Along the dead ground at the foot of the cliffs the kzin infantry battalion were deploying from their vehicles. Not a huge force, but enough, it was thought, to sweep this cave system of the human and other vermin that infested it.
Corporal surveyed the eight members of his section, anticipating the inspections Sergeant and Platoon Officer would make before the final deployments. They looked Heroic enough, and their equipment complete.
He scanned the horizon about. There were flying creatures in the air about the scarp, coming and going at the cave entrances. Movements of small animals here and there on the plains. Certainly nothing for kzin regular infantry to fear.
Company by company they moved off, each assigned to a major entrance. Vehicles were expensive, and parking them immediately below the cliffs would risk attacks on them from the still-unseen enemy. The final approach was made on foot.
Any tame humans in the area kept well away or out of sight. With Heroes slavering to come to grips with the Enemy, any human that raised its head during a kzin military operation would have been distinctly unwise. On the other claw, Corporal thought as he looked about the quiet landscape, there was little point in professional soldiers simply massacring unarmed anthropoids which were, after all, part of Wunderland's wealth and infrastructure. This was the Patriarch's Army, too disciplined to kill valuable slaves and taxpayers needlessly.
Already in these derelict farmlands-marginal when, after the first kzin landings, dispossessed humans had tried to cultivate them, and now long gone to ruin-they had rounded up a couple of very young feral humans: wild-eyed, with long tangled hair, and extremely dirty. They were either too knowing or too terrified to make trouble or flee, and Hroarh-Officer ordered them taken to the rear. If they were clever enough to be decorous, they might have a future as slaves in his household. Hroarh-Officer was a follower of Chuut-Riit's ideas and a student of humans, which was one reason he had been assigned to this force. They had also found a couple of very young kzinti-wild orphans, who had also been sent to the rear. Once these would have been left to fend for themselves, to perish or not as the Fanged God decreed for His bravest sons, but things were a little different now, and there were more than a few kzin orphans…
The caves were, it was thought, an important base and resource to the feral humans. Ambushes were possible even before they reached them-possible but unlikely. Humans generally lacked the spirit to attack a kzin military force in the open.
Once a jerky, unnatural movement brought the platoon leaping to the ready. It was only an ancient human farming robot, long unmaintained and unreprogrammed, grubbing in the dust beside a shattered irrigation canal where crops had once grown. It was small for such a machine, unpleasantly suggestive of a living being grown crippled and stupid with age. Platoon Officer raised his sidearm as if to blow it to pieces, then lowered it again. The fact that the thing still had power to function, years after human attempts at farming had ceased here, suggested it had a power-source which it would be as well to leave alone. It might accidentally harvest some unwary human or kzin-in fact there appeared to be bones in a basket it carried that might have been meant to hold vegetable crops-but that would teach those concerned to keep a better lookout.
The limestone cliffs, crowned by the red vegetation of Ka'ashi, folded into a long canyon as the ground under their feet rose. Eagerly, kzin officers and troops broke into a trot. Detachments split off to guard the many exits.
So far there had been no activity from the feral humans. That might mean the kzin expedition had surprised them. But that was unlikely, Corporal thought. Humans' eyes and ears were poor, but they had many of them.
Urrr… if the ferals did the right thing, promotion might come. It was possible to dream. Corporal, not uniquely among Ka'ashi-born kzin of his generation, had a more complex attitude to humans than he realized. On one claw, like all sapient non-kzin life-forms, they were slaves and prey. There were kz'eerkti-monkeys-on Homeworld. The very brightest of those made slaves, the rest reasonable sport, and their tricks and monekyshines could make good stories. Yet on the other claw, these particular kz'eerkti with guns and spaceships who had colonized Ka'ashi from Sol system were not like the other alien races the Kzin had smashed so easily.
True, kzin conventionally regarded them in their wild state as simply vermin, and Corporal had shared the rage of all the kzin of the Alpha Centauri system when the fleets sent against Sol limped back with their dead and their shame, but some, including most importantly Chuut-Riit, the new Planetary Governor and of the Patriarch's blood, had come to feel them worth studying, and sometimes odd similarities between kzin and humans had emerged from that study. There were some who had called to mind from the classics certain ancient verses composed by the Prophet Kdarka-Riit, one day when the Sage had been celebrating after a successful Kz'eerkti-hunt on Homeworld:
The war will be both long and strange If one day under distant suns
Kzinti find Kz'eerkti carrying guns And kzinti destiny will change.
There were even some Kzin who were thought to be too interested in humans, and there was a term for these, which if uttered in their hearing (but obviously never in the hearing of Chuut-Riit) could be taken as an automatic challenge to a death-duel. Corporal, for his part, had felt a slight fondness for some of the human slaves who had raised him. Also, one or two had served him satisfactorily since. He was, however, a professional. If Chuut-Riit and Hroarh-Officer said humans were to be studied, he would study them. Otherwise he would supervise them or kill them impartially as ordered.
There was a small library of ancient human military books at the NCO training school now, part of Chuut-Riit's encouragement of Thinking Soldiers in general and of Human Studies in particular. Human military records on Wunderland-all dating from their ancient days on their homeworld before spaceflight-had been sparse and fragmentary, but there were memorable gleams here and there among them. He remembered one passage now, a surviving fragment of an old book:
Many years ago, hoping some day to be an officer, I was poring over the "Principles of War" listed in the old Field Service Regulations when the Sergeant-Major came upon me. "Don't bother your head about them things, me lad," he said. "There's only one principle of war and that's this: Hit the other fellow, as quick as you can, and as hard as you can, where it hurts most, when he ain't lookin'!"
The author had been a human "named" Slim, a word meaning Thin. It did not sound like a warrior's Name. His rank-title when he wrote the book had been something called Field-Marshal. Somehow Corporal felt he could imagine the human Slim and the human Sergeant-Major in the scene he described. Hoping to be an officer… That brought his thoughts back to his own position, and he focused his attention on the task before them.
It might, Corporal thought, have been more effective to send a small force of two or three Heroes to spy out the land thoroughly, taking advantage of the humans' poor sight and hearing, before launching the main attack. That sort of thing had been done at the time of the first landings, when humans were an unknown quantity-these very caves had been a lurking-place for some of the first kzinti scouts. However, and whatever Chuut-Riit said, many in the kzin military command had been reluctant to descend to using spies against monkey activities since then. It smacked of caution. Which may be one reason why this war against them is taking so long to finish, Corporal thought. The column was moving at a good pace, and he snarled at a couple of troopers who were losing their position, though with private thoughts that their close formation was inviting an ambush and hopes that any feral humans about had not also read Slim.