A crescent of light began to glow along the horizon. He’d never seen a sunrise from space before, only sanguine R’hshssira rising huge in the dusty atmosphere of Hssin. The viewport darkened in response to the new sun. It was small compared with immense R’hshssira! And bright! Even through the darkening viewport it was too bright to look at. Didn’t they freeze with a sun that small? Well, they had fur and maybe their sun made up in dazzle what it lacked in size.
The dawn area of W’kkai grew as they watched, rolling like a surf of light beneath them. The mottled blue and green smoothness would be sea. Their massive space structure overtook a vessel that passed above them. He found himself as fascinated as his mother.
Another change. They were shipped to the planet’s surface. While floating trucks bounced them through low hills to a distant destination, Monkeyshine had time to watch the sky and wonder where its supports were hidden. At the homestead site they were set up in military prefabs. It was worse than Hssin. There were bugs that crawled through the prefab doors and flew noisily. The small ones bit. Things changed too fast to resent the discomfort.
Little by little the troop of refugees, kzin and slaves, were taking up a new life. Mellow Yellow seemed to command vast wealth. Monkeyshine was awed to see construction crews build a mansion for the mighty Grraf-Nig surrounded by an airy palazzo for his kzinretti. Groomed, coy females came to the lord, offered by fathers who sought favor. At each of the numerous wedding feasts the boy competed with the ambling Jotoki to serve the live beasts, or run errands on the hunts, proud in his new livery. The elaborate celebration tents gave way to more formal affairs within the partially completed mansion. They had all risen to a level of importance. Once they had been servants of a grumpy kzin warrior who scrounged through the war ruins of Hssin for bolt and copper wire. Now they served his females milk in tooled platinum dishes within the corridors and feast halls of a palace!
Chapter 2
(2436 A.D.)
Major Yankee Clandeboye scowled at the travel orders on his info comp. Now that was being hauled off to Gibraltar on pretty short notice! A brief mnemonic executed by quick fingers called up his almanac of the Asteroids. He punched in Egeria and Gibraltar and zoomed. At the moment Egeria was 80 degrees out of phase with Gibraltar Base-so it would be a long trip in a tiny can. If it was business that couldn’t be conducted over the network it was going to be trouble. Again. And for a man on disciplinary probation, any kind of trouble was bad news.
Flies in the cow dung!
He swore like a flatlander because he was a flatlander, though he had never touched a cow or smelled dung in his life. Once he had pushed his cousin Nora into a simspace manure pile when he was nine and she was three. His parents believed in education for their children and had put Old Macdonald’s Farm in his library because they believed everyone should know something about Earth’s past. His cousin, who was from an Iowa farm city, had been lording it over him in his own simspace; it was his farm, filled with his colors and sounds and smellies and more pets than he’d ever want to own, his pets. It was not her farm. So he had pushed her into the manure pile. The cows scolded him. Usually they only sang with the pigs and the ducks and the horse and the dancing geese.
What kind of scolding was it going to be this time?
These Belters were never going to leave him alone. Nervously, he looked around his small office. It was free of unauthorized chemicals. There wasn’t anything blocking the air vent, nor dangerous floating things-his mermaid charm on a string didn’t count. If you were a flatlander, to survive in space you had to be twice as good as a Belter or they harassed you to distraction. You had to notice everything. If you weren’t being chewed out for playing hazardous games with their hallowed air supply, you were being chewed out for having too much nefarious hair… or something, even for the way you smelled.
But this time it was going to be big. They didn’t drag a man a quarter of the way around the Belt just to rap his knuckles for neglecting the air filters. He patted his faded lucky charm and she bobbed in the ventilation breeze wiggling her tail. “Gonna need you, pretty baby.” His mermaid was his one reminder of Earth and her seas. She was a plastic antique with a blue bra, which dated her to the twentieth century, and she’d gone to war with him against the kzinti and brought him home.
Major Clandeboye had been in space for a full nineteen of his forty-seven years. He’d been farther from Sol in a marauding hyperdrive than any of these arrogant Belters he met-brave men who panicked if they had to travel farther than five meters from their pressure suits. With the infocomp still in his hand, Yankee toggled back to his orders. Signed by General Fry. Another holier-than-thou Belter who’d never been out of Sol System. What could this flasher have on him?
Ever since the inquest into the Virgo fiasco, Yankee had slavishly cultivated all the aspects of a model military administrator-even to the point of making and filling out daily self-evaluation checksheets. He knew they’d never forgive him, not after five years, not even after hell froze over. For Finagle’s sake, he’d been devoted to his behavior. It was hard work keeping his ass so clean.
Well, almost clean. Oh, oh.
But nobody knew about that. He slumped for a minute, which makes you look like a limp rag in space, and then grabbed a bulkhead handle and slithered through the lock, kicking himself down the narrow fallway, adrenaline ready for a major confrontation. Could Smelly have betrayed him? His best friend? It wasn’t impossible. After all, Smelly (whose real name was Smeegie) was a lanky Belter of low morals. He slipped his infocomp into its holster.
While he sought out Smeegie, he had time to cool down. Yankee and Smeegie had not started out as friends. They were assigned to the same combat flight when the Virgo Volunteers were thrown together for a probing dash deep into kzin space. Smeegie had openly resented serving under a flatlander of insecure demeanor. He valued his life. But danger forges bonds and by the time Clandeboye, the only surviving senior officer, brought them back alive none of his men cared that he was a flatlander.
He found his friend in the workshop with their orange kzin warrior, who was even taller than Smeegie and grinning at him while a furry arm was being operated upon. To divert himself from his untactful suspicions, Yankee took the opportunity to grab the kzin by the nose with one hand. With the other he pulled on the fur of the jaw to pry the mouth open. He ran fingers over the teeth. “I think his teeth are too sharp,” said Yankee. “We should file them down.”
“Why?”
“He might hurt someone.”
“He already has.”
“Yah. That’s what has suddenly started to worry me,” grumbled Yankee, watching his comrade closely for signs of betrayal.
“You don’t think your, ahem, colleagues are going to complain, do you? They wouldn’t dare admit to being mauled by a mechanical kzin. They’d be laughed out the airlock. Who’s to know you were the teleop? I know, but I like my private jokes. You’re not even supposed to know how to run a waldo, much less know how to fight from an op-suit. Your reputation as a rough and tough fighter is piss-in-a-bladder-sack and always has been-except, of course, among us surviving Virgins.” Smeegie grinned while he did something to the kzin’s arm with a whizzing tool. He was remembering the gruesome outcome of the original fistfight at the officers’ mess, tormentors against flatlander. A very beat-up Yankee had had time and reason to work out a careful revenge.
“I overdid it.”
“Just because you gave them a week’s vacation in the autodoc?” Smeegie suggested, slyly. “That was bugs in the equipment.” He smirked. “An unadjusted damping coefficient.” Smeegie lied well. “You know how waldos are; they aren’t good at picking up an egg without breaking it. I’m fixing that, aren’t I? Right now. Maybe you did them a favor. When they meet a real kzin, he’s not going to have his damping coefficients adjusted down to ‘play.’ You make a great kzin, sir. That pair will be reminded about the consequences of flailing with their fists on that day when they meet a flesh-and-blood ratcat.”