by Larry Niven
“Now!” Harold shouted.
His strakaker gave its high-pitched strangled scream, spitting out a stream of high-velocity pellets filled with liquid teflon. Four others did likewise. The two huge orange shapes were springing out of the tank, blurring fast. One staggered in midair, fell to the pavement with a thud audible even now; the other managed to recoil, but a long pink tail and short thick arm sprawled out, motionless. The hand flexed and then went limp, four digits like a big black leather glove, the claws glinting as they slid free a last time. Blood dripped, darker than human; on general principle he emptied the rest of the clip into the compartment, aiming where the body would be. Limb and tail jerked as the pellets jellied the corpse.
“Samedi bless, it worked,” Sam Ogun said.
“Harry, we’ve got to move,” Claude Montferrat-Palme said. “They’re still not trying for a matching orbit with the slowboat”—for some inscrutable alien reason the kzinti had not tried to stop anyone leaving the Alpha Centauri system; contempt, perhaps—“but it’s the last shuttle and the last launch-window.”
“Well, Ingrid’s piloting,” Harold said, forcing himself to grin. Suddenly the noise of fire and distant fighting seemed almost quiet.
“Von Sydow, Hashami,” he called softly. “All clear?”
One of the other guerrillas raised her head to look for the scouts. It vanished in an almost-visible flicker of white light; beam-rifle, close range. The body stayed upright for a moment, then toppled backward like a tree. The screaming began a moment later, astonishingly loud; a month ago he would have sworn it came from something other than a human throat.
“Ratcat!” someone shouted; there was a scramble as they dove for new positions that gave cover to their rear. All but Sam. He came to his knees, raising his jazzer.
“Eat this!” he screamed, and the stubby-barreled weapon thumped twice, pitching out its bomblets.
“Follow me!” Harold yelled on the heels of the quick crumpcrumpcrump of their explosion; there was no time for a firefight. One more human died before they reached what had been a sunken garden behind the house, still screened by the wreckage of a pergola and a scarlet froth of bougainvillea. The broad muzzle of a beam rifle showed above; behind him Claude snapshot with his strakaker, tearing it out of the kzin’s hands. Harold dove through the screen of withes and vines—
—and fell to his back as his feet slipped on flagstones running with blood. Human blood, mostly. Von Sydow and Hashami were here; Hashami’s legs were missing, and her head. Von Sydow was still alive, but it looked as if something had bitten half his stomach out and then pulled.
Something had. It loomed over him, immense even for a kzin, two and a half meters. Infantry this time, synthetic impact-armor glittering where fragments and bullets had cut it, a bone-deep slash on the blunt muzzle running dark-red blood as it reached for him. Pain and hysteria made it disdain the other weapons clipped to its harness; artificial claws of density-enhanced steel glittered and snapped out on its gauntlets as it reached to pull his throat to that mouthful of fangs. His strakaker seemed fixed in honey as he strained to bring it around, finger closing spasmodically on the trigger plate. Pellets splashed on the impact-armor over the thing’s belly, knocking it back. The weapon hissed empty. The kzin straightened with a grunting roar, and then it was coming at him again—
A whining buzz, and it stopped in its tracks. Then it fell, legs useless. Twirling and slashing with its claws even as it collapsed, but Sam danced back, poised as graceful as a matador, moved in with a chopping cut. Kzinti blood smoked away from the buzzing wire edges of his ratchet knife, spurted in hose-like jets from the alien’s throat; the Krio thumbed the weapon off and clipped it back at his shoulder. Behind him a strakaker chittered once and von Sydow’s gasping breath ceased.
“Come on, Mr. Yarthkin,” he said, extending a hand. “Miss Raines is waiting.”
—and Harold jerked awake.
“Hunh,” he mumbled, shaking his head in the darkness, shaking away the nightmare and forty years. His teeth chattered on the glass he grabbed two-handed from the bedside stand; some of the verguuz slopped down the sides, its smell sharp and minty in the stale odors of his bedroom. Fire bloomed in his gut, giving him steadiness enough to palm on the lights. That had been a bad one, he hadn’t had that one for more than a decade.
“But she wasn’t waiting,” he said quietly. The glass crashed against the wall. “She wasn’t there at all.”
✩ ✩ ✩
Interesting, Chuut-Riit thought, standing on the veranda of his staff-secretary’s house and lapping at the gallon tub of half-melted vanilla ice cream in his hands. Quite comely, in its way.
In a very unkzin fashion. The senior staff quarters of his estate were laid out in a section of rolling hills, lawns and shrubs and eucalyptus trees, modest stone houses with high-pitched shingle roofs set among flowerbeds. A dozen or so of the adults who dwelt here were gathered at a discreet distance, down by the landing pad; he could smell their colognes and perfumes, the slightly mealy odor of human flesh beneath, a mechanical tang overlain with alien greenness and animals and…Yes, the children were coming back—preceded by the usual blast of sound. The kzin’s ears folded themselves away at the jumbled high-pitched squealing, one of the less attractive qualities of young humans. Although there was a very kzinlike warbling mixed in among the monkeysounds…
The giant ball of yarn bounced around the corner of the house and across the close-clipped grass of the lawn, bounding from side to side with the slight drifting wobble of .61 gravities, trailing floppy ends. A peacock fled shrieking from the toy and the shouting mob of youngsters that followed it; the bird’s head was parallel to the ground and its feet pumped madly. Chuut-Riit sighed, finished the ice cream, and began licking his muzzle and fingers clean. Alpha Centauri was setting, casting bronze shadows over the creeper-grown stone around him, and it was time to go.
“Like this!” the young kzin leading the pack screamed, and leaped in a soaring arch, landing spreadeagled on the soft fuzzy surface of the ball. He was a youngster of five, all head and hands and feet, the fur of his pelt an electric orange with fading black spots, the infant mottling that a very few kzin kept into early youth. Several of the human youngsters made a valiant attempt to follow, but only one landed and clutched the strands, screaming delightedly. The others fell, one skinning a knee and bawling.
Chuut-Riit rose smoothly to his feet and bounced forward, scooping the crying infant up and stopping the ball with his other hand.
“You should be more careful, my son,” he said to the kzin child in the Hero’s Tongue. To the human: “Are you injured?”
“Mama!” the child wailed, twining its fists into his fur and burying its tear-and-snot-streaked face in his side.
“Errruumm,” Chuut-Riit rumbled helplessly. They are so fragile. His nostrils flared as he bent over the tiny form, taking in the milky-sweat smell of distress and the slight metallic-salt odor of blood from its knee.
“Here is your mother,” he continued as the human female scuttled up and began apologetically untwining the child.
“Here, take it,” he rumbled, as she cuddled the infant. The woman gave it a brief inspection and looked up at the eight-foot orange height of the kzin.
“No harm done, just overexcited, Honored Chuut-Riit,” she said. The kzin rumbled again, looked up at the guards standing by his flitter in the driveway, and laid back his ears; they became elaborately casual, examining the sky or the ground and controlling their expressions. He switched his glare back to his own offspring on top of the ball. The cub flattened itself apologetically, then whipped its head to one side as the human child clinging to the slope of the ball threw a loose length of yarn. Chuut-Riit wrenched his eyes from the fascinating thing and plucked his son into the air by the loose skin at the back of his neck.
“It is time to depart,” he said. The young kzin had gone into an instinctive half-curl. He cast a hopeful glance over his shoulder at his father, sighe
d, and wrapped the limber pink length of his tail around the adult’s massive forearm.
“Yes, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” he said meekly, then brightened and waved at the clump of estate-worker children standing by the ball. “Good-bye,” he called, waving a hand that seemed too large for his arm, and adding a cheerful parting yeowl in the Hero’s Tongue. Literally translated it meant roughly “drink blood and tear cattle into gobbets,” but the adult trusted the sentiment would carry over the wording.
The human children jumped and waved in reply as Chuut-Riit carried his son over to the car and the clump of parents waiting there: Henrietta was in the center with her offspring by her side. I think her posture indicates contentment, he thought. This visit confers much prestige among the other human servants. Which was excellent; a good executive secretary was a treasure beyond price. Besides…
“That was fun, Father,” the cub said. “Could I have another piece of cake?”
“Certainly not, you will be sick as it is,” Chuut-Riit said decisively. Kzin were not quite the pure meat-eaters they claimed to be, and their normal diet contained the occasional sweet, but stuffing that much sugar-coated confection down on top of a stomach already full of good raw ztirgor was something the cub would regret soon. Ice cream, though…Why had nobody told him about ice cream before? Even better than bourbon-and-milk; he must begin to order in bulk.
“I must be leaving, Henrietta,” Chuut-Riit said. “And young Ilge,” he added, looking down at the offspring. It was an odd-looking specimen, only slightly over knee-high to him and with long braided head-pelt of an almost kzinlike orange; the bare skin of its face was dotted with markings of almost the same color. Remarkable. The one standing next to it was black—there was no end to their variety.
The cub wiggled in his grasp and looked down. “I hope you like your armadillo, Ilge,” he said. Ilge looked down at the creature she had not released since the gift-giving ceremony and patted it again. A snout and beady eye appeared for a second, caught the scent of kzin, and disappeared back into an armored ball with a snap.
“They’re lots of fun.” Kzin children adored armadillos, and Chuut-Riit provided his with a steady supply, even if the shells made a mess once the cubs finally got them peeled.
“It’s nice,” she said solemnly.
“The ball of fiber was an excellent idea,” Chuut-Riit added to Henrietta. “I must procure one for my other offspring.”
“I thought it would be, Honored Chuut-Riit,” the human replied, and the kzin blinked in bafflement at her amusement.
One of the guards was too obviously entertained by his commander’s eccentricity. “Here,” Chuut-Riit called as he walked through the small crowd of bowing humans. “Guard Trooper. Care for this infant as we fly, in the forward compartment. Care for him well.”
The soldier blinked dubiously at the small bundle of chocolate-and-mud-stained fur that looked with eager interest at the fascinating complexities of his equipment, then slung his beam rifle and accepted the child with an unconscious bristling. Chuut-Riit gave the ear-and-tail twitch that was the kzin equivalent of sly amusement as he stepped into the passenger compartment and threw himself down on the cushions. There was a slight internal wobble as the car lifted, an expected retching sound and a yeowl of protest from the forward compartment.
The ventilators will be overloaded, the governor thought happily. Now, about that report…
✩ ✩ ✩
Tiamat was shabby. Coming in to dock on the rockjacker prospecting craft Markham had found for them it had looked the same, a little busier and more exterior lights; a spinning ironrock tube twenty kilometers across and sixty long, with ships of every description clustered at the docking yards at either end. More smelters and robofabricators hanging outside, more giant baggies of water ice and volatiles. But inside it was shabby, rundown.
That was Ingrid Raines’s first thought: shabby. The hand-grips were worn, the vivid murals that covered the walls just in from the poles of the giant cylinder fading and grease-spotted. The constant subliminal rumble from the freighter docks was louder; nobody was bothering with the sonic baffles that damped the vibration of megatons of powdered ore, liquid metal, vacuum-separated refinates pouring into the network of pumptubes. Styles were more garish than she remembered, face-paint and tiger-striped oversuits; there was a quartet of police hanging spaced evenly around the entry corridor, toes hooked into rails and head in toward the center. Obstructing traffic, but nobody was going to object, not when the goldskins wore impact armor and powered endoskeletons, not when shockrods dangled negligently in their hands.
“Security’s tight,” Jonah murmured as they made flip-over and went feet-first into the stickyfield at the inward end of the passage. There was a familiar subjective click behind their eyes, and the corridor became a half-kilometer of hollow tower over their heads, filled with the up-and-down drift of people.
“Shut up,” Ingrid muttered back. That had been no surprise; from what they’d been told the collaborationist government had reinvented the police state all by themselves in their enthusiasm. They went through the emergency pressure curtains, into the glare and blare of the inner corridors. Zero-G, here near the core of Tiamat, away from the rims that were under one-G. Tigertown, she thought. The resident kzin were low-status engineers and supervisors, or navy types: They liked heavy gravity; the pussies had never lived in space without gravity control. Tigers, she reminded herself. That was the official slang term. Ratcat if you wanted to be a little dangerous.
They turned into a narrow side corridor, what had been a residential section the last time she was here, transient’s quarters around the lowgrav manufacturing sections of the core. Now it was lined on three sides by shops and small businesses, with the fourth spinward side playing down. Not that there was enough gravity to matter this close to the center of spin, but it was convenient. They slowed to a stroll, two more figures in plain rockjack innersuits, the form-fitting coverall everyone wore under vacuum armor. Conservative Belter stripcuts, backpacks with printseal locks to discourage pickpockets, and the black plastic hilts of ratchet knives.
Ingrid looked around her, acutely conscious of the hard shape nestling butt-down on her collarbone. Distortion battery, and a blade-shaped lozenge of wire; switch it on, and the magnetic field made it vibrate, very fast. Very sharp. She had been shocked when Markham’s intelligence officer pushed them across the table to the UNSN operatives.
“Things are that bad?”
“The ratcats don’t care,” the officer had said. “Humans are forbidden any weapon that can kill at a distance. Only the collabo police can carry stunners, and the only thing the ratcats care about is that production keeps up. What sort of people do you think join the collabo goldskins? Social altruists? The only ordinary criminals they go after are the ones too poor or stupid to pay them off. When things get bad enough to foul up war production, they have a big sweep, and maybe catch some of the middling-level gangrunners and feed them to the ratcats. The big boys? The big boys are the police, or vice versa. That’s the way it is, sweetheart.”
Ingrid shivered, and Jonah put an arm around her waist as they walked in the glide-lift-glide of a stickyfield. “Changed a lot, hey?” he said.
She nodded. The booths were for the sort of small-scale industry that bigger firms contracted out; filing, hardcopy, genetic engineering of bacteria for process production of organics, all mixed in with cookshops and handicrafts and service trades of a thousand types. Holo displays flashed and glittered, strobing with all shades of the visible spectrum; music pounded and blared and crooned, styles she remembered and styles utterly strange and others that were revivals of modes six centuries old: Baroque and Classical and Jazz and Dojin-Go Punk and Meddlehoffer. People crowded the ’way, on the downside and wall-hopping between shops, and half the shops had private guards. The passersby were mostly planetsiders, some so recent you could see they had trouble handling low-G movement.
Many were ragged, openly dir
ty. How can that happen? she thought. Fusion-distilled water was usually cheap in a closed system. Oh. Probably a monopoly. And there were beggars, actual beggars with open sores on their skins or hands twisted with arthritis, things she had only seen in historical flats so old they were shot two-dimensional.
“Here it is,” Jonah grunted. The eating-shop was directly above them; they switched off their shoes, waited for a clear space, and flipped up and over, slapping their hands onto the catch net outside the door. Inside, the place was clean, at least, with a globular free-fall kitchen and a human chef, and customers in dark pajama-like clothing floating with their knees crossed under stick-tables. Not Belters, too stocky and muscular; mostly heavily Oriental by bloodline, rare in the genetic stew of the Sol system but more common here.
Icy stares greeted them as they swung to a vacant booth and slid themselves in, their long legs tangling under the synthetic pineboard of the stick-table.
“It must be harder for you,” Jonah said. “Your home.”
She looked up at him with quick surprise. He was usually the archetypical rockjack, the stereotype asteroid prospector, quiet, bookish, self-sufficient, a man without twitches or mannerisms but capable of cutting loose on furlough—but perceptive, and rockjacks were not supposed to be good at people.
Well, he was a successful officer, too, she thought. And they do have to be good at people.
A waitress in some many-folded garment of black silk floated up to the privacy screen of their cubicle and reached a hand through to scratch at the post. Ingrid keyed the screen, and the woman’s features snapped clear.
“Sorry, so sorry,” she said. “This special place, not Belter food.” There was a singsong accent to her English that Jonah did not recognize, but the underlying impatience and hostility came through the calm features.