by Larry Niven
Corporal guessed Platoon Officer despised the cautious injunctions of the Manual as monkey thinking, despite its fearsome and illustrious author. Corporal was aware that he himself was too cautious to be an ideal Hero. He thought of the little group among his fellow recruits who had once been his particular companions: Most of them had been more recklessly daring than he, and many of them would be of superior rank or even Name if they had still been alive. That was another reason he would like a mate and a son: Sometimes late at night the dead were not satisfactory company.
Sergeant turned to him. "Corporal, you and your eight will guard the rear!" In strict military practice that was Sergeant's task, but Sergeant had no intention of accepting a position that carried relatively little chance of glory. Corporal obeyed unquestioningly. Sergeant also had the speed and strength for his orders to be unquestioned. And anyway, Corporal told himself, in these tunnels, where anything might be behind them, the position of rearguard was not actually shameful. Weapons were raised. "Forward!" Platoon Officer rushed the tunnel, two eights of Heroes behind him, shrieking. What happened next was hard for Corporal to follow. The shrieks changed in pitch into insensate screams—the screams of kzinti who realized something terrible but incomprehensible had been done to them. He heard their bodies crashing down to the flat ground at the foot of the slope. He saw a couple of their lights swing through wild arcs, revealing nothing. Then the screams died away. There was another sound, plainly the sound of a kzin scrambling back up the slope. It stopped, and slid back. There was nothing more.
Corporal called, but no answer came. There were still some faint sounds but they were dying away. The smell of blood—kzin blood, mixed with the smells of marrow and entrails and pain—rose up the passage in a cloud.
One trooper, plainly maddened by what he heard and smelled, charged headlong down the passage, ignoring Corporal's shouted command to be still. Whatever happened to the others happened to him. A shriek, and then silence save for the thud of his body landing far below.
Kzin are not easily horrified, but Corporal paused. One part of his mind and his emotions stated imperiously that it was his duty to charge down after the others. If there was danger, a Hero attacked head-on, reckoning nothing of the odds. He was the senior surviving rank, and now the leader. But the fact he was the only surviving NCO, he thought, put a different cast on things: he commanded an eight of troopers—eight minus one now—and without him they would be leaderless. He had seen before the consequences of that. Monkey tactics had always been to kill the kzin officers and NCOs first—a strategy in which, he thought, kzin officers and NCOs had often been only too willing to cooperate. Now he had a duty not to risk himself.
There was nothing to see down the tunnel but a dim light, presumably reflected from some of the Heroes' glow-patches at the bottom. Nothing to smell but waves of blood and death that drowned out all other smells. There might be human or morlock there.
"I wish a volunteer to explore the tunnel," he told the troopers.
"Command us, Corporal!" It was a unanimous shout and snarl. No kzin soldier would dream of not volunteering for hazardous duty.
"You." He picked the nearest trooper. He spoke with emphasis: "You are ordered to go slowly and cautiously. Tell me everything you smell, see, and hear as you go. When you have detected the danger return to us. Do not attempt to fight it alone."
Trooper advanced on all fours.
"It is a steep incline," he called back, "but my claws hold me. The ground is firm enough. I see nothing. I smell only the blood of Heroes..."
"Still nothing," he called a few moments later. "Blood smell is stronger... There is... a sting... my face. PAIN!"
"Come back! Come back at once! That is an order!" If Trooper were injured, an examination of his injuries might tell them what devilish thing awaited Heroes in that tunnel. And Trooper did not seem to be badly hurt yet. He heard Trooper scrabbling back, saying nothing. He seemed to be breathing with a peculiar wet noise.
Trooper came out of the tunnel. But he looked different. He shook his head and staggered as he moved. In the dim light it took corporal a second to see his face was a mask of blood.
"What happened? Report!" As he spoke he gestured for the unit medical kit to be brought. "Pain... " Trooper's head fell apart. Corporal saw bone, brain, flesh and gushing blood. Trooper fell forward, plainly dead.
Roars of rage from every kzin throat. They surged about the top of the fall, preparing another mass-charge down it. Corporal cuffed them back with unsheathed claws, snarling curses. At last he got them into some sort of order, and held them till their fury had been brought under control.
There was only one possible course now. Corporal picked the oldest and, he hoped, the wisest of his Heroes. "I will explore the tunnel myself alone," he said. "If this kills me, take command and report to higher authority what has happened. Do not follow me."
It was as the Trooper had said. The tunnel was wide enough for Kzin on all fours, or even standing partly erect, to charge down it at a good pace. The floor of it was fairly firm and gave a good purchase for claws, but even in Wunderland's light gravity the bulk of a kzin's body had a tendency to run away downhill on such a slope. He stopped just before it began to level off a little.
This was, he thought, as far as Trooper had got.
Something like an insect tickled the tip of his nose. He drew back instantly, raised one hand, and felt it. His massive, stubby fingers came away wet with blood.
He waited. There was a stinging pain on the sensitive skin of his nose now, but from the amount of blood it was not a serious injury.
His strained his eyes to see anything in the gloom.
There was a fine line in mid-air. A fine dark line. He touched it with the tip of his w'tsai. There was a scraping sound.
It was fiendish and simple. A length of superfine metal wire, perhaps a single molecule in thickness, had been stretched across the tunnel. Listening carefully, he heard a tiny buzzing or droning sound. A miniaturized engine, he guessed, would make it vibrate minutely to increase the cutting effect. The charging kzinti, going downhill with gravity adding to their speed, had simply cut themselves in half on it. No wonder there was so much blood. It was so fine that it caused little or no immediate pain and even Trooper going more cautiously had not realized what was happening when it was inside his head. Now there was enough blood and tissue on it for it to be visible.
He backed away up the slope. It would have been possible to crawl under the wire, but it was too late to help those below. In any case, he realized, there might be other such wires strung almost anywhere. He felt the eyes of the others upon him: they were waiting to be led.
How much of the wire did the humans have? That was a fairly meaningless question. Kzin grew such wire in space—it needed zero gravity and vacuum—but Markham and other ferals had spaceships and could be supplying it. He remembered Hroarh-Officer's warning now: "They can make anything into a weapon." It had been placed at the bottom of the steepest part of the slope, where the kzinti would run into it at the greatest speed. No doubt the humans were waiting in the chambers below for his own section either to come charging down after their comrades and share their fate, or to realize what had happened to them and depart, leaving the humans to pillage Heroes' sliced-up corpses of their gear and weapons and perhaps (he had heard rumors about human ferals) to eat the meat from their bones in a declaration of Conquest. Platoon Officer's radar, presenting an instant three-dimensional picture of the cave complex, might also be a prize for the humans worth more than w'tsais and beam rifles. Well, it would not be borne. Quickly he told the troopers what had happened.
Should he report that this section of the caves was infested with ferals and the best thing to do would be to seal the entrances and pump in nerve gas or fire the plasma cannon to exhaust the oxygen and cook everything in the nearer tunnels? Perhaps detonate a dirty bomb in one of the big chambers and let the radiation do the business? But it would take time to evacuate
the other kzin forces, and he had an obligation to avenge Platoon Officer, Sergeant, and the Troopers personally. It was not the kzin way to retreat from trouble. Traps were a contemptible monkey trick to be despised and destroyed. His w'tsai was also monomolecular-edged.
The w'tsai's blade brought him to a stop as he started down the slope a second time. The wire itself was plainly very strong—in fact, he found, there were two wires strung a little way apart, and several reinforcing and bracing strands. Scraping the blade back and forth along the wire, following the sound, brought him to the anchor points. Using the squad's heavy weapon to destroy them would cost more time and perhaps collapse the tunnel. He marked them instead and crawled on under them, w'tsai held before him in one hand, beam rifle ready in the other, his troopers following close behind.
Below him was a scrabbling sound. He heard a confused clamor of human voices. He could see no more wires at the end of the slope, but held his w'tsai ready and launched himself.
He landed on the pile of sliced-up kzin bodies. He made a diving role forward through the fragments, hoping the humans' sight and other senses would not be acute enough for them to understand what was happening. The stench of kzin blood, rage, terror, and agony (some of them had lived a little after being bisected, long enough at least to know what had been done to them) almost made him lose control. His troop followed hard behind. The humans scuttled away. One or two fired wild shots, and the kzin troopers hosed fire after them. Several fell to kzinti speed and accuracy before they reached the stalagmite groves. Corporal went for them in a standing leap that covered several body-lengths. His jaws clashed together in one's chest so that he felt its heart lurching before it stopped. At the same instant his claws ripped at another, tearing it into two pieces that he flung flapping away. His tail lashed out to trip another, curling around its spindly legs. He jerked it and brought it down. Another smash of his great claw to its head, the claw coming away slimy with the human's brains. Rifles blazed and the air shook as his squad leaped up to him, roaring and screaming with vengeance. Humans fell to left and right. Then they were gone.
The other kzinti would have leaped after the retreating simians, becoming separated in the darkness or hurling themselves, for all he knew, onto more traps and snares, if he had not called them back. He licked the blood from his lips. They formed a ring at the bottom of the slope, about the pile of dead, weapons pointing outward into the surrounding darkness.
Claws dug at his shoulder. It was Sergeant, mangled and mutilated like the rest, but not dead yet. His grip was still powerful, though his death-struggle was past. He turned Corporal to him and fixed him with his dying eyes.
"Win battle," he muttered. "Have caution." Then he tore a badge from the monkey-leather strap that held his decorations and passed it to Corporal in a hand that dripped with his own blood. He gasped out a few more words as he died: "You are Sergeant now."
He had not thought of that. But his promotion was quite orthodox. Most kzin got their ranks when those above them died in battle. He had been young to be Corporal and he was young to be Sergeant. It would be interesting to see if he grew any older. There was no time to think of it further. One or two of the other ill-fated Heroes might be alive, and would wish to be dispatched to the Fanged God with speed and dignity. There was also the securing of the area and the deployment of his troops. He had but six Heroes about him. True, there was no limit to what seven Heroes might achieve, but the caves were large. In any event, their objective was not security but pursuit and revenge. Somewhere a way off there was an explosion, and that momentarily lit the mouth of one of the tunnels snaking into this cavern. He guessed from the smell that the humans were using their nitrate bombs. Better lights would have been helpful, he thought. Next time we must bring better lights. The beasts might be anywhere.
He could make out a chaos of stalagmites, stalactites, columns, boulders, flowstone, fantastic twisting heligtites. He found the remains of Platoon Officer, but neither his radar nor most of the platoon's weapons were to be seen. He gathered up a few beam rifles and charges the humans had missed and issued them to his own Heroes. Ammunition expenditure was likely to be heavy. Somewhere was a rushing and bubbling of water—the stream or river that had made this cave. It sounded like a big one. There were other sounds of movement in the darkness. One Hero fired instantly at the sound, but the beam struck a stalagmite only a few body lengths away. There was a shattering explosion of rock-crystals, giving lacerations to several Heroes.
If the humans had thrown one of their primitive nitrate-bombs in the direction of the kzin group and only narrowly missed it, the result would have been similar. Indeed for a moment Sergeant thought that was what had happened. Had they not been in a combat situation, trouble would have resulted. As it was the overeager Hero responsible received only glares and snarls from the others that suggested the matter might be taken up again when they returned to the surface. There was an odd rustling sound he could not place.
The great pillar glowed green for some time after the ray had hit it, glowed darker green and faded to black at last. These formations had enough crystal facets to trap light for an appreciable time. Bright beams of cooler light stabbed out from the section's lamps and dialed-down lasers but showed only a chaos of pillars, rocks, and shifting shadows. In fact the contrast between the lights and the shadows they cast made things worse for the night-eyed kzin, though they could consciously control the expansion and contraction of their irises. Sergeant found Platoon Officer's goggles but for the moment they were little help.
Then, out of the darkness he heard a high wailing sound: The humans had ratchet knives, although as far as his ears could tell, less than an eight of them. Kzin w'tsais rang and flashed as they were drawn. Beam rifles were cocked with a rippling, metallic rattle and crash. Seven Heroes against what sounded like about three eights of humans. It would be a quite serious battle, but, given the speed, strength and coordination of Heroes, not too serious. In hand-to-hand combat they had beaten far greater odds before. And vengeance fired their livers.
Black shapes darker than the darkness behind them. Swift and silent. He spun round. They stood for a second in the light, huge bulging eyes blinded, fangs dripping. Not humans, morlocks. The things were as ugly as humans and smelled worse. They were carrion eaters, as contemptible as omnivores if not more so. And, he realized, the carrion they sought to eat was the flesh of Heroes. He advanced on the brainless things, expecting them to flee. But they held their ground, and, beyond the beam of his light, he could see the dark shapes of others advancing. There was something unpleasantly like coordination and purpose in that advance. They were spreading out to surround the living kzin. Dimly through the stalactite groves he saw more, flitting like ghosts. They were as silent as one would expect cave-predators to be.
Urrr. A modern beam rifle could dispose of the creatures quickly. There was a real enemy to fight without these other vermin wasting time and resources.
Something struck him hard on the head, knocking him sprawling.
"Down, Dominant One!" cried a Trooper. A beam cracked into the limestone beside him. A smoking, bisected morlock dropped from his shoulders. The creature had dropped on him from the roof. And he saw why its impact had stunned him. It clasped a heavy, pointed rock, perhaps the tip of a stalactite, but at any rate a weapon and tool. Even in Ka'ashi's gravity it could have split his skull.
He swung the beam of his light upward. The spiky roof of the cavern was seething with morlocks, so many of them the stones themselves seemed to be crawling.
Kzin beam rifles fired on the instant, nearly killing Sergeant and all his Heroes: the blasts knocked tons of stalactite and rock from the cave roof—calcite crystal formations like giant spears, hard, heavy, and as deadly to those below as any dumb missile might be.
The kzin had never questioned that beam rifles in a confined space should make short work of such creatures. A few minutes' experience showed this was not the case.
Firing up at
the morlocks was clearing the cave roof of them, but slowly, and with a large expenditure of charges, apart from the menace of the great crystal missiles falling from the roof each time they fired. With the lights casting wildly waving shadows, the creatures blended easily into the darkness and dodged behind the protection of thick stalactites and columns.
Clearing the area around them was even more difficult than clearing the roof. The innumerable columns and pinnacles of stalactites and stalagmites made it a stony jungle, with endless places of shelter and cover. Heaps of rock and dark shadows concealed the entrances of tunnels. Further, the facets of crystal split and reflected the beams: It was like firing a laser into an infinity of tiny mirrors. Certainly the stone could be melted and blasted away with a concentrated beam, but the charges of the rifles would not last forever.
Still, the professionals of the Patriarch's Army knew their business. They adjusted quickly, kept cover, and when they fired an enemy usually fell. Sergeant looked back at the upward-leading tunnel, straining to see through the fumes and dust now filling the air.
He threw himself down and turned his eyes away just in time as a beam stabbed out to smash the rock just above him. There were humans at the tunnel. He lived because, like all their kind, they were slow, even without the weight of the kzin weapons they were using. He gestured to the Trooper near him to lay down a suppressing fire in that direction. Still, it was another complicating factor: a force of wellarmed humans was positioned between them and retreat—if it had to come to retreat. Aim. Fire. Aim. Fire. Then lights on the other side of the great cavern. The roars of kzintosh voices. It was another squad, attracted from other tunnels by the noise, charging into the battle. The morlocks fell on them from the roof like black leaves in a forest storm. He and his troopers shot a few as they fell. Screams and snarls of the other kzin force, beams arching in all directions. Humans running and firing, to be hit by the Troopers' quick, accurate bursts.