Man-Kzin Wars IV (Man-Kzin Wars Series Book 4) Read online

  “Perfect companion for a long voyage,” Olsen added. “You can be whatever, whomever you want to be.” Their expressions had become almost salacious. Now Halloran was sorry he had ever initiated conversation. How much of this was teasing, how much—actual cruelty?

  Or were they simply testing his stability before insertion?

  “You’d like to see a kzin?” he asked quietly.

  “We’d like to see Fixer-of-Weapons,” Ysyvry affirmed. “We were told you’d need to test the illusion before we release the hulk and your lifeship.”

  “It’s a bit early—we still have two hundred hours.”

  “All the more time to turn back if you don’t convince us,” Olsen said.

  “It’s not just a hat I can put on and take off.” He glanced between them, finding little apparent sympathy. Belters were polite, individualistic, but not the most socially adept of people. No wonder their mainstay on long voyages was silence. “I won’t wear Fixer-of-Weapons unless I become him.”

  “You won’t consciously know you’re human?”

  Halloran shook his head. “I’d rather not have the dichotomy to deal with. I’ll be too busy with other activities.”

  “So the kzinti will think you’re one of them, and … will you?”

  “I will be Fixer-of-Weapons, or as close as I can become,” Halloran said.

  “Then you’re worse than the fake soldiers in World War II,” Olsen commented dryly.

  “Show us,” Ysyvry said, over her companion’s words.

  Halloran tapped his fingers on the edge of the keyboard for a few seconds. He could show them Halloran-Kzin—the generic kzin he had manufactured from Fixer-of-Weapons’s memories. That would not be difficult.

  “No,” he said. “You’ve implied that there’s something wrong, somehow, in what I’m going to do. And you’re right. I only volunteered to do this sort of thing because we’re desperate. But it’s not a game. I’m no freak, and I’m not going to provide a sideshow for a couple of bored and crass Belters.”

  He tapped out the serenade from Haydn’s string quartet Opus 3 number 5.

  Ysyvry smiled: “All right, Mr. Halloran. Looks like the UNSN made a good choice—not that they had much choice.”

  “I don’t need your respect, either,” Halloran said, a little surprised at how deeply he had been hurt. I thought I was way beyond that.

  “What she’s saying,” Olsen elaborated, “is that we were asked to isolate you, and harass you a little. See if you’re as much of a show-off as your records indicate you might be.”

  “Fine,” Halloran said. “Now it’s back to the silence?”

  “No,” Ysyvry said. “The music is beautiful. We’d appreciate your playing more for us.”

  Halloran swore under his breath and shook his head.

  “Nobody said it would be easy, being a hero … did they?” Ysyvry asked.

  “I’m no hero,” Halloran said.

  “I think you have the makings for one,” Olsen told him, regarding him steadily with her clear green eyes. “Whatever kind of bastard you were on Earth. Really.”

  Will a flatlander ever understand Belters? They were so mercurial, strong, and more than a little arrogant. Perhaps that was because space left so little room for niceties.

  “If you accept it,” Ysyvry said, “we’ve decided we’ll make you an honorary Belter.”

  Halloran stopped playing.

  “Please accept,” Olsen said, not wheedling or even trying to placate; a simple, polite request.

  “Okay,” Halloran said.

  “Good,” Ysyvry said. “I think you’ll like the ceremony.”

  He did, though it made him realize even more deeply how much he had to lose…

  And why do I have to die before people start treating me decently?

  * * *

  The Belter pilots dropped the hulk a hundred and three hours after his induction into the ranks. They cut loose the kzin lifeship, with Halloran inside, five hours later, and then turned a shielded ion drive against their orbital path to drop inward and lose themselves in the Belt.

  There were beacons on the lifeship, but no sensors. In the kzinti fleet, rescue of survivors was strictly at the discretion of the commanding officers. Halloran entered the digitized odor-signature and serial number of Fixer-of-Weapons into the beacon’s transmitter and sat back to wait.

  The lifeship had a month’s supplies for an individual kzin. What few supplements he dared to carry, all consumable, would be gone in a week, and his time would start running out from that moment.

  Still, Halloran half hoped he would not be found. He almost preferred the thought of failure to the prospect of carrying out his mission. It would be an ordeal. The worst thing that had ever happened to him. His greatest challenge in a relatively peaceful lifetime.

  For a few days, he nursed dark thoughts about manifest destiny, the possibility that the kzinti really were the destined rulers of interstellar space, and that he was simply blowing against a hurricane.

  Then came a signal from the kzinti fleet. Fixer-of-Weapons was still of some value. He was going to be rescued.

  “Bullshit,” Halloran said, grinning and hugging his arms tightly around himself. “Bullshit, bullshit bullshit!”

  Now he was really afraid.

  * * *

  Wherever you are, whether in the crowded asteroid belt or beyond the furthest reaches of Pluto, space appears the same. Facing away from the sun—negligible anyway past the Belt—the same vista of indecipherable immensity presents itself. You say, yes, I know those are stars, and those are galaxies, and nebulae; I know there is life out there, and strangeness, and incident and death and change. But to the eye, and the animal mind, the universe is a flat tapestry sprinkled with meaningless points of fire. Nothing meaningful can emerge from such a tapestry.

  The approach of a ship from the beautiful flat darkness and cold is itself a miracle of high order. The animal mind asks, Where did it come from?

  Halloran, essentially two beings in one body, watched the kzinti dreadnought with two reactions. As Fixer-of-Weapons, now seating himself in the center of Halloran’s mind, the ship—a rough-textured spire with an X cross at the “bow”—was both rescue and challenge. Fixer-of-Weapons had lost his status. He would have to struggle to regain his position, perhaps wheedle permission to challenge and supplant a Chief Weapons Officer and Alien Technologies Officer. He hoped—and Halloran prayed—that the positions on the rescue ship were held by one kzin, not two.

  The battleship would pick up his lifeship within an hour. In that time, Halloran adjusted the personality that would mask his own.

  Halloran would exist in a preprogrammed slumber, to emerge only at certain key points of his plan. Fixer-of-Weapons would project continuously, aware and active, but with limitations; he would not challenge another kzin to physical combat, and he would flee at an opportune moment (if any came) if so challenged.

  Halloran did not have a kzin’s shining black claws or vicious fangs. He could project images of these to other kzinti, but they had only a limited effectiveness in action. For a moment, a kzin might think himself slashed by Fixer-of-Weapons’s claws (although Halloran did not know how strong the stigmata effect was with kzinti), but that moment would pass. Halloran did not think he could convince a kzin to die…

  He had never done such a thing with people. Exploring those aspects of his abilities had been too horrifying to contemplate. If he was pushed to such a test, and succeeded, he would destroy himself rather than return to Earth. Or so he thought, now…

  Foolishness, Fixer-of-Weapons’s persona grumbled. A weapon is a weapon.

  Halloran shuddered.

  The battleship communicated with the lifeship; first difficulty. The coughing growl and silky dissonance of the Hero’s Tongue could not be readily mimicked, and Halloran could not project his illusion beyond a few miles; he did not respond by voice, but by coded signal. The signal was not challenged.

  The kzinti could n
ot conceive of an interloper invading their fold.

  “Madness,” he said as the ships closed. Humming the Haydn serenade, Lawrence Halloran Jr. slipped behind the scenes, and Fixer-of-Weapons came on center stage.

  * * *

  The interior of the Sons Contend With Bloody Fangs—or any kzinti vessel, for that matter—smelled of death. It aroused in a human the deepest and most primordial fears. Imagine a neolithic hunter, trapped in a tiger’s cave, surrounded by the stench of big cats and dead, decaying prey—and that was how the behind-the-scenes Halloran felt.

  Fixer-of-Weapons salivated at the smells of food, but trembled at the same time.

  “You are not well?” the escorting Aide-to-Commanders asked hopefully; Fixer’s presence on the battleship could mean much disruption. The kzin’s thoughts were quite clear to Fixer: Why did Kfraksha-Admiral allow this one aboard? He smells of confinement … and…

  Fixer did not worry about these insights, which might be expected of a pitiful telepath; he would use whatever information was available to re-establish his rank and position. He lifted his lip at the subordinate, lowest of ranks aboard the battleship, a servant and licker-of-others’-fur. Aide-to-Commanders shrank back, spreading his ears and curling his thick, unscarred pink tail to signify non-aggression.

  “Do not forget yourself,” Fixer reminded him. “Kfraksha-Admiral is my ally. He chose to rescue me.”

  “So it is,” Aide-to-Commanders acknowledged. He led Fixer down a steep corridor, with no corners for hiding would-be assailants, and straightened before the hatch to Kfraksha-Admiral’s quarters. “I obey the instructions of the Dominant One.”

  That the commander did not allow Fixer to groom or eat before debriefing signified in how little regard he was held. Any survivor of a warship lost to animals carried much if not all the disgrace that would adhere to a surviving commander.

  Kfraksha-Admiral bade him enter and growled to Aide-to-Commanders that they would be alone. This was how the kzin commander maintained his position without losing respect, by never exhibiting weakness or fear. Loss of respect could mean constant challenge, once they were out of a combat zone with its restrictions. As a kzin without rank, Fixer might be especially volatile; perhaps deranged by long confinement in a tiny lifeship, he might attack the commander in a foolish effort to regain and then better his status with one combat. But Kfraksha-Admiral apparently ignored all this, spider inviting spider into a very attractive parlor.

  “Is your shame bearable?” Kfraksha-Admiral asked, a rhetorical question since Fixer was here, and not immediately contemplating suicide.

  “I am not responsible for the actions of the commander of War Loot, Dominant One,” Fixer replied.

  “Yes, but you advised Kufcha-Captain of alien technologies, did you not?”

  “I now advise you. Your advantage that I am here, and able to tell you what the animals can do.”

  Kfraksha-Admiral regarded Fixer with undisguised contempt and mild interest. “Animals destroyed your home. How did this happen?”

  This is why I am aboard, Fixer thought. Kfraksha-Admiral overcomes his disgust to learn things that will give him an edge.

  “They did not engage War Loot or any of our sortie. There is still no evidence that they have armed their worlds, no signs of an industry preparing for manufacture of offensive weapons—”

  “They defeated you without weapons?”

  “They have laser-propulsion systems of enormous strength. You recall, in our first meetings, the animals used their fusion drives against our vessels—”

  “And allowed us to track their spoor back to their home worlds. The Patriarchy is grateful for such uneven exchanges. How might we balance this loss?”

  Fixer puzzled over his reluctance to tell Kfraksha-Admiral everything. Then: My knowledge is my life.

  “I am of no use to the fleet,” Fixer said, with the slightest undertone of menace. He was gratified to feel—but not see—Kfraksha-Admiral tense his muscles. Fixer could measure the commander’s resolve with ease.

  “I do not believe that,” Kfraksha-Admiral said. “But it is true that if you are no use to me, you are of no use to anybody … and not welcome.”

  Fixer pretended to think this over, and then showed signs of submission. “I am without position,” he said sadly. “I might as well be dead.”

  “You have position as long as you are useful to me,” Kfraksha-Admiral said. “I will allow you to groom and feed … if you can demonstrate how useful you might be.”

  Fixer cocked his fan-shaped ears forward in reluctant obeisance. These maneuvers were delicate—he could not concede too much, or Kfraksha-Admiral would come to believe he had no knowledge. “The humans must be skipping industrialization for offensive weapons. They are converting peaceful—”

  Kfraksha-Admiral showed irritation at that word, not commonly used by kzinti.

  “—propulsion systems into defensive weapons.”

  “This contradicts reports of their weakness,” Kfraksha-Admiral said. “Our telepaths have reported the animals are reluctant to fight.”

  “They are adaptable,” Fixer said.

  “So much can be deduced. Is this all that you know?”

  “I learned the positions from which two of the Propulsion beams were fired. It should be easy to calculate their present location…”

  Kfraksha-Admiral spread his fingers before him unsheathing long, black and highly polished claws. Now it was Fixer’s turn to tense.

  “You are my subordinate,” the commander said. “You will pass these facts on to me alone.”

  “What is my position?” Fixer asked.

  “Fleet records of your accomplishments have been relayed to me. Your fitness for position is acceptable.” The days when mere prowess in personal combat decided rank were long gone, of course; qualifications had to be met before challenges could be made. “You will replace the Alien Technologies Officer on this ship.”

  “By combat?” A commander could grant permission … which was tantamount to an order to fight. Another means of intimidating subordinates.

  “By my command. There will be no combat. Your presence here will not be disruptive, so do not become too ambitious, or you will face me … on unequal terms.”

  “And the present officer?”

  “I have a new position he will not be unhappy with. That is not your concern. Now stand and receive my mark.”

  Halloran-Fixer could not anticipate what the commander intended quickly enough to respond with anything more than compliance. Kfraksha-Admiral lilted his powerful leg and swiftly, humiliatingly, peed on Halloran-Fixer, distinctly marking him as the commander’s charge. Then Kfraksha-Admiral sat on a broad curving bench and regarded him coldly.

  Deeply ashamed but docile—what else could he be?—Fixer studied the commander intently. It would not be so difficult to … what?

  That thought was swept away even before it took shape.

  * * *

  Fixer-of-Weapons had no physical post as such aboard the flagship. He carried a reader the size of a kzin hand slung over his shoulder—with some difficulty, which did not immediately concern him—and went from point to point on the ship to complete his tasks, which were many, and unusually tiring.

  The interior spaces of the Sons Contend With Bloody Fangs were strangely unfamiliar to him. Halloran had not had time (nor the capacity) to absorb all of his kzin subject’s memories. He did not consciously realize he was giving himself a primary education in kzinti technology and naval architecture. His disorientation would have been an infuriating and goading sign of weakness to any inferior seeking his status, but he was marked by Kfraksha-Admiral—physically marked with the commander’s odor, like female or a litter—and that warned aggressive subordinates away. They would have to combat Kfraksha-Admiral, not just Fixer.

  And Fixer was proving himself useful to Kfraksha-Admiral. This aspect of Halloran’s mission had been carefully thought out by Colonel Early and the Intelligence Staff—what cou
ld humans afford to have kzinti know about their technology? What would Fixer logically have deduced from his experience aboard the War Loot?

  Kfraksha-Admiral, luckily, expected Fixer to draw out his revelations for maximum advantage. The small lumps of information deemed reasonable and safe—past locations of two Belter laser projectors that had since burned out their mirrors and lasing field coils, now abandoned and useless except as scrap—could be meted out parsimoniously.

  Fixer could limp and cavil, and nobody would find it strange. He had, after all, been defeated by animals and lost all status. His current status was bound to be temporary. Kfraksha-Admiral would coax the important facts from him, and then—

  So Fixer was not harassed. He studied his library, with some difficulty deciphering the enigmatic commas-and-dots script and mathematical symbologies. Unconsciously, he tapped the understanding of his fellows to buttress his knowledge.

  And that was how he attracted the attention of somebody far more valuable than he, and of even lower status—Kfraksha-Admiral’s personal telepath.

  Kzinti preferred to eat alone, unless they had killed a large animal by common endeavor. The sight of another eating was likely to arouse deep-seated jealousies not conducive to good digestion; the quality of one’s food aboard the flagship was often raised with rank, and rank was a smoothly ascending scale. Thus, the officers could not eat together safely, because there were no officers at the same level, and if there was no difference in the food, differences could be imagined. No. It was simply better to eat alone.

  This suited Fixer. He had little satisfaction from his meals. He received his chunks of reconstituted meat-substitute heated to blood temperature—common low-status battle rations from the commissary officer, and retired to his quarters with the sealed container to open it and feed. His head hurt after eating the apparent raw slabs of gristle, bone and meager muscle; he preferred the simulated vegetable intestinal contents and soft organs, which were the kzinti equivalent of dessert. A kzin could bolt chunks the size of paired fists… But none of it actually pleased him. What he did not eat, he disposed of rapidly: pitiful, barely chewed-fragments it would have shamed a kzin to leave behind. Fixer did not notice the few pills he took afterwards, from a pouch seemingly beneath his chest muscles.