Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin Page A

explosive plastic darts, so she would not actually have to score a
hit
, just come close.
    Warily, she moved toward the open door. She paused to one side of it, raised her pistol high, thumbed off the safety, and then peered quickly into the room.
    Nothing.
    It was some kind of storage room, she saw, full of plastisealed equipment piled high on floater skids. She glanced around uneasily. Had she imagined it, then? No. As she was about to turn away, she saw it once more, a tiny darting shape that appeared on the periphery of her vision and vanished before she could quite get a clear look at it.
    But this time she had seen where it had gone. She hurried after it, feeling bolder now; it had, after all, been quite small.
    She had it cornered, she saw when she rounded the looming equipment skid. But what was it? Celise Waan moved closer, gun at the ready.
    It was a cat.
    It stared at her steadily, its tail flicking back and forth. It was kind of a funny cat. Very small—a kitten, really. It was pale white, with vivid scarlet stripes, an oversized head, and astonishing lambent crimson eyes.
    Another cat, thought Celise Waan. That was all she needed: another cat.
    It hissed at her.
    She drew back, a little startled. Tuf’s cats hissed at her from time to time, especially the nasty black-and-white one, but not like
that.
That hiss was almost, well, reptilian. Chilling, somehow. And its tongue… it seemed to have a very long, very peculiar tongue.
    It hissed again.
    “Here, kitty,” she called. “Here, kitty.”
    It stared at her, unblinking, cold, haughty. Then it drew itself back and spat at her. The spittle struck her square in the center of her faceplate. It was thick greenish stuff, and it obscured her vision for a moment until she wiped it away with the back of her arm.
    Celise Waan decided that she’d had enough of cats. “Nice kitty,” she said, “come here, kitty. I’ve got a present for you.”
    It hissed again, drew back to spit.
    Celise Waan grunted and blew it to hell.
     
    The plasma cannon would dispose of Kaj Nevis handsomely; on that score Jefri Lion had no doubt. The strength of the armor on that alien battlesuit was an unknown factor. If it was at all comparable to the armored suits worn by the Federal Empire’s own assault squads during the Thousand Years War, it might be able to deflect laser fire, to withstand small explosions, to ignore sonic attacks, but a plasma cannon could melt through five meters of solid duralloy plate. One good plasma ball would instantly turn any kind of personal armor into slag, and Nevis would be incinerated before he even understood what had hit him.
    The difficulty was the size of the plasma cannon. It was unfortunately cumbersome, and the so-called portable version, with its small energy-pac, took almost a full standard minute after each shot to generate another plasma ball in its force chamber. Jefri Lion was acutely and uncomfortably aware that, were he to miss Kaj Nevis, he would be unlikely to get a second shot. Moreover, even on its tripod, the plasma cannon was unwieldy, and it had been many years since he had been in the field, and even then, his strong suits had been his mind and his tactical sense, not his reflexes. After so many decades at the ShanDellor Center, he had no great confidence in his eye-hand coordination.
    So Jefri Lion concocted a plan.
    Fortunately, plasma cannons had often been employed for automated perimeter defense, and this one had the standard minimind and autofire sequence. Jefri Lion erected the tripod in the middle of a broad corridor, approximately twenty meters down from a major intersection. He programmed in an extremely narrow field of fire, and calibrated the targetting cube with the utmost precision. Then he initiated the autofire sequence and stepped back with satisfaction. Inside the energy-pac he saw the plasma ball forming, burning brighter and brighter, and after a minute the ready light flashed on. Now the cannon was set, and