The well-armed car carrying Arthur Guthlac, Colonel Cumpston and Karan touched down beside Vaemar's empty vehicle. Apart from its turret-mounted weapons, Cumpston had a strakkaker and Guthlac a heavy, powerful beam rifle, a great cannon of a thing based on a kzin sidearm, and with mini-waldos for human use. Karan had a kzinrret's knife, the new and improved female version of a w'tsai, and another strakkaker. Weapons ready, the occupants alighted, the humans wearing breathing filters as Dimity had. In case they needed the car quickly, the engine was left idling and the doors unlocked. There was no sign of any live friend or enemy.
Karan pointed and bounded to the dead thunderbirds, the humans hurrying behind. Small scavengers scattered.
"Beam rifle, close range," said Cumpston. "And the other looks like a kzin bite."
"They stood here," said Karan, pointing. Looking closely, Guthlac and Cumpston could make out two very different-sized sets of footprints, the larger tipped with claw points. "It didn't get near them."
"The car has been tampered with," said Cumpston. "Look! Its antennas are gone." He also tried the door.
"Dimity and Vaemar, according to the ways we can measure IQs, are possibly the two cleverest beings on Wunderland," said Guthlac. "I hope they can look after themselves."
"Clever doesn't necessarily mean survivor," said Cumpston. "There's more than a touch of the idiot savant in Dimity. Super-genius she may be, but she's narrowly focused. Just because she shatters the old sexist stereotype of the beautiful blonde doesn't mean she . . . More common sense, better instincts and reflexes, may mean survival in a place like this. Vaemar, I can't pronounce on. But he's an intellectual, too, however sharp his claws are. I wish old Raargh was with them, or some human sergeant-major."
Guthlac thought he detected something in his friend's voice when he spoke of Dimity. There could hardly be a less appropriate time or place for him to comment. "Karan, can you follow their trail?" he asked
Karan was already moving down one of the rock-tunnels, almost on all fours, a barred orange shadow in the shifting and flickering grey light.
"We might do better to search from the air," Guthlac said. "This is another labyrinth."
"If there was anything to see from the air I think we'd have seen it," said Cumpston. "Come on! We're lucky to have her, but I don't want her getting too far ahead on her own. If anything happened to her, would you want to be the one to tell Vaemar?"
"Trail stops," said Karan a few minutes later.
They caught up to her. They were standing in a circular space in the rock-maze.
"Do you smell anything?" Guthlac asked her.
"Sand and rock turned over." Karan said. "Not a long time past. And kzintosh. There has been another male kzin here. And at the car. And something else. A bad smell."
Cumpston pointed to the edge of the rock wall. "Sand and rock turned over there?" he asked her.
"Yes."
"A gravity motor."
"But all gravity motors are monitored," said Guthlac.
"Get through to the monitoring stations," said Cumpston. "Pull your rank, Arthur! Hurry! They must have recorded something."
Guthlac sent the message. His face was dark. "I'm getting a very ugly thought," he said.
"So am I. But tell me yours first."
Guthlac made sure Karan was out of earshot, still hunting along the rock wall. He spoke softly and quickly.
"Vaemar has taken Dimity into space. He's a kzin. It looks as if he's taking her to the Patriarchy. Our pioneering hyperdrive expert!"
"Any ship that took off from here would be too small for interstellar travel."
"But it could meet a bigger one."
"We've monitored Vaemar pretty carefully. And taken other precautions. There's been no hint of anything like that."
"Apart from reversing the kzinti's whole military position, it would get him back his place beside the Riit throne. Perhaps position him for a bid for the Patriarchy! Why should we trust him to be more loyal to us than to his own species? Especially when the reward could be so enormous? I know policy was to trust him as much as possible, but perhaps we've put too much temptation in his way. Or perhaps it was just a mistake to trust a ratcat!"
"That hangs together very nastily," said Cumpston. "I have just one small ray of hope that you're wrong. It was we who sent him here. He couldn't have planned a secret rendezvous with a spacecraft . . . unless it had been waiting for a long time."
"And unless he manipulated us into sending him. He knew he'd be coming this way sooner or later. I've given Defense Headquarters an emergency alert. The next thing is to get after them, anyway. But Vaemar doesn't feel like that to me."
"I put some trust in someone when all appearances were against her a little while ago," said Guthlac. "In a ruined hamlet beyond Gerning in a storm. I haven't regretted it. I'll try to believe the best of Vaemar yet, but I'm putting out an emergency alert to Defense HQ all the same."
"We should have stopped her associating with him so. That's obvious enough with hindsight."
"Dimity is an Asperger's. A superlatively high-functioning one. When she makes up her mind to do a thing the only way you can stop her is by breaking that mind.
"She can be killed any time," Guthlac went on. "There's an implant in her that can be activated remotely. An idea we got from the kzin zzrou. ARM insisted on it."
"Arthur! We've got to get her back!"
"I know!"
"You mustn't let ARM know what's happened! Not yet!"
"Michael, there are a lot of things neither of us let ARM know about. And I don't mean your peculiarly-colored bird or a certain Earth flower with green petals. Try to hang onto hope."
"Does she know?"
"I don't know. ARM was subtler than the kzinti about such things. Nanobots in the food. But Vaemar's got one too. ARM is not trusting. It wasn't my idea or orders, but . . ." Guthlac suddenly smacked his own head. "Idiot! How do we win wars with generals like me? I had completely forgotten! They both have locators in them anyway! Standard VIP models. We can read them from the car!"
"Come on!"
Calling Karan, they turned and headed back out of the granite maze. The thunderbird launched itself at them from the rock wall. Half as big again as the ones Dimity and Vaemar had killed, its vast striking beak knocked Guthlac sprawling. The tough fabric of his coverall saved him from being torn apart, but had the thing snapped its beak it would have crushed his bones in an instant. Karan was a blur of rippling orange muscle as she leapt at it. Screaming, two more thunderbirds launched themselves from the rock wall.
Karan severed the first thunderbird's neck with her fangs and claws before the beak could seize her. Cumpston, getting his beamer up just in time, shot another in the chest. The third sprang into the air again, and came down on their car. Guthlac fired at the bird and hit the car. Its tough materials could normally have withstood far worse hits, but the unlocked door flew open. Either the beam or the avian's great kicking legs activated the controls, and car and avian tangled together shot fifty feet into the air, rolled, dived, and crashed into the rock wall.
Guthlac struggled free of the dead weight of the first thunderbird. Cumpston ran to them. Karan got to her feet, staggered and fell again, pumping gouts of purple and orange blood from gaping lacerations in her thighs. Guthlac found the end of a severed blood-vessel and held it shut while Cumpston raced for the crashed car and its medical kit, killing the broken-limbed avian as it struggled and snapped at him. The car's fuel lines had ruptured, and as Cumpston turned and ran back to Karan a spark ignited the clouds of hydrogen billowing from it. Automatically released jets of inert gas quickly smothered the flames, but the cabin and control console were wrecked.
Frantic work with a kzin military chemical bandage stabilized the wound, but it took time. Karan was weak and barely conscious.
The car, it was soon obvious, was not going to fly again without major repairs, and the lock on the car which Vaemar and Dimity had used was keyed to open to the patterns of Vaemar's and Dimity's hand or their tappetum or retina respectively. It was centuries since the last manually pickable lock had been made for anything as expensive as a car. Any attempt to burn the doors open, if it did not ruin the car's delicate mechanisms, would probably exhaust their weapon first. They carried Karan into the meager shelter of an overhang as rain began to fall from the grey sky. Mobile telephones were a standard part of their equipment. They called for help, and waited. After a time the rain gave way to sleet and snow. More thunderbirds came.
The comet-debris had served them well, Kzaargh-Commodore thought. Night-Lurker had passed undetected into the thick asteroid belt the humans called the Serpent Swarm.
The long descent back towards the sun had not been spent in idleness. Heroes had worked to disguise the ship.
At first Kzaargh-Commodore had thought to disguise it as a derelict, but had changed his mind after coming across a genuine kzin derelict warship. After stripping it of all that might be useful and giving the dead Heroes aboard space burial, he had sent it sunward for a test, cold, tumbling, patently helpless and dead. Human instruments had identified it, and interrogated it, and when it did not respond batteries of laser-cannon had vaporized it. The same happened when he sent in a stealthed ship's boat, manned by a crew of Hero volunteers. Stealth technology took them quite a long way, but it was plainly not the whole answer. Rocks did better, if they were not identified as being on a collision course with Ka'ashi or some other large body—there were too many rocks for the human defenses to vaporize them all, and in any case many contained valuable ores.
The apes seemed arrogantly confident of their mathematics and of their meteor defenses. Any large meteor whose path missed Ka'ashi by more than 50,000 miles was generally not intercepted.
Night-Lurker became a lurker indeed. Like Lord Hrras-Charr of legend, who had cut off his own ears to fool his enemy, the cruiser had lost external parts. So altering something as complex as a spaceship without dockyard facilities was a mighty task, but his Heroes were skillful. Most of the removed parts had been stored inboard or put into orbits from which they might one day be retrieved, but one way and another it had changed shape and shrunk. Its sleek lines and mirror-finished surface had disappeared under stony plating and rubble. The ports of its great rail-guns and laser-cannon were hidden by lids. Its gravity-engines were never used. There was sufficient delta-V for it to maneuver with short bursts of low-powered chemical rockets, inefficient but far harder to detect in space.
"What do you think of Chorth-Captain?" asked Dimity.
"He is not his own master. I do not only say that because it is unbelievable that a Hero would voluntarily serve such monsters. He appears to have no power to correlate. And there is a spot on the back of his neck that is not a battle-scar. It is metallic. I saw it gleam. I think it is some kind of Protector-made descendent of a zzrou."
"Could a Protector have learnt of such things?"
"The caves contained abandoned equipment of all kinds. The Protector could have found a zzrou and improved on it. Chorth-Captain is likely not the first Hero it captured. It could have experimented on others until it perfected what was necessary for a reliable . . . slave . . . servant . . .?"
"Catspaw?"
"It is not a term I would choose. But an enslaved Hero—or a succession of them—would have been very useful to the Protector at first. I imagine less so now. But I do not know why it did not simply create an army of Protectors on Wunderland as soon as it knew how."
"I think I know why," said Dimity. "The first Protector wanted a force of Protectors it could control. These are not quite the same as the original Pak Protectors and it had become aware of how limited and temporary Protectors' ability to cooperate is. That is why it worked gradually, in an environment where it set the parameters of existence.
"Here it is in control of the others far more completely than it would be in the caves, where suddenly aware new Protectors might remember hiding places and so forth of their own. But there is another thing. As soon as it could, I am sure the first Protector began keying into the internet. Remember the old saying that the net is the most two-edged of all swords? A power to one's own side but the greatest gift imaginable to an enemy? There is material about Protectors on the internet, and although most of it is under security closure a Protector's intelligence would crack that open quickly.
"The Protector would try to learn about creatures like itself, and I am sure it would come upon scientific papers about the Hollow Moon. The theory is that this is an ancient Pak ship. If that is so, there may be Pak machines here, Pak books . . . manuals . . . Surely for the Pak teaching newly-changed breeders must have always been a high-priority use for resources."
"It would not know the language of such manuals."
"It could learn. You and I learn languages very quickly by the standards of our kinds."
A dark spot grew in the lightning-streaked grey of the sky. A car from one of the monitoring stations. It landed near the overhang and six well-armed humans alighted. They were dressed in the tough uniform overalls of the Wunderland security forces.
Guthlac and Cumpston went forward to meet them, stepping between dead thunderbirds. The creatures had been attacking in increasing numbers. Guthlac had begun to worry about their ammunition some time before. He had brought the big rifle thinking to deal with Morlock Protectors if he had to. But its size and weight, even with the mini-waldos, were a disadvantage, and even without considering that he had managed to wreck the car with it. Thunderbirds moved fast. He realized it was as well he had not had to deal with Protectors, who evidently moved much faster. Last time I was in this sort of trouble was because I went hunting with a .22, he thought, thinking Wunderland game was all sport after kzin-hunting.
The leader of the rescue party stepped ahead of the rest to meet them. At the sight of Karan, lying unconscious, his strakkaker swept up. He cocked it with a fluid, infinitely practiced movement and trained it on her.
"What are you doing?" Guthlac jumped forward in front of the man.
"What are you doing? That's a ratcat, isn't it? A friend of yours?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact she is. She was wounded a little while ago defending us."
"We believe in dead ratcats here."
"Not this one."
"I'm the one who decides that around here."
"Do you know who I am?" Asked Guthlac.
"Yes. Someone who owes their life to our responding to your call. Stand aside!"
"The war has been over on this planet for more than ten years! Put that weapon in its proper place!"
"I know the proper use for a weapon when there's a live ratcat around."
"I repeat! The war is over on this planet. There is a peace treaty. I will not repeat that again!"
"I look quite pretty now, don't I," the man said. "Thanks to our Liberators. But see my skin. Look at my face a little closely. A little pink here and there. I spent years with a metal jaw and half a metal face, thanks to one of those Teufel's claws."
"Well, you don't have to now," said Guthlac.
"Yes, I'm lucky, aren't I? My wife, my son, my two brothers, and my uncle, had no such luck as metal replacement parts. Just a quick, short ride down the kzin alimentary canal. Oh, I'm a lucky man, all right! A little micro-surgery to deaden the nerve ends before our Liberators' arrived would have helped. All the nerve ends. I could have gone to my cousins perhaps—maybe after a while they could have looked at me without vomiting. Oh, I forgot! They were in Neue Dresden. You ask me to be a ratcat lover?"
"We are a brigadier and a colonel of the UNSN," said Guthlac. "We happen to be the Liberators you just thanked. The kzinti ate my only family before you were born. I have fought them for more than fifty years. But here on Wunderland things must change. And this particular ratcat was instrumental in saving the lives of two humans, not long ago. She was young when the war ended, and took no part in it. In addition she is"—not really a recommendation to tell this character she is the mate of the leading kzin on the Planet—"our friend." Dear God! he thought. Let this character kill Karan and we can say goodbye to any hope of Man-Kzin cooperation on this planet—our best chance of building eventual peace between the species—forever.
He saw Cumpston raise his right hand and pinch his lower lip between forefinger and thumb in a nervous or thoughtful gesture he sometimes had. It also had the effect of pointing the table-facet of the jewel in the ring on his index finger at the man. Not yet, Michael, he thought. But if necessary . . .
"You lie," the man answered. "God knows why you should bother. But female ratcats can't think. After Liberation we kept some in zoo cages and fed collaborators to them. They didn't stop to ask them their political opinions before they sat down to dine."
"This one thinks," said Guthlac. "A few have always done so, secretly. If you are opposed to the Kzin Patriarchy and Empire you should see what an asset to humanity intelligent kzinrretti may be.
"All of which," he added, "is irrelevant to the fact that I am giving you a direct military order. I am not debating. She comes with us. And she will be given the best of treatment. That is more than because she is our companion and was wounded fighting in our defense, and has been beside other humans in peril before. There are high reasons of policy. Harm her, and you will regret it more keenly than I can say."
"Wunderland is independent! I do not need to take orders from the UNSN."
"I tell you of my certain knowledge that if you give that reason at your court-martial it will do you little good."
Cumpston intervened. "Do you know Nils Rykermann?" he asked.
"Yes," said the man.
"One of the resistance's greatest leaders in the war, and now a close friend of ours. Harm that kzinrret, and you will answer not only to the kzin who is her mate, but to him. In your place I would prefer the kzin."
He could kill us all and make it look an accident, Cumpston thought. By the time anyone else arrived, the thunderbirds wouldn't have left enough of our bodies to investigate. I doubt he has too much inhibition against killing humans. Best get him now, perhaps, and as many of the others as I can with the ring, then draw and fight it out with the rest. But they have beam rifles and they're ready and they look like fighters. . . .
"Rykermann was my commander," the man said at length. "For him I will do this. Get it into the car."
Getting Karan into the car was not easy. If much smaller than a male kzin, she was still the size and weight of a tigress. But she was partly conscious and did her best to help. The car carried them to a dome that rose out of the near-tundra landscape. There were other buildings with the dishes of heavy-duty com-links, all surrounded and covered by strong fencing. Karan was put into shelter. Guthlac, using all the psychological dominance at his command, and his brigadier's identity and electronic passes, demanded a desk and called his headquarters and then Rykermann. He summoned his modified Wolverine-class command ship, the Tractate Middoth. It was well-armed for its size, and its small permanent crew were his own picked men. It was a vast relief to see its familiar shape appear and grow in the gray sky and swoop to the landing-pad.