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.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The little trading post had a dusty, abandoned feel. There was the adobe store, two houses and a paddock, all planted where three faint mule-tracks crossed a creek. The houses had roofs of tile with tiles missing, carrying solar-power panels with some of the panels missing; the pump that filled the watering troughs before the veranda of the store was still functioning, and the metered charger available to anyone who wanted to top up their batteries. The satellite dish on the rooftree looked to be out of order for some time, though. A straggly pepper tree shaded the notional street, and a big kitchen garden lay behind a dun-colored earth wall.