Crack. The hovertank had pivoted and fired a plasma-pulse into an intact house on the other side of the street and a few hundred meters down. Stone spalled away, burning white as it turned to lime; the front of the building rumbled down into the street, and the interior stood exposed. It was like a breakaway doll’s house, kitchen and autochef, bedrooms upstairs with beds neatly made, all perfect and small for a moment before the floors fell in. Rubble cascaded into the street, snapping off trees. The vehicle pivoted again to aim its gun down the street, slid sideways and began circling the pile of broken stone and furniture.
“Now,” Harold whispered.
Thup. The missile whooshed out of the tube, driven by magnetic coils. The kzin tank detected it, lost a vital half-second trying to bring its gun to bear before it was around the last of the stone. The hovertank’s rear swung wide as its bow ground against rock, and the missile arrived overhead. A bang this time, a pancake of orange fire turning to a ball as the self-forging arrowhead of tungsten drove straight down into the upper deck of the war machine. It staggered, died, fell with an echoing clang to the road; hatches like gull-wings popped open on either side just behind the gun.
“Now!” Harold shouted.
His strakaker gave its high-pitched strangled scream, spitting out a stream of high-velocity pellets filled with liquid teflon. Four others did likewise. The two huge orange shapes were springing out of the tank, blurring fast. One staggered in midair, fell to the pavement with a thud audible even now; the other managed to recoil, but a long pink tail and short thick arm sprawled out, motionless. The hand flexed and then went limp, four digits like a big black leather glove, the claws glinting as they slid free a last time. Blood dripped, darker than human; on general principle he emptied the rest of the clip into the compartment, aiming where the body would be. Limb and tail jerked as the pellets jellied the corpse.
“Samedi bless, it worked,” Sam Ogun said.
“Harry, we’ve got to move,” Claude Montferrat-Palme said. “They’re still not trying for a matching orbit with the slowboat”—for some inscrutable alien reason the kzinti had not tried to stop anyone leaving the Alpha Centauri system; contempt, perhaps—”but it’s the last shuttle and the last launch-window.”
“Well, Ingrid’s piloting,” Harold said, forcing himself to grin. Suddenly the noise of fire and distant fighting seemed almost quiet.
“Von Sydow, Hashami,” he called softly. “All clear?”
One of the other guerrillas raised her head to look for the scouts. It vanished in an almost-visible flicker of white light; beam-rifle, close range. The body stayed upright for a moment, then toppled backward like a tree. The screaming began a moment later, astonishingly loud; a month ago he would have sworn it came from something other than a human throat.
“Ratcat!” someone shouted; there was a scramble as they dove for new positions that gave cover to their rear. All but Sam. He came to his knees, raising his jazzer.
“Eat this!” he screamed, and the stubby-barreled weapon thumped twice, pitching out its bomblets.
“Follow me!” Harold yelled on the heels of the quick crumpcrumpcrump of their explosion; there was no time for a firefight. One more human died before they reached what had been a sunken garden behind the house, still screened by the wreckage of a pergola and a scarlet froth of bougainvillea. The broad muzzle of a beam rifle showed above; behind him Claude snapshot with his strakaker, tearing it out of the kzin’s hands. Harold dove through the screen of withes and vines—
—and fell to his back as his feet slipped on flagstones running with blood. Human blood, mostly. Von Sydow and Hashami were here; Hashami’s legs were missing, and her head. Von Sydow was still alive, but it looked as if something had bitten half his stomach out and then pulled.
Something had. It loomed over him, immense even for a kzin, two and a half meters. Infantry this time, synthetic impact-armor glittering where fragments and bullets had cut it, a bone-deep slash on the blunt muzzle running dark-red blood as it reached for him. Pain and hysteria made it disdain the other weapons clipped to its harness; artificial claws of density-enhanced steel glittered and snapped out on its gauntlets as it reached to pull his throat to that mouthful of fangs. His strakaker seemed fixed in honey as he strained to bring it around, finger closing spasmodically on the trigger plate. Pellets splashed on the impact-armor over the thing’s belly, knocking it back. The weapon hissed empty. The kzin straightened with a grunting roar, and then it was coming at him again—
A whining buzz, and it stopped in its tracks. Then it fell, legs useless. Twirling and slashing with its claws even as it collapsed, but Sam danced back, poised as graceful as a matador, moved in with a chopping cut. Kzinti blood smoked away from the buzzing wire edges of his ratchet knife, spurted in hose-like jets from the alien’s throat; the Krio thumbed the weapon off and clipped it back at his shoulder. Behind him a strakaker chittered once and von Sydow’s gasping breath ceased.
“Come on, Mr. Yarthkin,” he said, extending a hand. “Miss Raines is waiting.”
—and Harold jerked awake.
“Hunh,” he mumbled, shaking his head in the darkness, shaking away the nightmare and forty years. His teeth chattered on the glass he grabbed two-handed from the bedside stand; some of the verguuz slopped down the sides, its smell sharp and minty in the stale odors of his bedroom. Fire bloomed in his gut, giving him steadiness enough to palm on the lights. That had been a bad one, he hadn’t had that one for more than a decade.
“But she wasn’t waiting,” he said quietly. The glass crashed against the wall. “She wasn’t there at all.”
* * *
Interesting, Chuut-Riit thought, standing on the veranda of his staff-secretary’s house and lapping at the gallon tub of half-melted vanilla ice cream in his hands. Quite comely, in its way.
In a very unkzin fashion. The senior staff quarters of his estate were laid out in a section of rolling hills, lawns and shrubs and eucalyptus trees, modest stone houses with high-pitched shingle roofs set among flowerbeds. A dozen or so of the adults who dwelt here were gathered at a discreet distance, down by the landing pad; he could smell their colognes and perfumes, the slightly mealy odor of human flesh beneath, a mechanical tang overlain with alien greenness and animals and . . . Yes, the children were coming back—preceded by the usual blast of sound. The kzin’s ears folded themselves away at the jumbled high-pitched squealing, one of the less attractive qualities of young humans. Although there was a very kzinlike warbling mixed in among the monkeysounds. . . .
The giant ball of yarn bounced around the corner of the house and across the close-clipped grass of the lawn, bounding from side to side with the slight drifting wobble of .61 gravities, trailing floppy ends. A peacock fled shrieking from the toy and the shouting mob of youngsters that followed it; the bird’s head was parallel to the ground and its feet pumped madly. Chuut-Riit sighed, finished the ice cream, and began licking his muzzle and fingers clean. Alpha Centauri was setting, casting bronze shadows over the creeper-grown stone around him, and it was time to go.
“Like this!” the young kzin leading the pack screamed, and leaped in a soaring arch, landing spreadeagled on the soft fuzzy surface of the ball. He was a youngster of five, all head and hands and feet, the fur of his pelt an electric orange with fading black spots, the infant mottling that a very few kzin kept into early youth. Several of the human youngsters made a valiant attempt to follow, but only one landed and clutched the strands, screaming delightedly. The others fell, one skinning a knee and bawling.
Chuut-Riit rose smoothly to his feet and bounced forward, scooping the crying infant up and stopping the ball with his other hand.
“You should be more careful, my son,” he said to the kzin child in the Hero’s Tongue. To the human: “Are you injured?”
“Mama!” the child wailed, twining its fists into his fur and burying its tear-and-snot-streaked face in his side.
“Errruumm,” Chuut-Riit rumbled helplessly. They are so fragile. His nostrils flared as he bent over the tiny form, taking in the milky-sweat smell of distress and the slight metallic-salt odor of blood from its knee.
“Here is your mother,” he continued as the human female scuttled up and began apologetically untwining the child.
“Here, take it,” he rumbled, as she cuddled the infant. The woman gave it a brief inspection and looked up at the eight-foot orange height of the kzin.
“No harm done, just overexcited, Honored Chuut-Riit,” she said. The kzin rumbled again, looked up at the guards standing by his flitter in the driveway, and laid back his ears; they became elaborately casual, examining the sky or the ground and controlling their expressions. He switched his glare back to his own offspring on top of the ball. The cub flattened itself apologetically, then whipped its head to one side as the human child clinging to the slope of the ball threw a loose length of yarn. Chuut-Riit wrenched his eyes from the fascinating thing and plucked his son into the air by the loose skin at the back of his neck.