“Forgive me, brother,” he whispered. Soft hands reached down out of time to lift and hold him, and a tongue washed his ears. A voice crooned wordlessly. He closed his eyes, and welcomed the long fall into night.
“Hey, Ed-look at that!”
Ed Gruederman glanced over to where a rifle muzzle prodded the huge wound on the dead kzin’s head, right where his left ear would have been. Silvery threads were lifting out of the blood and grey matter, almost invisibly thin, twisting and questing in the light. He slid his cleaned machete back into the sheath behind his right hip and walked over to the mule.
“Get back from that, you scheissekopf,” he called to the man by their victim. Stupid ratcat, not to think we had a sniper ready. “That’s some kzin shit, it may be catching, you know, like a fungus.”
The bandit jumped back and leveled his rifle, firing an entire cassette into the dead carnivore. When it clicked empty the torso had been cut in half, but the tendrils still waved slowly.
“Watch it, fool, we’re close to town-you want them to hear us and call the mounted police?” Then: “Yazus Kristus!”
They all crowded around, until he beat them back with his hat. “Gold,” he said reverentially, lifting one of the plastic sacks from that side of the packsaddle.
They all recognized it, of course. Nobody could be in their line of work in the Jotuns and not recognize gold dust; for one thing, nothing else was that heavy for its size. They counted the bags, running their hands over them until their leader lashed the tarpaulin back.
“Ten, fifteen thousand krona,” one muttered. “Oh, the verguuz and bitches I can buy with this.”
“Buy with your share, if Ed Gruederman can keep your shitty head on your sisterfucking shoulders that long,” their leader replied. “Back! There’s an assessor’s office in Neu Friborg. We’ll stop there and get krona and sell the mule, and then head for Munchen or Arhus-on-Donau, the Jotuns is no place for an honest man these days-too many police. Look at them, letting ratcats wander around attacking humans.”
That brought grins and laughter. “What’s this, boss?” one asked, lifting the smooth featureless egg that balanced the mule’s load.”
It shifted in his arms, and he dropped it with a cry of surprise. That turned to horror as it split open, and a spindly-limbed creature rose shakily from the twin halves; it was spider thin, blue-black and rubbery with three crimson eyes and a mouthful of teeth edged like a saw.
“Scheisse!” the bandit screamed. The mobile lips moved, perhaps in the beginning of wait.
The motion never had time to complete itself. A dozen rounds tore the little creature to shreds, until Gruederman shouted the bandits into sense-they were in more danger from each other’s weapons than from whatever-it-was. Even then three of them hacked it into unrecognizable bits with their machetes. Their fear turned to terror as the twin halves of the egg began to glow and collapse on themselves.
“We get out of here,” Gruederman said. “The advokats will take care of the bodies.” There were always a pack of them around a human settlement, waiting for garbage to scavenge, impossible to exterminate. “Come on. Money is waiting.”
“Not more than an hour or so,” Jonah said, with an odd sense of anticlimax. And yes, he thought. Sadness. The mangled remains of the tnuctipun were pathetically fragile in the bright light of Alpha Centauri. To come so far so long, for this. There Ain’t No Justice.
Tyra shied a stone at a lurking advokat that lingered,. torn between greed and cowardice. It yelped and ran back a few paces; tears streaked her face.
“Come look at this!” Hans said sharply. He reached down with a stick and turned the dead kzin’s head to one side. Not much of the soft tissue was left after the advokat pack, but for some reason they had avoided the shattered bone.
Spots began a snarl of anger, then stopped as he saw what was revealed. The others stood beside him, watching the silver tendrils move in their slow weaving. Hands probed with the stick; several of the threads lashed towards it and clung for a moment. A button-sized piece of the same material was embedded in the shattered remains of Bigs’ inner eat
“Stand back,” Spots said, unslinging his beamer.
None of the others quarreled with that; they crowded back with the gaping outbackers as the kzin stood on the edge of the creekbank and fanned a low-set beam across the bodies until nothing was left but calcinated ash. The tendrils of the device in his brother’s brain shriveled in the heat, and the central button exploded with a small fumf of released pressure. Spots kept up the fire until the wet clay was baked to stoneware, then threw the exhausted weapon aside.
“That… thing explains a good deal,” Jonah said; Tyra nodded, reached out an hand and then withdrew it.
“I am owed a debt of vengeance by a race three billion years dead,” Spots said, in a voice that might have been of equal age. “How shall I requite it?”
“There’s a debt of vengeance only about three hours hold,” Hans said sharply. “Those tracks are heading for Neu Friborg.”
“Let’s do it then,” Jonah said grimly. “Let’s go.”
“Hey, it’s a good mule,” Ed Gruederman said. “But we don’t need it any more-we had good luck up in the mountains.”
His men were on their best behavior; grinning like idiots with their hats clasped to their chests, and keeping their mouths silent the way he had told them. Gruederman felt a swelling of pride at their discipline; he’d had to boot plenty of head to get them so well-behaved. A big crowd had gathered around the mule with the unbalanced load as the four of them led it into town. Well, nothing ever happened in little arse-pimple outback towns like this, even if it did have a weekly run down to the lowlands. Fine well-set men like themselves were an event. He caught the eye of a young woman, scowling when she looked away.
“This the assessor’s office?” he said. It should be, the best building in the town and the only one of prewar rockmelt construction.
“Ja.”
A young girl often or so had slid under the mule, examining the girth and then running a hand down the neck. She seemed interested in the bar-code brand; not many of those out in the hills, he guessed. Then she ran up the stairs into the building.
“How long did you say you’d been up in the Jotuns?” a man said, his tone friendly.
The crowd was denser now; Gruederman felt a little nervous, after so long in the bundu, but he kept his smile broad, even when he felt a plucking at his belt. Nothing there for a pickpocket to get, but in a few hours he’d be rich. With luck, he might be able to shed the others before he got to Munchen and cashed the assessor’s draft. Pickings were slim in the Jotuns these days. From what he heard, Munchen was a wide-open town with plenty of opportunities for a man with a little ready capital and not too many foolish scruples.
A woman in a good suit came down the steps with the little girl and touched a reader to the mule’s neck.
“That’s the one,” she said quietly.
Danger prickled at Gruederman’s spine. He shouted and leaped back, reaching for his machete. It was gone, hands gripped him, the honed point of his own weapon pricked behind his eat He rolled his eyes wildly. All his men were taken, only one had unslung his weapon and it was wrestled away before he could do more than fire a round into the air. The crowd pushed in with a guttural animal snarl.
“Kill the bandits!” someone shouted.
The snarl rose, then died as the woman on the steps shouted and held up her hands:
“This is a civilized town, under law,” she said firmly. “Put them in the pen-tie them, and two of you watch each of them. We’ll call the police patrol back, they can’t have gone far.”
“Take your hands off me!” Gruederman screamed, as rawhide thongs lashed his wrists behind his back and a hundred hands pushed him through the welded steel bars of the livestock pen. “You can’t do this to me!” He spat through the bars, snapping his teeth at an unwary hand and hanging on until a stick broke his nose. “Motherfuckers! Kzinshit eaters!”