"Noble Hero, please call your companion out."
"Companion?"
She raised a nitesite.
"Noble Hero, I am aware from this device that there is another Hero ensconced in the tall grass not far away. I think it is Vaemar. I mean you no harm. And what harm could a single manrret do to two Heroes?"
She had a point there. And she seemed truly alone. Raargh had heard no other footsteps or mechanisms. He called and Vaemar bounded back towards the light.
"What do you want?" he said again.
"You!" She opened her gloved hands and fired the guns they concealed, spinning on her heel from Raargh to Vaemar. Kzin are inhumanly fast in battle, and it was a very near thing, but with the guns already in her hands she was fractionally faster. When they fell and had ceased to move she called an eight of Kzinti out of hiding and loaded them onto a sled.
Leonie emerged from the great mouth of the Drachenholen as Nils Rykermann landed. She was smeared with mud and had a strakkaker slung over her shoulder. They embraced.
"Another dirty day for you." Nils Rykermann was wearing a modern fabric jacket. The wet soil fell from it.
"We've penetrated the old 19-K tunnel complex," she answered. "Plenty of mess to clean up." They walked together under the scarred and blasted cliffs through the cave entrance and into the great ballroom of the Drachenholen's twilight zone. Rykermann cast an odd look for a moment at an old habitat module, stripped and plundered long ago by the desperate scavengers of the Resistance, now refitted. He seldom passed it without making a small gesture which Leonie never commented on. The limestone formations, once an incredible fantasy of flowering stone, were blackened and broken above them. The cave floors had been cleared down to bedrock. Bright lights had been strung here and there. There seemed to be no crepuscular life left to disturb.
"Remember our first trips here?" asked Leonie.
"Yes. And the others."
"We thought the caves would be here forever, unchanged. A great biological treasure house. I remember the weeks I took to excavate my first fossil… then we chucked fossils aside as we shoveled out the guano."
"Guano meant bombs," said Rykermann. "Bombs meant dead kzin. Water under the bridge. We'll restore it. What have you done with the students?"
She gestured to lights emerging from one of the tunnels beyond. Several young men and women, wearing masks and breathing apparatus, were trooping out of the cave carrying litters. They bore loads of bones and rags and a few partly mummified bodies and body-parts, human and kzin. "Decent burial," she said. "I've wanted to give it to them for a long time."
"One might say they had decent burial already," said Rykermann.
"They were our comrades. I think some would have wanted their bodies to go home. I found Argyle von Saar. He loved the caves, of course. I left him where he was. He'd be happy his body went into the Drachenholen's food-chain. But some of the others… they'd like prayers and headstones, I think, and grass and sun and the flutterbys."
"You speak as if they were still alive."
"Of course. This ugly rubbish isn't the people we knew. What about these?" She gestured. Another group of students was emerging around a small sledge, purring loudly as it was lifted by a Kzin-derived gravity-motor. It was piled with weapons: kzinti beam rifles and plasma guns, heavier tripod-mounted squad weapons, gas canisters, old human Lewis guns and smart guns, all manner of detritus. Someone had set another mummified kzin on top of the pile, in parody of a conqueror's triumph. "Some of those may still be charged. Get them into one of the outside modules and lock it. I'll keep the key. We'll have to take them to the city as soon as possible. I don't want to lose any more students… Come to think of it," Rykermann went on, "I was talking to a fellow yesterday who began as a museum guard on Earth. UNSN Brigadier now. There should be a museum of the Resistance. He might be able to give us advice in setting it up. Let future generations look at those Lewis guns and wonder at what we were forced to fight with."
"I don't like all these mummies," Leonie said.
"They're hardly very aesthetically pleasant. But they're not the people we knew. Just organic matter going back to nature a bit more slowly. As you say, ugly rubbish."
"I mean, if the skin and tissues haven't been eaten, it shows how little life is left in the caves, where they once crawled with scavengers."
"I knew those scavengers well." They leaned together and he slipped his arm around her. "So did I. So much of the biosystems have been destroyed."
"It was to be expected," said Rykermann. "Plasma guns, gas, biologicals… There are other caves. We'll find the lost species and reintroduce them here."
"No sign of live morlocks yet. I think we and the kzinti may have killed them all between us."
Then be sure to get all the dead material you can. It might make a good graduate student project to clone them."
"I feel guilty about them," said Leonie.
"You killed a good few yourself, my dear. You and me and our furry friend together at one stage."
I know. But we invaded their habitat. And… we have no right to wipe out species."
Not even near-brainless predators of atrocious habits?"
She was silent a moment before replying. Then she answered:
"Not even them… Not even, I think, predators of atrocious habits whose brains are comparable to our own."
"I don't know any creatures whose brains are comparable to our own," he said.
There was a slight stiffening of her body, imperceptible to a casual observer.
"Not even one who saved our lives?"
An edge of iron entered his voice. "I paid that debt in a currency that was understood." Leonie had known terror in these caves during the wars. The Resistance had decorated her and the Free Wunderland government had rewarded her for heroism. She had fought monsters and horrors in the hills of Wunderland and in this stone jungle and beaten them. But now she looked at her husband with a new kind of fear in her eyes.
Raargh recovered consciousness in a police web. Turning his head cautiously, he saw Vaemar similarly restrained a few feet away. There was no sky above them. Their packs had been laid on a small stand in front of them.
The light was reddish, and somehow familiar, as were the high sandstone walls. He remembered: Some outstanding NCO's, himself among them, had been lectured by senior officers of the General Staff. It was like the palace of a kzinti noble, a replica of the noble architecture of Old Kzin. Once, rage would have exploded in him and if he could not have torn the web apart he would have torn himself apart in his efforts to do so. But his years as an NCO, and even more the five years since the Liberation, had taught Raargh self-control. He did not even scream. He remained still and watched Vaemar slowly open his eyes and raise his head.
Footsteps. Human and kzin. A door opening. The human female Emma entered, accompanied by another female he did not know, a male human and a young adult kzin, all armed with nerve-disrupters. The humans were wearing bizarre costumes of orange with variegated stripes. It was almost as if they were trying to imitate the markings of a kzin pelt. The human male bore on the pale skin of its forehead the tattoo of Chuut-Riit's house service. Since tattoos could be removed, Raargh knew it must have retained this voluntarily. Its pallor, and that of the second female, suggested to him that they had long lived away from the sun. The humans went down in the prostration before them, and the second female began to speak in the Slaves' Patois.
"Noble Hero, this slave craves your indulgence to hear her. My daughter and I have done great discourtesy, to you and to He whose blood is the most glorious on this planet. I beg you, stay your wrath while I speak. It is for the sake of the Patriarchy that I have acted so.