back to the towns when the liberation came. The others have become worse, and more have joined them since. They do not come this far back into the mountains often-we have little to steal, and we will fight to keep what we have, When the police chase them, then they run deep into the Jotuns. Some of the ones who were here during the war, they know their way around, a little.”
“Do you help the police?”
“Yes.” Flat and decisive. “The outlaws, they are advokats.” That was a small, scruff’, unpleasant-smelling carrion eater common to this part of the continent; it travelled in packs, attacked sick or wounded animals, and would eat anything including dung. Eat until it puked up, then eat the vomit. The beast was almost all mouth and legs, with very little in the way of a brain, an evolutionary holdover. “If we had more guns, we would shoot them ourselves.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be cautious.”
“And… “he looked down at his feet in their crude leather sandals. “You said, you were looking also for unusual things?”
Tyra felt a sudden prickle of interest. Unusual could mean anything, back in here; jadeite, a meerschaum deposit, abandoned kzinti equipment from a clandestine base… or news of the party she had been told to look out for. Business for herself, or for Herrenmann Montferrat-Palme. It was about time something turned up, it was cheap to live in the outback but not free, and she would be damned if she was going to be a burden on Mum. Doubly damned if she would go asking lb for help.
“Yes, if you please,” she answered.
“Here.”
He pulled out something small but heavy, wrapped in cloth, and placed it on the table between them. The work-gnarled fingers unfolded the homespun cotton with slow care and the young aristocrat leaned over, holding her breath. A dull-shining piece of… not metal, she thought. About the size of her palm, with a curved surface and a ragged edge, as Wit had been torn lose from a larger sheet. Not any material she recognized, but there was a cure for that.
“Excuse me,” she said, and rummaged in the pack-saddle braced against one bamboo wall. The sample scanner Montferrat had gotten for her was late-model. a featureless rectangle with a pistol grip and readout screen. She pressed it against the whatever-it-was and pulled the trigger.
No data, it told her.
“What do you mean, no data?” she muttered. Perhaps the contact wasn’t close enough: she turned the piece over and made sure there was no airspace.
No data.
“Swine of a gadget!” she said, and tried it on the surroundings. No problem with the table, a rock on the floor; the bamboo wall, or her own hand. Tyra pressed it firmly against the artifact.
No data.
“Hmmpfh.” The girl tapped at the back, running the diagnostic. Everything fine.
Her hand stopped in mid-motion. The scanner worked by firing a tiny but very intense burst of laser energy into the sample, then analyzing the result. The material involved was minuscule, too little to even feel if you used it on yourself, unless you pressed it to your eye, of course. But the laser was very energetic.
She tapped out temperature. At ambient, which was no surprise. Then she squeezed the trigger for the sample function-no data-and asked for hotspots. Nothing: still at ambient temperature. Whatever this was, it was absorbing the energy and not ablating; not even warming up.
Odd, she thought: very odd. Back home in Gerning, the manor-house had had a functioning computer system with good educational programs. Tyra Nordbo had received a sound university-entrance level scientific education, and offhand she could not think of anything with those characteristics. A moment’s conference with her belt- comp’s reference functions confirmed her ignorance. It could be a kzin product, or something military that was not in the general databases…
“Do you mind if I test this?” she said to the headman.
He grinned. “We tried shooting at it. Then we dropped large rocks on it. Nothing we could do would so much as scratch it. The smith’s forge didn’t even heat it up.”
She nodded. That did not mean much, since the only thing these outbackers had in the way of weapons was old-fashioned chemical energy rifles. There were plenty of modern materials that would be untouchable to anything they could do, and which would reflect away a lot more thermal energy than charcoal could produce.
A crowd of children gathered as she came out into the sun, blinking for a moment in the brightness; all dressed alike in shorts, bare feet and varying degrees of grime. They clustered bright-eyed as she drew the magrifle from its sheath beside her saddle, on the porch of the hut, and held up the piece.
“Would one of you like to help me?” she said. A sea of hands waved at her amid eager clamor. She picked a girl of nine or so, with strawberry-blond braids and a gap in her teeth. “What’s your name?”
The girl blushed and dug at the packed dirt with a toe. “Helge,” she whispered.
“Well, Helge, why don’t you take this all the way down there-down by that big boulder-and put it in at ground level? Jam it in tight, facing me. The rest of you,” she went on, “get back-back behind me. Yes, that means you, too. One of you take the little one.”
A few adults had come to look as well; some of them with envy at her equipment, more in curiosity Gracious lord Gott but it must be boring here, she thought. The cassette of regular ammunition came out with a clack sound, and she slid in the red-flagged one from the bottom of her war-bag. The normal rounds were single-crystal iron, prefragrnented for antipersonnel or hunting use. These were narrow penetrators of osmium, in a ferroplastic sabot that would peel off at the muzzle. Antiarmor darts, and at a hundred meters they would punch through two hundred millimeters of machinable steel plate. Much less of real armor, and it drained the batteries like the teufel, but she had a solar-charging tarpaulin spread out over a sunny patch of ground. She tapped the velocity control to maximum and set the weapon for semi-auto.
Helge ran like the wind, heels flashing, and used one to pound the piece of material into the angle between ground and rock. Tyra gave her a smile of thanks and waved her back into the crowd as she sat, pushed her hat back and brought the rifle up with her elbows on her knees. A final check to be sure that everyone was behind herDada-mann had taught her about firearms as soon as she could walk; even under the occupation Herrenmann families had been allowed hunting weapons-and she took up the slack on the trigger. The sighting holo sprang up before her eye on x5, and she laid the target blip on the center of the gray material. Squeeze gently- Whack. The recoil was punishing, several times worse than normal; there was not all that much mass in the darts, but they were travelling fast. She let the tremor die out of her arms and shoulders and the sight settle back on the target as the muzzle came down with its own weight. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Five rounds, as much as her shoulder could stand and more than should be necessary.
“Don’t touch it!” she called sharply, as some of the children ran ahead of her.
The older ones pulled their younger siblings back, making a circle around her as she knelt. The impacts had driven the fragment back against the stone; into the stone, in fact, cutting a trough. The surface was shiny, plated with a film of osmium, and splashes had colored the earth and rock. She reached out with a stick, and it sizzled as the end came in contact with the shiny film. The osmium layer peeled away at the touch, falling to the battered earth below.
“Scheisse,” she whispered. Nothing. Gottdamned nothing. The dull gray surface of the material was utterly unmarked, to the naked eye at least. She shifted the rifle to her left hand and pulled out the scanner. Another no data, and the temperature was still at ambient… no, about. 002 of a degree higher. That after being struck with penetrator darts that splashed across its surface in a molten film!
Well, Herr Montferrat-Palme wanted the unusual she thought. And this is certainly unusual enough.
Another thought struck her as she lifted the material and turned it. The edges were torn, twisted as if something had struck a sheet of whatever-it-was and belled this piece out beyond the breaking strain of the material. Considering what the tensile strength must be, that would have to be a fairly drastic event.
“Careful about that,” she said to a curious child who was poking at the film of osmium; the edges would be razor sharp even though it was thinner than tinfoil. She crumpled it with the heel of her boot and stamped it into a harmless lump. Turning to the headman:
“Where did you find this stuff?”
