this.
Chapter 10
The well-armed car carrying Arthur Guthlac, Colonel Cumpston and Karan touched down beside Vaemar's empty vehicle. Apart from its turret-mounted weapons, Cumpston had a strakkaker and Guthlac a heavy, powerful beam rifle, a great cannon of a thing based on a kzin sidearm, and with mini-waldos for human use. Karan had a kzinret's knife, the new and improved female version of a w'tsai, and another strakkaker. Weapons ready, the occupants alighted, the humans wearing breathing filters as Dimity had. In case they needed the car quickly, the engine was left idling and the doors unlocked. There was no sign of any live friend or enemy.
Karan pointed and bounded to the dead thunderbirds, the humans hurrying behind. Small scavengers scattered.
'Beam rifle, close range,' said Cumpston. 'And the other looks like a kzin bite.'
'They stood here,' said Karan, pointing. Looking closely, Guthlac and Cumpston could make out two very different-sized sets of footprints, the larger tipped with claw points. 'It didn't get near them.'
'The car has been tampered with,' said Cumpston. 'Look! Its antennas are gone.' He also tried the door.
'Dimity and Vaemar, according to the ways we can measure IQs, are possibly the two cleverest beings on Wunderland,' said Guthlac. 'I hope they can look after themselves.'
'Clever doesn't necessarily mean survivor,' said Cumpston. 'There's more than a touch of the idiot savant in Dimity. Super-genius she may be, but she's narrowly focused. Just because she shatters the old sexist stereotype of the beautiful blonde doesn't mean she… More common sense, better instincts and reflexes, may mean survival in a place like this. Vaemar, I can't pronounce on. But he's an intellectual, too, however sharp his claws are. I wish old Raargh was with them, or some human sergeant-major.'
Guthlac thought he detected something in his friend's voice when he spoke of Dimity. There could hardly be a less appropriate time or place for him to comment. 'Karan, can you follow their trail?' he asked
Karan was already moving down one of the rock-tunnels, almost on all fours, a barred orange shadow in the shifting and flickering grey light.
'We might do better to search from the air,' Guthlac said. 'This is another labyrinth.'
'If there was anything to see from the air I think we'd have seen it,' said Cumpston. 'Come on! We're lucky to have her, but I don't want her getting too far ahead on her own. If anything happened to her, would you want to be the one to tell Vaemar?'
'Trail stops,' said Karan a few minutes later.
They caught up to her. They were standing in a circular space in the rock-maze.
'Do you smell anything?' Guthlac asked her.
'Sand and rock turned over.' Karan said. 'Not a long time past. And kzintosh. There has been another male kzin here. And at the car. And something else. A bad smell.'
Cumpston pointed to the edge of the rock wall. 'Sand and rock turned over there?' he asked her.
'Yes.'
'A gravity motor.'
'But all gravity motors are monitored,' said Guthlac.
'Get through to the monitoring stations,' said Cumpston. 'Pull your rank, Arthur! Hurry! They must have recorded something.'
Guthlac sent the message. His face was dark. 'I'm getting a very ugly thought,' he said.
'So am I. But tell me yours first.'
Guthlac made sure Karan was out of earshot, still hunting along the rock wall. He spoke softly and quickly.
'Vaemar has taken Dimity into space. He's a kzin. It looks as if he's taking her to the Patriarchy. Our pioneering hyperdrive expert!'
'Any ship that took off from here would be too small for interstellar travel.'
'But it could meet a bigger one.'
'We've monitored Vaemar pretty carefully. And taken other precautions. There's been no hint of anything like that.'
'Apart from reversing the kzinti's whole military position, it would get him back his place beside the Riit throne. Perhaps position him for a bid for the Patriarchy! Why should we trust him to be more loyal to us than to his own species? Especially when the reward could be so enormous? I know policy was to trust him as much as possible, but perhaps we've put too much temptation in his way. Or perhaps it was just a mistake to trust a ratcat!'
'That hangs together very nastily,' said Cumpston. 'I have just one small ray of hope that you're wrong. It was we who sent him here. He couldn't have planned a secret rendezvous with a spacecraft… unless it had been waiting for a long time.'
'And unless he manipulated us into sending him. He knew he'd be coming this way sooner or later. I've given Defense Headquarters an emergency alert. The next thing is to get after them, anyway. But Vaemar doesn't feel like that to me.'
'I put some trust in someone when all appearances were against her a little while ago,' said Guthlac. 'In a ruined hamlet beyond Gerning in a storm. I haven't regretted it. I'll try to believe the best of Vaemar yet, but I'm putting out an emergency alert to Defense HQ all the same.'
'We should have stopped her associating with him so. That's obvious enough with hindsight.'
'Dimity is an Asperger's. A superlatively high-functioning one. When she makes up her mind to do a thing the only way you can stop her is by breaking that mind.
'She can be killed any time,' Guthlac went on. 'There's an implant in her that can be activated remotely. An idea we got from the kzin zzrou. ARM insisted on it.'
'Arthur! We've got to get her back!'
'I know!'
'You mustn't let ARM know what's happened! Not yet!'
'Michael, there are a lot of things neither of us let ARM know about. And I don't mean your peculiarly-colored bird or a certain Earth flower with green petals. Try to hang onto hope.'
'Does she know?'
'I don't know. ARM was subtler than the kzinti about such things. Nanobots in the food. But Vaemar's got one too. ARM is not trusting. It wasn't my idea or orders, but…' Guthlac suddenly smacked his own head. 'Idiot! How do we win wars with generals like me? I had completely forgotten! They both have locators in them anyway! Standard VIP models. We can read them from the car!'
'Come on!'
Calling Karan, they turned and headed back out of the granite maze. The thunderbird launched itself at them from the rock wall. Half as big again as the ones Dimity and Vaemar had killed, its vast striking beak knocked Guthlac sprawling. The tough fabric of his coverall saved him from being torn apart, but had the thing snapped its beak it would have crushed his bones in an instant. Karan was a blur of rippling orange muscle as she leapt at it. Screaming, two more thunderbirds launched themselves from the rock wall.
Karan severed the first thunderbird's neck with her fangs and claws before the beak could seize her. Cumpston, getting his beamer up just in time, shot another in the chest. The third sprang into the air again, and came down on their car. Guthlac fired at the bird and hit the car. Its tough materials could normally have withstood far worse hits, but the unlocked door flew open. Either the beam or the avian's great kicking legs activated the controls, and car and avian tangled together shot fifty feet into the air, rolled, dived, and crashed into the rock wall.
Guthlac struggled free of the dead weight of the first thunderbird. Cumpston ran to them. Karan got to her feet, staggered and fell again, pumping gouts of purple and orange blood from gaping lacerations in her thighs. Guthlac found the end of a severed blood-vessel and held it shut while Cumpston raced for the crashed car and its medical kit, killing the broken-limbed avian as it struggled and snapped at him. The car's fuel lines had ruptured,
