Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (40 page)

“To lead from the front. And no more maneuvering. We have enough forces to push the humans to the other end of the valley if we are bold enough, strong enough, fierce enough: if we listen to the Heroes’ blood of our sires, singing in our veins.”

“But Freay’ysh-Administrator, we have been trying—”

“That is the problem, Captain.” He left out his subordinate’s Name purposefully: the veiled threat of Name revocation teetered on the edge of actualization. “We have been ‘trying.’ Trying is for kits and cubs: we do or we die. That is the truth of the Hero. Now, I shall reaffirm that truth. You will stay here, Captain, with the support services section and this number-loving leaf-eater’s spawn.” The adjutant whimpered, but also struggled to keep his lips together over his gritting teeth. “You will coordinate with the rear. That seems a fitting job for you both.”

Zhveeaor-Captain reared up. “If the failure is so completely mine as you deem, Freay’ysh-Administrator, I again offer my Name and my harem—”

“Keep your Name so that we may better attach your shame to it. And what mangy collection of females would stay in a harem of yours rather than scratch open their own veins? None that I would deign to
ch’rowl
with.” Aggression pheromones streamed out of Freay’ysh-Administrator: he could smell them pouring out of his body. He felt alive and vital once again. He noted Zhveeaor-Captain’s rigid stance and his suddenly muted pheromones: he elected to interpret it as cowardice rather than a further sign of the captain’s almost preternatural self-restraint. Teeth bared at his two subordinates, Freay’ysh-Administrator reared up to his full height and closed the side clasps on his ballistic armor. “I will go into the valley at the head of all our forces, find our foes, defeat them, and suck the marrow from their bones. Stand aside, you nuzzlers-of-genitals: make way for a true Hero. ”

* * *

Mads came stumbling into the CP, out of breath. Hilda knew what his message was before he opened his mouth, knew it because Mads was too old to run flat out for anything less than a crisis, and because John Smith had been expecting the news for two days, now. “How many and how fast?” Hilda asked, shouldering the cut-down kzin beamer that was her new personal weapon. Most of the large kzin weapons took two humans to hold and operate, even after the grips, forestocks and other outsized furniture was reduced. But the ’Runners had been able to modify a few of the carbine-sized beamers they had captured so that they were no more unwieldy than a big human assault rifle.

“They’re coming fast and on a broad front. As for how many—” Mads took a deep breath “—damn me if it ain’t all of them, Hilda.” He looked around. “Where’s Smith?”

The perpetual question and, now that she and the captain were lovers, her own secret embarrassment:
where’s Smith?
What could she say? The most martial occupation Smith had undertaken in the past week was to supervise the construction of the pillbox-fort two kilometers further east, then oversee the excavation and concealment of defilading trenches on the flanking heights. But, then, toward the end of each day, her hero-paramour would once again steal away to contemplate the flowers, trees, and bushes in some intense myopia of fascination that might have been appropriate for a botanist or Romantic poet but not for the captain of a guerilla war band. It was as if he went into the jungles and marshes looking for a sign, an omen. One that was apparently very slow in coming.

“He’s off being nature-boy again, isn’t he?” Mads voice had edged into pity for Hilda: he was one of the few who was aware of her relationship with Smith.

“Not anymore,” announced a voice from the doorway.

They turned as Smith entered at a brisk pace; he was wearing the secure box like a backpack now, and moved purposely to the trunk that was his gun and ammo locker. “How long until they get here, Mads?”

“An hour, maybe two if we give them a stiff fight.”

Smith turned, eyes sharp. “No, Mads. Pass the word: no one runs, but no one is to hold a clearly compromised position.”

“Damn it, Smith, the moment the kzinti start attacking a position in earnest, it gets compromised. Pretty quickly, too.”

“That’s fine. We’ve drilled this for weeks. Our troops are to fall back, each defensive line leapfrogging to the rear and into the next open set of defensive positions.”

Mads looked grim. “So: no secret weapon to save the day, after all.”

Smith smiled. “Oh, the secret weapon is quite ready. Fully deployed.”

“What? When did you—?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s in place now and primed.”

Mads frowned. “Well, what is it and how do we use it? Is it remote-activated? Or remote-operated? Do we have to—?”

Smith had his
strakkake
r in hand: on his back was one of the three kzin fire-and-forget missiles they had taken. “Mads, listen to me: we don’t need to worry about the weapon. It doesn’t require our control.”

“Okay, but—but how do we coordinate with it? We need to know its area of effect so that we can adjust our own—”

“Mads.” Smith smiled, waited. “Mads. You’re listening, but you’re not hearing me: the weapon takes care of itself. Entirely. We don’t need to control it, or adjust to work with it, not beyond the preparations we’ve already made. Now, get those orders to the unit runners. And Hilda, have Margarethe take the snipers to the bolt-holes in grid box delta-tango. They’re to stay fully concealed until the kzinti have gone past.”

“And then hit them in the rear.”

“Under no circumstances are they to hit them in the rear. Not until they hear three shrills of my whistle. Again, just the way we drilled it.”

“So what are they to do? Follow the kzinti and watch the fun?”

“Yes, from a safe range. Beyond detection.”

Mads shook his head. “And you think that’s going to work? That the kzinti won’t have rear-area security units watching for that kind of trick?”

Smith’s smile widened. “That’s exactly what I think, Mads. Now: you have your orders. And remind our people: final fall-back is to the bunker.”

“It isn’t big enough for all of us,” Hilda said in a hushed voice. “You must be expecting a lot of casualties.”

Smith kept smiling. “Are the civvies already there?”

“Sent at the first sign of the new attack. They’re already inside the walls.”

“Good. Send them into the underground shelter.”

“And then what?”

“And then the civvie group leaders we’ve trained will help Papa ’Runner take it from there. Now scoot.”

* * *

A sergeant, whose name Freay’ysh-Administrator suddenly could not remember, bounded to his side. “Success again, Freay’ysh-Administrator. We have driven the humans back from another line of defenses.”

“Yes, yes, but how many have we killed?” Freay’ysh-Administrator gnashed his fangs at the mere thought of seeing ruined, gutted, dismembered human bodies. In a brief moment of calm between the quick, pounding waves of fury and bloodlust, he knew that this was bad command image, that the sergeant might believe his commander was verging over into the Unknowing Rage.

But evidently the sergeant did not notice, or did not care—possibly because his own exposed teeth, stooped posture, and intense pheromonal secretions indicated that he was even closer to the mind-blanking fury that his commander was narrowly holding in check. “Not as many dead leaf-eaters as we would wish, Freay’ysh-Administrator, but that is only because they are running like terrified, self-soiling
sthondats
.”

Freay’ysh-Administrator let his pelt ripple wildly and his lips roiled away from his teeth. “Let them run. Because there is no way for them to get past us, and this valley is a dead end. For them, a truly dead end. We must wait a little while longer, but—the slaughter at the climax! The slaughter!”

He imagined himself coated in human blood, mounting endless throngs of kzinretti: his own, Chuut-Riit’s, every kzinrett he had ever seen or smelled. The rut-aggression surged; he would kill the females which did not please him, which did not writhe against him with enough desperate fear and eagerness—

Apparently overcome by the flood of both his own and his superior’s pheromones, the sergeant tilted back his head and unleashed a screech that was both mating cry and war howl.

They both stopped, panting, and looked at each other. Freay’ysh-Administrator wondered if his noncommissioned officer was as deep in rut, as rigidly and uncomfortably tumescent, as he himself was. He blinked; the sergeant looked away.

“Orders, Freay’ysh-Administrator?”

With a profound effort, Freay’ysh-Administrator kept his voice low and level: “All units to the line and advance. We shall push the humans as hard as we can. We will overrun them before the sun sets. We will taste their marrow tonight, Hero; this I swear.”

“I bear your words to your Heroes, Freay’ysh-Administrator.” And the sergeant bounded off into the underbrush, moving awkwardly, stiffly.

* * *

Hilda serpentined her way through the final set of tripwires and saw Smith standing at the entry to the pillbox like he was directing traffic. His voice was loud, clear, unhurried: “That’s the last of the civvies, Papa. Get the team leaders moving. Yes, now. Everything’s going to be okay, but only if they start moving
now
.” To the slightly battered, but still intact squads that had already fallen back to the pillbox, he pointed them up the slopes to the defilade positions. “Morena, Keibel, take your squads up to the left flank overlooks. Varsic, Mbele, head up to the right. Missiles ready; if they have any vehicles to commit, they’re going to do it here where they’ve got a clear field of fire and comparatively safe flanks.” He looked around to see if anyone else was waiting for orders, saw Hilda, walked over. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi. They’ll be here soon. Not more than ten minutes, possibly as little as five.”

“How many losses did we take?”

“Once they started coming on strong, we couldn’t keep our heavy weapons positions secure or our lines dressed. We lost about two dozen in the last hour, and the last line will be coming under fire any minute.”

A set of rapid explosions told them that even that estimate had been optimistic. Somewhere overhead, there was a rapid, shuddering rush that echoed strangely in the saturated air of the valley: loud but muted, like listening to a sound system with all the treble removed. Explosions—large ones, starting five hundred meters behind the pillbox—pounded their way further east.

“That’s not good,” Hilda observed.

“Yeah, but that’s probably as close as their air units are going to come for now,” Smith speculated. “They know that the detection and tracking systems on the missiles we captured can’t see up through the clouds here, but that we can prang them if they drop down beneath the murk.”

And murk was not an exaggeration: the pillbox, built and dug out of an upthrust bulge of rock, was flanked by perpetually bubbling hot springs. A constant upward drift of water vapor created a ceiling haze that was nearly opaque at fifty meters altitude, and largely trapped in place by the prevailing temperature gradients about three hundred meters above that. Real fleet sensors—downlook densitometers and the like—could have picked out the basic terrain features well enough to generate targeting solutions, but to the rear-echelon, battalion-level gear that the kzinti had been using in the Susser Tal, the murk was functionally impenetrable.

“Do you think they’ll eventually bring their attack craft down into the valley?”

Smith nodded. “When they see the last of us run into the pillbox and shut the door, they’ll want to bring down the fire. I would.”

Hilda looked up the gentle upward slopes to north and south; both highlands pinched somewhat tighter here, putting the pillbox astride the valley’s narrowest bottleneck. “And the ’Runner marksmen that you’ve sent up to the defilade slit-trenches; how are they going to get inside in time?”

“They’re not.”

“What? They’ll be slaughtered out here.”

“No, they won’t, because they’re going to stay in hiding. Until they get their signal to fire.”

“But when the kzinti fan out and check their flanks, they’ll find them.”

“Tell me, Hilda, how well have the kzinti been following their standard tactical doctrines today?”

“Well, they—” She looked at him, wondering. “In a word, they weren’t following any doctrine at all. They were coming straight at us.”

Smith nodded. “So trust me for just a little longer; I’m pretty sure our troops up on the slopes are going to be fine.”

Deep within the tree line, a ripple of heavy reports—’Runner elephant guns—was drowned out by several stuttering roars and a supercharged whine-hiss: kzin automatic weapons and a heavy beamer, respectively.

Hilda swallowed. “They’re coming. And our troops won’t get here much sooner than they do.”

Smith touched her cheek with a grimy, sulfur-reeking hand. “I know. So, get inside the pillbox.”

“What? I’m an officer; I’ve got to stay out here and help—”

“It’s because you’re an officer that you’re needed inside the pillbox; it’s the most crucial position.”

“Why?”

“Because without radios, we need someone with excellent judgment inside.”

“Excellent judgment about what?”

“About when the kzinti are going to bring down the tacair hammer and blow the whole upper level to dust. If we don’t have someone in there who’s shrewd enough to anticipate that airstrike at least half a minute before they make it, we’ll lose all our combatants. Hell, we’ll lose anyone who isn’t already underground in the bomb shelter. So. Get inside the pillbox. Now.”

* * *

The humans ran like so many startled
veerthsas
, one of the prey animals that the kzinti brought to every world they settled. Small and fast, the
veerthsa
was quite challenging to bring down, but, ah, the satisfaction when the spindly beast was finally pinned beneath an irresistible paw . . .

So it felt now, watching the humans scatter away from their prepared positions, their tattered clothes streaming behind them like the shredded flags of a lost battle. Each defensive line had crumbled faster than the one before it, his Heroes gathering inertia and more bloodlust with each successive triumph. The evasive human foes had finally stood and fought: they had been forced to, Freay’ysh-Administrator told himself, since they were trapped in a valley with no exit. A small voice, that belonging to the weakling trait that Chuut-Riit bombastically liked to call “higher reason,” whispered that today’s success was also puzzling: the kzinti had tried this tactic before, led by the very capable Zhveeaor-Captain. But those offensives had bogged down every time, gaining only three kilometers a day. The double-envelopments, the L-ambushes, the stay-behind attack teams, the cunning use of mines to guide kzin assault forces into cleared fields of fire: the humans had not made such extensive, or effective, use of these ploys today.