The Man-Kzin Wars 02

“About five thousand krona less well than we could have,” she said sharply.

“We'll none of us starve,” Yarthkin added mildly, and strolled over to the baccarat table.

Montferrat raised an eyebrow and smiled thinly. His anger had faded. “You're a sentimental idiot, Harry.”

“Probably true, Claude,” Yarthkin said, and took a plain unlogoed credit chip from the inside pocket of his jacket. “The usual.”

Montferrat palmed it and smoothed back his mustache with a finger. “Sometimes I think you indulge in these little quixotic gestures just to annoy me,” he added, and dropped three cards from his hand. “Banco,” he continued.

“Probably right there, too, Claude,” he said. “I'm relying on the fact that you're not an unmitigated scoundrel.”

“Now I'm an honest man?”

“No, a scoundrel with mitigating factors… and I'm a sentimental idiot, as you mentioned.” He stopped, listened abstractedly. “See you later, somebody wants to see me. Sam says it's important, and he isn't given to exaggeration.”

The doors slid open and Yarthkin stepped into the main room, beside the north end of the long bar. The music was the first thing he heard, the jaunty remembered beat. Cold flushed over his skin, and the man he had been smiling and waving to flinched. That brought the owner of Harold's Place back to his duties; they were self- imposed, and limited to this building, but that did not mean they could be shirked. He moved with swift grace through the throng, shouting an occasional greeting over the surf-roar of voices, slapping a shoulder, shaking a hand, smiling. The smile was still on his face as he stepped up off the dance floor and through the muting field around the musicomp, but he could taste the acid and copper of his own rage at the back of his throat.

“I told you never to play that song again,” he said coldly. “We've been together a long time, Samuel Ogun, it'd be a pity to end a beautiful friendship this way.”

The musician keyed the instrument to continue without him and swiveled to face his employer. “Boss… — Mr. Yarthkin, once you've talked to those two over at Table Three, you'll understand. Believe me.”

Yarthkin nodded curtly and turned to the table. The two Belters were sitting close to the musicomp, with the shimmer of a privacy field around them, shrouding features as well as dulling voices. Yarthkin smoothed the lapels of his jacket and wove deftly between tables and servers as he approached, forcing his anger down into an inner cesspit where discarded emotions went. Sam was no fool, he must mean something by violating a standing order that old. He did not shake easy, either, and that he had been was plain to see on him. This should be interesting, at least; it would be good to have a straightforward bargaining session after the embarrassing exhilaration of the incident in the gambling room. Money was a relaxing game to play, the rules were clear, victory and defeat a matter of counting the score, and no embarrassing emotions; and these might be the ones with the special load that the rumors had told of. More profit and more enjoyment if they were… more danger, too, but a man had to take an occasional calculated risk. Otherwise, you might as well put a droud in your head and be done with it.

The man looked thirty and might be anything between that and seventy: tough-looking, without the physical softness that so many rockjacks got from a life spent in cramped zero-G spaceships. A conservative dark innersuit, much less gaudy than what most successful Swarmers wore these days, and an indefinably foreign look about the eyes. Yarthkin sat, pulled out a chair and looked over to study the woman's face. The world went black.

“Boss, are you all right?” There was a sharp hiss against his neck, and the sudden sharp-edged alertness of a stimshot. “Are you all right?”

“You,” Yarthkin whispered, shaking the Krio's hand off his shoulder with a shrug. Ingrid's face hovered before him, unchanged, no, a little thinner, more tanned. But the same, not forty years different, the same. He could feel things moving in his head, like a mountain river he had seen on a spring hunting trip once. Cracks running across black ice, and the rock beneath his feet toning with the dark water's hidden power. “You.” His voice went guttural, and his right hand went inside the dress jacket.

“Jonah, no!” Ingrid's hand shot out and slapped her companion's to the table. Yarthkin felt his mind stagger and broach back toward reality as the dangerprickle ran over his skin; that was probably not an engineer's light-pencil in the younger man's hand. He struggled for self-command, dropped his gunhand back to the table.

“Well.” What was there to say? “Long time, no see. Glad you could make it. The last time, you seemed to have a pressing appointment elsewhere. I showed up on time — and there the 'boat was, boosting like bell a couple of million klicks Solward. Me in a singleship with half a dozen kzin Slashers sniffing around.”

Ingrid's face went chalk-white. “Let me explain—”

“Don't bother. Closed account.” He paused, lit a cigarette, astonished at the steadiness of his own hands.

“Claude know you're here?”

“No, and it's best he doesn't.”

“Sure. Let me guess. Now you're back, and Mr. Quick-Draw here with you, on some sort of UN skullbuggery, and need my help.” He looked thoughtful. “Come to that, how did you get here?”

“Jonah Matthieson,” the Sol-Belter said. “How we got here isn't important. But we do need your help. Damned little we've gotten in this system that hasn't been bought and paid for, and half the time we've been sold out to the pussies even so.”

“Pussies? Oh, the ratcats.” He laughed, a little wildly. “So you haven't found legions of eager, idealistic volunteers ready to throw themselves into the jaws of the kzin to help you on your sacred mission, whatever it is. How can that be?”

“We can pay.”

“Pay. Well, well, the UN has money.” Yarthkin's finger touched behind one ear, and the mirror behind the bar went screenmode. It showed an overgrown park, flicking between micropickups scattered wholesale through the vegetation. There had been lawns here once; now there was waist-high grass, Earth trees grown to scores of meters in the light gravity, native Wunderlander growths soaring on spidery trunks. The sound of panting breath, and a naked human came stumbling through the undergrowth. His legs and flanks were lashed and scratched by thorns and burrs. He reeled with exhaustion, feet pounding with careless heaviness; the eyes were flat and blank in the stubbled face, mouth dribbling. Behind him there was a flash of orange-red, alien among the cool greens of Earth, the tawny olives of Wunderland. A flash, two hundred kilos of sentient carnivore charging on all fours in a hunching rush that parted the long grass in an arrow of rippling wind. Not so much like a cat as a giant weasel, blurring, looming up behind the fleeing human in a wall of flesh, a wall that fell tipped with bright teeth and black claws.

The screaming began at once, sank to a bubbling sound and the wet tearing noises of feeding. Shouts of protest rose from the dance floor and the other tables, and the sound of someone vomiting into an expensive meal. Yarthkin touched the spot behind his ear and the screen switched back to mirror. The protests lasted longer, and the staff of Harold's went among the patrons to soothe with free drinks and apologies, murmurs. Technical mistake, government override, here, let me fix that for you, gentlefolk…

“And that,” Yarthkin said, “is a good reason why you're not going to be finding hordes beating down your door to volunteer. For glory or for money. We've been living with that for forty years, you fool. While you in the Sol system sat fat and happy and safe.”

Jonah leaned forward. “I'm here now, aren't I? Neither fat, nor very happy, and not at all safe right now. I was in two fleet actions, Mr. Yarthkin. Out of four. Earth's been fighting the kzin since I was old enough to vote. We haven't lost so far. Been close a couple of times, but we haven't lost. We could have stayed home. Note we didn't. Ingrid and I are considerably less safe than you.”

Ingrid and I, Yarthkin thought, looking at the faces, side by side. The young faces. Sol-Belter. Hotshot pilot. Secret agent. All-round romantic hero, come to save us worthless pussy-whipped peons. Tonight seemed to be a night for powerful emotions, something he had been trying to unlearn. Now he felt hatred strong and thick, worse than anything he