Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC Read Online Free PDF

approached the city with what was unusual caution for kzin warriors. The superior technology of the Dilillies had the effect of making the captain take precautions, so the troops advanced in small groups, others covering them, until an ambush seemed unlikely. There was nothing like the collection of tall buildings they had expected.
    The city, when they entered it, was weird even to those kzinti who had seen alien architecture on different worlds. It seemed to consist of little more than ribbons of metal, with Mobius strips a frequently occurring feature, with vegetation growing through it, and a few tall trees, planted in scenic locations. A plinth with a most peculiar statue on it occupied their attention for some minutes. Then they found the rails. They were a pair of some sort of metal, possibly aluminium, less than an arm span apart, and disappearing behind the strips of metal and the trees in both directions. Some sort of road?
    “We follow them, that way.” The captain ordered. They had gone only a few hundred paces when they heard a whistling sound and a curious regular pounding. Coming around the bend was some sort of monster with eyes and a face wearing an imbecile smile. It bore no resemblance to the creatures they had seen, and it puzzled the kzinti, who were of course unacquainted with Thomas the Tank Engine. Possibly, they thought, it was a local god, something like a moving idol. It ran towards them on wheels connected by rods, mouth agape, and screaming with apparent excitement. They opened up with massive firepower, and it exploded, leaving almost nothing behind.
    The captain pondered the ineffectual attack, and inspected the remains of the monster. The absence of blood worried him. The absence of almost anything worried him. Even a war machine should have left more than this, a quantity of what a human being would have thought looked rather like the result of scraping the burnt bits from overdone toast. And which, moreover, was being rapidly dissipated by the ever present wind. They went back to following the rails in the direction from which the thing had come, to find the track terminated in a large but empty shed.
    Exploring from the shed in different directions led to more inconsequential discoveries. There were lakes and canals, one of which contained a small replica of what an informed human being or Dililly would have recognized as the Bismarck , though the armament in its turrets, which the kzinti had taken at first to be rail-guns, turned out to be dummies. When the metal of these various artifacts was analyzed, they turned out to be common alloys, with a large amount of the aluminium which was found in ordinary clays on many worlds. There was nothing the automated mining and factory facilities of the big carrier could not easily synthesize. Sitting forlorn and solitary in another shed they found a copy of the British State Coach. This yielded some small amount of gold, which the kzinti valued as ornaments and a source of coinage, but of course their physics had enabled them to synthesize it for generations. The coach was too small for adult kzinti, but Captain could, he supposed, present it to Feared Zrarr-Admiral as a plaything for his kittens. Working out what were the seats and doors enabled him to make an estimate of the occupants’ size. Unfortunately, this had no relevance to the Dilillipsans—a fact he could hardly be expected to guess. There were no rare earths in worthwhile quantities.
    Captain was more than a little disappointed. One totally pointless attack didn’t appear to be much ground for glory, he hadn’t lost a single kzin. Losses in battle were taken to be a mark of success, so he could hardly claim one. He doubted any kzinti would want to settle on the planet, even if game were imported: it was too far away from anything. Population pressure was not a problem on Kzin worlds, given the kzinti’s predilection for death-duels. Its alien industrialization, such as it was,