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.”
Armbrust smiled up toward the source of the voice at the back of the darkened auditorium. “That is almost entirely true.”
“‘Almost’ entirely? You have an uncompleted degree lurking somewhere beyond the margins of your resume, perhaps?”
“No. I had the good fortune of being briefed by Dr. Yang herself, and have subsequently been granted full access to her research proposal.”
“Your first point is a non sequitur. The second is valueless.” Rumor had it that the director had argued vehemently against granting military personnel access to the full text of the proposal. A strange vehemence, Selena reflected, considering that access to it was, in his current statement, “valueless.”
Armbrust apparently detected the same contradiction. “Valueless, Director? Then why did the command staff need to make repeated requests for access?”
“I wonder if sharing it with your command staff was deemed a breach of the project’s secrecy protocols, Captain,” mused the voice of Marquette, a member of the project’s Steering Board and an inveterate toady.
The captain’s smile widened. “Actually, I believe our overall clearance rating was higher than yours, in regard to the relevant data. We were actually going on the operation, after all.”
The director’s own voice rolled archly mellifluous over Selena’s head. “The reason we resisted granting you access was noise, Captain. The pointless, distracting noise that would have been generated by providing unqualified persons with enough information so that they could start their own pointless theorizings, which, out of sheer good manners, we would have had to listen to-rather than dismissing them out of hand, as was warranted. So: you have your answer. Continue your report.”
Armbrust had turned his back and was heading toward the lectern before the director had finished speaking. Selena quelled a sudden impulse to cheer the captain.
“So, to conclude,” said Armbrust, “we have only five healthy specimens, two of which are females of less than two weeks. Leaving us three males. One would soon have been removed from the combination harem-crèche-playground: he is at least three months of age. The other is approximately a month old and is not particularly pliable, according to your own researchers. The last one-”
“-Is no concern of yours, Captain. You can hardly know anything about a creature you held for less than two minutes.”
“True. But it is also true that it may have been a very important two minutes.”
“Yes, yes: I’ve heard all the amateurish tripe about kzinti possibly having a first-imprinting reflex such as many higher terrestrial mammals, and some species of birds. But at this point, that is only unwarranted and rather romanticized speculation.” The director’s voice slowed, deepened, became subtly dangerous: “I have it on good report that you have even shown up to look in on the littlest one, from time to time.” Selena did not know how a pause could be smug, but Pyragy’s was: “Perhaps some imprinting did take place, Captain, but perhaps it is not the kit who was imprinted.”