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

sound a gas alarm. The officer farthest from the air purifier did issue that alarm before he died.

The surviving kzinti moved efficiently into their battle armor, which was gas-proof—alert, thoroughly alarmed, and ready for action. They were primed for orders, and they got them: “Battle Stations!” That was the wrong order. The ship was being attacked internally, not from an external threat. “Boarding Stations!” would have been a better order. “Damage Containment!” might have worked. Even “Abandon Ship!” would have collected them into a defensible position. “Battle Stations!” just dispersed them to known destinations, along known routes, across Jotok devised booby traps. A Jotok, in a rack-held Ztirgor, picked off the kzin who tried to pass through the hanger.

Lieutenant Argamentine was master-minding the battle from a tiny munitions closet which had been jury-rigged into the Bitch’s main communications net, finally wearing trousers and a shirt she’d ordered her Jotoki allies to make for her, plus an ugly kzin oxygen mask, retailored for her head. She knew the jig was up when a kzin commando team retook the Command Center, killing the occupying Jotoki, and cut off her contact.

They could trace her location.

She evacuated instantly, taking the best position she could, facing down both legs of an L-shaped corridor, her only weapon the improvised concussion-pellet launcher. Hunkering behind her portable stun-gun barricade, she knew that this was where she was going to die. She wondered what the kids would think when they came out of sedation. She was damned if she wanted to die in a cage.

Without warning, a stun-bolt ripped down the corridor, covering the advance of a kzin clean-up team. The barricade hardly did any good at all. She felt the bolt hit her back, probably from a bounce off a wall, numbly noting that her fingers were now so frozen that she could hardly fire off the concussion rounds—one at the lead kzin, one at the kzin behind, and one for good measure at the blind bend from whence they had appeared. The blasts went off. She was suddenly deaf and her paralyzed legs refused to propel her out of the way but she saw the disabled kzinti carried toward her down the gravityless corridor. She felt the thuds on the wall as she was buried in kzin armor.

When a little girl studied war, odd things stuck in her memory. Now she was remembering the fragment of a twentieth century Frenchman’s letter from a hospital near Reims describing how he had spent four days buried with eight dead comrades on top of him in a shell-destroyed trench.

The duty of a soldier is to wait. And while one is waiting, paralyzed, life goes on. Three Jotoki raced around the corner, chattering in their pseudo-Hero’s Tongue. Efficient hands rolled the kzinti over, removed their helmets and slit their throats. They stripped the corpses of weapons, piled the armored bodies in a neat barricade for Nora, reloaded her launcher, and propped her up facing down the L. Two of the beasts skittered away. The third remained just long enough to give her a shot of paralysis antidote—effective for a kzin but no better than a bee sting for a human. Hands rearranged her trousers, and then he, too, was gone.

The duty of a soldier is to wait, soaked in the blood of an enemy, fingers unable to fire, praying that the fingers will come back to life before it is necessary to kill again.

Daddy had been burned alive.

Eventually Long-Reach arrived, arguing with himselves about how to help Nora. Three Jotoki carried her away for a bath by multitudinous arms. While her mouth was still only able to make the noises of a baby trying to discipline its tongue, she learned of their impossible victory.

Lieutenant Argamentine couldn’t speak her joy but her eyes could leak. If General Fry could see me now, naked and being bathed by monster slaves!

Long-Reach was combing out her hair with three hands, caressing the auburn richness of it, fluffing it, adding proteins to it to give body. He knew how to take care of a pelt!

“Did … Mellow … Yellow … survive?”

“Slept through it all. Like a kit.”

Nora grinned to herself. One to go! A half an hour later, when she could speak coherently, she suggested the dehibernation of Mellow-Yellow.

Long-Reach was uneasy. The other Jotoki became somber in their fear. “Not now. First we clean up ship. Blood! Dents! Awful mess!” Big(arm) added somberly, “He must never know.” Freckled(arm) shivered. “The rage if he finds out…”

“Lie to a kzin, and it’s the torture chamber for you,” said Nora knowingly.

“The mutiny never happened!” said Long-Reach adamantly. “All is as it was.”

The Jotoki knew enough about gravity polarizers to alter course. They were almost at turnover by the time of the revolt and were doing a quarter of the velocity of light. They didn’t try to decelerate. They just changed direction—with deep space as their only destination.

One team spaced the kzin corpses. Each corpse was ejected violently by the polarizer field in a transient restabilization of the ship’s energy and momentum balance. Other teams cleaned and scrubbed and repaired. Long-Reach slaughtered all Jotoki who were bonded to deceased kzin, dressing and storing them for Mellow-Yellow’s table.

For the first time in millennia, the ancient conquerors of the barbarian warlords of Kzin-home commanded their own warship.

CHAPTER 24

(2420 A.D.)

Hibernation did damp the immediacy of the thoughts and rages with which one went into hibernation, but there was no memory loss upon revival. Waking up and expecting to confront Grraf-Hromfi and possible death, to find oneself instead the master of a kzinless lumbering drydock headed off in the general direction of kzinspace was a disorienting experience. At the minimum he should have rated a navigator and crew.

Trainer-of-Slave’s first assumption had been that Grraf-Hromfi had undergone a drastic change of liver, had seen the reasonableness of the request to flee the battle with the superluminal motor and had simply sent him on his way. It was the only logical assumption. Everything