whatever-it-was. Even then three of them hacked it into unrecognizable bits with their machetes. Their fear turned to terror as the twin halves of the egg began to glow and collapse on themselves.
“We get out of here,” Gruederman said. “The advokats will take care of the bodies.” There were always a pack of them around a human settlement, waiting for garbage to scavenge, impossible to exterminate. “Come on. Money is waiting.”
“Not more than an hour or so,” Jonah said, with an odd sense of anticlimax. And yes, he thought. Sadness. The mangled remains of the tnuctipun were pathetically fragile in the bright light of Alpha Centauri. To come so far so long, for this. There Ain’t No Justice.
Tyra shied a stone at a lurking advokat that lingered,. torn between greed and cowardice. It yelped and ran back a few paces; tears streaked her face.
“Come look at this!” Hans said sharply. He reached down with a stick and turned the dead kzin’s head to one side. Not much of the soft tissue was left after the advokat pack, but for some reason they had avoided the shattered bone.
Spots began a snarl of anger, then stopped as he saw what was revealed. The others stood beside him, watching the silver tendrils move in their slow weaving. Hands probed with the stick; several of the threads lashed towards it and clung for a moment. A button-sized piece of the same material was embedded in the shattered remains of Bigs’ inner eat
“Stand back,” Spots said, unslinging his beamer.
None of the others quarreled with that; they crowded back with the gaping outbackers as the kzin stood on the edge of the creekbank and fanned a low-set beam across the bodies until nothing was left but calcinated ash. The tendrils of the device in his brother’s brain shriveled in the heat, and the central button exploded with a small fumf of released pressure. Spots kept up the fire until the wet clay was baked to stoneware, then threw the exhausted weapon aside.
“That… thing explains a good deal,” Jonah said; Tyra nodded, reached out an hand and then withdrew it.
“I am owed a debt of vengeance by a race three billion years dead,” Spots said, in a voice that might have been of equal age. “How shall I requite it?”
“There’s a debt of vengeance only about three hours hold,” Hans said sharply. “Those tracks are heading for Neu Friborg.”
“Let’s do it then,” Jonah said grimly. “Let’s go.”
“Hey, it’s a good mule,” Ed Gruederman said. “But we don’t need it any more-we had good luck up in the mountains.”
His men were on their best behavior; grinning like idiots with their hats clasped to their chests, and keeping their mouths silent the way he had told them. Gruederman felt a swelling of pride at their discipline; he’d had to boot plenty of head to get them so well-behaved. A big crowd had gathered around the mule with the unbalanced load as the four of them led it into town. Well, nothing ever happened in little arse-pimple outback towns like this, even if it did have a weekly run down to the lowlands. Fine well-set men like themselves were an event. He caught the eye of a young woman, scowling when she looked away.
“This the assessor’s office?” he said. It should be, the best building in the town and the only one of prewar rockmelt construction.
“Ja.”
A young girl often or so had slid under the mule, examining the girth and then running a hand down the neck. She seemed interested in the bar-code brand; not many of those out in the hills, he guessed. Then she ran up the stairs into the building.
“How long did you say you’d been up in the Jotuns?” a man said, his tone friendly.
The crowd was denser now; Gruederman felt a little nervous, after so long in the bundu, but he kept his smile broad, even when he felt a plucking at his belt. Nothing there for a pickpocket to get, but in a few hours he’d be rich. With luck, he might be able to shed the others before he got to Munchen and cashed the assessor’s draft. Pickings were slim in the Jotuns these days. From what he heard, Munchen was a wide-open town with plenty of opportunities for a man with a little ready capital and not too many foolish scruples.
A woman in a good suit came down the steps with the little girl and touched a reader to the mule’s neck.
“That’s the one,” she said quietly.
Danger prickled at Gruederman’s spine. He shouted and leaped back, reaching for his machete. It was gone, hands gripped him, the honed point of his own weapon pricked behind his eat He rolled his eyes wildly. All his men were taken, only one had unslung his weapon and it was wrestled away before he could do more than fire a round into the air. The crowd pushed in with a guttural animal snarl.
“Kill the bandits!” someone shouted.
The snarl rose, then died as the woman on the steps shouted and held up her hands:
“This is a civilized town, under law,” she said firmly. “Put them in the pen-tie them, and two of you watch each of them. We’ll call the police patrol back, they can’t have gone far.”
“Take your hands off me!” Gruederman screamed, as rawhide thongs lashed his wrists behind his back and a hundred hands pushed him through the welded steel bars of the livestock pen. “You can’t do this to me!” He spat through the bars, snapping his teeth at an unwary hand and hanging on until a stick broke his nose. “Motherfuckers! Kzinshit eaters!”
He screamed and spat through the strong steel until the square emptied.
“What do we do now, boss?” one of the men asked, from his slumped position on the floor of the cage.
“We fuckin’ die,” Gruederman shouted, kicking him in the head. His skull bounced back against the metal; it rang, and the bandit fell senseless.
Neu Friborg seemed deserted in the early evening gloaming, as Jonah and his party rode down the rutted main street. He stood in the saddle-painfully, since riding was not something a singleship pilot really had to study much-and craned his neck about. He could hear music, a slow mournful march, coming from the sidestreet ahead, down by the church.
A little ahead of the riders, Spots lifted his head and sniffed. “They are there,” he said flatly. “Also a large crowd of monkey-of humans. Many armed. They do not smell of fear, most of them; only the ones we hunt.”
“Odd,” Jonah said.
He swung down from the saddle. Finagle, but that beast was trying to saw me in ha if from the crotch up, he thought. It had been downright embarrassing in front of Tyra, who seemed to have been born in the saddle from the way she managed it. She’d said something, about how a spacer must know more real skills than riding, though… quite a woman.
“Cautious but polite,” Jonah said, leading the way. “Remember that.” For Spots’ benefit; the kzin seemed to be in a fey mood, bloodthirsty as usual but relieved. Perhaps that his brother hadn’t broken an oath entirely under his own power, although Jonah suspected the tall kzin had been a willing victim at the start. The temptation was simply too great. There are times when I think Early is right, he mused. But they never last.
The little laneway opened out into a churchyard, and a field beyond that; the crowd stood in an arc about the outer wall of the graveyard. There, outside the circle of consecrated ground, four men were digging graves. A double file of armed men and women faced them, with Provisional Gendarmerie brassards. Seeing the genuine article, Jonah wondered how he could have been taken in by the bandits, even for a moment. He also decided that the mounted police were decidedly more frightening than the freelance killers had ever been. Beside him, Tyra checked for a moment at the sight of the tall crop-haired blond officer who led the firing party.
Jonah scanned the slab-sided Herrenmann face, and reluctantly conceded the family resemblance. If you subtract all the humor and half the brains, he decided. Aloud, in a whisper:
“Your brother?”
“Ib,” she confirmed.
One of the digging men swung his shovel too enthusiastically, and a load of dirt ended up in the mid-die grave. The man there climbed out and leaned over to swat the culprit with his hat, cursing with imaginative obscenity. Hans shaped a soundless whistle,
“Seems the Provisionals got in before us,” he said. “Can’t say as I’m sorry”
“Neither am I,” Jonah said.
“Jam,” Spots grinned.
The bandits stood in front of the graves they had dug. The rifles of the squad came up and lb Nordbo’s hand
