Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - X

by Hal Colebatch

  “I can think of several reasons,” she said. “Watch a kitten with a ball of wool. Cats enjoy stalking until they are ready to leap. They may have found the caves with radar. Maybe their radar is better than ours. Also, they want to spy out the land. Remember the monastery. They don’t give themselves away until they’re ready. If they are like terrestrial felines, won’t silent stalking until the pouncing strike be instinctual? They enjoy lurking, stalking, pouncing. Also, we don’t know what’s been happening in space. Maybe they are barreling in up there.”

  We were back at the modules, fed and rested. We had slept for the better part of two days, and done nothing for a few days more. But their walls now gave little feeling of security. We would have to flee farther, I thought. But where? Just how do you flee from an alien invasion of your world?

  Perhaps one of the city political factions had succeeded in making contact with the aliens. The first-aid foam on my chest had now been hardened for a long time, but I guessed further treatment was needed. I placed my hands in the autodoc and it began to click and blink. Probably, I realized, too late to release my hands, it was putting a sedative into my system. It left me feeling as a sedative would: better but lethargic. I sat down heavily and watched Dimity at the desk as some time passed.

  “This is no good,” I told her. “I thought this was a refuge. It isn’t.”

  She was flicking across the channels on the desk. Nothing from space at all now, nothing from Munchen but a brief flicker of a talking head mouthing without sound.

  “Our lasers could burn through this wall. So could theirs.”

  “I know.”

  We had, in a curious way, been happy here in the last few days following our escape from the rockfall: perhaps what the abbot had called a retreat. Irresponsibly or not, I had kept the desk and the television turned off.

  “Time to go.”

  I turned around in the chair. Dimity set the music box—such a tiny, delicate thing!—on the desk, and its crystal little chimes floated into the air. She was standing in front of me. We reached out to each other and came into each other’s arms without a word. She nestled into me and I found myself kissing her hair, her throat, her lips.

  On the security screen the mynocks rose in a shrieking cloud.

  “I think we have company,” Dimity said.

  “We’ll get to the car and fly it straight out.”

  “Can you manage now?”

  “My legs feel a little weak. I can force them.”

  “Let’s go.”

  I found my hands were shaking.

  “You take the keys, for the annex and the car. I might drop them.”

  “No. Tie them around your neck. I’ll need to hold the gun…” She turned the light on the beacon up to flood. There seemed nothing more to do. We opened the door and ran.

  I don’t recommend running with a system full of medical sedative and an anesthetized chest. I was stumbling like a drunk and thought I would fall at every step. Dimity, holding a strakkaker at the ready and laden with other gear, couldn’t help me.

  No movement yet but the flying creatures. A horrible fumbling at the annex door, and we were in the car.

  We were in the air when we saw it. It came staggering out of the tunnel, bent over one side, one arm and shoulder maimed and shredded. It must have climbed the fall.

  It leaped at the car as I pulled the nose up. The claws of its undamaged forelimb scrabbled at the metal, dragging us down, tipping the car. We had not had time or the thought to fasten our seat belts. The car flew lopsidedly for a moment with the creature clinging to it as I wrestled with the controls. Then Dimity fell out.

  It had nearly dragged us down by then. We were only two meters above the ground. Freed of Dimity’s weight the car rolled up, gyros howling, throwing the creature off. There seemed no sedative in my system now. I wrenched the car around in a tight circle.

  Dimity was getting up. She seemed unhurt. The creature was standing on its hind legs. Between Dimity and the circling car it seemed undecided what to do. I dropped the nose of the car and fired the two heavy strakkakers I had mounted on it.

  We weren’t used to fighting, and certainly not to killing. Whatever this being was, I didn’t want it dismantled like the other. I fired into the cave floor in front of it. Then I brought the strakkakers back to bear on its head.

  It couldn’t have misunderstood. I knew it was fast, but I was also sure that, injured as it was, I would be faster when pulling a trigger was all I had to do. It was “at my mercy” as some old book put it. It took a step backward.

  I brought the car toward Dimity, keeping the strakkakers trained on it. She jumped aboard and I gave thanks for Wunderland gravity. The creature seemed to have lost its weapons and equipment. I took the car up to near the cave roof, higher, I was sure, than it could jump in its present condition. It stood staring up at us, with those huge intelligent eyes, and suddenly I realized what I had done. We had killed—yes, and even eaten—one intelligent alien and maimed another. They had, it was true, snarled and leaped at us in the cave, but…that might have been self-defense. It might even have been an attempt to communicate. Many a peaceful, herbivorous gorilla had died on Earth because its chest-beating display warnings to “leave me and my family and our territory alone” had been taken by humans as a signal of attack, and they had shot. As I had.

  The dead morlock? But morlocks were aggressive predators. Who had attacked first? But there was something else there too. I thought again of H.G. Wells’s Morlocks, the originals, and the fact, intentional or otherwise, that there was no real evidence in his story that they were really hostile. I thought of ancient science-fiction films like It Came from Outer Space, in which it had turned out that grotesque and horrifying aliens had only wanted to make repairs and depart, and had attacked only in self-defense. We had shot without trying to negotiate or make peace. This creature, or some creature like it, had not attacked the monks when it came upon them in the night.

  Perhaps they now viewed the human race with as much terror as we viewed them, and with better reason. Perhaps these were peaceful creatures that had found themselves on a planet of horror. If so, no wonder they had not shown themselves! What would we have done in their position? It was armed. Well, so were we, and we had used our arms first and lethally. All this went through my head far quicker than I can tell it.

  They looked carnivorous. Well, I had once had a cat, a gentle old female who moved in with me and whose main desires had been to be petted, to curl up on my lap, and to share my bed, and had who brought me gifts of food filched from neighbors’ barbecues as offerings of affection. She had had pointed teeth, too, and claws and, until age overtook her, had been a terror to balls of wool. I am a scientist and I don’t anthropomorphize animals or their emotions, but I remembered how, purring and kneading me in bed, that tiny-brained creature had gone against her own instincts and kept her claws sheathed. She sometimes bit my fingers in play, but took care never to break the skin or draw blood. Carnivores, even such perfect carnivores as cats, need not be cruel. Humans’ front teeth were for meat-eating, but we were not…

  The warnings from Sol? They might mean anything. What had happened light-years away in space might have been an exact parallel to this situation: panicky humans attacking first. We weren’t sure what Sol humans were like now. And this creature was in a terrible way, injured and starving—I saw the bones starting through its wasted frame.

  It all went through my mind in a few seconds as I circled in the cave, guns trained on the creature. I began to wonder miserably how many laws I might have broken, beginning with the one against murder.

  I can’t kill it, I thought. I don’t know that it even meant us any harm.

  It would be right, I thought, to land and try to negotiate with the creature, treat its terrible injuries, make amends. But that was impossible. Too much damage had been done.

  Whatever its original intentions, it saw me as an enemy now. I had maimed it and killed its co
mpanion, or, for all I knew, its mate. It was much darker than the other creature, almost black, though with a white pattern like an old scar on one side, where its stripes did not match, and some part of my professional mind wondered if this was a sexual differentiation. My clothes were still spattered with its companion’s blood. And there might be others coming up the cave system.

  There was one thing I could do. Round my neck was the belt I had taken from the dead Pseudofelis, the “kzin.” I had learned little from examining it, but it looked sufficiently like our own equipment for me to guess that it contained utility supplies, including, if there was any parallelism is our species’ thinking, medical supplies. I held the belt out and dropped it at the creature’s feet.

  I had no idea whether or not it could eat our food, but I dropped a package of explorers’ rations as well. I raised my hand in a confused gesture of salute, and we headed out of the cave. I felt a deathly misery and guilt as the car shot into the sunlight, like a stake of ice at my heart. “Are you all right? That was a bit of a fall.”

  “No permanent damage. I know how to fall. But it was no fun being on the ground with violet-eyes.”

  “What else could I have done?” I burst out.

  “We’re alive,” said Dimity. “We might very easily not be. Those claws were sharp.”

  Perhaps I had read too much. I thought of the Ancient Mariner and the albatross, and suddenly knew what he meant by “a woeful agony.” He had confessed his crime to a holy man and begged forgiveness. In the abbot I had an official holy man for a friend. I was not a Catholic, but would it help me to make confession?

  Not far away to the north a vast cloud of black smoke was rising into the sky, an intense red flame at its core. Smaller fires were burning around it. Once before I had seen something similar. It looked as if something had smashed into the mountain range from space. That, I guessed, was what had caused the shock and the rockslide that had freed us from the cave.

  I gave thanks as the ground flashed away below us and the scarp of the Hohe Kalkstein, looking ominous and threatening now rather than wild and fascinatingly mysterious, dwindled behind.

  Briefly I gave thanks. A red warning light blinked on the dashboard fuel gauge. Behind us in the sky was a white cloud. Pierce a liquid hydrogen system and it vaporizes fast. I wouldn’t be able to keep the car in the air for long.

  Chapter 11

  Again we had reason to be grateful to Wunderland gravity. Cars have limited gliding qualities. I kept the car flying as long as I could, putting more kilometers between us and the caves. We landed on a low mesa in arid, deserted country. The Hohe Kalkstein and the Drachenholen were a blue line on the eastern horizon, the farmlands still far to the west.

  The damage was obvious. The kzin’s claws had opened the metal at the rear of the car and at one point punctured a hydrogen fuel line. It was a tiny puncture, barely visible, but with liquid hydrogen fuel under high pressure it was enough. I doubted the puncture could be plugged reliably. The line and its fittings would have to be replaced. We had been lucky to get as far as we had. I had loaded the car with all sorts of spares, including, of course, spare fuel cells, and mercifully I had secured them thoroughly. But it would be a long job.

  As I looked at the evidence of the power of those claws I realized again how lucky we had been. Suddenly we seemed to be still all too close to the Drachenholen. I had loaded a camouflaged biologist’s field tent among the stores and we draped this over the car. It didn’t cover it entirely but I hoped it might break up the silhouette. I would like to have had us both checked by the car’s doc, but was not sure I could trust it after the rough time it had had.

  Perhaps it was thinking of that which caused the sedatives still washing round in my system to kick in again just as the flight-or-fright was wearing off. I began to remove the damaged panels but started fumbling and dropping tools. Finally I gave it up and mumbled that I would have to rest again. When sleeping out in Wunderland it is ingrained in us to search out any cuddly little Beam’s beasts and other small but dangerous creatures. I just about managed to inspect the neighboring small rocks, and we placed a couple on the car to break up its silhouette a little more.

  Our elevation gave us a good view in all directions but also made me feel unpleasantly visible. We crawled under the tent and Dimity covered me with a blanket. When I next woke up it was night. My chest felt as if it was on fire. Even for Wunderland, I thought, there seemed once again to be an unusual number of meteors in the sky. I felt my head wasn’t working well, but Dimity, sleeping apparently peacefully beside me, was something to cling to. The western sky was particularly bright. I could hear thunder and see distant lightning flashes.

  Meteors and lightning storms? Lightning storms in a cloudless sky? Meteors visible in a cloud-covered one? I shook Dimity awake just in time for us to see the familiar rhomboid pattern of one of the bigger low-orbit billboards explode in golden fire.

  Were there black shapes passing against the luminous band of the Serpent Swarm? They must be either huge or very low.

  A burning thing like a tiny comet fell out of the sky and hit the ground with a fierce explosion a few miles to the north. We heard it and then felt the shock-wave.

  The mayday alarm on the car began to howl. An emergency call close by. There was still plenty of battery power for the dashboard display. A spacecraft’s escape module was descending almost on top of us. With the dashboard telltale to guide us, I picked up its blinking beacon visually with binoculars.

  The sides of the mesa were partly eroded, and it was easy enough to jump down from rock to rock. The module landed as we approached and the hatch opened. We saw the pilot jump from it and run. I started toward him, but Dimity grabbed me.

  “Wait,” she snapped. “If he’s running away from it, don’t run towards it.”

  She dragged me partly behind the cover of a boulder. The pilot was running more or less in our direction, presumably because our car’s alarm unit had fed back to him at least a rough position for us.

  A dark wedge-shaped thing flashed out of the sky, swooping low. There was no time to make out details. I saw greenish points of fire flashing under stubby wings. The escape module exploded in a fireball. The dark thing was gone. We heard debris falling out of the sky.

  Now we hurried to the pilot. He wore the insignia of a member of the Meteor Guard. He looked about as one would expect a crash survivor to look, and, his first energy gone, needed some help to walk.

  “That thing will be back!” he croaked. He was breathing with difficulty. “Get under cover fast.”

  “Can it track our receiver?” asked Dimity.

  “I don’t think so. Not yet. But if they see us moving in the open we’re dead.”

  Bearing a good deal of his weight and breathing shallowly made it difficult for me to talk as we shuffled back toward the mesa. Dimity asked: “Are they the cats?”

  “Yes.”

  Burning wreckage was scattered over a wide area. As we climbed into the shadows of the mesa, the same black craft or another swooped down and fired another missile into the biggest piece. We were far enough away not to be involved but the explosion threw us flat.

  “Heat. Don’t give them heat to home in on,” he told us. Then he added, “If they’re shooting up ground targets like that now, it must be just about over…Well, we gave it our best shot.”

  He told us to turn off the battery power and all electronics. We laid him in the back of the car under the cover and got his pressure suit off. Space pilots are scrupulously, fanatically clean. This man stank as if he had lived in the suit for days, for weeks. Many spacers are funny colors, often starkly piebald unless they are born black. This one had the space pallor in his face overlaid with dirt, sweat, oil and blood. He looked in terrible shape and again I wanted to use the doc. Again I decided against it. We’re all in bad shape, I thought. Munchen hospital will be our next port of call. I wish I had thought to fit a portable shower setup in the car. I sponged his face
with a cleaner and something came off, dirt or protection. I recognized Commander Kleist of the Meteor Guard.

  At least I had some explorer’s brandy. That and a meal was something we could use. Then he began to talk. He was exhausted, shocked and bruised, but he talked.

  “We got notice of Outsiders long before even you were told,” he said. “The powers that be on Wunderland didn’t tell us too much and the public heard even less. Apparently the idea was that negotiation was a possibility. We were under orders to say nothing.”

  “You said little enough,” I said, “when the first Defense Council meeting was called.”

  “That was orders. They said there had been some ‘unfortunate incident’ with Sol ships and if these were the same aliens we would have to approach them carefully and diplomatically. By the time that first meeting was called the fighting had already been going on for weeks. ‘There must be no panic’…That was what they kept saying: ‘No panic. But let them see we are aware of the problem and are doing something.’ Were our people insane?”

  “Inexperienced, anyway,” said Dimity.

  “We had the meeting you attended, and saw the various committees set up. We know now they’d been landing small parties for some time.”

  “We know that too.”

  “Not what we’d been watching for. We thought—I don’t know if we knew what we thought, but we had some idea they’d approach us with some sort of ceremony. But the overall idea of everybody was that with a little talk they could be friends.

  “When something was first detected coming in some thought it might be a new comet. But comets don’t maneuver.

  “We were excited, of course, and one ship didn’t seem to be all that threatening. Some argued that the fact they had sent a single ship was an indication that they were peaceful. Our mass detectors didn’t record it as very large, and it never occurred to us that its true size might be cloaked. We took what we thought were precautions. We sent a team of four ships, the anti-meteor lasers ready in case of trouble. I’m alive, so you can see I wasn’t with them.