“Stop!” said Chip. “Don’t touch that stuff! Do you hear me, Fal?”
“Boy, tell him I am deaf,” said Fal, ignoring Chip pointedly.
“You must speak louder sir. My master is very deaf,” said Pistol, obligingly, cracking a bottle neck against a pillar.
Chip snatched the bottle from the one-eyed rat. Red wine sloshed onto the floor. Pistol looked startled. “Now, Chip. There is plenty for all of us.”
“Don’t be fools, Pistol, Fal. You’re both still starving-hungry, right?”
“Yes. But what we want for in meat we’ll have in drink.” The fat rat eyed the bottle greedily.
“While you’re sober, you’re keeping your wits. Keeping your hunger in check. Get a bit drunk and all you’ll want is food, and once you’re good and drunk, and this hungry, you won’t care where you get that food. You’ll eat me. You’ll eat each other. We’ve got to find food first—before you drink.”
The rats were silent.
“You can put the bottle down,” said Fal, seriously. “Food first, eh, Pistol?”
“I reckon. I wouldn’t want to eat Chip. Not while he owes me a crate of whiskey.” The rat sniffed at the robust, berry-rich inky bouquet of the spilt wine. “And it is a lousy vintage, anyway.”
“A rat! I have found a rat!” Nym bellowed.
They all ran back upstairs. The big Nym had cornered a large black rat. The real thing, too—a descendant of unwanted stowaways on the slowship, not a creation of genetic engineers. A real, non-cyber-uplifted rat. It bared its yellow rodent teeth at them.
“Dinner!”
Fal lifted his long nose. “Sexy smelling dinner!”
“Yeah. Nice body!” said Pistol, eyeing the rat lecherously. “Shame we’re just gonna eat it.”
Fal straightened. “Hur. That’s where you’re wrong, Ancient Pistol. There is something we’ve got to do first. ‘Tis our soldiering duty after all. Tradition! Tradition’s clear as crystal on the subject. Says soldiering’s got killing, looting and rapine.” Fal rubbed his paws and eyed the rat. “Fighting Magh’, o’ course, ’twas a moot point. But now methinks we’ve gotten lucky!”
“Hark at him, lads!” cried Pistol. “This soldiering business has really got it all!” He turned his head to let his one good eye get a proper look at the captive.
“You’re a bunch of paltry rogues,” sneered Melene. “Kill it and let’s eat.”
“Well, just now!” protested Pistol. “I mean a rat’s gotta do what a rat’s gotta do!”
Fal nodded solemnly. “Duty first! We’re just going to have to steel ourselves to it.” He smiling toothily at the captive rat. It hissed back at him.
Nym looked at the wild rat. Then at Pistol. “You know what his ideas usually get us into.”
“What, good Nym?” exclaimed Fal. “Can I believe my ears? A valorous whoreson rat not willing to put up his naked weapon? What manner of rat are you?” Fal strutted back and forth before them, his paunch wobbling, his chest out and his head back. He flourished his bristly tail. “Where is your martial vigor?”
Nym still looked skeptical. “I’m remembering that time when you . . .”
“Don’t be disgusting, you lot!” Phylla did not look amused. “Get on and just kill it. My stomach thinks my throat has been cut, while you fool around.”
Siobhan had fluttered in. “You are not going to eat that rat, surely?!” she said in tones of horror. “Why, it is nothing better than cannibals that you are!”
“In sooth. Doth it speak? Is it a tame shrew?” demanded Pistol.
Doc had wandered in, by now, and immediately begun pontificating. “Indeed, that is the question. The morality of the deed rests on this. Does it think deep thoughts? If it does not, then wherein lies the problem? Not in the mere fleshy envelope.”
“There is as much going through its mind as there is going through one of you rats’ minds!” snapped Siobhan.
“Therefore,” said Fal reasonably, “as you bats have assured us nothing goes through our heads, the killing of this rat is no sin.”
“They’re planning to rape it first,” hissed Phylla.
The bat looked as if was going to throw up.
Fal put on a mournful expression. “We really don’t want to, of course—but the soldierly duty’s to be done, to be done!”