by Larry Niven
"We were right," he said. "A zzrou, or its descendant, but capable of controlling behavior as well as action. I have removed it."
"Is he dead?"
"Probably not. Kzinti are much tougher than humans, and this thing has no wires or roots to suggest it was deep in his nerves or spine. As to the quality of life he may expect, that is another matter. He must live with knowledge of what he has allowed himself to become. The door is open. The catspaw is out of action. Now, perhaps, we only have five Protectors to deal with. Or perhaps more." He picked up Chorth-Captain's w'tsai. "I feel less naked with this," he said. Then he dropped it again. "But what use would it be against a Protector? Let him keep it. I will take this, though." He hefted the beam-weapon. "Now, Dimity-Human," he said, "you and I have a chance to do deeds fit for a song!"
"Lead, Hero!" she told him.
"Obviously, if we can get control of the ship, we should take it. But I do not think we will be allowed. They are surely monitoring us. But come!"
There was the "ward" with the rows of transforming Morlocks. There were no Protectors to be seen. "Why don't they try to stop us?" Vaemar asked.
"They are probably interested in seeing what we do. A practical lesson in our tactics."
"That Sinclair field could be a weapon, perhaps. Urrr."
"What are they doing with it? Growing more Protectors?"
"Chorth-Captain said the rest of the tree-of-life agent was still on Wunderland." Vaemar peered into the field. "It looks like some small-scale industrial process. Some super-strong materials take a long time to grow, and they could be speeding them up. Mountings for hyper-drive motors need super-strong materials. That is what it looks like to me. Getting ready. But you know more of building the hyperdrive than I."
"They know of the hyperdrive already?"
"If our knowledge of Protectors is true they have immense ability to correlate. They could learn from the internet. Not everything, but enough to start work."
Dimity too examined what could be seen through the blue radiance of the field. She nodded after a long pause. "Yes. That's what it looks like."
"I agree."
"They don't have the hyperdrive... yet."
"Anticipation. They believe they will get it out of your mind. Or if not from you, from another."
"You will ensure I do not live to tell them, Vaemar."
"If it must be. But it has not come to that yet."
Two Protectors leapt out of a passage. Possibly the sight of the naked human female breeder halted the first one for a moment. Too fast for Dimity to follow, Vaemar swung up the beam-weapon and fired. The cantaloupe-head of the Protector exploded, hit between the eyes. The other, far faster than even the young kzin, dodged behind the Sinclair field. Vaemar, keeping his claws retracted, seized Dimity with his free hand and dragged her behind the cover of a metal partition. He raised the beam rifle again, waiting for the Protector to show itself. Then he had a better idea. Firing straight into the Sinclair field, he thought, might well have most spectacular results. It might even wreck the hatch cover and open the compartment to space, which would solve everyone's problems. Orlando would carry on his line. As he depressed the beamer's trigger, the lights on its stock died. He pulled the trigger again, harder. Nothing happened. Obviously it was under remote control and had now been deactivated.
The Protector knew it was safe. It stood up, then leapt, so effortlessly that it seemed to fly, onto what appeared to be the housing of the Sinclair field's generator.
Chorth-Captain hit it from behind like a bolt of orange lightning. They fell forward together. Screaming, Chorth-Captain went headfirst into the Sinclair field. His lower body and hind legs, protruding for a moment, convulsed wildly and then went into the blue glow. But the Protector, too, had staggered forward into the field, standing in it up to its thighs.
The Protector did not seem to accept immediately what had happened. It stayed where it was for a long moment, looking down. It was not their kidnapper but one of the more recently changed ones. Stay there! Stay there! Dimity implored silently. It reached up and touched its ears, as though puzzled. It even pushed a hand down into the field as if testing it. Dimity realized the Protector's armored skin and relative lack of pain sensitivity could be a handicap to it. Nerve couriers could not tell it so much about its environment. They're so tough they don't need pain for an alarm signal. Then it gathered itself and sprang out of the field. It should have sprung precisely on top of them. But tough as the Protector was, it still had a circulatory system. In the field its lower limbs and feet had been deprived of blood, died and had been dead for some time. Its lower leg muscles were gone and it fell short. It landed on its feet, but collapsed as it landed, the bones of lower limbs and feet splintering.
As the Protector tried to leap again, both legs and one hand dead, Vaemar closed with it, jaws gaping, slashing with his claws. The swing of its remaining hand was still too fast for Dimity to follow, but this time Vaemar caught it, slashed and bit. Dimity heard his fangs clash on bone. He leapt back, out of reach of the Protector's snapping muzzle. It had two hearts, but its powerful circulatory system was carrying dead and decayed matter into both of them. It continued to stagger towards them on the bony, disintegrating stumps of its legs, its smell alone almost enough to knock a human down as Vaemar grabbed Dimity and dragged her back, springing up and out of the thing's reach. It made another leap after them, fell again, crawled, collapsed and died.
Vaemar turned off the field. He and Dimity looked down for a moment at what remained of Chorth-Captain.
"At least he died a Hero," said Dimity. "And look! There was more of that control device in him than we knew."
"No Hero should have allowed such a thing to happen to him," said Vaemar. "But I will take his w'tsai now. Perhaps I can do him the service of gaining it new honor. And look further! Here is the key to the ship! But there is something to be done before anything else." He leapt to the doors, closing them one after another. "We may be thankful this is kzin-derived architecture," he said. "I think we have locked them out for a time. But they will bypass those locks soon." He turned to the lines of transforming Morlocks and began rapidly but methodically slashing their throats with his claws and the w'tsai. Already the skin was turning into a leathery armor and it was hard work, but Vaemar was quick and strong.
Vaemar saw the horror in Dimity's eyes as he returned to her. He took her hand and touched it against his forearm.
"Remember," he said. "Fur, not skin."
"I know," she said.
"Now we have Protectors whose children I have killed," he said. "They will not be pleased with us. I think they will be coming soon. I see no escape. Can you think of a solution?"
"To escape in the ship that brought us. You have the key now."
"Yes. Unfortunately the hatch above it is closed. I can perhaps work out how to open it if the Protectors do not override the ship's controls, but it will take a little time. Unless you can help me?"
"I have not your practical ability with machinery, kzin-based or otherwise. But there is something." She took him back to the housing of the Sinclair Field controls. "Can you turn on the field again?"
"Yes, it is simple. Why?"
"I think we have a chance of reducing the odds against us. The Protectors are still inexperienced. I am going to stand in the area of the field. When I give the word, turn it on around me."
"You will die! You will exhaust the oxygen! One can only live in a Sinclair field with special air supplies, to say nothing of food and water. Urrr."
"I can live for a short time, that is why I say..."
Two Protectors leapt out of the passage. Dimity jumped into the field-area, and screamed, "Now, Vaemar! Now!"
Vaemar threw the switch. Dimity became a shimmering shape inside the blue dome.
Whether the Protectors meant to kill or recapture them, Vaemar was unsure. But they meant business. Their expressionless leathery faces with the Morlock eyes now strangely alight with intel
ligence were also lit with fury. Vaemar wondered if they were keeping him alive for torture. But the reactivated Sinclair field was between him and them. As they advanced, he saw Dimity in the field flashing almost too fast for his superb eyes to follow. Vaemar crouched, waiting a chance to spring, a chance he knew he would not get.
There were two shattering explosions, so close together they seemed one. One Protector's upper body disintegrated, then the other. Vaemar, head ringing, jumped back to his feet. He seemed uninjured. He stared in amazement for a second, then saw Dimity halt in her meteor-fast movements, fall and lie still. He leapt to the controls and killed the field. Gently, keeping his claws sheathed, he tried to give her artificial respiration, fearful that he should crush her fragile ribs, fearful she was dead. I care so for a human! The surprised realization flashed through his mind.
"Look at me! Look at me! Look at me now!" he sang at her from their old song. She stirred and sat up, gasping.
"It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how," she completed the quotation with a weak smile at length.
"Are you all right? I learnt the theory of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the ROTC, but I believe giving it to you would be difficult for me."
"There were still a few breaths of air," she said. "There was an emergency tank inside. And some water. They must have had Protectors spending time in there controlling the processes. But it was a pretty near thing!"
"It was you killed the Protectors?"
"Yes."
"How?"
She pointed to her feet. "I threw my boots at them. I had plenty of time to take aim and work out the trajectories and kinetic energies. They were moving like slugs. And I do still have quite a good mathematical brain."
"You are a Hero," said Vaemar. "There may, with good fortune, now be only one Protector left."
"Yes. Why didn't it attack as well?"
"I suspect the answer is that those Protectors were the last parents of the Morlocks I just killed," said Vaemar. "Despite the increase in their sapience, they were still Morlocks, still fairly newly changed, and mad with rage. The remaining Protector is the original, the one that brought us here. It has no children of its own, so it can make more Protectors without prejudice to its plans, and, at least until it comes to understand that human reproductive technology could still give it children, its behavior is not unclouded by parental emotion and anticipations. It is the one mature and partly experienced and educated Morlock Protector, obviously by far the most dangerous, and if we do not kill it we will be no better off than before. If it does not come to us, we must hunt it down."
"That would be quite hopeless, even if we had a functioning weapon. You saw how swift and strong it is, and it is armed too."
"You would have us ssurrendirr, Dimity-Hero?" Vaemar's human speech slipped as he pronounced the hated word. "Or flee? Urrr."
"I think we have no choice but to press on. Explore!"
"Hero! Well said!"
"With caution. You have Chorth-Captain's w'tsai?"
"Yes! Let it regain honor in my hands!"
Dimity clicked the trigger of the beam rifle experimentally. It was still dead. "We will have to hope a Hero's w'tsai is enough," she said.
"I had better lead," said Vaemar.
Chapter 12
Mechanisms towered about Dimity and Vaemar. Dimity had, with Vaemar's help, improvised a breathing mask, which she hoped would keep out the smell of any tree-of-life, from the tatters of what had been the top part of her suit, and sealed the rents in the rest as well as she might with an all-purpose repair gel from Chorth-Captain's belt. They had obtained a light from the same source. Tracking the Protector by the pain it was radiating had brought them this far.
"Fusion toroids," she said, pointing. "The energy needed to move this between stars must have been vast."
"I am glad our kinds did not know too much about such energies in the past," said Vaemar. "Think of a war fought with bodies like this as missiles."
Something, too fast for human eyes to see clearly, scuttled away in the dark above them. "The Protector," said Dimity. "Why doesn't it attack?"
"It was a Protector," said Vaemar, "but I do not think it was the same one. Dimity, we have been too optimistic, I think. I do not think we have accounted for all the newly awakened Protectors. Perhaps its task is to watch us and report."
They came to an opening into a vast cavern, filled with machinery.
Vaemar stood unmoving for a moment, then he said, "There are... vibrations in the air... perhaps you cannot sense them... which tells me these motors may not be dead."
"After scores or hundreds of thousands of years? Surely not?"
"Look at the cavities in the roof," said Vaemar. "They appear to have been artificially dug."
"Yes."
"Except during brief eclipses, half the external surface of this body is always in sunlight, half in the darkness and cold of space. The temperature differentials on the surface must be very large. It is a problem and an opportunity in all space-engineering."
"Yes. I see what you mean. That would give unlimited electrical power for tunnelling robots. They could extract and refine fuel."
"It would not, perhaps, take much to keep the engines simply ticking over."
"Would Protectors think like that?"
"I cannot know how Protectors would think. They are more like you than me. But I sense there is power here. This asteroid was overlooked for mining because its metallic content is relatively low. But I would guess it was metal-rich when the Protectors chose to make it a spaceship. I guess some automated or natural variety of mining worm has been tunnelling and mining in it for a long time."
"A machine refining its own ore and making its own replacement parts," said Dimity. "We have nothing outside fiction that can do that for so long or on such a scale. Self-sustaining machinery, processes still carrying on after a million years. And we have no information that Cybernetics was a Protector talent."
"Obviously, they could have set themselves to acquire such a talent. Dimity, this gives us a glimpse of what mature Protector technology can do! I do not like it.... And look! There are lights. They could be solar-powered engines ticking over. Or powered by long-lived fission or fusion processes. Doing essential maintenance, ready to set off a fusion reaction when needed. There are many ways hydrogen could be collected and stored, for example. Or perhaps it has been completely closed down and our Protector and Chorth-Captain have reactivated it."
"It is as well, as you say," said Dimity, "that this moon was not properly explored before the end of the war. It could have been a super-weapon."
"It still could be. I do not know if we should approach anything critical too closely. It may provoke a response."
"I think we have to provoke a response. The status quo does not favor us."
Dimity stepped forward cautiously. She gave a cry of fear and surprise. Vaemar leapt, grabbed her with one arm and pulled her back. Then he advanced cautiously and pointed. "Nothing to fear too much. An active kzin gravity-sled. Heavy-duty Naval model. Chorth-captain must have brought it here. We can avoid its field."
"I am sorry. I am a little rattled. You can handle one, Vaemar?"
"Of course. I have flown one since I was a kit. It was one of the first things Honored Step-Sire Raargh bought when we were living in the farm country."
"Then let us not avoid it. Let us use it."
"To fly on? There is not much space for that."
"To fly on and to fight with. Do you think the Protectors would let us use it? We could do great damage if we could fly. I am sure they would try to stop us."
"Dimity, I think the God, whichever one has dominion here, has been good to us. You will have to move very quickly. I will board the sled. You will take the copilot's seat and hang on for your life, and pray that these Protectors still think like Morlock Breeders, jumping down on their enemies when they see us escaping. Now!"
Vaemar and Dimity leapt into the sled. From above, two Prote
ctors sprang. As they did so, Vaemar's claws flashed at the sled's controls, flinging its motor into maximum reverse flux. The Protectors, directly above it, were flung straight up. One smashed into the machinery above them, and stuck among it, the other, as though swimming through air, reached the edge of the field and fell onto the sled. It clung with one hand. Vaemar had time for one slash at the hand, removing three fingers and reducing its power of purchase. Desperately he continued to slash at the leathery arm and snapping beak with the w'tsai and his claws. Dimity grabbed the flight-controls of the sled. They skimmed back along the corridor as Vaemar finally cut the Protector's grip. It changed hands. Vaemar grabbed the controls and stopped the sled, keeping the field focused on the Protector. Dimity screamed in its ear and it let go. It flew upwards, seemed to grow smaller and vanished into the blackness above.
"I hope it ends up at the center of the moon," said Vaemar as they flew back into the first chamber. "Half a mile from any surface. I don't think I killed it, but that will give us time, I hope, to do some real damage. If it was the last Protector. We will have to hope it was. But we cannot continue sticking our noses into the cave, unarmed, in the hope more will come out. We have been lucky so far."
Then he asked: "Why did you make that noise? Were you what humans call terrified? Panicked?"
"In the caves the Morlocks must have evolved and enhanced every nonvisual sense," Dimity said. "Particularly hearing. I thought its hearing would be specially sensitive. Sensitive enough to use against it. I wondered why the other Protector did not leap out of the Sinclair field instantly instead of pausing while the field killed it. Chorth-Captain had screamed as he pushed it in, and I think that stunned it momentarily. They must have evolved in the caves to hear the slightest sound—the rustling of insectoids, the tiny bubbling of water's meniscus rising in grains of mud. Evolution towards hearing microsounds. But with never a need to evolve a defense against too much sound. I realized that just now."
"Dimity, you do not disappoint. Now what?"
"We can get away and do real damage at the same time."