“I claim my right,” Goon screamed, and added a word that Locklear was beginning to loathe. Only then did the huge gunner notice that Puss was in no condition to present him with what he had just killed to get. He nudged her roughly, and did not see Locklear approach with one arrow notched and another held between his teeth.
But his ear umbrellas pivoted as a twig snapped under Locklear's foot, and Goon spun furiously, the big legs flexed, and for one instant man and kzin stood twenty paces apart, unmoving. Goon leaped for the nearest weapon, the beam rifle Puss had dropped, and saw Locklear release the short arrow. It missed by a full arm span and now, his bloodlust rekindled and with no fear of such a marksman, Goon dropped the rifle and pulled Yellowbelly's stiletto from his own arm. He turned toward Locklear, who was unaccountably running toward him instead of fleeing as a monkey should flee a leopard, and threw his head back in a battle scream.
Locklear's second arrow, fired from a distance of five paces, pierced the roof of Goon's mouth, its stainless steel barb severing nerve bundles at the brain stem. Goon fell like a jointed tree, knees buckling first, arms hanging, and the ground's impact drove the arrow tip out the back of his head, slippery with gore. Goon's head lay two paces from Locklear's feet. He neither breathed nor twitched.
Locklear hurried to the side of poor, courageous, ill-starred Puss and saw her gazing calmly at him.
“One for you, one for me, Puss. Only two more to go.”
“I wish I could live to celebrate that,” she said, more softly than he had ever heard her speak.
“You're too tough to let a little burn,” he began.
“They shot tiny things, too,” she said, a finger migrating to a bluish perforation at the side of her ribcage. “Coughing blood. Hard to breathe,” she managed.
He knew then that she was dying. A spray of slugs, roughly aimed at night from a perimeter-control smoothbore, had done to Puss what a beam rifle could not. Her lungs filling slowly with blood, she had still managed to report her patrol and then return to guard the birthing bower. He asked through the lump in his throat, “Is Boots all right?”
“They followed my spoor. When I came out, twitching my best prret routine — they did not look into the bower.”
“Smart, Puss.”
She grasped his wrist, hard. “Swear to protect it with your life.” Now she was coughing blood, fighting to breathe.
“Done,” he said. “Where is it, Puss?”
But her eyes were already glazing. Locklear stood up slowly and strode to the beam rifle, hefting it, thinking idly that these weapons were too heavy for him to carry in one trip. And then he saw Puss again, and quit thinking, and lifted the rifle over his head with both hands in a manscream of fury, and of vengeance unappeased.
The battle scene was in sight of the lake, fully in the open within fifty paces of the creek, and he found it impossible to lift Puss. Locklear cut bundles of grass and spread them to hide the bodies, trembling in delayed reaction, and carried three armloads of weapons to a hiding place far up the ravine just under its lip. He left the dead kzinti without stripping them; perhaps a mistake, but he had no time now to puzzle out tightband comm sets or medkits. Later, if there was a later…
He cursed his watery joints, knowing he could not carry a kzin beam rifle with its heavy accumulator up to the manor. He moved more cautiously now, remembering those kzin screams, wondering how far they'd carried on the breeze which was toward the lake. He read the safety legends on Goon's sidearm, found he could handle the massive piece with both hands, and stuck it and its twin from Yellowbelly's arsenal into his belt, leaving his bow and quiver with the other weapons.
He had stumbled within sight of the manor, planning how he could unmast the airboat and adjust its buoyancy so that it could be towed by a man afoot to retrieve those weapons, when a crackling hum sent a blast of hot air across his cheeks. Face down, crawling for the lip of the ravine, he heard a shout from near the manor.
“Grraf-Commander, the monkey approaches!” The reply, deep-voiced and muffled, seemed to come from inside the manor. So they'd known where the manor was. Heat or motion sensors, perhaps, during a pass in the lifeboat — not that it mattered now. A classic pincers from down and up the ravine, but one of those pincers now lay under shields of grass. They could not know that he was still tethered invisibly to that zzrou transmitter. But where was Kit?
Another hail from Brickshitter, whose tremors of impatience with a beam rifle had become Locklear's ally: “The others do not answer my calls, but I shall drive the monkey down to them.”
Well, maybe he'd intended merely to wing his quarry, or follow him.
You do that, Locklear thought to himself in cold rage as he scurried back in the ravine toward his weapons cache; you just do that, Brickshitter. He had covered two hundred meters when another crackle announced the pencil-thin beam, brighter than the sun, that struck a ridge of stone above him.
White-hot bees stung his face, back and arms; tiny smoke trails followed fragments of superheated stone into the ravine as Locklear tumbled to the creek, splashing out again, stumbling on slick stones. He turned, intending to fire a sidearm, but saw no target and realized that firing from him would tell volumes to that big Sonofabitch kitty behind and above him. Well, they wouldn't have returned unless they wanted him alive, so Brickshitter was just playing with him, driving him as a man drives cattle with a prod. Beam weapons were limited in rate of fire and accumulator charge; maybe Brickshitter would empty this one with his trembling.
Then, horrifyingly near, above the ravine lip, the familiar voice: “I offer you honor, monkey.”
What the helclass="underline" the navigator knew where his quarry was anyhow. Mopping a runnel of blood from his face, Locklear called upward as he continued his scramble. “What, a prisoner exchange?” He did not want to be more explicit than that.
“We already have the beauteous kzinrett,” was the reply that chilled Locklear to his marrows. “Is that who you would have sacrificed for your worthless hide?”
That tears it; no hope now, Locklear thought. “Maybe I'll give myself up if you'll let her go,” he called. Would I? Probably not. Dear God, please don't give me that choice because I know there would be no honor in mine…
“We have you caged, monkey,” in tones of scorn. “But Grraf-Commander warned that you may have some primitive hunting weapon, so we accord you some little honor. It occurs to me that you would retain more honor if captured by an officer than by a pair of rankings.”
Locklear was now only a hundred meters from the precious cache. He's too close; he'll see the weapons cache when I get near it and that'll be all she wrote. I've got to make the bastard careless and use what I've got. He thought carefully how to translate a nickname into kzin and began to ease up the far side of the ravine. “Not if the officer has no honor, you trembling shitter of bricks,” he shouted, slipping the safety from a sidearm.
Instantly a scream of raw rage and astonishment from above at this unbelievably mortal insult, followed by the head and shoulders of an infuriated navigator. Locklear aimed fast, squeezed the firing stud, and saw a series of dirt clods spit from the verge of the ravine. The damned thing shot low!
But Brickshitter had popped from sight as though propelled by levers, and now Locklear was climbing, stuffing the sidearm into his belt again to keep both hands free for the ravine, and when he vaulted over the lip into low brush, he could hear Brickshitter babbling into his comm unit.