His men, who had obeyed his precautions to remain under cover, were smiling at him. Tips, the powderman, drawled with a grin, “Seems like someone forgot to take his own advice, Captain.”
Smith grinned back. At last: they were calling him Captain.
And best of all, they were teasing him.
Freay’ysh-Administrator stood as the grit and rock shards that had been blasted skyward by the strike package began to fall around them like monstrous hail. As it did, the thickest drifts of the ground smoke began to clear, revealing a shattered, rocky shell where the low, sturdy pillbox had been. Piercing screams of triumph and victory rose up all along the arc of kzin attackers, who now sprung to their feet, weapons ready, bodies hunched forward, each eager to be first to find survivors, bodies, pieces, anything human that they might further rend and despoil.
And why shouldn’t they? If the cleared area around the pillbox had been seeded with mines, the concussive ground wave would certainly have triggered them. If there had been booby-traps in the structure, they would have been either tripped or disabled. And if there were any survivors in that smoking framework of waist-high remains, it was best to be upon them swiftly, before they could fight back or flee.
The Rage was poised within Freay’ysh-Administrator just as his body was poised to run. Was there anything left to consider? It was hard to think beyond the desire to attack, to rend, to rape-and so he did not bother to think.
The long, ululating shriek that rose up from him was like an engine, propelling him forward. Shifting his beamer to his left hand, he drew his w’tsai and bounded-five meters per leap-toward the ruined human pillbox.
With a chorus of cries akin to Freay’ysh-Administrator’s own, his remaining troops rushed from their hiding places, a ring of snarling orange fur converging upon the smoking pit that was their final objective.
“Stink!” came the sharp call sign whisper from the bracken to Smith’s rear.
He gave the response-“Pot!”-and watched as Hilda came low-crawling into the slit trench. “Did everyone get out?”
“Yeah, but just barely. The tunnel collapsed about ten meters behind me.”
“Behind you? You were the last one out?”
“My post: my job.”
He smiled and touched her face. The men in the trench stared, then looked away awkwardly: almost all were smiling; the youngest one was blushing.
Freay’ysh-Administrator leaped from smoking rockpile to smoking rockpile. Here and there a hand, a leg, part of a torso, a few human implements twisted and scorched beyond easy recognition. Cordite and sulfur and guttering fires completed a tableau that some human mythologists associated with the punishment-place that they called hell. But-
“There are not enough bodies, or material,” he snarled. The Heroes around him growled and snapped their agreement.
But one yowled sharply. “Here! A trapdoor! They must have crawled away through a tunnel, like the shit-burrowers that they are.”
Freay’ysh-Administrator felt his fur standing straight out, partly from rage at being thwarted again, partly because it meant there was more hunt left to thrill him, and the promise of rending more humans-live ones-at its conclusion. He reached the flimsy door in two great bounds, felt his troops gathering close around him. He tried to remember his training, to think what would be wisest at this point. Tunnel attacks were a risky business, but they were Heroes, and their adversaries were skinny, swamp-grubbing humans who were outcasts even amongst their own contemptible species.
“Down! After them!” he shrieked, and his Heroes roared approval and struggled with each other to be the first down the hole.
Hilda almost sighed when Smith removed his gentle hand from her face and his tone became businesslike again. “So what about the wires?”
“Well, I’m glad we laid three sets,” Hilda admitted. “And we still have the wireless relay, if it comes to that.”
“Guess we’ll find out. You wanna do the honors?”
She stared at the wire-wound, inverted alligator clips-adapted from jumper cables-that had been pressed into service as a contact detonator: “No: it’s your show.”
“Freay’ysh-Administrator, we can go no further: the tunnel is too narrow for us beyond thirty meters, and it has caved in. But there may be another exit.”
“Yes?”
“We have found another door-much better hidden-in the floor of this subterranean shelter.”
“Well, open it!”
“Yes, Freay’ysh-Administrator. But perhaps we should start by cutting the wires running down through the floor alongside it?”
Far at the back of Freay’ysh-Administrator’s lust-besotted consciousness, a small voice rose one last time, crying for one last moment of caution.
A cry that came one moment too late.
Smith smiled at Hilda, squeezed the makeshift contact detonator, and, bringing her down with him, ducked into the trench.
The entirety of the Sumpfrunners’ reserve stores of explosives went up with a roar nearly equal to the kzin strike package. But this explosion was longer, lower, louder, and it hoisted up great slabs of rock and gouts of dirt.
It also vaporized or splattered all but forty of the kzinti that had intended to slaughter the humans as completely as they themselves were now being slaughtered.
As the first vertically ejected rocks came down, some easily large enough to be lethal, Hilda looked up over the edge of the slit trench. The surviving kzinti were littered in an arc around the smoking hole that remained, moving feebly. Most were trying to roll or crawl away from the epicenter of destruction, thin lines of blood running out of their ears and nostrils. One or two actually staggered upright.
Hilda felt, rather than saw, Smith stand up. When she looked over at him, he was clenching a starter’s whistle between his teeth. He blew it once, paused, blew it twice-
— the kzinti, shaking their heads, stared around dumbly, as if vaguely aware that, despite their shattered hearing, there was some new sound in the air around them-
— Smith blew the whistle three times.
The troops in the slit trench rose up, leaned over their weapons, adjusted their sights. Across the valley, Hilda could just barely make out subtle hints of the same movements being performed in that defilade trench, too.
And then-one slow, deliberate shot after the next-the turkey shoot began.
Papa Sumpfrunner-who now insisted that they call him by his given name, Maurice-looked back down from the Grosse Felsbank’s Schwerlinie Pass into the Susser Tal. Hilda, seeing the melancholy look on his face, stopped to join him. Smith slowed to a halt a little further along the trail, standing to one side so that the refugee Sumpfrunners could still pass two abreast into the narrowest part of their journey: a crevice only four meters wide, but with walls almost two hundred meters high. Once on the other side of it, they would be on the reverse slope of the Grosse Felsbank and unable to see the valley anymore.
“Seems wrong,” Maurice grumbled, looking down at the Susser Tal. “Birthed there, lived there, loved there, chapped there, fought there. It’d be rightways that I’d die there. Ja, stimm’.”
Hilda put a hand on his narrow, wiry shoulder. “But you’d die too soon, Maurice. You know the kzinti are going to go in again, and this time, no half measures. They lost the better part of two battalions in the Susser Tal; that makes it more than a regional problem. Chuut-Riit or one of his inner circle will take charge and bring in all the resources at their disposal.” She shook her head. “You fought a good fight for as long as you could fight it. Now it’s time for you-for all of you-to leave.”