Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (48 page)

It was time for the power approach, and Flex returned to auto, making sure he had a clear visual of Annie. His tube tumbled head over heels, the thruster no longer breaking. Now it accelerated him forward, low over the ground that was still hidden by darkness. Annie’s tube also turned, right on schedule, as did the others, which were now fifty-three meters away. Still manageable, but they had a lot of ground to cover before final braking.

They glided into badlands seeped in pre-dawn mist, the guidance systems keeping them low, between the hills, and then threading them through sandstone canyons and monuments that leaped from the shadows as if they were shoots seeking light. Flex’s tumbler dodged and weaved, leaving him free to scrutinize Annie’s.

Her tube was negotiating the labyrinth, so its maps and guidance were operational. But execution was sluggish—it was slow to evade on all planes. These mountains and rocks provided perfect cover for tiny personal craft to sneak in, but there was no room for the kind of slop that Annie’s tumbler was exhibiting. He watched with horror as Annie careened toward an outcropping, only to avert it at the last minute.

“Not while I’m here,” Flex said, adding a choice swear word he overheard in an isolated vacuum plant while still a boy on Jinx. That was not far from Brain Freeze, where he later learned what the word really meant.

A large stone pillar loomed ahead, and he felt his tube adjust for a tight pass. That’s how this course had been charted, as a geographilic caress of the landscape. Even though they had strayed from the plan, the guidance system adjusted. He felt his thruster ease off some, but noted that Annie’s did not.

That was the problem, then. Somehow her tube was not modifying its speed properly, so its steering was wild and uncontrolled. She was going to hit that mountain.

In desperation, Flex kicked over to manual and gunned it. His tumbler shot ahead, directly toward the rock wall. He caught up with Annie and pulled alongside. With a hearty “Tabam!” he nudged over, physically knocking her tube away from the death ahead.

It worked. He saw her tube shoot off to the left, to a relatively open area. His own tube had yawed to the right, so to avoid the mountain, he had to shoot around the other side, losing sight of Annie. He found her again, this time sliding dangerously toward a rock-ribbed plain.

“Come on, Annie, wake up!” he said. “I can’t steer for both of us!”

He zipped in her direction, taxing the poor maneuverability of the tumbler. The only evident way to keep her from crashing would be to get underneath her, and jostle her upward. He straightened out in front of her and cut power. Annie’s jet was pegged, and as she passed above him he bumped her just enough to level her off. Then he allowed her to move ahead again.

“Wake up, Annie, we need you! You’re the only one who can get S’larbo out alive!” A calculated exaggeration.

Ahead, the ground sloped slowly, sinking into a verdant morass. The kzin backyard was somewhere in that jungle, and somehow he had to get them safely grounded there.

Twice, Flex kicked Annie’s tumbler this way and then nudged it that. One last time he saw the other four tumblers kilometers away. Then the green hills separated them from sight.

Trees seemed to shoot into the sky, the tumblers rising above them, Annie’s with a little kiss from Flex’s. It was impossible to steer the speeding tubes between such dense obstacles.

An alert signaled the final tumble. Flex’s tube pitched 180 degrees back to the braking position that had countered the planet’s gravity a while ago. Annie’s followed suit and their thrusters beat at the steaming air above the forest canopy. Flex predicted that if her thruster did not modulate it would overbrake, and she would drop into the ground like a hot javelin through snow. So with his own retro roaring, he again slid beneath her and gave her an upward push, their hulls grinding together like teeth.

Too much. He contacted off center, too close to the engine. Her tube rose into the air, while his own, scorched from her flaming exhaust, began to shut down. The last thing he saw was her tube, still on a defective autopilot, tumbling back into braking attitude, but yawing and rolling like a snuffed candle discarded into a cloud-spackled sky.

Completely fried, Flex’s tumbler lost power, and the crash net deployed prematurely, draping uselessly over his legs. In utter blackness, he felt the tumbler chopping branches away from the canopy.

He wished that he had broken silence before losing power, if only to say good-bye. What more was there to lose?

* * *

The benefit of autopilot is that the organic pilot is free from complicated tasks to focus on tasks more reliant on a natural intelligence. Yet the human mind has its own autopilot, wherein autonomic bodily functions or rote activities continue without conscious management. In Flex’s case, his autopilot was shock-induced, his full consciousness deferred. His legs moved him through the kzinti recreational area, his throbbing head unaware of his surroundings. When he came upon a running stream, a decision was forced upon him, and that kicked him back into manual.

Flex remembered where he was. Slowly, his vision widened, and with a lone breeze that meandered through the trees, he heard the multitude sounds of the jungle. Insects circled him, distant unknown animals barked and cried, and overhead, the whir of a motor grew faint and was gone. A bird began a sweet chirping that invariably ended in a mock-death scream. Its
warble-warble-tweet-tweet-YAAAGH
neatly encapsulated the beauty and horror of any number of jungles in known space. The sun slanted through the steamy air, slicing the contours of gray-green foliage into confusion.

Born and raised in the nearly doubled gravity of Jinx, Flex Bothme was short and stocky, a knotted muscle of a man. Such a knot might slip at any moment, and he often had. He was wearing cammo flight togs, and his wristcomp still worked. Apparently, he had been walking for only a few minutes. He thought to backtrack to his tumbler, but suddenly he remembered Annie Venzi. If she was still alive, she was in mortal danger, so he had to find her immediately. Had he, in his traumatized subconscious, calculated which way she must be? He’d been walking northeast before encountering the stream. That would be about right, so he decided to continue.

A large winged insect dared a pass at his neck, but before he could swat it, it changed his mind. “Guess I don’t smell right,” he muttered. On Gummidgy, Annie and Flex chased pests through the air with a sizzler, and then swung lazily in a hammock. They watched the wan light of the little moon bobbling on Circle Sea, and then made love. That was number nine on their “worlds to make love on” list. Flex swore to himself that if he found her alive on Meerowsk, he’d make love to her there and then, even if it meant
mission interruptus
.

In the sandy loam at his feet, fresh footprints from a small clawed animal with at least four legs ran along the stream. Flex was not a tracker, but he was not the stereotypical dull-witted Jinxian either. It was obvious that the thing had lingered for a drink and then bounded downstream, to his left. This might be important if the animal was being tracked by kzinti hunters. After all, this was a recreational park designed for their amusement. Flex might suddenly find himself the prey of known space’s finest hunters.

He scanned the shallow stream up and down. He had a sidearm, but would be no match for a kzin in this situation. Even if he survived, there would be no way to rescue Annie. Come to think of it, his best chance to find her was if the kzinti found her for him. And there was one way he could help them do that.

Flex used his wristcomp to estimate the direction of Jarko-S’larbo’s lodge. His comp calibrated to the planet’s magnetic field, and he bounded off in that direction. If he could surrender to the kzinti, he might be able to bargain for her life, mission be damned. Annie had always said it was a bad idea to serve together. Despite all the fun and profits they’d had, she was right. What good was it earning money to buy expensive treatments to try to extend their short Jinxian lives if you got killed in the process?

Only bruised here and there, Flex made good time through the forest, but he was far from stealthy. He heard the crashing of limbs behind and above him—something large but elusive was leaping from tree to tree, chasing him. He darted behind a thick mossy trunk, drew his flashlight laser, and chanced a look back.

Nothing. Whatever it was, it was clever. His eyes darted around, but could not detect a trace of the arboreal predator. He hadn’t studied the native fauna, because they were supposed to have landed nearer to the kzin compound, and there was no time to look them up now.

A tentative rustle from above. No doubt that by hiding, Flex had signaled a disadvantage that the beast above sensed. If it’s eat or be eaten, Flex’s choice was clear, and he broke cover, crouched and took rough aim.

The thing growled, a marbled, choking sound. Flex’s sidearm could out-growl that. He shot at the thing in the shadows, missing but making his point. Before he caught so much as a sight of it, the creature’s growls were echoed from all directions.

There were a lot more of the things closing on him. So much for growling. Flex stood and ran like hell in his original direction, laser in fist. He heard rustling above, like a hurricane whipping at the trees. Maybe Annie was lucky; if still unconscious, she would be in the safety of her tumbler.

He thought to turn and fire, but hearing the beasts both behind and above, he knew it wouldn’t buy him a quantizer’s nano. It might, however, get someone else’s attention.

He made for an open area where the predators would have to come down from the heights, improving his odds. In the center of the clearing was a rocky knoll, and he climbed that, turned, and fired at will.

The creatures were cats the size of kzinti, but they were not kzinti. Flex had never seen them before, but they reminded him of saber-toothed tigers from pictures, except that these were green and gray, and stout. Black stripes ran straight back from the eyes like tears peeled from the eyes by racing the wind in the treetops.

He took two of them down with one slow sweep, but one got back up, and a dozen more appeared at the forest wall. The laser wasn’t powerful enough to take out these cats quickly—it would take a concerted beam. Now the tigers were wary, but they quickly circled the clearing. Their ears were long and laid back, their jutting teeth curved like scimitars.

“Can anybody hear me?” Flex shouted to the trees. He repeated the call in the Heroes’ Tongue.

The cats roared, and he fired at will, wheeling from his rocky roost. This cowed them only for a moment, then they moved closer, still circling. No solitary hunters, these. The green cats were methodical and organized. Perfect prey for the kzinti, who were ever thirsty for more challenging sport. Probably genetically created just for this purpose, Flex thought.

He fired more shots, taking out several tigers. He also took some random long shots in the direction he thought the kzinti were. “Come on you ass-lickers!” he shouted at the kzinti. “You’re missing some good
killzerkitz
hunting here!”

One of the tigers leaped at Flex. He took his best shot, hitting it square in the chest. At the same time, he whirled to find a second cat attacking from his rear. He had anticipated that, and took it down, too. But sooner or later, he would miss, or would be overwhelmed. Sooner, he knew. Even his fellow tumblers could not help him now, and they were doubtless continuing the mission elsewhere.

Angry, Flex fired randomly at the monsters, trying to break up their formation. They slunk back and forth—he had bought a few more seconds.

Then, words, unexpectedly screamed from the shadows. “Hold your fire, you stupid monkey!”

The tigers turned on the speaker, a large kzin hunter who screamed and leaped from the jungle onto the back of one of the green things. Flex expected a furious cat-on-cat fight, but the kzin had the beast in a choke hold with one powerful arm, anticipating its reaction. The startled tiger snapped in that direction, lunging its body around to try to throw the kzin off. The kzin hunter let the tiger toss his legs around, and he used that momentum to advantage with his free arm, clawing a deep gash in an arc across the tiger’s throat.

Before the other tigers could react, he had torn open the furry neck of the tiger and thrown the bleeding carcass onto its back. At the same time, a dozen more kzinti screams, and as many dead tigers, and Flex, staring breathless at the slaughter around him.

But three kzinti stood prizeless at the jungle edge, glaring at Flex with eye slits as sharp as their claws. “You stole our prey from us,” one snarled, kicking one of the cats Flex had shot.

Flex exhaled deeply, relieved that the tigers were all lifeless, and certain he could not escape or fight his way out of this jam. He shrugged and dropped his weapon, thinking hard of a ruse to save his skin, and Annie’s.

“You’re wasting your time toying with these pussies,” he said, grinning carefully so as not to show his teeth provocatively. “I know something more challenging for you to hunt, and far more rewarding.”

* * *

Flex stood in the den of Jarko-S’larbo, stripped of weapon, wristcomp, and clothes. The three kzinti hunters whose game he had killed stood around him, constantly poking and clawing at him, gently by their standards, but with the successful intention of drawing a little blood.

The den looked vaguely like a hunting lodge, if only because Flex knew that was its function. It was a long, tall hall with windows on the left, tall tiers of blue carpeted couches on the right, all empty. At the far end was a massive iron fireplace the size of a small lander, burning only a modest fire to one side. Most telling were the numerous trophies, huge toothy creatures stuffed in the most horrific poses. These formed two lines of the grand hall, standing fierce on pedestals carpeted with live grass, perhaps as an eternal insult. They were guardians of an old way of life, preserved by the modern kzinti as evidence of the deep instincts that had not been bred out of them despite centuries of attempts by other space-faring species. The angry kzinti forcibly marched Flex through the gauntlet of taxonomic terrors to the great hearth where the puffy Jarko-S’larbo sat on a cushion, looking like nothing less than an overweight tabby cat curled in front of a fireplace. Next to him purred a
prret
, a female concubine. Not only was she sleeping, she was also loosely bound with red leather leashes, the purpose of which Flex did not want to know. To the left rose a wall of windows, dripping on the outside with condensation that distorted the view of the jungle playground.