Movement at his feet, from the pile of bodies. Cold in his side, so cold, looking down at the hilt of the wtsai driven up into the lung, the overwhelming salt taste of his own blood. The one they called Spotty crawled free of the piled bodies, broken-backed but evading his weakened slash.
“Kill him,” the adolescent panted. “Kill the betrayer, kill him.”
The waiting children shrieked and leapt.
* * *
“He must have made his last stand here,” Zroght-Guard-Captain said, looking around the nursery. The floor was a tumbled chaos of toys, wooden weapons, printout books; the walls still danced their holo gavotte of kits leaping amid grass and butterflies. There was very little of the kzin governor of the Alpha Centauri system left; a few of the major bones, and the skull, scattered among smaller fragments from his sons, the ones wounded in the fighting and unable to defend themselves from their ravenous brothers. The mom stank of blood and old meat.
“Zroght-Guard-Captain!” one of the troopers said. They all tensed, fully-armed as they were. Most of the young ones were still at large, equipped from the practice rooms, and they seemed ghostly clever.
“A message, Zroght-Guard-Captain.” The warrior held up a pad of paper; the words were in a rusty brownish liquid, evidently written with a claw. Chuut-Riit’s claw, that was his sigil at the bottom. The captain flipped up the visor of his helmet and read:
FORGIVE THEM
Zroght chirred. There might be time for that, after the succession struggle ended.
* * *
“Gottdamn, they’re out of range of the last pickup,” Montferrat said.
Yarthkin grunted, careful to stay behind the policeman. The tubecar route was an old one, left here when this was a country club. The entrance was a secluded cleft in the rocky hill, and it appeared on no kzin records; its Herrenmann owners had felt no need to inform the municipal authorities of what they did, and had died in the war. His hand felt tight and clammy on the handle of the stunner, and every rustle and creak in the wilderness about them was a lurking kzin.
Teufel, I could use a smoke, he thought. Insane, of course, with ratcat noses coursing through the woods.
“Are they alive?” he asked tightly.
“The tracers are still active, but with this little interfacer I can’t—Ingrid!”
He made a half-step forward. A pair of scarecrow figures stumbled past the entrance to the cleft, halted with a swaying motion that spoke of despair born of utter exhaustion. The man was scratched and bloodied; Yarthkin’s eyes widened at the scraps of dried fur and blood and matter clinging to the rude weapon in his hand. Both of them were spattered with similar reminders, rank with the smell of it and the sweat that glistened in tracks through the dirt on their faces. More yet on the sharpened pole that Ingrid leaned on as a crutch, and fresh blood on the bandage at her thigh.
Jonah was straightening. “You here to help the pussies beat the bushes?” he panted. Ingrid looked up, blinked crusted eyes, moved closer to her companion. Yarthkin halted, speechless, shook his head.
“Actually, this is a mission of mercy,” Montferrat began in his cool tone. Then words ripped out of him: “Gottdamn, there are two kzin coming up, I’m getting their tracers.” Fingers played over his interfacer. “They’re stopping about a kilometer back—”
“Where we left the body of the one we killed,” Jonah said. His eyes met Yarthkin’s levelly; the Wunderlander felt something lurch in the pit of his stomach at the dawning wonder in Ingrid’s.
“Yah, mission of mercy, time to get on with it,” he said, stepping forward and planting the projector cone of his stunner firmly in Montferrat’s back. “Here.”
He reached, took the policeman’s stunner from his belt and tossed it to Jonah. “And here.” An envelope from inside his own neatly tailored hunting-jacket. “False identity, guaranteed good ones. You’ll have to get cosmetic work done to match, but there’s everything you need in the room at the other end of the tubeline here. Money, clothes, contacts.”
“Tube?” Jonah said.
“Hari—” Montferrat began, and subsided at a sharp jab.
“You said it, sweetheart,” Yarthkin replied. His tone was light, but his eyes were on the woman.
“We can’t leave you here,” she began.
Yarthkin laughed. “I didn’t intend for you to, but it looks like you’ll have to. Now get moving, sweetheart.”
“You don’t understand,” Ingrid said. “Jonah’s the one who has to get away. Give him the permit.”
“The Boy Scout? Not on your life—”
“You can give it to me. No, don’t move.” The voice came from behind him, the tube entrance; a woman’s voice, with a hint of a sneer in it.
“Efficient as usual,” Montferrat said, with a tired slump of the shoulders. “Allow me to introduce my ambitious chief assistant.”
“Indeed, dear Chief,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said as she strolled around to where everyone was visible. The chunky weapon in her arms was no stunner; it was a strakaker, capable of spraying them all with hypervelocity pellets with a single movement of her finger. “Drop it, commoner,” she continued in a flat voice. “Thanks for disarming the chief.”
Yarthkin’s stunner fell to the ground. “Did you really think, Chief, that I wasn’t going to check what commands went out under my codes? I look at the events record five times a day when things are normal. Nice sweet setup, puts all the blame on me . . . except that when I show the kzin your bodies, I’ll be the new commissioner.”
The tableau held for a moment, until Montferrat coughed. “I don’t suppose my clandestine fund account . . . ?” He moved with exaggerated care as he produced a screenpad and light-stylus.
Axelrod-Bauergartner laughed again. “Sure, we can make a deal. Write out the number, by all means,” she taunted. “Porkchops don’t need ngggg.”
The stylus yawped sharply once. The woman in police uniform fell, with a boneless finality that kept her finger from closing on the trigger of her weapon until her weight landed on it. A boulder twenty meters away suddenly shed its covering of vegetation and turned sandblast-smooth; there was a click and hiss as the strakaker’s magazine ran empty.
Yarthkin coughed, struggled not to gasp. Montferrat stooped, retrieved his stunner, walked across to toe the limp body. “I knew this would come in useful,” he said, tapping the captured light-pencil against the knuckles of one hand. His eyes rose to meet Yarthkin’s, and he smoothed back his mustaches. “What a pity that Axelrod-Bauergartner was secretly feral, found here interfering with the Hunt, a proscribed weapon in her hands . . . isn’t it?” His gaze shifted to Ingrid and Jonah. “Well, what are you waiting for?”
The woman halted for an instant by Yarthkin. “Hari—” she began. He laid a finger across her lips.
“G’wan, kid,” he said, with a wry twist of the lips. “You’ve got a life waiting.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, slapping the hand aside. “Murphy’s Balls, Hari! I thought you’d grown up, but not enough, evidently. Make all the sacrificial gestures you want, but don’t make them for me.” A gaunt smile. “And don’t flatter yourself, either.”
She turned to Jonah, snapped a salute. “It’s been . . . interesting, Captain. But this is my home . . . and if you don’t remember now why you have to get back to the UN, you will.”
“Data link—”
She laughed. “It would take hours to squirt all that up to Catskinner and you know it. Get moving, Captain. I’ll be all right. Now go.”
He started to protest and his finger throbbed unbearably. “All right, but I’ll wait as long as I can.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort.”
He hesitated for a second more, then walked to the tubeway entrance. A capsule hissed within.
Ingrid turned to face the two men. “You males do grow up more slowly than we,” she said with a dancing smile in her eyes. “But given enough time . . . there are some decisions that should have been made fifty years ago. Not many get another chance. Where are we going?”
Montferrat and Yarthkin glanced at each other, back at the woman, with an identical look of helpless bewilderment that did not prevent the policeman from setting the tube’s guidance-plate.
“All three of us have a lot of catching up to do,” she said, and swung the hatch down over herself.
“Well,” Montferrat said dazedly. “Well.” A shake of his head. “You next.”
“Where did you send her?”
Montferrat grinned slightly. “You’ll just have to trust me to send you there too, won’t you?” Much of the old tube system was still functioning.
“Claude—”
“You’ve been there. A landing stage, and then aircar to my family’s old lodge. I’ve kept it hidden from—from everyone.” He laughed slightly. “You’ve already had a head start with her. A few more days won’t matter. But when I get there, I’ll expect equal time. Now get moving, I have to set the stage.”