The Man-Kzin Wars 05 mw-5 Page 8

  The bandit, Gruederman, lost some of his bluster. Hirose thought that was merely from the guard’s speed, not from the true depths of disciplined obedience it showed; but any lesson learned by a barbarian was an improvement. “Herr Gruederman,” the Nipponjin said. “I have gone to some trouble to secure false identities for you and your group as members of the Provisional Gendarmerie. I am sure you will find them very useful.”

  Gruederman threw himself back in the chair, taking up his bottled beer and gulping at it. Hirose hid a cold distaste behind his bland smile. The other man was short and thickset, bouncy-muscular, which was something; many Wunderlanders who did no manual labor were obscenely flabby. Humanity had had only a few centuries to adapt to the .61 gravity, and millions to develop a physiology suited to 1.0. But for the rest he was a slobbering pig, not even bothering to depilate—Hirose suppressed a shudder at the sheer hairiness of gaijin—with great bands of sweat darkening his khaki tunic under the armpits and at the neck. Granted, the hotel room was hot, even with the ceiling Ian, but…

  He wrinkled his nose. Gruederman didn’t wash very often, either, and he had the rank body odor of a red-meat eater.

  “More guns is what we need, more equipment,” he was saying. “Not stinkin’ ID. Why can’t you get us guns? You slants fence what we take, you’ve got to have good contacts.”

  “Our contacts are our concern,” Hirose said quietly. “We have provided a valuable service; you may purchase weapons elsewhere with the valuata we supply.” And we are not going to make you so much of a menace that the Provisional Government looks too closely, which would happen f we provided you with the equipment you desire. “In return, we ask only that you do an occasional favor—”

  Gruederman frowned. “Ja, no problem, we boot some head. Who you want done?”

  Hirose pushed the holos across the table and sipped delicately at his sake.

  “Lieber Herr Gott!” Gruederman swore, taking another swig of beer. “Ratcats!”

  “The humans are the crucial targets,” the oyabun said quietly.

  “I know these fuckers! They were on the convoy to Neu Friborg last week. Shot us up! You say they’re goin’ into the Jotuns?” Hirose inclined his head. “No problem, we boot their heads good.”

  “Excellent,” Hirose said, nodding.

  Gruederman belched huge pushed back his chair and swaggered to the door. “We boot them good.” The bandit hitched at his belt and went out without bowing. The oyabun walked quickly to the window and flung it open; without needing orders, the others began to clean the room and lit incense.

  The things I do for the Secret Rule, he thought ironically. Or for fear of the Secret Rule. Once your family was in the Brotherhood, there was no such thing as resignation. That was how the world had been knit together, back on Earth; slowly, but oh so surely. “Until Holy Blood fills Holy Grail…” he quoted to himself. And now, it seemed, the extra-solar colonies would go the same way. He sighed; it had been pleasant, the degree of autonomy four and a half light-years interposed between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Virtual independence, the way it must have been on Earth before Nippon was opened to the West, when the Eastern Way families had received their orders from the Elders only once or twice in a generation. All things came to an end, though; the kzinti had come, the hyperdrive had followed, and now the universe had shrunk drastically once more.

  It was useless to think of resistance. Even more so to think of rebellion, or exposing the Brotherhood; it had been exposed a dozen times, and it did not matter. In more than one century investigators had managed to publish books with most of the details of the Brotherhood, its origin, many of the membership, even some of the signs of the Craft. They hadn’t mattered. The books were not believed. They were buried under a mountain of disinformation, the tale-tellers ignored if outsiders, silenced if initiates. Outright rebels like Frederick Barbarossa and Lenin were crushed. Invincible, secret beyond secret, the conspiracy at the heart of all conspiracies and secret orders, the Brotherhood went on. Just at the moment it took the form of the ARM and Buford Early, and demanded that certain individuals vanish in the dangerous, bandit-haunted wastes of the Jotuns. That, at least, was easily arranged, with willing tools who knew nothing of what purpose they served.

  “Go.” He turned, nodding to the attendant who had caught the spilled wine. “See to your hurts.”

  He kept his voice curt, but the man sensed the approval. When the time comes to silence Gruederman, I will send that one, Hirose decided. None of Gruederman’s band could be allowed to live, of course. They would be no loss to anyone.

  “It’s a very tempting proposition, Herr Early—or should I say Herr General Early?—but I’m afraid it’s not what I had in mind at the present time,” Claude Montferrat-Palme said.

  His current mistress set a tray between the two men and withdrew; she was a spectacular blond in red tights and slashed tunic; and Early’s eyes followed her out of the lounge with appreciation. Low gravity could do some interesting things for the human figure, things only prosthethics or special effects could accomplish on Earth. Belters were usually too spindly to take advantage.

  They were meeting on Montferrat’s home ground, the manor-house of his grudgingly restored estate. Grudgingly, since his allegiance to the Resistance had been so late and politic, but the conversion had been spectacular when it came. Also he turned out to have used much of the graft that came the way of a collabo chief of police for München to help refugees, most of whom had showed their gratitude in electorally solid ways… Rather surprising me, Montferrat chuckled inwardly. Sometimes I wish the world would not keep chipping away at my cynicism so. You needed the vigor of disillusioned youth to maintain a really black, bitter cynicism. In his seventh decade and settling into middle age, Claude felt a disconcerting mellowing effect.

  Early leaned back, coffee cup in one hand and brandy snifter in the other. “Excellent,” he said after sipping at one and then the other. Continuing: “I’m surprised you’re not interested, Herrenmann. You struck me as an ambitious man.”

  “Pleasant to meet someone who appreciates the finer things,” Montferrat said, swirling the amber liquid in his snifter and inhaling the scent. Most of the plutocrats who founded Wunderland had been German or Netherlander or Scandinavian; his Montferrat ancestors were a French exception, and they had worked long and hard to establish the true vines of Cognac on this property. Along with the coffee plantations, things were possible in Wunderland’s climate that were not on earth.

  “And I am ambitious, Herr General,” he went on, setting it down and taking out his cigarette case.

  Early accepted one of the cigarillos, and they both lit from the candle on the table. The big room was dimly lit, letting in moonlight and warm garden scents through the tall louvered windows on three sides. Blue smoke drifted up toward the molded plaster of the ceiling.

  “Strange you should be willing to risk all this, then,” he said, waving an arm at the outer wall; taking in the mansion and estate beyond, in spirit.

  “If you mean the inheritance of the Nineteen Families,” Montferrat said, blowing a smoke ring, “it’s already more-or-less lost. And in any case, what business is it of yours?”

  “I’m merely advising General Markham, as liaison with the UN Space Navy,” Early said mildly.

  “Advising him that his dreams of returning Wunderland to the pre-War status quo can be accomplished,” Montferrat said dryly. “Absurd. For a variety of reasons, good and bad, the Families were too closely involved in running the planet during the Occupation. Their rule is doomed, even if the Provisional Government’s Gendarmerie has stopped the rioting and looting against them.”

  “You haven’t thrown in with the Democrats, either,” Early pointed out.

  “No, because I recognize a certain fine Terrestrial hand behind them—you’ve been puppeting the new Radical Democrat party too—financing it, in fact.”

  “You’ll never prove a word of that,” Early replied.

&
nbsp; “Of course not; I’m not entirely sure what you and your masters are after, but you’re certainly no fool. There isn’t even enough evidence to convince Markham, and he’s a clinical paranoid, I wonder his autodoc doesn’t fix him. My best guess is that you want to use Markham to restore order, infiltrating our military in the process—then use him to discredit the aristocrats completely with his ham-handed repression. Thus leaving the field to the Radical Democrats, who want a constitution that’s a carbon copy of Earth’s—complete with a technological police. Which the experience of the UN shows is equivalent to handing the government over to the technological police, since to control technology in a modern society you have to control everything.”

  For a moment the mask of affability slipped on Early’s face, and Montferrat felt a slight prickling along his spine. How much of that is genuine? he thought. The man is ancient, for Gott’s sake. At least three times older than himself… and he ought to be sitting wheezing in a computerized wheelchair in the Strudlebug’s Club back on Earth. Secrets of the ARM.

  “You are ambitious,” Early said softly. “I’d hoped to talk you out of this party you’re promoting.”

  “Many people are involved with the Centrists,” Montferrat corrected; Early waved his hand.

  “Please, I know the signs of secret influence when I see them.” For some reason he grinned at that. “Separatism is not a viable alternative.”

  “Independence is,” Montferrat said. “And Wunderland—the Alpha Centauri system—is going to be independent. Of the kzin, and of Earth and the UN.”

  “You’d better be sure you’ve got ample bargaining power before you sit down to bargain with me,” Early warned.

  “Oh, exactly, my dear General. Which is why, as you will have noticed, I’m not bargaining with you now.”

  Unexpectedly, Early laughed; it was a deep rich sound, thick as chocolate. “You aren’t, are you?” He took another sip of the brandy. “Well, in that case—perhaps you could expand on the remark you made at dinner, about local performance techniques and classical Meddelhoffer?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “He’s not human,” Jonah gasped, flopping down on a rock and watching Hans swing along up the mountainside.

  Bigs rolled a baleful eye at him as he lay prone in the track, twitching expressive eyebrows; Spots carefully poured water from a plastic container over his body, from head to the base of his tail. Then he trudged down to the small stream and poured several more over his own head before returning to repeat the process with his brother: Both kzin were panting, their tongues lolling, the palms of their hands and feet and their tails oozing sweat. Those were the only ways kzinti had to shed excess heat; Kzin was a cooler planet than Earth or Wunderland. Besides…

  “If—” Spots stopped, thrust his muzzle into the plastic container and lapped down a torrent “—if I remember my instructors, you monk—hrrreaow, you Men evolved into omnivores by taking to running down your prey in long chases.”

  “Think so,” Jonah replied.

  His feet hurt, and he felt dizzy from the amount he’d sweated. A swallow from his canteen to wash down salt tablets, and he poured more on a neckerchief and wiped his face and neck. The hollow where they had halted was shady at least, big gum trees and whipsticks, but the steep rock to either side concentrated the sunlight, and it was humid as well. The air hummed and buzzed with insects, drawn to sweat, landing and biting and stinging. The human ignored them; there was no relief until they made camp and set up the sonics—and those had to be turned low or the sensitive ears of the kzin found them unbearable in frequencies humans could not hear.

  “Well, we Heroes evolved from stalk-and-leap hunters!” Spot snapped. Literally: his jaws closed on the word with a wet clomp. “Of course we don’t shed heat as well. We don’t chase prey that escapes our ambush! We never needed to! We developed brains cunning enough to catch meat without following it for days!”

  There was a teeth-gritting whine in the kzin’s voice. Bigs was in worse shape, heavier and thicker-pelted; he simply lay with his tongue hanging out on the ground. Jonah nodded wordlessly, stumbling down to the stream and refilling his canteen. He had never had the slightest interest in chasing prey of any sort, except kzinti Vengeful Slasher-class fighters during the War—and that could be done in the decent comfort of a crashcouch, right next to a good food synthesizer and autodoc. Fighting in space was war for gentlemen: either you won or you died, usually quickly, and you did it in climate-conditioned comfort. There had been a couple of boarding actions when the Fourth Fleet was smashed, but even those had been done in space armor.

  He shuddered slightly, swallowing hard. There had been tubing in the meat last night.

  The water looked cool and inviting as he dipped his head once more. The pebbles in the bottom were unusual—he noticed the dull glitter of them through the rippling water, and idly lifted a handful. Heavy, he thought, and threw them skipping across the surface. One struck a shovel lashed to the pack-saddle of a mule, startling the animal out of its torpor and into a brief bucking frenzy. The sound of pebble on steel was a dull, metallic clunk…

  “Wait a minute,” Jonah whispered. He scrabbled at his belt for the sample spectroscope and scooped again for more pebbles; his hands were trembling as he shoved one into the trap of the instrument and flicked the activator. “Platinum!” he yelled. The kzinti unfurled their ears to maximum, like pink radar dishes. “54% platinum, by Finagle’s ghost!”

  Jonah Matthieson bad been a rockjack, an asteroid prospector, in the brief intervals of peace in Sol System; the methods in that were a great deal more mechanized, but he knew what was valuable. He scrabbled in the streambed, then tore back to his mules for the pan. Pebbles and heavy sand washed out as he swirled the water and flicked off the lighter material. Readings glowed as he jammed more samples into the scanner: 57%, 72%, an incredible 88%. His stomach ached with the tension as he worked his way upstream; Bigs and Spot were following, howl-spitting at each other in the Hero’s Tongue. At last he thought to call Hans. The Sol-Belter was still fumbling with the belt radio when the old man came up, leading his mules and looking nearly as phlegmatic.

  “Ja,” he said calmly. “Platinum all right. Nice heavy concentration.” He took the pipe out of his mouth to spit aside. “Worthless.”

  Spot gave an ululating howl, jaws open at the sky. Bigs collapsed again, this time into the stream with only his eyebrows and black nostrils showing; his tail waved pink in the water, and little fish-analogues came to nibble at it. Jonah felt an overwhelming urge to break the spectroscope over the Wunderlander’s head, and then a sick almost-headache at the back of his neck.

  “It’s a perfectly good industrial metal!” he protested, slogging to the bank of the stream and sitting down on a wet rock. A kermitoid croaked and thrashed away through the spiny underbrush. “It’s used for everything from chemical synthesis to doping crystal fusion cores. Back in the Sol Belt, it was the first thing we looked for.”

  “Ja, so useful the kzinti hauled seven or eight asteroids from the Swarm to near-Wunderland orbit as reserves, back during the Fifth Fleet buildup,” Hans nodded. “Still a lot of it left. We need something valuable but not so valuable they thought to get a supply set up,” he went on. “Gold, hafnium, something like that. Well,” he went on, “rest-period’s over. Got to get a move on if we want to get anything done.”

  Spots and Bigs whined. So did Jonah.

  “Give me two,” Spots said, throwing two cards into the pile.

  Jonah dealt, watching the kzin across the campfire narrowly. His scent was calm—he had long since learned to recognize the gingery smell of kzinti excitement—but that could simply be control enough to keep it down below the stun-your-nostrils level humans could recognize. Bigs seemed to be watching him intently, ears out and fur fluffed up around his face. Spots’ tail was held rigidly and quivering just slightly at the tip…

  “Fold,” he decided. Nobody else wanted more cards.

  Spots fla
pped his ears, and his eyebrows twitched. “See you and raise you three.”

  Three krona, to the humans; the brothers were playing each other for kzinretti, of which they both had more than they wanted, due to the surplus after most of the kzintosh—male kzin—in the system died. Evidently numbers in the harem were a status matter for kzinti.

  “See you,” Bigs said in Wunderlander: “And smell you, you vatach-in-the-grass,” he muttered under his breath in the Hero’s Tongue, in the Mocking Tense.

  “And two,” Hans added. He puffed ostentatiously on his pipe, and the two kzin closed their nostrils in an exaggerated gesture. Their huge golden eyes caught the firelight occasionally, silver disks in the darkness.

  Well, it is pretty foul, Jonah conceded. On the other hand, Hans was sitting downwind.

  “Call.” Bigs’ tail was quivering visibly.

  Spots sighed and let his ears droop. “Three queens,” he said, flipping his hand upright.

  Bigs lunged and snapped close to his nose. “I thought you were bluffing!” he said, throwing down his pair of tens.

  “You should have listened to the Conservors and learned to control the juices of your liver,” Spots said sanctimoniously, purring slightly and letting the tip of his tongue show through his teeth. The pelt rose around his neck, and his whiskers worked back and forth; he licked a wrist and smoothed them back. “That is fifteen kzinretti you owe me—my selection, remember.”

  “Sorry, fellers,” Hans laughed. “That’s fifteen krona you three owe me.” He turned up his hand; three aces.