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

the image of the exposed section into the control center. Whether it had been deliberately buried there, or it and the planet had collided in the remote past, or it had once been housed in some installation whose metal was now coloring the sand, there was no way of telling. There were curves of vitrified rock that might be the last traces of the rimwall of an ancient impact crater—not necessarily related. Anyway, unanswerable speculations as to how it got there were of no importance at all, beside the question of what it might contain.

Deep-radar showed it was spherical—unusual—and about twenty feet in diameter. Far smaller than the last one, but still huge for a stasis box. All aboard Cunning Stalker knew it was quite big enough to contain live Slavers.

The box was now uncovered. A "mining robot" (which bore a remarkable resemblance to a Third War automated sapper) was landed next to it; it burrowed beneath the box with a disintegrator, emerged a few minutes later, and rose to be picked up. Cunning Stalker moved aside, and a fusion charge blew the stasis box off the planet.

They had to catch it before it fell back; it didn't reach escape speed. The charge had been meant to accomplish that, so the box was significantly more massive than expected. This might be good or bad: it could mean the box was packed solid, with no room for inhabitants, or it could mean that there was extremely heavy equipment inside, which suggested weapons—and someone to use them.

The box was towed to high orbit, and the ship's fusion drive was aimed at it and kept hot. Charrgh-Captain, Slaverexpert, Telepath, two troopers, and the humans took the gig over to it. (The "gig" had oversized gravity compensators and a remarkably heavy layer of hullmetal lining its nose, almost as if it was meant to be used to ram a hole in something.) Slaverexpert fired a parcel of fine black material at it: superconductor. The fabric wrapped around the box, formed a closed surface, turned silver briefly, and rolled itself back up into the parcel. "Clever," Gay murmured.

"The dropcloth is Pierin emergency firefighting equipment," Charrgh-Captain remarked. "I don't think they had this in mind."

The container's surface was still seamless, but had acquired a creamy hue. Richard had been watching the views from the scanners around the box, and he said, "Where's the cutoff switch?"

Slaverexpert, who had never previously spoken unless directly addressed, startled Richard by saying, "True." In Interworld.

"Explain," commanded Charrgh-Captain.

"These were designed to be opened easily, Charrgh-Captain. A panel would be spring-loaded, to break the conductive surface when the field was interrupted. The stasis has ended, but the surface is still seamless."

Gay, who had gotten curious and was having a look, said, "It isn't. It's split in half. Look, there." She pointed at one of the screens. The seam was at an inconvenient angle, so nobody else had noticed it.

And it hadn't been as big. The split was getting wider.

"Battle stations," Charrgh-Captain said. Still in Interworld, addressing the two humans—kzinti routine was Battle Stations. The Guthlacs got to their couches and strapped in.

"Sir," Telepath said dopily, drugged with sthondat-lymph extract, "I detect no life."

"You can't read Slaverexpert, either," Charrgh-Captain replied.

"No, sir, but I can tell where he is."

"Noted. Slaverexpert, report."

"The only energy I detect is heat, in amounts consistent with being present before stasis began, plus the separation of the shell. Shall I deep-radar?"

"Yes. Display the results."

The image on the humans' screens was divided into wedge-shaped compartments, almost all full of materials slightly denser than water. One held even denser material, probably metallic, in boxes. "It looks like an orange designed by ARMs," Richard said.

Charrgh-Captain, relieved of tension, snorted amusement. "An orange? The fruit?"

"Sure. Armor-plated for safety, big so it's easy to find, opens automatically when ripe."

"So what's all the metal?" Gay chuckled, pointing at the last wedge.

Slaverexpert spoke up. "Emergency escape pods for the seeds?" After a moment of utter silence, he looked up to find everyone else staring at him—even Telepath. "Sorry, sir," he said faintly to Charrgh-Captain, and looked back down at his instruments in a marked manner.

"We'll examine that section before taking the box in tow," Charrgh-Captain said.

Probably the best thing about working in space with kzinti was that they had been doing it for so long. Lighting, for instance. Humans, even those in the mining industries, tended to put up one or two bright lights, and wear one or two smaller lights on their helmets, producing sharp-edged shadows and a nagging conviction that something was hiding just out of sight. Here, though, Second Trooper strewed fistfuls of little spheres toward the partitions: where they hit, they stuck, and presently began to glow gently. They had frosted surfaces, so the light was diffuse. The kzinti suits also had multiple lights: a couple at each wrist, and two rows of three each down the torso, where things would be held to work on them. A light under the chin illuminated things directly ahead.

The Guthlacs were given clusters of faint blue lights to strap onto their suits, which in conjunction with standard kzinti lighting gave them a spectrum they could use easily. The amount of thought and preparation this implied was extremely flattering: They were being extended enormous courtesy. Richard found himself wondering if Charrgh-Captain had known all along that human-model food dispensers included a toilet.

There wasn't much time to dwell on this. The parcels were full of gadgets.

Most of them were pretty straightforward power tools: drills, saws, hammers, trimmers, shapers, diggers, a couple of amazingly elaborate grippies, and something that Gay and Slaverexpert tentatively labeled, after much consultation, as a handheld turret lathe. "These must have been for the use of a slave race," said Slaverexpert. "They are too large for Tnuctipun hands, and Thrintun would rather starve than toil." He sounded troubled.

"What's wrong?" said Richard.

"There is something familiar about the workmanship. Disturbing."

"What would this be?" Charrgh-Captain said, holding up a thing that included a short spike, a knife, a crank,