“Right away, sir.”
“Narrow the field for me, Navigator, and we’ll find the thieves by using our native hunting instincts.” He turned to Weaponsmaster. “Can you readjust the circuits of that homing radar for a slightly different concentration of carbon?”
“It’s almost dawn.”
“How can you tell?”
“I think I can see my feet.”
“The brush does seem lighter.”
“Ouch! Damn it! I give up.”
“It’s probably safe to rest here.”
Without answering, Sally Krater released enough of the monofilament to allow her to sit on the branch that had tripped her. She let the rest of it float around her face—and didn’t care if it snagged on anything and cut off her nose.
“We may not be as far ahead of the kzinti as Jared and Hugh now are,” Gambiel said.
“How do you figure?”
“When we stopped to take bearings—”
“And open the box, remember.”
“—and open the box,” he agreed, “we lost valuable time. And we haven’t been making it up in the dark.”
“What can we do about that?”
“Listen!”
“How’s that going to—?”
“Hush!”
Krater cocked her head and listened. Faintly, through the brush, she could hear a crashing and snapping of the greenery. It was behind them, coming along their back trail.
Gambiel thrust the flute-thing and the white dog into her arms. Before she could stop it, the dog jumped free. It started to run off in the opposite direction, then turned and looked back at her. A long, hard stare that seemed to be full of meaning.
“Go along, now,” the Jinxian told her.
“But you—?”
“I’ll delay them. Go.”
Krater stood up and took in the slack monofilament. “Come here, Fellah!” she called in a low voice.
The dog came up to her and stood on its hind legs, putting a paw on her knee. She scooped up the animal and hit her winder’s clutch. In less than a minute, she had gone twenty meters higher and thirty meters farther into the jungle canopy.
Gambiel turned about-face, called upon all his inner strength, his chi, and began his patient preparations. After a lifetime of training and development, he was finally going to fight a kzin in the flesh. It was likely to be wearing armor, he knew, but Gambiel had his laser rifle and the advantage of surprise.
He retrieved his grapple, loaded the launcher and fired straight up. The grapple thunked into solid wood ten meters overhead. Slowly, so as to make as little noise as possible, Gambiel raised himself off the stable branch layer where he and Krater had paused to rest and where a full grown kzin in armor would undoubtedly choose to walk. He stopped when he found a tunnel through the leaves that gave him an angle back to that stouter layer. His view crossed their earlier track through the area. Then he hung quietly, staring down and holding the rifle, at full charge, across his thighs. Gambiel made himself as still as a bow hunter waiting in the dawn above a game trail.
The kzin came into view, placing its feet with great care, advancing cautiously from limb to supporting limb. For all its mechanical encumbrance and the excess weight, the warrior was still moving incredibly smoothly. The body markings on this suit of armor were different from those on the kzin that Gambiel and the others had watched leaving the enemy ship the day before. (Had it been no longer than that?) This one was clearly a different member of the crew.
Gambiel raised the rifle with hypnotic slowness and sighted on the gap which showed orange fur between the jaw extender and the articulated breastplate—the place where a suit of human armor would have fastened a steel gorget.
His first pulse of coherent blue light, even masked by the gloom of the forest canopy, sent the kzin hurtling sideways. However, a flash of white smoke and a startled “Rowrrl!” told Gambiel that something tender had been burned.
Stumbling off balance, the kzin almost crashed through the unstable floor. Then it might have fallen ninety meters or more, to be painfully damaged if not killed. But the armored figure managed to right itself.
Gambiel lined up on the edge of his aiming hole and fired another pulse, seeking another tender spot. Instead, he touched the ablative surface of an armored gauntlet. It dissipated the energy in a spark of ceramic fragments, leaving only a small, white crater in the material. Then the kzin was up and moving forward, climbing over intervening branches, walking into the point source of the laser pulses. It was hunched over—not in pain, Daff knew, but only so that it offered the thicker material of the shoulder and neck plates to the oncoming fire.
Gambiel reeled in on his winder, moving higher as quickly as he could, and kicked backward to put himself beyond the kzin’s reach. His retreat was limited, however, by the set of his grapple.
The kzin was upon him too quickly and knocked the rifle aside. The weapon fell and disappeared through the green canopy floor.
Before the warrior could strike again, Gambiel hit the release latch on his climbing harness and dropped, on all fours, ten meters to the canopy’s base layer. He grasped with his hands and snagged with his feet among the vines. Once he knew he was not going to fall through, he raised his body in a wrestler’s crouch and looked up and around, ready to meet the kzin.
The kzin—too heavy to drop like that—climbed quickly down to his level and stopped, considering Gambiel. Daff could read its reactions. Even though the human was now unarmed, its stance was not that of prey. He was actually challenging the kzin. And the tattoo on Gambiel’s forehead might be familiar from kzinti training tapes. Somewhere they must have described a breed of humans so marked, who would actually fight barehanded.
The kzin appeared to reach a decision. Slowly and deliberately, gesturing to make itself understood, it keyed a release button. The armor sprang apart like a cracked crabshell. The kzin kicked the suit aside—and it, too, fell through the loose floor. Daff’s opponent raked its own flanks in a brief scratch. Gambiel visibly bent his knees into a deeper crouch, preparing to absorb the shock of the first attack across the springy floor layer. He dug in his toes and raised his hands in a defensive position.
Human and kzin confronted each other with a long stare. The kzin seemed to be focusing on the Hellflare tattoo. Maybe the warcat did understand its meaning.
The kzin screamed and leaped directly at Gambiel.
Gambiel lifted his left foot from the entangling vines, straightened his right leg and—hoping he wouldn’t screw himself right down into the criss-crossed foliage—performed a perfect veronica around the swinging left paw. Its claws extended five centimeters outside the flashing orange blur. As the furred flank passed, Gambiel struck backhanded at the third skeletal nexus. He heard as much as felt the joint crack.
The kzin’s scream rose an octave in pitch.
The warrior came back on attack with a feint. Gambiel ignored the stroke but still countered with a twisting punch. It found only air and a whisk of fur.
In two more exchanges, the kzin absorbed one painful blow, and Gambiel took a raking that opened his right arm and shoulder to the bone. As he was trying to press back the flap of flayed skin, he felt a jet of arterial blood. The fourth claw had struck higher on his neck than he though!
The kzin, sensing imminent victory, prepared its last charge.
Gambiel then made the decision that had loomed over his entire life for so long. He would not step aside again. He met the charge full on—with a stopkick whose perfect focus on the center of the kzin’s skull was one-half centimeter longer than the warcat’s reach. His blow cracked that skull a half-second before the eight claws swung across his torso in converging slices.
Disemboweled, the Jinxian’s body flew sideways and caught against a tree limb. He saw it arrest his flight but could feel nothing down there. Then his eyes darkened, a red mist creeping across his field of vision. But before the mist could raise the night, he saw the orange body stagger curl up, an
d disappear through a gap in the shrubbery.
The kzin did not even scream as it fell.
Hanging in her harness with just a toe-perch among the slender branches, Sally Krater listened carefully to the thrashing below her in the canopy. The fight that Gambiel was waging proceeded without cries or curses, just that one scream of challenge. If it was followed by heavy breathing and grunts of pain, she could not hear them.
The dog Fellah huddled in her arms, shivering against her chest. But occasionally it lifted its head and looked down. Then, by the tilting of its ears, she sensed the animal was following the action and weighing their chances of survival.
When the thrashing ceased, Krater released her winder and unclenched her toes, dropping down into the open vaults beneath the canopy layer and above the forest floor far below. Off to her right, about forty meters away, she saw an orange body drop through the leaves and tumble three times head over heels before it hit the hard ground. It lay there in a bundle of matted fur. Krater thought it was dead, until it twitched and moved a paw, raised itself and began to crawl.
Sally lifted herself into the cover of the leafy layer and watched. The kzin rose on its hind legs with painful, ungraceful jags of motion and started to walk away. Krater withdrew fully into the canopy. She consulted her sense of direction and moved back toward the place of the fight.
At first, all she could see were torn branches and a ruck of leaves, turned over to show their lighter undersides among splashes of blood. At the side of the clearing, however, she quickly spotted the Jinxian’s uniform. She set the dog down on a firm branch and moved quickly over the vines toward Gambiel.
His coverall was curiously flat, deflated. She touched his shoulder, to rouse him and turn him over, and the torn remains slumped apart, ripping the uniform fabric across the back.
Krater found his head, his eyes open and staring. She closed them with the edge of her hand.
Then there was nothing more she could do, no words to say, and no way to bury him. She gathered up the dog and continued moving toward the noon rendezvous.
“Fellah” they had called him, these beings that lived and moved separately, apart from the Discipline. “Fellah” was the word shape that came up in their blue-green minds and arrowed at him like yellow fire. “Fellah.” And they did not mean it unkindly.
As he lurched through the rushing trees, under the arm of the “Sally,” the Pruntaquilun Balladeer closed his eyes to the flying wind and the green leaves, and tightened his stomach against the surgings of sensation. He called up his latent powers of intellect and considered all that he had experienced since being packed into Guerdoth’s traveling case.
When the Master had prepared for a month’s stay at the hunting estates of his uncle, the Magistrate Alcuin, he had taken along his favorite Balladeer. And his baton, of course. Fellah knew what the device did and how it worked. As a Pruntaquilun, with his limited insight into other minds and his facility with courtly language, he was instrumental in the Master’s charades.
None other than Guerdoth’s favorite Balladeer could be trusted to help the Master conceal the shame of his Powerloss and so to survive. Thus, Fellah would observe and make stealthy inquiries with the edges of his mind, accumulating bits and shadings of thought from other Thrintun and from Slaves. Then he would sing of them to Guerdoth in an ancient tongue that only the Master understood. With Fellah’s espionage, and with the Baton, they cemented the impression among all who cared that Guerdoth still retained the Power and wielded it as a true Thrint.
But when the time-stranding case had been opened, Fellah was arrived not at Alcuin’s estates but in a green world of wild, waving plants and among wild, unDisciplined beings. Except that the “Daff” had wielded Guerdoth’s Baton. Although he had used it inexpertly, still he made the commands to love and respect, to attend and obey. And he made them on Fellah himself.
Yet even as he made the commands, the Daff had not thought of himself as a Master. The word-image he used was “human.” Strange it was, however, that the shape of this thought in the Daff’s mind was not much different from the shape of “Thrint” in Guerdoth’s. It contained the same overtones of capability, of mastery of the expectation to control and order the world and time as one saw fit.
Similar thought-shapes had also been in the Sally’s mind—although not so strongly, not since that Other had come and destroyed the Daff. Fellah himself had known the Daff was dead in the instant his mind sparked and went black.
Fellah wished the Sally would use more and simpler words in her thinking about the death, so that he might absorb them and add to his picture of these new masters, the humans. He was putting together a sense of the pattern of their minds and their language with every thought he intercepted. But it was harder this way, starting without a grammar or even a coherent picture of the world into which he had emerged from the traveling case.
The Other who had killed the Daff had used still another word-image, “kzin.” It was brighter, more jaggedly lit with reddish-orange colors and blood scents, than the “human” in Daff’s and Sally’s minds. Yet “kzin” meant controller and shaper of destinies, too.
And nowhere, not along any of the dimensions among which Fellah cast his mind, did he find any echo now of “Thrint.” The glinting hard edges of their Power was gone from the universe, creating a black and peaceful vacuum, as if it had never been.
Fellah contemplated a universe without Discipline, without the ever-present puppet strings. He tried to decide if this emptiness was a good thing in itself.
He began to suspect it might be.
Nyawk-Captain found Weaponsmaster’s discarded armor through the emergency distress tone it was generating. From its position on the forest floor, with the helmet bent back and the visor digging a Furrow in the dirt, he concluded that it had fallen out of the trees.
He studied the pattern of burn marks on the ablative surface. No blood or carbonized flesh on either, although the one at the throat smelled of burned hair. Clearly, Weaponsmaster had not been injured significantly while wearing the armor. Nor had he been wearing it when it fell.
Nyawk-Captain tilted his head back to study the underside of the roof layer. Nothing in its leaf pattern told him anything.
“My Captain!”
The voice was faint and coming from his left. Nyawk-Captain rose in a crouch and his armor prepared itself for violence.
Weaponsmaster limped forward from one of the rare patches of jungle growth on the forest floor. His gait reflected broken bones. He tended to circle to the right as he moved.
Weaponsmaster fell. Nyawk-Captain, moving toward him, caught his crewmate and lowered his body gently to the ground. Nyawk-Captain pawed at his belt for the field medical kit and began breaking ampoules of pain-reliever.
“Do not bother,” Weaponsmaster grunted. “My head is cracked and my life is at an end.”
“Did you fall? I found your armor. How did—?”
“One of the humans confronted me. He actually challenged me. It would have been dishonorable—to meet a naked combatant in armor. So I shed mine…He fought well.”
Nyawk-Captain heard this explanation but hardly believed it. The sons of Hanuman were known to fight by deceit and trickery, not by challenge in an honorable contest. And they did not kill adult kzinti in naked combat. This was most odd!
“Did you kill him?” Nyawk-Captain asked, feeling sure of the answer.
“I do not know…Not for certain. But too much blood covers my paws, I think, for him to live.”
“Was he alone?”
“I saw one only.”
“That is never proof that there aren’t others.”
“I know. I failed you…should have…”
“Which way was it—were they—going?”
“…East?”
The word ended with a huge, jaw-cracking yawn. A gout of blood came up in Weaponsmaster’s throat, flowed over his tongue, and dripped between his teeth. The body went limp and, by reflex, the pin
k ears opened wide.
Nyawk-Captain smoothed them closed and lowered the great head to the ground.
Then the kzin considered his options. He had time, barely, to locate the humans, recover the contents of the Thrintun box, and still make his rendezvous at Margrave. But he would accomplish all this, he decided, even if it violated his margin for error on the mission. This was no longer just a matter of the box and its treasures. It was now an affair of honor.
“How far are we from the ship, do you figure?” Jook asked.
Cuiller looked up at his companion in surprise. “You’re the navigator.”
“Astrogation only. I’m a wreck in two dimensions.”
“But I thought you were keeping track…”
The Wunderlander shook his head and looked down at his hands, massaging the bubble cast around his knee.
“Well, we were turning left all the time,” Cuiller reasoned, “so we have to be somewhere south of Callisto.”
“But how far?”
“Can’t be more than two or three kilometers. We haven’t traveled more than five or six altogether. And that wasn’t in any kind of straight line.”
“Are we lost?”
“Umm.” Cuiller sucked his lips. “Which direction do you think the sun is?”
“Straight up.”
“Then we’re lost,” the commander admitted. “But later on, when the sun moves west, we could work our way east and attempt to locate Sally and Daff.”
“In this jungle, we could pass within forty meters of them and never know it.”
“I guess it’s time to try the radio.” Cuiller raised the wrist unit, powered it up, and clicked the send key a couple of times.
“Captain?” from the speaker.
“Is that you, Sally?”
“Yeah. Where are you?”
“Somewhere south of the ship,” he said. “I think.”
“Me too. How are we going to link up?”
Cuiller thought for a moment. “One from each party should climb a tall tree, get above the forest canopy.”