'So I have learned. Would they follow?'
'We can accelerate to near light-speed. But so can the kzinti. The longer start we have the better.'
'Where will you go ultimately? Would you head for another star cluster? Another galaxy?' I talked of these things easily now.
'It would take too long. Even if we put ourselves into hibernation, as we usually do, the air would gradually leak out through the hulls, atom by atom. Our automatics would fail, micrometeorites and free hydrogen atoms would erode hull material at last. In any event, our life systems would eventually disintegrate. So would our bodies, in hibernation or not. And so, at last, would the hulls of our ships. We can travel far, but there is a limit.'
'Where will you go?' I pressed them.
'Our friend, if we do not tell you, you cannot reveal it under torture.'
'I am a Roman still. I do not fear torture.'
'Forgive us, but you have not experienced kzinti torture. In a matter as important as that they would not hesitate a moment. Also you know they have telepaths-think what it means to be tortured by a telepathic race, and pardon us if we do not entrust you with our most priceless secret. But perhaps we are not clear yet ourselves. We must seek among the stars for the furthest that it is practical for us or our tadpoles' tadpoles to reach.'
'You will go and leave us here? To fight the kzinti alone and without hope?'
'No. Only a few of us will go. Enough, just, to crew the ships and care for the tadpoles. The rest remain to delay the kzinti.'
'I see. Like Horatius.'
'Who?'
'A hero of our people.'
'If we defeat the kzinti, we buy not only the survival of our kind, but also the survival of your kind, perhaps. Conquer them, and you will have the ships to go where you will. Back to your own planet, perhaps. The kzinti will strike your kind sooner or later, but if it is late enough, perhaps your kind will have science enough to fight them.'
'You really believe that?' I thought of the onagers and javelins of the legions and of Rome attacked by kzinti weaponry. Hannibal and his elephants had been hard enough to subdue. And the cold hand that had touched my heart at a certain vision touched it again-kzinti falling upon Earth, upon the towns and cities of the Empire, of legions marching out with eagles and trumpets and small swords and javelins to fight sword-lights and plasma cannon. All the Empire, all Terra, turned into a vast arena for humans to be hunted by beasts. Forever. Delay them, he said. But could we delay them or divert them long enough?
'All things are possible,' Jegarvindertsa said. 'You have barely begun to discover metal alloys, but your military and civil organization are amazingly advanced-we traded with many primitive races and we know potential when we see it.'
Their strange eyes with their pupils like crosses looked deep into my eyes. Somehow-perhaps Mithras Himself spoke to me-I knew that I stood at one of those moments when the decision of a soldier may change all the world. Mithras had been a soldier.
'You have seen the star maps and you know we speak truth.' Jegarvindertsa said. 'Your world, your Terra, lies that way. We intend to flee. We think the kzinti will pursue us. We will draw them away from your Terra, a sector of space which they would otherwise reach within a few generations real-time.'
'But you have shown us how the kzinti advance everywhere.'
'In some directions faster than others. But the longer the kzinti are delayed, the better the chance we will have of escape. Which means leading their empire away from your Earth. That is also buying time for your kind to develop defenses of your own.'
'Spaceships? Beam-weapons?'
'One day, perhaps. Why not? Your kind have the brain for arches and aqueducts, maps and mathematics and even a bureaucracy. That means, we think, you have the brain to build spaceships. We do not know why the gods gave your kind-plains-dwelling apes-so much brain, though they also gave it to us, colonial amphibians, and to the cursed cats. There is more brain in each of us than you-or we, or they-ever needed for mere survival. But if it happened once, if can happen again. Perhaps it is a condition of amphibianism.'
'But we are not amphibians! We are not frogs or sea creatures!'
'You have poetry, art, philosophy, as well as arches and aqueducts and armies. You have religion. That makes you amphibians. That is why we argued against Jufadirvanlums that you be recruited.'
'The felines appear to have all those things too.'
'Yes. That is a part of the mystery. Those barbarians have a glimmering of something else as well. We have tried to civilize them and failed. Now nothing remains for us but to fight to ward off our final destruction by them. We, and the species we brought forward into the light, are doomed to be but their slaves and prey. And yet, perhaps, one day far beyond our vision, you may be the agent that…' They stopped, and their strange eyes took on a yet stranger cast, as though they were focused upon some faraway light.
'Yes?'
'Perhaps, perhaps…one day…you will civilize them. We cannot.'
'We have civilized Greeks, and Gauls, and Britons. A few Caledonians. Even a few Germans. But for how long? I do not know.'
'You are physically more like the kzinti than we are.'
'I am surprised you recruited us, then.'
The strange mood was broken. Jegarvindertsa laughed.
'My dear Maximus, that was precisely the reason we did recruit you. That and the fact we were desperately short of mass for our fighting units anyway. But it was the argument we-that is, this five-unit of the Jotoki, comprising the group-individual that is Jegarvindertsa-put before the poor makeshift that has replaced our trade council.'
The strange mood was broken. But I left my sword sheathed. I knew now what the Ninth Legion had to do. The old man had often spoken to me when I was a child, of the ultimate duty of dying for civilization. I wished my task had been so simple and easy.
Again the picture jumped.
A strategos does not lead a Legion on foot. Nor did I now. For all that had changed, and for all the Jotoki learning machines had taught us, our legionaries still remembered something of Roman tactics: scrupulous preparation, and then a thrust in the right place-use the sword for the thrust into the belly, don't waste time slashing at the armored head and chest. We dealt with the felines in the same way. The vanguard of their ships rushed at us, and we passed between them to attack from behind.
The kzinti gravity polarizers were as good as ours, as were their beam-weapons, but when the legions had fought barbarians it had been feet and hooves against feet and hooves, and swords and spears against swords and spears. When, with their scout ships and fighters smashed, we closed on their line of capital ships, it reminded me of tales of fighting in the arena.
We had learnt not to attack the heavily armored weapons turrets, or the strengthened prows, but to burn into the sides. Damage in the vacuum of space multiplies itself. The first felines I saw then were bodies flying into space when my beams tore into the semi-globular belly of a great feline warship.
We cut their line at two points, using their own speed against them and allowing their van to fly on until it could return and join the battle. By the time they did, the line was in chaos.
Human barbarians often keep attacking though it is plain they have lost the tactical upper hand, and have no concept of a fighting, strategic withdrawal, fighting instead as a furious disorganized mass, each unable to support the other. The kzinti were much the same.
There were gaps in our ranks-there always are after a battle-when we flew back to the carrier, but there was wine and women and feasting too. The Jotoki poured freshly minted gold on us, still valuable even though they had a technology for transmuting metals. I had read Caesar's Commentaries and imagined how he would have relished being here, lecturing the Jotoki on how to improve their space tactics and quietly plotting to take them over. It was then that I began to write this commentary of my own.
And we fought. Many times, crossing distances I cannot grasp even now, to strike in unexpected new places. And we won, many times.
