Man-Kzin Wars V by Larry Niven (people reading books txt) 📕

desperately sincere. Tanj, why couldn't she be a middle-aged battleaxe of eighty?

"All right," he said. "I'll play it safe." Because if we do give up our guns, there's our options gone right there. "You get over there east of the Brothers Kzinamaratsov; they might come up the gully."

To his surprise, he heard her chuckle—he had only taken up ancient literature in the last year himself; data was free, if nothing else—and she touched a finger to her brow before heading off east with an expert's use of cover.

"If this ID is genuine," Jonah called down to the man halfway up the slope, "then you won't mind me calling in to Munchen for confirmation. Leutnant Gruederman."

Gruederman began a snarl, and forced it back into a smile. Docking contact, Jonah told himself. Tyra was right.

"Hey, man, we don't want to steal your guns—it's the law, you know. Here—" he shoved the other man "—we'll give you compensation."

"See," the little man said, rummaging in his knapsack. "This is worth three, maybe four hundred krona!" He held up a briefcase sized box, an obsolete model of musicomp and library. "Good stuff, pre-war!"

Stolen from some farmer you bushwhacked, Jonah thought grimly. He took up the slack on his trigger and put the aiming point on the musicomp. Whack. The casing exploded and the little bandit went howling and whirling away, face slashed by the fragments. The sharp sound of the high-velocity round went echoing off down the valley in a whack-whackkkkk of fading repetitions.

"Get moving," Jonah called flatly.

The bandit chief's face convulsed, going from a broad grin to an expression that was worthy of a kzin. Spittle flecked out as he screamed:

"You can't do this to Ed Gruederman! I will boot your head!"

The smaller bandit had recovered enough to unlimber his jazzer. A round cracked over Jonah's head; by reflex he shifted aim and sent a short burst into the man's torso. It blossomed out in a mist of sliced bone and flesh as the prefrag bullets punched in and disintegrated, a thousand crystalline buzzsaws of adamantine strength. By the time he shifted back it was too late. Gruederman threw himself backward in a desperate flip, somersaulting and rolling down the short distance to cover. Bullets pecked at his shadow, and then the whole treeline opened up. Magrifle bullets chewed at the stone, and a boulder exploded as a tripod-mounted beamer punched megajoules of energy into its brittle structure. Thunder rolled back from the cliffs.

"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's 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