There were many Nameless officers, and many high officers who had no more than partial Names, and a few, a very few, senior NCOs who had partial Names too. In the noncommissioned ranks these were an Order of the Elite of the Elite. Corporal had met one or two, and looked on them with awe, though a Name was far beyond his own ambitions. But valor and blood-lust were still the way to Names, victories won by no more preparation than a scream and leap, whatever the Manual said.
Corporal guessed Platoon Officer despised the cautious injunctions of the Manual as monkey thinking, despite its fearsome and illustrious author. Corporal was aware that he himself was too cautious to be an ideal Hero. He thought of the little group among his fellow recruits who had once been his particular companions: Most of them had been more recklessly daring than he, and many of them would be of superior rank or even Name if they had still been alive. That was another reason he would like a mate and a son: Sometimes late at night the dead were not satisfactory company.
Sergeant turned to him. "Corporal, you and your eight will guard the rear!" In strict military practice that was Sergeant's task, but Sergeant had no intention of accepting a position that carried relatively little chance of glory. Corporal obeyed unquestioningly. Sergeant also had the speed and strength for his orders to be unquestioned. And anyway, Corporal told himself, in these tunnels, where anything might be behind them, the position of rearguard was not actually shameful. Weapons were raised. "Forward!" Platoon Officer rushed the tunnel, two eights of Heroes behind him, shrieking. What happened next was hard for Corporal to follow. The shrieks changed in pitch into insensate screams-the screams of kzinti who realized something terrible but incomprehensible had been done to them. He heard their bodies crashing down to the flat ground at the foot of the slope. He saw a couple of their lights swing through wild arcs, revealing nothing. Then the screams died away. There was another sound, plainly the sound of a kzin scrambling back up the slope. It stopped, and slid back. There was nothing more.
Corporal called, but no answer came. There were still some faint sounds but they were dying away. The smell of blood-kzin blood, mixed with the smells of marrow and entrails and pain-rose up the passage in a cloud.
One trooper, plainly maddened by what he heard and smelled, charged headlong down the passage, ignoring Corporal's shouted command to be still. Whatever happened to the others happened to him. A shriek, and then silence save for the thud of his body landing far below.
Kzin are not easily horrified, but Corporal paused. One part of his mind and his emotions stated imperiously that it was his duty to charge down after the others. If there was danger, a Hero attacked head-on, reckoning nothing of the odds. He was the senior surviving rank, and now the leader. But the fact he was the only surviving NCO, he thought, put a different cast on things: he commanded an eight of troopers-eight minus one now-and without him they would be leaderless. He had seen before the consequences of that. Monkey tactics had always been to kill the kzin officers and NCOs first-a strategy in which, he thought, kzin officers and NCOs had often been only too willing to cooperate. Now he had a duty not to risk himself.
There was nothing to see down the tunnel but a dim light, presumably reflected from some of the Heroes' glow-patches at the bottom. Nothing to smell but waves of blood and death that drowned out all other smells. There might be human or morlock there.
"I wish a volunteer to explore the tunnel," he told the troopers.
"Command us, Corporal!" It was a unanimous shout and snarl. No kzin soldier would dream of not volunteering for hazardous duty.
"You." He picked the nearest trooper. He spoke with emphasis: "You are ordered to go slowly and cautiously. Tell me everything you smell, see, and hear as you go. When you have detected the danger return to us. Do not attempt to fight it alone."
Trooper advanced on all fours.
"It is a steep incline," he called back, "but my claws hold me. The ground is firm enough. I see nothing. I smell only the blood of Heroes…"
"Still nothing," he called a few moments later. "Blood smell is stronger… There is… a sting… my face. PAIN!"
"Come back! Come back at once! That is an order!" If Trooper were injured, an examination of his injuries might tell them what devilish thing awaited Heroes in that tunnel. And Trooper did not seem to be badly hurt yet. He heard Trooper scrabbling back, saying nothing. He seemed to be breathing with a peculiar wet noise.
Trooper came out of the tunnel. But he looked different. He shook his head and staggered as he moved. In the dim light it took corporal a second to see his face was a mask of blood.
"What happened? Report!" As he spoke he gestured for the unit medical kit to be brought. "Pain… " Trooper's head fell apart. Corporal saw bone, brain, flesh and gushing blood. Trooper fell forward, plainly dead.
Roars of rage from every kzin throat. They surged about the top of the fall, preparing another mass-charge down it. Corporal cuffed them back with unsheathed claws, snarling curses. At last he got them into some sort of order, and held them till their fury had been brought under control.
There was only one possible course now. Corporal picked the oldest and, he hoped, the wisest of his Heroes. "I will explore the tunnel myself alone," he said. "If this kills me, take command and report to higher authority what has happened. Do not follow me."
It was as the Trooper had said. The tunnel was wide enough for Kzin on all fours, or even standing partly erect, to charge down it at a good pace. The floor of it was fairly firm and gave a good purchase for claws, but even in Wunderland's light gravity the bulk of a kzin's body had a tendency to run away downhill on such a slope. He stopped just before it began to level off a little.
This was, he thought, as far as Trooper had got.
Something like an insect tickled the tip of his nose. He drew back instantly, raised one hand, and felt it. His massive, stubby fingers came away wet with blood.
He waited. There was a stinging pain on the sensitive skin of his nose now, but from the amount of blood it was not a serious injury.
His strained his eyes to see anything in the gloom.
There was a fine line in mid-air. A fine dark line. He touched it with the tip of his w'tsai. There was a scraping sound.
It was fiendish and simple. A length of superfine metal wire, perhaps a single molecule in thickness, had been stretched across the tunnel. Listening carefully, he heard a tiny buzzing or droning sound. A miniaturized engine, he guessed, would make it vibrate minutely to increase the cutting effect. The charging kzinti, going downhill with gravity adding to their speed, had simply cut themselves in half on it. No wonder there was so much blood. It was so fine that it caused little or no immediate pain and even Trooper going more cautiously had not realized what was happening when it was inside his head. Now there was enough blood and tissue on it for it to be visible.
He backed away up the slope. It would have been possible to crawl under the wire, but it was too late to help those below. In any case, he realized, there might be other such wires strung almost anywhere. He felt the eyes of the others upon him: they were waiting to be led.
How much of the wire did the humans have? That was a fairly meaningless question. Kzin grew such wire in space-it needed zero gravity and vacuum-but Markham and other ferals had spaceships and could be supplying it. He remembered Hroarh-Officer's warning now: "They can make anything into a weapon." It had been placed at the bottom of the steepest part of the slope, where the kzinti would run into it at the greatest speed. No doubt the humans were waiting in the chambers below for his own section either to come charging down after their comrades and share their fate, or to realize what had happened to them and depart, leaving the humans to pillage Heroes' sliced-up corpses of their gear and weapons and perhaps (he had heard rumors about human ferals) to eat the meat from their bones in a declaration of Conquest. Platoon Officer's radar, presenting an instant three-dimensional picture of the cave complex, might also be a prize for the humans worth more than w'tsais and beam rifles. Well, it would not be borne. Quickly he told the troopers what had happened.