The Man-Kzin Wars 07

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Rrowl-Captain equalized pressures and popped open his helmet. The rank, moist odor of monkeys too long confined thickened the darkness around him, swarming into his wide nostrils.

He controlled the urge to spit in distaste, and tried to breathe through his mouth.

Other Heroes of the boarding party were floating just inside the alien airlock, waiting respectfully for the captain of Belly-Slasher to signal them. At his hiss of permission, they opened their own helmets. Rrowl-Captain could hear the snarls of disgust at the humid jungle smells in the tunnel, like a Jotoki biome. The only light was from their helmet lamps. Sounds echoed harshly in the gloom, then faded away to a damp silence.

He shifted his grip on the fragile primate handholds and looked around the access tunnel. Blank and featureless walls, empty except for the long ladders and equipment docks he could see by helmet light. He snarled a hissing swearword at the monkeys' lack of gravity-polarizer technology. Primitives!

Alien-Technologist had used an echo-thumper to determine that atmosphere existed inside the outer hatch at the bow of the derelict monkeyship. The crewkzin then erected a sealed bubbledome around the airlock, and cut through the thick metal with heavy lasers, revealing the long dark access tunnel.

No trap-bombs, no cowardly monkey tricks.

Rrowl-Captain, as Dominant Leader, was first to set claw and fang inside the alien spacecraft. His victory, his prize.

The captain snarled orders, and crewkzin anchored powerful search lamps near the power feed that had been snaked through the airlock. Reassuring orange light blazed down the long access tunnel, banishing the darkness into small shadows. Rrowl-Captain could see the glint of another airlock far, far away in the darkness.

With a start, he tightened his grip on the monkey handhold as his perspective suddenly shifted. The tunnel pointed down, his alarmed reflexes informed him. He and his crew appeared to be hanging precariously at the top of a very long vertical tunnel. It did not matter to his brain, evolved on a planet, that the contra-matter reaction drive was providing only a tiny proportion of gravitational acceleration at present. It did not matter that the captain intellectually knew that he would not plummet like a stone down the shaft, but would drift like a bit of fluff combed from his pelt.

Kzin feared falling.

"Alien-Technologist," he rasped, mastering his fear after several deep breaths.

The kzin made an awkward microgravity leap to Rrowl-Captain's side from across the tunnel, using a reaction pistol judiciously, and snapped a suit bolt onto a nearby crossbar. The captain was impressed, but refused to show it.

"Command me," Alien-Technologist said without bravado, clearly as nervous in the tunnel as his captain.

"Lead your party to the inner airlock and secure this monkeyship.”

"At once, Dominant One!”

Rrowl-Captain watched with grudging admiration as the octal of Heroes under Alien-Technologist's command rappelled down the tunnel. The figures in space armor swiftly became smaller as they descended, using secured lines and reaction pistols.

Lifting one wrist, he clumsily punched up the shipboard commlink with gloved fingers. Static hissed and fizzed in his ears.

"Command me!" growled-and-spat the low reply from Navigator on the command bridge.

"Status.”

"The monkeyship continues to operate as before. Drone remotes have been dispatched to all major sectors of the outer hull." Navigators tone sounded confident and full of Heroic pride. "No sign of traps or trickery.”

"Open a telemetry channel to my portable thinplate.”

"At once!" came Navigator's reply.

Rrowl-Captain unfolded his personal thinplate and accessed data downloaded from Belly-Slasher. Status reports stalked one another across the thinplate under the captain's gaze. The alien spacecraft was indeed running as if derelict with only the contra-matter drive and magnetic field arrays operational. No beacons, no navigational control.

He spent some time reviewing the data, running a tongue over his sharp teeth in thought, waiting for the remote drones to complete their scans.

"Dominant One," crackled his headset in Alien Technologist's voice, "we have secured the alien ship as you commanded.”

"Did you find monkey bodies?”

"Yes," came the reply with a pleased growl. "We have found nearly four octals of the humans in artificial hibernation." There was a pause. "The maintenance subsystems appear to be both intact and functional.”

Rrowl-Captain knew what Alien-Technologist was thinking Fresh, living monkey meat. Saliva washed his fangs in anticipation. He rasped his rough tongue across thin black lips. Ship rations were not always pleasing to a Noble Hero's palate. Still, first things first.

"Do you mean that this ship was piloted by machines?”

"All hibernation couches are occupied.”

Rrowl-Captain wanted to stretch his batwing ears in confusion and not a little suspicion. The monkeys relied very heavily indeed on untrustworthy automation, true. But to leave such a fearsome reaction drive under automated control smacked of madness.

They do not think like Heroes, the captain reminded himself yet again. No alien thinks like a Hero. But what kind of artificial mind could have directed such an uncanny defense?

"Have you found their command bridge?" he finally rasped.

A tone of pride entered the hissing voice in his helmet. "We have, Leader. The room has not been touched, and is waiting for you.”

Repressing a shudder, Rrowl-Captain attached a belt loop to the guide lines left by his boarding party, and slid down the monkeyship access shaft in one slow, nightmare fall. From time to time, he fired his own reaction pistol to slow his dreamlike descent, barely suppressing his mews of fear as the tunnel walls slid past. When he finally reached the bottom of the tunnel, his posture ensured that none of the crewkzin dared look his way as he entered the inner airlock.

The interior was cramped, narrow. Lights were strung down empty corridors, spreading clear orange illumination into dark corners. Rrowl-Captain could hear hiss-and-spit conversation from engineers and specialists bent over alien equipment. He had known that the monkeys were puny, but his back complained painfully as he stooped under several hatch fittings. It would have been better to stalk these alien corridors on all fours, but space armor prevented that posture.

The captain rudely cuffed a low-ranking kzin apprentice standing guard. "Nameless One," he rumbled, "direct me to the monkey command bridge.”

The other kzin saluted smartly and led his captain down one darkened corridor to a small area equipped with two tiny acceleration chairs and accompanying consoles. The nameless kzin saluted and stood at the hatchway, waiting for further instructions.

The captain of Belly-Slasher ceremonially urinated at all four cardinal points of the monkeyship command bridge, marking it as kzin territory.

And Rrowl-Captains property in the Name of the Riit Patriarch of Kzin-home.

He examined the console carefully, looking at the burnt and damaged equipment clearly caused by the magneto-electrical pulse. He sniffed delicately at a heavy fiber-optic cable that had been torn from some kind of socket. He sniffed the broken end of the cable again, more thoroughly.

Something was wrong, Rrowl-Captain knew with a start, his ruff rising in alarm within his space armor. Containing a snarl, he swiftly looked from side to side, half expecting the very walls to burst open with hordes of laser-wielding monkeys.

Fangs did not fit into this wound channel as they should.

He whirled suddenly and sniffed at the empty acceleration chairs. The scent was very fresh.

The captain began to growl low in his throat.

"Alien-Technologist," Rrowl-Captain hissed into his commlink.

"Leader!" came the reply in his helmet.

"Where are you at present?”

"I am studying the contra-matter drive. Dominant One, the brute force of the monkey technology, without artifice or subtlety, is astounding. Brute force primitives. They have wrestled contra-particles into a high vacuum chamber, and – “

"Enough," the captain interrupted. "Tell me again that all of the hibernation chambers are occupied.”

"It is so, Dominant One. This spacecraft, for all its apparent size, is quite tiny – an iceball with a small life-bubble deep inside.”

Rrowl-Captain blinked in thought, staring at the empty chairs and savoring the scents he had found on them. "Is it possible," he hissed, "that two of the monkeys have but recently entered hibernation?”

There was a short pause.

"No, Leader. Even with alien machinery, it is clear that all of the hibernation chambers have been occupied for several years.”

"Report to me at once," Rrowl-Captain shrieked. He punched up Navigator in Belly-Slasher on his commlink and spat syllables quickly, issuing orders and demanding information.

It took some time to prove what Rrowl-Captain's nose had suspected. There had indeed been two monkeys alive and warm inside the iceball of a spacecraft not long before Rrowl-Captain's boarding party entered. There were no bodies, and all of the hibernation chambers were in long-term use.

Even an unblooded kitten could set fangs into these facts: The two monkeys were hiding or had fled.

Judicious use of Alien-Technologist's sonic echo-thumper sounded the walls of the monkeyship, and after some search found an empty shipbay, hidden behind a false bulkhead. Instruments detected residual radiation from a fusion drive lining what was clearly a collapsed escape tunnel through reinforced ice.

Navigator's instruments aboard Belly-Slasher, using the remote drones and Alien-Technologist's growing intuition of monkey ways, found a magnetic anomaly receding quickly from them. It was decelerating very rapidly indeed, and seemed to have originated from the derelict monkeyship.

"Why are the honorless leaf-eaters running and not fighting?" Rrowl-Captain growled in anger and frustration. "Why would they flee, and leave the defenseless bodies of their comrades to us?”

Kzin never let their fellow Heroes become prey.

Alien-Technologist averted his eyes, folded ears against skull inside his helmet. "Because they cannot win, Leader, and flee witlessly before Noble Heroes.”

The captain slashed claws in rebuke at the other kzin's lickspittle foolishness. "Hardly," he rasped angrily. "This event reeks of monkey trickery." He paused a moment in carnivorous thought. Think like a duplicitous monkey, he reminded himself with vast distaste.

"The contra-matter drive is stable?”

"Yes, Leader. We have tapped into the monkey telemetry cables, and found the confinement fields steady.”

There was a snarl of static over the commlink from Navigator, still aboard Belly-Slasher. "Dominant One, I do not mean to intrude, but there is an anomalous finding – “

"Report," Rrowl-Captain growled. "Remote drones near the reaction drive section show increasing levels of radioactivity," the tiny voice finished.

The darkened monkey corridor seemed to whirl around Rrowl-Captain and close in on him like an implacable enemy's claws. He felt a growl growing within his throat.

"You have no other manner," he hissed slowly to the other kzin standing before him, "to determine the status of the reaction drive than what the monkeys wish us to know?" Alien-Technologist looked at his captain blankly.

"Leader, I do not understand. These are standard telemetry lines linking the contra-matter drive directly to these navigation consoles… hrrrrr," he said, falling silent in thought.

Rrowl-Captain barely contained his fury. "Confirm the status of the contra-matter drive at once. Directly. In person if necessary. I feel enemy eyes upon us, and scent danger." Rrowl-Captain repressed the desire to slash an ear from the monkey-trusting Alien-Technologist for his trophy loop. "In the meantime, the rest of the crew not associated with you will return to Belly-Slasher.”

Rrowl-Captain snorted his displeasure at Alien-Technologist, who hung bouncing in the microgravity like a toothless kitten's prey-toy. He ignored the other kzin's humbled salute and turned to leave the navigation chamber abruptly.

The captain would lead Belly-Slasher on a diverting exercise, a small hunt for the escaped monkeys, who would rather run than fight. Perhaps by the time he had returned with his trophies, Alien-Technologist and his crew would have truly secured the monkeyship prize. He entered the access tunnel, and hooked the guide line to a reinforced loop on his battle armor. Rrowl-Captain snarled and leaped upward in the microgravity, toward the outer airlock, firing his reaction pistol downward for added emphasis.

He never looked down.

Rrowl-Captain entered Betty-Slasher, feeling the comforting artificial gravitation firm beneath his taloned boots once more. Suddenly, slurred hisses of Alien-Technologist yowled over the commlink in a frenzied rush of harsh syllables.

He could not make out the words, but the tone was clear: Fear. Warning.