“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.”