“Yes.”
“But not well-defended against the kind of surprise attack Protectors could mount. Then, if I were directing their strategy, I would attack Wunderland and the other settled asteroids of the Serpent Swarm from Tiamat. And while Wunderland's defenses are busy, crash this moon or another into it.
“Morlocks fight by dropping on their enemies and hurling rocks down on them. This would be the same thing on a bigger scale.
“The Protectors could break the moon up on its way by controlled explosions so that the fragments would impact in a predetermined pattern and with predetermined force. That would be the end of human—and kzin—life on Wunderland. If all was not destroyed by the first impacts, it would be so shattered that the Protectors could finish off any remnants at leisure. But the Morlocks in the great caves could survive. With Tiamat, they would not need Wunderland's industrial centers. They could destroy the other asteroid settlements one by one. Many are still reduced by war-damage anyway. I do not think their defenses would last long against Protectors.”
“I cannot fault your reasoning,” said Dimity. “And then… how many breeders would they get from the Morlocks of Wunderland?”
“Their numbers were thinned in the war, but they are breeding up again, as I know from personal experience,” said Vaemar. “Hundreds, at least. Thousands, I am sure. We do not yet know how far the cave systems go.”
“The Sinclair fields! That is why they have them here!”
“Yes, of course! I should have seen at once! They can use the Sinclair fields to accelerate breeding! They could have thousands more breeders and thousands of Protectors.”
“That would also give them the numbers for genetic diversity.”
“It would give them the numbers for a double leap into human and kzin space,” said Vaemar. “And another bad thing strikes me, one which this Protector has perhaps not realized yet but sooner or later must: you humans have put much effort into developing reproductive technology, though you do not exploit its full potential. A Protector with access to that would not need to have got all its children before the change. It could clone as many as it wished from its own cell structure. There would be no limit to their numbers!
“We kzinti have experimented with cloning. A band of celibate warriors, who had dedicated themselves to the Eternal Hunt, tried to breed without females once. Each cloned his own kittens. But the kittens were incurably savage and aggressive… Is that so amusing?”
“If a kzin hero calls them incurably savage and aggressive,” said Dimity, “they must have been a problem indeed!”
“They were. But the point is that the inhibitions of your culture or mine about cloning would mean nothing to a Protector. Dimity, we must stop them now. The cost of our own lives is nothing in these circumstances.”
“I know,” said Dimity.
“Unfortunately, at this moment I cannot see how.”
“Nor I.”
“Why didn't the original Pak Protectors simply clone themselves?” said Vaemar.
“Perhaps they had no need to think in such directions,” said Dimity. “Their mature bodies were so strong, long-lived and perfect that they did little to develop biological sciences. They didn't need to improve on what they had. All that we know of the Pak species' thinking was what Brennan picked up while he was a Pak's prisoner and told to the humans who he met later. But there seem to be some gaps in Pak thinking. Humans are more creative. And, from what little I know about them, Protectors are unable to cooperate with one another beyond the briefest temporary alliances. Further, our own science showed us long ago that cloning sapient beings is fraught with risks. It seemed to promise everything at first, but then we discovered the pitfalls.
“The Protectors' science as far as we know is exclusively military-oriented. Each cares only for his own blood-line. It seems their only stimulation and excitement is war. They could have been the greatest race in the galaxy, but their intelligence and instincts together locked them into a dead-end. Their single-mindedness virtually robbed them of free will. Even their spaceflight was stimulated by nothing but a desire to find new breeding grounds. No curiosity, no sense of wonder. No sense of anything beyond themselves. The kind of creature I yearn desperately not to be. When I had to read of them it horrified me, because I saw so much of myself in them.”
“It is something to be horrified,” said Vaemar. “Raargh told me that to be aware of horror is an early step to knowledge. Know horror and you know glory. Know fear and you know courage.”
“You understand the human idea of the knight, Vaemar? The ideal, I mean.”
“I trust so. I have read much human history. It fascinates me that the knight should emerge from the dark ages, as it fascinates me that Roman order, Greek art and thought, could combine with barbarian vigor to build an order that would take you to the stars. Was it like that with other star-faring races, I wonder, races that did not have the Jotok as we did? But yes, I know of human knights. Some kzinti are like that too, but not many, and as you would expect, not quite the same.”
“Can you imagine Pak knights, crusaders, chivalrous champions of some cause beyond ensuring more breeders?” said Dimity. “I cannot. I loved Nils because he, for all his lack of self-awareness, had something of the knight in him. I never saw what he did in the war, of course, Leonie had all of that… The Pak were—it seems are—little more than gene-carrying machines, breeding and fighting and crossing between the stars for no end but reproduction. Trapped by their own brain structure. Trapped, as I fear most of all to be trapped.”
“Can we use that, I wonder? There are at least four blood-lines here.”
“With the childless Protector to keep them in order.”
“Yes. He is our prime target.”
“Target? You have high hopes, Vaemar-Hero.”
“A Hero does not need hope, Dimity-Human.”
They logged onto the internet with the computers supplied. As they had guessed, they could receive but not send data. Dimity and Vaemar were both clever with computers, and they spent a lot of time trying to circumvent this.
Chapter 10
The well-armed car carrying Arthur Guthlac, Colonel Cumpston and Karan touched down beside Vaemar's empty vehicle. Apart from its turret-mounted weapons, Cumpston had a strakkaker and Guthlac a heavy, powerful beam rifle, a great cannon of a thing based on a kzin sidearm, and with mini-waldos for human use. Karan had a kzinrett's knife, the new and improved female version of a w'tsai, and another strakkaker. Weapons ready, the occupants alighted, the humans wearing breathing filters as Dimity had. In case they needed the car quickly, the engine was left idling and the doors unlocked. There was no sign of any live friend or enemy.
Karan pointed and bounded to the dead thunderbirds, the humans hurrying behind. Small scavengers scattered.
“Beam rifle, close range,” said Cumpston. “And the other looks like a kzin bite.”
“They stood here,” said Karan, pointing. Looking closely, Guthlac and Cumpston could make out two very different-sized sets of footprints, the larger tipped with claw points. “It didn't get near them.”
“The car has been tampered with,” said Cumpston. “Look! Its antennas are gone.” He also tried the door.
“Dimity and Vaemar, according to the ways we can measure IQs, are possibly the two cleverest beings on Wunderland,” said Guthlac. “I hope they can look after themselves.”
“Clever doesn't necessarily mean survivor,” said Cumpston. “There's more than a touch of the idiot savant in Dimity. Super-genius she may be, but she's narrowly focused. Just because she shatters the old sexist stereotype of the beautiful blonde doesn't mean she… More common sense, better instincts and reflexes, may mean survival in a place like this. Vaemar, I can't pronounce on. But he's an intellectual, too, however sharp his claws are. I wish old Raargh was with them, or some human sergeant-major.”
Guthlac thought he detected something in his friend's voice when he spoke of Dimity. There could hardly be
a less appropriate time or place for him to comment. “Karan, can you follow their trail?” he asked.
Karan was already moving down one of the rock-tunnels, almost on all fours, a barred orange shadow in the shifting and flickering grey light.
“We might do better to search from the air,” Guthlac said. “This is another labyrinth.”
“If there was anything to see from the air I think we'd have seen it,” said Cumpston. “Come on! We're lucky to have her, but I don't want her getting too far ahead on her own. If anything happened to her, would you want to be the one to tell Vaemar?”
“Trail stops,” said Karan a few minutes later.
They caught up to her. They were standing in a circular space in the rock-maze.
“Do you smell anything?” Guthlac asked her.
“Sand and rock turned over.” Karan said. “Not a long time past. And kzintosh. There has been another male kzin here. And at the car. And something else. A bad smell.”
Cumpston pointed to the edge of the rock wall. “Sand and rock turned over there?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“A gravity motor.”
“But all gravity motors are monitored,” said Guthlac.
“Get through to the monitoring stations,” said Cumpston. “Pull your rank, Arthur! Hurry! They must have recorded something.”
Guthlac sent the message. His face was dark. “I'm getting a very ugly thought,” he said.
“So am I. But tell me yours first.”
Guthlac made sure Karan was out of earshot, still hunting along the rock wall. He spoke softly and quickly.
“Vaemar has taken Dimity into space. He's a kzin. It looks as if he's taking her to the Patriarchy. Our pioneering hyperdrive expert!”
“Any ship that took off from here would be too small for interstellar travel.”
“But it could meet a bigger one.”
“We've monitored Vaemar pretty carefully. And taken other precautions. There's been no hint of anything like that.”
“Apart from reversing the kzinti's whole military position, it would get him back his place beside the Riit throne. Perhaps position him for a bid for the Patriarchy! Why should we trust him to be more loyal to us than to his own species? Especially when the reward could be so enormous? I know policy was to trust him as much as possible, but perhaps we've put too much temptation in his way. Or perhaps it was just a mistake to trust a ratcat!”
“That hangs together very nastily,” said Cumpston. “I have just one small ray of hope that you're wrong. It was we who sent him here. He couldn't have planned a secret rendezvous with a spacecraft… unless it had been waiting for a long time.”
“And unless he manipulated us into sending him. He knew he'd be coming this way sooner or later. I've given Defense Headquarters an emergency alert. The next thing is to get after them, anyway. But Vaemar doesn't feel like that to me.”
“I put some trust in someone when all appearances were against her a little while ago,” said Guthlac. “In a ruined hamlet beyond Gerning in a storm. I haven't regretted it. I'll try to believe the best of Vaemar yet, but I'm putting out an emergency alert to Defense HQ all the same.”
“We should have stopped her associating with him so. That's obvious enough with hindsight.”
“Dimity is an Asperger's. A superlatively high-functioning one. When she makes up her mind to do a thing the only way you can stop her is by breaking that mind.
“She can be killed any time,” Guthlac went on. “There's an implant in her that can be activated remotely. An idea we got from the kzin zzrou. ARM insisted on it.”
“Arthur! We've got to get her back!”
“I know!”
“You mustn't let ARM know what's happened! Not yet!”
“Michael, there are a lot of things neither of us let ARM know about. And I don't mean your peculiarly-colored bird or a certain Earth flower with green petals. Try to hang onto hope.”
“Does she know?”
“I don't know. ARM was subtler than the kzinti about such things. Nanobots in the food. But Vaemar's got one too. ARM is not trusting. It wasn't my idea or orders, but…” Guthlac suddenly smacked his own head. “Idiot! How do we win wars with generals like me? I had completely forgotten! They both have locators in them anyway! Standard VIP models. We can read them from the car!”
“Come on!”
Calling Karan, they turned and headed back out of the granite maze. The thunderbird launched itself at them from the rock wall. Half as big again as the ones Dimity and Vaemar had killed, its vast striking beak knocked Guthlac sprawling. The tough fabric of his coverall saved him from being torn apart, but had the thing snapped its beak it would have crushed his bones in an instant. Karan was a blur of rippling orange muscle as she leapt at it. Screaming, two more thunderbirds launched themselves from the rock wall.
Karan severed the first thunderbird's neck with her fangs and claws before the beak could seize her. Cumpston, getting his beamer up just in time, shot another in the chest. The third sprang into the air again, and came down on their car. Guthlac fired at the bird and hit the car. Its tough materials could normally have withstood far worse hits, but the unlocked door flew open. Either the beam or the avian's great kicking legs activated the controls, and car and avian tangled together shot fifty feet into the air, rolled, dived, and crashed into the rock wall.
Guthlac struggled free of the dead weight of the first thunderbird. Cumpston ran to them. Karan got to her feet, staggered and fell again, pumping gouts of purple and orange blood from gaping lacerations in her thighs. Guthlac found the end of a severed blood-vessel and held it shut while Cumpston raced for the crashed car and its medical kit, killing the broken-limbed avian as it struggled and snapped at him. The car's fuel lines had ruptured, and as Cumpston turned and ran back to Karan a spark ignited the clouds of hydrogen billowing from it. Automatically released jets of inert gas quickly smothered the flames, but the cabin and control console were wrecked.
Frantic work with a kzin military chemical bandage stabilized the wound, but it took time. Karan was weak and barely conscious.
The car, it was soon obvious, was not going to fly again without major repairs, and the lock on the car which Vaemar and Dimity had used was keyed to open to the patterns of Vaemar's and Dimity's hand or their tappetum or retina respectively. It was centuries since the last manually pickable lock had been made for anything as expensive as a car. Any attempt to burn the doors open, if it did not ruin the car's delicate mechanisms, would probably exhaust their weapon first. They carried Karan into the meager shelter of an overhang as rain began to fall from the grey sky. Mobile telephones were a standard part of their equipment. They called for help, and waited. After a time the rain gave way to sleet and snow. More thunderbirds came.
* * *
The comet-debris had served them well, Kzaargh-Commodore thought. Night-Lurker had passed undetected into the thick asteroid belt the humans called the Serpent Swarm.
The long descent back towards the sun had not been spent in idleness. Heroes had worked to disguise the ship.
At first Kzaargh-Commodore had thought to disguise it as a derelict, but had changed his mind after coming across a genuine kzin derelict warship. After stripping it of all that might be useful and giving the dead Heroes aboard space burial, he had sent it sunward for a test, cold, tumbling, patently helpless and dead. Human instruments had identified it, and interrogated it, and when it did not respond batteries of laser-cannon had vaporized it. The same happened when he sent in a stealthed ship's boat, manned by a crew of Hero volunteers. Stealth technology took them quite a long way, but it was plainly not the whole answer. Rocks did better, if they were not identified as being on a collision course with Ka'ashi or some other large body—there were too many rocks for the human defenses to vaporize them all, and in any case many contained valuable ores.
The apes seemed arrogantly confident of their mathematics and of their meteor defenses. Any large meteor
whose path missed Ka'ashi by more than 50,000 miles was generally not intercepted.
Night-Lurker became a lurker indeed. Like Lord Hrras-Charr of legend, who had cut off his own ears to fool his enemy, the cruiser had lost external parts. So altering something as complex as a spaceship without dockyard facilities was a mighty task, but his Heroes were skillful. Most of the removed parts had been stored inboard or put into orbits from which they might one day be retrieved, but one way and another it had changed shape and shrunk. Its sleek lines and mirror-finished surface had disappeared under stony plating and rubble. The ports of its great rail-guns and laser-cannon were hidden by lids. Its gravity-engines were never used. There was sufficient delta-V for it to maneuver with short bursts of low-powered chemical rockets, inefficient but far harder to detect in space.
* * *
“What do you think of Chorth-Captain?” asked Dimity.
“He is not his own master. I do not only say that because it is unbelievable that a Hero would voluntarily serve such monsters. He appears to have no power to correlate. And there is a spot on the back of his neck that is not a battle-scar. It is metallic. I saw it gleam. I think it is some kind of Protector-made descendent of a zzrou.”
“Could a Protector have learnt of such things?”
“The caves contained abandoned equipment of all kinds. The Protector could have found a zzrou and improved on it. Chorth-Captain is likely not the first Hero it captured. It could have experimented on others until it perfected what was necessary for a reliable… slave… servant…?”
“Catspaw?”
“It is not a term I would choose. But an enslaved Hero—or a succession of them—would have been very useful to the Protector at first. I imagine less so now. But I do not know why it did not simply create an army of Protectors on Wunderland as soon as it knew how.”
“I think I know why,” said Dimity. “The first Protector wanted a force of Protectors it could control. These are not quite the same as the original Pak Protectors and it had become aware of how limited and temporary Protectors' ability to cooperate is. That is why it worked gradually, in an environment where it set the parameters of existence.
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