Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

TOMCAT TACTICS

2413 BCE: Wunderland, leading Trojan point asteroids

“If you botch the insertion, the oyabun will have your left testicle,” muttered Pytor Iarngavi over the tightbeam. “Probably your right one, too.”

Moto Yakazuki snorted defiance. “Just let him try and get them.” The wiry EVA expert shut off and detached the portable compressed air retro: it was old, reliable, zero-energy-signature tech. Perfect for this job. Yakazuki stowed the retro on the side of his life-support unit, and then shifted his grip on the small space-rock. Only four meters in length and two wide, one couldn’t seriously call it an asteroid. He fired his suit jets in quick bursts to make small side-vector corrections.

“It’s going to be too close to the other-”

“It’s not, Pytor,” Yakazuki snapped. “Now, shut up.” The small Serpent Swarmer pulled himself hand over hand to the other side of the probably artificial splinter of rock. Once secured, he pulsed his suit jets, counter-boosting until he had zeroed out the inertia along its insertion vector. He pushed gently away, assessed his EVA handiwork: the tiny lozenge-like object was now motionless relative to the other rocks at the trailing end of Wunderland’s leading Trojan point asteroids. “Perfect: like it’s been there since the beginning of time.”

“Whaddya think it is?”

“I dunno,” confessed Yakazuki as he began boosting back to the small prospecting boat they had been loaned for this task. “Way too light to be a genuine rock, that’s for sure. But the man didn’t say what it was, and I wasn’t about to ask. I’m just glad to start paying off for my, eh, overzealous lovemaking with Funikawa’s prize baishunfu.”

“Since when has ‘beating a whore’ become ‘overzealous lovemaking’?”

“Mind your own business and vices, Iarngavi. Just how many thousands are you in debt, now? Word has it that when you couldn’t pay last month, you offered your ass to the Yamikin’s collection goons. Who kicked it raw for you.”

“Fuck you, Moto.”

“I’ll bet you would, if you got the chance. Open the hatch. I’m done out here.”

Tomoaki Kitayama sipped at the small porcelain cup: the sake was ever so slightly less than body temperature. Not really tepid, yet, but not correct. However, this was probably going to be the least of his problems, today.

His gang’s senior accountant, or kaikei, appeared at the entrance of his office, located in the back of the restaurant that bore Kitayama’s name. The kaikei bowed. “Kobun?”

“Proceed.”

“We have received the signal from the debtor and the rapist. They have completed their task.”

“Has our spy drone verified their report?”

“Yes, kobun. Shall I inform the oyabun that the mission has been a success?”

“No, I shall do that personally.”

“Very well, kobun. Are there other matters which need my attention today?”

“No, but tell me: the men who performed the mission-is their ship still in line-of-sight, for clear transmission?”

“Yes, kobun. Shall I raise them?”

“No, I shall tend to that also. You may go home. My regards to your family.”

“We hope you will honor us by coming to dinner soon again, kobun.”

“Yes, perhaps.” Please no; his wife is as dull as a potted plant. And less comely. “However, it is uncertain when I might be free to do so. I shall inform you if my schedule becomes less taxing.” Which will never happen.

Kitayama nodded in response to his kaikei’s bow, then studied the data tablet beside him. Two channels were already pulsing, ready to be activated: a red one that would send a narrow lascom transmission to the prospecting boat, and a green one that would open a secure line to the oyabun. Kitayama smiled, pressed the red button, and then the green one.

Forty seconds after the red button was pressed, and at a distance of forty light-seconds, the computer in Iarngavi’s and Yakazuki’s small prospecting boat received a lascom signal that did not route through to the communications panel in the bridge. Instead, it was a coded command that was addressed for the subprocessor overseeing engine operations. Which obeyed the command immediately.

The magnetic bottle on the plasma drive flickered out of existence. The superheated hydrogen expanded in every direction, including right through the hull of the craft. When it came into contact with the oxygenated atmosphere within, combustion occurred.

Which Tomoaki Kitayama’s small, undetected spy drone duly recorded and transmitted.

Eighty seconds after Kitayama pressed the red button, a small, bright, yellow flare twinkled momentarily on the synced screens of the oyabun and his most trusted kobun. They nodded in unison.

“The package is in place, then,” the oyabun said, his eyes sharp and satisfied. “And no loose ends.”

“Yes, oyabun, and only we know of its existence and position.”

“And now it is our job to forget the package, Tomoaki.”

“Forget what package, oyabun?”

Kitayama matched the oyabun’s smile with one of his own.

2420 BCE: Wunderland, leading Trojan point asteroids, and planetside near Munchen

Upon the dull surface of the rock-that-was-not-a-rock, reflections of Alpha Centauri’s steady yellow light shone faintly. Other highlights-faint, brief-flickered across its surface: signs of the dying flares of ships and asteroids nearby. A human ship-a ramscoop traveling within a gnat’s whisker of the speed of light itself-had come rushing into the system, spewing death and destruction as it came. Scores of large, steel-alloy projectiles had been strewn in a wide arc as the craft made its approach: many had already ploughed into various planetoids, the debris from which had surged outward like shrapnel from anti-personnel warheads, destroying nearby kzin warships.

The remaining projectiles were now approaching various planets and planetoids located deeper in the system, several bound for the kzin subpolar bases on Wunderland itself. The Fifth Kzin Fleet, primed to begin its long sublight trek to invade Earth, could not respond in time: without any real warning, they were functionally stationary from the time the attack commenced to the time that it finished.

The magnetically induced corona that followed hard on the energetic bow-wave of the ramscoop tested the limits of the kzinti’s EM shielding. Those limits, as well as many throughout the human communities of the asteroid belt known as the Serpent’s Swarm, were exceeded by the next high-energy cataclysm: the cascade of coronal mass ejections triggered by the projectiles that had plunged straight into Alpha Centauri prime. Although no danger to the stability of the star, they tore huge holes down to the bottom of the photosphere, leaving nature-abhorred vacuums in their wake, as well as a brief moment of absolute magnetic disruption.

When the plasma rushed back into the empty vortices left in the wake of these warheads, and the magnetic fields reconnected, it was akin to high waves rushing headlong upon each other in the ocean: a shattering torrent sprayed upward from the thunderous collision of these two opposed forces. But, in this case, it was particles and radiation that sprayed outward through the system, due to arrive at Wunderland within a day, and the center of the Swarm within two.

Amidst all the destruction and streaming particles and energies, the kzinti missed detecting two subtler, but ultimately more destructive, actions taken by the human ramscoop vessel. Firstly, it deposited a small infiltration/commando ship which, equipped with a stasis field, would soon wreak legendary havoc across the system. Secondly, and functionally undetectable since it was but one emission among countless others, the main vessel sent a brief, powerful omnidirectional signal, which was backed up by transmitters in two of the near-relativistic projectiles. Around the system, as the signal spread outward, a variety of dormant systems awoke in response to its summons.

One such system was embedded in the small space-rock drifting serenely with the rest of the rubble that comprised the trailing edge of Wunderland’s leading cluster of Trojan point asteroids. Low power electronics, aided by bioelectric relays that generated no discernible signature, awakened automated systems. Motion recorders and atomic clocks compared data with beacon triangulation systems and visual trackers. Having confirmed its precise location within the Alpha Centauri system-and, in that same act, having determined Wunderland’s relative bearing-navigational computers calculated trajectories, thrust, and duration. The moment the flight solution was confirmed, the low-power plasma thruster ignited. The pseudo-rock accelerated backward along its orbital track toward Wunderland.

The man in the protective tube at the center of the pseudo-rock awoke to the smell of fried circuitry and an alarm which both rang in his ears and pulsed in his mandibular implant. He tried to rise up, couldn’t, groggily tried looking around, couldn’t really do that either. But he slowly made his eyes focus.

They showed him a small screen at the far end of a compartment so tight that it reminded him of when, as a preschooler, he had hidden in a mossy, narrow-gauge culvert to stymie the bigger kids during an epic game of hide-and-seek. They’d never found him. Of course, he had almost failed to extricate himself, too. What price glory?

Despite the smoke and tocsin that both warned of impending catastrophe, he realized he’d almost nodded off: the cold-sleep grogginess was not out of him. He triggered a stimulant autoinjector, felt a needle pierce his thigh: he needed all his wits and all his training to figure out what was happening, right now.

He was unsurprised that the news was not good. This cryopod-capsule was the same one into which they had stuck him, three months after the kzinti invaded. The top brass hadn’t been sure of very much, back then: the only thing they could agree upon was that, when the time right, he’d be awakened and sent back to Wunderland to resume the fight against the kzin.

However, it was the method of his return that was now instilling a modest measure of anxiety in him. The small screen located only thirty centimeters in front of him was displaying status reports from his primary systems. Most of the indicators were orange, with a smattering of red and green tags. Thrust and manual systems were okay, but the more sensitive systems-such as automated guidance and sensors-were either unreliable or dead.

Another circuit fried and as the acrid smoke wafted around him, he wondered, how long before something catches fire? Fortunately, that wouldn’t be him: the unipiece combat suit he was wearing was inflammable. On the other hand, even if live flame couldn’t reach his skin and roast him, the narrow space could easily enough become a pressure cooker. So far there had only been shorting wires, but soon enough, now-

A new, more urgent klaxon superimposed itself on the multiple malfunction tones: a collision alarm. Which, without the sensors, didn’t tell him much: it could be a basketball-sized rock at short range, or a whole planet at long range. He toggled the screen over to simple visual pickup, which rolled bars of grey and green for a moment before it straightened out into an incompletely colorized image. But despite the distortions, he immediately knew what he was looking at.

Wunderland. He was going to crash into Wunderland.

Which was a pretty sizable problem. He should have been awakened hours before reaching this point-except, now that he checked, the automated revival system had failed completely. So what the hell had happened?

The answer popped up when he checked the astrographic plot and position logs. They had been pretty good up to an hour ago. Then, right in the middle of a data-line, the positional reporting feed went haywire and stopped. And now that he was looking at it, all the other failed systems had gone down at the same second.

The reason for that simultaneous failure became clear: the external sensor archives showed a more or less normal electromagnetic and radiant soup outside, until an hour ago. Then the readings went completely off the scale for the better part of twenty minutes. The peaks of the rad and solar wind readings were like nothing he’d ever seen. And so he knew: he’d been caught in a coronal mass ejection. The worst ever recorded. He was lucky anything was still working, but was damned unlucky to be auto-deployed right into the biggest solar storm on record.

But no, he realized: it might not just be a matter of bad luck. This immense coronal mass ejection was probably the result of something big and fast crashing into the sun at near-relativistic speeds. Which might be a fast STL craft from Earth, since there wasn’t much else he could think of which would approach at such speeds, and since that would also be the logical means whereby humanity would respond to the kzin attack upon Wunderland.

Great. So he had visuals, manual guidance controls, and thrusters. Not much else, but then again, those were all he really needed to land.

Well, those and a whole lot of luck. Eyeball guidance would be hard enough in terms of getting near the preferred pre-planned drop zone. The real challenge was making sure he came in at the correct angle. Too steep and he’d burn up. Too shallow and he’d bounce off, without enough juice left to counterboost, come about, and push in for another try. So the learning curve on this task, for which he had received not quite one hour of simulator training, was fairly daunting: one strike and you’re out.

Which reacquainted him with the adrenaline-fueled truth that nothing focuses one’s mind so much as imminent mortal danger. Luckily, he didn’t need to tumble his rock into a counterboost position: the automated attitude adjustment system had taken care of both that and the braking thrust sometime yesterday when he was still in cold sleep. But about an hour ago, the computer watchdogging that system had gone down for good, which meant that he now had to counterthrust immediately and hard in order to compensate for the lost hour.

He brought the plasma engine online, taking note of the rate of volatile consumption and the time. Then he shifted over to the viewscreen again, pinged the planet with a laser, pinged again after five seconds, and a third time after yet another five count to confirm range, his initial rate of closure, his absolute velocity, and the rate of its decrease given the current counterboost setting.

And in performing these tasks, he got his first bit of good news: he had enough fuel left to make a clean deorbit at a survivable speed, and still retain a sizable reserve. Which meant he could afford to spend a little main thruster fuel to selectively vector the exhaust for gross corrections to his descent attitude, and thereby save the dedicated but short-duration attitude control thrusters for terminal, detailed adjustments. If he was any judge of such things-and he really wasn’t-he guessed that the probability of his making it to the ground alive had just jumped from unpromising to pretty good.

And that happy change had come just in time: grain-sized debris started buffeting his pseudo-rock, requiring brief corrections, and leading him to wonder: where did this debris field come from? This was clean space on the charts, and there was no way regular use could have-

The answer to his question came in the form of moonrise: one of Wunderland’s two, very small satellites came around the terminator. Suddenly bathed in the yellow glow of Alpha Centauri, it showed a markedly different reflection pattern. Even its shape looked different, as if-

Then he understood. Whatever had arrived in this system, and had probably caused the coronal mass ejections, had savaged planetary bodies as well. The moon’s new, somewhat lopsided shape was evidence that much of it had been blown free, and that the lighter debris was beginning to migrate out into various orbital tracks surrounding Wunderland. Such as the one he was traversing now. The planet itself was flickering at the poles-probably impact sites-and wreathed in dark, slowly expanding clouds.

Cheating the nose a little closer to the planet, he held the rock more or less on course, noting two bright flares ahead of him. What? Counter fire? Kzin interceptors juicing their afterburners? But no, he realized after another moment: it was simply a pair of meteorites, glowing and flaring as they entered Wunderland’s atmosphere. As he watched, he saw almost half a dozen other descending streaks of light, bright against the dark clouds below. Chunks of the moon, those blown inward or close enough to quickly succumb to the planet’s gravity, were being pulled in to their fiery death. Which was good news: his own falling rock would not even be an anomaly under these conditions, and thereby, warrant no special investigation. Presuming that there were any kzinti down below who still had the operational leisure to investigate just one more shooting star.

Which, he realized, was what his rock was starting to become. The backup skin-temperature sensors showed a growing thermal spike: he was hitting dense atmosphere and starting to buck. He felt, more than read from the screen, that his angle was a little too shallow. Using the attitude control thrusters, he brought the nose into a steeper descent. He had allowed the rock’s descent angle to remain slightly shallow up until now, because it was relatively simple in the early reentry phases to push the ship’s vector closer to the planet’s line of gravitic attraction. Conversely, if one started with too steep angle of descent, it took a great deal more energy to correct into a more oblique trajectory. And in doing so, it was too easy to overshoot the proper point of correction and skitter off the atmosphere like a flat stone skimmed across a pond.

As the rock’s rate of descent increased, the cooling systems started making an ominous ticking which rapidly escalated into a knocking, accompanied by smoke. No, not smoke: vapor from the overtaxed condensers-overtaxed because several of them had gone off-line. The remaining units were overloading as they struggled to meet the minimum environmental demands. It started to become stiflingly hot in the capsule.

The ride became bumpier, but the pseudo-rock was well into a viselike grasp of Wunderland’s gravity, which now impeded further side-vectoring. In fact, he was fairly certain that there was hardly any further danger of catastrophe unless one or more of the drogue chutes failed, or there was a problem when-

The external ablative coating, which also served as the capsule’s pseudo-rock exterior, peeled off with a thunderous clatter, followed by a slight tug that started the nose of the capsule drifting away from its drop trajectory. Another half-degree, and the increased drag on the nose would swing it further off the descent line, which would further increase the drag, and then the capsule would start-

Tumbling meant death. He gingerly brought the best-situated attitude control thruster back on-line, ready to deliver the faintest nudge of correction. Too little and he might not have the time to try again; too much and he’d swing out of descent alignment in the other direction, and again, begin tumbling ass-over-eyeballs down to a very kinetic demise. He brushed the thrust toggle so briefly that he wondered if the system had even engaged…

But the nose swung slowly back into stable alignment. Two seconds later, the cooling system died with a roar, and genuine smoke started filling the capsule. Checking his watch, he sealed the helmet faceplate of his combat suit, and waited for the first drogue chute to deploy, hoping the fire in the cooling system would not spread too quickly.

The expected bump was so hard that his faceplate banged into the screen and blanked it. But it told him that yes, indeed, the first drogue chute had deployed. Two more bumps meant he was now at an altitude of 2500 meters, and moving at a paltry 500 kph.

He flared the main thruster briefly, the slaved ACTs joining in, maintaining the drop trajectory against any marginal side-vectoring. Again, he found himself slammed sharply against the capsule’s screen as his final braking burn dropped the speed to 300 kph. Ironically, the burn he couldn’t control was internal: he was pretty sure the comfort liner of the capsule was now starting to spark and flare.

Which meant that even if he survived landing, he’d do so with a live fire aboard. And he still had almost twenty percent of his volatiles in tankage. In short, he was now riding a bomb with a lit fuse down to a hard landing. Typical landing protocols dictated retaining the fuel as an insurance against terminal chute failure, but at this point, chute failure was only a dire possibility. A hard landing with a live fire and fuel aboard was currently a dire certainty. He flipped the cover back on the emergency manual overrides, and depressed the third button from the left. The fuel tanks vented with a sound like a suddenly punctured aerosol can, meaning that he was now completely in the hands of fate. And if the main chute did not deploy-

A sudden jerk and sense of sustained deceleration signaled that the main chute was out and full: the predictable, faint swaying motion was the harbinger of a gentle ride to the ground.

Gentle, but hardly a relief: the flame in the capsule was now steady, working its way up the liner and causing further short-outs. The heat in his combat suit suddenly increased, became intense, soared toward unbearable-

— just as, with sudden thump, the capsule jarred to a rough halt. In the same second, there was a creaky wheeze, and then a blast of explosive bolts blew the top of the capsule off. The flames around him roared up, greedily feeding upon the abundant oxygen in the atmosphere.

He tumbled out of the coffinlike remains of the capsule, turned about and leaned back into the conflagration, the combat suit setting up a desperate warning squall: complete failure was imminent-

Rummaging about under the control panel, he sprung open a small, armored cargo receptacle, and yanked out the four-liter secure container he found there.

Then he ran deep into the sparse scrub-lands in which he had landed…

A twig snapped a moment before a voice came from the bushes: “Hands up. Don’t move.”

“I won’t,” he answered. “I’ve been waiting here for you.”

Two men and two women emerged from the thick brush that lined the southern perimeter of the small clearing; to the north, sand pines shot up like feathery stalagmites into the cloud-darkened dusk. “You were waiting here for us?” asked the smaller and older of the men.

“Yep. Saw you about two hours ago, following my trail from the crash site.”

The man raised his weapon a little higher. “You seem pretty casual and self-assured for someone-some human-who just landed in a meteoritic assault capsule. You connected to today’s activities out in space?”

“Look: I’ve been gone from Wunderland for a long time. Just woke up from coldsleep today. So I’m not exactly up on the most recent news: what activities in space are you talking about?”

Long looks bounced from face to face among the four armed people. The apparent leader spoke again. “Seems Earth finally did something about the kzin occupation. Looking at that suit of yours, and the timing of your arrival, seems logical you were part of the package they sent. Arrived early this morning at nearly light speed; wreaked havoc throughout the system. We figured you must have come from Earth as part of that attack force.”

“Nope. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never been further from Wunderland than the Serpent Swarm.”

The larger of the two men, and clearly the youngest of the group, brought his weapon up quickly, sighting along its barrel. “Which means you wouldn’t be alive unless the kzinti wanted you to be. Which would make this a trap.”

“Nope, not the case. When I say I’ve been asleep for a long time, I mean a long time. They corpsicled me three months after the ratcats showed up.”

“And so where were you all that time?”

“Can’t tell you the exact location, because I have no way of knowing. I was in cold storage, so to speak.”

“I ain’t laughing, stranger. Who put you in storage, and for what reason?”

“The who is the local UNSN command staff. The reason was to strike back at the ratcats, but only once we had an effective weapon.”

The leader of the group looked around the area, finding nothing large enough to contain the aforementioned effective weapon: just the man, his gear, his charred combat suit, a sidearm, and a small secure case. “I don’t see any miracle weapon. And why wait all this time if you’ve been in system for-what? — more’n forty years, as you claim it.”

“Yes. Forty years is how long it took to gather enough information about the kzin, pass it on to the facilities on Earth, and then back here. That meant two research labs working together with a four-point-three-seven-year message delay between them. So it took a little longer than a conventional counterattack. And the weapon they came up with is right here.” He laid a long index finger atop the secure box.

The leader frowned. The young man smiled, but it was not a friendly expression. “Well, thanks for explaining things. So either everything you say is utter bullshit, in which case you’re a kzin plant, trying to sneak into the ranks of our resistance. Or you’re not a plant, but we’ve got your miracle weapon, anyway. So the logical alternative is that we take no chances: killing you might be a damned shame, but we still get our hands on the mystery weapon, and haven’t taken any risks with our own security.” He leaned over his tangent sights. “So sorry, but war is hell and all that.”

“No,” said one of the women sharply.

The young man looked at her. “C’mon; can’t you see what’s going on here? He’s a collaborator, a traitor. And even if he’s not, we have to work as though he was. We have no way to find out if he’s telling the truth or-”

“No. We do.” She turned and studied his charred combat suit again. Returning her scrutiny, he saw she was unusually, even strikingly, beautiful. Not in a soft or delicate fashion; her face was severe, with high cheekbones, dark eyes, almost white-blonde hair, and a strangely square chin for a woman. He thought he might have seen a painting of a Valkyrie that looked like her. “You,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Smith.”

“Oh. Really. And let me guess: your first name is Joe.”

“John, actually.”

“So: John Smith. And are you a captain, like your namesake?”

“Well, it so happens that I am.”

“And tell me, Captain John Smith, why did it take so long to research this wonder weapon of yours?”

“Hey, it isn’t mine. But the main development problem, as I understand it, was that while there was plenty of opportunity to observe kzin behavior here, and gather physical samples and specimens, there were no underground research facilities that were really equipped to do the hard number crunching, or diverse lab work, to make any headway with it. So the information had to be gathered on site, here and in the Swarm, relayed off-world, and then sent back to Earth for-”

But she wasn’t listening anymore: she had turned to her four comrades. “He’s for real.”

“What?” squawked the younger man. “How can you-?”

But she was looking at the older man, their leader, who had fallen strangely silent. “You know I’m right,” she insisted. “You told me how, when you started with the resistance, there was a central cell-not an ops group, but an intelligence branch-that kept gathering data on the kzinti. Always wanted specimens, even live prisoners, to sneak off-world.”

“It’s true,” he admitted. “And it fits. But what if the kzinti found out about that operation? What if they got their paws on whoever was behind it, extorted or tortured the info out of him, or her, and realized that this was the perfect ploy for getting someone inside our organization?”

She thought. “No, that doesn’t fit. Even if they were going to launch that kind of operation, they’d have scrubbed it today, given the events out in space. On the other hand, if information has been going back and forth between researchers here and on Earth, then the UNSN or ARM would have seen that this was going to be the perfect day to slip in an operative. The local researchers could have had him pre-positioned so that, when the ship from Earth arrived, they’d send a signal to trigger his drop. And in the midst of all the chaos, who’d notice?” She turned back to look at him. “Well, John Smith, welcome home. I’m sorry to say you’ll find it rather changed.”

“So I’ve heard,” he said, standing, and picking up his gear. “Let’s go: if my space-rock didn’t fool all the kzinti, then we’ll want to put as much ground as possible between us and the crash site.”

Hilda Stensgaard looked away from the distant back of the sleeping man who insisted his name was John Smith. “Everything he’s told us checks out with what we know.”

“Which is almost nothing.” Large, young, eager Gunnar Baden turned toward their leader. “Mads, let’s not get soft-headed just because there were some pretty lights in the sky today and the ratcats got their tails a little singed. It’s clear this was a one-off strike, not a prelude to invasion. We’re still on our own, and that means we can’t afford to take chances.”

“We can’t afford to ignore opportunities either, Gunnar.” Mads Klinkman scooped the last of the cold beans out of his mess tin. “And I think Hilda’s right: he’s genuine. But I’m convinced for different reasons.”

“Oh? And what are they?”

Mads spoke around his last mouthful of beans. “If the kzinti had learned that we were taking samples of them and sending them off-world, I think we’d have had some pretty vengeful indications of it long before now. Even given their new tendency toward increased patience, their outrage would have had them storming around to get to the bottom of what was going on and who was behind it. At the very least, you can be sure that their response would not have been an elaborate counter-intelligence ruse, complete with a human commando from the past. And from what I can tell, he really is from the past.”

Hilda nodded. “He’d have to be an exceptional actor to pull off what he has so far. He really doesn’t seem to know about anything that happened more than three months into the invasion, other than what he read in the briefing materials he showed us.”

“Must be a pretty quick reader,” grumbled Gunnar.

“Oh, he is.” Hilda nodded at the hardcopy they would burn shortly after first light. “Haven’t you noticed? He remembers everything after hearing it just once. And he’s very alert: he picked out the trace Jotuntalander accent I picked up from mein Mutti. Just from listening to me convince you not to shoot him, Gunnar.”

“So he has an ear for accents; so what?”

“So don’t you notice how he verges into Uni slang, from Munchen, on occasion?”

“And that proves what, other than that he has an intolerably high opinion of himself?”

Hilda ignored the hostile tone and undercurrent of envy. “It proves a lot, since the Uni slang just about died out when the kzinti came. There were years of disruption, and the professors and students bolted until it became clear that they weren’t going to be slaughtered, or forced to collaborate. But when they came back, the institutional memory was gone; the links to the past were shattered. You hear a little of the old Uni slang these days: a few words, here and there. But back before the kzinti came, it was almost a dialect unto itself. And he speaks it.”

“Yeah, a dialect for herrenmanner only.”

Mads smiled slowly. “Do I look like an aristocrat to you, Gunnar?”

“No, but you-”

“Then shut up. I went to Uni for a few years, before the kzinti found my family sheltering resistance fighters.”

Gunnar not only became silent; he looked away, abashed.

“Probably the only reason I’m alive is because I was at Uni, at the time,” recalled Mads in an increasingly flat tone. “As it was, they yanked me out in the middle of a class, and grilled me until they were sure I didn’t know anything. Made damned sure. Made me damned sure I wanted to join the resistance, too.”

Hilda let her eyes drop, rather than see the look on Mads’ face. He didn’t talk about his early days very much, mostly because they were simply too painful. He had been nineteen when the kzinti had caught his parents red-handed, aiding and abetting the resistance. They had been condemned to die in the invaders’ “Sport Hunts,” usually held to sharpen the tracking and killing skills of cubs on the cusp of maturity. His whole family had been held in a pen, for Mads to see. And then, one per day, the bastard ratcats drove them out, to run as long as they could before a young kzin caught and eviscerated each one in an ecstatic kill-frenzy.

And after each one died, the kzinti reapproached Mads, offering to spare the remaining members of his family if only he would provide them with some information: where are the headquarters of the resistance? Who are its leaders? How many are there?

And of course, Mads had no answers. He was not a member of the resistance; indeed, his parents had carefully shielded him from even knowing they themselves were involved.

But the kzinti were not interested in excuses, and when, in desperation, he started saying anything to get them to stop, they simply continued to flush his remaining family members out of the pen and into the fields: they knew he was lying. In the end, they apparently realized that the reason Mads had not answered any of their questions accurately was because he couldn’t. By that point, only one of his nuclear family remained: little Anneliese, the “surprise child” who was all smiles and hugs and whom his parents called Fall-flower, since she had arrived later in their life than anticipated-a full eleven years after Mads.

He had never recounted whether, when her day came, Anneliese had shrieked or was mute; was agitated or still; pleaded or spat defiance. Hilda only knew that the kzinti had shooed her out of the pen as a “free target,” almost as an afterthought, a tidying-up. Anneliese didn’t even make it halfway across the field; the fastest of the young kzin chased her down and took his trophies from her body. Right before Mads’ eyes.

Which were now dull. “Smith isn’t lying about how long he’s been asleep: he knows those days too well for it to be something he learned for a role. Little bits of outdated vernacular, the long-past details of his hometown, Neue Ingolstadt, the particulars of sports rivalries back then: some are so minor and old that I barely remember hearing about them as a bub. No: he’s who he says he is.”

“Okay,” Gunnar muttered. “But that doesn’t mean he’s a soldier for our side. He could still have sold out to the kzinti.”

Hilda shook her head sharply. “Nein, that’s nonsense. You could hear that almost everything he knew about the kzinti came from the materials he had just finished reading when we found him. He’s still trying to piece things together and not look like the newbie he is, at least when it comes to kzinti. He’s a fast learner, and he’s drinking in all the tactically relevant materials with incredible speed, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to live with them.”

Margarethe, the group’s sniper, and almost always silent unless there was something truly urgent to say, wondered aloud: “So what’s the real back story on this weapon of his, do you think? How could a research program have been going on all this time, without the kzinti tweaking to it?”

Mads shrugged. “Oh, that’s not so hard to imagine. The kzinti don’t lack energy-god knows-but, lacking patience, they’re not always very tidy. And that’s all a smart intelligence operator needs: the messy parts of the kzin occupation are where intel operators could live and breed. For instance, look at the ratcats’ policy of minimum involvement in our commercial affairs. They clearly know that they are permitting all sorts of black-market operations to thrive, and must know just as clearly that, like remora attaching to Old Earth sharks, intelligence operatives will seed themselves into that community, using it as a conduit to move equipment, information, and orders without the kzinti ever knowing.”

Gunnar flicked a stone from his sleeping bag. “Which I just don’t get: why do they permit any of it?”

“Because we’re the geese that lay golden eggs for them, and they know better than to rearrange our nest: we might stop laying. Besides, they don’t worry about problems until the problem becomes obvious. Which means they have a target. Which allows them to do what they do best: jump into the very center of that problem and lay about, destroying everything they find.”

“Killing untold numbers of innocents when they do so,” spat Gunnar.

“They don’t worry a lot about collateral damage or due process,” agreed Mads.

Margarethe nodded slightly. “Okay. But the research Smith refers to wasn’t done in some backroom, underworld lab. This whole operation obviously had a lot of forethought and long-duration planning built into it.”

Hilda nodded. “Absolutely. I’m thinking that the research facility in this system is not on Wunderland, or out in the Swarm. Anyone seeing that the system was going to fall to the kzinti would anticipate that those areas were going to be closely watched. So they’d go further out, to Centauri B, maybe. Possibly all the way out to Proxima.”

“Proxima? That’s damn close to a wasteland.”

“Which would be perfect, Gunnar. It’s just a small gas giant and rocks. Lots of rocks, most of which are uncharted. That would be perfect for the construction of a secret base. Or maybe one already existed out there, put in by the ARM before the war.”

“And why would they have done that? They weren’t expecting any trouble from the kzinti, then.”

“No, Gunnar,” Mads drawled. “They would have built that base because the ARM was designed to worry about trouble from us humans.”

After a long pause, Gunnar scratched his ear and mumbled. “Oh. Yeah.”

Hilda smiled. “So I’m guessing they’ve got a commo system distributed across the rocks out there, or maybe across all the systems, as a huge phased array.”

Mads nodded, apparently seeing the deduction toward which Hilda was driving. “So that, when the researchers on Earth found a means of striking back at the kzinti with a really game-changing weapon, they could relay that information back here, so it could be built on site, ready to go. That way, using it did not necessarily mean having to wait for it to be brought by a fleet from Earth.”

Gunnar wrapped himself in his bag against the unseasonable chill. “Okay, but how did they get ‘Captain Smith’ from Proxima back into the main system, presumably someplace close to Wunderland, so they could send him planetside with the weapon?”

Hilda shrugged. “I’m guessing he never left the Serpent Swarm. All they had to do was stick him in a cryo capsule along with the weapon, and insert the completed package into a holding orbit. And wait for a prearranged activation signal.”

“Which almost surely was sent by whatever craft from Earth came ripping through the system today.”

Margarethe nodded at Mads. “Meaning that he may not be the only person-or operation-that got a preprogrammed wake-up call today.”

“Or will get one in the days to come.” Mads nodded. “If this is part of a larger plan, some of the systems awakened today may simply be countdown clocks. When they run to zero, they’d send a second, third, or fourth set of wake-up signals. So like I said, we’d better be alert to the possibility of new opportunities springing up around us.”

“Speaking of being awake and alert,” added Margarethe, “where’s Captain Smith?”

Damn it, thought Hilda, what is Smith up to? If he was going to go running off into the bush, why wouldn’t he have at least-?

Panting almost as heavily as she was, Gunnar ran past, small branches rasping and snapping around him. “I am going to kill the son-of-a-bitch when we catch him.”

“You’ll do no such thing.” Mads’ growl was pained: he was getting a little old for two-hour jogs. “We need him alive.”

“Why? We’ve got his box.”

“Which we can’t seem to open.” Hilda pushed an aptly named whipweed away from her welted face. “I suspect he either means to come back to us or is hoping we’ll follow.”

“Yeah, follow him right into a kzin ambush, probably.”

“Makes no sense for him to do that,” gasped Mads. “He could have killed us all right there in camp.”

At first, Hilda was so surprised at the idea that she couldn’t even pant, and then she realized the simple truth of Mads’ observation. Captain Smith had been no more than fifteen meters away from them while they sat chatting about him as if he were on the other side of the planet: they had been sure that he was sleeping, exhausted after the ordeals of his day. But somehow, he had slipped away from them, leaving behind the secured case with the mystery weapon. However, in its place he had taken a long-arm, one of the high rate-of-fire strakkakers. What he intended to do with that weapon, which could spit out almost eight hundred tiny glass lances per minute, was anybody’s guess, but it seemed unlikely that he would train it upon his rescuers. Had he wanted to, he could have riddled them all as they chatted idly about whether he was who he claimed to be. The ridiculousness of Gunnar’s suspicions seemed to double.

Gunnar stopped and turned to face Mads. “Okay, then if he’s not leading us into an ambush, why the hell did he run? He claims his objective was to link up with human resistance on Wunderland, in the greater Munchen region. So meeting us should be ‘mission accomplished,’ right?”

Hilda started understanding why Smith might be running. “Meeting us only accomplished only his first objective. Remember what he said he wanted to do next: hit the kzin compound at Neue Ingolstadt.”

“Yeah. Revenge. I get that.”

“No. Not revenge. He said he needed to do something to get the ratcats furious, to make them follow him.”

Behind her, she heard Mads stop. “What are you saying, Hilda?”

“I’m saying that I don’t think he’s running from us, or setting us up to be ambushed by the kzinti. He’s preparing to ambush the kzinti himself.”

Gunnar scowled. “And so he picks his old home town? That isn’t a mission: that’s collecting a blood debt. While committing suicide.”

“I think he’s heading toward Neue Ingolstadt because, of all the places on the planet, he’ll still be most familiar with that region, despite all the changes over the last half-century.”

“So why wouldn’t he just tell us that?” Gunnar complained. “Hey, I’d even have helped him to-”

“It’s my fault.” Mads’ voice was low.

“What?” Hilda and Gunnar chorused.

“Right before he bedded down, Smith asked me to lead a raid on Neue Ingolstadt. Tomorrow. I told him we couldn’t, not yet. We had to bring him and his weapon back to HQ, first. He just nodded: I figured he understood. Now I think he realized that once we got back to our main camp, he couldn’t be sure he’d get his raid approved there, either. Probably he’d be penned up and grilled about his mystery weapon and where he had come from. And he knew if he argued at all, we might start realizing we had to watch him, guard against him running off on his own.”

Gunnar shook his head. “Still doesn’t make any sense. What does he think he’s going to do with a single strakkaker?”

“He’s going to make the kzinti madder than hell,” Hilda said as she realized how Smith was going to do it with just one shoulder arm.

“How?”

“I know the area a bit too, because I went to Uni-”

“Yeah.” Gunnar’s arms were crossed. “We know.”

She felt herself ready to launch into the old rebuttal against his self-conscious class bigotry-I’m not herrenman stock; we just had enough money, and then I got a scholarship-but she turned aside from that impulse. “There was a satellite campus out in Neue Ingolstadt, which is about sixty kilometers to the north of Munchen. I went there once, for a field study.”

Gunnar affected boredom. “Is this story of old school days going somewhere?”

Mads’ voice was quiet but sharp. “Shut up, Gunnar. Hilda, what’s in Neue Ingolstadt?”

“The old governor’s mansion, about fifteen kilometers to the north. It’s one of the first places the kzinti took over. It’s reserved for the use of their territorial governor.”

Gunnar looked like he’d bitten a lemon. “The territorial governor lives in the schloss outside of Munchen. Everyone knows that.” Then his face cleared. “Even you know that. So why are you saying-?”

“I didn’t say it was the territorial governor’s residence, Gunnar; I said it was reserved for his use. As a preserve.” She prompted a little more directly when she saw the blank look on his face. “A hunting preserve.”

“Oh, shit,” he said.

“Ja,” affirmed Hilda with a sharp nod, reshouldering her rucksack.

Mads was already back in the lead, setting what promised to be a shattering pace for them. “Hilda, do you happen to remember hearing how frequently they run their Hunts out of that lodge?”

Hilda increased her pace, moving past Mads. “Every day.”

The rest, understanding, ran after her.

What none of them anticipated was that, despite being less than forty-eight hours out of decades-long cold sleep, Smith would outpace them handily. Which was probably why he made no effort to break trail at any point; he left a clear path for them to follow. Because that’s what he wants, Hilda thought, ignoring the wind-stitch in her right side, so high and tight that she found herself tilting in that direction as she ran.

Oddly enough, it was Mads-“old” Mads-who was slightly in the lead when, heading east, they crested the Eel’s Spine: a rampart of low ridges that marked the western limit of the rolling expanses of sward and forest that sprawled and undulated northward from Neue Ingolstadt. Although the day was hazy, made so by the approach of the high-atmospheric dust clouds, the land stretched out before them in varied shades of green, hemmed in by the dark, forbidding forest to the north. That distant tree line was the inevitable first flight objective of the humans who served as prey in the kzin Sport Hunts. Few ever made it that far.

Surprisingly, Smith’s trail led down the slope in that direction. Hilda started down-

— and felt herself pulled back by the left shoulder: Gunnar’s hand. She shook it off.

“Wait,” he panted. “Don’t go. No cover. Kzinti will. See us. For sure.”

Mads squinted into the distance, studied the land. Then he pointed, down to where the northern end of the ridge they were on dipped down before reaching the next low rise: a small wooded dale was sheltered in that notch. “He’s heading there. It’s close to the forest and protrudes out onto the plain: he’ll have a clear shot at the Hunters as they cross the open ground.”

Gunnar shook his head. “I thought he was going for the leadership, was going to hit the lodge. Maybe from an overlook.”

Mads shook his head. “Nei. Look.” He pointed in the opposite direction, this time down the southern line of the Eel’s Spine. Far off, so small that it was not much more than an angular brown wart upon the shimmering green grass, lay the squat lodge. “That’s where the leadership is. They don’t come out to help or watch the Hunters. It would dishonor the cubs and undermine the notion that it is a test of personal worthiness.”

Margarethe, who had been silent behind them, sucked in her breath sharply. “So he’s not going after the adults.”

“No,” Hilda said, reversing her steps as she realized the truth of Mads’ conjecture. “He’s going to shoot the Hunters, the young kzinti.” Recrossing the ridge line, she walked back down the westward slope and then turned north again, paralleling the crest and using its lip to shield her against any eyes that might glance in their direction from the flatlands.

“Gott in Himmel,” breathed Margarethe. “When the adults find out, they are going to be blind with rage.”

Mads made his laconic observation from the rearguard position: “That, I think, is exactly what Captain Smith wants.”

Hilda was panting. Sweat had soaked her loose-fitting field-tans to a dull brown-black. Mads pointed a shaking finger down into the wooded dell. “There.”

Hilda squinted, saw a faint bit of motion next to the broad trunk of a ten-meter-high allweather fern: Captain Smith was settling the strakkaker into the crook of a branch protruding from the main stem of the treelike weed.

Margarethe, the only one of the four who seemed to have any physical reserves left at all, stared down the steep switchback that would have to be navigated before getting down to the same level as Smith: “Mads, what do we do? He’s setting up to fire: he must have acquired his target.”

Mads pointed again. “We do nothing. Because you’re right: he chosen his target and he’s going to fire before we can get to him. Not sure he’d cease and desist even if we told him to.”

Gunnar rubbed the forestock of his rifle meaningfully. “That depends upon how we tell him.”

“Stow that crap. I don’t like what he’s doing, but mostly because I don’t know what he’s up to. But we’re not going to start shooting down our own people.”

“But he could-”

Hilda started moving down the trail that would eventually bring them to Smith, but she did so at a leisurely pace. “Might as well start moving.”

Gunnar did not move to follow. “Why not wait here?”

Margarethe almost sneered. “Because, Gunnar, he won’t exit the area by the same path he entered. And the closer we are when he finishes, the less time we spend linking up before un-assing this place. How long do you figure we’ll have before the ratcats are after us, Mads?”

“At least a couple of hours, maybe half a day. If one of their young bucks is late, they’ll presume almost anything-lost scent, tricky or lucky prey, laziness-before they’d imagine that he’s been killed.”

“So we just might get away clean?”

Mads rubbed his chin. “Clean? As in, they have no idea where we went? I doubt that, and I doubt that fits in with the captain’s plans, either.”

“Whaddya mean?” asked Gunnar.

Hilda shrugged and almost lost her balance at the edge of a fifteen-meter sheer drop. “Mads means that Smith probably wants the ratcats to be able to follow our trail. Why else rile them up like this?”

“But that’s insanity, it’s suicide-”

“Whatever it is, it’s happening right now.” Margarethe stopped, pointed. “Look.”

Smith was hunched over the strakkaker. Following along the trajectory implied by its muzzle, they could see a slight perturbation out in the sward, perhaps three hundred meters beyond the edge of the tree- and fernline: a young would-be Hero, tracking his prey. Even at this range, they could see the kzin confirm the scent: he put his head up, an orange-furred protrusion that lifted over the rippling sea of meadow grass, tipped by the twitching black dot that was his nose. Far off, nearly a kilometer to the east, they marked the progress of yet another indistinct rustling in the green: that was the next closest Hunter, and he was moving farther off.

Hilda was able to predict the moment when Smith fired, having spotted for Margarethe, who was a formidable sniper. The wind came behind them from the west, and as it shaped the sward into undulating currents, it made a whispering rustle: nature’s own version of white noise. Also, with the breeze blowing from behind, there would be minimal azimuth drift when the strakkaker fired-

A growling hiss rose up out of the dell when the young kzin put his head up again; the weapon was just barely audible given the distance and the breeze. Out on the plain, the black-tipped orange snout was obscured by a spray of red; the grasses around it seemed to shudder fitfully beneath a less calm and steady force than the breeze. Then silence, stillness.

Hilda had not, however, foreseen what Smith did next: he snatched the weapon out of its support and raced headlong into the grass himself, heading directly for the target he had presumably slain. “What the-?”

“Fuck!” Gunnar finished for her, although his was an angry exclamation where hers had been a baffled query. “He’s going to bring the whole damn lot of them down on us!”

Mads said nothing, just launched himself down the switchback at a full run, Margarethe right behind him.

Hilda followed. “Damn it,” she hissed at Gunnar, “get moving.”

“Fine, but we’re going the wrong way. We should be un-assing this place, and right now. Back over the ridge. And as far away from Captain Kzin-magnet as possible. He’s going to-”

“He’s going to need us to be right there waiting for him when he gets back from whatever he’s doing out there.”

“You mean, we’re going to follow this verrückter?”

“Ja-what else? He’s the only one who knows what he’s up to, so we follow him, or abandon him.”

“Yeh? Well I vote for-”

“Gunnar.” Mads panted over his shoulder, grey-faced. “You don’t vote; I give orders. And Smith isn’t crazy. He has a plan.”

Hilda grimly noted the return of her wind stitch. “Wish he would have told us what it was beforehand.” She half-ran, half-stumbled around a steep-shouldered corner and kept sprinting deeper down into the dell.

By the time they reached the spot Smith had used as his hide site, they saw stealthy movement in the sward. Approaching.

Mads ducked low. “Damn it. Gunnar, fan left. Margarethe, to the right. Stay low. Target confirmation before you fire.” He paused. “What did I say, Gunnar?”

“See it before you shoot it.”

“Damned straight.”

The closest thatch of chest-high grass vee-ed apart and spat out Smith, who was running at a crouch, strakkaker held loosely in his right hand. And in his left he held-

“That’s our death warrant you’re carrying there,” Mads exhaled.

Hilda stared and gulped at the large, pink half-parasol ear that Smith was stuffing into a plastic ration-wrap. “You know what they’ll do when they find him dead, and with his ear removed. They can’t let it stand, can’t let a human kill one of their Hunters and carry the ear away as a trophy, as defiance.” She swallowed again, met his dark brown eyes. “They’re going to come after us with everything they have.”

“Which is just what I want them to do.” Smith cleaned his knife on the grass, shouldered the strakkaker. “Now, let’s see how well they do in a real chase.”

The longer the kzinti searched, the more hyperactive they became. Hilda had no way of knowing how quickly they had discovered their slain Hunter, but she was the first to hear the spaceplanes screaming across the skies, the dim echoes of their passage echoing all the way down into the limestone tunnels that they had entered only ninety minutes after having left Smith’s hide-site. In the following hours, and then days, the frequency and diversity of noise seemed to build steadily; towards the end of the second day, the breathy rush of tilt-rotors combing the ground in a slow, methodical nap-of-earth mode were clearly audible on several occasions. Smith paused when he heard that, and then moved them deeper into the caverns.

Hilda had been able to maintain a sense of direction and relative position for the first twelve hours, but after that, she relented and accepted that she simply had no idea where they were. None of them did, anymore. Except, apparently, Captain Smith. Gunnar had tried to learn a little bit about the caves: how extensive they were, where they resurfaced. Smith simply shook his head and tapped his ear meaningfully: in these caves, traveling as they did with relatively low-intensity cold-lights, they were far more likely to detect the approach of an enemy via sound than sight. Gunnar, frustrated both in his desire to learn about the caverns and his clear desire to start an exchange which would allow him to needle Smith, consoled himself with surly, guttural comments, until Mads scolded, and shamed, him to silence.

Hilda picked up her pace until she was trailing Smith by no more than a meter. “You’re not really from Neue Ingolstadt proper. You’re from right around here, aren’t you?”

Smith swept his light in a quick arc across the irregular walls, found a side-branching tunnel they would have walked straight past, otherwise: he slipped into it. “I was born just a few klicks south of the lodge the kzinti are using for their Hunts.”

“Farm boy?”

He half-turned, smiled: he had fine, straight teeth and features to match. “Not really. Dad was a town official.”

“Security? Police?”

He snickered. “Procurement. Don’t tell Gunnar, though: he’ll be sure to crack a joke about my Vati being a pimp.”

Hilda grinned back at him. “So, procurement?”

“Yeah, you know: vehicles, maintenance supplies, work suits, screwdrivers, demo charges. Soup to nuts and the kitchen sink in which to keep them.”

“That’s a pretty broad mandate for one official.”

“Well, we lived in a pretty small town. You know how it is: you don’t need much of any one thing, so you assign one person to be your all-around expert on ‘needed stuff.’”

“So that’s the official terminology used: he procured ‘needed stuff’?”

“Something like that.”

“Just the same way your official name is John Smith.”

Smith smiled and didn’t insult her by disputing or wisecracking. The new passage had widened out; small bits of limestone growled and rasped beneath their feet; a fine white mist drifted up to obscure their lamps.

“So that’s how you know these tunnels,” she persisted. “Fled to them to escape having to work alongside Dad?”

“No. Nothing as sensible as that. We just came here as kids because it was dangerous. You know: one wrong turn and you’re lost forever.” He went silent. “Actually, two kids were lost forever. Never found them. But there are really only a few turns you have to watch out for when you’re heading north like we are. It twists a lot, but almost all the secondary tunnels branch out behind us, to the south. So as long as we don’t do something stupid, like taking a hairpin turn, it’s all pretty straightforward until we come out the far side.”

“Which is where?”

“North of the Grunwald, which was where the Hunters were heading, trying to catch their prey before it could get in among the trees. That can slow things down for them, and young kzinti haven’t really learned to savor the thrill before the kill, evidently.”

Hilda shuddered. “You took a big chance.”

“How do you mean?”

“Counting on these tunnels being unused by the resistance, and unexplored by the kzinti.”

“Oh, I was pretty sure your resistance didn’t have access to these.”

“How?”

“From talking with Mads the first night. I didn’t ask about the tunnels, but I asked about your operations: how much lead time for retreat you needed, refuges, bolt holes. Everything he told me indicated that these tunnels did not figure in your broader tactical picture.”

“They might have.” Hilda put up her square chin stubbornly. “Could have been that the very first resistance fighters used them, and the kzinti flushed them out.”

“In which case I would have seen the automated monitors the ratcats would surely have left behind in the region, and possibly live patrol spoor. But when I neared the ridge line and the entrances to the caves, there was nothing there.” He smiled back at Hilda. “C’mon, now, admit it: this one time, aren’t you actually glad to be wrong?”

“What do you mean, ‘this one time’?” She sniffed. “It’s not like you know me.”

“No, I don’t know you.” The way he emphasized “you,” she was sure he was going to conclude his comment with “-but I know your type.” He didn’t, saying instead: “However, it seems to me that you’re pretty clever and strong-willed. Meaning you’re usually right, and you usually get your way, which is why Gunnar resents you so much. And is probably smitten with you, too.”

“Gunnar likes his women big and dumb, just like himself.”

“Ahhh…I suspect he’d make an exception, in your case.”

Hilda elected not to reveal that she’d had a similar, sneaking suspicion herself. “Besides, Gunnar’s got a real class-consciousness issue. He’s convinced my folks were herrenmanner.”

“Huh.” Smith did not sound surprised.

“What do you mean, ‘huh’?”

“I mean it’s funny how some things change, and some things don’t. It was the same in my day.”

She considered that. Considered his accent. Considered his familiarity with Neue Ingolstadt and Munchen, despite being from a little Dorf up near the hill country. “You went to live in Munchen long before Uni, didn’t you?” She considered the possibilities. “A sponsored invitation to the Gymnasium, there?”

He almost missed a step. “You’re good,” he allowed after a moment. He raised his voice so the others could hear him. “We’re coming to the end of our subterranean stroll. They shouldn’t be waiting for us on the outside, but-”

“-but you never know.” Mads nodded, snapped his rifle off safety.

Following Smith’s lead, they shut off their cold-lights. Up ahead, a dim grey patch stood out from the blackness. He turned to them. “I’m going up ahead. I’ll be gone for a few minutes so I can scout not just the exit, but some of the surrounding terrain. It’s far more likely that they’d be in the vicinity by chance, rather than purposely sitting right on top of the exit, waiting.”

Even Gunnar didn’t have any answer other than a single, sober nod.

Smith faded into the grey, stooping lower as he went.

Mads came closer to Hilda. “Did I hear him mention that we’re coming out north of the Grunwald?”

“Ja. Why?”

Mads scratched the back of his sun burnt neck. “That puts us well outside of our operations zone. It’s a long way home, from here. And with all the kzinti combing the countryside for us, we wouldn’t stand much chance of making it back.”

Hilda nodded. “I suspect he knows that. In fact, I suspect he’s counting on it.”

“Why?”

Gunnar’s voice was tight, sharp. “Because he’s a crazy, arrogant bastard, that’s why.”

“Gunnar, you are an ass. Smith is doing all this because he doesn’t want, or doesn’t have the time, to negotiate with the resistance cadre. He’s got a secret weapon to test and everything he’s been doing is almost certainly driven by that mission.”

Mads shrugged. “Hell. He should’ve pulled rank on me and taken command. Then at least he could have let us know where we were going instead of trailing us along this way.”

Margarethe remained in the shadows, invisible, but her words were clearly coming out of a smile: “Sure, Mads. And you’d have let him pull rank over you. Sure.”

Hilda sighed. “Look, let’s walk in his shoes for a moment. It’s pretty clear his orders prohibit him from revealing what’s going on: I don’t think he’s playing mystery theater with us just for fun. But at the same time, he’s got orders to test this weapon, something he probably can’t pull off on his own. And it’s also a mission which I’m guessing cannot afford to fail. The folks with the fleets and the power need to know if this weapon is going to work or not.

“So he looks at the situation when we catch up with him and he rightly concludes that if he goes back to our HQ with us, his mission is going to be buried in procedural haggling. He also knows that if he comes right out and tries to usurp command over you, Mads, all of us would have told him to shove his orders and his rank where none of the three suns shine. And what could he have done in response? Reported our mutiny to higher authorities that are light-years away? Besides, he’s no idiot: he knows that our resistance has worked on its own for almost half a century. We have our own values and ranks and traditions and protocols. So he knew that, just because he arrived in a flying refrigerator with an official uniform and rank, we weren’t simply going to snap salutes, fall in, and pretend that the last fifty years hadn’t left us with ideas and a command structure of our own.”

Gunnar rested his own strakkaker on both knees, put his elbows atop it, put his chin atop his cupping hands. “Ten gets you one he’s got a bioweapon in that case.”

Hilda reflected that when Gunnar was not busy demonstrating how big his mouth and biceps were, he was actually not the idiot he seemed. “I won’t take that bet. Fact is, I’d put my money on the same horse.”

Margarethe’s voice was cool, level. “Because of the size of the case?”

Hilda looked at the object, which Mads had entrusted to her. “That, and the fact that this is one tricked-out puzzle box. And also because the kzin life sciences tend to lag far behind the others: it could be an area where they’re particularly vulnerable.”

Mads nodded. “Ja, medicine and genetics are not their strong suit, probably as much due to impatience as all the other reasons combined. I wonder how many Heroes aspire to earn their Names by conquering a gene code with a computer and a microscope?”

Gunnar’s tone had become more surly. “So if following Captain Kzin-magnet doesn’t get us sliced and shredded by the kzinti themselves, we can look forward to coughing up our lungs in great piles of gooey slime, courtesy of some new viral agent of our own manufacture.”

Hilda sighed. “Gunnar, neither side has shown any willingness to use that kind of broad-spectrum agent: they’re too indiscriminate, and there’s always a chance that, once you let a bug out of its test tube and it starts replicating in a target population, it could mutate and come roiling back in your direction. That’s particularly true if the agent is retroviral, and in this case, it would almost have to be.”

Margarethe sounded genuinely interested. “Why’s that?”

Mads shrugged. “Because any bacteria or non-viral microorganism designed to do them in would almost surely find us tasty as well. But Hilda, even a new retrovirus would be dangerous for the same reason: we’re similar enough in terms of our chemical building blocks that a virus made to harm the kzinti could hop the genetic divide and come for us, just like bacteria.”

“Not quite, Mads: they don’t have our genetics. Hell, their biological blueprint isn’t even encoded on a braided double-helix structure. So if the bug was something that went strictly after the proteins of their gene-analogs, maybe we’d be safe.”

“That’s a pretty big maybe,” observed Gunnar.

“No argument, but it’s hard to imagine what else he’s got in the box.”

“So why don’t you ask me?” inquired Smith’s voice.

The four of them-even sharp-eyed and — eared Margarethe-started violently. Smith emerged from the near-darkness. Hilda was tempted to look down, half-expected to see that he had removed his boots, just to creep up and scare the feces out of them. “You mean, you’ll actually tell us what’s in the case?”

Smith smiled a bit. “No, not yet.”

Gunnar scowled. “Then when, damn it?”

“When the time is right, Gunnar. Now, let’s get going.” He began moving back toward the grey patch at the end of the passage. “It’s dusk out there, but darker and cooler than usual, due to the high-altitude dust. I heard a fast mover heading east to west but it was too far to the south to see. It looks like they landed a few troops here a day ago to look around; the bush is tramped down in a few places, but not more than you’d expect from a fire team.”

Mads nodded. “Sounds like we’re on the far edge of their search perimeter. They dropped a few Heroes to snoop about for a few hours, maybe half a day, then gave it up and moved them elsewhere.”

“That’s how I see it.”

“And they didn’t leave sensors behind?”

Mads shook his head at Margarethe’s question. “Nei, ’chen. Hell, the local ratcats aren’t equipped for this kind of search, not out here in the boonies. And their local administrator won’t want to admit that humans have eluded him, not right away. So by the time he realizes that he should have sucked up his pride and taken the prudent step of asking for help and more resources, he’ll also realize that our possible escape radius has become impossible for him to cover, even with additional assets.”

Gunnar nodded. “So they’re ramming around the search perimeter with whatever they’ve got on hand, trying to be in twenty places at once.”

Smith nodded. “And probably doing a fair job of it, too. But I was pretty sure they wouldn’t find us here.” They neared the mouth of the cave, faint light picking its way in through a chaotic filigree of vines, roots, and branches.

“And what’s so special about this place, that the kzinti wouldn’t be looking for us there?” Gunnar asked.

“See for yourself.” Smith pushed through the tangled growth, held an armful back so the others could exit.

Hilda squirmed out, felt a gnarled branch scrape her face, wondered why she suddenly cared how the scratch would make her look, and slowed to a stop two steps beyond the mouth of the cave. She felt, rather than heard or saw, the others drag to a halt around her.

“Oh, Christ,” Gunnar groaned.

“Gott verdammt,” profaned Mads, as Margarethe ground her molars audibly.

“Scheisse lei,” whispered Hilda. “We’re running there? To this hemisphere’s own natural cesspool?”

“It’s called the Sumpfrinne,” Smith supplied patiently.

Freay’ysh-Administrator’s mouth sagged open slightly in violent frustration, then he snapped it shut. Not that he was enamored of Chuut-Riit’s endless object lessons in patience, but rage was of little help when coping with human resistance fighters. The leaf-eaters were innate cowards but, being omnivores, had just enough opportunistic cunning and duplicity to be dangerous. As his patrols had learned on one or two occasions, when venturing into the small hamlets that were known to shelter the resistance.

Which was a misnomer, he mused, since the humans did not resist in the physical sense of the word. They struck and faded away, always fleeing, yielding before the kzinti could meet them in battle. Wherever his security patrols went, the humans were not there: having the sympathy of the region’s populace, they also enjoyed timely warnings from multiple sources. Freay’ysh-Administrator had been sure that burning a few of the more troubling hamlets to the ground, inhabitants included, would deprive the monkeys of much of their support. The tactic backfired. If anything, the support had increased.

The administrator let his jaw sag open again and did not care: the stiff wind of riding in a fast floater was invigorating when it hit his teeth, chilling them, awakening a semblance of the same, sweet ache that Heroes felt in the immediate anticipation of biting a long-elusive prey-animal. However, today’s prey-the humans who had left Shraokh-Lieutenant’s first-born cub earless upon the sward-was more than merely elusive: it was defiant, arrogant, taunting. His lips rippled as he fought to control the fury that brewed down deep in his belly every time he reflected upon the audacity of their actions, and the signal dishonor of having it happen on his own lands.

Worse yet, those lands were, more formally, Chuut-Riit’s lands: Freay’ysh-Administrator was both direct vassal of, and regional overseer for, the Patriarch’s most august offspring. Chuut-Riit did not spend an immense amount of time on his estates near Munchen, but still tarried there enough to be aware of what was transpiring even in this far-flung holding. The Dominant One’s teeth were sure to show over this incident unless Freay’ysh-Administrator found and exterminated the patch-furred vermin who had-

“Freay’ysh-Administrator, Zhveeaor-Captain urgently requests a meeting.”

“There is progress in the hunt?”

“It seems so.”

“Then do not fiddle aimlessly with the controls; fly to a suitable point of rendezvous-at once!”

The floater banked steeply and came around, the waist-gunners leaning into the turn, the pintle-mounted heavy beamers loose in their heat-gloved hands. Freay’ysh-Administrator quickly spotted what had to be Zhveeaor-Captain’s command sled. The flat, angular wedge was making the kind of low-altitude speed that only a comms-and-control chassis could sustain. Down on the ground, small orange faces looked up at its screaming approach: it was the first sign of promising urgency since the hunt had begun almost a week before.

The administrator’s and captain’s vehicles slowed as they drifted toward a bare hillock which was set at the northern end of the Eel’s Spine like the dot of an inverted exclamation point. The command sled’s top hatches popped open, two kzin officers emerged, and Freay’ysh-Administrator felt his ears go back. One of the officers he had expected: Zhveeaor-Captain. But the other was a complete and uncomfortable surprise: Shraokh-Lieutenant himself, the sire of the slain cub. But there was nothing to be done: Freay’ysh-Administrator had summoned Zhveeaor-Captain in all haste, and Shraokh-Lieutenant was one of the captain’s subordinates. The two craft settled onto the sparse grass that tufted the top of the hillock.

Shraokh-Lieutenant was out in a single leap. However, despite his bodily energy, the kzin’s mouth hung slack, his pelt was unkempt, and the air audibly rasped between his teeth: he did not radiate fury so much as a form of savage distraction. Apparently, when the human perpetrators had not been swiftly found and eviscerated, he had lost something even more irreplaceable than his oldest offspring: some essential component of Shraokh-Lieutenant’s reason had been swept away, left behind in the meadows where his first cub had been butchered.

Zhveeaor-Captain followed his subordinate at a brisk but dignified pace and touched noses briefly with the Administrator. He snarled lightly at the lieutenant, who evidently recalled that some sign of fealty and subordination was required of him. Shraokh-Lieutenant leapt up and grazed a sloppy nose across the Administrator’s own. Who resisted the urge to bat the ill-mannered offender, because remonstration would be pointless. Logically, no insult could have been intended, since no thought or attention to decorum seemed to remain in Shraokh-Lieutenant: just a restless, subcognitive monomania to tear apart the murderers of his progeny. Well, the sooner this is over-“You have news, Zhveeaor-Captain?”

“I-we-do, Freay’ysh-Administrator. We know where the humans have taken refuge.”

So suddenly? So certainly? “Their scent is fresh then, their trail clear?”

Zhveeaor-Captain glanced anxiously at his distracted subordinate. “We needed no scent or trail.”

“Truly?”

Zhveeaor-Captain licked his lips as he produced a small, leather pouch, with a flap. “The humans showed us where they are.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator’s ears flicked forward, then snapped back in rage and loathing. “They openly indicated their location? And they still live?”

“Freay’ysh-Administrator, it is not so simple as that. I will explain.”

“You had better. And quickly.”

“We were patrolling at the far northern tip of the search perimeter, coordinating the floater patterns, when two of the crews saw a bright arc against the sky.”

“A weapon discharge?”

“No, Freay’ysh-Administrator. It was a flare. Shortly after it was fired, we approached and our lead unit saw a fire burning: we could not tell if it had been ignited by the flare, or-”

“You investigated, did you not?”

“Yes.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator was tempted to cuff Zhveeaor-Captain for his failure to report quickly and clearly, but rethought that impulse. The captain was his best officer, had attracted the special notice of Chuut-Riit himself, and was the epitome of both ferocity and efficiency. Noticing the quick, measuring glances that he shot at his distracted lieutenant, Freay’ysh-Administrator realized that the captain was either fearful of, or fearful for, his subordinate. But there was no time to untangle interpersonal nuances: duty was duty and there were humans to catch and rend. “Zhveeaor-Captain, what did your investigation reveal?”

“Just the fire, Freay’ysh-Administrator. And this.” He proffered the leather pouch to his superior.

Who crossed his arms and shook his head. “No; you open it.”

With a nervous glance at Shraokh-Lieutenant, the captain undid the clasp. Carefully, as if reaching in to handle a venomous serpent, he removed its contents:

One half of a young kzin’s right ear.

Freay’ysh-Administrator drew in a rapid, surprised breath. Then, suddenly unsure of what reaction this object might provoke, he shot a fast glance at Shraokh-Lieutenant.

Who, eyes unfocused, let slip a long, thin stream of drool; it spattered on his foot. None of the three kzinti moved or made a sound.

After a long moment, Zhveeaor-Captain shrugged a shoulder away from his subordinate, whose downward stare was evidently focused upon the very core of the planet itself. Administrator and captain moved aside, walked to the far rim of the hillock’s crest.

“How long has he been like this?” the Administrator demanded.

“Just since we found his cub’s-since we found this.”

“And you will answer for his behavior?”

Zhveeaor looked as though someone was removing his claws with red-hot iron tongs. “Freay’ysh-Administrator, I must. I do not wish to. But our duty to those whose heads have been beneath our hands must come before our own preferences.”

The administrator rumbled approval deep in his chest; it was clear why Chuut-Riit liked this Hero so much. He spoke and acted as the kzinti of Old. “Very well. Now: you say that this token tells you the location of the humans. How? Was it near a stronghold?”

“No, Administrator: the ear was-well, it was on a threshold.”

“What do you mean? The threshold to what?”

“It was at the very mouth of the Susser Tal.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator leaned back. “They’ve gone in there? Into the swamps of the Sumpfrinne?”

The captain shrugged. “So it would seem. We found their tracks leading that way.”

“And you did not pursue?”

“The trail we found was a false one, Freay’ysh-Administrator, and the swamp was unsafe for a small probe.”

“What do you mean, unsafe?” It sounded like evidence of cowardice to the administrator, and he would have presumed it to be case had the speaker been anyone other than Zhveeaor-Captain.

“Freay’ysh-Administrator, the trail split five times within the first two hundred meters. At that point, the overhead cover from the trees was too thick for aerial reconnaissance, and floaters would have been easy prey for ground fire. And I lost one of my Heroes to a deadfall trap.”

“Set in anticipation of our probe?”

“No, Freay’ysh-Administrator: it was a game trap. And quite old, probably several years. But there were too few of us, the light was failing, and we are entirely unfamiliar with the terrain. Our chances of finding prey whose scent had been lost were slim, at best. Conversely, the chance to suffer further casualties, by enemy action or misadventure or both, was rising rapidly. Seeing that a more concerted effort would be required, it seemed that the best course of action was to bring this-object-back to you as soon as possible, and prepare for a more determined pursuit.”

“And the lieutenant compelled you to bring him along when you made your report?”

“He was insistent, but I was also fearful of his being shunned if I left him behind. His behavior has degraded precipitously. He cannot effectively command, and his demeanor dishonors his rank.”

“Yet you do not relieve him of his command.”

“Freay’ysh-Administrator, with respect, how may I do so? He would impale himself upon our collective claws if we try to remove him from the search: his thirst for his cubslayer’s blood has driven him beyond mere fury into the Unknowing Rage.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator shook his great head sadly: reduced to an animal by incessant, uncontrollable rage. Humans had similar psychological ailments, although rarely so extreme as this: their obsessive-compulsive disorders were more common, but infinitely more benign and passive afflictions. Obversely, losing control by slipping into the Unknowing Rage could not always be cured. And invariably, if a cure was possible, it required the satisfaction of the thwarted vengeance that was usually its cause. “So what do you recommend, Captain?”

Zhveeaor-Captain sighed. “That he be assigned special duty as a lone tracker, and a rogue killer.”

“Do you really believe we should make him a hseeraa aoshef? Would that not be suicide for him, pursuing the humans on his own, and in his current state?”

“Perhaps, but better he should have a chance to avenge himself or die trying than being slain by us should he become uncontrollable when removed from his command. Besides, given the prospect to engage his energies and anger in a vengeance hunt, I believe much of his current distraction will be replaced with intense focus.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator nodded sad approval. “Perhaps we can use him as a means of conducting advance reconnaissance into the Susser Tal and its swamps. Shraokh-Lieutenant will no doubt move quickly and range far, disdaining obstacles. If he were to be rigged with an adequate sensor cluster-”

“I have already ordered one be brought up from stores, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

“Your foresight is admirable, Zhveeaor-Captain, as is your tactical thought. Speaking of which, we have a campaign to plan.”

“Yes, sir: that is why I returned in haste. A successful pursuit now becomes far more involved, and costly.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator let a growl echo in his throat. “Some treasure spent now-teaching the humans that they cannot dishonor us with impunity-is better than whole vaults of it spent later on. Because that is what will be required if the leaf-eaters become emboldened by our lack of resolve in pursuing and punishing the perpetrator of this outrage.”

“My thoughts precisely, Freay’ysh-Administrator. What do you command?”

“First, an assessment of the larger tactical picture. I am not so familiar with these regions.” It galled him to admit it; it galled him even more that the humans had chosen to lose themselves in the hellish morass that were the swamps of the Susser Tal. It was hard to tell whether their choice had been motivated by desperation or inspiration, but either way, it set a further challenge before the kzinti: since the biome was particularly unfriendly to their physiology, they had little experience with the region, and even less interest in it.

That was obviously soon to change. Zhveeaor-Captain had apparently prepared for this eventuality; he commenced what sounded very much like a prepared briefing: “The microclimate of the valley will undoubtedly be our greatest obstacle and adversary. It features the most dramatic shift in temperature and humidity on the entire planet, relative to the surrounding climate zone.” He called up a map on his data slate. “Down here at Munchen, with an elevation of about eighty meters above sea level, average daytime temperatures in the current season range between nineteen and twenty-four degrees centigrade, with humidity of seventy-five percent being considered somewhat high. Moving north eighty kilometers to Neue Ingolstadt, we find modest change. At one-hundred-ninety meters above sea level, average temperatures dip slightly, as does humidity. Then we go sixty kilometers further north, across the plains, and beyond the forest back there”-he pointed to the southeast-“which the humans call the Grunwald. Average temperatures and humidity remain relatively unchanged. Until we get here.” His finger thumped down on a valley mouth that looked like an opening into an eastward-stretching worm’s gut. “This is the entry to the Susser Tal, which, in the first three kilometers, descends over four hundred fifty meters to a valley floor that is nearly two hundred fifty meters below sea level.”

“A drainage ditch without any run-off,” growled Freay’ysh-Administrator in disgust.

“An apt characterization,” agreed Zhveeaor-Captain. “It is bordered on the north by the Grosse Felsbank, a mostly sheer escarpment that climbs rapidly to two thousand meters above sea level, with a few alpine spurs set further back in massif-groupings. The southern extent of the Susser Tal is bordered by a slowly rising upland, which reaches almost six hundred meters above sea level. It is neither very steep, nor very high, but more than enough to make the valley resemble a trench between two highlands.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator traced the swampy trench that was the floor of the Susser Tal back to its narrowing, dead-ended eastern terminus. “A strange place to choose as a refuge. Despite its advantages, the humans have no way out. Unless they can get over these southern hills.”

Zhveeaor-Captain shook his head. “Actually, the southern highland is more impassable than the Grosse Felsbank. It is very jagged and barren, even though the average per-kilometer elevation increase is not so great.”

“A strange formation.”

“Not so strange, Freay’ysh-Administrator, when its origins are taken into account: it lies right along a tectonic contact front. These low jagged hills-like teeth sprung from other teeth-follow along the fault line where the southwestern plate is breaking, buckling, and snapping up through the surface of the ground. Made more treacherous by winter ice-cleaving and wind erosion, even the locals deem these highlands impassable except to professional mountaineers.”

“And yet the valley itself has a surprisingly temperate climate, does it not?”

Zhveeaor-Captain looked sidelong at his superior. “I would say that its climate is much more than merely temperate, Freay’ysh-Administrator. It is punishing. At this time of the year, the prevailing temperatures are in the high twenties and low thirties centigrade. The air is almost perpetually at one-hundred-percent humidity, with some rather unusual supersaturation effects reported. The prevailing biome is therefore a half swamp, half jungle microecology.”

“But certainly, this must change in winter?”

“Not as much as one might expect, Freay’ysh-Administrator. Because it lies along an active tectonic faultline, the valley is riddled with hot springs. These factors, in combination with a slight elevation of ambient temperature from widespread vegetable decay, makes snowfall extremely rare. Also, the prevailing winter winds from the Grosse Felsbank tend to shoot straight over the valley without depositing much moisture. It is only seven kilometers across at its widest point.”

“How strange.”

“Yes, strange and uninviting. In addition to the stink of dying vegetation, the sulfur-reek from the springs is as pervasive as the local flora is pungent. I doubt we will have much luck sorting out human scents in that environment. Furthermore, the tree cover makes conventional aerial observation almost useless, and the attempt to compensate with thermal imaging is only effective picking out biosigns that are fairly distant from the heat-blooms of the hot springs.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator twitched his ruff, vexed at the implicit mystery: “Then it is strange that the human resistance has not made use of it before now. In many ways, it is an ideal hiding spot.”

“Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator, but as you observed at the outset, it is also a cul-de-sac. Except for a handful of narrow, forbidding passes through the Grosse Felsbank, the only way out is also the only way in. Which is quite easy for us to patrol and hold.”

“Could they not exfiltrate through the northern passes you mention?”

“Not swiftly enough to be tactically feasible. The Grosse Felsbank cannot be navigated by ground vehicles, and we would detect any aerial movement with ease. For a human on foot, it is almost a two-month trek through the mountains to the great northern plateau, where there are few settlements, and to date, no resistance activity or suspected contacts.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator gave the one-shouldered toss that was the kzin equivalent of a human shrug. “This cesspool isn’t in practical range of any useful targets for them, anyhow. And not a lot of local support, either. If I remember correctly, wasn’t the valley used as a compound for various social outcasts?”

“There is a small community of locals, although they are not exiles so much as they are separatists.”

“Political antagonists of the human state?” Freay’ysh-Administrator felt the glimmerings of an advantage. If the indigenous population of the region disliked the human authorities, perhaps he could entice them to-

“Not political antagonism,” Zhveeaor-Captain said, and the administrator felt his hopes deflate. “Cultural and class disaffection.”

“Explain.”

“Before our arrival, all the human settlers avoided this region except for a few Hinterlanders, as they were called: people who preferred to dwell at the far fringes of the larger communities. Many of them had radically different religious beliefs and family structures; others felt alienated by the majority of the human settlement groups.”

“What? Why?”

“They were from different cultures.”

“What do you mean, different cultures?”

“Evidently, Freay’ysh-Administrator, the homeworld environment of the humans was once extremely heterogeneous in terms of language, traditions, philosophies, economies, ethnicities.”

“Logical: it explains their chaotic multi-focal society today. So: how did these self-imposed exiles survive? Hunting? I seem to recall that there are some excellent, and quite dangerous, prey animals in the swamps, no?”

“There are. The scant reports we have indicate that the locals rely heavily upon the meat of those creatures for their own protein intake. But this was not the basis of their external trade. They subsisted on collecting biobounties.”

“On collecting what?”

“Biobounties, Freay’ysh-Administrator. It was discovered that the swamps and jungles of the valley were rich in rare plants and insects prized for the unique compounds they contain. In particular, many of these substances proved to be very useful to the pharmaceutical corporations that were attempting to produce new, improved anti-senescence formulations.”

“Which we have largely suspended. So how have the Susser Tal’s inhabitants survived since we occupied Wunderland?”

“Poorly, Freay’ysh-Administrator. And we only know this because there is still some rare contact between the swamp-dwellers and distant relatives they have in the villages around Neue Ingolstadt.”

The administrator nodded at the dataslate, signaling that he no longer needed its displays. “So, Zhveeaor-Captain: how many companies do you think it will take to find the human lickers-of-feces and root them out?”

Zhveeaor-Captain let his tongue wash slowly over his nose: his statement was to be understood as a carefully considered opinion. “Freay’ysh-Administrator, I think that two battalions might be enough.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator stared at his subordinate.

Who twitched one shoulder slightly: “Maybe three.”

“So just where are these swamprats you were talking about, Smith?” Gunnar spat. “We’ve been slogging through this shithole for two days and haven’t seen a single-”

“They call themselves Sumpfrunners. And as for where they are-” Smith gestured to the quagmires through which they were slowly wending their way “-they’ve been paralleling us for a while now. Probably about three hours.”

“Four, actually.” The voice seemed to emerge from a plant that looked like an upward-writhing mix of Spanish moss and cactus. A spare, sallow man of middle years wriggled out of what had looked like the solid folds of the cactus trunk. Dressed in much-patched overalls, spattered in swamp muck, and his hair a receding skullcap kept slick by humidity and infrequent washing, he was not a particularly welcoming sight. His attitude seemed a match for his appearance: dour and uncongenial. “Seems like you drylanders are a lang wegs from home. Nichts for y’all here.” He spat with meticulous care and deliberation atop Gunnar’s own spattering of saliva.

“Actually, we came here quite intentionally-” Hilda began.

“Zat so, li’l ’madchen? Sorry to disappoint, but there’s still nichts here fer du.”

Smith stepped forward. “You’re here. We came for you.”

The Sumpfrunner looked Smith up and down. “Und whad’ud you want mit me, officer? Yeh, I can smell it: you got goverstink comin’ outta ever’ one of yore pores. Police? No, military.”

Smith nodded. “That’s right.”

“Well, you come to de wrong place, hauptman: you comin’ fifty years too late, and one army too short. You turned your back on us; now we turnin’ our backs on you.”

“I didn’t turn my back on anyone. I’ve been in cold sleep for fifty years. And I’m here to fight the kzinti.”

The Sumpfrunner’s sideways glance might have been sympathetic or merely pitying. “Then you got a lotta catchin’ up to do, hauptman. But you won’t do it wandering in here; thayz all out there. Kzinti don’t like the Sumpfrinne very much.”

“Maybe not. But they’re coming.”

“Then lettum come.” Other Sumpfrunners emerged from similar hiding spots. All were armed; some were carrying much-refurbished or homemade bolt-action rifles that would have inflicted a case of bore envy upon any self-respecting twentieth-century elephant gun.

“Those are mighty big rifles,” Mads said appreciatively.

“Theyz gut fer killin’ ratcats,” the ’Runner answered with a narrow smile. Hilda, seeing the teeth, wished he had settled for a close-lipped grin.

“Bet they are,” Mads nodded. “But they won’t be enough.”

“We got lossa bullets,” the other offered.

“I’m sure you do, but they still won’t be enough.”

For the first time, the ’Runner’s easy, dismissive confidence faded. “How many you think are comin’, drylander?” He looked from Smith to Mads and then back to Smith.

“As many as they can bring. At least a battalion. Maybe two. Maybe more.”

The ’Runner stared at Smith. “Scheisse. And what got them so riled up to come pouring in here?” He followed Mads’ quick glance at Smith. “Oh, so we have you to dank for their visit.”

Smith shrugged, nodded.

“And just what did you do to them? Take one of their ears and laugh in their faces?”

“Actually, yes.”

The ’Runners looked simultaneously aghast and envious. “What? How?”

Smith told them. Hilda could see the factual knowledge of the event and the birth of a legend growing in their eyes at the same time.

When Smith finished, the spokesperson of the Sumpfrunners whistled, the sound made three-toned by the plentiful gaps in his teeth. But then he shook his head. “Schlaffin’ through fifty jahr muss’ve made you eager to join all yore dead friends from back then. And so now you run here to hide.” He spat again, but this time it was fast and angry. “So nice of you to think of us-now.”

“We thought of you fifty years ago.”

Again, the ’Runner squinted, suspicious, but Hilda saw that he was also intrigued. “Whaddyu mean, that you thought of us fifty jahr ago?”

Smith squatted down, and Hilda admired the posture change: without sending any message too overtly, it signaled that this was to be the beginning of a story, told in a casual fashion. He’s good, thought Hilda, maybe too good, the way he manages to slowly draw more and more people into whatever ultimate scheme he’s hatching.

“So,” Smith began, “fifty years ago, when it was pretty clear the ratcats were going to overrun Wunderland, there were some folks in the ARM and UNSN who were thinking ahead to how humanity was going to come back and kick their furry butts off our home.”

A few smiles sprung up around the group; Hilda folded her arms, thought: and once again, Smith gets the measure of his audience and begins to work them. He could’ve made a small fortune peddling snake oil…

“There were a lot of ideas tossed around. Most did not survive close eye-balling by the experts, but a handful did. And most of those were going to take time: time spent watching the kzinti, learning about them, their habits, their biochemistry, their society. You all hunt, right?”

The slick, unwashed heads all nodded in unison.

“Well, how well could you hunt an animal if you didn’t know its habits, where it liked to sleep, to feed, to rut, to run?”

Now the same heads shook from side to side. “Might as well stay home and stay hongry,” drawled one of Smith’s audience; a few snickers followed it.

“Exactly. And that’s what the war-planners realized: that they’d be damn fools trying to put any plans into motion until they knew more about the species they were hunting. And when it comes to kzinti, we’ve got to have the advantage in smarts, because they’ve got it all over us in speed and strength.”

Somber, even grim nods followed Smith’s assertion, as well as one solemn, “Ja, stimmt.”

“So, fifty years ago, the war planners put long-range projects in motion. And they put a bunch of people like me down for the longest nap in human history, without even telling us what the plans were. That information, along with whatever tools and weapons we’d need, were added to our cryo-capsules years later. That way-”

“That way, if the ratcats found you before the plans were ready, they couldn’t learn anything about what was in store for them.” The ’Runner who’d completed Smith’s sentence was quick-eyed, clean-shaven, and lean.

Smith nodded his agreement and appreciation. “Exactly: just like he said. So when I woke up early last week, I had no idea of what I was supposed to do. But there was a briefing packet with me: hardcopy only, which was lucky, since my capsule’s electronics had been fried. In that, I learned that I was to land in any one of four locations that the experts said would be the best place to try out a brand new weapon, which is in that box right there.” He pointed at the safe-case that Hilda was carrying: all eyes turned toward her. She resisted-barely-the impulse to sheepishly wave at them all.

“What is it?” shouted one of the ’Runners.

“He can’t say, not yet,” countered the quick-eyed lean one.

“I ain’t fighting for people-outsiders! — fifty years dead and a weapon no one will tell me about,” a third rebutted.

“Stille!” shouted their gap-toothed spokesman, who looked back to Smith. “You tell a mighty schon story, hauptman,” he said quietly, “but maybe that’s all it is: a story.” He and Smith watched each other: neither blinked. “I don’t see, and I haven’t heard, anything that proves that your experts chose four locations or that the Susser Tal was one of them.”

Smith nodded, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a slim strip of plasticoding. He read from it: “42.68.2113 by 89.61.4532; do you know where those planetary coordinates are?”

The spokesman sat up as if someone had jabbed a spear into his back. After a long moment, he said, rather formally, “Yes. I know the location of those coordinates.” His followers looked stunned, first at him, then at each other, murmuring as they did. Hilda couldn’t tell if it was his sudden loss of local accent, or knowledge about the global coordinate system that had surprised them most.

Smith was nodding. “Then here’s what you do. Go to those exact coordinates, which, unless I am very much mistaken, are about a day’s march further east. Then dig. You’ll probably need to go down at least a meter or maybe a little more, given the fact that this valley is like one big compost heap. You’ll find a box. In the box, you’ll find a plasticoding strip like this one and there will be a single word on it. Don’t tell anyone else what the word is; just come to me. I’ll tell you the word on the strip.”

The group was completely silent. The spokesman rose, nodded soberly, and started down the trail to the east. After a moment, he turned, stared at Smith and the resistance fighters: “Well, you comin’ with us or waiting here to get snatched by the ratcats?”

Later that day, when the pace of the march had slacked off, and during a brief lull in the wave-attacks favored by the local mud-mites and swamp-flies, Hilda caught up to Smith. “Quite a performance you put on back there.”

He stared at her. “I had the choice to make the truth interesting, or dull. I chose interesting. But it was the truth, every bit of it.”

His sudden seriousness took her aback. “Hey, I’m sorry: I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“No, not exactly. But you figured a little needling wasn’t out of line.”

“Well-” she wondered if it was right to feel suddenly defensive, and decided she didn’t care. “Well, maybe it isn’t out of line, after all. You’re dragging more and more of us around by our noses, without ever telling us what we’re up to, or why we’re doing it.”

He looked away. “We’re doing it to kill kzinti. To kill a lot of kzinti.” His cheeks bunched as he said it.

“Yeah, we figured that out. But it would help if you could share a little more-”

“Look.” His voice was calm, but low. “I don’t like keeping secrets, but it’s part of my job. What if this weapon doesn’t work? What if it does but the kzinti capture some of us, now or later? This isn’t the start of the Great War of Liberation: this is only the test of a new weapon. Which will only be effective later on if it remains a surprise, a secret, after it’s been tested.”

“So what does that mean? That you’ll kill all of us after you’ve tested the weapon? Otherwise, every one of us that walks away from your apparent suicide mission is a potential security leak, right?”

“Wrong.” His expression and tone softened slightly. “That won’t be necessary. You won’t be security risks.”

“Oh? And why is that? No, wait: let me guess; you can’t tell me.”

“See?” Smith’s jocularity had returned. “You are starting to get the hang of this.”

“Ha ha. But what about you? You know about this weapon, and you could be caught. That seems like a pretty significant secrecy risk. Unless, that is, Captain John Smith has his own private poison pill, ready to go.” She had meant it as a jibe, but seeing his expression, Hilda suddenly realized that her wild fabulation had actually brought her face to face with the cold hard truth of the matter. “Gott in Himmel! I–I’m sorry. I didn’t know-I didn’t mean to-”

“Of course you didn’t. Look: I’m sure a lot of my old mates would have been happy to have a ‘final option’ rather than get captured by the kzinti, and be diced up or Hunted for sport. Besides, this mission ends one of two ways for me: success and hiding, or failure and death. So if I fail, I’d rather the death be quick, painless, and at the time and place of my choosing.”

In the silence that followed, Hilda sought desperately for a new conversation-starter and discovered that no such rhetorical beast existed: “Well, that was all a bit awkward.” He shrugged.

“And continues to be so,” she added. That got a genuine smile; handsome, even through the swamp muck, she had to admit.

“Having a kill-pill in your pocket is only a big deal if you let it be one,” he said gently. “Taking a mission like this-well, let’s just say I made my peace with all possible outcomes the day I said ‘yes,’ and they cut my orders.” He drew to a halt when the local that Hilda had come to think of as Papa Sumpfrunner put up a hand, listened, and then made a leisurely, palm-down motion. Sighing, the whole contingent sank to the ground, except the three that Papa selected with pointed finger; they uttered sighs of resignation, not relief, and wandered outward toward the perimeter.

Watching Smith’s easy motions, Hilda took a stab at starting a different conversation: “You seem pretty comfortable here: have you been in the Susser Tal before?”

“Not in it, but at the entrance to. A couple of times. Back when I was a kid, and my dad dragged me along on his provisioning trips, we had to make runs up here. Ours was the closest town that got regular deliveries of supplies and spare parts, so the ’Runners came to him with their orders.”

“But I thought your dad only ‘procured stuff’ for your town.”

“Yeah, but areas as far off as the Sumpfrinne fell into a special category. Technically, they are in someone’s backyard, and in this case, it was my dad’s. Could’ve been a few other towns just as easily, but my dad wasn’t a bigot or a classist prick, so he didn’t mind being their conduit to the cities and supply sources. And they were pretty grateful. Not that they showed it much: people back in these swamps don’t show much of anything. They’re a careful bunch. But still, you could tell they liked him.”

“Oh? How?”

“They teased him a lot.”

“And that’s how they show they like you?”

He stared at her. “Of course it is. It’s their way of saying, ‘you’re okay; you can take a joke.’ You have to have a certain basic level of trust, of comfort, between two people before they can start to really tease each other.”

Hilda nodded, tried to simultaneously study his features but not get caught looking at him: every time she spent five more minutes talking with Captain Smith, she discovered things about him that were surprising. In this case, the surprise was not how he had learned to manipulate ’Runners so well, but rather, the obvious affection he had for a father now long-dead, and the genuine sympathy he had for the ’Runners themselves. As well as a sharp dislike of bigots. You’re not half-bad, Captain Smith, inside or out…“And so if the ’Runners don’t like you?”

“They don’t tease you. At all. They don’t do anything: they just stare at you. And spit at the ground. A lot. Not right at you, or where you’re standing. But you’d have to be a low-grade moron not to get the message.”

“So how did these people come to live in the Sumpfrinne?”

Smith shrugged. “It was better than being constantly reminded that the herrenmanner think you’re subhuman. And the rest of the Teuto-Nordic immigrants followed their example; the poorest of them were the most outspoken and harsh in their prejudice.”

“When you’re next to the lowest spot on the totem pole, you fight pretty hard to keep the one guy lower than you are in his place.”

“Ja, wirklich. A lot of these folks either traced their roots to gastarbeiters or signed on the colony ships as the equivalent of indentured servants: a lot were poor folks from the Balkans, South America, South Africa. And of course, anyone foolish enough to marry into that kind of family was encouraged to spare their high-blooded kin any further embarrassment by wandering out here to join the rest of the untermenschen. To become swamprats, hillbillies: your choice of derogatory terminology.”

“Upon whose bioharvesting skills the anti-senescent pharmaceutical firms depended, if I recall correctly.”

Smith nodded. “Until the kzinti arrived, who apparently decided that the earlier each human dies, the better they like it.”

“Ja, sure seems that way. But how do the ’Runners survive at all, now?”

“Hey, you’re the one who was born into this time period, not me.” Smith turned to look at their shabby clothing and much-repaired guns. “Looks to me like they’re just managing to hang on. Maybe not even that.” He looked away. “I don’t want to know what their infant mortality rate has been, since the kzinti arrived. Nor the prevalence of malnutrition-related diseases.”

Hilda followed his gaze, saw the same things, wondered a further question she decided not to ask: so why would they stay? The answer was in front of her, plain to see, if difficult to grasp: they didn’t leave the oppressive stink and miasmas of the Sumpfrinne because it was all they knew, and was what their parents had known before them. In almost every face, she could detect the sullen resolve of squatters. These were the faces of true parochialism, of the unfathomable intransigence of insular communities that had, since the beginning of recorded history, doggedly inhabited the most marginal and isolated of environments. Even unto their own, slow extinction.

Papa Sumpfrunner had risen to his feet again; about half a dozen of his followers drifted into the bushes rather than lining up on the trail. They wielded machetes, wore heavy gloves, carried hide sacks that they started to fill with cuttings. If there was a rhyme or reason to their action, Hilda could not discern it.

Smith nodded in the direction of the harvesters. “That’s Burn Bramble they’re harvesting.”

“Burn Bramble?”

“Yeah, the smaller branches and leaf-stems have tiny pockets of nitric acid stored in them: really discourages grazing by the local fauna.”

“And the ’Runners harvest it because-?”

“’Cause nitric acid be the main ingredient in smokeless powder, ’chen,” muttered Papa Sumpfrunner as he drifted past, seeing to the assignment of their rearguard and the laying of a few choice traps. “Can’t live without it. Easier to blow things up than cut them down here in the Sumpf. And even before the kzinti come, we stuck with old-style cartridge guns. Reload our own brass, make the powder from the Bramble.”

“And the bullets?”

He smiled at her quick understanding of their real challenge. “Ja, well, we make bullets from whatever metal works and is handy. Thayz not always so gut as we’d like, but they get the job done.” He waggled his heavy-barreled rifle.

That was the first time Hilda noticed the desiccated kzin ear attached like a tribal fetish to the trigger guard.

Papa saw her staring and nodded. “Ja, ’chen-they get the job done.”

Hilda did not doubt him in the least.

Early the next day, they arrived at the closest thing to a town that the Susser Tal could boast: about three dozen families, whose huts were perched on stilts sunk into rock pilings. Hilda stared at the spindly structures. “Spring floods come down from both sides,” Smith commented at her elbow. “And the rest of the time, the problem is the rain, which has nowhere to go but down. Slowly.”

She nodded. “How many people are-?” She stopped: again, how would Smith know, after having been asleep for half a century? Handily, wiry Papa Sumpfrunner was about to pass them, moving at a good clip.

“Bitte-” she started.

He turned, apparently agitated. “Schnell or nothing, ’chen: I got a message to dig up.” He glanced at Smith.

“Uh-how many of you are there?”

“You talking here, or the whole Tal?”

“The whole valley.”

He shrugged. “Seven hundred, maybe seven hundred twenty. Why?”

Hilda was going to confess idle curiosity, but Smith jumped in before she could. “Because that’s how many people will need to be informed that the kzinti are coming. And that’s how many may have to leave this valley as a result.”

The spokesman glared at him. “I guess we’ll see about that, hey?”

Smith shrugged. “I suppose we will.”

“And if I don’t agree, then what? You gonna make us go, you an’ your army of four?”

Smith shook his head. “They sure aren’t my army: hell, they don’t even like me. But that’s not who’s going to convince you to leave the Susser Tal.”

“No? Who then?”

Smith pointed to the dried kzin ear hanging from the trigger guard of Papa Sumpfrunner’s rifle. “They will. Believe me.”

“Well, we’ll see whether you can be believed at all, first.” He waved the plasticode strip Smith had given him and stalked away.

He stopped directly under the center of what appeared to be his own house, given the questions that were being shouted down at him, and which he momentarily ignored. He started prying up rocks, rather than digging. When he saw Smith’s look, he spat, grumbled: “I thought my PeePaw was verruck, insisting we keep this pile clean and the plastic sheeting over it.” He paused, glared more fiercely. “Well, come on, you soft-skinned drylander; you ain’t as tough as me, but you got decent-sized muscles. Help me move these damned rocks.”

Smith joined him in his labors; four other ’Runners drifted over to pitch in, as well. In less than twenty minutes, they had moved the rocks, thrown back an all-weather tarp and heaved up an old vacuum-rated shipping crate. They opened it and found a plastic-wrapped footlocker inside. Within that was a box. And in that box was a single plasticode strip. Papa Sumpfrunner stared at it as if he were holding a live viper. Then he studied the characters scored into its impervious surface, folded it up, and jammed it in his grime-lined pocket. He turned to Captain Smith. “What’s the code, drylander?”

Smith looked him straight in the eye. “The word on the plasticode is ‘distemper.’”

The spokesman blinked, looked down in the hole, looked away. “Well, shit,” he said.

Mads looked from Papa Sumpfrunner to Smith. “So? What does it mean?”

The senior ’Runner looked at Mads with eyes that were prematurely rheumy. “It means that your friend is exackly who he says he is.” He sighed, his shoulders sloped. “Well, come on in with you all. We might as well have supper while we talk about the end.”

Hilda blinked. “The end? What end?”

Papa Sumpfrunner looked around himself sadly, and then at her. “The end of this, ’chen: the end of our world.”

Shraokh-Lieutenant heard the splashing slither again, this time closer behind him. He froze in place as quickly and completely as only a Hero could.

But the sound was gone, and the other incessant buzzings and whirrings and sloshings and ploppings of the accursed swamp reasserted in his ears.

In his ears. His ears. No longer distracted by the demands of his hunt-mission, Shraokh-Lieutenant felt the sudden, torturing itch in his middle ear return. He dug at it with claws half-extended, gouging and scratching in his urgency to get relief.

Which was impossible to obtain. On the third day of his vengeance-hunt as a lone-tracker, the mud-mites had swarmed and found a warm, moist nesting place next to Shraokh-Lieutenant’s eardrum. Two days later, the senior battalion doctor, Nriss’sh-Healer, had fiddled with the afflicted audial canal for the better part of an hour, spraying one noxious potion after another into what felt like the center of his head. All to no avail: the mud-mites proved impervious to the anti-bacterials and insecticides the kzinti had ready to hand, and were now busily laying eggs in the cavity. Which, according to the Healer, meant he would lose hearing in that ear sometime within the next four days. So he had to find his prey before then, because his nose was of almost no use in this midden-heap of a valley, and with his hearing diminished-

More noise, this time in the bushes to the left, moving steadily from his front flank to his rear.

Shraokh-Lieutenant swung his beamer-a carbine-sized model-off his shoulder and snarled, squeezing the trigger as he spun to put his aim point in front of the target, sweeping back toward where he had heard the sound.

The welding-bright beam sliced into the jungle like a blinding scythe, decapitating ferns and bushes, toppling a pair of trees, torching a few patches of (rare) dry grass, and eliciting a single, abruptly silenced scream. Matching that sound with his own high-pitched screech of triumph, Shraokh-Lieutenant sprang forward: an eight-meter leap from a standing start. He landed at the source of the death-sound.

At his feet lay a feral boar, bisected lengthwise, half a meter beneath the spine. The smell of the seared meat made him retch through his fury and frustration. He turned his back upon the creature and sprinted further down the trail, in search of his real prey: humans. Leaf-eating, urine-gulping, cub-slaughtering humans. He felt the emotional upsurge toward the Unknowing Rage, and fought back hard. Distracted, he consequently forgot the caution which he had rigidly imposed upon himself since setting forth to avenge his cub as a hseeraa aoshef, a solo rogue-killer. He forgot to move carefully rather than swiftly.

As he ran, paralleling the bubbling hot springs to his right, he remained focused on his left flank and the ground beneath his feet-and so missed the catch-wire that was looped down among the hanging mosses he pushed out of the way to his right. He heard the unmistakable sound of a mechanical release, instantly twisted away from it, and felt darts whistle past his chest, missing by a centimeter. But he did not hear the sigh of a heavy weight beginning to swing down from above his head to the left.

As the spiked, rock-laden warhead of the pendulum trap swung down faster, its sigh became an accelerating rush. Shraokh-Lieutenant heard it now, but, with his feet still committed to the fast leaping sidestep he had used to dodge the darts, he was unable to react, other than to avert his face and put out his arms. He knew, even through the building Rage, that this was what the humans had intended: that they had known the darts were not faster than his reflexes, but that they could force him into an evasive maneuver that would make it impossible to avoid the true, killing component of their double-trap.

The sharpened, dung-smeared stakes on the pendulum-bob swung into him with a sound of slicing leather and shattering kindling. He felt multiple punctures along his left side, and then he was airborne: the impact of the warhead threw him five meters to the right, halfway into the murky, fetid water he had been paralleling.

Shraokh-Lieutenant howled, partly in pain, but mostly in a fury that quickly blotted out the pain, washed over his senses, even disintegrated the shame of having been so dishonored by the humans. In place of all that was not merely rage, but the Rage. Thought was now extraneous. Wounds were now extraneous. Caution was now extraneous. Killing was the only thing that mattered. Only killing.

Consequently, he did not hear, until the very last second, the stealthy wet rush behind him: he spun, bringing up the beamer. And found himself looking into a maw full of teeth: a maw even wider, with teeth even longer, than his own.

It was, he dimly realized as he pulled the trigger and converted his roar of rage into one of murderous aggression, what the humans called a swampadile. However, it did not really resemble their homeworld’s much-storied crocodile. This creature, although every bit as large, was more akin to a flattened eel with stunted legs and wide, almost spatulate, jaws. But whereas the crocodile was surprisingly fast over short distances on land as well as water, the swampadile’s limbs were too rudimentary for such pursuit. On the other hand, its feet were wide and webbed, and so, although not a good land predator, it had extraordinary speed in the water, being propelled both by its limbs and the sinusoidal motion of its body.

As the creature’s teeth seemed to leap toward Shraokh-Lieutenant’s face, the kzin’s beamer sent out a brief actinic stab-and died. Whether the power pack was exhausted, or fouled by immersion in water, was of no importance to Shraokh-Lieutenant. More important was that he had missed: one of the pendulum’s stake-points had lodged and broken off in his left shoulder-joint, throwing off his accuracy.

The swampadile was badly injured, nonetheless: the momentary beam flash hit the water in front of the creature, sending up a gout of hissing, reeking steam. Scalded, the swampadile writhed back. The kzin cast aside his spent beamer and pulled his w’tsai: a shortsword with a nearly mono-molecular edge.

His overhand cut coincided with the swampadile’s forward lunge. The weapon dug in, well behind the rear of the creature’s jaws, which snapped down on the kzin’s warding left arm. A medley of splintering bones and shearing hide counterpointed the contending screeches of the combatants.

But only for a moment. A second heavy blow from the undaunted kzin was a message that even the almost brainless swampadile understood: its current grip upon the orange-furred creature was not killing it, at least not fast enough. Even the left arm of the biped, although almost completely severed and halfway down the monster’s gullet, evidently had claws on the end of it: they ripped and tore at the amphibian’s upper gut. The swampadile coiled back, releasing the mauled arm, eyes fixing instinctually on the kzin’s head, and it came forward with a warbling screech-

— only to impale itself on the w’tsai, which the kzin plunged deep into its mouth, the point ripping out through the creature’s faint dorsal ridge, just behind its eyes.

But the swampadile completed its attack even in death; the fang-crowded jaws snapped down on Shraokh-Lieutenant’s last good arm.

The kzin tried to extricate himself, found his arm held in a death-vise, pierced by half a dozen of the creature’s long, tapering teeth. Frustration, pain, triumph, and, oddly, rut-aggression boiled up out of him in a long, thready scream.

When he fell quiet, the jungle and swamp rewarded him with a moment of perfect silence. And then, he once again heard the slithering burble that had presaged the swampadile’s attack. Shraokh-Lieutenant’s kill- and rut-addled brain focused for the briefest moment, noted the sound, wondered, hypothesized-

At that moment, he learned a fundamental and important lesson about the swampadiles of the Sumpfrinne:

They always hunt in pairs.

Freay’ysh-Administrator could tell from Zhveeaor-Captain’s rigidly erect posture that he bore bad news. And he suspected he knew what it was. “Shraokh-Lieutenant has fallen in the hunt, I presume?”

The other kzin nodded tightly, but said nothing.

So, something worse than death? “And what else?”

“We found him like this.” Zhveeaor-Captain handed a dataslate to his superior.

Freay’ysh-Administrator looked at the image on its screen and felt his fur tuck flat, his ears snap back against the rear of his head, his lips ripple open to release a deep, primal growl. Somewhere, from miles away-or maybe only a meter: all distances were suddenly the same-Zhveeaor-Captain’s voice explained: “He had met his Hero’s End before the humans nailed him up in this fashion. Most of the damage to his body was done by swampadiles: they killed him when one of humans’ traps wounded him and knocked him into the water.”

“And did the swampadiles bite off his right ear, as well?”

“No, Freay’ysh-Administrator. They did not. If you look carefully down here, you will see that the humans pinned his ear onto his-onto his-”

“I see clearly enough, Zhveeaor-Captain. But-” he peered more closely, not wanting to do so, but wishing to confirm the full magnitude of the human atrocity “-this is not his whole ear, is it?” When the captain did not reply, he looked up.

And discovered a hide pouch being held out toward him. He turned away. “I do not need to see its contents,” he growled, a screeching buzz edging into his voice, rising up from the rage, the shame, the rut-aggression-

He stopped, sniffed mightily, shook his head: how odd. Rut-aggression? Yes, it was there: he could feel it, but he smelled no female kzinti. Which was manifestly impossible here, being so far from any harem. So why-?

“There is more,” Zhveeaor-Captain said calmly.

How could there be more than this? “Yes?”

“It seems the humans killed the second swampadile so that it would not consume Shraokh-Lieutenant, so that they could create this monument of defiance.”

“And have we responded?”

“We have.”

The lack of extrapolation told Freay’ysh-Administrator everything he needed to know. “But our response was repulsed.”

“Not repulsed, Freay’ysh-Administrator: lost. No Heroes returned. The coursing squad assigned the task of tracking down the humans drew ahead of the main body-”

“And they were ambushed.”

“Freay’ysh-Administrator, I take this on my own head; I offer up my Name and females in expiation of my failure. I should have known. The short sight ranges in the undergrowth made it simple for them to ambush us. And exhaustion must have led to our Heroes’ obvious distraction. I suspect they were overheated by the mud coating their fur, which cannot be removed except by extensive grooming.”

The administrator stared at the captain. “Our Heroes were distracted? In what way?”

“When the humans retreated from their ambush, our Heroes gave chase.”

“Is this not customary?”

“Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator, but not until the main body has arrived, so that the pursuit can be made along a broad front, with secure flanks. But our Heroes, hot and enraged as I must imagine they were, completely disregarded that protocol, as well as communication discipline. They seemed to be on the edge of the Unknowing Rage themselves. And so, following the trail of the retreating units, they did not detect the second ambush, lying close along that path.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator closed his eyes. “Have our reconnaissance assets located the leaf-eating shit-lickers who destroyed our Heroes?”

“No, Freay’ysh-Administrator. The tree cover is too thick, and the heat from the springs makes thermal imaging useless down in the lowlands. Perhaps if we had more aerial drones to seed down under the forest canopy-”

The administrator negated that notion with a toss of his head and flex of his ruff. “Impossible. With the recent incursion by the human ship from outsystem, the fleet has concentrated out in the Serpent Swarm, bringing most uncommitted ground assets with it in order to quell the scattered insurgents who were evidently emboldened by this recent human attack. The two battalions we have on hand are all that we are going to get.”

“With a full company providing base security, here at the mouth of the valley, I am uncertain that the remaining numbers will be enough.”

“They will have to be, Zhveeaor-Captain. And they will be. They are kzin Heroes.”

“They are, but they still have no target. Our short-range patrols have found nothing but a few abandoned observation posts. And our rogue-killer, and now our subsequent scouting teams, are all dead, with little to show for their Heroes’ Ends.”

“Then the time has come to conduct a reconnaissance in force. You are to coordinate a rolling series of company-level sweeps, all along our front, pushing constantly deeper into the valley. Our minimum objective is to move the lines of our safe zone ahead at least five kilometers a day.” Freay’ysh-Administrator saw Zhveeaor-Captain’s uncertainty, felt rage-and again, that odd hint of rut-aggression, as if the captain was a mating rival. “This is what is required of our Heroes!” he asserted. “This they must do!”

“It shall be as you order, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

“Make sure that it is.” He paused. “Or you may yet forfeit your Name and females.”

The three surviving kzinti came bounding through the brush, pursuing Gunnar and one of the ’Runners, closing the gap with sickening speed. Hilda held her breath as the two humans vaulted over a fallen fern-trunk, then crouched down rather than continuing to run.

The kzinti pushed harder, one of them firing his beamer as he sprinted and shrieked like a scalded tiger. The beam danced unsteadily along the fallen trunk, slicing chunks off, starting one brief, guttering fire, but not focused enough to cut through it.

The kzinti were within five meters of the trunk when their leader evidently noticed something odd about the brush ahead: specifically, that parts of it had been cleared. He paused, probably seeing the faint, narrowing avenues that had been cut through the foliage.

From Hilda’s reverse viewpoint, though, they were sightlines into the widening fields of fire that the kzinti had now entered. “Optimum,” she said, sharply enough to be heard up and down the line. From concealed positions in the densest brush, five roars-almost as loud as light artillery-boomed out at the kzinti: an equal number of meter-long muzzle-flashes marked their sources.

The lead kzin had a leg blown clean off: as it cartwheeled into the underbrush behind him, the Hero yowled and exsanguinated in great arcing gouts of dark red blood. The second of them staggered, then stopped, and lasted just long enough to look down and realize that a sizable red divot had carved away half of his right lung. He never realized-but revealed as he fell, senseless-that the exit wound in his back was a crater so wide that it had partially exposed his spine.

The third was, marginally, luckier: one shot took off half his tail, another clipped through his gut at an angle. The pulped coils which flopped out of this belly wound signified it as mortal, but kzinti did not die quickly or easily. He struggled back to his feet as the five human snipers reloaded their home-brewed, single-shot elephant guns.

That was when Gunnar and the ’Runner popped up from behind the fallen fern-trunk and sent streams of strakkaker fire into the slowly rising Hero. Bits of fur, blood, and bone flew in a haze of carnage: as the weapons fell silent, magazines expended, the tattered remains of the third kzin toppled backward.

“That’s the last of them,” shouted Gunnar in savage glee.

“And it will be the last of us if we don’t get the hell out of here now,” Hilda shouted back. “No talking: move. Back to waypoint Foxtrot.” Hilda jumped up, grabbed her gear, and, as she launched herself full speed down the narrow path that was her personal bug-out route, she wondered: And again, where the hell is the heroic Captain Smith?

By the time they got back to their combination camp/refuge/hideout nine hours later, Gunnar had exhausted his considerable creative energies for thinking up new insults concerning Captain Smith’s courage, commitment, leadership skills, choice of aftershave, and female ancestors. And what galled Hilda most was that she had to endure hearing it in silence.

Because, in terms of leadership, and maybe even courage, Gunnar was right. Or at least he seemed to be.

Which was what Hilda was thinking when she stormed into Smith’s lean-to and stared not at him, but the secure box he’d been carrying for days now, wandering and staring about as though he were some uber-macho version of Van Gogh looking for the perfect field-or, in the Sumpfrinne, fetid bog-to paint. “So, have you had a productive afternoon, Captain?”

He stopped his infernal map plottings-his favorite activity these days, after wandering around with his purported secret-weapon-in-a-box-and looked up at her mildly. “Pretty fair. How about you?”

“Well, we had a great day, Captain. Shot up two squads of kzinti that were poking into the village we evacuated yesterday. They came after us, as they always do, and burned down Shindle and Milsic with beamers. Which left the ratcats feeling so wonderfully confident that they charged straight into another L-ambush. Killed about a dozen there.”

Smith had an almost dreamy look on his face. “That never gets old, does it?”

“I can’t see how you’d know, sir, since you haven’t been on a single god-damned op since the second day we got the ’Runners organized. But if it matters to you, the last of the kzinti came after us, straight into the firing lanes of our hidden rearguard’s elephant guns.” She threw her empty canteen down and realized she stank. Just like the whole Sumpfrinne stank. And she resented Smith for stinking less-a lot less-than she did. “All told, we got a whole section of them today. No thanks to you, Captain.”

His right eyebrow arched. He had never made himself the official CO: Mads and Papa Sumpfrunner would probably have bristled at that. But the de facto reality was that he was in charge. He never gave orders: he simply pointed out what needed to be done, maybe put in a word or two on how best to do it, and faded away, resuming his love affair with his goddamned secure box. “Well, it seems like you don’t really need me out there,” he said. “You folks are doing a fine job all by yourselves.”

“Yes, but what for? Smith, you said that your plans for success included survival. But we’re trapped here. There’s no way out of this valley except through the kzinti. Which is to say, there’s no way out of this valley.”

“There are the passes up through the Grosse Felsbank.”

“Yeah, an exit where we have to walk two abreast, with a horde of angry kzinti on our tails. That’s not a retreat. That’s volunteering ourselves to be the victims of a box-canyon slaughter.”

Smith shrugged. “I’m not sure it would turn out that way. But tell me, why do you think the kzinti are unable to adapt to the ambushes you’ve been setting up?”

“Damned if I know, and damned if I care.” She lurched across the rickety card table that Smith used as a desk. “Listen: this can’t go on. We need you out there. At least so we can stop the rumors that the ’Runners are starting to whisper back and forth. Rumors about how you don’t really have a master plan, how we’re all going to die in a last stand, because word has it you’re building an oversized pillbox at a chokepoint in the eastern half of the valley.”

“I promised them we’d escape, and I mean it: we’re building that pillbox with a big escape tunnel that will-”

“Screw escape tunnels! Escape to where, Smith? Have you lost your mind? Wait: is that the secret weapon inside the box? That it has the power to make a human leader so insane that even the kzinti can’t predict the tactical idiocies he’s going to think up?”

“You could not be more wrong,” he said. And then he smiled. “Or more right.”

“Quatsch! Enough with the mysteries: when are you going to use this verdammten secret weapon? When are we going to start seeing some results?”

Smith paused, and Hilda had the strange sensation that he was trying to decide which of her two questions he should answer. “You’ll see the effects in time.”

“In time for what? In time to save us? In time for any of us to survive? Or in just enough time to witness our pyrrhic victory as the last of us to keel over from exhaustion, or heat, or wounds?”

Smith smiled. “Long before that. Hell, if that were to happen, then I’d screw up my other objective.”

She reared back. “What? Another objective? What the hell is this one? Global domination? Mastery of the universe?”

Smith suddenly looked serious as he came around the table. His eyes lowered for a moment: she thought he was going to sneak a glance at the map, but instead his gaze came up, directly into hers. “No. My other objective is to make sure you get out of here alive.”

Wha-? She swallowed; her facetious rejoinder was hoarse, weak: “Yeah, right after you’ve seen to your own-”

“No. You come first.”

“But what about-?”

“No. No ‘buts.’ This has top priority. Commander’s discretion.”

Hilda wasn’t sure if she grabbed him or he grabbed her. She only knew, as they kissed long and hard:

Damn it, I do stink more than he does…

Freay’ysh-Administrator stared at the map. We’re gaining only three kilometers a day and they are still getting in among us, occasionally in our rear. And we almost never catch them. He pounded the field table with his fist: the frame-metal legs screeched as they bent under the blow; they did not spring back. And now I’ve ruined this piss-for-steel table. He batted it aside, charts and datachips spraying in a wide sweep against the south side of his hab-shelter.

Staring at the mess, he noticed shadows protruding through the open flap hole: “Enter,” he growled.

Zhveeaor-Captain and a young Hero, one he had not seen before, entered. Both waited upon his gesture to approach, which he signed gruffly. They entered, leaned forward, touched noses quickly, lightly, stepped back. The administrator looked at the young kzin again: he could not have been six months beyond the Hunt that elevated him into the ranks of the Heroes of the Race. He faced Zhveeaor-Captain. “And where is your usual adjutant?”

Zhveeaor-Captain’s shoulders sagged for the first time in the years he had known him. “He was slain by the humans this morning, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

The administrator calmly reached out for the table, intending to right it, but instead, snapped off one of its steel legs and started bending it. “Unfortunate.”

The other two kzinti looked at each other, then Zhveeaor-Captain stood a bit straighter. “You asked for a report, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

“I did.” The steel leg was now horseshoe shaped.

“The new tactic of inflicting maximum casualties upon the humans instead of taking more ground has proven ineffective, also. Our new, reinforced hunter-killer sweeps are inflicting few-and mostly unconfirmed-enemy KIAs.”

“So you believe we are not finding all the bodies of those that we kill.”

“It is probable, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

“I must have answers, information, Zhveeaor-Captain, to know if this strategy should be continued.”

The new adjutant spoke, voice buzzing with throaty anxiety. “Freay’ysh-Administrator, perhaps I can be of assistance in this matter.”

“You?” The chair leg was now a hoop. “How?”

“I have studied the hum-the leaf-eaters’ history, Freay’ysh-Administrator. One of their great pre-unification powers faced a problem akin to ours.”

“A leaf-eater solution is not a kzin solution.”

“Not normally, perhaps, but their problem was identical: determining how many leaf-eaters were actually killed in a battle when it was not possible to find all the bodies.”

“Hmmm.” Freay’ysh-Administrator’s hands were still upon the tortured table leg. “And what was their solution?”

“They used ratios, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

“Ratios?” His hands flexed; the steel squealed faintly.

“Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator: ratios. The method was devised by the power’s senior war leader at the time.”

“And what was this war leader’s Name, for I assume he had a Name as well as a title?”

The young adjutant lifted his chin in the throat-exposing gesture of deference. “He did, Freay’ysh-Administrator. As best we can tell, he was known as McNamara-SecDef.” The adjutant’s tone became distracted: “He apparently had many titles over the course of his life, some of which are now only preserved as the shorthand address-forms which the humans…” Zhveeaor-Captain jabbed a warning elbow into his adjutant’s ribs. The young kzin’s voice terminated with the suddenness of a machine being switched off.

Freay’ysh-Administrator’s hands absently worked the steel hoop more tightly upon itself. “And before sharing this battle-wisdom, McNamara-SecDef had himself led armies in many wars?”

“No, not exactly.” Seeing the administrator’s look, the adjutant added hastily, “But, in his youth, he planned bombing missions.”

“Hmm. Hardly deeds worthy of earning a Name.” The chair leg now resembled a pretzel. “Tell me, Adjutant, what were these magical numbers that made this leaf-eater so canny a war leader?”

“His numbers indicate that one can determine the total enemy dead without actually counting their bodies.”

The administrator felt scorn vie with dark curiosity. “I do not understand. How can one know the number of relevant objects without counting them?”

“By estimate, Freay’ysh-Administrator. If our tactics and doctrine remain constant, we can arrive at a ratio of how much firepower we expend per human killed by studying the enemy casualty count in those battles where we know that none of the leaf-eaters have escaped. Thus, in less-controlled engagements, even if we find only one human body, then we may infer how many more we have killed, based on the control data. Once the system is perfected, arguably you only need to count the number of shots you have fired to determine how many of the enemy you have kil-”

Freay’ysh-Administrator whipped out his fist-the one holding the steel pretzel-and smashed the adjutant across the nose: the sharp snap and spurt of blood ensured that he would have a lasting reminder of how his crooked logic had earned him a perpetually crooked snout. “Moron! Imbecile! Eater of sthondat-dung! This is not an answer: this is a delusion.”

“But,” whimpered the young adjutant, “Chuut-Riit urges us to reflect upon problems, attempt to devise new solutions which employ thought, rather than brute force or overly simple-”

“The only thing here that is ‘overly simple’ is you, dolt.” Freay’ysh-Administrator swept back his hand: the adjutant flinched then fell flat on the ground in the most abject of honorable submission gestures. Freay’ysh-Administrator had thought staying his raised hand would be easy, but it was not: a sudden surge of deeper anger, almost like rut-aggression, peaked, proved unusually hard to quell. In order to physically defuse the strange, persisting rage, Freay’ysh-Administrator heaved the steel pretzel at the far side of his shelter: with a brittle popping sound, it burst through the blend of synthetic sheeting and carbon-filaments and out into the spoiled-egg stink of the Sumpfrinne’s marshes. “These ratios are foolishness,” he growled at both of them, “and cowardice. A war leader may need the skill of estimation, but this is saying that shit is meat, and piss is blood. There is no help in such numbers, for they are not real. Allow me to hypothesize, learned adjutant: this McNamara-SecDef lost the war he was fighting, did he not?”

“Well, there are some who say that-” Seeing Freay’ysh-Administrator’s look, the adjutant cowered back down, one paw held protectively over his bent and bleeding nose. “Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator: he lost.”

“Rrrrsh’sh’ch. Of course he did. His was a science of opiating lies, not truth.” Freay’ysh-Administrator reflected: truth. The truth of Heroes. The truth of Heroes is that the great should lead, not sit in an office like this McNamara-SecDef obviously had. Nor in a shelter like this one. I must lead. And the powerful aggression impulse surged again. By leaving behind the cursed numbers and reports and analyses, he would be the Hero he should be. He strode to the squat locker that held his combat gear. “Here is a truth for you both: not many mathematicians make great Heroes, and vice versa. And so I have the Hero’s answer to our quandary in this campaign.”

Zhveeaor-Captain’s ears came forward quickly. “And what is that, Freay’ysh-Administrator?”

“To lead from the front. And no more maneuvering. We have enough forces to push the humans to the other end of the valley if we are bold enough, strong enough, fierce enough: if we listen to the Heroes’ blood of our sires, singing in our veins.”

“But Freay’ysh-Administrator, we have been trying-”

“That is the problem, Captain.” He left out his subordinate’s Name purposefully: the veiled threat of Name revocation teetered on the edge of actualization. “We have been ‘trying.’ Trying is for kits and cubs: we do or we die. That is the truth of the Hero. Now, I shall reaffirm that truth. You will stay here, Captain, with the support services section and this number-loving leaf-eater’s spawn.” The adjutant whimpered, but also struggled to keep his lips together over his gritting teeth. “You will coordinate with the rear. That seems a fitting job for you both.”

Zhveeaor-Captain reared up. “If the failure is so completely mine as you deem, Freay’ysh-Administrator, I again offer my Name and my harem-”

“Keep your Name so that we may better attach your shame to it. And what mangy collection of females would stay in a harem of yours rather than scratch open their own veins? None that I would deign to ch’rowl with.” Aggression pheromones streamed out of Freay’ysh-Administrator: he could smell them pouring out of his body. He felt alive and vital once again. He noted Zhveeaor-Captain’s rigid stance and his suddenly muted pheromones: he elected to interpret it as cowardice rather than a further sign of the captain’s almost preternatural self-restraint. Teeth bared at his two subordinates, Freay’ysh-Administrator reared up to his full height and closed the side clasps on his ballistic armor. “I will go into the valley at the head of all our forces, find our foes, defeat them, and suck the marrow from their bones. Stand aside, you nuzzlers-of-genitals: make way for a true Hero.”

Mads came stumbling into the CP, out of breath. Hilda knew what his message was before he opened his mouth, knew it because Mads was too old to run flat out for anything less than a crisis, and because John Smith had been expecting the news for two days, now. “How many and how fast?” Hilda asked, shouldering the cut-down kzin beamer that was her new personal weapon. Most of the large kzin weapons took two humans to hold and operate, even after the grips, forestocks and other outsized furniture was reduced. But the ’Runners had been able to modify a few of the carbine-sized beamers they had captured so that they were no more unwieldy than a big human assault rifle.

“They’re coming fast and on a broad front. As for how many-” Mads took a deep breath “-damn me if it ain’t all of them, Hilda.” He looked around. “Where’s Smith?”

The perpetual question and, now that she and the captain were lovers, her own secret embarrassment: where’s Smith? What could she say? The most martial occupation Smith had undertaken in the past week was to supervise the construction of the pillbox-fort two kilometers further east, then oversee the excavation and concealment of defilading trenches on the flanking heights. But, then, toward the end of each day, her hero-paramour would once again steal away to contemplate the flowers, trees, and bushes in some intense myopia of fascination that might have been appropriate for a botanist or Romantic poet but not for the captain of a guerilla war band. It was as if he went into the jungles and marshes looking for a sign, an omen. One that was apparently very slow in coming.

“He’s off being nature-boy again, isn’t he?” Mads voice had edged into pity for Hilda: he was one of the few who was aware of her relationship with Smith.

“Not anymore,” announced a voice from the doorway.

They turned as Smith entered at a brisk pace; he was wearing the secure box like a backpack now, and moved purposely to the trunk that was his gun and ammo locker. “How long until they get here, Mads?”

“An hour, maybe two if we give them a stiff fight.”

Smith turned, eyes sharp. “No, Mads. Pass the word: no one runs, but no one is to hold a clearly compromised position.”

“Damn it, Smith, the moment the kzinti start attacking a position in earnest, it gets compromised. Pretty quickly, too.”

“That’s fine. We’ve drilled this for weeks. Our troops are to fall back, each defensive line leapfrogging to the rear and into the next open set of defensive positions.”

Mads looked grim. “So: no secret weapon to save the day, after all.”

Smith smiled. “Oh, the secret weapon is quite ready. Fully deployed.”

“What? When did you-?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s in place now and primed.”

Mads frowned. “Well, what is it and how do we use it? Is it remote-activated? Or remote-operated? Do we have to-?”

Smith had his strakkaker in hand: on his back was one of the three kzin fire-and-forget missiles they had taken. “Mads, listen to me: we don’t need to worry about the weapon. It doesn’t require our control.”

“Okay, but-but how do we coordinate with it? We need to know its area of effect so that we can adjust our own-”

“Mads.” Smith smiled, waited. “Mads. You’re listening, but you’re not hearing me: the weapon takes care of itself. Entirely. We don’t need to control it, or adjust to work with it, not beyond the preparations we’ve already made. Now, get those orders to the unit runners. And Hilda, have Margarethe take the snipers to the bolt-holes in grid box delta-tango. They’re to stay fully concealed until the kzinti have gone past.”

“And then hit them in the rear.”

“Under no circumstances are they to hit them in the rear. Not until they hear three shrills of my whistle. Again, just the way we drilled it.”

“So what are they to do? Follow the kzinti and watch the fun?”

“Yes, from a safe range. Beyond detection.”

Mads shook his head. “And you think that’s going to work? That the kzinti won’t have rear-area security units watching for that kind of trick?”

Smith’s smile widened. “That’s exactly what I think, Mads. Now: you have your orders. And remind our people: final fall-back is to the bunker.”

“It isn’t big enough for all of us,” Hilda said in a hushed voice. “You must be expecting a lot of casualties.”

Smith kept smiling. “Are the civvies already there?”

“Sent at the first sign of the new attack. They’re already inside the walls.”

“Good. Send them into the underground shelter.”

“And then what?”

“And then the civvie group leaders we’ve trained will help Papa ’Runner take it from there. Now scoot.”

A sergeant, whose name Freay’ysh-Administrator suddenly could not remember, bounded to his side. “Success again, Freay’ysh-Administrator. We have driven the humans back from another line of defenses.”

“Yes, yes, but how many have we killed?” Freay’ysh-Administrator gnashed his fangs at the mere thought of seeing ruined, gutted, dismembered human bodies. In a brief moment of calm between the quick, pounding waves of fury and bloodlust, he knew that this was bad command image, that the sergeant might believe his commander was verging over into the Unknowing Rage.

But evidently the sergeant did not notice, or did not care-possibly because his own exposed teeth, stooped posture, and intense pheromonal secretions indicated that he was even closer to the mind-blanking fury that his commander was narrowly holding in check. “Not as many dead leaf-eaters as we would wish, Freay’ysh-Administrator, but that is only because they are running like terrified, self-soiling sthondats.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator let his pelt ripple wildly and his lips roiled away from his teeth. “Let them run. Because there is no way for them to get past us, and this valley is a dead end. For them, a truly dead end. We must wait a little while longer, but-the slaughter at the climax! The slaughter!”

He imagined himself coated in human blood, mounting endless throngs of kzinretti: his own, Chuut-Riit’s, every kzinrett he had ever seen or smelled. The rut-aggression surged; he would kill the females which did not please him, which did not writhe against him with enough desperate fear and eagerness-

Apparently overcome by the flood of both his own and his superior’s pheromones, the sergeant tilted back his head and unleashed a screech that was both mating cry and war howl.

They both stopped, panting, and looked at each other. Freay’ysh-Administrator wondered if his noncommissioned officer was as deep in rut, as rigidly and uncomfortably tumescent, as he himself was. He blinked; the sergeant looked away.

“Orders, Freay’ysh-Administrator?”

With a profound effort, Freay’ysh-Administrator kept his voice low and level: “All units to the line and advance. We shall push the humans as hard as we can. We will overrun them before the sun sets. We will taste their marrow tonight, Hero; this I swear.”

“I bear your words to your Heroes, Freay’ysh-Administrator.” And the sergeant bounded off into the underbrush, moving awkwardly, stiffly.

Hilda serpentined her way through the final set of tripwires and saw Smith standing at the entry to the pillbox like he was directing traffic. His voice was loud, clear, unhurried: “That’s the last of the civvies, Papa. Get the team leaders moving. Yes, now. Everything’s going to be okay, but only if they start moving now.” To the slightly battered, but still intact squads that had already fallen back to the pillbox, he pointed them up the slopes to the defilade positions. “Morena, Keibel, take your squads up to the left flank overlooks. Varsic, Mbele, head up to the right. Missiles ready; if they have any vehicles to commit, they’re going to do it here where they’ve got a clear field of fire and comparatively safe flanks.” He looked around to see if anyone else was waiting for orders, saw Hilda, walked over. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi. They’ll be here soon. Not more than ten minutes, possibly as little as five.”

“How many losses did we take?”

“Once they started coming on strong, we couldn’t keep our heavy weapons positions secure or our lines dressed. We lost about two dozen in the last hour, and the last line will be coming under fire any minute.”

A set of rapid explosions told them that even that estimate had been optimistic. Somewhere overhead, there was a rapid, shuddering rush that echoed strangely in the saturated air of the valley: loud but muted, like listening to a sound system with all the treble removed. Explosions-large ones, starting five hundred meters behind the pillbox-pounded their way further east.

“That’s not good,” Hilda observed.

“Yeah, but that’s probably as close as their air units are going to come for now,” Smith speculated. “They know that the detection and tracking systems on the missiles we captured can’t see up through the clouds here, but that we can prang them if they drop down beneath the murk.”

And murk was not an exaggeration: the pillbox, built and dug out of an upthrust bulge of rock, was flanked by perpetually bubbling hot springs. A constant upward drift of water vapor created a ceiling haze that was nearly opaque at fifty meters altitude, and largely trapped in place by the prevailing temperature gradients about three hundred meters above that. Real fleet sensors-downlook densitometers and the like-could have picked out the basic terrain features well enough to generate targeting solutions, but to the rear-echelon, battalion-level gear that the kzinti had been using in the Susser Tal, the murk was functionally impenetrable.

“Do you think they’ll eventually bring their attack craft down into the valley?”

Smith nodded. “When they see the last of us run into the pillbox and shut the door, they’ll want to bring down the fire. I would.”

Hilda looked up the gentle upward slopes to north and south; both highlands pinched somewhat tighter here, putting the pillbox astride the valley’s narrowest bottleneck. “And the ’Runner marksmen that you’ve sent up to the defilade slit-trenches; how are they going to get inside in time?”

“They’re not.”

“What? They’ll be slaughtered out here.”

“No, they won’t, because they’re going to stay in hiding. Until they get their signal to fire.”

“But when the kzinti fan out and check their flanks, they’ll find them.”

“Tell me, Hilda, how well have the kzinti been following their standard tactical doctrines today?”

“Well, they-” She looked at him, wondering. “In a word, they weren’t following any doctrine at all. They were coming straight at us.”

Smith nodded. “So trust me for just a little longer; I’m pretty sure our troops up on the slopes are going to be fine.”

Deep within the tree line, a ripple of heavy reports-’Runner elephant guns-was drowned out by several stuttering roars and a supercharged whine-hiss: kzin automatic weapons and a heavy beamer, respectively.

Hilda swallowed. “They’re coming. And our troops won’t get here much sooner than they do.”

Smith touched her cheek with a grimy, sulfur-reeking hand. “I know. So, get inside the pillbox.”

“What? I’m an officer; I’ve got to stay out here and help-”

“It’s because you’re an officer that you’re needed inside the pillbox; it’s the most crucial position.”

“Why?”

“Because without radios, we need someone with excellent judgment inside.”

“Excellent judgment about what?”

“About when the kzinti are going to bring down the tacair hammer and blow the whole upper level to dust. If we don’t have someone in there who’s shrewd enough to anticipate that airstrike at least half a minute before they make it, we’ll lose all our combatants. Hell, we’ll lose anyone who isn’t already underground in the bomb shelter. So. Get inside the pillbox. Now.”

The humans ran like so many startled veerthsas, one of the prey animals that the kzinti brought to every world they settled. Small and fast, the veerthsa was quite challenging to bring down, but, ah, the satisfaction when the spindly beast was finally pinned beneath an irresistible paw…

So it felt now, watching the humans scatter away from their prepared positions, their tattered clothes streaming behind them like the shredded flags of a lost battle. Each defensive line had crumbled faster than the one before it, his Heroes gathering inertia and more bloodlust with each successive triumph. The evasive human foes had finally stood and fought: they had been forced to, Freay’ysh-Administrator told himself, since they were trapped in a valley with no exit. A small voice, that belonging to the weakling trait that Chuut-Riit bombastically liked to call “higher reason,” whispered that today’s success was also puzzling: the kzinti had tried this tactic before, led by the very capable Zhveeaor-Captain. But those offensives had bogged down every time, gaining only three kilometers a day. The double-envelopments, the L-ambushes, the stay-behind attack teams, the cunning use of mines to guide kzin assault forces into cleared fields of fire: the humans had not made such extensive, or effective, use of these ploys today.

But the voice of Freay’ysh-Administrator’s rage and bloodlust shouted down these observations into mute oblivion: why question what was working? The answer could be as simple as this: he, Freay’ysh-Administrator, was a more inspiring leader than Zhveeaor-Captain. Also, he had been willing to sacrifice more kzinti in a sustained assault in order to achieve his objective. Two hundred eighty kzinti had started the offensive this day, and slightly more than a third were either dead or incapacitated. Many of those still on the line were severely wounded; he had personally seen three Heroes amputate and cauterize their own ruined arms with beamers and move forward, carrying whatever weapon they could still wield. It was a day of loss and blood and terror and fierce fierce fierce exultation: it was akin to living in the time of the Ancient Heroes, of being in one of the sagas, of…

“Freay’ysh-Administrator, our scouts have come upon a hard point: a large pillbox partially built out of an immense tooth of stone straddling hot springs.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator looked around for the source of the voice; a Hero, his left side bloody and partly shredded by a human mine, waited upon his reply. Freay’ysh-Administrator wanted to shriek in joy and rage, and order a general charge-but the small, interior voice reasserted momentarily, just long enough to compel him to ask: “This pillbox is in a clearing, yes?”

“Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

“How much open ground from the edge of the surrounding cover to the pillbox?”

“Rangefinders put it at eighty meters, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

Eighty meters: not much, but on the other hand, the humans had achieved quite a lot, just clearing that much brush and building this pillbox. Whatever their disgusting habits and contemptible inferiorities, the leaf-eaters did not lack industriousness. Or inventiveness: somewhere off in the distance, a whistle shrilled three times. A signal of some sort, obviously, but for what? The Ancestors themselves would not have known. “Is the fort equipped with heavy weapons?”

“Impossible to tell until we probe it. So far, all we have seen is that they have adapted some of our own beamers to personal use. And we know that some of our missiles are missing, and probably in their hands.”

“Yes, that is true. Do you have a clear signal to Captain?”

The Hero blinked at hearing his superior’s title stripped of his Name. “We have a clear signal.”

“He is to call in our two dedicated attack craft immediately. They are to fly to these coordinates and await our signal to come beneath the mists and strike at the pillbox, if necessary. Choose three steady Heroes for laser designation.”

“And then, Freay’ysh-Administrator?”

Freay’ysh-Administrator heard the eagerness in the kzin’s voice, felt his own hunger for rending the humans limb from limb leap up to meet that excitement-but mastered it. For the last time, he promised the best, fiercest, and truest part of himself. After this, the Rage. Just the Rage. Until the humans are no more.

“Freay’ysh-Administrator?”

Freay’ysh-Administrator struggled back out of his visions, out of savoring the carnage to come. “Security teams to the flanks. Assure we are safe. The rest encircle the hardpoint. Concentrate fire. If the humans are weak enough, we shall not risk the attack craft. If they are stubborn, one airstrike will ensure that their fort becomes their tomb.”

Through old-fashioned binoculars, Smith watched the five kzinti trudge up the hill. Like almost everything else the ’Runners used, the binoculars did not rely upon batteries. And in this brief campaign, that had been a welcome feature: there had been enough other logistical needs to contend with.

One of the ’Runners in the defilading trench whispered, “Captain, I see ’em, too. Should we-?”

“Stay down. Stay quiet. Stay calm. Those are orders.”

A stunned silence was followed by a whispered chorus of “Yes, sir.”

Smith watched the five ratcats scan the slopes, saw two glance longingly behind, in the direction of the firefight and the fleeing humans. The intervals between the Heroes of this flank security patrol had started well, but now they were pulling apart: the two back-lookers had begun to drift wide of the other three. Predictably, back down toward the battle unfolding on floor of the valley.

Remonstrations that Smith could not hear were obviously uttered. And ignored. The kzin on point in the upslope group raised a weapon, pointed in the direction of the two malcontents. One roared something: the posture could have meant outrage, challenge, frustration, impatience, or any mix of them. The point-man’s gun wavered. The other two did not move directly away, but their distance widened. Within a minute they would be out of sight of the three who were still ascending the slope, and it was plain to Smith that the pair’s course would then shift even more radically back in the direction of the valley floor and all the excitement there.

Which, twenty seconds later, became an almost irresistible lure. The main kzin force, having gathered in a wide ring around the pillbox, tried to send a team to work through the misty margin between the flank of the strongpoint and the southern hot spring. Weapon fire erupted from the pillbox; two kzinti went down immediately. A third was clipped in the back of the leg as he tried to reach the safety of the tree line again. Stumbling to a knee, he rose up, was swatted down again by a shot from a hunting rifle, staggered, got both legs under him-and his back fairly exploded in a cloud of small bits of blood and fur: the work of a strakkaker on full auto. The mauled kzin finally fell over. In the meantime, the final, fourth member of the kzin probing team leaped into the underbrush and vanished.

The response along the kzin line was both spontaneous and unanimous: the surrounding perimeter of covering brush erupted in weapon fire, all directed inward upon the pillbox. Beamers slashed at it, autoguns peppered it with the force of jackhammers. When that first wave of fire relented, and the smoke cleared, the pillbox still stood. It certainly looked worse for wear, but it was structurally intact and defensibly sound.

Smith swung his binoculars back to the kzin flankers coming up his slope. The two who had already been veering away were now sprinting pell-mell back in the direction of the battle that had been joined. Of the remaining three, their pace slowed, not due to argument, but to indulge in a wistful appreciation of the same martial spectacle. One of them started pointing in that direction as the gunfire began again: not so concentrated this time, but steady and loud.

Which was why none of the three slope-scouting kzinti heard the reports of the elephant guns that fired into them from the rear. Two of the Heroes went down immediately, one missing his head before he even started to fall. The third staggered against a tree, then fell into the brush, left arm dangling uselessly, his right leg washed in blood: not quite an arterial wound, but a bad one.

His tumble into the bushes was probably what saved him in those first seconds. There was no movement in the undergrowth for a five count, then a ten count-

At the count of thirteen, the kzin came rushing out with a severe limp, but the real shock was that he could force himself to move at all. Smith saw one flash and then another jump out of the dark wall of the undergrowth some seventy meters behind the kzin. Both shots were misses. Another ten meters, and the kzin would reach the cover of a granite outcropping and be within shouting distance of-

Two more flashes licked out of the distant wall of tangled vegetation, and the last kzin fell over, three meters short of the outcropping.

Smith exhaled through a smile.

The fellow next to him in the slit trench-a ’Runner named Tip and their best guncotton brewer-cocked a quizzical head: “What’s up, hauptman?”

“Our odds of success,” Smith replied, “our odds of success.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator waved away the two scouts who had just returned from scouting the left, or northern, flank. They claimed there had been nothing to report on the northern slopes. So why were the other three in their team continuing to search? Nervous glances had gone back and forth between the two of them: because they were going higher, just to be sure. Yes, that was what they were doing.

In his earlier and weaker days, Freay’ysh-Administrator would probably have clouted them across the nose for what was obviously an abandonment of their assigned duties: there was no way they could have gone high enough up the slopes to conduct a full security sweep. That, no doubt, was what the other three, including the team leader, were still doing.

But Freay’ysh-Administrator could not bring himself to punish them for heeding the savage summons singing in their blood, since it was the same one he was following as well. Indeed, the scouts on the other flank had abandoned their mission en masse as soon as the barrage was unleashed upon the pillbox. When asked to explain themselves, they had looked down, abashed-a cub’s reflex-and admitted that they had forgotten the mission they had been sent to carry out.

In the moment, Freay’ysh-Administrator had had to struggle to keep his pelt from writhing in sudden amusement, because he knew they were telling the truth. When the siren-song of combat drew them back, it wasn’t an act of insubordination. It was a strangely intense, almost irresistible attraction to a veritable orgy of violence, of sating a bloodlust almost as arousing as the promise of ch’rowl. The need to weed out insurgents, to show mastery, to exact vengeance had long fallen aside as the primary motivations of their struggle in the Susser Tal: it was to satisfy their hunger-both individually and as a group-to drench themselves in the gore of the humans. Nothing else would do, for nothing else remained in their minds.

The kzin known as Communicator approached him. “Latest reports, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

“Yes?”

“Still no word from the last upslope scouts, sir, although it is still somewhat early to expect them to have-”

“I am unconcerned: if the humans had significant forces up there, they would have intervened by now. They would have a clear field of fire down upon us here, and would not be so foolish to miss taking advantage of it.”

“As you say, Freay’ysh-Administrator. Our attempts to outflank the stronghold itself have been repulsed. There are only a few meters between the flanking faces of the pillbox and the hot springs to either side. And there is no cover.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator waved his acceptance of the situation: he had watched three of the attempts himself. They had been futile-and costly-tactical probes. “What else?”

“We confirm at least half a dozen defenders killed inside the pillbox, but there must be at least fifty more leaf-eaters sheltering behind its walls.”

“Have you tried to fire through the embrasures with the beamers?” It would be a difficult shot, of course, but the effects, if successful-

As if to illustrate the futility of that option, a beam lanced out at the pillbox. It was focused on the horizontal slit in the front face of the structure, but then it seemed to double back on itself. The resulting explosion threw out a jet of dust and debris, occluding the embrasure, and making it impossible to keep the beam fixed on the initial aim point. At the same instant, one of the defenders’ elephant guns barked, and the kzin who had been wielding the beamer yowled piteously.

“That has been the result so far,” explained Communicator. “Although we cannot see it in the shadows, the embrasure is stepped, and irregularly so. Consequently, if the beam is not perfectly aligned, it will graze against the stepped surfaces. This deflects part of the beam’s energy back upon the beam itself and obscures the aim point with debris. Also, to hold the beam on target for more than two seconds both threatens to burn out the weapon from overheating, and also attracts the attention of the enemy’s marksmen, as you just saw.”

So. Half a dozen of the humans killed. Maybe. At least thirty of his Heroes had been lost in the trade; more, if you counted the wounded. Working around to the rear of the structure would mean an all-night hike up the slopes and down again on the far side. And once there, if his guess was correct, they would find rear-facing embrasures in the structure, built to frustrate just such an attempt to get in behind it. He turned his gaze on Communicator. “The attack craft are on station?”

“Awaiting your orders, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”

“Pull our Heroes back from the tree line. Once they have found adequate cover, call in the air strike. Let us throw open the gates that we may drink their blood without losing any more of our own.”

Hilda noticed it before Gunnar could shout it out. “They’re pulling back! Gott sei dank, they’re-!”

“No. They’re not.” She grabbed her gear, gave a high sign to Papa Sumpfrunner, who dropped through the narrow hatchway in the floor of the pillbox.

“Whaddya mean?” shrieked Gunnar, almost as loud and enraged as a wounded kzin might have sounded. “They’ve stopped firing. I can see them un-assing their positions. They’ve had enough, they’ve-”

“Shut up, Gunnar. They’re not giving up; they’re clearing the zone.”

“Clearing the zone? For what?”

“So they can bring in their strike package. Now: everyone down the hole. We’re getting out of here.”

The kzin fast movers were in and out so quickly that Smith doubted he could have launched a self-guiding missile at them, even if he had wanted to.

Clearly, the kzin pilots had been warned that the humans had nabbed a couple of dual-purpose missiles in the early stages of the hunt-become-a-campaign. When the two ground-attack birds roared down out of the low-hanging murk, their internal bay seals were already open for munitions deployment. A cluster of missiles dropped out of each one’s belly. As their rockets ignited and they streaked toward the pillbox, the attack craft were already nosing back up into the mists: they disappeared just as the strike package hit its target dead-on.

Smith had not thought that, at more than half a kilometer’s distance, the sound would be too bad, or the destructive force so considerable that he should suspend observing the area of operations. So he was not prepared for the deafening roar, nor the concussive wave that slapped him against the rear wall of the trench so hard that it winded him. And the six bright after-images of the warhead flashes, which moved around with his point-of-view, had the look of a retinal imprint that would not disappear for quite a while.

His men, who had obeyed his precautions to remain under cover, were smiling at him. Tips, the powderman, drawled with a grin, “Seems like someone forgot to take his own advice, Captain.”

Smith grinned back. At last: they were calling him Captain.

And best of all, they were teasing him.

Freay’ysh-Administrator stood as the grit and rock shards that had been blasted skyward by the strike package began to fall around them like monstrous hail. As it did, the thickest drifts of the ground smoke began to clear, revealing a shattered, rocky shell where the low, sturdy pillbox had been. Piercing screams of triumph and victory rose up all along the arc of kzin attackers, who now sprung to their feet, weapons ready, bodies hunched forward, each eager to be first to find survivors, bodies, pieces, anything human that they might further rend and despoil.

And why shouldn’t they? If the cleared area around the pillbox had been seeded with mines, the concussive ground wave would certainly have triggered them. If there had been booby-traps in the structure, they would have been either tripped or disabled. And if there were any survivors in that smoking framework of waist-high remains, it was best to be upon them swiftly, before they could fight back or flee.

The Rage was poised within Freay’ysh-Administrator just as his body was poised to run. Was there anything left to consider? It was hard to think beyond the desire to attack, to rend, to rape-and so he did not bother to think.

The long, ululating shriek that rose up from him was like an engine, propelling him forward. Shifting his beamer to his left hand, he drew his w’tsai and bounded-five meters per leap-toward the ruined human pillbox.

With a chorus of cries akin to Freay’ysh-Administrator’s own, his remaining troops rushed from their hiding places, a ring of snarling orange fur converging upon the smoking pit that was their final objective.

“Stink!” came the sharp call sign whisper from the bracken to Smith’s rear.

He gave the response-“Pot!”-and watched as Hilda came low-crawling into the slit trench. “Did everyone get out?”

“Yeah, but just barely. The tunnel collapsed about ten meters behind me.”

“Behind you? You were the last one out?”

“My post: my job.”

He smiled and touched her face. The men in the trench stared, then looked away awkwardly: almost all were smiling; the youngest one was blushing.

Freay’ysh-Administrator leaped from smoking rockpile to smoking rockpile. Here and there a hand, a leg, part of a torso, a few human implements twisted and scorched beyond easy recognition. Cordite and sulfur and guttering fires completed a tableau that some human mythologists associated with the punishment-place that they called hell. But-

“There are not enough bodies, or material,” he snarled. The Heroes around him growled and snapped their agreement.

But one yowled sharply. “Here! A trapdoor! They must have crawled away through a tunnel, like the shit-burrowers that they are.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator felt his fur standing straight out, partly from rage at being thwarted again, partly because it meant there was more hunt left to thrill him, and the promise of rending more humans-live ones-at its conclusion. He reached the flimsy door in two great bounds, felt his troops gathering close around him. He tried to remember his training, to think what would be wisest at this point. Tunnel attacks were a risky business, but they were Heroes, and their adversaries were skinny, swamp-grubbing humans who were outcasts even amongst their own contemptible species.

“Down! After them!” he shrieked, and his Heroes roared approval and struggled with each other to be the first down the hole.

Hilda almost sighed when Smith removed his gentle hand from her face and his tone became businesslike again. “So what about the wires?”

“Well, I’m glad we laid three sets,” Hilda admitted. “And we still have the wireless relay, if it comes to that.”

“Guess we’ll find out. You wanna do the honors?”

She stared at the wire-wound, inverted alligator clips-adapted from jumper cables-that had been pressed into service as a contact detonator: “No: it’s your show.”

“Freay’ysh-Administrator, we can go no further: the tunnel is too narrow for us beyond thirty meters, and it has caved in. But there may be another exit.”

“Yes?”

“We have found another door-much better hidden-in the floor of this subterranean shelter.”

“Well, open it!”

“Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator. But perhaps we should start by cutting the wires running down through the floor alongside it?”

Far at the back of Freay’ysh-Administrator’s lust-besotted consciousness, a small voice rose one last time, crying for one last moment of caution.

A cry that came one moment too late.

Smith smiled at Hilda, squeezed the makeshift contact detonator, and, bringing her down with him, ducked into the trench.

The entirety of the Sumpfrunners’ reserve stores of explosives went up with a roar nearly equal to the kzin strike package. But this explosion was longer, lower, louder, and it hoisted up great slabs of rock and gouts of dirt.

It also vaporized or splattered all but forty of the kzinti that had intended to slaughter the humans as completely as they themselves were now being slaughtered.

As the first vertically ejected rocks came down, some easily large enough to be lethal, Hilda looked up over the edge of the slit trench. The surviving kzinti were littered in an arc around the smoking hole that remained, moving feebly. Most were trying to roll or crawl away from the epicenter of destruction, thin lines of blood running out of their ears and nostrils. One or two actually staggered upright.

Hilda felt, rather than saw, Smith stand up. When she looked over at him, he was clenching a starter’s whistle between his teeth. He blew it once, paused, blew it twice-

— the kzinti, shaking their heads, stared around dumbly, as if vaguely aware that, despite their shattered hearing, there was some new sound in the air around them-

— Smith blew the whistle three times.

The troops in the slit trench rose up, leaned over their weapons, adjusted their sights. Across the valley, Hilda could just barely make out subtle hints of the same movements being performed in that defilade trench, too.

And then-one slow, deliberate shot after the next-the turkey shoot began.

Papa Sumpfrunner-who now insisted that they call him by his given name, Maurice-looked back down from the Grosse Felsbank’s Schwerlinie Pass into the Susser Tal. Hilda, seeing the melancholy look on his face, stopped to join him. Smith slowed to a halt a little further along the trail, standing to one side so that the refugee Sumpfrunners could still pass two abreast into the narrowest part of their journey: a crevice only four meters wide, but with walls almost two hundred meters high. Once on the other side of it, they would be on the reverse slope of the Grosse Felsbank and unable to see the valley anymore.

“Seems wrong,” Maurice grumbled, looking down at the Susser Tal. “Birthed there, lived there, loved there, chapped there, fought there. It’d be rightways that I’d die there. Ja, stimm’.”

Hilda put a hand on his narrow, wiry shoulder. “But you’d die too soon, Maurice. You know the kzinti are going to go in again, and this time, no half measures. They lost the better part of two battalions in the Susser Tal; that makes it more than a regional problem. Chuut-Riit or one of his inner circle will take charge and bring in all the resources at their disposal.” She shook her head. “You fought a good fight for as long as you could fight it. Now it’s time for you-for all of you-to leave.”

“Shouldn’t never have fought at all,” he retorted. “Warn’t our fight. Not worth it. It was outsider doings, an outsider war. We coulda waited until-”

“Until someone came to save you, or the kzinti owned the world so completely that they decided that even the Sumpfrinne had to be forced to bow down before them.” Smith’s voice wasn’t exactly harsh, but it certainly wasn’t gentle. “There are no outsiders anymore, Maurice. Flatlanders, Belters, herrenmanner, ’Runners: we’re all fighting the kzinti, fighting for our lives, for our species. And sometimes, in order to keep doing that-to survive to fight not just another day, but throughout all the years that might follow-we have to leave things behind. Our families, our lives, our homes. I came from around here, too, and I don’t know if any of my family is left alive. I don’t even know if I’ll ever see them, or my home, again. But I cope and keep fighting.”

Smith looked back at the Susser Tal; the mists thinned, thickened, and roiled in futile bids to escape. “That valley made you ’Runners tough. Tougher than drylanders, I used to hear your relatives tell my dad. So now you tell me: are you tough enough to do what I’m doing? To leave your home to fight the kzin? At least this way, you get to stay together with your families.” Smith waved to take in the winding stream of refugees, making their way slowly through the passes, some being carried on litters. “Because you know what would have happened if you had stayed behind. Instead of watching your young and your old and your wives and children taking a hard passage over hard mountains, you’d be watching them-one by one-fleeing through the bushes, through the meadows, flitting among the trees, before the kzin coursers finally catch them and rip them limb from bloody limb. For sport, mind you: for sport, practice, and a little ratcat thrill. So tell me: is living in your valley worth that? Is that what you want to stick around and see, just so you can hang on to that piece of land a few weeks more?”

Maurice looked back toward the Susser Tal. “My gros’vati, he was willing to fight and die to keep that patch of swamp.” The mists thinned, revealing the festering Sumpfrinne. Maurice shrugged. “I guess he wuz the hot-headed type.” He tilted a cracked smile at Smith, patted Hilda on the arm, and then resumed trudging up the path.

Hilda turned to look after Maurice, let her eyes slip over to Smith. “So, about that secret weapon-”

“C’mon, you’ve figured that out already.”

“The basics, ja. It altered the kzinti’s behavior, but in such a way that it must have felt-well, normal to them. So I’m guessing it was a pheromone or a hormone.”

Smith nodded. “Both, actually. Specifically, a pheromone that activates their rut-aggression hormone.”

“Rut-aggression? Is that any different than plain old aggression?”

“Actually, yes, it’s very different. Whereas we human males have pretty much just one main aggression hormone-testosterone-the kzinti have several. And unlike testosterone, which performs a lot of other functions in the body-like growth regulation and muscle development-kzin hormones tend to be one-purpose compounds.”

“That must make for a much more complicated system.”

“I’m no biologist, but it’s a very different system, certainly. Rather than relying upon a single big gland secreting a single hormone that handles a bunch of related functions, the kzin physiology separates the same functions into many smaller glands. In addition to better loss-resistance through organ redundancy, this also gives their bodies the opportunity to employ a lot of finely tuned hormonal effects.”

“And that’s where all their various aggression hormones come in?”

“Right. When our scientists started doing comparative studies linking kzin biochemistry to kzin behavior, they started wondering: if kzin males will unthinkingly and often uncontrollably fight to the death over females because of a surge in aggression hormones, then how do they exert the self-control they show during military operations, when their aggression hormones are also at high tide? So the researchers started looking very closely at the kzin aggression hormone and discovered that what looked at first like one compound was actually a family of related compounds, each of which evinced subtle differences from the others. What they identified as the ‘rut-aggression hormone’ was by far the most powerful of them all. But it was also the one that was most selectively and rarely secreted, since it is only released when a male is exposed to the pheromones of a female in estrus.”

Hilda nodded. “So the other aggression hormones still permit some measure of flight-or-fight discretion, whereas the rut-aggression hormone is, essentially, a berserker drug.”

“Exactly. And because of its evolutionary connection with mating, their brains find it an especially thrilling high, so much so that they don’t really care if they live or die.”

“I guess that was pretty much an evolutionary necessity, given how deadly kzinti are, even to other kzinti.”

“Ja: they needed something that was going to trump common sense during the mating season if natural selection was going to favor maximum combat power and aggressiveness. The weaker ones had to fight-and die-in order to maintain an optimal breeding population.”

“That’s a grim picture,” commented Hilda.

“Yes, but it turned out to be a very pretty picture for us. Once the researchers had isolated this hormone, they started to realize that it had extraordinary weapons potential. Yes, it made the kzinti extremely aggressive, but it also made them more impetuous, harder to control, incapable of self-restraint, and too impatient to formulate or follow complicated plans.”

“In short, you reduced them to the kzin equivalent of cavemen.”

“Right.”

“And so where does your little silver case come in? Were you spraying the female estrus pheromone in the places you expected them to be? That doesn’t seem very effective.”

“You’re right; that wouldn’t be effective at all. And that was the real challenge of the research project: to design an effective delivery system.”

“Which was?”

“Which was not to deliver the estrus pheromone like a weapon, all at once, but more like slow poisoning: something that increased slowly over time.”

Hilda shuddered. “So what did they come up with?”

Smith smiled and opened the case. Inside was a canister for compressed gases, a temperature-control system, sensors, and a small data-reader.

Hilda gawked. “And that’s it?”

“That’s it. The trick is that the canister doesn’t contain the estrus pheromone: it contains a geneered mold that remains inert when at or near zero Celsius. However, when it is released into a warmer environment, it quickly activates. When it reaches maturity it releases several different chemicals into the air, one of which is a slightly denatured form of the pheromone that the kzinti females release during estrus. When it comes into contact with a kzin male’s mucosa, it is too weak to generate the smell they associate with the female, but it is still potent enough to trigger the hormone production cascade that results in the release of the rut-aggression hormone.”

“You mean, they’re running around angry and horny?”

Smith laughed; it was a pleasant sound. She’d only heard it a few times before, and very much looked forward to hearing more of it in the months to come. “No, they’re not horny. Not exactly. It’s more like they’re…well, on edge.”

Hilda raised an eyebrow. “As you have now learned, I’m not a prude. I believe the common term you’re looking for is ‘blue balls.’” And to her utter delight, the redoubtable Captain Smith actually blushed: very slightly, but the glow was there. Hilda, even your mother would like this one-

Smith was pointing to a small aperture in the side of the case, mated to the narrow nozzle of the canister. “I just pressed this button under the handle, here, and the mold was discharged through this hole. Although I started by seeding the key parts of the valley, the mold spread far beyond them, flourishing in the environmental conditions of the Sumpfrinne: hot, humid, lots of decay. Mold paradise.”

She nodded. “And then as you walked around, that sensor package kept track of the amount of pheromone that was being released. And I’m guessing you seeded the entry to the Susser Tal lightly, so that the kzinti would be advancing into areas of steadily increasing mold density. That way the effects would grow slowly enough that they’d never notice them, particularly not if it felt good, and their own powers of observation and cognition were being undercut.”

“Yes, that was one of the reasons. Also, I had to measure the type and intensity of kzin behavioral change at different levels of exposure. The experimental data are guesstimates at best: there was no way to control for continuous versus intermittent exposure, or for the effects of exposure incidents of different duration. But what we did learn is that it works, that the kzinti don’t feel the onset, and that their sensors don’t detect it as a toxin or biohazard. And why should they? It’s a natural product of their bodies, and one that they seem to consider a positive hormone.”

“So now what? Grow the mold and share the joy with our kzin visitors all over Wunderland?”

Smith shook his head. “Nei. That’s the last thing we want. One of the other reasons that the brass chose the Susser Tal is because of the spring flooding from the mountain runoffs. Sustained immersion in water kills the mold, and we don’t want to leave any long-term evidence behind, or worse yet, have started a crèche from which the stuff can spread naturally.”

“I don’t get that; so how-or more to the point, when-do we get to use this as a weapon?”

Smith reached out and held both her hands in his. “As soon as we get the coded signal confirming that the counter-invasion fleet from Earth is in the system. We, or whoever is around to use it, will spread the mold, ensuring the highest possible densities in the landing areas.”

Hilda nodded. “Makes sense to keep it as a surprise weapon for when all the cards are on the table. Once we release it broadly on the planet, it will not only help our forces retake Wunderland, but will be a permanent planetary defense. And I am presuming, of course, that the mold will be seeded on Earth, itself?”

Smith shrugged. “That’s supposed to remain classified, but given what you’ve seen here, I don’t think it’s much of a secret.”

“No, it isn’t. In fact, as far as I can tell, there’s only one more secret that needs revealing.”

“Oh?” Smith looked genuinely perplexed.

Could he be so smart-and so dumb-all at the same time? She pulled her hands out of his, put them on her hips, smiled up into his still-wondering face: “How about your name? What’s your real name, Captain Smith?”

“Oh, that.” He smiled. “I’m Wulf. Wulf Armbrust.”

She put her hands on his chest and stood on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. “Nice to meet you, Captain Wulf Armbrust. Now, let’s catch up with the logistics staff: we’re going to need to rework the portage roster to redistribute the food and water.”

Together, they turned their backs on the mist-filled Susser Tal and resumed the long trek between the snow covered peaks of the Grosse Felsbank, so impossibly high above them.