They scrambled past mounds of soft dirt until Locklear felt cool night air on his face. “You may quit insulting my tail now,” Kit growled. “We must wait inside this tunnel awhile. You take this: I do not use it well.”
He felt the cold competence of the object in his hand and exulted as he recognized it as a modem kzin sidearm. Crawling near with his face at her shoulder, he said, “How’d you know exactly where I was?”
“Your little long-talker, of course. We could hear you moaning and panting in there, and the magic tools of my mate located you.”
But I didn’t have it turned on. Ohhh-no; I didn’t KNOW it was turned on! The goddamned thing is transmitting all the time . . . He decided to score one for Stockton’s people, and dug the comm set from his ear. Still in the tunnel, it wouldn’t transmit well until he moved outside. Crush it? Bury it? Instead, he snapped the magazine from the sidearm and, after removing its ammunition, found that the tiny comm set would fit inside. Completely enclosed by metal, the comm set would transmit no more until he chose.
He got all but three of the rounds back in the magazine, cursing every sound he made, and then moved next to Kit again. “They showed me what they did to Scarface. I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Kit. He was my friend, and they will pay for it.”
“Oh, yes, they will pay,” she hissed softly. “Make no mistake, he is still your friend.”
A thrill of energy raced from the base of his skull down his arms and legs. “You’re telling me he’s alive?”
As if to save her the trouble of a reply, a male kzin called softly from no more than three paces away: “Milady; do we have him?”
“Yes,” Kit replied.
“Scarface! Thank God you’re—”
“Not now,” said the one-time warship commander. “Follow quietly.”
Having slept near Kit for many weeks, Locklear recognized her steam-kettle hiss as a sufferer’s sigh. “I know your nose is hopeless at following a spoor, Rockear. But try not to pull me completely apart this time.” Again he felt that long bushy tail pass across his breast, but this time he tried to grip it more gently as they sped off into the night.
* * *
Sitting deep in a cave with rough furniture and booby-trapped tunnels, Locklear wolfed stew under the light of a kzin glowlamp. He had slightly scandalized Kit with a hug, then did the same to Boots as the young mother entered the cave without her kittens. The guard would never be trusted to guard anything again, said the towering Scarface, but that rescue tunnel was proof that a kzin had helped. Now they’d be looking for Boots, thinking she had done more than lure a guard thirty meters away.
Locklear told his tale of success, failure, and capture by human pirates as he finished eating, then asked for an update of the Kzersatz problem. Kit, it turned out, had warned Scarface against taking the priests from stasis but one of the devout and not entirely bright males they woke had done the deed anyway.
Scarface, with his small hidden cache of modern equipment, had expected to lead; had he not been Tzak-Commander, once upon a time? The priests had seemed to agree—long enough to make sure they could coerce enough followers. It seemed, said Scarface, that ancient kzin priests hadn’t the slightest compunctions about lying, unlike modern kzinti. He had tried repeatedly to call Locklear with his all-band comm set, without success. Depending on long custom, demanding that tradition take precedence over new ways, the priests had engineered the capture of Scarface and Kit in a hook-net, the kind of cruel device that tore at the victim’s flesh at the slightest movement.
Villagers had spent days in building that walkway out over a shallowly sloping lake, a labor of loathing for kzinti, who hated to soak in water. Once it was extended to the point where the water was four meters deep, the rough-hewn dock made an obvious reminder of ceremonial murder to any female who might try, as Kit and Boots had done ages before, to liberate herself from the ritual prostitution of yore.
And then, as additional mental torture, they told their bound captives what to expect, and made Scarface watch as Kit was thrown into the lake. Boots, watching in horror from afar, had then watched the torture and disposal of Scarface. She was amazed when Kit appeared at her birthing bower, having seen her disappear with great stones into deep water. The next day, Kit had killed a big ruminant, climbing that tree at night to recover her mate and placing half of her kill in the net.
“My medkit did the rest,” Scarface said, pointing to ugly scar tissue at several places on his big torso. “These scum have never seen anyone recover from deep body punctures. Antibiotics can be magic, if you stretch a point.”
Locklear mused silently on their predicament for long minutes. Then: “Boots, you can’t afford to hang around near the village anymore. You’ll have to hide your kittens and—”
“They have my kittens,” said Boots, with a glitter of pure hate in her eyes. “They will be cared for as long as I do not disturb the villagers.”
“Who told you that?”
“The high priest,” she said, mewling pitifully as she saw the glance of doubt pass between Locklear and Scarface. The priests were accomplished liars.
“We’d best get them back soon,” Locklear suggested. “Are you sure this cave is secure?”
Scarface took him halfway out one tunnel and, using the glowlamp, showed him a trap of horrifying simplicity. It was a grav polarizer unit from one of the biggest cages, buried just beneath the tunnel floor with a switch hidden to one side. If you reached to the side carefully and turned the switch off, that hidden grav unit wouldn’t hurl you against the roof of the tunnel as you walked over it. If you didn’t, it did. Simple. Terrible. “I like it,” Locklear smiled. “Any more tricks I’d better know before I plaster myself over your ceiling?”
There were, and Scarface showed them to him. “But the least energy expended, the least noise and alarm to do the job, the best. Instead of polarizers, we might bury some stasis units outside, perhaps at the entrance to their meeting hut. Then we catch those kshat priests, and use the lying scum for target practice.”
“Good idea, and we may be able to improve on it. How many units here in the cave?”
That was the problem; two stasis units taken from cages were not enough. They needed more from the crypt, said Locklear.
“They destroyed that little airboat you left me, but I built a better one,” Scarface said with a flicker of humor from his ears.
“So did I. Put a bunch of polarizers on it to push yourself around and ignored the sail, didn’t you?” He saw Scarface’s assent and winked.
“Two units might work if we trap the priests one by one,” Scarface hazarded. “But they’ve been meddling in the crypt. We might have to fight our way in. And you . . .” he hesitated.
“And I have fought better kzinti before, and here I stand,” Locklear said simply.
“That you do.” They gripped hands, and then went back to set up their raid on the crypt. The night was almost done.
* * *
When surrendering, Scarface had told Locklear nothing of his equipment cache. With two sidearms he could have made life interesting for a man; interesting and short. But his word had been his bond, and now Locklear was damned glad to have the stuff.
They left the females to guard the cave. Flitting low across the veldt toward the stasis crypt with Scarface at his scooter controls, they planned their tactics. “I wonder why you didn’t start shooting those priests the minute you were back on your feet,” Locklear said over the whistle of breeze in their faces.
“The kittens,” Scarface explained. “I might kill one or two priests before the cowards hid and sent innocent fools to be shot, but they are perfectly capable of hanging a kitten in the village until I gave myself up. And I did not dare raid the crypt for stasis units without a warrior to back me up.”
“And I’ll have to do.” Locklear grinned.
“You will.” Scarface grinned back; a typical kzin grin, all business, no pleasure.
They settled the scooter near the ice-rimmed force wall and moved according to plan, making haste slowly to avoid the slightest sound, the huge kzin’s head swathed in a bandage of leaves that suggested a wound while—with luck—hiding his identity for a few crucial seconds.
Watching the kzin warrior’s muscular body slide among weeds and rocks, Locklear realized that Scarface was still not fully recovered from his ordeal. He made his move before he was ready because of me, and I’m not even a kzin. Wish I thought I could match that kind of commitment, Locklear mused as he took his place in front of Scarface at the crypt entrance. His sidearm was in his hand. Scarface had sworn the priests had no idea what the weapon was and, with this kind of ploy, Locklear prayed he was right. Scarface gripped Locklear by the neck then, but gently, and they marched in together expecting to meet a guard just inside the entrance.