'Ssstop!' Karan's nonhuman voice jolted them. She was standing, trembling. She had pulled out the plasma injector. She appeared to be holding herself upright by her extended claws dug into the fabric of a seat-cover. Her eyes had a strange, unfocused look. She appeared still half conscious, possibly delirious. Just what we need, thought Guthlac, going into battle against hopeless odds with a delirious kzinret loose in the ship.
'Vaemar! Vaemar is there!'
'How do you know?'
'Karan knows! I know.'
A delirious kzinret. Was oxygen-starvation affecting her brain? But all kzinti had a sense from which the talent of the telepaths was made. Among nontelepaths it was extremely limited and did not work to cross the distances of space. But… Karan was Karan. And, Guthlac thought, Vaemar was Vaemar. Neither of them were ordinary kzinti.
'The locators are dead,' said Guthlac. 'They say nothing. But this is close to the last position we had from them!'
'That's not a ship! It's a moving moon!'
'Vaemar is there! He comes!' Karan screamed.
'The boat must have picked us up,' said Cumpston, 'but it's not firing at us. It's taking evasive action, all right, but it seems to be evading the fighter.'
'Shall we try a com-link?'
'Yesss!' Karan leapt as she spoke. Not a great leap for a kzin, at least not one in good shape, but she was between the two men at the command console. Albert Manteufel sprang from his chair, drawing a pistol, but Guthlac motioned him back. In any event, gunplay within a spaceship was seldom a good idea. Karan spun to face them, claws out and jaws in the killing gape. Her knife was out, though the hand she held it in was trembling.
Cumpston and Guthlac were veterans of many battles in space as well as on the ground, battles often faster than thought, in a realm where only certain instincts and intuitions given to a few could offer hope of survival, controlling machine-enhanced reflexes beyond the frontiers of the purely physical, swifter and more subtle than any dance of bodies or equations. Both knew, too, the potential treachery of instinct. They stayed their hands now, as Karan operated the com-link to the flying, twisting speck on the screen. Weak as she was, her claws flashed too fast for the humans to follow, and much too fast for them to interfere with.
There on a screen was the cockpit of the gig. Flying it were Vaemar and Dimity. Karan collapsed.
'A dreadnought!' With shriek of ecstasy and blood lust Kzaargh-Commodore leapt onto the great kz'eerkt-hide battle-drum, sending its call booming throughout the ship. Was this what Chorth-Captain had somehow achieved? Already Night-Lurker had identified Chorth-Captain's fighter and gig. How had he done it? And what were the fighter and gig doing? Distracting the monkeys before the dreadnought's terrible slash ripped the guts out of their planet? But it mattered not. 'The Patriarch's battle-fleet has joined us!' This was no time for thoughts of how so mighty a consort might have penetrated so deep into the Centauri system and so close to Wunderland undetected, nor for the unworthy thought that so mighty a consort would take most of the glory from a mission that a moment before had been a matter of lone heroism. His crew of Heroes roared an equally enthusiastic response. That they might be perhaps less concerned with Kzaargh-Commodore's glory and more with their own suddenly enhanced chances of survival was not a thought for that moment either. Night-Lurker barrelled in, closing with the strange gigantic vessel.
Bigger than all but the biggest dreadnoughts. And camouflaged as Night-Lurker itself had been. The minds of the great strategists of the Patriarch's General Staff had thought like his own.
There was no further need for radio silence. It would be sensible to co-ordinate plans with the great carrier. 'Call them!' he ordered Captain. He stood posed before the com-screen, Captain at a respectful distance behind him.
Com-screens on Night-Lurker's bridge and in the Hollow Moon blizzarded briefly with light and cleared. Kzinti and Protectors saw one another. Each lunged instantly at the firing-buttons on their consoles.
Night-Lurker flung itself into evasive action, firing as it turned. Its heaviest punches included disrupter bomb- missiles. They were not in the class of Baphomet but powerful enough. Kzaargh-Commodore had taken the decision to fire, and fired, almost as fast as it was physically possible for a living being, even with motor-neurone enhancement. However the Protectors in the Hollow Moon were slightly faster.
Night-Lurker glared fantastically in the heat of beams for seconds as its layers of mirror-shielding boiled away, a red, then blue, outline of a kzin heavy cruiser. Its disrupters hit the Hollow Moon, burrowed through its shell and exploded. The Hollow Moon vented gigantic plugs of rock and blew apart. Night-Lurker exploded simultaneously.
The gig was perilously near the second explosion. Impact at such speeds with practically any piece of debris, however small, would be the end of it. Guthlac in the Tractate Middoth spread the lasers as far as possible and fired them to sweep between the blue-white sphere of the explosion and the little craft, hoping to at least reduce the flying wreckage. Smaller explosions sparkled and flared. The gig remained. Flying like a wounded bug, it turned and headed towards them. The Rending Fang fighter had disappeared again.
Chapter 14
Paddy Quickenden looked up from the deep-radar screen.
'It looks like an ants' nest,' he said 'Things are boiling in there.'
'There's usually a lot of activity in the caves,' said Leonie. 'Let me see… But yes, things are boiling. There are sizeable creatures moving-bipeds.'
'Humans… Morlocks,' said Raargh. His claws extended.
'We can't see much more from here,' said Leonie. 'We'd better land and take a look.'
'What, go into the caves?'
'With modern motion-detectors and Rarrgh's eye we should be able to see anything long before it gets near us. We both know the caves.'
'I don't,' said Paddy. 'But I've lived underground most of my life.'
'I'm not letting you near these caves,' said Leonie. 'And there's no way I'd leave the car and the com-link unattended. You'll stay in this car, with the canopy closed and weapons cocked. But be ready to let us in if we have to get back in a big hurry.' She opened the com-link and spoke to Nils Rykermann briefly. She was already suited up as she landed the car in a small limestone-sided valley. She and Rarrgh leapt down and disappeared into one of the cave mouths.
Paddy settled himself before the console. The car's weapons were ready. Like all spacers, he was experienced in waiting. The broken limestone walls and pinnacles, 'honeycombed, honey-colored' with small red Wunderland trees on the valley floor, and sprays and creepers of other red Wunderland vegetation, made the place seem like a wild, dishevelled garden, peaceful and, from within the car, silent, though instruments picked up the sounds of small animals and the murmuring of a tiny stream. This is a lovely place, he thought. Let me help Dimity find peace, let me cure her of what is torturing her, and she and I-and our children-could live on this world forever. They need spacers here, more than We Made It does. There could be a place for me here in paradise with the woman I love. He thought of Leonie, heading fearlessly into the cave with the great kzin. He could see them now on the deep radar, a large and a small figure, moving down the tunnel into the darkness and what lay beyond. How lucky Rykermann is to have such a wife! Well, this is paradise around me. Let me enjoy it for the moment.
Leonie and Raargh were both veteran cave fighters. Their checks of weapons, lights and other gear were fast, automatic and thorough. Both could read the ghostly, ambiguous shapes of tunnels and cavities on the screen of
