He inspected the interior with optical enhancers, and found three hairs-finer than those on any kzin’s pelt-and all without pigment. In daylight, they would be white.
“Is this a billion-year-old joke?” Navigator asked.
“No. The box was inhabited by a live animal,” Nyawk-Captain replied. “Too small to be a Thrint. Unlikely to be a Tnuctip.”
“But now we have nothing to show for our effort… and for the delay.”
“Do you have a problem with that?” Nyawk-Captain asked pointedly.
“No, sir. But now we should give full attention to repairing Cat’s Paw and resuming our flight to attack Margrave. The mission has not yet become problematical.”
“We still have time to find the contents of the box-and the humans who stole it.”
“Not with the sensory equipment we have at band.”
“Then use your skills as Navigator. Plot me a course. Use the Leaf-Eaters’ stripped hull as a starting point. One vector is defined by our first sighting of this box, now a burned-out hole in a tree. The second sighting point, where we actually found the box, yields another vector. Assume, to begin with, that the humans have no means of transport nor any logical destination other than the hull. Then give me their probable locus within those limits.”
“Right away, sir.”
“Narrow the field for me, Navigator, and we’ll find the thieves by using our native hunting instincts.” He turned to Weaponsmaster. “Can you readjust the circuits of that homing radar for a slightly different concentration of carbon?”
“It’s almost dawn.”
“How can you tell?”
“I think I can see my feet.”
“The brush does seem lighter.”
“Ouch! Damn it! I give up.”
“It’s probably safe to rest here.”
Without answering, Sally Krater released enough of the monofilament to allow her to sit on the branch that had tripped her. She let the rest of it float around her face-and didn’t care if it snagged on anything and cut off her nose.
“We may not be as far ahead of the kzinti as Jared and Hugh now are,” Gambiel said.
“How do you figure?”
“When we stopped to take bearings-”
“And open the box, remember.”
“- and open the box,” he agreed, “we lost valuable time. And we haven’t been making it up in the dark.”
“What can we do about that?”
“Listen!”
“How’s that going to “Hush!”
Krater cocked her head and listened. Faintly, through the brush, she could hear a crashing and snapping of the greenery. It was behind them, coming along their back trail.
Gambiel thrust the flute-thing and the white dog into her arms. Before she could stop it, the dog jumped free. It started to run off in the opposite direction, then turned and looked back at her. A long, hard stare that seemed to be full of meaning.
“Go along, now,” the Jinxian told her.
“But you “I’ll delay them. Go.”
Krater stood up and took in the slack monofilament.
“Come here, Fellah!” she called in a low voice.
The dog came up to her and stood on its hind legs, putting a paw on her knee. She scooped up the animal and hit her winder’s clutch. In less than a minute, she had gone twenty meters higher and thirty meters farther into the jungle canopy.
Gambiel turned about-f ace, called upon all his inner strength, his chi, and began his patient preparations. After a lifetime of training and development, he was finally going to fight a kzin in the flesh. It was likely to be wearing armor, he knew, but Gambiel had his laser rifle and the advantage of surprise.
He retrieved his grapple, loaded the launcher and fired straight up. The grapple thunked into solid wood ten meters overhead. Slowly, so as to make as little noise as possible, Gambiel raised himself off the stable branch layer where he and Krater had paused to rest and where a full grown kzin in armor would undoubtedly choose to walk. He stopped when he found a tunnel through the leaves that gave him an angle back to that stouter layer. His view crossed their earlier track through the area. Then he hung quietly, staring down and holding the rifle, at full charge, across his thighs. Gambiel made himself as still as a bow hunter waiting in the dawn above a game trail.
The kzin came into view, placing its feet with great care, advancing cautiously from limb to supporting limb. For all its mechanical encumbrance and the excess weight, the warrior was still moving incredibly smoothly. The body markings on this suit of armor were different from those on the kzin that Gambiel and the others had watched leaving the enemy ship the day before. (Had it been no longer than that?) This one was clearly a different member of the crew.
Gambiel raised the rifle with hypnotic slowness and sighted on the gap which showed orange fur between the jaw extender and the articulated breastplate-the place where a suit of human armor would have fastened a steel gorget.
His first pulse of coherent blue light, even masked by the gloom of the forest canopy, sent the kzin hurtling sideways. However, a flash of white smoke and a startled “Rowrrl!” told Gambiel that something tender had been burned.
Stumbling off balance, the kzin almost crashed through the unstable floor. Then it might have fallen ninety meters or more, to be painfully damaged if not killed. But the armored figure managed to right itself.
Gambiel lined up on the edge of his aiming hole and fired another pulse, seeking another tender spot. Instead, he touched the ablative surface of an armored gauntlet. It dissipated the energy ma spark of ceramic fragments, leaving only a small, white crater in the material. Then the kzin was up and moving forward, climbing over intervening branches, walking into the point source of the laser pulses. It was hunched over-not in pain, Daff knew, but only so that it offered the thicker material of the shoulder and neck plates to the oncoming fire.
Gambiel reeled in on his winder, moving higher as quickly as he could, and kicked backward to put himself beyond the kzin’s reach. His retreat was limited, however, by the set of his grapple.
The kzin was upon him too quickly and knocked the rifle aside. The weapon fell and disappeared through the green canopy floor.
Before the warrior could strike again, Gambiel hit the release latch on his climbing harness and dropped, on all fours, ten meters to the canopy’s base layer. He grasped with his hands and snagged with his feet among the vines. Once he knew he was not going to fall through, he raised his body in a wrestler’s crouch and looked up and around, ready to meet the kzin.
The kzin-too heavy to drop like that-climbed quickly down to his level and stopped, considering Gambiel. Daff could read its reactions. Even though the human was now unarmed, its stance was not that of prey. He was actually challenging the kzin. And the tattoo on Gambiel’s forehead might be familiar from kzinti training tapes. Somewhere they must have described a breed of humans so marked, who would actually fight barehanded.
The kzin appeared to reach a decision. Slowly and deliberately, gesturing to make itself understood, it keyed a release button. The armor sprang apart like a cracked crabshell. The kzin kicked the suit aside-and it, too, fell through the loose floor. Daff’s opponent raked its own flanks in a brief scratch. Gambiel visibly bent his knees into a deeper crouch, preparing to absorb the shock of the first attack across the springy floor layer. He dug in his toes and raised his hands in a defensive position.
Human and kzin confronted each other with a long stare. The kzin seemed to be focusing on the Hellflare tattoo. Maybe the warcat did understand its meaning.
The kzin screamed and leaped directly at Gambiel.
Gambiel lifted his left foot from the entangling vines, straightened his right leg and-hoping he wouldn’t screw himself right down into the criss-crossed foliage-performed a perfect veronica around the swinging left paw. Its claws extended five centimeters outside the flashing orange blur. As the furred flank passed, Gambiel struck backhanded at the third skeletal nexus. He heard as much as felt the joint crack.