The Man-Kzin Wars 05

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The little trading post had a dusty, abandoned feel. There was the adobe store, two houses and a paddock, all planted where three faint mule-tracks crossed a creek. The houses had roofs of tile with tiles missing, carrying solar-power panels with some of the panels missing; the pump that filled the watering troughs before the veranda of the store was still functioning, and the metered charger available to anyone who wanted to top up their batteries. The satellite dish on the rooftree looked to be out of order for some time, though. A straggly pepper tree shaded the notional street, and a big kitchen garden lay behind a dun-colored earth wall.

Tyra Nordbo tethered her horses where they could drink; Garm stood on his hind paws to lap beside them. Two meters further down two pack-mules looked up at her animals, then returned to their indifferent doze. She blinked at them thoughtfully as she loosened girths and patted her horse’s neck, put a hand to the stock of her rifle where it rested before the right stirrup in its saddle scabbard, then shook her head.

“Hello the house,” she called, from outside the front door; outback courtesy.

The inside was just as shabby as the exterior, if a little cooler from the thick walls, and the fan-and-wet-canvas arrangement over the interior door. A counter split the room in half, with a sleepy-looking outbacker standing behind it; boxes and bales were heaped up against the walls. And another man was at the customer’s side, reading from a list:

“…two four-kilo boxes of the talcum powder. Two kilos of vac-packed vanilla ice cream. One kilo radiated pseudotuna. A thousand meters of number-six Munchenwerk Monofilament, with a cutter and tacker. Ten hundred-nail cassettes for a standard nailgun…”

Both men looked up, then looked again, squinting against the sunlight behind her. A third look, when she stepped fully inside and became more than an outline; the storekeeper straightened and unconsciously slicked back his thinning brown hair. Tyra sighed inwardly. There were times when being twenty and a pattern of Herrenmann good looks was something of an inconvenience. Here in the back of beyond it made you stand out, even in smelly leathers with a centimeter of caked dust on your face and a bowie tucked into the right boot-top. Then her eyes narrowed slightly; after the first involuntary reaction, the customer was looking at her with suspicion, not appreciation.

He’s changed, she realized. Harder and stronger-looking than the holo Montferrat had shown her. Burned dark-brown from outdoor work, dressed in shabby leather pants and boots with a holstered strakkaker at his waist and a sleeveless jerkin. The Belter crest still stood alone on his head, legacy of a long-term depilation job, but it had grown longer and tangled.

“Guetag, hem” she said politely, nodding.

What the tanj is she doing out here? Jonah thought suspiciously. His gaze travelled from head to toe. Young, very pretty, with the indefinable something-perhaps her accent-that indicated Herrenmann birth. Definitely not an outbacker. Not the sort to be bashing the bundu. Although there were plenty of Herrenmann families down on their luck these days, of course. He started to estimate what she would look like without the bush jacket and leather pants…

Get back to business, mind, he admonished himself, with a mental slap on the wrist. Think of ice and sulphur. Besides that, his experience with Wunderlander women had not exactly been overly positive.

“Been out here long?” she asked.

“Not long,” he said shortly.

“Prospecting? Odd to find a Sol-Belter prospecting dirtside.”

Jonah stopped, a finger of cold fear trailing across his neck. His crest marked him, and his accent. For that matter the standard Sol-System caucasoid-asian mix of his own genetic background was uncommon here, where unmixed European stock was in the majority.

“Hunting,” he grunted, jerking his head at the pile of pelts on the counter.

Suddenly they looked completely unconvincing. The beautiful wavy lines of tigripard, the fawn and red of gagrumphers, all might as well have been cheap extrudate. She met his eyes and smiled, face unlined but crinkles forming in the reddish-grey dust on her skin. It was a charming smile.

“Hunting good?” she asked. “Enough to keep all of you in business?”

“Good enough,” Jonah replied, lifting a sack of beans to his shoulder. Then he turned back. “All of us?” he said.

“Not really smart to be out in the bundu alone,” she pointed out. “Let me give you a hand.”

Before he could prevent her she scooped up a double armful of sacks-a very respectable armful, for a Wunderlander born and raised in this gravity-and carried them out the door. Jonah followed, torn between fear and embarrassment. Outside, she was tying them down to a mule’s packsaddle with brisk efficiency.

“What’s wrong with hunting alone?” he asked, when the silence began to be suspicious in itself. She turned and looked at him with open-eyed surprise; blue eyes, he noticed, with a faint darker rim.

“Break a leg and die,” she said. “Or a dozen other things. Not to mention the bandits.”

Jonah moved to the other side of the mule and began strapping the sack of beans to the frame of the saddle, moving it a little to be sure the load was balanced. She had neat hands, slender for a tall woman but strong-looking; her nails were clipped short and clean enough to make him feel self-conscious about the rim of black grime under his. It was difficult to object to the lecture; coming out here alone would be insanely risky. Too risky even for a flatlander.

“Heard the Provisional Police have the bandits under control,” he said.

“Oh, they’re getting there. Not much on trials and procedures, but they track well enough. Big job, though. It’ll be a while before these hills are safe for a man alone-or a woman, of course. Tempting fate to go out there with a mule-train of supplies, too.”

Jonah worked on in silence, turning on his heel for another load and ignoring the presence at his heel.

“Tyra Nordbo, clan Freunchen,” she said after a moment. “Besides which, a man alone usually doesn’t require that much tuna and ice cream. You don’t look like you drink that much bourbon by yourself, either.”

“Manse Chung,” he replied shortly. “I’ve got unusual tastes.”

“Not Jonah Matthieson?” she enquired sweetly. “The man with the unusual, large, hairy friends?”

Jonah stepped back half a pace, snarling and reaching for his strakkaker; he paused with the vicious machine-pistol half out of the holster, half from prudence and half from the genuine shock on her face.

“Please, be calm, Mr. Matthieson,” she said soothingly, hands held palm-down before her. “We have a mutual friend in Munchen who asked me to look you up. And,” she added with a gamine grin, “you’re a girlhood hero of mine, anyway-some people did hear a little of what went on out in the Serpent Swarm, you know.”

“I don’t have any friends in Munchen, and I don’t have any here either,” Jonah barked. Montferrat. He’s checking up on us, the scheming bastard. “I’ve got a backer in Munchen, and he’ll get the return on his capital he was promised, if he leaves me alone to do my work. Now if you’ll pardon me, Fra Nordbo or whatever your name is, I’m a busy man.”

“What took you so long?” Hans said.

“Making sure I wasn’t followed,” Jonah said. “Got it out?”

“Out to the mouth of the diggings,” the old man said. “Didn’t think it would be all that smart to leave it out in plain view.”

“Show me.”

Film sheeting had been rigged over the mouth of the shaft and covered with dirt and vegetation. Jonah ducked through into the interior chamber, lit by glowrods stapled to the timbers of the shoring, and whistled silently.

The… craft, he supposed… was a wasp-waisted spindle four meters long and three wide. One end flared with enigmatic pods; a hole had been torn in it there, the only sign of damage. Through the hole showed the unmistakable sheen of a stasis field. A Slaver stasis field, except that no thrint could be held in a ship this size; the thrintun were Man-tall and much more thickly built. Jonah shuddered at the memory of icy tendrils of certainty ramming into his mind… but he knew thrint naval architecture as few men living did, and they had been programmed to forget it. Thrintun ships were always large; the thrint were plains-dwelling carnivores by inheritance, and not intelligent enough to suppress their instincts.

“Tnuctipun,” he breathed.

The Slavers’ engineers, the ones whose revolt had brought down the Slaver Empire three billion years before. The revolt had wiped out both races and every other sentient in the galaxy save for the bandersnatch; humans and kzinti alike had evolved from Slaver-era tailored foodyeasts, along with the entire ecosystems of their respective planets. As a master race, the thrint had not been too impressive, apart from their power of telepathic hypnosis -with the Power, they did not need intelligence. An IQ equivalent to human 80 was normal for thrintun. Little was known of the tnuctipun, but it was clear that they had been very clever indeed.

“Or something else from then,” Hans said. “That hull’s like nothing in Known Space, that’s for sure. Tensile strength and radiation resistance is right off the scale; none of the gear we brought can even test it.” He scratched in the perpetual white three day’s beard that covered his chin. “Wish we hadn’t found it. Gold I understand. This I don’t. Don’t like it”

“This could make us one bleeping lot richer than all the gold on Wunderland,” Jonah said.

“We do not know if there is anything valuable in the artifact,” Spots said. “Not yet”

“There is a stasis field!” Bigs replied. “Neither the Patriarchy nor the monkeys have that as yet. There is the hull material. Think of the naval implications of such ships! We know the ancients had superluminal drives-undoubtedly the secret of that is inside as well. Matter conversion…”

He licked his chops and forced his voice to quietness; they were near the disused gold-washing boxes, but the humans could be anywhere and both of them had some command of the Hero’s Tongue.

“You said we could not return to the Patriarchy-we, defeated cowards with nothing to offer. Now we can return. Now we can return as Heroes, assured of Full Names-assured of harems stocked from the Patriarch’s daughters, and a position second only to his!”

Spots nodded thoughtfully. “There is some truth in that,” he said judiciously; his voice was calm, but his eyes gleamed and the wet fangs beneath showed white and strong in the morning light. “If we could get the secrets, and if we can get them off planet-you do not hope to ride aloft in the alien craft, I hope,” he added dryly.

Bigs snorted; neither of the humans could fit in any likely passenger compartment, much less a kzin.

“We must get the pilot, or download the data from the craft’s computers,” he said decisively.

“Easy to say,” Spots said, flapping his ears. Bigs grinned at the reminder that his sibling had always been better with information systems. “The hardware and programs both will be totally incompatible-fewer similarities in design architecture than kzinti-human system interfaces have. At least we and the monkeys have comparable capacities, and integrating those systems was a reborn-as-kzinrett nightmare. I did some of that during the war. What kind of computer would the monkey slaves of the thrintun build?” “And yet. To be a true Hero, to have a name, it never was easy. Until not it was not possible. Now it is.”

Spots paused thoughtfully, scratching himself under the jaw. “And the monkey authorities-if they sniff one trace scent of this, they will bury us so deep that we will stay submerged as long as that spacecraft did.”

Bigs’s fur rippled, and he gave an involuntary dry retch. Ever since the cave-in he had been unable to force himself closer than the outer entrance of the shaft. The darkness, the stifling closeness… he retched again. As nearly as they could estimate the tnuctipun spaceship had spent the last three thousand million years in the planetary magma, bobbing around beneath the Aeserheimer Continent’s crustal plate. The hot spot must be connected with it, somehow-the how of it was beyond them; none of them was a specialist in planetary mechanics-and only chance had ever brought it to the surface again. Vanishingly unlikely that it should be then, although erosion would have revealed it in another few centuries. On the other paw, it had to be discovered sometime. It looked to be eternal.

To be buried that long, though. His mind knew that it had been less than an instant; inside a stasis field, the entropy gradient was disconnected from that of the universe as a whole. Less than a single second would pass inside during the entire duration of the universe, from the explosion of the primal monobloc to the final inward collapse into singularity. His mind knew that, but his gut knew otherwise.

Spots chirred. “For that matter, what of the humans here? They seem no more anxious than we to attract the government’s”-he fell into Wunderlander for that; the Hero’s Tongue had no precise equivalent-“attention. Yet they may be reluctant to allow us to depart with the data-they are monkeys, after all.”

“We can bury their bones. They are outcasts, not dear to the livers of the monkeys in authority. Who will miss their Scent?”

The smell of anger warned him; he looked up just in time to jerk his head backward, and Spots’s claws fanned the air over his nose rather than raking through the sensitive flesh.

“Honorless sthondat!” the smaller kzin hissed. “Did you forget the oath we swore with Jonah-human? You are alive because of the Jonah-human! Oath-breaker! Are you without regard for the bones of your ancestors? The Fanged God will regurgitate your soul.”

Bigs bristled, swelling up to a third again his size; his ears folded back.

“They are monkeys,” he growled back; the sound was a steady urrreeuueeerree beneath the modulations of his words. The Menacing Tense in Imperative Mode.

“That monkey crawled into the darkness to rescue you as you lay helpless,” Spots said; he stood higher, unwilling to let Bigs’ height give him dominance. All eight claws on his hands were out. “Blood for blood.”

They began to circle, tails rigid. “What of our duty to the Patriarch?” Bigs spat.

“Our first duty to the Patriarch is to be Heroes,” Spots replied. “Heroes do not break their solemn oath!”

They both sank on their haunches for the final leap. Then Bigs let his fur fall and looked aside.

“There is a true trail among the prints of your words,” he admitted with sullen reluctance. Earth rumbling and the walls closing around-“If the monkey… if Jonah-human refuses to let us leave with the data, I will challenge him to honorable single combat.”

Spots straightened suspiciously; he sniffed with his jaw open and licked his nose for a second try.

“I smell reservations. They smell stronger than a dead kshat,” he warned. “Be sure, I will not permit less. No under-the-grass killing. And if you duel Jonah-human, you must preserve his head for the Ancestral Museum of our line.”

“Agreed. We shall all act as Heroes. Even the Jonah-human.”

Spots’s pelt rippled in a shrug. “We quarrel over the intestines of a prey that grazes yet,” he said. “So far, all we have is an impenetrable mystery.”