Man-Kzin Wars III Read online

  * * *

  “Erruch,” Ingrid said as the recording finished. “You’ve got more . . . you’ve got a lot of guts, Claude, dealing with them at first hand like that.”

  “Oh, some of them aren’t so bad. For ratcats. Staff Officer there expressed ‘every confidence’ in me.” He made an expressive gesture with his hands. “Although he also reminded me there was a continuous demand for fresh monkeymeat.”

  Ingrid paled slightly and laid a hand on his arm. That was not a figure of speech to her, not after the chase through the kzinti hunting preserve. She remembered the sound of the hunting scream behind her, and the thudding crackle of the alien’s pads on the leaves as it made its four-footed rush. Rising as it screamed and leaped from the ravine lip above her; the long sharpened pole in her hands, and the soft heavy feel as its own weight drove it onto her weapon . . .

  Claude laid his hands on hers. Harold cleared his throat.

  “Well,” he said. “Your position looks solider than we thought.”

  The other man gave Ingrid’s hand a squeeze and released it. “Yes,” he said. A hunter’s look came into his eyes, emphasized the foxy sharpness of his features. “In fact, they’re outfitting some sort of expedition; that’s why they can’t spare personnel for administrative duties.”

  Ingrid and Harold both leaned forward instinctively. Harold crushed out his cigarette with swift ferocity.

  “Another Fleet?” Ingrid asked. I’ll be stuck here, and Earth . . .

  Claude shook his head. “No. That raid did a lot of damage; it’d be a year or more just to get back to the state of readiness they had when the Yamamoto arrived. Military readiness.” Both the others winced; over a million humans had died in the attack. “But they’re definitely mobilizing for something inside the system. Two flotillas. Something out in the Swarm.”

  “Markham?” Ingrid ventured. It seemed a little extreme; granted he had the Catskinner, but—

  “I doubt it. They’re bringing the big guns up to full personnel, the battlewagons. Conquest Fang class.”

  They exchanged glances. Those were interstellar-capable warships, carriers for lesser craft and equipped with weapons that could crack planets, defenses to match. Almost self-sufficient, with facilities for manufacturing their own fuel, parts and weapons requirements from asteroidal material. They were normally kept on standby as they came out of the yards, only a few at full readiness for training purposes.

  “All of them?” Harold said.

  “No, but about three-quarters. Ratcats will be thin on the ground for a while. And—” he hesitated, forced himself to continue “—I’ll be able to do the most good staying here. For a year or so at least, I can be invaluable to the underground without risking much.”

  The others remained silent while he looked away, granting him time to compose himself.

  “I’ve got the false ID and transit papers, with disguises,” he said. “Ingrid . . . you aren’t safe anywhere on Wunderland. In the Swarm, with that ship you came in, maybe the two of you can do some good.”

  “Claude—” she began.

  He shook his head. When he spoke, the old lightness was back in his tone.

  “I wonder,” he said, “I truly wonder what Markham is doing. I’d like to think he’s causing so much trouble that they’re mobilizing the Fleet, but . . . ”

  Chapter IV

  Tiamat was crowded, Captain Jonah Matthieson decided. Even for the de facto capital of Wunderland’s Belt. It had been bad enough the last time Jonah was here. He shouldered through the line into the zero-G waiting area at the docks, a huge pie-shaped disk; those were at the ends of the sixty-by-twenty kilometer spinning cylinder that served the Serpent Swarm as its main base. There had been dozens of ships in the magnetic grapples: rockjack singleships, transports, freighters . . . refugee ships as well; the asteroid industrial bases had been heavily damaged during the Yamamoto’s raid.

  Not quite as many as you would expect, though. The UN ramscoop ship’s weapon had been quarter-ton iron eggs traveling at velocities just less than a photon’s. When something traveling at that speed hit, the result resembled an antimatter bomb.

  A line of lifebubbles went by, shepherded by medics. Casualties, injuries beyond the capacities of outstation autodocs. Some of them were quite small; he looked in the transparent surface of one, and then away quickly, swallowing. Shut up, he told his mind. Collateral damage can’t be helped. And there had been a trio of kzinti battlewagons in dock too, huge tapering daggers with tau-cross bows and magnetic launchers like openwork gunbarrels; Slasher-class fighters clung to the flanks, swarms of metallic lice. Repair and installation crews swarmed around them; Tiamat’s factories were pouring out warheads and sensor-effector systems.

  The mass of humanity jammed solid in front of the exits. Jonah waited like a floating particle of cork, watching the others passed through the scanners one by one. Last time, with Ingrid—forget that, he thought—there had been a cursory retina scan, and four goldskin cops floating like a daisy around each exit. Now they were doing blood samples as well, presumably for DNA analysis; besides the human police, he could see waldo-guns, floating ovoids with clusters of barrels and lenses and antennae. A kzin to control them, bulking even huger in fibroid armor and helmet.

  And all for little old me, he thought, kicking himself forward and letting the goldskin stick his hand into the tester. There was a sharp prickle on his thumb, and he waited for the verdict. Either the false ident holds, or it doesn’t. The four police with stunners and riot-armor, the kzin in full infantry rig, six waldos with 10-megawatt lasers . . . if it came to a fight, the odds were not good. Since all I have is a charming smile and a rejiggered light-pen.

  “Pass through, pass through,” the goldskin said, in a tone that combined nervousness and boredom.

  Jonah decided he couldn’t blame her; the kzinti security apparatus must have gone winging paranoid-crazy when Chuut-Riit was assassinated, and then the killers escaped with human-police connivance. On second thoughts, these klongs all volunteered to work for the pussies. Bleep them.

  He passed through the mechanical airlock and into one of the main transverse corridors. It was ten meters by twenty, and sixty kilometers long; three sides were small businesses and shops; on the fourth, spinward, was a slideway. There was a ring of transfer booths around the airlock exits, permanently disabled; only kzinti and humans under their direct supervision were allowed the convenience of lightspeed pseudo-teleportation. The last time he had been here, a month ago, there had been murals on the walls of the concourse area. Prewar, faded and stained, but still gracious and marked with the springlike optimism of the settlement of the Alpha Centauri system. Outdoor scenes from Wunderland in its pristine condition, before the settlers had modified the ecology to suit the immigrants from Earth. Scenes of slowships, half-disassembled after their decades-long flight from the Solar System.

  The murals had been replaced by holograms. Atrocity holograms, of survivors and near-survivors of the UN raid. Mostly from dirtside, since with an atmosphere to transmit blast and shock effects you had a greater transition between dead and safe. Humans crushed, burned, flayed by glass-fragments, mutilated; heavy emphasis on children. There was a babble of voices with the holos, weeping and screaming and moaning with pain, and a strobing title: Sol-System Killers! Their liberation is death! And an idealized kzin standing in front of a group of cowering mothers and infants, raising a shield to ward off the attack of a repulsive flatlander-demon.

  Interesting, Jonah thought. Whoever had designed that had managed to play on about every prejudice a human resident of the Alpha Centauri system could have. It had to be a human psychist doing the selection; kzinti didn’t understand homo sapiens well enough. A display of killing power like this would make a kzin respectful. Human propagandists needed to whip their populations into a war-frenzy, and anger was a good tool. Make a kzin angry? You didn’t need to make them angry. An enemy would try to make a kzin angry, because that reduced t
heir efficiency. Let this remind you that a collaborationist is not necessarily an incompetent. A traitor, a Murphy’s-asshole inconvenience, but not necessarily an idiot. Nor even amoral; he supposed it was possible to convince yourself that you were serving the greater good by giving in. Smoothing over the inevitable, since it did look like the kzinti were winning.

  Jonah shook himself out of the trance and flipped himself over. I’ve got to watch this tendency to depression, he thought sourly. Finagle, I ought to be bouncing for joy!

  Instead, he felt a grey lethargy. His feet drifted into contact with the edge of the slideway, and he began moving slowly forward; more rapidly as he edged toward the center. The air became more quiet. There was always a subliminal rumble near the ends of Tiamat’s cylinder, powdered metals and chemicals pumping into the fabricators. Now he would have to contact the Nipponese underworlder who had smuggled them from Tiamat to Wunderland in the first place, what had been his name? Shigehero Hirose, that was it. An oyabun, whatever that meant. There was the data they had downloaded from Chuut-Riit’s computers, priceless stuff. He would need a message-maser to send it to Catskinner; the ship had been modified with an interstellar-capacity sender. And—

  “Hello, Captain.”

  Jonah turned his head, very slowly. A man had touched his elbow. Stocky, even by flatlander standards, with a considerable paunch. Coal-black, with tightly curled wiry hair; pure Afroid, not uncommon in some ethnic enclaves on Wunderland but very rare on Earth, where gene-flow had been nearly random for going on four hundred years. General Buford Early, UN Space navy, late ARM. Jonah gasped and sagged sideways, a grey before his eyes like high-G blackout. There was another Flatlander but Jonah barely noticed. Early slipped a hand under his arm and bore him up with thick-boned strength. Archaic, like the man; he was . . . at least two centuries old. Impossible to tell, these days. The only limiting factor on how old you might be was when you were born, after medicine started progressing fast enough to compensate for advancing age . . .

  “Take it easy,” Early said.

  Eyes warred with mind. Early was here; Early was sitting in his office on Gibraltar Base back in the Solar System.

  Jonah struggled for breath, then fell into the rhythm taught by the Zen adepts who had trained him for war. Calm flowed back. Much knowledge of war had fallen out of human culture in three hundred years of peace, before the kzinti came, but the monks had preserved a great deal. What UN bureaucrat would suspect an old man sitting quietly beneath a tree practicing and preserving dangerous technique? Jonah spoke to himself: Reality is change. Shock and fear result from imposing concepts on reality. Abandon concepts. Being is time, and time is Being. Birth and death is the life of the Buddha. Then: Thank you, roshi.

  The men at either elbow guided him to the slower edge-strip of the slideway and onto the sidewalk. Jonah looked “ahead,” performed the mental trick that turned the cylinder into a hollow tower above his head, then back to horizontal. He freed his arms with a quiet flick and sank down on the chipped and stained poured-rock bench. That was notional in this gravity, but it gave you a place to hitch your feet.

  “Well?” he said, looking at the second man.

  This one was different. Younger, Jonah would say; eyes do not age or hold expression, but the small muscles around them do. Oriental eyes, more common. Both of them were in Swarm-Belter clothing, gaudy and somehow sleazy at the same time, with various mysterious pieces of equipment at their belts. Perfect cover, if you were pretending to be a modestly prosperous entrepreneur of the Serpent Swarm. The kzinti allowed a good deal of freedom to the Belters in this system; it was more efficient and required less supervision than running everything themselves. That would change as their numbers built up, of course.

  “Well?” he said again.

  Early grinned, showing strong and slightly yellowed teeth, and pulled a cheroot from a pocket. Actually less uncommon here than in the Solar System, Jonah thought, gagging slightly. “You didn’t seriously think that we’d let an opportunity like the Yamamoto raid go by and only put one arrow on the string, did you, Captain? By the way, this is my . . . associate, Watsuji Hajime.” The man smiled and bowed. “A member of the team I brought in.”

  “Another stasis field?” Jonah said.

  “We did have one ready,” Early said. “We like to have a little extra tucked away.”

  “Trust the ARM,” Jonah said sourly.

  The UN’s technological police had been operating almost as long as humans had been in space. Their primary function was to suppress technologies which had dangerous consequences . . . which turned out to be most technologies. For a long time they had managed to make Solar humanity forget that there had even been such things as war or weapons or murder. That was looked back upon as a Golden Age, now, after two generations of war with the kzinti; privately, Matthieson thought of it as the years of Stagnation. The ARM had not wanted to believe in the kzinti, not even when the crew of the Angel’s Pencil had reported their own first near-fatal contact with the felinoids. And when the war started, the ARM had still dealt out its hoarded secrets with the grudging reluctance of a miser.

  “It’s for the greater good,” Early replied.

  “Sure.” That you slowed down research and so when the kzinti hit us they had technological superiority? For that matter, why had it taken a century and a half to develop regeneration techniques? And millions of petty criminals—jaywalkers and the like—had been sliced, diced and sent to the organ banks before then. Ancient history, he told himself. The Belters had always hated the ARM . . .

  “Certainly for the greater good that you’ve got backup, now,” Early continued. “We came in with a slug aimed at a weapons fabrication asteroid. The impact was quite genuine . . . God’s my witness—” he continued.

  He’s old all right.

  “—the intelligence we’ve gathered and beamed back is already worth the entire cost of the Yamamoto. And you and Lieutenant Raines succeeded beyond our hopes.”

  Meaning you had no hope we’d survive, Jonah added to himself. Early caught his eye and nodded with an ironic turn of his full lips. The younger man felt a slight chill; how good at reading body language would you get, with two centuries of practice? How human would you remain?

  “Speaking of which,” the general continued, “where is Lieutenant Raines, Matthieson?”

  Jonah shrugged, looking away slightly and probing at his own feelings. “She . . . decided to stay. To come out later, actually, with Yarthkin-Schotmann and Montferrat-Palme. I’ve got all the data.”

  Early’s eyebrows rose. “Not entirely unexpected.” His eyes narrowed again. “No personal animosities, here, I trust? We won’t be heading out for some time—” if ever, went unspoken “—and we may need to work with them again.”

  The young Sol-Belter looked out at the passing crowd on the slideway, at thousands swarming over the handnets in front of the shopfronts on the other three sides of the cylinder.

  “My ego’s a little bruised,” he said finally. “But . . . no.”

  Early nodded. “Didn’t have the leisure to become all that attached, I suppose,” he said. “Good professional attitude.”

  Jonah began to laugh softly, shoulders shaking. “Finagle, General, you are a long time from being a young man, aren’t you? No offense.”

  “None taken,” the Intelligence officer said dryly.

  “Actually, we just weren’t compatible.” What was that phrase in the history tape? Miscegenation abyss? Birth cohort gap? No . . . “Generation gap,” he said.

  “She was only a few years younger than you,” Early said suspiciously.

  “Biologically, sir. But she was born before the War. During the Long Peace. Wunderland wasn’t sown nearly as tight as Earth, or even the Solar Belt . . . but they still didn’t have a single deadly weapon in the whole system, saving hunting tools. I’ve been in the Navy or training for it since I was six! We just didn’t have anything in common except software, sex and the mission.” He s
hrugged again, and felt the lingering depression leave him. “It was like being involved with a younger version of my mother.”

  Early shook his head, chuckling himself, a deep rich sound. “Temporal displacement. Doesn’t need relativity, boy; wait ’til you’re my age. And now,” he continued, “we are going to have a little talk.”

  “What’ve we been doing?”

  “Oh, not a debriefing. That first. But then . . . ” He grinned brilliantly. “A . . . job interview, of sorts.”

  * * *

  “Well. So.” The oyabun nodded and folded his hands.

  Jonah looked around. They were in the three-twelve shell of Tiamat, where spin gave an equivalent of .72 G weight. Expensive, even now when gravity polarizers were beginning to spread beyond kzinti and military-manufacturing use. Microgravity is marvelous for most industrial use; there are other things that need weight, bearing children to term among them. This room was equally expensive; most of the furnishings were wood. The low tables at which they all sat, knees crossed. The black-lacquered carved screens with rampant tigers as well, and he strongly suspected that those were even older than General Buford Early. A set of Japanese swords rested in a niche, long katana and the short “sword of apology” on their ebony stand.

  Sandalwood incense was burning somewhere, and the floor was covered in neat mats of plaited straw. Against all this the plain good clothes of the man who called himself Shigehero Hirose were something of a shock. The thin ancient porcelain of his sake cup gleamed as he set it down on the table, and spoke to the Oriental who had come with the general. Jonah kept his face elaborately blank; it was unlikely that either of them suspected his knowledge of Japanese . . . enough to understand most of a conversation, if not to speak it. Nippon’s tongue had never been as popular as her goods, being too difficult for outsiders to learn easily.

  “It is . . . an unexpected honor to entertain one of the Tokyo branch of the clan,” Shigehero was saying. “And how do events proceed in the land of the Sun Goddess?”