Smith swung his binoculars back to the kzin flankers coming up his slope. The two who had already been veering away were now sprinting pell-mell back in the direction of the battle that had been joined. Of the remaining three, their pace slowed, not due to argument, but to indulge in a wistful appreciation of the same martial spectacle. One of them started pointing in that direction as the gunfire began again: not so concentrated this time, but steady and loud.
Which was why none of the three slope-scouting kzinti heard the reports of the elephant guns that fired into them from the rear. Two of the Heroes went down immediately, one missing his head before he even started to fall. The third staggered against a tree, then fell into the brush, left arm dangling uselessly, his right leg washed in blood: not quite an arterial wound, but a bad one.
His tumble into the bushes was probably what saved him in those first seconds. There was no movement in the undergrowth for a five count, then a ten count-
At the count of thirteen, the kzin came rushing out with a severe limp, but the real shock was that he could force himself to move at all. Smith saw one flash and then another jump out of the dark wall of the undergrowth some seventy meters behind the kzin. Both shots were misses. Another ten meters, and the kzin would reach the cover of a granite outcropping and be within shouting distance of-
Two more flashes licked out of the distant wall of tangled vegetation, and the last kzin fell over, three meters short of the outcropping.
Smith exhaled through a smile.
The fellow next to him in the slit trench-a ’Runner named Tip and their best guncotton brewer-cocked a quizzical head: “What’s up, hauptman?”
“Our odds of success,” Smith replied, “our odds of success.”
Freay’ysh-Administrator waved away the two scouts who had just returned from scouting the left, or northern, flank. They claimed there had been nothing to report on the northern slopes. So why were the other three in their team continuing to search? Nervous glances had gone back and forth between the two of them: because they were going higher, just to be sure. Yes, that was what they were doing.
In his earlier and weaker days, Freay’ysh-Administrator would probably have clouted them across the nose for what was obviously an abandonment of their assigned duties: there was no way they could have gone high enough up the slopes to conduct a full security sweep. That, no doubt, was what the other three, including the team leader, were still doing.
But Freay’ysh-Administrator could not bring himself to punish them for heeding the savage summons singing in their blood, since it was the same one he was following as well. Indeed, the scouts on the other flank had abandoned their mission en masse as soon as the barrage was unleashed upon the pillbox. When asked to explain themselves, they had looked down, abashed-a cub’s reflex-and admitted that they had forgotten the mission they had been sent to carry out.
In the moment, Freay’ysh-Administrator had had to struggle to keep his pelt from writhing in sudden amusement, because he knew they were telling the truth. When the siren-song of combat drew them back, it wasn’t an act of insubordination. It was a strangely intense, almost irresistible attraction to a veritable orgy of violence, of sating a bloodlust almost as arousing as the promise of ch’rowl. The need to weed out insurgents, to show mastery, to exact vengeance had long fallen aside as the primary motivations of their struggle in the Susser Taclass="underline" it was to satisfy their hunger-both individually and as a group-to drench themselves in the gore of the humans. Nothing else would do, for nothing else remained in their minds.
The kzin known as Communicator approached him. “Latest reports, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”
“Yes?”
“Still no word from the last upslope scouts, sir, although it is still somewhat early to expect them to have-”
“I am unconcerned: if the humans had significant forces up there, they would have intervened by now. They would have a clear field of fire down upon us here, and would not be so foolish to miss taking advantage of it.”
“As you say, Freay’ysh-Administrator. Our attempts to outflank the stronghold itself have been repulsed. There are only a few meters between the flanking faces of the pillbox and the hot springs to either side. And there is no cover.”
Freay’ysh-Administrator waved his acceptance of the situation: he had watched three of the attempts himself. They had been futile-and costly-tactical probes. “What else?”
“We confirm at least half a dozen defenders killed inside the pillbox, but there must be at least fifty more leaf-eaters sheltering behind its walls.”
“Have you tried to fire through the embrasures with the beamers?” It would be a difficult shot, of course, but the effects, if successful-
As if to illustrate the futility of that option, a beam lanced out at the pillbox. It was focused on the horizontal slit in the front face of the structure, but then it seemed to double back on itself. The resulting explosion threw out a jet of dust and debris, occluding the embrasure, and making it impossible to keep the beam fixed on the initial aim point. At the same instant, one of the defenders’ elephant guns barked, and the kzin who had been wielding the beamer yowled piteously.
“That has been the result so far,” explained Communicator. “Although we cannot see it in the shadows, the embrasure is stepped, and irregularly so. Consequently, if the beam is not perfectly aligned, it will graze against the stepped surfaces. This deflects part of the beam’s energy back upon the beam itself and obscures the aim point with debris. Also, to hold the beam on target for more than two seconds both threatens to burn out the weapon from overheating, and also attracts the attention of the enemy’s marksmen, as you just saw.”
So. Half a dozen of the humans killed. Maybe. At least thirty of his Heroes had been lost in the trade; more, if you counted the wounded. Working around to the rear of the structure would mean an all-night hike up the slopes and down again on the far side. And once there, if his guess was correct, they would find rear-facing embrasures in the structure, built to frustrate just such an attempt to get in behind it. He turned his gaze on Communicator. “The attack craft are on station?”
“Awaiting your orders, Freay’ysh-Administrator.”
“Pull our Heroes back from the tree line. Once they have found adequate cover, call in the air strike. Let us throw open the gates that we may drink their blood without losing any more of our own.”
Hilda noticed it before Gunnar could shout it out. “They’re pulling back! Gott sei dank, they’re-!”
“No. They’re not.” She grabbed her gear, gave a high sign to Papa Sumpfrunner, who dropped through the narrow hatchway in the floor of the pillbox.
“Whaddya mean?” shrieked Gunnar, almost as loud and enraged as a wounded kzin might have sounded. “They’ve stopped firing. I can see them un-assing their positions. They’ve had enough, they’ve-”
“Shut up, Gunnar. They’re not giving up; they’re clearing the zone.”
“Clearing the zone? For what?”
“So they can bring in their strike package. Now: everyone down the hole. We’re getting out of here.”
The kzin fast movers were in and out so quickly that Smith doubted he could have launched a self-guiding missile at them, even if he had wanted to.
Clearly, the kzin pilots had been warned that the humans had nabbed a couple of dual-purpose missiles in the early stages of the hunt-become-a-campaign. When the two ground-attack birds roared down out of the low-hanging murk, their internal bay seals were already open for munitions deployment. A cluster of missiles dropped out of each one’s belly. As their rockets ignited and they streaked toward the pillbox, the attack craft were already nosing back up into the mists: they disappeared just as the strike package hit its target dead-on.
Smith had not thought that, at more than half a kilometer’s distance, the sound would be too bad, or the destructive force so considerable that he should suspend observing the area of operations. So he was not prepared for the deafening roar, nor the concussive wave that slapped him against the rear wall of the trench so hard that it winded him. And the six bright after-images of the warhead flashes, which moved around with his point-of-view, had the look of a retinal imprint that would not disappear for quite a while.