Dean Ing - Cathouse

Sampling war’s minor ironies: Locklear knew so little about the Weasel or wartime alarms, he thought the klaxon was hooting for planetfall. That is why, when the Weasel winked into normal space near that lurking kzin warship, little Locklear would soon be her only survivor. The second irony was that, while the Interworld Commission’s last bulletin had announced sporadic new outbursts of kzin hostility, Locklear was the only civilian on the Weasel who had never thought of himself as a warrior and did not intend to become one.

Moments after the Weasel’s intercom announced completion of their jump, Locklear was steadying himself next to his berth, waiting for the ship’s gravity polarizer to kick in and swallowing hard because, like ancient French wines, he traveled poorly. He watched with envy as Herrera, the hairless, whipcord-muscled Belter in the other bunk, swung out with one foot planted on the deck and the other against the wall. “Like a cat,” Locklear said admiringly.

“That’s no compliment anymore, flatlander,” Herrera said. “It looks like the goddamn tabbies want a fourth war. You’d think they’d learn,” he added with a grim headshake.

Locklear sighed. As a student of animal psychology in general, he’d known a few kzinti well enough to admire the way they learned. He also knew Herrera was on his way to enlist if, as seemed likely, the kzinti were spoiling for another war. And in that case, Locklear’s career was about to be turned upside down. Instead of a scholarly life puzzling out the meanings of Grog forepaw gestures and kzin ear-twitches, he would probably be conscripted into some warren full of psych warfare pundits, for the duration. These days, an ethologist had to be part historian, too—Locklear remembered more than he liked about the three previous man-kzin wars.

And Herrera was ready to fight the kzinti already, and Locklear had called him a cat. Locklear opened his mouth to apologize but the klaxon drowned him out. Herrera slammed the door open, vaulted into the passageway reaching for handholds.

“What’s the matter,” Locklear shouted. “Where are you?” Herrera’s answer, half-lost between the door-slam and the klaxon, sounded like “attention” to Locklear, who did not even know the drill for a deadheading passenger during battle stations. Locklear was still waiting for a familiar tug of gravity when that door sighed, the hermetic seal swelling as always during a battle alert, and he had time to wonder why Herrera was in such a hurry before the Weasel took her fatal hit amidships.

An energy beam does not always sound like a thunderclap from inside the stricken vessel. This one sent a faint crackling down the length of the Weasel’s hull, like the rustle of pre-space parchment crushed in a man’s hand. Sequestered alone in a two-man cabin near the ship’s aft galley, Locklear saw his bunk leap toward him, the inertia of his own body wrenching his grip from his handhold near the door. He did not have time to consider the implications of a blow powerful enough to send a twelve-hundred ton Privateer-class patrol ship tumbling like a pinwheel, nor the fact that the blow itself was the reaction from most of the Weasel’s air exhausting to space in explosive decompression. And, because his cabin had no external viewport, he could not see the scatter of human bodies into the void. The last thing he saw was the underside of his bunk, and the metal brace that caught him above the left cheekbone. Then he knew only a mild curiosity: wondering why he heard something like the steady sound of a thin whistle underwater, and why that yellow flash in his head was followed by an infrared darkness crammed with pain.

It was the pain that brought him awake; that, and the sound of loud static. No, more like the zaps of an arc welder in the hands of a novice—or like a catfight. And then he turned a blurred mental page and knew it, the way a Rorschach blot suddenly becomes a face half-forgotten but always feared. So it did not surprise him, when he opened his eyes, to see two huge kzinti standing over him.

To a man like Herrera they would merely have been massive. To Locklear, a man of less than average height, they were enormous; nearly half again his height. The broadest kzin, with the notched right ear and the black horizontal fur-mark like a frown over his eyes, opened his mouth in what, to humans, might be a smile. But kzinti smiles showed dagger teeth and always meant immediate threat.

This one was saying something that sounded like, “Clash-rowll whuff, rurr fitz.”

Locklear needed a few seconds to translate it, and by that time the second kzin was saying it in Interworld: “Grraf-Commander says, ‘Speak when you are spoken to.’ For myself, I would prefer that you remained silent. I have eaten no monkeymeat for too long.”

While Locklear composed a reply, the big one—the Grraf-Commander, evidently—spoke again to his fellow. Something about whether the monkey knew his posture was deliberately obscene. Locklear, lying on his back on a padded table as big as a Belter’s honeymoon bed, realized his arms and legs were flung wide. “I am not very fluent in the Hero’s tongue,” he said in passable kzin, struggling to a sitting position as he spoke. As he did, some of that pain localized at his right collarbone. Locklear moved very slowly thereafter. Then, recognizing the dot-and-comma-rich labels that graced much of the equipment in that room, he decided not to ask where he was. He could be nowhere but an emergency surgical room for kzin warriors. That meant he was on a kzin ship.

A faint slitting of the smaller kzin’s eyes might have meant determination, a grasping for patience, or—if Locklear recalled the texts, and if they were right, a small “if” followed by a very large one—a pause for relatively cold calculation. The smaller kzin said, in his own tongue, “If the monkey speaks the Hero’s tongue, it is probably as a spy.”

“My presence here was not my idea,” Locklear pointed out, surprised to find his memory of the language returning so quickly. “I boarded the Weasel on command to leave a dangerous region, not to enter one. Ask the ship’s quartermaster, or check her records.” The commander spat and sizzled again: “The crew are all carrion. As you will soon be, unless you tell us why, of all the monkeys on that ship, you were the only one so specially protected.”

Locklear moaned. This huge kzin’s partial name and his scars implied the kind of warrior whose valor and honor forbade lies to a captive. All dead but himself? Locklear shrugged before he thought, and the shrug sent a stab of agony across his upper chest. “Sonofabitch,” he gasped in agony. The navigator kzin translated. The larger one grinned, the kind of grin that might fasten on his throat.

Locklear said in kzin, very fast, “Not you! I was cursing the pain.”

“A telepath could verify your meanings very quickly,” said the smaller kzin.

“An excellent idea,” said Locklear. “He will verify that I am no spy, and not a combatant, but only an ethologist from Earth. A kzin acquaintance once told me it was important to know your forms of address. I do not wish to give offense.”

“Call me Tzak-Navigator,” said the smaller kzin abruptly, and grasped Locklear by the shoulder, talons sinking into the human flesh. Locklear moaned again, gritting his teeth. “You would attack? Good,” the navigator went on, mistaking the grimace, maintaining his grip, the formidable kzin body trembling with intent.

“I cannot speak well with such pain,” Locklear managed to grunt. “Not as well protected as you think.”

“We found you well-protected and sealed alone in that ship,” said the commander, motioning for the navigator to slacken his hold. “I warn you, we must rendezvous the Raptor with another Ripping-Fang class cruiser to pick up a full crew before we hit the Eridani worlds. I have no time to waste on such a scrawny monkey as you, which we have caught nearer our home worlds than to your own.”