Man-Kzin Wars XIV Read Free Page B

haven’t lost my marbles.”
    Sarah took the binoculars and adjusted them. “I think you’re right. Can we get closer?”
    “If it’s what it might be, we need to take the flyer over it. We can record it for the television studios. Hey, we might get enough to pay for the whole honeymoon! Come on, let’s get back inside. It will be warmer, too.”
    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