* * *
Halfway around the planet a single unwinking eye looked down on a display. A hand like a three-fingered mechanical grab touched controls.
"Launch a Godfist at these coordinates," the thrint officer rasped, his tendrils clenched tight to his mouth in determination.
"Master—" the three-armed slave technician said in agitation. A Godfist was a heavy bombardment weapon, a small spaceship in itself with a high-level computer, and well-armed for self-defense. The warhead held nearly a kilogram of antimatter. After it landed there would be very little left of the continent.
OBEY, the thrint commanded. The Power clamped down brutally; the Slaver could feel the technician's acute desire to be elsewhere.
I wish I were elsewhere too, the thrint thought bitterly, watching the Godfist lift on the remote screens. I wish I were at the racetrack or with a female. I wish I were small and back home with Mother.
"What does it matter?" he said to the air. "We're all going to die anyway." In about twenty years; the garrison here was to withdraw and leave only the foodyeast-supervisor quite soon. Dubious if they would make it to the next thrint-held system, anyway. The Power was of little use in a space battle against shielded tnuctipun vessels. "At least this powerloss-sucking tnuctipun spy will die before us."
As it turned out, he was wrong.
CHAPTER ONE
Mixed crowd tonight, Harold thought, as he watched Suuomalisen's broad and dissatisfied back push through the crowd and the beaded curtain over the entrance. Sweat stained the fat man's white linen suit, and a haze of smoke hung below the ceiling as the fresher system fought overstrain. The screened booths along the walls and the tables around the sunken dance-floor were crowded, figures writhing there to the musicomp's Meddlehoffer beat, a three-deep mob along the long brass-railed bar. Blue uniforms of the United Nations Space Navy, gray-green of the Free Wunderland forces, gaudy-glitzy dress of civilian hangers-on and the new civilian elite of ex-guerrillas and war profiteers grown rich on contracts and confiscated collabo properties. Drinking, eating, talking, doing business ranging from the romantic to the economic, or combinations; and most were smoking as well. Some of the xenosophont customers would be uncomfortable in the extreme; Homo sapiens sapiens is almost unique in its ability to tolerate tobacco.
Tough, he decided. Outside the holosign would be floating before the brick: HAROLD'S TERRAN BAR: A WORLD ON ITS OWN. Below that in lower-case print: humans only. The fat man had chosen to ignore that in his brief spell as quasi-owner, and Harold agreed with the decision. The sign had been a small raised finger to the kzinti during the occupation years; now that humans ruled the Alpha Centauri system again, anyone who could pay was welcome. There were even a depressed-looking pair of kzin in a booth off at the far corner, the hiss-spit-snarl of the Hero's Tongue coming faintly through their privacy screen. That was the only table not crowded, but quarter-ton felinoid carnivores did not make for brash intrusion.
But it's a human hangout, and if the aliens don't like it, they can go elsewhere, he decided.
"Glad to see the last of him, boss," the waitress said, laying a platter and a stein in front of him. "I'd rather work for a kzin."
"Good thing you didn't have to, then," Harold said, a grin creasing his basset-hound features between the jug ears. Suuomalisen had bought under the impression—correct—that Harold was on the run from the collaborationist government, right towards the end of the kzinti occupation. He had also been under the impression—false—that he was buying a controlling interest; in fact, the fine print had left real control with a consortium of employees. He had been glad to resell back to the original owner, and at a tasty profit for Harold.
Akvavit, beer chaser, and plate of grilled grumblies with dipping sauce called; he added a cigarette and decided the evening was nearly complete.
"Completely complete," he murmured, as his wife joined him; he stood and bowed over a hand.
"What's complete?" she said. Ingrid Schotter-Yarthkin was tall, Belter-slim; the strip-cut of her hair looked exotic above the evening gown she wore to oversee the backroom gambling operation.
"Life, sweetheart."
"At seventy-three?" she said; Wunderland years, slightly shorter than Terran. She had been only two years younger than he when they were growing up in the old Wunderland before the ratcat invasion. Now, time-dilation and interstellar cold sleep had left her less than half his biological age. "Middle-aged spread already?"
"I'm spreading myself thin, personally," Claude Montferrat-Palme said, sliding in to join them.
Harold grunted. The ex-policeman was thin, with the elongated build and mobile ears of a purebred Wunderland Herrenmann. He also wore the asymmetric beard favored by the old aristocracy.
"Seems sort of strange to be back to private life," Harold said musingly.
Claude shuddered. "Count it lucky we weren't put before a court," he said.
"Speak for yourself."
Claude winced slightly; he had been police chief of Munchen under the kzinti occupation. Resister before Wunderland surrendered to the invaders, then a genuine collaborator; someone had to hold society together, to get whatever was possible from the kzin. Earth was losing the war. But then—
Then Ingrid came back, with the Belter captain, and Claude's world came apart. His help to the resistance had been effective, and timely enough to save him from a firing squad. Not timely enough to save his job as police commissioner, of course. Harold was tarred with the edge of the same brush; anyone who made money under the occupation was suspect in these new puritanical days, as were the aristocrats who had perforce cooperated with the alien invaders. There was irony for you . . . especially considering how the commons had groveled to the kzin, and worked to keep their war factories going during the invasions of Sol System. Double irony for Harold, since he was a Herrenmann's bastard and so never really
