I decided that kzin and man were very different in some ways. “I’m not ashamed that we humans are more compassionate than you kzin,” I told her.
“You aren’t. You just save your compassion for losers, we save ours for the species. It’s called evolution in action when some idiot gets himself killed. It’s the way the Fanged God does things. We accept that and go along with it; you try to fight it. As if you think your god got it wrong, and you’re going to improve on creation. Doesn’t look to be a good strategy in the long run. We’ve never exterminated a species in all our conquests, by the way.”
No, I thought, just reduced them to slaves and prey-animals, like the wretched Jotok, who once had a great trading empire that lifted races out of barbarism, and the God alone knows how many other peaceful societies. But this was hardly the time to be picking a fight.
“What if I got hurt, or fell into a pit, would you help me?”
“Of course. You’re my friend, and more to the point, you aren’t my species. I don’t mind if your species fills up with more incompetents. But I won’t have it happen to mine.”
I don’t think she meant to be hurtful, but I also don’t think she cared much whether she hurt my feelings or not. kzin don’t put much store in feelings about other kzin, much less humans. I think she was just giving a truthful answer, but it was a bit chilling. You can get along with kzin and feel that they aren’t all that different from human beings on the inside, and then they say something which just shows you that you were wrong all along. There are similarities, but deep down, kzin are different from us, or at least from me. When she said she was more dangerous than K’zarr or Silver, she meant it.
We continued walking towards the Andersons’ lander in silence, Bengar trudging after us.
Bengar came up to us. Kzin are less gregarious than humans, but I think he was hungry for company, as who wouldn’t be after years of solitude?
“Ye’ll take me back off this world, will ye not?” he asked, with almost a whine in his voice. “And ye’ll not gi’ me up to Silver, will ye? Else I’m prey. And you treat poor Bengar right and there’s much he can tell ye. The treasure, ye know. I can lead ye to the treasure, so I can.”
“We know where the treasure is, it’s in the tower,” Marthar told him.
“Ahh, that’s what K’zarr thought, and he left me to it, so he did. I reckon he knew that if either of those of us that he abandoned by those discs came back, ’twould do us no good. For we’d have had to fix those dreadful snakes to our eyes and be blinded like Gra-Prompyh. So though he didn’t know what was on those bars, he thought they was treasure. But I knows different. I knows which of they is valuable and which is dross, so I do. And dross there be a-plenty, unless ye be awful interested in stories o’ aliens and their follies, and lore of other worlds, long since passed away, I should think.”
“What do you mean?” Marthar asked.
“What I means is, I found meself in another tower, far from here. And when I was shivering in the long night, I braved one o’ they discs on my own, I did, and gradually I learned a few things. Like I made some sense o’ the writin’ they aliens put on the discs. An’ not just the discs, and there was other ways o’ reading them silver bars, there was. ’Cos there was more kinds o’ aliens than those what they were aiming at in the first tower. There be ways o’ getting information about what’s in the bars, an’ they don’t need to put yer eyes out to get it. So if there’s treasure in the knowledge o’ how the discs work, for instance, and how other things work, engineering sort o’ stuff, mathematical sort o’ stuff, not just stories for kits and kzinretti, beggin’ your pardon, warrior-lady, for I sees you aren’t just an ordinary kzinrett, indeed I do.”
“Gosh, that sounds just the thing!” I said enthusiastically to Marthar. “We were worried about making sense of those bars, now it sounds as though we can bypass the snake things.”
“’Tes so, young monk—. . . master, indeed, ’tes so. And be sure that poor Bengar will show ye both exactly how ’tes done. Safe will ye both be with me, so long as ye treats me right, which I’ve no doubt ye will. I can tell ye that there is such matter there will be very excitin’ for the scientists and the engineers, though ’twas no use to poor Bengar, who knows nothing o’ such matters. Being but a poor lad from the country when I was took by the press gangs of K’zarr, may he live wi’ the mist demons in hell, and havin’ no education to speak of. But K’zarr knew nothin’ of it, d’ye see? Oh, given time, I daresay he’d have found the true treasure, but it took me a year or so, and I was lucky to find the right tower.”
This sounded pretty good, if we could trust Bengar. I had no idea whether we could or not, but no doubt Marthar could think of some way of keeping control of him. We kept walking in silence for another hour, broken only by the panting of Bengar. He must have used up his implanted oxygen a long time ago, and was struggling to find enough in the local atmosphere.
We could see the spire of the Andersons’ lander, and almost broke into a run. Then a kzin stepped out from behind a bush and halted us with a gesture.
“My lady, go no further,” he said with some formality to Marthar. “Wait while I get Ursula. The renegades have taken the lander. We can’t get in, and they seem to be unable to take off. It’s a stalemate.” He looked thoughtfully at Bengar for a moment. Then he stalked off, and a moment later Ursula bustled into view. “Marthar, Peter, thank God you’re safe! Terrible things have happened.” Ursula hugged me and beamed at Marthar. She gave Bengar a bewildered look.
“What happened?” I asked.
“There were some mutineers on board the lander, taking orders from Silver. They pulled back inside and sealed the doors. The last one in shouted something at us, something to the effect that they were going to join Silver at the tower. We ran for it so as not to get scorched by the rockets when they lifted, but they never did. They never came out, either. We tried to raise them by phone, to ask what was going on, but they cut the phones. Now nobody knows what is going on.”
“How many of them went back inside?” Marthar wanted to know.
“Seven. That left three loyal kzin and Sam and me.”
“Hmmm. Now who stopped them taking off, and how?” Marthar asked herself. Then she brightened. “It must have been Sire and S’maak-Captain. They must have managed something with even the corpse of Valiant. Now we have to get in touch with them.”
That was the moment when we heard a humming sound, and the third lander came into view. For an awful moment I thought it was Silver’s lander, but the colors were different. The Andersons’ was green, Silver’s was red, and the one coming down close to the green one was a beautiful silvery blue. My spirits soared. Soon we would be back on the Valiant and we could take Bengar and get Valiant back into life again, or at least give it a jolly good shot.
It didn’t work out like that.
PART FOUR
A DEFENSIVE
POSITION
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The lander settled on its four spindly legs and the hatch opened, and Orion-Riit stood at the top of the steps within minutes of the flames closing down.
“Daddy!” Martha shrieked and ran towards him. He looked astonished to see her running across the field, but he went down quickly to hold her as she threw herself at him. Where he had stood, S’maak-Captain took up nearly as much space, and behind him, the Judge and the Doctor looked out more cautiously.
“What happened?” Orion demanded. His daughter explained it all at speed, the mutineers held the other two landers, and the loyal crew were there in the clearing, coming in despite the possibility that the mutineers were armed and would shoot them down. It was true that there were no known weapons on the lander, but it certainly didn’t seem safe to assume they hadn’t brought some with them.
S’maak-Captain looked up at the other lander with some satisfaction, I thought. “Get everyone aboard! We must get back to the Valiant before Silver and his cutthroats arrive,” he ordered. “We saw them
heading this way as we came into last descent. I want us away, and we have only minutes!”
I was calling out to Ursula and Sam to come quickly. Not knowing who was in the lander until they saw S’maak, and not having the best reflexes, it took them an agonizingly long time to explain.
“Sam is some miles off, he went to spy out the land,” Ursula explained, worried. “And the other two of the loyal kzin went off in the opposite direction for the same purpose. There’s only me and Ruarrgh here.”
“Damn,” muttered the Judge. “Nothing goes according to plan. We hoped to come on down, pick up the good guys and leave the bad guys to stew. Now it turns out that the bad guys are much easier to pick up.”
“And here they come, I think,” Orion said drily. The hatch of the green lander was opening and one of the mutineers peered out. S’maak-Captain shot him with a needler. He yelled and the hatch door slammed shut behind him.
“Phone your mate and the other one, and tell them to rendezvous with us, say ten miles away, north of here. We can lure Silver away in the opposite direction, then double back and pick them up,” Orion ordered.
“But the phones stopped working. Oh, I suppose now you’re here they’ll work again, right?” Ursula was rattled.
“Get in the lander first!” S’maak-Captain ordered.
Flustered, Ursula, followed by the loyal kzin, moved towards the lander. I started off to go with them, as did the other humans.
“Too late for that, me little friends,” said Silver, coming out from some bushes. He pointed a gun at S’maak-Captain. Not a needler—a blaster. S’maak dived and rolled and shot at him with his needler, but Silver roared and fired. The needler must have hit the weapon, for it flamed out, a brilliant white fire that missed S’maak but hit one of the legs of the blue lander. The spindly thing evaporated, the lander tilted and then very slowly fell over, its gyros whirring futilely. We all looked at it in horror as it canted, seemed to settle then came down like a great tree. The sound of fracturing metal and plastic seemed to go on for ever. Silver disappeared. S’maak-Captain leapt up after him, but stopped to pick up the blaster where Silver had dropped it. Then he threw it away contemptuously.
The lander lay on its side, the door gaping open and half off.
“Inside. It will still give us some protection!” S’maak bellowed. We all sprang for it. Getting in was only a bit awkward. Although the door was sideways, the kzin had to twist to get in. The inner door was open, so the air inside was still that of the treasure planet. We got inside just before the rest of the pirates turned up. All the rooms were sideways too, so it felt very strange as if we were standing on the walls. We couldn’t close the door, but we could try to block the entrance and hold it by firepower. S’maak wasn’t the only one with a needler. And if they blasted us, well, at least the hull would hold off the ravening fury of the blaster bolt for a while.
There were eight of us, looking at each other. Bengar had vanished as soon as Silver had appeared. Outside, there were nine of Silver’s men, standing there with no sign of Silver himself, and another seven in the green lander. And no way of escape for any of us. Nothing we had would get the blue lander back into the air, let alone into space.
S’maak ordered one of the crew to look to see if we had any communications capacity, then went to guard the door. The rest of us looked at each other.
“I suppose this gives us time to catch up,” Marthar remarked philosophically. “We seem to be stalemated. I always hate that.”
Orion looked at her fondly. “You begin. Tell us what happened after you silly kits eloped.”
Marthar told the whole story, and how we’d caught Bengar, and what he had told us about the treasure, then finishing up with us seeing the blue lander come down. I added what I might, including the story of the murder of the faithful crewman.
“What was his name?” he asked me.
“I think he had no official Name, sir, but he was called T’orr.”
Orion-Riit made a strange, clearly ceremonial, gesture. “He will not be forgotten,” he said.
“The rest you know because you were here,” Marthar finished. “Bengar seems to have vanished. Now it’s your turn. And why didn’t you restore Valiant? No, tell us everything in order.”
So Orion settled down to tell what had happened in the Valiant, and here is the tale.
The four of them, S’maak, Orion, the Judge and the Doctor were in the eating area, sitting around a table. S’maak had the closed look of someone who was communing with the ship and studying readouts in his head.
Orion asked Valiant, “Where are the kits?”
“Inside the first lander,” Valiant answered.
“Dear God, not with Silver?” the Doctor exclaimed.
“No, in the lander commanded by Samuel Anderson,” Valiant told them.
“Well, that’s something to be grateful about, I suppose,” the Doctor said. “Why the devil did they have to do it?”
“High spirits,” Orion answered comfortably. He seemed more pleased with their enterprise than annoyed.
“Valiant, Silver’s lander has just left. I want you to ensure that neither lander can lift again without a direct order from me. Can you do that?”
“Certainly, S’maak-Captain,” Valiant replied.
“Now I want you to destroy Silver’s lander while not damaging the Andersons.’ Can you do that? I would prefer it to happen on planetfall and to look like an accident.”
There was no answer.
“Valiant, that was an order.” S’maak-Captain said with a trace of anger.
There was no response.
“Why is Valiant not acknowledging your order?” the Doctor wondered.
“Uh-oh,” the Judge said thoughtfully. “I rather think that Silver has anticipated that.”
“Valiant, acknowledge,” S’maak-Captain said coldly. There was no response.
“I think we had best get to the control room,” Orion suggested. “We may have to put into action the emergency measures.”
They all went up in the lift, looking at each other. When they got to the control room, the door was closed; this was normal, but when S’maak ordered it to open it did nothing.
“There is a subsidiary intelligence node called Vorchar which is supposed to respond in an emergency,” S’maak said. “Vorchar, acknowledge.”
Nothing happened.
“Mine was called Vi’irth,” Orion told them. “Vi’irth, please reply.” Nothing happened.
“Mine was called Victor. Victor, please acknowledge,” said the Judge. There was only the hum of the engines and the faint hiss of atmosphere controls. They turned to the Doctor.
“Mine was called Victor too. I guess we shared one,” the doctor admitted.
“I should say that Silver anticipated this too,” the Judge sighed. “Anybody else got any bright ideas?”
The elevator sighed and went down.
“The armaments. Quickly, one deck down, before the crew get to them!” S’maak called over his shoulder as he moved to the stairs, Orion after him instantly. The humans rattled after the two kzin, making a deal more noise as they clattered down. One deck down and the small room where the hand weapons were stored was close. S’maak-Captain wrenched it open and took out some human needlers, which he gave to the men. He also took some kzin-sized needlers, sticking three in his belt and giving three more to Orion. There was a blaster, which he also stuck in a belt, and some rifles, which he looked at for a moment. He gave three to each of the humans and broke the others like dry sticks. The ammunition boxes for the rifles he handed out to the Doctor and the Judge, and spare magazines for the kzin needlers went into his pouch and Orion’s. They heard the lift coming back. There were many weapons left, including some huge kzin cutlasses, which he ignored, but Orion took one.
The lift opened on three kzin who saw them and in the same moment screamed and charged, wtsais drawn instantly. S’maak-Captain shot them with a needler. Their bodies came apart under the hail,
but the corpses wouldn’t admit they were dead until Orion sliced their heads off with the cutlass. He swung the great blade casually as though it weighed nothing, and the Doctor winced as it went through tissue, bone and cartilage like butter.
“Your ears, I think, Lord,” S’maak-Captain said politely.
“Not my custom,” Orion said, equally politely.
“There are more where they came from,” the Judge warned. “By my count there were thirteen kzin still on board when the landers left. That leaves ten of them.”
“Leave the lift, with those bodies there so the door won’t close, which cuts off access to the mutinous scum. We take the stairs down. You humans, stay behind us. And keep those needlers on safety. I don’t want to be shot in the back.”
The two kzin prowled down the stairs like ghosts in a hurry, the two humans following them with less speed but more noise.
“Do you think we can take out ten kzin?” the Doctor whispered.
“You and I can’t, not even with a blaster apiece. They move too damned fast,” the Judge answered with an air of regret. “But S’maak doesn’t seem to have any problem with needling them. Orion would probably want to do it the old-fashioned way in single combat. But I’d back him to win that too. S’maak would think it a waste of time. He’s a realist. Like young Marthar. If she were here, those mutinous scum would already be dead I suspect, probably vaporized. The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
There were seven kzin in the eating area, looking around aimlessly. S’maak-Captain got two before the others worked out what was happening, then they all drew wtsais and attacked. S’maak-Captain took down another one, and Orion took down another three with his cutlass. The Judge and the Doctor killed one between them, though S’maak-Captain had to finish him with a wtsai.
“Not our custom either,” the Judge thanked him. “Help yourself if you collect ears, though; you did a good job of finishing this one off.”