by Larry Niven
“I don’t know anything about their technology. Jennifer thought it might be some kind of field drive, something where the drive forces operate on the entire ship and its contents equally. That way they could accelerate at hundreds of gravities and not feel anything.”
I was still having trouble believing this. First, hostile outsiders. No, make that hostile slave-taking outsiders. And now I find out that they have technologies that made our best ramships look like cloth and wood biplanes in an era of hypersonic jets. This really wasn’t the way that first contact was supposed to happen. Tom continued his story.
“The crew tried every communication scheme you could imagine. The kzinti never responded to any of them. Maybe they misunderstood us, but it sure seemed like they were just ignoring us. I wish that’s all they had done.”
Tom paused, remembering. I tried to imagine the hopes and anticipations of the crew. Lightyears from Earth, lightdays from a new star, and then they make first contact with the outsiders—the often imagined, more often imaginary, intelligent creatures from another world. Everyone knew this would be an epochal moment in human history. The fulfillment of many lifetimes of dreaming and imagining. Tom’s voice threatened to break as he told me the rest of the story.
“Then the kzinti sent over a couple of small craft and forced their way onto our ship. There was a fight, but we were outmatched. Most of the crew were killed in a matter of minutes. I was in the Med-Center and didn’t even have time to get to anyone who needed me.”
Tom’s eyes took on a distant, haunted, look. I didn’t want to think about the things he must have seen.
“Jennifer tried to restart the drive. I guess she hoped its magnetic field would kill the kzinti who were still on their ship. Maybe she wanted to use the drive’s exhaust as a weapon. Who knows? The kzinti broke into the control deck and killed her and the remainder of the crew. In the fighting our drive got damaged and it executed an auto-shutdown. But not before its magnetic field had destroyed the drive and most of the electronics on the kzinti warship as well as killing all its occupants.”
Warship. A word from our past. In school they had taught us that the last human warships were boats that plied the oceans with sails. The idea of a warship that could sail between the stars was almost unimaginable.
“Our ramscoop destroyed the drive on the kzinti ship?” I couldn’t bring myself to call it a warship. “How’s that possible?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not an engineer.”
“Well, how badly was our drive damaged?”
“Ib. I keep telling you, I’m not an engineer. I can’t answer that question. That’s where you come in. We need someone who can repair the drive system and pilot us into orbit around Vega IVb.”
“Me? I’m just a singleship jockey, not a ramship pilot.”
“That may be, but you’re our best hope. The crew’s dead. I had to thaw out someone. There were . . . complications.”
“Complications?” I interrupted.
“You don’t want to know,” replied Tom. “You had to spend almost two weeks in the autodoc. Of all the people available you had the most . . . qualifications.”
“What qualifications?” I demanded.
“You’re the only Belter with an advanced degree in astroengineering.”
Tom was holding something back. What was it? “You can’t be serious. It’s been ages since I did any engineering. And all that was design work, not fixing stuff. That can’t be enough.”
“It better be enough.” He hesitated then continued. “I know you singleship pilots. You brag about being able to fix anything with nothing. If you can’t, we’re dead meat.”
I interrupted, “But . . .”
“But nothing. Our only chance for life is if you can fix the ship.” Tom’s eyes pleaded with me as we stared at each other. I’m not sure if I believed him. Finagle, I’m not sure he believed himself. I thought of something else.
“How many kzinti are on our ship?”
“Not many. Just the boarding party that was behind our shields when Jennifer started the drive.”
I interrupted, “But then can’t we reason with them or . . .”
“You can’t reason with them,” Tom interrupted. “They don’t think like we do.” Depressed silence filled the room, until it was broken by Tom getting up to leave.
“I’m going to go and let you get some rest. Twenty years of coldsleep can really mess up your endocrine balance. I’d like to have you spend a couple more days in the ’doc to let it sort out your biochemistry. But the kzinti won’t let me do that. Hell, they didn’t even want to let me check in on you today.”
Tom handed me a small vial filled with orange pills. “Here’s some medicine that the autodoc made up for you. Take two every eight hours. They should help you get back to normal.”
His eyes tried to tell me more than his words could convey, but I couldn’t understand him. “Take your medicine and rest. It’s important. I’ve convinced the kzinti that you won’t be able to do anything for a day or so. I don’t know how long I can stall them.”
Tom turned and headed for the door. As he did I noticed he had a pronounced limp that I didn’t remember from when we’d left the solar system.
“Tom, what happened to your leg?”
Tom grimaced as he slowly turned to face me. He leaned against the wall and lifted the leg of his pants. Where there should have been a sock covered leg was a gleaming titanium stump that disappeared into his shoe and up his pants leg.
“The kzinti have short tempers,” he said. “Don’t get them upset.”
I spent the rest of the day resting, eating and sleeping. I set a timer to go off every eight hours and when it chimed I took my medicine. Those pills must have been strong because taking them made my head feel light and put my whole body on edge. I would have been worried, but all my life I’d been taught to trust the ministrations of the autodocs. In any case, I spent a lot of time dozing off, waking up only when my nightmares of overgrown cats and the forgotten art of war caused me to jerk upright screaming.
* * *
The next morning came too soon. Was it morning? My time sense was really out of kilter. I woke without assistance and found that there was a small autochef in the room, though many of its meat items were logged as being unavailable. (Should I blame that on the kzinti also?) I had just finished eating a breakfast of eggs, toast and coffee without sausage when the door to my quarters slid open and two of the kzinti walked in. The larger of the two had to duck his head down to get through the doorway, but the smaller, disheveled one was slumped down so far that he didn’t need to duck. I recognized the larger of the two kzinti as the one who could speak Standard. He started talking without preamble.
“I am ‘Slave Master.’ I will speak slave language until you learn Hero’s Tongue. First, prove your worth. Solve ship problem. Then we treat you as worthy slave.”
“And how would you do that?” I asked.
“You will live.”
I didn’t have any response to that comment and the big cat stayed silent for a moment. I looked into his face, but his emotions—did he have any emotions, I wondered?—were a complete mystery to me. What was the meaning of his twitching ears? And should I be worried that he was showing me his teeth, or was that just his idea of a smile?
The rat-cat (that was all I could think of while I watched his naked tail flick back and forth) snarled something to the smaller, disheveled kzinti who shivered and seemed to pull into himself. He reached down into a bag he was carrying and took out a syringe with a gleaming silver needle. His stare went from the syringe to the larger kzinti and finally to me. The larger kzinti snarled at him again, I’d swear I could sense disgust in his snarl, and the small kzinti plunged the needle deep into his forearm. He shuddered and seemed to pull into himself even more, almost as if he was going into a trance, and then he looked at me.
It was like he was looking straight into my soul. His eyes sparkled with a life that I hadn’t seen
before but his body still shivered and shook. I heard a low moaning growl come from deep in his throat. I felt a pressure building in my head. It might have been nervous anxiety from my fear of the upcoming interrogation.
“Now talk.” Slave Master stared at me. Somehow I didn’t think this was the time or place for the quick rejoinder or smartass remark.
“Okay. We’ll talk. About what?”
“No. Not ‘we talk.’ You talk. Can you fix ship?”
I started to frame an evasive answer, when my head exploded in pain and disorientation. It felt like I was falling down an infinitely deep hole while being hurled up toward an ever unreachable sky I felt like I was spinning rapidly while being completely immobile. If not for decades of freefall reflexes I would have spewed my breakfast all over the kzinti and the four walls of the tiny room. (I didn’t think that would be a good career move.) Slowly the sensation diminished but never completely went away.
The disheveled kzinti sat in a corner of the room. Glowering at me. His eyes boring through me, while his body shivered almost uncontrollably. He haltingly growled something to Slave Master.
The larger kzinti stared at me and I watched in horror as thick black claws sprang from his four fingertips. He raised his clawed hand above my head, as if ready to bring it down in one swift killing move.
“Truth only. No lies. I will know.” He paused. “Understand?”
It was clear as a bell.
“Yes, sir.”
He raised his hand higher. His fur was pulled back and lying flat across his face.
“Use proper form of address. Not Sthondat form. I am Slave Master. Not sir.” He lowered his face close to mine. I could watch each whisker on his muzzle twitch. I could smell the fetid odor of dead meat on his breath. One wrong answer and my scent would be added to his breath.
“Yes si—Yes. Slave Master.” I tried to make it sound respectful. Fear for your life can do that.
Slave Master slowly lowered his arms. His fur began to fluff out, his claws retracting slowly as he lowered his arms. “Now tell of your ship knowledge and repair skills.”
And so I tried to tell them what I hoped they wanted to know. If I promised more than I could deliver I knew I would die, but if I didn’t promise enough I knew I’d never get the chance to be proven wrong. I let them know that I’d have to make an inspection of the ship’s systems before I could decide on a course of action. That I might need to thaw out someone else from coldsleep to help me. (They didn’t like this idea.)
Although Slave Master knew some Standard there were big lapses in his technical vocabulary and at times we had to stop and work out language problems. He had me visualize things and describe them until finally he understood me. And all through this the disheveled kzinti sat there staring at me while my head felt like it was going to explode at any minute. By the time we were finished I was totally exhausted. (I think they knew this, but they didn’t care.) Luckily for me they seemed to have gotten what they needed. I hoped I had bought myself a few days of looking for options. Time to find hope in a hopeless situation.
Slave Master looked me in the eye. “We go now. Discuss. Churl-Captain will decide. Inspection and repairs later. Rest now. Eat. Prepare.” With that the two kzinti turned and left the room. The only thing remaining from their visit was the scent of sweaty grass and ginger and my fear of what would happen next.
I thought of staying up and planning, of plotting how I might work against them. But my head still ached. I thought it might have been from tension, but if it was, it was unlike any tension headaches I’d ever had before. It was nothing like that time when I was smuggling a shipment of luxury foodstuffs to a Flatlander science station on Enceladus and tried dodging a Goldskin patrol by hiding my ship in the braided ring of Saturn. By comparison that was a relaxed afternoon at Heisenberg’s Pub back at Ceres Base.
I stretched out on the waterbed to organize my thoughts and only ended up organizing my dreams. Except that those dreams kept getting interrupted by nightmares where I was a mouse being chased by a tiger.
* * *
I woke up with my mind filled with half-formed imaginings and leftover nightmares. In my sleep I had imagined that our slowboat had been overrun by ferocious outsiders that looked like a fantasy image from an old flat film. (The kinds of films that the ARM thought they had suppressed, but which were popular humor among Belters in their singleships far from the patronizing protection of the ARM.) And then it hit me. This was no dream. These outsiders were real. And they weren’t a Saganesque fantasy of wise and peaceful creatures who wanted to guide us on the path to enlightenment. These were killers who thought of humans as nothing more than another race to be subjugated. I wanted to go back to sleep, to dream my way out of this nightmare, but I’d been sleeping too much the last couple of clays. (Why should I be so tired after spending twenty plus ship-years in coldsleep?)
I didn’t know how much time had passed since my last meeting with the kzinti, but I expected they’d be coming soon. Either to use me to repair the ship, or to dispose of me as a useless implement. In either case I needed to prepare myself. Breakfast was another meatless exercise in frustration but standing under the shower did more to refresh me than all of my sleeping from the last few days. I stared at my face as I dried off and thought about shaving off my beard and retrimming my hair into its Belter’s crest, but didn’t have the energy or inclination.
I didn’t have to wait long for my captors to come and fetch me. The door opened without warning and in walked Slave Master followed by the small disheveled kzinti. Slave Master growled at the smaller kzinti, who reached into his pouch without making a sound, pulled out his syringe and pressed it into his arm while staring at me. The look on his face made me want to take pity on him, but when I thought of what he and his kind had done to the crew of our ship, I hoped that whatever he was going to do was going to hurt him. Badly.
For a moment nothing happened. Then my head exploded in pain and disorientation. Slave Master looked at me without any concern for my condition and spoke without preamble. “You come now. Fix ship.”
“I need to go to the Command Deck so I can check out the ship first.”
The disheveled kzinti . . . I was going to have to come up with a name for him. Fritz. That would do. Fritz moaned a few sounds to Slave Master and then went back to glaring at me.
“We go. Obey or die.”
We went.
The ship’s curving corridors were empty as we made our way to the Command Deck. I hadn’t seen any other kzinti since the first day, but I knew they were around. I could smell them. And sometimes I heard their caterwauling sounds echoing down the air ducts as we walked through empty passageways scarred by burn marks and ragged holes.
The Command Deck was deserted, and its condition made it painfully obvious just how desperate our situation was. All around me was a scene of death and destruction. I remembered my friends who should be here, but who weren’t. I tried not to feel the pain of their absence. I didn’t do a good job of it.
The empty captain’s couch had a broken headrest, with long tears going down the sides of the couch with cushioning material hanging out in tatters. I didn’t want to bring myself to recognize the stains on the couch and the surrounding floor.
Many of the command and control displays were dark or showed digital static. Ragged holes in the control panels gave evidence that weapons of some kind had mindlessly destroyed the ship’s equipment. Rusty stains having little to do with iron oxide covered many of the panels. A few flickering lights on the consoles were the only sign that power and life still flowed through the controls. The kzinti paid no attention to any of this, but just stared at me. Waiting for me to do something. Slave Master growled something and I sat down at the Engineer’s station and went to work.
A few of the flat panel displays still functioned and I used them to bring up colored charts and rows of numbers showing the status of the ship’s systems. But the picture they gave me was simultaneousl
y confusing, incomplete and over detailed. All I could access was raw data, with vast amounts missing, with no easy way to synthesize it into concise information about the ship’s status. If other people had been here we could have worked together to make sense out of this patchwork of data. But that wasn’t an option the kzinti would make available to me. I’d need to use the VR system to try and make sense of the jumbled data.
The data gloves and head mounted displays for the VR system were in a storage locker at the rear of the Command Deck. The kzinti didn’t do anything but watch as I got up and went to get them. They stiffened as I reached for the locker and Slave Master growled.
“I’m just getting some equipment I need.” I hoped they didn’t misinterpret my nervousness.
Slave Master growled over at Fritz, who stared at me. And my head wrenched in a fresh wave of pain. Fritz muttered something to Slave Master that sounded like a cat having a fit and the large kzinti appeared to relax.
I pulled out a set of data gloves and a head mounted display from the locker and carried them back to the Engineer’s station where I adjusted them to fit my hands and head. My custom gear would have fit better, but considering the situation these would do just fine. After I plugged them in they went through their diagnostics and beeped their readiness. I adjusted the audio volume to a level that would let me hear Slave Master if he spoke and the video display so it would leave a transparent image of the Command Deck overlaid behind the immersive VR display. I knew I couldn’t concentrate on the ship if the VR system left me wondering what the kzinti were up to.
Slave Master and Fritz were watching me intently. I don’t know if they had anything like VR. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but in any case, they didn’t move to stop me as I slid my hands into the data gloves and nestled the display unit over my head.
The audiophones were a warm softness on my ears. I could hear the empty echoes of silence and the ocean wave sound of the blood flowing through my ears. The data gloves fit my hands like, well, like gloves. They provided a tight pressure on my hand and I could feel the resistance of the force feedback sensors as I flexed my fingers. The watching kzinti became pale ghosts as I lowered the half-silvered visors of the head-mounted display and activated the VR program.