Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

having a good scratch. The intruder was at a control console in the observatory, monitoring her arrival. He had a largely mundane but decent arsenal, including a pretty good bomb.

Peace took over the monitor system, told it lies, suited up, had her ship dock on its own, and used the softener to step through the hull. She jumped to the observatory, came through the wall, reached over his shoulder to pluck the dead-man detonator out of his hand, and stunned him. It was a good detonator: it took her a couple of seconds of real thought to figure out the disarm.

When she opened her suit, the man's smell was severe. She'd been away for a couple of weeks, and that wasn't long enough for him to get into this condition, so he'd arrived filthy. He must be deranged.

She restored the console, then called her associate. "Hi, Buckminster, I'm home. You leave me any butter?"

His reply began with a chuckle. With the telepathic region removed from the brain, a kzin was remarkably easygoing. "I only had a few pounds. Is our guest still alive?"

"By the smell he could be a zombie, but I'll take a chance and say yes. How come you didn't disarm him?" she asked, though she knew; she also knew Buckminster would want to say it, though.

"I didn't want to touch him," Buckminster confirmed. "Besides, I didn't think it would make him stop fighting, and I didn't want to have to explain bite marks on a human corpse."

"Difficult to do when you're swollen up with ptomaine, too. Come to the observatory and sort through his stuff. I'll be cleaning him up."

"You humans show the most unexpected reserves of courage," Buckminster remarked.

As she stripped, washed, and depilated the man, the remark seemed progressively less likely to have been a joke. There was a significant layer of dead skin, and the smell of him underneath it was actually somewhat worse. He must not have bathed in months, if not years.

Getting the hair off his face confirmed an impression: she'd seen him before. He'd been one of the psychists at her mother's prison. Peace hadn't actually met him, and Jan Corben hadn't given his name—she'd called him Corky. He was evidently a survivor of the kzinti occupation of Pleasance, and had probably witnessed some awful things. Peace didn't spend much pity on him—she'd been her mother's clone, created to be the recipient in a brain transplant like many before her, and she had yet to hear a worse story.

Once he was clean, he was also pretty raw in spots, so Peace had to spray some skinfilm on, to hold him while she programmed the autodoc. This took her almost half an hour, as she'd never expected to have a human breeder here, and she had to start from scratch. When she was done she stuck him in, then washed herself and went to see how Buckminster was doing.

He was having a great time. He'd taken Corky's arms to the small firing range (the big one was necessarily outside), where he had laid them out in a long row and was methodically using them to perforate targets of various compositions. "Interesting viewpoint he has," Buckminster told her. "No nonlethal weapons, but not many random-effect ones. This man wants to kill in a very personal way."

"He talk to you much?"

"Nothing informative. 'Go there, do that, you baby-eater.' Made eye contact and grinned a lot. Seemed to bother him that I didn't get hostile."

"I expect so. Did you explain?" Peace said, amused.

"No, the baby-eater remark offended me, so I just let him pant."

"Sweat."

"Sweat? Yes, that would mean the same thing, wouldn't it?"

"Not quite. A human letting someone else work off his foul mood on his own doesn't need as much self-control," Peace pointed out. "So there's less satisfaction involved for us. Well, I'd better check his ship. Want to come along?"

"If it's as big a mess as he was I'll need my suit."

"I'll put mine back on too," Peace agreed.

There was only one boobytrap; it was in the airlock, and Buckminster spotted it too. The ship only had deck gravity in the exercise room, and that was turned off. There wasn't any debris floating about, but surfaces were dirty and smeared, and the air plant was in extremis. The ship's arms looked like he'd tried for the greatest lethality for the money: there was a turret with two disintegrators, plus and minus, to slice targets open with bars of lightning; and torpedo tubes that fired Silver Bullets, a weapon the Wunderlanders had devised at the end of the Third War but never got to use. These were all-but-invisible pellets of stasis-held antihydrogen, stasis shutting down on impact—the blast would punch through thick hullmetal, and the surplus neutrons from the destroyed atoms would flood a ship's interior. "What a stupid concept," Buckminster said. "That'd ruin everything but the hull. You'd have to rebuild the ship almost completely for any sort of prize."

"Though it is an excellent killing device," Peace said.

"If that's all you want."

"It's all he wants, and it's his ship."

"It's still stupid. What if he had a chance at a better ship?"

Peace shrugged—which, given the swollen joints of a Protector's shoulders, was a very emphatic gesture—and said, "I doubt he intends to live long enough for it to matter."

"Urr," Buckminster growled, which from a kzin qualified as tactful acknowledgment.

"I agree it's unusually stupid," Peace added, aware that he might not have understood that.

They searched the ship without finding further portable weapons, which made some sense if he was on a suicide mission—he'd hardly go back for more. The only question was, what was he doing here? "Did he say what he was doing here?" she said, realizing Buckminster wouldn't mention it unless it came up—small talk was "monkey chatter" to kzinti, and Peace judged this was not an unfair assessment. It probably did derive from primate chattering.

"No, he wanted to know what I was doing here."

"What did you tell him?"

"That I was a deserter."

Peace,