Man-Kzin Wars XI by Hal Colbatch (positive books to read .TXT) 📕

When she looked at him now he saw again the expression that had been on her face the first time he had seen her conscious after the operations and the long regeneration processes.

He also remembered her as she had been carried out of the cave, apparently dead or dying from the laser-wound, and his entreaties to her to live, shouted until they sedated him. But she lives, he thought. Thanks to Dimity and to a couple of kzinti, she lives . . . And thanks to a donor, too, whoever she may once have been. Collaborator? War criminal? Accident victim? Best not to think. What does she fear? The idea of yet more monsters unleashed on our world . . . our worlds! . . . or the stranger's body sewn onto her? Or that I am still desperately in love with a beautiful super-genius who saved her life and about whom we can never speak? Oh my poor, dear wife! He stepped forward and took her in his arms. He began to run his fingers down the familiar curve of her spine, then stopped. Once his hands would have known by instinct how to caress her. The first times they had made love when she returned from hospital had been bizarre, and in a real sense frightening, for them both. It had more of comfort and release now, but still . . . Her breasts were still the same firm-tipped softness against him that he knew so perfectly. He felt the body that was not entirely her body respond to him, and the sudden wetness of her tears on the skin of his chest. There was the saltiness of them in his nostrils, more a taste than a smell, the fluttering of her eyelashes' attempt to brush them away. When he bent to kiss her, the part of her skin that touched his lips tasted as it had always done. Much of the rest, he knew, would not.

My dear, dear wife, he thought. Life has not exactly been kind to you. You deserved better. We are casualties of war, we in our way as much as the millions whose bones lie bleaching about this planet. Nothing to do but press on. Kipling had the words for it: "Be thankful you're living, and trust to your luck, and march to your front like a soldier." And you are the bravest soldier I know. But what would I not give to make the world kinder for you?

Chapter 5

Vaemar landed his car in the High Limestone country, the Hohe Kalkstein, in an overgrown glade formed by an ancient cave roof collapse, near the twisted wreckage of an old kzin military sledge, partly covered with reddish vegetation and sunk into the soil. There was also a scattering of bones, gnawed by large and small teeth, bleached and fading into the ground. The Wunderland War Graves Authority had much to do and few people to do it with.

Kzinti loved exploring caves, but unless charging in the heat of battle, no kzin was capable of entering one recklessly. Vaemar had lights and a handgun as well as his w'tsai, and a tough helmet which now had the addition of a lobster-tail neck-guard at the back and epaulettes covering his shoulders—the favorite initial tactic of Morlocks was to drop both rocks and themselves onto the heads of intruders. He checked his radiation detector, very much standard procedure for all who ventured into the great caves of Wunderland, littered with the debris of more than five decades of war. As he crossed the threshold, there was a sharp jump in the gauge and a whirring from its miniaturized descendent of a Geiger counter. Vaemar leapt back. The radiation was not huge, but he saw no reason to expose himself to it. He climbed into a tough, lightweight suit, also standard equipment, and resumed his exploration, keeping a wary eye on the detector.

He moved further into the cave, lights and his own superb eyes sweeping the darkness for any signs of activity. There was nothing on the cave floor, not even the normally ubiquitous vermiform scavengers.

There was little, without major surgery, which they disliked, that could be done to kzinti's eyes to make them more efficient light collectors, but Vaemar did carry a pair of goggles that extended his visual range further. Such simple and lightweight aids were quite new, and humans had reason to be thankful that the kzinti had not possessed them during the war.

There, as Rykermann had described it, was the embankment of earth that covered the containers. Deep layers of mynock droppings showed it had been undisturbed for a long time. Evidently the transitory creatures did not remain long enough for the radiation to affect them.

He set up a motion detector focused into the cave beyond, unfolded a small robot digging tool, and stepped well back as it went to work.

The robot struck solid material after only a few moments. Vaemar deactivated it and stepped forward. One glance was really enough, but he pushed more earth aside to be sure. Beneath the earth was rock. Not only had the containers been removed, the removal had been disguised. The Geiger counter whirred merrily.

Vaemar searched the immediate area thoroughly, but there was no other reasonably possible hiding place. Weapon at the ready, he ventured down the tunnel a long way, out of sight of the daylit mouth and into the beginning of a branching labyrinth of chambers, but again without result. He had compasses, motion detectors and miniaturized sensory devices, all specially developed for such expeditions. Infrared beams in his helmet gradually created a three-dimensional picture of the cave that could be retrieved in several ways, including a hologram.

He found and killed a couple of Morlocks, pausing to note with scientific detachment their body weights and general state of nutrition. He knew better than to try eating the foul-smelling, foul-tasting things. Each tunnel ended at last either in a blank wall, a stream diving under