"Get back in the car!" Leonie cried out. "Stay in the car!"
The rock hit him on the side of the head. The blow could have shattered his skull had he not been wearing earphones. He staggered and fell. Leonie fired at the rock's point of origin, a stand of tall grasses by the little stream. Patrick, streaming blood, began to crawl back towards the car as the grass flashed into flame. A dozen ferals burst out of the grass. They were armed with at least one strakkaker as well as rocks and an ancient Lewis-gun. They converged on the injured Crashlander.
Patrick bought up a handgun and fired, hitting the feral with the strakkaker. I forgot he was a Spacer flashed through Leonie's mind faster than she recognized the thought. Raargh swung upon the rifle-crutch and fired in a blur of speed. Leonie knew what his marksmanship was like. His first shot shattered the Lewis-gun, probably killing the gunner, but his second he fired not into the ferals but ahead of them. They went down, out of sight behind the bank of the stream. Patrick stumbled back to the car and pulled himself into the cabin as Raargh and Leonie laid down covering fire.
Something was happening in the sky to the southwest, a ball of purple radiance travelling like a meteor, heading towards them. Patrick was taking the car straight up.
The thing in the sky—a purple spider, a retinal disorder, a chip of cauliflower—expanded, shimmered to a shape Raargh and Leonie knew well. A kzin Rending Fang-class heavy fighter, heading towards them, landing gear down.
The car dodged and swerved in the sky. It was above the big fighter, which was now coming down for a landing on its gravity-motor. The car hovered for a moment. Then it dived vertically. At seven hundred feet car and fighter collided with a shattering explosion. With strength she never dreamed she had, Leonie flung herself at the bulk of the kzin, pushing him back into the shelter of the cave mouth as fragments of white-hot wreckage rained down about them.
Amid the falling wreckage was the dark shape of an escape capsule. It hit the ground and opened. The Protector sprang out and rushed towards the cave mouth. Raargh and Leonie had both dropped their rifles, but Raargh had his w'tsai out. The Protector snatched them up and, straightening, and ran straight at the w'tsai, but at the last instant twisted in its stride, dodging so that Raargh's slashes with blade and claws slid off its leathery skin, doing little damage. Raargh tried to strike as he had struck in the cave, but missed, and he could no longer leap. At the same time the Protector struck out at them, knocking them both against the cave wall. Then it was past them, a leaping spider-shape disappearing down the passage into the darkness.
"Now ribs broken," said Raargh. "It will not stop Raargh fighting!"
"I think I may have broken a couple, too," said Leonie. "Why did it not kill us?"
"Hands full. It had our weapons."
"Why did it not kill us?" she asked again.
Raargh voice was different when he answered. He was the senior sergeant contemplating a military problem again.
"I think, Leonie, it believes it does not need to kill us."
"A foolish thing to think of Raargh and Leonie!" she told him ringingly. Raargh had little more than torn stumps of ears projecting from a complex of scar tissue, but he raised them in a signal that to her was eloquent enough.
"Feral humans return," said Raargh.
The surviving ferals were approaching the cave mouth in a semicircle. Their major weapons were gone, but they were still armed with rocks, which Leonie knew they could throw as accurately as Morlocks. Several new fires were burning where the wreckage had fallen in the vegetation, and a pall of dark smoke was rising to cover the sky above the glade. Raargh scrabbled across the ground and retrieved the w'tsai knocked out of his hand.
He should have killed them when we had the chance, thought Leonie. But he seemed to be trying not to kill humans. It was as if the shadowed walls of the cave and the sky beyond were turning a uniform white with the agony in her chest. Thinking was difficult. I don't think I can fight at all. They are not going to have mercy on me or a kzin. One human knife, one w'tsai, and one old kzin to wield it who's now very knocked about. This is real trouble. To survive more than fifty years of war to die at the hands of human children . . .
"Friends!" she managed to call. The ferals continued their cautious advance. She called again, without response. She had a knife. They had knives as well as rocks.
Suddenly they stopped, and fled, scattering into the vegetation in all directions. A moment later she too heard the sound of a ship in the sky. There it was, not shielded like the Protector's fighter. Arthur Guthlac's Tractate Middoth. It touched down, jets of foam smothering the burning vegetation, and armed figures leapt from it. Hunched over her broken ribs, she staggered out to meet them.
* * *
"So we have tree-of-life, Breeders and Protectors all together again in the caves," said Cumpston. "Along with who knows how many prisoners. There are people missing from some of the tableland farms, and most of the feral gangs round here have vanished." They were hovering, looking down at the great escarpment from several hundred feet.
Arthur Guthlac took a deep breath. The faces of the humans were grey. Strain, exhaustion, defeat.
"Only one thing to do if we're to keep the chain of command intact," said Guthlac. "We report to Early. He and ARM were pretty definite that he was to be informed before any major decisions are made."
"Not a good idea, when dealing with
