Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

Miffy understood. He began to keen in wordless panic.

The kzin watched as the hanger doors slid smoothly open. The navigation program read the stars and told him he was closer to a contested border than he had dared imagine. He entered in the command to launch. The scout ship slid out into the void.

Now was the time for decision. Did he wheel the scout ship around and crash into the base or did he attempt to get himself and his very interesting prisoner home again? Before he had seen no value in his continued life, but now…Not only did he have what he himself had learned, he had a very special prisoner. His status would go up.

The equation had changed in favor of life…of that strange intangible, hope.

As the kzin set his course, he knew his escape was not certain, but at least he would die free, not a prisoner, no longer a captive. Miffy had fallen silent, foam flecking his lips, his eyes wild and bloodshot as he contemplated his future.

The kzin wondered. Had Dr. Anixter all but sent Miffy to the hanger? Had she manipulated the situation so that not only would the kzin have a hostage and a prize, but also a reason to escape rather than wreck both himself and the base? He wouldn’t be surprised if she had.

Two types of teeth…If he survived the journey home, he would need to try and explain about humans and their two types of teeth.

Jenni napped until she was awakened by the klaxons. Without leaving her bunk, she activated a subroutine that would put some interesting information into Miffy’s files, information that indicated how deeply he had feared the kzinti, how he had contemplated changing sides if by doing so he could buy a position as a collaborator working under kzinti masters.

Miffy would not be the first human to do this. He would not be the last.

She’d had to keep this final touch until late in the game, for Miffy must not be permitted to see these interesting additions to his files in advance. Now, however, either he was dead, taken by the kzinti, or, at the very least, a base commander who had just permitted his most valuable prisoner to attempt an escape.

Miffy’s protestations of innocence would not hold up, especially since Jenni would be there to gently explain how this quite fit the psychological pattern of a man who chose to name himself Otto Bismarck.

Belting her fluffy pink robe over her flowered pajamas, Jenni moved toward the door, reacting just as she would if this was an emergency she knew nothing about. As she hurried out, she swallowed a smile, knowing that now was not the time to show her teeth.

2367 CE: Proxima Centauri System, Outer Belt

With the bright red disk of Proxima Centauri growing quickly in his forward screens, hn-Pilot rose from the kzin smallship’s co-pilot seat. He stretched as much as was possible for an eight-foot felinoid in a cramped cockpit.

The second helmsman-rr-Pilot, who was currently flying the tiny craft-sniffed deeply as his nominal commander twisted his spine to work out the kinks of a long immobile watch. “Boredom has its own scent, evidently.”

hn-Pilot stopped in mid-stretch: rr-Pilot’s undeniably accurate observation was also borderline insolence. But then again, hn-Pilot’s authority was borderline as well: neither had true Names, only differentiation-prefixes, and, therefore, his superiority in rank and seniority was marginal. They were also closely matched in height, weight, and speed, so neither one could be confident of victory in a formal challenge. rr-Pilot’s oblique challenge was, therefore, quite canny: without contesting hn-Pilot’s official command status, he signaled that he would not accept any matching assumptions regarding personal dominance.

hn-Pilot’s fur rippled faintly: the kzin expression of modest mirth or amusement. rr-Pilot was stalking his objective-status-with all the canny indirection that hn-Pilot would have used, had their situations been reversed. Which was good: aggressiveness was the hallmark of any worthy Hero. But, inversely, if hn-Pilot did not effectively respond to this subtle challenge, it would mean he was too docile: doubly so, since he was technically the commander of the smallship dubbed Incisor-Red .

hn-Pilot finished his interrupted stretch in a leisurely fashion and then stooped forward, resting his arms down on the back of rr-Pilot’s seat with a jarring thump. He tilted his weight forward; the seat shifted and squealed in protest.

He watched as rr-Pilot’s pink, white-ribbed, scalloped-edged ears half-folded back against this neck fur: annoyance, readiness to fight if further provoked. rr-Pilot asked, “Do you need to remain in that place?”

“Yes,” sighed hn-Pilot. “Yes, I do. I want to make sure you are performing your duties properly, rr-Pilot. That’s part of my job as commander.”

rr-Pilot’s ears retracted a millimeter more, quivering. “And are you quite satisfied with my performance?”

“It is too early to say. I haven’t completed observing you, yet.” hn-Pilot made the sardonic amusement clear in his voice. He saw rr-Pilot’s jaw sag open, the points of needle-like teeth showing: the kzin “smile” was a prelude to either combat, or at least, readiness to engage in it. hn-Pilot leaned even more of his weight into the chair, which groaned under his mass. “What? Do you disapprove of my command prerogatives? You’re not challenging me, are you, rr-Pilot?” Said in the mildest of tones, it was a sarcastic gauntlet waved in the air between them.

“I do not question your command, or its prerogatives. But your scent is overpowering, hn-Pilot.”

“As am I.” He felt rr-Pilot’s body tensing against that boast, but neither the circumstances nor his physical position made resistance prudent. Since the in-flight monitors were running, there would be plentiful evidence that he had initiated violence which could endanger the mission. And besides, rr-Pilot was seated, facing away from his commander, who was already on his feet, behind him, eyes and claws ready. rr-Pilot’s ears folded back fully, taut, then relaxed: he had found a mutually acceptable path out of the confrontation: “hn-Pilot, you might want to use some of your power to tell ms-Pilot of Incisor-Yellow to keep properly formed up on us: he is drifting wide, again.”

The comment not only defused their own tense situation, but was inarguably true: in the sensor scope, the blip signifying their brother craft was allowing the gap between them to widen. hn-Pilot toggled the ship-to-ship: “ Incisor-Yellow , eyes on the trail! Do you sleep even as you stalk?”

ms-Pilot’s response was bored, but the blip indicating his ship began to close the distance: “Surely, this is not stalking. It seems to me that we are simply dragging our paws from one dry watering hole to another.”

Which hn-Pilot had to admit was a most adequate description of their current mission: to escort the human robot transport- Euclid’s Lasso -on its first post-invasion cycle from the main Centauri system to its distant trinary component Proxima, and back again. Why they were loping dutifully after this pointless, brainless beast of a hull was beyond hn-Pilot’s comprehension. It shipped food and other necessary supplies out to the sparse human population of the Proxima system; it returned with their marginal ore finds. So far as he could tell, the human miners of Proxima had a rather desperate paw-to-maw existence, and were strategically and economically insignificant due to both their poverty and astrographic position.

But that was hardly any of his concern. hn-Pilot, like the rest of his species, was of the opinion that there was nothing to be gained in trying to improve the productivity of slave races through intervention. Such intervention always- always -cost more than it was worth. This was the result of language barriers, of radically different approaches to similar problems, and of the inevitable resentment of the enslaved locals. But just as often, it was because those same locals knew their own systems better than the conquerors did. As long as the tribute required was paid promptly and in full, the slaves could use whatever methods worked best.