Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

“We need to hunt the horde. Possibly several hordes. Can you get these things airborne without burning down the palisade?”

“Certainly, ah, ma’am. They should have no difficulty picking up a large number of bodies, even in the dark. Infrared capacity was noted in your specification.”

“Then get them up there and quarter the district. Circle around the village and then look east. The beasts travel in large packs.”

The officers looked at each other, and one of them shrugged. They had been trained to kill kzin, not take orders from one, but these were new and different times. Mental flexibility was definitely part of the modern job description.

“Very well, ah, my lady. We have six large monitors, one for each drone, and you will see what the drone sees. But please keep the newsmen well back.”

The drones were released and went up on thin rocket flames. Karan watched the pictures they sent back. The village looked ridiculously small, but for a while she could see herself and the group inside the walls as green flickers against the darker ground. Those walls might have to be rebuilt from stone if this didn’t work. The officers worked with keyboards and controllers, and the drones carefully avoided each other and surveyed the region. There were occasional flashes of bright green as small bodies roamed the woods and hills. But nothing like a horde.

“Further east,” Karan ordered. The officers obeyed, and the six drones drifted off silently. “Deputy, do you recognize the area?” Karan asked one of the native kzin.

“Yes, my lady. That one is about a quarter of the way to the site of the massacre. And that one is flying over territory where we have seen solitary kzin who do not wish to join us.”

It was perhaps too early for the lesslocks; the sun, Alpha A, had set only an hour earlier.

“Where would you expect the lesslocks to be at this time?” Karan asked.

“It is impossible to say with confidence. They seem to be moving far afield, which means starting early if they are to be back before sunrise, so it would not surprise me if they were further east and perhaps more southerly, since they have already devastated the region where the massacre took place. They are probably smart enough not to revisit the site. Although they will eat carrion, and may remember where their visit produced so many bodies. Of course, we buried them, but maybe they will dig them up again.”

“What’s that?” one of the newsmen asked, He had been taking pictures straight off the monitors. Others had been getting background shots of Karan and the officers, not to mention the villagers and particularly the kzinti.

“Ahh,” one of the officers made an approving noise. “Hundreds of them. Each as big as an ape, moving on all fours in the main. I’ll take us in closer.”

“I’ve got another group,” another officer remarked. “I should say at least a thousand of them. Going down to check up.”

The two monitors dived towards the hordes. The bodies glowed bright green against the black background. They seemed oblivious to the vehicles above them.

“They must be lesslocks, but I need to be sure. Any way we can be certain?” Karan asked.

“ Fiat Lux. Let there be light,” an officer ordered, and a searchlight in the drone illuminated some of the horde.

“Lesslocks,” Karan said with satisfaction. The beasts squinted up into the light, pausing. Some of them carried guns and had bandoliers slung around their squat bodies.

The drones rose quickly. Whether the beasts had the sense to use muskets against the drones was not at all clear, but a lucky hit could lose some very expensive equipment. A very lucky hit could do worse. Several of these present remembered the grossly asymmetrical war between the kzin Occupation forces and the Resistance that had flickered and smouldered in these red-jungle-clad hills. Human casualties in the end had been something like eighty percent of their original strength, but overconfident, unwary or unlucky kzin had suffered too.

“Destroy them. Every one of them,” Karan ordered. The last part of the order was probably unnecessary, but Karan was taking no chances. With humans you could never be quite sure. Should lesslocks with guns escape into the great cave systems…and there was a question of vengeance. Another thought struck her even as she gave the order: many of the caves were still littered with the debris of decades of war. Not homemade muskets, but strakkakers and plasma-cannon, lasers and beam rifles. There were even stories of nukes…Let the lesslocks, now they knew of the principles of modern weapons, get hold of those, and…

This was what the officers had come for. The drones banked and tilted. A missile left the drone with deceptive slowness; it turned into the center of the horde and suddenly accelerated earthwards. Just before impact, it exploded into a vicious hail of slivers of steel and glass, and then detonated again into a ferocious flame of petroleum jelly. There was no microphone on the drone, but Karan had no difficulty imagining the screams of napalmed and razored bodies. She found it immensely satisfying. Something she had read once came to mind. For the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Kipling had got that right, she thought.

Both of the hordes were wiped out and reduced to roiling black smoke. No others could be found. A few individuals vanished like giant black insects into cracks in the ground, but they were very few. You did not choose your enemies wisely, Karan thought. The drones returned to land outside the stockade after inspecting the ground to make sure it was clear of lesslocks. The villagers cheered the officers and Karan with jubilation. The judge had been avenged.

Stan the Man had a lot of competition. One of his opposite numbers on a different television station had sneaked away from the southern continent with a less-than-convincing explanation involving a deceased relative. As if any newsman would put a relative, deceased or not, before the job. Unless the relative had been garrotted or hanged, drawn and quartered in a really grisly fashion, of course, when it would become a story, and one with a human interest angle.

The story of the village where kzin and humans lived happily together broke like a tidal wave. There were, it was true, a few other joint settlements, but in these they kept apart, in a state of watchful, suspicious truce. The fact that a human had taken a bullet for a kzin kit (pictures of Arwen blowing bubbles, and a slightly jealous Orion) showed what brave and noble people human beings were, which the human beings really liked, and pictures of Karan delivering justice cheered the kzin. Of course, there wasn’t much justice to deliver, since asking the lady Karan to adjudicate on just which party had owned the pig and which the piglet seemed a bit, well, trivial really. So some issues had to be, if not manufactured, at least helped along a bit by kindly newsmen and newswomen. The justice Karan had delivered to the lesslocks went down well with both kzin and humans. Pictures of children and kits playing went around the planet. Pictures of dead lesslocks and of the massacre which had caused the retribution followed. People were proud of the brave pioneers who had gone out to face such things, and glad that they had kzin to help them. After the story hit, human beings went out of their way to be decent to kzin, a sort of acknowledgement that the surrender meant genuine peace. Kzin accepted that the truce was something more than a cessation of active fighting and looked as if it was going to last indefinitely. Some of the underlying tension that had outlasted the war began to dissipate. It was a slow process, but a man-kzin alliance was starting to look like something that could happen on Wunderland.