Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

He pressed on, feeling a thickening of space with each latent step. His left foot kept straying outward, and his right would tend to trip into the left, so he crouched to lower his center of mass and lessen the Coriolis effect.

The next step was a toughie. To his eyes, the tunnel ahead appeared level, but his muscles told him that the floor sloped up like a summitless mountain. Just a few more arduous steps for mankind, he thought, and I should be able to get a look into the other tunnels. Then retreat.

Another step, as through thick mud, then another, through hardening cement. “You’re a Jinxian,” he told himself, “the strongest race in known space, by weight. Now move your Finagling feet.”

Aside from the difficulty in walking, Flex could only assume that the nearer he was to the stasis boxes, the slower time must be moving for him, relative to home. It was a sobering thought, but he recalled an old Jinxian adage: Only a fool wastes time worrying about time. Wisdom for a race of short lifespan, his father once said.

When he was a swindler’s dozen paces from the center, he craned his neck to look up into one of the other spokes in the roulette. As it rolled away and out of sight, he thought he saw inside a huge vehicle of some kind, so huge that it should not have been able to fit inside. It was a transport laden with dozens of terra-movers with mounted guns. Or so it appeared to Flex. Whatever it was, it looked like it was meant to build entire worlds-or destroy them. He could analyze the fleeting image later because his helmet imager was recording.

He gazed into the next wormhole as it wheeled into view to his right. Inside was a star field, and against that, what looked like a fleet of ships in an attack formation. The ships matched the configuration of those he had seen in a research project many years back: Slaver battleships. How a fleet of ships could fit in a tunnel not much larger than a personal yacht he did not know. Perhaps the wormhole could compress space as well as time. The fleet may have fallen into a larger wormhole that pinched into the roulette an eon ago.

Flex kept his feet apace with the rolling floor, and tried to peer into another tunnel. To do that, he had to step aside to see past a trio of the largest stasis boxes, that were large enough to hold a groundcar. He ran opposite the tunnel’s rotation, slowing it into darkness, and then picking up speed counter-clockwise. The light from the other spokes returned, only this time their contents were different.

In the tunnel directly above, the mechanical armatures began to move, and Flex watched in horror as a huge spindly gray creature-or robot-darted through the lowering arms like a bizarre monkey in high steely branches. The leggy creature grabbed two of the crane arms and beat them together until they came untangled. Immediately, the crane separated into two parts, each a cage of curved girders. No longer binding together, the cages lowered until they were just above the tumbling metal boxes ahead. Arms protruding from the cages unfolded to corral the boxes, holding each in the vacuum above the turning floor. What the crane was attached to up in the vertical tunnel was a mystery; it could not be affixed to the inner surface of a rotating cylinder.

I’ll be damned, Flex thought. The robot just repaired this whole thing.

He realized that not only had the wormhole been harnessed into a stasis factory, but that he had the opportunity of a lifetime-if he didn’t end up frozen in the jaws of time. No, it was Jarko-S’larbo who would be caught!

Humans hold a great part of their reflexes in the spinal cord, so that a hand may be pulled from fire without even thinking about it. On the other hand, humans also have instincts to freeze and to flee. Kzinti had a larger part of their reflexes in the spine, hence the “scream and leap” before thinking. Sometimes freezing or fleeing was better than charging. This evolutionary difference was to determine what happened next. With all the technology, knowledge, wisdom, and experience, what matters most at times is a construction of nature that was intended for primordial worlds, not rotating wormholes.

Flex calculated what might make Jarko-S’larbo leap, and decided it was time to reveal himself. He backpedaled, gradually slowing the tunnel’s rotation until the roulette faded into darkness.

“Ratcat!” he said.

“I see where you are now, Jinxian. You’re dead!”

“Don’t you want my name and title first, so you can claim bragging rights? I’m Flex Bothme, the guy who dropped the bomb on your kits!”

“ Skalazaal !” bellowed Jarko-S’larbo in a cry meant to freeze prey. “Flex Bothme?”

Flex ran hard, pounding up the wall to set things spinning again. His feet hurt like hell, worse than the frostbite at Brain Freeze, but he ran even harder, conjuring up the roulette, and the mechanical arms overhead.

He only heard the kzin shout, “-you shitflick-” as the cat leaped toward him, and froze in mid-air, amidst the repaired machinery.

When the icy-eyed monkey thing went into action, Flex needed no other warning. He made the most of that human flight reflex, taking the path of decreasing resistance.

As he reached the mouth of the tunnel, he realized he might be able to turn off the machinery, so he jogged the cylinder down to a halt. The roulette spun away into unseen dimensions and the lights went out. Cautiously making his way back to the center, Flex beamed his light around. There was no sign of the Slaver fleet, the monster monkey, nor of Jarko-S’larbo.

Unless you count the neatly packaged, kzin-sized stasis box that lay sealed on the floor.

“Well happy birthday to me,” said Flex.

Zel Kickovich folded his arms and looked Flex hard in the eyes. “What took you so damn long?” he said. “We nearly got fried by the Sizthz Chitz .”

“You try lugging a metal box the size of a groundcar through a tunnel, down eight stairs, across a pile of rubble, and into a cargo hold,” Flex retorted. “With a kzin in it. Then try evading the Lisp Kzinship -”

“ Sizthz Chitz .”

“-however you pronounce it, in a lander with half the power of a wristcomp. Oh, and did I mention nearly getting stuck in a time trap? How long is it supposed to take to get out of one of those, by the book?”

Zel beamed and clapped Flex on the back. “I love it when you get mad.”

That drew a wan smile from Flex.

Now that Catscratch Fever had reached hyperdrive, Flex was able to contact the Puppeteer Hylo by hyperwave.

“Mission accomplished,” he said dryly. “I found a stasis box, but I’m keeping it.”

Both Hylo’s sock puppet heads bobbed up and down in silhouette, but did not make a sound.

“Don’t get your necks in a knot,” Flex said. “I’ve got something even better for you.”

“It would not go well with you to renege on our bargain,” said Hylo, composing herself. (At least Flex assumed Hylo was a female, based on the shimmering pitch of her alluring voice. If Hylo was male, Flex felt just a little bit dirty.)

“Trust me, when I tell you what I found, you’re not going to want the stasis box anymore.” Puppeteers were cowards, after all, and used humans to deal with dangerous species. For Finagle’s sake, Hylo would probably be afraid of its own silhouette.

He told Hylo about the stasis assembly line, and Zeno’s Roulette. “Not only can you make your own stasis boxes, there are ageless places to explore, if you can figure out how to get through. It’s impossible to place a value on that.”

After a pantomime of what looked like two weak-knuckled hand shadows consulting one another, Hylo could only agree. “What’s in the stasis box?” she asked.