and as Cumpston turned and ran back to Karan a spark ignited the clouds of hydrogen billowing from it. Automatically released jets of inert gas quickly smothered the flames, but the cabin and control console were wrecked.
Frantic work with a kzin military chemical bandage stabilized the wound, but it took time. Karan was weak and barely conscious.
The car, it was soon obvious, was not going to fly again without major repairs, and the lock on the car which Vaemar and Dimity had used was keyed to open to the patterns of Vaemar's and Dimity's hand or their tappetum or retina respectively. It was centuries since the last manually pickable lock had been made for anything as expensive as a car. Any attempt to burn the doors open, if it did not ruin the car's delicate mechanisms, would probably exhaust their weapon first. They carried Karan into the meager shelter of an overhang as rain began to fall from the grey sky. Mobile telephones were a standard part of their equipment. They called for help, and waited. After a time the rain gave way to sleet and snow. More thunderbirds came.
The comet-debris had served them well, Kzaargh-Commodore thought. Night-Lurker had passed undetected into the thick asteroid belt the humans called the Serpent Swarm.
The long descent back towards the sun had not been spent in idleness. Heroes had worked to disguise the ship.
At first Kzaargh-Commodore had thought to disguise it as a derelict, but had changed his mind after coming across a genuine kzin derelict warship. After stripping it of all that might be useful and giving the dead Heroes aboard space burial, he had sent it sunward for a test, cold, tumbling, patently helpless and dead. Human instruments had identified it, and interrogated it, and when it did not respond batteries of laser-cannon had vaporized it. The same happened when he sent in a stealthed ship's boat, manned by a crew of Hero volunteers. Stealth technology took them quite a long way, but it was plainly not the whole answer. Rocks did better, if they were not identified as being on a collision course with Ka'ashi or some other large body-there were too many rocks for the human defenses to vaporize them all, and in any case many contained valuable ores.
The apes seemed arrogantly confident of their mathematics and of their meteor defenses. Any large meteor whose path missed Ka'ashi by more than 50,000 miles was generally not intercepted.
Night-Lurker became a lurker indeed. Like Lord Hrras-Charr of legend, who had cut off his own ears to fool his enemy, the cruiser had lost external parts. So altering something as complex as a spaceship without dockyard facilities was a mighty task, but his Heroes were skillful. Most of the removed parts had been stored inboard or put into orbits from which they might one day be retrieved, but one way and another it had changed shape and shrunk. Its sleek lines and mirror-finished surface had disappeared under stony plating and rubble. The ports of its great rail-guns and laser-cannon were hidden by lids. Its gravity-engines were never used. There was sufficient delta-V for it to maneuver with short bursts of low-powered chemical rockets, inefficient but far harder to detect in space.
'What do you think of Chorth-Captain?' asked Dimity.
'He is not his own master. I do not only say that because it is unbelievable that a Hero would voluntarily serve such monsters. He appears to have no power to correlate. And there is a spot on the back of his neck that is not a battle-scar. It is metallic. I saw it gleam. I think it is some kind of Protector-made descendent of a zzrou.'
'Could a Protector have learnt of such things?'
'The caves contained abandoned equipment of all kinds. The Protector could have found a zzrou and improved on it. Chorth-Captain is likely not the first Hero it captured. It could have experimented on others until it perfected what was necessary for a reliable… slave… servant…?'
'Catspaw?'
'It is not a term I would choose. But an enslaved Hero-or a succession of them-would have been very useful to the Protector at first. I imagine less so now. But I do not know why it did not simply create an army of Protectors on Wunderland as soon as it knew how.'
'I think I know why,' said Dimity. 'The first Protector wanted a force of Protectors it could control. These are not quite the same as the original Pak Protectors and it had become aware of how limited and temporary Protectors' ability to cooperate is. That is why it worked gradually, in an environment where it set the parameters of existence.
'Here it is in control of the others far more completely than it would be in the caves, where suddenly aware new Protectors might remember hiding places and so forth of their own. But there is another thing. As soon as it could, I am sure the first Protector began keying into the internet. Remember the old saying that the net is the most two-edged of all swords? A power to one's own side but the greatest gift imaginable to an enemy? There is material about Protectors on the internet, and although most of it is under security closure a Protector's intelligence would crack that open quickly.
'The Protector would try to learn about creatures like itself, and I am sure it would come upon scientific papers about the Hollow Moon. The theory is that this is an ancient Pak ship. If that is so, there may be Pak machines here, Pak books… manuals… Surely for the Pak teaching newly-changed breeders must have always been a high-priority use for resources.'
'It would not know the language of such manuals.'
'It could learn. You and I learn languages very quickly by the standards of our kinds.'
A dark spot grew in the lightning-streaked grey of the sky. A car from one of the monitoring stations. It landed near the overhang and six well-armed humans alighted. They were dressed in the tough uniform overalls of the Wunderland security forces.
Guthlac and Cumpston went forward to meet them, stepping between dead thunderbirds. The creatures had been attacking in increasing numbers. Guthlac had begun to worry about their ammunition some time before. He had brought the big rifle thinking to deal with Morlock Protectors if he had to. But its size and weight, even with the mini-waldos, were a disadvantage, and even without considering that he had managed to wreck the car with it. Thunderbirds moved fast. He realized it was as well he had not had to deal with Protectors, who evidently moved much faster. Last time I was in this sort of trouble was because I went hunting with a. 22, he thought, thinking Wunderland game was all sport after kzin-hunting.
The leader of the rescue party stepped ahead of the rest to meet them. At the sight of Karan, lying unconscious, his strakkaker swept up. He cocked it with a fluid, infinitely practiced movement and trained it on her.
'What are you doing?' Guthlac jumped forward in front of the man.
'What are you doing? That's a ratcat, isn't it? A friend of yours?'
'Yes, as a matter of fact she is. She was wounded a little while ago defending us.'
'We believe in dead ratcats here.'
'Not this one.'
'I'm the one who decides that around here.'
'Do you know who I am?' Asked Guthlac.
'Yes. Someone who owes their life to our responding to your call. Stand aside!'
'The war has been over on this planet for more than ten years! Put that weapon in its proper place!'
'I know the proper use for a weapon when there's a live ratcat around.'
'I repeat! The war is over on this planet. There is a peace treaty. I will not repeat that again!'
'I look quite pretty now, don't I,' the man said. 'Thanks to our Liberators. But see my skin. Look at my face a little closely. A little pink here and there. I spent years with a metal jaw and half a metal face, thanks to one of those Teufel's claws.'
'Well, you don't have to now,' said Guthlac.
