by Larry Niven
Spots stared at him oddly as Hans handed him the tools. Jonah tied the rope around his waist and went down on his belly.
“I’m—” he hesitated for a moment and took a deep breath. “I’m going to go in head-first. I’ll tie a loop under Bigs’s forelimbs, if I can, and you pull him out.”
That might work with a kzin; they were so flexibly jointed that they could get through any space big enough to pass their head with a centimeter to spare on either side of the skull. That was a conscious kzin, of course.
“You are going in that hole?” Spots asked, in a low voice. His pelt was bristling in a ripple pattern, as if he tried to order it flat and his nerves rebelled. He looked over his shoulder; the entrance was a spot of light. More dirt trickled down from above. “Bigs might be dead.”
“I said I’m going, didn’t I?” Jonah asked, his voice rough with more than the bad air. A wave of gooseflesh ran over his own skin; he looked at the hole, and remembered the piping cry of the fuzzball. Don’t try to talk me out of it. You might succeed.
“Pain does not hurt,” he muttered to himself. “Death does not cause fear; fear of death causes fear.”
The mantra was little protection as he squirmed into the hole. He could feel it shifting above him, and the jagged edges of broken wood clawed at his back and flanks. He could feel the blood trickling down, feel the salt sweat stinging in the wounds. One meter, then ten, infinitely cautious. Controlling his breathing helped control the overwhelming impulse to squirm backward. The glowrod was little help, in air so thick with floating dust, and his passage stirred up more.
At least it’s fairly straight. After a time that could have been a minute or twenty, his outstretched hand touched something softer. Kzinti fur, that twitched under his hand. Timber creaked.
“Brother?” Bigs whispered, in the Hero’s Tongue.
“Jonah,” the man said, and felt the kzin start again. “Careful, it’s still unstable! Can you understand me?”
“Yes,” the alien rasped. The heavy scent of its fear was detectable even through the dirt; he could smell urine, too.
“Are you badly injured?”
A moment’s silence, full of heavy panting. “No. I think not. There is a timber resting on my thighs, but they are only bruised, not broken. My shoulder is dislocated.” That hurt a kzin less than a human, but it meant the arm was useless until the joint was set back. “I am bleeding a little, but I cannot move.”
Jonah had been feeling around, raising the glowrod. Bigs was in a bubble of space, spindle-shaped with the narrow end at his feet. There was a main vertical support across his legs just down from the crotch; one jagged end of a fastening peg had driven into the flesh for a centimeter or so.
“I’m—” Jonah paused to cough. “I’m going to have to get in there with you,” he said. Tanjit. There Ain’t No Justice. I don’t even like the bleeping pussy—never did. It was mutual, too. “I’ll tie this rope under your forelimbs and then sever the timber with my cutter-bar. Then we’ll slide you out on your back, I’ll follow and get you past the obstacles. Understand?”
“Brother,” the kzin whispered again, and something in his own language too fast and faint for Jonah to follow.
The human shook him, and barely dodged the instinctive snap that followed.
“Finagle shave you bald, do you understand me?”
“Yesss…” followed by a mumble.
Oh, joy. Concussed. Jonah shone the light into the big golden eyes. One pupil was slightly larger than the other, and that was a cross-species indicator. No blood from the nose or ears, though.
“Here I come,” Jonah said, keeping up a flow of words to maintain Bigs’s attention. And to boost my morale too. “I’m going to have to do a forwards somersault.” That took an eternity, but when it was completed he was lying along the kzin’s side. “Here comes the rope. Can you lift your forequarters?”
Another eternity before the dazed kzin understood, and the slipknot loop went under his armpits. He made a short convulsive sound between clenched fangs as the rope touched his dislocated shoulder, and the claws of his other hand stabbed into the dirt close to Jonah’s stomach.
“Be a Hero,” Jonah said sharply, in that language. Bigs twitched his whiskers affirmatively. It was not that the kzin was unable to control his fear, but the blow to the head was leaving him wavering in and out of full consciousness. A quarter-ton of kzin acting from instinct and reflex was not something you wanted to have with you in a confined space.
“Here we go,” the human muttered, and reached down with the cutter bar.
This was the one with no broken teeth, and it sliced smoothly through the tough gumtree wood. Pale curls of shavings came free as he drew and pushed, with a faint shirrr-shirrr sound. His own pelvis was under the timber. If it was bearing weight, it would shift when he cut through and smash his hipbones to splinters. Not that that would be of much interest to either of them when the dirt closed ’round…Halfway through, and the log had not pinched shut on the cutter bar, that was a good sign. Three quarters of the way, and something went crack over his head. Man and kzin froze, peering upwards. Another crack and the sound of rock grinding on wood. Jonah’s arm resumed movement, more quickly this time. He closed his eyes for the last cut. There was a deep tung sound as the wood was cut—and the severed end rode up, not down towards him.
He let out a shaky breath, suddenly conscious of how thirsty he was. No time for that. He dropped the cutter-bar, carefully, and wedged his knee under the end of the timber that now lay across Bigs’s thighs.
“This is going to hurt,” Jonah said, and repeated it until he was sure Bigs was fully conscious. “Here goes.”
“Eeeeraaeeeewwooww!”
The kzin scream was deafening in the strait space, like being in a closet with a berserk speaker system. After the jagged wood was free of his flesh Bigs was silent save for rapid shallow panting.
“All right,” Jonah shouted, mouth to the hole. “Get ready to pull!” The slack on the rope came taut. “Carefully. If the rope gets caught on a timber, it could bring the whole thing down on us.”
The ten meters of passage might as well have been a kilometer. Jonah had to follow behind Bigs’ nearly inert form, pushing on his feet and easing the cable-thick tail over obstacles; when the rope caught, he had to crawl millimeter by millimeter along the hairy body until his hands could reach and free the obstruction. More skin scraped off his back and shoulders as he did so, a lubrication of sweat and human and kzinti blood that made the wiggling, gasping effort a little easier. After the first few minutes he lost track of progress; there was only effort in the dark, an endless labor. Until light that was dazzling to his dark-adapted eyes made him blink, and a draft of air cool and pure by comparison brought on another coughing fit. Hands human and inhuman pulled him and the comatose kzin out of the last body length of the wormhole.
Jonah had only an instant to lie and wheeze. The groaning and creaking from above became a series of gunshot cracks, and streams of loose dirt poured down. A board followed, ripped free as the scantlings twisted under the force of the earth above and weakened with the forward sections brought down in the first fall. He told his body to rise and run, but nothing happened but a boneless flopping sensation; there was nothing left, no reserve against extremity. Death was coming, smothering in the dark, coming at the instant of victory.
Spots had been squatting while Hans maneuvered the larger, heavier body of his sibling across his shoulders. One hand was up, steadying that; the other reached out and gathered Jonah to his orange-furred chest.
“Run,” he grunted.
Hans ran beside him—a staggering trot was a better description—steadying the load on his back and taking some of the dragging weight. Jonah was clutched beneath him, turning his progress into a three-limbed hobble that turned into a scrambling rush as the innermost section of the shoring gave way behind them. Wood screamed as each successive section took the full weight for a moment and yielded; the c
ollapse nipped at their heels, its billow of choking dust enclosing them like the hot breath of a carnivore in pursuit. They shot out of the mouth of the diggings like a melon-seed squeezed between fingers and collapsed half a dozen meters from it; Spots was barely conscious enough to turn sideways and avoid crushing Jonah beneath the half-ton weight of two grown kzintosh.
Jonah was still sitting with his head in his hands when Hans returned with the medical kit and water.
“Better look at Bigs first,” he coughed, drinking a full dipper in one long ecstatic draught and blinking up at the sun. It had hardly moved; less than two hours since the cave in, difficult to believe.
“Hmmm-hmm,” Hans agreed.
He and Spots went to work. “No broken bones,” Spots pronounced. “There is a lump on the skull but the bone is sound beneath it. Reflexes are within parameters. Concussion, but I doubt any major damage.”
“Speak for yourself,” Bigs whispered. “More water.” He drank rather than lapping, to wash down the handful of antibios and hormonal healing stimulants his brother handed him.
Hans had been examining the thigh wound. “Splinters in here,” he said, slipping his hand into the debrilidator glove. “Want a pain-killer?”
“I am a Hero—” Bigs began. Then the miniature hooks in the computer-controlled glove began extracting foreign matter from the wound. “—so of course I do,” he went on, in a thready whisper.
The work was quickly done, and Hans stepped over to Jonah; then he whistled, watching as the younger man doused himself with water. Fresh blood slicked great patches of skin and raw flesh.
“You done a good job on yourself, youngster,” he said, rummaging for the synthskin sprayer. “Hold on.”
Jonah did his best to ignore the itching sting of the tiny hooks cleaning dirt and dead skin out of the scrapes. The synthskin was cooling relief in comparison, sprayed on as each area was cleansed.
“What the tanjit were you doing digging that deep?” he asked Bigs. “You were way beyond the shored-up section. You know the routine; timber and shore every meter you go in.”
Bigs’ eyes were glazed. “Hull,” he mumbled. “I found the hull.”
“You found the what?” Jonah asked, looking up sharply; then he gasped. Hans had done likewise, and braced himself against a flayed area. Spots halted with his muzzle half way into a bucket.
“Hull,” Bigs said more distinctly. “Like nothing I’ve seen before. Spaceship hull. Small.”
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The little trading post had a dusty, abandoned feel. There was the adobe store, two houses and a paddock, all planted where three faint mule-tracks crossed a creek. The houses had roofs of tile with tiles missing, carrying solar-power panels with some of the panels missing; the pump that filled the watering troughs before the veranda of the store was still functioning, and the metered charger available to anyone who wanted to top up their batteries. The satellite dish on the rooftree looked to be out of order for some time, though. A straggly pepper tree shaded the notional street, and a big kitchen garden lay behind a dun-colored earth wall.
Tyra Nordbo tethered her horses where they could drink; Garm stood on his hind paws to lap beside them. Two meters further down two pack-mules looked up at her animals, then returned to their indifferent doze. She blinked at them thoughtfully as she loosened girths and patted her horse’s neck, put a hand to the stock of her rifle where it rested before the right stirrup in its saddle scabbard, then shook her head.
“Hello the house,” she called, from outside the front door; outback courtesy.
The inside was just as shabby as the exterior, if a little cooler from the thick walls, and the fan-and-wet-canvas arrangement over the interior door. A counter split the room in half, with a sleepy-looking outbacker standing behind it; boxes and bales were heaped up against the walls. And another man was at the customer’s side, reading from a list:
“…two four-kilo boxes of the talcum powder. Two kilos of vac-packed vanilla ice cream. One kilo radiated pseudotuna. A thousand meters of number-six Munchenwerk Monofilament, with a cutter and tacker. Ten hundred-nail cassettes for a standard nailgun…”
Both men looked up, then looked again, squinting against the sunlight behind her. A third look, when she stepped fully inside and became more than an outline; the storekeeper straightened and unconsciously slicked back his thinning brown hair. Tyra sighed inwardly. There were times when being twenty and a pattern of Herrenmann good looks was something of an inconvenience. Here in the back of beyond it made you stand out, even in smelly leathers with a centimeter of caked dust on your face and a bowie tucked into the right boot-top. Then her eyes narrowed slightly; after the first involuntary reaction, the customer was looking at her with suspicion, not appreciation.
He’s changed, she realized. Harder and stronger-looking than the holo Montferrat had shown her. Burned dark-brown from outdoor work, dressed in shabby leather pants and boots with a holstered strakkaker at his waist and a sleeveless jerkin. The Belter crest still stood alone on his head, legacy of a long-term depilation job, but it had grown longer and tangled.
“Guetag, hem” she said politely, nodding.
What the tanj is she doing out here? Jonah thought suspiciously. His gaze travelled from head to toe. Young, very pretty, with the indefinable something—perhaps her accent—that indicated Herrenmann birth. Definitely not an outbacker. Not the sort to be bashing the bundu. Although there were plenty of Herrenmann families down on their luck these days, of course. He started to estimate what she would look like without the bush jacket and leather pants…
Get back to business, mind, he admonished himself, with a mental slap on the wrist. Think of ice and sulphur. Besides that, his experience with Wunderlander women had not exactly been overly positive.
“Been out here long?” she asked.
“Not long,” he said shortly.
“Prospecting? Odd to find a Sol-Belter prospecting dirtside.”
Jonah stopped, a finger of cold fear trailing across his neck. His crest marked him, and his accent. For that matter the standard Sol-System caucasoid-asian mix of his own genetic background was uncommon here, where unmixed European stock was in the majority.
“Hunting,” he grunted, jerking his head at the pile of pelts on the counter.
Suddenly they looked completely unconvincing. The beautiful wavy lines of tigripard, the fawn and red of gagrumphers, all might as well have been cheap extrudate. She met his eyes and smiled, face unlined but crinkles forming in the reddish-grey dust on her skin. It was a charming smile.
“Hunting good?” she asked. “Enough to keep all of you in business?”
“Good enough,” Jonah replied, lifting a sack of beans to his shoulder. Then he turned back. “All of us?” he said.
“Not really smart to be out in the bundu alone,” she pointed out. “Let me give you a hand.”
Before he could prevent her she scooped up a double armful of sacks—a very respectable armful, for a Wunderlander born and raised in this gravity—and carried them out the door. Jonah followed, torn between fear and embarrassment. Outside, she was tying them down to a mule’s packsaddle with brisk efficiency.
“What’s wrong with hunting alone?” he asked, when the silence began to be suspicious in itself. She turned and looked at him with open-eyed surprise; blue eyes, he noticed, with a faint darker rim.
“Break a leg and die,” she said. “Or a dozen other things. Not to mention the bandits.”
Jonah moved to the other side of the mule and began strapping the sack of beans to the frame of the saddle, moving it a little to be sure the load was balanced. She had neat hands, slender for a tall woman but strong-looking; her nails were clipped short and clean enough to make him feel self-conscious about the rim of black grime under his. It was difficult to object to the lecture; coming out here alone would be insanely risky. Too risky even for a flatlander.
“Heard the Provisional Police have the bandits under control,” h
e said.
“Oh, they’re getting there. Not much on trials and procedures, but they track well enough. Big job, though. It’ll be a while before these hills are safe for a man alone—or a woman, of course. Tempting fate to go out there with a mule-train of supplies, too.”
Jonah worked on in silence, turning on his heel for another load and ignoring the presence at his heel.
“Tyra Nordbo, clan Freunchen,” she said after a moment. “Besides which, a man alone usually doesn’t require that much tuna and ice cream. You don’t look like you drink that much bourbon by yourself, either.”
“Manse Chung,” he replied shortly. “I’ve got unusual tastes.”
“Not Jonah Matthieson?” she enquired sweetly. “The man with the unusual, large, hairy friends?”
Jonah stepped back half a pace, snarling and reaching for his strakkaker; he paused with the vicious machine-pistol half out of the holster, half from prudence and half from the genuine shock on her face.
“Please, be calm, Mr. Matthieson,” she said soothingly, hands held palm-down before her. “We have a mutual friend in Munchen who asked me to look you up. And,” she added with a gamine grin, “you’re a girlhood hero of mine, anyway—some people did hear a little of what went on out in the Serpent Swarm, you know.”
“I don’t have any friends in Munchen, and I don’t have any here either,” Jonah barked. Montferrat. He’s checking up on us, the scheming bastard. “I’ve got a backer in Munchen, and he’ll get the return on his capital he was promised, if he leaves me alone to do my work. Now if you’ll pardon me, Fra Nordbo or whatever your name is, I’m a busy man.”
“What took you so long?” Hans said.
“Making sure I wasn’t followed,” Jonah said. “Got it out?”
“Out to the mouth of the diggings,” the old man said. “Didn’t think it would be all that smart to leave it out in plain view.”
“Show me.”
Film sheeting had been rigged over the mouth of the shaft and covered with dirt and vegetation. Jonah ducked through into the interior chamber, lit by glowrods stapled to the timbers of the shoring, and whistled silently.