Man-Kzin Wars XI Hal Colbatch (chrome ebook reader .txt) 📖

Lewis-guns and beam and bullet rifles met them. The kill-ratio was better this time, almost one kzinti for every two humans dead. Four kzinti made it into the cave, where the fight ended. The humans had bombs of nitrate-based explosives.

Nils and Leonie Rykermann, highly-experienced fighters, and protected as major assets by their own people, survived, as did some of their fighters. None of the convoy party did.

The last fighting kzin, staggering bloody and maimed from the cave to die on the attack, fell screaming in a storm of converging bullets and beams. The few surviving humans moved fast, killing the wounded kzinti and those of their own too badly wounded to move.

"Let's go!" Tasso von Lufft, the second-in-command, grabbed Rykermann's arm.

The dying kzin commander had been playing possum, hoping to lure a human within reach of his claws. Rykermann finished shooting him between the eyes. Some kzinti were terrified of going to the Fanged God without ears or noses. In case this kzin should be one such, Rykermann paid his respects to the details of this belief by slashing the nose off with his ratchet-knife. Two more slashes secured the tattooed ears, which would go to his belt—a kzin custom which the guerrillas had adopted. With practiced fingers he rifled the ammunition pouches.

"We can't leave this stuff!" Leonie protested. Half the containers were unburied still, a number scarred by the kzin beam. The damp ground around them steamed.

"There'll be more ratcats here any minute," von Lufft objected.

"Not quite yet," said Leonie. "If that was a set ambush they'd have had follow-up on top of us now. I think it was just a hunting party or a random patrol."

"But the cars will probably have signalled," said von Lufft. "And satellites will have picked up the beams. We've got to get out of here fast! There will be more kzin forces on the way here now. That's if they're in the mood for a hunt and don't just hit us from space."

"They died to get that stuff here," said Nils Rykermann, gesturing at the dead leader of the couriers. "Whatever it is, it's important."

"And if it's dangerous, and leaking? Those drums took a fair hit. Like the man said, I don't think it's strawberry ice cream."

"If they're leaking virulent radioactives we're dead already. But"—a quick examination—"I don't see my meter moving. I'm hoping they were made with strong linings. Come on! The sooner we get them covered the sooner we're out of here."

The containers were quickly buried in the caves, invisible to any human in the entrance or the main passage. Decades of war had made these resistance fighters instinctively expert at camouflage. The scattered bodies, human and kzin, were stripped of equipment and weapons. Some of the humans carved pieces of flesh from the dead kzinti for ritual cooking and eating later.

There were too few survivors to carry everything away, and what could not be moved was smashed. They turned to the kzin cars and wrecked them as thoroughly as they could. Flying them was out of the question. It had been, Rykermann thought, counting the survivors, a Pyhrric victory—in fact no victory at all. The kzinti could afford to lose a couple of carloads of troops more than the guerrillas could afford to lose so many proven fighters—and friends. Friends who had died for he knew not what. He hoped it was worth it to whoever in Sol System was responsible. The courier group would have to be rebuilt from scratch with a fresh draft of doomed humans. Most guerrilla formations had already had casualty rates of several times one hundred percent of their original numbers. With that thought Rykermann, not for the first time, fought down a sense of hopelessness that at times threatened to overwhelm him. How much longer will recruits come forward for the fight? he thought. And answered himself: As long as the kzinti remain terrible and unendurable. And that will be until we are all dead, and forever beyond that. He scattered a few pressure-mines about the site, and sacrificed a precious strand of Sinclair wire, stretching it between two trees at a height where it might, with luck, decapitate or bisect any kzinti charging in pursuit, though it was fiendishly dangerous and difficult to handle in the dark.

The surviving guerrillas scattered into the forest, to where the rest of their horses and ponies were waiting hobbled under a limestone overhang at the entrance of another cave. They were not ideal transport between the trees but they were the fastest things reasonably safe from mechanical detection, and horses needed no urging to flee from the smell of kzinti. There were many horses without riders now, and the surviving guerrillas turned some of these loose in the hope they would be a decoy.

Then they rode, the woods dark around and above them. Behind them after a little while were the flashes and reports of kzin missiles hitting the site of the fighting. Lights in the sky were kzin gravity-cars flashing towards the scene, loaded with troops.

Branches whipped by them. The fleeing guerrillas smashed through a glade where a small herd of gagrumphers were sleeping, the creatures lurching bellowing to their feet in the dark around them. Good, thought Rykermann, as he realized what they were. The infrared signatures of the big beasts milling about might help confuse kzin spy-satellites as well as ground troops. At his command they hauled their horses round and headed northwest, at right-angles to their previous path.

They splashed through a wide, shallow stream, dropping powerful olfactory agents that might confuse kzinti tracking them by unaided scent. Rykermann turned to glance at Leonie, bent low over her pony's neck, urging it on, and the other survivors about, counting them again. He dug in his own spurs. It would be a near thing. It was one of the rare nights when, with neither Alpha Centauri B nor Wunderland's moons yet risen, the sky would be relatively dark for some time. He hoped that would