Man-Kzin Wars V

by Larry Niven

  "What the hell are you doing?" Krater asked as she brushed aside a branch and climbed the last few meters down to his level.

  "Trying one of these meat pies." He took them out and showed her.

  "You opened the box!"

  "Well, we can't keep carrying it. The stasis-field makes us sitting ducks for the kzinti."

  "But you should have—"

  "Asked your permission? Well, would you have agreed?"

  "Of course not."

  "So why would I ask?" He shrugged.

  "You should have thought it through, Daff. That's an artifact from an ancient xeno-civilization, older than life on Earth. You have no way of understanding what's inside there."

  "Sure I do. A little dog, a flute-thing that doesn't work, and some rations that don't have much taste. I tried them on the dog, but it doesn't—"

  “You tried them on the dog!”

  "And ate some myself. But why does that upset you so?"

  Krater ignored his question. She turned to Fellah and was peering at the little animal, which had crawled backwards in among the leaves. Only its eyes and nose, three shiny black marbles among the fluffy white fur, peered out at her.

  "It does look like a dog," she said. "How big is it?"

  "About five kilos."

  "Does it have four legs, a tail, all that?"

  "Yeah. I've seen holos of dogs before."

  "And friendly?"

  "Real friendly. I call him Fellah."

  Krater reached out a hand to it. "Come here, Fellah!"

  The animal's eyes grew wider and it backed farther into the foliage.

  "Not that friendly," Krater said.

  "Well, he came to me."

  "Then you take care of him, because we have get moving. Our course is more—" She looked around their bubble of clearing, swung her arm off to the right. "—that way."

  Gambiel stood and stuck the flute into his belt, taking care not to bend the keys. "Hey, Fellah!"

  The dog came out of its leaf hole and jumped into his arms.

  "He does seem to like you," Krater admitted.

  Gambiel reached down for the dull-gray box, forced it shut—but with the field off—and juggled it under his left arm. "Going to be awkward," he said, hitching the dog around into the crook of his right arm. "Would you . . . ?"

  Krater shook her head. "I'm having enough trouble moving myself through these vines. Put the dog and the other stuff back in the box, why don't you?"

  "He'll suffocate."

  "Then turn the field back on."

  "And let the kzinti use it to track us?"

  "Then we have to leave the box," she said.

  "The Navy will pay a high ransom for an operating stasis mechanism. Could be worth your pension and mine together."

  "Then leave the dog."

  "No, he'll die up here. Starve to death, fall through to the forest floor, or get eaten by the kzinti. Besides, he could be valuable."

  "Well, you're the one who opened the box in the first place."

  "We can leave the box," Gambiel decided, setting it down on the vine mat. "Do you think you could find this place again?"

  "No."

  "If I left it with the stasis-field turned on, we could locate it again, easily."

  "So could the kzinti."

  "Yeah. And that might distract them."

  "Then leave it," she agreed.

  "Is that the right decision, hey, Fellah?" he asked, hugging the little dog tighter under his arm.

  It looked up at him with those big eyes, seeming to understand the question. It made a sound halfway between a chirp and a whine.

  "Err-yupp!"

  "Oh, brother!" Krater sighed.

  He bent down and activated the flat disk. The cloudy surface of the box cleared to a hard, silvery shine in the fading light.

  "Let's get out of here," Krater said.

  It was too dark, really, to go swinging thought the trees. But with the box set like a beacon behind them, Gambiel could see no alternative. He readied the grapple in its launcher and aimed left-handed.

  Chuff!

  * * *

  "I need better field accuracy than this," Nyawk-Captain said, handing his jury-built locator to Weaponsmaster.

  The kzin took it and inspected the pirated missile circuitry. "Perhaps I can tune—"

  "Is the ship's radar back in commission yet?"

  "Navigator and I were just making the final adjustments."

  "Give me a sweep of the area."

  "Yes, sir."

  While they fired up the repaired systems, Nyawk-Captain stretched, scratched, and got himself something to eat. He had learned it was easier to shed the armor outside the ship and work the airlock unencumbered. Bad policy if a ground force attacked while all of them were inside, but he didn't think anything would come against the ship, except more Whitefoods. And Nyawk-Captain had made reconstruction of the short-range armaments a priority.

  Munching a haunch of Mystery Meat—a Fleet ration consisting of amalgamated proteins and vitamins, pressed around a synthetic bone and inadequately rehydrated—he looked out through the open hatch. The armor stood sentinel there, and in more than just a symbolic sense. Before stepping out of it, he had keyed the enhancers for sound and scent, slaving them by radio circuit back into the ship's sensors.

  "Ready now, sir." Navigator called.

  "Locate the Thrintun box."

  "Two kilometers distant but at a new bearing—uhn, different from the one you took."

  "Which way?"

  "North and east of here."

  "Weaponsmaster, get armor. We will go together to find it this time."

  "Aye, sir."

  * * *

  "Ouch!" came a low sound in the utter blackness.

  "What was that?"

  "I hit my head on a branch."

  "Again?"

  "Can't we slow down?"

  "Still three kzinti out there. Behind us."

  "One, you mean."

  "One that we saw."

  "The others are working on their ship."

  "Yes—last time we looked."

  "We'll kill ourselves, swinging through these trees in the dark."

  "You want to walk? And put both feet through a hole?"

  "We could stop for the night."

  "The kzinti would find us."

  "In this jungle, I couldn't find us."

  "You don't have their sense of smell."

  "Ow!"

  "What now?"

  "I barked my shin."

  "Well, do it quietly. They have ears, too."

  * * *

  Nyawk-Captain aimed the locator up into the trees. The refinements Weaponsmaster had made in its circuits were amazing: they reduced the light bloom of any hardened return to a pinpoint, while stepping up the return image from woody branches and trunks into a ghost map of the tree world.

  "I detuned everything else and made it selective for carbon," Weaponsmaster had explained, the first time his captain had used it. "Carbon is a component in cellulose," the kzin added.

  "Very creative," Nyawk-Captain had said.

  Now, two kilometers from the ship, he aimed into the treetops again and took a reading. The artifact was right above them, almost aligned with the tree by which they were standing.

  Nyawk-Captain turned his helmet light up the side of the tree. "The artifact is approximately ten cubits out from this trunk in—" He oriented himself against it and pointed. "—that direction."

  "Shall I climb for it?"

  "Do so."

  In five minutes, the kzin returned with the storage box under his arm.

  "It feels light, sir."

  "We'll open it at the ship."

  * * *

  "When they find it's empty, what do you think they'll do?"

  "Come after us."

  "They're already doing that."

  "So? Did you expect them to stop?"

  "No, I guess not."

  * * *

  Excitemen
t overcame Nyawk-Captain. Rather than shed his armor and climb into the ship, he called on Navigator to come out with a strong worklight.

  "Should not someone stay inside, sir? To guard against—"

  "Come out here!"

  Before Navigator could negotiate the airlock, Nyawk-Captain had the box on the ground and, in the light of their helmet lamps, had found the actuator stud.

  The box turned from flashing mirror-brightness to a simple, luminous gray. A crack appeared along its top. Nyawk-Captain forced it apart with his hands. Navigator brought up the light and angled it down inside.

  Nothing.

  In all the records collected by the Patriarchy concerning Thrintun boxes, none had mentioned an empty box. Preserving fresh air was not a priority with any species.

  Nyawk-Captain put the beak of his helmet into the space and inhaled deeply, with suit enhancers at full power. His own nose told him that some animal had once—briefly and forever—inhabited this space. The suit's flicker display began cataloging a long list of organic chemicals: oils, hormones, enzymes, pheromones.

  He inspected the interior with optical enhancers, and found three hairs—finer than those on any kzin's pelt—and all without pigment. In daylight, they would be white.

  "Is this a billion-year-old joke?" Navigator asked.

  "No. The box was inhabited by a live animal," Nyawk-Captain replied. "Too small to be a Thrint. Unlikely to be a Tnuctip."

  "But now we have nothing to show for our effort . . . and for the delay."

  "Do you have a problem with that?" Nyawk-Captain asked pointedly.

  "No, sir. But now we should give full attention to repairing Cat's Paw and resuming our flight to attack Margrave. The mission has not yet become problematical."

  "We still have time to find the contents of the box—and the humans who stole it."

  "Not with the sensory equipment we have at hand."

  "Then use your skills as Navigator. Plot me a course. Use the Leaf-Eaters' stripped hull as a starting point. One vector is defined by our first sighting of this box, now a burned-out hole in a tree. The second sighting point, where we actually found the box, yields another vector. Assume, to begin with, that the humans have no means of transport nor any logical destination other than the hull. Then give me their probable locus within those limits."

  "Right away, sir."

  "Narrow the field for me, Navigator, and we'll find the thieves by using our native hunting instincts." He turned to Weaponsmaster. "Can you readjust the circuits of that homing radar for a slightly different concentration of carbon?"

  * * *

  "It's almost dawn."

  "How can you tell?"

  "I think I can see my feet."

  "The brush does seem lighter."

  "Ouch! Damn it! I give up."

  "It's probably safe to rest here."

  Without answering, Sally Krater released enough of the monofilament to allow her to sit on the branch that had tripped her. She let the rest of it float around her face—and didn't care if it snagged on anything and cut off her nose.

  "We may not be as far ahead of the kzinti as Jared and Hugh now are," Gambiel said.

  "How do you figure?"

  "When we stopped to take bearings—"

  "And open the box, remember."

  "—and open the box," he agreed, "we lost valuable time. And we haven't been making it up in the dark."

  "What can we do about that?"

  "Listen!"

  "How's that going to—?"

  "Hush!"

  Krater cocked her head and listened. Faintly, through the brush, she could hear a crashing and snapping of the greenery. It was behind them, coming along their back trail.

  Gambiel thrust the flute-thing and the white dog into her arms. Before she could stop it, the dog jumped free. It started to run off in the opposite direction, then turned and looked back at her. A long, hard stare that seemed to be full of meaning.

  "Go along, now," the Jinxian told her.

  "But you—?"

  "I'll delay them. Go."

  Krater stood up and took in the slack monofilament. "Come here, Fellah!" she called in a low voice.

  The dog came up to her and stood on its hind legs, putting a paw on her knee. She scooped up the animal and hit her winder's clutch. In less than a minute, she had gone twenty meters higher and thirty meters farther into the jungle canopy.

  * * *

  Gambiel turned about-face, called upon all his inner strength, his chi, and began his patient preparations. After a lifetime of training and development, he was finally going to fight a kzin in the flesh. It was likely to be wearing armor, he knew, but Gambiel had his laser rifle and the advantage of surprise.

  He retrieved his grapple, loaded the launcher and fired straight up. The grapple thunked into solid wood ten meters overhead. Slowly, so as to make as little noise as possible, Gambiel raised himself off the stable branch layer where he and Krater had paused to rest and where a full grown kzin in armor would undoubtedly choose to walk. He stopped when he found a tunnel through the leaves that gave him an angle back to that stouter layer. His view crossed their earlier track through the area. Then he hung quietly, staring down and holding the rifle, at full charge, across his thighs. Gambiel made himself as still as a bow hunter waiting in the dawn above a game trail.

  The kzin came into view, placing its feet with great care, advancing cautiously from limb to supporting limb. For all its mechanical encumbrance and the excess weight, the warrior was still moving incredibly smoothly. The body markings on this suit of armor were different from those on the kzin that Gambiel and the others had watched leaving the enemy ship the day before. (Had it been no longer than that?) This one was clearly a different member of the crew.

  Gambiel raised the rifle with hypnotic slowness and sighted on the gap which showed orange fur between the jaw extender and the articulated breastplate—the place where a suit of human armor would have fastened a steel gorget.

  His first pulse of coherent blue light, even masked by the gloom of the forest canopy, sent the kzin hurtling sideways. However, a flash of white smoke and a startled "Rowrrl!" told Gambiel that something tender had been burned.

  Stumbling off balance, the kzin almost crashed through the unstable floor. Then it might have fallen ninety meters or more, to be painfully damaged if not killed. But the armored figure managed to right itself.

  Gambiel lined up on the edge of his aiming hole and fired another pulse, seeking another tender spot. Instead, he touched the ablative surface of an armored gauntlet. It dissipated the energy in a spark of ceramic fragments, leaving only a small, white crater in the material. Then the kzin was up and moving forward, climbing over intervening branches, walking into the point source of the laser pulses. It was hunched over—not in pain, Daff knew, but only so that it offered the thicker material of the shoulder and neck plates to the oncoming fire.

  Gambiel reeled in on his winder, moving higher as quickly as he could, and kicked backward to put himself beyond the kzin's reach. His retreat was limited, however, by the set of his grapple.

  The kzin was upon him too quickly and knocked the rifle aside. The weapon fell and disappeared through the green canopy floor.

  Before the warrior could strike again, Gambiel hit the release latch on his climbing harness and dropped, on all fours, ten meters to the canopy's base layer. He grasped with his hands and snagged with his feet among the vines. Once he knew he was not going to fall through, he raised his body in a wrestler's crouch and looked up and around, ready to meet the kzin.

  The kzin—too heavy to drop like that—climbed quickly down to his level and stopped, considering Gambiel. Daff could read its reactions. Even though the human was now unarmed, its stance was not that of prey. He was actually challenging the kzin. And the tattoo on Gambiel's forehead might be familiar from kzinti training tapes. Somewhere they must have described a breed of humans so marked, who would actually fight barehanded.

 
; The kzin appeared to reach a decision. Slowly and deliberately, gesturing to make itself understood, it keyed a release button. The armor sprang apart like a cracked crabshell. The kzin kicked the suit aside—and it, too, fell through the loose floor. Daff's opponent raked its own flanks in a brief scratch. Gambiel visibly bent his knees into a deeper crouch, preparing to absorb the shock of the first attack across the springy floor layer. He dug in his toes and raised his hands in a defensive position.

  Human and kzin confronted each other with a long stare. The kzin seemed to be focusing on the Hellflare tattoo. Maybe the warcat did understand its meaning.

  The kzin screamed and leaped directly at Gambiel.

  Gambiel lifted his left foot from the entangling vines, straightened his right leg and—hoping he wouldn't screw himself right down into the criss-crossed foliage—performed a perfect veronica around the swinging left paw. Its claws extended five centimeters outside the flashing orange blur. As the furred flank passed, Gambiel struck backhanded at the third skeletal nexus. He heard as much as felt the joint crack.

  The kzin's scream rose an octave in pitch.

  The warrior came back on attack with a feint. Gambiel ignored the stroke but still countered with a twisting punch. It found only air and a whisk of fur.

  In two more exchanges, the kzin absorbed one painful blow, and Gambiel took a raking that opened his right arm and shoulder to the bone. As he was trying to press back the flap of flayed skin, he felt a jet of arterial blood. The fourth claw had struck higher on his neck than he thought.

  The kzin, sensing imminent victory, prepared its last charge.

  Gambiel then made the decision that had loomed over his entire life for so long. He would not step aside again. He met the charge full on—with a stopkick whose perfect focus on the center of the kzin's skull was one-half centimeter longer than the warcat's reach. His blow cracked that skull a half-second before the eight claws swung across his torso in converging slices.

  Disemboweled, the Jinxian's body flew sideways and caught against a tree limb. He saw it arrest his flight but could feel nothing down there. Then his eyes darkened, a red mist creeping across his field of vision. But before the mist could raise the night, he saw the orange body stagger curl up, and disappear through a gap in the shrubbery.

  The kzin did not even scream as it fell.

  * * *

  Hanging in her harness with just a toe-perch among the slender branches, Sally Krater listened carefully to the thrashing below her in the canopy. The fight that Gambiel was waging proceeded without cries or curses, just that one scream of challenge. If it was followed by heavy breathing and grunts of pain, she could not hear them.