.”

“I don’t… Just before it pushed me, I seem to remember dropping the Fiddle.”

“It went through the leaves,” Krater agreed, “and fell.”

“And the kzin went after it—as if he knew it was valuable.”

“Do you think he found it?”

The foliage around them rustled, and both humans tensed for a renewed attack. As Cuiller tried to lever himself more erect he stirred sharp pains in his arm and shoulder. Krater stilled him with her hand.

“It’s Fellah,” she said, pointing toward the small animal as it crept out of the leaf-cover near their feet. “The big cat must have scared him badly, too,” she concluded.

“Other kzin… it’s gone,” Fellah said.

“Did you see it go?” Sally asked. “I mean, how do you know?”

The Pruntaquilun raised its head, closed its eyes, and seemed to sniff the air. But Cuiller, who was watching closely, did not see the creature’s nose even twitch. Fellah’s attention was focused further back, behind his eyes, inside his skull.

“Gone,” Fellah confirmed.

“How does he know that?” Sally asked Cuiller.

“Well, how does he speak Interworld?” he asked in return. “Fellah must have some kind of telepathic sense, either innate or engineered. And it would certainly be a useful quality in a singer and entertainer, to read the minds, the emotional states of his audience. His language ability had improved remarkably just from being around us.”

“You’re saying he senses the kzin telepathically.” She didn’t sound convinced.

“He found his way right to us, didn’t he?”

“Okay, how ‘bout it, Fellah?” she asked playfully. “Do you read minds?”

The Pruntaquilun looked at her seriously. “See words. Hear words.” It wiggled a shrug again.

“What is the kzin going to do next?” Cuiller asked.

“Kzin is gone.”

“Gone back to its ship? Gone from the planet? Where did it go?”

“Gone.”

Krater shook her head. “Jared, he doesn’t know anything about the ship, remember? And he probably doesn’t have much conception of planets and astronavigation.”

“Gone far.” Fellah said with a nod. “With prize for Admiral Lehruff. Continue his mission.”

“What’s that?” Cuiller said, fighting the fog of painkilling drugs in his head.

“Cat’s Paw… Mission to Margrave.”

“He’s reading the kzin’s thoughts directly,” Cuiller told Krater.

The linguist nodded. “I suppose we would, too—if we were a defenseless little dog hiding from those giant cats.”

“This could prove the Navy’s theories,” Cuiller went on. “Cat’s Paw. That’s probably some kind of inciting action, a deception or a fake, like a feint against a mousehole.”

“I think maybe you’re reading too much—”

“And what else would an interceptor-class warship be doing this far out?”

“On patrol? Like us?”

“Not with that kzin’s mission so deeply ingrained in his mind that Fellah can read it this clearly.”

“Kzinti are particularly dutiful,” Krater pointed out. “And this one is dutifully heading back toward Margrave. You heard that part, didn’t you, Sally?”

“Yes. That much was clear.”

“Then we have to stop him. Even if we can’t get off this planet ourselves, we have to keep that kzin pinned here.”

“Why?” she asked.

“It has the Slaver’s device, doesn’t it? That’s the power to control human and other minds, to make them do anything a kzin would want them to… Think about that for a minute.”

“All right, Jared,” she agreed. “But we have a problem: only two laser rifles and three kzinti to kill.”

“Two,” Fellah said. “Kzin the Daff fought, died soon after.”

“How do you know that for sure?” Krater asked. “You were with me all the time, and I didn’t see that.”

“His mind…” The animal paused significantly. “Gone.”

“And not back to his ship, either,” Cuiller summed up. “That’s good news, Sally… Ahh-gahhh,” he yawned. “It makes the odds a little more even.” Cuiller finished sleepily, finally succumbing to the painkillers. His arm felt a long way away.

“Those are armed kzinti you’re talking about,” Sally protested. “With a functioning warship to boot.”

He was already halfway down the well of sleep, but Cuiller roused. “Then the trick,” he said easily, “will be to separate them from their ship… before they can take off.” He yawned again.

The forest around him darkened as if with the flu of night, and Krater caught him as he fell into it as into a bed.

“In any human army, that would be a field piece,” Cuiller observed.

After sleeping, recuperating, and moving on, he and Krater now hung inside the canopy, lost in the shadows of the curving, vaulting branches that ascended from one of the trunks. They looked down through holes in the greenery that they opened—slowly, naturally, like a riffle of wind—with their dangling toes. They were suspended above the kzinti ship, with a horizontal offset of less than fifty meters.

Cuiller studied the vessel with a pair of binoculars, working them one-handed. One of the kzinti was climbing on the outside, naked except for a beltful of tools, working with a mechanical fitting against the curve of the hull. The other, in full armor, stood watch. That one’s visored helmet moved across regular arcs of the canopy surrounding the ship, and each time he panned toward them, Cuiller let the veil of leaves slide smoothly into place.

It was the kzin’s massive rifle that had caught the commander’s attention: some kind of pulsed energy weapon.

“Can you sense them, Fellah?” he asked the small creature snuggled into Sally Krater’s arms. “How close are they to finishing repairs, hey?”

Fellah raised his head and looked gravely down, past their toes. He appeared to consider. “Repair Soon.”

Cuiller realized that the alien’s exposed white hair would make an effective aiming point for that cannon. And that gave him an idea.

“I think I can improve our odds with one shot,” he told Krater.

“How?”

“First, by splitting our positions and halving our vulnerabilities. I want you and Fellah to maneuver off to the west, around the ship. Put about twenty degrees of radial separation between us.”

“But then what are you going to do?”

“I think I can pick off the kzin who’s doing the work. Without breaking my cover.”

“You’ll get killed!” Sally said, alarmed. “That other one, in the armor—with the weapon he’s carrying, all he has to do is bear close on you. And poof!”

“It’s a big jungle.”

“He can take bigger sweeps with that thing,” she said.

“Sure, but I’ll have time to get him with my second shot. In case he does a sweep, however, I want you in an alternate position… You can offer a diversion or something.”

“I don’t want you to risk yourself—sir! Look, why not wait for a Bandersnatch to come along? That’ll really keep him busy.”

“Because long before then the kzinti’ll be all finished up and ready to lift ship.”

“All right, Jared,” she said coolly. “If you won’t listen to reason, we’ll do it your way. But give me time to get in position.”

“Ten minutes?”

“Time enough. But not a minute sooner, you hear?”

“A full ten minutes, I promise.”

With a baleful look, she withdrew higher into the canopy, taking Fellah with her. Soon he could hear only the faint whirr of her rig’s winder motor.

As he waited, Cuiller spread the leaves below him and practiced taking aim with his rifle. Holding it steady in his right hand did not work, and he could not find a point of purchase on the cloth sling covering his left arm. Then he figured out a solution.

Cuiller worked his winder and rose into the forest cover until he could get his feet under him. Paying out slack, he took a loop of the fluorescent-dyed monofilament and wrapped it around the rifle housing. He would have to control the rifle’s tendency to lever up and slip the loop as he put his weight on the line, but he could do that with his right elbow. The only other danger was that the monofilament might cut into the weapon’s barrel and tear it apart. A calculated risk.

Sally’s time limit was still a minute short of coming up when Cuiller lowered himself back into firing position. He had no intention of letting her offer any kind of diversion and so becoming a target herself.

Cuiller moved the rifle around, holding it steady with his armpit on the stock, sighting down the pips, to the forehead of the unarmed kzin. His body was tending to pivot on the looped line, so he braced his feet against the springy branches, the same ones that made up his concealment. Then he gathered his concentration, breathed out slowly, and—

A spear of blue-white light stabbed down from twenty degrees away to his left and opened the kzin’s skull. She had fired first!

The kzin on guard wheeled and sighted his field piece back in the direction from which the beam had come—toward Sally!

Bobbling slightly on his line, Cuiller shifted his aim faster, immediately found a good side-on view of the aiming figure, and fired at the breech of the kzin’s rifle.

The weapon exploded.

When his weapon’s energy packs discharged all at once, Nyawk-Captain was thrown backward. The eyeshield of his visor flared white but saved his vision from flying shrapnel. His whiskers were singed below the limits of its protection, however, and the insides of his arms hurt terribly. He smelled and tasted burned hair.

Only when he tried to rise did he understand how critically the blast had injured him. His upper limbs moved slowly, and some of the armor’s joints worked not at all. Molten metal from the exploding weapon had locked them, dripping even as far as the knee flexor on his right side. He rolled in the dirt, trying to break out of the imprisoning bodysuit. The shell clasps up his belly line were sticking, too.

With a mammoth, flexing spasm of his back, he brought the armor upright on its knees and started to limp toward the ship’s hatchway and the relative safety inside the hull. There he would also find tools to help him get free of the imprisoning suit. With every step he took, Nyawk-Captain expected more energy pulses to blast away the ablative surface and heat the steel shell over his back.

When he got his locked paws on the hatch coaming, he remembered the impossible squeeze that moving into and out of the airlock had been, even with fully functioning armor. He wasn’t going to make it.

He was beating the suit’s belly against hullmetal, trying to break the clasps free, when one of the humans dropped out of the trees on a thin, purple wire and put the projector of a laser rifle against his forehead. A small, fluffy white animal which curled under one of its arms jumped free and scrambled into the ship.

Nyawk-Captain, staring into the human’s glaring eyes, did not dare move.

After a second, the white animal came out with the Thrintun artifact held in its jaws. Nyawk-Captain remembered leaving the device on the ship’s workbench for his and Navigator’s further study. As the animal emerged, a second human—this one more wounded than the first—came down on another wire and also leveled its rifle.

The first human put aside its own weapons, took the alien artifact from the White fluff, and aimed it at Nyawk-Captain’s forehead instead.

Krater tried various settings on the Fiddle and watched with a clinical eye as the kzin twitched and went into convulsions. She settled on one which left it trembling and hypnotized inside its steel restraints.

“This process can either be painful or not,” Cuiller explained to the kzin slowly in Interworld. “I don’t think it understands, Sally,” he said finally.

“Well, if I let up with this thing,” she proposed, “he might be able to nod or something. Want to try it?”

“No thanks. You keep him under.” Cuiller turned back to the kzin and said conversationally, “Now, we need to borrow your ship, Kitty. I’m going to burn you out of that armor, and you’re going to cooperate—one way or another.”

Cuiller studied the latches down the suit’s front. They were gobbed with metal and streamers of burned plastic. He placed the projector of his laser alongside the middle one and fired a short burst. The clasp flew off into the dirt. He repeated with the other two, and the clamshell halves of the belly plate sagged apart The commander then laid the rifle against the soft, reddish fur underneath.

“Slowly,” he told the kzin.

The warrior shrugged massively, withdrawing its arms from the crabbed gauntlets, vambraces, rerebraces, and pauldrons. It divided its attention between Cuiller’s aim with the rifle and Krater’s hold on the Fiddle.

Krater twisted something, and the kzin’s eyes crossed. Its hands moved sideways, too fast for Cuiller to react. He almost opened the massive chest with a burst before he understood that the Fiddle had prompted that sudden movement.

“Keep working on it,” Cuiller told her, “I think you’re getting somewhere. I hope he’s either captain or navigator of this interceptor, because that’s the only way he’ll be able to help us.”

Then inspiration struck.

“Hey, Fellah!” Cuiller called.

The tiny alien was dwarfed by the huge warcat, but he glanced up at the commander with some confidence.

“Talk to the kzin,” Cuiller told him. “Get inside his mind. See words—say words. Tell him we need his ship, need him. Take us to Margrave. Tell him Margrave. He can do it the easy way or hard. But one way or another, he’s going to take us to Margrave.”

Fellah looked at Cuiller with his big, dark eyes gleaming out from among the white hair. The commander sensed that the alien understood what he meant. After a moment, Fellah turned to the kzin and began to growl and spit in a timbre that was no more suited to his delicate, curling tongue than Interworld was.

Through his sudden pain and the sensory confusion that the Thrintun artifact had thrust upon him, Nyawk-Captain was catching only a fraction of the humans’ speech and understanding even less. Still, the gestures with the rifle were significant. He did hear the word “Margrave,” which as the proper name for a human-dominated planet was common to both Interworld and his own language.

Then the Whitefluff began speaking in the Hero’s Tongue.

“Thinskins take you. We-they put you… at disadvantage.”

Nyawk-Captain stopped trying to override the nerve-scrambles that imprisoned him and listened closely.

“True enough,” he growled.

“You are with… luck.”

“Be careful how you tease me, Fluff. I might still regain enough control with just one fingerpad to squash you.”

“Be silent. I-Fellah help you.”

“Why should you help a kzin when you travel with the humans?”

“They prison me, too.”

“True enough. So. What do you propose?”

“Human the Sally works the… Painstick. She does it badly, yes? You are more aware now, yes?”

Nyawk-Captain suddenly saw the opportunity before him. The alien artifact, the Painstick, impeded his actions more or less as the human woman varied the intensity and direction of its strange power. The eerie music still gave Nyawk-Captain a headache but, as the human woman fretfully twisted and fingered the device, its nerve signals were less paralyzing to him than they had been at first. Eventually he might work free of it and be able merely to simulate a body under external control. Then, if he could keep from retching, he would pretend to do what they wanted—until they were both distracted.

“I see your meaning, yes,” he told the Fluff. “What do you suggest?”

“They want you take… ship and them. Go to place called ‘Margrave.’ You know this?”

“Yes, I know Margrave. My crew and I were headed there, before we landed here.” And, with luck and at the human’s own prompting, Nyawk-Captain told himself, Cat’s Paw might still arrive there right on schedule.

“Play along,” the Whitefluff told him. “Pretend pain. Be docile. Be watchful, too.”

“Yes. Until the moment.”

“I tell you when,” the tiny alien advised.

The human male interrupted them with “[Something unintelligible] Margrave?”

The Fluff looked back and answered with “[More nonsense sounds] Margrave.”

Nyawk-Captain nodded his head vigorously in the human gesture signaling agreement. Then, still twitching his arms in random and mechanical ways, he climbed slowly out of the armor’s greaves and cuisses.

The work Navigator had been performing on the hull when he died was related only to the sensors for defensive weapons—useful but not essential systems, now. Nyawk-Captain’s mission could proceed without them.

The kzin’s stomach lurched and staggered with a change of balance as human the Sally tried a new twist with the artifact. The device was still making him do strange things and feel unusual sensations, some pleasant but most merely irritating. It was infuriating to occasionally lose control, but he could learn to live with that. He could even feel himself beginning to like the human female, just a little.

The other human went through the airlock first, keeping his rifle leveled on Nyawk-Captain’s throat. The kzin let him. When he wanted, when the time was right, he would take away that toy before the human could fire it.

Cuiller backed the kzin into the central crash-cradle and made it sit down. While he held the rifle to its forehead, Sally used the couch’s cloth straps and mechanical braces to bind the kzin. She left one forearm and paw free to work the instruments at its station. However, a brief and sweeping study of the control layout had convinced Cuiller that at least two people were needed to pilot the interceptor.

Once the kzin was secured, Krater stepped up to the main panel and fastened the Fiddle to a cleared space with a wad of stickum from her pack. She arranged it so the Fiddle’s presumed working end pointed at the captive’s forehead.

Cuiller inspected the arrangement. “I hope long-term exposure to that thing isn’t going to render him incapacitated, or dead.”

“We could do worse,” she suggested.

Fellah sat quietly on the deckplates, where Cuiller hand set him down.

“Okay, Fellah, tell him we need to start the main polarizers and lift ship. He’ll tell you how, and you translate for us. Or, I guess, you can just point at whatever controls we should attend to next.”

The alien absorbed this and began spitting in the Hero’s Tongue. Cuiller and Krater settled into the two remaining kzinti couches and tried to adapt the crash webbing to their smaller bodies.

With pantomime gestures and low growls, the kzin instructed Fellah in takeoff procedures. Then he relayed the instructions in a series that went, “Push this, pull that, turn this one until red line comes up here, do not move until this disk turns blue.”

Working one-handed, Cuiller hit switches and verniers in the indicated order. The airlock closed, the board lit up, and somewhere back of them the world stiffened and shifted as the gravity polarizers kicked in.

On one of the screens, he watched the landing site and Callisto’s battered hull dwindle and then disappear in a wash of green. In another second the green foliage was gone, dissolving in a flutter of hazy light that turned a chlorine-tinted white as the ship, still accelerating, rose above the limb of the planet.

“Good-bye, Beanstalk,” Krater called cheerfully.

“Good-bye, Daff and Hugh,” Cuiller added soberly. “They were good shipmates.”

“Amen to that.”

As they cleared atmosphere, the kzin turned back to Cuiller directly and gestured with its free paw toward controls on the panel in front of it.

The commander studied the almost-glazed eyes and the string of dribble at the corner of the kzin’s black-lipped mouth. Was he missing some procedure—landing gear, hull integrity, something important? Cuiller threw the switches that the kzin had indicated.

The cabin was immediately filled with the buzz of an open comm circuit. An anxious kzinti face peered out of the screen directly ahead. It warbled a growl at them, and its eyes grew suddenly large.

Before the kzin in the chair could respond, Krater lunged forward, grabbed the Fiddle, and began pressing all its keys. Their kzinti captive went rigid and trembled with induced catatonia.

Cuiller frantically turned all the switches on the section of control board he’d just used, scrambling them with random settings. Finally, the alien face faded out in a blaze of static.

“Our captive was faking submission,” he observed.

“I’m sorry, Jared,” she said apologetically. “I don’t know enough about the Fiddle to make him do anything more than twitch. Can we fly this ship alone?”

“I think I could pick out the star pattern surrounding Lambda Serpentis,” Cuiller said. “We can probably bend a vector in that direction. And, given a few tries with this comm system, I think we can call out those segments of the U.N. fleet stationed at Margrave.”

“Who was it that he contacted?” Sally asked.

“His commanding officer?” Cuiller suggested. “Some flight dispatcher back in kzinti space?”

“The face on that comm screen appeared almost instantly, didn’t it? So the relay time was virtually nil. Whoever it was is damn close, Captain. Closer than kzinti space.”

“Kzin… self-named Lehruff,” Fellah offered. “Admiral.”

“I was tricked into opening a comm-circuit directly into the entire kzinti command structure,” Cuiller said. “Now the entire Patriarchy is going to know something damn peculiar has happened aboard this ship.”

“Damned bad,” from Fellah.

“Well, not much we can do about it now,” Cuiller said. “Except run like hell and call for reinforcements.”

“Agreed,” Krater said.

“We travel,” Fellah said. “Be here ‘long, long time.’ In this small space,” he observed thoughtfully. “Enough food here? Hey, Sally?”

“Don’t worry, Fellah,” she assured him. “We won’t eat a sentient species.”

Fellah waved a paw at the recumbent kzin. “Does he?”

“Time lies with we-us. Our side,” the Whitefluff growled sternly to Nyawk-Captain. “You… risk. With Lehruff. Damn bad doings.”

“I know it,” the kzin growled in return, idly making gestures at a disused bank of controls that the Fluff could demonstrate to the humans as a pretext for making conversation. The human male cautiously worked the sliders, unaware that he was just opening and cycling the ship’s atmosphere vanes. “I thought it was an opportunity worth the taking,” Nyawk-Captain explained.

“Risk to be taking! Do not again.”

“Why not?”

“Human the Sally will use maximum setting. Painstick cripples. It also kills.”

Nyawk-Captain eyed the device where it was stuck to the main panel, aimed at him. After his trick with the comm-circuits, the woman had readjusted its settings. For a brief time, the Painstick had left him dazed and trembling.

And this had been good, Nyawk-Captain thought now. The experience had shown him the weapon’s unique flaw. Continuous exposure, even at the highest settings, allowed an active brain to become acclimatized to the effect. Like a patch of skin under abrasion, his mind was developing the neural equivalent of a callus. After a span of hours he had found himself able to shape coherent thoughts and activate useful synapses around the offending signals. He still did not have much control—not enough to slip the bonds of his couch, turn upon the humans, and rend them to bloody fragments. But his head was definitely growing clearer and his limbs felt more his own.

“On this… heading, at this… velocity,” Fluff groped for the navigational terms in the Hero’s Tongue, “Lehruff catches us?”

“What? No, his fleet is still a day or more behind us.”

“All along way to Margrave?”

“He was going there already.”

“But these humans, we-they get there first,” Fluff concluded. “Humans have their own fleet at Margrave?”

“Yes, there will be a battle. Not as grand as the one we kzinti had planned, but enough still to—”

“Humans have the Painstick. Soon all humans have it. Some will learn better than human the Sally.” Fellah spat in a particularly suggestive manner.

Now that was a bad thought. Nyawk-Captain envisioned bands of raucous monkeys armed with copies of the Painstick. They were cutting down armed kzinti in mid-leap and marching them off as twitching zombies. He saw the males of the Patriarchy reduced to the status of shivering, voiceless females… And the Fluff was right. These two humans would get to Margrave ahead of the Last Fleet and call out their Navy. They would certainly have time to turn the Painstick over to their high command, who would remove it from the battle theater for study and duplication. The Patriarchy might win this coming Battle of Margrave, and still lose their souls for eternity.

Could Nyawk-Captain stop them? Could he give these humans not just useless instructions but damaging ones? Could he dupe them into disabling Cat’s Paw, so that Lehruff would draw even with them and take everyone aboard his flagship? That would deliver the Painstick neatly to Lehruff and then to the Patriarchy.

Or, barring that, might Nyawk-Captain trick the humans into destroying this ship?

Unlikely… His stupid (yes, it was stupid!) attempt with the communications switch had alerted the human male to Nyawk-Captain’s potential for trickery. The humans would be doubly careful with every command he suggested now. Only those with no effect—like their current twiddling of the atmosphere vanes—would escape that scrutiny.

However, Nyawk-Captain might be able to slow them up. He could cut their lead ahead of the Last Fleet. Then Lehruff would overtake and—

…But no. Even if that one glimpse over the comm-circuits had alerted Lehruff to some kind of disturbance aboard the Paw, the old kzin still had his orders. He would only follow the interceptor down to Margrave and let the Cat’s Paw make its feinting run, as planned. Lehruff knew how to do his duty, even if things he saw in a flash of broken communications might trouble his eyes.

Then Nyawk-Captain knew what he had to do.

His only worry was his failing strength. At their current speed, it would be many days before the human fleet stationed at Margrave came out to take possession of the fleet. Until that time, the two humans would keep him bound, physically and mentally, or so they thought. They would loosen the bonds only to feed him and take instruction in ship operations. But even then, the woman had discovered intravenous supplements among the medical supplies, and these had diagrams to guide a nonmedical kzin in an emergency. The woman had rigged drip equipment above his crash-couch and was running the tasteless liquids into the vein at Nyawk-Captain’s neck.

His flesh would soon be melting away. Eventually his atrophied muscles would be as weak as the humans’ own. He would be weak as a kzitten when they finally released him—but maybe that would be enough.

“Tell the human to stop his adjustments,” he instructed Fluff. “We’ve had enough nonsense for one watch.”

The little animal nodded and turned away to make his soft and useless mouthings.

Nyawk-Captain relaxed and composed his mind, exploring new pathways around the Painstick’s ingrained signals. He prepared himself for a continued stream of idle days.

For twenty days Jared Cuiller had been surreptitiously monitoring the approach of the kzinti warfleet behind them and relaying his observations ahead to the human fleet that had sailed from Margrave on his alert. He had also hoped to renew with Sally the intimacy they had derived from that one long kiss among the treetops. But the quarters in the captured interceptor were too cramped, the kzin was too restless, and Fellah too keenly observant.

“Maybe later.” Sally had smiled, when he first shyly proposed it. “We’ll have lots of time.”

But would they? He thought dismally of the major battle that was brewing, with a war surely to follow. As Cuiller made his observations of the kzinti fleet, he dared probe in their direction for no more than a few seconds. And still these peeks accounted for hundreds of obvious warships and other massed vessels. When the two forces came together, it was going to be a battle to remember.

Too bad, in a way, that they wouldn’t be on hand to take part in it. But earlier he had arranged to rendezvous with an Empire-class supply ship somewhere on the human side of the conjectured clash point among the stars. The Navy would take this captured ship in tow and transfer off Jared and Sally’s prisoner and their prizes: a new sentient life form, a working stasis-box, and—best of all—a mechanical enhancement of the Slavers’ power. Rich prizes.

In the many days that the two humans and Fellah had to study the interceptor’s layout, Cuiller had worked out its flight sequencers to his own satisfaction.

And now, within visual-contact distance of the globe comprising the human fleet, he shut down the gravity polarizers and let the ship drift forward at a considerable fraction of light-speed.

“Cuiller to Sumeria,” he called, adjusting the comm panel. “Ready to match velocities.”

The supply ship dropped out of the battle formation, dived below hyperspace, and showed up on one of the control board’s screens.

“We’ll take you with magnetic grapples, Captain Cuiller,” the bridge officer informed him. And no, the rank he used was not a slip of the tongue, either:

“Captain,” instead of “Lieutenant Commander.”

Jared and Sally began powering down nonessential systems.

“What about him?” she asked, pointing at the recumbent kzin.

At first their captive had thrashed around, testing his restraints, but as the days wore on he had become increasingly silent, spending more and more time sleeping. Krater had changed his fluid bottles regularly, raking new ones from the food generator, which she had programmed from a card in the medical supplies. Now, as they approached the englobement, the kzin’s only response was an occasional yawn and whole-body shudder. She routinely wiped white drool from the fanged mouth as he lay there.

“I guess we’ll have to untie him to make the transfer,” Cuiller said. “We knew that sooner or later we’d have to trust your control with the Fiddle alone.”

He flexed his own left arm, which had begun to heal straight and painlessly. That was probably thanks in part to his new diet of rich, red meat which seemed to be the food machine’s only other setting.

Krater unstuck the Fiddle from its place on the control panel, being careful to keep it oriented on the kzin’s head. Cuiller bent to undo the couch’s straps and braces. One by one he released the mechanical controls over their comatose enemy.

Cuiller’s head was down near the backrest when he heard the couch squeak.

“Jared! Look out!” Sally warned.

A huge paw, twenty centimeters wide, swept across over his head and snagged the Fiddle out of her hands. In the partial gravity of the control space, the device flew toward the wall, bounced off it with a clack!, missed Cuiller’s ear by four centimeters on the rebound, ricocheted under the control panel, and skittered along the floor.

He dove for the Fiddle, but before his hands could close on it, a massive, clawed foot stamped down on the hullmetal plates. The barrel of the device exploded in a shower of fragments and sparks. Cuiller closed his eyes in reflex and felt the pieces patter against his face.

The kzin ground its foot against the floor for good measure, then kicked the mixed fragments off to one side. It had lurched out of the crash-couch to reach the Fiddle, and now the kzin collapsed against the padded armrest, gasping with the effort.

Before the kzin could move again to attack Cuiller, Sally had retrieved one of their laser rifles and slid its projector up against the prisoner’s left eye. The kzin raised his paw in a warding gesture and shook his head. Then he slipped back into the chair and made to fasten the restraints again.

The kzin growled and hissed in Fellah’s direction. “Better this way, he says,” the alien translated, and then, speaking directly: “Thrintun power… Bad thing, yes? Bad in your world. Bad in his. Now, no more.”

The kzin stretched his lips without baring his teeth.

Cuiller looked down at the shattered tube and glittering shards of what could be electronic circuits—or perhaps conductors of some other energy. He nodded.

“Do humans eat their prisoners?” Fellah asked, again translating. “Or do you allow an… honorable death… in hunt for sport.”

“Neither,” Cuiller answered. “You—” He pointed at the kzin. “—will probably be interned for the duration of the coming war.”

“Kept in… confinement?” Fellah asked, still working through the Hero’s Tongue.

“Yes, certainly.”

“Worse yet. But…” And here the kzin thumped his paw on the couch’s padding. “Better at least than this.”

Magnetic grapples seized the hull. Fellah gave out a glad, barking laugh that would translate the same in both Interworld and the Hero’s Tongue.