Larry Niven: The Man-Kzin Wars 05

“Ma’am?” Jonah asked. “Spare some eating money for a veteran down on his luck?”

She stopped, looking him up and down shrewdly. Stocky and middle-aged, pushing seventy, with rims of black under her fingernails. Not one of the tall slim mobile-eared aristocrats of the Nineteen Families, the ones who had first settled Wunderland. A commoner, with a hint of a nasal accent to her Wunderlander that suggested the German-Bait-Dutch-Danish hybrid was not her native tongue.

“Pilot?” she said skeptically.

“I was, yes,” Jonah said, bracing erect. He felt a slight prickle of surprise when she read off the unit and section tabs still woven into the grimy synthetic of his undersuit.

“Then you’ll know systems… atmosphere training?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll see.” The questions stabbed out, quick and knowledgeable. “All right,” she said at last. “I won’t give you a fennig for a handout, but I could have a job for you.”

Hope was more painful than hunger or hangover. “Who do I have to kill?” he said.

She raised her brows, then showed teeth. “Ach, you joke. Good, spirit you have.”

She held out a belt unit, and he laid a palm on it as hope flickered out. There would be a trace on it from the net, General Early would have seen to that. There had been other prospects.

“Hmm,” she grunted. “Well, a good record would not have you squatting in the ruins, smelling… “ She wrinkled her nose and seemed to consider. “Here.” She pulled out a printer and keyed it, then handed him the sheet it extruded, together with a credit chip. “I am Heidja Eladsson, project manager for Skognara Minerals, a Suuomalisen company.

“If you show up at the listed address in two days, there will be work. I am short several hands; skilled labor is scarce, and my contract will not wait. The work is hard but the pay is good. There’s enough money in the chip to keep you blind drunk for a week, if that’s your problem. And enough for a backcountry kit, working clothes and such, if you want the job. Be there or not, as you please.”

She turned on her heel and left. Alpha Centauri had set, but the eye-straining point source that was Beta was still aloft, and the moon.

“I won’t spend the chip on booze,” he said to himself. “But by Murphy’s ghost, I’m going to celebrate with the coins that smug-faced farmer gave me.”

The question of where to do it remained. Then his eyes narrowed defiantly. Somewhere to clean up first, then-yes, then he’d hit Harold’s Terran Bar. It would be good to sit down and order. Damned if he would have taken Harold Yarthkin’s charity, though. Not if he were starving.

The chances were he’d be the only Terran there, anyway.

Minister the Honorable Ulf Reichstein-Markham regarded the Terran with suspicion. The office of the Minister for War of the Provisional Government was as austere as the man himself, a stark stone rectangle on the top floor of the Ritterhaus. Its only luxuries were size and the sweeping view of the Founder’s Memorial and Hans-Jorge Square; for the rest it held a severely practical desk and retrieval system, a cot for occasional sleep, and a few knickknacks. The dried ear of a kzin warrior, a picture of Markham’s mother-who had the same bleakly handsome, hatchet-faced Herrenmann looks with a steel-trap jaw-and a model of the Nietzsche, Markham’s ship during most of his years as a leader of Resistance guerrillas in the Serpent Swarm, the asteroid belt around Alpha Centauri. Markham himself was a young man, only a little over thirty-five; blond asymmetric beard and wiry close-cropped hair tall lean body held ramrod-tight in his plain gray uniform.

“Why, exactly, do you wish to block further renovation of the Munchen Scholarium?” he said, in his pedantic Wunderlander-flavored English. It held less of that guttural undertone than it had a year ago.

General Buford Early, UN Space Navy, lounged back in the chair and drew on his cheroot. He looked to be in late middle age, perhaps eighty or ninety, a thick-bodied black man with massive shoulders and arms and a rumpled blue undress uniform. The look was a finely crafted artifact.

“Duplication of effort,” he said. “Earth and We Made It are producing technological innovations as quickly as interstellar industry can assimilate them-faster than the industries of Wunderland and the Serpent Swarm can assimilate them. Much cheaper to send data and high-end equipment directly here, now that we have the hyperdrive, and hyperwave communications. You’re our forward base for the push into kzinti space; the war’s going to last another couple of years at least, possibly a decade, depending on how many systems we have to take before the kzin cry uncle.”

Markham’s brow furrowed for a moment, then caught the meaning behind the unfamiliar idiom.

“The assault on Hssin went well,” he pointed out.

That was the nearest kzin-held system, a dim red dwarf with a nonterrestrial planet; the assault that took the Alpha Centauri system had been mounted from there. UN superluminal warships and transports had ferried Wunderlander troops in for the attack. Early could read Markham’s momentary, slightly dreamy expression well. Schadenfreude, sadistic delight in another’s misfortune. Hammerblows from space, utterly unexpected, wrecking the ground defenses and what small warships were deployed at Hssin. Then the landing craft floating down on gravity polarizer drive, hunting through the shattered habitats and cracking them one by one. Hssin had unbreathable air, and it had been constructed as a maintenance base more than a fortress.

“True,” Early nodded. “And that’s just what Wunderlanders should concentrate their efforts on-direct military efforts. Times have changed; it doesn’t take decades to travel between Sol and Alpha Centauri any more. With the Outsider’s Gift”-the hyperdrive had been sold to the human colonists of We Made It by aliens so alien they made kzinti look familiar-“star systems don’t have to be so self-sufficient anymore.”

Markham’s frown deepened. “Wunderland is an independent state and not signatory to the United Nations treaties,” he pointed out acerbically.

Early made a soothing gesture, spreading his hands. The fingers moved in a rhythmic pattern. Markham’s eyes followed them, the pupils growing wider until they almost swallowed the last gray rim of the iris.

“You really don’t care much about the Scholarium, do you?” the Terran said soothingly.

Markham nodded, his head moving slowly up and down as if pulled on a string.

“True. It vas of no use to us during the occupation, und now makes endless trouble about necessary measures.” His accent had grown a little thicker.

“There are so many other calls on resources. And it really is politically troublesome.”

Another nod. “Pressing for early elections. Schweinerie! What does nose-counting matter? Ve soldiers haf the understanding of Vunderland’s problems. The riots against the Landholders must be put down! Too many of my colleagues prejudices against their social superiors haff.”

“The alliance with the UN is important. We have to stand by our allies while the war is on, after all.”

This time Markham seemed to frown slightly, his head jerking as if it tried to escape some confinement. Early moved his fingers again and again in the rhythmic dance, until the Wunderlander’s face grew calm once more.

“True. For ze present.”

“So you’ll deny their application for additional funds.”

“Ja.” Early snapped his fingers, and Markham started. “And if you have no further matters to discuss, Herr General?” he said, impatiently keying the system on his desk.

“Thank you for your time, sir,” Early replied, standing and saluting.