knew.'
'No Hero should have allowed such a thing to happen to him,' said Vaemar. 'But I will take his w'tsai now. Perhaps I can do him the service of gaining it new honor. And look further! Here is the key to the ship! But there is something to be done before anything else.' He leapt to the doors, closing them one after another. 'We may be thankful this is kzin-derived architecture,' he said. 'I think we have locked them out for a time. But they will bypass those locks soon.' He turned to the lines of transforming Morlocks and began rapidly but methodically slashing their throats with his claws and the w'tsai. Already the skin was turning into a leathery armor and it was hard work, but Vaemar was quick and strong.
Vaemar saw the horror in Dimity's eyes as he returned to her. He took her hand and touched it against his forearm.
'Remember,' he said. 'Fur, not skin.'
'I know,' she said.
'Now we have Protectors whose children I have killed,' he said. 'They will not be pleased with us. I think they will be coming soon. I see no escape. Can you think of a solution?'
'To escape in the ship that brought us. You have the key now.'
'Yes. Unfortunately the hatch above it is closed. I can perhaps work out how to open it if the Protectors do not override the ship's controls, but it will take a little time. Unless you can help me?'
'I have not your practical ability with machinery, kzin-based or otherwise. But there is something.' She took him back to the housing of the Sinclair Field controls. 'Can you turn on the field again?'
'Yes, it is simple. Why?'
'I think we have a chance of reducing the odds against us. The Protectors are still inexperienced. I am going to stand in the area of the field. When I give the word, turn it on around me.'
'You will die! You will exhaust the oxygen! One can only live in a Sinclair field with special air supplies, to say nothing of food and water. Urrr.'
'I can live for a short time, that is why I say…'
Two Protectors leapt out of the passage. Dimity jumped into the field-area, and screamed, 'Now, Vaemar! Now!'
Vaemar threw the switch. Dimity became a shimmering shape inside the blue dome.
Whether the Protectors meant to kill or recapture them, Vaemar was unsure. But they meant business. Their expressionless leathery faces with the Morlock eyes now strangely alight with intelligence were also lit with fury. Vaemar wondered if they were keeping him alive for torture. But the reactivated Sinclair field was between him and them. As they advanced, he saw Dimity in the field flashing almost too fast for his superb eyes to follow. Vaemar crouched, waiting a chance to spring, a chance he knew he would not get.
There were two shattering explosions, so close together they seemed one. One Protector's upper body disintegrated, then the other. Vaemar, head ringing, jumped back to his feet. He seemed uninjured. He stared in amazement for a second, then saw Dimity halt in her meteor-fast movements, fall and lie still. He leapt to the controls and killed the field. Gently, keeping his claws sheathed, he tried to give her artificial respiration, fearful that he should crush her fragile ribs, fearful she was dead. I care so for a human! The surprised realization flashed through his mind.
'Look at me! Look at me! Look at me now!' he sang at her from their old song. She stirred and sat up, gasping.
'It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how,' she completed the quotation with a weak smile at length.
'Are you all right? I learnt the theory of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the ROTC, but I believe giving it to you would be difficult for me.'
'There were still a few breaths of air,' she said. 'There was an emergency tank inside. And some water. They must have had Protectors spending time in there controlling the processes. But it was a pretty near thing!'
'It was you killed the Protectors?'
'Yes.'
'How?'
She pointed to her feet. 'I threw my boots at them. I had plenty of time to take aim and work out the trajectories and kinetic energies. They were moving like slugs. And I do still have quite a good mathematical brain.'
'You are a Hero,' said Vaemar. 'There may, with good fortune, now be only one Protector left.'
'Yes. Why didn't it attack as well?'
'I suspect the answer is that those Protectors were the last parents of the Morlocks I just killed,' said Vaemar. 'Despite the increase in their sapience, they were still Morlocks, still fairly newly changed, and mad with rage. The remaining Protector is the original, the one that brought us here. It has no children of its own, so it can make more Protectors without prejudice to its plans, and, at least until it comes to understand that human reproductive technology could still give it children, its behavior is not unclouded by parental emotion and anticipations. It is the one mature and partly experienced and educated Morlock Protector, obviously by far the most dangerous, and if we do not kill it we will be no better off than before. If it does not come to us, we must hunt it down.'
'That would be quite hopeless, even if we had a functioning weapon. You saw how swift and strong it is, and it is armed too.'
'You would have us ssurrendirr, Dimity-Hero?' Vaemar's human speech slipped as he pronounced the hated word. 'Or flee? Urrr.'
'I think we have no choice but to press on. Explore!'
'Hero! Well said!'
'With caution. You have Chorth-Captain's w'tsai?'
'Yes! Let it regain honor in my hands!'
Dimity clicked the trigger of the beam rifle experimentally. It was still dead. 'We will have to hope a Hero's w'tsai is enough,' she said.
'I had better lead,' said Vaemar.
Chapter 12
Mechanisms towered about Dimity and Vaemar. Dimity had, with Vaemar's help, improvised a breathing mask, which she hoped would keep out the smell of any tree-of-life, from the tatters of what had been the top part of her suit, and sealed the rents in the rest as well as she might with an all-purpose repair gel from Chorth-Captain's belt. They had obtained a light from the same source. Tracking the Protector by the pain it was radiating had brought them this far.
'Fusion toroids,' she said, pointing. 'The energy needed to move this between stars must have been vast.'
'I am glad our kinds did not know too much about such energies in the past,' said Vaemar. 'Think of a war fought with bodies like this as missiles.'
Something, too fast for human eyes to see clearly, scuttled away in the dark above them. 'The Protector,' said Dimity. 'Why doesn't it attack?'
'It was a Protector,' said Vaemar, 'but I do not think it was the same one. Dimity, we have been too optimistic, I think. I do not think we have accounted for all the newly awakened Protectors. Perhaps its task is to watch us and report.'
They came to an opening into a vast cavern, filled with machinery.
Vaemar stood unmoving for a moment, then he said, 'There are… vibrations in the air… perhaps you cannot sense them… which tells me these motors may not be dead.'
'After scores or hundreds of thousands of years? Surely not?'
'Look at the cavities in the roof,' said Vaemar. 'They appear to have been artificially dug.'
'Yes.'
