The Man-Kzin Wars 05 Read online

  “Which is why you order fifty-year whiskey and grouper,” he said, gesturing at the table. The two-meter fish was a mess of clean-picked bones on the platter; he picked up the head and crunched it for the brains, salty and delicious.

  Large-Son flattened his batwing ears and wrinkled his upper lip to expose long wet dagger-teeth. “You eat your share, hairball-maker-who-never-matured.” Spots growled around the mouthful; he had never entirely lost the juvenile mottles in his orange pelt. Dueling scars and batwing ears at his belt showed how he usually dealt with those who reminded him of it. “And the price of a meal is nothing compared to what we owe.”

  Spots-Son flared his facial pelt in the equivalent of a shrug. Kzinti rarely lie; it is beneath a warrior’s honor, and in any case few of them can control the characteristic scent of falsehood.

  “Truth,” Spots said. “My liver is chill with worry; we are poor beyond redemption. But if we must die, at least let us do it full and soothed.”

  A shape brushed past the shimmer of the privacy screen. “Owe? Poor?”

  They both wheeled, grinning and folding their ears into combat-position. Long claws slid out of four-digit hands like knives at the tips of black leather gloves. A human had spoken, mangling the Hero’s Tongue with his monkey palate. During the kzinti occupation, a human would have had his tongue removed for so insulting the language of the Heroic Race.

  “You intrude,” Spots-Son said coldly in Wunderlander.

  “This is a public booth,” the man pointed out. “And the only one not full. Besides, we all seem to have something in common.”

  That was an insult. The fur lay flat on their muzzles, and they grinned wider, threads of saliva falling from thin carnivore lips.

  “Cease to intrude, monkey,” Large-Son said; this time he used the Hero’s Tongue, in the Menacing Tense.

  “We’re all warriors, for one thing,” the human continued, smelling of reckless self-confidence.

  Both kzin relaxed, blinking and studying the monkey. He was a tall male, with a strip of dark head-fur; the clothes he wore were uniform and also thermally adjustable padding for wear underground-combat armor. They blinked again, noting the ribbons and unit-markings, looked at each other.

  He speaks truth, Spots-Son signaled with a twitch of eyebrows. Both of them had been junior engineering officers in an underground installation before the human counterattack on the Alpha Centauri system; both had been knocked out with stungas toward the end. The human was actually more of a warrior than either of them; their defense battery might or might not have made a kill during the tag-end of atmospheric combat, but this monkey had beaten kzinti fighters at close quarters. The pips on his sleeve were so many dried kzin ears dangling from a coup belt. It was permissible to talk to him, although not agreeable.

  The human smiled in his turn, although he kept his teeth covered. “Besides, we’re all broke, too. My name is Jonah Matthieson, ex-Pilot, ex-Captain, United Nations Space Navy. Let me order the next round of drinks.”

  and so we inherit the care of our dams, our Sire’s other wives, now ours, and our siblings and half-siblings,” Spots-Son said morosely some hours later, upending the whiskey decanter over his dish. “Honor demands it.”

  Harold’s was half-empty now; a waiter came quickly enough when the long orange-furred arm waved the crystal in the air, setting out fresh liquor and cream. Spots-Son slopped the amber fluid into his bowl and into Jonah’s glass. Large-Son was lying with his muzzle in his dish, tongue protruding slightly as he snored. Thin black lips flopped against his fangs, and his eyes were nearly shut.

  “Kzinti females take much care,” Spots continued, lowering his muzzle. Despite his care it went too far into the heated drink as he nearly toppled, making him sneeze and slap at his nose. “And much feeding. The properties have been confiscated by the military government—all the fine ranchlands and hunting-grounds our Sire possessed, all except the house. Where once we feasted on blood-dripping fresh beef and screaming zianyas, now our families must trade heirlooms for synthetic protein. Soon we will have no alternative but honorable suicide.”

  “Thas—that’s a shame,” Jonah said. “Yeah, after th’ war the fighters get nothin’ and the politicians get rich, like always.” He hiccuped and drank. “Goddam UN

  Space Navy doesn’t need no loudmouths who think for themselves, either. Say, what did you say you did before the war?”

  “I,” Spots said with slow care and some pride, “was a Senior Weapons System Repairworker. And my sibling, too.”

  Jonah blinked owlishly. “Reminds me.” He fumbled a sheet of printout from a pocket. “Lookit this. Decided it was a good deal so I’d come in here an’ spend my last krona. Here.”

  He spread the crumpled paper on the damp surface of the table. The kzin craned to look; it was in the spiky fourteen-point gothic script most commonly used for public announcements on Wunderland. Printed notices were common; during the occupation the kzin overlords had restricted human use of the information net, and since then wartime damage had kept facilities scarce.

  Technical personnel wanted, he read, for heavy salvage operation. Categories of skills were listed. Heavy work, some danger high pay. Suuomalisen Contracting, vid. 97-777-4321A München.

  “Urrrowra,” Spots said mournfully. “Such would be suitable—if we were not kzinti. Surely none will hire us. No, suicide is our fate—we must cut our throats with our own w'tsai and immolate our households. Woe! Woe for a dishonored death in poverty, among furless omnivores! No shrine will enclose our bones and ashes; only eating-grass will cover our graves. Perhaps Kdapt-Preacher is right, and the God has a hairless face!”

  Large-Son whimpered in half-conscious agreement and slapped his hands over his eyes to blank out the horrible vision of the heretic’s new creed, that God had created Man in His own image.

  “Naw,” Jonah said. “I talked to the boss, she don’t care anything but you can do the job. Or wouldn’t have hired me, with a black mark next to my discharge. C’mon—bring the bottle. Talk to her tomorrow.”

  “You are right!” Spots bellowed, standing to his full two meters and a half of massive, orange-furred height. His naked pink tail lashed. “We will fight against debt and empty-accountness. We leap and rip the throat of circumstance. We will conquer!”

  From the other side of the long room beads rustled as a tall black-skinned human stuck his head through the curtain. He was dressed in archaic white tie and tuxedo, but there was a fully functional military-grade stunner in his fist. Behind the bar several other employees reached down and came up with shockrods as guests’ heads turned toward the booth.

  “Shhhhh!” Jonah said, tugging recklessly at the felinoid alien’s fur. “The bouncers.”

  “Rrrrr. True.” There was no dignity in being stunned and thrown out in the gutter. “Where shall we go? Our quarters are far outside München, and transport for kzin costs much.” Sleeping outside would not be very wise, given the number of exterminationist fanatics ready to attack a helpless kzin.

  “C’mon. I know a doss where they don’t care ‘bout anything but your coin, and it’s cheap.”

  They weaved their way to the door, Spots half-carrying his brother and Jonah lifting the unconscious kzin’s tail with exaggerated care.

  · CHAPTER FIVE

  “...still worth lookin’, oh, yes,” the old man said.

  Jonah yawned and looked over at him. The two kzin were unrolling their pallets up a level in the framework; the human had a stack of blankets and a pillow instead, all natural fiber in the rather primitive way of Wunderland, and all smelling dubious and looking worse. It must be even more difficult for the felinoids, with their sensitive noses.

  “Look at ‘er this way,” the man was saying. “You take hafnium —“

  It was hard to estimate his age; he could be as young as seventy or as old as one-fifty, depending on how much medical care he had been able to afford during the occupation.

  “— good useful industrial m
etal; or gold, likewise, and we use it as monetary backing. Usually don’t pay to mine it anywhere but in the Swarm, in normal times. But there ain’t been any normal times, not since the pussies came, no sirree. So people’ve been out in the Jotuns for a dog’s age now, finding deposits. Don’t pay to bring in heavy equipment; deposits are rich but small. You can make yourself rich that way, and that’s not counting salvage on all the equipment the pussies abandoned out there, all very salable these days. I’d go myself don’t you doubt it, go again like a shot.”

  “Hey,” Jonah called. “You sound like you’ve done that before; what’re you doing here?”

  The great room was noisy with the sounds of humans settling down to sleep, snores, snatches of drunken song. There were still tens of thousands of displaced from the war years.

  “Made me a fortune, oh, yes, more than one,” the old man said. His wrinkled-apple face looked over at Jonah, eyes twinkling. “Lost ‘em all. Some the government took, and I spent the others going back and looking for a bigger strike. Most people get into that game don’t know where to stop. Get thirty thousand crowns worth, they want sixty. Get sixty, spend it trying to find half a million. Stands to reason, of course; that’s why the heavy metals are so valuable. Value of’em includes all the time and labor and money spent by those who don’t find anything, you see.”

  “Wouldn’t be like that with me,” Jonah said, unrolling the blankets. Finagle, but I’m tired of being poor he thought. Odd; poverty had never come up before he got to Alpha Centauri. Before then he’d been a Navy pilot, or a rockjack asteroid prospector. The Navy fed you, and rockjacks generally made enough to get by—certainly during the war, with industry sucking in all the materials it could find, “Just enough to set me up. Software business.” He had a first-rate Solarian education in it, and the locals were behind. “That’s all I’d want.”

  “Likely so, stranger, likely so,” the old man said. “Well, don’t signify, does it?”

  “Finagle!” Jonah swore, as the beam jerked backward towards him. He heaved at the bight of control line. “Get it, Spots!”

  “Hrrrrr” Spots growled, and caught the end of it. His pelt laid itself flat under the harness, and the long steel balk slowed and then touched gently on the junction-point. A little less power in the stubby plump-cat limbs and they would both have been crushed against the uprights of the frame.

  “Slack off!” Jonah called down.

  Large-Son flapped his ears in amusement thirty meters below and turned the control rheostat of the winch. The woven-wire cable slacked, and together man and kzin guided the end of the beam into its slot. Jonah clamped the sonic melder’s leads to the corners and stepped back Onto the scaffolding.

  “Sound on the line,” he called, and keyed his belt unit.

  That flashed the alarm and began the process of sintering the beam into a single homogenous unit with the rest of the frame; it worked by vibrational generation of a heat-interface, and Spots winced and crouched beside him, hands clamped firmly over furled ears. The human took the opportunity to flip up his sight goggles and take a mouthful of water from his canteen; when he noticed the kzin’s dangling tongue he poured some into a saucer the felinoid had clipped to his harness. Around them the complex geometries of the retrieval rig were growing into a latticework around the hill. Humans and the odd alien—there was a kdatlyno, and a couple of unbelievably agile five-armed Jotoki, and the brothers Kzinamaratsov, as he had named them in a private joke. Beyond was a flat terrain of swamp, livid-green Terrestrial reeds and mangrove, olive-green palmlike things native to Wunderland.

  He slapped at his neck; it was hot here, right on the equator. The bugs were native, but they would cheerfully bite humans, or kzinti if they could get through the fur and thick hide. The brothers were suffering more than he. Their species shed excess heat through tongue and nose and the palms of hands and feet, more than enough on savagely dry Kzin. Difficult in this steambath, although the kzinti’s high natural body-temperature and the light gravity of Wunderland helped a little. Jonah shook his head. He had been fighting kzin for most of his adult life: in space back in Sol-System, by sabotage, and even hand-to-hand in a hunting preserve when he’d been sent in as a clandestine operative. Now he was working with a couple of them, and they turned out to be a pretty good team. Stronger than humans by far, which was valuable on this archaeological relic of a project— the contractor was too cheap to rent much of what little modern equipment could be spared for civilian projects—and quicker. Their abilities were well balanced by his superior hands and better head for heights; kzinti had evolved on a world of 1.5 gravities, climbing low hills rather than trees. They were not quite as good with their fingers as humans, and a long vertical drop made them nervous.

  “More water?” he offered the other.

  No, Spots signaled with a twitch of his ruff, scratching vigorously a moment later. Then, aloud: “Is that not the Contractor Human?”

  “It is, by Finagle’s ghost,” Jonah muttered. “Hey, Biggie! We’re coming down”

  Jonah did so with a graceless rush down the catwalks; he had always been athletic for a Belter, and the last two months had left him in the best condition he had ever been, but he was still a child of zero-G. The kzin followed with oil-smooth grace, and they dropped in front of the project supervisor. Fairly soon the contract would be over...

  “Looks like it’ll be finished soon,” Jonah said amiably. “Should be, with the extra time we’ve been putting in.”

  “And the bonuses you’ll be getting, don’t forget that,” she replied, wiping at her face with a stained neckerchief.

  “Yeah, they sound real good on the screen—the problem is, we haven’t seen anything deposited to our accounts.”

  Heidja made an impatient gesture, then smiled—

  carefully, because the two kzin were looming behind Jonah like oil-streaked walls of orange fur. Their teeth were very white, and all were showing.

  “What vould you with money be doing here?” she said reasonably, waving a hand. There were pressmet huts standing on the dredged island; beyond the six-meter reeds of the swamp began, stretching beyond sight. Tens of thousands of square kilometers of them, and the closest thing to humanity in there was wild pigs gone feral, fighting it out with the tigripards. “Except to gamble and lose it? I ride the float of your money—all the hands’ money—this is true, because it furnishes working capital; but the bonuses more than make up for it. Transfer will be made as soon as the hovercraft gets back to München.”

  · CHAPTER SIX

  “No, Ib,” Tyra Nordbo said, lowering her rifle.

  “Fire!” the young man said.

  “No!”

  One of the prisoners looked up from his slump; tears rolled slowly down through the dirt on his cheeks and the thin wispy adolescent beard. His lips moved soundlessly.

  “Squad—fire!”

  The magrifles gave their whispering grunt, and the five prisoners toppled into the graves they had spent the last half-hour digging. Behind, the villagers gave a murmur, halfway between shock and approval; they were Amish, men in dark suits and women in long black skirts. The half-ruined houses of the farmtown beyond were slipping into shadow as Alpha Centauri set; the moon was up, and Beta, leaving it just too dark to tell a black thread from a white. The air smelled of death and of moist turned earth from the graves, and from the plowed fields beyond, purple-black rolling hills amid the yellow of reaped grain and the dusty green of pasture. Orchards and vineyards spotted the land, and small lakes behind dams. Woodlots were the deep green of Terran oak and the orange-green of Kzin, tall frondlike growths in Wunderland’s reddish ocher. Westward the last sunlight touched the glaciers and crags of the Jotuns, floating like a mirage seen through glass. The mountains were close, the dense forest of the foothills less than a day’s walk away.

  It was hard to imagine war had passed this way, until you saw the graves. Many fresh ones in the churchyard, and these five outside it, along the graveled main
street. The other soldiers in the squad lowered their weapons and turned to watch the exchange between brother and sister.

  Tyra Nordbo was 180 centimeters, as tall as her brother, but she lacked the ordinary low-gravity lankiness of Wunderlanders; she was robust and fullbosomed, and strikingly athletic for a girl of eighteen. Her brother was only four years older and much alike in his high-cheeked, snub-nosed looks. There was a hardness to his face that she lacked, although she matched the anger when he swung to confront her.

  “Karl, Yungblut,” he snapped over his shoulder, “bury them. Kekkonen, get the dogs back to the van.” He raised his voice to the villagers. “You people, return to your homes. Justice has been done.”

  The black-clad farmers stirred and settled their hats and turned back to their houses.

  “Justice, Ib?” Tyra said, her voice full of quiet fury She slung her rifle and reached to tear off the Provisional Gendarmerie badge sewn to the arm of her bush jacket. It landed at Ib’s feet with a quiet plop of dust. Her holoprinted ID card followed it.

  “Those were bandits!” lb said, jerking his head at the graves where earth fell shovelful by shovelful.

  “Thieves, murderers, and rapists,” Tyra said, nodding jerkily. The sight was not too bad; the prefrag penetrators were highly lethal but did not mangle flesh much. She had seen much worse, working in an aid station for the underground army, during the Street fighting in Muchen at Liberation. “They deserved to die—after a fair trial.”

  The Amish here were strict in their pacifist faith, and had made little resistance when the gang moved in; the investigation had been ugly hearing. This part of the Jotun foothills had been guerrilla country during the last days of the occupation, full of folk on the run from the collaborationist police, from the forced-labor gangs, or simply from spreading poverty and chaos. Not all of them had gone back to the lowlands when peace came, to the sort of badly-paid hard work that was available. Many had turned to raiding, and were difficult to catch. The Wunderlander armed forces were stretched thin, and most of their efforts had to go to the fighting farther into the kzinti sphere, as the human fleets pressed the aliens back.