by Larry Niven
“Yeah, follow him right into a kzin ambush, probably.”
“Makes no sense for him to do that,” gasped Mads. “He could have killed us all right there in camp.”
At first, Hilda was so surprised at the idea that she couldn’t even pant, and then she realized the simple truth of Mads’ observation. Captain Smith had been no more than fifteen meters away from them while they sat chatting about him as if he were on the other side of the planet: they had been sure that he was sleeping, exhausted after the ordeals of his day. But somehow, he had slipped away from them, leaving behind the secured case with the mystery weapon. However, in its place he had taken a long-arm, one of the high rate-of-fire strakkakers. What he intended to do with that weapon, which could spit out almost eight hundred tiny glass lances per minute, was anybody’s guess, but it seemed unlikely that he would train it upon his rescuers. Had he wanted to, he could have riddled them all as they chatted idly about whether he was who he claimed to be. The ridiculousness of Gunnar’s suspicions seemed to double.
Gunnar stopped and turned to face Mads. “Okay, then if he’s not leading us into an ambush, why the hell did he run? He claims his objective was to link up with human resistance on Wunderland, in the greater Munchen region. So meeting us should be ‘mission accomplished,’ right?”
Hilda started understanding why Smith might be running. “Meeting us only accomplished only his first objective. Remember what he said he wanted to do next: hit the kzin compound at Neue Ingolstadt.”
“Yeah. Revenge. I get that.”
“No. Not revenge. He said he needed to do something to get the ratcats furious, to make them follow him.”
Behind her, she heard Mads stop. “What are you saying, Hilda?”
“I’m saying that I don’t think he’s running from us, or setting us up to be ambushed by the kzinti. He’s preparing to ambush the kzinti himself.”
Gunnar scowled. “And so he picks his old home town? That isn’t a mission: that’s collecting a blood debt. While committing suicide.”
“I think he’s heading toward Neue Ingolstadt because, of all the places on the planet, he’ll still be most familiar with that region, despite all the changes over the last half-century.”
“So why wouldn’t he just tell us that?” Gunnar complained. “Hey, I’d even have helped him to—”
“It’s my fault.” Mads’ voice was low.
“What?” Hilda and Gunnar chorused.
“Right before he bedded down, Smith asked me to lead a raid on Neue Ingolstadt. Tomorrow. I told him we couldn’t, not yet. We had to bring him and his weapon back to HQ, first. He just nodded: I figured he understood. Now I think he realized that once we got back to our main camp, he couldn’t be sure he’d get his raid approved there, either. Probably he’d be penned up and grilled about his mystery weapon and where he had come from. And he knew if he argued at all, we might start realizing we had to watch him, guard against him running off on his own.”
Gunnar shook his head. “Still doesn’t make any sense. What does he think he’s going to do with a single strakkaker?”
“He’s going to make the kzinti madder than hell,” Hilda said as she realized how Smith was going to do it with just one shoulder arm.
“How?”
“I know the area a bit too, because I went to Uni—”
“Yeah.” Gunnar’s arms were crossed. “We know.”
She felt herself ready to launch into the old rebuttal against his self-conscious class bigotry—I’m not herrenman stock; we just had enough money, and then I got a scholarship—but she turned aside from that impulse. “There was a satellite campus out in Neue Ingolstadt, which is about sixty kilometers to the north of Munchen. I went there once, for a field study.”
Gunnar affected boredom. “Is this story of old school days going somewhere?”
Mads’ voice was quiet but sharp. “Shut up, Gunnar. Hilda, what’s in Neue Ingolstadt?”
“The old governor’s mansion, about fifteen kilometers to the north. It’s one of the first places the kzinti took over. It’s reserved for the use of their territorial governor.”
Gunnar looked like he’d bitten a lemon. “The territorial governor lives in the schloss outside of Munchen. Everyone knows that.” Then his face cleared. “Even you know that. So why are you saying—?”
“I didn’t say it was the territorial governor’s residence, Gunnar; I said it was reserved for his use. As a preserve.” She prompted a little more directly when she saw the blank look on his face. “A hunting preserve.”
“Oh, shit,” he said.
“Ja,” affirmed Hilda with a sharp nod, reshouldering her rucksack.
Mads was already back in the lead, setting what promised to be a shattering pace for them. “Hilda, do you happen to remember hearing how frequently they run their Hunts out of that lodge?”
Hilda increased her pace, moving past Mads. “Every day.”
The rest, understanding, ran after her.
* * *
What none of them anticipated was that, despite being less than forty-eight hours out of decades-long cold sleep, Smith would outpace them handily. Which was probably why he made no effort to break trail at any point; he left a clear path for them to follow. Because that’s what he wants, Hilda thought, ignoring the wind-stitch in her right side, so high and tight that she found herself tilting in that direction as she ran.
Oddly enough, it was Mads—“old” Mads—who was slightly in the lead when, heading east, they crested the Eel’s Spine: a rampart of low ridges that marked the western limit of the rolling expanses of sward and forest that sprawled and undulated northward from Neue Ingolstadt. Although the day was hazy, made so by the approach of the high-atmospheric dust clouds, the land stretched out before them in varied shades of green, hemmed in by the dark, forbidding forest to the north. That distant tree line was the inevitable first flight objective of the humans who served as prey in the kzin Sport Hunts. Few ever made it that far.
Surprisingly, Smith’s trail led down the slope in that direction. Hilda started down—
—and felt herself pulled back by the left shoulder: Gunnar’s hand. She shook it off.
“Wait,” he panted. “Don’t go. No cover. Kzinti will. See us. For sure.”
Mads squinted into the distance, studied the land. Then he pointed, down to where the northern end of the ridge they were on dipped down before reaching the next low rise: a small wooded dale was sheltered in that notch. “He’s heading there. It’s close to the forest and protrudes out onto the plain: he’ll have a clear shot at the Hunters as they cross the open ground.”
Gunnar shook his head. “I thought he was going for the leadership, was going to hit the lodge. Maybe from an overlook.”
Mads shook his head. “Nei. Look.” He pointed in the opposite direction, this time down the southern line of the Eel’s Spine. Far off, so small that it was not much more than an angular brown wart upon the shimmering green grass, lay the squat lodge. “That’s where the leadership is. They don’t come out to help or watch the Hunters. It would dishonor the cubs and undermine the notion that it is a test of personal worthiness.”
Margarethe, who had been silent behind them, sucked in her breath sharply. “So he’s not going after the adults.”
“No,” Hilda said, reversing her steps as she realized the truth of Mads’ conjecture. “He’s going to shoot the Hunters, the young kzinti.” Recrossing the ridge line, she walked back down the westward slope and then turned north again, paralleling the crest and using its lip to shield her against any eyes that might glance in their direction from the flatlands.
“Gott in Himmel,” breathed Margarethe. “When the adults find out, they are going to be blind with rage.”
Mads made his laconic observation from the rearguard position: “That, I think, is exactly what Captain Smith wants.”
* * *
Hilda was panting. Sweat had soaked her loose-fitting field-tans to a dull brown-black. M
ads pointed a shaking finger down into the wooded dell. “There.”
Hilda squinted, saw a faint bit of motion next to the broad trunk of a ten-meter-high allweather fern: Captain Smith was settling the strakkaker into the crook of a branch protruding from the main stem of the treelike weed.
Margarethe, the only one of the four who seemed to have any physical reserves left at all, stared down the steep switchback that would have to be navigated before getting down to the same level as Smith: “Mads, what do we do? He’s setting up to fire: he must have acquired his target.”
Mads pointed again. “We do nothing. Because you’re right: he chosen his target and he’s going to fire before we can get to him. Not sure he’d cease and desist even if we told him to.”
Gunnar rubbed the forestock of his rifle meaningfully. “That depends upon how we tell him.”
“Stow that crap. I don’t like what he’s doing, but mostly because I don’t know what he’s up to. But we’re not going to start shooting down our own people.”
“But he could—”
Hilda started moving down the trail that would eventually bring them to Smith, but she did so at a leisurely pace. “Might as well start moving.”
Gunnar did not move to follow. “Why not wait here?”
Margarethe almost sneered. “Because, Gunnar, he won’t exit the area by the same path he entered. And the closer we are when he finishes, the less time we spend linking up before un-assing this place. How long do you figure we’ll have before the ratcats are after us, Mads?”
“At least a couple of hours, maybe half a day. If one of their young bucks is late, they’ll presume almost anything—lost scent, tricky or lucky prey, laziness—before they’d imagine that he’s been killed.”
“So we just might get away clean?”
Mads rubbed his chin. “Clean? As in, they have no idea where we went? I doubt that, and I doubt that fits in with the captain’s plans, either.”
“Whaddya mean?” asked Gunnar.
Hilda shrugged and almost lost her balance at the edge of a fifteen-meter sheer drop. “Mads means that Smith probably wants the ratcats to be able to follow our trail. Why else rile them up like this?”
“But that’s insanity, it’s suicide—”
“Whatever it is, it’s happening right now.” Margarethe stopped, pointed. “Look.”
Smith was hunched over the strakkaker. Following along the trajectory implied by its muzzle, they could see a slight perturbation out in the sward, perhaps three hundred meters beyond the edge of the tree- and fernline: a young would-be Hero, tracking his prey. Even at this range, they could see the kzin confirm the scent: he put his head up, an orange-furred protrusion that lifted over the rippling sea of meadow grass, tipped by the twitching black dot that was his nose. Far off, nearly a kilometer to the east, they marked the progress of yet another indistinct rustling in the green: that was the next closest Hunter, and he was moving farther off.
Hilda was able to predict the moment when Smith fired, having spotted for Margarethe, who was a formidable sniper. The wind came behind them from the west, and as it shaped the sward into undulating currents, it made a whispering rustle: nature’s own version of white noise. Also, with the breeze blowing from behind, there would be minimal azimuth drift when the strakkaker fired—
A growling hiss rose up out of the dell when the young kzin put his head up again; the weapon was just barely audible given the distance and the breeze. Out on the plain, the black-tipped orange snout was obscured by a spray of red; the grasses around it seemed to shudder fitfully beneath a less calm and steady force than the breeze. Then silence, stillness.
Hilda had not, however, foreseen what Smith did next: he snatched the weapon out of its support and raced headlong into the grass himself, heading directly for the target he had presumably slain. “What the—?”
“Fuck!” Gunnar finished for her, although his was an angry exclamation where hers had been a baffled query. “He’s going to bring the whole damn lot of them down on us!”
Mads said nothing, just launched himself down the switchback at a full run, Margarethe right behind him.
Hilda followed. “Damn it,” she hissed at Gunnar, “get moving.”
“Fine, but we’re going the wrong way. We should be un-assing this place, and right now. Back over the ridge. And as far away from Captain Kzin-magnet as possible. He’s going to—”
“He’s going to need us to be right there waiting for him when he gets back from whatever he’s doing out there.”
“You mean, we’re going to follow this verrückter?”
“Ja—what else? He’s the only one who knows what he’s up to, so we follow him, or abandon him.”
“Yeh? Well I vote for—”
“Gunnar.” Mads panted over his shoulder, grey-faced. “You don’t vote; I give orders. And Smith isn’t crazy. He has a plan.”
Hilda grimly noted the return of her wind stitch. “Wish he would have told us what it was beforehand.” She half-ran, half-stumbled around a steep-shouldered corner and kept sprinting deeper down into the dell.
* * *
By the time they reached the spot Smith had used as his hide site, they saw stealthy movement in the sward. Approaching.
Mads ducked low. “Damn it. Gunnar, fan left. Margarethe, to the right. Stay low. Target confirmation before you fire.” He paused. “What did I say, Gunnar?”
“See it before you shoot it.”
“Damned straight.”
The closest thatch of chest-high grass vee-ed apart and spat out Smith, who was running at a crouch, strakkaker held loosely in his right hand. And in his left he held—
“That’s our death warrant you’re carrying there,” Mads exhaled.
Hilda stared and gulped at the large, pink half-parasol ear that Smith was stuffing into a plastic ration-wrap. “You know what they’ll do when they find him dead, and with his ear removed. They can’t let it stand, can’t let a human kill one of their Hunters and carry the ear away as a trophy, as defiance.” She swallowed again, met his dark brown eyes. “They’re going to come after us with everything they have.”
“Which is just what I want them to do.” Smith cleaned his knife on the grass, shouldered the strakkaker. “Now, let’s see how well they do in a real chase.”
* * *
The longer the kzinti searched, the more hyperactive they became. Hilda had no way of knowing how quickly they had discovered their slain Hunter, but she was the first to hear the spaceplanes screaming across the skies, the dim echoes of their passage echoing all the way down into the limestone tunnels that they had entered only ninety minutes after having left Smith’s hide-site. In the following hours, and then days, the frequency and diversity of noise seemed to build steadily; towards the end of the second day, the breathy rush of tilt-rotors combing the ground in a slow, methodical nap-of-earth mode were clearly audible on several occasions. Smith paused when he heard that, and then moved them deeper into the caverns.
Hilda had been able to maintain a sense of direction and relative position for the first twelve hours, but after that, she relented and accepted that she simply had no idea where they were. None of them did, anymore. Except, apparently, Captain Smith. Gunnar had tried to learn a little bit about the caves: how extensive they were, where they resurfaced. Smith simply shook his head and tapped his ear meaningfully: in these caves, traveling as they did with relatively low-intensity cold-lights, they were far more likely to detect the approach of an enemy via sound than sight. Gunnar, frustrated both in his desire to learn about the caverns and his clear desire to start an exchange which would allow him to needle Smith, consoled himself with surly, guttural comments, until Mads scolded, and shamed, him to silence.
Hilda picked up her pace until she was trailing Smith by no more than a meter. “You’re not really from Neue Ingolstadt proper. You’re from right around here, aren’t you?”
Smith swept his light in a quick arc across the irregular walls, fo
und a side-branching tunnel they would have walked straight past, otherwise: he slipped into it. “I was born just a few klicks south of the lodge the kzinti are using for their Hunts.”
“Farm boy?”
He half-turned, smiled: he had fine, straight teeth and features to match. “Not really. Dad was a town official.”
“Security? Police?”
He snickered. “Procurement. Don’t tell Gunnar, though: he’ll be sure to crack a joke about my Vati being a pimp.”
Hilda grinned back at him. “So, procurement?”
“Yeah, you know: vehicles, maintenance supplies, work suits, screwdrivers, demo charges. Soup to nuts and the kitchen sink in which to keep them.”
“That’s a pretty broad mandate for one official.”
“Well, we lived in a pretty small town. You know how it is: you don’t need much of any one thing, so you assign one person to be your all-around expert on ‘needed stuff.’”
“So that’s the official terminology used: he procured ‘needed stuff’?”
“Something like that.”
“Just the same way your official name is John Smith.”
Smith smiled and didn’t insult her by disputing or wisecracking. The new passage had widened out; small bits of limestone growled and rasped beneath their feet; a fine white mist drifted up to obscure their lamps.
“So that’s how you know these tunnels,” she persisted. “Fled to them to escape having to work alongside Dad?”
“No. Nothing as sensible as that. We just came here as kids because it was dangerous. You know: one wrong turn and you’re lost forever.” He went silent. “Actually, two kids were lost forever. Never found them. But there are really only a few turns you have to watch out for when you’re heading north like we are. It twists a lot, but almost all the secondary tunnels branch out behind us, to the south. So as long as we don’t do something stupid, like taking a hairpin turn, it’s all pretty straightforward until we come out the far side.”
“Which is where?”
