Man-Kzin Wars XII Read online

  "What does T.C. stand for?" Perpetua said.

  "The name of a classical author. I come from a long line of subversives, and I joined the ARM to stop being inundated with the material. So what do they do but put me in Propaganda. Where can I put this?" He indicated his parcel.

  "What is it?" said Ginger.

  "My official weaponry. If you want to search it, don't press any switches. Can I use your shower? I've spent the past day suited up and reading the manuals on all this junk."

  "Why'd you do that in a pressure suit?" Perpetua said.

  "The display's in the helmet." He grimaced.

  "Through there," she said.

  As he departed, she murmured, "Wonder what the complaints were for?"

  "Throoping!" he called back up the passageway.

  "Good ears," said Ginger. After the refresher had opened and closed, he added, "What's 'throoping'?"

  "No idea."

  The ship's database defined it as Intra-bureaucratic use of sarcasm and absurdity to point out, refute, and if possible punish extreme foolishness. Context invariably implies the sole voice of reason speaking with total lack of concern for consequences. Origin artificial, circa 1950. "Interesting concept," Ginger said, opening the parcel. "But does it work?"

  "They must have had some reason for sending him here," she said. Then she fell silent.

  There was a slug gun, a folding multibladed hullmetal knife, a hullwelding laser with a huge battery, a variable stunner, small grenades of assorted types both lethal and nonlethal, interrogation drugs, flare goggles, and impact armor; then there were the concealed weapons, like the dartgun rings, and the watch with its loop of Sinclair filament. "Interesting," Ginger said.

  "A man arrives equipped for piracy and you call it 'interesting'?"

  "No, what's interesting is that it's all newly opened. Still smells of packing foam. Never been used."

  "And he must have brought it all with him eleven years ago," Perpetua realized.

  "Oh?"

  "The Belters wouldn't have allowed the ARM to establish an arsenal. They're as touchy about independence as Wunderlanders, and they've actually got it."

  "Urr. Good for them."

  They sorted things out into weapons, probable weapons, probable nonweapons, and who-knows-what. The last category included an elaborately sealed box of what was labeled as ordinary candy, three packages Perpetua thought looked like inflatable boats, a first-aid kit that included a small electric drill, and a sculpting rig that included an amazingly elaborate set of vibratory controls for one standard cutting bit, plus a headband with a heavy cable attaching it to the controls.

  They were still puzzling over that one when Smith came out and said, "That's a touch-sculpting rig. You got some odd controls on your dispenser. What's with the sorting arrangement?" He was wearing clothes he certainly hadn't had under his suit.

  "Weapons, possible, likely not, unknown," said Ginger, pointing.

  "Oh, put everything in weapons," he said. "The Outfit makes a big deal over being able to kill anybody with anything. Except the candy; I got that from a woman when I said I was leaving . . . maybe you should just put that out the lock."

  Perpetua and Ginger exchanged a glance, and Perpetua said, "Um, are you a paranoid?"

  "No. But she is."

  "Wish we had a stasis box," Ginger muttered in Wunderlander.

  "Three right there," Smith replied, with a horrible accent. He pointed at the "boats" and said, in Flatlander again, "So what did you want to talk to an ARM for?"

  "Ah," said Perpetua. "We're engaged in rescuing humans in kzinti custody. A couple of thousand years ago, the Jotoki recruited some Romans as mercenaries, north of Hadrian's Wall—"

  "The Ninth Legion was abducted by aliens?" Smith exclaimed, then burst out laughing.

  It took him some time to calm down. While he was wiping his eyes, Perpetua said, "You just happen to know all about the Ninth Legion?"

  "Well, I guess I do now," he said, chuckling.

  "Why is that funny?" Ginger said.

  "Kind of a personal joke. Fission Era mythology was full of stories of people being abducted by aliens, and I got exposed to a lot of it as a kid. I gather you've found their descendants?"

  "Yes . . . this seems like a funny coincidence. It's kind of obscure," Perpetua said warily.

  "No coincidence at all. I told you, I'm in Propaganda. Most of it's historical work. You have to know what you're lying about."

  "Oh."

  "So where do I come in?"

  "Well, there's thousands of them, and the planet they're on has two old kzinti troop carriers in orbit, so we've put together a plan to steal those, load up the humans and Jotoki, and escape. The thing is, they're slow ships. We needed an excuse to get to them, though, so we've gotten the owner to hire us to install hyperdrives in them. So we need phase initiators—everything else can be made there."

  "It takes about a thousand man-hours to shake down a new phase initiator," Smith said, "and that's in a drive whose other parts are known to work together. You need two complete hyperdrives. No way I can make those just disappear; what have you got to trade?"

  "Gold. You'll do it?" Perpetua said, astonished.

  "Oh, absolutely, I love the idea. Gold, huh? Not many people . . . hm. I may know somebody on Mars."

  "Mars?"

  "Mars. Fourth planet. It's on the other side of the sun just now, so it'll be, oh, three days to get there with this rig."

  "More like two," Ginger said, getting up.

  "Not unless you plan to skim the sun."

  "Three," Ginger agreed.

  "How did you decide to believe us so quickly?" Perpetua said at their first meal.

  "VSA implant," Smith replied. "Voice stress analysis. Lie detector. I don't have the kind of brain chemistry that can be tweaked into continuous heavy-duty intuition, which is what most ARMs rely on."

  "I thought they were paranoid," she said.

  "That's the term for public consumption," he agreed. "Keeps 'em nervous. The ARM doesn't have the omnipotence it had before the wars, so we take any advantage we can get. Untrained, unchanneled paranoids did a lot of damage in the past. People remember that." He grinned. "We remind them regularly."

  "Oh," she said uneasily. "What's Mars like?"

  "Cold," he said. "Dry. Less of both with each generation, though. The residents are gradually terraforming it. Before the wars it was a real hole. We used it as a dumping ground for troublemakers—writers, roleplayers, history buffs."

  "Who lives there now?"

  "Same people. Just not brainwashed. They like it. Don't ask me why. Part of the whole fantasist culture." He took a bite, chewed, swallowed, and added, "Not brainwashed by us, anyway."

  He grew gloomy and avoided conversation for a day or so.

  * * *

  In the middle of the third day he suddenly told Ginger, "There's people on Earth who think the ARM made the wars up."

  This was apropos of nothing whatsoever, and ridiculous to boot; Ginger said, "What?"

  "There are people who earnestly believe the whole interstellar war story is just a huge juice job. That is, all the death on Wunderland was something we caused ourselves, and we're blaming you to discredit you so you can't expose us."

  Ginger thought about that, then said, "That's crazy."

  "True. With eighteen billion people on Earth you get all kinds. At the other end of the spectrum of insanity you get the tweeties—that is, people who think the kzinti are responsible for everything that goes wrong, and this literally includes poor weather."

  "What do you do with people like that?" Perpetua wondered, and Ginger realized it was a good question—they wouldn't simply get killed in the course of their daily affairs.

  "Unless they're really deranged, ignore them. They're not that numerous."

  "And the extreme cases?" she said.

  "We recruit them into Technology Restriction."

  Her initial laughter died down as she realized he
wasn't smiling.

  "There's a placement test after you qualify for the ARMs," he said. "They give you a little sliver of soap and a sheet of paper, and you're supposed to write down five fundamentally different ways to kill someone with the soap. There are only four. You can poison him, lubricate something to cause an accident, use it as fuel for combustion or explosive, or stuff it down his throat to strangle him."

  "Bludgeon," said Ginger.

  "It's too small. If you think of a fifth method, you're qualified for Technology Restriction. Usually." He half-smiled. "I wrote down a fifth: 'Force him to concentrate on the thing until his head explodes.' They put me in Propaganda."

  Amused, Ginger said, "So what's the fifth?"

  "Oh, they never tell anyone outside TR Division that." He put on an expression of grim, heroic concern: " 'There's an awful lot of soap out there.' " He laughed at their incredulity, and nodded vigorously.

  "I'm surprised you still have fire," Ginger said.

  "They're more or less resigned to fire," Smith said thoughtfully. "But I'm fairly sure they'd like to crack down on bronze."

  XII

  As they made the approach to Mars, Smith told Perpetua, "We want that white spot on the equator."

  "Right," she said nervously—she hadn't made many landings. Then she said, "Are those clouds?"

  "Yeah. Set down outside the northern edge, there's water under the clouds."

  "A lake?"

  "Actually the locals call it 'the Sea of Issus.' Literary reference. The ARMs call it 'O'Donnell's Surprise.' Bartholomew O'Donnell got his degree in exotic physics right at the start of the First War and came up with a proposal for more effective bombs. In those days they were desperate for something they could make quickly, so they gave him research facilities and plenty of room."

  "What happened?" Perpetua said.

  "All his notes and designs were in his lab, so nobody really knows, but the general consensus is that he succeeded. He had this wild notion that he could cause natural thorium to spontaneously fission—"

  "Uh-oh," said Ginger.

  "Well said. Fission into iron and nickel and a whole lot of beta rays. The prospectus called for never having more than a nanogram of thorium in his field generator at a time. My guess is the generator produced a somewhat larger field than he expected."

  They were descending toward the settlement by then. It was on higher ground than the cloud layer, which looked thinner up close. That seemed to be about ten times the diameter of the lake, which radar said was about four kilometers across. "Some blast," said Ginger admiringly.

  "There was an automated monitor on Phobos—that's the nearer moon, it was passing almost overhead—that was able to relay a picture of a big circle around the base turning X-ray blue before it melted."

  "The orbital monitor melted?" said Perpetua.

  "Phobos melted. A lot of it, anyway. The monitor evaporated along with that side of Phobos's surface. Recoil kicked Phobos into a less eccentric orbit, as a matter of fact."

  Ginger said, "At a planet's surface, thorium can be easier to find than lead. You're lucky he didn't sterilize the system."

  "I know. The affected area was a bit over half a kilometer across—pretty sharply defined, in the pictures. The blast was later calculated at something like thirty thousand megatons. Popped every dome on the planet. Land by that big one, it's the Customs shack."

  Perpetua was settling Jubilee when Smith abruptly said, "Damn, come back up and move us to the other side of the dome."

  She took them up smoothly and shifted position, then said, "People?"

  "No, some kind of plants. This whole region is in a depression, not just the lake and clouds. Pictures taken right after it happened show this hemisphere looking like somebody put a bullet through a sheet of glass. This area was scooped out, and even up here it has ten times the atmospheric pressure you'd find at the antipodes. Still not much, but they've been trying to breed grass that'll survive it. Either they've succeeded, or they dumped in another ice asteroid when I wasn't paying attention. Here's good."

  They suited up and went outside. There were smaller domes clustered about the Customs station, and various people had already come out of these, holding guns in a conspicuous fashion, not quite pointed at them. They paid a lot of attention to Ginger.

  Smith held up an ARM ident and triggered its flasher, then said over the common channel, "If it's your intention to start fighting the next war now, by all means let me know so I can start conscripting troops." People began to disperse.

  "What do you expect people to do when they see a kzinti ship landing?" somebody said defensively.

  "Around here? Raise meat prices."

  There was some grumbling, and another voice said in amused tones, "There's still time, Kate."

  "Aw, shut up," said somebody else.

  Smith signaled for the private channel and said, "Don't say anything you don't want heard. Sooner or later someone will break the encryption."

  "ARMs?" Perpetua said.

  "Hobbyists. These people are all obsessives. This place is still a dumping ground for lunatics—it's just that now they're self-diagnosed."

  "You grew up here," Ginger guessed suddenly.

  "Yes, didn't I say? I didn't. Yeah. I started working out very young." The gravity was about two-thirds that of Wunderland; he must have started wearing a weight suit well before puberty.

  As they went through the airlock—the biggest they'd ever seen—Perpetua said, "You wanted to join the ARMs that young?"

  "I wanted to leave that young. The ARMs had the best deal."

  "Were there any survivors of the blast?" Ginger said.

  "Everybody except the ARMs survived," Smith said. "The exiles lived on the other side of the planet, but they heard about the project and started wearing pressure suits all the time, and keeping their kids near them with bubbles handy. The ARMs made fun of them, until Blowout Day. Then they stopped." The inner door opened, and he and Perpetua took off their helmets, while Ginger folded his back.

  "Any fissionables or bioactives?" said a bored-looking man with beige skin and a green-and-yellow suit. The suits outside had just been green.

  "Okay. How much?" Smith said.

  The man frowned, then saw the ARM ident and grunted. "Get your own," he said, and waved them by. As they passed, he said, "Hey, why is he wearing a military suit?"

  "What do you mean?" Smith said.

  "No tail."

  Ginger had never thought about it before, but it made sense; the convenience of being able to stretch his tail for balance would make the suit more vulnerable. This was simply the only design anyone on Wunderland had ever seen.

  "So nobody will suspect he's a spy," said Smith.

  Ginger and Perpetua both stared at him, but the Customs inspector just snorted and waved them back into motion.

  They went through another pressure door, but before either of them could say anything to Smith, somebody said, "Hey, Waldo, what's the password?"

  Smith, in the lead, stopped, and slowly turned to the group of five men to the left of the doorway. "There's a new one," he said, in a low voice. "It's, 'I'm not an unarmed child anymore.' "

  He had been a mild, affable companion for the past three days. Now Ginger smelled murder.

  Since humans who fight for trivial reasons are typically of inferior intelligence, it was a common error to suppose that kzinti were rather dim. In fact, they averaged somewhat brighter than humans, due to intense competition for mates; but for the same reason, they just didn't care.

  But Ginger had a responsibility to see to. "Excuse me, sir," he said to Smith, "but you did say back at the embassy you wouldn't kill anyone else until you found me another job."

  Smith turned sharply, staring. "What?"

  Ginger moved, quickly and smoothly, out of Smith's reach. "I realize these aren't kzinti, Mr. Smith, but you did say anyone, sir."

  The five men had already dwindled to two, the others having worked out the implic
ations at once. Smith blinked a few times, looked back at the remaining two, looked at Ginger again, and nodded. "Fair enough." He turned to face the pair again, and said in a declamatory tone, " 'Would you buy it for a quarter?' "

  Both of the men had the smoothness of motion that indicated a human past 100, but Smith must have been nearly that old himself; and while he was no Hero, compared to a low-gee build he looked like a Jinxian. One was whispering frantically in the other's ear; Ginger was able to catch the phrase "ARM Commando," this being one of the first terms he'd learned in Flatlander. The one being spoken to was shorter and solider, but not in Smith's shape.

  That human looked at Ginger, then at his own companion; then he said, "Uh, pass, friend."

  As they went by, Ginger thought to hear a suit's recycler start up. He didn't look—he was pretty certain whose it was, anyway.

  They were in a broad inner space, like a courtyard, only with no gun turrets. Smith led them through it, past unlabeled pressure doors, to a door just like the others, and started it opening. Perpetua, who was just getting the idea that she'd come very close to being held by the UN as principal witness, started up an innocuous subject: "How did this settlement get started?"

  "After the Blowout one of the old lifers talked people into gathering everything up and bringing it here. More air and water. They stayed up here because it wasn't stable down lower. Still isn't. Once a habitat was set up, they formed a government and petitioned the UN for membership before the ARM thought of jamming them. The ARMs try to keep people from hearing more than absolutely necessary about this place, but it's really popular with smugglers since the ARM moved in on Luna," he said.

  "What was this lifer's name?" Ginger said, impressed—he was picturing what the weather must have been like for the migration.

  "He didn't know. He dated to brainwipe days," said Smith. They entered the door, and he closed it; abruptly the floor began to descend. "There are stories that he was actually Raymond Sinclair, but I checked ARM records, and Sinclair was murdered years before the Founder arrived. He seems to have been something of an invisible man—the Founder, that is. Have you ever heard of the Tehuantepec Canal?" They hadn't. "Okay. On Earth there's an ocean bordered by two continents, and one of the two is kept from freezing solid by an ocean current from the other. Now, the sun has been abnormally cool for thousands of years, and keeps getting worse by stages. The warm current started to give up most of its heat in hurricanes as a result. Sharper gradient, see? What the Founder appears to have done, to get arrested and brainwiped, was make secret arrangements with local officials and investors to blast open a sea-level trench at a place called Tehuantepec, where two oceans weren't separated very far. The ocean to the east was the one with the current, and the one to the west was cooler, with a higher sea level. Water washed out the trench, and mixed with the warm water, so it got stirred up and wouldn't stay put long enough to let hurricanes form. They need still, saturated air. The ocean current wound up transporting more heat than it had in a thousand years, so everybody was saved. But the man responsible had already been brainwiped, so the ARM made his records vanish and claimed it was their own project. The Founder turned out to be one of those people who does really well in low gravity, so he was still here a couple of centuries later for the Blowout." The elevator stopped. Another door was now visible.