Man-Kzin Wars IX, Larry Niven [leveled readers TXT] 📗

His smile quirked at her through the barriers between. "All set for the dance, Tyra?"

"Well, I'll take a promissory note for my corsage," she forced herself to reply in kind.

Sternly: "To repeat the doctrine one last time. I go first. You stay behind at the entrance till I call for you. If I call, 'Get away!' instead, or you realize that something's gone seriously wrong, close our airlock and release the gang tube. Worning will instruct you how to bring Caroline back. This isn't heroics, it's plain common sense, and you know how and why to follow orders."

Softly: "Not that I expect danger. Horror, perhaps. You may well be tougher than me, dealing with that. You're a remarkable lady, Tyra, and I'm an incredibly lucky man."

"I love you," she whispered, and knew she meant it. Whatever happened in the future, she had been set free of regrets from the past.

They waited for a span that felt endless, although clocks showed little change. Then she felt a thud go through metal and knew that the vessels had made contact.

She stood trying to visualize events. Caroline nudged the sundiver. Both recoiled the least bit. The autopilot had gauged nicely; airlocks were nearly aligned. Caroline's gang tube need only extrude two or three meters to enclose the lock opposite and grip with molecular forces. The search program got busy as directed, stimulating crystals into vibrations that it detected and analyzed. It found the combination that would activate the mechanisms. Quantum levels fluctuated, utterances of command. Engines in the outer and inner portals of the kzin hull swung the valves aside. Gas billowed into the tube. Instruments verified that, while not in any normal state, it was not potentially destructive. Caroline's lock opened.

Heat rushed over Tyra in a flood. Protected, she felt it only slightly. The suit could maintain her in the oven for several minutes at least. She was flashingly, selfishly glad she could not smell whatever stenches the inflow bore.

Raden sprang forward. She followed as far as the airlock chamber and halted. Raden spun upward. His heels kicked ridiculously as he went out of her sight. The gravity polarizers inside the sundiver had failed too, she understood. Well, he knew how to handle himself in microgravity.

After a few hundred heartbeats his voice reached her. "Come on through, Tyra. There's just one of them. He's in bad shape, but alive. Come help me bring him over to us."

15

Heroes scream when they leap to do battle. They bear pain in silence.

That was a battle of its own. Ghrul-Captain had never dreamed how long and lonely it could be. Often he wanted to make an end. If necessary, he could claw his throat across.

But his folk might yet regain the spacecraft. Finding his body, they would see how he died. If he had endured to the end, always watchful for the chance to somehow strike back, they would bring home his praise. His kin would gain pride, and renewed standing. He would live on in memory, song, fame. If what he had done turned out to be to the good of the Race, he might be given a shrine and yearly blood sacrifices.

If nothing else, they would remember how he had dared. Something no kzin had ever done before. Something no monkey ever would.

Yes, let him keep this before him, that he was not a monkey who whimpered and fled, but a Hero.

He bobbed about randomly. Now and then he bumped into a side of the cabin. Though the lining was a soft insulator, every touch seared, and he jerked free with the breath hissing between his fangs. His fur was singed, his whiskers scorched, his tail one blister from end to end. Each shallow breath filled his breast with pain. His ears were clenched tight. He seldom opened his eyes to the parching, baking air. Dreams had begun to weave distortedly through the darkness behind the lids. He tried to fight them off.

If only death would come, the cool, kindly night— No, he must not think so, the wish was unworthy of a Hero. Let him rather hold that fact to his bosom, and the victory over the monkeys he had achieved.

It was what meant most, he thought whenever the tide of delirium ebbed back for a while. If only within his own spirit, he had struck a blow at them. Someday they would find out how deeply the blade had gone in. One stab, true, one out of the millions it would take to bring them down and avenge the Race, but his.

Something stirred, something made noise. He hauled himself to full awareness. A shape, not a vision, a real thing that touched him—anguish lanced; he almost cried out—and gabbled. Behind its helmet was a face like the face of a flayed corpse.

Monkey.

Another soared in. He snatched for recollections. Strong Runner swung afar. The monkeys, the rich, battening monkeys had sent boats out. One had laid alongside his.

What did they want? To take him captive, maybe try to sell him back to his folk—to seize the knowledge his vessel had won from the wreck of a world—or hand him over freely and gloat?

It hardly mattered. They were monkeys, victorious.

They were pulling and shoving him with them.

No, never. A kind of joy gleamed through the pain that had become Ghrul-Captain's universe.

Monkeys crawled around in their tree. They jeered at the hunter below and pelted him with dung. But all the while, their bough was bending under their weight, until they were in reach of him.

To kill these would be his vengeance for the Race and himself. What happened afterward mattered little. He might or might not be able to pilot their craft back to Strong Runner in time for the medic to save him. Certainly their fellow monkeys would shriek and jabber; but they'd do nothing decently warlike. Certainly, too, his achievement would go far toward inspiring the Race, would help hasten the day of reckoning.

His warrior skills returned to him. He should