“That from a man who starts fistfights he can’t win?”
“I didn’t start that fight, sir. I raised my voice.”
Fry was grinning. He knew how to hit a man hard without raising a finger. “And, of course, they hit you first?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re very good at training, I hear.”
“I think so, sir.”
“I have a better job for you.”
“There isn’t a better job, sir.”
“What’s this? You’re going to refuse to take orders from me?”
Yankee knew very well that the general was referring to mutiny. It was a delicate point and he hesitated, beginning an answer he didn’t have the words to finish—so he started over. He was damned if he was going to kiss a Belter’s butt. “Yes, sir. I do what is in the best interest of the navy.”
Fry garumphed in his throat. “In that case, I’ll have to clock you in the crotch to persuade you. Everything is fair in a fisticuffs fight, right? Are you ready? Stick up your dukes. How would you like to rescue your cousin?”
Clandeboye had to repeat that last sentence to himself. He was dumbfounded. “Nora?” Even after he said her name, he was disbelieving, checking his memory frantically for other cousins he might have forgotten.
“We have information that Lieutenant Argamentine may have been captured.”
“Is she alive?”
“We don’t know. She was captured with her hyperdrive scout. We’d really like to find out what happened to it.”
“Where is it?”
“We don’t know. Your assignment might involve a tour of duty inside the Patriarchy.”
“I don’t think anyone in the navy would trust me inside the Patriarchy.”
Lucas Fry smiled enigmatically while he rubbed his hand through the strip of white brush topping his side-shaved skull. “The men you brought back alive trust you.”
This conversation was unnerving Clandeboye. “But do you trust me, sir?”
“Of course not! What I’m interested in is the look on your enemies’ faces when you come back with evidence that the kzinti are building an armada of hyperdrive dreadnoughts.”
Clandeboye sucked in his breath. “We don’t know what happened to Nora’s ship, sir?”
“But we have to find out, don’t we?”
“Yes, sir.” Yankee was too stunned to say more.
“So it’s yes then, is it? You start today.” Immensely pleased with himself, General Fry brought out the miniature of Nora Argamentine. “And, if we can, we’ll try to find her, too. If our heroine is alive we can’t leave her out in the boondocks with only ratcats for company. Ungentlemanly. Soldiers take care of each other.”
Chapter 5
Yankee Clandeboye had nostalgic waves of emotion on his return to interstellar duty even though he was stationed at a different star and the war had been over for three years. He was ever the provincial flatlander gawking at the new sights. Then it had been the brilliant white dwarf companion beside Procyon in the sky of We Made It, now it was Beta Centauri floating beside Alpha from the viewports of Tiamat. Only a flatlander connected by megayear ties to Earth would be awed to be a tourist in a binary system.
The Wundervolk, having suffered during the war as slaves of the kzinti, treated him differently than had the crashlanders—they carried their slave history as a kind of martyrdom that allowed them to feel they had won the war all by themselves. They almost resented the presence of UNSN personnel. He could sense it in the way they handled his requests for information. The aloofness of Interworld Space Commissioner Markham was typical.
Yankee’s UNSN Intelligence team were all Belters and they had set up shop in Alpha Centauri’s Serpent Swarm, on the asteroid Tiamat where his men were comfortable because it had originally been tunneled and tamed by Belter colonists. Yankee promised himself a side trip to more earthlike Wunderland but there was work to do first, sorting through the wreckage of kzinti warships, checking the reasoning of other teams but with eyes primed for a different theme.
On his tenth day in Tiamat, in a mood of angry frustration, he ran into an old crashlander friend from the era of his Virgo mission. The man was unmistakable, a seven-foot-tall albino, slender with almost skeletal limbs stooping in an archway that was too small for him.
“Brobding!” He wasn’t sure it was his friend Brobding Shaeffer—all crashlanders looked alike to him, and when the pale eyes stared at him without comprehension, he was sure he had made a mistake until a sudden smile cupped the large nose.
“Yankee! Didn’t recognize you—all flatlanders look alike to me! I thought you were rotting in irons!”
“They didn’t know how to pin my sins on me!”
“Finagle is sending you on another wild chase?” The Virgo mission had jumped off from the naval yards of Procyon’s We Made It. Yankee remembered the underground warrens of Crashlanding City and had become fond of his albino mechanics and the tall willowy women who liked to touch a real flatlander. In those days of war, not so very long ago, the nervous crashlanders took very good care of the soldiers who defended them. “Where to this time?”
“You could call it a wild chase; I hope not as far as the nether regions of Virgo.”
“Then you like it here among our Wunderland hosts?”
“Not really,” mused Yankee ruefully. “They’re all so sure they won the war single-handed—don’t seem to appreciate the part Sol and We Made It played in their liberation.”
“But they make good Verguuz.”
“Haven’t tried it. Hear that it’s like a hand grenade that sneaks upon you with a sugar coating.”
“I know a place. It has authentic antique Landholder artifacts on the walls glorifying the good old days before the invasion when Landholders were Landholders and the volk, respectful.”
That was how they came to find themselves in one of Tiamat’s after-hours trunkshuppen, sipping Verguuz and reminiscing about old times. The crashlanders had fought the war from a different perspective than the Wundervolk. Unknown to man or kzin the outpost world of We Made It had been settled inside the nominal kzinti frontier. When the small We Made It colony woke up 300 years later to the fact that they were behind the lines of an interstellar war, they appreciated allied comrades in arms like Major Yankee Clandeboye. The camaraderie was still there.
Eventually the talk, now slightly voluble, turned to the kzinti.
The Patriarchy had once probed Procyon, Yankee informed Brobding conspiratorially (drawing upon his new Intelligence sources). The probes returned with a negative report about a nasty F5 star sixteen times as brilliant as Kzin, almost a subgiant, its only usable planet having an axis in the orbital plane which made for unacceptable seasonal violence. The planet was uninhabitable.
“They fielded smarter probes than ours,” the crashlander commented wryly. “When was this?”
“Long ago. At about the time we humans were questioning the validity of our early interplanetary efforts. I’ve read some of the old texts.” He sipped his Verguuz from a goblet blown from green glass. “The wisemen of the time were sure that an interstellar civilization would be benevolent.” He began to grin. “Sometimes the wisemen were monkey-arrogant in the belief that humanity was alone in the universe and invulnerable behind the light-speed barrier. You should read their proofs that we are alone in the universe. All of these proofs seem to be based on the statistical analysis of a sample of one.”
They both had a laugh at the expense of their naive ancestors.
Yankee continued. “Fortunately for you guys, the frontier kzin lost interest in Procyon—or your original slowboat would have walked into a kzinti outpost hungry for skinny slaves to brush their fur.”
“Lucky for you, you mean,” retorted Brobding, trying to fit his legs under the little table. “What if the Outsiders had arrived to sell their hyperdrive tech to the kzinti!”