They trudged through flurries of snow back to the flyer. Half an hour later, Sarah had gone back to T-shirt and shorts and was poised with the videocamera ready as Greg took them out to sea.
“Low tide, or we wouldn’t have seen anything, but look, there’s a lot of it underwater. It’s a spaceship, or more than half of one. And it doesn’t look like one of ours.”
Wunderland ships had evolved their own design architecture around enclosed globes and spaces. The kzin favored wedge-and-ovoid shapes. Sol ships, however, came in many varieties.
“Must be one of the blockade runners from Sol System, one that nearly made it. Must have been here for at least since the end of the war.”
“Why haven’t the satellites picked it up, then?”
“Not many pass ’round here. The stationary ones look north, and the others look up for kzin warships, not down. Besides, a lot of the kzin satellites as well as nearly all the pre-war ones were destroyed.”
Southland had never had too much interest to anybody. No minerals worth extracting, a lousy climate for crops or humans. There had been some kzin bases, of course, but they got a pasting at Liberation. Greg and Sarah had chosen it as an unusual honeymoon spot because it was practically pristine. Also, it lacked the dangerous life-forms of little Southland-or so they hoped. So far, they had seen nothing that a modern vehicle couldn’t easily keep out.
Wunderland’s biology was by no means fully classified yet. Now that the war was over, on the surface of the planet at least, and scientific research was resuming, professional and amateur scientists and collectors could still hope for major discoveries. Meanwhile, military craft and dedicated satellites guarded the skies, ceaselessly alert for anything that might be the radiation signature of a kzin ship that was unaware of, or disregarded, the still fragile cease-fire on the planet.
“Now, try not to interrupt, I’m starting to record.” Sarah pointed the camera down as Greg obligingly tilted the flyer.
“This is Sarah and Greg Rankin reporting from just half a kilometer into the not particularly great Southern Ocean, off Southland, and less than a hundred meters up from the water,” Sarah narrated.
“We’re looking down at what appears to be a spaceship, sunken and hard to detect. It has quite a lot of marine growth on it. We saw the fin by chance, and came for a closer look. You can see that it has a UNSN insignia, so it must have been here for a couple of years. We think it’s the wreck of a blockade runner.” She looked straight at the camera and blinked.
“It’s a very sad discovery to make on our honeymoon. Brave men and women died in that ship, and to no good purpose. They got so close, but crashed when they’d nearly made it. It would be worth finding out what it was that stopped them from bringing arms and other supplies to us, and perhaps to commemorate their efforts. Bravery should be recognized.” No point in speculating too much. Every spacer knew the phrase “The many deaths of space.” She went on: “Maybe the kzin shot them down. But we don’t know what brought them to Southland.”
She turned off the recorder. “I’ll send a copy to my parents to show them that coming here wasn’t as stupid as they reckoned, and another to the government. And I’ll ask the television news channels if they are willing to pay for the video before I send anything. Once they’ve got it, goodbye to our getting another cent for it. But if we can build up a bidding war, we might just pay for the rent on the flier at least.”
“Go for it, girl. Who is that current affairs guy? Stan Adler? Try him, and tell your parents not to part with their copy. And instead of the government, try the Guthlacs. If it goes straight into the bureaucracy, nobody will ever hear anything more about it.”
“You mean you don’t trust the government?” She pronounced it “gummint” as a term of mockery. “But all those warm, loving politicians and bureaucrats exist only to look after us and protect us.” Sarah grinned at him. Greg would either explode or start a rant. Either would be entertaining, and she had an instant cure for both. All she had to do was lean forward seductively and say: “Ooh, Greg, you are so clever,” and he’d start laughing.
“There is one thing, though,” she said before he could get started. “It was generally kzin tactical doctrine, after they got the measure of us in the early days, to travel in the largest possible fleets. This ship doesn’t look as if it was hit by a fleet.”
“Well, that’s very interesting, but what has it got to do with me?” Vaemar asked the two humans. Their breathing indicated they were nervous, but confronting a predator with more than twice their combined bodyweight would tend to have that effect. Vaemar was used to it, and went out of his way to underplay the fangs. Yawning was definitely out, and watching a videotape of a downed spacecraft isn’t particularly stimulating, so concentration was needed.
“Well, we were all set to sell the video to a news channel. We’d agreed to a huge price, and everything looked grand. But then Sarah thought of something.”
Sarah explained: “You see, I figured it was probably shot down by a kzin warcraft. I mean it’s the easy explanation, isn’t it? And that might stir up old resentments. If you think it would cause interspecies trouble, we wouldn’t go through with it. I mean, we could do with the money, but money isn’t everything, and it was just luck that we saw the fin. So it’s not as if we did anything to earn any. We don’t really deserve it.” She would have smiled, but knew better. The circumstances in which humans showed their teeth to kzin were very restricted.
Vaemar looked at her thoughtfully. A sense of honor in a female human. He’d known it before, of course; he had several manrett friends, but it was not altogether common, and rather refreshing. “But why me?”
“We talked to Abbot Boniface first, and he said you were the one to see. He said you are effectively leader of the kzin, and it was time you got into politics,” Sarah told him innocently.
Vaemar sighed, a kzin noise like treacle going down a drain. He was already getting into politics, and he hated every single politic he’d gotten into. But he liked these people. The male was ginger-haired and had orange spots all over his face. Freckles, he thought they were called. The female was a nice chocolate color, which looked much healthier, and she had crinkly black hair, which looked like spun wire. When he moved, the sun flashed on the metal of his ear-ring. After the adventure in the caves with Rarrgh, he had the beginnings of a respectable collection of human and kzinti ears hanging from his belt. The kzin-yes, call it “surrender”-on Wunderland, while the war went on in space, had been inevitable, and he was overwhelmingly glad of it for many reasons, but it did make life complex sometimes.
“It might, of course, have been downed by a kzin warcraft,” his deep voice half-purred. “But a spacecraft is unlikely. Most of the ships from Earth that tried to run the blockade were detected and intercepted when still in deep space. Getting this close would have been difficult. An approach well out of the ecliptic might have been tried, but there were detecting satellites out there, too. If it had got as far as low orbit of Ka’ashi-I beg your pardon, of Wunderland-there would be little defense except aircraft and a few satellites. If it had run into the fleet or one of its prides, there would have been nothing left of it.
“I shall have records searched to see if there is any mention of the kzin shooting down a craft that got very close. They may not exist-much was destroyed at…” He couldn’t quite bring himself to say either “Liberation” or “surrender” easily, and the humans noticed it-“at the signing of the truce with Man, but it would be interesting to see if there is anything left. Hroth, who was staff-officer, is writing an account.”
Not a pleasant job for a kzin to undertake, thought Sarah. Still, it may be an interesting document. And humans will enjoy buying it to read heroic things about themselves.