Man-Kzin Wars IX Read online

  "I'd like to," Tyra replied. "You were so brave and—"

  "Scarcely like you." His hand reached for hers.

  She shrugged. "Needs must. The story wouldn't give them a pretext for starting the next war. They aren't ready yet."

  He frowned slightly but kept silence.

  "Maybe it could complicate diplomacy a little, though," Tyra went on. "And surely it'd complicate relationships here at Pele. All right, ma'am and sir, it won't go beyond the four of us." I'll keep the glory to myself, and wish he'd share it with me, but he never will, she thought.

  He relaxed and laughed. "I couldn't have robbed that database anyhow," he said. "Couldn't have endured the heat and wasn't acquainted with their systems."

  "I wish you had been," growled Worning. "I'll hate seeing that knowledge fall into their claws."

  "It cannot be critically important," Raden reassured him. "Once we've established a permanent scientific presence—robotic, no doubt, but permanent—we'll soon have all of it and much more. Meanwhile, we've gotten the truly invaluable piece of information. Not just that there's a hazard we must protect future probes against, but that there's an extraordinary phenomenon. Whether or not my hypothesis about the iron proves out, we hold a clue to understandings we never even knew we lacked." His voice dropped. "Tragic, that a sentient being died for it. If only we could commemorate him somehow—"

  Jesu Kristi, thought Tyra, after he did his best to kill us? Then, ruefully: That's my Craig.

  "But we have learned," Raden said, with a lilt in his voice that she also knew. "This alone justifies our expedition. Let the kzinti take what he earned for them."

  "As a matter of fact," answered Bihari, "they aren't going to." Startled gazes sought her. "Shayin-Mate told me he would launch a missile—he told me exactly when, giving us plenty of time to track and stand alert—that will overhaul and destroy the sundiver. It started off about half an hour ago. He also said, um-m, `The Heroes have accomplished everything they intended, and will return home very shortly.' The latest indications are that preparations for departure are already in train."

  "Kzinti—simply giving up?" asked Tyra.

  "Well, perhaps they have no boat capable of rendezvous with one on such a trajectory. Caroline barely was, and the parameters were more favorable than they are by now. Under no circumstances would the kzinti make us a free gift of anything the mission gained. On the other hand—I can't prove this, it's an intuition, but rising from experience. I strongly suspect Ghrul-Captain was the driving force behind their entire venture. The acting master may well be seizing an opportunity to minimize his role, or actually make him out to have been a fool. Thereafter Shayin-Mate becomes the paragon who frustrated the humans, salvaged everything that could be salvaged, and brought his ship home to fight another day. He can hope to be made Shayin-Captain. Kzinti have their own internal politics."

  Tyra grinned. "Not altogether unlike ours, hm? You're right about that much, Craig."

  Her look upon him remained soft. He returned it. The humans wouldn't be here much longer either. She'd insist he take several weeks' leave of absence, or vacation or whatever they called it in Earthside academe, to spend with her. She wanted him to meet her father. She wanted to show him the merry old inns of Munchen, the ancestral house and sea cliffs at Korsness, the scenery and geysers of Gelbstein Park, the tremendous overlook from the peak of the Lucknerberg, the dancers in Anholt, all the wonders of Wunderland. Maybe later he could take her likewise around Earth. Maybe then they could think about making a home.

  HIS SERGEANT'S HONOR

  Hal Colebatch

  Chapter 1

  "There is a `cease-fire.' "

  The word was not new to kzin military terminology, though used rarely. The kzintis' forebears had offered a cease-fire to the remnant of human resistance on Wunderland once.

  The smoke stung Raargh-Sergeant's eye and nose but he held himself rigidly alert.

  There were black commas with dangling limbs drifting high in the air with the smoke, he saw: a group of dead kzin and human fighters still held aloft by lift-belts, debris of the previous weeks of fighting. The wind brought the sound of bells pealing from the monkey temple as well as drifting smoke from the burning city and from the straggle of huts beyond the monastery gates. A gust of wind drove two of the floating bodies together. A side arm that one of them still clasped fired a few random bolts into air and ground, throwing up rock and flame. Neither kzin moved.

  "We have our orders," Hroarh-Captain said again. "You are not permitted to die heroically. Go to barracks and remain there until you hear further, either from me or another proper authority. I go to seek Hroth-Staff Officer.

  "You are, as you know, the senior surviving Sergeant," he added. "I look to you to help preserve what order and discipline there may be in the Patriarch's armed forces . . . all that is left of them. We are Regulars. We are professionals, not wild outland barbarians, and our Honor is in that. We have taken oaths and our Honor is in obedience. Remember that a dead Hero is useless to the Patriarch."

  He moved to the half-repaired battle car which Raargh-Sergeant had been loading with weapons for the last attack and killed the engine. It sank to the ground, a visibly dead, defeated thing. Junk.

  "You have kits, Raargh Sergeant?"

  "No longer, Hroarh-Captain." At least I know mine is dead. I need not tear my liver wondering if he somehow escaped.

  A kzin of the old type would have affected indifference to the fate of his male kits once they reached some maturity and did not dishonor him, but times had changed with the extinction of so many bloodlines. Heroes and indeed bloodlines had perished wholesale as one fleet after another attacked Sol System and limped back with its dead and its wreckage. More recently the UNSN's raids had devastated much of the system's infrastructure. Then, like lightning falling from a clear sky, had come the bizarre, unexpected war of kzin against kzin, between the followers of Traat-Admiral and Ktrodni-Stkaa, and finally, with much of the kzin fleet destroyed in space in fratricidal combat and the ground war beginning to escalate beyond the nuclear threshold, the UNSN's Hyperdrive Armada had swept in with its bombardment from the skies and then infantry landings, coupled with widespread—in fact almost universal—uprisings among the human population of both Wunderland and the Serpent Swarm. There would be many lost kits . . .

  "Nor I," said Hroarh-Captain. He looked as if he was in no shape to get more offspring even if chance permitted, but obviously Raargh-Sergeant could hardly broach that topic.

  "A dead Hero is also useless to all others who look to him for protection."

  A ball of orange fire was rising into the sky from the old human ruins on the plains a few miles away. Some band of Heroes had made a stand there, to be blasted to the Fanged God by attack from the skies which the humans now ruled. The kzintis' sensitive hearing filtered out a chaos of distant explosions and the supersonic booms of aircraft.

  "There are moments," said Hroarh-Captain, "when self-control is the only weapon a warrior has. There is no shame . . ." He twitched convulsively; the ground-effect cart that took the place of his legs lurched, spitting pebbles from the dirt. He had no tail to signal his emotions and the torn remnants of his ears were held steady but his mane was flat as Raargh-Sergeant's. Both felt shame beyond measure.

  "I have been summoned," Hroarh-Captain went on. "I will return as soon as possible. Maintain discipline and await further orders. Remember that the situation may change quickly.

  "Remember always, a warrior has a duty to all those under his care." He gestured with his remaining arm to the Speaker-for-Humans who, with its female deputy, stood between them. Moisture was running down its pale face and it was shaking. The deputy's expression was hard to read.

  "This human has been loyal to the Patriarchy and will remain in charge of human affairs here," the officer went on. "It—he—and those under him are under the Patriarchy's protection still. You will exert that protection. But humans in general are no longer slaves or p
rey. . . ." He folded and unfolded what were left of his ears thoughtfully, almost as if he were groping for words.

  "You are old, Raargh-Sergeant. You are a good soldier, and it was my pleasure to recommend that you be honored with a partial name for your valor and bloodlust in the Hohe Kalkstein. . . ."

  The name called up memories for both of them. "There was good hunting in the forest and the caves there. I can smell the limestone now. War in the great caves has pleasures all its own. . . ." Raargh-Sergeant tried to cheer his captain. He remembered the great caves of the high limestone, and the strange, three-sided war a few lucky Heroes had fought in the depths with the feral humans and the brainless but savage creatures the humans called Morlocks. Happy days. Once they had placed Morlock skins over their heads and waded through a cold shallow underground stream to come upon a human position . . .

  "So I recall. But I recommended you too because I know you have the cunning of a lurker in tall grass, and are no fool who is burnt to death by the passion for glory in his over-hot liver. There are few old and foolish soldiers. You are a survivor and more than ever do we need our survivors of guile now. Continue to survive. That also is an order."

  The wind brought a renewed sound of fighting. The sergeant flicked his own torn ears. "The cease-fire does not seem to be very effective, Hroarh-Captain," he said.

  "The humans are also fighting among themselves. That is no business of ours now . . . unless the Patriarchy's honor is involved."

  Raargh-Sergeant brought his own remaining natural arm up in a claws-across-the-face salute as Hroarh-Captain headed away, holding up a white cloth. Hroarh-Captain was a good officer, he thought, although he is still alive. Or because he is still alive? Then he turned to the human.

  "Do I give you a name now?" he asked.

  He spoke in the slaves' patois. His was the third generation on the planet and though his sire had been but a sergeant also he had been raised by human house-slaves. He understood Wunderlander well but it was still difficult to pronounce.

  Raargh-Sergeant had dealt with this human frequently before when it had been in charge of maintaining order and discipline among the local slaves and taxpayers, and it had been in charge of a force of armed human auxiliaries for some time, but its rank description seemed inappropriate now.

  It—he, as Hroarh-Captain had said—replied in a sort of Wunderlander in which the slaves' patois and a few Kzinti or Kzinti-derived words were making encroachments. A Hero could certainly use such a language to a slave since matters of dealing with slaves were beneath most considerations of dignity.

  "I am called Jorg, Raargh-Sergeant Noble Hero," the human told him. "My deputy is called Jocelyn. If you will give us leave, I will go and try to keep order as I may. I am leaving a guard of twelve of my men at the gate under my orders. They are armed and are instructed to keep other humans out."

  Raargh-Sergeant did not know if it was competent for him to give the humans leave now, but it hardly mattered. He made a dismissive sign with his tail, and the humans withdrew, Jorg with many an uneasy glance over its—his—shoulder. It is easier if you think of it as "him." Raargh-Sergeant watched the human out of sight, and the human "guard" deploy, then he turned and limped stiffly across the parade ground to the barracks.

  Circle Bay Monastery had been taken over by the kzin forces in the last days of the war. Most of its humans had fled and though a few "monks" lurked in cellars and remote rooms, it would have been a rash human who without authorization had shown himself before a kzin there in the last few days.

  But few remained of the kzin garrison now, and all of these were more or less seriously wounded or disabled, clustered into what had been the Sergeants' Mess. He reviewed them as he entered.

  Lesser-Sergeant, the closest thing to a friend that one in his position could allow himself; First and Second Section-Corporals, both badly shot up; Trainer-of-Strong-Muscles; Guardian-of-Stores/Fixer-of-Small-Weapons; a junior doctor, almost helpless without either his equipment or his natural forelimbs; an orderly; and two infantry troopers—one of them his personal servant and groom, an old sweat whose reflexes had long ago slowed too much for front-fighting—the other half-conscious, leaking blood and serum and twitching from some head wound that would be fatal soon if he could not be taken to a fully-equipped military doc.

  The place resembled a hospital save that in normal times a hospital would have had proper medicines, treatment facilities and better prostheses as well as regeneration tanks and machine-doctors. As it was, it looked like a first-time soldier's bad dream of what might happen to him. As well as what were mainly crude and temporary field prostheses, meant to be fitted in actual battle conditions to keep Heroes in action, Junior Doctor had a few primitive salves and dressings, some commandeered from the human monks' "infirmary." Presumably the salves were effective for Heroes. Perhaps Junior Doctor had tried them on himself. His eyes were violet with pain.

  The nine fully-conscious military kzin had fourteen eyes and twenty-five natural limbs remaining between them. But they stood like Heroes, as poised for action as might be. Whiskers were keen and quivering and some even managed to hold their tails jauntily.

  There were also a pawful of kzinti civilians: a trainer of kzinretts, a couple of Computer Experts, a Trader with an annoying cough, a very young and evidently orphaned kitten, still spotted and milk-feeding, that Junior Doctor had managed to sedate and was now sleeping on a nest of cushions, the ancient, near-blind Bursar of the Order of Conservors—flotsam of war. The place had been designated an assembly area for civilians as things had fallen apart elsewhere but few had made it: kzin fighting spirit and poor administrative ability had seen to that between them.

  In no kzinti eye was there a trace of fear, and every one of them, soldier and civilian, still had his wtsai. All looked mature enough to preserve self-control, though all, he knew, would fling themselves against the humans at his order. But the battle car would not have taken us far into the monkey lines if we had ridden it into a last attack, Raargh-Sergeant thought, looking at them.

  The insurgent humans were no longer fighting, as the ferals had in the old hill campaigns, with an assortment of makeshift and captured weapons. Though the Wunderlanders were increasingly running riot, and Markham and other feral leaders were said to have landed from space, more and more of the human infantry were regular UNSN troops with heavy battlefield weapons, armored vehicles and plentiful air support.

  In its last major battle, their own regiment had gone in almost entirely on foot, its transport destroyed by air attacks. These few had survived by chance, and by Hroarh-Captain's decision, when command had recently devolved upon him, to keep a small garrison of the least battle-fit at the monastery to protect what civilians and loyal humans they might. Hroarh-Captain was probably the regiment's last surviving officer: kzinti officers always led their Heroes into attack, and the UNSN had been pouring in supplies of precision-guided weapons.

  A few traces of the room's brief service as a Mess were still to be seen. There were the accumulated battle trophies of years—rings of dried kzinti and human ears donated by famous Heroes, stuffed humans and pieces of humans who had put up memorable fights, and bits of armor and weapons, various skins, the wtsai of old Krawth-Sergeant mounted in a translucent block, a silver-inlaid jar of Chuut-Riit's urine, presented after the second battle of the Hohe Kalkstein, the drum. Dried Morlock heads from the great caves like fanged brainless parodies of men. A mural on one wall showed a Hero rampant, locked in battle with a troop of humanoid monsters, hind claws dug into a heap of simian corpses.

  There were even two live humans—the Mess-slaves, shivering and terrified.

  There were still distant sounds of bells and battle here. No business of ours, Hroarh-Captain had said. The ancient walls of the monastery were thick, but pierced as they were by many doors and windows, and damaged further in the recent fighting, they made a poor defensive position. There was no point in thinking about that. There was, Raargh-Sergeant thou
ght, little point in thinking about anything. Thought might too easily lead to despair, madness and the neglect of Duty.

  He signaled a slave—a servant—to bring him his usual bourbon-and-tuna ice cream, but knew he must resist the temptation to drink himself into oblivion.

  There was no power for the Mess television—not that many had wanted electronic entertainment there anyway—and the official communications channels seemed to be blocked or disabled, but he felt he should see what was happening.

  He crossed the courtyard, signing to the human guards that they need not prostrate, and headed down the crooked alley running between the straggle of huts outside, one of which advertised itself as an internet cafe.

  The monastery was situated in rolling meadowland, high on the lip of an ancient meteor crater. Once the humans had raised herbivorous animals on its pastures and vegetables in its gardens, but in recent years, until the Patriarchy had commandeered it, a great straggle of refugee huts had grown up about its walls and fences. These were burning in several places now, and with the heaps of wreckage and refuse and with the smoke of their burning mingling with the smoke drifting from the burning city it was hard to see far.

  Any live humans around kept well out of sight. A pair of dead ones lay by a stoop, fluffy white Beam's Beasts already cuddling into them. The blue-eyed, poisoned-fanged vermin had been multiplying in and under the maze of human shanties. Greasy patches nearby littered with acid-corroded bone fragments showed they had been busy for more time.

  The internet cafe itself was an older, more substantial and cleaner building, one of the original monastery outbuildings, standing on a slight rise of ground.

  As he entered the cafe he was glad, not for the first time, that the mealy smell of humans was odd rather than repulsive, for it was strong here, but in any case he took it for granted now.

  The cafe, he noticed with some surprise, for he had not entered it before, had both human and kzin-sized chairs and keyboards which combined human letters and the claw-mark-derived Kzinti alphabet, with layouts for either five small thin or four short massive fingers, though several of the chairs were overturned and the building itself was empty.