Man-Kzin Wars IV Larry Niven (ink ebook reader .txt) 📖

a threat to no one. “I have been deranged and you will notice that I am locked behind bars.”

Long-Reach opened the cage and quickly closed it. “Bargain,” he said. “We make bargain.” She could hear the tremor in his voices, and she was sure she could see his arms shaking. He was terrified. She could almost see him running. The tremors came from inhibiting the flight.

“What can I do for you?”

“You kill all kzin, but one. We free Mellow-Yellow. Bargain? Mellow-Yellow live.”

“I’m quite willing to let Mellow-Yellow live,” she lied. She almost saw the four of them relax. “What makes you think I might be able to kill all kzin?”

“Ferocious monkey warriors defeat kzin. We know. Monkey squash kzin ships. We repair. We scrape kzin off wall.”

Were they thinking that if they let her out of her cage she might not settle for anything less than the death of all kzin on board? As if she had a hope of killing even one of the behemoths! It hadn’t slipped her notice that her interrogator had two sets of human ears casually attached to his belt.

“Mellow-Yellow live. Bargain?” Long-Reach repeated.

Why were these creatures so bonded to Mellow-Yellow? Why was he different from the others? His name translated as something like Overseer of Inferiors, or Animal Manipulator. Perhaps he had a chemical hold on them? Perhaps he was an expert at some kind of hypnotic conditioning? No matter. The irrational loyalty was there. She remembered the day she had attacked Mellow-Yellow, ready to die, because he was cruel to children, and Long-Reach had been watching her with four eyes. If she had hurt Mellow-Yellow, Long-Reach would have killed her.

It was a strange bargain. If she protected their master (from her cage?), the Jotoki were hers.

Was it a good bargain? It was dangerous to have naïve allies. Were they as naïve as they seemed? Were they treacherous? How much did the kzin trust their slaves? How reliable were these Jotoki? What skills did they have? What skills did she have? What weapons did she have? Nothing. She knew the formula for a nerve gas that would kill kzin and was harmless to men, but even given the equipment, she wouldn’t have known how to manufacture it. This whole situation wasn’t part of her Gibraltar Base training.

No, it wasn’t a good bargain, but it was the only bargain she had.

“I’m no match for a kzin,” she said. She wanted them to tell her something.

“You have military mind. We have arms. Ship is our playground.”

They began to feed her more often. They cleaned cages and when they moved her to a new cage, she found a ship map on the floor. She was surprised that they controlled the cage locks. They were trusted. Or was it just that Mellow-Yellow trusted them and in the heat of battle that kzin’s duties had not been fully reapportioned? Why was he in disgrace?

Her allies came up with vicious little plans. They had molecular trip-wire that they could set up that would cut a kzin’s legs off. They knew how to rig a gravity floor plate into a booby trap that would grab a kzin in a sudden six-g field. But when she tried to plan with them, she understood why they needed her. What they didn’t have was an overall strategic sense. When one starts a battle, it sets off an avalanche of activity. The good commander is able to predict where the avalanche will go, and have his responses already in place.

She could make detailed plans, but could they follow orders? Can a slave follow orders? She was willing to bet that they could.

Some of the events she wasn’t going to be able to predict. So far as Nora knew, the human hyperfleet was already fighting at Alpha Centauri. That was one wild card—she could be vaporized by her comrades before the mutiny even started. On the other hand, the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch was the most sluggish ship of the Third Black Pride and so would reach its new station many days later than the maneuverable elements of its squadron. If the mutiny could be carried out before they reached the battle, their chances were much better. Haste was in order.

Lieutenant Nora Argamentine did not expect to survive the mutiny, so she was optimizing her strategy for maximum kzin kill. She wanted as many kzin dead as possible before the inevitable moment when her plans fell apart. Meticulously, with the information the slaves gave her, she targeted every kzin on board the Bitch. Mellow-Yellow was at the bottom of the list. He could be killed by flooding his hibernation cell with liquid nitrogen—but not while she still needed her Jotoki allies.

They were able to manufacture her nerve gas. That surprised her at first until she remembered what Mellow-Yellow had been doing to the children. He had some kind of “grant” to do “medical research” on humans. No, she was not going to spare that one.

The Jotoki fiends even cobbled together hand weapons. They had a spaceman’s usual devout respect for high-velocity projectiles and high-energy cutting tools. The result was a launcher for a concussion pellet that could hemorrhage a kzin’s insides but wouldn’t damage bulkheads.

The Bitch’s manufacturing shop was designed for interstellar war. You didn’t fly in spare parts to an interstellar battle, you tooled up for anything, on the spot, at a moment’s notice and burped out one-of-a-kind items. It was incomprehensible to Nora that such facilities could be trusted to slaves, but then she wasn’t a kzin.

The attack began in the dorm. The airseal bulkheads sealed without triggering alarms—gas flooded the rooms, stayed, and was flushed out—the airseal bulkheads unlocked. A gas-killed kzin looks like he’s asleep except that he’s not breathing.

Jotoki who were not already at their stations on regular jobs began to move to their assigned positions. The Command Center was gassed. Hrith-Master Officer was comprehending what was happening to him at the same time his nervous system was failing to obey his order to