Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

Naturally, it was locked and he had no doubt that the mechanism was sturdy. But not sturdy enough to shrug off his gravitically tamped charges. His demo specialist was almost done with setting the four-point package when Aquino, whose ears probably rivaled those of their kzinti opponents, held up a hand. “Wait. I hear something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at the brazen-bound portal. “Almost like-rabbits screaming.”

Dieter felt the hair on the back of his neck stand suddenly erect as a chill washed through him. “Finish and blow the package.”

“But sir-”

“Do it. NOW!” Dieter scrambled back. “Fire in the hole!”

Three seconds later, as the demo specialist dove past him, the charge went off with a shuddering roar, followed by a metallic clangor as the brutally twisted doorframe went cart-wheeling away.

And in the wake of that sound arose mewling cries of confused, mortal terror-counterpointed by what sounded like a ragged chorus of snarling sobs.

Dieter leaped up and toward the deformed, blackened doorway. “On me, all numbers!”

Aquino and one of his troopers were through the door before Dieter, but they lagged to a halt as they crossed the threshold, not understanding what they were seeing at first. But Dieter had anticipated this, had argued with the command staff to have it included in the training materials, had worried about it from the moment he had been given the clearance to see Dr. Yang’s full report. So he was the first to act.

He brought up his needler and dumped half a clip of its tranq-gelatin wedges into the closest kzin female, who was about to tear off the head of her own kit. She swayed, but the drug didn’t take effect fast enough. Her raking claws were off the mark, but still lethal-just not clean and swift. The small kit, no more than four weeks old, dropped to the deck, shriek-mewling, one of his lungs and much of his intestines spilling out.

Damn it: they’re too strong to succumb to the drugs immediately. Now if they’d given me the high-octane non-lethals I’d asked for- but that was all spilt milk. And Dieter had no time to cry over it. “Switch back to lethals. Two-tap the females-all of them.” He dropped his needler and snatched up his coil gun, already tracking across the loose throng of kzinretti and putting two rounds in each one that danced through his sights.

A moment later, his men followed suit. Some, lately arrived, did not understand the nuances of the situation, and actually shot a pair of kits. Aquino knocked their muzzles aside and shredded them with oaths as pointed and lethal as the projectiles of their own coil guns.

But critical damage had been done to the nursery’s precious population, overwhelmingly inflicted by the female kzin themselves. Walking through the litter of bodies, Dieter called out to the xenomed specialist every time he found a live kit. He did not call out very often. He worked deeper into the collective safehold of the harems of the senior flag officers.

At the very rear, in an alcove that was shrouded and almost completely unlit, Dieter saw faint signs of movement. Was it the admiral’s mate, perhaps: is that why she was in what looked like a specially secluded boudoir-bower? But no, he realized as he came closer, although it was a special place, set aside for privacy, it also permitted discrete observation. It had not been arrayed and appointed for mating.

It was for birthing.

Dieter parted the roughly spun gossamer blinds with the barrel of his gun, cautious but also feeling a sudden, deep spike of guilt. The female, stretched on her side, moved listlessly: one coil gun projectile, probably a stray, had gone through her neck. The wound, not arterial but severe, had created a puddle of blood beneath her: she was still alive only because of the immense vitality of her species. Under her paws was a newborn female kit. It had been slain with a single claw-slash across its tiny neck. The kzinrett’s bloody paw hovered over it, alternately protecting and caressing the little corpse.

Her other paw strained fitfully after the second kit of her litter, a half-black male that had not wriggled closer to her deadly embrace. What had stopped him? Had there been a subtle warning in the tone of his littermate’s desperate cries as the milk-rich body which had just given them life suddenly turned tender claws of death upon them? Had it been the smell of blood? Had it been the sight and sounds of devastation with which the strange hairless bipeds had shattered the quiet of the harem-nursery?

The kit’s nose wrinkled, turned uncertainly in Dieter’s direction, and his eyes blinked open as he made a small sound: “Meef?”

The sound roused the mother. Her eyes roved, her claws slid out of their beds, her arm came back; she even managed to raise her body slightly, to lean her torso forward…

So that she could reach far enough to kill her last kit.

Dieter brought up his weapon and squeezed the trigger once.

The female’s left eye imploded. She collapsed, as limp as old rags.

Dieter looked back at the kit; it blinked up at him through milky, and probably still blind, eyes. He reached down, scooped it gently into the crook of his left arm. He could swear that its eyes were fixed upon his.

“Meerf,” it said. And then the kit’s eyes closed, and it nestled against him tightly.

2396 BCE: Subject age-less than one year

Despite the scenes of carnage that she had been watching for the past minute, Dr. Selena Navarre flinched anew at the scene of a kzin female being bisected-literally bisected-by the screeching sweep of a commando’s coil gun. The image froze.

A freshly minted UNSN captain by the name of Armbrust came from behind the lectern. “Had we listened to Dr. Yang’s warnings, this outcome might have been averted. Instead, because the allowed non-lethals were too weak to instantly drop an adult kzin in its tracks, we had to resort to lethal weapons. And you can see the results.” He waved at the frozen tableau behind him. “In addition to having to kill all the females, twenty-five percent of the kits were killed by our fire, as well. They were too close to their mothers, and the situation was too chaotic to take more time or better aim.

“This outcome is compounded by the loss of sixty percent of the kits through the infanticide carried out by the mothers. This leaves us six kits. Of those, one was severely wounded. Your personnel have informed me that it has subsequently been euthanized.”

“It would not have been useful to us, anyway,” objected Director Pyragy’s rather snappish voice from the darkened auditorium behind Selena. “It was a female.” So, the team director had finally spoken up. In an attempt to minimize the scope of the disaster, of course. A disaster for which he, it was rumored, was primarily responsible: he had resisted almost every special tactical contingency the mission planners had placed before him for approval. Including the double-strength tranq rounds.

Captain Armbrust stared. “The female kit would not have been useful? Director Pyragy, at this point I would have thought that any kit would be useful. After all, as Dr. Yang pointed out in her research précis, there is nothing that proves that the females are inherently subsentient. It may simply be that-”

“Captain, your heroics in securing these live subjects are admirable, as was your rather baffling ability to identify the rumored harem-protection cruiser among the rest of the kzin ships.” Pyragy pompously sniffed distaste at the very things he had praised. “But the value of your speculations on the mental capacities of the kzin are directly proportionate to your qualifications in xenobiology and xenobehavior. Which are nonexistent.”