Wary of what might still be in the darkness, she leopard-crawled to Raargh. The old kzin was spitting and cursing. His prosthetic arm was badly damaged, she saw, and when he tried to stand his right knee gave way and he fell forward. Leonie remembered he had been wounded in his knees long before. Her light showed blood and a gleam of bone. She applied her last field-dressing. There were sounds diminishing in distant tunnels.
“Leonie,” said Raargh, “I cannot run. You must go on alone.”
“There is no need. Our mission was reconnaissance. We know what is here and what is happening here. Our job now is to tell the others, not for one or two of us to fight Protectors and Morlock bands alone.”
“We attack!” Raargh cried. Leonie knew the kzin attack-reflex well. A kzin, like the Protector she had just killed, would crawl to its enemies if that was the only chance of a final slash or bite. But Raargh could inhibit that reflex when his wits were about him. It was why he had grown old. He was not going to be much use crawling into battle on two functioning limbs.
“Is that what you would tell Vaemar, were he here?” she asked him.
Raargh was silent for a moment. Then “You are bleeding,” he said. “Still you must leave me. Go and report. Urrr.”
Leonie touched the leg and felt it give. The webs of interlocking and reinforcing cartilage might help it a bit, but the bone was gone. She saw something too she had never seen before—a spasm in the old kzin's arm and face that could only be unbearable pain.
“We have both had worse wounds,” she told him. “Use the rifle as a crutch. Let us get back to the car.”
“No! Dishonor! I stay and cover your retreat from Morlocks.”
“You have done that once before in these caves. But there is no need this time. Come! Or we stay together here till Morlocks and Protectors return!”
Leonie's years as a guerrilla leader had taught her kzin as well as human psychology. She allowed the old kzin to lurch and hobble painfully around to collect the ears of the Morlocks he had killed. He tried to cut or wrench off some part of the Protector he had killed as a trophy additional to the conveniently large ears but she did not see the details. Then grumbling, sometimes mewing involuntarily like a cat in agony, leaning on his rifle, Raargh limped slowly with her back towards the daylight. She resumed the helmet briefly as they passed the tunnels where, she guessed, tree-of-life had been stored. She supposed the Protectors had taken it, along with all the weapons and other assets they could gather, deep into the great cavern system. They would be back soon.
There was no sign of the young ferals who had gone before them, and who, Leonie knew, might regard either a uniformed human or a kzin as equally their enemy. She told Patrick they were coming and to be ready for take-off.
Rarrgh moved with more difficulty as they went on. Leonie's suit had enhanced power joints, or it would have been quite impossible, but even so she could barely support part of his huge weight. Work, legs! she commanded silently. You are Leonie now! She knew kzinti could discipline their bodies to a literally superhuman degree and if they slowed down in a combat situation they were in a dire way indeed. She was surprised at what her new legs could do, and thought briefly that her old legs, injured by kzin claws and repaired by primitive surgery, could not have done it. I wonder if she was an athlete? Then: Not a really useful thought at the moment! Get a life! But the tunnel, which they had descended so easily, was a different matter to ascend with Raargh in such a condition. A desperate call from Patrick to hurry did not help. Finally they had to stop.
“Raargh legs no good,” the old kzin muttered disgustedly.
“Legs heal.” Leonie told him.
“Raargh finish. Raargh die.”
His leg injuries were not fatal. But Leonie knew that kzinti, who preferred to die on the attack, could also die of shame.
“No, Raargh not coward! Urrr!”
“Raargh might as well be dead. Cannot attack! Cannot support Leonie-Comrade. Go to Fanged God now before shame deeper.”
Raargh's natural eye was turning a peculiar violet color. The pattern of his respiration was changing in a way Leonie had never heard in him before. But self-induced death for a kzin could be very quick. Leonie had seen it during the Liberation.
“Did Leonie dig Raargh out of rockfall for nothing?” she asked in the Mocking Tense that it would once have been instant death for any human on Wunderland to use towards a kzin. “Did Leonie trust Raargh for nothing? Does Vaemar wish Raargh to die? Do Raargh's kits not wish to have Rarrgh hunt with them again? Will others rear Raargh's kits and chrowl Raargh's harem? Urrr!” She saw the fury and agony in his eye, but he made another effort.
“Legs can be repaired,” she told him. And then: “Remember it is Leonie who speaks. Remember what happened to Leonie's legs in cave! Leonie, manrret, lived with Raargh's help! Leonie walks again!”
There were times when she had scratched the old kzin's ragged ears in a gesture of comradeship. But she knew better than to touch him in such a manner now. Then, greatly daring, she stood before him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “You will not desert Leonie!” The Tense of Military Command. My instinct was to use the Imploring Tense, she thought. Slowly his breathing changed again.
“Leonie survived worse than Raargh,” he admitted at length. “Raargh will not be shamed,” he added in a different tone of voice. Slowly and painfully he stood and hobbled on. Leonie let him lead. Was that what it was for? She wondered. So I could talk a kzin into living? And then she thought: But Raargh is a special kzin. It took a long time, and there were more calls from Patrick.
Patrick opened the car's canopy as they emerged from the cave mouth into the daylit glade. He stood up in his seat and jumped down, hastening towards them.
“Get back in the car!” Leonie cried out. “Stay in the car!”
The rock hit him on the side of the head. The blow could have shattered his skull had he not been wearing earphones. He staggered and fell. Leonie fired at the rock's point of origin, a stand of tall grasses by the little stream. Patrick, streaming blood, began to crawl back towards the car as the grass flashed into flame. A dozen ferals burst out of the grass. They were armed with at least one strakkaker as well as rocks and an ancient Lewis-gun. They converged on the injured Crashlander.
Patrick bought up a handgun and fired, hitting the feral with the strakkaker. I forgot he was a Spacer flashed through Leonie's mind faster than she recognized the thought. Raargh swung upon the rifle-crutch and fired in a blur of speed. Leonie knew what his marksmanship was like. His first shot shattered the Lewis-gun, probably killing the gunner, but his second he fired not into the ferals but ahead of them. They went down, out of sight behind the bank of the stream. Patrick stumbled back to the car and pulled himself into the cabin as Raargh and Leonie laid down covering fire.
Something was happening in the sky to the southwest, a ball of purple radiance travelling like a meteor, heading towards them. Patrick was taking the car straight up.
The thing in the sky—a purple spider, a retinal disorder, a chip of cauliflower—expanded, shimmered to a shape Raargh and Leonie knew well. A kzin Rending Fang-class heavy fighter, heading towards them, landing gear down.
The car dodged and swerved in the sky. It was above the big fighter, which was now coming down for a landing on its gravity-motor. The car hovered for a moment. Then it dived vertically. At seven hundred feet car and fighter collided with a shattering explosion. With strength she never dreamed she had, Leonie flung herself at the bulk of the kzin, pushing him back into the shelter of the cave mouth as fragments of white-hot wreckage rained down about them.
Amid the falling wreckage was the dark shape of an escape capsule. It hit the ground and opened. The Protector sprang out and rushed towards the cave mouth. Raargh and Leonie had both dropped their rifles, but Raargh had his w'tsai out. The Protector snatched them up and, straightening, and ran straight at the w'tsai, but at the last instant twisted in its stride, dodging so that Raargh's slashe
s with blade and claws slid off its leathery skin, doing little damage. Raargh tried to strike as he had struck in the cave, but missed, and he could no longer leap. At the same time the Protector struck out at them, knocking them both against the cave wall. Then it was past them, a leaping spider-shape disappearing down the passage into the darkness.
“Now ribs broken,” said Raargh. “It will not stop Raargh fighting!”
“I think I may have broken a couple, too,” said Leonie. “Why did it not kill us?”
“Hands full. It had our weapons.”
“Why did it not kill us?” she asked again.
Raargh voice was different when he answered. He was the senior sergeant contemplating a military problem again.
“I think, Leonie, it believes it does not need to kill us.”
“A foolish thing to think of Raargh and Leonie!” she told him ringingly. Raargh had little more than torn stumps of ears projecting from a complex of scar tissue, but he raised them in a signal that to her was eloquent enough.
“Feral humans return,” said Raargh.
The surviving ferals were approaching the cave mouth in a semicircle. Their major weapons were gone, but they were still armed with rocks, which Leonie knew they could throw as accurately as Morlocks. Several new fires were burning where the wreckage had fallen in the vegetation, and a pall of dark smoke was rising to cover the sky above the glade. Raargh scrabbled across the ground and retrieved the w'tsai knocked out of his hand.
He should have killed them when we had the chance, thought Leonie. But he seemed to be trying not to kill humans. It was as if the shadowed walls of the cave and the sky beyond were turning a uniform white with the agony in her chest. Thinking was difficult. I don't think I can fight at all. They are not going to have mercy on me or a kzin. One human knife, one w'tsai, and one old kzin to wield it who's now very knocked about. This is real trouble. To survive more than fifty years of war to die at the hands of human children…
“Friends!” she managed to call. The ferals continued their cautious advance. She called again, without response. She had a knife. They had knives as well as rocks.
Suddenly they stopped, and fled, scattering into the vegetation in all directions. A moment later she too heard the sound of a ship in the sky. There it was, not shielded like the Protector's fighter. Arthur Guthlac's Tractate Middoth. It touched down, jets of foam smothering the burning vegetation, and armed figures leapt from it. Hunched over her broken ribs, she staggered out to meet them.
* * *
“So we have tree-of-life, Breeders and Protectors all together again in the caves,” said Cumpston. “Along with who knows how many prisoners. There are people missing from some of the tableland farms, and most of the feral gangs round here have vanished.” They were hovering, looking down at the great escarpment from several hundred feet.
Arthur Guthlac took a deep breath. The faces of the humans were grey. Strain, exhaustion, defeat.
“Only one thing to do if we're to keep the chain of command intact,” said Guthlac. “We report to Early. He and ARM were pretty definite that he was to be informed before any major decisions are made.”
“Not a good idea, when dealing with Protectors. We can't afford the time lag. Every minute we waste is giving the Protectors more of the time they need to learn and organize and make defenses and multiply themselves. And they've Number One back with them now.”
“We're stuck with it. ARM has become desperate about losing control of the situation… of all situations. And they've made pretty unambiguous threats about what will happen if we break the chain.”
“I'd like to see them threatening Protectors. How long will reporting take?”
“You know Early has left the system. I can't tell you where he is. We can send him a signal via a hyperwave buoy. That will take several days. Several more for orders to return.”
“Have we got several days?”
“I think not. The alternative is to send in an infantry force to clean them out.”
“It would be fighting Protectors. Protectors with weapons. They may be newly changed, but they learn very, very fast. And during decades of war the kzinti were never able to quite clear out the caves. Neither were we. Nils and his students haven't got them all mapped even yet, I believe, Leonie?”
Leonie nodded. The pressure bandages helped greatly, but it was still painful to talk.
“And hostages. They've got hostages. We're only just starting to learn how many.”
“I've got all the forces I can muster on the way,” said Guthlac, “and Nils has been onto the Wunderland authorities for their troops. There are local militias organized, too, and they're heading for the caves.”
“Lambs to the slaughter,” said Leonie.
“There are weapons,” said Cumpston. “Dimity says sound affects them. Fly over a sonic drone.”
“It wouldn't penetrate.”
“Our people have police sonics.”
“So did the police they grabbed. Protectors are tough. Sonics may discomfort them but I don't think they'll stop them for more than seconds. We might render them unconscious with directed sonics if we knew their brainwaves. Unfortunately we don't know and haven't time to find out. Shouting at them won't be good enough.”
“There are a lot of other things. Nerve gas. Spectrum radiation.”
“They're coming with the troops. Unfortunately a lot of our nerve gas supplies are kzin-specific and as for the rest—well, there are the human hostages.”
“If they have intelligence—and they do—they'll be dispersing now.”
“You've got weapons here.”
“Most of them are for use in space. We can blast away at the limestone while they organize. It won't be long before they're shooting back at us.”
Dimity Carmody's fingers had been running over a keyboard on the main control console. “Arthur,” she said. “Take us up higher. Fast. Put some southwest in it.”
“How high?”
“Just keep going.”
“Why?”
“I'll explain in a minute.”
The Tractate Middoth rose, drawing away from the caves. Higher.
Below them, from first one and then scores of openings, smoke and fire jetted from the escarpment and the limestone plain above it. The profile of the ground seemed to bulge. A fireball erupted, and another, and as they watched the whole scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein went sliding down into ruin.
“Fly!” roared Guthlac. The Tractate Middoth flashed away.
There was another explosion and a greater fireball, incandescent, blue-and-white-cored, burst from the seething ruin. It boiled into the sky, transforming into an orange-and-black cumulus, hideous and obscene to the watchers in the Tractate Middoth as they raced desperately upward into the clean stratosphere and away. Other fireballs followed.
“I kept the code numbers and detonation keying for the nukes,” said Dimity. “They were in Vaemar's computer. It's all over now. There was nothing else to do.”
“I'll call defense HQ,” said Guthlac. “They'll need to get decontamination teams to work fast. And before they signal a retaliatory strike on every kzin ship and world in reach.”
“But why didn't you say what you were going to do?” asked Vaemar.
“I didn't see why you should all have the responsibility. It's all gone now. Protectors, Morlock, ferals, hostages, the whole cave system and countless species. A swathe of human farms and hamlets. Your rapid reaction teams. Your militia. A bewildered Protector who wondered about God. Did you want to live with that?”
Dimity looked up into Vaemar's eyes and read his expression.
“I am very close to being a Protector,” she told him.
She put his great hand with its terrible razor claws on her forearm.
“Skin,” she said. “Not fur.”
Chapter 15
“I pronounce you man and wife,” said the abbot. “You may kiss the bride.”
Hand in hand, Arthur and Gale Guthlac walk
ed from the monastery chapel, surrounded by their friends. Each in turn came to them and laid a wreath around their necks, the three intertwined colors of vegetation from three worlds that grew on Wunderland now: red, green and orange. Gale's children had arrived from the Serpent Swarm. Guthlac's crew had no swords as would once have been ceremonially drawn to make an arch for the couple to pass under, but they presented arms.
“Have you heard from Early?” Rykermann asked Cumpston as they crossed the garth.
“Yes. He didn't betray much emotion about what happened. It's a fait accompli, anyway. And the Protectors are gone. ARM is busy with other things. I imagine they are things that include us, and the Wunderkzin. But I'm tired of being one of ARM's catspaws.”
“I should think there have been worse jobs than becoming Vaemar's friend,” said Rykermann. “Even if he does thrash you on the chessboard.”
“I hope I'll always be Vaemar's friend,” said Cumpston. “But I feel a change in the whole course of my life is coming upon me.”
“For what reason.”
“I don't know. Just a feeling. Something very new.”
“I didn't know you were foresighted.”
“Neither did I.”
“I sense certain things too,” said Rykermann. “Dimity… Vaemar… whatever bond is between those two will not be broken.”
Arthur Guthlac, Gale, the abbot and two of the monks were laughing together at something. Orlando and Tabitha had lost little time after the ceremony in wriggling and clawing out of their ornate formal garments and were leaping through the long grass together after flutterbyes. Nurse, who, it had been decided, was indispensible whatever he charged, carried a bag of buttons for their claws.
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