by Larry Niven
The twirling hemispheres missed Dolittle, but neatly sheared off the starboard superconductive wing. In one window of the holoscreen, Bruno had a glimpse of the severed gossamer assembly twisting and falling away into the darkness. Half the green telltale status lights on the command console flashed red.
"Close," Carol breathed.
"Carol, the wing was the target of that weapon, not the ship proper.”
Carol wiped sweat from her brow, and did not look away from the holoscreen.
"Sure, Tacky," she said evenly. "The ratcat wants us intact. To take us apart piece by piece.”
"Lasers still operational?”
"Yes, at half power," Carol replied, and raised a jet black eyebrow.
Neither of them mentioned the larger problem. With one of the superconductive wings gone, it would be nearly impossible for Dolittle to decelerate to nonrelativistic speeds in a straight line. They would be turning to port as they slowed.
Carol fired another laser blast at the icon of the kzin singleship, while Bruno scratched his interface socket idly. He powered up particle-beam and X-ray pump bomblets. The laser array powered by their remaining superconductive wing was their major weapon, but Bruno wanted all of Dolittle's armament available at Carol's whim.
He smiled to himself. Carol was actually doing quite well, considering that Dolittle was supposed to be piloted by a non-brain-damaged and fully Linked Bruno Takagama.
Suddenly, their crash couches tightened around them as the universe seemed to jerk and twist violently
— then relax again. Alarms buzzed and whooped in the tiny cabin of Dolittle. Alert windows automatically opened on the main holoscreen, displaying schematics and updated diagnostics.
"Censored dammit," Carol shouted, her hands freezing on her console for a moment in sheer Belter reflex. "What's going on?" Even as she spoke, her hands were dancing across her console to look for the answer.
Carol fell silent as she stared at the forward holoscreen windows. Almost as an afterthought, she slammed a keypad with her fist, silencing the alarms.
Bruno did not believe the readings, nor the screen.
"Carol," he said softly, in wonder. He shook his head.
"Bruno," she replied in flat tones, looking at the realtime forward window in the holoscreen, "would you please tell me what you are seeing?" He could hear her swallow over the low rustle of the ventilation system. "I want to know if I am going schitz.”
"Our velocity appears to no longer be zero point seven C," Bruno said, staring openly at the normal-appearing starscape, not squashed or altered by relativistic speeds. "The superconductive wing batteries are no longer drawing significant power, again suggesting that our velocity is no higher than zero point one C." He paused. "That means the weapons systems are inoperable.”
Carol shrugged at Bruno's last comment, her fingers dancing across her console. "Worry about that later, Bruno. Putting fusion drive on standby," she said crisply, as the sensation of gravity faded. Then, the dropping elevator sensation of free fall. "Is the kzin singleship still there?”
"Yes," he replied, still dazed. "It appears to be in the same position, relative to us, as before the... incident." Bruno watched the datastream next to the kzin icon in the Tactical window for a moment. "It does not appear to be maneuvering. It's stationary... as we are, apparently.”
Still feeling very odd, Bruno busied himself with collecting and analyzing the last few minutes of shipboard time. After a moment, Carol reached across and pinched his arm, very hard.
"Bruno!”
"Yes?" he answered politely.
With trembling claws, the captain warmed up the strained gravitic polarizer and put the weapons panel on standby Within a few moments, Rrowl-Captain would finish his scream-and-leap, weapons firing, and destroy the monkey vessel. Then he would deal with these meddling intruders.
A yowling alarm tone halted Rrowl-Captain's ready claw poised over the initiate keypad.
He looked up with a snarl, and saw many octal-squared of nightmare black shapes blotting out the stars, living creature flying through empty space toward Sharpened-Fang.
Magnification and vector analysis showed the hordes to originate from the intruder moon-ship. The intruder aliens were even uglier than Jotoki, Rrowl-Captain realized with a hiss of distaste. Thick central stalks surrounded by an octal-and-half of sinuous tendrils — yet bearing tools and wearing harnesses.
Powerful or not, Rrowl-Captain could not let these aliens threaten a Hero's vessel, nor his own plans. He reoriented the weapons panel and prepared to fire.
·CHAPTER TWENTY
Like Bruno, Carol was still dazed by the sudden appearance of the titanic alien ship that had somehow halted them in space and now held position, motionless, ten thousand kilometers to starboard. She slowly turned to Bruno, who appeared to be recovering from the shock of the past few minutes. At least he was reviewing data instead of staring blankly at the strangely unshifted stars in the holoscreen.
"Where is the ratcat ship?”
Her lover shook his head slightly, tapped on a few keypads. A red circle appeared in the holoscreen. "Just under two hundred kilometers dead ahead, right where it was when things got... well, weird.”
Weird was the right word, Carol thought. How could Dolittle go from 0.7 C to dead stop in a second?
She peered at the portion of the holoscreen indicating the kzin singleship for a moment or two, looking for activity. "Looks like the ratcat isn't moving, either.”
"Maybe it's just as surprised by recent events as we are.”
Carol mulled that one over, then decided to change the subject. She put an autowatch subroutine on the kzin singleship that would set off alarms if the ratcat vessel moved or showed activity. Carol then highlighted the huge alien ship.
"Well, Bruno," she asked brightly, "what do you think?”
Bruno could not tear his eyes from the holoscreen windows. "Like you said, Captain-my-captain. It's the size of a moon.”
"A small moon.”
"Sure. But what's the point of a spacecraft a hundred kilometers across?”
Bruno had made a good point, Carol thought. Further, the alien vessel looked more like a city or hive of insects than a spacecraft. There were what appeared to be buildings and domes across its broad and complex expanse. It was baroque and ornate, like some windup Victorian Christmas tree ornament out of a history chip.
"Notice the weblike structures?" Bruno indicated a portion of the realtime magnified view of the moon-ship. "Look at them in IR.”
In infrared, the complex webs all over the moon-ship were hundreds of degrees warmer than the rest of the vessel. "Heat exchangers?" she asked. Bruno nodded. "I'm betting that they are particularly hot now, after... stopping us a bit ago. That must have taken a lot of energy." Carol noticed flocks of tiny lights moving around the spires of the gigantic alien ship. "What are those?" "No idea," Bruno replied, tweaking the image enhancers. Magnification did not help, only revealing blurred glowing shapes that darted and swooped like living things around upper portions of the moon-ship.
Bruno finally asked the question. "What do we do?" "Nothing," she replied. "Let them make the first move." Carol reached over and stroked his arm gently. "Face it, Tacky. Whatever they are, they're much more powerful than me and thee. They could swat us to paste anytime. I would rather wait, peacefully, to see what they want with us.”
Bruno nodded slowly. "I just feel stupid and helpless," he finally said, looking away. "I used to know almost everything." "But only when you were part machine. I like you better as a human." She moved his lips into a smile with her fingers and was rewarded by the real thing. "Carol?" Bruno gestured at the holoscreen with a nervous finger. "What is it?" she asked. "The kzin ship is getting visitors." Long-range scanning showed at least one hundred small objects flying toward the kzin singleship from the huge alien vessel. Extreme magnification showed vague dusky shapes with many arms flitting across the starry blackness. They rotated smoothly as they
flew, arms stretched out radial fashion for stability.
"Those must be our new friends," Bruno commented. Carol said nothing, biting her lip. They would get some idea of the new aliens' intentions from their actions toward the kzin singleship. They must have been moving very quickly to be so close to the ratcat vessel.
A low warning tone sounded. Carol made a face as she studied the holoscreens. "Looks as if we are going to be entertaining a few visitors of our own," she said, pointing at a small cloud of dots on the short-range scanner window in the main holoscreen. The cloud was growing closer to Dolittle by the second, decelerating rapidly. "Still want me to do nothing?" Bruno asked. Carol nodded. "Watch the ratcat ship.”
As the flock of aliens approached the kzin singleship, it began to move, maneuvering away with its reactionless drive. Extreme magnification showed a pale purple beam of light stretching from one of the tiny hydra shapes to the kzin spacecraft. The whole vessel glowed purple for a moment, then the slight aura faded.
The singleship halted and hung motionless in space. Long-range scanners showed that all electronic emissions from the kzin vessel had ceased. The droves of tiny shapes merged with it.
"As I mentioned," Carol remarked conversationally, "I suspect it would be wise to do nothing." Bruno smiled without showing his teeth. "Hold that thought, Carol. Our visitors have arrived." He gestured to a holoscreen window displaying a view of the external hull. Many-armed shapes swarmed past the cameras.
"Follow them with the hull cameras, please.”
Bruno set up a series of small windows in the holoscreen displaying the external hull of Dolittle. The windows showed weaving tendrils, rapid activity. "Switch to infrared," Carol said after a while. Perhaps the aliens would show up better in the longer wavelengths. One by one, the windows went blank, showing the multicolored snowy display of holographic static. "What happened?" she rapped. "Hardware failure. They're doing something to the ship." Before Carol could say anything else, the external long-range scanners failed. Then weapons-status telemetry. She unstrapped and floated over to a supply locker. "What are you doing?" Bruno asked her, unstrapping himself and joining her. "Going to suit up and try and convince the uglies on the hull to stop what they are doing. Force of my commanding personality, that sort of thing, you know.”
Her lover frowned. "You know that I can't Link right now, and you are better behind the console. Let me go outside. I need you at the console, to get us out of here if necessary." His glance speared her heart. For a moment, Carol was busy repressing her odd mix of maternal and sexual feelings that Bruno brought out in her. If they survived, she would take the confusion up with her autodoc psychiatric module at length. "Go," the Captain persona inside her finally said. "But be careful, Tacky," her deeper self appended. "I need you, too.”
Bruno gave her a quick hug, and she efficiently helped him into his spacesuit. "Oh," Carol added conversationally, "you might want to take this, too." She pressed an electron-beam rifle into his hands. Bruno took it awkwardly, then slung it over his shoulder.
The main computer reset itself, then fell to fifty percent processing capacity. More warning tones began to sound.
"You had better hurry," Carol said softly, "while we can still cycle the airlock.”
Bruno started to dog his helmet shut and entered the airlock. He paused and turned back to Carol. She smiled at his look.
"I love you, too," she said simply.
Carol kept a smile on her face until she heard the hatch close firmly. Then she blinked a few times to clear the tears that pooled in her eyes in the microgravity, and strapped back into her crash couch. After a moment she swept her hands across the main console, to see what systems remained responsive.
·CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Bruno opened the outer airlock door of Dolittle.
"Carol," he whispered over the suit commlink.
"I'm here, lover." Her voice buzzed in his headset.
"I'm leaving the airlock now. You getting video?”
"Affirmative.”
Bruno clumsily lifted himself out of the airlock and locked down his magnetic boots on the dark hull of Dolittle. The riot of distant stars all around him shone down indifferently. This was deep space, with no friendly sun for light-years.
Over to one side, as large as the full Moon seen from faraway Earth, shone the glittering lights of the alien vessel.
Their own ship was a dark blur. He tongued his video amplifiers, repressed a gasp. The aliens thronged the hull of Dolittle, too many to count.
"Are you getting this?" he breathed.
"Yes," buzzed Carol's short reply.
The aliens stood perhaps a meter and a half in height. They looked like cat-o'-nine-tails bullwhips, overly thick handle down and whips flailing about like snakes. Each whip end unraveled in a fractal series of smaller tendrils, final fingerlets clearly adept at manipulation. The aliens wore ornate harnesses, studded with bulging pockets and metallic-looking triangular shapes. On a hunch, he tongued his helmet visuals to infrared IR and saw that the metal triangles were nearly seventy degrees warmer than the whip-aliens themselves.
Heat exchangers, like the spidery constructions on the moon-ship. This was confirmed when one of the aliens landed on the hull of Dolittle twenty meters from Bruno, arms down, and the triangular shapes on its harness blazed under IR to shed the heat.
Under infrared, the aliens were much more than black ropy shapes. Delicate traceries of relative warmth pulsed beneath their cold skin, like some sort of circulatory system. Portions of their alien anatomies were clearly intended to remain much colder than others.
Bruno watched one of the aliens remove a complicated shape from a pocket and touch it to an open section of Dolittle's hull. The shape smoothly changed shape and extended a questing projection, like a living thing. It thrust into what Bruno realized was part of Dolittle's main sensory net. That alien's heat exchangers glowed. Other aliens continued to enlarge the open section under study, methodically taking the hull apart with strange tools. Other aliens ran snaky arms and odd objects over the disassembled parts.
"Carol," he whispered. "You still with me?" "Right." "Looks like they are studying our electronics. That must be what is shutting things down." "You think they mean to shut us down?" came Carol's voice, peppered with static, but still soft in his ears. "Doubtful. If they wanted to kill us, they would have quite a while ago. I just think they're curious." "So why aren't they paying attention to you?" Bruno didn't say anything in reply. Several more of the aliens came over the curving hull of Dolittle, moving quickly in a series of somersaults. They crowded around the alien who had tapped into the shipboard sensory net. Fascinated despite himself, Bruno watched IR patterns shift and change across their alien skin. Waving tendrils danced fluidly. Bursts of static hissed and crackled in his ears. Communications?
"Bruno!" Carol's voice was suddenly grim. "I'm here," he said, trying to sound calm. "Life support just failed. I'm getting into my suit now." Bruno swore, his voice loud in his own helmet. He had to try and stop the aliens before they — even by mistake — managed to kill both of them.
He unslung the electron-beam rifle from his shoulder, lifted it carefully, and checked its charge. The telltales glowed green: a full charge. Bruno flicked the safety off. "I don't know if you can hear me, and if you can, you probably don't understand me," he told the cluster of many-armed shapes who were busily peeling still more of Dolittle's hull away. "But you have to stop what you are doing." Bruno aimed just above the nearest alien shape. There was a crack of static in his headset as he stroked the trigger, and sent an invisible bolt of high-energy electrons over the tops of its waving tentacles.
The reaction was immediate. Alien shapes turned, tentacles weaving madly, and quickly began advancing on him. Bruno started backing toward the airlock. "Tacky?" Carol was back on line, hissing with interference. "I'm getting a lot of static, and have lost video. You reading me?”
"I have a problem, Carol. I shot over their... well, wha
t I think are their heads, and they seem annoyed with me now.”
"Get back inside." "Aye-aye, Captain, my very thought." Bruno turned and swore again. Three of the weaving shapes crouched in front of the airlock. "I'm surrounded.”
"Shoot one." "I don't suppose surrender is an option." "It looks like they dismantle first, and ask questions later." Bruno took a deep breath, and aimed at one of the arms of an alien creature standing between him and the airlock. He didn't give himself time to think, and simply fired the electron-beam rifle.
Instantly, the entire alien blazed in infrared. It leaped up and away from Dolittle, vanishing into the starscape, apparently unhurt. "Bruno," Carol's voice hissed urgently. "You all right?" He started to reply, then noticed one of the aliens to his right aiming a black pointed object at him. A pale purplish bolt of light filled his vision, engulfing him. His suit went instantly dead, and his head seemed to explode. As the worst of the pain flash faded he realized that the electromagnetic soles of his boots had lost their grip on the hull of Dolittle. Miraculously his arm brushed against a handhold and he clutched convulsively. The airlock was just a few meters — Bruno was damned if he would let Carol die alone. Suddenly something held one his legs stationary. Then the other. Bruno pulled harder with his arms.
When he lifted one hand to switch his grip to a new handhold, something very strong looped around his wrist and held it fast. He wished that he could see, but the starlight was too dim without electronic enhancement.
How long had it been since his suit had failed? It was getting stuffy. Bruno felt something thin but very strong pry his fingers loose from his last handhold one by one, methodical and patient. He felt himself being lifted free from Dolittle, suspended and held by dozens of whiplike alien arms.
He wished that he could have said good-bye to Carol.
Bruno waited for the aliens to pull his suit neatly apart as they had started to do to Dolittle. He started yawning uncontrollably in the darkness. CO2 overload... Just as he passed out, he felt tiny fingers of singing fire burn their way through the interface socket in his neck into his dying brain. No strength, not even to scream his despair.