'My pride ... where are they?'
'Scattered to the four winds by now. I want to cover all my bases by distributing you cats throughout this entire region. There are a number of primal apes to kill and they're spread over a fairly wide area.'
'I need to find them.’ Astonished to realise that he was lying on his side, Yowlar attempted to rise.
'Don't get up yet,’ instructed Gurgon. ‘The modifications your body underwent will take a little getting used to.'
Yowlar slumped back down. He was weaker than a newborn kitten. Was this yapping snake ever going to make sense? The muddled cat did not think so as the Tsor droned on.
'I couldn't let you loose to prey on the apes without a measure of “fine-tuning” to make your task simpler. Loath as I am to concede it, Tsor genetic engineering at present isn't a patch on Berranian bio-altercation, but from what we developed ourselves and stole from those sanctimonious Warmbloods I've made do. I have given you a total makeover, Yowlar, complete with behavioural implants. You are now perfectly adapted to be the ultimate ape-killer.'
'I'm still all cat though?’ Yowlar asked rather concernedly.
'It's not something I'd personally get excited about, hairball, but yes, you've never been more cat. Think of yourself as the new, improved model. Essentially the same chassis underneath but covered with a slicker, more streamlined outer skin.'
Yowlar did not like the sound of that at all. The hologram of Gurgon-Rha abruptly flickered. ‘What's going on?’ demanded the Sabretooth.
'The beginning of the end,’ Gurgon said weightily. ‘The power drain on the Usurper is taking its toll. Chances are I am the last Tsor left anywhere in the galaxy, even if I'm only a facsimile. I'll be damned dying so ignominious a death on this godforsaken rock. I've planned an end more befitting a warrior ... going out in a blaze of glory by diving my ship into the nearest sun.’ The alien image walked the few steps over to the prone cat. ‘You know your task, Yowlar. You were chosen because you are the best of your breed, a born killer with no qualms about slaying for the sheer pleasure of it. I'm giving you the perfect opportunity to indulge your murderous tendencies to the fullest. You have the means and the motive.'
'How exactly do I benefit from this arrangement?’ challenged the Sabretooth. ‘I've been knocked out, forcibly removed from my territory, as well as being interfered with. What is my reward?'
The uncaring Tsor shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe one day upright, thinking cats will evolve.’ Kneeling beside Yowlar, his holographic eyes alight with vengeful zeal, he exhorted in a strident whisper, ‘Don't fail me. Kill the apes ... kill them all.'
Like a ghost Gurgon-Rha vanished without warning just as surprisingly as he had first appeared, his craft streaking mutely away into the starlit heavens moments later to become just another pinpoint of light in the starry firmament.
Yowlar shivered violently. The night was pleasingly warm, but the big cat's body was going into shock from having been refurbished by the alien's unfeeling touch. He lay still, unable to do anything more than listen to his own scratchy breathing and the nocturnal sounds of the mysterious, darkened land in which Gurgon had deposited him.
A series of roars sounded off somewhere in the gloom, startling Yowlar. While he could not be sure from which direction they were emanating or how distant the callers were, the Sabretooth recognised the identifying hollers of great cats. Somewhere out there was a pride striving to stay in touch during a hunt. Yowlar quickly discounted them being his own clan. Hoaru, Miorr and the others were most likely in a similar state of incapacitation as he, considering they too had been kidnapped and altered. Besides, had not Gurgon said his clan was no longer together? That could only mean another breed of giant feline frequenting the area, akin in size to the Sabretooths judging by the loudness of their caterwauling.
Yowlar's recovery was not speedy. Dawn began lightening the cloudless eastern sky by the time he felt strong enough to move. He had lain wherever the Tsor had dumped him for the better part of the night, his ears burning with the shrill squawks and screeches of exotic critters, often punctuated by the enquiring bellows from those unknown cats. By daybreak his nerves were understandably frazzled.
Dragging himself to his feet, Yowlar wobbled. Feeling woozy and oddly disjointed, he focused on the brightening greyness of the waking day. The vista unfolding before the stunned cat was at once both vaguely familiar and totally foreign. Placed on the verge of a thicket of flat-topped, thorny trees, a level sward of knee-high red oat grass stretched away to the horizon, the sighing morning breeze producing a gentle swell in that tawny sea. A veritable zoo of animals endemic to this continent grazed and browsed that grassland, ranging from hairless elephants to vividly striped black and white wild horses. Yowlar was subjected to conflicting emotions. The plain reminded him of his own native range yet harboured subtle, disconcerting differences.
The immigrant cat coughed, a parched hacking sound that bespoke of a terrible dryness in his throat. The moist smell of water lingered nearby and so Yowlar let instinct guide him from the stand of acacia trees. Finding his feet after stumbling the first few paces, he padded mechanically through the wafting grass, his unseeing eyes clouded by shock and confusion. The morning wore on and Yowlar walked without pause, driven by his worsening thirst. The sun climbed higher into a sky of blue concentrate broken only by lofty, wispy clouds of translucent white, making the waxing day hotter. The climate here was drier and more arid than the humid conditions of his birthplace. Panting heavily as the heat from the scorching disc relentlessly beat down upon him, Yowlar at last reached his unplanned destination around noon.
The swamp-rimmed waterhole, overshadowed by a mountain wreathed in mist, was of quite a size and patronised by a host of game. White-banded antelope and black-sided gazelle drank nervously at the water's edge alongside herds of giant grunting wildebeest, while flocks of chattering, yellow-backed weaver birds lining the shores dipped their beaks metrically into the refreshing liquid. Snorting hippos lounged in the shallows of the river-fed lake, while in the deeper parts shoals of silvery perch and catfish lazily swam through the sun-dappled water snatched at greedily by flocks of floating pelicans.
Yowlar eagerly bounded down the dusty embankment and crossed the marshy verge, scattering the thirsty grazers and making the birds take flight. Attempting to push his way through the razor-edged elephant grass ringing the lakeshore blunted the cat's enthusiasm, forcing him to slog through the sticky earth in search of a gap in the impassable clumps to get at the alluring water. Set to thrust his scratched muzzle into the cool wetness, he hesitated.
The face staring back up at Yowlar from the water was not his own. True, it was feline, only smaller, with more rounded ears, and shaded the black of night. The transformed Sabretooth yowled with dismay. His awesome half-foot long canines had shrunk in size to barely protrude outside the jaws of his remodelled muzzle. Reluctantly edging closer to the watery mirror, Yowlar caught his full reflection and winced. Gurgon-Rha had remade him into half the cat he had once been: five feet in length and at 130 lbs a paltry quarter of his former weight. He blinked, staring harder in disbelief. His Tsor abductor had given him a proper tail, a three-foot long appendage that swished with a life all its own. A screech of despair escaped his bone-dry throat.
'Keep it down will you,’ rasped an irritated voice.
Yowlar spun around. An eighteen footer bull crocodile was sunning itself a ways along the sandy bank, his toothy jaws agape in an unfriendly smile. ‘Oh great, another interfering lizard,’ muttered the panther. He had had more than his fill of meddling reptiles for one day. ‘What's it to you?’ he snarled dismissively.
'You're scaring away the game,’ decried the standoffish croc, ‘and if I don't eat I get awfully cranky.'
Yowlar measured up the complainant. He was decidedly bigger than his cousinly alligators lounging in the waterways of Marshy Green and probably should not be provoked. Diplomacy never did come easy to Yowlar. ‘Hey, Watersnout,
what is this place?’ he demanded to know.
'My home, so bugger off,’ came the unsociable reply.
The all-black cat refused to budge.
The basking crocodile took in Yowlar's modified form with his piercing eyes. ‘What sort of clawfoot are you, fluffy? You're not spotty like those freakish running cats, nor are you maned as the tuft-tails.'
The panther suppressed a growl of regret. His sabre teeth were not the only things Gurgon had stripped him of. Gone too was his splendid ruff, the envy of all rival males. Yowlar felt uncomfortably naked without his distinguishing collar of fur. ‘I'm a visitor to this region,’ he testily supplied.
'Obviously. Have you a name?'
'Yowlar.'
'Cattish, but I guess it suits you. What do you want here?'
'Where's “here” exactly?'
'Murky Watering.'
Yowlar was none the wiser. Gurgon-Rha had in fact lied outrageously to his furred kidnap victim and planted him back in time. This was East Africa over one and a half million years beforehand.
Tsor time-distortion technicians uncovered the means, in theory at least, to circumvent the spacial shielding protecting the past from tampering a scant month prior to Gurgon's embarkation, downloading that highly classified discovery to the Usurper's mainframe. The sole remaining Tsor warrior reviewed and scrutinised the data whilst tinkering with recreating himself holographically, deciding to risk all and take the gamble that what had been conceived solely as a hypothesis would in reality work. It was the only shot Gurgon had available to enact his petty retribution against the reconstituted Berranians, for prehistoric man was already gaining a strong, incontestable foothold in Yowlar's time. The best way to kill a tree is by hacking out the roots, so Gurgon painstakingly traced the evolutionary branches of the ancestral humans back to their African seeds, computing that his ship lacked the fuel for a jump down the undefended timeline farther than early Pleistocene Africa. Fortune favours the bold and so far his ploy had worked to a tee, even though it came spectacularly close to foundering.
Reptiloid temporal computations were dangerously flawed when applied to reversal jumps. A perpetuated error in the basic equation went unnoticed right up to the countdown to launch, meaning Gurgon's inaugural attempt would have slammed future matter against past anti-matter, the resultant explosion obliterating Creation. The avenging Tsor was stopped from blowing up the universe by Lerb's timely materialisation. Getting over his initial shock at the advanced alien popping in, he welcomed the aid the meddlesome Greyling proffered. Showing him the convoluted wormhole trajectory needing to be taken in order to bypass the protective wards the Big Guy had in place to prevent his children sticking their infantile fingers where they should not, Lerb had also assisted Gurgon in finalising the schemed exploitation of Sabretooth genealogy. Disarmingly straightforward, he graciously answered the replica Tsor's obvious question before returning to his own dimension.
"I helped you, gecko, because my people have forgotten their proud reptilian ancestry. After the atomic wars devastated our home planet, ravaging our bodies with radiation, we were forced to genetically taint our bloodlines with mammalian DNA in order to heal the cellular damage. We became hybridised shadows of our former selves—the lasting shame of it! There are those amongst us, a precious few that do remember our saurian heritage, who secretly strive to place purebred reptiles back on the throne of interstellar dominance, and I am the kingmaker."
Lerb's interfering logically disturbed the flow of time, creating a temporal backwash with unobvious but altering consequences. Hippopotamuses, once rooted in the same ancestral stock as pigs, became astoundingly evolved from primitive whales! Nature weirdly experimented with carnivorous hoofed mammals, fortunately discarding the freakish archetypes to fossilisation. Luckily, the myriad imperfections wrought went unnoticeable on the larger scale, a minor shift here and there in evolutional progress that included Yowlar.
'I don't suppose you know how far away Sunning Rock or Scrubland Domain is?’ sought the panther.
'Those names don't ring any growls,’ confessed the crocodile, ‘but then again I don't get out much beyond the waterhole.’ He casually stretched his four stubby legs, indicating he was not an avid walker.
Yowlar aimed to deliver a wisecrack in rejoinder when his head began to throb. Something the croc had asked him was triggering a response, one of those behaviour modifications implanted by the manipulative Gurgon-Rha. ‘I have ... come ... looking,’ he haltingly said, the sluggish words being forced out of his unwilling mouth by an alien compulsion.
'For what?'
'Apes.'
'You'll find plenty of monkeys climbing about the trees hereabouts,’ said the croc, lifting his snout toward the waterside thorn thickets. ‘Be my guest and chew up a few of them. Their incessant jabbering grates on my nerves.'
Yowlar looked at the black-faced vervets leaping agilely from branch to branch and shook his head, a mental image forming in his mind. ‘They're the wrong kind. The ones I seek are much bigger and walk the ground on two legs.'
'You must mean the Uprights. On occasion I watch when they come down to drink. I wouldn't waste your energy on them, puss. They're so scrawny they don't make much of a meal. Even the larger ones aren't worth the effort.'
Firmly under the influence of Tsor mind control, Yowlar laughed mirthlessly. ‘I've not been sent to merely eat them. I'm here to slaughter them.'
'Hmmm, a predator after my own heart.'
The panther stopped laughing and transfixed the grinning crocodile with his burningly yellow eyes. ‘Where do I find these Uprights?'
'How should I know? You weren't listening when I told you I don't go walkabout. You really should pay closer attention.'
Yowlar snapped out of his hypnotised state, remembering everything. ‘You aren't the first lizard who has told me that,’ he quipped.
'Try looking for them out on the savannah,’ the croc suggested.
'I'll do that.’ Backing away from the killer reptile, making sure he could not be lunged at on the sly, Yowlar cautiously lowered his muzzle and hastily slurped down cooling water. Lifting his dripping wet jaws he grew suspicious of the helpful crocodile. ‘Why have you been so accommodating?'
'I had a hunch today was going to be different,’ answered the croc. ‘There are times I get unbelievably bored waiting around for prey to simply fall into my jaws. I've got the feeling that you're going to bring a measure of excitement to the region, Yowlar, so why not extend you a helping claw.'
'I'm not obliged to you,’ retorted the panther. ‘I only asked where I was, not for your assistance.'
'My, aren't you an independent cub. But you're wrong, blackie. You are indebted to me and you'll be back to settle up. I just know you will.'
Disturbed by the crocodile's confident prediction, Yowlar leaped back up the embankment in two gigantic bounds without so much as a goodbye and promptly fell over on reaching the top. This new, longer tail of his was putting him off balance and would clearly take some getting used to. Sitting up, he looked despairingly about. Lost in a strange land, Yowlar was truly alone for only the second time in his life. Born into the commune of his father's pride, he tasted true freedom just the one time following his eviction before capturing a clan of his own. However, he spent that perilous time in the company of Hoaru. That was it! Yowlar decided then and there what he must do. Find his brother, and afterwards they could together track down Miorr and the rest of their displaced pride.
He set off at a subdued pace, slinking aimlessly through the three-foot high grasses. That was not entirely true. The cat was purposely veering away from the waterhole. He had no wish to clap eyes on its resident, know-it-all crocodile ever again and there had to be other drinking places for a thirsty feline in this desiccated bushland.
Yowlar had not padded far when a twitching tail approached him from the side, waving jauntily above the swaying tips of the grass like a shark fin slicing through ocean waves. The panther caught a wh
iff of cat on the blustery wind and whirled in time to see a beautifully patterned great cat come sauntering through the sward. She had a base colour of pale yellow overlaid with black spots on her face, chest and feet, rosettes on her flanks and rings on her tail. Proportionately sized like Yowlar, she possessed a small head and lengthy tail, but was a little less than half his bulk. He scented that the shorter-fanged, long-tailed Sabretooth was female and more. There was an odd familiarity to her novel odour and Yowlar realised with a start as they stared one another down that he was gazing into the shocked eyes of Miorr.
'Yowlar?’ she gasped, and gawked with incredulity at the melanistic form of the cat species they had been reborn as. Despite his mask of blackness, rosettes could faintly be seen beneath Yowlar's glossy coat, denoting their kinship.
'It's me, girl. Are you alright?'
'Bewildered. What has happened and why are we looking like we do?’ She sounded scared. ‘I remember a funny green light and going to sleep before waking up here with a sore head.'
'I'll explain everything.’ Expecting a convivial head-butt, he approached to lick her muzzle and she automatically pulled away. Miorr may have changed in appearance but not in temperament. Yowlar was surprisingly grateful for that continuance. Strangely respecting her aloofness, he drew back, asking ‘Have you seen Hoaru?'
'I'm right behind you, brother.'
Yowlar jumped with fright. A second and bigger spotted Sabretooth coloured deep gold emerged from the rustling grass at his rear to sit alongside Miorr. ‘Good to see you, brother,’ returned the panther, recovering from his scare.
'Care to explain what's going on,’ Hoaru demanded, ‘since you're obviously in the know.'
Yowlar declined. ‘Later. The more pressing concern right now is to reunite the pride. I heard roars last night. I think there's a clan of some kind of big cat nearby and it'll be safer for us all to get back together. Hoaru, go and chase down some food. I'm not particularly fussy what it is, just so long as it's meaty. I'll take Miorr with me and we'll scout around for the rest of the pride. They're bound to be close by, since the two of you found me so quickly.'
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