Man-Kzin Wars XIII

by Larry Niven

  “You think kzinti are the only barbarians in known space? Do not fool yourself, Agent Khan. We’ve had four glorious wars and you’ve won every one of them. We are currently sitting at the bottom of a planetwide scar etched by one of your claws of mass destruction. I believe the veneer of civility has long been cast off. You have soundly beaten us, and as consolation, you offer us whorehouses and fast-food restaurants.”

  Varsha knew he was right. The wars had changed humanity, just as much as they had changed kzinti. Now, each species met somewhere in the muddy middle. She composed herself rather quickly and said, almost in the Menacing Tense, “Did you invite me here to mess with me? To gloat?”

  “No, Agent Khan. I need your assistance.” The kzin was covered in blood, and a bloated, banded cadaver lay bare on the floor.

  “My assistance? What makes you think I’m not going to arrest you right now for espionage? Remember, I was tracking you before all this tanj prostitution affair came up. I know you’ve been selling information to the Patriarchy.”

  “I am just a simple tool. Would you arrest the listening device or the listener? If you help me, I can open up further and reveal the full extent of my spying on at least three worlds, as well as some colorful sabotage and an assassination.” He let a trickle of information pass between them and her large, lilac eyes widened into saucers. “If you play your cards right and use your clever little monkey tricks to help me, you might even arrest Yearrl-Captain himself.”

  “Why now? It doesn’t make any sense!”

  “I’m a strung-out old telepath on his last hunt and I’ve just had something of an epiphany. I know now that what I’ve done is wrong.”

  The dribble of thought continued between them, and she knew he was lying about his guilt. He was quite proud, in fact. It was the closest this drug-addled kzin had come to feeling like a true warrior, but some kind of revelation had shaken him recently. Varsha caught a flash of a small, sickly kitten, black as night with aquamarine eyes, and three trapped and desolate kzinretti.

  “What do you want of me?”

  “Transport. I need you to pull some ARM strings and get me a ship so I can get off this fractured rock.”

  “Where will you go? Fafnir? Wunderland?”

  “No, those are regular scratching posts along Devourer’s prowl. Yearrl-Captain will have ample connections and resources to hunt me down.”

  “Then where the tanj else can a sthondat-juice junkie and his freemother females hide in the universe?”

  The predatory speed with which Bobcat slammed Varsha against the blood-splashed wall made her heart stop. “That will be the last time you refer to my harem in such a disrespectful manner. We did not choose our horrid circumstances.” The words came out hot with the stench of the fresh kill on his breath.

  “I’m sorry. I really am.” Varsha immediately regretted her remark, not because she could feel the prickling of reaperlike claws pressed against her jugular, but because she had touched the kzinretti’s awesome heartache through the tiny telepathic feed.

  Bobcat released her. “Will you assist me? All I have is one hour. By then, Yearrl-Captain expects me to be onboard the Devourer with the kit. When I don’t show up, he’ll immediately send Heroes down to fetch me.”

  Varsha realized that that infinitesimal filament of thought running from this creature’s soul to hers had given her a taste of its bleak perspective and that of the females and even the poor shade of a kitten. She understood that, like it or not, she was becoming invested, which is precisely why she severed the connection. “I’m sorry. I guarantee you that we will investigate this prostitution ring, but I cannot under any circumstances help a spy escape. All I can give you is the assurance that I will not impede you in any way.”

  Varsha turned and left the gory feeding stall before Bobcat could even process her rebuff. She thought she caught a glimpse of his lips peeling back exposing rows of deadly, ivory-colored teeth, a black hole where a three-inch canine should’ve been.

  Rage erupted from Bobcat in the form of an explosive roar as Varsha Khan exited the restaurant. The female monkey had outright betrayed him. He had been so sure she would help. He had felt her pity, her genuine concern. After all these years, how little he understood these honorless kz’eerkt! He pounded the wash button in the stall and let the boiling water cleanse the blood and fury off of him.

  * * *

  Bobcat hastily made his way back to the bordello. He didn’t stop to appreciate the dazzling human civilization scrambling up the crag. He had no plan and he was entirely alone. He had two doses of the psychoactive steroid left and he needed to conserve at least one of them. He stopped suddenly at the foyer of the so-called temple and urinated on a faux stone column. The immature warriors mulling about the lobby caught a whiff of Bobcat’s musky kairomone challenge and hurriedly left, not wanting to shame their families by being embroiled in an embarrassing situation.

  He ran toward the chamber holding the sentient kzinretti.

  “Did you think that monkeys bold enough to work with warcats don’t hoot and holler at each other whenever there’s danger? I got a call the second your server at Serengeti overheard you murmuring to that cop.” That kchee kz’eerkt, Larsson, blocked his path, brandishing an impressive fifty-year-old gun.

  Bobcat slowed a bit, but only a bit. He slashed with a laser-sharp claw across the pimp’s belly, and his stinking innards spilled to the carpet with an audible slosh. Bobcat jumped over the spasming body and stormed the room. The kzinretti were gone. He sniffed the air and caught their distinct spice not far off. He launched himself out of the cheap harem chamber.

  Bobcat found them toward the back of the building as four of Larsson’s gorilla goons were trying to wrestle them out to the alley and into a waiting airtruck. He charged. One of the wretched apes lifted a beam pistol and shot a straight red lance of light through his shoulder. Pure, blazing agony dropped Bobcat onto the filthy alley floor. The females instinctively, viciously took note and mauled their captors with such contempt that Bobcat caught sobering pangs of it despite not being on the drug. He picked himself up, screamed and leapt onto the gun-monkey, ripping out his throat (and a better part of his shoulder), exposing clean white vertebrae.

  “Yara, Xast, go back and get the simple kzinrett and her black kit!” he spat in their native tongue. They hesitated for an instant, not wanting to reenter their prison, but a fast moment later, they sprang back inside. “Raxa, prepare the cargo compartment of the truck for our escape.”

  Bobcat took the hypodermic from its case and plunged it into his arm. The familiar rush of extrasensory force exploded from his brain. He tracked and gulped down the necessary knowledge to fly the human vehicle from a shredded and dying human. He also knew that Larsson had already reported his treachery to Yearrl-Captain. He had less than an hour.

  The two intelligent kzinretti came out escorting the dazed mother, Tirran, and her little bundle of mewling dark matter. Without question, the group jumped into the airtruck and shut the door. Bobcat shoved himself into the cramped driver’s seat as electric pain spread from the burnt hole in his shoulder across his body. He blocked it, like he’d blocked other people’s pain, and released the brake. The airtruck rocketed out of the alley and over the bottom of the artificial canyon. He flew the tight vehicle made for small primates with reckless abandon, nearly hitting a penthouse terrace as he raced to the spaceport.

  Doubt and balconies rushed by as he flew up the nineteen-plus kilometers along the north precipice. He looked across the wide gap to the south cliff and saw shining white structures and rugged, indigenous amarillo moss running up and down its face like gold and silver veins in the rock. He grasped that, one way or another, he would never see this world again.

  What did he hope to accomplish? All he had was an insystem shuttle, which was absolutely no match for the might of the Devourer of Monkeys. Where could he take his parody of a pride that would be safe? Another thought struck him: despite her betrayal, Varsha h
ad kept her promise, no police had even attempted to get in his way.

  He slowed near the lip of the massive ravine just enough to dip into the airlock tunnel that led to the pressurized portion of the spaceport. Once at the garage, he skidded the truck to a stop. Something was wrong. He sensed no mind (or too few) in this usually busy area of spaceport. Canyon Police must have evacuated this entire zone. He tore the cargo hold’s door open and hastily pulled the females out, absorbing their fear and disorientation.

  “Hurry!”

  The group ran, huddled in a tight knot of flame-colored fur, down the airtight tarmac toward the waiting shuttle. Bobcat was all too aware that a second shuttle, from the bowels of Devourer, had just touched down nearby. His mind was so completely focused on the coming Heroes, that the sight of Canyon law enforcement officers surrounding, no, dismantling his ship nearly floored him. The Canyonites looked like cobalt-uniformed social insects carrying away components of his ship in single file.

  His keen sense of smell and even keener telepathy discerned the presence of five fully-armed kzinti warriors before he even saw them pouring out of a passage that led back to their ship parked on the surface. His phantom tail lashed furiously. He was trapped.

  “You will die, Nameless Traitor!” shouted Remover-of-Obstacles of the Devourer’s elite boarding squad. The black-swathed, orange warrior dwarfed the injured telepath.

  “I have a Name!” Bobcat bared his teeth and dug in his hind claws, preparing to die fighting single-handedly and finally meet the Fanged God.

  Hold your breath, a human voice rang in his mind and compelled his lungs to lock up. The Heroes were upon them. Everything blurred. He choked. His females were suffocating. He heard the distinct clank of a metal container hitting asphalt and then a blast of smoke filled the spaceport’s pressurized terminal.

  Don’t breathe; just run to me. Varsha’s spectral voice controlled Bobcat and his harem like holopuppets. They ran, lungs yearning for air, muscles burning for oxygen. After an eternity, they cleared the haze and reached the undercover agent waiting by an old ARM ship. She finally allowed them to suck in air.

  “You look like cinnamon-sprinkled shit,” she said without a hint of jest.

  “Trap?” he managed to gasp, ignoring the wicked monkey’s verbal feces.

  “No. I need you to link with me. Do that bridge thing you kzinti telepaths do,” she said, helping Tirran and her kit.

  “Nwarrkaa Kishri Zaaarll?” he coughed. “How do you know of the Double Bridge of Demons?” Was she trying to help him? These monkeys lied too easily.

  “We had a kzinti telepath as a consultant during the wars. Do you think you’re the first to defect?”

  “No, of course not.” In fact, he bet his life on it. “That is a permanent mental structure. We would be inextricably bound forever!”

  “Does it have to be lasting and demonic? How about a telepathic pontoon bridge?” She sent him an image of a temporary military bridge. “Quickly now! You didn’t give me the hour you promised and I need to explain the situation. Anything less than the speed of thought would be dangerously slow.”

  They both opened up to each other, much more so than the small bond they had shared back in the restaurant. Their minds bled together, but they took great care not to lose themselves in the experience. “They were listening to us at the restaurant! They were prepared,” Bobcat said with the speed of a neuron firing.

  “Of course they were listening to us. That’s why I made it a point to refuse you out loud. I didn’t want them to know you had ARM help.”

  “I thought you had abandoned us!”

  “Sorry, I didn’t think you were going to leap into the whorehouse and kill everyone!”

  “I’m a kzintosh. What else did you expect?” Bobcat looked back and saw Devourer’s Heroes writhing and purring on the tarmac like lunatics, frantically licking and scratching the pavement. “What did you do to them, some kind of nerve agent?”

  Varsha laughed. “Nah, we tossed a Catnip Canister at them, made of a powerful strain of genetically engineered zheerekti plant. Canyon Police has been experimenting with non-lethal violence deterrents to break up the regular death-duels that spontaneously erupt.”

  She led them up the gangplank and into a chaotic ARM ship. Canyon medics gently ushered his nervous females toward the coldsleep caskets. “This is the I Love Lucy. I had our techs cannibalize your shuttle and moved over a kzinti autodoc and autokitchen. They’re in the process of installing your command console to this ship so you can pilot it.”

  Bobcat looked around at the blue-garbed officers working with haste on the snall ship and was entirely unimpressed. “Thank you,” he said politely, sinking into the command chair. Fussy medics descended upon him, hooking tubes and cables from the autodoc to his long-abused body. The acute pain of the wound dulled.

  Varsha instantly felt his dismay and added, “Trust me, this is all part of my cunning monkey plan. There is another ship exactly like this one primed to take off in minutes. These old ships are hardened against invasive kzinti scans. Yearrl-Captain won’t know which one to pounce on and he won’t act within Canyon space, anyway. They’ll respect the Covenant of 2505.”

  Bobcat noticed his orange female being put under the freezer. “Bring me the kit!” he howled at the medics while trying to get up from the chair, but pain and pushy doctors held him down. “When I tell him of our fight for freedom, I want to say he sat right here on the bridge!” A tall, reluctant female medic handed him the tiny ebon kitten. Bobcat thought with great shock that this was the first time he’d ever held a kit.

  “That only gives me a fifty-fifty chance. Those aren’t wonderful odds.”

  Varsha rapidly checked the tech’s work. These local kids are good, she thought and turned back to Bobcat, “Can’t you telepathically nudge Yearrl-Captain toward the Sun Wukong, like I did with you during the gas attack?”

  “I cannot. Will you help?”

  “Hmmm, that complicates things a bit, but I’ll think of something.”

  “I can guide you through his mind, but I cannot deposit any thoughts.”

  “Anyway, I should mention that we’re not going to give you an incredibly expensive hyperdrive ship. ARM isn’t a charity and no amount of telepathic manipulation on my part will change that. The faster-than-light section of the ship will separate from the crew subdivision once it has reached its destination and return to its point of origin, leaving you to navigate the system with a fusion drive alone.”

  “Despite my many considerable talents, piloting in hyperspace is not one of them.”

  “I thought of that. The I Love Lucy is a coldsleep troop transfer ship; you just punch in the target location, go to sleep, and it wakes you up when you get there. Are you going to tell me where you’re going? I’ve been trying to pick it from your brain since the restaurant and all I’m getting is a vague idea that alludes to something like the Promised Land.”

  “What do you know about the Angel’s Pencil?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  He sensed her ignorance. “Angel’s Pencil was part of the first wave of human colonization about two hundred years ago. It had the misfortune of running into two kzinti warships and plunging deeper into Patriarchy space. Somehow, this slow and antiquated vessel managed to destroy the two ships. Then it disappears. Its ion trail goes cold, but no debris was ever found. The Dripping Crimson Saber was sent to investigate the wreckage of the Gutting Claw, and it found a defiant message from the Gutting Claw’s Telepath to its Captain recorded on the ship’s surviving backup computer.

  “On the surface, it was a tirade of insults and challenges and a clear declaration of treason. The telepath had sided with the humans and escaped. The official Patriarchy statement was that the Angel’s Pencil and its weak telepath ally were obliterated beyond any detectable trace. The techs however deduced that they cut off the Angel’s messy fusion drive and were then towed by the captured kzin barge using its faster and untraceable grav
ity-engine to another location. The Dripping Crimson Saber’s Telepath also perceived a hidden vibrational message embedded within the recording. It said, Brother Telepaths, an opportunity presented itself and I pounced. I have taken a harem and I will earn a Name. I challenge you to join me.

  “Over the years this account has become legend, Agent Khan. Their secret location has grown into some kind of mythical sanctuary for our kind, although I don’t know of any telepath that has heeded the call.”

  “Because they don’t know the exact location! You don’t know that these humans didn’t just shoot this telepath in the head the second they were clear of the Patriarchy.”

  “Come now, Agent Khan, you know as well as I do that these humans went against their instincts and helped Gutting Claw’s Telepath just as you are helping me now.”

  “You still don’t know where you’re going!” She felt that all of this had been for nothing. She should have probed deeper into his desperate delusional mind. When had kzinti become the dreamers and humans the cold realists?

  “I have a spoor of a theory. Telepaths have a penchant for the symbolic. If Gutting Claw’s Telepath wanted us to follow him as his message suggests, he’d give us an emblematic sign post. If he towed them, he certainly had some say in their destination. I believe they went to 46 Leonis Minoris.”

  “The lesser lion, the eunuch?” She grasped the archaic human imagery from his mind.

  “Are feeble telepaths not lesser lions? Unable to breed, are we not eunuchs?” He flushed with emotion.

  Varsha sensed that these blasphemous ideas had been percolating within him for a long time. She also had to admit that they carried a sort of mystical logic; the reasoning of a drug-crazed telepath.

  One of the fresh-faced medics that a second ago had waved diagnostic instruments around the kzinretti, now approached and broke the spell, bringing them back to the slow pace of the material plane. “Two of the yellow females are pregnant. I suggest they go into coldsleep before takeoff. I’d hate for them to get jostled around.”