Strata

hissing softly.
    ‘Tell it if it attacks, I will shoot,’ said Jalo. ‘Tell it!’
    ‘You know he can understand you,’ said Kin coldly. She heard Silver say in shandi: ‘In a minute there’s going to be an almighty fight, Kin. No one threatens a kung and lives.’
    ‘Marco is legally human,’ said Kin in allspeak.
    ‘Yes, that fooled me,’ said Jalo. ‘I should have known better. I told that agency computer on Real Earth to pick three people that fitted my specifications, and it gave me three names. The damn thing never bothered to say two of them were BEMs.’
    Only Silver, student of history, understood the term. She growled.
    ‘It surely mentioned planets of origin,’ said Kin.
    ‘The big frog was born on Earth, though, and the bear born in a ship orbiting Shand,’ said Jalo. ‘Doesn’t anyone ever mention
species
these days? Legally human! Ye gods!
Do not move.
’
    ‘I was wondering where you were,’ said Kin. ‘I should have been looking for a patch of fuzzy air –
looter
.’
    He grinned lopsidedly. ‘The word is, uh, nasty but true. Just like the Company looted strata machines and the Line monomolecular technique.’
    ‘Not true. The Company administers them for the general good.’
    ‘Fine, so on this trip the profits will be for mygeneral good. I figure I’m owed something. I knew LeVine and the rest. I trained with them. I’m taking my reward now. I’ve got the jackpot.’
    Something small and black hopped around the curve of the corridor behind him. Kin recalled that Marco, determinedly human, had been trying to make a pet of the raven. It was feeding time.
    ‘I shall need assistance,’ Jalo said.
    ‘You’ve got the self-filling purse,’ said Kin. ‘That sounds like a jackpot to me.’
    ‘Nah. With what’s here we can start our own Company where we’re going.’ He reached into a sidepocket and pulled out a navigation reel. ‘It’s all here.’
    ‘I would prefer to talk further without the piftol threatening uf,’ said Silver painfully. ‘It if not kind.’
    The raven flew up onto Jalo’s shoulder and screamed in his ear—
    —a stream of Clipe needles zonked into the ceiling—
    —Marco moved so fast that his passage across the space separating him from Jalo could only be deduced from the fact that he was suddenly astride the fallen figure, the Clipe held in one hand and the other three raised to smash a skull—
    —he blinked, and looked around as if waking from a dream.
    He stared at Jalo, and then leaned forward.
    ‘He’s dead,’ he said helplessly. ‘I didn’t even strike him.’
    Kin knelt down by the man.
    ‘He was dead before you got there.’
    She had seen the face go snow-white after the bird’s scream. Jalo had already been dropping when Marco reached him.
    He was sufficiently recently dead for it to be worth slotting his body into the ship’s medical sargo, which immediately flashed a row of red lights. Kin checked the readings on the panel below. Cell rupture, organ rupture, brain damage – when they got back to a human world it would be six months in a resurrection vat for Jalo.
    ‘A coronary?’ suggested Silver.
    ‘Massive,’ said Kin. ‘He’s lucky.’
    There was silence, and when Kin turned the shand was looking at her in astonishment.
    ‘Coronary is easy,’ she explained. ‘We can repair that. Simple job. If Marco had got to work on him there wouldn’t have been anything left to put in a vat. He threatened Marco.’
    Silver nodded. ‘Kung are paranoid. But he also acts like a human.’
    ‘You watch him enter a room. That walk of his is a fighting stance. Kung don’t know the meaning of the word fear.’
    ‘Fine,’ said Silver pleasantly. ‘Half kung, halfhuman. Well, I know the meaning of the word fear, and right now I’m scared.’
    ‘Yeah, I can see—’
    (a few seconds of vertigo, an eternity of despair)
    The first thing Kin registered when her sight came back was the cabin window and the view outside. The ship appeared to be surrounded by a fog full of icebergs.
    She was dimly aware of an alarm, which cut off abruptly.
    She was aware of hazy stars, and of drifting across the cabin because there was no gravity. Silver was floating near what had been the ceiling, out cold.
    Let’s see. The ship had been floating on a lake. Now it was floating in space. Outside was frozen air and quite a bit of the lake, so down on Kung storms must be raging since a few cubic hectares of air and water had suddenly been dragged