The Wunder War mw-10

by Hal Colebatch

  “During the war I did plenty of ruthless things, including acting as an agent provocateur to discredit the pacifist movement when the situation on Earth required it. I've slept well with many deaths on my conscience—and I'm not talking about kzin deaths. But to just let these lunatics go ahead with their attempted mayhem seems wrong—perhaps because that old kzin trusts Rykermann, perhaps because we're all getting old and less hot-livered—I mean hot-tempered! Even seeing that kzin and those humans working together at the spaceport. Perhaps I'm wobbling a bit about Exterminationism. Also, who knows how much damage the revolt might do before we crushed it? I need to think the whole thing over.”

  “I don't! But there's one reason for me against just sitting back, my love: If Henrietta is there I'm going after her! Alone if need be! But I suppose it would be silly to resent reinforcements.”

  As Cumpston had a habit of pinching his lower lip when thinking, Arthur Guthlac had a habit of sticking his out. Jocelyn leaned closer to him, bit it gently between her teeth, then licked his face. She thought of how Markham had enjoyed that.

  “Leonie liver not happy,” said Raargh in his blend of Wunderlander and the former slaves' patois. It was a statement, not a question, the vocabulary somewhat broken down. Leonie was not as fluent as the colonel.

  “No,” she said, “Leonie liver not happy.”

  “We go into battle,” said Raargh. Even though Leonie was a female, it—she—was a fighter, and surely the prospect of action should rouse any fighter's spirits. “Good for soldier to go into battle with high liver. Fight best… Memory Raargh and Leonie fight morlocks?… Why Leonie not happy? Leonie just mate. Mating make females happy.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Ziirgah sense,” he told her. “Not telepath,” he emphasized. “Not tell thoughts. But tell feelings. Leonie happy when Raargh wake. Now…”

  She laughed.

  “Why Leonie discharge from eyes? That also show humans not happy, Raargh know… Once, Leonie dig Raargh out of trap. Once, Raargh help Leonie breathe. Leonie female, but still Leonie and old Raargh companions, Raargh thinks.”

  “Yes, Leonie and Raargh companions,” she replied. “Life was simple then. But Leonie is stupid manrret.”

  “Some manretti not stupid,” he told her. “Some manretti clever. Leonie clever… Some mans,” he went on, “like clever manretti.”

  “Yes, Raargh,” said Leonie. “That is problem. Some mans like clever manretti. Hard to explain to Hero.” She put out a hand and scratched the great scarred head under the lower jaw. Raargh resisted an undignified temptation to purr.

  “Raargh companion,” he said.

  “Yes, Raargh companion.”

  “Leonie have enemies, Raargh have enemies. Raargh eat! Raargh have long fangs, sharp claws.” He demonstrated. “Raargh old, but Raargh quick!… Is Jocelyn manrret Leonie enemy?” he asked hopefully.

  “You would, too, wouldn't you? No, companion, it's not that simple. Leonie has no enemies. Not here.”

  “Leonie not want to kill kzinti… kill ratcats. Raargh knows.”

  “No. But I will fight if I must today… Otherwise… maybe disaster.”

  “Yes. Raargh knows.”

  Very carefully, imitating a gesture he had seen among humans, Raargh laid his great clawed hand on Leonie's shoulder. Surprised, she turned her tear-streaked face to him. Arthur Guthlac entered. His own eyes widened for a moment at the scene.

  “We're ready!” he barked. “We're all going!”

  “Shouldn't we leave someone here?” Leonie asked.

  “We're too thin on the ground to divide our forces any further. Professor Carmody is our guest on this planet, and I'm charged with keeping her out of danger. But leaving her here with or without a guard is hardly a practical option. In any case, she has said she doesn't want to be left here and she'll come. But I want no lives lost. Remember, we're not going to fight, but to blockade them till Early's troops arrive.

  “Raargh,” he went on, “I am declaring this a military situation. Will you take orders from me?”

  “Yes.” Five years had accustomed Raargh to humans' notions of discipline. The old kzin did not even growl. And that, thought Arthur Guthlac, weakens me as an Exterminationist a little more. I am a soldier, and that old ratcat becomes one of my troops. Honor is a tanjed awkward thing. And what was the old ratcat doing just now? It looked for a moment as if he was comforting her… But why?… Of course! As the song goes: 'What kind of fool am I?'… and it took a kzin to see it!

  “Let's move out!” he snarled.

  “What now?” Vaemar asked Colonel Cumpston.

  “Waiting is very difficult. At the moment it is all we can do.”

  “I think they are listening to us.”

  “Yes.”

  “It does not matter,” said Vaemar. “Seizing me by a trick and insulting my Honored Step-Sire Raargh—even insulting you, my chess-partner—is not the way to gain my cooperation…”

  “If she and Emma have you, they can use your Name to the other kzinti.”

  “And what you said… that Emma's plans would destroy every kzin on Wunderland… Do you believe that?”

  “Yes, Vaemar. Worse, it would mean no peace between our kinds would ever be possible. That will be difficult enough as things are.”

  “It surprises me, that she should behave so.”

  “Not me, so much, perhaps, but I have read more of human history. And lived longer.”

  “Do you think Henrietta is truly loyal to my Honored Sire?”

  “She probably thinks she is. Whether he would approve of what she says in his name is another matter… Suppose, Vaemar, suppose against all odds Emma's plans succeeded—that the Kzin revolted and captured the hyperdrive. How would you feel?”

  “I am a kzin. I am Chuut-Riit's son. But I am also a kzin of Ka'ashi—of Wunderland. I know you and other humans… difficult.”

  “According to the holo, your honored Sire Chuut-Riit knew Henrietta had influenced him. And he wanted her, if he died, to influence his own sons and Traat-Admiral. He was looking—as far as being what he was allowed him to look—as some sort of eventual partnership—or at least I know of no other notion that described it more closely. His ideas were perhaps not so far removed from those we now hear from Markham and a few others—save, of course, that he saw the Kzin as the utterly dominant ones and the humans existing on sufferance—slaves perhaps at best one day a little above the Jotok.” And monkey-meat if they were fractious, he thought. But if we ever get out of this, I want this young ratcat thinking about a human-kzin relationship on more positive lines. Civilize them for a few—perhaps more than a few—generations, and who knows?

  “Yes,” said Henrietta, stepping into the room, Emma beside her. “Chuut-Riit knew I influenced his policies, knew I helped him understand humans. He accepted it. But listening to you has told me a good deal. I seek to stop the secret manipulation of the human race as well as the Kzin. It appears my daughter has an altogether different agenda.”

  “There is no point in hiding it any longer,” said Emma. “It is I who am truly loyal to the Patriarchy, and the memory of the Riit.”

  “This ARM officer is right! Your plans are insane!” Henrietta cried out. “To guide and instruct Vaemar to help destroy the ARM conspiracy when he leads the kzinti of Wunderland is my charge and my sacred goal. You would destroy everything in a mad adventure!”

  “Mad! You call me mad! Have you looked at your own brain lately?”

  “Andre sides with me. We have planned this for years.”

  Emma raised one hand and made a gesture. “Go and make ch'rowl with your pet monkey, then! Behold!” A dozen male kzin entered the room, standing about her. They were all, Cumpston saw, young. Older than Vaemar, taller and bulkier, but several still with the last traces of juvenile and adolescent spotting on their coats. There were also several more humans with them.

  “The loyal humans and the loyal Heroes side with me!” Emma snarled. One or
two of the kzin growled. Emma addressed them in the hiss-spit of the Heroes' Tongue. Cumpston was astonished that a human could pronounce it so well. She turned back to Henrietta. “You forget! Half these Heroes' Sires were of Ktrodni-Stkaa's pride! They follow me!”

  “I have given them refuge.” Henrietta's hand went to the weapon on her belt. “I have tried to help the kzin of Wunderland, of every pride, but not for this! And you have here the blood of Chuut-Riit, who you would risk! Chuut-Riit, who was my good Master! Yes, and who called me friend as well as slave!”

  “Chuut-Riit! You cannot impress us with that name! My loyalty is to the Riit! The true Riit, whose traditions were borne by Ktrodni-Stkaa! Chuut-Riit was a compromiser, if nothing worse! If Riit he truly was! Chuut-Riit's reward was foul death at the hands of a human assassination team. Ktrodni-Stkaa saw Chuut-Riit and Traat-Admiral for what they were! Monkey-lovers! Much good it did them!”

  Cumpston looked at Vaemar with alarm. To insult a kzin—for a human to insult a kzin!—was more than bad enough. To insult a kzin's Sire was far worse. And for a human to insult a kzin's Sire of Riit blood was… unreal. But Vaemar betrayed no emotion save an unnatural stillness.

  Two more humans rushed in, wearing the odd pseudo-kzin costume that seemed to be the uniform of these people.

  “We've picked up activity in the south passages! Large life-forms. About a dozen of them. They appear to be human but at least one kzin.”

  The human identified as Andre strode forward. “We have a common enemy!” he shouted. “We must destroy these invaders. Defense stations!” He stepped to the control console.

  Vaemar screamed and leaped. One slash sent the human behind Andre who blocked his way spinning across the room, blood splattering. Then Vaemar ripped at the control console. The lights went out, save for the illuminated numbers of a couple of clocks and other pinpoints. The air was a confusion of kzin and human shrieks. There was the gingery smell of kzinti battle-reflexes. Cumpston felt the weight and sharpness of a clawed Kzinti hand on him.

  “It is I, Vaemar,” a voice hissed in his ear. “Follow. Hold my tail. We must find a hiding place!”

  Emergency lights were coming on as they left. Henrietta and Emma seemed to be working together at the console. The kzinti and humans were seizing weapons from the racks.

  Chapter 9

  The journey back the way Raargh had come, with lights and a marked trail, was much quicker. With lights and company, too, even if the company was only human, he did not suffer from the delusions of sensory deprivation. Any surviving morlocks kept out of their way—and the Rykermanns had lights whose radiations morlocks were meant to find especially painful. Raargh again went in the lead, again hoping his prosthetic arm would catch any Sinclair wire before it sliced into living flesh and bone. Arthur Guthlac kept close behind him.

  The Rykermann party had automatic compasses, GPS indicators, microminiaturized deep radar and other directional aids, and there was little risk this time of getting lost. Leonie made a selection of emergency medical equipment developed in years of guerrilla war, and Dimity, the most lightly armed of the party, carried it. They went fast, but, to Raargh's impatience, at less than maximum speed. They had only their feet and were hung with gear, and Arthur Guthlac insisted on no more than a walking pace with rest stops. At his insistence they were kitted up in skin-coveralls and each third of the party took it in turns to wear gas masks and helmets. They passed the bone-heap and entered the lined tunnels. Ahead was a dim glow. There seemed little point in dousing their own lights.

  “Should we spread out?” asked Jocelyn.

  “I don't think there's much point in spreading far. If they've got deep radar or motion detectors they'll see us coming. If they have plasma guns or nerve gas it isn't spreading out that will save us. But it might be a good idea if they try to take us on hand-to-hand.”

  “Fighting kzin hand-to-hand isn't a good idea. Anyway, the point isn't to fight. It's to stop them getting away, with or without their prisoners.”

  “How do you know this is the only way out?” asked Dimity.

  “I don't,” said Guthlac after a moment. “I suppose I took it for granted. In fact, knowing how paranoid the kzin can be when they put their minds to it, it's unlikely they'd have restricted themselves to a single—”

  “There!” Raargh stabbed with a massive finger at Guthlac's motion detector. “Movement ahead of us and on our right flank.”

  “How many?” asked Leonie.

  “They are not many yet. An eight, two eights. But we are not many also.”

  The lights showed nothing. Only the single tunnel ahead of them, and what they knew were a complication of dark holes behind.

  “These caves have never been fully mapped,” said Leonie. “We've been finding new ones all the time.”

  An explosion shattered the panel above them. Raargh, faster than any human could have moved, spun, firing the heavy kzin weapon. Guthlac's two troopers also fired back with quick, short professional bursts.

  “Behind us as well, now!” Raargh snarled.

  One of the students was down, hit by a chunk of flying metal behind the left ear. Arthur Guthlac saw instantly he was dead. Keeping low, he gathered the strakkaker and spare charges, as well as the food pack the boy had been carrying.

  “Did you see anything?”

  “No, too quick. Too dark.”

  “No point in staying here, then,” said Arthur Guthlac. “Plans are changed. We move on. And we stay together. We're too few to split. Forward!”

  A blue glow lit the tunnel ahead of them. Hemispherical, it blocked the way. Raargh recognized it as something to be avoided. Dimity recognized it as a Sinclair field, and Arthur Guthlac knew it from old ARM texts. It was possible to live in the time-compressed zone inside it, given adequate supplies of food, water and air, but only if one was in place before it was generated: The process of entering the zone once it was activated would probably be fatal.

  A beam, or the projectiles of a strakkaker, fired through the field would receive enormous acceleration. What would happen to such a beam on leaving the field on the other side no one was sure, but as a rule attempts to get around the Special Theory of Relativity in the Einsteinian universe had either no results or cataclysmic ones. Strakkaker needles, or other projectiles emerging from the field with a kinetic energy giving them far more destructive power than artillery shells, would also not be a good thing in this confined space.

  “We'll have to go over it,” Dimity said.

  “How?”

  She pointed. The roof above them was a complex of machinery—pipes, ducting, ladders, and gangways.

  “It's too obvious. They will have booby trapped it.”

  Dimity turned to Raargh.

  “This field was not on when you came this way?” she asked, speaking carefully in Wunderlander.

  “No.”

  “I think it's been set up here in a hurry. They may not have had time to do more. If it's enough to delay us, from their point of view that's better than nothing.”

  “All right. How do we get over it?”

  “We have ropes in the caving gear,” said Leonie. “If that would help.”

  “It might. If we could get up there and attach them.”

  “Can the kzin do it?” asked Dimity.

  “Can you, Raargh?”

  “Raargh can try,” he answered. “But Raargh cannot jump like kitten. Raargh is old and has wounds in legs.”

  “You are still quick,” said Leonie. “Still have strength of Hero.”

  He screamed and leaped, straight upwards, claws scrabbling. The claws of his natural hand cut grooves in the paneling, deep but not deep enough to hold him. The claws of his prosthetic hand smashed through it, found a hold. His hind claws dug in. He pulled himself vertically upright, seized at the overhead ducting and struggled onto it.

  “Useful to have a kzin along,” said Leonie.

  The glowing domes of the Sinclair fields below them reminded Cumpston a l
ittle of giant jellyfish stranded on an Earth beach. But they would, he knew, be considerably more deadly to touch than the worst jellyfish. They were crawling along a high gantry, and he felt hopelessly exposed to any hunter with modern tracking or sensory devices.

  The red dot of a laser-site appeared on his chest. Fight or flight, he knew, would be useless. He raised his hands in surrender, signaling to Vaemar to do the same. A group of the armed humans from the fortress appeared at the end of the gantry, McGlue in their lead.

  “You had better come out quietly,” said McGlue. There were six of them, with strakkakers and nerve disrupters. Vaemar and Cumpston obeyed.

  “Put your hands on top of your heads. Do not make any sudden moves. Dead, neither of you are any use. But we will shoot if we have to. You cannot beat six of us. But I do not want to treat you as prisoners. We are on the same side.”

  “And whose pride are you?” asked Cumpston. “The mad one or the even madder one?”

  “Ostensibly, we side with Emma,” said the man. “Actually, we have our own agenda. One which you, Colonel, are obliged to support.”

  “I suppose you'll explain?”

  “I need to. We seem to be alone at present. All other kzinti and humans are off wiping out your little rescue party in the caves. Does this mean anything to you?” He held up a small plastic cube, projecting a holo.

  “An ARM ident.”

  “Genuine, as you well know. Specifically coded to my DNA and impossible to counterfeit. We have the same employer, Colonel. Or ultimately the same employer.”

  “Go on.”

  “Your job has been to watch this young kzin. To adjust him to living on a human world. To become his friend.”

  “I am his friend! And I have never concealed my ARM status from him.”

  “I congratulate you. You have carried out your instructions cleverly. But it has been my part to play a more covert role. ARM is, as you have perhaps guessed, the instrument of a higher power.”