Jonah lurched erect, mouth working against the foul taste, blinking gritty eyes. For a moment the sensation reminded him—
"Oh, Finagle, I hurt."
They had come from Earth, Jonah and Ingrid and the artificial intelligence ship Catskinner, and the ship's computer had found something that shouldn't have been there. A ship that had floated in the Belt for so long that it had accreted enough dust to become an asteroid. A ship held unchanging in stasis, unchanging for billions of years, until it was awakened. Not just the ship. The Master.
Jonah shuddered.
That had been one of the times the thrint's mind-control had slipped. It had been busy, keeping control of all the minds of the Free Wunderkind flotilla, trying to find out what had gone on during the several billion years it had lain in timeless stasis.
Eyes blurring, burning, skin hanging loose and gray and old around the wrists of bleeding hands, speckled with ground-in-dirt.
Thrint tended to forget to tell their slaves to remember personal maintenance; they were not a very bright species. What humans would call an IQ of 80 was about average for Thrintun, and Dnivtopun hadn't been a genius by Slaver standards. That had been almost the worst of the subconscious humiliation. The Master had been so stupid—and under the Power you couldn't help but try to change that, to rack your brains for helpful solutions. Help the Master!
Jonah had been the one to crack the problem of making a new amplifier helmet to increase the psionic powers of the revenant Slaver. That would have made Dnivtopun master of the Alpha Centauri system and every human and kzin living there. Made him ruler of a new Slaver empire, because there had been fertile thrint females and young in the ship, the ship encased in its stasis field and the asteroid that had accreted about it over the thousands of millennia.
He moaned and pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. Yes, he'd broken free for an instant at the end, enough to struggle with Markham. Ulf Reichstein-Markham, who had liked the telepathic hypnosis the Slaver imposed. The psychists had erased Markham's memories of that; now he was a hero, space-guerrilla kzin-killing Resistance fighter and stalwart of the Provisional Government. The psychists hadn't been nearly as thorough with Jonah Matthieson, one-time Terran Belter, ex-combat pilot in the UNSN, assassin of Chuut-Riit. They'd just given him a strong block about the secret aspects of the affair, and turned him loose. He was supposed to recover fully in time, too. Not soon enough to have his job back, of course. No one wanted an unstable combat pilot. They'd give him his rank, but he'd be a paper shuffler, a useless man in a useless job. So he'd asked to go home. Belter prospectors were slightly mad anyway. And he learned that a hyperdrive transport back to Sol was out of the question, and there wasn't even a place for him in cold sleep aboard a slowship. Shuffle paper or get lost. Of course they'd hinted there was one other possibility, one he'd hated even more than shuffling paper.
He'd been bitter about that. That had led to more trouble . . .
A man was walking by, with the brisk step of someone with a purpose and somewhere to go.
"Gut Herr, spare some money to feed a veteran?" Jonah asked. He despised himself each time he did this, but it was the price of the oblivion he craved.
"Lieber Herr Gott," the man's voice rasped. Wunderland was like that, conservative: they even swore by God instead of Finagle. It had been settled by North European plutocrats uneasy with the way Earth was heading under the UN and the ARM. "You again! This is the third time today!"
Startled, Jonah looked up. The face was unfamiliar, clenched and hostile under a wide-brimmed straw hat. The man's suit was offensively white and clean, a linen bush-jacket. Some well-to-do outbacker in town on business.
"Sorry, sir," Jonah said, backing up slightly. "Honest—I didn't look at your face, just your hands and the money. Please, I won't hit on you again, I promise."
"Here." A solid gold-alloy coin, another Wunderlander anachronism. "And here, another. To keep your memory fresh. Do not bother me again, or the polezi I will call." Frowning: "How did a combat veteran come to this?"
Jonah ground the coins together in his fist, almost tempted to throw them after the retreating back of the spindly low-gravity. Because the bloody ARM is punishing me! he screamed mentally. Because I spoke out! Not anything treasonable, no secrets, no attempt to evade the blocks in his mind. Just the truth, that they were still holding back technological secrets—had even while Earth faced defeat at kzinti hands—that they were conspiring to put the whole human race back into stasis, the way they had in the three centuries of the Long Peace, before the kzinti came. That the ARM had secret links, secret organizations on all the human-settled worlds. Buford Early, Prehistoric Man, has frozen me out. The ARM general probably thought he was giving a gentle warning, tugging on his clandestine contacts until every regular employment was closed to Matthieson. So that Matthieson would come crawling back, eventually.
Early was at least two centuries old, probably more. Old enough to remember when military history was taught in the schools, not forbidden as pornography. Possibly old enough to have fought against other humans in a war. He was very patient . . . and he had hinted that Jonah would make a good recruit for the ARM, if he altered his attitudes. Perhaps even for something more secret than the ARM, the
