“How many?” asked Leonie.
“They are not many yet. An eight, two eights. But we are not many also.”
The lights showed nothing. Only the single tunnel ahead of them, and what they knew were a complication of dark holes behind.
“These caves have never been fully mapped,” said Leonie. “We've been finding new ones all the time.”
An explosion shattered the panel above them. Raargh, faster than any human could have moved, spun, firing the heavy kzin weapon. Guthlac's two troopers also fired back with quick, short professional bursts.
“Behind us as well, now!” Raargh snarled.
One of the students was down, hit by a chunk of flying metal behind the left ear. Arthur Guthlac saw instantly he was dead. Keeping low, he gathered the strakkaker and spare charges, as well as the food pack the boy had been carrying.
“Did you see anything?”
“No, too quick. Too dark.”
“No point in staying here, then,” said Arthur Guthlac. “Plans are changed. We move on. And we stay together. We're too few to split. Forward!”
A blue glow lit the tunnel ahead of them. Hemispherical, it blocked the way. Raargh recognized it as something to be avoided. Dimity recognized it as a Sinclair field, and Arthur Guthlac knew it from old ARM texts. It was possible to live in the time-compressed zone inside it, given adequate supplies of food, water and air, but only if one was in place before it was generated: The process of entering the zone once it was activated would probably be fatal.
A beam, or the projectiles of a strakkaker, fired through the field would receive enormous acceleration. What would happen to such a beam on leaving the field on the other side no one was sure, but as a rule attempts to get around the Special Theory of Relativity in the Einsteinian universe had either no results or cataclysmic ones. Strakkaker needles, or other projectiles emerging from the field with a kinetic energy giving them far more destructive power than artillery shells, would also not be a good thing in this confined space.
“We'll have to go over it,” Dimity said.
“How?”
She pointed. The roof above them was a complex of machinery—pipes, ducting, ladders, and gangways.
“It's too obvious. They will have booby trapped it.”
Dimity turned to Raargh.
“This field was not on when you came this way?” she asked, speaking carefully in Wunderlander.
“No.”
“I think it's been set up here in a hurry. They may not have had time to do more. If it's enough to delay us, from their point of view that's better than nothing.”
“All right. How do we get over it?”
“We have ropes in the caving gear,” said Leonie. “If that would help.”
“It might. If we could get up there and attach them.”
“Can the kzin do it?” asked Dimity.
“Can you, Raargh?”
“Raargh can try,” he answered. “But Raargh cannot jump like kitten. Raargh is old and has wounds in legs.”
“You are still quick,” said Leonie. “Still have strength of Hero.”
He screamed and leaped, straight upwards, claws scrabbling. The claws of his natural hand cut grooves in the paneling, deep but not deep enough to hold him. The claws of his prosthetic hand smashed through it, found a hold. His hind claws dug in. He pulled himself vertically upright, seized at the overhead ducting and struggled onto it.
“Useful to have a kzin along,” said Leonie.
The glowing domes of the Sinclair fields below them reminded Cumpston a little of giant jellyfish stranded on an Earth beach. But they would, he knew, be considerably more deadly to touch than the worst jellyfish. They were crawling along a high gantry, and he felt hopelessly exposed to any hunter with modern tracking or sensory devices.
The red dot of a laser-site appeared on his chest. Fight or flight, he knew, would be useless. He raised his hands in surrender, signaling to Vaemar to do the same. A group of the armed humans from the fortress appeared at the end of the gantry, McGlue in their lead.
“You had better come out quietly,” said McGlue. There were six of them, with strakkakers and nerve disrupters. Vaemar and Cumpston obeyed.
“Put your hands on top of your heads. Do not make any sudden moves. Dead, neither of you are any use. But we will shoot if we have to. You cannot beat six of us. But I do not want to treat you as prisoners. We are on the same side.”
“And whose pride are you?” asked Cumpston. “The mad one or the even madder one?”
“Ostensibly, we side with Emma,” said the man. “Actually, we have our own agenda. One which you, Colonel, are obliged to support.”
“I suppose you'll explain?”
“I need to. We seem to be alone at present. All other kzinti and humans are off wiping out your little rescue party in the caves. Does this mean anything to you?” He held up a small plastic cube, projecting a holo.
“An ARM ident.”
“Genuine, as you well know. Specifically coded to my DNA and impossible to counterfeit. We have the same employer, Colonel. Or ultimately the same employer.”
“Go on.”
“Your job has been to watch this young kzin. To adjust him to living on a human world. To become his friend.”
“I am his friend! And I have never concealed my ARM status from him.”
“I congratulate you. You have carried out your instructions cleverly. But it has been my part to play a more covert role. ARM is, as you have perhaps guessed, the instrument of a higher power.”
“So even Chuut-Riit guessed. Not a very effective secret if it can be worked out by an alien being four and a half light-years from Earth.”
“Suppose Emma's plans—though I will be frank with you and say our plans, for you know the way we must operate—for a revolt of the Wunderland kzin go ahead. As any practical military man such as yourself understands, it will almost certainly fail. The kzin are relatively few, disorganized and disarmed. On the other hand, given the heavy weapons stockpiled here, and kzin courage and fighting ability, and given a few lucky breaks, an uprising could do great damage and cause considerable loss of human life. As you have eloquently put it, the kzin on Wunderland and Tiamat would then probably be wiped out to the last kzinrett and the last kitten—if events followed an undirected course.”
“But they will not follow an undirected course, and in any case you are wrong is thinking that the kzin of the Patriarchy would care particularly in a moral sense. We would be doing no more than they expect of monkeys. Kzin culture does not have much of the human concept of hostages. The kzinti of the Alpha Centauri system have surrendered. They are disgraced anyway. Their lives mean nothing. That they tried to fight back when the situation was hopeless meant they did no more than Heroes are expected to do. Perhaps it would make their dishonor a little less. Certainly, it will mean other kzin worlds and other individual kzinti will be even less willing to surrender when all their hope is gone than they are now. Certainly, the war will be prolonged, not forever, but enough to give us time.”
“I still don't understand,” said Cumpston. “At the very least, a lot more humans will die, directly and indirectly. And we know the kzinti have other slave races. Some would say, even setting everything else aside, we have a moral duty to help them. Prolonging the war will not do that. A peace has been possible here so far. It may be possible with whole planets.”
“I suggest you look at the long view,” McGlue replied. “The hyperdrive is the greatest threat to the stability of the human species—indeed to all species. Given the absence of war and easy interstellar travel, sooner or later our control is gone. Not this year, not this decade, perhaps not this century. But eventually.
“In the three centuries between the first settlement of Wunderland, followed by the other interstellar colonies, and the development of the hyperdrive we—ARM—lost a great deal of control.