Bigs dipped the stunner to his belt. Spots unlocked his jaws from the knife-man’s right shoulder and threw him a dozen paces to crumple bonelessly on the soft turf of a lawn. Jonah swept up the ratchet knife and flipped the hilt in his hand, the molecular-distortion battery making it heavy even in the. 6l-G field of Wunderland. The contractor’s eyes were open; Bigs had taken time to reset the stunner’s field to light. That meant that Eldasson could feel and see, although not move the main voluntary muscles. The Sol-Belter drove his heel into her ribs with judiciously calculated force.
“Paytime, Fra Eldasson,” he said. “Payback time.”
Her lips worked, trying to spit at him. Bigs picked her up by the back of her tunic and shook her at arm’s length, as effortlessly as he might have a rag doll. When he was finished he brought her close and smiled in her lice, tongue dangling and carnivore breath hot
“How… how much?” she croaked.
“Just what you owe us,” Jonah said. “Not one fennig more… in money.”
General Buford Early looked a little less out of place in Munchen than he did in his native Sol System, these days; men as black as he were rare on Wunderland, and mostly from the Krio enclaves. They were even rarer in the polyglot genetic stew of Earth. That was not true at the time of his birth. He had been born while there were still distinct human sub-races, a fact he took some care to disguise. Not least by keeping a careful ear for the changes in language, and by muting the inhuman gracefulness learned through the centuries. Other things he bid more deeply; but the power he held from his rank in the UN Space Navy, from his role in the ARM, and from his own force of personality, he did not bother to conceal. Heldja Eldasson looked a little intimidated, sitting across the wide oak desk in the upper offices of the Ritterhaus, once more headquarters of Wunderland’s government.
“What else could I do?” she said sullenly. The autodoc had healed the worst of her injuries, but she had not been allowed enough time to clear up the bruises that marked her face with red and blue splotches. “The ratcat-lover had his tame kzin grin at me until I transferred the funds and authenticated the contract.”
“You could have gone to the police,” he pointed out, lighting a cigar. That was also more common here on Wunderland than on Earth, among the many archaisms he found rather pleasant.
“Teufelheim! They had the contracts -and would the police believe me, with my record? I wouldn’t have chanced stuffing them, if you hadn’t suggested it.”
He stared at her for a moment, and she dropped her eyes before the steady yellowish glare of his.
“Excellency,” she finished sullenly.
“It should have occurred to you that -“ Early stopped. That I have influence with the courts, and the police. Both quite true, although not to the extent he would on Earth. There, opponents of the ARM-or the Brotherhood, if they were unlucky enough to learn of its existence-could be ignored so completely that they found nobody even acknowledged their existence any longer. Harsher measures were rarely necessary; overt fear was a crude tool. The Secret Reign had survived the centuries by manipulating men, not by trying to rule them directly. It was already far older than any mere state in the year Buford Early was born…
“Never mind,” he continued. “You’ll be compensated for your loss.” Loss of stolen money, he thought ironically. “And keep me informed of anything to do with Matthieson. Understood?”
“Jawul,” she replied.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jonah pulled his head out of the fountain and shook it; the two kzin looked up from tending their wounds and complained with yeowls as drops hit their fur. The human restrained an impulse to grin at them; from the way they were wagging their ears back at him, they felt the same way.
“Well, we’re rich,” he said. “Comparatively speaking. Rich in spirit, too-I never did like being cheated.” And this time I got to do something about it, he added silently. Finagle, but I feel good! Better than he had in a year. Better than he had since the psychists released him and Early began his campaign of persecution.
Bigs grunt-snarled. Spots answered aloud: “We have fought side by side,” he said. His whiskers drooped. “Although there will be little enough left of this money when our debts are paid and supplies laid in for our households.”
“Considering that you were contemplating suicide the night I met you, that’s not bad,” Jonah observed dryly, turning and sitting on the cornice of the fountain. “How much will you have left?”
“If we pay no more than the most pressing of our debts… “Spots turned and consulted with his sibling in the Hero’s Tongue; kzin felt uneasy with a language as verbal as English. “A thousand each.”
“Hmmm. The idea is to let money make money,” Jonah replied. “You ought to invest it.”
Bigs folded his ears in anger, and the pelt laid itself flat on his face, sculpting against the massive bones. Spots lifted his upper lip and let his tail twitch in derision.
“If we had the skill, we would not have the opportunity. Business-who would do business of that sort with a kzin?”
“Well, I-“Jonah snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute! Remember that dosshouse we stayed at, the night I told you about the job?”
“I would rather forget,” Spots said.
“Vermin,” Bigs rasped. “Human-specific vermin at that. If the Fanged God is humorous, they will die from ingesting kzin blood.”
“No, the old man I talked to-he’d been on prospecting expeditions into the Jotuns.”
Spots had bent his head to lap at the water in the fountain; now he raised it, hands still braced on the rim, long pink washcloth-sized tongue lapping at his jowls and whiskers.
“You are altruistic, for a monk-for a human,” he said suspiciously.
“Tanj,” Jonah replied. “There Ain’t No Justice. You two are out of luck because your side lost the war; I’m in bad odor with… hmmm, an influential patriarch, lees say. And we’ve just pounded on some people who, if not respectable, are certainly established citizens of Munchen. Reason and health both say we should get out of town. If nothing else, living’s cheaper in the countryside. The Jotuns are pretty wild; we could hunt most of our food.”
That brought the kzinti heads up, both of them. The aliens stared at him with their huge round lion-colored eyes for a moment, then looked at each other.
“I’ve got three thousand, you’ve got thirty-five hundred, our two friends here have a thousand apiece. No, that’s not enough. Mm-hm. Need about twice that”
The old man’s name was Hans Shwartz, and he had been perfectly willing to discuss an expedition. His honesty was reassuring, if depressing.
“Why so much?” Jonah asked. “I’ve done rockjack work, back in the Sol-Belt, but this is planetside-the air’s free.”
“Ja, but nothing else is,” Hans said. “Look. You’ve got animals-no sense in trying to take ground vehicles, it’s too rough in there- and you’ve got personal supplies, you’ve got weapons-”
“Weapons?”
“Bandits. Worse now than during the war. Weapons, then there’s detector equipment. Southern Jotuns have funny geography, difficult-that’s why it’s worthwhile going in there. Scattered pockets of high-yield stuff; doesn’t pay for large-scale mining, even these days.”
Jonah nodded, and the two kzin flared their nostrils in agreement. The Serpent Swarm had been stripped of experienced rockjacks; they made the best stingship fighter-pilots, and the Alpha Centauran space-navy had inherited plenty of shipbuilding capacity from the occupation. Thousands of small strike craft built in Tiamat and the other space fabrication plants were riding in UN carriers deeper and deeper into kzinti space. Even so, the natural superiority of asteroid mining was only somewhat diminished. There would have been little or no mining and industry on the surface of Wunderland but for the kzinti. Kzin bad been in its late Iron Age when the Jotok arrived and brought with them the full panoply of fusion power and gravity polarizers. The polarizer made surface-to-orbit travel fantastically cheap, and with fusion power pollution had never been a problem either.