disturbance, she might really try to stiff us. Kzinti were not popular with the courts, understandably enough- although Jonah’s war record would help. It was not everyone who had assassinated a Planetary Governor like Chuut-Riit.
“Look, Fra Eldasson, we’re broke until we get paid- we don’t even have enough to buy a drink,” he said reasonably.
“Ja. Hmmm. Here”-She took him by the arm and lead him to one side, behind a wrecked crane. The thick synthetic bars had frayed out into tangled fiber fragments; heavy beam-rifle hit, from the look of it. Composites did not weather, so it might have been from last year, or from the street-fighting fifty years ago when the kzin landed.
“Here’s four hundred in cash,” she said. “Don’t let any of the others know, or everyone will be about me like grisflies. Meet me at Suuomalisen’s Sauna later tonight, and I’ll transfer the rest for you and your two ratcats.”
“All right.”
“Hrraer”
“I thank Eldasson for the drink and the meat,” Spots said, “but the delay is irksome. We will have much to set at rights in our households; our younger siblings are still immature, of shrunken liver and rattlepate.”
Bigs wrinkled his upper lip in agreement and stropped his claws on the table. Shavings of tekdar curled back, creamy yellow beneath the darker patina of the surface.
Jonah nodded. They were in one of the quieter rooms of the Sauna, which despite its name was an entertainment center of varied attractions, some shocking even to him; the tamer floor shows were interesting, but of course wasted on non-humans. The kzinti had eaten on their own-no human felt comfortable with a feeding kzin, and the felinoids detested the smell of what men ate -but had returned to wait with him.
“Yeah; I’m anxious to get the credit deposited myself,” he said. And you’re not bad company for ratcats, but you’re not half as pretty as what I have in mind, he thought: it had been a long month in the swamps. “Eldasson had better show up soon.”
“Eldasson?” a voice said.
Jonah looked up, slightly surprised. A man who associated with kzinti got used to being ignored, or left to his own thoughts, whichever way you preferred to look at it. The speaker was a thickset man for a Wunderlander, with a blue-jowled stubble of beard and a grubby turban; from one of the little ethnic enclaves that hung on even here in Munchen. The light from the stained-glass overhead lamps flickered across his olive skin.
“She owes you money?” the man went on.
“A fair bit,” Jonah replied.
The other man giggled and lifted his drink; the steel bracelets on his wrist tinkled.
“Then you had better have a written contract,” he said. “Notarized.”
“Notarized?” Jonah said in alarm. “We’ve got the contracts, right here.” He tapped his belt-unit. “With mods for bonuses and overtime.”
“A personal recording?” the turbaned man said scornfully. “How long have you been on Wunderland, flatlander?”
Jonah bristled and ran a reflexive hand down his Sol-Belter strip of hair; his great-great-grandmother had been the last of his family to be born on Earth.
“Sorry-I knew by your accent you were Sol-System,” the other said, raising a placating hand. “I just wanted to warn you; Eldasson and Suuomalisen are like that”-he held up two fingers, twined about each other-“and they’re both crooked as a kzin’s hind leg. You’d better be ready to sue for that money.”
A gingery scent filled the air; the stranger backed off in alarm, as the two kzin stood and grinned, lines of slaver falling from their thin black lips. The same thought had occurred to Jonah; a kzin was not likely to receive much justice from the Wunderland junta’s courts, these days.
“Let’s go hunting,” he said.
“Hraareow.”
Munchen was the biggest city Jonah had ever traveled: over a quarter of a million people. There were many times that in the Belt, but not even Gibraltar Base had as much in one habitat. Of course, much of Earth was one huge city-over eighteen billion, an impossible number-but he had been born to the Belt and the war against the Kzin. The other problem was that it wasn’t a habitat at all; it was uncontained, sprawling with the disregard for distances of a thinly settled planet and a people who had been wealthy enough to give most families their own aircar. The open space above still made him a little nervous; he pretended it was the blue dome of a bubbleworld, one of the larger farming ones with a high spin. Luckily, it was unlikely that Eldasson was in the residential neighborhoods, or the slums that had grown up during the occupation. Nor was she at the address Public Info listed as her home, which had turned out to be a townhouse with several loud, extremely xenophobic-or at least anti-kzinti-dogs.
“Hrunge k’tze hvrafo tui,” Bigs said; he stopped, opened his mouth and wet his nose with his tongue. “Tui, tza!”
I think I scent the prey, Jonah translated mentally. He let the length of skeelwood he was carrying up the sleeve of his overall drop until the tip rested on his fingers. The prey is here.
The nightspot they were staking out was a few hundred meters behind them, around a slight curve in the tree-lined road. It was a converted house, and the buildings here stood well apart; hedges lined the outer lawns, making the turf roadway a glimmer of green-black under the glowglobes. The summer night was quiet and dark, the moon and Beta both down and the stars little dimmed by city lights; the smell of dew was stronger than that of men’s engines. Feet came walking, several pair. Then he saw them. Eldasson right enough, but dressed in a fancy outfit of black embroidered tunic and ballooning indigo trousers. A dark woman in a tight shipsuit to one side of her, arm in arm, talking and laughing. Another behind them, tall even for a Wunderlander but thick-built, almost a giant, shaggy ashblond hair…
“Fra Eldasson,” Jonah said, stepping into the pool of light under one of the globes that hung from the treebranches; they were biologicals, hitched into the tree’s sap system. “How pleasant to meet you.”
He could sense the kzinti spreading out behind him. Not hear them-their padded feet were soundless on the grass-but a whisper of movement, a hint of sour-ginger scent. Kzin anger: it sent the hair on his own backbone to bristling as conditioned reflex said danger. His smile was grim. Danger in truth, but not to him.
Eldasson stopped, blinking at him. “What are you doing here?” she snapped. Her companions looked at Jonah, then recoiled slightly at the sudden looming appearance of Spots and Bigs. The tall blond rumbled a challenge; the two women crouched slightly, spreading to either side.
Finagle, Jonah thought. These aren’t flatlanders. I miscalculated. Even after decades of war between Man and Kzin, most Earthers were still culturally conditioned against violence. That had never gone as far on Wunderland, and there had been little law here for humans while the kzinti ruled. Nobody who prospered in those years was likely to be a pacifist. Jonah rapped his belt unit, for emphasis and for a record of what followed.
“We got a little tired of waiting for you to show up with our money, Fra Eldasson,” he said calmly. “We’d like it now, if you please.”
“You’ll get it as soon as the transfer to me clears,” she said. The voice was flat and wary; her right hand was behind her back.
Calm settled on Jonah, a comforting familiarity. The feeling of being completely immersed in reality and completely detached at the same time, what the adepts who trained him for war had said was the closest he would ever approach salon. For the first time in a year, the wounds within his mind ceased to itch.
“Not good enough. We want know.”
“No! Now get out of this neighborhood; you’re not welcome here.”
Bigs spoke; his Wunderlander was more thickly accented than his sibling’s and distorted by anger as well:
“Why do you think you can cheat a Hero and live, monkey?”
“Ah, a racial slur,” Eldasson said, smiling tightly. “Jilla, von Sydow, remember that.” To the kzin: “Go ch’rowl your Patriarch, ratcat.”
Bigs screamed and leaped. Everything seemed to move very slowly after that. Jonah dove forward and down, the yawara-stick snapping out into his hand, then sweeping toward Eldasson’s wrist as it came out with the chunky shape of a military-grade stunner. She was throwing herself backward; the wood met the synthetic of the weapon
