More noise, this time in the bushes to the left, moving steadily from his front flank to his rear.
Shraokh-Lieutenant swung his beamer—a carbine-sized model—off his shoulder and snarled, squeezing the trigger as he spun to put his aim point in front of the target, sweeping back toward where he had heard the sound.
The welding-bright beam sliced into the jungle like a blinding scythe, decapitating ferns and bushes, toppling a pair of trees, torching a few patches of (rare) dry grass, and eliciting a single, abruptly silenced scream. Matching that sound with his own high-pitched screech of triumph, Shraokh-Lieutenant sprang forward: an eight-meter leap from a standing start. He landed at the source of the death-sound.
At his feet lay a feral boar, bisected lengthwise, half a meter beneath the spine. The smell of the seared meat made him retch through his fury and frustration. He turned his back upon the creature and sprinted further down the trail, in search of his real prey: humans. Leaf-eating, urine-gulping, cub-slaughtering humans. He felt the emotional upsurge toward the Unknowing Rage, and fought back hard. Distracted, he consequently forgot the caution which he had rigidly imposed upon himself since setting forth to avenge his cub as a hseeraa aoshef, a solo rogue-killer. He forgot to move carefully rather than swiftly.
As he ran, paralleling the bubbling hot springs to his right, he remained focused on his left flank and the ground beneath his feet—and so missed the catch-wire that was looped down among the hanging mosses he pushed out of the way to his right. He heard the unmistakable sound of a mechanical release, instantly twisted away from it, and felt darts whistle past his chest, missing by a centimeter. But he did not hear the sigh of a heavy weight beginning to swing down from above his head to the left.
As the spiked, rock-laden warhead of the pendulum trap swung down faster, its sigh became an accelerating rush. Shraokh-Lieutenant heard it now, but, with his feet still committed to the fast leaping sidestep he had used to dodge the darts, he was unable to react, other than to avert his face and put out his arms. He knew, even through the building Rage, that this was what the humans had intended: that they had known the darts were not faster than his reflexes, but that they could force him into an evasive maneuver that would make it impossible to avoid the true, killing component of their double-trap.
The sharpened, dung-smeared stakes on the pendulum-bob swung into him with a sound of slicing leather and shattering kindling. He felt multiple punctures along his left side, and then he was airborne: the impact of the warhead threw him five meters to the right, halfway into the murky, fetid water he had been paralleling.
Shraokh-Lieutenant howled, partly in pain, but mostly in a fury that quickly blotted out the pain, washed over his senses, even disintegrated the shame of having been so dishonored by the humans. In place of all that was not merely rage, but the Rage. Thought was now extraneous. Wounds were now extraneous. Caution was now extraneous. Killing was the only thing that mattered. Only killing.
Consequently, he did not hear, until the very last second, the stealthy wet rush behind him: he spun, bringing up the beamer. And found himself looking into a maw full of teeth: a maw even wider, with teeth even longer, than his own.
It was, he dimly realized as he pulled the trigger and converted his roar of rage into one of murderous aggression, what the humans called a swampadile. However, it did not really resemble their homeworld’s much-storied crocodile. This creature, although every bit as large, was more akin to a flattened eel with stunted legs and wide, almost spatulate, jaws. But whereas the crocodile was surprisingly fast over short distances on land as well as water, the swampadile’s limbs were too rudimentary for such pursuit. On the other hand, its feet were wide and webbed, and so, although not a good land predator, it had extraordinary speed in the water, being propelled both by its limbs and the sinusoidal motion of its body.
As the creature’s teeth seemed to leap toward Shraokh-Lieutenant’s face, the kzin’s beamer sent out a brief actinic stab—and died. Whether the power pack was exhausted, or fouled by immersion in water, was of no importance to Shraokh-Lieutenant. More important was that he had missed: one of the pendulum’s stake-points had lodged and broken off in his left shoulder-joint, throwing off his accuracy.
The swampadile was badly injured, nonetheless: the momentary beam flash hit the water in front of the creature, sending up a gout of hissing, reeking steam. Scalded, the swampadile writhed back. The kzin cast aside his spent beamer and pulled his w’tsai: a shortsword with a nearly mono-molecular edge.
His overhand cut coincided with the swampadile’s forward lunge. The weapon dug in, well behind the rear of the creature’s jaws, which snapped down on the kzin’s warding left arm. A medley of splintering bones and shearing hide counterpointed the contending screeches of the combatants.
But only for a moment. A second heavy blow from the undaunted kzin was a message that even the almost brainless swampadile understood: its current grip upon the orange-furred creature was not killing it, at least not fast enough. Even the left arm of the biped, although almost completely severed and halfway down the monster’s gullet, evidently had claws on the end of it: they ripped and tore at the amphibian’s upper gut. The swampadile coiled back, releasing the mauled arm, eyes fixing instinctually on the kzin’s head, and it came forward with a warbling screech—
—only to impale itself on the w’tsai, which the kzin plunged deep into its mouth, the point ripping out through the creature’s faint dorsal ridge, just behind its eyes.
But the swampadile completed its attack even in death; the fang-crowded jaws snapped down on Shraokh-Lieutenant’s last good arm.
The kzin tried to extricate himself, found his arm held in a death-vise, pierced by half a dozen of the creature’s long, tapering teeth. Frustration, pain, triumph, and, oddly, rut-aggression boiled up out of him in a long, thready scream.
When he fell quiet, the jungle and swamp rewarded him with a moment of perfect silence. And then, he once again heard the slithering burble that had presaged the swampadile’s attack. Shraokh-Lieutenant’s kill- and rut-addled brain focused for the briefest moment, noted the sound, wondered, hypothesized—
At that moment, he learned a fundamental and important lesson about the swampadiles of the Sumpfrinne:
They always hunt in pairs.
Freay’ysh-Administrator could tell from Zhveeaor-Captain’s rigidly erect posture that he bore bad news. And he suspected he knew what it was. “Shraokh-Lieutenant has fallen in the hunt, I presume?”
The other kzin nodded tightly, but said nothing.
So, something worse than death? “And what else?”
“We found him like this.” Zhveeaor-Captain handed a dataslate to his superior.
Freay’ysh-Administrator looked at the image on its screen and felt his fur tuck flat, his ears snap back against the rear of his head, his lips ripple open to release a deep, primal growl. Somewhere, from miles away—or maybe only a meter: all distances were suddenly the same—Zhveeaor-Captain’s voice explained: “He had met his Hero’s End before the humans nailed him up in this fashion. Most of the damage to his body was done by swampadiles: they killed him when one of humans’ traps wounded him and knocked him into the water.”
“And did the swampadiles bite off his right ear, as well?”
“No, Freay’ysh-Administrator. They did not. If you look carefully down here, you will see that the humans pinned his ear onto his—onto his—”
“I see clearly enough, Zhveeaor-Captain. But—” he peered more closely, not wanting to do so, but wishing to confirm the full magnitude of the human atrocity “—this is not his whole ear, is it?” When the captain did not reply, he looked up.
And discovered a hide pouch being held out toward him. He turned away. “I do not need to see its contents,” he growled, a screeching buzz edging into his voice, rising up from the rage, the shame, the rut-aggression—
He stopped, sniffed mightily, shook his head: how odd. Rut-aggression? Yes, it was
there: he could feel it, but he smelled no female kzinti. Which was manifestly impossible here, being so far from any harem. So why—?
“There is more,” Zhveeaor-Captain said calmly.
How could there be more than this? “Yes?”
“It seems the humans killed the second swampadile so that it would not consume Shraokh-Lieutenant, so that they could create this monument of defiance.”
“And have we responded?”
“We have.”
The lack of extrapolation told Freay’ysh-Administrator everything he needed to know. “But our response was repulsed.”
“Not repulsed, Freay’ysh-Administrator: lost. No Heroes returned. The coursing squad assigned the task of tracking down the humans drew ahead of the main body—”
“And they were ambushed.”
“Freay’ysh-Administrator, I take this on my own head; I offer up my Name and females in expiation of my failure. I should have known. The short sight ranges in the undergrowth made it simple for them to ambush us. And exhaustion must have led to our Heroes’ obvious distraction. I suspect they were overheated by the mud coating their fur, which cannot be removed except by extensive grooming.”
The administrator stared at the captain. “Our Heroes were distracted? In what way?”
“When the humans retreated from their ambush, our Heroes gave chase.”
“Is this not customary?”
“Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator, but not until the main body has arrived, so that the pursuit can be made along a broad front, with secure flanks. But our Heroes, hot and enraged as I must imagine they were, completely disregarded that protocol, as well as communication discipline. They seemed to be on the edge of the Unknowing Rage themselves. And so, following the trail of the retreating units, they did not detect the second ambush, lying close along that path.”
Freay’ysh-Administrator closed his eyes. “Have our reconnaissance assets located the leaf-eating shit-lickers who destroyed our Heroes?”
“No, Freay’ysh-Administrator. The tree cover is too thick, and the heat from the springs makes thermal imaging useless down in the lowlands. Perhaps if we had more aerial drones to seed down under the forest canopy—”
The administrator negated that notion with a toss of his head and flex of his ruff. “Impossible. With the recent incursion by the human ship from outsystem, the fleet has concentrated out in the Serpent Swarm, bringing most uncommitted ground assets with it in order to quell the scattered insurgents who were evidently emboldened by this recent human attack. The two battalions we have on hand are all that we are going to get.”
“With a full company providing base security, here at the mouth of the valley, I am uncertain that the remaining numbers will be enough.”
“They will have to be, Zhveeaor-Captain. And they will be. They are kzin Heroes.”
“They are, but they still have no target. Our short-range patrols have found nothing but a few abandoned observation posts. And our rogue-killer, and now our subsequent scouting teams, are all dead, with little to show for their Heroes’ Ends.”
“Then the time has come to conduct a reconnaissance in force. You are to coordinate a rolling series of company-level sweeps, all along our front, pushing constantly deeper into the valley. Our minimum objective is to move the lines of our safe zone ahead at least five kilometers a day.” Freay’ysh-Administrator saw Zhveeaor-Captain’s uncertainty, felt rage—and again, that odd hint of rut-aggression, as if the captain was a mating rival. “This is what is required of our Heroes!” he asserted. “This they must do!”
“It shall be as you order, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”
“Make sure that it is.” He paused. “Or you may yet forfeit your Name and females.”
The three surviving kzinti came bounding through the brush, pursuing Gunnar and one of the ’Runners, closing the gap with sickening speed. Hilda held her breath as the two humans vaulted over a fallen fern-trunk, then crouched down rather than continuing to run.
The kzinti pushed harder, one of them firing his beamer as he sprinted and shrieked like a scalded tiger. The beam danced unsteadily along the fallen trunk, slicing chunks off, starting one brief, guttering fire, but not focused enough to cut through it.
The kzinti were within five meters of the trunk when their leader evidently noticed something odd about the brush ahead: specifically, that parts of it had been cleared. He paused, probably seeing the faint, narrowing avenues that had been cut through the foliage.
From Hilda’s reverse viewpoint, though, they were sightlines into the widening fields of fire that the kzinti had now entered. “Optimum,” she said, sharply enough to be heard up and down the line. From concealed positions in the densest brush, five roars—almost as loud as light artillery—boomed out at the kzinti: an equal number of meter-long muzzle-flashes marked their sources.
The lead kzin had a leg blown clean off: as it cartwheeled into the underbrush behind him, the Hero yowled and exsanguinated in great arcing gouts of dark red blood. The second of them staggered, then stopped, and lasted just long enough to look down and realize that a sizable red divot had carved away half of his right lung. He never realized—but revealed as he fell, senseless—that the exit wound in his back was a crater so wide that it had partially exposed his spine.
The third was, marginally, luckier: one shot took off half his tail, another clipped through his gut at an angle. The pulped coils which flopped out of this belly wound signified it as mortal, but kzinti did not die quickly or easily. He struggled back to his feet as the five human snipers reloaded their home-brewed, single-shot elephant guns.
That was when Gunnar and the ’Runner popped up from behind the fallen fern-trunk and sent streams of strakkaker fire into the slowly rising Hero. Bits of fur, blood, and bone flew in a haze of carnage: as the weapons fell silent, magazines expended, the tattered remains of the third kzin toppled backward.
“That’s the last of them,” shouted Gunnar in savage glee.
“And it will be the last of us if we don’t get the hell out of here now,” Hilda shouted back. “No talking: move. Back to waypoint Foxtrot.” Hilda jumped up, grabbed her gear, and, as she launched herself full speed down the narrow path that was her personal bug-out route, she wondered: And again, where the hell is the heroic Captain Smith?
By the time they got back to their combination camp/refuge/hideout nine hours later, Gunnar had exhausted his considerable creative energies for thinking up new insults concerning Captain Smith’s courage, commitment, leadership skills, choice of aftershave, and female ancestors. And what galled Hilda most was that she had to endure hearing it in silence.
Because, in terms of leadership, and maybe even courage, Gunnar was right. Or at least he seemed to be.
Which was what Hilda was thinking when she stormed into Smith’s lean-to and stared not at him, but the secure box he’d been carrying for days now, wandering and staring about as though he were some uber-macho version of Van Gogh looking for the perfect field—or, in the Sumpfrinne, fetid bog—to paint. “So, have you had a productive afternoon, Captain?”
He stopped his infernal map plottings—his favorite activity these days, after wandering around with his purported secret-weapon-in-a-box—and looked up at her mildly. “Pretty fair. How about you?”
“Well, we had a great day, Captain. Shot up two squads of kzinti that were poking into the village we evacuated yesterday. They came after us, as they always do, and burned down Shindle and Milsic with beamers. Which left the ratcats feeling so wonderfully confident that they charged straight into another L-ambush. Killed about a dozen there.”
Smith had an almost dreamy look on his face. “That never gets old, does it?”
“I can’t see how you’d know, sir, since you haven’t been on a single god-damned op since the second day we got the ’Runners organized. But if it matters to you, the last of the kzinti came after us, straight into the firing lanes of our hidden rearguard’s elephant guns.” She threw he
r empty canteen down and realized she stank. Just like the whole Sumpfrinne stank. And she resented Smith for stinking less—a lot less—than she did. “All told, we got a whole section of them today. No thanks to you, Captain.”
His right eyebrow arched. He had never made himself the official CO: Mads and Papa Sumpfrunner would probably have bristled at that. But the de facto reality was that he was in charge. He never gave orders: he simply pointed out what needed to be done, maybe put in a word or two on how best to do it, and faded away, resuming his love affair with his goddamned secure box. “Well, it seems like you don’t really need me out there,” he said. “You folks are doing a fine job all by yourselves.”
“Yes, but what for? Smith, you said that your plans for success included survival. But we’re trapped here. There’s no way out of this valley except through the kzinti. Which is to say, there’s no way out of this valley.”
“There are the passes up through the Grosse Felsbank.”
“Yeah, an exit where we have to walk two abreast, with a horde of angry kzinti on our tails. That’s not a retreat. That’s volunteering ourselves to be the victims of a box-canyon slaughter.”
Smith shrugged. “I’m not sure it would turn out that way. But tell me, why do you think the kzinti are unable to adapt to the ambushes you’ve been setting up?”
“Damned if I know, and damned if I care.” She lurched across the rickety card table that Smith used as a desk. “Listen: this can’t go on. We need you out there. At least so we can stop the rumors that the ’Runners are starting to whisper back and forth. Rumors about how you don’t really have a master plan, how we’re all going to die in a last stand, because word has it you’re building an oversized pillbox at a chokepoint in the eastern half of the valley.”
“I promised them we’d escape, and I mean it: we’re building that pillbox with a big escape tunnel that will—”
“Screw escape tunnels! Escape to where, Smith? Have you lost your mind? Wait: is that the secret weapon inside the box? That it has the power to make a human leader so insane that even the kzinti can’t predict the tactical idiocies he’s going to think up?”