The Man-Kzin Wars 05

CHAPTER TWO

Jonah Matthieson belched and settled his back against the granite of the plinth. The long sunset of Wunderland was well under way. Tall clouds hung hot-gold nearly to the zenith of the pale blue sky where the dome of night was darkening. Along the western horizon bands of purple shaded down to crimson and salmon pink. War had done that, the Yamamoto’s raid two years ago pounding the northern pole with kinetic-energy missiles at near light speed, then the fighting with the Crashlander armada later, which had included a fair number of high-yield weapons on kzinti holdouts. There was a lot of dust in the atmosphere. Wunderland is a small planet, half Earth’s diameter and much less dense, a super-Mars; the gravitational gradient was small, and the air extended proportionately farther out. Hence there was a lot of atmosphere for it to fill.

And a wonderful sunset for one mustered-out stingship pilot to sit and savor, particularly if he was drunk enough. Unfortunately the bottle was empty.

A sudden spasm of rage sent it flying, out to crash among the other debris along the front of the Ritterhaus. The ancient government house had been a last strongpoint for the kzinti garrison in Munchen. Scaffolding covered the front of the mellow stone, but the work went slowly while more essential repairs were attended to. Much Centauran industry had been converted to war production during the occupation, and what survived was now producing for the United Nations Space Navy and Wunderland’s own growing forces.

Jonah lurched erect, mouth working against the foul taste, blinking gritty eyes. For a moment the sensation reminded him “Oh, Finagle, I hurt.”

They had come from Earth, Jonah and Ingrid and the artificial intelligence ship Catskinner and the ship’s computer had found something that shouldn’t have been there. A ship that had floated in the Belt for so long that it had accreted enough dust to become an asteroid. A ship held unchanging in stasis, unchanging for billions of years until it was awakened. Not just the ship. The Master.

Jonah shuddered.

That had been one of the times the thrint’s mind-control had slipped. It had been bus keeping control of all the minds of the Free Wunderkind flotilla, trying to find out what had gone on during the several billion years it had lain in timeless stasis.

Eyes blurring, burning, skin hanging loose and gray and old around the wrists of bleeding hands, speckled with ground-in-dirt.

Thrint tended to forget to tell their slaves to remember personal maintenance; they were not a very bright species. What humans would call an IQ of 80 was about average for Thrintun, and Dnivtopun hadn’t been a genius by Slaver standards. That had been almost the worst of the subconscious humiliation. The Master had been so stupid-and under the Power you couldn’t help but try to change that, to rack your brains for helpful solutions. Help the Master!

Jonah had been the one to crack the problem of making a new amplifier helmet to increase the psionic powers of the revenant Slaver. That would have made Dnivtopun master of the Alpha Centauri system and every human and kzin living there. Made him ruler of a new Slaver empire, because there had been fertile thrint females and young in the ship, the ship encased in its stasis field and the asteroid that had accreted about it over the thousands of millennia.

He moaned and pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. Yes, he’d broken free for an instant at the end, enough to struggle with Markham. Ulf Reichstein Markham, who had liked the telepathic hypnosis the Slaver imposed. The psychists had erased Markham’s memories of that; now he was a hero, space-guerrilla kzin-killing Resistance fighter and stalwart of the Provisional Government. The psychists hadn’t been nearly as thorough with Jonah Matthieson, one-time Terran Belter, ex-combat pilot in the UNSN, assassin of Chuut-Riit. They’d just given him a strong block about the secret aspects of the affair, and turned him loose. He was supposed to recover fully in time, too. Not soon enough to have his job back, of course. No one wanted an unstable combat pilot. They’d give him his rank, but he’d be a paper shuffler, a useless man in a useless job. So he’d asked to go home. Belier prospectors were slightly mad anyway. And he learned that a hyperdrive transport back to Sol was out of the question, and there wasn’t even a place for him in cold sleep aboard a slowship. Shuffle paper or get lost. Of course they’d hinted there was one other possibility, one he’d hated even more than shuffling paper.

He’d been bitter about that. That had led to more trouble…

A man was walking by, with the brisk step of someone with a purpose and somewhere to go.

“Gut Herr, spare some money to feed a veteran?” Jonah asked. He despised himself each time he did this, but it was the price of the oblivion he craved.

“Lieber Herr Gott,” the man’s voice rasped. Wunderland was like that, conservative: they even swore by God instead of Finagle. It had been settled by North European plutocrats uneasy with the way Earth was heading under the UN and the ARM. “You again! This is the third time today!”

Startled, Jonah looked up. The face was unfamiliar, clenched and hostile under a wide-brimmed straw hat. The man’s suit was offensively white and dean, a linen bush-jacket. Some well-to-do outbacker in town on business.

“Sorry, sir,” Jonah said, backing up slightly. “Honest

– I didn’t look at your face, just your hands and the money. Please, I won’t hit on you again, I promise.”

“Here.”A solid gold-alloy coin, another Wunderlander anachronism. and here, another To keep your memory fresh. Do not bother me again, or the polezi I will call.” Frowning: “How did a combat veteran come to this?”

Jonah ground the coins together in his fist, almost tempted to throw them after the retreating back of the spindly low-gravity. Because the bloody ARM is punishing me! he screamed mentally. Because I spoke out! Not anything treasonable, no secrets, no attempt to evade the blocks in his mind. Just the truth, that they were still holding back technological secrets-had even while Earth faced defeat at kzinti hands- that they were conspiring to put the whole human race back into stasis, the way they had in the three centuries of the Long Peace, before the kzinti came. That the ARM had secret links, secret organizations on all the human-settled worlds. Buford Early Prehistoric Man, has frozen me out. The ARM general probably thought he was giving a gentle warning, tugging on his clandestine contacts until every regular employment was closed to Matthieson. So that Matthieson would come crawling back, eventually.

Early was at least two centuries old, probably more. Old enough to remember when military history was taught in the schools, not forbidden as pornography. Possibly old enough to have fought against other humans in a war. He was very patient… and he had hinted that Jonah would make a good recruit for the ARM, if he altered his attitudes. Perhaps even for something more secret than the ARM, the thing hinted at by the collaboration with the oyabun crimelords here in the Alpha Centauri system. Jonah had threatened to reveal that.

Go right ahead, Lieutenant, Buford had said, laughing. It creased his carved-ebony face, gave you some idea of how ancient he really was, how little was left of humanity in him. Laughter in the gravel voice: It’s been done before. Whole books published about it. Nobody believes the books, and then they somehow don’t get reprinted or copied.

“Finagle eat my eyes if I’ll crawl to you, you bleeping tyrant,” Jonah whispered softly to himself.

He looked down at the coins in his hand; a five-krona and a ten. Enough to eat on for a couple of weeks, if you didn’t mind sleeping outside in the mild subtropical nights. Of course, that made it more likely someone would kick your head in and rob you, in the areas where they let vagrants settle. Another figure was crossing the square, a woman this time, in rough but serviceable overalls and a heavy strakkaker in a holster on one hip.

“Ma’am?” Jonah asked. “Spare some eating money for a veteran down on his luck?”

She stopped, looking him up and down shrewdly. Stocky and middle-aged, pushing seventy, with rims of black under her fingernails. Not one of the tall slim mobile-eared aristocrats of the Nineteen Families, the ones who had first settled Wunderland. A commoner, with a hint of a nasal accent to her Wunderlander that suggested the German-Bait-Dutch-Danish hybrid was not her native tongue.

“Pilot?” she said skeptically.

“I was, yes,” Jonah said, bracing erect. He felt a slight prickle of surprise when she read off the unit and section tabs still woven into the grimy synthetic of his undersuit.

“Then you’ll know systems… atmosphere training?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll see.” The questions stabbed out, quick and knowledgeable. “All right,” she said at last. “I won’t give you a fennig for a handout, but I could have a job for you.”

Hope was more painful than hunger or hangover. “Who do I have to kill?” he said.

She raised her brows, then showed teeth. “Ach, you joke. Good, spirit you have.”

She held out a belt unit, and he laid a palm on it as hope flickered out. There would be a trace on it from the net, General Early would have seen to that. There had been other prospects.

“Hmm,” she grunted. “Well, a good record would not have you squatting in the ruins, smelling… “ She wrinkled her nose and seemed to consider. “Here.” She pulled out a printer and keyed it, then handed him the sheet it extruded, together with a credit chip. “I am Heidja Eladsson, project manager for Skognara Minerals, a Suuomalisen company.

“If you show up at the listed address in two days, there will be work. I am short several hands; skilled labor is scarce, and my contract will not wait. The work is hard but the pay is good. There’s enough money in the chip to keep you blind drunk for a week, if that’s your problem. And enough for a backcountry kit, working clothes and such, if you want the job. Be there or not, as you please.”

She turned on her heel and left. Alpha Centauri had set, but the eye-straining point source that was Beta was still aloft, and the moon.

“I won’t spend the chip on booze,” he said to himself. “But by Murphy’s ghost, I’m going to celebrate with the coins that smug-faced farmer gave me.”

The question of where to do it remained. Then his eyes narrowed defiantly. Somewhere to clean up first, then-yes, then he’d hit Harold’s Terran Bar. It would be good to sit down and order. Damned if he would have taken Harold Yarthkin’s charity, though. Not if he were starving.

The chances were he’d be the only Terran there, anyway.