Chapter Two: Kzin Bites Dog
“No, I niver seen any sich a thing, an’ if I had then he went east, and no, he never shared his rabbits wi’ me, for that ud be poachin’; which neither o’ the two o’ us would iver dream o’ doin’,” Tim assured Goddard.
Paddy growled at Goddard; he had a clear idea of who the bad guys were. Tim pulled the string attached to his collar.
“That damned pooch gets loose and comes near me, I’ll blast it to plasma,” Goddard hissed at Tim.
“When did you see it?” Elain asked in a more friendly way. Being more friendly than Goddard was not too hard.
“Like I tol’ yez, I niver seen nuthin’. An’ what would an old hobo like me know o’ time anyway? Look at me. Does ye see a watch? No. Does ye see a diary? No. Does ye see one o’ they phonies what tells ye what to do and nags ye ef ye doesn’t do ut? No, ye does not. So ef there were some sort o’ crittur around what I niver saw anyhow, how the bright blue buggery would I know when?”
“Was it yesterday?” Elain asked.
“No.”
“Was it the day before yesterday?”
“No.”
“Was it the day before that?”
“No. Anyways, I’m after thinkin’ there may niver ha’ been such a time. I don’t say there was, and I don’t say there weren’t, but wi’ the pot’heen workin’ its bliss upon me soul, I has to declare it’s all very hypothetical whether that many days ago ever existed.”
“This is hopeless,” Goddard snarled. “The old idiot is useless.”
“There’s a question yez hasn’t asked o’ me,” Tim said helpfully.
“What’s that?” Elain asked him.
“Ye ha’n’t asked me if ’twere this very day that I didn’t see this monster ye prate on about.”
“Did you see him today?” Elain asked, excited.
“No,” Tim told her with an air of virtue.
* * *
After they had gone, Tim O’Flaherty hugged himself. He’d told at least four lies, he estimated, and a lie to the gummint was worth a Hail Mary at least. Maybe he’d saved himself an Our Father even. Either way, he was at least a few minor sins in hand. He hoped that strange, big feller with the unpronounceable name that sounded like somebody gargling grass, and the long teeth and all, was well on his way. Furry, he’d been. Definitely a furriner, not a doubt of it, and very possibly one o’ these karzins they’d talked about, but a daecent enough feller for all that.
* * *
“How the hell does it happen that the damned kzin makes friends with humans?” Goddard demanded.
“Only kids and derelicts, so far,” Elain pointed out.
“Yeah. But kzin are ferocious killers, we know that. Why doesn’t he eat humans?”
Elain shrugged. “I doubt if that old guy would have tasted good. Or maybe it’s all part of some plot to undermine our morale.”
It certainly wasn’t doing Goddard’s morale much good. He scowled. Not at Elain, at the entire universe.
* * *
They hunted west for two days, while another aircar followed the dogs north. H’char’n had followed Tim’s advice on the quickest way to get to the less-populated area known as Canada. He had some doubts as to Tim’s reliability, but the man had insisted that staying away from towns and cities would be easier if he went north, and H’char’n trusted his good will if not, altogether, his judgment.
“The damned thing has gone over fifty kilometers a day for at least four days and in bad terrain; no horse could keep up with that, and no vehicle except a tank could handle the terrain,” Goddard fumed. “Nor the dogs. It isn’t enough to keep following the damned dogs, we have to work out where it’s headed and get in front of it.”
“At some point he’ll get to forest or mountains where it will be hard to locate him,” Elain said. “I wouldn’t have thought an alien could hope to remain uncaught as long as this. He’s plenty smart.”
“The damned monster has already gotten over the Appalachians. It’ll be in the Rockies in another week or two if it keeps this up.”
* * *
H’char’n stuck to the high ground as long as possible. There were isolated farms around, and in the far distance he could see the haze of towns, but there were no cities visible. He knew they existed and mainly on the coasts, which was why he’d been anxious to head west. There seemed to be fewer big cities in the middle of the continent. It wasn’t just the space a city took up, it was the great hinterland around, dedicated to servicing it, that was the problem.
He was getting used to the vegetation and the animals and birds. There was a certain beauty to it. He sensed still the strangeness of another world, where you saw not what was there but what one expected to see, an expectation based on a different planet. And likely to be horribly wrong. But he was learning to take this world on its own terms, and he rather liked it. On Kzin-Home itself, and on most of the long-settled colony worlds of the Patriarchy, the best land had been locked up by the great noble families for centuries. There was, by comparison, a powerful feeling of freedom here. When Earth is conquered, he thought, and if I am still alive, this will be where I will stake out my own hunting preserves.
Strangest of all had been the two humans he had encountered. One a child and the other a man who was pickling his brain, but it had been a good brain once, in an odd sort of way, and he had recited a great deal of incomprehensible stuff which somehow had a kind of music to it. H’char’n had had little time for reading anything other than military manuals, although he had been obliged to learn great chunks of epic poetry when a kitten. Poetry. It was in stark contrast to the murderous yet passionless killing that the humans were capable of that troubled him. He could understand that they wanted freedom and would fight for it. The life of a kzin slave was not an easy one. Yet they sacrificed fleets so that some handful of civilians might survive. They sent their spacecraft into certain death, and what was unaccountable was that they often won. It was almost as if they were blessed by the Fanged God with some quite incredible good luck. They were ridiculously outnumbered and outgunned at the beginning of the war, but they never gave up. No doubt some would have done; there were stories of some on conquered Ka’ashi who were prepared to betray their species for favors, something the kzin found disgusting but were prepared to use. And there were others who had more than kzin disdain for their own traitors and killed them out of hand.
And yet Timmo Flahrty had treated him with honor and something more. Something for which H’char’n didn’t even have a name.
* * *
“We’ve got a line of soldiers across its route. They have enough firepower to stop it dead. As long as it keeps heading in the direction the dogs think it’s gone, we’ll get it.” Goddard had a rictus that looked like death rather than humor.
“We are supposed to capture him for interrogation, you know,” Elain pointed out. “I hope the troops know that.”
Goddard could see she thought him half insane. Maybe he was, he thought, but he had good reason.
“I had a brother, once, a little younger than me,” he said heavily. “He went to Wunderland with a volunteer force to help the resistance with weapons and training, and got himself captured by the kzin, some local overlord and his scum. Who had heard that gelding animals made them more docile, and wanted to see if it worked on men; so he ordered my brother castrated. And maybe he didn’t make the instructions very clear, because the savage thing that did the actual job just tore his clothes off, forced his legs apart and bit everything off. And swallowed them. And it didn’t bother to stop the flow of blood, it just left him, thinking that he would heal the way a kzin probably would. It did it in front of the others they had captured, and they helped my brother as best they could, which amounted to leaving him their bootlaces so he could hang himself. Which he did, as he slowly bled to death. One of them escaped and spread the story which is how I heard about it via the old Nifleheim maser. And let me tell you, since then, I’ve wanted to destroy every goddam kzin I’ve ever heard of. I want them wiped off the face of the universe. And if they die slowly, I’ll be glad of it, for what they did. Yes, it’s very, very personal for me. And when I catch up with that…thing, I’m gonna do to it what they did to my brother.” His voice was rising. “I’m going to shoot its dick off, and its balls, then I’m going to take its feet off, and I’m going to watch it die, an inch at a time.” There were flecks of foam on the corners of his mouth.
Elain looked at him helplessly. She too, along with millions of others, had lost people in the war. She had relatives on Wunderland, now dead or enduring the horror of slavery to the Kzin. But seeing red, going berserk, was a short-term advantage in a fight only if you didn’t care about surviving it. It made you useless in the long run.
* * *
Captain Jevons was in charge of the first squad of the Orbisonia Militia. They had been told off to guard the Sherman River, near the Blue Mountain.
The squad knew they weren’t real soldiers, and most didn’t pretend to be, though they were proud of their uniforms and weapons. Hell, it was pretty much a social club. All the same, most of them understood the nature of duty, and they faced up to the prospect of meeting a kzin warrior with as much courage as they could muster. All the same, standing guard at night without a fire preyed on the nerves.
H’char’n loped toward them along the side of a stream. He had drunk from it, and it was cold and reasonably clean. Not that the bacteria here should cause him problems. They had co-evolved with very different species.
He was traveling a little east of north, keeping to the high ground. Ahead of him was a wood. And humans. He could smell them. And they must be waiting for him because they were not talking. He stopped and probed the night. Less than a dozen. Could he go around them? He might even be able to go in between them; they were making a lot of noise, breathing and moving and scratching and rubbing their hands together. H’char’n was amused rather than worried. That was before he discovered they had some sort of infrared detector, and could see him in the dark. He found out about it when something came whooshing toward him jetting flame. He worked out that it was some sort of rocket-propelled grenade. He waited and then moved sideways. It flashed past and he felt the flame of its exhaust. He swiveled to watch it, and the thing turned in flight. It was detecting his body heat, he realized, and went into the stream with only a small splash. Then he swam down river.
Like most felinoids, H’char’n didn’t enjoy swimming, but it had been a part of his training a long time ago, and he swam strongly underwater.
He heard a CRUMP! as something exploded, and he raised his head for a look. The missile had found a rabbit and chased it down a hole.
The enemy had detected him shortly after he had detected them. He knew their sense of smell was poor, likewise their vision and hearing, but they had augmented all three senses artificially, and with those devices they could see in the dark about as well as he could. And there were about ten of them.
Captain Jevons was the only one with a proper infrared detector and he had only two RPGs. He was looking around in panic. He’d seen a huge figure looming out of the dark, glowing green, and he’d been terrified. He’d hissed an order to Sergeant Baker to fire at it, and she had, although she’d wondered if she should. Orders were to hold it and notify the army. The proper army. But Captain Jevons’ orders were orders, too. She had sighed to herself and decided that it was Captain Jevons who was responsible if they blew the thing up. And a dead kzin was certainly less of a problem than a kzin prisoner. So she’d sighted through the tiny IR scope in the direction Jevons had pointed in, and fired at the huge shape, smack in the middle. The thing moved like lightning. It vanished from her scope, and she swung it around but couldn’t find it.
Neither could Captain Jevons. He had a much bigger thing like an iPad and he swung it around praying that he’d see the thing. He’d had his chance, and he’d blown it.
“You missed, Sergeant, dammit,” he swore at her in an undertone. “And when the missile swung to have another shot, the damned beast wasn’t there. Where the hell did it go?”
The rest of the squad was worrying about exactly the same thing. They had seen the RPG screaming toward something, seen it miss, seen a huge shape briefly outlined by the exhaust, and then it had gone. They had old, old, weapons and nothing like enough live ammunition. They had heard that it took forty men to down one kzin, and there weren’t forty of them. They held their ground, some out of determination to do so, others because they couldn’t think of an alternative.
A huge paw came over Jevons’ shoulder and crushed his pad. Sergeant Baker looked up at something as it crushed the tube of the grenade launcher. It was too dark to see much, but white fangs gleamed in the starlight. Jevons went for his side gun, which was neatly buttoned down at his waist, and it was taken from him and thrown into the undergrowth.
A deep voice came out of the darkness. “I give you your lives. I do not kill save for food, for defense, for justice. And I shall not kill man unnecessarily.”
Sergeant Baker hoped that man included woman.
* * *
It must have done, because there was no further contact with the enemy. Jevons phoned in a report, admitted that they had fired at the kzin and missed. He also reported the kzin’s statement, word for word. It was engraved on his memory for the rest of his life.
* * *
“We’ve got the bastard!” Goddard was in triumph. “It tangled with a bunch of militia outside some dump in Admindic whatever. Pennsylvania. We’re relocating the dogs there right now. And they’ve put regular army units in its path.
“How many killed?” Elain asked.
“None.” Goddard sounded unhappy about it. “It said something about not eating people. And only killing in self-defense. But hell, that was just another lie. Kzin are notorious for eating humans given a chance. There’s no way I’d trust it.”
“Maybe,” Elain said thoughtfully. “But so far his PR has been top-notch. If the army kills him in a fight I guess we’d be able to spin it. But if we just murder him we’re gonna look bad.”
“So we’ll just have to supply some human casualties,” Goddard said. “Or make it a straight fight, one on one. That would make killing it really great television.” His eyes gleamed at the thought. “Anyway, we’re going straight to where it was last night.”
Goddard had totally lost it now, Elain thought. He no longer had even a veneer of rationality. He’d be for the high jump if a superior officer had heard that. It was hard to say which of the two, the kzin or Goddard, was the alien monster at times.
Elain wasn’t looking forward to meeting a kzin warrior with an insane Goddard intent on making his name in a fight. She had a feeling the kzin would be a much, much better fighter. If Goddard pissed it off, the kzin could kill Goddard and have her too as a side-dish.
* * *
H’char’n swam down the stream despite its easterly direction, intent on leaving as little as possible for sniffers or hunting animals. He feared being closer to towns and cities, but he feared the sniffers more. The humans had fliers which could drop armed humans in his path and had no doubt already done so. The squad he had met last night showed the intent. He hoped that the remainder of the troops he met would be as incompetent, but it didn’t seem likely. That lot had been expendable and had done their job just by identifying him. The great northern wastes and forests up near the arctic circle were looking further and further away.
Giving himself up didn’t cross his mind. He was still fighting in the war; he was diverting a tiny fraction of the enemy’s resources into hunting him. It wasn’t much, but every little helped. Besides, he liked his freedom. He’d never had so much before; his life up until now seemed to have been dominated by others. Now he made his own decisions. It felt good.
Also he was learning much about the enemy. As individuals, they were strange, but his sample was rather biased. As combatants they were surprisingly ineffectual. Perhaps they were not much concerned about his presence; after all, he could do little real harm. Even if he devoured every human he met, it wouldn’t amount to much more than a nuisance except at the level of morale, and had he done that no doubt the enemy would go to more trouble to destroy him. But it was possible that if he disappeared into the great northern wastes, they would leave him alone. By declaring he would not eat them, he hoped to give the humans every reason to do just that. And he could easily come to care for this world. It had great beauty.
He went ten miles downstream, in quite the wrong direction for the northern wastes, but he could easily make that up in an hour of moderate running. So he emerged some time when his nose told him he was getting close to a town. He had caught some small fish and eaten them, drank some of the water, which tasted bad, and was ready to head north again.
* * *
“The dogs can’t find a scent,” Goddard snarled. “It must either have retreated, or gone into the trees, or gone by river.”
The trees didn’t look big enough to hold a full-grown kzin, and the river was going the wrong way if the kzin’s intentions of heading north and west had meant anything. Since the meeting with O’Flaherty, the kzin had gone much more northerly, Elain had noted. More evidence that the derelict had had friendly relations with the kzin, which was strange, and against the stereotypes. Everything she had been told about kzin said he should have eaten O’Flaherty and his dog both, to avoid being betrayed. But of course he hadn’t been betrayed using his own methods either, so it had to be allowed that they worked. The kzin seemed to have some sort of sense of honor. That was confirmed by what he had told the militiaman and woman. He sure wasn’t just a dangerous animal, although he was that too. If it hadn’t been for Goddard, she would have rather looked forward to catching up with the kzin; he interested her. But being with Goddard made it unholy dangerous. Goddard would go for him and try to kill him on sight; he’d made that clear enough. And she didn’t want to be with him when he did it. In the unlikely event that Goddard survived, she’d be a witness to murder. More likely it would be suicide by kzin. Either would be a serious health hazard to her.
* * *
H’char’n looked down the hill. It was evening, and the lights of camps flickered in the approaching gloom. This, he suspected, was a temporary camp put up for the purpose of blocking him. There would be soldiers down there, armed. And with those sniffers, or animals capable of scenting him. And those devices that gave them sight in the infrared which their eyes did not normally see. Sneaking in between them did not look to be feasible; he must go around them.
A howl came from behind him. Some animal, but whether a wild one or something that these humans had domesticated into a tracker he could not know. He turned east, and descended the hill, traveling fast and on all fours so as to minimize the chances of being seen. He made huge leaps, risking a slip on shaky stones, and moving so fast that a single slip could be disastrous. At the bottom was a stream, and he leapt it. The ground on the other side was soft and took his prints, but he could do nothing about that now. Then up a slight hill and over the top before he had time to survey it, right into another camp.
There were about a dozen soldiers, still lighting a fire, and unprepared to find something bigger than a tiger and a lot more dangerous right in among them. They recovered, far too late. H’char’n took out their leader, and tore one of the milk glands off her chest with a downward slash, then his claw ripped open her chest into bloody ruin, scattering ribs and heart. Her scream died with her. At the same time his wtsai gutted the man next to her, and he spun away while two of the slow-witted started to reach for their weapons. One had his throat ripped out by H’char’n’s teeth while the other collapsed, his head rolling away and his neck spurting blood. The corpse of the first was thrown and knocked two soldiers off balance which they never recovered. Half of them were dead in three seconds. The remainder raised guns and yelled, and he slew them all, methodically and fast.
H’char’n looked at them, lying there, their weapons unused, the fire still unlit. Two of the corpses had milk glands on their chests which meant that they were female. It was strange to think of females as soldiers, but these were aliens. He had given them all an honorable death. A warrior could ask for nothing better.
He cleaned the wtsai which had claimed most of them, the others falling to his claws and fangs. In battle against a kzin, he would have licked the blade clean of blood, as tribute to the dead. Here it seemed silly, so he cleaned it on a body. He was tempted to eat one to keep up his strength (also, he thought, the meat of one’s own kill had that extra taste). But he had promised not to eat humans, so he turned away.
He took a deep breath and savored the smell of blood. None of it his. Some from one or more of the soldiers had got on his left paw, so he licked it off. Yes, it tasted good. Then with a reluctant look at all the fresh meat, he continued, back on all fours again for speed.
After a while, when he was sure he was clear of the enemy, he turned north again.
* * *
“It took out a squad. Murdered every single one. Some of them have the claw marks to prove it.” Goddard was taking it personally again.
Elain shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t count as murder if it’s a war,” she pointed out. The pictures he had shown were revolting, no question, but no worse than some she had seen of the old wars between humans, censored by ARM until recently. “They’d have killed him if they could. His claim not to kill except in defense is still good if you ask me.”
“I didn’t,” Goddard raged at her. “This thing didn’t try to talk to them; it just murdered them.”
“Would you try to have a chat with a squad of enemy soldiers if you met them on the battlefield?” she asked him. “Don’t be dumb. You’d kill them quick, if you had the means. He did.”
She was sick of Goddard. And growing more afraid of him. The smell of insanity was overpowering, now. So he’d lost relatives on ops, and he’d bought into the hatred in consequence. Elain thought it was a mistake to hate your enemy. Kill them, yes, capture them if possible so as to gain intelligence, and if not wipe them off the face of the universe. But getting emotional about it only hindered. You got all warm thinking about the slaughter which didn’t make you any better at doing it. Slowed you down. It was like those silly adventure stories where the bad guy did a good gloat, allowing the hero time to escape. Good guys don’t gloat, they just kill when necessary. If you had to get all emotional about it, the time to do so was when it was all over. Nursing hatred just made you twisted and sour.
* * *
H’char’n would have agreed with that. He had no regrets about killing the squaddies. They’d threatened him fast enough when they had woken up to his presence. If they’d left him alone, he would have left them alone, but they were under orders from a malevolent force, so they’d had to go. H’char’n didn’t even think about it. He was focused on getting as far away from the place as possible, because that was where they would start the sniffers.
* * *
“General Dillon.”
“Sir.”
“General Dillon, I’ve asked you to see me to discuss this business of the kzin pilot who survived a crash when we shot his fighter down. I understand the animal has killed a squad of the eighteenth battalion and seems to be headed for Administrative District 1047.”
“Yes sir. But I should hesitate to call him an animal. He’s almost certainly a good deal more intelligent than the soldiers he took down, and possibly more intelligent than their commanders.” Dillon was old, but had settled for looking about fifty, with a tight brush of white hair and pale blue eyes.
“That suggests you have a low opinion of some of your colleagues, general.” The assistant to the undersecretary of state was smooth, cynical and like all successful politicians, fundamentally dumb in Dillon’s view. All about seeming, not about being or doing.
“Not necessarily sir, but it is a profound mistake to underestimate your enemy,” he answered. “And to make my position unambiguous, it has to be said that our home troops are not the best fighters. Those are on the front line, in space. Sir.”
“Well what would you recommend, General? It is looking bad if we fail to catch one kzin on home ground.”
“Based on what I have heard, my recommendation would be to leave him alone, sir. He’s not a serious problem. If he gets into the wild and stays there, he’s doing no harm. Maybe kill a few bears. At present he’s tying up resources to no good end.”
“That’s impossible, General. We must be seen to be doing something,” the assistant said. “and if he gets to 1047, their local government will have something to say. And what if he goes wild and kills some of their people? Besides, there are assets up there he could sabotage, including fusion plants.”
General Dillon maintained a stern expression, although he would laugh when it was safe to do so. Politicians must be seen to be doing something, even something stupid. Had they any idea about fusion plants? Like they understood electricity, he guessed. Press the switch and the light comes on.
“Well sir, if we must capture him, then it should be done with rather more knowledge and thought than has been applied so far. If you want me to take charge, then of course I will.”
“Excellent. I was hoping you would offer,” the assistant undersecretary said jovially.
It hadn’t been an offer exactly. More of a resigned acceptance of the power relationship.
“Then I shall want the officer Captain Goddard recalled,” Dillon said. “The man is a loose cannon. His sidekick, Captain Thomas, can stay in the field; she’s an ARM agent incidentally, though she doesn’t know we know. I have no objection to ARM agents meeting up with reality. Who knows, it might get back to their leaders someday.”
“We must be careful not to annoy ARM, General. They have important friends in Washington.”
Dillon recognized this as code for saying that ARM had a large number of senators it could blackmail. That was an understatement. ARM—the Amalgamation of Regional Militias—had pervasive influence everywhere. It had been pervasive as a technological police and the war had given it more power than ever. One of its long-term prewar projects had been to create a pacifist human race. It had censored history and suppressed many inventions. That project had had to be put into reverse overnight once the kzin had attacked. Earth’s new, hastily raised armed forces had grown out of it. Even now, only a minority of Earth’s senior military officers did not have ARM backgrounds. Buford Early, the officer commanding this operation, was an ARM bureaucrat of who-knew-how-much seniority. Early was old—ARM had had geriatric drugs long before it had released them to the rest of humanity.
“Yes, sir. And if we lose the war, as looks not unlikely, I can only hope the kzin eat them first. Had it not been for ARM and its one-world-at-peace dogmas, we’d have been in rather better shape to fight and win.”
“Well, that’s all water under the bridge, General. No sense in holding grudges; we’re all in this together now.”
General Dillon didn’t think he’d ever be in anything with ARM. He didn’t speak.
The silence dragged on, and the politician lost his smile and spoke, since it was obvious the general wasn’t going to.
“Very well, General, I’ll have your authorizations cut ASAP. We don’t care if you kill it or capture it, just so long as you do it fast.”
* * *
Goddard bit his lip. He was looking from a flyer that was hovering somewhere over where the thing’s route looked to be, and hoping that he would see it. It seemed to move mainly by night and hole up in the day, but maybe it wouldn’t have found a place to do that yet. He hadn’t seen anywhere likely, so maybe the thing was still coming on. He’d allowed a very generous distance for the thing to travel; it went unbelievably fast. It was nearly in Admindic 1002 now. What most people still thought of as New York State.
Elain was searching too, through binoculars, as he was.
Their flyer was stealthed and should have been invisible from the ground, but Elain had doubts about it working with a kzin. It was known that they could see in the infrared and the flier probably glowed. At least it was light now, so maybe they wouldn’t be too bright.
“Hey, is that him?” Elain asked. A gray shape had flowed over a ridge to the south, heading their way. It was big, as big as a Kodiak, but it moved more like an otter.
“Yes. It’s sticking to the ridge. It likes high ground and this takes it a bit east, as I suspected,” Goddard said with satisfaction. He tracked the kzin briefly, and when he was sure about the direction, he turned the flyer and drifted off, slowly so as not to draw attention to himself. When he could no longer see the kzin, he dived and brought it into land.
“Okay, out. We’ll meet it here. I’m going to blast it good, and I’m gonna enjoy doing it,” Goddard said. They were just to the north of a break in the vegetation, which was sparse anyway.
Elain sighed. She figured she was risking her life here, but that, no doubt, was why they paid her the big bucks. Ha! The Army didn’t believe in big bucks, not for captains, anyway. And the ARM supplement went into a secret account for her retirement and was less than generous. But sometimes a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do. You don’t sign up to the Army for the quiet and security. Not in time of war, anyway.
Goddard stood with his hand on the grip of his blaster. Elain stood ten feet behind him to his left. She’d have had the gun out and ready, but Goddard was busy being heroic. She had a slug gun at her waist and made no move to draw it. It wouldn’t have stopped a kzin anyway. The dogs came out and sniffed, exploring between them and the approaching kzin.
H’char’n could scent them before he could see them. Two, and one a female, and some small animals. It didn’t look much of a threat to him, and curiosity drove him forward. He stepped out, upright now, towering over the scene.
Hagon growled. He was not chosen for his intelligence but his bravery, and he had plenty of that. He launched himself at H’char’n, fangs ready. Vala made a whining noise and just stood there.
H’char’n caught the dog and ripped its head off, just as Goddard drew the blaster. He threw the body to one side, hurled the head at Goddard and moved. Vala turned and fled.
The head hit Goddard in the face, and stopped him long enough. When he got the gun leveled, a blade came down and sliced his hand off at the wrist. H’char’n turned to Elain and a hind foot kicked the gun and the hand holding it into the undergrowth. It had all happened far too fast for Elain to react. Goddard looked in surprise at the blood spouting from the severed wrist, and then wrapped his left hand around it tightly, trying to stop the blood.
“You are fee-male, is it not so?” H’char’n asked Elain, conversationally.
“Yes,” Elain said with a gulp.
“Are you this one’s mate?” he asked.
“Hell, no. No! Definitely not,” Elain answered.
“Still, it might be as well if you were to bind his wound. He should survive. I do not kill except when under serious attack.”
The conversation was too much for Elain. She was less than three meters from a thing that could have killed her as casually as she’d deliver a squirt of insect spray at a housefly. Something that thought a man leveling a blaster at him wasn’t serious.
Goddard buckled, went to his knees and moaned. Elain jumped to him, pulled out a vibrator penknife, sliced into his shirt and made a strip long enough to wrap around the wrist. She closed the knife and slipped it into the strip to make a tourniquet and tightened it until the blood stopped spurting. By this time Goddard was out for the count.
She looked around for the kzin, but he had vanished. He had taken the corpse of Hagon with him, she discovered later. He hadn’t, after all, promised not to eat dogs.