Man-Kzin Wars IX, Larry Niven [leveled readers TXT] 📗

himself for an instant to fire and dropping back. Firing again, jerking and falling into the bottom of the ditch. Raargh-Sergeant crawled to him.

Lesser-Sergeant's skull and jaws had been seared by a beam. He was unable to speak but Raargh-Sergeant held his paw and groomed him with his tongue until he could not see his chest rise and fall. He buried Lesser-Sergeant's trophy belt quickly, hoping it would not be found and dishonored. He took Trainer's rifle—there was hardly enough of Trainer left to honor—but left Lesser Sergeant's beside him. He hissed orders to Trader-Gunner.

A few bolts sizzled past over his head but no monkey dared approach yet. His fur, covered with blood and the mud from the ditch's sides and bottom, glowed orange no more. He backed away down the ditch, pausing momentarily only to plaster more mud over himself. Trader-Gunner ahead of him was equally covered in dark mud and slime. The big laser had passed through a group of the human huts and they were now burning fiercely, more smoke in the air. He crawled on.

A sound of mud on mud behind made him pause and turn. Lesser Sergeant was not quite dead, he saw. He was crawling up to the lip of the ditch, somehow still holding the rifle. He saw him raise it and fire again. He was burnt so that he no longer looked like a kzin, but even as he was, plainly dying, by rights already dead, he had a warrior's quickness still. Humans fired back. Raargh-Sergeant crawled on, round a curve that hid Lesser-Sergeant's stand from sight, and on. He knew that to go to his companion's support now would be the ultimate betrayal of him, though his liver was sickened and his mane flattened itself against his neck. He heard firing from him for a little longer, and then answering fire. Then it stopped.

Now they were up and running, dark shapes almost invisible in rolling clouds of dark smoke, through the burning wreckage of the monkey houses, Trader-Gunner breathing in tearing gasps and spitting blood, the mud that covered them shielding them from the flames as well as camouflaging.

Then into an alley where the houses were not burning. Back into the deserted internet cafe. A Beam's Beast leapt at him from a computer console, fangs dripping venom. Trader-Gunner shot it in mid-spring, and it carried across the room like a small fiery comet to crash against the wall. He stamped on the burning white fur.

"You know the net?" he asked Trader-Gunner. It took the coughing kzin a few moments to reply.

"Yes, Raargh-Sergeant. I use it every day in my craft."

"You are probably more expert than I. Activate it! Hurry!"

Trader-Gunner threw himself into one of the kzin-sized seats, claws to the keyboard. There was an arc of blue fire, and he leapt up screaming, fingers fused to the keys, vomiting sparks and fire, falling forward dead and burning, smoke pouring from mouth, ears and eyes.

So there had been a booby trap after all. Perhaps his fighter's instincts had atrophied with sickness as he feared. He should have seen it. Well, Trader-Gunner had at least had the luck to die in battle, of a sort.

Still, there was the computer Raargh-Sergeant had used earlier that day. That had been safe then and perhaps still was. He would soon see.

He keyed in his military code. With that code any kzin could, in theory, dominate human passwords. He hoped that was still the case. He keyed in human government vehicles, and the number of the gun car.

Yes. It was still working. A netcam gave him a view of the car's cabin, and beyond, of humans standing about and hunting cautiously along the ditch. He called up the car's controls. A car in human use was programmed to have the sensor and receptor cells in its brain overridden by several Kzin keywords.

But the cannon was newly installed by the humans and not connected to the car's brain. Could he drive it forward into the ditch? He keyed in a command and spat curses. The humans had, of course, disabled the key motor-response cells, leaving it under purely mechanical control. Only the brainless netcam was not affected. He could start the car and kick it forward in a straight line, but that was all. It would run into the monastery wall.

Better than nothing, if it squashed a monkey or two, he thought. Indeed, a human stood directly in front of it. He moved to kick in its starter, when he recognized that the monkey wore the robes of the abbot.

That one took me under his protection, he thought. To run the car over that one would be dishonorable now. Could it not have been any other? Fate is playing some bitter tricks today.

No matter. He had got behind the car anyway. Clutching the two beam rifles, he doubled himself into the crouching attack run.

Out of the hut. Straight down the alley, propping the two weapons steady on a wedge of timber, aiming, firing.

Hitting the laser cannon behind its shield. The car suddenly airborne on a wall of roiling fire, the air hammer of the explosion, a ball of fire leaping skywards from a ruptured fuel-tank, the car turning over, the cannon cycling laser bolts skyward, into the walls, into the ground in gouts of flame, the car crashing back upside-down between the shattered gates. Humans dropping, firing.

He dropped and rolled. He thought that if he kept low he could lose himself for quite a time in the huddle of huts and alleys—until they began strafing them from the air, in fact. It would be a bold human who followed him. He raised his head cautiously, fairly sure that he was unseen still in smoke and shadows.

He heard Jocelyn's voice: "Come out, you one-eyed ratcat bastard! Come out and die!"

"Sun ov a beetch!" he called back in his best human accent, wondering if the human insult was appropriate. He had several spare charges for the rifles in his belt,