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

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.

The . . . craft, he supposed . . . was a wasp-waisted spindle four meters long and three wide. One end flared with enigmatic pods; a hole had been torn in it there, the only sign of damage. Through the hole showed the unmistakable sheen of a stasis field. A Slaver stasis field, except that no thrint could be held in a ship this size; the thrintun were Man-tall and much more thickly built. Jonah shuddered at the memory of icy tendrils of certainty ramming into his mind . . . but he knew thrint naval architecture as few men living did, and they had been programmed to forget it. Thrintun ships were always large; the thrint were plains-dwelling carnivores by inheritance, and not intelligent enough to suppress their instincts.

"Tnuctipun," he breathed.

The Slavers' engineers, the ones whose revolt had brought down the Slaver Empire three billion years before. The revolt had wiped out both races and every other sentient in the galaxy save for the bandersnatch; humans and kzinti alike had evolved from Slaver-era tailored foodyeasts, along with the entire ecosystems of their respective planets. As a master race, the thrint had not been too impressive, apart from their power of telepathic hypnosis—with the Power, they did not need intelligence. An IQ equivalent to human 80 was normal for thrintun. Little was known of the tnuctipun, but it was clear that they had been very clever indeed.

"Or something else from then," Hans said. "That hull's like nothing in Known Space, that's for sure. Tensile strength and radiation resistance is right off the scale; none of the gear we brought can even test it." He scratched in the perpetual white three day's beard that covered his chin. "Wish we hadn't found it. Gold I understand. This I don't. Don't like it."

"This could make us one bleeping lot richer than all the gold on Wunderland," Jonah said.

* * *

"We do not know if there is anything valuable in the artifact," Spots said. "Not yet."

"There is a stasis field!" Bigs replied. "Neither the Patriarchy nor the monkeys have that as yet. There is the hull material. Think of the naval implications of such ships! We know the ancients had superluminal drives—undoubtedly the secret of that is inside as well. Matter conversion . . ."

He licked his chops and forced his voice to quietness; they were near the disused gold-washing boxes, but the humans could be anywhere and both of them had some command of the Hero's Tongue.

"You said we could not return to the Patriarchy—we, defeated cowards with nothing to offer. Now we can return. Now we can return as Heroes, assured of Full Names—assured of harems stocked from the Patriarch's daughters, and a position second only to his!"

Spots nodded thoughtfully. "There is some truth in that," he said judiciously; his voice was calm, but his eyes gleamed and the wet fangs beneath showed white and strong in the morning light. "If we could get the secrets, and if we can get them offplanet—you do not hope to ride aloft in the alien craft, I hope," he added dryly.

Bigs snorted; neither of the humans could fit in any likely passenger compartment, much less a kzin.

"We must get the pilot, or download the data from the craft's computers," he said decisively.

"Easy to say," Spots said, flapping his ears. Bigs grinned at the reminder that his sibling had always been better with information systems. "The hardware and programs both will be totally incompatible—fewer similarities in design architecture than kzinti-human system interfaces have. At least we and the monkeys have comparable capacities, and integrating those systems was a reborn-as-kzinrett nightmare. I did some of that during the war. What kind of computer would the monkey slaves of the thrintun build?"

"And yet. To be a true Hero, to have a name, it never was easy. Until now it was not possible. Now it is."

Spots paused thoughtfully, scratching himself under the jaw. "And the monkey authorities—if they sniff one trace scent of this, they will bury us so deep that we will stay submerged as long as that spacecraft did."

Bigs's fur rippled, and he gave an involuntary dry retch. Ever since the cave-in he had been unable to force himself closer than the outer entrance of the shaft. The darkness, the stifling closeness . . . he retched again. As nearly as they could estimate the tnuctipun spaceship had spent the last three thousand million years in the planetary magma, bobbing around beneath the Aeserheimer Continent's crustal plate. The hot spot must be connected with it, somehow—the how of it was beyond them; none of them was a specialist in planetary mechanics—and only chance had ever brought it to the surface again. Vanishingly unlikely that it should be then, although erosion would have revealed it in another few centuries. On the other paw, it had to be discovered