Unexpected, fear gripped him; a loose hot sensation below the stomach, and the humiliating discomfort of his testicles trying to retract from his scrotum. Ripped to shreds was exactly and literally true. He remembered lying in the dark outside the kzinti outpost, back in the guerrilla days right after the war. They had caught Dagmar the day before, but it was a small patrol, without storage facilities. So they had taken her limbs one at a time, cauterizing; he had been close enough to hear them quarreling over the liver, that night. He had taken the amnesty, not long after that . . .
“Here’s looking at you, sweetheart,” he said, as they cycled the lock closed. It was not cramped; facilities built for kzin rarely were, for humans. A Slasher-class three-crew scout, he decided. Motors whined as the docking ring retracted into the annular cavity around the airlock. Weight within was kzin-standard; he sagged under it, and felt his spirit sag as well. “Tanjit.” A shrug. “Oh, well, the honeymoon was great, even if we had to wait fifty years and the relationship looks like it’ll be short.”
“Hari, you’re . . . sweet,” Ingrid said, smiling and stroking his cheek. Then she turned to the inner door.
“Hell, they’re not going to leave that unlocked,” Harold said in surprise. An airlock made a fairly good improvised holding facility, once you disconnected the controls via the main computer. The Wunderlander stiffened as the inner door sighed open, then gagged as the smell reached him. He recognized it instantly: the smell of rotting meat in a confined dry place. Lots of rotting meat . . . oily and thick, like some invisible protoplasmic butter smeared inside his nose and mouth.
He ducked through. His guess had been right: a Slasher. The control deck was delta-shaped: two crash-couches at the rear corners for the Sensor and Weapons operators, and the pilot-commander in the front. There were kzinti corpses in the two rear seats, still strapped in and in space armour with the helmets off. Their heads lay tilted back, mouths hanging open, tongues and eyeballs dry and leathery; the flesh had started to sag and the fur to fall away from their faces. Behind him he heard Ingrid retch, and swallowed himself. This was not precisely what she had expected . . .
And she’s got a universe of guts, but all her fighting’s been done in space, he reminded himself. Gentlefolk’s combat, all at a safe distance and then death or victory in a few instants. Nothing gruesome, unless you were on a salvage squad . . . even then, bodies do not rot in vacuum. Not like ground warfare at all. He reached over, careful not to touch, and flipped the hinged helmets down; the corpses were long past rigor mortis. A week or so, he decided. Hard to tell in this environment.
A sound brought his head up, a distinctive ftttp-ftttp. The kzin in the commander’s position was not dead. That noise was the sound of thin wet black lips fluttering on half-inch fangs, the ratcat equivalent of a snore.
“Sorry,” the screen in front of the kzin said. “I forgot they’d smell.”
Ingrid came up beside him. The screen showed a study, book-lined around a crackling hearth. A small girl in antique dress slept in an armchair before a mirror; a white-haired figure with a pipe and smoking jacket was seated beside her, only the figure was an anthropomorphic rabbit . . . Ingrid took a shaky breath.
“Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann,” she said. “Meet . . . the computer of Catskinner.” Her voice was a little hoarse from the stomach-acids that had filled her mouth. “I was expecting something . . . like this. Computer, meet Harold.” She rubbed a hand across her face. “How did you do it?”
The rabbit beamed and waved its pipe. “Oh, simply slipped a pseudopod of myself into its control computer while it attempted to engage me,” he said airily, puffing a cloud of smoke. “Not difficult, when its design architecture was so simple.”
Harold spoke through numb lips. “You designed a specific tapeworm that could crack a kzinti warship’s failsafes in . . . how long?”
“Oh, about 2.7 seconds, objective. Of course, to me, that could be any amount of time I chose, you see. Then I took control of the medical support system, and injected suitable substances into the crew. Speaking of time . . .” The rabbit touched the young girl on the shoulder; she stretched, yawned, and stepped through a large and ornately framed mirror on the study wall, vanishing without trace.
“Ah,” Harold said. Sentient computer. Murphy’s phosphorescent balls, I’m glad they don’t last.
Ingrid began speaking, a list of code-words and letter-number combinations.
“Yes, yes,” the rabbit said, with a slight testiness in its voice. The scene on the viewscreen disappeared, to be replaced with a view of another spaceship bridge. Smaller than this, and without the angular massiveness of kzinti design. He saw two crashcouches, and vague shapes in the background that might be life-support equipment. “Yes, I’m still functional, Lieutenant Raines. We do have a bit of a problem, though.”
“What?” she said. There was a look of strain on her face, lines grooving down beside the straight nose.
“The next Identification Friend or Foe code is due in a week,” the computer said. “It isn’t in the computer; only the pilot knows it. I’ve had no luck at all convincing him to tell me; there are no interrogation-drugs in his suit’s autodoc, and he seems to have a quite remarkable pain tolerance, even for a kzin. I could take you off to Catskinner, of course, but this ship would make splendid cover; you see, there’s been a . . . startling occurrence in the Swarm, and the kzinti are gathering. I see I’ll have to brief you . . .”
The man felt the tiny hairs along his neck and spine struggle to erect themselves beneath the snug surface of his Belter coverall, as he listened to the cheerful voice drone on in upper-class Wunderlander. Trapped in here, smelling his crew rot, screaming at the walls, he thought with a shudder. There were a number of extremely nasty things you could do even with standard autodoc drugs, provided you could override the safety parameters. It was something even a kzin didn’t deserve . . . then he brought up memories of his own. Or maybe they do. Still, he didn’t talk. You had to admit it, ratcats were almost as tough as they thought they were.
“I know how to make him talk,” he said abruptly, cutting off an illustrated discourse on the Sea Statue; some ancient flatlander named Greenberg stopped in the middle of a disquisition on thrintun ethics. “I need some time to assimilate all this stuff,” he went on. “We’re humans, we can’t adjust our worldviews the minute we get new data. But I can make the ratcat cry uncle.”
Ingrid looked at him, then glanced away sharply. She had a handkerchief pressed to her nose, but he saw her grimace of distaste.
“Don’t worry, kinder. Hot irons are a waste of time; ratcats are hardcases every one. All I’ll need is some wax, some soft cloth and some spotglue to hold his suit to that chair.”
It’s time, Harold decided.
The kzin whose suit clamped him to the forward chair had stopped trying to jerk his head loose from the padded clamps a day or so ago. Now his massive head simply quivered, and the fur seemed to have fallen in on the heavy bones somehow. Thick disks of felt and plastic made an effective blindfold, wax sealed ears and nose from all sight and scent; the improvised muzzle allowed him to breathe through clenched teeth but little else. Inside the suit was soft immobile padding, and the catheters that carried away waste, fed and watered and tended and would not let the brain go catatonic.
A sentient brain needs input; it is not designed to be cut off from the exterior world. Deprived of data, the first thing that fails is the temporal sense; minutes become subjective hours, hours stretch into days. Hallucinations follow, and the personality itself begins to disintegrate . . . and kzin are still more sensitive to sensory deprivation than humans. Compared to kzinti, humans are nearly deaf, almost completely unable to smell.
For which I am devoutly thankful, Harold decided, looking back to where Ingrid hung loose-curled in midair. They had set the interior field to zero-G; that helped with the interrogation, and she found it easier to sleep. The two dead crewkzin were long gone, and they had cycled and flushed the cabin to the danger point, but the oily stink of death seemed to have seeped into the surfaces. Never really present, but always there at the back of your throat . . .
She had lost weight, and there were bruise-like circles beneath her eyes. “Wake up, sweetheart,” he said gently. She started, thrashed, and then came to his side, stretching. “I need you to translate.” His own command of the Hero’s Tongue was fairly basic.