Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIV

Nils Rykermann had not been particularly happy about bringing them, but Vaemar had been insistent. He had given detailed instructions to watch for signs of intelligence on the female kit’s part. If she had inherited Karan’s intelligence, the implications could be significant. Anyway, Rarrgh came with the kits, and he would be an asset in the event of any trouble.

Just now Rarrgh was flying the car. He was remembering another flight, the day kzin resistance on the planet had ceased, and he had escaped with Vaemar and Jorg von Thoma from the remnants of the kzin garrison at Circle Bay Monastery.

“So what happened to Captain von Thoma?” Nils Rykermann asked him. “I was still recovering from having the Zrrow removed from my shoulder. Removing it killed the surgeon and nearly killed me. We still didn’t have proper autodocs deployed then. I missed all those months.”

“I swore to protect him on the last day,” said Rarrgh. “One of the last servants of the Patriarchy who remained loyal…I could not hand him over to the vengeance of your people. You shouldn’t have been able to remove the Zrrow at all. We only accepted your parole because you were wearing it,” he added.

“And because you put in a good word for me, I think,” said Nils.

“We had fought side by side against the Morlocks. You and Leonie had saved my life when I was helpless. As least Leonie did-she dug me out of the rockfall instead of blasting me. And I think I know how else you used your fighter’s privileges…”

“I swore to kill von Thoma many times during the war,” said Nils. “But later I grew sick of killing and vengeance. Leonie showed me other things. The abbot released me from my vows. He said they were not good vows anyway. Mind you, if I actually did see him again…I had relatives, and students, who went to the Public Hunts, thanks to his police…”

“I am still sworn to protect him, but I suppose after this time it can hardly hurt to tell you what happened. And I trust you,” said Rarrgh. “When we were a good way away from any human forces, I set him down, as I had promised him. He had basic survival equipment from the car. A food-and-water maker, a shelter-tent. I did not search him for weapons, but I imagine he had some concealed. He would have needed them in that country. When I checked it out later I found it was thick with tigrepards. They had multiplied without check during the Occupation, and the lesslocks were leaving their burrows. The fighting had destroyed many of their old food sources.”

“I feel sorry for them,” said Nils. “Like the Morlocks. They are unpleasant creatures, but they did us no harm till we attacked them.”

Rarrgh still had trouble understanding certain human emotions.

“It was war,” he said.

“Not their war.”

Rarrgh gestured through the window to a ruined homestead on the ground below. “That might well have been their work,” he said. “Of course, there might be other explanations…”

There was only the deep thrumming of the engines for a while.

“And there were other things,” said Rarrgh. “Beam’s Beasts, Advokats, Zeitungers…I thought he might not have survived. The Zeitungers were the worst.”

“I know. I had one brush with them. One brush was enough.”

“When I had established a secure and defensible bivouac for Vaemar and myself I went back to check on him, but he was gone. Whether he lived or died I know not. Later, when I was doing some work on the human farms, I tried to probe with a few questions. Some said they had seen a lone male human heading north, but there were many such wanderers then. There still are. Do you have a god that watches over travellers?”

“We have a saint. Saint Christopher.”

“Ah. For us, the brave traveller, who dares the unknown, comes under the attention of Amara, third male kit of the Fanged God. But he lives on the Traveller’s Moon, which orbits Kzin with the Hunters’ Moon. I am not sure how much attention he pays to the goings-on of this world.”

Senator von Höhenheim grunted. He had said relatively little so far, and had kept one wary eye on Rarrgh and the other on Stan and his two assistants. Below them the sea was shallowing and changing color.

“We must be getting close,” Sarah said.

A gong sounded. A light blinked on the control panel.

“There it is. A nuclear engine, leaking but not badly. Let’s get suited up.” Now the radar was focused on the shape of the ship. The warcraft’s sweeping lines, designed for high speed in atmosphere, were marred by obvious damage about two-thirds of the way down the hull. The after part had broken off and lay some distance away.

“That looks like a missile hit, all right.”

They landed the car on a shelving beach about half a kilometer from the rolling hulk.

The Rykermanns and the Rankins headed out to the wreck in a tender-boat. It had a translucent bottom, and diving was carried out through a central airlock. The high seas of Wunderland made this essential.

Had they been on a pleasure cruise there would have been plenty to watch. The seas of Wunderland teemed with life. Boisterous as the surface waves were, the sea a short distance down was tranquil.

The great curve of the Valiant ’s tail-part rose before them, somehow menacing in its sheer size. Nils steered the tender to the stern of the wreck.

“Look!” he said, rather unnecessarily, pointing. A circular hole had been punched in the banks of exhaust ports. Stan’s people and an automatic camera on the tender were busily filming. Stan’s competitors were trying to get better shots.

“Heat-seeking missile, I’d guess,” Nils continued. “It must have got some way in before it detonated. Well, I guess there’s not much to tell who fired it. The missile itself would have been completely destroyed.”

“I would think,” said Stan, “that such a missile would not have been very effective in space, where there would have been no point in running a chemical motor anyway. It has locked onto its target too neatly. As far as I know, these blockade-runners had ramscoops, which they detached and left in orbit to pick up on return. For flight in atmosphere they had chemical rockets-and hot exhaust ports. Especially in a system as dusty as this one, there would have been too much danger of a ramscoop picking up particles, not to mention enemy tactics like dropping compressed radon into it. I’d say it was flying on chemicals.”

“Meaning it was shot down in atmosphere.”

“And look there!” said Sarah. Towards the nose of the great wreck, lights were burning behind several ports.

“The forward part is still air-tight.” With strong modern alloys, designed for years in space, that was not particularly surprising.

“Could there be…anyone alive in there, do you think?” asked Sarah.

“It’s not impossible. Those ships had mighty rugged life-support systems. It’s been a long time, but the old design was expecting to be in space for decades.”

“Try calling them up.”

The results were ambiguous. No answer came, but a finely tuned motion-detector reported movement. Something was in there, about the size of a man.

“If he’s been down there all these years he’s not likely to be keeping a watch on the instruments,” Leonie said. “He’s not likely to be very sane, for that matter.”

“We can’t just leave things like this,” said Nils. “We’ll have to go in now, and find out. But we’d better go armed.”

“We’ll need cutting torches to clear the growth off the airlock controls anyway,” said Leonie. “And to cut away any evidence we find.”

“I think we should take a couple of beam rifles as well.”

Their suits were designed for space but worked equally effectively under water. Von Höhenheim, who was too bulky for athletics, remained in the tender. A quick pass of the torch was enough to clear the growth off one of the derelict’s forward airlocks. They stepped into the airlock and the water cycled away. The first thing that caught their eyes on the bridge was a translucent tank attached to an instrument console. It was nearly empty and the skeleton of a dolphin fitted with artificial hands lay on the floor. They removed their helmets.