by Larry Niven
“So they’ve seen you,” he said, dismayed.
“From their shouts, I think they were not sure what they saw. But I will kill them for this, sentry or no sentry.”
Her voice was more distant now. Locklear raised his voice slightly: “Puss, can we help you?”
“I have been burned before,” was the reply.
Kit, moving into the darkness quietly: “You are certain there are only four?”
“Positive,” was the faint reply, and then they heard only the night wind.
Presently Kit said, “It would take both of us, and when wounded she will certainly fight to the death. But we might overpower her now, if we can find the bower.”
“No. She did more than she promised. And now she knows she can kill me by smashing the transmitter. Let’s get some sleep, Kit,” he said. Then, when he had nestled behind her, he added with a chuckle, “I begin to see why the kzinti decided to breed females as mere pets. Sheer self-defense.”
“I would break your tail for that, if you had one,” she replied in mock ferocity. Then he laid his hand on her flank, heard her soft miaow, and then they slept.
Locklear had patrolled nearly as far as he dared down the ravine at midmorning, armed with his wtsai, longbow, and an arrow-filled quiver rubbing against the zzrou when he heard the first scream. He knew that Kit, with her short lance, had gone in the opposite direction on her patrol, but the repeated kzin screams sent gooseflesh up his spine. Perhaps the tabbies had surrounded Boots, or Puss. He notched an arrow, half climbing to the lip of the ravine, and peered over low brush. He stifled the exclamation in his throat.
They’d found Puss, all right—or she’d found them. She stood on all-fours on a level spot below, her tail erect, its tip curled over, watching two hated familiar figures in a tableau that must have been as old as kzin history. Almost naked for this primitive duel, ebony talons out and their musky scent heavy on the breeze, they bulked stupefyingly huge and ferocious. The massive gunner, Goon, and engineer Yellowbelly circled each other with drawn stilettoes. What boggled Locklear was that their modern weapons lay ignored in neat groups. Were they going through some ritual?
They were like hell, he decided. From time to time, Puss would utter a single word, accompanied by a tremor and a tail-twitch; and each time, Yellowbelly and Goon would stiffen, then scream at each other in frustration.
The word she repeated was ch’rowl. No telling how long they’d been there, but Goon’s right forearm dripped blood, and Yellowbelly’s thigh was a sodden red mess. Swaying drunkenly, Puss edged nearer to the weapons. As Yellowbelly screamed and leaped, Goon screamed and parried, bearing his smaller opponent to the turf, What followed then was fast enough to be virtually a blur in a roil of Kzersatz dust as two huge tigerlike bodies thrashed and rolled, knives flashing, talons ripping, fangs sinking into flesh.
Locklear scrambled downward through the grass, his progress unheard in the earsplitting caterwauls nearby. He saw Puss reach a beam rifle, grasp it, swing it experimentally by the barrel. That’s when he forgot all caution and shouted, “No, Puss! Put the stock to your shoulder and pull the trigger!”
He might as well have told her to bazzfazz the shimstock; and in any case, poor valiant Puss collapsed while trying to figure the rifle out. He saw the long ugly trough in her side then, caked with dried blood. A wonder she was conscious, with such a wound. Then he saw something more fearful still, the quieter thrashing as Goon found the throat of Yellowbelly, whose stiletto handle protruded from Goon’s upper arm.
Ducking below the brush, Locklear moved to one side, nearer to Puss, whose breathing was as labored as that of the males. Or rather, of one male, as Goon stood erect and uttered a victory roar that must have carried to Newduvai. Yellowbelly’s torn throat pumped the last of his blood onto alien dust.
“I claim my right,” Goon screamed, and added a Word that Locklear was beginning to loathe. Only then did the huge gunner notice that Puss was in no condition to present him with what he had just killed to get. He nudged her roughly, and did not see Locklear approach with one arrow notched and another held between his teeth.
But his ear umbrellas pivoted as a twig snapped under Locklear’s foot, and Goon spun furiously, the big legs flexed, and for one instant man and kzin stood twenty paces apart, unmoving. Goon leaped for the nearest weapon, the beam rifle Puss had dropped, and saw Locklear release the short arrow. It missed by a full arm span and now, his bloodlust rekindled and with no fear of such a marksman, Goon dropped the rifle and pulled Yellowbelly’s stiletto from his own arm. He turned toward Locklear, who was unaccountably running toward him instead of fleeing as a monkey should flee a leopard, and threw his head back in a battle scream.
Locklear’s second arrow, fired from a distance of five paces, pierced the roof of Goon’s mouth, its stainless steel barb severing nerve bundles at the brain stem. Goon fell like a jointed tree, knees buckling first, arms hanging, and the ground’s impact drove the arrow tip out the back of his head, slippery with gore. Goon’s head lay two paces from Locklear’s feet. He neither breathed nor twitched.
Locklear hurried to the side of poor, courageous, ill-starred Puss and saw her gazing calmly at him. “One for you, one for me, Puss. Only two more to go.”
“I wish—I could live to celebrate that,” she said, more softly than he had ever heard her speak.
“You’re too tough to let a little burn,” he began.
“They shot tiny things, too,” she said, a finger migrating to a bluish perforation at the side of her ribcage. “Coughing blood. Hard to breathe,” she managed.
He knew then that she was dying. A spray of slugs, roughly aimed at night from a perimeter-control smoothbore, bad done to Puss what a beam rifle could not. Her lungs filling slowly with blood, she had still managed to report her patrol and then return to guard the birthing bower. He asked through the lump in his throat, “Is Boots all right?”
“They followed my spoor. When I—came out, twitching my best prret routine—they did not look into the bower.”
“Smart, Puss.”
She grasped his wrist, hard. “Swear to protect it with your life.” Now she was coughing blood, fighting to breathe.
“Done,” he said. “Where is it, Puss?”
But her eyes were already glazing. Locklear stood up slowly and strode to the beam rifle, hefting it, thinking idly that these weapons were too heavy for him to carry in one trip. And then he saw Puss again, and quit thinking, and lifted the rifle over his head with both hands in a manscream of fury, and of vengeance unappeased.
The battle scene was in sight of the lake, fully in the open within fifty paces of the creek, and he found it impossible to lift Puss. Locklear cut bundles of grass and spread them to hide the bodies, trembling in delayed reaction, and carried three armloads of weapons to a hiding place far up the ravine just under its lip. He left the dead kzinti without stripping them; perhaps a mistake, but he had no time now to puzzle out tightband comm sets or medkits. Later, if there was a later…
He cursed his watery joints, knowing he could not carry a kzin beam rifle with its heavy accumulator up to the manor. He moved more cautiously now, remembering those kzin screams, wondering how far they’d carried on the breeze which was toward the lake. He read the safety legends on Goon’s sidearm, found he could handle the massive piece with both hands, and stuck it and its twin from Yellowbelly’s arsenal into his belt, leaving his bow and quiver with the other weapons.
He had stumbled within sight of the manor, planning how he could unmast the airboat and adjust its buoyancy so that it could be towed by a man afoot to retrieve those weapons, when a crackling hum sent a blast of hot air across his cheeks. Face down, crawling for the lip of the ravine, he heard a shout from near the manor.
“Grraf-Commander, the monkey approaches!” The reply, deep-voiced and muffled, seemed to come from inside the manor. So they’d known where the manor was. Heat or motion sensors, perhaps, during a pass in the lifeboat—not that it
mattered now. A classic pincers from down and up the ravine, but one of those pincers now lay under shields of grass. They could not know that he was still tethered invisibly to that zzrou transmitter. But where was Kit?
Another hail from Brickshitter, whose tremors of impatience with a beam rifle had become Locklear’s ally: “The others do not answer my calls, but I shall drive the monkey down to them.” Well, maybe he’d intended merely to wing his quarry, or follow him.
You do that, Locklear thought to himself in cold rage as he scurried back in the ravine toward his weapons cache; you just do that, Brickshitter. He had covered two hundred meters when another crackle announced the pencil-thin beam, brighter than the sun, that struck a ridge of stone above him.
White-hot bees stung his face, back and arms; tiny smoke trails followed fragments of superheated stone into the ravine as Locklear tumbled to the creek, splashing out again, stumbling on slick stones. He turned, intending to fire a sidearm, but saw no target and realized that firing from him would tell volumes to that big sonofabitchkitty behind and above him. Well, they wouldn’t have returned unless they wanted him alive, so Brickshitter was just playing with him, driving him as a man drives cattle with a prod. Beam weapons were limited in rate of fire and accumulator charge; maybe Brickshitter would empty this one with his trembling.
Then, horrifyingly near, above the ravine lip, the familiar voice: “I offer you honor, monkey.”
Whatthehell: the navigator knew where his quarry was anyhow. Mopping a runnel of blood from his face, Locklear called upward as he continued his scramble. “What, a prisoner exchange?” He did not want to be more explicit than that.
“We already have the beauteous kzinrett,” was the reply that chilled Locklear to his marrows. “Is that who you would have sacrificed for your worthless hide?”
That tears it; no hope now, Locklear thought. “Maybe I’ll give myself up if you’ll let her go,” he called. Would I? Probably not. Dear God, please don’t give me that choice because I know there would be no honor in mine…
“We have you caged, monkey,” in tones of scorn. “But Grraf-Commander warned that you may have some primitive hunting weapon, so we accord you some little honor. It occurs to me that you would retain more honor if captured by an officer than by a pair of rankings.”
Locklear was now only a hundred meters from the precious cache. He’s too close; he’ll see the weapons cache when I get near it and that’ll be all she wrote. I’ve got to make the bastard careless and use what I’ve got. He thought carefully how to translate a nickname into kzin and began to ease up the far side of the ravine. “Not if the officer has no honor, you trembling shitter of bricks,” he shouted, slipping the safety from a sidearm.
Instantly a scream of raw rage and astonishment from above at this unbelievably mortal insult, followed by the head and shoulders of an infuriated navigator. Locklear aimed fast, squeezed the firing stud, and saw a series of dirt clods spit from the verge of the ravine. The damned thing shot low!
But Brickshitter had popped from sight as though propelled by levers, and now Locklear was climbing, stuffing the sidearm into his belt again to keep both hands free for the ravine, and when he vaulted over the lip into low brush, he could hear Brickshitter babbling into his comm unit.
He wanted to hear the exchange more than he wanted to move. He heard: “…has two kzin handguns—of course I saw them, and heard them; had I been slower he would have an officer’s ears on his belt now! —Nossir, no reply from the others. How else would he have Hero’s weapons? What do you think?—I think so, too.”
Locklear began to move out again, below brushtops, as the furious Brickshitter was promising a mansack to his commander as a trophy. And they won’t get that while I live, be vowed to himself. In fact, with his promise, Brickshitter was admitting they no longer wanted him alive. He did not hear the next hum, but saw brush spatter ahead of him, some of it bursting into flame, and then he was firing at the exposed Brickshitter who now stood with brave stance, seven and a half feet tall and weaving from side to side, firing once a second, as fast as the beam rifle’s accumulator would permit.
Locklear stood and delivered, moving back and forth. At his second burst, the weapon’s receiver locked open. He ducked below, discarded the thing, and drew its twin, estimating he had emptied the first one with thirty rounds. When next he lifted his head, he saw that Brickshitter had outpaced him across the ravine and was firing at the brush again. Even as the stuff ahead of him was kindling, Locklear noticed that the brush behind him flamed higher than a man, now a wildfire moving in the same direction as he, though the steady breeze swept it away from the ravine. His only path now was along the ravine lip, or in it.
He guessed that this weapon would shoot low as well, and opened up at a distance of sixty paces. Good guess, Brickshitter turned toward him and at the same instant was slapped by an invisible fist that flung the heavy rifle from his grasp. Locklear dodged to the lip of the ravine to spot the weapons, saw them twenty paces away, and dropped the sidearm so that he could hang onto brush as he vaulted over, now in full view of Brickshitter.
Whose stuttering fire with his good arm reminded Locklear, nearly too late, that Brickshitter had other weapons beside that beam rifle. Spurts of dirt flew into Locklear’s eyes as he flung himself back to safety. He crawled back for the sidearm, watching the navigator fumble for his rifle, and opened up again just as Brickshitter dropped from sight. More wasted ammo.
Behind him, the fire was raging downslope toward their mutual dead. Across the ravine, Brickshitter’s enraged voice: “Small caliber flesh wound in the right shoulder but I have started brush fires to flush him. I can see beam rifles, close-combat weapons and other things almost below him in the ravine. —Yessir, he is almost out of ammunition and wants that cache. Yessir, a few more bolts. An easy shot.”
Locklear had once seen an expedition bundle burn with a beam rifle in it. He began to run hard, skirting still-smoldering brush and grass, and had already passed the inert bodies of their unprotesting dead when the ground bucked beneath him. He fell to one knee, seeing a cloud of debris fan above the ravine, echoes of the explosion shouldering each other down the slopes, and he knew that Brickshitter’s left-armed aim had been as good as necessary. Good enough, maybe, to get himself killed in that cloud of turf and stone and metal fragments, yes, and good wooden arrows that had made a warrior of Locklear. Yet any sensible warrior knows how to retreat.
The ravine widened now, the creek dropping in a series of lower falls, and Locklear knew that further headlong flight would send him far into the open, so far that the zzrou would kill him if Brickshitter didn’t. And Brickshitter could track his spoor—but not in water. Locklear raced to the creek, heedless of the mis-step that could smash a knee or ankle, and began to negotiate the little falls.
The last one faced the lake. He turned, recognizing that he had cached his pathetic store of provisions behind that waterfall soon after his arrival. It was flanked by thick fronds and ferns, and Locklear ducked into the hideyhole behind that sheet of water streaming wet, gasping for breath.
A soft inquiry from somewhere behind him. He whirled in sudden recognition. It’s REALLY a small world, he thought idiotically. “Boots?” No answer. Well, of course not, to his voice, but he could see the dim outline of a deep horizontal tunnel, turning left inside its entrance, with dry grasses lining the floor, “Boots, don’t be afraid of me. Did you know the kzin males have returned?”
Guarded, grudging it: “Yes. They have wounded my mate.”
“Worse, Boots. But she killed one,”—it was her doing as surely as if her fangs had torn out Yellowbelly’s throat—“and I killed another. She told me to—to retrieve the things she took from me.” It seemed his heart must burst with this cowardly lie. He was cold, exhausted, and on the run, and with the transmitter he could escape to win another day, and, and—. And he wanted to slash his wrists with his wtsai.
“I will bring them. Do not come nearer,�
�� said the soft voice, made deeper by echoes. He squatted under the overhang, the splash of water now dwindling, and be realized that the blast up the ravine had made a momentary check dam. He distinctly heard the mewing of tiny kzin twins as Boots removed the security of her warm, soft fur. A moment later, he saw her head and arms. Both hands, even the one bearing a screwdriver and the transmitter, had their claws fully extended and her ears lay so flat on her skull that they might have been caps of skin. Still, she shoved the articles forward.
Pocketing the transmitter with a thrill of undeserved success, he bade her keep the other items. He showed her the sidearm. “Boots, one of these killed Puss. Do you see that it could kill you just as easily?”
The growl in her throat was an illustrated manual of counterthreat.
“But I began as your protector. I would never harm you or your kittens. Do you see that now?”
“My head sees it. My heart says to fight you. Go.”
He nodded, turned away, and eased himself into the deep pool that was now fed by a mere trickle of water. Ahead was the lake, smoke floating toward it, and he knew that he could run safely in the shallows hidden by smoke without leaving prints. And fight another day. And, he realized, staring back at the once-talkative little falls, leave Boots with her kittens where the cautious Brickshitter would almost certainly find them because now the mouth of her birthing bower was clearly visible.
No, I’m damned if you will!
“So check into it, Brickshitter,” he muttered softly, backing deep into the cool cover of yellow ferns. “I’ve still got a few rounds here, if you’re still alive.”
He was alive, all right. Locklear knew it in his guts when a stone trickled its way down near the pool. He knew it for certain when he felt soft footfalls, the almost silent track of a big hunting cat, vibrate the damp grassy embankment against his back. He eased forward in water that was no deeper than his armpits, still hidden, but when the towering kzin warrior sprang to the verge of the water he made no sound at all. He carried only his sidearm and knife, and Locklear fired at a distance of only ten paces, actually a trifling space.
