The Man-Kzin Wars 02

hungry, Daddy, Daddy—”

Chuut-Riit uttered a grating sound deep in his chest and looked down; his son's w'tsai had been wedged to hold the door from the inside, the kits must have done it at his instruction, while he waited outside to face the hunters. Hunger-frenzy eroded what little patience an adolescent kzin possessed, as well as intellect; they would not spend longing 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 his dead son 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 vice regal 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 breech 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 semi-circle 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 burnt 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 w'tsai 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 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 room 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 transfer booth was an old one, left here when this was a country club. It stood in a secluded cleft below the rocky hill. Deactivated, supposedly permanently, it appeared on no kzin records. 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 Hari Yarthkin's levelly; the Wunderlander felt something lurch at 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 Montferrats 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. He handed it to Jonah. “False identity, guaranteed good one. I couldn't get but one exit permit, but maybe you can manage that somehow. 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 booth here. Money, clothes, contacts.”

“Booth?” Jonah said.

“Yeah. Let's get going. You get the exit permit.”

“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.

“I won'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. Not me. I don't matter, but he does. Give him the permit.”