Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

sky, the first stars and sliding satellites appearing as Alpha Centauri A set. A few hours before, he though, he had not expected to see the stars again. Life was good. Karan sat in the opposite corner. He felt a sudden tickling and looked down. The tip of her tail was twined around his. Their eyes met again and this time it was she who raised her ears in a smile.

Catspaws

Hal Colebatch

Chapter 1

That an ape has hands is far less interesting to a philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them.

—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908. 

Occupied Wunderland,

2406 a.d.

The human freighter from Tiamat and the Serpent Swarm landed at a corner of the old Munchen spaceport not needed at that moment by the warships of the Patriarch's Navy.

Humans, however, inconvenienced their conquerors even potentially only at their peril. Under the guns of security guards of the Wunderland government the freighter was unloaded with feverish haste, largely by sweating human muscle.

The guards took their bribes, ran checks over the piles of cargo seeking for weapons, explosives or other contraband, checked the manifests with their counterparts at Tiamat, took more bribes, and saw the cargo into a bonded warehouse. Few humans served either the kzinti or the collaborationist human government with fanatical zeal, but terror, desperation and poverty made workable substitutes for devotion. The ship took off again for Alpha Centauri A's asteroids before the kzinti decided they needed its landing area.

With the area cleared there was time for another, more thorough check. Part of the cargo, 50- and 100-liter liquid containers, was shown to be medical and agricultural chemicals, as the manifest described. Raw material for geriatric and other drugs, plus a few agricultural trace-elements in solution. There were also the usual vacuum and zero-gravity products that were a mainstay of Serpent Swarm export, manufactured in space and on asteroids where there were still relatively few kzinti and more working human factories. There were sealed containers with the warning symbol for radioactive substances, but these were elaborately certified from Tiamat's medical laboratories and the government as vital isotopes for nuclear medicine and without potential weapons use.

The chemical containers and some of the other cargo were loaded into primitive but well-armed wheeled vehicles. The kzinti allowed few humans to use flyers, even the clumsy human ground-effect cars. The vehicles' signatures were transmitted continually to the kzinti and Wunderland government satellites monitoring traffic and they were allowed to proceed by road along a predetermined route to a processing plant. That road had, long before, been made in a few hours by the flame of a hovering ship's reaction-drive fusing the ground. Now it was kept more-or-less in repair by gangs of human serfs with picks and shovels.

The geriatric chemicals needed processing but, even without the remainder of the consignments, they, far more than the nuclear material, would still have made a prize almost beyond price for any highjacker. There were few geriatric drugs or facilities on the ground for making them with the Wunderland economy shattered by the war and the kzin occupation. People were ageing and dying. Few human criminals, however, now had the resources for a highjacking. Crime was largely a matter of solitary muggings or Government-level corruption.

The processing plant where the vehicles stopped stood in a semi-ruined area on the outskirts of the city. There had been a battle there in the few days of organized human ground resistance around Munchen after the kzinti landings, and much of the area had been flattened, but some factories were now providing a thin stream of necessities. The Trummerfrauen (that archaic term recently revived on Wunderland) had been and gone. The repaired and gimcrack new buildings—factories, workers' huts, a few small bars and shops—stood here and there like islands.

The streets wandering through this semi-wasteland were bleak and empty, though the reddish Wunderland vegetation was growing back on the wide stretches where nothing had been rebuilt and there were some Wunderland scavenging creatures, bolder than they had once been. Beam's Beasts, Advokats and even a few of the foul zeitungers were breeding up again as sanitary services broke down in these districts, and attempts at preserving something of civic culture gave way to apathy and despair. However, some humans kept minimal services going. Kzinti did not like dogs barking, and the dogs rounded up to help produce that primitive, now near-priceless chemical, insulin, were muzzled or without vocal chords in their cages under the plant, the plant itself sheltered behind heaps of rusty razor-wire. Kzinti seldom deigned to visit these parts but there were a few robot and human sentries, the robots the better armed.

The containers were unloaded, checked off again, and stored in secure areas. The contents of most of them were made into desperately needed drugs. Some people involved got rich, though in rapidly inflating occupation money. Some made enough to get to the Serpent Swarm or into the hills. Some of the nuclear material found its way to hospitals where painful and primitive treatments and procedures had been revived, often for long-forgotten but now also revived diseases. Many people who would otherwise have died, lived, at least for a time.

However not all the containers were opened. Some few were removed and dummies substituted. These containers were eventually loaded onto other primitive vehicles, or onto horses and mules, and, with other traffic, taken northeast in cautious stages to the great limestone escarpment of the Hohe Kalkstein and the sparsely-settled country beyond. A few days after they left the warehouse the collaborationist government on orders from the local kzin supervisor-of-animals brought in a kzin telepath to sweep the minds of key personnel working in the plant. The resistance was alerted beforehand and several fled. The alert was not perfect, however, and so several others died, but they died before the telepath could reach them.

Occupied Wunderland

2407 a.d.

The convoy arrived in the little valley at nightfall. Nils and Leonie Rykermann and a dozen others emerged from hiding and