“Not repulsed, Freay’ysh-Administrator: lost. No Heroes returned. The coursing squad assigned the task of tracking down the humans drew ahead of the main body-”
“And they were ambushed.”
“Freay’ysh-Administrator, I take this on my own head; I offer up my Name and females in expiation of my failure. I should have known. The short sight ranges in the undergrowth made it simple for them to ambush us. And exhaustion must have led to our Heroes’ obvious distraction. I suspect they were overheated by the mud coating their fur, which cannot be removed except by extensive grooming.”
The administrator stared at the captain. “Our Heroes were distracted? In what way?”
“When the humans retreated from their ambush, our Heroes gave chase.”
“Is this not customary?”
“Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator, but not until the main body has arrived, so that the pursuit can be made along a broad front, with secure flanks. But our Heroes, hot and enraged as I must imagine they were, completely disregarded that protocol, as well as communication discipline. They seemed to be on the edge of the Unknowing Rage themselves. And so, following the trail of the retreating units, they did not detect the second ambush, lying close along that path.”
Freay’ysh-Administrator closed his eyes. “Have our reconnaissance assets located the leaf-eating shit-lickers who destroyed our Heroes?”
“No, Freay’ysh-Administrator. The tree cover is too thick, and the heat from the springs makes thermal imaging useless down in the lowlands. Perhaps if we had more aerial drones to seed down under the forest canopy-”
The administrator negated that notion with a toss of his head and flex of his ruff. “Impossible. With the recent incursion by the human ship from outsystem, the fleet has concentrated out in the Serpent Swarm, bringing most uncommitted ground assets with it in order to quell the scattered insurgents who were evidently emboldened by this recent human attack. The two battalions we have on hand are all that we are going to get.”
“With a full company providing base security, here at the mouth of the valley, I am uncertain that the remaining numbers will be enough.”
“They will have to be, Zhveeaor-Captain. And they will be. They are kzin Heroes.”
“They are, but they still have no target. Our short-range patrols have found nothing but a few abandoned observation posts. And our rogue-killer, and now our subsequent scouting teams, are all dead, with little to show for their Heroes’ Ends.”
“Then the time has come to conduct a reconnaissance in force. You are to coordinate a rolling series of company-level sweeps, all along our front, pushing constantly deeper into the valley. Our minimum objective is to move the lines of our safe zone ahead at least five kilometers a day.” Freay’ysh-Administrator saw Zhveeaor-Captain’s uncertainty, felt rage-and again, that odd hint of rut-aggression, as if the captain was a mating rival. “This is what is required of our Heroes!” he asserted. “This they must do!”
“It shall be as you order, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”
“Make sure that it is.” He paused. “Or you may yet forfeit your Name and females.”
The three surviving kzinti came bounding through the brush, pursuing Gunnar and one of the ’Runners, closing the gap with sickening speed. Hilda held her breath as the two humans vaulted over a fallen fern-trunk, then crouched down rather than continuing to run.
The kzinti pushed harder, one of them firing his beamer as he sprinted and shrieked like a scalded tiger. The beam danced unsteadily along the fallen trunk, slicing chunks off, starting one brief, guttering fire, but not focused enough to cut through it.
The kzinti were within five meters of the trunk when their leader evidently noticed something odd about the brush ahead: specifically, that parts of it had been cleared. He paused, probably seeing the faint, narrowing avenues that had been cut through the foliage.
From Hilda’s reverse viewpoint, though, they were sightlines into the widening fields of fire that the kzinti had now entered. “Optimum,” she said, sharply enough to be heard up and down the line. From concealed positions in the densest brush, five roars-almost as loud as light artillery-boomed out at the kzinti: an equal number of meter-long muzzle-flashes marked their sources.
The lead kzin had a leg blown clean off: as it cartwheeled into the underbrush behind him, the Hero yowled and exsanguinated in great arcing gouts of dark red blood. The second of them staggered, then stopped, and lasted just long enough to look down and realize that a sizable red divot had carved away half of his right lung. He never realized-but revealed as he fell, senseless-that the exit wound in his back was a crater so wide that it had partially exposed his spine.
The third was, marginally, luckier: one shot took off half his tail, another clipped through his gut at an angle. The pulped coils which flopped out of this belly wound signified it as mortal, but kzinti did not die quickly or easily. He struggled back to his feet as the five human snipers reloaded their home-brewed, single-shot elephant guns.
That was when Gunnar and the ’Runner popped up from behind the fallen fern-trunk and sent streams of strakkaker fire into the slowly rising Hero. Bits of fur, blood, and bone flew in a haze of carnage: as the weapons fell silent, magazines expended, the tattered remains of the third kzin toppled backward.
“That’s the last of them,” shouted Gunnar in savage glee.
“And it will be the last of us if we don’t get the hell out of here now,” Hilda shouted back. “No talking: move. Back to waypoint Foxtrot.” Hilda jumped up, grabbed her gear, and, as she launched herself full speed down the narrow path that was her personal bug-out route, she wondered: And again, where the hell is the heroic Captain Smith?
By the time they got back to their combination camp/refuge/hideout nine hours later, Gunnar had exhausted his considerable creative energies for thinking up new insults concerning Captain Smith’s courage, commitment, leadership skills, choice of aftershave, and female ancestors. And what galled Hilda most was that she had to endure hearing it in silence.
Because, in terms of leadership, and maybe even courage, Gunnar was right. Or at least he seemed to be.
Which was what Hilda was thinking when she stormed into Smith’s lean-to and stared not at him, but the secure box he’d been carrying for days now, wandering and staring about as though he were some uber-macho version of Van Gogh looking for the perfect field-or, in the Sumpfrinne, fetid bog-to paint. “So, have you had a productive afternoon, Captain?”
He stopped his infernal map plottings-his favorite activity these days, after wandering around with his purported secret-weapon-in-a-box-and looked up at her mildly. “Pretty fair. How about you?”
“Well, we had a great day, Captain. Shot up two squads of kzinti that were poking into the village we evacuated yesterday. They came after us, as they always do, and burned down Shindle and Milsic with beamers. Which left the ratcats feeling so wonderfully confident that they charged straight into another L-ambush. Killed about a dozen there.”
Smith had an almost dreamy look on his face. “That never gets old, does it?”
“I can’t see how you’d know, sir, since you haven’t been on a single god-damned op since the second day we got the ’Runners organized. But if it matters to you, the last of the kzinti came after us, straight into the firing lanes of our hidden rearguard’s elephant guns.” She threw her empty canteen down and realized she stank. Just like the whole Sumpfrinne stank. And she resented Smith for stinking less-a lot less-than she did. “All told, we got a whole section of them today. No thanks to you, Captain.”
His right eyebrow arched. He had never made himself the official CO: Mads and Papa Sumpfrunner would probably have bristled at that. But the de facto reality was that he was in charge. He never gave orders: he simply pointed out what needed to be done, maybe put in a word or two on how best to do it, and faded away, resuming his love affair with his goddamned secure box. “Well, it seems like you don’t really need me out there,” he said. “You folks are doing a fine job all by yourselves.”