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 sometime. It looked to be eternal.
To be buried that long, though. His mind knew that it had been less than an instant; inside a stasis field, the entropy gradient was disconnected from that of the universe as a whole. Less than a single second would pass inside during the entire duration of the universe, from the explosion of the primal monobloc to the final inward collapse into singularity. His mind knew that, but his gut knew otherwise.
Spots chirred. “For that matter, what of the humans here? They seem no more anxious than we to attract the government’s”—he fell into Wunderlander for that; the Hero’s Tongue had no precise equivalent—“attention. Yet they may be reluctant to allow us to depart with the data—they are monkeys, after all.”
“We can bury their bones. They are outcasts, not dear to the livers of the monkeys in authority. Who will miss their scent?”
The smell of anger warned him; he looked up just in time to jerk his head backward, and Spots’s claws fanned the air over his nose rather than raking through the sensitive flesh.
“Honorless sthondat!” the smaller kzin hissed. “Did you forget the oath we swore with Jonah-human? You are alive because of the Jonah-human! Oath-breaker! Are you without regard for the bones of your ancestors? The Fanged God will regurgitate your soul.”
Bigs bristled, swelling up to a third again his size; his ears folded back.
“They are monkeys,” he growled back; the sound was a steady urrreeuueeerree beneath the modulations of his words. The Menacing Tense in Imperative Mode.
“That monkey crawled into the darkness to rescue you as you lay helpless,” Spots said; he stood higher, unwilling to let Bigs’ height give him dominance. All eight claws on his hands were out. “Blood for blood.”
They began to circle, tails rigid. “What of our duty to the Patriarch?” Bigs spat.
“Our first duty to the Patriarch is to be Heroes,” Spots replied. “Heroes do not break their solemn oath!”
They both sank on their haunches for the final leap. Then Bigs let his fur fall and looked aside.
“There is a true trail among the prints of your words,” he admitted with sullen reluctance. Earth rumbling and the walls closing around—“If the monkey…if Jonah-human refuses to let us leave with the data, I will challenge him to honorable single combat.”
Spots straightened suspiciously; he sniffed with his jaw open and licked his nose for a second try.
“I smell reservations. They smell stronger than a dead kshat,” he warned. “Be sure, I will not permit less. No under-the-grass killing. And if you duel Jonah-human, you must preserve his head for the Ancestral Museum of our line.”
“Agreed. We shall all act as Heroes. Even the Jonah-human.”
Spots’s pelt rippled in a shrug. “We quarrel over the intestines of a prey that grazes yet,” he said. “So far, all we have is an impenetrable mystery.”
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“What did you do?” Spots demanded, springing back and bruising his tail against a timber upright. He rubbed at it absently, eyes locked on the tnuctipun spacecraft with the same intent longing that they might have fixed on a zianya bound in the blood trough of a feasting table.
“I did nothing,” Bigs said.
Jonah grunted, and Hans whistled softly. For the better part of a week, nothing. And now the stasis field had vanished, seemingly of its own accord.
/> The hull had turned…translucent, as well. Much of the interior seemed to be packed solid with equipment of various sorts; none of it familiar, although he thought he recognized something like the wave-guides of a gravity polarizer. If it’s that small, arid can lift this ship, it’s better than anything we or the kzin can make, he thought. Nothing this size could make space on its own—the power-plant alone would be too large—and nothing this size could possibly mount a superluminal drive, from what little was publicly known about them. On the other hand, nothing humans or kzinti knew would stand three billion years of immersion in liquid metal, either.
“Tnuctipun,” he whispered, awed. In the center of the forward bulge was a capsule, and inside that he could dimly see the outline of a body inside a cocoon of tubes and wires.
Small, was his first thought. He knew from his time on the thrintun ship Ruling Mind that tnuctipun were small; they had built that thrintun vessel, and many of the crawlspaces were too cramped for a human to enter. Long limbs in proportion to the body, and twelve digits, longer and more jointed than human fingers. Another indication; there was a rough correlation between manual dexterity and the length of time a species had been sentient. Dolphins and bandersnatch were exceptions, of course. Overall he thought it would come to about his waist standing erect, but the arms were as long as his. A single nostril in the long snout, ahead of an even longer swelling of braincase; a pattern of holes on either side of the head that might correspond to ears, or might not; two large eyes and a smaller one set where the forehead would be if there was one. The eyelids closed side-to-side rather than up and down.
I’m the first human ever to see a tnuctipun, Jonah thought, slightly dazed. He stepped forward, acutely conscious of the smell of his own sweat, of the ginger scent of the kzin. They were staying well back; not that they were more fearful than he, just less driven by curiosity.
“It’s hurt,” he said, peering closely with his hands on the absolute smoothness of the hull; it was an odd sensation, the palms always trying to slip away.
Whatever the tnuctipun was floating in was liquid, and reddish blood was hazing the egg-shaped chamber; it thinned and flowed away as he watched. An autodoc, he realized. Doubling as a pilot’s crash couch. Some small scoutcraft and atmosphere flyers used that arrangement, with a high-oxygen liquid for breathing. A body with open air spaces inside it was much more vulnerable to acceleration than one whose lungs were solidly filled with incompressible liquid. Why bother, if they had gravity polarizers? he wondered. Then: ah. Gravity waves were detectible, and the ones from a polarizer much more so than the natural variety. A clandestine operations craft, no doubt. The tnuctipun had probably been a spy, and the ship designed to slip onto thrintun-held planets during the war of the Revolt. Jonah was willing to bet a great deal that the hull material was superlatively stealthed, as well as near-as-no-matter invulnerable.
“You realize what this means?” he said, looking at the others. “It means we four are potentially the richest beings in known space.”
“Means we could all lose our heads, hearts and testicles when the gov’mint gets its claws on us,” Hans said dourly. The kzin both snapped their jaws shut: We are meat.
“We certainly are if Markham or the ARM get hold of us,” Jonah mused.
And the bleeping ARM wouldn’t even use this stuff, particularly now we’re beating the pussies. At that thought his head came up, raking his eyes across the kzin. Both returned his glance blandly, looking aside in carnivore courtesy. The Patriarchy would use it, he knew. Kzinti had never been able to afford antitech prejudice; they had less natural inventiveness than humans to begin with. Tanj. And we were ready to kill each other over gold, much less this.
A voice spoke in his ear, in the Hero’s Tongue: “What did you do?”
Jonah jumped backwards; then he noticed everyone else around the spacecraft had done likewise; the Kzinamaratsov brothers were whirling in place, trying to find whatever was speaking beside their ears.
“It’s hurt,” the voice said, in Wunderlander with a trace of Sol Belt accent. The wet sound of kzin jaws closing on air followed.
The kzin were bristling. “Haunted weapons,” Spots said, snapping twice.
“Translator program,” Jonah said. “The systems are active, if not the pilot. It’s trying to talk to us.” It was vibrating the air beside their ears somehow, not too startling compared to the rest of the technology.
“That is beyond my parameters,” the computer said. “I must consult my operator before I can make further judgments.”
Jonah opened his mouth to reply, and found himself croaking. A startled glance outside showed darkness.
“We’d better knock it off for a while,” he said. Nerve wracking work.
Especially when the translator program had spent an hour trying to find out which side they were on in the tnuctipun-thrintun war; it seemed to have a bee in its bonnet about that, understandably enough. He strongly suspected that it also had a self-destruct subroutine, and would engage it if it ‘thought’ that they were part of a thrint slave-species. The type of suicide bomb available to a culture whose basic energy source was matter conversion did not bear thinking of. You could tell a good deal about the people who designed an infosystem by talking to one of their programs, and there was a pristine ruthlessness to this one that even the kzin found chilling.
No wonder the Revolt wiped out intelligent life, he thought. They had had to take a datalink out and show the ship’s system the stars before it really seemed to believe them about the length of time that had passed. At that, it was probably fortunate that the pilot was still comatose. The computer had limited autonomy; it was very powerful, right up with the great machines that ran the UN Space Navy from Gibraltar Base in the Sol Belt, but not a true personality, as far as he could tell. Neither human nor kzinti designers had ever been able to make a really sentient system that did not go catatonic within months. Evidently the ancient world of the Slaver Empire had been no more successful. At least the AI was completely logical; Finagle alone knew what a conscious but traumatized tnuctipun would do on realizing it was the only member of its species left in a universe changed beyond recognition.
Jonah shivered again. That did not bear thinking about either. When the Yamamoto dropped him and Ingrid Raines off into the kzin-occupied Alpha Centauri system two years ago they had decelerated by using a stasis field—one of the few the UN had been able to make—and skidding through the photosphere of the star. A little, little mistake and they would have spent the next several billion years in stasis themselves—until Alpha Centauri went nova, perhaps. Then the invulnerable bubble of not-time might have been flung out, eventually to land on a planet. To wait while intelligent life arose or arrived, then be opened. He swallowed, mind exploring the concept the way a tongue might probe at a sore tooth. At that, there would have been two of us, he thought. And I’d still have gone off the deep end.
Jonah was preoccupied enough not to notice the extra figure at the campfire, as he walked downslope to the tents. Spots and Bigs had better senses; he looked up sharply at their angry hisses of territorial violation.
“You all seemed to be busy,” Tyra Nordbo said, crouched by the fire. “So I thought I’d help myself to some of this coffee.”
With her free hand, she pitched something small and heavy out into the firelight. All of them recognized the material. After a moment, they recognized the shape; the hole in the rear section of the tnuctipun ship’s hull matched it exactly.
“No, of course I haven’t reported back to Herrenmann Montferrat,” Tyra said. “How could I? The government—which means the ARM, remember—is monitoring all frequencies and all the cable and satellite links. There is still a state of military emergency on, you know.”
Jonah relaxed slightly; out of the corner of his eye, he could see Spots and Bigs doing likewise, the ruffs of fur around their throats and shoulders sinking back to the level of the rest of their pelts. Their eyes stayed locked on the yo
ung woman, ominously steady, glints of silver and red in the gathering dark against the ruddy orange of their fun Hans was imperturbable as he sucked his pipe to a glowing ember.
“You really don’t have much choice but to go through with your agreement, as far as I can see,” she went on.
“Oh?” Jonah said, softly. “We didn’t bargain to hand over the Secret of the Ages for a pat on the head and a few thousand krona.”
Bigs snorted agreement, followed by a low growl. Spots was silent, but the tip of his tongue showed as he panted slightly.
“It’s too big,” Tyra said. “The ARM would give anything to suppress this—they’ll take the tnuctipun back to Earth, put it in the museum next to the Sea Statue, that thrint they bottled up again, and that’ll be that. You know them. They have a lot of influence here on Wunderland these days. To make any use of the secret, you’d have to have a powerful patron of your own—or,” she added with a gamine chuckle that made her look twelve for a second, “you could take it and sell it to the Outsiders or the Patriarch of Kzin. No offense,” she added in the brothers’ direction.
Bigs snarled, a sound like ripping canvass, Spots snorted, a flupp sound. “None taken,” he said.
“Besides which,” she went on, “I know about it, and it’s my duty to see that the most responsible authority takes charge of it for the benefit of Wunderland—of everyone, eventually. That means Montferrat. Of course, you could kill me and bury my body.” She leaned back against her saddle. “Up to you, mein herren.”
Blast, she had to go and say it, Jonah thought. His palms were damp. I’m a—moderately—law abiding type, he mused. And normally, I’d be against offing anyone that good-looking on general principle. But Finagle there’s a lot at stake here!
Odd, how ambition struck. He had never been conscious of wealth as something he lacked, before. Enough to be comfortable, yes; the loss of that had been shocking when Early had him railroaded out of the UN Space Navy and then blacklisted. A little more of the gold, yes; independence had looked awfully desirable. The tnuctipun’s secrets were more than wealth, they were power. The problem was, they were proportionately risky.