With the area cleared there was time for another, more thorough check. Part of the cargo, 50- and 100-liter liquid containers, was shown to be medical and agricultural chemicals, as the manifest described. Raw material for geriatric and other drugs, plus a few agricultural trace-elements in solution. There were also the usual vacuum and zero-gravity products that were a mainstay of Serpent Swarm export, manufactured in space and on asteroids where there were still relatively few kzinti and more working human factories. There were sealed containers with the warning symbol for radioactive substances, but these were elaborately certified from Tiamat’s medical laboratories and the government as vital isotopes for nuclear medicine and without potential weapons use.
The chemical containers and some of the other cargo were loaded into primitive but well-armed wheeled vehicles. The kzinti allowed few humans to use flyers, even the clumsy human ground-effect cars. The vehicles’ signatures were transmitted continually to the kzinti and Wunderland government satellites monitoring traffic and they were allowed to proceed by road along a predetermined route to a processing plant. That road had, long before, been made in a few hours by the flame of a hovering ship’s reaction-drive fusing the ground. Now it was kept more-or-less in repair by gangs of human serfs with picks and shovels.
The geriatric chemicals needed processing but, even without the remainder of the consignments, they, far more than the nuclear material, would still have made a prize almost beyond price for any highjacker. There were few geriatric drugs or facilities on the ground for making them with the Wunderland economy shattered by the war and the kzin occupation. People were ageing and dying. Few human criminals, however, now had the resources for a highjacking. Crime was largely a matter of solitary muggings or Government-level corruption.
The processing plant where the vehicles stopped stood in a semi-ruined area on the outskirts of the city. There had been a battle there in the few days of organized human ground resistance around Munchen after the kzinti landings, and much of the area had been flattened, but some factories were now providing a thin stream of necessities. The Trummerfrauen (that archaic term recently revived on Wunderland) had been and gone. The repaired and gimcrack new buildings—factories, workers’ huts, a few small bars and shops—stood here and there like islands.
The streets wandering through this semi-wasteland were bleak and empty, though the reddish Wunderland vegetation was growing back on the wide stretches where nothing had been rebuilt and there were some Wunderland scavenging creatures, bolder than they had once been. Beam’s Beasts, Advokats and even a few of the foul zeitungers were breeding up again as sanitary services broke down in these districts, and attempts at preserving something of civic culture gave way to apathy and despair. However, some humans kept minimal services going. Kzinti did not like dogs barking, and the dogs rounded up to help produce that primitive, now near-priceless chemical, insulin, were muzzled or without vocal chords in their cages under the plant, the plant itself sheltered behind heaps of rusty razor-wire. Kzinti seldom deigned to visit these parts but there were a few robot and human sentries, the robots the better armed.
The containers were unloaded, checked off again, and stored in secure areas. The contents of most of them were made into desperately needed drugs. Some people involved got rich, though in rapidly inflating occupation money. Some made enough to get to the Serpent Swarm or into the hills. Some of the nuclear material found its way to hospitals where painful and primitive treatments and procedures had been revived, often for long-forgotten but now also revived diseases. Many people who would otherwise have died, lived, at least for a time.
However not all the containers were opened. Some few were removed and dummies substituted. These containers were eventually loaded onto other primitive vehicles, or onto horses and mules, and, with other traffic, taken northeast in cautious stages to the great limestone escarpment of the Hohe Kalkstein and the sparsely-settled country beyond. A few days after they left the warehouse the collaborationist government on orders from the local kzin supervisor-of-animals brought in a kzin telepath to sweep the minds of key personnel working in the plant. The resistance was alerted beforehand and several fled. The alert was not perfect, however, and so several others died, but they died before the telepath could reach them.
Occupied Wunderland, 2407 A.D.
The convoy arrived in the little valley at nightfall. Nils and Leonie Rykermann and a dozen others emerged from hiding and greeted it. More remained hidden.
“Our instructions,” said the guerrilla courier in charge of the convoy, “are to get this stuff to you, and you are to get it under cover. Bury it in the caves—caves that aren’t used—and forget it until you hear further.” He passed Rykermann a sealed copy of orders.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.” That was hardly surprising. “Need to know” was enforced with religious zeal in the Resistance. Kzin interrogation of prisoners very often included telepathic probing, and even without this kzin tortures were very persuasive. “Markham’s ships picked it up off Acheron.” He gestured to the nuclear-material warning which some of the containers bore. That seemed self-explanatory even if the rest did not. “It was landed with false certifications. I know there was a lot of effort put into getting it here.”
Rykermann nodded. “If it’s something that kills ratcats, that’s all that matters for now,” he said. Hatred glittered in his eyes. “Dead ratcats. That’s all that matters,” he repeated to himself. It was probably an unnecessary statement. None of the humans present felt differently.
“I don’t think Sol would go to this much trouble to send us strawberry ice cream,” the courier said.
Their infrared signatures, diffused through the canopy of leaves, and further by the cloaks which they and their mounts wore, might be indistinguishable from those of a herd of gagrumpher or other large Wunderland animals to kzin or government surveillance satellites. But it would be foolish to bet that way for too long and they wasted little time in talking.
Rykermann, the Resistance’s chief biochemist and Wunderland’s major expert on the great cave systems of the Hohe Kalkstein, supervised the rapid unloading of the animals. The containers were stacked inside one of the many cave entrances in the area. Some of these caves joined the huge main system, but even those that did not could be prodigious in themselves. Mapping the great caves and their connecting passages—many times the size of the Carlsbad Caverns of Earth—had been barely begun when the kzinti landed forty years before, and after decades of use by human guerrillas it was still very far from complete. A quick prior inspection had shown these chambers at least to be free of recent signs of Morlocks, the large, quasi-humanoid but near-brainless predators that had ruled in the deep caves. The two parties hurriedly began covering the containers.
“I’m sorry I can’t stay and socialize,” said the courier.
“Don’t apologize,” said Rykermann. “Whatever this stuff is, we’d better not linger too near it. And I’ve got an honest job to get back to.”
“Kzin!” screamed Leonie as the two gravity-cars rose over the valley-wall. Her beam rifle was firing before she finished the word. Attached to her rifle was a small surface-to-air missile. It just missed one of the sledges, but the kzinti did not know it was the only one the guerrillas had—given the threat of such missiles, they could not circle firing from the air. They needed no other encouragement for ground-combat. Other guerrillas, previously posted, fired from hiding-places around. Some of the weapons were primitive makeshifts, others were more modern and effective.
The kzin cars were sledges for light scouts and hunting-parties, not for full-scale war, but they carried a couple of heavy beam-weapons mounted at the noses and the great felinoids had sidearms. The beam from one smashed into the part-buried heap of containers before the housing of the car’s gravity-planer was hit and it turned over, the screaming kzinti leaping clear, firing their own weapons as they came. The main human party was down too, firing into the
m.
One of the human party’s horses provided a diversion. Maddened by the smell of kzinti it broke its tether and ran screaming. Uncontrollable reflexes triggered by the sight and by the smell of its terror, two kzinti leapt at it, razor claws slashing through saddle, hide, muscle and ribs, the kzinti themselves presenting a target the human marksmen were quick to find. The shrieking animal ran in a semicircle, crashing into a group of kzin as it collapsed in its death-agony. The humans had time to begin firing at the grounded kzin troops in earnest before they leapt.
The ground combat was short and bloody. No human could hope to match a kzin in speed or strength, but if the human was trained and experienced and could get in or under shelter with a modern weapon, the odds were evened a good deal. The members of the guerrilla supply column obeyed their instincts and went down in a circle, firing outwards. The kzinti obeyed their instincts and tactical doctrine: they leapt and charged, screaming and firing as they came. Kzinti died in the charge, but the circle of guerrillas was overrun and shattered. Their heavy weapons apart, the kzinti’s speed and agility were as terrible in battle as were their claws, teeth, strength and merciless fury.
Leonie leapt to one of the abandoned kzin sledges and swung its heavier gun onto the main kzin body. More kzinti died, the survivors scattered, regrouped and counterattacked. Leonie and the gun were their main target for a moment. A laser blast hit her squarely in the chest, but she was wearing one of the guerrillas’ few high-tech light-weight flak-jackets with layers of mirror. She went down in a diving somersault and crawled away as the guerrillas—Rykermann’s group and the few survivors of the supply party—gave covering fire. The kzinti again charged the main human position. Again kzinti died, and so did a large number of humans, then, but thanks largely to Leonie and the gun, the humans now outnumbered the kzin enough to take losses and keep fighting.
The leader of the guerrilla convoy was torn apart by the claws of one kzin slow to die of wounds, who plunged on to wreak havoc with rest of the convoy party. The surviving kzinti scattered after their first slashing leaps, but humans followed them, screaming their own battle-cries. The kzinti, instead of disappearing into the darkening forest, regrouped and leapt back. Strakkakers, Lewis-guns and beam and bullet rifles met them. The kill-ratio was better this time, almost one kzinti for every two humans dead. Four kzinti made it into the cave, where the fight ended. The humans had bombs of nitrate-based explosives.
Nils and Leonie Rykermann, highly-experienced fighters, and protected as major assets by their own people, survived, as did some of their fighters. None of the convoy party did.
The last fighting kzin, staggering bloody and maimed from the cave to die on the attack, fell screaming in a storm of converging bullets and beams. The few surviving humans moved fast, killing the wounded kzinti and those of their own too badly wounded to move.
“Let’s go!” Tasso von Lufft, the second-in-command, grabbed Rykermann’s arm.
The dying kzin commander had been playing possum, hoping to lure a human within reach of his claws. Rykermann finished shooting him between the eyes. Some kzinti were terrified of going to the Fanged God without ears or noses. In case this kzin should be one such, Rykermann paid his respects to the details of this belief by slashing the nose off with his ratchet-knife. Two more slashes secured the tattooed ears, which would go to his belt—a kzin custom which the guerrillas had adopted. With practiced fingers he rifled the ammunition pouches.
“We can’t leave this stuff!” Leonie protested. Half the containers were unburied still, a number scarred by the kzin beam. The damp ground around them steamed.
“There’ll be more ratcats here any minute,” von Lufft objected.
“Not quite yet,” said Leonie. “If that was a set ambush they’d have had follow-up on top of us now. I think it was just a hunting party or a random patrol.”
“But the cars will probably have signalled,” said von Lufft. “And satellites will have picked up the beams. We’ve got to get out of here fast! There will be more kzin forces on the way here now. That’s if they’re in the mood for a hunt and don’t just hit us from space.”
“They died to get that stuff here,” said Nils Rykermann, gesturing at the dead leader of the couriers. “Whatever it is, it’s important.”
“And if it’s dangerous, and leaking? Those drums took a fair hit. Like the man said, I don’t think it’s strawberry ice cream.”
“If they’re leaking virulent radioactives we’re dead already. But”—a quick examination—“I don’t see my meter moving. I’m hoping they were made with strong linings. Come on! The sooner we get them covered the sooner we’re out of here.”
The containers were quickly buried in the caves, invisible to any human in the entrance or the main passage. Decades of war had made these resistance fighters instinctively expert at camouflage. The scattered bodies, human and kzin, were stripped of equipment and weapons. Some of the humans carved pieces of flesh from the dead kzinti for ritual cooking and eating later.
There were too few survivors to carry everything away, and what could not be moved was smashed. They turned to the kzin cars and wrecked them as thoroughly as they could. Flying them was out of the question. It had been, Rykermann thought, counting the survivors, a Pyrrhic victory—in fact no victory at all. The kzinti could afford to lose a couple of carloads of troops more than the guerrillas could afford to lose so many proven fighters—and friends. Friends who had died for he knew not what. He hoped it was worth it to whoever in Sol System was responsible. The courier group would have to be rebuilt from scratch with a fresh draft of doomed humans. Most guerrilla formations had already had casualty rates of several times one hundred percent of their original numbers. With that thought Rykermann, not for the first time, fought down a sense of hopelessness that at times threatened to overwhelm him. How much longer will recruits come forward for the fight? he thought. And answered himself: As long as the kzinti remain terrible and unendurable. And that will be until we are all dead, and forever beyond that. He scattered a few pressure-mines about the site, and sacrificed a precious strand of Sinclair wire, stretching it between two trees at a height where it might, with luck, decapitate or bisect any kzinti charging in pursuit, though it was fiendishly dangerous and difficult to handle in the dark.
The surviving guerrillas scattered into the forest, to where the rest of their horses and ponies were waiting hobbled under a limestone overhang at the entrance of another cave. They were not ideal transport between the trees but they were the fastest things reasonably safe from mechanical detection, and horses needed no urging to flee from the smell of kzinti. There were many horses without riders now, and the surviving guerrillas turned some of these loose in the hope they would be a decoy.
Then they rode, the woods dark around and above them. Behind them after a little while were the flashes and reports of kzin missiles hitting the site of the fighting. Lights in the sky were kzin gravity-cars flashing towards the scene, loaded with troops.
Branches whipped by them. The fleeing guerrillas smashed through a glade where a small herd of gagrumphers were sleeping, the creatures lurching bellowing to their feet in the dark around them. Good, thought Rykermann, as he realized what they were. The infrared signatures of the big beasts milling about might help confuse kzin spy-satellites as well as ground troops. At his command they hauled their horses round and headed northwest, at right-angles to their previous path.
They splashed through a wide, shallow stream, dropping powerful olfactory agents that might confuse kzinti tracking them by unaided scent. Rykermann turned to glance at Leonie, bent low over her pony’s neck, urging it on, and the other survivors about, counting them again. He dug in his own spurs. It would be a near thing. It was one of the rare nights when, with neither Alpha Centauri B nor Wunderland’s moons yet risen, the sky would be relatively dark for some time. He hoped that would help the fleeing humans more than the kzinti.
The kzinti bombarded the area behind them, t
hough only with ordinary weapons, then their troopers landed and swept it, snarling over their dead. One triggered a pressure-mine, adding to the rage and confusion. With their eyes’ superb sensitivity to movement and their keyed-up, hair-trigger reflexes, they blasted a number of small animals, both in the limestone glades and hollows and when they fired at dim movements in the dark of the caves. They found one badly-wounded human alive whom Rykermann’s party in its haste had missed and took him for terminal interrogation. They removed their own dead and threw the burnt human dead into the caves, after removing ears and other trophies in their turn. The unburnt human dead were stacked in the cars—monkeymeat.
Then they left, searching for humans, some running on all fours and leaping into the dark of the forest like the great hunting cats they were. One of the sledges was salvaged, the other, wrecked beyond possibility of further use, was abandoned. The slave-worked factories produced them for the kzin armed forces in thousands. One flying car hit the Sinclair wire, with spectacular and bloody results. They left. As Rykermann had hoped, the noisy gagrumphers delayed them a little.
Silence returned to the valley and the caves. Then the flying cave-creatures that the humans called mynocks returned from the deeper caverns to their perches, hissing, squawking, their droppings, rich in nitrates and concentrated uric acid, falling to add to the deep layers already forming the cave floor: food for the vermiforms and other scavengers. More acidic compounds, burying the containers a little deeper.
After a time a party of Morlocks from the deeper caves approached the place where the noise and lights had been. The mynocks rose in a shrieking cloud, some snapping at the Morlocks with their horny toothed beaks and beating at them with barbed leathery wings. The Morlocks leapt and tore at them with slavering, baboonlike muzzles, dragging those they could out of the air to tear apart and eat alive. The main cloud of mynocks divided and flapped away, some into the night sky outside, some down the tunnels and into the labyrinth’s deeper darkness. The Morlocks were savage and hungry. With the mynocks gone the smell of burnt human flesh drew them, heads down and bulging eyes running with tears and squinting against the little starlight that filtered into the cave’s crepuscular zone.