Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (27 page)

“What are you seeing with thermal imaging?” she shouted above the wind.

The senior of the two security specialists shook his head. “Nothing yet.”

That was the same moment that the pilot switched on the forward floodlights, and the paddock gate jumped out of the darkness in high contrast: a sudden, vertical blue-white mesh that scalloped itself out of the surrounding black.

And it was open.

Selena saw the reason faster than she could blink her eyes: cracked wedges of stone—mostly slate, from the look of it—littered the area around the shattered lock. Hap had wedged them in, tighter and tighter until the lock had burst.

But no, that didn’t make any sense: the lock was rated for far more pounds per square inch than either Hap or the bear could generate on their own, even if they threw themselves headlong against the gate with a running start . . .

Yes, it was strong enough to thwart either one of them—but not both.

The monstrous genius of Hap’s plan now unfolded before her. He had baited the bear into charging against the fence repeatedly. And every time that mountain of muscles, bone, and fangs crashed into the gate, Hap had jammed a slightly wider wedge into the space between the frame and the lock until, adding his own strength, the gate was sprung.

“Damn it,” the senior security specialist snapped, “how did this happen? Where are the drones? Where are the—?”

And then Selena saw the telltale signs of the rest of Hap’s careful handiwork and planning. He had built the equivalent of a lean-to about two hundred meters away from the paddock: the semi-autonomous drones were littered about it. He had evidently watched how they operated, had discerned the one constant pattern: one was always close, three were farther off. So when he went into the lean-to, the closest drone lost access, tried following him in—and had been smashed with the discarded cudgel Selena saw in the doorway. One after another, the smart ’bots had demonstrated just how titanically stupid they really were. Why there had not been better oversight, she would inquire later: someone had evidently taken a very long coffee break. Which, now that she thought about it, was yet another pattern that Hap had probably figured out by testing the responsiveness of the drones. He had obviously learned to distinguish when they were receiving overrides from a live operator in comparison to when they were simply following the predictable commands of their expert system. Meaning that he had been able to put his plan into action when the odds were high that he was under automated, rather than live, surveillance.

“I’ve got a thermal bloom—there.” The security specialist pointed up toward the ridgeline. “Downloading coordinates.”

“ETA?” Selena demanded.

The pilot looked back; he and the security specialist exchanged glances. The latter coughed deferentially: “Dr. Navarre, the safety protocols are quite clear on this matter. When we do not have clear visual lock on any of the predators in the preserve, we are to assume—”

“I wrote those protocols, damn it, and now I am ordering you to disregard them. On my authority.” She faced the pilot. “Fly. Now.”

He did.

* * *

They could hear the melee almost three hundred meters away, even over the attitude fans and screaming engine of the floater: a constant counter-point of basso-profundo bellows and high-pitched kzinti yowls of what sounded like ecstatic fury. She had heard Hap fight predators before, but the sound had never been like this. She leaned over the pilot’s shoulder and shouted: “Hurry!”

The floater sped forward and then swerved into the steep-sided arroyo that cut lengthwise into the ridge, paralleling the crest before narrowing to a dead-end. The pilot reached for the floodlights. Selena put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t you want to save him, Doctor?”

“Yes, but if we’re going to be sure of doing that, we don’t dare blind him.”

“Then use these, ma’am.” The junior security specialist, who was not much more than a kid, handed her his combo-goggles: light intensification blended with thermal imaging, software-integrated to provide maximum visibility under changing conditions. She slipped them on.

And her breath caught in her throat. Hap was doing something she had never seen before: he was retreating. His fur sticking slick against his body from the sweat pouring out of him, he scanned the surrounding slopes, looking for a way out.

The bear rushed him, so large that even before it got to him, Selena was unable to see Hap over its shambling bulk.

There was a flash of bioheat on shadow—Hap dodging toward the canyon wall—as the bear lunged, raking long claws at the evasive kzin, who, grazed, spun like a top, his yowl echoing up out of the ravine.

But Hap never really fell; tumbled by the glancing blow, he landed and jumped in the same moment, and was suddenly attached to the bear’s right flank, all four paws spread wide, claws buried in the thick hide, his jaws reaching, snapping up toward the spine.

Which was when the bear rolled, but not away from the attack: rather, the bear rolled into it.

Hap had never encountered such a move, possibly because he had never encountered so large and comparatively invulnerable opponent. Even the modern brown bears had instinctively pushed themselves away from the teeth-bristling kzin jaws. Which had made for a predictable endgame: Hap was so much faster that, by swinging himself aggressively into the roll, he always came down on the far side of the bears, his body wide of their dangerous jaws and arms. That was always the beginning of the end: the only variable was the time required to finish the job.

But the prehistoric bear had no fear of Hap, and if it felt the need to protect its head and neck from the kzin that had attached itself to its left side, that need was not stronger than its impulse to roll in the direction of its attacker, thereby crushing him beneath his metric ton of mass.

Which squeezed a scream out of Hap that sent a needle of fear-pain lancing down into Selena’s bowels and which she realized was a stab of maternal terror. Until the senior security specialist grabbed her shoulder roughly, she didn’t realize that she had also moved next to the railing, one leg already rising to clear it. She didn’t notice the specialist’s startled stare: she saw nothing but the battle down in the arroyo.

The bear, feeling Hap’s grip weaken and his teeth release into a scream, twisted so that the kzin was now mostly under him. The beast’s immense head, as large as a small refrigerator, bore Hap down, struggling and squirming as he was pinned in place by the snout. The jaws opened like those of a small steam-shovel and then snapped closed, locking down on the kzin’s upper left ribcage.

The sharp splintering of kzin bone reminded Selena of a sound she had heard years ago, sailing with Dieter down in Florida: their four-inch fiberglass mast had snapped in a sudden gale off the Florida Keys. Hap’s ribs sounded like three of those masts breaking in rapid sequence.

Hap squirmed, thrashed, yowled, blood welling up out of his throat, staining his maw.

“Do you have a shot?” Selena coughed through the bile in her throat and mouth.

The senior security specialist shook his head. “Steady this damned floater,” he growled at the pilot. Knowing, as they all did, that the thermals here were just enough to put a dangerous, unpredictable quiver in the vehicle, no matter what the pilot did.

And there wasn’t the time, anyway. Selena could tell, seeing with eyes that had learned to read such actions and understand their portents millenia ago, that the bear would soon attempt to shift to a final, mortal bite. It was in the sideways slide of the creature’s shoulders, the sudden rigidity of the head as it prepared for the kill.

But, whether it took the bear longer to get better purchase for that next bite, or perhaps the unexpectedly alien taste of a creature that did not share its genetic rootstock, the bear opened its maw a fraction sooner than instinct had instructed. Then the massive jaws pushed in quickly again, looking for a bigger mouthful of kzin to crush.

Selena gasped—not at the bear’s lunge but at Hap’s blinding speed. In the half eye-blink that the ursoid’s vicelike jaws relented, the kzin became a writhing corkscrew-blur of orange and black. The bear’s jaws snapped down resoundingly on thin air. Hap’s blood, trailing behind as he made his almost balletic escape, landed in a wide, dark arc upon the dry ground.

Selena thumped the driver on the back. “Now! The floodlights! NOW!”

The pilot complied, and the bear flinched away, the lights full in its eyes. Hap, half-facing the other direction, was not so completely blinded, and reacted with extraordinary speed and tactical presence of mind.

As the bear tried to avoid the light, obviously uncertain what to do next, the kzin quickly scanned the sides of the arroyo, and found what he was looking for: a rocky outcropping. Knowing it to be too steep and small to be useful as a perch, Selena did not understand Hap’s intent—until, gauging the bear’s half-blind approach, he leapt straight at the stony protrusion.

But instead of landing on it, Hap used it like a springboard: all four limbs were extended like ready shock absorbers when he hit it. In the split second before gravity could pull him down, he looked like a bug, fantastically affixed to the wall of the arroyo. Then he pushed off with savage force, propelling himself at the bear: he twisted in mid-air and landed square on his adversary’s back.

Normally, this would be when Hap would go for a killing bite to the back of the neck. But judging from the torn fur of the bear, he had already tried that tactic and had discovered the almost armored skeleton residing beneath that thick hide: even for the manic strength of a combat-stimulated kzin, the skull and neck bones of
arctodus simus
were simply too hard to snap or even dent.

So Hap adapted: holding on with his teeth and rear claws, he used his front paws to rake down across the bear’s face, from over the top of its head. The bear shook, seemed about to reprise its defensive roll, and then howled as a razor-sharp kzin claw found its mark: an eye. Forgetting the roll, the bear tried breaking away, running. Hap hung on, slashed, slashed again—and another, even more piteous roar announced the loss of the bear’s other eye.

Hap wasted no time, ripping with mouth and claws at the side of the bear’s face. It flinched away, stumbled: Hap was there again, teeth sinking deep into one of the steady legs.

The bear went down. A flash of black and orange was quickly at the side of its throat, well wide of the bear’s killing jaws, and behind the sweeping arc of its front paws. Hap buried his face deep into that part of the neck that would have housed the carotid artery in a human . . .

. . . Four of whom watched, speechless, from the airborne platform of the floater. Then the young security specialist retched. A moment later, his superior muttered, “Jesus Christ.”

Selena tapped the stunned, motionless pilot lightly on the back. “Kill the lights,” she said.

2408 BCE: Sol System, Asteroid Belt near Ceres

Dieter Armbrust knew he had lost the last smallship in his command group a moment before his SensorOp reported it. “Jiang just bought it, sir. Orders?”

Well,
thought Dieter,
now, commanding the 128th Squadron just means I have to fight my ship. For as long as I can. Which might not be very much longer,
he conceded, with a glance at the plot.

The three remaining kzin Raker IIs were closing in on him from three points of the battlesphere: high to port, low on the bow, dead astern. The starboard side was occluded by a planetoid whose identifying number he’d forgotten. It wasn’t one of the major ones: it showed some evidence of old robotic prospecting, but no active mining. Not surprising: judging from the densitometer scans, it was just dead rock.

But that dead rock had kept him alive, shielding him from counter fire while the last two ships of his command—Jiang’s and his own
Catscratch Fever
—concentrated their fire on one half of the kzin squadron that they had baited into this part of the Belt. But now the other half of the ratcat formation was coming in on him, pinning him against the planetoid. Or so they intended.

Still, the kzinti had recovered quickly from Dieter’s ambush, a skill at which they had been steadily improving since their invasion force had arrived insystem twelve days ago. Scream-and-pounce was no longer the full measure of their tactical repertoire. They had become canny hunters, too, and this group had been the canniest yet.

And Dieter Armbrust would know. He had been in the thick of the fighting since this fourth kzin fleet had made its real objectives clear: to smash the defenses of the Belt as a preliminary to attacking Earth. The ratcats had become smarter, considering the unfolding game two or three moves in advance, instead of being constrained to their prior engagement doctrine of “damn the torpedos; full speed ahead.” Almost two weeks’ worth of human ruses and decoy ships, double-reverses, and delayed envelopments had taught them not to ignore the torpedos (or any of the other human toys in the battlespace) and to proceed with a judicious mix of decisiveness and caution.

But I’ve still got one trick left up my sleeve,
thought Dieter
.
“Ms. Hitsu, ready at the helm: we are bringing the auxiliary thrust package on line within the minute. Until then, slow to one-quarter, feathering the gravitic planer to simulate battle damage.”

“Should I engage the damage simulation subroutine, Captain Armbr—?”

“Not entirely. Use occasional overrides. I’m worried that our automated damage mimicry is becoming predictable enough that their computers can detect it. It was a great trick a week ago, but it’s getting old. Time to revivify it by throwing in some random human overrides.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Paraway?”

“Engineering here, sir.”

“If we dump the current charge stored in our capacitors, how fast can we initiate the auxiliary thrust package?”

“About two seconds, sir.”

“Then prepare to do so on my mark.”

“Awaiting your mark, sir.”

On the plot, Armbrust watched as the three motes designating the kzin ships closed in, the one astern closing the gap most rapidly, the one on his bow coming fully out of the shadow of the planetoid alongside which the
Catscratch Fever
was making its now unsteady way. The bogey to port was keeping distance: she’d taken some beam damage at the start of the engagement, and might not be so ready to mix it up at closer ranges anymore. All the better.