Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI Read online

  “I can’t get through,” she said after a several attempts.

  “We have layers of every kind of armor all round us,” said Hugo. Like a lot of the technology available on post-Liberation Wunderland the telephone was primitive, produced when human factories had been running down during the kzin occupation, and modern molecular-distortion batteries had largely been banned because they made overly handy bombs. Its signals could not travel through the armor of the cruiser. With kzin gravity-control technology, weight had been of relatively little consequence in building kzin warships. Battle-damage meant holes in the outer hull—indeed he had seen several when they first approached the cruiser, but here they were deep in the labyrinthine subdivisions, probably with several sealed compartments between them and the sky.

  He turned to Karan. “The bridge, the place with the drum. Is it near the top of the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you see the sky there? Is there a window?”

  “I did not see one. There are still lights burning there. But I think there is sky…”

  There might be a window. Kzinti hated being confined or being completely dependent on artificial senses, and it was normal to have a window on the bridge that the captain could see through at least when the ship was at cruising stations. It would of course be closed and shielded in battle. Could he open it? Better to try that than try to force their way back up the corridor where the boat waited, especially now. And “sky” sounded hopeful.

  “Can you lead us there?”

  “Yes. But there are Jotok. And we must go through corridors. A Hero cannot crawl through the ducts. Many of them are too small even for me.”

  Especially, thought Vaemar, a Hero carrying Swirl-Stripes. He obviously could not leave the disabled kzin to the Jotok, and even in Wunderland’s gravity he was far too heavy for the others to think of lifting. Another grim thought: carrying Swirl-Stripes he would not be able to fight either. Would the humans have the speed of reflex and marksmanship to beat the Jotok? Then the grimly amused thought: Why do I ask? They beat us. Swirl-Stripes was too weak or too responsible to protest as Vaemar taped his claws with the special tape the medical kit contained for that purpose. An injured kzin lashing out in agony or in a half-conscious delirium was not something even another kzin wanted to be carrying.

  No point in delay. He bent and hoisted Swirl-Stripes on his back. Karan and Anne went ahead, with the beam rifle and one strakkaker. Karan, Vaemar saw, ported the heavy kzin weapon as if she knew how to use it. Rosalind and Hugo brought up the rear with the other strakkakers. Swirl-Stripes, drifting in and out of consciousness, asked to be left, as a Hero would. Vaemar ignored him, as a Hero would.

  The emergency lights were few and random in the upper corridor through which Karan led them, but at least it was dry underfoot, and dry enough to use, if necessary, the beam rifle in a brief burst with relative safety. Once or twice the floor beneath their feet swayed. Kzin warships seldom died easily and there must be a great deal of structural damage in the lower part of the cruiser, under water and gradually sinking under its own weight into the mud. More holes in the armor on the upper part of the hulk might have been useful.

  For some way even the kzinti’s ears detected no movement by any large bodies ahead: apparently the armed Jotok had concentrated below to cut them off from the boat. Then the lights became a little brighter and more frequent, a proper supplement to their own lamps. They passed a fire-control point lit by a bank of small globes that seemed to have been put there recently. It made progress a little faster.

  “Your work?” Vaemar asked Karan.

  “No. The Jotoks’ work. I told you they were beginning to accomplish things. They are beginning to make repairs.”

  A little while before it had been he who had reminded the others that the Jotok were not stupid. But it was hard to remember the weird creatures had originally been on this ship as technicians and the trained, loyal slaves of Heroes. The ship was obviously wrecked beyond hope of ever flying again. Why were they repairing it? Habit? To make a fortress? Who knew how those joined brains worked, or were coming to work now? Vaemar though that he was probably the first kzintosh for generations, apart from the professional trainers-of-slaves, to care how or why Jotok thought. Until recently very few kzinti had been interested in the thought processes of any of the other species which the Fanged God had placed in the Universe for them to dominate.

  There was a Jotok scuttling up a pipe. A young one, its five segments not long joined. An Earth marine biologist would have thought it an impossible mixture of phyla: echinoderm and mollusc, starfish with a large dash of octopus giving the arms length and flexibility. Then they saw others on the pipes and bulkheads, miniatures of the adults that could hold and fire kzin weapons and, given sufficient numbers, even overwhelm kzinti in close fighting. I wonder if their ancestors designed our guns for us? Vaemar thought. The color of the bulkheads here was orange, and the passage was wider. This had been senior officers’ country. The bridge must be near.

  Anne shouted and pointed. Ahead was brighter light. The corridor opened onto the bridge. Hope against hope, there was a broad shaft of daylight. The captain’s window and more was gone. Battle damage. Of course the ship’s attackers would have concentrated on the bridge. Vaemar smelt the air blowing in from the wide channels and the salt of the not-so-distant sea. Swirl-Stripes had lost consciousness. Vaemar laid him down, and punched in the telephone’s distress call, holding the key down for a continuous send. The others had needed no orders to check the doors and hatchways and close those that could be closed.

  No large Jotok to be seen, though there were a few small ones climbing about the walls. Vaemar strode to the captain’s fooch, kicking a couple of smelly, disintegrating trophies aside. Before him was the semicircle of screens which the bridge team would monitor in combat, the keyboards and touchpads they would operate.

  There were still some panels glowing as if with life. Light pulsed aimlessly across several screens. The ship was not yet entirely dead. An image came to Vaemar of commanding a ship like this in its pride.

  There had been the power here to lay worlds waste. Vaemar had been in wrecked kzin warships before—there were plenty of them on Wunderland—and even in their ruin they could not but remind him: My Sire was Planetary Governor. I might have been Planetary Governor, too. Not merely to command such a ship, or a dreadnought that would dwarf it, but to lead a fleet of thousands, to order their building and their loosing upon the enemy with a wave of his hand…The thought was instantaneous, fleeting, ravenous. He closed his jaws with an effort, but did not retract his claws. He might need them at any moment. He remembered the words of Colonel Cumpston, his old chess-partner: “You know you are a genius, Vaemar. By kzin or human standards. More than the kzinti of this world will have need of you.” Make my own destiny, he whispered to himself, tearing his eyes from the fascinating weapons consoles. I am Riit and I can afford to adapt. It is easier for me than for one who needs to prove something each day…But I do need to prove something each day. It is just that I am not quite sure what. But my challenge is here. His disciplined his thoughts. The human Henrietta had demonstrated to him the madness which dreams of a reconquest could lead into. And at this moment he had a real enough task for a Hero before him.

  He had done all he could to summon help. Now they would have to help themselves. He stood rampant.

  “Show yourselves, Jotok Slaves!” he roared in the Ultimate Imperative Tense of the Heroes’ Tongue, the tense that normally only one of the Riit’s blood-line or a guardian of the kzin species’s honor might use.

  No response.

  “Show yourselves, Jotok!” He roared again, this time in the normal Imperative Tense, which simply meant: “Obey instantly or be torn to pieces.”

  “More humble, kzin!” came a voice from nowhere.

  “Who spoke?”

  “We show ourselves.” One of the meaninglessly flickering screens, a large one set high, cleared. Swir
l-Stripes, drifting back into consciousness, yelled and scrabbled with his forelimbs. The huge image of a Jotok stared down at them.

  The thing’s real size was hard to judge, but the juveniles they had seen so far looked tiny, spindly copies. The thing had age and bulk. More, Vaemar and the staring humans recognized, it had power…Authority. Vaemar had little memory of Chuut-Riit’s palaces. But he knew Authority. And this thing—these things, he remembered they were colonial animals—had none of the air of a slave. Even through the medium of the viewing screen that was obvious. He raised his ears and flexed them, so the tattoos might be seen. He had no doubt they were in the deadliest peril. These killers-of-kzinti would not have revealed itself/themselves were they not confident that they were complete master of the situation. They could hardly intend that he should live or escape to give warning of their existence. And even as these thoughts flashed through his head he was conscious of Karan’s eyes upon him.

  “More humble!” came the voice.

  “I speak to you in the Tense of Equals,” said Vaemar. He fought down a plainly futile urge to leap at the screen and destroy it. “And I am Riit. What do you wish?”

  “That you should know us. There are still some Jotoki left,” said the old Jotok, “who lived on this ship as slaves of the smelly-furred kzinti. We”—one of its arms gestured towards itselves—“rose to the position of fuse-setter and maintainer of secondary gravity motors. Scuttling to do our master’s bidding before we roused its wrath. Waiting to be torn apart and eaten when we became too old to serve. But that was not to be…

  “Many of us died when the ship came down in this swamp, and our kzin masters were killed. The other kzinti abandoned the ship. They cared nothing for us, of course. Had they been in less haste they might well have taken us with them as a dependable food source.

  “We were alone. Time passed. We hunted and survived. Those of us who could operate the ship’s radios listened for orders from our masters, for words of others of our kind, but we heard nothing.

  “Many more Jotoki died then of masterlessness. We, and some like us, did not. We knew we had no living masters. And we and those who are like us prepared to strike back.

  “We have journeyed far from the ship. We have killed the kz’eerkti and the kzinti. We feast on them and on the swimming creatures. This realm we make our own.

  “We see the pictures that the kz’eerkti transmit. We have learnt from them a little of what was taken from us. We, and the Jotoki species, have learnt of revenge!”

  Swirl-Stripes moaned again. Vaemar was suddenly aware of Anne beside him. “Keep him talking,” she mouthed. His acute hearing just picked up the words. He wondered if the Jotok could lip-read human speech. It seemed highly unlikely. Everything so far had been said by it—by them?—in an odd blend of the slave’s patois with additional odd and insolent importations from the Heroes’ Tongue.

  “This realm we make our own…” Hardly. And perhaps he could do worse than point that out right away.

  “The disappearances in Grossgeister Swamp are already starting to attract attention,” he said. He spoke straight up at the image, though he did not know from where he was actually being observed. “That is partly why we are here. If we do not return without further harm, more will come in greater force. Your realm will not last long.”

  “I see you have kz’eerkti slaves working for you now that you have abandoned us,” said the Jotok. Vaemar disentangled resentment in the scrambled tenses. Have these Jotok become jealous of humans? Certainly, it was plain they had no idea how things really stood on Wunderland. I can hardly expect them to think like us. And then he thought: They have only seen the world from the point-of-view of kzinti techno-slaves. They know nothing of how things really are. And almost like us when we collided with the humans, no real experience of war except the old style of kzin wars of conquest. Ambushing paddlers in the swamp is not war. Even at the very first, they were traders, not warriors…And that led to another thought.

  “Do you seek to trade?” he asked.

  “Trade?”

  “Your ancestors traded.”

  “We seek revenge for our ancestors. We are angry. We have much to avenge.”

  “So do we!” He thought of the flayed kzinti corpses in the compartment below. But vengefulness was the most dangerous of all emotions for a kzin on Wunderland. There was a lost war to avenge, and for all kzinti that was a demon living in their minds that needed strong caging. It sometimes escaped.

  “Our vengeance has begun,” the Jotok replied. “As we begin to understand what we have lost.”

  “Your ancestors were traders. We offer you trade again.” So, I must become an instant expert on another alien psychohistory, he thought. As if having to learn to live among humans as an equal was not enough. Yet perhaps what he had learned among humans was a help. He was practiced in thinking the unthinkable, in saying the unsayable, in dealing with members of an alien species rather than taking them automatically as slaves and prey. He could at least talk to the Jotok. The creatures were silent for a moment, as if in thought. Then they asked: “What have you to trade?”

  “The oldest trade there is. Our lives for yours.”

  “Say on, kzin.”

  “Kill us, and others will follow us to this ship. Next time they will be shooting as they come. Release us, and you may live.”

  “Zrrch! So a kzin begs for its life!” Could there be a deadlier insult? Vaemar felt his ears knotting with the effort as he again fought down the urge to scream and leap at the image. I am Vaemar! I am Vaemar-Riit! I am Son of Chuut-Riit! I can control my emotions!

  “For the lives of others!”

  The Jotok seemed to hesitate. Presumably its brains were conferring among themselves.

  “We have killed kzinti,” it/they replied. “We know kzinti. Kzinti will not forgive!”

  That was true.

  “Also we have killed kz’eerkti, kzinti’s new favorite slaves. Kzinti will not forgive.”

  A certain information gap there, thought Vaemar. But basically this monstrosity is right. They have done too much to be allowed to live. Besides, I have no authority to make a binding deal with them. And the monkey-trick of lying is not available to me.

  “And I have no authority to deal,” added the Jotok, as if echoing Vaemar’s own thoughts. Was that some dim race-memory of a civilization that had had organization, consultation, hierarchy? “Only to kill.” This was in the Heroes’ Tongue, nearly pure. “And to tell you, kzinti, before you die, of the wrath and vengeance of the Jotoki, whom you have twice betrayed! Take that message to your Fanged God! You will die, kzinti, but you will know your killers.”

  Its mouths struggled with an untranslatable alien word: “Rrrzld…stand clear!”

  “There!” Anne pointed.

  The Jotok was on a small gantry near the deckhead, largely concealed in the shadows cast from the patch of sky. A Jotok band might once have played there for the pleasure of the Captain. Vaemar jumped and fired the beam rifle with kzin speed an instant before the Jotok could operate its own weapons. The Jotok, hit in its center by the beam, staggered to the edge of the balcony, drew itself up, and fell. In a convulsive spasm its toroidal neurochord ruptured, its five arms separating themselves into the individuals they had originally been. Vaemar’s Ziirgah sense reeled for a moment under the psychic blast of their agony. For a hideous second he almost understood what it was like to be a colonial animal torn apart, and not for the first time gave an instant’s thanks he was not a telepath. Other Jotok—large, mature Jotok—appeared, running for the balcony which, they saw, carried a set of heavy rifles, mounted in quad. Anne and Hugo shot them down with the strakkakers. Karan screamed and leapt. Vaemar spun on his hind-legs. Three more Jotoki rushed out of the darkness at them, kzin w’tsais whirling in their hands. Vaemar leapt after Karan. Together they dismantled them.

  There was silence on the bridge for a moment, save for rustling like forest leaves as the small Jotok fled, and thrashing of
severed Jotok arms and brains, their voices diminishing into death. Behind and below them were more purposeful sounds.

  “We must get out now!”

  The hole in the deckhead was not an impossible leap for a kzin in Wunderland’s gravity, but it was far too high for a human, even if Hugo had been unwounded, and there was the dead weight of Swirl-Stripes. The tough sinews and central nerve-toroids of the dead Jotok, however, when separated by Vaemar’s w’tsai and razor-like claws, plus the expedition-members’ belts, plus the humans’ clothes knotted together, made a sling. Modern fabrics could stand huge stresses without tearing. While the humans held the Jotok back with short bursts from their weapons, Vaemar and Karan scrambled to the gantry, and leapt to the opening. They hoisted the others out one by one.

  Coming into the bright sunlight, with the wide rippling blue-green water and the wind from the sea, was for a moment like leaping into a new world. But it was, Vaemar thought, as he hefted the rifle again and surveyed the situation, a world they might not enjoy long.

  They were on the upper part of the kzin cruiser’s ovoid hull, which curved down to the water a dozen yards away. The surface would hardly have afforded a purchase for feet or claws were it in pristine condition, but it was pitted by minor damage and there was a build-up of molds and other biological debris.

  A movement caught the corner of Vaemar’s vision. With faster-than-human reflexes he spun and fired. Another large Jotok, carrying a rifle in two of their arms, a knife in another, leapt out of a turret. Mortally wounded, they staggered on two of their arms towards the group, shrieking with all their mouths, and collapsed. Vaemar retrieved the rifle before it slid into the water.

  There were, they now saw, many other openings in the hull, including the empty or damaged blisters of weapons-turrets and mountings. There were a score or more of places from which the Jotok could fire at them from behind cover. They themselves had no cover, and charges and ammunition for their weapons were running low. They had escaped from one trap into another.