Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI Read online

  They swung the beams of their lights round the chamber. The humans cried out. Vaemar and Swirl-Stripes roared.

  Hanging upside down from the deckhead were the flayed corpses of several kzinti. Though the skin and several of the limbs were missing and the bodies otherwise damaged, it was plain from the sizes that they were both males and females. There were five males. There had been five males at the little fish-processing business.

  Guns ready, instinctively moving again into a circle with their eyes and weapons facing outwards, they approached the bodies.

  They had been dead for days, but not many days. Vaemar exerted his self-control. A kzintosh warrior must not lose judgement in the presence of death, however much the dishonoring of Heroes’ bodies might provoke it: rage and blood-lust should be channelled into the worthwhile and efficient vengeful slaughter of enemies. Such, he thought at that moment, had been the teaching of his Honored Sire Chuut-Riit, whose military writings he had studied, and the lessons drilled into him by Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero.

  There did not seem to be marks of beam-weapons, blades, or projectile weapons on what was left of the bodies, though the heads were much damaged. He heard a high-pitched whirring sound behind him, and spun round, claws extended to strike, but it was only Rosalind, with a high-speed camera, filming the scene. For a moment he was doubly infuriated by this insult to the dead and raised his claws to strike it away. Then reason returned: a film of the scene would be useful as evidence. She was behaving correctly. Still, orders should be formerly given.

  “This is now a military situation,” he said. “As holder of the senior ROTC commission, I am taking formal command. Hugo, you are second in seniority and will be second-in-command. We press on. Any questions?”

  There were none. He was the youngest present but kzin matured faster than humans. It would have been a bold or foolish human on Wunderland who questioned a kzin standing as Vaemar stood, claws extended, beam rifle cocked, ears flat in his head and his jaws salivating and wide in a killing gape.

  Something moved in the darkness overhead. It was hard to tell its size or shape, but it was fast, and it disappeared before they could focus on it. A quick shot after it produced no result but a fall of sparks where some still-live power-line ruptured.

  Lights played over the deckhead showed a few small ventilation ducts. But humans had used the ducting of kzin ships in the war, hiding in and crawling along passages where the great felinoids could not follow. Nerve-gas was the prescribed kzin treatment for the problem…

  “Humans would have used weapons,” said Anne cautiously. Vaemar growled in his throat but said nothing. Whoever or whatever had hung up those kzin bodies like animals, it was plainly the work of intelligence, not any predatory swamp creature.

  “These appear to have been eaten,” said Anne. “Humans never eat kzinti.”

  “Never?”

  “Well, hardly ever.”

  Then something pale caught Anne’s eye. She pointed. Vaemar recognized the bones at once as a pair of human femurs, still joined to a human pelvis. Hugo was cursing softly and incessantly, jerking the snout of his weapon about, aiming futilely at one dark, silent opening after another. Anne’s chest was heaving as she took deep, deliberate breaths.

  Humans eat other humans? Vaemar had heard of it happening in famines during the Occupation, though it was rare. That kzinti could eat other kzinti he of all the kzintosh on Wunderland, last son of Chuut-Riit, had the direst reason to know. But that was a matter of hunger-frenzy when, in adolescents, mind and control went together. This was systematic butchery.

  From the compartment below them the boat suddenly screamed. Vaemar and Swirl-Stripes leapt back down the steps. Their beam rifles fired, but for an instant only. Their reflected beams hit the water, flashing it into live steam. Had they depressed the triggers an instant longer, the kzinti would have broiled themselves. There were two explosions, ear-crackingly loud in that confined space. Something hit Vaemar and knocked him backwards across the door-sill. Swirl-Stripes screamed and charged through the water. Then whatever it was had gone.

  Vaemar rose cautiously. The rifle had been torn from his claws and he was, he knew, lucky not to have lost digits as well. Its bulk had saved him, but its charge-regulator was smashed. Something had hit it hard. One rifle was useless.

  Not only one rifle. Hugo’s strakkaker was in two pieces, and one of his arms hung broken. Anne strapped the arm with an expanding mini-splint and applied a pain-killer, but he was plainly out of any fighting for a time.

  The others covering him, Vaemar examined the companionway. The bulkhead some distance behind him gleamed raw with the impact of a new missile. The missile itself was still sizzling in the water. It was nothing but a blob of metal, but could have been—must have been—a bullet from a real “rifle”—a hunting rifle such as both kzin and humans used both to practice marksmanship and to kill game without the disintegrating effects of a strakkaker or a military beamer.

  Toby was gone and the boat’s brain and computer terminal had been smashed. The brain, Vaemar thought, was not much loss, but the computer would have been valuable. Other gear was gone too, including food, spare ammunition, the telephones and the motion-detector.

  “It wasn’t Toby,” said Hugo. “I’m sure it wasn’t Toby.” He looked up at Vaemar with drugged, still pain-filled eyes. “Upon my name as my word, I pledge, it was not him. Whatever it was has taken him…”

  “We go on,” said Vaemar. No human, whatever their knowledge of kzin body-language, would have argued with him. They returned to the chamber of dead kzinti.

  There were open doors leading to dark companionways. Beams of light down them showed nothing. There were also closed doors. Molds and plants growing on them suggested they had been shut a long time, presumably ever since the ship had come down.

  Hugo pointed to one: around the handle it was clean and shining. A panel of colored lights beside the handle showed its lock was alive.

  “Open it!” ordered Vaemar. There was a chance the lock was not actually engaged.

  Anne pulled on the handle, uselessly. Swirl-Stripes tried, also without result. Without the code for the lock neither human nor kzin muscular strength was going to move it.

  They had the beam-guns, but Vaemar thought their lasers would have no effect on the door before their charges burnt out. It would be stupid to fire them at the wall. Partly to give himself time to think, but largely because decorum demanded it, he ordered the kzinti’s bodies cut down and their remaining limbs suitably composed. Briefly but pointedly, he urinated on them, offering them the mark of one who bore the blood of Chuut-Riit and the Patriarch. No need to carry their mutilated bodies into the light of day. They would lie with the bones of other kzinti here, in this brave ship. It was not too bad a spot. Or it would not be once they had been most comprehensively avenged, of course. He remembered a stanza from one of his favorite human poems, “The Ballad of the White Horse”:

  Lift not my head from bloody ground,

  Bear not my body home;

  For all the Earth is Roman Earth,

  And I shall die in Rome.

  They had been hung on meat-hooks such as were common in any kzinti dead-meat locker. There were other hooks with strips of dried stuff hanging from them. Rosalind collected some samples for further analysis. He wondered whether to leave a couple to watch the door while he led the rest on to investigate the other companionways. No, all military training spoke against dividing a small force, especially in the face of an enemy whose deadliness was now plain.

  Brief, cautious forays into the other companionways revealed nothing. His companions might be his soldiers, but they were also his fellow-students, and he had a consciousness of his responsibility to them along with his lust for vengeance and battle. To go, leaving some unknown behind that locked door, seemed a bad idea, as well as violating all kzin instincts and precepts of honor. To sit tight and wait upon the enemy to make the next move seemed a bad idea also. Anyway, it
was a good idea to eat, but not in the presence of these dead. Off one of the companionways was another room, empty and relatively dry. They retired there and ate and drank. The small blocks of compressed food from their belt-pouches did not need preparation and in a situation like this humans and kzinti could eat together. It was, however, a very unsatisfying meal. It provided energy but would hardly assuage kzin hunger-pangs much. They should, Vaemar thought, have made sure they had a proper meal earlier. He filed the thought away for next time.

  What would Honored Sire do? Vaemar wondered. Or Honored Step-Sire? He also thought of the cleverest humans he knew—Colonel Cumpston, or Professor Rykermann, or Brigadier Guthlac, or the abbot. Even the manrretti—Dimity with whom he talked long and who beat him at chess, or Leonie, whose adventures in the caves with Honored Step-Sire Raargh when he received his rank and Name he had often been told about. This compartment seemed at first a good place to wait. It had but a single door. But it would be dark eventually. That meant less to the night-eyed kzinti than to the humans, but it would still be a disadvantage in dealing with the unknown. And the single door meant there was no line of retreat.

  Vaemar’s ears twitched violently at a sound. Motioning the others to stillness, he moved silently to the door and into the companionway, in a stalking crouch with his stomach-fur brushing the deck. He leapt. There was the sound of a hissing, spitting struggle. The others burst out behind him, weapons levelled. Vaemar was holding a kzinrret.

  “Be still!” he hissed at her in the Female Tongue.

  “Be still yourself!” she replied, and not in the Female Tongue, but in the Heroes’ Tongue, in the tense of equals. “Release me! I am not an enemy.”

  Vaemar was nonplussed. The Heroes’ Tongue, with its complex tenses and extensive technical vocabulary, was far beyond females’ comprehension. And what female, even if she had the intellectual equipment to do so, would speak to any kzintosh in the tense of equals?

  His surprise made him forget for a moment their whole position. Then he saw how thin she was, how tensely she held her body. Her great eyes were violent-edged and wild. But one kzinrret, alone, could hardly be a threat. He released his hold on her. She stood poised to run or fight. He gestured to Swirl-Stripes and the humans. “These…companions,” he said. He gestured more explicitly: “Humans,” he said, “you know?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  He saw that she was older than he, but not old. She would have been at the end of adolescence when the human hyperdrive armada swept in to reconquer Wunderland a decade before. She would have spent her formative years with humans as her slaves and prey. If she was the daughter of a noble—and most kzinti had been the sons and daughters of nobles—she might have been cared for by a gloved, padded and otherwise protected human nurse. But her vestigial female mind was unlikely to see humans today as sapients and companions. He would have to be careful.

  “My name is Karan,” she said. She looked at him as if the information might convey something significant.

  A quite common female name. What was not common was for a female to enunciate it in a clear and grammatical sentence. There were things about her eyes, her whole posture, that were not normal. Then her eyes narrowed. Vaemar knew that she was seeing his ear-tattoos. A kzinrret of upper-normal female intelligence might dimly know them as betokening Quality.

  “Riit!” she said. Swirl-Stripes, he saw, jumped a little at the word. Even the humans, whose childhood had been under the kzin Occupation, knew it. He picked up the glandular responses. But there was no awe or reverence in her voice. She spoke, and all his senses reinforced this impression, like one recognizing and challenging an enemy.

  “My name is Vaemar,” he said. It was “name,” not “Name.” Some odd scrap of memory recalled to him a sentence from a literature course: “His sensitive ear detected the capitals.” Then he added: “I am a student.” He realized as he said it that such a word could have no meaning to her. Or could it? She had recognized the ear-tattoos.

  “I also hunt killers of kzinti,” he told her, still in the soft, simple syllables of the Female Tongue. “Who has killed Heroes and kzinrretti here?”

  “You do not know? You are bold to stick your nose into a cave where you know nothing.”

  Clear, grammatical sentences. Imagery. Abstract conceptualization.

  A kzinrret telling a Hero he knew nothing! Vaemar felt bewilderment and rage in almost equal proportions. He fought both down. Living with Raargh and among humans had taught him self-control. It had also instilled in him a determination that, however he died, it would not be of culture-shock. But this was something he felt he must handle alone as far as he could. He ordered Swirl-Stripes and the humans to guard the entrances to the corridors. Then he turned back to her.

  “No,” he said, and not in the Female Tongue this time. “I do not know. But that is why we are here in arms.”

  “‘We’…” she repeated. She looked the kzinti and the backs of humans up and down. She seemed, whatever else, to take this in without surprise.

  “We are no longer at war with humans on this world,” he told her, slipping into a more complicated vocabulary before he realized it. “And they are no longer our slaves. We work together.”

  “I worked with humans before you were born,” she replied. Then she added, “I am small enough to hide in the ducting. You kzintosh are not. If you do not wish to be like those”—she gestured in the direction of the flayed corpses—“by the time the sun goes down, I suggest we are far away. You will take me with you.”

  How exactly we are going to get away is another matter, he thought. Aloud he said: “You tell me nothing. Who are the enemies we have come to destroy?”

  “Enemies you kzintosh have destroyed already. The Jotok.”

  “I do not understand. Say on!”

  “There were adult Jotok in this ship when it came down, serving as slave-mechanics. Most died. But enough survived to breed. The whole ship here in the swamp could have been designed as a giant nursery for Jotok—full of sheltered, water-filled compartments and with unlimited food that could be fetched from close by.”

  “But adult Jotok were decorous slaves!”

  “Only to their trainers, and those to whom they bonded when young.”

  Vaemar had read and been told of the Jotok but, except perhaps in those barely-remembered days as a kitten at the palace, he had never seen a live one. Many kzinti had had Jotok slaves, but those that survived the fighting on Wunderland had been killed by their masters at the time of the Liberation as part of the general destruction of military assets. Kzin Heroes going out to die would not leave their slaves for victorious humans. He knew, however, that wild Jotok could be savage. Hunting them was a favorite sport on kzin worlds—they were generally a far better challenge than unarmed humans and other monkeys—and even relatively small artificial habitats had boasted Jotok-runs.

  “These Jotoks’ masters had died or abandoned them,” Karan went on, “and the new generation had known no masters. They had no teachers but their own masterless adults, who had no loyalties to any living kzintosh. Kzinti had eaten their kind, without a thought. Now they eat kzinti. And humans, and any other prey, large or small.”

  “Then why are you alive?” asked Vaemar. The question of how she, with her female mind, could understand these things and speak of them clearly and fluently was another matter.

  “I have burrows here. Compartments with no openings for a large Jotok to enter, save doors I can close and guard. I keep ahead of them and so far I have survived.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Does it matter now?”

  “Yes. I am dealing with the unknown, and if possible I must see the background of events before I move. I take it we are in no immediate danger.”

  “Not for a short time. Most of the big Jotok swim far when hunting. The smaller ones are hiding from us now, apart from the guards they have to keep us in. But when the others return…”

  “The
re is another thing I do not understand,” said Vaemar.

  “I know.”

  “Yes, you know. You are not an ordinary kzinrret.”

  “I told you my name is Karan,” she replied.

  “Yes.”

  “Were we on a world of the Patriarch, young Riit, I would die under torture before I said more. And I will say no more of that now.”

  “You are a sapient female. That is plain.”

  She glared at him silently, teeth bared and claws extended. But all the kzinti had claws extended here. “For some, a few, who bear that name…” She stopped. “I have said too much,” she hissed at length.

  “Or not enough.”

  “My mother taught me a little of our secrets before she died in fighting. I ran from my Sire’s house. I was a feral kitten. I met feral human kittens. There were caves.”

  I am remembering, thought Vaemar. Raargh’s story of how he got his Name.

  “We lived in the great caves, until the night-stalkers killed most of us and captured me. They killed the human who was with me, and they broke my legs and left me for meat.”

  “And a Hero with a human female freed you?”

  “Yes! How do you know?”

  “That Hero is my Honored Step-Sire, Raargh. I have heard his stories. The female human was Leonie.” This kzinrret would have been hardly out of childhood then. Had she been any older he doubted any human kit would have survived her company long, sapient or not. Adolescent kzinti of both sexes, on kzin-colonized Ka’ashi, had not been notable for their tolerance of humans or for interspecies diplomatic skills.

  “Yes, Leonie-human. Heroes came then, and I was taken into the household of Hroarh-Officer.”