Choice of the Cat

by E. E. Knight

  After waiting for another long burst from his partner's machine gun to stop, Valentine called over his shoulder "Ahn-Kha, there are some of your people out front. I think they're ready for action, but don't know what to do. Let's switch. Talk to them."

  Valentine ran to the base of the stairs and sighted his gun upward. "There's just one. You can't see him from the bottom of the stairs, but go halfway up and he shoots," Ahn-Kha warned.

  The Grog went to the door and threw both the portals open wide. He began bellowing into the night, waving the gun above his head.

  Golden Ones rushed in, brandishing picks and mallets. It appeared as though, without willing it, he and Ahn-Kha had started a revolt.

  "My David, show my people the armory, I beg of you. I have business elsewhere," Ahn-Kha said, leaping up the stairs three at a time. The example inspired some of his fellows to follow despite their lack of weapons. A shot splintered the banister, and the giant sprayed bullets up to the third floor.

  "Can you all understand me?" Valentine asked.

  "Yes, sir," the growing mob said in various accents.

  He led them down to the little room, wishing it had three times as many guns. He handed over the automatic he had taken off the dead radio operator. The Golden Ones just took the guns and grenades and left the explosives, Valentine was happy to see. Nothing saps the will to revolt like accidentally blowing up a dozen of your vanguard.

  More and more Grogs gathered as the word spread. One of them, an oldster missing a hand, an eye, and with a pronounced limp, joined Valentine in handing out guns and the proper ammunition.

  "My friend, was no-right at rail-gate," the elderly Golden One said in his halting, glottal English. "Own-eyes watched Hood-man drop dead. No-gun, no-hurt. Guard-mans watch their-eyes same-same, ranned away. Now my people done Hood-mans?"

  "I hope so. I don't know," Valentine said.

  The last guns left in the hands of their new owners. Valentine followed the flood of straw-tinted muscle to the door. He could hear shooting outside. The old Grog grabbed him by the arm as he went out the door.

  "Careful-careful, sir!" he implored, and yelled something up the steps. "Or shoot you, maybe-maybe." The Grog led Valentine to the door.

  In front of the old library, a bonfire had been constructed out of any wood the Grogs could lay their hands on, mostly in the form of railroad ties. Even now, pairs of what he recognized as females were carrying up more ties, adding to the blaze. Valentine heard shooting from the direction of the Twisted Cross Barrack, and saw further flames lighting the sky there. Guard towers on the other side of the wall were firing into the ghetto, but they were too far away for Valentine to tell whether they were achieving anything other than alerting every Grog in Omaha that something was seriously wrong in the Golden One quarter. Valentine, feeling that events were now well out of his control, just lugged his booty from the armory to outside the library and sat on the steps to watch. The old Grog barked orders this way and that to hurrying youngsters, but if they paid attention to his words, Valentine could not say. He could see the ears on the Grogs, twitching this way and that in excited confusion.

  "My people were like that bonfire, my David," Ahn-Kha said, unexpectedly joining him. His machine gun was down to its last belt, and the Grog reeked like a sulfur pit as he kicked another of his kind, longer haired and fleshier, before him. "Sit, dog!" he told the prisoner. Then to Valentine: 'The fuel was there. They just needed air and a spark. You provided both—"

  "We provided both," Valentine corrected.

  "You provided both," the Grog insisted, "when you destroyed the Hooded Ones. That was the air, allowing them to breathe. From what I am told, the Hooded Ones all dropped over unconscious at the same time. The spark came in this building."

  "Interesting. When a Reaper's tie is severed with its Master, it acts on instinct. Dangerous, but not smart."

  "Ah, but that is when the Master is still alive, is it not?"

  "I don't know. Is this the esteemed Khay-Hefle?"

  The wretch plucked at Valentine's pant cuff. "Sir, take me to—"

  Ahn-Kha wrapped his long foot around the prisoner's neck. "Silence! Yes, my David. Though my dream of revenge is not to be. It is—well, it was—a law of the clan that none of my people may kill except in battle or duel of honor, and he was unarmed. With this pretender brought low, I believe the old laws will be restored. His fate will be for the new Elders to decide. Besides, he screamed for mercy. There is no triumph in killing such a One on his knees."

  "That's so." Valentine doubted he would have been as charitable if his family had been buried under a latrine.

  Other Grogs came and strung Khay-Hefle from the iron bars of his own palace, giving the General's surrogate a good view of events. He hung from his wrists, crying as Grogs came to shout what had to be abuse.

  "He's right side up. Mussolini wasn't so lucky," Valentine said to Ahn-Kha. The mob surprised him with its restraint: it restricted itself to words, sometimes pointing and laughing. Humans probably would have set fire to him; he'd heard ugly stories from veteran Wolves about what happened when towns changed hands.

  "This Mussolini, he once ruled your Free Territory?"

  "Never mind."

  Two more Grogs ran up to the bonfire, each with a huge kettledrum on its back. They were beautifully fashioned, carved so the different woods and metals looked as though they'd grown together. A third Grog with a pair of club-size drumsticks began to beat out a rapid-fire tattoo.

  The pounding rhythm gave Valentine a welcome primal thrill, heating the cold sour ache in his belly. The drumming intensified until he felt the earth shake with the Golden Ones' stamps. Even the muzzle flashes from the distant watchtowers paused while the drums boomed. Then it slowed to a steady, ominous beat.

  The sound galvanized the Grogs. Without a word, they knelt and rapped their weapons against the pavement, ears pointed up and out like the horns on a Viking's helmet. The drumbeat intensified, and its tempo increased as did the clatter of rifle butts hitting concrete. As a people, they tilted their heads back and began to bellow and howl to the stars.

  Valentine took in the crescendo and he trembled for their enemies.

  Chapter Ten

  The Cave: Strategic Air Command's old headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base has seen better, and worse, days. Better when it was a buzzing hive of planes and blue uniforms, jet exhaust in the air, and the camaraderie of men who know that they're the best in the world at what they do. Worse in the summer of '22, when the nukes came, thundering blossoms of thermonuclear heat that reshaped the landscape. They turned sand to glass and flattened anything that wasn't built to bunker specifications in a hurricane of wind, pushing first out from the blast and then rushing back toward the mushroom clouds of the MIRV warheads.

  Now some of the great hangars have been rebuilt, SAC's old underground catacombs reoccupied. A new general has come, with men in strange uniforms; the swastika flag flies, its spiderish black-and-white design stark and forbidding against the blue of Omaha's skies.

  * * *

  Thirty-six hours after the bonfires died, Valentine, Ahn-Kha, and a strong young Grog named Khiz-Mem watched the shadows lengthen across the old base south of Bellevue.

  Ahn-Kha selected Khiz-Mem after the flame-lit night in the ghetto.

  Valentine remembered the rest of the revolt as little but a confused series of impressions. The Twisted Cross barracks aflame. Screams of Man and Grog. The endless drumming. Gunfire clattering in the distance, dying off, then starting up again. Fresh ash lifted skyward, turning the wind bitter.

  Valentine had stayed out of the struggle at the request of his friend, who feared that in the confusion, some Golden

  One would shoot him down as a one of their Twisted Cross overseers.

  The killing did not stop until after dawn, when the last guards in the watchtowers outside the walls either fled or were brought down by snipers. The towers inside the walls unexpectedly revealed major structural fau
lts as the revolt got going, and they came crashing down at a signal of one of the Golden One engineers. The Golden Ones shot as far and as well as their Gray One brethren, many of whom lay dead in the upper floors of the Great Hall and in the little barrack houses outside the two gates of the ghetto.

  With a few hours' rest and some warm food inside him, Valentine decided to push on southward. He knew the Twisted Cross would not take the Golden One revolt lightly, and that they'd be back soon with everything the General had. Ahn-Kha shared Valentine's fear of the coming threat and refused to be parted from him.

  "Ahn-Kha, your people need you more than I do."

  "My David, here I am just one more set of hands. With you, I am half of the first alliance joining Golden Ones with the Freeholders, honored to stand at the side of a friend. In which role can I help my people more?"

  Valentine wanted to go to the General's Cave and throw a little sand in the gears of the Twisted Cross war machine before it could return to Omaha and quash the Golden One rising. But now it would take more than blowing up a few hundred feet of bridge. In preparation, he and Ahn-Kha "liberated" flamethrowers and explosives from the Hall's armory.

  Khiz-Mem made the pair a trio after Ahn-Kha drafted him to serve as packhorse and guide. Ahn-Kha assured Valentine that the young Grog knew every corner of the aboveground part of the old Strategic Air Command base. Khiz-Mem, in the full flush of his twenty-something strength, shouldered the weight of flamethrower, satchel charges, food, as well as his own pistol and rifle. Ahn-Kha carried the other flamethrower and a slightly lighter load. Valentine had an additional satchel full of grenades—white phosphorous incendiary grenades among the others.

  Ahn-Kha examined one of the cylinders as they walked out of the ghetto. "With these, they burn the houses of those they would punish. I should like to give the Hooded Ones a sample of their own flame."

  The Cave was a little more than a long day's walk south of the ghetto, but Valentine did not want to move straight down the rails connecting the base with the city center.

  What was left of the Twisted Cross ghetto-police had taken that route; discarded equipment lay at the edge of the rail line like markers. They were probably holding some intermediary point, waiting for their own chance at vengeance.

  So the trio took off west before turning south, retrieving Valentine's submachine gun and pack from the little cache. Picking its way south with Valentine scouting well ahead, sweeping the smugglers' trails of Omaha with his ears and nose, the party took its time. He wished he had another few days to look for Duvalier, they weren't very far from the rendezvous point.

  The day had a hint of autumn to it; even the afternoon heat had a cool quality to it that the summer days had lacked.

  They spotted a scout plane midday. If the little ship was not the ill-omened red-and-white one from the Dunes, it was its twin sister. It flew up from the south and circled the city above the Golden One ghetto. As they watched it from a halt, Valentine explained to Ahn-Kha the story of its use in the Dunes.

  "So that means they will attack soon," Ahn-Kha said.

  "Yes, they'll hit your people before the Golden Ones can get organized."

  "Our people, my David, our people. From this day forward, you will always be accounted a member of our clan, and welcome in the Hall."

  "I hope there'll be a Hall—and people to do the welcoming," Valentine said, studying the little plane.

  At another break, in the roofless ruins of a warehouse, Ahn-Kha showed Valentine how to use the flamethrower. It consisted of three tanks on a backpack frame, a small one with compressed air and two larger tanks containing gasoline with a thickening agent. The mixture was fired by what amounted to a heavily built garden hose attached to a wide-mouthed insecticide sprayer. It fired the jellied gasoline a good thirty yards with a frightening roar of flame.

  "I saw some burnt-out ruins in Wisconsin once where the Kurians had been doing some kind of training under the supervision of the Reapers. I wonder if they were teaching their men how to use these things? None of us could figure out how so much damage could be done without explosives."

  "You must be careful with your trigger finger, my David," Ahn-Kha said. 'This pack is half-empty now. You must use very short bursts, and even then you have only a few. Why do we carry these all this way?"

  "I want to do the same thing at the Cave that I did at the Hall. Just on a bigger scale. The Hooded Ones are terrible, but the ones working them are vulnerable. Maybe more vulnerable than the General knows."

  After a final hard march, they came up on the damaged areas outside the base in the late afternoon. The scouts shared a heartroot meal in a patch of tall grass at the old interstate, looking down at the outer edge of the camp. The perimeter fence consisted of two lines of fence topped with concertina wire. The main part of the base was hidden behind a lip of low hills; concrete observation bunkers set among them like teeth. A rail track ran along this, the western edge of the base.

  Khiz-Mem talked in his native tongue and pointed to the wire and the area beyond.

  Ahn-Kha patted the youngster on the head and turned to Valentine. "Between the wires are mines. You cannot see them, but there are guard posts well concealed behind the wire. Not all are manned all the time. The General still does not have all the men he wants, but he has plans for this place. He trains new soldiers always. Omaha was thought to be a good post to give recruits experience."

  "They got an experience, all right," Valentine said, trailing his binoculars over the open prairie surrounding the base. It would be a nightmare to get in—there were probably trip wires within the concertina, if not Reapers prowling like guard dogs. "I don't think marching up to the gate is going to work for me here."

  "I told you—our people are resourceful. There is a small tunnel, which stretches very far. It opens out on the far side of the old concrete road behind us. A few have used it to escape. We cannot go through it in great numbers, for the air goes bad within. Khiz-Mem says it is very tiring. You have to crawl the whole way. It opens within the base in a livestock barn, at the pigpen sluice."

  "Fantastic," Valentine said. He was not sure if Ahn-Kha's knowledge of English extended as far as sarcasm.

  "No, my David, this is to your advantage. They use dogs on the base, some running free, at night to find intruders. Pig odor may confuse them."

  After the meal and rest, they swung around to the west in a final arc to the exit hole for the escape tunnel.

  "Strange how things turn out. We dug this to let our people get out, but we will use it to get in."

  "Not we," Valentine said. "I. I don't think we should all go in, especially at night."

  Ahn-Kha opened his mouth to argue when the noise of engines caused them all to drop to the ground. Valentine and Ahn-Kha climbed up to the cracked and uneven remains of the old expressway and looked out at the western border of the base.

  A column of trucks bumped along a road running alongside the rail line bordering the Cave, turning out from the main gate that Valentine could now see farther to the south. A four-by-four scout car led the column, followed by a genuine armored car on fat tires. Then came truck after smoke-belching truck, twenty-two in all, mostly old two-and-a-half-ton army jobs, restored and painted and towing trailers. A few of these carried machine guns mounted in a ring on the roof above the passenger seat. Double-axle pickup trucks towing cannon followed the army trucks, interspersed with camouflage-painted U-Hauls. In the beds of the pickups, uniformed figures sat facing each other.

  Valentine plucked a piece of grass and chewed it as the procession of motorized military might passed by.

  "I see some of our people still wish to serve the General," Ahn-Kha observed, as more utility trucks rolled by, their slat-sided beds filled with armed Golden Ones and Gray Ones.

  "My species hasn't cornered the market on betrayal," Valentine said. 'There's good and bad everywhere."

  "I would have more good," Ahn-Kha said, lifting a mule's worth of gear.


  "Someday, old horse," Valentine said, watching dust settle as the column bumped off to the north at a steady ten miles an hour.

  The sun was setting, the Twisted Cross Reapers would be in Omaha soon, and he had a tunnel to crawl through.

  They went back to the outlet, an old cement drainage pipe by the interstate, broken open by some force of war or nature.

  "I believe you should let me come, be another set of eyes, if nothing else," Ahn-Kha insisted.

  "Suppose we are crawling through your tunnel as a Reaper passes overhead. He might find it strange that life-sign is passing a few feet under his boots, don't you think?"

  Valentine turned over the PPD and his remaining ammunition. "Here's my gun. If I'm not back by tomorrow morning, go to the meeting place at the river I told you about. There should be a human woman there—if not, look for a pile of four of anything: rocks, firewood, whatever. There may be a note in there, and you can act on it as you see fit. Or go back to yo—our people in Omaha."

  He unwrapped his old nylon hammock, placed the flamethrower, his sword, and the satchel charge within its webbing, and then wrapped it all up in a blanket. He climbed into the tunnel, pulling the sack behind him.

  "See you at sunup," he said, and backed into the hole.

  The escape tunnel was a wonder of improvised engineering. Valentine had expected to have to wiggle through it like a mole in a garden tunnel, but forgot about the Grog shoulder span. Wood held it up in some places, corrugated aluminum in others, and beneath the road and rail line Valentine crawled through a real concrete tunnel. The building of this thing must be a fascinating story in itself; he promised himself to hear the whole tale from Khiz-Mem should he come out of this.

  It grew pitch-dark as he left the opening behind. Valentine hated the abyss of absolute dark. The dark of the grave, of death. Even his newly sensitive eyes were useless; only the Reapers could hunt here. He imagined steel-like fingers reaching out of the darkness behind him and closing around his neck. He reached into a pocket for a leather tobacco pouch and brought out the diamond-shaped glow bulb that Ryu had given him as a parting gift. He had bound it in a little harness loop of leather, which he now hung around his neck. The comforting yellow glow was like a tiny little piece of the sun with him in the darkness, and he felt his fears shrink back to manageable size. He sniffed the damp air of the tunnel and smelled a faint piggy smell.