“Let me guess—the other side doesn’t like Terrans?” Dick hazarded.
“I wish it was that simple. Unfortunately, the other side worships the kreshta as children of their prime deity.” Vena couldn’t quite repress a snarl. “Kill one, and you’ve got a holy war on your hands—we’ve been slaughtering hundreds for better than two years. The attempt on the Octet was just the opening salvo for us heretics. The Chief Minister has been here, telling me all about it and falling all over himself in apology. Here—” She pulled a micro reader out of a drawer in her desk and tossed it to him. “My head of security advises that you commit this to memory.”
“What is it?” Dick asked, thumbing it on, and seeing (with some puzzlement) the line drawing of a nude Lacu’un appear on the plate.
“How to kill or disable a Lacu’un in five easy lessons, as written by the Patrol Marines.” Her face had gone back to that deadpan expression again. “Lieutenant Reynard thinks you might need it.”
The prickling of claws set carefully into his clothing alerted him that one of the cats was swarming up to drape itself over his shoulders, but somewhat to his surprise, it wasn’t SKitty, it was SCat. The tom peered at the screen in his hand with every evidence of fascinated concentration, too.
He was Patrol, after all. . . . was his second thought, after the initial surprise. And on the heels of that thought, he decided to hold the reader up so that SCat could use the touch screen too.
It was easier to disable a Lacu’un than to kill one, at least in hand to hand combat. Their throats were armored with bone plates, their heads with amazingly thick skulls. But there were vulnerable major nerve-points at all joints; concentrated pinpoint pressure would paralyze everything from the joint down when applied there. When Dick figured he had the scanty contents by heart, he tossed the reader back to Vena, though what he was supposed to do with the information was beyond him at the moment. He wasn’t exactly trained in anything but the most basic of self-defense—that was more in Erica Makumba’s line, and she was several light-years away at the moment.
“The Lacu’un Army has been alerted, the Palace has been put under tight security, and the caretakers of the other cats have been warned about the poisoning attempt. However, the mysterious kitchen-helper got clean away, so we can assume he’ll make another attempt. My advisors and I would like to take him alive if we can—we’ve got some plans that may abort this mess before it gets worse than it already is.”
SCat’s deep-voiced growl showed what he thought of that idea, and Vena lowered her smoldering, dark eyes from Dick’s to the tom’s, and smiled grimly.
“I’d like to put a Marine guard on the cats—but I know that’s hardly possible,” Vena continued, as SCat and SKitty voiced identical snorts of disdain. “But let’s walk back over to the Palace and talk about what we can do on the way.”
SCat looked up at him and made an odd noise, easy enough to interpret. “SCat thinks he and SKitty can guard the kittens well enough,” Dick replied, as Vena waved him through the door, a torrent of cats washing around his ankles.
“I’m sure he does,” Vena retorted. “But let’s remember that he’s only a cat, however much his genes have been tweaked. I hardly think he’s capable of understanding the danger of the current situation.”
“He isn’t just a cat, he was a Patrol cat,” Dick pointed out, but Vena just shook her head at that.
“Dick, we don’t even know exactly what we’re into—all we know is that there was an attempt to poison the cats by an assassin that got away. We don’t know if it was a lone fanatic, someone sent by our hosts’ enemies, if there’s only one or more than one—” She sighed as they reached the street. “We’re doing all the intelligence gathering we can, but it’s difficult to manage when you don’t look anything like the dominant species on the planet.”
The street was empty, which was fairly normal at this time of day when most Lacu’un were inside at their evening meal. The sky of this world seemed a bit greenish to him, but he’d gotten used to it—today, there were some clouds that might mean rain. Or might not, he didn’t know very much about planet-side weather.
SCat’s squall was all the warning Dick got to throw himself out of the way as something dark and fast whizzed through the place where he’d been standing. SKitty and the kittens fairly flew back to the safety of the Embassy, SCat whisked out of sight altogether; a larger, cloaked shape sprang from the shadows of a doorway, and before Dick managed to get halfway to his feet, the grey-cloaked, pale-skinned Lacu’un seized Vena and enveloped her, holding a knife to her throat.
“Be still, blasphemous she-demon!” it grated, holding both Vena’s arms pinned behind her back in a way that had to be excruciatingly painful. She grimaced but said nothing. “And you, father of demons, be still also!” it snapped at Dick. “I am the righteous hand of Kresh’kali, the all-devouring, the purifier! I am the bringer of cleansing, the anointed of God! In His name, and by His mercy, I give you this choice—remove yourselves from our soil, take yourselves back into the sky forever, or you will die, first you and your she-demon and your god killing pests, then all of those who brought you.” Its voice rose, taking on the tones of a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. “Kresh’kali is the One, the true God, whose word is the only law, and whose minions cleanse the world in His image; His will shall not be flouted, and His servants not denied—”
It sounded like a well-rehearsed speech, and probably would have gone on for some time had it not been interrupted by the speaker’s own scream of agony.
And small wonder, for SCat had crept up unseen even by Dick, until the instant he leapt for the assassin’s knife-wielding wrist, and fastened his teeth unerringly into those sensitive nerves at the joining of hand and wrist.
The knife clattered to the street, Vena twisted away, and Dick charged, all at the same moment; his shoulder hit the assassin and they both went down on the hard stone paving. But not in a disorderly heap, no; by the time the Marines came piling out of the Embassy, alerted by the frantic herd of cats, Dick had the miscreant face-down on the ground with both arms paralyzed from the shoulders down. And, miracle of miracles, this time he wasn’t the one battered and bruised—in fact, he was intact beyond a few scrapes!
He wasn’t taking any chances though; he waited until the Marines had all four limbs of the assassin in stasis-cuffs before he got off his captive and surrendered him.
“Do we turn him over to the locals?” one of the Marines asked Vena diffidently.
“Not a chance,” she growled. “Hustle him into the Embassy before anyone asks any questions.”
“What are you going to do?” Dick asked sotto voce, following the Marines and their cursing burden.
“I told you, we’ve got some ideas—and a couple of experiments I’d rather try on this dirt-bag rather than any Lacu’un volunteers,” was all she said, leaving him singularly unsatisfied. All he could be certain of was that she didn’t plan to execute the assassin out-of-hand. “We caught him, and we’ve got a chance to try those ideas out.”
He continued to follow, and was not prevented, as Vena led the way up the stairs to the Embassy med-lab. The entire entourage of cats followed, and Vena not only let them, she waved them all inside before shutting and locking the door. The prisoner was strapped into a dental chair and gagged, which at least put an end to the curses, though not to the glares he cast at them.