The Man-Kzin Wars 05

CHAPTER ONE

Mixed crowd tonight, Harold thought, as he watched Suuomalisen’s broad and dissatisfied back push through the crowd and the beaded curtain over the entrance. Sweat stained the fat man’s white linen suit, and a haze of smoke hung below the ceiling as the fresher system fought overstrain. The screened booths along the walls and the tables around the sunken dance-floor were crowded, figures writhing there to the musicomp’s Meddlehoffer beat, a three-deep mob along the long brass-railed bar. Blue uniforms of the United Nations Space Navy, gray-green of the Free Wunderland forces, gaudy-glitzy dress of civilian hangers-on and the new civilian elite of ex-guerrillas and war profiteers grown rich on contracts and confiscated collabo properties. Drinking, eating, talking, doing business ranging from the romantic to the economic, or combinations; and most were smoking as well. Some of the xenosophont customers would be uncomfortable in the extreme; Homo sapiens sapiens is almost unique in its ability to tolerate tobacco.

Tough, he decided. Outside the holosign would be floating before the brick: HAROLD’S TERRAN BAR: A WORLD ON ITS OWN. Below that in lower-case print: humans only. The fat man had chosen to ignore that in his brief spell as quasi-owner, and Harold agreed with the decision. The sign had been a small raised finger to the kzinti during the occupation years; now that humans ruled the Alpha Centauri system again, anyone who could pay was welcome. There were even a depressed-looking pair of kzin in a booth off at the far corner, the hiss-spit-snarl of the Hero’s Tongue coming faintly through their privacy screen. That was the only table not crowded, but quarter-ton felinoid carnivores did not make for brash intrusion.

But it’s a human hangout, and if the aliens don’t like it, they can go elsewhere, he decided.

“Glad to see the last of him, boss,” the waitress said, laying a platter and a stein in front of him. “I’d rather work for a kzin.”

“Good thing you didn’t have to, then,” Harold said, a grin creasing his basset-hound features between the jug ears. Suuomalisen had bought under the impression-correct-that Harold was on the run from the collaborationist government, right towards the end of the kzinti occupation. He had also been under the impression-false-that he was buying a controlling interest; in fact, the fine print had left real control with a consortium of employees. He had been glad to resell back to the original owner, and at a tasty profit for Harold.

Akvavit, beer chaser, and plate of grilled grumblies with dipping sauce called; he added a cigarette and decided the evening was nearly complete.

“Completely complete,” he murmured, as his wife joined him; he stood and bowed over a hand.

“What’s complete?” she said. Ingrid Schotter-Yarthkin was tall, Belter-slim; the strip-cut of her hair looked exotic above the evening gown she wore to oversee the backroom gambling operation.

“Life, sweetheart.”

“At seventy-three?” she said; Wunderland years, slightly shorter than Terran. She had been only two years younger than he when they were growing up in the old Wunderland before the ratcat invasion. Now, time-dilation and interstellar cold sleep had left her less than half his biological age. “Middle-aged spread already?”

“I’m spreading myself thin, personally,” Claude Montferrat-Palme said, sliding in to join them.

Harold grunted. The ex-policeman was thin, with the elongated build and mobile ears of a purebred Wunderland Herrenmann. He also wore the asymmetric beard favored by the old aristocracy

“Seems sort of strange to be back to private life,” Harold said musingly.

Claude shuddered. “Count it lucky we weren’t put before a court,” he said.

“Speak for yourself.”

Claude winced slightly; he had been police chief of Munchen under the kzinti occupation. Resister before Wunderland surrendered to the invaders, then a genuine collaborator; someone had to hold society together, to get whatever was possible from the kzin. Earth was losing the war. But then Then Ingrid came back, with the Belter captain, and Claude’s world came apart. His help to the resistance had been effective, and timely enough to save him from a firing squad. Not timely enough to save his job as police commissioner, of course. Harold was tarred with the edge of the same brush; anyone who made money under the occupation was suspect in these new puritanical days, as were the aristocrats who had perforce cooperated with the alien invaders. There was irony for you… especially considering how the commons had groveled to the kzin, and worked to keep their war factories going during the invasions of Sol System. Double irony for Harold, since he was a Herrenmann’s bastard and so never really accepted by his lather’s kindred. That might have changed if folk knew exactly what Harold and Ingrid and that Sol-Belter Jonah Matthieson had done out in the Serpent Swarm.

It would be too an exaggeration to say that the three of them-well, they three plus Jonah Matthieson-had won the war; but it wouldn’t be too large an expansion of the truth to say that without them the war would have been lost.

“Heroes are not without honor,” Claude said. “Save in their own countries. Perhaps we should write a book to tell our true story.”

“Sure,” Harold said. “That would really make that ARM bastard happy. Right now he’s happy, but-”

Claude’s knowing grin stopped him. “Yes, of course. No books.” He shrugged. “So we know, but no one else does.”

And at that General Early had been tempted to make all four of them vanish, no matter their service to the UN. There would have been no trials. Freedom or a quiet disappearance, and for some reason-perhaps Early really had some human emotions-they’d been turned loose with their memories more or less intact.

They all frowned; Harold thoughtfully, looking down at the wineglass he rolled between his palms.

“I don’t like it,” Ingrid said. “Oh, I don’t miss the fame-more trouble than it’s worth, we’d have to beat off publicity-seekers and vibrobrains with clubs. I don’t like General Buford Early-remember, I worked for him back in Sol System”-Ingrid had escaped the original kzin attack on Alpha Centauri and made the twenty-year trip back to Sol in suspended animation-“and I don’t like the ARM getting a foothold here. What did our ancestors come here for, if not to get away from them?”

Both men nodded agreement. In theory, the ARM were the technological police of the United Nations, charged with keeping track of new developments and controlling those that menaced social peace. That turned out to be all new technology, and the ARM had grown until it more-or-less set UN policy. For three centuries they had kept Sol System locked in pacifistic stasis, to the point where even the memory of conflict was fading and a minor scuffle got people sent to the psychists for “repair.” That placid changelessness and the growing sameness of life in the overcrowded, over-regulated solar system had been a strong force behind the interstellar exodus.

The ARM had kept Solar humanity from making ready after the first kzinti warship attacked a human vessel, right up to the arrival of the First Fleet from conquered Alpha Centauri. The operators of the big launch-lasers on Mercury had had to virtually mutiny to fight back, even when the kzin battlecruisers started beaming asteroid habitats.

“I don’t like the way Early’s so cozy with the new government,” Harold growled.

“In the long run, luck goes only to the efficient,” Claude said, and the others nodded again, because it wasn’t hard to guess his train of thought.

The war was ended by pure luck: the weird aliens who sold the faster-than-light spacedrive to the human colonists on We Made It had really won the war for Sol. The kzin Fifth Fleet would have crushed all resistance, if there had been time for it to launch from Alpha Centauri and cover the 4.3 light-years at. 80. Chuut-Riit, the last kzin Governor, had been a strategic genius; even more rare in his species, he never attacked until he was ready. Fortunately for humanity, that Chuut-Riit hadn’t lived to send that fleet.

It had been Buford Early’s idea to send in an assassin team with the scoopship Yamamoto’s raid as a cover. Jonah, and Ingrid, and an intelligent ship that had gone insane. A mad scheme, one that shouldn’t have worked, but it was all Earth could try-and it had worked. Was General Early a military genius, or incredibly lucky?

Now the hyperdrive would open the universe to Man. The problem was that it eliminated the moat of distance; the hyperwave, the communications version of the device, gave contact with Earth in mere hours.

Cultures grown alien in centuries of isolation were thrown together… and serious interstellar politics became possible once more, and ARM General Buford Early was right in the middle of it all.

“I thoroughly agree,” Claude said. “He’s got Markham under his thumb, and a number of others. It’s already unwise to cross him.”

“As Jonah found out,” Ingrid sighed.

Harold felt a prickle of irritation. True, Ingrid had chosen him-when both Claude and the Sol-Belter were very much available-but he didn’t like to be reminded of it. Even less he didn’t want to be reminded that she and Jonah had been lovers as well as teammates. It hadn’t helped that the younger man refused all help from them, later.

She shook her head. “Poor Jonah. He should not have been so… so brusque with General Early. Buford is older than the Long Peace, and he can be… uncivilized.”