"Somehow I think it's too quiet," Ingrid said. When Jonah cast a blankly puzzled look over his shoulder, she shrugged. "Aren't you interested in anything cultural?"
"I'm interested in staying alive," Jonah said.
They were strolling quietly down one of the riverside walks. The Donau rolled beside them, two kilometers across; it sparkled blue and green-gray, little waves showing white. A bridge soared from bank to bank, and sailboats heeled far over under the stiff warm breeze. Away from the shrilling poverty of the residential quarters, the air smelled of silty water, grass, flowers.
"Of course, staying alive from now on jeopardizes the mission," Jonah continued.
"No." Ingrid shook her head. "You have to get back."
"I do? Why?"
"You just do." Murphy's balls! Those ARM psychists really do know their stuff. He's forgotten already. What have I forgotten? It's no fun, holes in your memory. Even if they're deliberate.
"The plan doesn't matter," Jonah said. "If it were going to blow, it would have done it. And we'd have heard the bang." Something itched at the back of his mind. "Unless—"
"Jonah?"
"Nothing." I don't want to remember. Or maybe there's nothing to remember. "My hand hurts. Wonder what I did to it?"
"You don't need to know that, either." It was the tenth time he'd asked. Clearly the psychists had done some powerful voodoo on Jonah.
After the war, I'm getting out of Sol system. The more I learn about the ARM, the more they look nearly as bad as the kzin. Maybe I should write a book exposing them or something.
It was odd that there was so little resentment of them, back among the flatlanders—even the Sol-Belters didn't kick up much of a fuss anymore. Or, considering Jonah's present state, maybe not so odd. She shivered and put it out of her mind; time enough for that later, if she lived.
They hailed a pedicab and climbed into the twin-passenger back seat. They had both been surprised to see the little vehicles skittering about the streets; surely machinery could not have become that expensive. The man hunched over the pedals was thin, all wire and leather, dressed only in a pair of ragged shorts. It was not that machines were so dear, but that labor was so cheap, labor of a certain kind. For those with skills needed by the kzinti war economy, there was enough capital to support reasonable productivity. For the increasing number of those without, there was only what unaided brute labor would buy: starvation wages.
Get your mind off the troubles of Wunderland and on to the more urgent matter of saving your own ass, she told herself as they turned into the Baha'i quarter. Back to Harold's Terran Bar . . . She winced. Then out to the Swarm; the Catskinner would be waiting, and Markham would simply have to accept them; that was one of the virtues of a ship with a will of its own. Then a straight boost out of the system; a Dart usually didn't have anything approaching interstellar capacity, but the stasis field changed things. Boost out, tightbeam the precious data, and wait for the fleet to scoop them up. Nothing could affect them within a stasis field, but the field as a whole could still be manipulated with a gravity-polarizer . . .
The chances of coming through this with a whole skin had seemed so remote that it wasn't even worth the trouble of thinking about. Now . . .
The ship will hold three. Hari, this time I won't leave you.
They turned into the street that fronted Harold's Terran Bar. Ingrid had just time enough to see the owner standing beside Claude at the entrance. The police vomited forth, dark in their turtle helmets and goggles, and aircars rose silently over the roofs all about. Giant ginger-red shapes behind them—
She rolled out of her side of the pedicab as Jonah did on his, a motion so smooth they might have rehearsed it. The light-pen was in her hand, and it made its yawping sound. A policeman died, dropping like a puppet with the strings cut, and she dove forward, rolling, trying for an angle at the kzin and—
Blackness.
"The interrogation is complete?" Chuut-Riit reclined again at ease on the bubblecouch behind his desk; a censer was sending up aromatic smoke.
The holo on the far wall showed a room beneath the Munchen police headquarters; a combination of human and kzin talents had long proven most effective for such work. Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals was there, and a shabby-looking Telepath. The mind-reader's fur was matted and his hands twitched; Chuut-Riit could see spatters of vomit down the front of his pelt, and hear his mumble:
" . . . salad, no, no, ak, ak, pftht, no please boiled carrots ak, pfffth . . ."
He shuddered slightly in sympathy, thinking of what it must be like to enter the mind of a human free-associating under drugs and pain. Telepathy was not like speech, it was a sharing that extended to sensations and memory as well. Food was a very fundamental drive. It would be bad enough to have to share the memory of eating the cremated meats humans were fond of—the very stink of them was enough to turn your stomach—but cooked plants . . . Telepath fumbled something out of a wrist-pouch and carefully parted the fur on one side of his neck before pressing it to the skin. There was a hiss, and he sank against the wall with a sigh of relief. His eyes slitted and he leaned chin on knees with a high-pitched irregular purr, the tip of his tongue showing pink past his whiskers.
Chuut-Riit wrinkled his nose and dismissed false compassion. How could you sympathize with something that was a voluntary slave to a drug? And to an extract of sthondat blood at that.
"Yes, Chuut-Riit," Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals said.
"Telepath's reading agrees with what the trained monkeys determined with their truth drugs." Chuut-Riit reminded himself that the drugs actually merely suppressed inhibition. "The attempt was a last-minute afterthought to the main attack of the monkey ship last month. Some gravitic device was used to decelerate a pod with these two; they came down in a remote area, using the disturbances of the attack as cover, and reached the city on foot. Their aim was to trigger the self-destruct mechanisms on your estate, but they were unable to do so."
Chuut-Riit brooded, looking past the kzin liaison officer to the human behind him. "You are not the human in charge of the Munchen police," he said.
"No, Chuut-Riit," the human said. It was a female. A flabby one, the sort that would squish unpleasantly when your fangs ripped open the body cavity, and somehow the holo gave the impression of an unpleasant odor.
"I am Chief Assistant Axelrod-Bauergartner at your service, Dominant One," she continued, giving the title in a reasonably good approximation of the Hero's Tongue. A little insolent? Perhaps—but also commendable, and the deferential posture was faultless. "Chief Montferrat-Palme delegated this summary of the investigation, feeling that it was not important enough to warrant his personal attention."
"Chrrrriii," Chuut-Riit said, scratching one cheek against a piece of driftwood in a stand on his desk. This Montferrat-creature did not consider an attack on the governor's private control system important? That monkey was developing a distorted sense of its priorities. The human in the screen had blanched slightly at the kzin equivalent of an irritated scowl; he let his lips lower back over the fangs and continued:
"Show me the subjects." Axelrod-Bauergartner stepped aside, to show two humans clamped in adjustable plastic brackets amid a forest of equipment. These were two fine specimens, tall and lean in the manner of the space-bred subspecies; both unconscious, but seeming healthy enough apart from the usual superficial cuts, abrasions, and bruises. "What is their condition?"
"No irreparable physical or mental harm, Chuut-Riit," Axelrod-Bauergartner said, bowing. "What are your orders as to their disposal?"
"Rrrrr," Chuut-Riit mused, shifting to rub the underside of his jaw on the wood. The last public hunt had been yesterday, the one to which he had taken his sons. "How soon can they be in condition to run amusingly?" he said.
"Half a week, Chuut-Riit. We have been cautious."
"Prepare them." His sons? No, best not to be too indulgent. There was a badsmelling lot of administrative work to be attended to; he would be chained to his desk for a goodly while anyway. Let the little devils attend to their studies, and he would visit them again when this had been disposed of. Besides, while free there had been a certain attraction in the prospect of dealing with this pair personally; as captives they were just two more specimens of monkeymeat—beneath his dignity.
"Get a good batch together, and have them all ready for the Public Preserve at the end of the week. Dismissed."
"Was that Suuomalisen I saw coming out of here?" Montferrat said.
"Unless you know another fat, sweaty toad in a linen suit looking like he'd just swallowed the juiciest fly on the planet." Yarthkin grinned like a shark as he settled behind his desk and pushed a pile of data chips and hardcopy to one side. "Sit yourself down, Claude, and have a drink. If it isn't too early."
"Fifteen hundred too early? That's in bad taste, even for you." But the hand that reached for the Maivin shook slightly, and there were wrinkles in the tunic. "But why was he so happy?"
"I just sold him Harold's Terran Bar," Yarthkin said calmly. Light-headed, he laughed, a boy's laugh. "Prosit!" he toasted, and tossed back his own drink.
"What!" That was enough to bring him bolt-upright. "Why—what—you've been turning that swine down for thirty years!"
"Swine, Claude?" Yarthkin leaned forward, resting his chin on paired thumbs. "Or have you forgotten exactly who's to be monkeymeat day after tomorrow?"
The reaction was more than Yarthkin had expected. A jerk, as if a high-voltage current surged through the other man's body. A dry retching sound. Then, incredibly, the aquiline Herrenmann's face crumpled. As if it were a mask, slumping and wrinkling like a balloon from which the air has been withdrawn . . . and he was crying, head slumping down into his hands. Yarthkin swallowed and looked away; Claude was a collabo and a sellout, an extortionist without shame . . . but nobody should see another man this naked. It was obscene.
"Pull yourself together, Claude; I've known you were a bastard for forty years, but I thought you were a man, at least."
"So did I," gasped Montferrat. "I even have the medals to prove it. I fought well in the war."
"I know."
"So when, when they let us out of the detention camp, I really thought I could help. I really did." He laughed. "Life had to go on, criminals had to be caught, we were beaten and resistance just made it harder on everyone. I'd been a good policeman. I still could be."
He drank, choked, drank. "The graft, everyone had to. They wouldn't let you get past foot-patrol if you weren't on the pad too, you had to be in it with them. If I didn't get promotion how could I accomplish anything? I told myself that, but every year a little more of me was gone. And now, now Ingrid's back and I can see myself in her eyes and I know what I am, no better than that animal Axelrod-Bauergartner, she's gloating, she has me on this and I couldn't, couldn't do it. I told her to take care of it all and went and I've been drunk most of the time since, she'll have my head and I deserve it, why try and stop her, it—"
Yarthkin leaned forward and slapped the policeman alongside the head with his open palm, a gunshot crack in the narrow confines of the office. Montferrat's mood switched with mercurial swiftness, and he snarled with a mindless sound as he reached for his sidearm. But alcohol is a depressant, and his hand had barely touched the butt before the other man's stunner was pointed between his eyes.
"Neyn, neyn, naughty," Yarthkin said cheerfully. "Hell of a headache, Claude. Now, I won't say you don't deserve it, but sacrificing your own liver and lights isn't going to do Ingrid any good." He kept the weapon unwavering until Montferrat had won back a measure of self-command, then laid it down on the desk and offered a cigarette.
"My apologies," Montferrat said, wiping off his face with a silk handkerchief. "I do despise self-pity." The shredded cloak of his ironic detachment settled about him.
Yarthkin nodded. "That's better, sweetheart. I'm selling the club because I need ready capital, for relocation. Grubstaking my people, the ones who don't want to come with me or stay here."
"Go with you? Where? And what does this have to do with Ingrid?"
Yarthkin grinned again, tapped ash off the end of his cigarette. Exhilaration filled him, and something that had been missing for far too long. What? he thought. Not youth . . . yes, that's it. Purpose.
"It isn't every man who's given a chance to do it over right," he said. "That, friend Claude, is what I'm going to do. We're going to bust Ingrid out of that Preserve. Give her a chance at it, at least." He held up a hand. "Don't fuck with me, Claude, I know as well as you that the system there is managed through Munchen Police HQ. One badly mangled corpse substituted for another, what ratcat's to know? It's been done before."
"Not by me," Montferrat said, shaking his head dully. "I always kept out of the setup side of the Hunts. Couldn't . . . I have to watch them, anyway, too often."
Odd how men cling to despair, once they've hit bottom, Yarthkin thought. As if hope were too much effort. Is that what surrender is, then, just giving in to exhaustion of the soul?
Aloud: "Computer, access file Till Eulenspiegel."
The surface of his desk flashed transparent and lit with a series of coded text-columns. Montferrat came erect with a shaken oath.
"How . . . if you had that, all these years, why haven't you used it?"
"Claude, the great drawback of blackmail is that it gives the victim the best possible incentive to find a permanent way of shutting you up. Risky, especially when dealing with the police. As to the how, you're not under the impression that you get the best people in the police, are you?" A squint, and the gravelly voice went soft. "Don't think I wouldn't use it, sweetheart, if you won't cooperate, and there's more than enough to put you in the edible-delicacy category. Think of it as God's way of giving you an incentive to get back on the straight and narrow."
"I tell you, Axelrod-Bauergartner has the command codes for the Preserve! I can override, but it would be flagged. Immediately."
"Computer, display file Niebelungen AA37Bi22. Damned lack of imagination, that code . . . There it is, Claude. Everything you always wanted to know about your most ambitious subordinate but were afraid to ask, including her private bypass programs." Another flick of ash. "Finagle, Claude, you can probably make all this look like her fault, even if the ratcat smells the proverbial rodent."
Montferrat smoothed down his uniform tunic, and it was as if the gesture slicked transparent armor across his skin once more. "You appear to have me by the short and sensitives, kamerat," he said lightly. "Not entirely to my dismay. The plan is, then, that Ingrid and her gallant Sol-Belter are whisked away from under the noses of the kzin, while you go to ground?"
Yarthkin laughed, a shocking sound. "Appearances to the contrary, Claude old son, you were always the romantic of us two. The one for the noble gesture. Nothing of the sort: Ingrid and I are going to the Swarm."
"And the man, Jonah?"
"Fuck him. Let the ratcats have him. His job was done the minute they failed to dig the real story out of him."
Montferrat managed a laugh. "This is quite a reversal of roles, Hari . . . but this, this final twist, it makes it seem possible, somehow." He extended a hand. "Seeing as you have the gun to my head, why not? Working together again, eh?"
"All right, listen up," the guard said.
Jonah shook his head, shook out the last of the fog. Ingrid sat beside him on the plain slatted wood of the bench, in this incongruous pen—change-rooms for a country club, once. Now a set of run-down stone buildings in the midst of shaggy overgrown wilderness, with the side open to the remnants of lawn and terrace covered with a shockfield. He looked around; there were a round two dozen humans with them, all clad alike in gray prison trousers and shirts. All quiet. The shockrods of the guards had enforced that. Some weeping, a few catatonic, and there was an unpleasant fecal smell.
"You get an hour's start," the guard said, in a voice of bored routine. "And you'd better run, believe me."
"Up yours!" somebody shouted, and laughed when the guard raised her rod. "What you going to do, ratcat-lover, condemn me to death?"
The guard shrugged. "You ever seen a house cat playing with a mumbly?" she jeered. "The ratcats like a good chase. Disappoint them and they'll bat you around like a toy." She stepped back, and the door opened. "Hell, keep ahead of them for two days and maybe they'll let you go." A burly man rose and charged, bounced back as she took another step through the door.
Laughter, through the transparent surface. "Have fun, porkchops. I'll watch you die. Five minutes to shield-down."
"You all right?" Jonah asked. Neither of them had been much damaged physically by the interrogation; it had been done in a police headquarters, where the most modern methods were available, not crude field-expedients. And the psychists' shields had worked perfectly; the great weakness of telepathic interrogation is that it can only detect what the subject believes to be true. It had been debatable whether the blocks and artificial memories would hold. . . . Kzin telepaths hated staying in a human's mind more than they had to, and the drug addiction that helped to develop their talents did little for motivation or intelligence.
"Fine," Ingrid said, raising her head from her knees. "Just thinking how pretty it is out there," she continued; tears starred her lashes, but her voice was steady.
Startled, he looked again through the near-invisible shimmer of the shockfield. The long green-gold grass was rippling under a late-afternoon sun, starred with flowers like living jewel-flecks; a line of flamingos skimmed by, down to the little pond at the base of the hill. Beyond was forest, flowering dogwood in a fountain of white against the flickering-shiny olive drab of native kampfwald trees. The shockfield let slow-moving air through, carrying scents of leaf mold, green, purity.
"You're right," he said. They clasped hands, embraced, stepped back and saluted each other formally. "It's been . . . good knowing you, Lieutenant Ingrid."
"Likewise, Captain Jonah." A gamin smile. "Finagle's arse, we're not dead yet, are we?"
"Huh. Hun-huh." Lights spun before Jonah's eyes, wrenching his stomach with more nausea. Gummy saliva blocked his mouth as he tumbled over the lip of the gully, crashing through brush that ripped and tore with living fingers of thorn and bramble. Tumble, roll, down through the brush-covered sixty-degree slope, out into the patch of gravel and sparse spaghetti-like grass analog at the bottom. To lie and rest, Murphy, to rest . . .
Memories were returning. Evidently his subconscious believed there wouldn't be another interrogation. Believed they were dead already. My fingernail. I have to escape. And there's a laugh . . . but I have to try.
He turned the final roll into a flip and came erect, facing in the direction of his flight; forced his diaphragm to breathe, stomach out to suck air into the bottom of the lungs. His chest felt tight and hot, as if the air pumping through it was nothing, vacuum, inert gas. Will kept him steady, blinked his eyes into focus. He was in a patch of bright sunlight, the forest above deep green-gold shade that flickered; the soil under his feet was damp, impossibly cool on his skin. The wind was blowing toward him, which meant that the kzin would be following ground-scent rather than what floated on the breeze. Kzin noses were not nearly as sensitive as a hound's, but several thousand times more acute than a human's.
And I must stink to high heaven, he thought. Even then he could smell himself; he hawked and spat, taking a firmer grip on his improvised weapon. That was a length of branch and a rock half the size of his head, dangling from the end by thin strong vines; thank Murphy that Wunderland flora ran to creepers . . .
"One," he muttered to himself. "There ain't no justice, I know, but please, just let me get one." His breathing was slowing, and he became conscious of thirst, then the gnawing emptiness under his ribs. The sun was high overhead; nearly a day already? How many of the others were still alive?
A flicker of movement at the lip of the ravine, ten meters above him and twenty away. Jonah swung the stone-age morningstar around his head and roared. And the kzin halted its headlong four-footed rush, rose like an unfolding wall of brown-red dappled in the light at the edge of the tall trees, and slashed across with the white of teeth. Great round eyes, and he could imagine the pupils going pinpoint; the kzin homeworld was not only colder than Wunderland, it was dimmer. Batwing ears unfolding, straining for sound. He would have to stop that, their hearing was keen enough to pick a human heartbeat out of the background noise. This was a young male, he would be hot, hot for the kill and salt blood to quench his thirst and let him rest . . .
"Come on, you kshat, you sthondat-eater," Jonah yelled in the snarling tones of the Hero's Tongue. "Come and get your Name, kinless offspring of cowards, come and eat turnips out of my shit, grass-grazer! Ch'rowl you!"
The kzin screamed, a raw wailing shriek that echoed down the ravine; screamed again and leaped in an impossible soaring curve that took it halfway down the steep slope.
"Now, Ingrid. Now!" Jonah shouted, and ran forward.
The woman rose from the last, thicker scrub at the edge of the slope, where water nourished taller bushes. Rose just as the second bounding leap passed its arc, the kzin spread-eagled against the sky, taloned hands outstretched to grasp and tear. The three-meter pole rose with her, butt against the earth, sharpened tip reaching for the alien's belly. It struck, and the wet ripping sound was audible even over the berserk siren shriek of the young kzin's pain.
It toppled forward and sideways, thrashing and ululating with the long pole transfixing it. Down onto Ingrid's position, and he forced rubbery leg muscles into a final sprint, a leap and scream of his own. Then he was there, in among the clinging brush and it was there too, convulsing. He darted in, swung, and the rock smashed into a hand that was lashing for his throat; the kzin wailed again, put its free hand to the spear, pulled while it kept him at bay with lunging snaps. Ingrid was on the other side with a second spear, jabbing; he danced in, heedless of the fangs, and swung two-handed. The rock landed at the juncture of thick neck and sloping shoulder, and something snapped. The shock of it ran back up his arms.
The pair moved in, stabbing, smashing, block and wriggle and jump and strike, and the broken alien crawled toward them with inhuman vitality, growling and whimpering and moving even with the dull-pink bulge of intestine showing where it had ripped the jagged wood out of its flesh. Fur, flesh, scraps of leaf, dust scattering about . . . Until at last too many bones were broken and too much of the dark-red blood spilled, and it lay twitching. The humans lay just out of reach, sobbing back their breaths; Jonah could hear the kzin's cries over the thunder in his ears, hear them turn to high-pitched words in the Hero's Tongue:
"It hurts . . ." The Sol-Belter rolled to his knees. His shadow fell across the battered, swollen eyes of his enemy. "It hurts . . . Mother, you've come back, Mother—" The shattered paw-hands made kneading motions. "Help me, take away the noise in my head, Mother . . ." Presently it died.
"That's one for a pallbearer." The end of his finger throbbed. "Goddamn it, I can't escape!"
Ingrid tried to rise, fell back with a faint cry. Jonah was at her side, hands moving on the ruffled tatters that streaked down one thigh.
"How bad . . . ?" He pushed back the ruined cloth. Blood was runneling down the slim length of the woman's leg, not pumping but in a steady flow. "Damn, tanj, tanj, tanj!" He ripped at his shirt for a pressure-bandage, tied it on with the thin vines scattered everywhere about. "Here, here's your spear, lean on it, come on." He darted back to the body; there was a knife at its belt, a long heavy-bladed wtsai. Jonah ripped it free, looped the belt over one shoulder like a baldric.
"Let's move," he said, staggering slightly. She leaned on the spear hard enough to drive the blunt end inches deep into the sandy gravel, and shook her head.
"No, I'd slow you down. You're the one who has to get away. Get going."
His finger throbbed anew to remind him. And she's Hari's girl, not mine. But— Another memory returned, and he laughed.
"Something's funny?"
"Yeah, maybe it is! Maybe—hell, I bet it worked!"
"What worked?"
"Tell you on the way."
"No, you won't. I'm not coming with you. Now get going!"
"Murphy bugger that with a diode, Lieutenant, get moving, that's an order."
She put an arm around his shoulder and they hobbled down the shifting footing of the ravine's bed. There was a crooked smile on her face as she spoke.
"Well, it's not as if we had anywhere to go, is it?"
The kzin governor of Wunderland paced tiredly toward the gate of his children's quarters, grooming absently. The hunt had gone well; the intruder-humans were undoubtedly beginning a short passage through some lucky Hero's digestive system, and it was time to relax.
"Hrrrr," Traat-Admiral said beside him. "I still feel uneasy leaving the planetary surface while ambushers may lurk, Dominant One," he said.
Chuut-Riit stopped, and turned to face the other kzin. Traat-Admiral was a decade older than him, and several hands higher, but there was nothing but real worry and concern in his stance. The viceroy put both hands on Traat-Admiral's shoulders.
"No need for formalities between us," he said, and then added deliberately: "My brother."
Traat-Admiral froze, and there were gasps from some of the others within hearing. That was a rare honor for a kzin not blood-related, overwhelmingly so considering the difference in hereditary rank. And a public avowal at that; Traat-Admiral licked his whiskers convulsively, deeply moved.
"You are my most trusted one," Chuut-Riit said. "Now that we know some human infiltrators were dropped off during the raid, that . . . thing of which we speculated becomes more than a theoretical possibility. Affairs are still in chaos here—the Fifth Fleet has been delayed half a decade or more—and I need someone fully in my trust to order the space-search."
"I will not fail you, Dom—Elder Brother," Traat-Admiral said fervently.
"Besides, the enemy humans here on Wunderland"—it was a long standing joke that the kzinti name for the planet meant lovely hunting ground—"have been disposed of. Go, and hunt well."
Perhaps I should have stayed to track them myself, he mused as he passed the last guard station with an absentminded wave. No, why bother. That prey is already caught; this was simply a re-enactment.
Chuut-Riit felt the repaired doors swing shut before him and glanced around in puzzlement, the silence penetrating through post-Hunt sluggishness. The courtyard was deserted, and it had been nearly seven days since his last visit; far too soon for another assassination attempt, but the older children should have been boiling out to greet him, questioning and frolicking . . . He turned and keyed the terminal in the stone beside the door.
Nothing. The kzin blinked in puzzlement. Odd. There has been no record of any malfunction. In instinctive reflex he lowered himself to all fours and sniffed; the usual sand-rock-metal scents, multiple young-kzin male smells, always slightly nerve-wracking. Something underneath that, and he licked his nose to moisten it and drew in a long breath with his mouth half open.
He started back, arching his spine and bristling with a growling hiss, tail rigid. Dead meat and blood. Whirling, he slapped for the exterior communicator. "Guard-Captain, respond. Guard-Captain, respond immediately."
Nothing. He bent, tensed, leaped for the summit of the wall. A crackling discharge met him, a blue corona around the sharp twisted iron of the battlement's top that sent pain searing through the palms of his outstretched hands. The wards were set on maximum force, and he fell to the ground cradling his burned palms. Rage bit through him, stronger than pain or thought; someone had menaced his children, his future, the blood of the Riit. His snarl was soundless as he dashed on all fours across the open space of the courtyard and into the entrance of the warren.
It was dark, the glowpanels out and the ventilators silent; for the first time it even smelled like a castle on homeworld, purely of old stone, iron, and blood. Fresh blood on something near the entrance. He bent, the huge round circles of his eyes going black as the pupils expanded. A sword, a four-foot kreera with a double saw edge. The real article, heavy wave-forged steel, from the sealed training cabinets which should only have opened to his own touch. Ignoring the pain as burned tissue cracked and oozed fluids, he reached for the long hide-wound bone grip of the weapon. The edges of the blade glimmered with dark wet, set with a mat of orange-red hairs.
His arm bent, feeling the weight of the metal as he dropped into the crook-kneed defensive stance, with the lead ball of the pommel held level with his eyes. The corridor twisted off before him, the faint light of occasional skylights picking out the edges of granite blocks and the black iron doors with their central locks cast in the shape of beast-masked ancestral warriors. Chuut-Riit's ears cocked forward and his mouth opened, dropping the lower jaw toward the chest: maximum flow over the nasal passages to catch scent, and fangs ready to tear at anything that got past the weapon in his hands. He edged down the corridor one swift careful step at a time, heading for the central tower where he could do something, even if it was only lighting a signal fire.
Insane, he thought with a corner of his mind that watched his slinking progress through the dark halls. It was insane, like something from the ancient songs of homeworld. Like the Siege of Zeeroau, the Heroic Band manning the ramparts against the prophet, dwindling one by one from wounds and weariness and the hunger-frenzy that sent them down into the catacombs to hunt and then the dreadful feasting.
Chuut-Riit turned a corner and wheeled, blade up to meet a possible attack from the dropstand over the corner. Nothing, but the whirl-and-cut brought him flush against the opposite wall, and he padded on. Noise and smell; a thin mewling, and an overpowering stink of kzinmeat. A door, and the first body before it. There was little of the soft tissue left, but the face was intact. One of his older sons, the teeth frozen in an eternal snarl; blood was splashed about, far more than one body could account for. Walls, floor, ceiling, gouts and spattered trails that dripped down in slow congealing trails toward the floor. A chugra spear lay broken by the wall, alongside a battered metal shield; the sound had been coming from behind the door the corpse guarded, but now he could hear nothing.
No, wait. His ears folded out to their maximum. Breathing. A multiple rapid panting. He tried the door; it was unlocked, but something had it jammed closed.
A mewl sounded as he leaned his weight against it and the iron creaked. "Open!" he snarled. "Open at once."
More mewls, and a metallic tapping. The panel lurched inward, and he stooped to fill the doorway.
The infants, he thought. A heap in the far corner of the room, squirming spotted fur and huge terrified eyes peering back at him. The younger ones, the kits just recently taken from their mothers; at the sight of him they set up the thin eeeuw-eeeuw-eeeuw that was the kzin child's cry of distress.
"Daddy!" one of them said. "We're so hungry, Daddy. We're so frightened. He said we should stay in here and not open the door and not cry but there were awful noises and its been so long and we're hungry, Daddy, Daddy—"
Chuut-Riit uttered a grating sound deep in his chest and looked down. His son's wtsai had been wedged to hold the door from the inside; the kits must have done it at his instruction, while he went outside to face the hunters. Hunger-frenzy eroded what little patience an adolescent kzin possessed, as well as intellect; they would not spend long hammering at a closed door, not with fresh meat to hand and the smell of blood in their nostrils.
"Silence," he said, and they shrank back into a heap. Chuut-Riit forced gentleness into his voice. "Something very bad has happened," he said. "Your brother was right, you must stay here and make no noise. Soon I . . . soon I or another adult will come and feed you. Do you understand?" Uncertain nods. "Put the knife back in the door when I go out. Then wait. Understand?"
He swung the door shut and looked down into his son's face while the kits hammered the knifeblade under it from the inside.
"You did not die in vain, my brave one," he whispered, very low, settling into a crouch with the sword ready. "Kdari-Riit," he added, giving the dead a full Name. Now I must wait. Wait to be sure none of the gone-mad ones had heard him, then do his best. There would be an alert, eventually. The infants did not have the hormone-driven manic energy of adolescents. They would survive.
"Zroght-Guard-Captain," the human said. "Oh, thank God!"
The head of the viceregal household troopers rose blinking from his sleeping-box, scratching vigorously behind one ear. "Yes, Henrietta?" he said.
"It's Chuut-Riit," she said. "Zroght-Guard-Captain, it wasn't him who refused to answer—I knew it and now we've found tampering; the technicians say they missed something the first time. We still can't get through to him in the children's quarters. And the records say the armory's open and they haven't been fed for a week!"
The guard-captain wasted no time in speech with the sobbing human; it would take enough time to physically breach the defenses of the children's quarters.
"Hrrnnngg-ha," Chuut-Riit gasped, panting with lolling tongue. The corner of the exercise room had given him a little protection, the desks and machinery a little more. Now a dozen lanky bodies interlaced through the equipment about his feet, and the survivors had drawn back to the other end of the room. There was little sentience left in the eyes that peered at him out of the starved faces, not enough to use missile-weapons. Dim sunlight glinted on their teeth and the red gape of their mouths, on bellies fallen in below barrel-hoop ribs.
That last rush almost had me, he thought. An odd detachment had settled over him; with a sad pride he noticed the coordination of their movements even now, spreading out in a semicircle to bar the way to the doors. He was bleeding from a dozen superficial cuts, and the long sword felt like a bar of neutronium in his hands. The blade shone liquid-wet along its whole length now, and the hilt was slimy in his numb grip, slick with blood and the lymph from his burned hands; he twisted it in a whistling circle that flung droplets as far as the closing pack. Chuut-Riit threw back his head and shrieked, an eerie keening sound that filled the vaulted chamber. They checked for a moment; shrinking back. If he could keep them . . .
Movement at his feet, from the pile of bodies. Cold in his side, so cold, looking down at the hilt of the wtsai driven up into the lung, the overwhelming salt taste of his own blood. The one they called Spotty crawled free of the piled bodies, broken-backed but evading his weakened slash.
"Kill him," the adolescent panted. "Kill the betrayer, kill him."
The waiting children shrieked and leapt.
"He must have made his last stand here," Zroght-Guard-Captain said, looking around the nursery. The floor was a tumbled chaos of toys, wooden weapons, printout books; the walls still danced their holo gavotte of kits leaping amid grass and butterflies. There was very little of the kzin governor of the Alpha Centauri system left; a few of the major bones, and the skull, scattered among smaller fragments from his sons, the ones wounded in the fighting and unable to defend themselves from their ravenous brothers. The mom stank of blood and old meat.
"Zroght-Guard-Captain!" one of the troopers said. They all tensed, fully-armed as they were. Most of the young ones were still at large, equipped from the practice rooms, and they seemed ghostly clever.
"A message, Zroght-Guard-Captain." The warrior held up a pad of paper; the words were in a rusty brownish liquid, evidently written with a claw. Chuut-Riit's claw, that was his sigil at the bottom. The captain flipped up the visor of his helmet and read:
FORGIVE THEM
Zroght chirred. There might be time for that, after the succession struggle ended.
"Gottdamn, they're out of range of the last pickup," Montferrat said.
Yarthkin grunted, careful to stay behind the policeman. The tubecar route was an old one, left here when this was a country club. The entrance was a secluded cleft in the rocky hill, and it appeared on no kzin records; its Herrenmann owners had felt no need to inform the municipal authorities of what they did, and had died in the war. His hand felt tight and clammy on the handle of the stunner, and every rustle and creak in the wilderness about them was a lurking kzin.
Teufel, I could use a smoke, he thought. Insane, of course, with ratcat noses coursing through the woods.
"Are they alive?" he asked tightly.
"The tracers are still active, but with this little interfacer I can't—Ingrid!"
He made a half-step forward. A pair of scarecrow figures stumbled past the entrance to the cleft, halted with a swaying motion that spoke of despair born of utter exhaustion. The man was scratched and bloodied; Yarthkin's eyes widened at the scraps of dried fur and blood and matter clinging to the rude weapon in his hand. Both of them were spattered with similar reminders, rank with the smell of it and the sweat that glistened in tracks through the dirt on their faces. More yet on the sharpened pole that Ingrid leaned on as a crutch, and fresh blood on the bandage at her thigh.
Jonah was straightening. "You here to help the pussies beat the bushes?" he panted. Ingrid looked up, blinked crusted eyes, moved closer to her companion. Yarthkin halted, speechless, shook his head.
"Actually, this is a mission of mercy," Montferrat began in his cool tone. Then words ripped out of him: "Gottdamn, there are two kzin coming up, I'm getting their tracers." Fingers played over his interfacer. "They're stopping about a kilometer back—"
"Where we left the body of the one we killed," Jonah said. His eyes met Yarthkin's levelly; the Wunderlander felt something lurch in the pit of his stomach at the dawning wonder in Ingrid's.
"Yah, mission of mercy, time to get on with it," he said, stepping forward and planting the projector cone of his stunner firmly in Montferrat's back. "Here."
He reached, took the policeman's stunner from his belt and tossed it to Jonah. "And here." An envelope from inside his own neatly tailored hunting-jacket. "False identity, guaranteed good ones. You'll have to get cosmetic work done to match, but there's everything you need in the room at the other end of the tubeline here. Money, clothes, contacts."
"Tube?" Jonah said.
"Hari—" Montferrat began, and subsided at a sharp jab.
"You said it, sweetheart," Yarthkin replied. His tone was light, but his eyes were on the woman.
"We can't leave you here," she began.
Yarthkin laughed. "I didn't intend for you to, but it looks like you'll have to. Now get moving, sweetheart."
"You don't understand," Ingrid said. "Jonah's the one who has to get away. Give him the permit."
"The Boy Scout? Not on your life—"
"You can give it to me. No, don't move." The voice came from behind him, the tube entrance; a woman's voice, with a hint of a sneer in it.
"Efficient as usual," Montferrat said, with a tired slump of the shoulders. "Allow me to introduce my ambitious chief assistant."
"Indeed, dear Chief," Axelrod-Bauergartner said as she strolled around to where everyone was visible. The chunky weapon in her arms was no stunner; it was a strakaker, capable of spraying them all with hypervelocity pellets with a single movement of her finger. "Drop it, commoner," she continued in a flat voice. "Thanks for disarming the chief."
Yarthkin's stunner fell to the ground. "Did you really think, Chief, that I wasn't going to check what commands went out under my codes? I look at the events record five times a day when things are normal. Nice sweet setup, puts all the blame on me . . . except that when I show the kzin your bodies, I'll be the new commissioner."
The tableau held for a moment, until Montferrat coughed. "I don't suppose my clandestine fund account . . . ?" He moved with exaggerated care as he produced a screenpad and light-stylus.
Axelrod-Bauergartner laughed again. "Sure, we can make a deal. Write out the number, by all means," she taunted. "Porkchops don't need ngggg."
The stylus yawped sharply once. The woman in police uniform fell, with a boneless finality that kept her finger from closing on the trigger of her weapon until her weight landed on it. A boulder twenty meters away suddenly shed its covering of vegetation and turned sandblast-smooth; there was a click and hiss as the strakaker's magazine ran empty.
Yarthkin coughed, struggled not to gasp. Montferrat stooped, retrieved his stunner, walked across to toe the limp body. "I knew this would come in useful," he said, tapping the captured light-pencil against the knuckles of one hand. His eyes rose to meet Yarthkin's, and he smoothed back his mustaches. "What a pity that Axelrod-Bauergartner was secretly feral, found here interfering with the Hunt, a proscribed weapon in her hands . . . isn't it?" His gaze shifted to Ingrid and Jonah. "Well, what are you waiting for?"
The woman halted for an instant by Yarthkin. "Hari—" she began. He laid a finger across her lips.
"G'wan, kid," he said, with a wry twist of the lips. "You've got a life waiting."
"Wait a minute," she said, slapping the hand aside. "Murphy's Balls, Hari! I thought you'd grown up, but not enough, evidently. Make all the sacrificial gestures you want, but don't make them for me." A gaunt smile. "And don't flatter yourself, either."
She turned to Jonah, snapped a salute. "It's been . . . interesting, Captain. But this is my home . . . and if you don't remember now why you have to get back to the UN, you will."
"Data link—"
She laughed. "It would take hours to squirt all that up to Catskinner and you know it. Get moving, Captain. I'll be all right. Now go."
He started to protest and his finger throbbed unbearably. "All right, but I'll wait as long as I can."
"You'll do nothing of the sort."
He hesitated for a second more, then walked to the tubeway entrance. A capsule hissed within.
Ingrid turned to face the two men. "You males do grow up more slowly than we," she said with a dancing smile in her eyes. "But given enough time . . . there are some decisions that should have been made fifty years ago. Not many get another chance. Where are we going?"
Montferrat and Yarthkin glanced at each other, back at the woman, with an identical look of helpless bewilderment that did not prevent the policeman from setting the tube's guidance-plate.
"All three of us have a lot of catching up to do," she said, and swung the hatch down over herself.
"Well," Montferrat said dazedly. "Well." A shake of his head. "You next."
"Where did you send her?"
Montferrat grinned slightly. "You'll just have to trust me to send you there too, won't you?" Much of the old tube system was still functioning.
"Claude—"
"You've been there. A landing stage, and then aircar to my family's old lodge. I've kept it hidden from—from everyone." He laughed slightly. "You've already had a head start with her. A few more days won't matter. But when I get there, I'll expect equal time. Now get moving, I have to set the stage."
"Better come now."
"No. First I see that the Sol-Belter gets offworld. Then I fix it so we can follow. Both will take time."
"Can you bring that off, Claude?"
"Yes." He straightened, and the look of the true Herrenmann was unmistakable. "It's good to be alive again."