Oh, well-there are monkeys down there I can kill, he thought gloomily.
“Sssisssi!’ Bigs snarled, and forced his clawed hand down again. “We should have pursued,” he went on.
“Shut up,” Tyra said, working the sprayskin around the depilated patch of singed flesh that ran down the barrel ribs of the big kzin’s body. “We’re not in any shape to pursue three times our number. Defending gave us an advantage.”
Jonah sighed and sipped again at his canteen, looking around the campsite; they had moved into the outer edge of the shaft, in case the bandits tried to sneak a sniper back, and left sensors scattered about outside with Spots to oversee. The kzin seemed depressed; not so Bigs, who was a little manic by his own surly standards. He lifted his beltphone.
“Spots, anything?”
“No. They ran, and continued to run to the limit of the audio sensor’s ability to detect the footfalls of their riding beasts.” A sigh. “Must we really leave all those bodies?”
“Yes!” Jonah snapped, swallowing at certain memories of his own. Every once in a while, you remember that they’re not humans in fur suits. “Last thing we want is a posse-mob of outbackers on our trail, understood?” Wunderlanders would not react well to the thought of kzin eating even dead bandits.
“Understood.” Along, sad sigh.
“Come on in.”
Silence crackled between them as they waited; Jonah met Hans’s eye, and got a slight nod in return. Tyra finished with Bigs and stepped quickly away, aware that an injured kzin was unlikely to tolerate much contact with a human. Got brains, that girl, Jonah thought admiringly. Spots ducked in between the screens and stopped, turning his head inquiringly towards his brother, ears cocking forward and nostrils flaring. Then he rippled his fur in a shrug and squatted against the restraining timbers of the far wall, hands resting on the ground before him.
“We can’t stay here,” Jonah said abruptly. “There’s something you should know: I don’t think that those bandits were acting on their own.”
It took a few minutes to sketch in Jonah’s relations with Buford Early, and Early’s campaign of persecution. Silence followed, and he went on:
“We can’t lug that”-he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the tnuctipun spyship-“either. Either the bandits will come back with more men, or the real Gendarmerie will show up. The bandits will kill us, the Gendarmerie might and the government will certainly stamp everything Excruciatingly Secret and silence us, one way or another. I’m a pariah, you two are kzin, Fra Nordbo here comes from a suspect family subject to pressure-“
“And I’m a worthless old bushcoot,” Hans said cheerfully.
“If we were lucky, they might buy us off,” Jonah continued. “If we want to make anything of what we’ve got, we’d better get out quick and make a sale to the only one who has the resources to make something of this-to Montferrat-Palme. At least we’ll have some bargaining position with him.”
“That…is…not…all,” a voice said behind him. Jonah shot erect, turning before he came down again. Within its sac of fluid, the tnuctipun’s eyes had opened. It stayed in its fetal position, hands wrapped about knees. The three eyes blinked vertically, and the mouth moved; the lips seemed almost prehensile, and they were not in synch with the words that he heard. The translator program, then.
“I…will…not…be…buried…again.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Durvash whimpered to himself, eyes squeezed tightly shut. Agony, agony to speak. Agony to think. Last. He was the last. I failed. Suicide night had succeeded. The thrint had won. Egg mother Womb mother Father Siblings. All dead. The tnuctipun race was dead, and he was the last. The last by three billion years. One-celled organisms had evolved to intelligence while belay within this planet’s crust. He was not even sure it was the planet he had lost consciousness on; there was more than enough time for his damaged craft to have drifted through several systems. Time for all the bodies of thrint and tnuctipun and shotovi and zengaborni to rot away, and the fabric of their cities to erode to dust and the dust to be ground down under moving continents, and for stars to age and Rest, the faithful machines said; they had no souls, no souls that longed for the deep red velvet sleep of death. Your functions are at less than 45% of optimum and you must rest for the healing to be complete.
He jerked. No. I must think. He was not the last tnuctipun! His race had won, not the mouth-beshitting Slavers. Joy brought Durvash tears as painful as despair. He existed; his autodoc and computer existed. They contained the knowledge to clone his cells, to modify the genetic structures to replicate individuals of all three sexes. Genetic records of thousands of tnuctipun; that was part of the general autodoc system. His rubbery lips peeled off his serrated teeth in aggression pleasure. Tnuctipun were pack-hunters of great sociability; group survival was sweet ecstasy.
I will need facilities. Laboratories, tools, time. The current sentients here would be complete fools to allow a rebirth of the tnuctipun species, of tnuctipun culture-and all of that was encoded in the memory of his computer as well.
They were not complete fools. Not very bright by tnuctipun standards, but then few races were. They were certainly more acute than thrint-by about a fifth to a third, he judged, from the hour or so of conversation, and to judge from their technology. It was fairly advanced, in a quaint sort of way-the beginnings of an industrial system, interstellar travel and fusion drives.
They were divided, too. Species from species, as was naturaclass="underline" the tnuctipun word for “alien” translated roughly as “food that talks”. Also individual from individual, a common characteristic of inferior races-he quickly suppressed memory of his own rivals at home. Durvash knew what to make of that. He had been trained as a clandestine agent, and his proudest accomplishment had been an entire thrint world wiped clean of life by engineering a civil war between thrintun clan elders.
The large carnivore, he decided. Carnivores were easiest to work with, in his opinion-as he was one himself. He is in a minority of one. It should be easy to persuade him to use the neural-connector earplug. That would make communication easy, and certain other things, if the biochemistries were similar enough.
Durvash squeezed his eyes shut. No warrior of tnuctipun had ever been so alone as he. He had lost a universe; there was a universe to win.
If I do not go mad, he thought; although his autodoc would probably not let him do so. He did not know if that was fortunate, or the most terrifying thing of all.
Sleep…
The little caravan prepared to depart in the blueish half-light of Beta dawn, with Alpha still a hint on the horizon, blocked by the peaks whose passes they would have to traverse. The mules had become inured to kzin scent-somewhat-and were loaded first, to proceed Tyra’s skittish horses who were doubly disturbed by the smell of carnivore and the dead horses from yesterday’s battle. Fading woodsmoke and coffee smells mixed with the crisp earthy scent of dew on the bushes, and the cries of birds and gliders cut a sharper undercurrent through the sound of the waterfall. That came into focus again, now that they were leaving it after so many months of labor.
“Done right well by us, this mountain,” Hans said reflectively, strapping the packsaddle of his mule. “Wonder Wit has a name? Not likely,” he decided. “Too small.” The little eroded volcanic peak was a midget among the Jotuns, even in the comparatively low hollow.
“Muttiberg,” Tyra said, passing by with her saddle over her shoulder. The dog Garm pressed against her leg, casting another apprehensive look back at the two kzin. He had been trying to keep himself between her and them since she rode into camp, despite the flattened ears and tucked tail of intimidation. Kzinti were nightmares to canines, of course. “The locals call it the Mother Mountain-for obvious reasons.”