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

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's 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." A long, sad sigh.

"Come on in."

Silence crackled between them as they waited; Jonah met Hans's 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:

"We can't lug that”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the tnuctipun spyship—“either. Either the bandits will come back with more men, or the real Gendarmerie will show up. The bandits will kill us, the Gendarmerie might and the government will certainly stamp everything Excruciatingly Secret and silence us, one way or another. I'm a pariah, you two are kzin, Fra Nordbo here comes from a suspect family subject to pressure—"

"And I'm a worthless old bushcoot," Hans said cheerfully.

"If we were lucky, they might buy us off," Jonah continued. "If we want to make anything of what we've got, we'd better get out quick and make a sale to the only one who has the resources to make something of this—to Montferrat-Palme. At least we'll have some bargaining position with him."

"That . . . is . . . not . . . all," a voice said behind him.

Jonah shot erect, turning before he came down again. Within its sac of fluid, the tnuctipun's eyes had opened. It stayed in its fetal position, hands wrapped about knees. The three eyes blinked vertically, and the mouth moved; the lips seemed almost prehensile, and they were not in synch with the words that he heard. The translator program, then.

"I . . . will . . . not . . . be . . . buried . . . again."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Durvash whimpered to himself, eyes squeezed tightly shut. Agony, agony to speak. Agony to think. Last. He was the last. I failed. Suicide night had succeeded. The thrint had won. Egg mother. Womb mother. Father. Siblings. All dead. The tnuctipun race was dead, and he was the last. The last by three billion years. One-celled organisms had evolved to intelligence while he lay within this planet's crust. He was not even sure it was the planet he had lost consciousness on; there was more than enough time for