by the laser. Right. It’s dissipating, I think.” True enough, the glow was already less intense.
“Unfortunate that our automatics are so single-mindedly defensive. Trust a puppeteer to know nothing of attack weapons!” said Speaker. “Even our fusion motors were on the wing. And still the enemy fire on us! But they will learn what it means to attack a kzin.”
“You’re going to chase them down?”
Speaker did not recognize sarcasm. “I am.”
“With what?” Louis exploded. “You know what they left us? A hyperdrive and a lifesystem, that’s what they left us! We haven’t got so much as a pair of attitude jets. You’ve got delusions of grandeur if you think we can fight a war in this!”
“So the enemy believes! Little do they know—”
“What enemy?”
“—that in challenging a kzin—”
“Automatics, you dolt! An enemy would have started shooting the moment we came in range!”
“I too have wondered at their unusual strategy.”
“Automatics! X-ray lasers for blasting meteors. Programmed to shoot down anything that might hit the ring. The moment our projected freely falling orbit intercepted the ring, pow! Lasers.”
“That…is possible.” The kzin began closing panels over dead portions of the control board. “But I hope you are wrong.”
“Sure. It’d help if you had someone to blame, wouldn’t it?”
“It would help if our course did not intercept the ring.” The kzin had closed off half the board. He continued to close panels as he talked. “Our velocity is high. It will take us out of the system, beyond the local discontinuity, to where we can use the hyperdrive to return to the puppeteer fleet. But first we must miss the ring.”
Louis hadn’t thought that far ahead. “You had to be in a hurry, didn’t you?” he said bitterly.
“At least we will miss the sun. The automatics will not have fired until our projected course circled the sun.”
“The lasers are still on,” Teela reported. “I can see stars through the glow, but the glow is still there. That means were still aimed at the ring surface, doesn’t it?”
“It does if the lasers are automatic.”
“If we hit the ring, will we be killed?”
“Ask Nessus. His race built the Liar. See if you can get him to unroll.”
The kzin snorted in disgust. By now he had closed off most of the control board. Only a pitiful few lights still glowed to show that part of the Liar lived on.
Teela Brown bent over the puppeteer, who was still curled into a ball behind the fragile netting of his crash web. Contrary to Louis’s prediction, she had shown not the least sign of panic since the beginning of the laser attack. Now she slid her hands along the bases of the puppeteer’s necks, scratching gently, as she had seen Louis do once before.
“You’re being a silly coward,” she rebuked the frightened puppeteer. “Come on and show your heads. Come on, look at me. You’ll miss all the excitement!”
Twelve hours later, Nessus was still effectively in catatonia.
“When I try to coax him out, he only curls up tighter,” Teela was near tears. They had retired to their room for dinner, but Teela couldn’t eat anything. “I’m doing it wrong, Louis. I know it.”
“You keep stressing excitement. Nessus isn’t after excitement,” Louis pointed out. “Forget it. He isn’t hurting himself or us. When he’s needed he’ll uncurl, if only to protect himself. Meanwhile let him hide in his own belly.”
Teela paced awkwardly, half-stumbling; she still hadn’t completely adjusted to the difference between ship’s gravity and Earth’s gravity. She started to speak, changed her mind, changed it again, and blurted, “Are you scared?”
“Yah.”
“I thought so,” she nodded, and resumed pacing. Presently she asked, “Why isn’t Speaker scared?”
For the kzin had been nothing but active since the attack: cataloguing weaponry, doing primitive trig calculations to plot their course, occasionally delivering concise, reasonable orders in a manner to command instant obedience.
“I think Speaker’s terrified. Remember how he acted when he saw the puppeteer worlds? He’s terrified, but he won’t let Nessus know it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I don’t! Why is everyone frightened but me?”
Love and pity tore at Louis’s insides with a pain so old, so nearly forgotten that it was almost now. I’m new here, and everyone knows but me! “Nessus was half right,” he tried to explain “You’ve never been hurt at all, have you? You’re too lucky to be hurt. We’re afraid of being hurt, but you don’t understand, because it’s never happened to you.”
“That’s crazy. I’ve never broken a bone or anything—but that’s not a psi power!”
“No.