“Let ‘em have it!” Jonah yelled.
Unnecessary, but satisfying. He rolled a half-dozen paces to his right, rose, fired a burst, ducked and rolled again. Hans was shooting from his position over the diggings, single shots. A man screamed and fell from a tree in the valley below, and the beamer fell silent. Over to the left the kzin were popping up for fractional seconds and sending bursts from their captured beamers, using heavy weapons like rifles, inhumanly quick and accurate. Trees below exploded into steam and supersonic splinters. Their screams sounded louder than the noise of battle, daunting in a way that the mechanized death they wielded was not. Hair rose on human spines, a fear that went back to the caves and beyond.
Wonder what Tyra’s doing, Jonah thought in a second of calm. Hope she hasn’t got buck fever.
Spots flicked himself up with a heave of his body. It was just enough to clear head and hands above the scree ahead of him; the aimpoint of the beamer settled on the target he had picked on his last shot, and it exploded with steam. From vegetation, and as he dropped and rolled he could smell flash-cooked monkey as well. He shrieked exultantly:
“Eeeeeereeieiaiiaaiawiowiue!” The kzinti are upon you! He had a wide arc before him, with a deep narrow ravine full of brush that stretched right down to the river. Already an arc of riverbank forest before him was burning. He looked down at the power readout of the beamer; almost half discharged. A pity, since he liked this weapon. The two strakkakers strapped to his thighs seemed like feeble toys in comparison, although the grips had been modified for kzin hands.
The next shot almost brought disaster. A fragment caught his forehead, and stinging blood covered his eyes as he dropped back into the protection of the rock. With a yowl of impatience he felt at the injury, even as rounds chewed at the tumbled volcanic basalt ahead of him. It was painful enough to wake him to full fury, the area above his brow-ridges cut to the bone and a flap of skin hanging free; his ears rang, and his mouth filled. He swallowed and forced pain and dizziness back. That had almost killed him; many monkeys would die for their presumption, and he would chew their livers. In the meantime he had to get the blood out of his eyes; it was blinding him, and the rank scent of kzin blood dulled his nostrils.
A yowl from Bigs meant that he had caught that smell too. “All’s well!” he snarled back. “Look to your front.”
There was a length of gauze in his beltpouch. He pushed the flap of skin back into position—he would get a worthy battlescar out of this, but in the meantime it stung—and began binding the wound with an X-shaped bandage, anchored by a loop under the base of his jaw and around the rear bulge of his skull. Hurriedly he poured water from his canteen over his brows and eyelashes, snuffling and scrubbing and licking his nose to clear his senses. A sharp scent of eucalyptus almost made him sneeze; some tree damaged in the fight, he supposed.
“Behind you!” a human voice screamed.
It was utterly unexpected, but Spots’ reflexes wasted no time on surprise. He dropped sideways.
A bandit lunged through the space he had occupied a moment before, with a vibroblade outstretched before him. It whined into uselessness as the humming wire edge sliced into rock. The knifeman’s face had just enough time to begin to show surprise when the kzin’s full-armed swing ripped out his throat almost to the neckbone and threw him ten meters through the air. The instinctive full-force effort swung Spots around in a three-quarter turn, his body betraying him in a G field barely a third of the one for which it had evolved. That exposed him to fire from below for a moment—rock spalls stung his shoulders—and left him helpless as the second bandit six meters away raised a strakkaker left-handed. The forty-round clip of liquid-teflon filled bullets would rip the kzin’s body open like an internal explosion.
The bandit’s head vanished from the shoulders up in a spray of red, gray and pink. The body stood for two seconds with blood fountaining up to where the face would have been, took two stumbling steps forward, and collapsed across Spots’ tail. He blinked surprise and looked.
Tyra-human lay prone beside another boulder, slapping another cassette into her rifle. She gave him a brief nod before moving off to a fresh firing position; her face was gray, and she smelled of fatigue poisons and nausea, an acrid scent.
Spots went flat again and readied his beamer, but the savor had gone out of the fight. Bigs owes a life to Jonah-human. Now I owe a life to Tyra-human. Two lives the honor of the House of Chotrz-Shaa owes to Man. It is too much. How will I know the balance of debt and obligation, unless the Fanged God tells me? Like most modern kzin, Spots had worked at rejecting religion as unfashionable. The effort wasn’t entirely successful. Intellect was one thing; but belief in the Fanged God was built deep into the kzin culture, and a desire to believe had been built into their very genes. The Conservators of the Patriarchal Past had a fertile field to sow. Now Spots wished he had listened more closely to the Conservators. It would take a God to figure out this tangle.
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’ 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: