Laughter, through the transparent surface. “Have fun, porkchops. I’ll watch you die. Five minutes to shield-down.”
“You all right?” Jonah asked. Neither of them had been much damaged physically by the interrogation; it had been done in a police headquarters, where the most modern methods were available, not crude field-expedients. And the psychists’ shields had worked perfectly; the great weakness of telepathic interrogation is that it can only detect what the subject believes to be true. It had been debatable whether the blocks and artificial memories would hold…Kzin telepaths hated staying in a human’s mind more than they had to, and the drug-addiction that helped to develop their talents did little for motivation or intelligence.
“Fine,” Ingrid said, raising her head from her knees. “Just thinking how pretty it is out there.” Tears starred her lashes, but her voice was steady.
Startled, he looked again through the near-invisible shimmer of the shockfield. The long green-gold grass was rippling under a late-afternoon sun, starred with flowers like living jewel-flecks. A line of flamingos skimmed by, down to the little pond at the base of the hill. Beyond was forest, flowering dogwood in a fountain of white against the flickering-shiny olive drab of native kampfwald trees. The shockfield let air through, carrying scents of leafmold, green, purity.
“You’re right,” he said. They clasped hands, embraced, stepped back and saluted each other formally. “It’s been…good knowing you, Lieutenant Ingrid.”
“Likewise, Captain Jonah.” A gamin smile. “Finagle’s arse, we’re not dead yet, are we?”
“Huh. huh-huh.” Lights spun before Jonah’s eyes, wrenching his stomach with more nausea. Gummy saliva blocked his mouth as he tumbled over the lip of the gully, crashing through brush that ripped and tore with living fingers of thorn and bramble. Tumble, roll, down through the brush-covered sixty-degree slope, out into the patch of gravel and sparse spaghetti-like grass analog at the bottom. To lie and rest, Murphy, to rest…
Memories were returning. Evidently his subconscious believed there wouldn’t be another interrogation. Believed they were dead already. My fingernail. I have to escape. And that’s a laugh. But I have to try…
He turned the final roll into a flip and came erect, facing in the direction of his flight; force the diaphragm to breathe, stomach out to suck air into the bottom of the lungs. His chest felt tight and hot, as if the air pumping through it was nothing, vacuum, inert gas. Will kept him steady, blinked his eyes into focus. He was in a patch of bright sunlight, the forest above a deep green-gold shade that flickered; the soil under his feet was damp, impossibly cool on his skin. The wind was blowing toward him, which meant that the kzin would be following ground-scent rather than what floated on the breeze. A kzin nose was not as sensitive as a hound’s, but several thousand times more acute than a human’s.
And I must stink to high heaven, he thought. Even then he could smell himself; he hawked and spat, taking a firmer grip on his improvised weapon. That was a length of branch and a rock half the size of his head, dangling from the end by thin strong vines. Thank Murphy that Wunderland flora ran to creepers…
“One,” he muttered to himself. “There ain’t no justice, I know, but please, just one.” His breathing was slowing, and he became conscious of thirst, then the gnawing emptiness under his ribs. The sun was high overhead; nearly a day already? How many of the others were still alive?
A flicker of movement at the lip of the ravine, ten meters above him and twenty away. Jonah swung the stone-age morningstar around his head and roared, and the kzin halted his headlong four-footed rush. Rose like an unfolding wall of brown-red, dappled in the light at the edge of the tall trees, slashed across with the white of teeth. Great round eyes, and he could imagine the pupils going pinpoint; the kzin homeworld was not only colder than Wunderland, it was dimmer. Batwing ears unfolding, straining for sound; their hearing was keen enough to pick a human heartbeat out of the background noise. This was a young male, he would be hot, hot for the kill and salt blood to quench his thirst and let him rest…
“Come on, you kshat, you sthondat-eater,” Jonah yelled in the snarling tones of the Hero’s Tongue. “Come and get your name, kinless offspring of cowards, come and eat turnips out of my shit, grass-grazer! Ch’rowl you!”
The kzin screamed, a raw wailing shriek that echoed down the ravine; screamed again and leaped in an impossible soaring curve that took it halfway down the steep slope.
“Now, Ingrid. Now!” Jonah shouted, and ran forward.
The woman rose from the last, thicker scrub at the edge of the slope, where water nourished taller bushes. Rose just as the second bounding leap passed its arc, the kzin spread-eagled against the sky, taloned hands outstretched to grasp and tear. The three-meter pole rose with her, butt against the earth, sharpened tip reaching for the alien’s belly. The two met, and the wet ripping sound was audible even over the berserk siren shriek of the young kzin’s pain.
It toppled forward and sideways, thrashing and ululating with the long pole transfixing it. He forced rubbery leg muscles into a final sprint, a leap and scream of his own. Then he was there, in among the clinging brush and it was there, too, convulsing. He darted in, swung, and the rock smashed into a hand that was lashing for his throat; the kzin wailed again, put its free hand to the spear, pulled while it kept him at bay with lunging snaps. Ingrid was on the other side with a second spear, jabbing; he danced in, heedless of the fangs, and swung two-handed. The rock landed at the juncture of thick neck and sloping shoulder, and something snapped. The shock of it ran back up his arms.
The pair moved in, stabbing, smashing, block and wiggle and jump and strike, and the broken alien crawled toward them with inhuman vitality, growling and whimpering and moving even with the dull-pink bulge of intestine showing where it had ripped the jagged wood out of its flesh. Fur, flesh, scraps of leaf, dust scattering about…Until at last too many bones were broken and too much of the bright-red blood spilled, and it lay twitching. The humans lay just out of reach, sobbing back their breaths; Jonah could hear the kzin’s cries over the thunder in his ears, hear them turn to high-pitched words in the Hero’s Tongue:
“It hurts…” The Sol-Belter rolled to his knees. His shadow fell across the battered, swollen eyes of his enemy. “It hurts…mother, you’ve come back, mother—” The shattered paw-hands made kneading motions, like a nursing kitten. “Help me, take away the noise in my head, mother…” Presently it died.
“That’s one for a pall-bearer.” The end of his finger throbbed. “Goddamn it, I can’t escape!” he shouted at it.
Ingrid tried to rise, fell back with a faint cry.
Jonah bent over, hands moving on the ruffled tatters that streaked down one thigh. “How bad…” he pushed back the ruined cloth. Blood was runneling down the slim length of the woman’s leg, not pumping but in a steady flow. “Damn, tanj, tanj, tanj!” He ripped at his shirt for a pressure-bandage, tied it on with the thin vines scattered everywhere about. “Here, here’s your spear, lean on it, come on.” He darted back to the body; there was a knife at its belt, a long heavy-bladed wtsai. Jonah ripped it free, looped the belt over one shoulder like a baldric.
“Let’s move,” he said, staggering slightly. She leaned on the spear hard enough to drive the blunt end inches deep into the sandy gravel, and shook her head.
“No, I’d slow you down. You’re the one that has to get away.” His finger throbbed anew to remind him. And she’s Hari’s girl, not mine. But—Another memory returned, and he laughed.
“Something’s funny?”
“Yeah, maybe it is! Maybe—hell, I bet it worked!”
“What worked?”
“Tell you on the way.”
“No, you won’t, I’m not coming with you. Now get going!”
“Murphy bugger that with a diode, Lieutenant. Get moving, that’s an order.”
She put an arm around his shoulder and they hobbled down the shifting footing of the ravine’s bed. There
was a crooked smile on her face as she spoke.
“Well, it’s not as if we had anywhere to go, is it?”
The kzin governor of Wunderland paced tiredly toward the gate of his children’s quarters, grooming absently. The hunt had gone well, the intruder-humans were undoubtedly beginning a short passage through some lucky Hero’s digestive system, and it was time to relax.
Perhaps I should have stayed to track them myself, he mused as he passed the last guard station with an absent-minded wave. No, why bother. That prey is already caught, this was simply a re-enactment.
Chuut-Riit felt the repaired doors swing shut before him and glanced around in puzzlement, the silence penetrating through post-Hunt sluggishness. The courtyard was deserted, and it had been nearly seven days since his last visit; far too soon for another assassination attempt, but the older children should have been boiling out to greet him, questions and frolicking…He turned and keyed the terminal in the stone beside the door.
Nothing. The kzin blinked in puzzlement. Odd. There has been no record of any malfunction. In instinctive reflex he lowered himself to all fours and sniffed; the usual sand-rock-metal scents, multiple young-kzin smells. Something underneath that, and he licked his nose to moisten it and drew in a long breath with his mouth half open.
He started back, arching his spine and bristling with a growling hiss, tail rigid. Dead meat and blood. Whirling, he slapped for the exterior communicator. “Guard-Captain, respond. Guard-Captain, respond immediately.”
Nothing. He bent, tensed, leaped for the summit of the wall. A crackling discharge met him, a blue corona around the sharp twisted iron of the battlement’s top that sent pain searing through the palms of his outstretched hands. The wards were set on maximum force, and he fell to the ground cradling his burned palms. Rage bit through him, stronger than pain or thought; someone had menaced his children, his future, the blood of the Riit. His snarl was soundless as he dashed on all fours across the open space of the courtyard and into the entrance of the warren.
It was dark, the glowpanels out and the ventilators silent; for the first time it even smelled like a castle on homeworld, purely of old stone, iron, and blood. Fresh blood on something near the entrance. He bent, the huge round circles of his eyes going black as the pupils expanded. A sword, a four-foot kreera with a double saw edge. The real article, heavy wave-forged steel, from the sealed training cabinets which should only have opened to his own touch. Ignoring the pain as burned tissue cracked and oozed fluids, he reached for the long hide-wound bone grip of the weapon. The edges of the blade glimmered with dark wet, set with a matt of orange-red hairs.
His arm bent, feeling the weight of the metal as he dropped into the crook-kneed defensive stance, with the lead ball of the pommel held level with his eyes. The corridor twisted off before him, the faint light of occasional skylights picking out the edges of granite blocks and the black iron doors with their central locks cast in the shape of beast-masked ancestral warriors. Chuut-Riit’s ears cocked forward and his mouth opened, dropping the lower jaw toward the chest: maximum flow over the nasal passages to catch scent, and fangs ready to tear at anything that got past the weapon in his hands. He edged down the corridor one swift careful step at a time, heading for the central tower where he could do something, even if it was only lighting a signal fire.
Insane, he thought with a corner of his mind that watched his slinking progress through the dark halls. It was insane, like something from the ancient songs of homeworld. Like the Siege of Zeeroau, the Heroic Band manning the ramparts against the prophet, dwindling one by one from wounds and weariness and the hunger-frenzy that sent them down into the catacombs to hunt and then the dreadful feasting.
Chuut-Riit turned a corner and wheeled, blade up to meet a possible attack from the dropstand over the corner. Nothing—but the whirl-and-cut brought him flush against the opposite wall, and he padded on. Noise and smell; a thin mewling, and an overpowering stink of kzinmeat. A door, and the first body before it. There was little of the soft tissue left, but the face was intact. One of his older sons, the teeth frozen in an eternal snarl; blood was splashed about, far more than one body could account for. Walls, floor, ceiling; guts and splatters that dripped down in slow congealing trails toward the floor. A chugra spear lay broken by the wall, alongside a battered metal shield; the sound had been coming from behind the door the corpse guarded, but now he could hear nothing.
No, wait. His ears folded out to their maximum. Breathing. A multiple rapid panting. He tried the door; it was unlocked, but something had it jammed closed.
A mewl sounded as he leaned his weight against it and the iron creaked. “Open!” he snarled. “Open at once.”
More mewls, and a metallic tapping. The panel lurched inward, and he stooped to fill the doorway.
The infants, he thought. A heap in the far corner of the room. Squirming spotted fur and huge terrified eyes peering back at him; the younger ones, the kits just recently taken from their mothers. At the sight of him they set up the thin eeeuw-eeeuw-eeeuw that was the kzin child’s cry of distress.
“Daddy!” one of them said. “We’re so hungry, Daddy. We’re so frightened. He said we should stay in here and not open the door and not cry but there were awful noises and it’s been so long and we’re hungry, Daddy, Daddy—”
Chuut-Riit uttered a grating sound deep in his chest and looked down; his son’s wtsai had been wedged to hold the door from the inside, the kits must have done it at his instruction, while he waited outside to face the hunters. Hunger-frenzy eroded what little patience an adolescent kzin possessed, as well as intellect; they would not spend long hammering at a closed door, not with fresh meat to hand, and the smell of blood in their nostrils.
“Silence,” he said, and they shrank back into a heap. Chuut-Riit forced gentleness into his voice. “Something very bad has happened,” he said. “Your brother was right, you must stay here and make no noise. Soon I…soon I or another adult will come and feed you. Do you understand?” Uncertain nods. “Put the knife back in the door when I go out. Then wait. Understand?”
He swung the door shut and looked down into his son’s face while the kits hammered the knifeblade under it from the inside.
“You did not die in vain, my brave one,” he whispered, very low, settling into a crouch with the sword ready. “Kdari-Riit,” he added, giving his dead son a full Name. Now I must wait. Wait to be sure none of the gone-mad ones had heard him, then do his best. There would be an alert, eventually. The infants did not have the hormone-driven manic energy of adolescents. They would survive.
“Zroght-Guard-Captain,” the human said. “Oh, thank God!”
The head of the vice regal household troopers rose blinking from his sleeping-box, scratching vigorously behind one ear. “Yes, Henrietta?” he said.
“It’s Chuut-Riit,” she said. “Zroght-Guard-Captain, it wasn’t him who refused to answer, I knew it and now we’ve found tampering, the technicians say they missed something the first time, we still can’t get through to him in the children’s quarters. And the records say the armory’s open and they haven’t been fed for a week!”
The guard-captain wasted no time in speech with the sobbing human; it would take enough time to physically breech the defenses of the children’s quarters.
“Hrrnnngg-ha,” Chuut-Riit gasped, panting with lolling tongue. The corner of the exercise room had given him a little protection, the desks and machinery a little more. Now a dozen lanky bodies interlaced through the equipment about his feet, and the survivors had drawn back to the other end of the room. There was little sentience left in the eyes that peered at him out of the starved faces, not enough to use missile-weapons. Dim sunlight glinted on their teeth and the red gape of their mouths, on bellies fallen in below barrel-hoop ribs.
That last rush almost had me, he thought. An odd detachment had settled over him; with a sad pride he noticed the coordination of their movements even now, spreading out in a semi-circle to bar the w
ay to the doors. He was bleeding from a dozen superficial cuts, and the long sword felt like a bar of neutronium in his hands. The blade shone liquid-wet along its whole length now, and the hilt was slimy in his numb grip, slick with blood and the lymph from his burnt hands; he twisted it in a whistling circle that flung droplets as far as the closing pack. Chuut-Riit threw back his head and shrieked, an eerie keening sound that filled the vaulted chamber. They checked for a moment, shrinking back. If he could keep them…
Movement at his feet, from the pile of bodies. Cold in his side, so cold, looking down at the hilt of the wtsai driven up into the lung, the overwhelming salt taste of his own blood. The one they called Spotty crawled free of the piled bodies, broken-backed but evading his weakened slash.
“Kill him,” the adolescent panted. “Kill the betrayer, kill him.”
The waiting children shrieked and leapt.
“He must have made his stand here,” Zroght-Guard-Captain said, looking around the nursery. The floor was a tumbled chaos of toys, wooden weapons, printout books; the walls still danced their holo gavotte of kits leaping amid grass and butterflies. There was very little of the kzin governor of the Alpha Centauri system left; a few of the major bones, and the skull, scattered among smaller fragments from his sons, the ones wounded in the fighting and unable to defend themselves from their ravenous brothers. The room stank of blood and old meat.
“Zroght-Guard-Captain!” one of the troopers said. They all tensed, fully-armed as they were. Most of the young ones were still at large, equipped from the practice rooms, and they seemed ghostly clever.
“A message, Zroght-Guard-Captain.” The warrior held up a pad of paper. The words were in a rusty brownish liquid, evidently written with a claw. Chuut-Riit’s claw; that was his sigil at the bottom. The captain flipped up the visor of his helmet and read: