Rrowl-Captain, eyes wide in fear, stared at his status viewscreen. He shrieked anger and surprise, then retched painfully with his growing sickness. The spasms subsided after a moment.
Time was growing very short indeed.
What power could have instantaneously stopped both Sharpened-Fang and his cowardly monkey prey dead-still in interstellar space? Kinetic potential was awesome at near luminal velocities. He didn't know the method, but clearly, the new and unknown spacecraft was the culprit.
The intruder vessel was the size of a small moon, and looked more like a crowded city than a spacecraft. Magnification showed spires and squarish buildings, open areas and domes, tiny motes of light that moved above and through the huge construct. Thin spidery webs extending from the main body of the vessel glowed incandescently in high infrared, bleeding off waste heat into interstellar space. Instruments showed that the moon-ship kept an ambient temperature of forty divisions above Total Cold.
Rrowl-Captain bared his aching fangs, slowly. Monkeys could not have built this ship. Nor could kzin, even as favored sons of the One Fanged God. No race Rrowl-Captain knew of could construct such a vessel.
Perhaps the intruders had intervened on the monkeys' behalf. Rrowl-Captain coughed again, spitting blood.
Memories of greenish light flared in the back of his mind. It would explain much.
He snarled as he pulled out another handful of fur with his blistered fingers. He gulped a few more of his antiradiation capsules, struggling to keep them inside his traitor belly, though the capsules only slowed the inevitable.
No, thought Rrowl-Captain on further reflection, the intruder spacecraft was not intervening on the side of the human monkeys. If that had been their alien intention, surely Rrowl-Captain and Sharpened-Fang would even now be mingled as thoroughly dispersed vapor. That was as clear as the fangs in his own jaws.
The intruders were simply meddlers.
Rrowl-Captain consulted his thinplate console. The forward screen revealed the monkeyship hanging dead in space. Even dying of radiation sickness, the captain smiled and rumbled in kzin humor. If the monkeys were not moving, then their power source was inactive.
Meddlers or no meddlers, Rrowl-Captain was going to complete his ceremonial kill. He would be unable to place human ears on his trophy loop, but he would accomplish a task almost as tasty. A final delicacy, in honor of his litter-brother.
With trembling claws, the captain warmed up the strained gravitic polarizer and put the weapons panel on standby. Within a few moments, Rrowl-Captain would finish his scream-and-leap, weapons firing, and destroy the monkey vessel. Then he would deal with these meddling intruders.
A yowling alarm tone halted Rrowl-Captain's ready claw, poised over the initiate keypad.
He looked up with a snarl, and saw many octal-squareds of nightmare black shapes blotting out the stars, living creatures flying through empty space toward Sharpened-Fang.
Magnification and vector analysis showed the hordes to originate from the intruder moon-ship. The intruder aliens were even uglier than Jotoki, Rrowl-Captain realized with a hiss of distaste. Thick central stalks surrounded by an octal-and-half of sinuous tendrils—yet bearing tools and wearing harnesses.
Powerful or not, Rrowl-Captain could not let these aliens threaten a Hero's vessel, nor his own plans. He reoriented the weapons panel and prepared to fire.