"All right, Jared," she agreed. "But we have a problem: only two laser rifles and three kzinti to kill."
"Two," Fellah said. "Kzin the Daff fought, died soon after."
"How do you know that for sure?" Krater asked. "You were with me all the time, and I didn't see that."
"His mind . . ." The animal paused significantly. "Gone."
"And not back to his ship, either," Cuiller summed up. "That's good news, Sally. . . . Ahh-gahhh," he yawned. "It makes the odds a little more even." Cuiller finished sleepily, finally succumbing to the painkillers. His arm felt a long way away.
"Those are armed kzinti you're talking about," Sally protested. "With a functioning warship to boot."
He was already halfway down the well of sleep, but Cuiller roused. "Then the trick," he said easily, "will be to separate them from their ship . . . before they can take off." He yawned again.
The forest around him darkened as if with the flu of night, and Krater caught him as he fell into it as into a bed.
* * *
"In any human army, that would be a field piece," Cuiller observed.
After sleeping, recuperating, and moving on, he and Krater now hung inside the canopy, lost in the shadows of the curving, vaulting branches that ascended from one of the trunks. They looked down through holes in the greenery that they opened—slowly, naturally, like a riffle of wind—with their dangling toes. They were suspended above the kzinti ship, with a horizontal offset of less than fifty meters.
Cuiller studied the vessel with a pair of binoculars, working them one-handed. One of the kzinti was climbing on the outside, naked except for a beltful of tools, working with a mechanical fitting against the curve of the hull. The other, in full armor, stood watch. That one's visored helmet moved across regular arcs of the canopy surrounding the ship, and each time he panned toward them, Cuiller let the veil of leaves slide smoothly into place.
It was the kzin's massive rifle that had caught the commander's attention: some kind of pulsed energy weapon.
"Can you sense them, Fellah?" he asked the small creature snuggled into Sally Krater's arms. "How close are they to finishing repairs, hey?"
Fellah raised his head and looked gravely down, past their toes. He appeared to consider. "Repair Soon."
Cuiller realized that the alien's exposed white hair would make an effective aiming point for that cannon. And that gave him an idea.
"I think I can improve our odds with one shot," he told Krater.
"How?"
"First, by splitting our positions and halving our vulnerabilities. I want you and Fellah to maneuver off to the west, around the ship. Put about twenty degrees of radial separation between us."
"But then what are you going to do?"
"I think I can pick off the kzin who's doing the work. Without breaking my cover."
"You'll get killed!" Sally said, alarmed. "That other one, in the armor—with the weapon he's carrying, all he has to do is bear close on you. And poof!"
"It's a big jungle."
"He can take bigger sweeps with that thing," she said.
"Sure, but I'll have time to get him with my second shot. In case he does a sweep, however, I want you in an alternate position. . . . You can offer a diversion or something."
"I don't want you to risk yourself—sir! Look, why not wait for a Bandersnatch to come along? That'll really keep him busy."
"Because long before then the kzinti'll be all finished up and ready to lift ship."
"All right, Jared," she said coolly. "If you won't listen to reason, we'll do it your way. But give me time to get in position."
"Ten minutes?"
"Time enough. But not a minute sooner, you hear?"
"A full ten minutes, I promise."
With a baleful look, she withdrew higher into the canopy, taking Fellah with her. Soon he could hear only the faint whirr of her rig's winder motor.
As he waited, Cuiller spread the leaves below him and practiced taking aim with his rifle. Holding it steady in his right hand did not work, and he could not find a point of purchase on the cloth sling covering his left arm. Then he figured out a solution.
Cuiller worked his winder and rose into the forest cover until he could get his feet under him. Paying out slack, he took a loop of the fluorescent-dyed monofilament and wrapped it around the rifle housing. He would have to control the rifle's tendency to lever up and slip the loop as he put his weight on the line, but he could do that with his right elbow. The only other danger was that the monofilament might cut into the weapon's barrel and tear it apart. A calculated risk.
Sally's time limit was still a minute short of coming up when Cuiller lowered himself back into firing position. He had no intention of letting her offer any kind of diversion and so becoming a target herself.
Cuiller moved the rifle around, holding it steady with his armpit on the stock, sighting down the pips, to the forehead of the unarmed kzin. His body was tending to pivot on the looped line, so he braced his feet against the springy branches, the same ones that made up his concealment Then he gathered his concentration, breathed out slowly, and—
A spear of blue-white light stabbed down from twenty degrees away to his left and opened the kzin's skull. She had fired first!
The kzin on guard wheeled and sighted his field piece back in the direction from which the beam had come—toward Sally!
Bobbling slightly on his line, Cuiller shifted his aim faster, immediately found a good side-on view of the aiming figure, and fired at the breech of the kzin's rifle.
The weapon exploded.
* * *
When his weapon's energy packs discharged all at once, Nyawk-Captain was thrown backward. The eyeshield of his visor flared white but saved his vision from flying shrapnel. His whiskers were singed below the limits of its protection, however, and the insides of his arms hurt terribly. He
