Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI

by Larry Niven

  There was little, without major surgery, which they disliked, that could be done to kzinti’s eyes to make them more efficient light collectors, but Vaemar did carry a pair of goggles that extended his visual range further. Such simple and lightweight aids were quite new, and humans had reason to be thankful that the kzinti had not possessed them during the war.

  There, as Rykermann had described it, was the embankment of earth that covered the containers. Deep layers of mynock droppings showed it had been undisturbed for a long time. Evidently the transitory creatures did not remain long enough for the radiation to affect them.

  He set up a motion detector focused into the cave beyond, unfolded a small robot digging tool, and stepped well back as it went to work.

  The robot struck solid material after only a few moments. Vaemar deactivated it and stepped forward. One glance was really enough, but he pushed more earth aside to be sure. Beneath the earth was rock. Not only had the containers been removed, the removal had been disguised. The Geiger counter whirred merrily.

  Vaemar searched the immediate area thoroughly, but there was no other reasonably possible hiding place. Weapon at the ready, he ventured down the tunnel a long way, out of sight of the daylit mouth and into the beginning of a branching labyrinth of chambers, but again without result. He had compasses, motion detectors and miniaturized sensory devices, all specially developed for such expeditions. Infrared beams in his helmet gradually created a three-dimensional picture of the cave that could be retrieved in several ways, including a hologram.

  He found and killed a couple of Morlocks, pausing to note with scientific detachment their body weights and general state of nutrition. He knew better than to try eating the foul-smelling, foul-tasting things. Each tunnel ended at last either in a blank wall, a stream diving under rock, or some passage too small for a kzin to easily enter, though plainly Morlocks had ways of coming and going from the bigger cave systems. The radiation level was falling now. Making a really comprehensive map would take some time. Vaemar felt it would be foolish to go further, especially when he had hardly room to move. His instincts screamed for him to press on, but he had become used to disciplining those instincts. Placing himself in a situation where enemies might come upon him at total disadvantage was not Heroic behavior. He returned to the car, and sent Rykermann and Arthur Guthlac a report, along with a copy of his recorded data. He searched some other small caves in the limestone glens and valleys nearby, without result. He surveyed the whole area with instruments from the air, recording radiation traces and signatures. Then he headed for home.

  Below Vaemar’s car were the fields and buildings of a human farm. His eye flickered across the instrument console. Since Cumpston’s warning of trouble with the feral gangs, most farms in the area had gone onto at least a minimal state of defense alert, which included transmitting a signal identifying themselves and indicating their electronics were functioning normally. This one was not transmitting.

  Vaemar made a leisurely pass low over the farm, sending out an interrogatory. He saw the movement of some animals. Nothing else. He decided that an examination of the situation was within the ambit of his task, and landed outside the main building.

  No one greeted him, and the wandering animals fled. He saw many human footprints on the ground, some bare. There was not much smell, which was in itself suspicious—it suggested scent-deadening Rarctha fat. The main door was open. The human height of it did not bother Vaemar—kzinti were comfortable going on all fours and preferred to do so when stalking or running any distance—but it was hardly wide enough to admit his shoulders. Looking in, he could see some brightly colored toys of human children scattered about. He called out, but there was no answer. His Ziirgah sense told him nothing apart from confirming that the place was empty, but it picked up desperate hunger from somewhere else.

  A white object like an oversized fluffy ball with blue eyes bounced up from the ground and through the air towards him. He hurled himself backwards, almost faster than a human eye could have followed, w’tsai flashing. The Beam’s Beast fell in two pieces, fangs squirting venom. Further evidence that the place had been deserted for some time.

  Stepping back into the courtyard, he noticed a limestone outcrop that had been fenced off for no obvious reason. Examining it more closely, he discovered a sink-hole at its center, covered by a metal grating, with no bottom to be seen. He tied a light to a fine cable and lowered it through the bars into the hole. It twirled around, showing blackness and stalactites. His sensitive nose and whiskers tasted the air from it. He could hear the cave-sounds of dripping and running water. So, the great caves touched the surface here, as they did in many places.

  He sensed game animals watching him fearfully from the cover of the trees. I would like to bring Orlando hunting here, he thought. And then, remembering the new state of things: And Tabitha, too, and Karan. Make it what the humans call a family picnic. Dimity, too, perhaps.

  Looking further at the main farm building, he saw indeed that stairs at one side led down to an underground cellar, where wooden containers were kept. Further on, the artificially shaped and lined walls gave way to living rock with cave formations, that seemed to go on down into darkness. “Monkey-daffy, monkey-lucky” was an old kzin maxim on Wunderland, but he could hardly believe anyone capable of such mad folly. There was certainly a stout steel-barred gate at the end of the cellar, but that, he saw had been opened. There were also footprints on the damp floor. Vaemar was a good tracker, but the prints were too confused and overlaid for him to make much out, save that several were human-sized and had five toes. They did not seem quite human shaped. There was a smell of blood, not new.

  He returned to the surface and moved on to another building. Opening the door of this he stepped into a considerably hotter climate. Vegetation grew thickly. It smelt of death. No Rarctha fat here.

  A couple of small bodies lay dead at his feet. Lemurs. Under the kzin occupation there had been a minor human industry—evidently there still was—growing them as playthings for very young kzin kittens, who loved them. They had no fighting abilities when caught, but like all primates they tasted good and chasing them through trees was a good exercise in training kittens to judge the strength of branches. A nursery game. The next step for the kits had been chasing baboons, which were much more dangerous, and then the real thing, which was much more dangerous again. These appeared to have starved. He saw the sharp faces of other lemurs peering at him from above. There were feeding-trays without food. Vaemar thought of releasing the lemurs, but did not know if they would survive in such a climate and with strange vegetable matter to eat. He had seen some food containers outside, and scattered some of the vegetable matter from one on the ground. The lemurs, starvation evidently overcoming even their terror of the kzin, leapt down to it.

  No humans anywhere. What was the human term? Déjà vu. This had happened before, in Grossgeister Swamp, when his small expedition had found human and kzin dwellings deserted.

  His detector showed no trace of the missing radioactives. A check with deep radar showed nothing moving underground in the immediate vicinity. He made a report and flew on. He passed over several more farms. Some responded to his interrogatories, a couple did not. There were also some plainly long deserted.

  Vaemar had rooms at the University, but he also had another residence, a considerable distance from most human habitation: a few buildings on the wooded lower slopes of the Valkyrieheim Hills, smaller sisters of the Jotun Mountains, northeast of the Hohe Kalkstein. It was not far from the country where he had grown up with Raargh in the years immediately after the Liberation, the country which he still to some extent regarded as his home territory.

  During the occupation the largest of these buildings had been a small palace for a kzin noble with, like almost all kzinti, a consuming love of hunting. Post-war, as was frequently the case on Wunderland, the original human owners of the land were no longer around. Normally the estate would have been redistributed b
ack to other humans, but ARM and others had quietly decided that Vaemar-Riit, potential leader of what were coming to be more widely called the “Wunderkzin,” should be housed in some dignity.

  Unlike many surviving kzin buildings, the high outer walls were intact. What had once been an eight-fold hedgehog of concentric defenses was much reduced, though not eliminated. Vaemar the postgraduate student did not deign to notice openly the possibility of assassination from either human exterminationists or from kzinti who regarded him as what they called—another new term for the Heroes’ Tongue—a kwizzliing, but Vaemar-Riit the leader of the Wunderkzin was obliged to take certain precautions.

  There was a small community on the estate. His Step-Sire Raargh and both their respective families lived there, as well as occupants of the old servant’s quarters, guard and guest-rooms. Raargh had his own buildings and enjoyed a reasonable-sized harem of traditional kzinrretti now, but Vaemar remained monogamous.

  This was partly by reason of policy. A first mate several years older than he, as Karan was, would have been by no means unusual previously. To stop so long at one would have been very unusual, when he had almost every kzinrret on the planet for the taking. But Vaemar understood and accepted the arguments put to him by Cumpston and others that the old ways could not continue. He had put them to other kzinti and fought more than one death-duel over them: smaller households and harems with females for every male kzin—“families”—would help ensure a more stable Wunderkzin society than the old way of vast harems for the nobles and little or nothing for the rest.

  Further, and more important than policy, Karan had let him know in no uncertain terms that other females in his harem would have to be approved by her. So far none had been. He had, of course, a number of kits by various other females but they generally mixed with Raargh’s. None save Orlando, his first, and so far only, son by Karan, had been born with the Riit blazon of red on the chest. He accepted fairly philosophically the fact that having a sapient mate brought some restrictions along with advantages.

  There was good hunting territory nearby, with tigripards as well as gagrumphers and other large beasts. Here he was much less the graduate student, and much more the kzin prince, though a modern, Wunderkzin prince.

  Vaemar landed in his inner courtyard, acknowledged the greetings of his servants (servants, not slaves, and the greetings less than a full prostration in these times), including the hired human Nurse in heavy, Teflon-reinforced apron and gloves, and fended off a mock attack from an excited Orlando. His banner was broken out from a high turret with a blast of horns and roll of drums.

  Raargh made his report on the doings of the estates and, as Vaemar had forecast, made pointed comments about the Morlock bites. Vaemar remembered that the human he had studied with much interest called C. Northcote Parkinson had said the motto of retired senior sergeants was: “There are no excuses for anything!” That, he thought, as the grizzled old veteran gave him a quick grooming lick, summed Raargh up well. Big John, the kzin medical orderly whom Gale had cared for, stumped out. His head, face, hands, feet and spine were largely a complex of metal and regrown tissue, but his new ears were smiling. Raargh and Vaemar—Vaemar-Riit!—had called him “Hero,” and at Arthur Guthlac’s request Vaemar had taken him in. Raargh’s now-numerous kittens, and Orlando too, looked upon his extravagant scars and prostheses with respect. His burden of cowardice had been taken from him. He had a mate of his own, for that matter, and a couple of kittens as well, all of which would have been quite beyond his dreams had he lived out his life, even unmutilated, in the old order of things.

  Vaemar made a prostration before the worship shrine holding a ceremonial jar, liberated from the quarters of the late Jocelyn van der Straat, which still contained at least a few molecules of the urine of his Honored Sire Chuut-Riit, and a few fragments of bone and hair identified by DNA testing as those of Elder Brother who had died protecting him as a kitten. He killed a yearling bull from the holding pens and ate quickly. Groom plied his blowdryer and talcum powder. Then Vaemar carried the recording brick to his laboratory, and called Arthur Guthlac’s headquarters again.

  A large hologram of Wunderland stood on the center of Guthlac’s control console, a duplicate on Vaemar’s. Circular marks on it, like old sores on a body, marked the sites of nuclear explosions. Some were fairly recent, from the Liberation or the intra-Kzin civil war that had so aided the human reconquest, some dated back to the original kzin landings. The oldest sites were quite faded now: the kzinti had blasted any human resistance that became too prolonged, but they had used fairly clean bombs. They were ecologists in their way, and anyway had not wished to destroy the infrastructure of the planet. But the monitors that built up the picture of Wunderland’s radioactivity were sensitive. A myriad of lines crossed the northern hemisphere. A far smaller number crossed the less-settled southern hemisphere.

  “These are the traces of highly radioactive substances which satellites have recorded in the last year,” Guthlac said. “From the state of the ground we don’t think the stuff’s been gone longer than that. Fortunately we can narrow it down further. The signatures you recorded match these—” he pointed to a long lonely line that crossed the Wunderland equator and continued down the globe. “They’ve gone to Little Southland. A couple of them have, anyway. As far as we can make out, the bulk of them can’t have been moved far, though. You did a good job, Vaemar.”

  “The University has routine trips to Little Southland,” said Nils Rykermann. “Mainly instrument checks. Vaemar can be rostered to do it. If we want to keep this matter quiet…”

  “We do. For the moment certainly.”

  “Vaemar had better take a look, then. A look and back. He shouldn’t be away more than a couple of days at most.”

  “What do you have in mind?” asked Cumpston.

  “If what you say is on the loose,” said Rykermann, “then for obvious reasons we don’t want humans going after it blindly. Vaemar is better able to look after himself than almost any human and if he can tell us what he sees, then we can at least make our next move with knowledge. Anyway, if all the containers are together, we can at least say they’ve been gotten away from the Morlocks. Setting aside the question of who took them.”

  “It might be—” Cumpston bit off the words. To suggest in Vaemar’s electronic presence that it might be dangerous for him would be an insult to test even Vaemar’s exceptional self-control.

  “The deserted farms?”

  “That’s bad. We thought the feral gangs were falling apart, but maybe this is their doing.”

  “If nothing worse. The thing we fear. We can’t keep this secret much longer.”

  “The police have some ready-reaction teams,” said Rykermann. “They’re small but they’ve got good weapons. I’ll get them up there now!”

  “What about ARM?”

  “They’re Wunderland police, not ARM, and what they do is not ARM’s business. Why do you think we have a police bagpipe band?”

  “I always assumed it was to torture kzin prisoners. Or maybe flatlanders.”

  “I’ll take that up with you later. Our pipers are actually part of an elite reaction force that doesn’t care to advertise its presence as such. Band-practice covers a multitude of sins. I’ve still got plenty of rank in the Wunderland armed forces and I’ll get them up to the Hohe Kalkstein now.”

  “Are you going to warn them about what they’ve really got to look out for?”

  “Yes, there seems no choice about that now. But they are our best.”

  “Do you really think your best is good enough?”

  “At the moment we’ve got no choice, with so much of our forces still tied up in the space war.”

  “I will give you full discretion,” Guthlac told Vaemar. “Take any companions you wish, but lead. Lurk cunningly in the tall grass, scent out the spoor, do not scream and leap at the prey, but return. Knowledge is the prize.”

  “I have done the ROTC intelligence course,” Vaemar r
eminded him, with the barest hint of something else in his voice, and adding after a moment, “sir.”

  “And that, my young Hero, is another reason you are chosen,” Guthlac told him. “Act at discretion.”

  Kzaargh-Commodore paced. Night-Lurker’s bridge did not allow him much space, a dozen strides one way, a dozen the other. But Captain, Navigator and the rest of the bridge team kept well out of his way.

  One kzin heavy cruiser. With repairs of less than naval dockyard standard. But with claws still capable of seizing Glory on an epic scale. Still with claws capable of devastating a planet or a system.

  Eight-and-four Earth-years had passed since, returning with some damage from a tip-and-run raid on the human bases in Sol system, his ship had received news of the death of great Chuut-Riit, of fratricidal war between Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, and, far worse and more unbelievable, disaster on disaster, the shattering news of the human reconquest of Ka’ashi, and of the humans’ possession of a superluminal drive against which no kzin strategy could prevail.

  Kzaargh-Commodore had turned tail and fled. A commander less sure of his own courage or of his crew would have leapt into the battle, however hopeless, but his veterans trusted him unwaveringly, and he had long since passed the point of needing to prove his courage to himself. He had guessed from other experiences that the apes had developed a means of detecting the monopoles that powered the big kzin gravity-motors, but like all modern warships, Night-Lurker had a reaction-drive as well.

  Evading detection in such circumstances was not difficult. In the vastness of space it was surprising that ships, even with detection equipment, encountered one another as often as they did, and he had more delta-V than he needed. He slowed the ship and headed in a long, elliptical orbit out of the Alpha Centauri system, well above the plane of the ecliptic, to further reduce chances of detection.

  But he did not entirely flee. He dispatched Chorth-Captain, one of his best officers, once “Hider-and-Whisperer,” a specialist in cloaking and communications technology, now promoted to Partial Name and Ship-Command rank, in a cloaked Rending Fang heavy fighter craft to spy out the situation. They would rendezvous later.