A moment later, his men followed suit. Some, lately arrived, did not understand the nuances of the situation, and actually shot a pair of kits. Aquino knocked their muzzles aside and shredded them with oaths as pointed and lethal as the projectiles of their own coil guns.
But critical damage had been done to the nursery’s precious population, overwhelmingly inflicted by the female kzin themselves. Walking through the litter of bodies, Dieter called out to the xenomed specialist every time he found a live kit. He did not call out very often. He worked deeper into the collective safehold of the harems of the senior flag officers.
At the very rear, in an alcove that was shrouded and almost completely unlit, Dieter saw faint signs of movement. Was it the admiral’s mate, perhaps: is that why she was in what looked like a specially secluded boudoir-bower? But no, he realized as he came closer, although it was a special place, set aside for privacy, it also permitted discrete observation. It had not been arrayed and appointed for mating.
It was for birthing.
Dieter parted the roughly spun gossamer blinds with the barrel of his gun, cautious but also feeling a sudden, deep spike of guilt. The female, stretched on her side, moved listlessly: one coil gun projectile, probably a stray, had gone through her neck. The wound, not arterial but severe, had created a puddle of blood beneath her: she was still alive only because of the immense vitality of her species. Under her paws was a newborn female kit. It had been slain with a single claw-slash across its tiny neck. The kzinrett’s bloody paw hovered over it, alternately protecting and caressing the little corpse.
Her other paw strained fitfully after the second kit of her litter, a half-black male that had not wriggled closer to her deadly embrace. What had stopped him? Had there been a subtle warning in the tone of his littermate’s desperate cries as the milk-rich body which had just given them life suddenly turned tender claws of death upon them? Had it been the smell of blood? Had it been the sight and sounds of devastation with which the strange hairless bipeds had shattered the quiet of the harem-nursery?
The kit’s nose wrinkled, turned uncertainly in Dieter’s direction, and his eyes blinked open as he made a small sound: “Meef?”
The sound roused the mother. Her eyes roved, her claws slid out of their beds, her arm came back; she even managed to raise her body slightly, to lean her torso forward…
So that she could reach far enough to kill her last kit.
Dieter brought up his weapon and squeezed the trigger once.
The female’s left eye imploded. She collapsed, as limp as old rags.
Dieter looked back at the kit; it blinked up at him through milky, and probably still blind, eyes. He reached down, scooped it gently into the crook of his left arm. He could swear that its eyes were fixed upon his.
“Meerf,” it said. And then the kit’s eyes closed, and it nestled against him tightly.
2396 BCE: Subject age—less than one year
Despite the scenes of carnage that she had been watching for the past minute, Dr. Selena Navarre flinched anew at the scene of a kzin female being bisected—literally bisected—by the screeching sweep of a commando’s coil gun. The image froze.
A freshly minted UNSN captain by the name of Armbrust came from behind the lectern. “Had we listened to Dr. Yang’s warnings, this outcome might have been averted. Instead, because the allowed non-lethals were too weak to instantly drop an adult kzin in its tracks, we had to resort to lethal weapons. And you can see the results.” He waved at the frozen tableau behind him. “In addition to having to kill all the females, twenty-five percent of the kits were killed by our fire, as well. They were too close to their mothers, and the situation was too chaotic to take more time or better aim.
“This outcome is compounded by the loss of sixty percent of the kits through the infanticide carried out by the mothers. This leaves us six kits. Of those, one was severely wounded. Your personnel have informed me that it has subsequently been euthanized.”
“It would not have been useful to us, anyway,” objected Director Pyragy’s rather snappish voice from the darkened auditorium behind Selena. “It was a female.” So, the team director had finally spoken up. In an attempt to minimize the scope of the disaster, of course. A disaster for which he, it was rumored, was primarily responsible: he had resisted almost every special tactical contingency the mission planners had placed before him for approval. Including the double-strength tranq rounds.
Captain Armbrust stared. “The female kit would not have been useful? Director Pyragy, at this point I would have thought that any kit would be useful. After all, as Dr. Yang pointed out in her research précis, there is nothing that proves that the females are inherently subsentient. It may simply be that—”
“Captain, your heroics in securing these live subjects are admirable, as was your rather baffling ability to identify the rumored harem-protection cruiser among the rest of the kzin ships.” Pyragy pompously sniffed distaste at the very things he had praised. “But the value of your speculations on the mental capacities of the kzin are directly proportionate to your qualifications in xenobiology and xenobehavior. Which are nonexistent.”
Armbrust smiled up toward the source of the voice at the back of the darkened auditorium. “That is almost entirely true.”
“‘Almost’ entirely? You have an uncompleted degree lurking somewhere beyond the margins of your resume, perhaps?”
“No. I had the good fortune of being briefed by Dr. Yang herself, and have subsequently been granted full access to her research proposal.”
“Your first point is a non sequitur. The second is valueless.” Rumor had it that the director had argued vehemently against granting military personnel access to the full text of the proposal. A strange vehemence, Selena reflected, considering that access to it was, in his current statement, “valueless.”
Armbrust apparently detected the same contradiction. “Valueless, Director? Then why did the command staff need to make repeated requests for access?”
“I wonder if sharing it with your command staff was deemed a breach of the project’s secrecy protocols, Captain,” mused the voice of Marquette, a member of the project’s Steering Board and an inveterate toady.
The captain’s smile widened. “Actually, I believe our overall clearance rating was higher than yours, in regard to the relevant data. We were actually going on the operation, after all.”
The director’s own voice rolled archly mellifluous over Selena’s head. “The reason we resisted granting you access was noise, Captain. The pointless, distracting noise that would have been generated by providing unqualified persons with enough information so that they could start their own pointless theorizings, which, out of sheer good manners, we would have had to listen to—rather than dismissing them out of hand, as was warranted. So: you have your answer. Continue your report.”
Armbrust had turned his back and was heading toward the lectern before the director had finished speaking. Selena quelled a sudden impulse to cheer the captain.
“So, to conclude,” said Armbrust, “we have only five healthy specimens, two of which are females of less than two weeks. Leaving us three males. One would soon have been removed from the combination harem-crèche-playground: he is at least three months of age. The other is approximately a month old and is not particularly pliable, according to your own researchers. The last one—”
“—Is no concern of yours, Captain. You can hardly know anything about a creature you held for less than two minutes.”
“True. But it is also true that it may have been a very important two minutes.”
“Yes, yes: I’ve heard all the amateurish tripe about kzinti possibly having a first-imprinting reflex such as many higher terrestrial mammals, and some species of birds. But at this point, that is only unwarranted and rather romanticized speculation.” The director’s voice slowed, deepened, became subtly dangerous: “I have it on good report that you have even shown up to look in on the littlest one, from time to
time.” Selena did not know how a pause could be smug, but Pyragy’s was: “Perhaps some imprinting did take place, Captain, but perhaps it is not the kit who was imprinted.”
Armbrust shrugged. “Time will tell, I suppose. Now, allow me to show you how we came across our unexpected find as we withdrew.”
Selena sat forward: she had only heard the faintest whispers about this when she was posted to the team three days ago, but if the rumors were accurate, it would put a whole new spin on kzin gender socialization.
A new video clip flashed on the screen. The camera motion was jerky. The muzzle of a gun was perpetually visible in the bottom center of the dancing screen: typical scope-view footage. Then, whoever was holding the gun panned around and aimed down a short corridor. He zoomed in on an open doorway there: as the image swam and focused, it resolved into serried ranks of inclined glass cylinders, all over two meters long. And in each was—
Selena breathed in sharply. Her gasp was mercifully drowned out by the director’s abrupt, “So these are the cloning tubes? The vats, as I believe you nicknamed them?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll advance the recording, so you can see a few more.”
The view on the screen sped forward in time, seeming to race down the corridor until it reached the threshold of the long, dark room: female kzinti, encased in dimly lit gargantuan test tubes, stretched to the far wall.
“And when you took samples, did you—?”
“You will appreciate, Director, that we had to improvise everything from this point on.”
“Including dividing your forces in the face of your enemy?”
“Sir, this was an unexpected discovery made during a hot exfiltration. I made sure that our primary objectives—the kits—were all removed to safe holding ASAP. Then we set about rigging two of the ROVs to carry one of the tubes in its entirety, as well as gathering genetic samples from all the others, and taking samples of every fluid being pumped into or out of them.”
“Crude,” commented the director. “Marginally effective, at best.”
Had there been any room to doubt that Pyragy disliked, personally disliked, Captain Armbrust, it was gone now. To Selena’s mind, and most of the other researchers with whom she could talk about these results, Armbrust had shown considerable presence of mind and ingenuity getting out what he did. That he had then lost an additional five men when another wave of kzinti showed up was hardly his fault: the increased time required to transport the clone tube and samples had made another engagement a near certainty. But in light of what humanity had gained with those additional samples—
“And then you destroyed their ship?”
Armbrust nodded. “Yes, Director, as per my orders. As much to prevent the kzinti from learning of our presence and activities aboard their cradle-cruiser as to strike a further blow against them.”
“And your own ship was still operable enough to effect your escape?”
Armbrust unsuccessfully attempted to mask his smile; even Selena hadn’t been so gullible as to have believed that the damage taken by the captain’s Raker-class decoy ship—salvaged during the defeat of the Second Kzin Fleet—was genuine. “Director, my ship was not damaged at any point, except by the intentional beam hits upon the fuel tanks. In the staged fight that the kzin witnessed between us and our own smallships, one of which was automated and convincingly destroyed by our fire, all the missiles were duds. The apparent internal explosions were prepared charges, already on-board. Our fusion plant was fully operable; it was just rigged to allow us to simulate irregular function and battle damage. As was everything else on the ship. The actual lifepods and lifeboats were replaced with cheap shams, leaving enough room for us to use their launch tubes to deploy our short range breaching pods, once the kzin ship slowed to match course and come alongside.”
The director sniffed again. “A wonderful display of how satisfactory results can result from the suitable use of low cunning.” Armbrust smiled instead of taking the bait, leaving the focus clearly upon the director’s own ignorance of military operations. Selena was sorely tempted to snicker but thought the better of it. She was lucky to have received this assignment at all. Until she had securely established her experimental schedule, the loyalty of her personnel, and had made herself indispensable, her semi-autonomous position as leader of the Behavioral Team of the Kzin Research Project was far too tenuous.
There was an extended silence in the darkened room. Then the director’s voice: “Captain, that will be all.”
Armbrust came around the lectern one last time: he was, Selena noticed, a handsome enough man, although hardly the classical vid-hero. For that, he would have needed an extra six or seven centimeters and longer proportions in general: light-legged and fine-hipped, the bottom half of his body was that of a dancer; the top half was broad, hard, flat: a laborer or a weight-lifter. He looked up into the dark, along a trajectory that tracked back to the source of the director’s voice. “I wonder if I might ask a few questions. As a personal favor.”
The long pause was not promising, but then a new voice—that of the positively ancient board member Boroshinsky—broke in, heavy-accented and quavery: “You may ask your questions, gospodin Armbrust. It is the very least accommodation we can make in appreciation of your fine service.” The director may have grunted impatiently; Selena could not be sure.
“Spasebo,” Armbrust said into the dark with a slight, deferential nod. “My first question is: have you completed the radio array for establishing communications with Dr. Yang in Proxima?”
“We have,” Pyragy replied. “Although it will be some years before we know if she is still there to receive it. It seems the kzinti, if impatient, are also thorough hunters.”
“Indeed they are. With any luck, Dr. Yang has not attracted their attention. That was her plan.”
“And to the best of our knowledge, she has kept to it: we have had no signals from Proxima since the kzinti first attacked twenty-nine years ago.”
Armbrust’s shoulders seemed to relax. “My other question is about the behavioral component of her research plan: will it in fact be funded?”
“I do not know what you are referring to.” The director’s tone belied his words: he might as well have said, “I will not share that information with a troglodyte like yourself.”
Armbrust was undeterred. “I am referring to her suggestion that, if possible, a promising kit should be raised to adulthood not merely to observe the details of its speciate development and distinguish the influences of nature from those of nurture, but also to breed him as a possible liaison to his own people.”
The lights in the room snapped on; the director was on his feet, and very red. “How did you learn of this? Yang specifically stated in the appendix to her proposal that this part of it had been separately ciphered and kept apart from the rest.”
“I know. But I also spoke to her directly. And she made her intentions quite clear.”
Pyragy aimed a shaking finger down at Armbrust. “Yang’s suggestion is an optimistic delusion that ignores one obvious and decisive fact: a kzin raised by us would be rejected by those which are natural products of their own society. Given a reasonable chance, they would retroactively do to our subjects what their mothers were trying to do to them when you first took them from their nursery a few weeks ago.”
“So you have not funded Dr. Yang’s behavioral research initiative?”
“Oh, no: we most certainly have funded it. We have simply revised its objective.”
“How so?”
One of the other board members—Marquette, the toady—waved an age-gnarled finger in time with his pedantic drone: “It is our intent to show that the kzinti can be rescued, saved, from their own base nature.”
Selena Navarre almost spun around in her seat to stare. Really? Really? Could they possibly be serious? In their arrogance, they had decided to rehabilitate the kzinti? The Board could not be so blind, so stupid—could it?
“Professor Marquette speaks somewhat
metaphorically,” Pyragy amended. “Let us say that we wish to explore the possibility that the kzinti need to be liberated from the eugenics programs that their one-time-masters—the Jotoki—apparently imposed upon them. And, having followed down that same path themselves, we must further explore what would happen if the modern kzinti were freed from their own hide-bound genetic tyranny.”
“Genetic tyranny?”
“Of course. Veiled references to the routine euthanization of intelligent females, and the cloned breeders you found are proof enough of that. Having the knowledge we now do, we can liberate the kzinti from their own self-perverted evolutionary growth, from the senseless violence in which they have immersed themselves. Even more deeply than we did. Until the ARM brought peace and order to our society.”
Good grief, thought Selena, he’s a true believer.
Armbrust muttered a guttural curse in some Wunderlander dialect and stared up at the director. “So you will correct the aberrations in the kzinti, the same way you did with humanity for the better part of three centuries? I’m tempted to dismiss it as impossible, but then again, you so pacified humanity that it took a near-genocidal wake-up call from the known universe’s apex predator to shake us out of that lotus-eater’s dream. But evidently even that hasn’t taught you that the universe is not inherently aligned with your cherished notions of nonaggression. So, now you’re going to try to make pacifists out of the kzinti? Good luck—and send the kzinti my regards and sincere commiseration.”
“They will no doubt appreciate such sympathetic wishes, coming from a warrior like yourself.” The director was smiling again. “Set a beast to catch a beast, I always say. And so we did, apparently. I thank you for bringing a set of beasts back to us, Captain. I am quite sure we can handle it from here, your own lofty cosmological warnings notwithstanding.”
Armbrust collected his papers and data chips, all the while glowering at the director. In the captain’s eyes, Selena saw a more profound, unconstrained variety of her own Belter sensibilities: the ARM had never managed to bring her people as completely under the yoke as they had the rest of the system, and particularly Earth. And now stalking from the room, mouth rigid, was the living evidence that the colonial ARM had been even less successful completing its pacification campaign in the Centauri system.