seemed to get off more than a few shots before the kzin fire found them and destroyed them.
Another group of humans rushed up to the wall and leveled a heavy beam weapon but didn't fire. None of them looked surprised to see us. I suppose no one had any emotion left. Von Diderachs took in what was left of Kleist's pilot's outfit with the comment, 'A professional. But we're all becoming professionals now.'
'What are you doing?'
'Buying time. Time for the evacuations. The lucky ones get to the slowboats. The less lucky may get out of the city. Peter… Colonel Brennan is taking some guerrillas to the hills.'
Whump! Whump! Whump! Three muffled sounds, almost like implosions, from somewhere farther down the human line, followed by the white light of MD batteries exploding, then a much louder explosion from the same direction. Van Roberts spoke into the communicator again.
'They got under cover in time. That was a human team. We're running out of smart automatics. Three rounds off from the mortar and they're still alive.' Then: 'Disperse! Disperse! Let them clump together!' I could see more humans scattered up and down the line now, crouched behind rocks and old walls and too scattered to be picked off easily.
'How long can they last?' I asked Kleist.
'I told you. Till the kzin get tired of playing.'
'The Tesla Towers did some good at first,' said Grotius. 'The waves seemed to upset their motors. Then they knocked them all down. They found the naval base we were trying to build at Glenrothes Field and nuked it, but they fought for a while on foot at the perimeter first… The last of the garrison got a message out… and it was a low-yield nuke… nice of them.'
'You see we're cooperating now,' said von Diderachs. 'A little late in the day. Herrenmanner and Prolevolk, Teuties and Tommies. And I'm a general, like some of my distant ancestors. Do you know how recently we didn't know what a general was?' He laughed and laughed and then began to weep. Grotius slapped his face.
Suddenly the fire from the kzin heavy weapons stopped.
'Thank God!' gasped Kleist. He too was looking all in now.
'Don't be too quick to do that,' Grotius told him. 'The only reason they'd raise the bombardment is that they're sending in infantry. They like a bit of that,' he added, evidently for me.
'Call in the picket! It can't do any good now!'
'Too late! Look!' From a depression in the ground beyond we saw a confused fight: bombs and beams. There was a hammering of gunfire.
'Poor bastards, poor tanj bastards,' muttered Kleist, ceaselessly.
'Artillery!' van Roberts was shouting into a communicator. 'On top of them! Put it right on top of them. They're dead men already.' The whole depression seemed to explode as human heavy guns converged on it. I saw kzin and human bodies, whole and in pieces, hurled into the air.
'Here they come!'
'Stand to!' shouted von Diderachs, his weeping fit gone. 'Infantry, rally to me!' To my surprise a man nearby began to beat with sticks on a little drum slung on his hip. It must have been a prearranged signal, because other humans sheltering behind scattered rocks and ruins began to converge upon it in crouching runs. Something that could not be blocked electronically.
A couple of robot guns and lasers, very new things that sought their own targets and took their own cover, were jumping and blazing, their muzzles dancing faster than the eye could follow. If only we had had more of them!
There were bigger lasers than I had realized, crude, strapped-together things, some with hideously dangerous unshielded conduction cables snaking across the ground.
The weapon at the wall began to fire. Other humans dashed forward, some bent in a crouch, hunched over the weight of the Lewis guns that they fired as they ran. There were a lot more humans scattered about the rocks and ruins than I had realized, and for a second I felt cheered.
There were the huge forms of kzin, carrying heavy arms, dashing across the open ground toward us, firing and snarling as they came. And they were fast.
Most of them seemed to be naked but for equipment, and under the light of Alpha Centauri B their brilliant orange fur made them stand out as targets. Human fire met them, strakkaker needles-which seemed to do little good against whatever the clothed ones were wearing but made straw and skeletons of the others-exploding Bofors shells, beams, bullets. A human would have tried to dodge that fire or to take shelter behind some ridge of ground, but the kzin kept coming straight at us. I thought at that moment that any space-traveling race would have a science of hard materials and wondered that they did not all wear armor. With the primitive and makeshift propellants we had, largely copies of antiques, our missiles would have bounced off modern armor like raindrops. Further, it would have camouflaged their brilliant coats.
There were a few coils of barbed wire and razor wire in front of and among the human defenses. The kzin for the most part leaped over it or charged through it, but some were funneled between lanes of wire into compact masses and into killing grounds where fixed guns were targeted.
I found that without conscious thought I was firing the heavy kzin sidearm. Dead kzin were falling and wounded kzin dragging themselves along the ground. Von Diderachs's mouth was open and he was screaming something, but the only thing I could hear in the explosions and the feline shrieks and roars was the scream in my own throat. There was one kzin in glittering armor ahead of the rest: I fired futility at the armour as it scrambled over the rubble and then at the junction of head and neck, decapitating it. I saw another kzin staggering and screaming, its feet transfixed by what I had learned were caltrops. There were another mass of kzin, funneled by lanes of wire into a compact group.
'Clear the front for the claymores!' came a mechanical shout.
A moment later I found out what this meant. Directed explosions shredded the mass of kzin. But more came on, dodging the killing ground. They died in heaps, but more charged in.
The close-packed kzin leaped the wall and crashed into a counter-mass of humans that swirled apart to let them pass.
Evidently expecting the humans to stand and fight, the kzin seemed momentarily puzzled. The humans were around them, pouring fire into the mass of them from every side, slashing with beams. It lasted only a few seconds, but by the time the kzin leaped scattering into the humans there were far fewer kzin. I saw more kzin leaping the wall, and Dimity, Kleist, von Diderachs and I shot them down. They seemed obsessed with charging into the battle and hardly even looked about them. Certainly they did not count the odds, though now the humans were swarming in.
Nor did some of the humans. I saw one human, a huge man, a giant, rushing at the kzin swinging a farmer's sledgehammer. But he seemed less of a giant as he approached the towering kzin. His blow with the hammer hit one in the ribs. It staggered back but did not fall as a man would have, then it grabbed him with one hand and took him apart with a few slashes of the other.
I saw two other kzin charge from behind one of the human gunners manning a recoilless gun. The human had no time to swing the gun round but fired it anyway, blasting one kzin to bits with the rocket exhaust, leaving the other burned black, eyeless and screaming.
A heavy industrial earth mover smashed through the rocks, driving into the kzin, guns firing from its windows and from a cupola on its cabin roof. The kzin charged at it. Some were mashed screaming under its blade, others boarded it and smashed their way into the cabin. The driver must have had a self-destruct.
More kzin crowded on flying sledges like ours. Bunched together like that they were impossible to miss, and a rapid-firing gun on the hill behind blasted them away. One sledge crossed a laser beam and exploded, the others flew on, empty.
Thought is too quick to describe, and somewhere in my mind flashed the memory of Kleist's words: 'They don't have much experience of war.'
One group of kzin still advanced in a purposeful body toward the ridge and ditch behind us. I saw van Roberts waving his arms in another signal.
'Now!' shouted van Roberts.
The kzin reached the edge of the ditch and hesitated. Humans hidden in it shot them down as they stood against the skyline. Strakkakers whirred and were drowned out by the ear-splitting rattle of the Lewis guns, human and alien screaming and the smashing blasts of the kzin sidearms and the claymores. There were dense clouds of
