Which will be needed, Early reflected; the strikes would have lasted microseconds, but the damage was comprehensive. Frozen air glittered in the blind unmerciful light, particles of water-ice and ores and metal mists, of blood and bone. The close-ups showed bodies drifting amid the wrecked fabricators and processing machines, and doubtless the habitat had been a refuge for children and pregnant mothers, as was common in the Sol-belt. Certain things required gravity, and he doubted the kzinti had spread gravity polarizers around wholesale.
A pity, he thought coldly, a little surprised at his own lack of emotion. You could not live as long as he had, in the service to which he had been born, without becoming detached. What is necessary, must be done.
“Why are you wasting efforts here?” he said harshly, watching the growling response of the kzin to the computer’s arrogant synthesis. “Most of the equipment”—the facility had manufactured fission-triggers, superconductors, and degenerate-matter energy storage devices—”seems to be in good order and salvage can wait.” The machine provided his false image with the ripple of fur, ears, tail that provided an analogue of a chuckle. “And the meat will keep.”
“If you sthondat-groomers can’t be of use, get out of the way!” the kzin screamed. Extreme hostility, the computer warned. Intent to initiate violence. “We’re doing emergency rescue work here.”
“Your leader’s concern for monkeys is touching,” Early sneered.
“These are valuable and loyal slaves, personal property of the Patriarchal clan,” the other said. “Evacuate the vicinity.”
“I order you to depart for work of higher priority,” Early rasped. “Co-ordinates follow.”
“I defecate upon your co-ordinates and leave it unburied!” the kzin howled. “I am here under direct orders of the Viceregal Staff!”
“I convey the orders of Ktrodni-Stkaa.”
“Then Ktrodni-Stkaa is a vatach-sucking fool—”
A beam stabbed out from the kzin vessel, deliberately aimed to miss. The torrent of fire that followed from the Inner Circle was aimed to kill, and did so very effectively. The ships had been at zero relative velocity and within a few hundred thousand kilometers, rare conditions for space combat. Precisely-aimed laser and neutral-particle beams from the camouflaged human vessel stabbed into the kzinti corvettes like superheated icepicks. Metal and synthetic sublimed and gouted out in asymmetric jets of plasma. The warships tumbled; the kzin officer’s face was driven into the visual pickup of his screen, a fractional second of horrified surprise before flesh smeared over the crystal. That screen went black, but the exterior pickup showed two brief new stars as fusion warheads detonated point-blank.
“Computer,” Early said. “Broadcast to the survivors”—most of the kzinti crews had been doing EVA rescue work—”that we were acting under Ktrodni-Stkaa’s orders, and that Chuut-Riit’s vessels initiated hostilities. Oh, and hole that transport—gut her passenger compartments.”
“Sir!” One of the others, turning a sweat-sheened face to Early. “Sir, there are humans aboard that transport.”
“Exactly,” Early said with chill satisfaction, as the big wedge-shaped craft blossomed fragments of hull panel and began to tumble slowly. “Son, we’re here to stir up Resistance activity, among other things. You should read more history.” A quasi-pornographic activity, even now that the restrictions of the Long Peace had been lifted. “Our friend Chuut-Riit is a sensible, rational—Finagle, even humane, by kzin standards—pussy. The absolute last thing we want; we want the kzin to be as horrible and brutal as possible, and if they won’t do the atrocities themselves we’ll tanjit do it ourselves and blame them. Besides stoking up dissension within enemy ranks, of course.”
He leaned back. Divide et impera, he thought. The ARM’s true motto, and the Brotherhood’s—with the added proviso that you did it without anyone realizing who was to blame.
He grinned; an almost kzinlike expression. Naive, that’s what these pussies are.
* * *
Chuut-Riit always enjoyed visiting the quarters of his male offspring.
“What will it be this time?” he wondered, as he passed the outer guards. The household troopers drew claws before their eyes in salute, faceless in impact-armor and goggled helmets, the beam-rifles ready in their hands. He paced past the surveillance cameras, the detector pods, the death-casters, and the mines; then past the inner guards at their consoles, humans raised in the household under the supervision of his personal retainers.
The retainers were males grown old in the Riit family’s service; there had always been those willing to exchange the uncertain rewards of competition for a secure place, maintenance, and the odd female. Ordinary kzin were not to be trusted in so sensitive a position, of course, but these were families which had served the Riit clan for generation after generation. There was a natural culling effect; those too ambitious left for the Patriarchy’s military and the slim chance of advancement, those too timid were not given opportunity to breed.
Perhaps a pity that such cannot be used outside the household, Chuut-Riit thought. Competition for rank was far too intense and personal for that, of course.
He walked past the modern sections, and into an area that was pure Old Kzin; maze-walls of reddish sandstone with twisted spines of wrought-iron on their tops, the tips glistening razor-edged. Fortress-architecture from a world older than this, more massive, colder and drier; from a planet harsh enough that a plains carnivore had changed its ways, put to different use an upright posture designed to place its head above savannah grass, grasping paws evolved to climb rock. Here the modern features were reclusive, hidden in wall and buttress. The door was a hammered slab graven with the faces of night-hunting beasts, between towers five times the height of a kzin. The air smelled of wet rock and the raked sand of the gardens.
Chuut-Riit put his hand on the black metal of the outer portal, stopped. His ears pivoted, and he blinked; out of the corner of his eye he saw a pair of tufted eyebrows glancing through the thick twisted metal on the rim of the ten-meter battlement. Why, the little sthondats, he thought affectionately. They managed to put it together out of reach of the holo pickups.
The adult put his hand to the door again, keying the locking sequence, then bounded backward four times his own length from a standing start. Even under the lighter gravity of Wunderland, it was a creditable feat. And necessary, for the massive panels rang and toppled as the rope-swung boulder slammed forward. The children had hung two cables from either tower, with the rock at the point of the V and a third rope to draw it back. As the doors bounced wide he saw the blade they had driven into the apex of the egg-shaped granite rock, long and barbed and polished to a wicked point.
Kittens, he thought. Always going for the dramatic. If that thing had struck him or the doors under its impetus, there would have been no need of a blade. Watching too many historical adventure holos.
“Errorowwww!” he shrieked in mock-rage, bounding through the shattered portal and into the interior court, halting atop the kzin-high boulder. A round dozen of his older sons were grouped behind the rock, standing in a defensive clump and glaring at him; the crackly scent of their excitement and fear made the fur bristle along his spine. He glared until they dropped their eyes, continued it until they went down on their stomachs, rubbed their chins along the ground and then rolled over for a symbolic exposure of the stomach.
“Congratulations,” he said. “That was the closest you’ve gotten. Who was in charge?”
More guilty sidelong glances among the adolescent males crouching among their discarded pull-rope, and then a lanky youngster with platter-sized feet and hands came squatting-erect. His fur was in the proper flat posture, but the naked pink of his tail still twitched stiffly.
“I was,” he said, keeping his eyes formally down. “Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” he added, at the adult’s warning rumble.
“Now, youngling, what did you learn from your first attempt?”
“That no one among us is your match, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” the kitten said. Uneasy ripples went over the black-striped orange of his pelt.
“And what have you learned from this attempt?”
“That all of us together are no match for you, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” the striped youth said.
“That we didn’t locate all of the cameras,” another muttered. “You idiot, Spotty.” That to one of his siblings; they snarled at each other from their crouches, hissing past bared fangs and making striking motions with unsheathed claws.
“No, you did, cubs,” Chuut-Riit said. “I presume you stole the ropes and tools from the workshop, prepared the boulder in the ravine in the next courtyard, then rushed to set it all up between the time I cleared the last gatehouse and my arrival?”
Uneasy nods. He held his ears and tail stiffly, letting his whiskers quiver slightly and holding in the rush of love and pride he felt, more delicious than milk heated with bourbon. Look at them! he thought. At an age when most young kzin were helpless prisoners of instinct and hormone, wasting their strength ripping each other up or making fruitless direct attacks on their sires, or demanding to be allowed to join the Patriarchy’s service at once to win a Name and household of their own . . . his get had learned to cooperate and use their minds!