The Man-Kzin Wars 05

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 metal; 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 Munchen.”