Man-Kzin Wars XII Larry Niven (list of ebook readers .TXT) 📖

please him, and did. "Maybe it will be enough to get them to agree. We can try."

Warrgh-Churrg summoned Trader the next day, and when the offworlder arrived (without the monkey) demanded, without formalities, "You went for a look at the kz'zeerekti, and had to land at Trrask-Rarr's castle with a breakdown. Did you say anything that might have let him know where they kept their gold?"

Trader froze, his ears cupped and swinging slowly from side to side: genuine surprise. "Feared Warrgh-Churrg, I don't know where they keep their gold," he replied.

"They don't," the satrap snarled. "Trrask-Rarr has it. Made a sudden raid this morning on a cavern deep in the wasteland, and when a wall caved in his troops found a stockpile."

Trader settled himself slightly and said, "Dominant One, did he take any slaves?"

"Not one. They'd cleared out, almost as if they were warned. . . ." Warrgh-Churrg glared at one of his own slaves, standing in an alcove, ready to fetch on command. The kz'zeerekti very properly stayed in its place, but began to smell panicky.

"The reason I ask, Fully-Named, is that there are far more kz'zeerekti out there than I had even speculated, and with that quantity of gold I thought he might be interested in taking part in a major shipment."

Warrgh-Churrg abruptly looked at the eyes of Trader, who ducked. "Why would he need gold to do that?"

"There isn't enough room on my ship for that many slaves. It would be necessary to obtain one or two large ships, possibly equipping them with hyperdrive if the price was right."

"You had implied that you couldn't get ships with hyperdrive," Warrgh-Churrg said, growing dangerous.

"I cannot. But most of the parts for a hyperdrive can be fabricated, and the key parts are available as spares. I never had enough money to do it, but if Trrask-Rarr has that much gold—"

"He's spending it," Warrgh-Churrg cut him off. "Buying land his sires once held. Suppose someone already had a large ship. Or two," he added offhandedly. "What would hyperdrive parts cost?"

Ginger was pleased to see that Perpetua had a shattergun aimed at the airlock door as he came through. When she saw it was him, she safetied it, set it down carefully, and ran up and grabbed him around the middle, to his great astonishment. She held him very hard, as human strength went, and after a few seconds he began having the strangest urge to wash her head like a kitten's. This gave him a hint about what she was doing, though, and after a little thought he patted her head, a gesture much used in entertainments. It appeared to help. She let go and looked up and said, "You're okay."

"I'm okay," he agreed. It seemed better than I know. "I have been cleverly talked around into going to purchase hyperdrive parts."

Perpetua began laughing. It took her a while to get it under control.

The gold began arriving two days later.

XI

The trip to Earth took almost ten weeks. As usual, they spent a lot of time playing games; as usual, Ginger almost always won.

The dangerous part of the trip, at least in Ginger's estimation, had been right at the start, when they were depending on pursuit countermeasures to stay intact. Perpetua, however, grew more uneasy the closer they got to Earth. She didn't say anything about it, but she was at least partly conscious of it: She bathed more often, sometimes twice in a day. (He in turn was not conscious of the fact that his tail began lashing when she smelled upset; but she was. She was trying to keep at least one of them calm.)

He would never have asked why. Such an assumption of authority over her mental state would have been treating her as a subordinate, and she was a friend; more, she was a Hthnar—something humans translated as Battle Companion, a term which did express the concept if given sufficient thought.

However, she was also a human, and therefore weird, so one day she suddenly decided to explain. "I don't trust the ARM," she said when he showed up for his watch on the mass detector.

"Good," he said agreeably, steering them around a fuzzy patch that was probably nothing much. (The thing worked better for him than for her. Its manual spoke of psionic aptitude and something called the Copenhagen Interpretation, but to him the matter was simple: It was a hunting device.)

"That's why I've been so worried. They were the ones who got Wunderland conquered, you know."

Ginger cupped an ear at her. "I'm pretty sure the Patriarchy was involved too."

She snorted. "They suppressed weapon technology and rewrote history books as propaganda, so everybody believed that no civilized being was capable of making war. When the first reports of contact with the kzinti came in they suppressed those too, as disruptive."

"I didn't know that!" he exclaimed.

"It's not something humans are proud to discuss," she said.

He had no idea what to say—before confiding something that potentially demeaning, a Hero would want hostages. However, she continued almost at once.

"They're perfectly capable of suppressing knowledge of the Romans and keeping them all for study somewhere," she said.

"They'd want them off Kzrral first, though, right?" Ginger said.

"I would think so," Perpetua said, sounding puzzled.

"Then we'll be fine. I won't make a final plan until we've left Earth, so they won't be able to get it out of us."

"You haven't decided what to do after we have the Romans?"

"What would be the point? We don't have them," he said, honestly puzzled. "We don't even know if we can get the hyperdrives here."

"What? You acted so confident!"

"I'm a kzin. I am confident. I may also be wrong."

"I'm starting to get a glimmering of why we won," she muttered, walking out.

Ginger thought about that for a while, but couldn't see the connection.

They'd dropped out of hyperspace and were moving into Sol System, and Perpetua was trying to ease her own tension. " . . . and the Herrenmann says, 'Never mind the thanks—repeat the instructions!' "

Ginger was just starting to laugh when the