Man-Kzin Wars V by Larry Niven (people reading books txt) 📕

sculpting against the massive bones. Spots lifted his upper lip and let his tail twitch in derision.

"If we had the skill, we would not have the opportunity. Business—who would do business of that sort with a kzin?"

"Well, I—" Jonah snapped his fingers. "Wait a minute! Remember that dosshouse we stayed at, the night I told you about the job?"

"I would rather forget," Spots said.

"Vermin," Bigs rasped. "Human-specific vermin at that. If the Fanged God is humorous, they will die from ingesting kzin blood."

"No, the old man I talked to—he'd been on prospecting expeditions into the Jotuns."

Spots had bent his head to lap at the water in the fountain; now he raised it, hands still braced on the rim, long pink washcloth-sized tongue lapping at his jowls and whiskers.

"You are altruistic, for a monk—for a human," he said suspiciously.

"Tanj," Jonah replied. "There Ain't No Justice. You two are out of luck because your side lost the war; I'm in bad odor with . . . hmmm, an influential patriarch, let's say. And we've just pounded on some people who, if not respectable, are certainly established citizens of Munchen. Reason and health both say we should get out of town. If nothing else, living's cheaper in the countryside. The Jotuns are pretty wild; we could hunt most of our food."

That brought the kzinti heads up, both of them. The aliens stared at him with their huge round lion-colored eyes for a moment, then looked at each other.

* * *

"I've got three thousand, you've got thirty-five hundred, our two friends here have a thousand apiece. No, that's not enough. Mm-hm. Need about twice that."

The old man's name was Hans Shwartz, and he had been perfectly willing to discuss an expedition. His honesty was reassuring, if depressing.

"Why so much?" Jonah asked. "I've done rockjack work, back in the Sol-Belt, but this is planetside—the air's free."

"Ja, but nothing else is," Hans said. "Look. You've got animals—no sense in trying to take ground vehicles, it's too rough in there—and you've got personal supplies, you've got weapons—"

"Weapons?"

"Bandits. Worse now than during the war. Weapons, then there's detector equipment. Southern Jotuns have funny geography, difficult—that's why it's worthwhile going in there. Scattered pockets of high-yield stuff; doesn't pay for large-scale mining, even these days."

Jonah nodded, and the two kzin flared their nostrils in agreement. The Serpent Swarm had been stripped of experienced rockjacks; they made the best stingship fighter-pilots, and the Alpha Centauran space-navy had inherited plenty of shipbuilding capacity from the occupation. Thousands of small strike craft built in Tiamat and the other space fabrication plants were riding in UN carriers deeper and deeper into kzinti space. Even so, the natural superiority of asteroid mining was only somewhat diminished. There would have been little or no mining and industry on the surface of Wunderland but for the kzinti. Kzin bad been in its late Iron Age when the Jotok arrived and brought with them the full panoply of fusion power and gravity polarizers. The polarizer made surface-to-orbit travel fantastically cheap, and with fusion power pollution had never been a problem either.

"Ja, lot of stuff we'd need to make it worthwhile going. I'm willing to invest my savings, but not lose them—why do you think I'm sleeping in flophouses with three thousand krona in the bank? The return would be worth it, but only if we're properly equipped."

Jonah rubbed at his jaw; the stubble was bristly, and he reminded himself to pick up some depilatory, now that he could afford it.

"What prey is in prospect?" Bigs said.

Shwartz understood the idiom; he seemed to have had some experience with kzin. Enough to know basic etiquette like not staring, at least.

"Depends, t'kzintar." Warrior, in the Hero's Tongue; a derivative of kzintosh, male. "Possibly, nothing at all! That's the risk. Have to go way outback; anything near a road or shipline's been surveyed to hell and back. Take in filter membranes, then build a hydraulic system if we discover anything. Pack it out. Only the heavy metals and rare earths worth enough. With luck, oh, maybe ten, twenty thousand krona each—profit, that is, after expenses. Depends on when you want to stop, of course."

"Twenty thousand sounds fine to me," Jonah said. About the price of a rockjack's singleship, in normal times. More than enough for independence, if he managed carefully; passage back to Sol System, if he wanted it. "Excuse us for a minute?"

"Ja," the old man said mildly, stuffing his pipe and turning away to sit quietly on his cot, blowing smoke rings at the grimy ceiling of the dosshouse.

Jonah and the kzin brothers huddled in a corner; the half-ton of sentient flesh made a barrier as good as any privacy screen.

"Sounds like the best prospect going," he murmured.

"Yes," Spots said. He took a comp from his belt and tapped at the screen; a kzin military model, rather chunky, marked in the dots-and-commas of the aliens' script. "That would repurchase enough land to sustain our households. With an independent base, we could contract work to meet our cash-flow problems."

"I am tempted," Bigs cut in; they both looked at him in surprise. "My liver steams with the juices of anticipation. With enough wealth, we need no longer associate so much with humans." His ears folded away and he ducked his muzzle. "No offense, Jonah-Matthieson. You hardly seem like a monkey."

"None taken," Jonah said dryly. Actually, he's quite reasonable . . . for a pussy, he thought, using the old UN Space Navy slang for the felinoids. That was flattery. Accepting defeat violated kzin instincts as fundamental to them as sex was to a human. Walking among aliens who did not recognize kzinti dominance without lashing out at them took enormous strength of will.

"Hrrrr." Spots closed his eyes to a slit; the pink tip of his tongue protruded slightly. "How are we to raise the additional capital?" He brightened, unfurling ears. "A raid! We will—"

Jonah groaned; Bigs was grinning with enthusiasm . . . aggressive enthusiasm. How had these two survived since