by Paul Chafe
Ayla suppressed the urge to cheer. Instead she whispered again in Ferlitz’s ear. “C’mell! Split your force, hunt them down.” She snarled the words like a kzin. “Don’t let any of them live.” She was unqualified to lead a ground battle, but she was doing it, and doing it well, and there was exhilaration in that. She scanned the displays, saw a few scattered Tzaatz wandering in the dark, spectrum goggles blinded by the fire, unfamiliar with the terrain, cut off from their support. “Kr-Pathfinder, take the lead on the ground. Hunt down the survivors. I’ll direct you.”
In her camera view Kr-Pathfinder made the tail signal that meant, “As you command.” Cherenkova breathed out. They had won, barely, and she would live to see another day. Even as she thought it, she became aware that the sounds of battle from the front of the den had vanished, and then there were footsteps in the dark, coming closer.
Only a fool stalks tuskvor.
—Wisdom of the Conservers
“Tuskvor!” Ftzaal-Tzaatz hadn’t believed the call when he heard it. The czrav were putting up tougher resistance than he’d expected, and though the Ftz’yeer were seasoned jungle fighters, there had been rumors about what might be found in the jungle, and about what might find you. None of his warriors would show cowardice, but there was no denying some of them were nervous, and there had been a few com calls that night that could be attributed to nothing else. You couldn’t see far in the jungle even in daylight. The darkness, the smoke, and the fire all added to the confusion. They were his weapons but…Every blade has two edges. Priest-Master-Zrtra had taught him that, and his master’s teachings had always been wise.
And then he saw for himself the huge shapes looming out of the darkness, bellowing in rage and fear. The fire must have stampeded them. Why then are they charging through the flames? No time for that question. His first line was already broken. He had to act now if he wanted to save any of his force.
He keyed his com. “Back to the gravcars. Now! Quickly!”
If they had grav belts they could have escaped, but with little scope to use them in the jungle he’d judged the extra weight not worth the few long-leaps the batteries could provide. The Ftz’yeer were well disciplined, wheeling in formation and heading back the way they’d come at a fast trot.
It wasn’t fast enough, not nearly. “Run,” Ftzaal ordered. “Sword leaders, keep your Heroes together. Rapsari, fall back first.”
They complied, and he ran himself. He keyed his com again. “Don’t run in front of them, angle out of their way.”
A few long-leaps would save all their lives now, but you couldn’t carry everything for every contingency, and in a different situation the extra weight might be lethal. Everything was a tradeoff. Little comfort to know now what he should have brought then. Ftzaal looked over his shoulder. The herd was swinging to follow them, snapping down the fire-blacked tree stumps, their heads raised high and looking down to see their quarry. They were now no more than a bowshot behind. He could feel the ground shake beneath their pounding footsteps in the brief instants his own feet touched the ground. Make a plan! The Ftz’yeer were scattered, but they all had communications, they would respond to his orders. They could make a stand with variable swords, cut the creatures’ legs from beneath them, but the mass and momentum of the huge beasts would be just as lethal when they fell. There was nowhere to hide. There was nothing within sprinting distance even close to big enough to stop a tuskvor.
What must have been the herd-grandmother was in front, bellowing ferociously. The whole herd would be following her lead. Inspiration! He slapped his comlink between strides, panting deeply as he ran. “Ftz’yeer! First sword split right, second sword split left!” The herd can’t chase all of us. He angled left himself, back down toward the river. If he could make it that far the big spire trees would provide some protection, in case the herd decided that he was the one it would follow. His muscles were burning now, and he had to concentrate on every leap to keep his legs driving him forward. His warriors were vanishing into the darkness, each following his own path now. The call of a grlor echoed through the night, not close but not far either, reminding him that fire and tuskvor were not the only dangers the jungle night held. There is vulnerability for each of us alone in the dark, but most will live to regroup.
“Sword leaders, split your blades.” He snarled the words. Verifications crackled back in his ear as his subcommanders passed his commands to their Heroes. He was running with Second Sword, and the warriors on his left and right angled away, and in seconds they were separated in the darkness.
He risked another glance backward, saw gleaming tusks and a huge head extended as a tuskvor thundered after him, another one close beside it. The herd has chosen me to follow. The thought galvanized him, and he ran harder, cutting to one side in the hopes that they might hold a straight course.
The tuskvor turned to follow him. The slope steepened, making running in the darkness more treacherous. A single fall would be the end. He breathed deep, dodging left and right. The tuskvor were big; a kzin could outmaneuver them, but if he got caught in the herd there would be no hope for survival at all.
His pursuer bellowed, so close that its call shook his belly. Something hit him, sharp pain in his right leg, and he fell. The tuskvor had stabbed with its tusk and hit him, but hadn’t been quite close enough to run him through. He skidded, dove sideways, and a foot as big as a tree stump came down beside his head. I will die here in the herd. There was no time for fear, for sadness, for panic, for anything but the realization that he was absolutely helpless, and then the huge beasts thundered past, one on each side of him.
There were none behind them. It took long heartbeats before Ftzaal understood that there were only two tuskvor, that he would not be ground to mush beneath the herd because the herd was gone. Even as his Swords had split, the tuskvor had split to chase them down. These are not herd animals! Ahead of him the two who had been pursuing him were turning, one right, one left, ponderous with their momentum. They are coming back to make sure they killed me. They’d turned to either side so that, if he’d survived, they would intercept him no matter which way he ran. The realization went through him like an electric shock. I am being hunted. Not just hunted, hunted with intelligence and cunning. Bellows rose over the valley slopes, mixed with kzinti kill screams, abruptly cut off. His elite Ftz’yeer were being slaughtered.
As he would be, if he stayed where he was. He went to click his goggle visor down, only to realize it had been torn off in his fall. There was only one way to go, and that was to follow his pursuers and stay inside their turning circle. Tuskvor had powerful senses of smell, but the valley would be full of kzinti scent by now. And aren’t tuskvor supposed to be diurnal? They would march without rest for days on end during their great seasonal migrations, when they crossed the North Continent from one side to the other, but they weren’t migrating now. Or are they? He knew too little about the jungles of Kzinhome. When I planned my brother’s attack I did not anticipate the jungles would become a battlefield.
One of the tuskvor bellowed, and he moved after them, hobbling on his injured leg. He was slower than they were now, but they would take some time to find him again. He staggered and stumbled, fell facefirst into water. He was in a meadow like the one by the burned-out valley, and it did become a marsh in the wet season. Even now in its center there were a few puddles. He stayed flat on the ground, crawling deeper into the mud so the water would cover his body and his scent together.
It was unpleasant but it seemed to work. The great beasts circled around and churned by again, slowly this time. They appeared to be searching, vast heads swaying to and fro. They stopped, and he could see them clearly in the moonlight. Low snarls rose in the Hero’s Tongue. Some of the Ftz’yeer had survived, at least. For a moment hope surged, until he realized where the snarls were coming from. He looked up at the nearer beast, saw a blurred shadow on its back. It could only be a kzin in a hunt cloak. Did they also have wide-spectrum goggles? If they
did it was only his fall that had saved him, the cold water masking enough of his thermal signature that the riders had overlooked him, at least the first time. He crawled deeper into the marsh, ignoring the painful throb in his wounded leg. There was much the Tzaatz would have to learn before they could say they controlled Kzinhome.
First he had to survive, and then he could find vengeance.
A Hero may only be judged in how he dies.
—Si-Rrit
Ayla felt along the wall until she found a rock, picked it up and crouched behind her console. If she were lucky, if she took them by surprise, she might kill one Tzaatz before they gutted her. If she were very lucky they would overlook her entirely, but she had little hope for that. To a kzin nose she would be stinking of fear and fight, and the Tzaatz had those nasty reptilian sniffers…
The footsteps came closer. She steeled herself for the moment.
It was V’rli-Ztrak who appeared from the darkness. Ayla relaxed, trembling with reaction, though some small part of her brain was actually disappointed that it hadn’t come to combat.
“What is the battle status?” V’rli’s snarl was rich with fight juices as she scanned her eye over the combat console.
Ayla put down the rock. “Honored Mother, I committed the mazourk. The Tzaatz are broken and our Heroes are hunting them down even now.”
“Good.” V’rli knelt by Ferlitz-Telepath, who was now mumbling inaudibly. She checked him as efficiently as any human paramedic, then looked up to meet Ayla’s eyes in the dim light cast by the combat console. “You have done well, kz’zeerkti.” There was approval in her voice.
Ayla nodded, suddenly feeling the rush of tension release. We’ve won. She would live another day. Quacy would be proud of me. All at once she wished she hadn’t thought that thought. She missed him horribly. She blinked back tears and blamed them on the smoke, checked her displays again to put her mind on something else. Everywhere she looked the Tzaatz were running, or simply gone.
Pouncer appeared in the darkness behind V’rli. He was carrying a bloodied body, a kzinrette—T’suuz. Pouncer dropped to his knees and the body slid to the floor. He leaned back and howled, long and mournfully. “Honored Mother…” He seemed unable to find words. “Honored Mother, my sister is dead.”
V’rli put a paw to his shoulder. “She fought well for my pride, Kitten-of-the-Rrit, and so did you.”
Pouncer snarled and slashed the air with his talons. “She will have a verse in the Pride Ballad, and I will write in Tzaatz blood.”
V’rli lashed her tail. “Your day will come, but not now. The Tzaatz have found the den. We must move the pride.”
“No. We have paid in blood for this den. My sister must have her death rite.”
“You do not understand. We keep the Long Secret. We work through stealth. The Tzaatz will be back. Or would you have what happened here today happen to every pride of the czrav?” There was anger in V’rli’s voice. “The migration is beginning. We must move.”
“I will stay. My time of sanctuary with you has ended anyway.”
“You have earned your place at our pride circle tonight. You must come with us. How many generations have we spent hiding the Telepath’s Gift from the Black Priests? The lines of Kcha and Vda are united in you. We need your blood.”
Before Pouncer could answer there was noise at the cavern entrance. They went there to find Quicktail, breathing heavily. “We have Kdtronai-zar’ameer, Honored Mother. And we have ears!” He held up two sets of Tzaatz trophies, blood still dripping where they’d been severed from their owner, his fangs showing through a wide smile.
V’rli turned to face him. “Where is he?”
“His leg is injured. Night-Prowler is bringing him. I ran ahead to bring the news.”
“You have both done well.” V’rli turned to face Pouncer again, her voice less harsh. “Your sister brought you here to see you survive. Don’t throw away her gift.” She turned to Quicktail before he could answer. “Find C’mell, gather the mazourk. There is much to do yet. The Tzaatz will return. We must be gone by morning.” She looked to the limp, bloody body of the Patriarch’s daughter. “And first we must have a death rite, for a Hero.”
Quicktail left at the bound. Pouncer’s tail lashed and his lips twitched over his fangs. He dropped to all fours and screamed, a long, mournful howl that embodied grief and promised vengeance as it echoed in the chamber. Ayla breathed out shakily. They had won, but the Tzaatz would be back. This is getting dangerous.
To see the right and not do it is cowardice.
—Confucius
The transpax in Valiant’s cockpit was opaque, and on the other side of it was hyperspace. Quacy Tskombe, fully vac-suited, checked the mass reader carefully, making sure none of the glowing blue lines radiating from the center of the globe were too bright, or too long. They had remoted most of Valiant’s instrumentation to Curvy’s console, but the mass reader needed a mind to look at it in order to work. It was a skill he’d practiced with Ayla in case Crusader had left 61 Ursae Majoris and they’d had to take their stolen Swiftwing through hyperspace themselves. He hadn’t needed to then, but the exercise was paying off now. I am becoming an experienced pilot. He needed to check it every four hours, which meant suiting up, sealing himself in the companionway and depressurizing it, then entering the damaged cockpit. The first time he’d done it he found his worst fears realized. Both Virenze and Khalsa were strapped into their command couches, dead of explosive decompression. It wasn’t a pretty way to die. I would expect to be numb to violent death by now. He’d seen enough of it in his career, but he wasn’t numb, and though he’d wrapped their bodies in sheets from their staterooms on a subsequent trip he still felt their presence when he entered the cockpit. He owed them his life. If they hadn’t fought the ship so well, if Khalsa hadn’t risked an early jump to hyperspace, then the cruiser would certainly have destroyed them. No one knew what happened to ships that tried to enter hyperspace too close to a gravitational singularity, except that they never came back. Exactly how close was too close was something else that wasn’t exactly clear, which is why he checked the mass reader with clockwork regularity, despite the fact that the around-the-clock visits to the cockpit violently disrupted his sleep pattern.
He checked the power readings and the rest of the ship’s vital statistics while he was there. Valiant had taken a lot of damage, but he couldn’t make repairs until they got out of hyperspace. They had power, they had life support; everything else would have to wait. He hadn’t told Trina how close they’d come to dying themselves. He told Curvy, but the dolphin didn’t seem too concerned by the prospect of her own death. She mourned the loss of the pilots, though—her friends for many years, he learned—with two days of withdrawn silence. After that she returned to what seemed to be her usual self, and they resumed their poker games. He had never known a dolphin, and she combined a mischievous sense of humor with a strange formality and depth of thought that was occasionally intimidating. Trina had come out of her shell somewhat. She still spent long hours by herself in the navigation blister, although with the transpax opaqued to keep out the Blind Spot the beautiful starscape view was gone. Sometimes she came down and played chess with Curvy. It was progress.
They had settled into a routine by their seventh day in hyperspace. Tskombe spent the bottom watch playing poker. Trina had gone back to her cabin, and he finally left after a long series of hands that saw him lose an entire barrel of imaginary salmon to the dolphin’s clever sequence of bluff and counterbluff. He folded his last hand and on a whim went up to the navigation blister, just to avoid having to go back to his cabin. He climbed the ladder, saw someone already there. It was Trina, backdropped by…nothing. The blackness of space wasn’t there, nor was the blankness of opaqued transpax. The walls warped weirdly into each other and into Trina, who seemed to vanish by degrees. He found he couldn’t see, found his entire awareness being sucked into the non-seeing blindness which seemed to absorb the world as he watc
hed.
In a panic he looked down, his head swimming. There were things in his visual field, but he was unable to tell where one began and another ended, or in fact put a name to any of them. He held on to the ladder, his tactile sense providing the grounding that vision no longer could. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt his way down the ladder. When he opened them again at the bottom the disorientation was fading, although he still had to feel his way along the wall to stay upright. He groped his way down to the cargo hold. Curvy whistled in surprise as he stumbled in.
“I can’t see properly.” He fought to keep his voice level. “Something’s happened in the navigation bubble. Trina’s up there…”
“Did you see the transpax?” Curvy’s translator made few inflections, but he was well enough acquainted with Cetspeak to sense her immediate concern.
“I don’t know, it was strange…”
“It is the Blind Spot. I will blank the transpax from here. You must bring her down at once.”
Curvy’s manipulator tentacles flew over her console, and Tskombe groped his way back to the access ladder. At the top the transpax was a plain opaque gray again, and nothing seemed strange at all. It was hard to even imagine what it had looked like before. Trina was staring blankly and unblinking, her lips slightly parted. For an instant she seemed dead, and then he saw her chest move as she breathed. He picked her up, maneuvering her awkwardly but easily in the zero gravity.
“I saw…I saw…” She stirred at his touch. Her voice was hushed, barely coherent, and though her eyes were wide and unblinking, she seemed to stare right through him. He carried her back down to the crash couch in the wardroom.
Curvy met him there, the first time the dolphin had ventured out of the hold in the journey. There was barely room for her in the accessway. “How long was she there?”
“I don’t know, I just found her.”
The dolphin nodded, an incongruously human gesture. “She’s in the void trance. It is not dangerous, and it will pass. She unblanked the transpax and saw the Blind Spot.”
