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

we who sent him here. He couldn't have planned a secret rendezvous with a spacecraft . . . unless it had been waiting for a long time."

"And unless he manipulated us into sending him. He knew he'd be coming this way sooner or later. I've given Defense Headquarters an emergency alert. The next thing is to get after them, anyway. But Vaemar doesn't feel like that to me."

"I put some trust in someone when all appearances were against her a little while ago," said Guthlac. "In a ruined hamlet beyond Gerning in a storm. I haven't regretted it. I'll try to believe the best of Vaemar yet, but I'm putting out an emergency alert to Defense HQ all the same."

"We should have stopped her associating with him so. That's obvious enough with hindsight."

"Dimity is an Asperger's. A superlatively high-functioning one. When she makes up her mind to do a thing the only way you can stop her is by breaking that mind.

"She can be killed any time," Guthlac went on. "There's an implant in her that can be activated remotely. An idea we got from the kzin zzrou. ARM insisted on it."

"Arthur! We've got to get her back!"

"I know!"

"You mustn't let ARM know what's happened! Not yet!"

"Michael, there are a lot of things neither of us let ARM know about. And I don't mean your peculiarly-colored bird or a certain Earth flower with green petals. Try to hang onto hope."

"Does she know?"

"I don't know. ARM was subtler than the kzinti about such things. Nanobots in the food. But Vaemar's got one too. ARM is not trusting. It wasn't my idea or orders, but . . ." Guthlac suddenly smacked his own head. "Idiot! How do we win wars with generals like me? I had completely forgotten! They both have locators in them anyway! Standard VIP models. We can read them from the car!"

"Come on!"

Calling Karan, they turned and headed back out of the granite maze. The thunderbird launched itself at them from the rock wall. Half as big again as the ones Dimity and Vaemar had killed, its vast striking beak knocked Guthlac sprawling. The tough fabric of his coverall saved him from being torn apart, but had the thing snapped its beak it would have crushed his bones in an instant. Karan was a blur of rippling orange muscle as she leapt at it. Screaming, two more thunderbirds launched themselves from the rock wall.

Karan severed the first thunderbird's neck with her fangs and claws before the beak could seize her. Cumpston, getting his beamer up just in time, shot another in the chest. The third sprang into the air again, and came down on their car. Guthlac fired at the bird and hit the car. Its tough materials could normally have withstood far worse hits, but the unlocked door flew open. Either the beam or the avian's great kicking legs activated the controls, and car and avian tangled together shot fifty feet into the air, rolled, dived, and crashed into the rock wall.

Guthlac struggled free of the dead weight of the first thunderbird. Cumpston ran to them. Karan got to her feet, staggered and fell again, pumping gouts of purple and orange blood from gaping lacerations in her thighs. Guthlac found the end of a severed blood-vessel and held it shut while Cumpston raced for the crashed car and its medical kit, killing the broken-limbed avian as it struggled and snapped at him. The car's fuel lines had ruptured, and as Cumpston turned and ran back to Karan a spark ignited the clouds of hydrogen billowing from it. Automatically released jets of inert gas quickly smothered the flames, but the cabin and control console were wrecked.

Frantic work with a kzin military chemical bandage stabilized the wound, but it took time. Karan was weak and barely conscious.

The car, it was soon obvious, was not going to fly again without major repairs, and the lock on the car which Vaemar and Dimity had used was keyed to open to the patterns of Vaemar's and Dimity's hand or their tappetum or retina respectively. It was centuries since the last manually pickable lock had been made for anything as expensive as a car. Any attempt to burn the doors open, if it did not ruin the car's delicate mechanisms, would probably exhaust their weapon first. They carried Karan into the meager shelter of an overhang as rain began to fall from the grey sky. Mobile telephones were a standard part of their equipment. They called for help, and waited. After a time the rain gave way to sleet and snow. More thunderbirds came.

* * *

The comet-debris had served them well, Kzaargh-Commodore thought. Night-Lurker had passed undetected into the thick asteroid belt the humans called the Serpent Swarm.

The long descent back towards the sun had not been spent in idleness. Heroes had worked to disguise the ship.

At first Kzaargh-Commodore had thought to disguise it as a derelict, but had changed his mind after coming across a genuine kzin derelict warship. After stripping it of all that might be useful and giving the dead Heroes aboard space burial, he had sent it sunward for a test, cold, tumbling, patently helpless and dead. Human instruments had identified it, and interrogated it, and when it did not respond batteries of laser-cannon had vaporized it. The same happened when he sent in a stealthed ship's boat, manned by a crew of Hero volunteers. Stealth technology took them quite a long way, but it was plainly not the whole answer. Rocks did better, if they were not identified as being on a collision course with Ka'ashi or some other large body—there were too many rocks for the human defenses to vaporize them all, and in any case many contained valuable ores.

The apes seemed arrogantly confident of their mathematics and of their meteor defenses. Any large meteor whose path missed Ka'ashi by more than 50,000 miles was generally not intercepted.

Night-Lurker became a lurker indeed. Like Lord Hrras-Charr of legend, who