Go right ahead, Lieutenant, Buford had said, laughing. It creased his carved-ebony face, gave you some idea of how ancient he really was, how little was left of humanity in him. Laughter in the gravel voice: It's been done before. Whole books published about it. Nobody believes the books, and then they somehow don't get reprinted or copied.
"Finagle eat my eyes if I'll crawl to you, you bleeping tyrant," Jonah whispered softly to himself.
He looked down at the coins in his hand; a five-krona and a ten. Enough to eat on for a couple of weeks, if you didn't mind sleeping outside in the mild subtropical nights. Of course, that made it more likely someone would kick your head in and rob you, in the areas where they let vagrants settle. Another figure was crossing the square, a woman this time, in rough but serviceable overalls and a heavy strakkaker in a holster on one hip.
"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-Balt-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 Heldja Eldasson, 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.
CHAPTER THREE
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
