The Man-Kzin Wars 05

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Spots-Son of Chotrz-Shaa whimpered softly in his sleep. He was hiding from his father. Chotrz-Shaa had seen the vids from the Fourth Fleet sent against Man-Home. Three elder sons and a brother had sailed with the Fourth Fleet; Ssis-Captain, Second Gunner and Squadron Analyst. Chotrz-Shaa raged through the home complex; the scent of his anger was terrible. In the palazzos of the harem, mothers tucked their kittens into cupboards or piles of pillows and yowled their fear and defiance, prepared to fight to the death to keep the enraged male from eating the young. That was an instinct older than the Patriarchy, older than speech and tools.

Spots-Son followed in his father’s wake; the smell of killing rage repelled and led. Occasionally a faint euuuw-euuuw trickled past the young kzin’s lips; his brother the Big One gave him a contemptuous look, that was the infant’s distress call. They followed down corridors of black basalt with trophies of ceremonial weapons, into the communications room. Sometimes their father brought them there for lessons with the teaching machines, but now it was in turmoil; smashed crockery, modules thrown here and there. A human servant huddled bleeding in one corner, then scuttled out as the youngsters entered.

Pictures were up on the wall holo. For a long time the two youngsters stared at them without comprehension, until Spots recognized the face in one.

“Uncle Ssis-Captain!” he cried. “Sire’s Brother!”

Bigs reared back beside him with a reeearrwowow of protest, hair bottling out and tail stiff. Uncle Ssis-Captain was dead. He was floating in zero-G, with the bottom half of him gone. The brothers were old enough for preliminary education; they both knew about spacecraft, and kzinti anatomy.

“But… but Uncle Ssis-Captain went to conquer the monkeys!” Spots wailed.

Uncle Ssis-Captain had picked him up and swung him around, and promised him an elephant-hunt when he came to visit on the estate on Earth…

“The monkeys killed Uncle Ssis-Captain,” Bigs said shakily. “That -.. that is Brother and Brother.” The other two forms in the bob were calcinated to ash and bone, but one had a chased-tungsten arm ring. Their father had given that when the Fleet left on its mission of conquest.

Two shrill cries of grief and rage rose, higher and higher until an adult mar cut them off.

“What are you doing here?” it bellowed.

Spots threw himself down flat, paws over eyes and fur laid flat. Bigs was more reckless; he stood upright, met his father’s eyes.

“I shall kill all the monkeys-they killed Uncle and-”

“Silence, cub!” Chotrz-Shaa bellowed, backhanding the youngling into the wall and whimpering silence. The huge face bent low, filling Spots’s vision, all glaring eyes and teeth and rage-smell.

“No, Father!” he cried, and woke.

I detest that dream, he thought, shaking his head and rolling up to all fours.

It was the hour before dawn, with the moon down and the air chilly; it felt good to be comfortable in his fur, and scents were marvelously clear. Eyesight was flatter and less color-sensitive than in daylight, but otherwise not much less as the pupils of his eyes expanded until the iris was only a yellow thread around the black pits of sight. Something moved, a human-he sniffed deeply-yes, the blander, earthier odor of the female.

Good, he thought. That dream usually came when something serious disturbed him in his sleep. If the human-female was trying to escape, he could kill it without angering Jonah-human; that would be best. Jonah is a fine monkey, he thought. If the thought were not slightly blasphemous, one could wish that he had been born a Hero, I will make him my Chief Slave when we reconquer Wonderland. As they would, if Bigs was right. If only. My liver says yes, but my brain disagrees. Enough. The longest leap begins with setting your hindclaws. First the Tyra-human.

He crept forward, belly to the earth, tail straight back to balance his weight and hands touching down occasionally to guide it. Ready for the sudden overwhelming rush, the final leap; he needed no weapon for this. Excitement folded his ears back into knots and drew lips back from teeth, brought the claws sliding out on all eight digits. Almost, he was reluctant to end it; Tyra-human moved very quietly, for a monkey, and he might have had trouble following her if the breeze had not been with him. Eagerness brought him forward faster, but with only a little more noise; a pebble displaced, a thorn snagging his fur and snapping. Then he went rigid with shock.

“Quiet,” she said, turning and calling softly. “They’re moving up the valley.”

She looked directly at him, with the bulbous shape of nightsight glasses hiding her eyes. She spoke in the Hero’s Tongue, as closely as a monkey could come to pronouncing it; in the Warning Tense. He nearly screamed and leapt then; only caution at the sight of her magrifle gave him pause. Then the sense of the words sank home.

They? he thought. Quickly he came level with her and followed her pointing hand. Motion, over a kilometer away; he took the glasses from his belt and looked. Humans on horseback, leading other horses. Octal to the second of them, all heavily armed, and he recognized the shapes of knock-down beamers on the lead horses.

“Who?” he breathed. I lay my fur flat in shame. Claw your own nose and roll in sthondat excrement, Spotted Fool! We should have kept lookouts.

“Don’t know,” she replied. Even now a thought flickered, how easy it would be to reach out-only arm’s reach-and slash her throat open.

No. Not with an unknown factor… unless she led them to us? His lips went further back in rage, but it was unlikely.

“Could be the Provisional Gendarmerie,” she said softly. “Or it could be bandits. Either way, bad news for us. They’ll be here by dawn at that rate. Can’t miss the trail and the water-furrow.”

Us, Spots thought mournfully. Us expands to too many monkeys. The Fanged God would have his jokes on those so lost to honor that they surrendered.

I will rip your throat yet, he thought, staring resentfully up into the sky for a second. The God appreciated a good fight.

“I will wake the others,” he went on aloud.

“Well, they’ve got Provisional Gendarmerie armbands,” Jonah said, lowering the magnifier.

“Cloth’s cheap,” Hans replied.

Jonah nodded, mind busy. “All right. Spots, you take your beamer and dig in behind those rocks over there. Hans, get the mules back into the diggings and then set up on the hill over the entrance.”

Hans was the best shot of all of them; it was difficult to be a bad shot with a military magrifle, but he was superb.

“I’ll take the center, here.”

“What about me?” Tyra Nordbo said.

I with to Finagle you were far, far away, Jonah thought. Aloud: “Ever used that rifle?”

“Yes.”

The reply was bitten off, and from the expression she hadn’t enjoyed it. All to the good; he’d known people in the UN Navy who enjoyed combat, and none of them were types he’d like to have backing him up. They tended to fly off the handle like… like kzinti, come to think of it.

“You get about ten meters to the east of me and take that little knoll.” He turned to eye the two kzin. “And nobody fires unless they open up, or I give the order. Understood?”

Bigs looked skeptical. “What if they flank us?” Spots asked. “There are enough of them.”

“Then we’ll retreat,” Jonah said. “And someone else will have the headache of what to do with that.” He jerked a thumb towards the entrance to the diggings.

The mounted column wove over the ridge opposite and down into the morning shadow of the valley, disappearing into the dense vegetation along the streambed. Jonah burrowed deeper into cover, showing nothing but the lenses of his field glasses, their systems keyed to passive receptors only. IR would show their locations, of course; a good deal depended on how much the whatever-they-were had in the way of detection systems. Quite a bit if they really were Provisionals, anything from the Eyeball Mark I to military issue if they were bandits. The dawn was coming up in the east, to his right; the snowpeaks and clouds around the summits of the Jotuns turned red as blood, while Beta was a point of white fire overhead. The waterfall toned and thundered to his right, mist rising out of darkness into light.

He pulled the audio jack on his field glasses out and put it in his ear. The instrument clicked, sorting out sound not in the human-voice frequencies. Then:

“…boot some head…”

“Shut up, scheisskopf! Turn it on!”

A crackling hiss filled his ear, Wonders of modern technology, he reflected sourly; it was always easier to make things not happen than to make them happen, so countermeasures generally ran ahead of detection. The rustle of boots and the clink of equipment came more dearly, and the tock… tock… of synthetic horseshoes on firm ground or rock. The strangers were in no hurry They stopped to water their horses and picket them, to set up a firing line along the edge of the brush, before two walked out from under the trees and began climbing the bill.

“Everybody stay calm,” Jonah warned again, as the pair halted and looked upslope.

They looked tough, shabby and a little hungry; or at least the rat-faced thin one did. The leader had a beer belly that hung over his gunbelt, and even in the cool morning sweat stains marked his armpits. He carried a strakkaker at his belt and a magrifle in his hands; his companion had the chunky shape of a jazzer slung from an assault sling. That fired miniature molecular-distortion batteries set to discharge into any living tissue they met. An unpleasant weapon.

The big-bellied leader smiled, a false grin creasing his stubbled face. His Wunderlander had a thick accent, maybe regional, or he might have come from one of the many ethnic enclaves that dotted the planet:

“Hey, you up there? Why you hiding?”

“Why are you here?” Jonah replied. “Ride on. We’ll mind our business, you mind yours.”

“Hey, we can’t do that, man!” the other man said. “We’re the Provisional Gendarmerie-you know, the mounted police? We’re inspecting the area for illegal weapons. New order, to confiscate all illegal weapons, peace and order, you know?”

“What’s illegal?” Jonah asked.

“Just military stuff, man. You know, magrifles, jazzers, beamers-hunting rifles, they are fine.

“Let’s see some ID, then.”

“ID? We got plenty of ID. Here, I show you.”

The fat man pulled something out of a leg-pocket on his stained pants and handed it to the smaller figure beside him. He murmured an order, which the other seemed to resent; then he took off his hat and began thrashing the little man over the head and shoulders.

“Ja, boss, Ja, I’ll take it,” the small man with the big nose said.

“Here!” he called out, climbing towards Jonah’s position.

“Toss it over that rock and get back down,” Jonah shouted.

Ratface scuttled to obey, and Jonah signed to Tyra. She leopard-crawled with her rifle across her elbows, over to the plastic card and examined it with a frown of puzzlement; then she ran it past the scanner of her beltcomp. That brought another frown, and she kept crawling to within arm’s length of him to pass the ID. He glanced down at it; a holo of the fat man’s face, looking indecent without its stubble. Serial number, and Leuenant Edward Gruederman, Provizional Staatspolezi.

“My comp recognizes the codes, and I updated about a month ago, but…”

“But?” Jonah bit out. If he had stood off a real Gendarmerie Leuenant, they were all in serious trouble. Wunderland was under martial law, and out here a mounted police officer could be judge, jury and executioner all in one. Staging a shoot-out with the police would be absolute suicide, even if he won. Jonah Matthieson’s ambiguous status would harden into “desperate criminal” quite quickly, then.

“But if that lot are Provisional’s, I’m a kzinrett.” She bit her lip; even then it was interesting… “Look, herr Matthieson-up until two months ago, I was in the Provisional Gendarmerie. My brother Ib’s a captain. I spent six months riding with them. That lot down there smell wrong, completely.”

Jonah met her eyes, a changeable sea-blue; tinted with gray this morning, desperately sincere. Tanj, why couldn’t she be a middle-aged battleaxe of eighty?

“All right,” he said. “I’ll play it safe.” Because f we do give up our suns, there’s our options gone right there. “You get over there east of the Brothers Kzinamaratsov; they might come up the gully.”

To his surprise, he heard her chuckle-he had only taken up ancient literature in the last year himself; data was free, if nothing else-and she touched a finger to her brow before heading off east with an expert’s use of cover.

“If this ID is genuine,” Jonah called down to the man halfway up the slope, “then you won’t mind me calling in to Munchen for confirmation. Leuenant Gruederman.”

Gruederman began a snarl, and forced it back into a smile. Docking contact, Jonah told himself. Tyra was right.

“Hey, man, we don’t want to steal your guns-it’s the law, you know. Here-” he shoved the other man “- we’ll give you compensation.”

“See,” the little man said, rummaging in his knapsack. “This is worth three, maybe four hundred krona!” He held up a briefcase sized box, an obsolete model of musicomp and library. “Good stuff, pre-war!”

Stolen from some fanner you bushwhacked, Jonah thought grimly. He took up the slack on his trigger and put the aiming point on the musicomp. Whack. The casing exploded and the little bandit went howling and whirling away, face slashed by the fragments. The sharp sound of the high-velocity round went echoing off down the valley in a whack-whackkkkk of fading repetitions.

“Get moving,” Jonah called flatly.

The bandit chief’s face convulsed, going from a broad grin to an expression that was worthy of a kzin. Spittle flecked out as he screamed:

“You can’t do this to Ed Gruederman! I will boot your head!”

The smaller bandit had recovered enough to unlimber his jazzer. A round cracked over Jonah’s head; by reflex he shifted aim and sent a short burst into the man’s torso. It blossomed out in a mist of sliced bone and flesh as the prefrag bullets punched in and disintegrated, a thousand crystalline buzzsaws of adamantine strength. By the time he shifted back it was too late. Gruederman threw himself backward in a desperate flip, somersaulting and rolling down the short distance to cover. Bullets pecked at his shadow, and then the whole treeline opened up. Magrifle bullets chewed at the stone, and a boulder exploded as a tripod-mounted beamer punched megajoules of energy into its brittle structure. Thunder rolled back from the cliffs.

“Let ‘em have it!” Jonah yelled.

Unnecessary, but satisfying. He rolled a half-dozen paces to his right, rose, fired a burst, ducked and rolled again. Hans was shooting from his position over the diggings, single shots. A man screamed and fell from a tree in the valley below, and the beamer fell silent. Over to the left the kzin were popping up for fractional seconds and sending bursts from their captured beamers, using heavy weapons like rifles, inhumanly quick and accurate. Trees below exploded into steam and supersonic splinters. Their screams sounded louder than the noise of battle, daunting in a way that the mechanized death they wielded was not. Hair rose on human spines, a fear that went back to the caves and beyond.

Wonder what Tyra’s doing, Jonah thought in a second of calm. Hope she hasn’t got buck fever.

Spots flicked himself up with a heave of his body. It was just enough to clear head and hands above the scree ahead of him; the aimpoint of the beamer settled on the target he had picked on his last shot, and it exploded with steam. From vegetation, and as he dropped and rolled he could smell flash-cooked monkey as well. He shrieked exultantly:

“Eeeeeereeieiaiiaaiawiowiue!” The kzinti are upon you! He had a wide arc before him, with a deep narrow ravine full of brush that stretched right down to the river. Already an arc of riverbank forest before him was burning. He looked down at the power readout of the beamer; almost half discharged. A pity, since he liked this weapon. The two strakkakers strapped to his thighs seemed like feeble toys in comparison, although the grips had been modified for kzin hands.

The next shot almost brought disaster. A fragment caught his forehead, and stinging blood covered his eyes as he dropped back into the protection of the rock. With a yowl of impatience he felt at the injury, even as rounds chewed at the tumbled volcanic basalt ahead of him. It was painful enough to wake him to full fury, the area above his brow-ridges cut to the bone and a flap of skin hanging free; his ears rang, and his mouth filled. He swallowed and forced pain and dizziness back. That had almost killed him; many monkeys would die for their presumption, and he would chew their livers. In the meantime he had to get the blood out of his eyes; it was blinding him, and the rank scent of kzin blood dulled his nostrils.

A yowl from Bigs meant that he had caught that smell too. “All’s well!” he snarled back. “Look to your front.”

There was a length of gauze in his beltpouch. He pushed the flap of skin back into position-he would get a worthy battlescar out of this, but in the meantime it stung-and began binding the wound with an X-shaped bandage, anchored by a loop under the base of his jaw and around the rear bulge of his skull. Hurriedly he poured water from his canteen over his brows and eyelashes, snuffling and scrubbing and licking his nose to clear his senses. A sharp scent of eucalyptus almost made him sneeze; some tree damaged in the fight, he supposed.

“Behind you!” a human voice screamed.

It was utterly unexpected, but Spots’ reflexes wasted no time on surprise. He dropped sideways.

A bandit lunged through the space he had occupied a moment before, with a vibroblade outstretched before him. ft whined into uselessness as the humming wire edge sliced into rock. The knifeman’s face had just enough time to begin to show surprise when the kzin’s full-armed swing ripped out his throat almost to the neckbone and threw him ten meters through the air. The instinctive full-force effort swung Spots around in a three-quarter turn, his body betraying him in a G field barely a third of the one for which it had evolved. That exposed him to fire from below for a moment-rock spalls stung his shoulders-and left him helpless as the second bandit six meters away raised a strakkaker left-handed. The forty-round clip of liquid-teflon filled bullets would rip the kzin’s body open like an internal explosion.

The bandit’s head vanished from the shoulders up in a spray of red, gray and pink. The body stood for two seconds with blood fountaining up to where the face would have been, took two stumbling steps forward, and collapsed across Spots’ tail. He blinked surprise and looked.

Tyra-human lay prone beside another boulder, slapping another cassette into her rifle. She gave him a brief nod before moving off to a fresh firing position; her face was gray, and she smelled of fatigue poisons and nausea, an acrid scent.

Spots went flat again and readied his beamer, but the savor had gone out of the fight. Bigs owes a life to Jonah-human. Now I owe a life to Tyra-human. Two lives the honor of the House of Chotrz-Shaa owes to Man. It is too much. How will I know the balance of debt and obligation, unless the Fanged God tells me? Like most modem kzin, Spots had worked at rejecting religion as unfashionable. The effort wasn’t entirely successful. Intellect was one thing; but belief in the Fanged God was built deep into the kzin culture, and a desire to believe had been built into their very genes. The Conservators of the Patriarchal Past had a fertile field to sow. Now Spots wished he had listened more closely to the Conservators. It would take a God to figure out this tangle.

Oh, well-there are monkeys down there I can kill, he thought gloomily.

“Sssisssi!’ Bigs snarled, and forced his clawed hand down again. “We should have pursued,” he went on.

“Shut up,” Tyra said, working the sprayskin around the depilated patch of singed flesh that ran down the barrel ribs of the big kzin’s body. “We’re not in any shape to pursue three times our number. Defending gave us an advantage.”

Jonah sighed and sipped again at his canteen, looking around the campsite; they had moved into the outer edge of the shaft, in case the bandits tried to sneak a sniper back, and left sensors scattered about outside with Spots to oversee. The kzin seemed depressed; not so Bigs, who was a little manic by his own surly standards. He lifted his beltphone.

“Spots, anything?”

“No. They ran, and continued to run to the limit of the audio sensor’s ability to detect the footfalls of their riding beasts.” A sigh. “Must we really leave all those bodies?”

“Yes!” Jonah snapped, swallowing at certain memories of his own. Every once in a while, you remember that they’re not humans in fur suits. “Last thing we want is a posse-mob of outbackers on our trail, understood?” Wunderlanders would not react well to the thought of kzin eating even dead bandits.

“Understood.” Along, sad sigh.

“Come on in.”

Silence crackled between them as they waited; Jonah met Hans’s eye, and got a slight nod in return. Tyra finished with Bigs and stepped quickly away, aware that an injured kzin was unlikely to tolerate much contact with a human. Got brains, that girl, Jonah thought admiringly. Spots ducked in between the screens and stopped, turning his head inquiringly towards his brother, ears cocking forward and nostrils flaring. Then he rippled his fur in a shrug and squatted against the restraining timbers of the far wall, hands resting on the ground before him.

“We can’t stay here,” Jonah said abruptly. “There’s something you should know: I don’t think that those bandits were acting on their own.”

It took a few minutes to sketch in Jonah’s relations with Buford Early, and Early’s campaign of persecution. Silence followed, and he went on:

“We can’t lug that”-he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the tnuctipun spyship-“either. Either the bandits will come back with more men, or the real Gendarmerie will show up. The bandits will kill us, the Gendarmerie might and the government will certainly stamp everything Excruciatingly Secret and silence us, one way or another. I’m a pariah, you two are kzin, Fra Nordbo here comes from a suspect family subject to pressure-“

“And I’m a worthless old bushcoot,” Hans said cheerfully.

“If we were lucky, they might buy us off,” Jonah continued. “If we want to make anything of what we’ve got, we’d better get out quick and make a sale to the only one who has the resources to make something of this-to Montferrat-Palme. At least we’ll have some bargaining position with him.”

“That…is…not…all,” a voice said behind him. Jonah shot erect, turning before he came down again. Within its sac of fluid, the tnuctipun’s eyes had opened. It stayed in its fetal position, hands wrapped about knees. The three eyes blinked vertically, and the mouth moved; the lips seemed almost prehensile, and they were not in synch with the words that he heard. The translator program, then.

“I…will…not…be…buried…again.”