Ktiir-Supervisor rose from his couch. He pointed at another kzin who huddled in one corner; a telepath, with the characteristic hangdog air and unkempt fur.
“Your tame sthondat there didn’t detect it either,” he snarled.
Literally snarled, Claude reflected. It was educational; after seeing a kzin you never referred to a human expression by that term again.
Staff Officer wuffled, snorting open his wet black nostrils and working his whiskers. It should have been a comical expression, but on four hundred pounds of alien carnivore it was not in the least funny. “You hide behind the failures of others,” he said, hissing. “Traat-Admiral directs me to inform you that your request for reassignment to the Swarm flotillas has been denied. Neither unit will accept you.”
“Traat-Admiral!” Ktiir-Supervisor rasped. “He is like a kit who has climbed a tree and can’t get down, mewling for its dam. This talk of a ‘secret menace’ among the asteroids is a scentless trail to divert attention from his refusal to launch the Fifth Fleet.”
“Such was the strategy of the great Chuut-Riit, murdered through your incompetence—or worse.”
Ktiir-Supervisor bristled, the orange-red fur standing out and turning his body into a cartoon caricature of a cat, bottle-shaped.
“You nameless licker-of-scentless-piss from that jumped-up creche-product Admiral, what do you accuse me of?”
“Treason, or stupidity amounting to it,” the other kzin sneered. Ostentatiously, he flared his batlike ears into a vulnerable rest position and let his tail droop.
Ktiir-Supervisor screamed. “You inner-worlds palace fop, you and Traat-Admiral alike! I urinate on the shrines of your ancestors from a height; crawl away and call for your monkeys to groom you with blowdriers!”
Staff Officer’s hands extended outward, the night-black claws glinting as they slid from their sheaths. His tail was rigid now; hairdressers were a luxury the late governor had introduced, and wildly popular among the younger nobility.
“Kshat-hunter,” he growled. “You are not fit to roll in Chuut-Riit’s shit! You lay word-claws to the blood of the Riit.” The Riit were the family of the Patriarch of Kzin.
“Chuut-Riit made ch’rowl with monkeys!” A gross insult, as well as anatomically impossible . . . or at least fatal for the monkey.
There was a feeling of hush, as the two males locked eyes. Then the heavy wtsai-knives came out and the two orange shapes seemed to flow together, meeting at the arch of their leaps, howling. Claude rolled back against the wall as the half-ton of weight slammed down again, sending splinters of furniture out like shrapnel. For a moment the kzinti were locked and motionless, hand to knife-wrist; their legs locked in thigh-holds as well, to keep the back legs from coming up for a disemboweling strike. Mouths gaped toward each other’s throats, inch-long fangs exposed in the seventy-degree killing gape. Then there was a blur of movement; they sprang apart, together, went over in a caterwauling blur of orange fur and flashing metal, a whirl far too fast for human eyesight to follow.
He caught glimpses: distended eyes, scrabbling claws, knives sinking home into flesh, amid a clamor loud enough to drive needles of pain into his ears. Bits of bloody fur hit all around him, and there was a human scream as the fighters rolled over a secretary. Then Staff Officer rose, slashed and glaring.
Ktiir-Supervisor lay sprawled, legs twitching galvanically with the hilt of Staff Officer’s wtsai jerking next to his lower spine. The slender kzin panted for a moment and then leaped forward to grab his opponent by the neck-ruff. He jerked him up toward the waiting jaws, clamped them down on his throat. Ktiir-Supervisor struggled feebly, then slumped. Blood-bubbles swelled and burst on his nose. A final wrench and Staff Officer was backing off, shaking his head and spitting, licking at the matted fur of his muzzle; he groomed for half a minute before wrenching the knife free and beginning to spread the dead kzin’s ears for a clean trophy-cut.
* * *
“Erruch,” Ingrid said as the recording finished. “You’ve got more . . . you’ve got a lot of guts, Claude, dealing with them at first hand like that.”
“Oh, some of them aren’t so bad. For ratcats. Staff Officer there expressed ‘every confidence’ in me.” He made an expressive gesture with his hands. “Although he also reminded me there was a continuous demand for fresh monkeymeat.”
Ingrid paled slightly and laid a hand on his arm. That was not a figure of speech to her, not after the chase through the kzinti hunting preserve. She remembered the sound of the hunting scream behind her, and the thudding crackle of the alien’s pads on the leaves as it made its four-footed rush. Rising as it screamed and leaped from the ravine lip above her; the long sharpened pole in her hands, and the soft heavy feel as its own weight drove it onto her weapon . . .
Claude laid his hands on hers. Harold cleared his throat.
“Well,” he said. “Your position looks solider than we thought.”
The other man gave Ingrid’s hand a squeeze and released it. “Yes,” he said. A hunter’s look came into his eyes, emphasized the foxy sharpness of his features. “In fact, they’re outfitting some sort of expedition; that’s why they can’t spare personnel for administrative duties.”
Ingrid and Harold both leaned forward instinctively. Harold crushed out his cigarette with swift ferocity.
“Another Fleet?” Ingrid asked. I’ll be stuck here, and Earth . . .
Claude shook his head. “No. That raid did a lot of damage; it’d be a year or more just to get back to the state of readiness they had when the Yamamoto arrived. Military readiness.” Both the others winced; over a million humans had died in the attack. “But they’re definitely mobilizing for something inside the system. Two flotillas. Something out in the Swarm.”
“Markham?” Ingrid ventured. It seemed a little extreme; granted he had the Catskinner, but—
“I doubt it. They’re bringing the big guns up to full personnel, the battlewagons. Conquest Fang class.”
They exchanged glances. Those were interstellar-capable warships, carriers for lesser craft and equipped with weapons that could crack planets, defenses to match. Almost self-sufficient, with facilities for manufacturing their own
