The Man-Kzin Wars 05

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Let her rip!” Hans called into his beltphone. “Don’t get your underwear in a knot,” he went on to Jonah. “And that’s enough dirt”

“My back agrees with you but my greed dissents,” Jonah said, straightening up.

The water-furrow that fed their wash was nearly half a kilometer long, dug along the hillside or carried in troughs of log slab. Nothing in it had come with them, except the monofilament line that held it together. The wash itself was a series of stepped wooden boxes, ingeniously rigged with baffles so that the flow of water would shake them.

Their bottoms were different; memory-film, made in Tiamat, the central manufacturing asteroid of the Serpent Swarm asteroid, Leads hooked them to a wooden stand where their computer and main distortion-battery lay. A single keystroke would activate the memory-film; each box’s floor was set to form an intricate pattern of moving ripples. Rushing water would dissolve the mixture of water-deposited volcanic soil and gold granules Jonah shoveled in to the first box; a thin layer of water would then run over the rippling film. Gravity would leave the heavier metal particles in the troughs of the ripples, and they would move slowly down each box to deposit the gold in a deep fold, ready to be scooped out. The surface had a differential stickiness, too, nearly frictionless to the useless garague, catching at any molecule the computer directed.

From higher up the water-furrow a rumbling sounded. Spots had lifted the sluicegate, and the flood was rumbling along. Raw timber vibrated and thuttered, and the beams reinforcing corners groaned as the first weight threw itself against them. A meter across and deep, the wave bore dirt and twigs before it, and a hapless kermitoid that peeped and thrashed. It curled and rose as it struck the pile of gold-rich dirt, then washed it away and into the settling tanks like a child’s sand-castle. The tanks themselves began vibrating back and forth, their squealing groans almost deafening.

“Shovel, boy, shovel!” Hans called. “That’s a pocketful of krona with every shovelful of dirt”

Jonah cursed and wiped at his face, covered in an oil of sweat and dirt; more moisture ran from the sodden rag around his forehead, trickling down to cut runnels over his face and drip onto his bare chest. He had always been muscular for a Belter, but the weeks of labor had thickened his arms and shoulders, besides burning his face and body nearly the color of teak. The loads of dirt still felt heavy as he swung the long handle. Hans was spindly and wrinkled beside him, but his movements were as regular as a metronome.

“You’re putting too much heave into it,” the old man said after a moment. “Remember what I told you. Don’t jerk at it. Just enough to get the shovel moving, then turn your wrists and let the dirt slide off into the water. No need to waste sweat sticking it in.”

Jonah grunted resentfully, but he followed Hans’ advice. He was right; it was easier that way. Zazen helped too. His training was coming back to him, more and more these days. Use the movements to end thought; become the eye that does not seek to see itself the sword that does not seek to cut itself, the unself-contemplating mind. Feel sensation without stopping its flow with introspection, pull of muscle, deep smooth breath, aware without being aware of being aware. The two humans fell into lockstep, working at the high pile of precious dirt. Presently the pile grew smaller, and Spots came up with more. He was dragging it on a sled made from more of the film, set to be nearly frictionless on the packed earth of the trail. There was a rope yoke around his neck and shoulders, and he pulled leaning far forward, hands helping him along. When he was level with the men he collapsed to earth, panting.

Jonah stuck his shovel in the pile and helped him out of the rope harness, then handed him a bucket made from a section of log. The kzin lapped down a gallon or so and then poured the rest over his head, scooping out another from the trough and repeating the process. Then he licked his whiskers back into shape and shook himself, showering Jonah and Hans with welcome drops from his fur. The air was full of the smell of a quarter ton of hot wet carnivore.

“Bigs needs someone to help with the shoring,” he rasped, drinking again. “He digs more quickly than we thought.”

“Guess I’d better,” Hans said, rubbing a fist into the small of his back. “See you later, youngster.” He walked off up the trail to the shaft they had sunk into the hillside, whistling.

Spots paused as he gathered up the drag harness and the film. “Ah-adventure!” he said. “Travelling to far-off lands; ripping out the gizzards of hardship and danger; winning fortune and Name. Is it not glorious? Does your liver not steam with-”

“Go scratch fleas,” Jonah muttered, spitting on his hands and reaching for the shovel.

“Better that than hauling freight like a zitragor,” the kzin replied, flapping his ears ironically as he turned to go for the next load. “Far better.”

“I cannot believe it! I do not believe the testimony of my own nose!” Bigs said, pawing through a pile of datachips.

“Believe what?” Spots replied.

Across the campfire Jonah looked up at the sound; the hiss-and-spit of the Hero’s Tongue always sounded like a quarrel, but this was probably the real thing.

“That I was stupid enough to let you pack the virtual-reality kit!” Bigs said.

That was a late-model type, with nose implants for scents as well as ear and eye coverings for visual and aural data.

“It’s in perfect working order.”

“The chips, fool, the chips-you forgot the Siege of Zeeroau, the Hero Chruung Upon the Ramparts, no Warlord Chmee at the Pillars-all our good stuff. None of the classics at all!”

Spots flapped his ears and fluttered his lips against his teeth. “You run too many of that graypelt sthondat excrement,” he said. “You will curdle your liver and stultify your brain living in the past that way; you should pay more attention to the modern world, sibling. Renovate your tastes! Entertainment should be instructive!”

“Modern-heeraaeeow-The Kzinrett’s Rump?” Bigs said sarcastically, throwing one chip aside and digging for more. His voice rose an octave as he listed tides, and his tail quivered and then began to lash.

“Blood and Ch’rowl? The Lost Patriarch of the Hareem Planet? Energy Swords at the Black Sun?” He screamed, a raw sound of rage. “Is there nothing here but smut and cheap, trashy science fiction adventures?”

He abandoned the carton of chips. The two kzinti faced each other, crouching low and claws extended: their ears were folded away and their tails held rigid. The air smelled of ginger as they growled through their grins, and their Fur bottled out. Jonah started to rise in genuine alarm; most of the siblings’ spats were half in fun, but this looked like the real thing-and when kzinti got angry enough to stop exchanging insults in the Mocking Tense, they were milliseconds away from screaming and leaping. It must be the sheer frustration of the hard labor.

Hans broke in first: “You two tabbies interested in our results, or are you too set on killing each other and leaving it all for us monkeys?” he said dryly.

The kzin relaxed, breaking the lock of their unwinking eye-to-eye stare. The huge golden orbs turned on the old man instead, and they both licked their lips with washcloth-sized pink tongues. After a moment their fur sank back and their tails relaxed, but they both drooled slightly with tongues lolling. Hans brought out the portable scale and a set of bags of tough thermoplastic, setting a heatrod at one hand.

“That’s the last of it,” Hans said.

He took the container off the scales and dropping the dust into a bag; then wrote the weight on the outside and sealed it shut with the rod. Jonah watched the digital readout blink back to zero. They were sitting in front of the humans’ tent-the shelters of the felinoids were longer but much lower-and the sunken firelight was flickering on their faces, shining in the eyes of the kzin. Tonight it was scarcely brighter than the moon, full and larger than Luna from earth, leaving a circle of blackness in the sky where the stars were outshone. The dust had not looked like gold, save for a few granules larger than pinheads. Mostly it was blackish.

“Not much to look at,” he said, hefting one of the bags. It was a little larger than his fist, but heavy enough to bring a grunt of surprise.

“No nuggets,” Hans nodded. “It’s rich, but not that rich. We’ve cleared about three thousand krona. Not bad for the first day’s work.”

“First month’s work,” Bigs grunted, lying flat on his belly with his hands on either side of his chin. “Not counting walking in to this verminous spot.”

“There is that, yes,” Hans went on cheerfully, and spat into the fire before lighting his pipe with a twig. “Thing is, we’ll get as much tomorrow. For a while, too. Sort of time for it all to pay off. Remember what I said back in Munchen; getting the benefit of all the labor that everyone else who went looking put into it. Now we reap the results. Should be tasty, very tasty”

Spot’s tongue moistened his nose. “How much?” he said. At their looks: “How much shall we take out before we stop?”

Hans pursed his mouth. “Twenty thousand over our expenses would do me fine. Twenty thousand’s enough to get the shop I’ve had my eye on.”

“Not enough for me,” Bigs said; the humans looked at him in slight surprise. Usually the larger kzin spoke as lithe to them as he could. “For what! want… I need more.”

“More is good,” Jonah nodded, remembering to turn away his eyes. Never stare at a kzin. Seven times, never stare at a hostile kzin. “I’d like forty thousand myself. Starting a business is risky. Plenty of people have gone bust just because they didn’t have enough cash to tide them over until the returns started.”

“Forty thousand would satisfy me,” Spots mused, using a branch he had whittled to scratch himself on one cheek, then under his chin. He slitted his eyes and purred, tongue showing slightly. “Plenty of land coming on the market; we might even be able to buy back some of our Sire’s lost estate. Enough over to start a consulting firm; there are kzinti in the Serpent Swarm, on Tiamat, who would be glad to have Wunderland agents.”

“Forty thousand it is, then,” Hans said. He hooked the coffeepot off the fire and poured himself a cup.

“Nothing like a cup of hot coffee to settle you for sleep.”

Bigs spoke up. “When shall we divide it?”

The old man’s hands stopped and he looked up, face carefully calm. “Well, that’s a question. We could split it up when we leave, or when we get back to civilization, or each day. Something to be said for all three,”

“Each day, where I can see it,” Bigs snarled. Literally; talking with kzinti made you realize that humans never really snarled. “I labor in the earth like a slave. The prey I toil for shall rest in no monkey’s larder.”

Spots hissed at him; he turned and hissed back through open jaws, and the smaller kzin shrugged with an elaborate ripple of spotted orange fur.

“I will be content either way,” he said. “By all means, divide it. It makes no difference.”

Jonah locked eyes with Bigs for a moment, then shrugged himself. It didn’t make any difference. Except… why was the kzin so insistent? A surly brute, to be sure-if Jonah had been in the habit of naming kzinti, he would have christened him Goon-but it was also a little strange he had never so much as mentioned what he intended to do with the money. In modern kzin society few ever satisfied the longing for physical territory with game on it, and their harem and retainers about them; that was reserved for the patriarchs. It must have been doubly cruel for a noble’s sons to have the prospect snatched away; Spots daydreamed about it constantly, and Jonah could see him imagining the wilderness about them to be his own. Whereas Bigs seemed more and more withdrawn, as if Wunderland were not really real to him anymore.

Again, he shrugged. Kzinti psychology was still a mystery to those humans expert in it. Jonah Matthieson had killed quite a few kzin, and worked a few months with two. That was no basis for easy judgment

– in fact, just enough to lull your sense of difference and put you most at risk of anthromorphizing them.

That could be dangerous; besides the weird culture the orange-furred aliens had produced, dragged straight from the Iron Age into an interstellar civilization, their basic mental reflexes were not like a human being’s. And never had been, even before they used the new technology to alter their own genes.

They wanted to be more like their folk heroes. So they did genetic engineering to make it so. That was what the ARM intelligence people decided was the only plausible explanation for Kzinti behavior and customs. Usually civilization changes things. Defects don’t result in death. Evolution stops, then works backwards. Bad genes are preserved. Not with the kzin. They really are like the Heroes they admire.

Hans wordlessly set out the scales, checking that each bag was identical. Then he divided them into four piles, and silently invited his partners to take their pick. Bigs scooped his up and disappeared into the dark; they heard him stop and make a long leap onto bare rock further up the slope, hiding his trail. Spots sighed and trotted out into the night in the opposite direction.

“Of course, now we’ve each got to wonder about our goods,” Hans added; the smaller kzin hesitated for a second, then continued. “Wonder if any of the others has found them, you see. Couldn’t tell who, not if some of it just disappeared.”

Jonah halted with an armful of small, heavy bags. “Finagle’s hairy arse, now you mention that?”

“Well, son, if it was all in one place it’d also be a teufel of a temptation, now, wouldn’t it?” There was a twinkle in the little blue eyes beside the button nose, but they were as hard as any Jonah had ever seen. “Been at this business quite a few years now. Not the first time I’ve had partners, no indeed. Something to be said for all the methods.”

Jonah yawned cavernously over his morning coffee, then hauled the crisp air deep into his lungs as he stretched work-stiffened muscles. It was a cool morning, a relief before the long blazing heat of the day. Alpha Centauri was rising red over the mountains to the east, and the eye-hurting bright speck of Beta hung on a peak like a jewel on a wizard’s staff. No mountain on Earth could have been so slender and so steep, but Wunderland pulled its heights less fiercely. Birds and orthinoids were waking down in the ribbon of forest that filled the valley purling and cheeping. None of the kzin were present, which was not surprising in itself. The aliens had fallen into a gorge-and-fast cycle which seemed to be natural to them, and the bacon and eggs frying in the pan would be repulsive to them.

They used to be that way to me, he admitted: far too natural. After this much pick-and-shovel work, he just felt hungry all the time.

“Want some hash-browns?” Hans asked.

“You’re bleeping right I do,” Jonah said, yawning again.

“See you didn’t get any more sleep than the rest of us,” Hans said.

“The rest of us?” Jonah paused with his fork raised over his loaded plate.

“Oh, I may be getting on, but that don’t make me sleep any sounder. Just the opposite. First the big ratcat goes out to check nobody’s found his goods-then the little one. Then you. Then the big one again…”

Jonah flushed. “I just had to piss,” he said.

“Funny you went in that direction, then,” Hans said, and cackled with laughter. “This’ll get worse the longer we’re out here. That’s why I wanted to stop at twenty thousand, mostly. Now we’ll all have to check nightly. And each of us worry about the others ganging up on him”

Jonah forced himself to eat. His body remembered his hunger, even if his mind was telling him his stomach was full of lead.

“You don’t seem too worried,” he said.

“Well, it’s a matter of possibilities,” Hans said. “The two ratcats could take us out-but they don’t get on too well, you may have noticed. Still, blood counts for something. Or you and Spots could take the rest of us

– Spots will be seeing Bigs as a real challenge down in his balls, while we’re just monkeys. Or-”

“Or you could know where it all is and just take it and clear out,” Jonah said harshly, feeling the hair on his back creep. As a programmer, he knew what an infinite regression setup could do to your logic; also how the Prisoner’s Dilemma generally worked out in real life.

Hans lit his first pipe of the day with a stick from the fire. “No, don’t think so. You three are a lot tougher than you were when we started. You’d catch me and kill me. Still, it’s something to think about, isn’t it?” He blew a cloud of smoke. “Enough lollygagging-nobody told us to stop working.”

“Sure,” Jonah muttered to himself “Send me back to Neu Friborg for supplies. Why me?”

Another charge of water went down the sluice, to his left past the beaten trail up to the shaft. The wood groaned less now after a week of operation; water had swollen it until the pegged joints were tight, and there was less leakage too. He ignored it, concentrating on strapping the pack-saddle tight; the mule just seemed quietly relieved to be free from hauling loads out of the mine. The pack was mostly empty, except for some hides and dried meat to lend credence to their cover-story of hunting for pelts. The last thing they needed was contact with the authorities. The Provisional Government was hard-up and had even more than the usual official determination to see that the citizenry and their money were soon parted. All four of them agreed on that, if nothing else, although it had been a bleeping struggle to get the kzinti to skin their kills before they ate them.

Is Hans out of his mind? Or is he in it with them? Jonah thought. It would be a four-day trip. Four days he’d be unable to check on his goods, and that was nearly fifteen thousand krona by now. Without that gold he’d be back cadging handouts in Munchen soon enough. I put up more money than the others, he thought bitterly. As it is I’m getting less than my share. Tanjit, but it’s hot. He reached for the canteen and poured more water on the cloth draped over his head. He could hear Spots coming down the trail, dragging another load of dirt for the boxes. With a scowl, he led the mule behind a boulder it was downwind from the trail this time of day, so he wouldn’t have to talk to the kzin.

Spots stopped for a moment, moaning softly and pulling the rope yoke over his head. His effort at grooming the matted, worn spots on his sloping shoulders seemed half-hearted, and after a few swipes he simply lay down in the roadway, groaning more loudly. Something he would never do if he were aware of being watched, of course… Jonah felt a moment’s guilt. I should cough or something, he thought. Then: No. If he did, he would have to explain why he was hiding behind the rock-and that would make Spots more suspicious than he was already. At least they were still talking when business made it necessary, while Bigs was barely speaking even to his sibling and not at all to the humans.

The kzin lay still, panting in the sparse shade a pile of rocks threw over the path. Then his head came up, the big pink bat-ears swiveling downslope. Jonah held his breath, eyes narrowing in suspicion. Spots drew his w'tsai and headed down the steeper slope, leaping over the water furrow and dodging along agile and swift as the hillside grew steeper. When the kzin stopped to cut a pole from a broombush and began prying up a large flat rock suspicion grew to rage. Jonah drew his magrifle out of its slings along the pack saddle and stepped out from behind the rock.

I should let him have it right now, he thought, taking up the slack. No, he decided, as the back of the kzin’s head sprang into the holosight. No, I want him to see it coming.

“Freeze, ratcat!” he shouted, and sent a round whack through the air over him.

Spots whirled and leaped backward instead, the stone thumping back down on the others that supported it. His ears flared wide with surprise, as did the wet black nostrils, then folded away in anger. He crouched, opening his mouth wide and extending his hands to either side; one gripped the w'tsai, and the claws slid out on the other, needles against the black leather of the hand.

“What-put that rifle down, monkey!”

“Right,” Jonah sneered; the ratcat had gotten good enough at Wunderlander to put indignation into its tones. “So you can cut me up-and then take my goods.”

Spots’s pupils flared wider still, in surprise. “Oh, so that was where you put them,” he said. “Clever, clever, the spray from the furrow would obscure your scent.”

The human had been moving downslope; he climbed across the furrow carefully, not that there was any danger with sixty-nine rounds still in the cassette, and baited beyond leaping distance.

“Drop the knife,” he said, his voice flat and ugly.

“I saw a fuzzball crawling under there,” Spots went on, staring at him in deliberate rudeness. “I was going to pry up the rock and kill it.”

“Murphy, can’t you invent something more plausible than that?” Jonah jeered. There was a bounty on fuzzballs… although they were commoner here in the Jotuns than in more settled regions.

Another footfall sounded on the trail Jonah risked a quick glance upslope; it was Hans, trotting up with his rifle at high port. He stopped at the sight of the tableau below and then climbed down, standing midway between Spots and Jonah but out of the line of fire, with the muzzle of his weapon carefully down.

“You fellers mind telling me what’s going on?” he said mildly.

They both began to speak at once. Jonah gestured Spots into silence with the rifle.

“The bleeping ratcat found my goods, and I caught him trying to lift the rock”-he nodded at the lever still jutting into the air, and then at the boulder upslope where the mule still stood-“and clean me out.”

He tensed slightly; Hans might be in it with the alien. Not likely, since Hans had voted to send Jonah off for the supplies. If it was Hans, they would have waited until he was gone and they could do it safely. Or wait- Spots could be double-crossing Hans by promising to wait until Jonah was gone, and then looting the cache first himself!

“Of course,” Jonah went on sardonically, “he claims it was all because he saw a fuzzball crawl under there.”

Spots had risen from his crouch. Ostentatiously, he sheathed the w'tsai and stood up to his full two-meters plus of height, staring down his muzzle at Jonah with ears half-unfurled. That was an insult as well; it was the Posture of Assured Dominance, rather than the fighting crouch used to confront an adversary.

“There is an easy way to find out, monkey,” he said. “Put your arm in through the gap you used to hide the bags of gold. If there is no fuzzball, it is perfectly safe.”

He backed up along the slope, still in clear sight but more than leaping distance away from the tumbled rocks. Jonah licked his lips, tasting the salt of sweat, and moved closer to his once-secret cache.

“Of course, you know that fuzzballs never let go once they bite, don’t you?” Spots said, as Jonah bent toward the hole. “The jaws have to be broken and pried loose. Not that that matters a great deal. The neurotoxin venom is quite deadly. Convulsions, bleeding from all the orifices, hallucinations and agonizing death.”

Jonah snorted and bent further. Then he stopped, looking at Spots. Kzin don’t lie well, he thought. The slick film of sweat that covered his body suddenly seemed to cool. They don’t get enough practice-they can smell each other lying. Spots could be relying on human inability to smell, nearly total by kzinti standards… but Jonah knew enough of their body language to know that he really was relaxed. Even amused. And if there was a Beam’s Beast hiding down there-With a convulsive movement he turned and hauled one-handed on the lever, The big volcanic slab toppled backwards slowly in Wunderland’s. 61 G, and the fuzzball cowered for a second as the light stabbed its dark-adapted eyes.

“Pappy-eek!” it shrilled, the characteristic warning cry Jonah gave a shout of loathing and pumped two rounds into the vermin. The little biped flew backward, half its torso torn away, but still snapping at the air. Beam’s Beast-the origin of the name was lost in the early settlement of the planet-was about half a meter long, covered in titan-blond fur. They had huge eyes, filling nearly half their faces, and clever monkey-like hands to match their demonic cunning. They could even be considered cute, if you didn’t notice the overlapping fangs. In a frenzy of disgust the human leaped forward and stamped the heavy heel of his boot into the big-eyed face. Then be had to spend a minute using the muzzle of his magrifle to pry the jaws out of the tough synthetic.

That was a welcome distraction. When he looked up Hans had slung his rifle and was looking at him with a speculative stare; Spots was grinning in contempt-threat. Jonah clicked his rifle onto safety.

“Guess I’d better get back to the mules -“he began.

Then the earth shook, and a cloud of dust rose from over the ridge where the mineshaft lay.

None of them wasted words as they ran.

Spots was the first to reach the entrance, but he hesitated. The exterior shoring on the hillside was still intact, but choking dust and grit billowed out. Most kzin are natural claustrophobics unless they are lactating females, and it had raised his opinion of his brother’s courage, if not his intelligence, when he volunteered for the job at the pit-face. It also kept Bigs more out of contact with the humans.

Without a word, Jonah plunged past him into the interior.

The outer stretch was intact, but the air broiled with metallic-tasting debris; hacking and coughing, he stopped for an instant to tie the wet headcloth over his mouth and nose and snatch a glowrod from the wall. Murk surrounded him, glowing with reflected light, thickening as he advanced wiping his streaming eyes. Ten meters in the roof had collapsed, and a tangle of dirt, rock, broken timbers and planking lay across his way. He dropped to the floor and raised the glowrod. A triangle of empty space in the lower right-hand corner of the pile gaped at him like a toothless mouth. He crawled close and shouted:

“Bigs! Can you hear me?”

Nothing; nothing but the trickling sound of dirt falling, and the groan of raw timber stressed to its limits. The rest might come down at any moment. He repeated the call in the Hero’s Tongue, shouting as loud as he could, grit raw in his throat and lungs.

A sound; faint, and it could be wood collapsing as readily as a kzin moaning in pain. Spots and Hans came up behind him, and he turned urgently.

“This looks like it might go through. Get me a cutterbar and a rope.”

Spots stared at him oddly as Hans handed him the tools. Jonah tied the rope around his waist and went down on his belly.

“I’m-“he hesitated for a moment and took a deep breath. “I’m going to go in head-first. I’ll tie a loop under Bigs’s forelimbs, if I can, and you pull him out.”

That might work with a kzin; they were so flexibly jointed that they could get through any space big enough to pass their head with a centimeter to spare on either side of the skull. That was a conscious kzin, of course.

“You are going in that hole?” Spots asked, in a low voice. His pelt was bristling in a ripple pattern, as if he tried to order it flat and his nerves rebelled. He looked over his shoulder; the entrance was a spot of light. More dirt trickled down from above. “Bigs might be dead.”

“I said I’m going, didn’t I?” Jonah asked, his voice rough with more than the bad air. A wave of gooseflesh ran over his own skin; he looked at the hole, and remembered the piping cry of the fuzzball. Don’t try to talk me out of it. You might succeed.

“Pain does not hurt,” he muttered to himself. “Death does not cause fear; fear of death causes fear.”

The mantra was little protection as he squirmed into the hole. He could feel it shifting above him, and the jagged edges of broken wood clawed at his back and flanks. He could feel the blood trickling down, feel the salt sweat stinging in the wounds. One meter, then ten, infinitely cautious. Controlling his breathing helped control the overwhelming impulse to squirm backward. The glowrod was little help, in air so thick with floating dust, and his passage stirred up more.

At least it’s fairly straight. After a time that could have been a minute or twenty, his outstretched hand touched something softer. Kzinti fur, that twitched under his hand. Timber creaked.

“Brother?” Bigs whispered, in the Hero’s Tongue.

“Jonah,” the man said, and felt the kzin start again. “Careful, it’s still unstable! Can you understand me?”

“Yes,” the alien rasped. The heavy scent of its fear was detectable even through the dirt; he could smell urine, too. “Are you badly injured?”

A moment’s silence, full of heavy panting. “No. I think not. There is a timber resting on my thighs, but they are only bruised, not broken. My shoulder is dislocated.” That hurt a kzin less than a human, but it meant the arm was useless until the joint was set back. “I am bleeding a little, but I cannot move.”

Jonah had been feeling around, raising the glowrod. Bigs was in a bubble of space, spindle-shaped with the narrow end at his feet. There was a main vertical support across his legs just down from the crotch; one jagged end of a fastening peg had driven into the flesh for a centimeter or so.

“I’m-“Jonah paused to cough. “I’m going to have to get in there with you,” he said. Tanjit. There Ain’t No Justice. I don’t even like the bleeping pussy-never did. It was mutual, too. “I’ll tie this rope under your forelimbs and then sever the timber with my cutter-bar. Then we’ll slide you out on your back, I’ll follow and get you past the obstacles. Understand?”

“Brother,” the kzin whispered again, and something in his own language too fast and faint for Jonah to follow.

The human shook him, and barely dodged the instinctive snap that followed.

“Finagle shave you bald, do you understand me?”

“Yesss…” followed by a mumble.

Oh, joy. Concussed. Jonah shone the light into the big golden eyes. One pupil was slightly larger than the other, and that was a cross-species indicator. No blood from the nose or ears, though.

“Here I come,” Jonah said, keeping up a flow of words to maintain Bigs’s attention. And to boost my morale too. “I’m going to have to do a forwards somersault.” That took an eternity, but when it was completed he was lying along the kzin’s side. “Here comes the rope. Can you lift your forequarters?”

Another eternity before the dazed lain understood, and the slipknot loop went under his armpits. He made a short convulsive sound between clenched fangs as the rope touched his dislocated shoulder, and the claws of his other hand stabbed into the dirt close to Jonah’s stomach.

“Be a Hero,” Jonah said sharply, in that language. Rigs twitched his whiskers affirmatively. It was not that the kzin was unable to control his fear, but the blow to the head was leaving him wavering in and out of full consciousness. A quarter-ton of kzin acting from instinct and reflex was not something you wanted to have with you in a confined space.

“Here we go,” the human muttered, and reached down with the cutter bait.

This was the one with no broken teeth, and it sliced smoothly through the tough gumtree wood. Pale curls of shavings came free as he drew and pushed, with a faint shirrr-shirrr sound. His own pelvis was under the timber. If it was bearing weight, it would shift when he cut through and smash his hipbones to splinters. Not that that would be of much interest to either of them when the dirt closed ‘round… Halfway through, and the log had not pinched shut on the cutter bar, that was a good sign. Three quarters of the way, and something went crack over his head. Man and kzin froze, peering upwards. Another crack and the sound of rock grinding on wood. Jonah’s arm resumed movement, more quickly this time. He closed his eyes for the last cut. There was a deep tung sound as the wood was cut-and the severed end rode up, not down towards him.

He let out a shaky breath, suddenly conscious of how thirsty he was. No time for that. He dropped the cutterbar, carefully, and wedged his knee under the end of the timber that now lay across Bigs’s thighs.

“This is going to hurt,” Jonah said, and repeated it until he was sure Rigs was frilly conscious. “Here goes.”

“Eeeeraaeeeewwooww!”

The kzin scream was deafening in the strait space, like being in a closet with a berserk speaker system. After the jagged wood was free of his flesh Bigs was silent save for rapid shallow panting.

“All right,” Jonah shouted, mouth to the hole. “Get ready to pull!” The slack on the rope came taut. “Carefully. If the rope gets caught on a timber, it could bring the whole thing down on us.”

The ten meters of passage might as well have been a kilometer. Jonah had to follow behind Rigs’ nearly inert form, pushing on his feet and easing the cable-thick tail over obstacles; when the rope caught, he had to crawl millimeter by millimeter along the hairy body until his hands could reach and free the obstruction. More skin scraped off his back and shoulders as he did so, a lubrication of sweat and human and kzinti blood that made the wiggling, gasping effort a little easier. After the first few minutes he lost track of progress; there was only effort in the dark, an endless labor. Until light that was dazzling to his dark-adapted eyes made him blink, and a draft of air cool and pure by comparison brought on another coughing fit. Hands human and inhuman pulled him and the comatose kzin out of the last body length of the wormhole.

Jonah had only an instant to lie and wheeze. The groaning and creaking from above became a series of gunshot cracks, and streams of loose dirt poured down. A board followed, ripped free as the scantlings twisted under the force of the earth above and weakened with the forward sections brought down in the first fall. He told his body to rise and run, but nothing happened but a boneless flopping sensation; there was nothing left, no reserve against extremity. Death was coming, smothering in the dark, coming at the instant of victory.

Spots had been squatting while Hans maneuvered the larger, heavier body of his sibling across his shoulders. One hand was up, steadying that; the other reached out and gathered Jonah to his orange-furred chest.

“Run,” he grunted.

Hans ran beside him-a staggering trot was a better description-steadying the load on his back and taking some of the dragging weight. Jonah was clutched beneath him, turning his progress into a three-limbed hobble that turned into a scrambling rush as the innermost section of the shoring gave way behind them. Wood screamed as each successive section took the full weight for a moment and yielded; the collapse nipped at their heels, its billow of choking dust enclosing them like the hot breath of a carnivore in pursuit. They shot out of the mouth of the diggings like a melon-seed squeezed between fingers and collapsed half a dozen meters from it; Spots was barely conscious enough to turn sideways and avoid crushing Jonah beneath the half-ton weight of two grown kzintosh.

Jonah was still sitting with his head in his hands when Hans returned with the medical kit and water.

“Better look at Bigs first,” he coughed, drinking a full dipper in one long ecstatic draught and blinking up at the sun. It had hardly moved; less than two hours since the cave in, difficult to believe.

“Hmmm-hmm,” Hans agreed.

He and Spots went to work. “No broken bones,” Spots pronounced. “There is a lump on the skull but the bone is sound beneath it. Reflexes are within parameters. Concussion, but I doubt any major damage.”

“Speak for yourself,” Bigs whispered. “More water.”

He drank rather than lapping, to wash down the handful of antibios and hormonal healing stimulants his brother handed him.

Hans had been examining the thigh wound. “Splinters in here,” he said, slipping his hand into the debrilidator glove. “Want a pain-killer?”

“I am a Hero-“ Bigs began. Then the miniature hooks in the computer-controlled glove began extracting foreign matter from the wound. “-so of course I do,” he went on, in a thready whisper.

The work was quickly done, and Hans stepped over to Jonah; then he whistled, watching as the younger man doused himself with water. Fresh blood slicked great patches of skin and raw flesh.

“You done a good job on yourself, youngster,” he said, rummaging for the synthskin sprayer. “Hold on.”

Jonah did his best to ignore the itching sting of the tiny hooks cleaning dirt and dead skin out of the scrapes. The synthskin was cooling relief in comparison, sprayed on as each area was cleansed.

“What the tanjit were you doing digging that deep?” he asked Rigs. “You were way beyond the shored-up section. You know the routine; timber and shore every meter you go in.”

Bigs’ eyes were glazed. “Hull,” he mumbled. “I found the hull.”

“You found the what?” Jonah asked, looking up sharply; then he gasped. Hans had done likewise, and braced himself against a flayed area. Spots halted with his muzzle half way into a bucket.

“Hull,” Bigs said more distinctly. “Like nothing I’ve seen before. Spaceship hull. Small.”