The Man-Kzin Wars 02

THE CHILDRENS HOUR
Jerry Pournelle & SM. Stirling

“We want you to kill a Kzin.”

The general didn't seem to be joking. Captain Jonah Matthieson frowned and reminded himself that flatlanders were odd. Damned odd. He ran his hand down the short-cropped black crest that was his concession to military dress codes. Even by Belter standards Jonah was tall, and if he'd stood straight he would have made a fine figure of a soldier, but he stood in the alert crouch Belters learn early. Matthieson's green slanted eyes showed little amusement as they flickered over General Buford Early's developing paunch. “Well… that's more or less what I've been doing.”

The general's expression didn't change, but he took a box of cheroots from his desk, offered one perfunctorily, and lit his own with a lighter built into what looked to be a genuine Kzin skull. “Gracie. Display. A-7, schematic,” Early said through a cloud of thick smoke.

The rear wall of the cubicle office lit with a display of hatchmarked columns. Jonah stared without comprehension.

“That's been boiled down to make it easier to see,” the general said. “Ships, weapons, casualties, for both sides. Think of it as battle intensity and duration.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Now look at it this way. Gracie: time sequence, phased.” The screen changed to show four separate matts. “Captain, this is the record of the four fleets the Kzin have sent since they took Wunderland and the Alpha Centauri system, forty-two years ago. Notice anything?”

Jonah shrugged. “We're losing.” The war with the felinoid aliens had been going on since before his birth — since humanity's first contact with them, sixty years before. Interstellar warfare at sublight speeds was a game for the patient.

“Fucking brilliant, Captain!” The general was short, black, and balding, and carried a mass of muscle that was almost obscene to someone raised in low gravity. He looked to be in early middle age, which depending on how much he cared about appearances, might mean anything up to a century and a half these days. “Yeah. We're losing. Their fleets are getting bigger and their weapons are getting better. We've made some improvements, too, but not as fast as they have.”

Jonah nodded. There wasn't any need to say anything.

“What do you think I did before the war?” the general demanded.

“I have no idea, sir.”

“Sure you do: ARM bureaucrat, like all the other generals,” Early said. “Well, I was. But I also taught military history in the ARM Academy. Damn near the only Terran left who paid any attention to the subject.”

“Oh.”

“Right. We weren't ready for wars, any of us. Terrans didn't believe in them. Belters didn't either; too damned independent. Well, the goddamn pussies do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Right. Everyone knows that. Now think about it, Captain. We're facing a race of carnivores with a unified interstellar government of completely unknown size, organized for war. They started ahead of us, and now they've had Wunderland and its belt for better than a generation. If nothing else, at this rate they can eventually swamp us with numbers. Just one set of multimegatonners getting through to Earth—”

The general puffed on his cigar with short, vicious breaths.

Jonah shivered inside himself at the thought: all those people dependent on a single life-support system. He wondered how flatlanders had ever stood it. Why, a single asteroid impact… The Belt was less vulnerable. Too much delta vee need to match the wildly varying vectors of its scores of thousands of rocks; its targets were weaker individually, but vastly more numerous and scattered.

He forced his mind back to the troll-like man before him, gagging slightly on the smell of the tobacco. Even with his rank, how does he get away with that on shipboard? He had thought that even on Earth, the filthy habit had died out. It must have been revived since the pussies came, like so many archaic customs.

Like war and armies, the Belter thought sardonically. The branch-of-service insignias on the shoulder of the flatlander's coverall were not ones he recognized. Of course, there were 18 billion people in the solar system, and most of them seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform these days; flatlanders loved playing dress-up. Comes of having nothing useful to do most of their lives, he supposed.

“So every time it gets harder,” Early said. “First time was bad enough, but they really underestimated us. Did the next time, too, but not so badly. They're getting better all the time. This last one that was bad.” General Early pointedly eyed the ribbons on Jonah's chest. Two Comets, and the unit citation his squadron of Darts had earned when they destroyed a Kzin fighter-base ship.

“As you know. You saw some of that. What you didn't see was the big picture — because we censored it, even from our military units. Captain, they nearly broke us. Because we underestimated them. This time they didn't just 'shriek and leap,' they came in tricky, fooled us completely when they looked like retreating… and we know why.”

He spoke to the computer again, and the rear wall became a holo image. Centered in it was a woman wearing lieutenant's stripes and the same branch badges as the general. Tall, slender, and paler-skinned than most, she was muscular in the fashion of low gravity types who exercise. When she spoke it was in Belter dialect.

“The subject's name was Esteban Cheung Jagrannath,” the woman said. The screen split, and a battered-looking individual appeared beside her. Jonah's eye picked out the glisten of sealant over artificial skin, the dying-rummy pattern of burst blood vessels from explosive decompression, the mangy look of someone given accelerated marrow treatments for radiation overdose. That is one sorry-looking son of a bitch. “He claims to have been born in Tiamat, in the Serpent Swarm of Wunderland, twenty-five subjective years ago.”

Now I recognize the accent, Jonah thought. The lieutenant's English had a guttural quality despite the crisp Belter vowels; descendants of Belters who migrated to the asteroids of Alpha Centauri talked that way. Wunderlander influence.

“Subject is a power-systems specialist, drafted into the Kzin service as a crewman on a corvette tender—” the blue eyes looked down to a read-out below the pickup's line of sight “—called—” Something followed in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero's Tongue.

“Roughly translated, the Bounteous Mother's Teats. Tits took a near-miss from a radiation-pulse bomb. The Kzin captain didn't have time to self-destruct; the bridge took most of the blast. She was a big mother—” the general blinked, snorted “—so a few of the repair crew survived, like this gonzo. All humans, as were most of the technical staff. We found a few nonhuman, non-Kzin as well, but they were all killed. Pity.”

Jonah and the flatlander nodded in unconscious unison. The Kzin empire was big, hostile, not interested in negotiation, and contained many subject species and planets; and that was about the limit of human knowledge. Not much background information had been included in the computers of the previous fleets, and very little of that survived; vessels too badly damaged for their crews to self-destruct before capture usually held little beyond wreckage.

The general spoke again. “Gracie, fast-forward to the main point.” The holo-recording blurred ahead. “Captain, you can review at your leisure. It's all important background, but for now…” The general signed and the recording returned to normal speed.

“… the new Kzin commander arrived three years before they left. His name's Chuut-Riit, which indicates a close relation to the… 'Patriarch,' that's as close as we've been able to get. Apparently, Chuut-Riit's first order was to delay the departure of the fleet.” A thin smile. “Chuut-Riit's not just related to their panjandrum; he's an author, of sorts. Two works on strategy: Logistical Preparation As The Key to Victory In War, and Conquest Through The Defensive Offensive.”

Jonah shaped a soundless whistle. Not your typical Kzin. If we have any idea of what a typical Kzin is like. We've only met their warriors, coming our way behind beams and bombs.

The lieutenant's image was agreeing with him. “The pussies find him a little eccentric as well; according to the subject, gossip had it that he fought a whole series of duels, starting almost the moment he arrived and held a staff conference. The new directives included a massive increase in the fleet's support infrastructure, and he ordered and supervised a complete changeover in tactics, especially to ensure that accurate reports of the fighting got back to Wunderland.”

The flatlander general cut off the scene with a wave. “So.” He folded his hands and leaned forward, the yellowish whites of his eyes glittering in lights that must be kept deliberately low. “We are in trouble, Captain. So far we've beaten off the pussies because we're a lot closer to our main sources of supply, and because they're… predictable. Adequate tacticians, but with little strategic sense, less even than we had at first, despite the Long Peace. The analysts say that indicates they've never come across much in the way of significant opposition before. If they had they'd have learned from it like they are — damn it — learning from us.”

“And in fact, what little intelligence information we've got, a lot of it from prisoners taken with the Fourth Fleet, backs that up; the Kzin just don't have much experience of war.”

Jonah blinked. “Not what you'd assume,” he said carefully.

A choppy nod. “Yep. Surprises you, eh? Me, too.”

General Early puffed delicately on his cigar. “Oh, they're aggressive enough. Almost insanely so, barely gregarious enough to maintain a civilization. Ritualized conflict to the death is a central institution of theirs. Some of the xenologists swear they must have gotten their technology from somebody else, that this culture they've got could barely have risen above the Neolithic stage on its own.

“In any event, they're wedded to a style of attack that's almost pitifully straightforward.” He looked thoughtfully at the wet, chewed cigar-end, discarded it and selected another from the humidor.

“And as far as we can tell, they have only one society, one social system, one religion, and one state. That fits in with some other clues we've gotten; the entire Kzin species has a longer continuous history than any human culture. Maybe a lot longer.” Another puff. “They're curiously genetically uniform, too; at least their fighters are. We know more about their biology than their beliefs — more corpses than live prisoners. Less variation than you'd expect, and large numbers of them seem to be siblings.”

Jonah stiffed. “Well, this is all very interesting, general, but—”

“—what's it got to do with you?” The flatlander leaned forward again, tapping paired thumbs together. “This Chuut-Riit is a first-class menace. You see, we're losing those advantages I mentioned. The Kzin have been shipping additional force into the Wunderland system in relays. Not so much weapons as knocked-down industrial plants and personnel. Furthermore, they've got the locals well organized. It's become a fully industrialized, system-wide economy, with an earth-type planet and an asteroid belt richer than Sol's. The population's much lower — hundreds of millions instead of nearly twenty billion — but that doesn't matter much.”

Jonah nodded in his turn. With ample energy and raw materials, the geometric-increase potential of automated machinery could build a war-making capacity in a single generation. Faster than that, if a few crucial administrators and technicians were imported, too. Earth's witless hordes were of little help to Sol's military effort. Most of them were a mere drain on resources — not even useful as cannon fodder in a conflict largely fought in space.

“So now they're in a position to outproduce us. We have to keep our advantages in operational efficiency.”

“You play Go with masters, you get good,” the Belter said.

“No. It's academic whether the pussies are more or less intelligent than we. What's intelligence, anyway? But we've proven experimentally that they're culturally and genetically less flexible. Man, when this war started we were absolute pacifists — we hadn't had so much as a riot in three centuries. We even censored history so that the majority didn't know there had ever been wars! That was less than a century ago, less than a single lifetime, and look at what we've done since. The pussies are only just now starting to smarten up about us.”

“This Chuut-Riit sounds as if he's… oh shit. Sir.”

A wide white grin. “Exactly. An exceptionally able ratcat. The Kzinti are less prone to either genius or stupidity than we are; they don't tolerate eccentrics, duel them to death, usually. But here they've got a goddamn genius in a position to knock sense into their heads.”

“He has to go.”

The flatlander stood and began striding back and forth behind the desk, gesturing with the cigar. Something more than the stink made Jonah's stomach clench.

“Covert operations is another thing we've had to reinvent, just lately. We need somebody who's good with spacecraft… a Belter, because the ones who settled the Serpent Swarm belt of Wunderland have stayed closer to the ancestral stock than the Wunderlanders downside. A good combat man who's proved himself capable of taking on Kzin at close quarters. And someone who's good with computer systems, because our informants tell us that is the skill most in demand by the Kzin on Wunderland itself.”

The general halted and stabbed toward Jonah with the hand that held the stub of burning weeds. “Last but not least, someone with contacts in the Alpha Centauri system.”

Jonah felt a wave of relief. A little relief, because the general was still grinning at him.

“Sir, I've never left—”

An upraised hand halted him. “Gracie. Tell Lieutenant Raines we're ready for her.”

A woman came in and saluted smartly, first the general and then Jonah; he recognized her from the holo. “I'd like you to meet Captain Matthieson.”

“God, what have you done to her?” Jonah asked the tall lieutenant as they grabbed stanchions and halted by the viewport nearest his ship.

The observation corridor outside the central graving dock of the base-asteroid was a luxury, but then, with a multi-megaton mass to work with and unlimited energy, the Sol-system military could afford that type of luxury. Take a nickel-iron rock. Drill a hole down the center with bomb-pumped lasers. Put a spin on the resulting tube, and rig large mirrors with the object at their focal points; the sun is dim beyond the orbit of Mars, but in zero-G you can build awfully big mirrors. The nickel-iron pipe heats, glows, turns soft as taffy, swells outward evenly, like cotton candy at a fair. Cooling, it leaves a huge open space surrounded by a thick shell of metal-rich rock. Robots drill the tunnels and corridors. Humans and robots install the power sources, life-support, gravity polarizers…

An enlisted crewman bounced by them horizontal to their plane of reference, sketching a sloppy salute as he twisted, hit the corner feet first and rebounded away. The air had the cool clean tang that Belters were used to, but with an industrial-tasting underlay of ozone and hot metal; the seals inside UNSN base Gibraltar were adequate for health but not up to Belt civilian standards. Even while he hung motionless and watched the technicians gutting his ship, some remote corner of Jonah's mind noted again that flatlanders had a nerve-wracking tendency to tolerate jury-rigged and barely adequate solutions. Simple self-respect demanded that the air one breathed be clean, damn it!

UNSN Catskinner hung in the vacuum chamber, surrounded by the flitting shapes of space-suited repair workers, compu-waldos and robots, torches that blinked blue-white, and a haze of detached fittings that hinted at the haste of the work. Beneath the mods and clutter the basic shape of the Dart-class attack boat still showed: massive fusion-power unit, tiny life-support bubble, asymmetric fringe of weapons and sensors designed for deep-space operation.

“What have you done to my ship?” Jonah asked again.

“Made some necessary modifications, Captain,” Raines replied. “The basic drive and armament systems are unaltered.”

Jonah nodded grudgingly. He could see the clustered grips for the spike-pods, featureless egg-shaped ovoid's, that were the basic weapon for light vessels, a one-megaton bomb pumping an X-ray laser. In battle they would spread out like the wings of a raptor, a pattern thousands of kilometers wide slaved to the computers in the control pod. The other weapons remained as well: fixed lasers, ball-bearing scatterers, railguns, particle-beam projectors, the antennae for stealthing and beam-deflection fields.

Unconsciously, the pilot's hands twitched; his reflexes and memory were back in the crashcouch, fingers moving infinitesimally in the lightfield gloves, holos feeding data into his eyes. Dodging with fusion powered feet, striking with missile fists, his Darts locked with the Kzinti Vengeful Slashers in a dance of battle that was as much like zero-G ballet as anything else…

“What modifications?” he asked.

“Grappling points for attachment to a ramscoop ship. Experimental. They're calling it the Yamamoto. The plan is that we ride piggyback until we reach the Wunderland system at high tau, having accelerated all the way. We drop off just this side of Alpha Centauri. They won't have much time to prepare for us at those speeds.” The ship would be on the heels of the wave-front announcing its arrival.

“Great,” he said sarcastically. “And just how are we supposed to stop?”

“Oh, that's simple,” Raines said. For the first time in their brief acquaintance, she smiled. Damn, she's good looking, Jonah thought with mild surprise. Better than good. How could I not notice?

“We ram ourselves into the sun.”

Several billion years before, there had been a species of sophonts with a peculiar ability. They called themselves (as nearly as humans could reproduce the sound) the Thrint; others knew them as Slavers. The ability amounted to an absolutely irresistible form of telepathic hypnosis, evolved as a hunting aid in an ecosystem where most animals advanced enough to have a spinal cord were at least mildly telepathic. This was a low-probability development, but in a universe as large as ours anything possible will occur sooner or later. On their native world, Thrintun could give a subtle prod to a prey-animal, enough to tip its decision to come down to the waterhole. The Thrint evolved intelligence as an additional advantage. After all, their prey had millions of years to develop resistance.

Then a spaceship landed on the Thrint homeworld. Its crew immediately became slaves. Absolutely obedient, absolutely trustworthy, willing and enthusiastic slaves. Operating on nervous systems that had not evolved in an environment saturated with the Power, any Thrint could control dozens of sophonts. With the amplifiers that slave-technicians developed, a Thrint could control an entire planet. Slaves industrialized a culture in the hunting-band stage in a single generation; controlled by the Power, in a few generations more slaves built an interstellar empire covering most of a galaxy.

Slaves did everything, because the Thrint had never been a very intelligent species, and once loose with the Power they had no need to think. Eventually they met, and thought they had enslaved, a very clever race indeed, the tnuctipun. The revolt that eventually followed resulted in the extermination of every tool-using sentient in the Galaxy, but before it did the tnuctipun made some remarkable things…

“A Slaver stasis field?” he said. Despite himself, awe showed in his voice. One such field had been discovered on Earth, then lost. Later, one more on a human-explored world. Three centuries of study had found no slightest clue concerning their operating principles; they were as incomprehensible as a molecular-distortion battery would have been to Thomas Edison. Monkey-see monkey-do copies had been made, each taking more time and expense than the Gibraltar. So far exactly two had functioned.

“Uh-mmm, give the captain a big cigar; right first time.”

Jonah shuddered, remembering the flatlander's smoke. “No, thanks.”

“Too right, Captain. Just a figure of speech.”

“Call me Jonah, we're going to be cramped enough on this trip without poking rank-elbows in each other's ribs.”

“Jonah. The Yamamoto skims through the system, throwing rocks.” At .999 of C, missiles needed no warheads. The kinetic energies involved made the impacts as destructive as antimatter. “We go in as an off course rock. Course corrections, then on with the stasis field, go ballistic, use the outer layer of the sun for breaking down to orbital speeds.”

Nothing outside its surface could affect the contents of a Slaver field; let the path of the Catskinner stray too far inward and they would spend the rest of the lifespan of the universe at the center of Alpha Centauri's sun, in a single instant of frozen time. For that matter, the stasis field would probably survive the re-contraction of the primal monobloc and its explosion into a new cosmic cycle… he forced his mind away from the prospect.

“And we're putting in a Class-VII computer system.”

Jonah raised a brow. Class-VII systems were consciousness-level; they also went irredeemably insane sometime between six months and a year after activation, as did any artificial entity complex enough to be aware of being aware.

“Our… mission won't take any longer than that, and it's worth it.” A shrug. “Look, why don't we hit a cafeteria and talk some more — really talk. You're going to have briefings running out of every orifice before long, but that isn't the same.”

Jonah sighed, and stopped thinking of ways out of the role for which he had been “volunteered.” This was too big to be dodged, far and away too big. Two stasis fields in the whole Sol system; one guarding United Nations Space Navy H.Q., the other on his ship. His ship, a Dart-Commander like ten thousand or so others, until this week. How many Class-VII computers? Nobody built consciousness-level systems any more, except occasionally for research; it simply wasn't cost-effective. And if you built them to be more intelligent than genius humans they went noncomp so quickly you couldn't prove they had ever been aware. A human-level machine gave you a sentient entity with a six-month lifespan that could do arithmetic in its head. Ordinary computers could do more — and for thinking people were much cheaper. It was a dead-end technology, like direct interfacing between human neural systems and computers. And they had revived it, for a special-purpose mission.

“Shit,” Jonah mumbled, as they came to a lock and reoriented themselves feet-down. There was a gravity warning strobing beside it; they pushed through the airscreen curtain and into the dragging acceleration of a one-G field. The crewfolk about them were mostly flatlander now, relaxed in the murderous weight that crushed their frames lifelong.

“Naacht wh'r?” Ingrid asked. In Wunderlander, but the Sol-Belter did not have to know that bastard offspring of Danish and Plattdeutsch to sense the meaning.

“I just realized… hell, I just realized how important this must all be. If the high command were willing to put that much effort into this, willing to sacrifice half of our most precious military asset, throw in a computer that costs more than this base complete with crew… then they must have put at least equal effort into searching for just the right pilot. There's simply no point in trying to get out of it. Tanj. I need a drink.”

“Take your grass-eater stink out of my air!” Chuut-Riit shrieked. He was standing, looking twice his size as his orange-red pelt bottled out, teeth exposed in what an uninformed human might have mistaken for a grin, naked pink tail lashing. The reference to smell was purely metaphorical, since the conversation was 'cast. Which was as well; he was pouring aggression-pheromones into the air at a rate that would have made a roomful of adult male Kzinti nervous to the point of lost control.

The holo images on the wall before him laid themselves belly-down on the decking of their ship and crinkled their ears, their fur lying flat in propitiation.

“Leave the recordings and flee, devourers of your own kittens!” screamed the Kzinti governor of the Alpha Centauri system. The Hero's Tongue is remarkably rich in expressive insults. “Roll in your own shit and mate with sthondats!” The wall blanked, and a light blinked in one corner as the data was packed through the link into his private files.

Chuut-Riit's fur smoothed as he strode around the great chamber. It stood open to the sky, beneath a near-invisible dome that kept the scant rain of this area off the kudlotlin-hide rugs. They were priceless imports from the home world. The stuffed matched pair of Chunquen on a granite pedestal were souvenirs acquired during the pacification of that world. He looked at them, soothing his eyes with the memory-taste of a successful hunt, then at other mementos. Wild smells drifted in over thin walls that were crystal-enclosed sandwiches of circuitry. In the distance something squalled hungrily. The palace-preserve-fortress of a planetary governor, governor of the richest world to be conquered by Kzinti in living memory. Richest in wealth, richest in honor… if the next attack on the human homeworld was something more than a fifth disaster.

“Secretariat,” he rasped. The wall lit.

A human looked up from a desk, stood and came to attention. “Henrietta,” the Kzin began, “hold my calls for the rest of the day. I've just gotten the final download on the Fourth Fleet fiasco, and I'm a little upset. Run it against my projections, will you?”

“Yes, Chuut-Riit,” he said — no, God devour it, she, I've got to start remembering human females are sentient. At least he could tell them apart without smelling them, now. Even distinguish between individuals of the same subspecies. There are so many types of them!

“I don't think you'll find major discrepancies.”

“That bad?” the human said, with a closed curve of the lips; the locals had learned that barring their teeth at a Kzin was not a good idea. The expression was called a “smile,” Chuut-Riit reminded himself. Betokening amusement, or friendliness, or submission. Which is it feeling? Born after the Conquest Fleet arrived here. Reared from a cub in the governor's palace, superbly efficient… but what does it think inside that ugly little head?

“Worse, the” — he lapsed into the Hero's Tongue, since no human language was sufficient — “couldn't apply the strategy properly in circumstances beyond the calculated range of probable response.”

It was impossible to set out too detailed a plan of campaign, when communication took over four years. His fur began to bristle again, and he controlled his reaction with a monumental effort of will. I need to fight something, he thought.

“Screen out all calls for the next sixteen hours, unless they're Code VI or above.” A thought prompted at him. “Oh, it's your offspring's naming-day next week, isn't it?”

“Yes, Chuut-Riit.” Henrietta had once told him that among pre-Conquest humans it had been a mark of deference to refer to a superior by title, and of familiarity to use names. His tail twitched. Extraordinary. Of course, humans all had names, without having to earn them. In a sense, they're assigned names as we are rank-titles, he thought.

“Well, I'll drop by at the celebration for an hour or so and bring one of my cubs.” That would be safe enough if closely supervised.

“We are honored, Chuut-Riit!” The human bowed, and the Kzin waved a hand to break contact.

“Valuable,” he muttered to himself rising and pacing once more. Humans were the most valuable subject-species the Kzin had yet acquired. Or partially acquired, he reminded himself. Most Kzin nobles on Wunderland had large numbers of human servants and technicians about their estates, but few had gone as far as he in using their administrative talents.

“Fools,” he said in the same undertone; his Kzin peers knew his opinion of them, but it was still inadvisable to get into the habit of saying it aloud. “I am surrounded by fools.” Humans fell into groups naturally; they thought in terms of organization. The remote ancestors of Kzin had hunted in small packs, the pre-humans in much larger ones. Stupidity to deny the evidence of senses and logic, he thought with contempt. These hairless monkeys have talents we lack.

Most refused to admit that, as though it somehow diminished the Hero to grant that a servant could do what the master could not. Idiocy. Chuut-Riit yawned, revealing a pink-red-and-white expanse of ridged pallet, tongue and fangs, his species' equivalent of a dismissive shrug. Is it beneath the Hero to admit that a sword extends his claws, or a computer his mind? With human patience and organizational talent at the service of the Heroes, there was nothing they could not accomplish! Even monkey inquisitiveness was a trait not without merit, irritating though it could be.

He pulled his mind away from vistas of endless victory, a hunt ranging over whole spiral arms; that was a familiar vision, one that had driven him to intrigue and duel for this position. To use a tool effectively, you had to know its balance and heft, its strengths and weaknesses. Humans were more gregarious than Kzinti, more ready to identify with a leader-figure. But to elicit such cooperation, you had to know the symbol-systems that held power over them. I must wear the mask they can see. Besides which, their young are… what is their word? Cute. I will select the cub carefully, one just weaned, and stuff it full of meat first. That will be safest.

Chuut-Riit intended to take his offspring with him to earth, after the conquest, the best of them. Early exposure to humans would give them an intuitive grasp of the animals that he could only simulate through careful study. With a fully-domesticated human species at their disposal, his son's, son's, sons could even aspire to… no, unthinkable. And not necessary to think of, that was generations away.

Besides, it would take a great deal of time to properly tame the humans. They were useful already, but far too wild, too undependable, too various. A millennium of culling might be necessary before they were fully shaped to the purpose.

“… didn't just bull in,” Lieutenant Raines was saying, as she followed the third akvavit with a beer chaser. Jonah sipped more cautiously at his, thinking the asymmetry of nearly pure alcohol and laager was typically Wunderlander. “Only it wasn't caution, the pussies just didn't want to mess the place up and weren't expecting much resistance. Rightly so.”

Jonah restrained himself from patting her hand as she scowled into her beer. It was dim in their nook, and the gravity was Wunderland-standard .61 Earth; the initial refugees from the Alpha Centauri system had been mostly planetsiders, and from the dominant Danish-Dutch-German-Baltic ethnic group. They had grown even more clannish in the generation since, which showed in the tall ceramic steins along the walls, plastic wainscoting that made a valiant attempt to imitate fumed oak, and a human bartender in wooden shoes, lederhosen, and a beard clipped closer on one side than the other.

The drinks slipped up out of the center of the table, of course.

“That was, teufel, three years ago, my time. We'd had some warning, of course, once the UN started mastering what the crew of the Angel's Pencil found on the wreckage of that Kzin ship. Plenty of singleships, and any reaction drive's a weapon; couple of big boost-lasers. But,” a shrug, “you know how it was back then.”

“Before my time, Lieutenant,” Jonah said, then cursed himself as he saw her wince. Raines had been born nearly three quarters of a century ago, even if her private duration included only two and a half decades of it.

“I'm Ingrid, if you're going to be Jonah instead of Captain Matthieson. Time— I keep forgetting, my head remembers but my gut forgets… Well, we just weren't set up to think in terms of war; that was ancient history. We held them off for nearly six months, though. Long enough to refit the three slowships in orbit, and give them emergency boost. I think the pussies didn't catch up and blast us simply because they didn't give a damn; they couldn't decelerate us and get the ships back, so why bother? Arrogant sons of…” another of those broad urchin grins “well, bitches isn't quite appropriate, is it?”

Jonah laughed. “You were in München when the Kzin arrived?”

“No, I'd been studying at the Scholarium there software design philosophy — but I was on sabbatical in Vallburg with two friends of mine, working out some, ha, personal problems.”

The bartender with the unevenly-forked beard was nearly as attenuated as a Belter, but he had the disturbingly mobile ears of a pure-bred Wunderland Herrenmann, and they were pricked forward. Alpha Centauri's only habitable planet has a thin atmosphere; the original settlers have adapted, and keen hearing is common among them. Jonah smiled at the man and stabbed a finger for a privacy screen. It flickered into the air across the outlet of the booth, and the refugee saloonkeeper went back to polishing a mug.

“That'd be, hmmm, Claude Montferrat-Palme and Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann?”

Raines nodded, moodily drawing a design on the tabletop with a forefinger dipped in the dark beer. “Yes… teufel, they're both of them in their fifties now, getting on for middle-aged.” A sigh. “Look… Harold's a, hmmm, hard to explain to a Sol-Belter, or even someone from the Serpent Swarm who hasn't spent a lot of time dirtside. His father was a Herrenmann, one of the Nineteen Families, senior line. His mother wasn't married to him.”

“Oh,” Jonah said, racking his memory. History had never been an interest of his, and his generation had been brought up to the War, anyway. “Problems with wills and inheritances and suchlike?”

“You know what a bastard is?”

“Sure. Someone you don't like, such as for example that flatlander bastard who assigned me to this project.” He raised his stein in salute. “Though I'm fast becoming resigned to it, Ingrid.”

She half-smiled in absent-minded acknowledgment, her mind 4.3 light-years and four decades away. “It means he got an expensive education, a nice little nest-egg settled on him… and that he'd never, never be allowed past the front door of the Yarthkin-Schotmann's family schloss. Lucky to be allowed to use the name. An embarrassment.”

“Might eat at a man,” Jonah said.

“Like a little kzin in the guts. Especially when he grew enough to realize why his father only came for occasional visits; and then that his half-siblings didn't have half his brains or drive and didn't need them either. It drove him, he had to do everything twice as fast and twice as good, take crazy risks… made him a bit of a bastard in the Sol sense of the word, too, spines like a pincodillo, sense of humor that could flay a gruntfish.”

“And Montferrat-Palme?”

“Claude? Now, he was Herrenmann all through; younger son of a younger son, poor as an Amish dirt farmer, and…” A laugh. “You had to meet Claude to understand him. I think he got serious about me mostly because I kept turning him down, it was a new experience and drove him crazy. And Harold he halfway liked, and halfway enjoyed needling.”

Municipal Director of Internal Affairs Claude Montferrat-Palme adjusted his cape and looked up at the luminous letters that floated disembodied ten centimeters from the smooth brown brick of the building in front of him.

Harolds Terran Bar, it read. A World On Its Own. Below, in smaller letters: humans only.

Ah, Harold, he thought. Always the one for a piece of useless melodrama. As if Kzin would be likely to frequent this section of Old München, or wish to enter a human entertainment spot if they did, or could be stopped if by some fluke of probabilities they did end up down here.

His escort stirred, looking around nervously. The Karl-Jorge Avenue was dark, most of its glowstrips long ago stolen or simply spray-painted in the random vandalism that breeds in lives fueled by purposeless anger. It was fairly clean, because the Kzin insisted on that, and the four-story brick buildings were solid enough, because the early settlers had built well. Brick and concrete and cobbled streets glimmered faintly, still damp from the afternoon's rain, loud wailing music echoed from open windows, and there would have been groups of idle-looking youths loitering on the front steps of the tenements, if the car had not had München Polizei plates.

Ba'hai, he thought, mentally snapping his fingers. He was tall, even for a Herrenmann, with one side of his face clean shaven and the other a close-trimmed brown beard cut to a floppish point; the plain blue uniform and circular brimmed cap of the city police emphasized the deep-chested greyhound build. This was a Ba'hai neighborhood.

“You may go,” he said to the guards. “I will call for the car.”

“Sir,” the sergeant said, the guide-cone of her stunner waving about uncertainly. Helmet and nightsight goggles made her eyes unreadable. “'tis iz a rough district.”

“I am aware of that, sergeant. Also that Harold's Place is a known underworld hangout. Assignment to my headquarters squad is a promotion; please do not assume that it entitles you to doubt my judgment.” Or you may find yourself back walking a beat, without such opportunities for income-enhancement, went unspoken between them. He ignored her salute and walked up the two low stairs.

The door recognized him, read retinas and encephalograph patterns, slid open. The coal-black doorman was as tall as the police officer and twice as broad, with highly-illegal impact armor underneath the white coat and bowtie of Harold's Terran Bar. The impassive smoky eyes above the ritually-scarred cheeks gave him a polite once-over, an equally polite and empty bow.

“Pleased to see you here again, Herrenmann Montferrat-Palme,” he said. You grafting ratcat-loving collaborationist son of a bitch, Montferrat added the unspoken portion himself. And I love you too.

Harold's Terran Bar was a historical revival, and therefore less out of place on Wunderland than it would have been in the Sol system. Once through the vestibule's inner bead-curtain doorway Montferrat could see most of the smoke-hazed main room, a raised platform in a C around the sunken dance floor and the long bar. Strictly human service here, which was less of an affectation now than it had been when the place opened, twenty years ago. Machinery was dearer than it had been, and human labor much cheaper, particularly since refugees began pouring into München from a countryside increasingly preempted for Kzin estates. Not to mention those displaced by strip-mining…

“Good evening, Claude.”

He started. It was always disconcerting, how quietly Harold moved. There he was at his elbow now, blue eyes expressionless. Face that should have been ugly, big-nosed with a thick lower lip and drooping eyelids. He was… what, sixty-three now? just going grizzled at the temples, which was an affectation, or a sign that his income didn't stretch to really thorough geriatric treatments. Short, barrel-chested… what sort of genetic mismatch had produced that build from a Herrenmann father and a Belter mother?

“Looking me over for signs of impending dissolution, Claude?” Harold said, steering him toward his usual table and snapping his fingers for a waiter. “It'll be a while yet.”

Perhaps not so long, Montferrat thought, looking at the pouches beneath his eyes. That could be stress… or Harold could be really skimping on the geriatrics. They become more expensive every year, the kzin don't care… There are people dying of old age at seventy, now, and not just Amish. Shut up, Claude, you hypocrite. Nothing you can do about it.

“You will outlast me, old friend.”

“A case of cynical apathy wearing better than cynical corruption?” Harold asked, seating himself across from the police chief.

Montferrat pulled a cigarette case from his jacket's inner pocket and snapped it open with a flick of the wrist. It was plain white gold, from Earth, with a Paris jeweler’s initials inside the frame and a date two centuries old, one of us is few inheritances from his parents… Harold took the proffered cigarette.

“You will join me in a schnapps?” Montferrat said.

“Claude, you've been asking that question for twenty years, and I've been saying no for twenty years. I don't drink with the paying customers.”

Yarthkin leaned back, let smoke trickle through his nostrils. The liquor arrived, and a plateful of grilled things that resembled shrimps about as much as a lemur resembled a man, apart from being dark green and having far too many eyes. “Now, didn't my bribe arrive on time?”

Montferrat winced. “Harold, Harold, will you never learn to phrase these things politely?” He peeled the translucent shell back from one of the grumblies, snapped off the head between thumb and forefinger and dipped it in the sauce. “Exquisite…” he breathed, after the first bite, and chased it down with a swallow of schnapps. “Bribes? Merely a token recompense, when out of the goodness of my heart and in memory of old friendship, I secure licenses, produce permits, contacts with owners of estates and fishing boats—”

“—so you can have a first-rate place to guzzle”

“—I allow this questionable establishment to flourish, risking my position, despite the, shall we say, dubious characters known to frequent it—”

“—because it makes a convenient listening post and you get a lot of, shall we say, lucrative contacts.”

They looked at each other coolly for a moment, and then Montferrat laughed. “Harold, perhaps the real reason I allow this den of iniquity to continue is that you're the only person who still has the audacity to deflate my hypocrisies.”

Yarthkin nodded calmly. “Comes of knowing you when you were an idealistic patriot, Director. Like being in hospital together… Will you be gambling tonight, or did you come to pump me about the rumors?”

“Rumors?” Montferrat said mildly, shelling another grumbly.

“Of another kzin defeat. Two shiploads of our esteemed ratcat masters coming back with their fur singed.”

“For god’s sake!” Montferrat hissed, looking around.

“No bugs,” Yarthkin continued. “Not even by your ambitious assistants. They offered a hefty sweetener, but I wouldn't want to see them in your office. They don't stay bought.”

Montferrat smoothed his mustache. “Well, the kzin do seem to have a rather lax attitude toward security at times,” he said. Mostly, they don't realize how strong the hunting desire to get together and chatter is, he mused.

“Then there's the rumor about a flatlander counterstrike,” Yarthkin continued.

Montferrat raised a brow and cocked his mobile Herrenmann ears forward. “Not becoming a believer in the myth of Liberation, I hope,” he drawled.

Yarthkin waved the hand that held the cigarette, leaving a trail of blue smoke. “I did my bit for liberation. Got left at the altar, as I recall, and took the amnesty.” His face had become even more blank, merely the slightest hint of a sardonic curve to the lips. “Now I'm just an innkeeper. What goes on outside these walls is no business of mine.” A pause. “It is yours, of course, Director. People know the ratcats got their whiskers pasted back, for the fourth time. They're encouraged… also desperate. The kzin will be stepping up the war effort, which means they'll be putting more pressure on us. Not to mention that they're breeding faster than ever.”

Montferrat nodded with a frown. Battle casualties made little difference to a kzin population; their nonsentient females were held in harems by a small minority of males, in any event. Heavy losses meant the lands and mates of the dead passing to the survivors… and more young males thrown out of the nest, looking for lands and a Name of their own. And kzin took up a lot of space; they weighed in at a quarter-ton each, and they were pure carnivores. Nor would they eat synthesized meat except on board a military spaceship. There were still fewer than a hundred thousand in the Wunderland system, and more than twenty times that many humans; it was getting crowded.

“More fighters crowding into München every day,” Yarthkin continued in that carefully neutral tone.

Refugees. München had been a small town within their own lifetimes; the original settlers of Wunderland had been a close-knit coterie of plutocrats, looking for elbow-room. They had allowed only limited industrialization, even in the Serpent Swarm, and very little indeed on the planetary surface. Huge domains staked out by the Nineteen Families and their descendants; later immigrants had fitted into the cracks of the pattern, as tenants or carving out smallholdings on the fringes of the settled zone, many of them were ethnic or religious separatists anyway.

Until the Kzin came. Kzin nobles expected vast territories for their own polygamous households, and naturally seized the best and ready-developed acreages. Some of the human land workers stayed to labor for new masters, but many more were displaced. Or eaten.

One of the first effects of the new ownership had been forced-draft industrialization in München and the other towns; kzin did not live in cities, and cared little for the social consequences. Their planets had always been sparsely settled, and they had developed the gravity polarizer early in their history, hence they mined their asteroid belts but put little industry in space. The refugees flooding in worked in industries that produced war materiel for the kzin fleets, not housing or consumer-goods for human use…

“It must be a bonanza for you, selling exit-permits to the Swarm,” Harold continued. Outside the base asteroid of Tiamat, the Belters were much more loosely controlled than the groundside population. “And exemptions from military call-up.”

Montferrat smiled and leaned back, following the schnapps with laager. “There must be regulations,” he said reasonably. “The Swarm cannot absorb all the would-be immigrants. Nor can Wunderland afford to lose the labor of all who would like to leave. The kzin demand technicians, and we cannot refuse, the burden must be allocated.”

“Nor can you afford to pass up the palm-greasing and the, ach, romantic possibilities—” Yarthkin began.

“Alert! Alert! Emergency broadcast!” The mirror behind the long bar flashed from reflective to broadcast, and the smoky gloom of the bar's main hall erupted in shouted questions and screams.

The strobing pattern of light settled into the civil defense blazon, and the unmistakable precision of an artificial voice. “All civilians are to remain in their residences. Emergency and security personnel to their duty stations, repeat, emergency and security personnel to their—”

A blast of static and white noise loud enough to send hands to ears, before the system's emergency overrides cut in. When reception returned the broadcast was two-dimensional, a space-armored figure reading from a screen prompt over the receiver. The noise in Harold's Terran Bar sank to shocked silence at the sight of the human shape of the combat armor, the blue-and-white UN sigil on its chest.

“—o all citizens of the Alpha Centauri system,” the Terran was saying. In Wunderlander, but with a thick accent that could not handle the gutturals. “Evacuate areas of military or industrial importance immediately. Repeat, immediately. The United Nations Space Command is attacking kzin military and industrial targets in the Alpha Centauri system. Evacuate areas—” The screen split to scroll the same message in English and two more of the planet's principal languages. The door burst open and a squad of München Polizei burst through.

“Scheisse!” Montferrat shouted, rising. He froze as the receiver in his uniform cap began a hissing and snarling override-transmission in the Hero's Tongue. Yarthkin relaxed and smiled as the policeman sprinted for the exit. He cocked one eye towards the ceiling and silently flourished Montferrat's last glass of schnapps before sending it down with a snap of his wrist.

“Weird,” Jonah Matthieson muttered, looking at the redshifted cone of light ahead of them. Better this way. This way he didn't have to think of what they were going to do when they arrived. He had been a singleship pilot before doing his military service. You could do software design anywhere there was a computer system, of course, and miners had a lot of spare time. But his reflexes were a pilot's, and they included a strong inhibition against high-speed intercept trajectories.

This was going to be the highest speed intercept of all time…

The forward end of the pilot's cabin was very simple, a hemisphere of smooth synthetic. For that matter, the rest of the cabin was quite basic as well; two padded crashcouches, which was one more than normal, an autodoc, an autochef, and rather basic sanitary facilities. That left just enough room to move… in zero gravity. Right now they were under one-G acceleration, crushingly uncomfortable. They had been under one-G for weeks, subjective time; the Yamamoto was being run to flatlander specifications.

“Compensate,” Ingrid said. The view swam back, the blue stars ahead and the dim red behind turning to the normal variation of colors. The dual-sun Centauri system was dead “ahead,” looking uncomfortably close. “We're making good time. It took thirty years coming back on the slowboat, but the Yamamoto's going to put us near Wunderland in five. Five objective, that is. Probably right on the heels of the pussy scouts.”

Jonah nodded, looking ahead at the innocuous twinned stars. His hands were on the control-gloves of his couch, but the pressure-sensors and light-fields were off, of course. There had been very little to do in the month-subjective since they left the orbit of Pluto other than accelerated learning with RNA boosters. He could now speak as much of the Hero's Tongue as Ingrid. Enough to understand it, kzin evidently didn't like their slaves to speak much of it; slaves weren't worthy. He could also talk Belter English with the accent of the Serpent Swarm, Wunderland's dominant language, and the five or six other tongues prevalent in the many ethnic enclaves… sometimes he found himself dreaming in Pahlavi or Croat or Amish pletterdeisz. Thank God it wasn't going to be a long trip; with the gravity polarizer and the big orbital lasers to push them up to ramscoop speeds, and no limit on the acceleration their compensators could handle…

We must be at a high fraction of the speed of a photon by now, he thought. Speeds only robot ships had achieved before, with experimental fields supposedly keeping the killing torrent of secondary radiation out…

“Tell me some more about Wunderland,” he said. Neither of them were fidgeting, Belters didn't; this sort of cramped environment had been normal for their people since the settlement of the Sol-system Belt three centuries before. It was the thought of how they were going to stop that had his nerves twisting.

“I've already briefed you twenty times,” she replied, with something of a snap in her tone. Military formality wore thin pretty quickly in close quarters like this. “All the first-hand stuff is fifty-six years out of date, and the nine-year-old material's all in the computer if you really want it. You're just bored.”

No, I'm just scared shitless. “Well, talking would be better than nothing. Spending a month strapped to this thing has been even more monotonous than being a rockjack. You were right, I'm bored.”

“And scared.”

He looked around. She was lying with her hands behind her head, grinning at him.

“Okay, I'm scared, too. Among other reasons because we will start this mission utterly dependent on the intervention of outside forces; the off switch is exterior to the surface of the effect.” It had to be; time did not pass inside a stasis field.

“The designers were pretty sure it'd work.”

“I'm sure of only two things, Jonah.”

“Which are?”

“Well, the first one is that the designers aren't going to be diving into the photosphere of a sun at .99 lights.”

“Oh.” That had occurred to him, too. On the other hand, it really was easier to be objective when your life wasn't on the line… and in any case, it would be quick. “What's the other thing?”

Her smile grew wider, and she undid the collar catch of her uniform. “Even if it has to be in a gravity field, there's one thing I want to experience again before possible death.”

Much later, they commanded the front screen to stop mimicking a control board. Now the upper half was an unmodified view of the Alpha Centauri system. The lower was a battle-schematic, dots and graphs and probability-curves like bundles of fuzzy sticks.

The Yamamoto was going to cross the disk of the Wunderland system in subjective minutes, mere hours even by outside clocks. With her ramscoop fields spreading a corona around her deadly to any life form with a nervous system, and the fusion flare a sword behind her half a parsec long; nothing could stop her and only beam-weapons stood a chance of catching her, even messages were going to take prodigies of computing power to unscramble. Her own weapons were quite simple; quarter-ton iron eggs. When they intercepted their targets at .99 C, the results would be in the gigaton-yield range.

Jonah's teeth skinned back from his teeth and the hair struggled to raise itself along his spine. Plains ape reflex, he thought, smelling the rank odor of fight-flight sweat trickling down his flanks. Your genes think you're about to tackle a Cape buffalo with a thighbone club. His fingers pressed the inside of the chair seat in a complex pattern.

“Responding,” said the computer in its usual husky contralto.

Was it imagination that there was already more inflection in its voice? And what did that really signify? Consciousness in a computer was not human consciousness, even though memory and drives were designed by humans… it possessed free will, unless he or Ingrid used the override keys, and unless the high command had left sleeper drives. Perhaps not so much free will; a computer would see the path most likely to succeed and follow it. Still, he supposed, he did the same, usually.

How would it be to know that you were a made thing, and doomed to encysted madness in six months or less?

Nobody had ever been able to learn why. He had speculated to himself that it was a matter of time; to a consciousness that could think in nanoseconds, that could govern its own sensory input, what would be the point of remaining linked to a refractory cosmos? It could make its own universe, and have it last forever in a few milliseconds. Perhaps that was why humans who linked directly to a computer system of any size went irretrievably catatonic as well…

“Detection. Neutronic and electromagnetic-range sensors.” The ship's system was linked to the hugely powerful but sub-conscious level machines of the Yamamoto. “Point sources.”

Rubies sprang out across the battle map, moving as he watched, swelling up on either side and pivoting in relation to each other. The fire-bright point source of Alpha Centauri in the upper screen became a perceptible and growing disk. Jonah's skin crawled at the sight.

This was like ancient history, air and sea battles out of Earth's past. He was used to maneuvers that lasted hours or days, ships and fleets matching relative velocities while the planets moved slowly and the sun might as well be a fixed point at the center of the universe… Perhaps when gravity polarizers were small and cheap enough to fit in Dart-class boats it would all be like this.

“The pussies have the system pretty well covered,” he said.

“And the Swarm's Belters,” Ingrid replied. Jonah turned his head, slowly, at the sound of her voice. Shocked, he saw a glistening in her eyes. “Home…” she whispered. Then more decisively: “Identification. Human-range sensors. Discrete.”

Half the rubies flickered for a few seconds. Ingrid continued to Jonah: “This is a messy system; more of its mass is in asteroids and assorted junk than yours. Belters use more deep-radar and don't rely on telescopes as much. The pussies couldn't have changed that. They'd cripple the Swarm's economy and destroy its value.” Slowly. “That's the big station on Tiamat. They've got a garrison there, it's a major shipbuilding center, was even,” she swallowed, “fifty years ago. Those others are bubble-worlds… More detectors on Wunderland than there used to be, and in close orbit. At the poles, and that looks like a military-geosynchronous setup.”

Jonah thought briefly what it would be like to return to the Sol-Belt after fifty years. Nearly a third of the average lifetime, longer than he had been alive — if he ever got home. The Yamamoto could expect to see Sol again in twenty years objective, allowing time to pass through the Alpha Centauri system, decelerate and work back up to a respectable Tau value. The plan-in-theory was for him and Ingrid to accomplish their mission, rejoin the Catskinner, boost her out in the direction of Sol, turn on the stasis field again — and wait to be picked up by UNSN craft. About as likely as getting back by putting our heads between our knees and spitting hard.

“Ships,” the computer said in its dispassionate tone. “Movement. Status, probable class and dispersal cones.”

Color-coded lines blinked over the tactical map. Columns of print scrolled down one margin: coded velocities and key-data. Hypnotic training triggered bursts into their minds, crystalline shards of fact, faster than conscious recall. Jonah whistled.

“Loaded for bandersnatch,” he said. There were a lot of warships spraying out from bases and holding orbits, and that was not counting those too small for the Yamamoto's detection systems; their own speed would be degrading signal drastically. Between the ramscoop fields, their velocity, and normal shielding there was very little that could touch them, but the kzin were certainly going to try.

“Aggressive bastards,” he said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the tactical display. It took courage, individually and on the part of their commander to put themselves in the way of the Yamamoto. Nobody had used a ramscoop ship like this before; the kzin had never developed a Bussard-type drive, they had had the gravity polarizer for a long time, and it had aborted work on reaction jet systems. But they must have made staff studies, and they would know what they were facing. Which was something more in the nature of a large-scale cosmic event than a ship. Mass increases with velocity: by now moving only fractionally slower than a laser beam, the Yamamoto had the effective bulk of a medium-sized moon.

That reminded him of what the Catskinner would be doing shortly, and the Dart did not have anything like the scale of protection the ramscoop warship did. Even a micrometeorite… Alpha Centauri was a black disk edged by fire in the upper half of the screen.

“Projectiles away,” the computer said. Nothing physical, but an inverted cone of trajectories splayed out from the path of the Yamamoto. Highly-polished chrome-tungsten-steel alloy slugs, that had spent the trip from Sol riding grapnel-fields in the Yamamoto's wake. Wildly varying albedo, from fully-stealthed to deliberately reflective; the Catskinner was going to be rather conspicuous when the Slaver stasis field's impenetrable surface went on. Now the warship's magnetics were twitching the slugs out in sprays and clusters, at velocities that would send them across the Wunderland system in mere hours. It would take the firepower of a heavy cruiser to significantly damage one, and there were a lot of slugs. Iron was cheap, and the Yamamoto grossly overpowered.

“You know, we ought to have done this before,” Jonah said. The sun-disk filled the upper screen, then snapped down several sizes as the computer reduced the field. A sphere, floating in the wild arching discharges and coronas of a G-type sun. “We could have used ramrobots. Or the pussies could have copied our designs and done it to us.”

“Nope,” Ingrid said. She coughed, and he wondered if her eyes were locking on the sphere again as it clicked down to a size that would fit the upper screen. “Ramscoop fields. Think about it.”

“Oh.” When you put it that way, he could think of about a half-dozen ways to destabilize one; drop, oh, ultra-compressed radon into it. Countermeasures… luckily, nothing the kzin were likely to have right on hand.

“For that matter,” she continued, “throwing relativistic weapons around inside a solar system is a bad idea. If you want to keep it.”

“Impact,” the computer said helpfully. An asteroid winked, the tactical screen's way of showing an expanding sphere of plasma. Nickel-iron, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon-compounds, some of the latter kzin and humans and children and their pet budgies.

“You have to aim at stationary targets,” Ingrid was saying. “The very things that war is supposed to be about seizing. Blowing them up is as insane as fighting a planetside war with fusion weapons and no effective defense. Only possible once.”

“Once would be enough, if we knew where the kzin home system was.” For a vengeful moment he imagined robot ships fiddling into a sun from infinite distances, scores of lightyears of acceleration at hundreds of G's, their own masses raised to near-stellar proportions. “No. Then again, no.”

“I’m glad you said that,” Ingrid replied. Softly: “I wonder what it's like, for them out there.”

“Interesting,” Jonah said tightly. “At the very least, interesting.”

“Please, keep calm,” Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, for the fourth time. “For Finagle's sake, sit down and shut up!”

This one seemed to sink in, or perhaps the remaining patrons were getting tired of running around in circles and shouting. The staff were all at their posts, or preventing the paying customers from hitting each other or breaking anything expensive. Several of them had police-model stunners under their dinner jackets, like his; hideously illegal, hence quite difficult to square. Not through Claude — he was quite conscientious about avoiding things that would seriously annoy the ratcats — but there were plenty lower down the totem pole who lacked his gentlemanly sense of their own long-term interests.

Everyone was watching the screen behind the bar again; the UNSN announcement was off the air, but the München news service was slapping in random readouts from all over the planet. For once the collaborationist government was too busy to follow their natural instincts and keep everyone in the dark, and the kzin had never given much of a damn, the only thing they cared about was behavior. Propaganda be damned.

The flatlander warship was stiff beaded in system; from the look of things they were going to use the sun for a whip-round. He could feel rusty spaceman's reflexes creaking into action. That was a perfectly sensible ploy; ramscoop ships were not easy to turn. Even at relativistic speeds you couldn't use the interstellar medium to bank. Turning meant applying lateral thrust; it would be easier to decelerate, turn and work back up to high Tau — unless you could use a gravitational sling, like a kid on roller-skates going hell-for-leather down a street and then slapping a hand on a lamppost.

He raised his glass to the sometime mirror behind the bar. It was showing a scene from the south polar zone with its abundance of ratcat installations; kzin were stuck with Wunderland's light gravity, but they preferred a cooler, drier climate than humans. The first impact had looked like a line of light drawn down from heaven to earth, and the shockwave flipped the robot camera into a spin that had probably ended on hard, cold ground.

Yarthkin grinned, and snapped his fingers for the waitress. He ordered coffee, black, and a sandwich.

“Heavy on the mustard, sweetheart,” he told the waitress. He loosened his tie and watched flickershots of boiling dust-clouds crawling with networks of purple-white lightning. Closer, into canyons of night seething up out of red-shot blackness, that must be molten rock…

“Sam.” The man at the musicomp looked up from trailing his fingers across the keyboard. It was configured for piano tonight — an archaism, like the whole setup. Popular, as more and more fled in fantasy what could not be avoided in reality, back into a history that was at least human. Of course, Wunderlanders were prone to that, the planet had been a patchwork of refugees from an increasingly homogenized and technophile Earth anyway. I've spent a generation cashing in on a nostalgia boom, Yarthkin thought wryly. Was that because I had foresight, or was I one of the first victim?

“Sir?” Sam was Krio, like McAndrews the doorman, although he had never gone the whole route and taken warrior scars. Many of the descendants of the refugees from Sierra Leone were traditionalists to a fault. Just as tough in a fight, though. He'd been enrolled in the Sensor-Effector program at the Scholarium, been a gunner with Yarthkin in the brief war in space, and they had been together in the hills. And he had come along when Yarthkin took the amnesty, too. Even more of a wizard with the keys than he had been with a jazzer or a strakkaker or a ratchet knife.

“Play something appropriate, Sam. Stormy Weather.”

The musician's face lit with a vast white grin, and he launched into the ancient tune with a will, even singing his own version translated into Wunderlander. Yarthkin murmured into his lapel to turn down the hysterical commentary from the screen, still babbling about dastardly attacks and massive casualties.

It took a man back. Humans were dying out there, but so were ratcats… Here's looking at you, he thought to the hypothetical crew of the Yamamoto. Possibly nothing more than A.I. and sensor-effector mechanisms, but he doubted it.

“Stormy weather for sure,” he said softly to himself. Megatons of dust and water vapor were being pumped into the atmosphere. “Bad for the crops.” Though there would be a harvest from this, yes indeed. I could have been on that ship, he thought to himself, with a sudden flare of murderous anger. I was good enough. There are probably Wunderlanders aboard her; those slowships got through. If I hadn't been left sucking vacuum at the airlock, it could have been me out there!

“But not Ingrid,” he whispered to himself. “The bitch wouldn't have the guts.” Sam was looking at him; it had been a long time since the memory of the last days came back. With a practiced effort of will he shoved it deeper below the threshold of consciousness and produced the same mocking smile with which he had faced the world for most of his adult life.

“I wonder how our esteemed ratcat masters are taking it,” he said. “Been a while since the ones here've had to lap out of the same saucer as us lowlife monkey-boys. I'd like to see it, I truly would.”

“… estimate probability of successful interception at less than one-fifth,” the figure on the screen said. “Vengeance Fang and Rampant Slayer do not respond to signals; Lurker at Waterholes continues to accelerate at right angles to the elliptic. We must assume they were struck by the ramscoop fields.”

The governor watched closely; the slight bristle of whiskers and rapid open-shut flare of wet black nostrils was a sign of intense frustration.

“You have leapt well, Traat-Admiral,” Chuut-Riit said formally. “Break off pursuit.” A good tactician, Traat-Admiral; if he had come from a better family, he would have a double name by now. And he would have a double name, when Earth was conquered, a name and vast wealth. One percent of all the product of the new conquest, since he was to be in supreme military command of the Fifth Fleet. That would make him founder of a Noble Line, his bones in a worship shrine for a thousand generations. Chuut-Riit had hinted that he would send several of his daughters to the admiral's harem, letting him mingle his blood with that of the Patriarch.

“Chuut-Riit, are we to let the… the… omnivores escape unscathed?” The admiral's ears were quivering.

A rumble came from the space-armored figures that bulked in the dim orange light behind the flotilla commandant. Good, the planetary governor thought. They are not daunted.

“Your bloodlust is commendable, Traat-Admiral, but the fact remains that the human ship is traveling at velocities which render it… it is at a different point on the energy gradient, Traat-Admiral.”

“We can pursue as it leaves the system!”

“In ships designed to travel at .8 lightspeed? From behind? Remember the Human Lesson. That is a very effective reaction drive they are using.” A deep ticking sound came from his throat and Traat-Admiral's ears laid back instinctively. The thought of trying to maneuver past that planetary length sword of nuclear fire…

Chuut-Riit paused to let the thought sink home before continuing: “This has been a startling tactic. We assumed that possession of the gravity polarizer would lead the humans to neglect reaction drives, as we had done, hrrrearow echssseee nwaroweeaatrurrre, this-does-not-follow. We must prepare countermeasures, investigate the possibility of ramscoop interstellar missiles… at least they did not strike at this system's sun, or drop a really large mass into the planetary gravity well.”

The fur of the kzin on the battlewagon's bridge laid flat, sculpting the bone-and-muscle planes of their faces.

“Indeed, Chuut-Riit,” Traat-Admiral said fervently.

“It was only surprise that made the tactic so effective. Counters come readily to mind: a series of polarizer-driven missiles, with laser-cannon boost, deployed ready to destabilize ramscoop fields. In any case, you are ordered to break off action, assist with emergency efforts, detach two units with interstellar capacity to shadow the intruder until it leaves the immediate vicinity. Waste no more Heroes in futility; instead, we must repair the damage, redouble our preparations for the next attack on Sol.”

“As you command, Chuut-Riit, although it shaves my mane to let the leaf-eating monkeys escape, when the Fifth Fleet is so near completion.”

The governor rose, letting his weight forward on hands whose claws slid free. He restrained any further display of impatience. I must teach him to think. To learn to think correctly he must be allowed to make errors.

“Its departure has already been delayed. Will losing further units in fruitless pursuit speed the repairs and modifications which must be made? Attend to your orders!”

“At once, Chuut-Riit!”

The governor held himself impressively immobile until the screen blanked. Then he turned and leaped with a tearing shriek over the nearest wall, out into the unnatural storm and darkness. A half-hour later he returned, meditatively picking bits of hide and bone from between his teeth with a thumb-claw. His pelt was plastered flat with mud, leaves, and blood, and a thorned branch had cut a bleeding trough across his sloping forehead. The screens were still flicking between various disasters, each one worse than the last.

“Any emergency calls?” he asked mildly.

“None at the priority levels you established,” the computer replied.

“Murmeroumph,” he said, opening his mouth wide into the killing gape to get at an irritating fragment between two of the back shearing teeth. “Staff.”

One wall turned to the ordered bustle of the household's management central. “Ah, Henrietta,” he said in Wunderlander. “You have that preliminary summary ready?”

The human swallowed and averted her eyes from the bits of something that the kzin was flicking from his fangs and muzzle. The others behind her were looking drawn and tense as well, but displayed no signs of panic. If I could recognize such signs, the kzin thought. They panic differently. A Hero overcome with terror either fled, striking out at anything in his path, or went into mindless berserker frenzy.

Berserker, he mused thoughtfully. The concept was fascinating; reading of it had convinced him that kzin and human kind were enough alike to cooperate effectively.

“Yes, Chuut-Riit,” she was saying. “Installations Seven, Three, and Twelve in the north polar zone have been effectively destroyed, loss of industrial function in the 75-80% range. Over 90% at Six, the main fusion generator destabilized in the pulse from a near-miss.” Ionization effects had been quite spectacular. “Casualties in the range of five thousand Heroes, thirty thousand humans. Four major orbital facilities hit, but there was less collateral damage there, of course, and more near-misses.” No air to transmit blast in space. “Reports from the asteroid belt still coming in.”

“Merrower,” he said, meditatively. Kzin government was heavily decentralized; the average Hero did not make a good bureaucrat, that was work for slaves and computers. A governor was expected to confine himself to policy decisions. Still… “Have my personal spaceship prepared for lift, I will be doing a tour.”

Henrietta hesitated. “Ah, noble Chuut-Riit, the feral humans will be active, with defense functions thrown out of order.”

She was far too experienced to mistake Chuut-Riit's expression for a smile.

“Markham and his gang? I hope they do, Henrietta, I sincerely hope they do.” He relaxed. “I'll view the reports from here. Send in the groomers, my pelt must be fit to be seen.” A pause. “And replacements for one of the bull buffaloes in the holding pen.”

The kzin threw himself down on the pillow behind his desk, massive head propped with its chin on the stone surface of the workspace. Grooming would help him think, humans were so good at grooming… and blowdryers, blowdryers alone were worth the trouble of conquering them.

“Prepare for separation,” the computer said. The upper field of the Catskinner screen was a crawling slow-motion curve of orange and yellow and darker spots; the battle schematic showed the last few slugs dropping away from the Yamamoto, using the gravity of the sun to whip around and curve out toward targets in a different quarter of the elliptic plane. More than a few were deliberately misaimed, headed for catastrophic destruction in Alpha Centauri's photosphere as camouflage.

It can't be getting hotter, he thought.

“Gottdamn, it's hot,” Ingrid said. “I'm swine sweating.”

Thanks, he thought, refraining from speaking aloud with a savage effort. “Purely psychosomatic,” he grated.

“There's one thing I regret,” Ingrid continued.

“What's that?”

“That we're not going to be able to see what happens when the Catskinner and those slugs make a high-Tau transit of the sun's outer envelope,” she said.

Jonah felt a smile crease the rigid sweat-slick muscles of his face. The consequences had been extrapolated, but only roughly. At the very least, there would be solar-flare effects like nothing this system had ever witnessed before, enough to foul up every receptor pointed this way. “It would be interesting, at that.”

“Prepare for separation,” the computer continued. “Five seconds and counting.”

One. Ingrid had crossed herself just before the field went on. Astonishing. There were worse people to be crammed into a Dart with for a month, even among the more interesting half of the human race.

Two. They were probably going to be closer to an active star than any other human beings had ever been and survived to tell the tale. Provided they survived, of course.

Three. His grandparents had considered emigrating to the Wunderland system; he remembered them complaining about how the Belt had been then, everything regulated and taxed to death, and psychists hovering to re-sanitize your mind as soon as you came in from a prospecting trip. If they'd done it, he might have ended up as a conscript technician with the Fourth Fleet.

Four. Or a guerrilla, the prisoners had mentioned activity by “feral humans.” Jonah barred his teeth in an expression a kzin would have had no trouble at all understanding. I intend to remain very feral indeed. The kzin may have done us a favor; we were well on the way to turning ourselves into sheep when they arrived. If I'm going to be a monkey, I'll be a big, mean baboon, by choice.

Five. Ingrid was right, it was a pity they wouldn't be able to see—

“Greow-Captain, there is an anomaly in the last projectile!”

“They are all anomalies, Sensor Operator!” The commander did not move his eyes from the schematic before his face, but his tone held conviction that the humans had used irritatingly nonstandard weapons solely to annoy and humiliate him. Behind his back, the other two kzin exchanged glances and moved expressive ears.

The Slasher-class armed scout held three crewkzin in its delta-shaped control chamber, the commander forward and the Sensor and Weapons Operators behind him to either side; three small screens instead of the single larger divisible one a human boat of the same size would have had, and many more manually activated controls. Kzin had broader-range senses than humans, faster reflexes, and they trusted cybernetic systems rather less. They had also had gravity control almost from the beginning of spaceflight; a failure serious enough to immobilize the crew usually destroyed the vessel.

“Simply tell me,” the kzin commander said, “if our particle-beam is driving it down.” The cooling system was whining audibly as it pumped energy into its central tank of degenerate matter, and still the cabin was furnace hot and dry, full of the wild odors of fear and blood that the habitation-system poured out in combat conditions. The ship shuddered and banged as it plunged in a curve that was not quite suicidally close to the outer envelope of the sun.

Before Greow-Captain a stepped-down image showed the darkened curve of the gas envelope, and the gouting coriolis-driven plumes as the human ship's projectiles ploughed their way through plasma. Shocks of discharge arched between them as they drew away from the kzin craft above, away from the beams that sought to tumble them down into denser layers where even their velocity would not protect them. Or at least throw them enough off course that they would recede harmlessly into interstellar space. The light from the holo-screen crawled in iridescent streamers across the flared scarlet synthetic of the kzin's helmet and the huge lambent eyes; the whole corona of Alpha Centauri was writhing, flowers of nuclear fire, a thunder of forces beyond the understanding of human — or kzinkind.

The two Operators were uneasily conscious that Greow-Captain felt neither awe nor the slightest hint of fear. Not because he was more than normally courageous for a young male kzin, but because he was utterly indifferent to everything but how this would look on his record. Another glance went between them; younger sons of nobles were notoriously anxious to earn full Names at record ages, and Greow-Captain had complained long and bitterly when their squadron was not assigned to the Fourth Fleet. He was so intent on looking good that operational efficiency might suffer.

They knew better than to complain openly, of course. Whatever the state of his wits, there was nothing wrong with Greow-Captain's reflexes, and he already had an imposing collection of kzin-ear dueling trophies.

“Greow-Captain, the anomaly is greater than a variance in reflectivity,” the Sensor Operator yowled. Half his instruments were useless in the flux of energetic particles that were sheeting off the Slasher's screens. He hoped they were being deflected; as a lowly Sensor Operator he had not had a chance to breed. Not so much as a sniff of kzinrett fur since they carried him mewling from the teats of his mother to the training crèche. “The projectile is not absorbing the quanta of our beam as the previous one did, nor is its surface ablating. And its trajectory is incompatible with the shape of the others; this is larger, less dense, and moving…” — a pause of less than a second to query the computer—“… moving as if its outer shell were absolutely frictionless and reflective, Greow-Captain. Should this not be reported?”

Reporting would mean retreat, out to where a message-maser could punch through the chaotic broad-spectrum noise of an injured star's bellow.

“Do my Heroes refuse to follow into danger?” Greow-Captain snarled.

“Lead us, Greow-Captain!” Put that way, they had no choice; which was why a sensible officer would never have put it that way. Both Operators silently cursed the better diet and personal-combat training available to offspring of a noble's household. It had been a long time since kzin had met an enemy capable of exercising greater selective pressure than their own social system.

“Weapons Operator, shift your aim to the region of compressed gasses directly ahead of our target, all energy weapons. I am taking us down and accelerating past redline.” With a little luck, he could ignite the superheated and compressed monatomic hydrogen directly ahead of the projectile, and let the multimegaton explosion flip it up or down off the ballistic trajectory the humans had launched it on.

Muffled howls and spitting sounds came from the workstations behind him; the thin black lips wrinkled back more fully from his fangs, and slender lines of saliva drooled down past the open necking of his suit. Warren-dwellers, he thought, as the Slasher lurched and swooped.

His hands darted over the controls, prompting the machinery that was throwing it about at hundreds of accelerations. Vatach hunters. The little quasi-rodents were all lower-caste kzin could get in the way of live meat. Although the anomaly was interesting, and he would report noticing it to Khurut-Squadron Captain. I will show them how a true hunter—

The input from the kzin boat's weapons was barely a fraction of the kinetic energy the Catskinner was shedding into the gasses that slowed it, but that was just enough. Enough to set off chain-reaction fusion in a sizable volume around the invulnerably-protected human vessel. The kzin craft was far enough away for the wave-front to arrive before the killing blow:

“—shield overload, loss of directional hhnrrreaw—”

The Sensor Operator shrieked and burned as induction-arcs crashed through his position. Weapons Operator was screaming the hiss of a nursing kitten as his claws slashed at the useless controls.

Greow-Captain's last fractional second was spent in a cry as well, but his was of pure rage. The Slasher's fusion-bottle destabilized at almost the same nanosecond as her shields went down and the gravity control vanished; an imperceptible instant later only a mass-spectroscope could have told the location as atoms of carbon and iron scattered through the hot plasma of the inner solar wind.

“Shit,” Jonah said, with quiet conviction. “Report. And stabilize that spin.” The streaking pinwheel in the exterior-view screen slowed and halted, but the control surface beside it continued to show the Catskinner twirling end-over-end at a rate that would have pasted them both as a thin reddish film over the interior without the compensation fields.

The screen split down the middle as Ingrid began establishing their possible paths.

“We are,” the computer said, “traveling at twice our velocity at switch off, and on a path twenty-five degrees further to the solar north.” A pause. “We are still, you will note, in the plane of the elliptic.”

“Thank Finagle for small favors,” Jonah muttered, working his hands in the control gloves. The Catskinner was running on her accumulators, the fusion reactor, and its so-detectable neutrino flux shut down.

“Jonah,” Ingrid said. “Take a look.” A corner of the screen lit, showing the surface of the sun and a gigantic pillar of flare reaching out in their wake like the tongue of a hungry fire-elemental. “The pussies are burning up the communications spectra, yowling about losing scoutboats. They had them down low and dirty, trying to throw the slugs that went into the photosphere with us off course.”

“Lovely,” the man muttered. So much for quietly matching velocities with Wunderland while the commnet is still down. To the computer: “What's ahead of us?”

“For approximately twenty-three point six lightyears, nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Hard vacuum, micrometeorites, interstellar dust, possible spacecraft, bodies too small or nonradiating to be detected from our position, superstrings, shadowmatter—”

“Shut up!” he snarled. “Can we brake?”

“Yes. Unfortunately, this will require several hours of thrust and exhaust our onboard fuel reserves.”

“And put up a fucking great sign, 'Hurrah, we're back' for every pussy in the system,” he grated. Ingrid touched him on the arm.

“Wait, I have an idea… is there anything substantial in our way, that we could reach with less of a burn?”

“Several asteroids, Lieutenant Raines. Uninhabited.”

“What's the status of our stasis-controller?”

A pause. “Still… I must confess, I am surprised.” The computer sounded surprised that it could be. “Still functional, lieutenant Raines.”

Jonah winced. “Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?” he said plaintively. “Another collision?”

Ingrid shrugged. “Right now, it'll be less noticeable than a long burn. Computer, will it work?”

“97% chance of achieving a stable Swarm orbit. The risk of emitting infrared and visible-light signals is unquantifiable. The field switch will probably continue to function, Lieutenant Raines.”

“It should, it's covered in neutronium.” She turned her head to Jonah. “Well?”

He sighed. “Offhand, I can't think of a better solution. When you can't think of a better solution than a high-speed collision with a rock, something's wrong with your thinking, but I can't think of what would be better to think… What do you think?”

“That an unshielded collision with a rock might be better than another month imprisoned with your sense of humor… Got, all those fish puns…”

“Computer, prepare for minimal burn. Any distinguishing characteristics of those rocks?”

“One largely silicate, one 83% nickel-iron with traces of—”

“Spare me. The nickel-iron, it's denser and less likely to break up. Prepare for minimal burn.”

“I have so prepared, on the orders of Lieutenant Raines.”

Jonah opened his mouth, then frowned. “Wait a minute. Why is it always Lieutenant Raines? You're a damned sight more respectful of her.”

Ingrid buffed her fingernails. “While you were briefing up on Wunderland and the Swarm… I was helping the team that programmed our tin friend.”

“Are you sure?”

The radar operator held her temper in check with an effort. She had not been part of the Nietzsche's crew long, but more than long enough to learn that you did not backtalk Herrenmann Ulf Reichstein-Markham. Bastard's as arrogant as a kzin, she thought resentfully.

“Yes, sir. It's definitely heading our way since that microburn. Overpowered thruster, usual spectrum, and unless it's unmanned they have a gravity polarizer. 200 G's, they pulled.”

The guerrilla commander nodded thoughtfully. “Then it is either kzin, which is unlikely in the extreme since they do not use reaction drives on any of their standard vessels, or —”

“And, sir, it's cool. Hardly radiating at all, when the fusion plant's off. If we weren't close and didn't know where to look… granted this isn't a military sensor, but I doubt the ratcats have seen him.”

Markham's long face drew into an expression of disapproval. “They are called kzin, soldier. I will tolerate no vulgarities in my command.”

Bastard. “Yessir.”

The man was tugging at his asymmetric beard. “Evacuate the asteroid. It will be interesting to see how they decelerate, perhaps some gravitic effect… And even more interesting to find out what those fat cowards in the Sol system think they are doing.”

“Prepare for stasis,” the computer said.

“How?” Ingrid and Jonah asked in unison. The rock came closer, tumbling, half a kilometer on a side, falling forever in a slow silent spiral.

Closer…

“Interesting,” the computer said. “There is a ship adjacent.”

“What?” Jonah said. His fingers slid into the control gloves like snakes fleeing a mongoose, then froze. It was too late; they were committed. “Very well stealthed.” A pause, and the asteroid grew in the wall before them, filling it from end to end.

Tin-brained idiot's a sadist, Jonah thought.

“And the asteroid is an artifact. Well hidden as well, but at this range my semi-passive systems can pick up a tunnel complex and shut-down power system. Life support on maintenance. Twelve seconds to impact.”

“Is anybody there?” Jonah barked.

“Negative, Jonah. The ship is occupied; I scan twinned fusion drives, and hull-mounted weaponry. Concealed as part of the grappling apparatus. X-ray lasers, possible railguns. Two of the cargo bays have dropslots that would be of appropriate size for kzin light seeker missiles. Eight seconds to impact.”

“Put us into combat mode,” the Sol-Belter snapped. “Prepare for emergency stabilization as soon as the stasis field is off. Warm for boost. Ingrid, if we're going to talk you'll probably be better able to convince them of our bona fides.”

The ripping-cloth sound of the gravity polarizer hummed louder and louder, and there was a wobble felt more as a subliminal tugging at the inner ear as the system strained to stop a spin as rapid as a gyroscope's. The asteroid was fragments glowing a dull orange-red streaked with dark slag, receding; the Catskinner was backing under twenty G's, her laser-pods starfishing out and railguns humming with maximum charge.

“Alive again,” Jonah breathed, feeling the response under his fingertips. The wall ahead had divided into a dozen panels, schematics of information, stresses, possibilities; the central was the exterior view. “Tightbeam signal, identify yourselves.”

“Sent. Receiving signal, also tightbeam.” A pause. “Obsolete hailing pattern. Requesting identification.”

“Request video, same pattern.”

The screen flickered twice, and an off right panel lit with a furious bearded face. Tightly contained fury, in a face no older than his own, less than thirty. Beard close-shaven on one side, pointed on the right. Yellow-blond and wiry, like the close-cropped matt on the narrow skull; pale narrow eyes, mobile ears, long-nosed with a prominent boney chin beneath the carefully cultivated goatee. Behind him a control chamber that was like the Belter museum back at Ceres, an early-model independent miner. But modified, crammed with jury-rigged systems of which many were marked in the squiggles-and-angles kzin script; crammed with people as well, some of them in armored spacesuits. An improvised warship, then. Most of the crew were in neatly tailored gray skinsuits, with a design of a phoenix on their chests.

“Explain yourselves,” the man said, with a slight guttural overtone to his Belter-English, enough to mark him as one born speaking Wunderlander.

“UNSN Catskinner, Captain Jonah Matthieson commanding, Lieutenant Raines as second. Presently,” he added dryly, “on detached duty. As representative of the human armed forces, I require your cooperation.”

“Cooperation!” That was one of the spacesuited figures behind the Wunderlander. A tall man with hair cut in the Belter crest, and adorned with small silver bells. “You fucker, you just missiled my bloody base and a year's takings!”

“We didn't missile it, we just rammed into it,” Jonah said. “Takings? What are these people, pirates?”

“Calm yourzelf, McAllistaire,” the Wunderlander said. His eyes had narrowed slightly at the Sol-Belter's words, and his ears cocked forward. “Permit selfintroduction, Haupmann Matthieson. Commandant Ulf Reichstein-Markham, at your zerfice. Commandant in the Free Wunderland navy, zat is. My, ahh, coworker here is an independent entrepreneur who iss pleazed to cooperate wit' the Naval forces.”

“Goddam you, Markham, that was a year's profit, yours and mine both. Shop the bastard to the ratcats, now. We could get a pardon out of it, easy. Hell, you could get that piece of dirt back on Wunderland you're always on about.”

The self-proclaimed commandant held up a hand palm-forward to Jonah and turned to speak to the owner of the ex-asteroid. “You try my patience, McAllistaire. Zilence.”

“Silence yourself, dirtsider. I—”

“Am now dispensable.” Markham's finger tapped the console. Stunners hummed in the guerrilla ship, and the figures not in gray crumpled.

The commandant turned to a figure offsereen. “Strip zem of all useful equipment and space zem,” he said casually. Turning to the screen again, with a slight smile. “It is true, you half cost us valuable materiel… you will understand, a clandestine war requires unorthodox measures, Captain. Ve are forced sometimes to requisition goods, as the Free Wunderland government cannot levy ordinary taxes, and it is necessary to exchange these for vital supplies vit t'ose not of our cause.” A more genuine smile. “As an officer ant a chentelman, you vill appreciate the relief of no lonker having to deal vit this schweinerie.”

Ingrid spoke softly to the computer, and another portion of the screen switched to an exterior view of the Free Wunderland ship. An airlock door swung open, and figures spewed out into vacuum with a puff of vapor; some struggled and thrashed for nearly a minute. Another murmur, and a green line drew itself around the figure of Markham. Stress-reading, Jonah reminded himself. Pupil-dilation monitoring — I should have thought of that. Interesting, he thinks he's telling the truth.

One of the gray-clad figures gave a dry retch at her console. “Control yourzeff, soldier,” Markham snapped. To the screen: “Wit all the troubles, the kzin are unlikely to have noticed your, ah, sudden deceleration.” The green fine remained. “Still, ve should establish vectors to a less conspicuous spot. Then I can offer you the hozpitality of the Nietzsche, and we can discuss your mission and how I may assist you at leisure.”

The green line flickered, shaded to green-blue. Mental reservations. Not on board your ship, that's for sure, Jonah thought, smiling into the steely fanatic's gaze in the screen. “By all means,” he murmured.

“… Zo, as you can imagine, we are anxious to take advantage of your actions,” Markham was saying. The control chamber of the Catskinner was crowded with him and the three “advisors” he had insisted on; all three looked wirecord-tough, and all had stripped to usefully lumpy coveralls. And they all had something of the outer-orbit chill of Markham's expression.

“To raid kzin outposts while they're off-balance?” Ingrid said. Markham gave her a quick glance down the eagle sweep of his nose.

“You vill understant, wit improvised equipment it is not always possible to attack the kzin directly,” he said to Jonah, pointedly ignoring the junior officer. “As the great military tinker Clausewitz said, the role of a guerrilla is to avoid strength and attack weakness. Ve undertake to sabotage their operations by disrupting commerce, and to aid ze groundside partisans wit intelligence and supplies as often as pozzible.”

Translated, you hijack ships and bung the crews out the airlock when it isn't an unmanned cargo pod, all for the Greater Good. Finagle's ghost, this is one scary bastard. Luckily, I know some things he doesn't.

“And the late unlamented McAllistaire?”

A frown. “Vell, unfortunately, not all are as devoted to the Cause as might be hoped. In terms of realpolitik, it iss to be eggspected, particularly of the common folk when so many of deir superiors haff decided that collaboration wit the kzin is an unavoidable necessity.” The faded blue eyes blinked at him. “Not an unreasonable supposition, when Earth has abandoned us… until now… zo, of the ones willing to help, many are merely the lawless and corrupt. Motivated by money; vell, if one must shovel manure, one uses a pitchfork.”

Jonah smiled and nodded, grasping the meaning if not the agricultural metaphor. And the end justifies the means. My cheeks are starting to hurt. “Well, I have my mission to perform. On a need-to-know basis, let's just say that Lieutenant Raines and I have to get to Wunderland, preferably to a city. With cover identities, currency, and instructions to the underground there to assist us, if it's safe enough to contact.”

“Vell.” Markham seemed lost in thought for moments. “I do not believe ve can expect a fleet from Earth. They would have followed on the heels of the so-effective attack, and such would be impossible to hide. You are an afterthought.” Decision, and a mouth drawn into a cold line. “You must tell me of this mission before scarce resources are devoted to it.”

“Impossible. This whole attack was to get Ingri— the lieutenant and me to Wunderland.” Jonah cursed himself for the slip, saw Markham's ears twitch slightly.

His mouth was dry, and he could feel his vision focusing and narrowing, bringing the aquiline features of the guerrilla chieftain into closer view.

“Zo. This I seriously doubt. But we haff become adept at finding answers, even some kzin haff ve persuaded.” The three “aides” drew their weapons, smooth and fast; two stunners and some sort of homemade dart-thrower. “You will answer. Pozzibley, if the answers come quickly and wizzout our having to damage you, I will let you proceed and giff you the help you require. This ship vill be of extreme use to the Cause, vahtever the bankers and merchants of Earth, who have done for us nothing in fifty years of fighting, intended. Ve who haff fought the kzin vit our bare hands, while Earth did nothing, nothing…”

Markham pulled himself back to self-command. “If it is inadvisable to assist you, you may join my crew or die.” His eyes, flatly dispassionate, turned to Ingrid. “You are from zis system. You also will speak, and then join or… no, there is always a market for workable bodies, if the mind is first removed. Search them thoroughly and take them across to the Nietzsche in a bubble.” A sign to his followers. “The first thing you must learn, is that I am not to be lied to.”

“I don't doubt it,” Jonah drawled, lying back in his crashcouch. “But you can't take this ship.”

“Ah.” Markham smiled again. “Codes. You vill furnish them.”

“The ship,” Ingrid said, considering her fingertips, “has a mind of its own. You may test it.”

The Wunderlander snorted. “A self-aware computer? Impossible. Laboratory curiosities.”

“Now that,” the computer said, “could be considered an insult, Landholder Ulf Reichstein-Markham.”

The weapons of Markham's companions were suddenly thrown away with stifled curses and cries of pain. “Induction fields… your error, sir. Spaceships in this benighted vicinity may be metal shells with various systems tacked on, but I am an organism. And you are in my intestines.”

Markham crossed his arms. “You are two to our four, and in the same environment, so no gasses or other such may be used. You vill tell me the control codes for this machine eventually; it is easy to make such a device mimic certain functions of sentience. Better for you if you come quietly.”

“Landholder Markham, I grow annoyed with you,” the computer said. “Furthermore, consider that your knowledge of cybernetics is fifty years out of date, and that the kzin are a technologically conservative people with no particular gift for information systems. Watch.”

A railgun yapped through the hull, and there was a bright flare on the flank of the stubby toroid of Markham's ship. A voice babbled from the handset at his belt, and the view in the screen swooped crazily as the Catskinner dodged.

“That was your main screen generator,” the computer continued. “You are now open to energy weapons. Need I remind you that this ship carries more than thirty parasite-rider X-ray lasers, pumped by one-megaton bombs? Do we need to alert the kzin to our presence?”

There was a sheen of sweat on Markham's face. “I haff perhaps been somewhat hasty,” he said flatly. No nonsentient computer could have been given this degree of initiative. “A fault of youth, as mein mutter is saying.” His accent had become thicker. “As chentlemen, we may come to some agreement.”

“Or we can barter like merchants,” Jonah said, with malice aforethought. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ingrid flash an “o” with her fingers. “Is he telling the truth?”

“To within 97% of probability,” the computer said. “From pupil, skin-conductivity, encephalographic and other evidence.” Markham hid his start quite well, “I suggest the bargaining commence. Commandant Reichstein-Markham, you would also be well advised not to… engage in falsehoods.”

Chuut-Riit always enjoyed visiting the quarters of his male offspring.

“What will it be this time?” he wondered, as he passed the outer guards. The household troopers drew claws before their eyes in salute, faceless in impact-armor and goggled helmets, the beam-rifles ready in their hands. He paced past the surveillance cameras, the detector pods, the death-casters and the mines; then past the inner guards at their consoles, humans raised in the household under the supervision of his personal retainers.

The retainers were males grown old in the Riit family's service. There had always been those willing to exchange the uncertain rewards of competition for a secure place, maintenance, and the odd female. Ordinary kzin were not to be trusted in so sensitive a position, of course, but these were families which had served the Riit clan for generation after generation. There was a natural culling effect; those too ambitious left for the Patriarchy's military and the slim chance of advancement, those too timid were not given opportunity to breed.

Perhaps a pity that such cannot be used outside the household, Chuut-Riit thought. Competition for rank was far too intense and personal for that, of course.

He walked past the modern sections, and into an area that was pure Old Kzin; maze-walls of reddish sandstone with twisted spines of wrought-iron on their tops, the tips glistening razor-edged. Fortress architecture from a world older than this, more massive, colder and drier; from a planet harsh enough that a plains carnivore had changed its ways, put to different use an upright posture designed to place its head above savanna grass, grasping paws evolved to climb rock. Here the modern features were reclusive, hidden in wall and buttress. The door was a hammered slab graven with the faces of night-hunting beasts, between towers five times the height of a kzin. The air smelled of wet rock and the raked sand of the gardens.

Chuut-Riit put his hand on the black metal of the outer portal, stopped. His ears pivoted, and he blinked; out of the corner of his eye he saw a pair of tufted eyebrows glancing through the thick twisted metal on the rim of the ten-meter battlement. Why, the little sthondats, he thought affectionately. They managed to put it together out of reach of the holo pickups.

The adult put his hand to the door again, keying the locking sequence, then bounded backward four times his own length from a standing start. Even under the lighter gravity of Wunderland, it was a creditable feat. And necessary, for the massive panels rang and toppled as the rope-swung boulder slammed forward. The children had hung two cables from either tower, with the rock at the point of the V and a third rope to draw it back. As the doors bounced wide he saw the blade they had driven into the apex of the egg-shaped granite rock, long and barbed and polished to a wicked point.

Kittens, he thought. Always going for the dramatic. If that thing had struck him, or the doors under its impetus had, there would have been no need of a blade. Watching too many historical adventure holos. “Errorowwww!” he shrieked in mock-rage, bounding through the shattered portal and into the interior court, halting atop the kzin-high boulder. A round dozen of his older sons were grouped behind the rock, standing in a defensive clump and glaring at him; the crackly scent of their excitement and fear made the fur bristle along his spine. He glared until they dropped their eyes, continued it until they went down on their stomachs, rubbed their chins along the ground and then rolled over for a symbolic exposure of the stomach.

“Congratulations,” he said. “That was the closest you've gotten. Who was in charge?”

More guilty sidelong glances among the adolescent males crouching among their discarded pull-rope, and then a lanky youngster with platter-sized feet and hands came squatting-erect. His fur was in the proper flat posture, but the naked pink of his tail still twitched stiffly.

“I was,” he said, keeping his eyes formally down. “Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” he added, at the adult's warning rumble.

“Now, youngling, what did you learn from your first attempt?”

“That no one among us is your match, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” the kitten said. Uneasy ripples went over the black-striped orange of his pelt.

“And what have you learned from this attempt?”

“That all of us together are no match for you, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” the striped youth said.

“That we didn't locate all of the cameras,” another muttered. “You idiot, Spotty.” That to one of his siblings; they snarled at each other from their crouches, hissing past barred fangs and making striking motions with unsheathed claws.

“No, you did locate them all, cubs,” Chuut-Riit said. “I presume you stole the ropes and tools from the workshop, prepared the boulder in the ravine in the next courtyard, then rushed to set it all up between the time I cleared the last gatehouse and my arrival?”

Uneasy nods. He held his ears and tail stiffly, letting his whiskers quiver slightly and holding in the rush of love and pride he felt, more delicious than milk heated with bourbon. Look at them! he thought. At the age when most young kzin were helpless prisoners of instinct and hormone, wasting their strength ripping each other up or making fruitless direct attacks on their sires, or demanding to be allowed to join the Patriarchy's service at once to win a Name and household of their own… His get had learned to cooperate and use their minds!

“Ah, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit, we set the ropes up beforehand, but made it look as if we were using them for tumbling practice,” the one the others called Spotty said. Some of them glared at him, and the adult raised his hand again.

“No, no, I am moderately pleased.” A pause. “You did not hope to take over my official position if you had disposed of me?”

“No, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” the tall leader said. There had been a time when any kzin's holdings were the prize of the victor in a duel, and the dueling rules were interpreted more leniently for a young subadult. Everyone had a sentimental streak for a successful youngster; every male kzin remembered the intolerable stress of being physically mature but remaining under dominance as a child.

Still, these days affairs were handled in a more civilized manner. Only the Patriarchy could award military and political office. And this mass assassination attempt was… unorthodox, to say the least. Outside the rules more because of its rarity than because of formal disapproval…

A vigorous toss of the head. “Oh, no, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit. We had an agreement to divide the private possessions. The lands and the, ah, females.” Passing their own mothers to half-siblings, of course. “Then we wouldn't each have so much we'd get too many challenges, and we'd agreed to help each other against outsiders,” the leader of the plot finished virtuously.

“Fatuous young scoundrels,” Chuut-Riit said. His eyes narrowed dangerously. “You haven't been communicating outside the household, have you?” he snarled.

“Oh, no, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit!”

“Word of honor! May we die nameless if we should do such a thing!” The adult nodded, satisfied that good family feeling had prevailed. “Well, as I said, I am somewhat pleased. If you have been keeping up with your lessons. Is there anything you wish?”

“Fresh meat, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” the spotted one said. The adult could have told him by the scent, of course, a kzin never forgot another's personal odor, that was one reason why names were less necessary among their species. “The reconstituted stuff from the dispensers is always… so… quiet.”

Chuut-Riit hid his amusement. Young Heroes-to-be were always kept on an inadequate diet, to increase their aggressiveness. A matter for careful gauging, since too much hunger would drive them into mindless cannibalistic frenzy.

“And couldn't we have the human servants back? They were nice.” Vigorous gestures of assent. Another added: “They told good stories. I miss my Clothilda-human.”

“Silence!” Chuut-Riit roared. The youngsters flattened stomach and chin to the ground again. “Not until you can be trusted not to injure them; how many times do I have to tell you, it's dishonorable to attack household servants! Until you learn self-control, you will have to make do with machines.”

This time all of them turned and glared at a mottled youngster in the rear of their group; there were half-healed scars over his head and shoulders. “It bared its teeth at me,” he said sulkily. “All I did was swipe at it, how was I supposed to know it would die?” A chorus of rumbles, and this time several of the covert kicks and clawstrikes landed.

“Enough,” Chuut-Riit said after a moment. Good, they have even learned how to discipline each other as a unit. “I will consider it, when all of you can pass a test on the interpretation of human expressions and body-language.” He drew himself up. “In the meantime, within the next two eight-days, there will be a formal hunt and meeting in the Patriarch's Preserve; kzinti homeworld game, the best Earth animals, and even some feral-human outlaws, perhaps!”

He could smell their excitement increase, a manecrinkling musky odor not unmixed with the sour whiff of fear. Such a hunt was not without danger for adolescents, being a good opportunity for hostile adults to cull a few of a hated rival's offspring with no possibility of blame. They will be in less danger than most, Chuut-Riit thought judiciously. In fact, they may run across a few of my subordinates' get and mob them. Good.

“And if we do well, afterwards a feast and a visit to the Sterile Ones.” That had them all quiveringly alert, their tails held rigid and tongues lolling; nonbearing females were kept as a rare privilege for Heroes whose accomplishments were not quite deserving of a mate of their own. Very rare for kits still in the household to be granted such, but Chuut-Riit thought it past time to admit that modern society demanded a prolonged adolescence. The day when a male kit could be given a spear, a knife, a rope, and a bag of salt and kicked out the front gate at puberty were long gone. Those were the wild, wandering years in the old days, when survival challenges used up the superabundant energies. Now they must be spent learning history, technology, xenology, none of which burned off the gland-juices saturating flesh and brain.

He jumped down amid his sons, and they pressed around him, purring throatily with adoration and fear and respect; his presence and the failure of their plot had reestablished his personal dominance unambiguously, and there was no danger from them for now. Chuut-Riit basked in their worship, feeling the rough caress of their tongues on his fur and scratching behind his ears. Together, he thought. Together we will do wonders.

Interesting, Chuut-Riit thought, standing on the verandah of his staff-secretary's house and lapping at the gallon tub of half-melted vanilla ice cream in his hands. Quite comely, in its way.

In a very un-kzin fashion. The senior staff quarters of his estate were laid out in a section of rolling hills, lawns and shrubs and eucalyptus trees, modest stone houses with high-pitched shingle roofs set among flowerbeds. A dozen or so of the adults who dwelt here were gathered at a discreet distance, down by the landing pad; he could smell their colognes and perfumes, the slightly mealy odor of human flesh beneath, a mechanical tang overlaid with alien greenness and animals and… yes, the children were coming back. Preceded by the usual blast of sound. The kzin's ears folded themselves away at the jumbled high-pitched squealing, one of the less attractive qualities of young humans. Although there was a very kzinlike warbling mixed in among the monkey sounds…

The giant ball of yarn bounced around the corner of the house and across the close-clipped grass of the lawn, bounding from side to side with the slight drifting wobble of .61 gravities, trailing floppy ends. A peacock fled shrieking from the toy and the shouting mob of youngsters that followed it; the bird's head was parallel to the ground and its feet pumped madly. Chuut-Riit sighed, finished the ice cream and began licking his muzzle and fingers clean. Alpha Centauri was setting, casting bronze shadows over the creeper-grown stone around him, and it was time to go.

“Like this!” the young kzin leading the pack screamed, and leaped in a soaring arch that landed spreadeagled on the soft fuzzy surface of the ball. He was a youngster of five, all head and hands and feet, the fur of his pelt an electric orange with fading black spots, the infant mottling that a very few kzin kept into early youth. Several of the human youngsters made a valiant attempt to follow, but only one landed and clutched the strands, screaming delightedly. The others fell, one skinning a knee and bawling.

Chuut-Riit rose smoothly to his feet and bounced forward, scooping the crying infant up and stopping the ball with his other hand.

“You should be more careful, my son,” he said to the Kzin child in the Hero's tongue. To the human: “Are you injured?”

“Mama!” the child wailed, twining its fists into his fur and burying its tear-and-snot streaked face in his side.

“Errruumm,” Chuut-Riit rumbled helplessly. They are so fragile. His nostrils flared as he bent over the tiny form, taking in the milky-sweet smell of distress and the slight metallic-salt odor of blood from its knee.

“Here is your mother,” he continued, as the human female scuttled up and began apologetically untwining the child.

“Here, take it,” he rumbled, as she cuddled the infant. The woman gave it a brief inspection and looked up at the eight-foot height of the kzin.

“No harm done, just over-excited, honored Chuut-Riit,” she said. The kzin rumbled again, looked up at the guards standing by his flitter in the driveway and laid back his ears; they became elaborately casual, examining the sky or the ground and controlling their expressions. He switched his glare back to his own offspring on top of the ball. The cub flattened itself apologetically, then whipped its head to one side as the human child clinging to the slope of the ball threw a loose length of yarn. Chuut-Riit wrenched his eyes from the fascinating thing and plucked his son into the air by the loose skin at the back of his neck.

“It is time to depart,” he said. The young kzin had gone into an instinctive half-curl. He cast a hopeful glance over his shoulder at his father, sighed and wrapped the limber pink length of his tail around the adult's massive forearm.

“Yes, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit,” he said meekly, then brightened and waved at the clump of estate worker children standing by the ball. “Goodbye,” he called, waving a hand that seemed too large for his arm, and adding a cheerful parting yowl in the Heroes Tongue. Literally translated it meant roughly drink blood and tear cattle into gobbets, but the adult trusted the sentiment would carry over the wording.

The human children jumped and waved in reply as Chuut-Riit carried his son over to the car and the group of parents waiting there; Henrietta in the center with her offspring by her side. I think her posture indicates contentment, he thought. This visit confers much prestige among the other human servants. Which was excellent, a good executive secretary being a treasure beyond price. Besides…

“That was fun, father,” the cub said. “Could I have another piece of cake?”

“Certainly not, you will be sick as it is,” Chuut-Riit said decisively. Kzin were not quite the pure meat-eaters they claimed to be, and their normal diet contained the occasional sweet, but stuffing that much sugar-coated confection down on top of a stomach already full of good raw ztirgor was something the cub would regret soon. Ice cream, though… why had nobody told him about ice cream before? Even better than bourbon-and-milk; he must begin to order in bulk.

“I must be leaving, Henrietta,” Chuut-Riit said. “And young Ilge,” he added, looking down at the offspring. It was an odd-looking specimen, only slightly over knee-high to him and with long braided headpelt of an almost kzinlike orange. The bare skin of its face was dotted with markings of almost the same color. Remarkable; the one standing next to it was black. There was no end to their variety.

The cub wiggled in his grasp and looked down. “I hope you like your armadillo, Ilge,” he said. Ilge looked down at the creature she had not released since the gift-giving ceremony and patted it again; the beasts had adapted well to Wunderland, but they were less common since the Kzinti arrived. A snout and beady eye appeared for a second, caught the scent of kzin and disappeared back into an armored ball with a snap.

“They're lots of fun.” Kzin children adored armadillos and Chuut-Riit provided his with a steady supply, even if the shells made a mess once the cubs finally got them peeled.

“It's nice,” she said solemnly.

“The ball of fiber was an excellent idea,” Chuut-Riit added to Henrietta. “I must procure one for my other offspring.”

“I thought it would be, honored Chuut-Riit,” the human replied, and the kzin blinked in bafflement at her amusement.

One of the guards was too obviously entertained by his commander's eccentricity. “Here,” Chuut-Riit called as he walked through the small crowd of bowing humans. “Guard Trooper. Care for this infant as we fly, in the forward compartment. Care for him well.”

The soldier blinked dubiously at the small bundle of chocolate-and-mud stained fur that looked with eager interest at the fascinating complexities of his equipment, then slung his beam rifle and accepted it with an unconscious bristling. Chuut-Riit gave the ear-and-tail twitch that was the kzin equivalent of sly amusement as he stepped into the passenger compartment and threw himself down on the cushions. There was a slight internal wobble as the car lifted, an expected retching sound, and a yowl of protest from the forward compartment.

The ventilators will be overloaded, the governor thought happily. Now, about that report…

Tiamat was shabby. Coming in to dock on the rockjacker prospecting craft Markham had found for them it had looked the same as it had half a century before — a little busier and more exterior lights; but basically the same spinning ironrock tube twenty kilometers across and sixty long, with ships of every description clustered at the docking yards at either end. More smelters and robofabricators hanging outside, more giant baggies of water ice and volatiles. But inside it was shabby, run-down.

That was Ingrid Raines's first thought. Shabby. The handgrips were worn, the vivid murals that covered the walls just in from the poles of the giant cylinder fading and grease-spotted. The constant subliminal rumble from the freighter docks was louder, nobody was bothering with the sonic baffles that damped the vibration of megatons of powdered ore, liquid metal, vacuum-separated refinates pouring into the network of pumptubes. Styles were more garish than she remembered, face-paint and tiger-striped oversuits. There were a quartet of police hanging spaced evenly around the entry corridor, toes hooked into rails and heads in toward the center. Obstructing traffic, but nobody was going to object, not when the goldskins wore impact armor and powdered endoskeletons, not when shockrods dangled negligently in their hands.

“Transfer booths closed down,” Jonah murmured as they made flipover and went feet first into the stickyfield at the inward end of the passage. There was a familiar subjective click behind their eyes, and the corridor became a half-kilometer of hollow tower over their heads, filled with the up-and-down drift of people.

“Shut up,” Ingrid muttered back. That had been no surprise, instantaneous transportation would foul up security too much. They went through the emergency pressure curtains, into the glare and blare of the inner corridors. Zero-G, here near the core of Tiamat, one-G at the rims. Tigertown was at one-G, she thought. The resident kzin were low-status engineers and supervisors, or navy types; they liked heavy gravity, the pussies had never lived in space without gravity control. Tigers, she reminded herself. That was the official slang term. Ratcat if you wanted to be a little dangerous.

They turned into a narrow side corridor that had been a residential section the last time she was here, transients' quarters around the lowgrav manufacturing sections of the core. Now it was lined on three sides by shops and small businesses, with the fourth, spinward, side acting as the “downward” direction. Not that there was enough gravity to matter this close to the center of the spin, but it was convenient. They slowed to a stroll, two more figures in plain rockjack innersuits, the form-fitting coverall everyone wore under vacuum armor. Conservative Belter stripcuts, backpacks with printseal locks to discourage pickpockets, and the black plastic hilts of hummknives.

Ingrid looked around her, acutely conscious of the hard shape nestling butt-down on her collarbone. Distortion battery, and a blade-shaped loop of wire; switch it on, and the magnetic field made it vibrate, very fast. Very sharp. She had been shocked when Markham's Intelligence Officer pushed them across the table to the UNSN operatives.

“Things are that bad?”

“The ratcats don't care,” the officer had said. “Humans are forbidden any weapon that can kill at a distance. Only the collabo police can carry stunners, and the only thing the ratcats care about is that production keeps up. What sort of people do you think join the collabo goldskins? Social altruists? The only ordinary criminals they go after are the ones too poor or stupid to pay them off. When things get bad enough to foul up war production, they have a big sweep, and maybe catch some of the middling-level gangrunners and feed them to the ratcats. The big boys? The big boys are the police, or vice versa. That's the way it is, sweetheart.”

Ingrid shivered, and Jonah put an arm around her waist as they walked in the glide-lift-glide of a stickyfield. “Changed a lot, hey?” he said.

She nodded. The boots were for the sort of smallscale industry that bigger firms contracted out; filing, hardcopy, genetic engineering of bacteria for process production of organics, all mixed in with cookshops and handicrafts and service trades of a thousand types. Holo displays flashed and glittered, strobing with all shades of the visible spectrum; music pounded and blared and crooned, styles she remembered and styles utterly strange and others that were revivals of modes six centuries old; Baroque and Classical and jazz and Dojin-Go Punk and Meddlehoffer. People crowded the way, on the rimside and wall-hopping between shops. Half the shops had private guards. The passers-by were mostly planetsiders, some so recent you could see they had trouble handling low-G movement.

Many were ragged, openly dirty. How can that happen? she thought. Fusion-distilled water was usually cheap in a closed system. Oh. Probably a monopoly. And there were beggars, actual beggars with open sores on their skins or hands twisted with arthritis, things she had only seen in historical flats so old they had been shot two-dimensional.

“Here it is,” Jonah grunted. The eating-shop was directly above them; they switched off their shoes, waited for a clear space and flipped up and over, slapping their hands onto the catch net outside the door. Inside the place was clean, at least, with a globular freefall kitchen and a human chef, and customers in dark pajama-like clothing floating with their knees crossed under sticktables. Not Belters — too stocky and muscular — they seemed almost purely Oriental by bloodline, which was rare in the genetic stew of the Sol system but more common here.

Icy stares greeted them as they swung to a vacant booth and slid themselves in, their long legs tangling under the synthetic pineboard of the stick table.

“It must be harder for you,” Jonah said. “Your home.”

She looked up at him with quick surprise; he was usually the archetypical rockjack, the stereotype asteroid prospector; quiet, bookish, self-sufficient, a man without twitches or mannerisms but capable of cutting loose on furlough… but perceptive — and rockjacks were not supposed to be good at people.

Well, he was a successful officer, too, she thought. And they do have to be good at people.

A waitress in some many-folded garment of black silk floated up to the privacy screen of their cubicle and reached a hand through to scratch at the post. Ingrid keyed the screen, and the woman's features snapped clear.

“Sorry, so sorry,” she said. “This special place, not Belter food.” There was a sing-song accent to her English that Jonah did not recognize, but the underlying impatience and hostility came through the calm features.

He smiled at her and ran a hand over his crest. “But we were told the tekkamaki here is fine, the oyabun makes the best,” he said. Ingrid could read the thought that followed: Whatever the fuck that means.

The frozen mask of the waitress' face could not alter, but the quick duck of her head was empty of the commonplace tension of a moment before. She returned quickly with bowls of soup and drinking straws; it was some sort of fish broth with onions and a strange musky undertaste. They drank in silence, waiting. For what, the pussies to come and get us? she thought. The Catskinner-computer had said Markham was on the level… but also that he was capable of utter treachery once he had convinced himself that Right was on his side, and that to Markham the only ultimate judge of Right was, guess who, the infallible Markham.

Gottdamned Herrenmann, she mused: going on 50 years objective, everything else in the system had collapsed into shit, and the arrogant lop-sided bastards hadn't changed a bit…

A man slid through the screen. Expensively nondescript dress, gray oversuit and bowl-cut black hair. Hint of an expensive natural cologne. Infocomp at his waist, and the silver button of a reader-bonephone behind his ear. This was Markham's “independent entrepreneur.” Spoken with tones of deepest contempt, more than a Herrenmann's usual disdain for business, so probably some type of criminal like McAllistaire. She kept a calm smile on her face as she studied the man, walling off the remembered sickness as the kicking doll-figures tumbled into space, bleeding from every orifice. Oriental, definitely; there were Sina and Nipponjin enclaves down on Wunderland, but not in the Serpent Swarm Belt, not when she left. Things had changed.

The quiet man smiled and produced three small drinking-bulbs. “Rice wine,” he said. “Heated. An affectation, to be sure, but we are very traditional these days.”

Pure Belter English, no hint of an accent. She called up training, looked for clues. In the hands, the skin around the eyes, the set of the mouth. Very little, no more than polite attention, this was a very calm man. Hard to tell even the age, if he was getting good geriatric care; anything from fifty minimum up to a hundred. Teufel, he could have been from Sol system himself, one of the last bunches of immigrants and wouldn't that be a joke to end them.

Silence stretched. The oriental sat and sipped at his hot sake and smiled; the two Belters followed suit, controlling their surprise at the vanish-in-the-throat taste. At the last, Jonah spoke:

“I'm Jonah. This is Ingrid. The man with gray eyes sent us for tekkamaki.”

“Ah, our esteemed GVB,” the man said. A deprecatory laugh and a slight wave of the fingers; the man had almost as few hand-gestures as a Belter. “Gotz von Blerichgen, a little joke. Yes, I know the one you speak of. My name is Shigehero Hirose, and as you will have guessed, I am a hardened criminal of the worst sort.” He ducked his head in a polite bow. Ingrid noticed his hands then, the left missing the little finger, and the edges of vividly-colored tattoos under the cuffs of his suit.

“And you,” he continued to Jonah, “are sent not by our so-Aryan friend, but by the UNSN.” A slight frown. “Your charming companion is perhaps of the same provenance, but from the Serpent Swarm originally.”

Jonah and Ingrid remained silent. Another shrug. “In any case, accordingly to our informants, you wish transportation to Wunderland, and well-documented cover identities.”

“If you're wondering how we can pay.” Jonah began. They had the best and most compact source of valuata the UN military had been able to provide.

“No, please. From our own resources, we will be glad to do this.”

“Why?” Ingrid said, curious. “Criminals seem to be doing better now than they ever did in the old days.”

Hirose smiled again, that bland expression that revealed nothing and never touched his eyes. “The young lady is as perceptive as she is ornamental.” He took up his sake bulb and considered it. “My… association is a very old one. You might call us predators; we would prefer to think of it as a symbiotic relationship. We have endured many changes, many social and technological revolutions. But something is common to each, the desire to have something and yet to forbid it.

“Consider drugs and alcohol… or wirehead drouds. All strictly forbidden at one time, legal another, but the demand continues. Instruction in martial arts, likewise. In our early days in dai Nippon, we performed services for feudal lords that their own code forbade. Later, the great corporations, the zaibatsu, found us convenient for dealing with recalcitrant shareholders and unions; we moved substances of various types across inconvenient national frontiers; liberated information selfishly stockpiled in closed data banks, recruited entertainers, provided banking services… Invested our wealth wisely, and moved outward with humanity to the planets and the stars. Sometimes so respectable that our affairs were beyond question; sometimes otherwise. A conservative fraction undertook to found our branch in the Alpha Centauri system, but I assure you the… family businesses, clans if you will, still flourish in Sol System as well. Inconspicuously.”

“That doesn't answer Ingrid's question,” Jonah said bluntly. “This setup looks like hog heaven for you.”

“Only in the short term. Which is enough to satisfy mere thugs, mere bandits such as a certain rockholder known as McAllistaire… you met this person? But consider; we are doing well for the same reason bacteria flourish in a dead body. The human polity of this system is dying, its social defenses disorganized, but the carnival of the carrion-eaters will be shortlived. We speak of the free humans and those in the direct service of the kzin, but to our masters we of the 'free' are slaves of the Patriarchy who have not yet been assigned individual owners. We are squeezed, tighter and tighter; eventually, here will be nothing but the households of clan nobles. My association could perhaps survive such a situation, and indeed we are making preparations.” He shrugged. “We have survived much over the centuries. But perhaps this time it will not be. Better by far to restore a functioning human system; our assets would be less in the short term, more secure in the longer.”

“And by helping us, you'll have a foot in both camps and come up smelling of roses whoever wins.”

Hirose spread his hands. “It is true, the kzin have occasionally found themselves using our services.” His smile became more genuine, and sharklike. “Nor are all, ah, Heroes, so incorruptible, so immune to the temptations of vice and profit, as they would like to believe.

“Enough.” He produced two sealed packets and slid them across the table to them. “This one contains the names of criminals in München who have worked with us and have not betrayed us. You will understand that this is no great endorsement. I cannot guarantee they will not sell you out to the authorities merely to win good will with them. However, these are the only names I have.

“This one is more important. The documentation and credit accounts are perfectly genuine. They win stand even against kzin scrutiny; our influence reaches far. I have no knowledge of what identities you have been given, nor do I wish to. You in turn have learned nothing from me that possible opponents do not already know, and know that I know, and I know that they know… but please, even if I cannot join you, do stay and enjoy this excellent restaurant's cuisine.”

“Well,” Jonah palmed the folder. “it might be out of character, rockjacks in a fancy live-service place like this.”

Shigehero Hirose halted, part-way through the privacy screen. “You would do well to study local conditions a little more carefully, man-from-far-away. It has been a long time since autochefs and dispensers were cheaper than humans.”

“The inefficiency of you leaf-eaters is becoming intolerable,” the kzin said.

Claude Montferrat-Palme bowed his head. Don't stare. Never, never stare at a ratca— at a kzin. “We do our best, Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals,” he said.

The kzin superintendent of München stopped its restless striding and stood close, smiling, its tail held stiffly past one column-thick leg. Two and a half meters tall, a thickly padded cartoon-figure cat that might have looked funny in a holo. It grinned down at him, the direct gaze that was as much a threat display as the barred fangs.

“You play your monkey games of position and money while the enemies of the Patriarchy scurry and bite in the underbrush.” Its head swiveled toward the police chiefs desk. “Scroll!”

Data began to move across the suddenly transparent surface, accompanied by a moving schematic of the Serpent Swarm; colors and symbols indicated feral-human attacks. Ships lost, outposts raided, automatic cargo containers hijacked…

“Comparative!” the kzin snapped. Graphs replaced the schematic. “Distribution!”

“See,” he continued. “Raids of every description have sprouted like fungus since the sthondat-spawned Sol-monkeys made their coward's passage through this system. With no discernible pattern. And even the lurkers in the mountains are slipping out to trouble the estates again.”

“With respect, Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals, my sphere of responsibility is the human population of this city. There has been little increase in feral activity here.”

Claws rested centimeters from his eyes. “Because this city is the locus where feral-human packs dispose of their loot, exchange information and goods, meet and coordinate. Paying their percentage to you! Yes, yes, we have heard your arguments that it is better for this activity to take place where our minions may monitor it, and they are logical enough. While we lack the number of Heroes necessary to reduce this system to true order, and we are preoccupied with the renewed offensive against Sol.”

He mumbled under his breath, and Montferrat caught an uncomplimentary reference to Chuut-Riit.

The human bowed again. “Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals, most of the groups operating against the righteous rule of the Patriarchy are motivated by material gain; this is a characteristic of my species. They cooperate with the genuine rebels, but it is an alliance plagued by mistrust and mutual contempt; furthermore, the rebels themselves are as much a grouping of bands as a unified whole.” And were slowly dying out, until the UN demonstrated its reach so spectacularly. Now they'll have recruits in plenty again, and the bandits will want to draw the cloak of respectable Resistance over themselves.

His mind cautiously edged toward a consideration of whether it was time to begin hedging his bets, and he forced it back. The kzin used telepaths periodically to check the basic loyalties of their senior servants. That was one reason he had never tried to reach the upper policy levels of the collaborationist government, that and… A wash of non-thought buried the speculation.

“Accordingly, if their activity increases, our sources of information increase likewise. Once the confusion of the, ah, passing raid dies down, we will be in a position to make further gains. Perhaps to trap some of the greater leaders, Markham or Hirose.”

“And you will take your percentage of all these transactions,” Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals said with heavy irony. “Remember that a trained monkey that loses other values may always serve as monkeymeat. Remember where your loyalties ultimately lie, in this insect-web of betrayals you fashion, slave.”

Yes, thought Montferrat, dabbing at his forehead as the kzin left. I must remember that carefully.

“Collation,” he said to his desk. “Attack activity.” The schematic returned. “Eliminate all post-Yamamoto raids that correlate to within 75% of the modus operandi of pre-Yamamoto attacks.”

A scattering, mostly directed toward borderline targets that had been too heavily protected for the makeshift boats of the Free Wunderland space guerrillas. Disconcertingly many of them on weapons fabrication plants, with nearly as many seizing communications, stealthing, command-and-control components. Once those were passed along to the other asteroid lurkers all hell was going to break loose. And gravity polarization technology was becoming more and more widespread as well. The kzin had tried to keep it strictly for their own ships and for manufacturing use, but the principles were not too difficult and the methods the Patriarchy introduced were heavily dependent on it.

“Now, correlate filtered attacks with past ten year pattern for bandits Markham, McAllistaire, Finbogesson, Cheung, Latimer, Wu. Sequencing.”

“Scheisse,” he whispered. Markham, without a doubt, the man did everything by the book and you could rewrite the manuscript by watching him. Now equipped with something whose general capacities were equivalent to a kzin Stalker, and proceeding in a methodical amplification of the sort of thing he had been doing before… Markham was the sort for the Protracted Struggle, all right. He'd read his Mao and Styrikawsi and Laugidis, even if he gave Clausewitz all the credit.

“Code, Till Eulenspiegel. Lock previous analysis, non-redo, simulate other pattern if requested. Stop.”

“Stop and locked,” the desk said.

Montserrat relaxed. The Eulenspiegel file was supposedly secure. Certainly none of his subordinates had it, or they would have gone to the ratcats with it long ago; there had been more than enough in there to make him prime monkeymeat. He swallowed convulsively; as Police Chief of München, he was obliged to screen the kzin hunts far too frequently. Straightening, he adjusted the lapels of his uniform and walked to the picture window that formed one wall of the office. Behind him stretched the sleek expanse of feathery downdropper-pelt rugs over marble tile, the settees and loungers of pebbled but butter-soft okkaran hide. A Matisse and two Vorenagles on the walls, and a priceless Pierneef… He stopped at the long oak bar and poured himself the single glass of Maivin that was permissible.

Interviews with the kzin Supervisor-of-Animals were always rather stressful. Montferrat sipped, looking down over the low-pitched tile roofs of Old München. None of the sprawling shanty-suburbs and shoddy gimcrack factories of recent years, this ten-story view was almost as he had known it as a student: The curving tree-lined streets that curled through the hills beside the broad blue waters of the Donau, banked flowers beside the pedestrian ways, cafes, the honeygold quadrangles of the University, courtyarded homes built around expanses of greenery and fountains. Softly blooming frangipani and palms and gumblossom in the parks along the river; the Gothic flamboyance of the Ritterhaus, where the Landholders had met in council before the kzin came. And the bronze grouping in the great square before it; the Nineteen Founders.

Memory rose before him, turning the hard daylight of afternoon to a soft summer's night; he was young again, arm in arm with Ingrid and Harold and a dozen of their friends, the new student's caps on their head. They had come from the beercellar and hours of swaying song, the traditional graduation night feast, and they were all a little merry. Not drunk, but happy and in love with all the world, a universe and a lifetime opening out before them. The three of them had lead the scrambling mob up the granite steps of the plinth, to put their white-and-gold caps on the three highest sculpted heads, and they had ridden the bronze shoulders and waved to the sea of dancing, laughing young faces below. Fireworks had burst overhead, yellow and green… shut up, he told himself. The present was what mattered. The UN raid had not been the simple smash-on-the wing affair it seemed, not at all.

“I knew it,” he muttered. “It wasn't logical, they didn't do as much damage as they could have.” The kzin had thought otherwise, but then, they had predator's reflexes. They just did not think in terms of mass destruction; their approach to warfare was too pragmatic for that. Which was why their armament was lacking in planet-busting weapons: the thought of destroying valuable real estate did not occur to them. Montferrat had run his own projections, and with weapons like that ramship you could destabilize stars. “And humans do think that way.”

So there must have been some other point to the raid, and not merely to get an effective ship to the Free Wunderlanders. Nothing overt, which left something clandestine. Intelligence work. Perhaps elsewhere in the system, pray God elsewhere in the system, not in his backyard. But it would be just as well…

He crossed to the desk. “Axelrod-Bauergartner,” he said.

A holo of his second-in-command formed, seated at her desk. The meter-high image put down its coffee-cup and straightened. “Yes, Chief?”

“I want redoubled surveillance on all entry-exit movements in the Greater München area. Everything, top priority. Activate all our contacts, call in favors, lean on everybody we can lean on. I'll be sending you some data on deep-hook threads I've been developing among the hardcore ferals.” He saw her look of surprise; that was one of the hole-cards he used to keep his subordinates in order. Poor Axelrod-Bauergartner, he thought. You want this job so much, and would do it so badly. I've held it for twenty years because I've got a sense of proportion; you'd be monkeymeat inside six months.

“Zum befehl, Chief.”

“Our esteemed superiors also wish evidence of our zeal. Get them some monkeymeat for the next hunt, nobody too crucial.”

“I'll round up the usual suspects, Chief— ”

The door retracted, and a white-coated steward came in with a covered wheeled tray. Montferrat looked up, checking… yes, the chilled Bloemvin 2337, the heart-of-palm salad, the pâté…

“And for now, send in the exit-visa applicant, the one who was having the problems with the paperwork.”

The projected figure grinned wickedly. “Oh, her. Right away, Chief.” Montferrat flicked the transmission out of existence and rose, smoothing down his uniform jacket and flicking his mustache into shape with a deft forefinger. This job isn't all grief, he mused happily.

“Recode Till Eulenspiegel,” Yarthkin said, leaning back. “Interesting speculation, Claude, old kamerat,” he mused. The bucket chair creaked as he leaned back, putting his feet up on the cluttered desk. The remains of a cheese-and-mustard sandwich perched waveringly on a stack of printout at his elbow. The office around him was a similar clutter, bookcases and safe and a single glowlight, a narrow cubicle at the alley-wall of the bar. Shabby and rundown and smelling of beer and old socks, except for the extremely up-to-date infosystem built into the archaic wooden desk; one of the reasons the office was so shabby was that nobody but Yarthkin was allowed in, and he was an indifferent housekeeper at best.

He lit a cigarette and blew a smoke-ring at the ceiling. Have to crank up my contacts, he thought. Activity's going to heat up system-wide, and there's no reason I shouldn't take advantage of it. Safety's sake, too: arse to the wall, ratcats overall. This wasn't all to get our heroic Herrenmann in the Swarm a new toy; that was just a side effect, somehow.

“Sam,” he said, keying an old-fashioned manual toggle. “Get me Suuomalisen.”

“Finagle,” Jonah muttered under his breath. The transfer booths were shut down at Munchenport as well, and the shuttle station had been moved out into open country. The station was a series of square extruded buildings and open spaces for the gravitic shuttles; mostly for freight, the passenger traffic was a sideline. “Security's tight.”

Ingrid smiled at the guard and handed over their identi-cards, The man smiled back and fed them into the reader, waiting a few seconds while the machine read the data, scanned the two Belters for congruence and consulted the central files.

“Clear,” he said, and shifted into Wunderlander: “Enjoy your stay planetside. God knows, there are more trying to get off than on, what with casualties from the raid and all.”

“Thank you,” Jonah said; his command of the language was adequate, and his accent would pass among non-Belters. “It was pretty bad out in the Belt, too.”

The lineup moving through the scanners in the opposite direction stretched hundreds of meters into the barnlike gloom of the terminal building. A few were obviously space-born returning home, but most were stockier, families with crying children and string-tied parcels, or ragged-looking laborers. They smelled of unwashed bodies and poverty, a peculiar sweetsour odor blending with the machinery-and-synthetics smell of the building and the residual ozone of heavy powder release. More raw material for the industries of the Serpent Swarm, attracted by the higher wages and the lighter hand of the kzin offplanet.

“Watch it,” Ingrid said. The milling crowds silenced and parted as a trio of the felinoids walked through trailed by human servants with baggage on mag-lifters; Jonah caught snatches of the Hero's tongue, technical jargon. They both wheeled at a sudden commotion. The guards were closing in on an emigrant at the head of the line, a man arguing furiously with the checker. “It's right!” he screamed. “I paid good money for it, all we got for the farm, it's right!”

“Look, scheisskopf, the machine says there's no record of it. Raus! You're holding up the line.”

“It's the right paper, let me through!” The man lunged, trying to vault the turnstile. The guard at the checker recoiled, shrieked as the would-be traveler slammed down his metal-edged carryall on her arm. The two agents could hear the wet crackle of broken bone even at five meters distance, and then the madman's body disappeared behind a circle of helmeted heads, marked by the rise and fall of shockrods. The others in the line drew back, as if afraid of infection, and the police dragged the man off by his arms; the injured one followed, holding her splinted arm and kicking the semiconscious form with every other step.

“Monkeymeat, you're monkeymeat, shithead,” she shrilled, and kicked him again. There was solid force behind the blow, and she grunted with the effort and winced as it jarred her arm.

“Tanj,” Jonah said softly. The old curse: there ain't no justice.

“No, there isn't,” Ingrid answered. “Come on, the railcar's waiting.”

“And the word from the Nipponjin in Tiamat is that two important ferals will be coming through soon,” Suuomalisen said.

Yarthkin leaned back, sipping at his coffee and considering him. Suuomalisen was fat, even by Wunderland standards, where the .61 standard gravity made it easy to carry extra tissue. His head was pink, egg-bald, a beak of a nose over a slit mouth and a double chin; the round body was expensively covered in a suit of white natural silk accented with a conservative black cravat and onyx ring. The owner of Harold's Terran Bar waited patiently while his companion tucked a linen handkerchief into his collar and began eating; scrambled eggs with scallions, grilled wurst, smoked kopjfissche, biscuits.

“You set a marvelous table, my friend,” the fat man said. They were alone in the dining nook; Harold's did not serve breakfast, except for the owner and staff. “Twice I have offered your cook a position in my Suuomalisen Suuomalisen's Sauna, and twice he has refused. You must tell me your secret.”

Acquaintance, not friend, Harold thought. And my chef prefers to work for someone who lets his people quit if they want to. Mildly: “From the Free Wunderland people? They've been doing better at getting through to the bands in the Jotun-scarp recently.”

“No, no, these are special somehow. Carrying special goods, something that will upset the ratcats very much. The tip was vague, I don't know if my source was not informed or whether the slant-eyed devils are just playing both ends against the middle again. It might be a power-struggle below the oyabun's level.” A friendly leer. “If you could identify them for me, my friend, I'd be glad to share the police reward. Not from Montferrat, from lower down… strictly confidential, of course, I wouldn't want to cut into the income you get from those who think this is the safest place in town.”

“Suuomalisen, has anyone ever told you what a toad you are?” Yarthkin said, butting out the cigarette in the cold remains of the coffee.

“Many times, many times! But a very successful toad.” The shrewd little eyes blinked at him. “Harold, my friend, it is a grief to me that you take such little advantage of this excellent base of operations. A fine profit source, and you have wonderful contacts; think of the use you could make of them! You should diversify, my friend. Into contracting, it is a natural with the suppliers you have. Then, with your gambling, you could bid for the lottery contracts… perhaps even get into Guild work!”

“I'll leave that to you, Suuomalisen. Your Sauna is a good 'base of operations'; me, I run a bar and some games in the back, and I put people together sometimes. That's all. The tree that grows too high attracts the attention of people with axes.”

The fat man shook his head. “You independent entrepreneurs must learn to move with the times, and the time of the little man is past… Ah, well, I must be going.”

Yarthkin nodded. “Thanks for the tip. I'll have Wendy send round a case of the kirsch. Good stuff, pre-War.”

“Pre-war!” The fat man's eyes lit. “Generous, generous. Where do you get such stuff?”

From ex-affluent people who can't pay their gambling debts, Yarthkin thought. “You have to let me keep a few little secrets; little secrets for little men.”

A laugh. “And again, any time you wish to join my organization… or even just to sell Harold's Terran Bar, my offer stands. I'll even promise to keep on all your people, they make the ambience of the place anyway.”

“No deal, Suuomalisen. Thanks for the consideration, though.”

Dripping, Jonah padded back out of the shower; at least here in München, nobody was charging you a month's wages for hot water. Ingrid was standing at the window toweling her hair and letting the evening breeze dry the rest of her. The room was narrow, part of an old mansion split into the cubicles of a cheap transient's hotel; there were more luxurious places in easy walking distance, but they would be the haunt of the local elite. He joined her at the opening and put an arm around her shoulders. She sighed and looked down the sloping street to the rippled surface of the Donau and the traffic of sailboats and barges. A metal planter creaked on chains below the window. It smelled of damp earth and half-dead flowers.

“This is the oldest section of München,” she said slowly. “There wasn't much else, when I was a student here. Five years ago, my time… and the buildings I knew are old and shabby… There must be a hundred thousand people living here now!”

He nodded, remembering the sprawling squatter-camps that surrounded the town. “We're going to have to act quickly,” he said. “Those passes the oyabun got us are only good for two weeks.”

“Right,” she said with another sigh, turning from the window. Jonah watched with appreciation as she rummaged in their bags for a series of parts, assembling them into a featureless box and snapping it onto the bedside datachannel. “There are probably blocks on the public channels…” She turned her head. “Instead of standing there making the passing girls sigh, why not get some of the other gear put together?”

“Right.” Weapons first. The UN had dug deep into the ARM's old stores, confiscated technology that was the product of centuries of perverted ingenuity. Jonah grinned: like most Belters, he had always felt the ARMs tended to err on the side of caution in the role as technological police. Opening their archives had been like pulling teeth, from what he heard, even with the kzin bearing down on Sol system in all their carnivorous splendor. I bleed for them, he thought. I won't say from where.

The killing-tools were simple, two light-pencils of the sort engineers carried for sketching on screens. Which was actually what they were, and any examination would prove it, according to the ARMs. The only difference was that if you twisted the cap, so, pressed down on the clip that held the pen in a pocket and pointed it at an organism with a spinal cord, the pen emitted a sharp yawping sound whereupon said being went into grand mal seizure. Range of up to two hundred meters, cause of death, “he died.” Jonah frowned. On second thought, maybe the ARMs were tight about this one.

“Tanj,” Ingrid said.

“Problem?”

“No, just that you have to input your ID and pay a whopping great fee to access the commercial pet… even allowing for the way this fake krona they've got has depreciated.”

“We've got money.”

“Sure, but we don't want to call too much attention to ourselves.” She continued to tap the keys. “There, I'm past the standard blocks… confirming… yah, it'd be a bad idea to ask about the security arrangements at you-know-who's place, it's probably flagged.”

“Commercial services,” Jonah said. “Want me to drive?”

“Not just yet. Right, I'll just look at the record of commercial subcontracts. Hmm. About what you'd expect.” Ingrid frowned. “Standard goods delivered to a depot and picked up by kzin military transports, no joy there. Most of the services are provided by household servants, born on the estate… no joy there, either. Ahh, outside contractors, now that's interesting.”

“What is?” Jonah said, stripping packets of what looked like hard candy out of the lining of a suitcase. Sonic grenades, but you had to spit them at the target.

“Our great and good Rin-Tin-Kzin has been buying infosystems and 'ware from human makers. And he's the only one who is; the ratcat armed forces order subcomponents to their own specs and assemble them in plants under their direct supervision. But not him.” She paused in thought. “It fits… limited number of system types, like an ascending series, with each step up a set increment of increased capacity over the one below. Nothing like our wild and woolly jungle of manufacturers. They're not used to non-standardized goods, it makes them uneasy.”

“How does that 'fit'?”

“With what the xenologists were saying. The ratcats have an old, old civilization… very stable. Like what the UN would have become in Sol system, with the psychists 'adjusting' everybody into peacefulness and the ARMs suppressing dangerous technology… which is to say, all technology. A few hundred years down the road we'd be on if the kzin hadn't come along and upset the trajectory.”

“Maybe they do some good after all.” Jonah finished checking the wire garrotes that lay coiled in the seams of their clothing, the tiny repeating blowgun with the poisoned darts, and the harmless-looking fulgurite plastic frames of their backpacks that you twisted so and they went soft as putty, with the buckle acting as detonator-timer.

“It fits with what we know about you-know-who, as well.” The room had been very carefully swept, but it didn't hurt to take some precautions. Not mentioning names, for one; a robobugger could be set to tag conversations with key words in them. “Unconventional. Wonder why he has human infosystems installed, though? Ours aren't that much better. Can't be.” Infosystems were a mature technology, long since pushed to the physical limits of quantum indeterminacy.

“Well, they're more versatile, even the obsolete stuff here on Wunderland. I think—” she tugged at an ear “—I think it may be the 'ware he's after, though. Ratcat 'ware is almost as stereotyped as their hardwiring.”

Jonah nodded; software was a favorite cottage industry in human space, and there must be millions of hobbyists who spent their leisure time fiddling with one problem or another.

“So we just set up in business and enter a bid?” he said, flopping back on the bed. He was muscular for a Belter, but even the .61 Wunderland gravity was tiring when there was no place to get away from it.

“Doubt it.” Ingrid murmured to the system. “Finagle, no joy. It's handled through something called the Datamonger's Guild: 'A mutual benefit association of those involved in infosystem development and maintenance.' Gottknows what that is.” A pause. “Whatever it is, there's no public info on how to join it. The contracts listed say you-know-who takes a random selection from their duty roster to do his maintenance work.”

“Perhaps our Japanese friend.”

“Perhaps.” Ingrid sank back on one elbow. “But what we really need are some local contacts,” she said slowly. “Jonah… we both know why Intelligence picked me as your partner. I was the only one remotely qualified who might know anyone here… and I do.”

“Which one?” he asked.

She laughed bitterly. “I'd have thought Claude, but he's— Jonah, I wouldn't have believed it!”

Jonah shrugged. “There’s an underground surrender movement on Earth. Lots of flatlander quislings; and the pussies aren't even there yet. Why be surprised there are more here?”

“But Claude! Oh, well.”

“So who else you got?”

She continued to tap at the console. “Not many. None. No one from the old days, none I'd trust, anyway. Except Harold.”

“Can you trust him?”

“Look, we have two choices. Go to Harold, or try the underworld contacts. The known-unreliable underworld contacts.”

“One of whom is your friend Harold.”

She sighed. “Yes, but— well, that's a good sign, isn't it? That he's worked with the— with them, and against—”

“Maybe.”

“And a bar is a good place to meet people.”

And mostly you just can't wait to see him. A man who'll be twice your age while you're still young. Do you love him or hate him? I still say it's damned iffy, but I guess it's the best chance we have. At least we'll be able to get a drink.

“This is supposed to be a Terran bar?” Jonah asked dubiously. He lifted one of the greenish shrimpoids from the platter and clumsily shelled it, getting a thin cut under his thumbnail in the process. He sucked on it, cursing. There was a holo of a stick-thin girl with body paint dancing in a cage over the bar, and dancing couples and groups beneath it. Most of the tables were cheek-to-jowl, and they had had to pay heavily for one with a shield, here overlooking the lower level of the club.

Ingrid ignored him, focusing on the knot in her stomach and the clammy feel of nervous sweat across her shoulders under the formal low-necked black jumpsuit. Harold's Terran Bar was crowded tonight, and the entrance-fee had been stiff. The Verguuz was excellent, however, and she sipped cautiously, welcoming the familiar mint-sweet-wham taste. The imitations in the Sol system never quite measured up. Shuddering, she noticed that two Swarm-Belter types at the next table were knocking back shot-glasses of it, and then following the liqueur with beer chasers, in a mixture of extravagance and reckless disregard for their digestions. The square-built Krio at the musicomp was tinkling out something old-sounding, piano with muted saxophone undertones.

Gottdamn, but that takes me back.

Claude had had an enormous collection of classical music, expensively enhanced stuff originally recorded on Earth, some of it on hardcopy or analog disks. His grandfather had acquired it; one of the eccentricities that had ruined the Montferrat-Palme fortunes. A silver-chased ebony box as big as a man's head, with a marvelous projection system. All the ancient greats, Brahms and Mozart and Jagger and Armstrong… they had all spent hours up in his miserable little attic, knocking back cheap Maivin and playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or Sympathy for the Devil loud enough to bring hammering broomstick protests from the people below…

Gottdamn, it is him, she thought, with a sudden flare of determination.

“Jonah,” she said, laying a hand on his arm. “This is too public, and we can't just wait for him. It's… likely to be something of a shock, you know? That musician, I knew him back-when too. I'll get him to call through directly, it'll be faster.”

The Sol-Belter nodded tightly; she squeezed the forearm before she rose. In space, or trying to penetrate an infosystem, both rank and skill made him the leader; here the mission and his life were both dependent on her. And on her contacts, decades old here, and severed in no friendly wise.

Ingrid moistened her lips; Sam had been on the edge of their circle of friends, and confronting him would be difficult enough. She wiped palms down her slacks and walked over to the musicomp; it was a handsome floor model in Svarterwood, with a beautiful point resonator and a damper field to ensure that nothing came from the area around it but the product of the keyboard.

“G'tag, Sam,” she said, standing by one side of the instrument. “Still picking them out, I see.”

“Fra?” he said, looking up at her with the dignified politeness of a well-raised Krio country-boy. She saw for the first time that one side of Sam's face was immobile; she recognized the signs of a rushed reconstruction job of the type they did after severe nerve-damage in the surface tissues.

“Well, I haven't changed that much, Sam. Remember Graduation Night, and that sing-along we all had by the Founders?”

His features changed, from the surflike smoothness of a well-trained professional to a shock so profound that the living tissue went as rigid as the dead. “Fra Raines,” he whispered. The skilled hands continued over the musicomp's surflike, but the tune had changed without conscious intent. He winced and hesitated, but she put a hand on his shoulder.

“No, keep playing, Sam.

The musician shook his head. “The boss doesn't like me to play that one, Fra Raines,” he said. “It reminds him, well, you'd know.”

“I know, Sam. But this is bigger than any of us, and it means we can't let the past sleep in its grave. Call him, tell him we're waiting.”

“Mr. Yarthkin?” the voice asked.

He had been leaning a shoulder against one wall of the inner room, watching the roulette table. The smoke in here was even denser than by the front bar, and the ornamental fans made patterns and traceries through the blue mist. Walls were set for a space scene, a holo of Jupiter taken from near orbit on one side and Wunderland on the other. Beyond them the stars were hard glitters, pinpoints of colored light receding into infinity, infinitely out of reach. Yarthkin dropped his eyes to the table. The ventilation system was too good to carry the odor of the sweat that gleamed on the hungrily intent fitees…

Another escape, he thought. Like the religious revivals and the nostalgia craze, even the feverish corruption and pursuit of wealth was but a distraction.

“Herrenmann Yarthkin-Schotmann?” the voice asked again, and a hand touched his elbow.

He looked down, into a girl's face framed in a black kerchief. Repurified Mennonite, by the long drab dress. Well-to-do, by the excellent material; many of that sect were. Wunderland had never relied much on synthetic foods, and the Herrenmann estates had used the Amish extensively as subtenants. They had flourished, particularly since the kzin came and agricultural machinery grew still scarcer… That was ending now, of course.

“No 'Herrenmann,' sweetheart,” he said gently. She was obviously terrified, this would be a den of Satan by her folk's teaching. “Just Harold, or Mr. Yarthkin if you'd rather. What can I do for you?”

She clasped her gloved hands together, a frown on the delicately pretty features and a wisp of blond hair escaping from her scarf and bonnet. “Oh… I was wondering if you could give me some advice, please, Mr. Yarthkin, everyone says you know what goes on in München.” He heard the horror in her voice as she named the city, probably from a lifetime of hearing it from the pulpit followed by “Whore of Babylon” or some such.

“Advice I provide free,” he said neutrally. Shut up, he added to his mind. There's thousands more in trouble just as bad as hers. None of your business.

“Wilhelm and I” she began, and then halted to search for words. Harold's eyes flickered up to a dark-clad young man with a tinge of beard around his face sitting at the roulette table. Sitting slumped, placing his chips with mechanical despair.

“Wilhelm and I, we lost the farm.” She put a hand to her eyes. “It wasn't his fault, we both worked so hard… but the kzin, they took the estate where we were tenants and…”

Yarthkin nodded. Kzin took a lot of feeding, and they would not willingly eat grain-fed meat, they wanted lean range beasts. More kzin estates meant less work for humans, and what there was, was in menial positions, not the big tenant holdings for mixed farming that the Herrenmann had preferred. Farmholders reduced to beggary, or to an outlaw existence that ended in a kzin hunt.

“Your church wouldn't help?” he said. The Amish were a close-knit breed.

“They found new positions for our workers, but the bishop, the bishop said Wilhelm… that there was no money to buy him a new tenancy, that he should humble himself and take work as a foreman and pray for forgiveness.” Repurified Mennonites thought that worldly failure was punishment for sin. “Wilhelm, Wilhelm is a good man, I told him to listen to the bishop but he cursed him to his face, and now we are shunned.” She paused. “Things, things are very bad there now. It is no place to live or raise children, with food so scarce and many families crowded together.”

“Sweetheart, this isn't a charitable institution,” Yarthkin said warily.

“No, Mr. Yarthkin.” She drew herself up and wrapped pride around herself like a cloak. “We had some money, we sold everything, the stock and tools. Swarm Agrobiotics offered Wilhelm and me a place, they are terraforming new farm-asteroids. With what they pay we could afford to buy a new tenancy after a few years.” He nodded. The Swarm's population was growing by leaps and bounds, and it was cheaper to grow than synthesize, but skilled dirt-farmers were rare. “But we must be there soon, and there are so many difficulties with the papers.”

Bribes, Yarthkin translated to himself.

“It takes so much more than we thought, and to live while we wait! Now we have not enough for the final clearance, and… and we know nothing but farming. The policeman told Wilhelm that we must have four thousand krona more, and we had less than a thousand. Nobody would lend more against his wages, not even the Sina moneylender, he just laughed and offered to— to sell me to— and Wilhelm hit him, and we had to pay more to the police. Now he gambles, it is the only way we might get the money, but of course he loses.”

The house always wins, Yarthkin thought. The girl steeled herself and continued.

“The Herrenmann policeman—”

“Claude Montferrat-Palme?” Yarthkin inquired, nodding with his chin. The police chief was over at the baccarat tables with a glass of Verguuz at his elbow, playing his usual cautiously skillful game.

“Yes,” she whispered. “He told me that there was a way the papers could be approved.” A silence. “I said nothing to Wilhelm, he is… very young, younger than me in some ways.” The china-blue eyes turned to him. “Is this Herrenmann one who keeps his word?”

“Claude?” Yarthkin said. “Yes. A direct promise, yes; he'll keep the letter of it.”

She gripped her hands tighter. “I do not know what to do,” she said softly. “I must think.”

She nodded jerkily to herself and moved off. Yarthkin threw the butt of his cigarette down for the floor to absorb and moved over to the roulette table. A smile quirked the corner of his mouth, and he picked up a handful of hundred-krona chips from in front of the croupier. Stupid, he thought to himself. Oh, well, a man has to make a fool of himself occasionally.

The Amishman had dropped his last chip and was waiting to lose it; he gulped at the drink at his elbow and loosened the tight collar of his jacket. Probably seeing the Welfare Office ahead of him, Yarthkin thought. These days, that meant a labor camp where the room-and-board charges were twice the theoretical wages… They would find something else for his wife to do. Yarthkin dropped his counter beside the young farmers.

“I'm feeling lucky tonight, Toni,” he said to the croupier. “We'll play the black. Let's see it.”

She raised one thin eyebrow, shrugged her shoulders under the sequins and spun the wheel. “Place your bets, gentlefolk, please.” Impassively, she tossed the ball into the whirring circle of metal. “Number eight. Even, in the black.”

The Amishman blinked down in astonishment as the croupier's ladle pushed his doubled stake toward him. Yarthkin reached out and gripped his wrist as the young man made an automatic motion towards the plaques. It was thick and springy with muscle, the arm of a man who had worked with his hands all his life, but Yarthkin had no difficulty stopping the motion.

“Let it ride,” he said. “Play the black. I'll do the same.”

Another spin, but the croupier's lips were compressed into a thin line; she was a professional, and hated a break in routine. “Place your bets… Black wins again, gentlefolk.”

“Try twelve,” Yarthkin said, shifting his own chip. “No, all of it.”

“Place your bets… Twelve wins, gentlefolk.”

Glancing up, Yarthkin caught Montferrat's coldly furious eye, and grinned with an equal lack of warmth. At the next spin of the wheel he snapped his finger for the waiter and urged the younger man at his side to his feet, piling the chips on an emptied drink tray.

“That's five thousand,” Yarthkin said. “Why don't you cash them in and call it a night?”

Wilhelm paused, scrubbed his hands across his face, straightened his rumpled clothes. “Yes… yes, thank you, sir, perhaps I should.” He looked down at the pile of chips, and Yarthkin could see his lips whiten with shock as the impact hit home. “I…”

The girl came to meet him, and gave Yarthkin a single glance through tear-starred lashes before the two left, clinging to each other. The owner of Harold's shrugged and pushed his own counters back to the pile before the croupier.

“How are we doing tonight, Toni?” he asked.

“About five thousand krona less well than we could have,” she said sharply.

“We'll none of us starve,” Yarthkin added mildly, and strolled over to the baccarat table.

Montferrat raised an eyebrow and smiled thinly. His anger had faded. “You're a sentimental idiot, Harry.”

“Probably true, Claude,” Yarthkin said, and took a plain unlogoed credit chip from the inside pocket of his jacket. “The usual.”

Montferrat palmed it and smoothed back his mustache with a finger. “Sometimes I think you indulge in these little quixotic gestures just to annoy me,” he added, and dropped three cards from his hand. “Banco,” he continued.

“Probably right there, too, Claude,” he said. “I'm relying on the fact that you're not an unmitigated scoundrel.”

“Now I'm an honest man?”

“No, a scoundrel with mitigating factors… and I'm a sentimental idiot, as you mentioned.” He stopped, listened abstractedly. “See you later, somebody wants to see me. Sam says it's important, and he isn't given to exaggeration.”

The doors slid open and Yarthkin stepped into the main room, beside the north end of the long bar. The music was the first thing he heard, the jaunty remembered beat. Cold flushed over his skin, and the man he had been smiling and waving to flinched. That brought the owner of Harold's Place back to his duties; they were self-imposed, and limited to this building, but that did not mean they could be shirked. He moved with swift grace through the throng, shouting an occasional greeting over the surf-roar of voices, slapping a shoulder, shaking a hand, smiling. The smile was still on his face as he stepped up off the dance floor and through the muting field around the musicomp, but he could taste the acid and copper of his own rage at the back of his throat.

“I told you never to play that song again,” he said coldly. “We've been together a long time, Samuel Ogun, it'd be a pity to end a beautiful friendship this way.”

The musician keyed the instrument to continue without him and swiveled to face his employer. “Boss… — Mr. Yarthkin, once you've talked to those two over at Table Three, you'll understand. Believe me.”

Yarthkin nodded curtly and turned to the table. The two Belters were sitting close to the musicomp, with the shimmer of a privacy field around them, shrouding features as well as dulling voices. Yarthkin smoothed the lapels of his jacket and wove deftly between tables and servers as he approached, forcing his anger down into an inner cesspit where discarded emotions went. Sam was no fool, he must mean something by violating a standing order that old. He did not shake easy, either, and that he had been was plain to see on him. This should be interesting, at least; it would be good to have a straightforward bargaining session after the embarrassing exhilaration of the incident in the gambling room. Money was a relaxing game to play, the rules were clear, victory and defeat a matter of counting the score, and no embarrassing emotions; and these might be the ones with the special load that the rumors had told of. More profit and more enjoyment if they were… more danger, too, but a man had to take an occasional calculated risk. Otherwise, you might as well put a droud in your head and be done with it.

The man looked thirty and might be anything between that and seventy: tough-looking, without the physical softness that so many rockjacks got from a life spent in cramped zero-G spaceships. A conservative dark innersuit, much less gaudy than what most successful Swarmers wore these days, and an indefinably foreign look about the eyes. Yarthkin sat, pulled out a chair and looked over to study the woman's face. The world went black.

“Boss, are you all right?” There was a sharp hiss against his neck, and the sudden sharp-edged alertness of a stimshot. “Are you all right?”

“You,” Yarthkin whispered, shaking the Krio's hand off his shoulder with a shrug. Ingrid's face hovered before him, unchanged, no, a little thinner, more tanned. But the same, not forty years different, the same. He could feel things moving in his head, like a mountain river he had seen on a spring hunting trip once. Cracks running across black ice, and the rock beneath his feet toning with the dark water's hidden power. “You.” His voice went guttural, and his right hand went inside the dress jacket.

“Jonah, no!” Ingrid's hand shot out and slapped her companion's to the table. Yarthkin felt his mind stagger and broach back toward reality as the dangerprickle ran over his skin; that was probably not an engineer's light-pencil in the younger man's hand. He struggled for self-command, dropped his gunhand back to the table.

“Well.” What was there to say? “Long time, no see. Glad you could make it. The last time, you seemed to have a pressing appointment elsewhere. I showed up on time — and there the 'boat was, boosting like bell a couple of million klicks Solward. Me in a singleship with half a dozen kzin Slashers sniffing around.”

Ingrid's face went chalk-white. “Let me explain—”

“Don't bother. Closed account.” He paused, lit a cigarette, astonished at the steadiness of his own hands.

“Claude know you're here?”

“No, and it's best he doesn't.”

“Sure. Let me guess. Now you're back, and Mr. Quick-Draw here with you, on some sort of UN skullbuggery, and need my help.” He looked thoughtful. “Come to that, how did you get here?”

“Jonah Matthieson,” the Sol-Belter said. “How we got here isn't important. But we do need your help. Damned little we've gotten in this system that hasn't been bought and paid for, and half the time we've been sold out to the pussies even so.”

“Pussies? Oh, the ratcats.” He laughed, a little wildly. “So you haven't found legions of eager, idealistic volunteers ready to throw themselves into the jaws of the kzin to help you on your sacred mission, whatever it is. How can that be?”

“We can pay.”

“Pay. Well, well, the UN has money.” Yarthkin's finger touched behind one ear, and the mirror behind the bar went screenmode. It showed an overgrown park, flicking between micropickups scattered wholesale through the vegetation. There had been lawns here once; now there was waist-high grass, Earth trees grown to scores of meters in the light gravity, native Wunderlander growths soaring on spidery trunks. The sound of panting breath, and a naked human came stumbling through the undergrowth. His legs and flanks were lashed and scratched by thorns and burrs. He reeled with exhaustion, feet pounding with careless heaviness; the eyes were flat and blank in the stubbled face, mouth dribbling. Behind him there was a flash of orange-red, alien among the cool greens of Earth, the tawny olives of Wunderland. A flash, two hundred kilos of sentient carnivore charging on all fours in a hunching rush that parted the long grass in an arrow of rippling wind. Not so much like a cat as a giant weasel, blurring, looming up behind the fleeing human in a wall of flesh, a wall that fell tipped with bright teeth and black claws.

The screaming began at once, sank to a bubbling sound and the wet tearing noises of feeding. Shouts of protest rose from the dance floor and the other tables, and the sound of someone vomiting into an expensive meal. Yarthkin touched the spot behind his ear and the screen switched back to mirror. The protests lasted longer, and the staff of Harold's went among the patrons to soothe with free drinks and apologies, murmurs. Technical mistake, government override, here, let me fix that for you, gentlefolk…

“And that,” Yarthkin said, “is a good reason why you're not going to be finding hordes beating down your door to volunteer. For glory or for money. We've been living with that for forty years, you fool. While you in the Sol system sat fat and happy and safe.”

Jonah leaned forward. “I'm here now, aren't I? Neither fat, nor very happy, and not at all safe right now. I was in two fleet actions, Mr. Yarthkin. Out of four. Earth's been fighting the kzin since I was old enough to vote. We haven't lost so far. Been close a couple of times, but we haven't lost. We could have stayed home. Note we didn't. Ingrid and I are considerably less safe than you.”

Ingrid and I, Yarthkin thought, looking at the faces, side by side. The young faces. Sol-Belter. Hotshot pilot. Secret agent. All-round romantic hero, come to save us worthless pussy-whipped peons. Tonight seemed to be a night for powerful emotions, something he had been trying to unlearn. Now he felt hatred strong and thick, worse than anything he had ever felt for the kzin. Worse even than he had felt for himself, for a long time.

“So what do you need?”

“A way into the Datamonger's Guild for a start.”

Yarthkin looked thoughtful. “That's easy enough.” He realized that Ingrid had been holding her breath. Bad. She wants this bad. How bad?

“And any other access to the— to networks.”

“Networks. Sure. Networks. Any old networks, right? Want into Claude's system? Want to see his private files? What else would you like?”

“Harry—”

“I can do that, you know. Networks.”

She didn't say anything.

“Help. You want help,” he said slowly. “Well, that leaves only one question.” He poured himself a drink in Jonah's water-glass, tossed it back. “What will you pay?”

“Anything we have. Anything you want.”

“Anything?”

“Of course. When do you want me?”

“Ingrid—”

“Not your conversation, Belter. Get lost.”

The club was dim, with the distinctive stale chill smell of tobacco and absent people that came in the hours just before dawn. Yarthkin sat at the table and sipped methodically at the Verguuz; it was a shame to waste it on just getting drunk, but owning a bar did have some advantages. He took another swallow, letting the smooth sweet minty taste flow over his tongue, then breathing out as the cold fire ran back up his throat. A pull at the cigarette, one of the clove-scented ones well-to-do Baha'i smoked. My, aren't we wallowing in sensual indulgence tonight.

“Play,” he said to the man at the musicomp. The Krio started and ran his fingers over the surface of the instrument, and the brassy complexities of Meddelhoffer lilted out into the deserted silence of the room.

“Not that,” Yarthkin said, and knocked back the rest of the Verguuz. “You know what I want.”

“No, you don't,” Sam said. “That's a manti-manti mara,” he continued, dropping back into his native tongue: a great stupidity. “What you want is to get drunk and manya-manya, smash something up. Go ahead, it's your bar.”

“I said, play it.” The musician shrugged, and began the ancient melody. The husky voice followed:

“… no matter what we say or do—”

A contralto joined it: “So happy together.”

They both looked up with a start. Ingrid dropped into a chair across from Yarthkin, reached for the bottle and poured herself a glass.

“Isn't there enough for two?” she asked, raising a brow in response to his scowl. The musician rose, and Yarthkin waved him back.

“You don't have to leave, Sam.”

“Do I have to stay? No? Then it's late, boss, and I'm going for bed. See you tomorrow.”

“Where's the Sol-Belter?” Yarthkin asked. His voice was thickened but not slurred, and his hand was steady as he poured.

“In the belly of the whale… Still working in your office.” And trying not to think about what we're doing. Or willl be doing in a minute, if you're sober enough. “That's a pretty impressive system you have there.”

“Yeah. And I'm taking a hell of a chance letting you two use it.”

“So are we.”

“So are we all. Honorable men, all, all honorable men. And women. Honorable.”

“Hari—”

“That's Herr Yarthkin to you, Lieutenant.”

“If you let me explain—”

“Explain what?”

“Hari, the rendezvous time was fixed, and you didn't make it! We had to boost, there were hundreds of lives riding on it.”

“Oh, no, Lieutenant Raines. The ships had to boost, and we had to keep the kzin off your backs as long as we could. Not every pilot had to go with them.”

“Angers was dying, radiation sickness, puking her guts out. Flambard's nerve had gone, Finagle's sake, Hari, I was the best they had, and—” she stopped, looking at his face, slumped. “Long ago, long ago.”

Not so long for you as for me, he thought. Her face was the same, not even noticeably aged. What was different, where did the memory lie? Unformed, he thought. She looks… younger than I remember. Not as much behind the eyes.

“Long ago, kid. How'd you get here?”

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“Probably I wouldn't. That raid—”

She nodded. “That raid. The whole reason for that raid was to get us here.”

“For God's sake, why?”

“I can't tell you.”

“It's part of the price, sweetheart.”

“Literally, I can't,” Ingrid said. “Post-hypnotic. Reinforced with— the psychists have some new tricks. Hari, I would literally die before I told you, or anyone else.”

“Even if they're taking you apart?”

She nodded.

Harold thought about that for a moment and shuddered. “OK. It was a long time ago, and maybe— maybe you saw things I didn't see. You always were bigger on romantic causes than the rest of us.” He stood.

She got to her feet and stood expectantly. “Where?”

“There's a bedroom upstairs.”

She nodded. “I've— I've thought about this a lot.”

“Not as much as I have. You haven't had as long.”

She laughed. “That's right.”

“So now I'm old—”

“No. Not old, Hari. Not old. Which way? The stairs over there?”

“Just a minute, kid. So. Assuming it works, whatever you and the Belter have planned, what afterward?”

“Once that's done it doesn't matter.”

“Sure it does.”

“Well, we brought a ship with us. Nice boat, the best the UN's making these days. Markham's keeping her for us, and then we'll do the guerrilla circuit afterwards.”

“Markham? Ulf Reichstein-Markham?” An old enmity sharpened his tone, one less personal. “A legitimate bastard of a long line of bastards, who does his best to out-bastard them all. He'd cut your throat for six rounds of pistol ammunition, if he needed them.”

“Didn't strike me as a bandit.”

“Worse. True Believer… and you can whistle in the wind for that ship.” She smiled. “That ship, you might say she has a mind of her own. Really; we've got a hold on it.”

Then you'll be off to the Swarm, Yarthkin thought. Playing dodgem with the ratcats, you and that Jonah. Flirting with danger and living proud. There was a taste of bile at the back of his mouth. Remembering the long slow years of defeat, strength crumbling away as one after another of them despaired; until nothing was left but the fanatics and the outlaws, a nuisance to the enemy and a deadly danger to their own people. What was the honor in going on with the killing when it had all turned pointless and rancid? No more than in taking the amnesty and picking up the pieces of life. But not for you. You and Jonah, you'll win or go out in a blaze of glory. No dirty alliances and dirtier compromises and decisions with no good choices. The two of you have stolen my life.

“Get out,” he said. “Get the hell out.”

“No.” She took his hand and led him toward the stairs.

“They've accepted our bid, Captain.”

Jonah nodded stiffly. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Not that I'm surprised.”

“No, sir.”

Back in Sol System a thousand hackers had labored to produce advanced software they thought might be salable on Wunderland. Most of it had been too advanced; they'd predicted a higher state of the art than Wunderland had retained, and the stuff wouldn't work on the ancient hardware. Even so, there was plenty that did work. It had only taken fifty days to make Jan Hardman and Lucy van den Berg moderately big names in the Datamonger's Guild. The computer records showed them as old timers, with a scattering of previous individual sales. They told everyone on the net that they owed their big success to teaming up.

Teaming up. A damned tough fifty days… Jonah looked unashamedly at Ingrid. “I admit you've improved Herr Yarthkin's disposition one whole hell of a lot, but do you have to look so tanj happy?”

“Capt— Jonah, I am happy.”

“Yeah.”

“I— Jonah, I'm sorry if it hurts you.”

“Yeah. All right, Lieutenant. We've got work to do.”

“These are the same monkeys as before.” The guards spoke in the Hero's Tongue. “The computer says they have access.”

The kzin tapped a large button on the console, and the door lifted.

Jonah and Ingrid cringed and waited. The kzin sniffed, then led the way outside. Another kzin warrior followed, and two more fell in on either side. The routine had been the same the other two times they had been there.

This will be different. Maybe. Jonah pushed the thoughts away. Kzin weren't really telepathic but they could sense excitement and smell fear. Of course the fear's natural. They probably like that scent.

Sunlight was failing behind evening clouds, and the air held a dank chill and the wild odors of storm swept grassland. The two humans crossed the landing field between forms a third again their height, living walls of orange-red fur; claws slid out in unconscious reflex on the stocks of their heavy beam rifles.

Jonah kept his eyes carefully down. It would be an unbearable irony if they were killed by reflex, victims of some overzealous kzin spooked by the upsurge in guerrilla activity. The attack of the Yamamoto had created the chaos that let them into Wunderland, but that same chaos just might kill them.

Doors slid aside, and they descended into chill corridors like a dreadnought's, surfaces laced with armored data conduits and the superconducting coil-complexes of field generators.

One of the kzin followed. “This way,” he said, prodding Jonah's shoulder with the muzzle of his weapon. The light down here was reddish, frequencies adjusted to the alien's convenience; the air was drier, colder than humans would have wished. And everything was too big, grips and stairs and doors adapted to a thick-bodied, short-legged race with the bulk of terrestrial gorillas.

They went through a chamber filled with computer consoles. This was as far as they'd been allowed the last two times. “Honored Governor Chuut-Riit is pleased with your work,” the kzin officer said.

“We are honored,” Ingrid said.

“This way.” The kzin led them through another door. They stepped into an outsized transfer booth, were instantly elsewhere. Gravity increased to the kzin homeworld standard, sagging their knees, and they stepped through into another checkzone. The desire to gawk around was intolerable, but the gingery smell of kzin was enough to restrain them as they walked through a thick sliding door. The transfer booth was inside an armored box, and he recognized the snouts of heavy remote-waldoed weapons up along the edges of the roof. Outside was another control room, a dozen kzin operators lying recumbent on spaceship-style swiveling couches before semicircular consoles. Their helmets were not the featureless wraparounds humans would have used; these had thin crystal facepieces, adjustable audio pickups and cutouts for the ears. Not as efficient, but probably a psychological necessity. Kzin have keener senses than man, but are more vulnerable to claustrophobia, any sort of confinement that cuts off the flow of scent, sound, light.

Patience comes harder to them, too, Jonah thought, as they penetrated another set of armored doors to the ultimate sanctum. At last!

“Accomplish your work,” the kzin said. “The inspector will arrive in six hours. Sanitary facilities are there.”

Jonah exhaled a long breath as the alien left. Now there was only the featureless four-meter box of the control room; the walls were a neutral pearly white, ready to transmit visual data. The only consol was a standup model in the centre, with both human and kzin seating arrangements before it. Ingrid and he exchanged a wordless glance as they walked to it and began unpacking their own gear, snapping out the support tripod and sliding home the thin black lines of the data jacks.

A long pause, while their fingers played over the small black rectangles of their portable interfacing units; the only sound was a subliminal sough of ventilators and the faint natural chorus that the kzin always broadcast through the speakers of a closed installation: insects and the rustle of vegetation. Jonah felt a familiar narrowing, a focus of concentration more intense than sex or even combat, as the lines of a program-schematic sprang out on his unit.

“Finagle, talk about paranoids,” he muttered. “See this freeze-function here?”

Ingrid's face was similarly intent, and the rushing flicker of the scroll-display on her unit gave her face a momentary look as of light through stained glass. “Got it. Freeze.”

“We're bypassed?”

“This is under our authorized codes. All right, these are the four major subsystems. See the physical channeling? The hardware won't accept config commands of more than 10k except through this channel we're at.”

“Slow response, for a major system like this,” he mused. The security locks were massive and complex, but a little cumbrous.

“It's the man-kzin hardware interfacing,” Ingrid said. “I think. Their basic architecture's more synchronic. Betcha they never had an industrial-espionage problem… Hey, notice that?”

“Ahhhh. Interesting.” Jonah kept his voice carefully phlegmatic. Tricky kitty. Tricky indeed. “Odd. This would be much harder to access through the original Hero system.”

“Tanj, you're right,” Ingrid said. She looked up with an urchin grin that blossomed with the pure delight of solving a software problem.

Jonah gave her a cautioning look.

Her face went back to a mask of concentration. “Clearly this was designed with security against kzin in mind. See, here and here? That's why they've deliberately preserved the original human operating system on this — two of them, and used this spatchcocked integral translation chip here, see?”

“Right!” His fingers flew. “In fact, if analyzed with the original system as an integrating node and catchpoint… see?”

“Right. Murphy, but you'd have more luck wandering through a minefield than trying to get at this from an exterior connection! There's nothing in the original stem system but censor programs; by the time you got by them, the human additions would have alarmed and frozen. Catches you on the interface transitions, see? That's why they haven't tried to bring the core system up to the subsystem operating speeds. Sure slows things down, though.”

“We'll just have to live with it,” Jonah said for the benefit of any hidden listeners. It seemed unlikely. There weren't many kzin programmers, and all of them were working for the navy or the government. This was the strictly personal system of Governor Chuut-Riit.

“Wheels within wheels,” Ingrid muttered.

“Right.” Jonah shook his head; there was a certain perverse beauty in using a cobbled-up rig's own lack of functional integration as a screening mechanism. But all designed against kzinti. Not against us. Ye gods, it would be easy enough for Chuut-Riit's rivals to work through humans—

Only none of them would think of that. This is the only estate that uses outside contractors. And the Heroes don't think that way to begin with.

His fingers flew. Ingrid — Lieutenant Raines — would be busy installing the new data management system they were supposed to be working at. What he was doing was far beyond her. Jonah let his awareness and fingers work together, almost bypassing his conscious mind. Absently he reached for a squeeze-bulb before he remembered that the nearest Jolt Cola was four lightyears away.

Now. Bypass the kzin core system. Move into the back door. He keyed in the ancient passwords embedded into the Wunderland computer system by Earth hackers almost a hundred years before. Terran corporate managers had been concerned about competition, and they'd built backdoors into every operating system destined for Wunderland. A built-in industrial espionage system. And the kzin attack and occupation should have kept the Wunderlanders from finding them…

/Murphy Magic. The SeCrEt of the UnIvErSe is 43, NOT 42.

$

“There is justice,” Jonah muttered.

“Joy?”

“Yeah.” He typed furiously.

She caught her breath. “All right.”

By the time the core realizes what's going on, we'll all be dead. “May take a while. Here we go.”

Two hours later he was done. He looked over at Ingrid. She had long finished, except for sending the final signals that would tell the system they were done. “About ready,” he said.

She caught her breath. “All right.”

For a moment he was shocked at the dark half-moons below her eyes, the lank hair sweat-plastered to her cheeks, and then concentration dropped enough for him to feel his own reaction. Pain clamped at his stomach, and the muscles of his lower back screamed protest at the posture he had been frozen in for long hours of extra gravity.

He raised his hand to his mouth and extended the little finger back to the rear molars. Precisely machined surfaces slipped into nano-spaced fittings in the vat-cultured substitute that had been serving him as a fingernail; anything else would have wiped the coded data. He took a deep breath and pulled; there was a flash of pain before the embedded duller drugs kicked in, and then it settled to a tearing ache. The raw surface of the stripped finger was before him, the wrist clenched in the opposite hand. Ingrid moved forward swiftly to bandage it, and he spat the translucent oblong into his palm.

“Tanj,” he said resentfully. Those sadistic flatlander morons could have used a nerve-pinch.

Ingrid picked the biochip up between thumb and forefinger. She licked her lips nervously. “Will it work?”

“It's supposed to.” The sound of his own pulse in his ears was louder than the background noise the kzin used to fool their subconscious into comfort. Pain receded, irrelevant, as he looked at the tiny oblong of modified claw. Scores of highly-skilled men and women, thousands of hours of computer time on machines whose price-tags ran in the billions of stars, all for this. No, for the information contained in this… nearly as much information as was required to make a complete human body, it was amazing what they could do these days with quantum-well storage. Although the complete specs for a man were in a packet considerably smaller, if it came to that.

“Give it here.” It ought to be quick. Milliseconds quick. A lot better than being hunted down by the ratcats.

She handed over the nail, and he slipped it into his own interface unit. “As your boyfriend likes to say, here's viewing, kinder.”

She nodded tightly. He raised a thumb, pressed it down on one of the outlined squares of the schematic that occupied his interfacer.

“Ram dam,” he said. The words came from nowhere, and an eerie memory of old Mukeriji speaking flitted through his mind. Dreadful Bride, spare us: ram dam ram dam ram—

The walls pulsed, flickered green, flashed into an intricate strobing pattern and froze. Jonah closed his eyes for a second and felt an enormous thankfulness. They might still be only seconds away from death, but at least it wouldn't be for nothing.

“Finagle!” Jonah said bitterly. “How could even a kzin be this paranoid?”

He kicked the pillar-console; it hurt through the light slipper. There were weapons and self-destruct systems in plenty, enough to leave nothing but a very large crater with magma at its core where Chuut-Riit's palace-estate had stood… but it wasn't clear how any of them could be triggered from here.

“Who ever heard of… wheels within wheels!” Jonah said disbelievingly. “Am I imagining things, or are these systems completely separated?”

Ingrid shook her head slowly. “I'm afraid that's a long way past me. Can't you do anything with it?”

“Maybe. There's a chance. Worth a try, anyway.”

He touched icons on the screen surface, then tapped in new commands. “Nope. All right, what does this do? Nothing. Hmm. But if— Yeah, this may work. Not immediately, though. You about through?”

“Hours ago. We don't have much longer.”

“Right. I do want to look at a couple of things, though.” Jonah's eyes narrowed. “Call,” he said to the computer. “Weekly schedule for user-CR, regression, six months, common elements.” His finger flicked out to a sequence on the wall ahead of them. “Got it! Got it, by Murphy's asshole; that's the single common element outside going to his office! What is it?”

Ingrid's fingers were busy. “No joy, Jonah. That's his visit to his kiddies. The males. They're in an isolation facility.”

“Oh. Bat puckey. Here, let me look—”

A warning light blazed on the console.

“They're coming,” Ingrid hissed. “Hurry.”

“Right. Plan B. Only—” Jonah stared at the files in wonder. “I will be dipped in shit.”

“We have positive identification,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said. The staff conference rustled, ten men and women grouped around a table of black ebony. It was an elegant room, walls of white stone fretwork and floor of tile, a sideboard with refreshments. No sound but the gentle rush of water in the courtyard outside; this had been the Herrenhaus, the legislature, before the kzin came.

Claude Montferrat leaned forward slightly and looked down the table to his second in command. How alike we all are, he thought. Not physical appearance, but something about the eyes… She was a pallid woman, with a beginning potbelly disgusting on someone her age, hair cropped close on the left and in a braided ponytail on the other.

“Oh?” he drawled. It was important to crack this case and quickly, Supervisor-of-Animals was on his track. Unwise to have a subordinate take too much credit for it, particularly this one, she had been using her own dossier files to build influence in the higher echelons of human government. Two can play at that game, he thought. And I do it better, since relying on blackmail alone is a crudity I've grown beyond. She doesn't know I've penetrated her files, either… of course, she may have done likewise…

No. He would be dead if she had.

“From their hotel room. No correlation on fingerprints, of course.” Alterations to fingerprints and retina patterns were an old story; you never caught anyone with access to underworld tailoring shops that way. “But they evidently whiled away their spare time with the old in-and-out, and they don't clean the mattresses there very well, DNA analysis.

“Case A, display,” she continued. Sections of the ebony before each of the staff officers turned transparent, a molecular analysis. “This is the male, what forensic could make of it. Young, not more than thirty. Sol-Belter, to 93%. Here's a graphic of his face, projection from the genes and descriptions by hotel staff.”

A portrait overlaid the lines and curves of the analysis, a hard-lined blocky face with a short Belter strip. “This doesn't include any scars or birthmarks, of course.”

“Very interesting,” Montferrat drawled. “But as you're no doubt aware, chance recombination could easily reproduce a Sol-Belter genetic profile; the Serpent Swarm was only colonized three centuries ago, and there has been immigration since. Our records from the Belt are not complete, you know the trouble we've been having getting them to tighten up on registration.”

Axelrod-Bauergartner shook her head, smiling thinly. “Less than a 3% chance, when you correlate with the probability of that configuration, then eliminate the high percentage of Swarmers we do have full records on. Beautiful job on the false idents, by the way. If we hadn't been tipped we'd never have found them.

“And this,” she said, calling up another analysis, “is the female. Also young, ten years post-maturity, and a Swarmer for sure. No contemporary record.”

Montferrat raised a brow and lit his cigarette, looking indifferently down at the abstract. “We'll have to pick them both up on suspicion,” he said, “and ream their memories. But I'd scarcely call this a positive ID; nothing I'd like to go to the kzin with, for certain.” A pause, and a delicate smile. “Of course, if you'd like to take the responsibility yourself…”

“I may just take you up on that… sir,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said, and a cold bell began ringing at the back of Montferrat's mind. “You see, we did find a perfect correlate for the female's DNA pattern. Not in any census registry, but in an old research file at the Scholarium, a genetics survey. Pre-War. Dead data, but I had the central system do a universal sweep, damn the expense, and there were no locks on the data. Just stored out of the way…”

“This doesn't make sense,” Grimbardsun said. He was Economic Regulation, older than Axelrod-Bauergartner and fatter; less ambitious, except for the bank account he was so excellently placed to feed. Complications with the kzin made him sweat, and there were dark patches under the armpits of his uniform tunic. “You said she was young.”

“Biological,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said triumphantly. “The forensics people counted how many ticks she had on her biological clock. But the Scholarium file records her as…”

A picture flashed across the data, and Montferrat coughed to hide his reaction. He was grateful for the beard and the tan that hid the cold waxy pallor of his skin as the capillaries shrank and sent the blood back to the veins and heart. It felt as if a huge hand had grasped his innards and was squeezing.

“Ingrid Raines,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said. “Chronological age, better than sixty. Qualified pilot and software wizard, and a possible alternate slotter on one of the slowboats that was launched just before the end.”

“I was a possible alternate myself, if I hadn't been taken prisoner,” Montferrat said, and even then felt a slight pleasure at Axelrod-Bauergartner's wince. She hadn't been born then, and it was a reminder that at least he had fought the kzin once, not spent his adolescence scheming to enter their service. “There were thousands of us, and most didn't make it anywhere near the collection points. It was all pretty chaotic, toward the end.” His hand did not tremble as he laid the cigarette in the ashtray, and his eyes were not fixed on the oval face with its long Belter strip that turned into an auburn fountain at the back.

“Which was why the ordinary student files were lost,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said, nodding so that her incipient jowls swayed. “Yah. All we got from the genetics survey was a name and a student number that doesn't correlate to anything existing. But the DNA's a one-to-one, no doubt about it at all. Raines went out on that slowboat, and somehow Raines came back, still young.”

Still young, Montferrat thought. Still young… and I sit here, my soul older than Satan's. “Came back. Dropped off from a ship going .999 lightspeed?”

A shrug. “The genes don't lie.”

“Computer,” Montferrat said steadily. “All points, maximum priority. Pictures and idents to be distributed to all sources; capture alive at all costs, we need the information they have.”

To his second. “My congratulations, Herrenfrau Axelrod-Bauergartner, on a job well done. We'll catch these revenants, and when we do all the summer soldiers who've been flocking to those Resistance idiots since the attack will feel a distinct chill. I think that's all for today?”

They rose with the usual round of handshakes, Grimbardsun's hand wet, Axelrod-Bauergartner's soft and cold as her eyes. Montferrat felt like someone smiling with his face, talking with his mouth. Impeccable, until he was in the privacy of his office, and staring down at the holo in his desk. Matching it with the one from his locked and sealed files, matching the reality with forensics projection. Feeling the moisture spilling from his eyes, down onto the imperishable synthetic, into the face he had seen with the eye of the mind every day for the last forty years. The face he would arrest and turn over to the interrogators and the kzin, along with the last of his soul.

“Why did you come back?” he whispered. “Why did you come back, to torment us here in hell?”

“Right, now download,” Jonah said. The interfacer bleeped quietly and opened to extrude the biochip.

“Well, this ought to be useful, if we can get the information back,” Ingrid said dully, handing him the piece of curved transparent quasi-tissue.

He unwrapped his hand gingerly and slid the fingernail home, into the implanted flexible gasket beneath the cuticle. “Provided we can get ourselves, this, or a datalink to the ship.”

Useful was an understatement; intelligence-gathering was not their primary job, but this was a priceless load. The complete specs on the most important infosystem on Wunderland, and strategic sampling of the data in its banks. Ships, deployments, capacities. Kzin psychology and history and politics, command profiles, strategic planning and kriegspiel-wargames played by the pussy General Staff for decades. All the back doors, from the human systems, then, through them, into the kzin system. UN Naval Intelligence would willingly sacrifice half a fleet for this…

“That's it, then,” Jonah said. “It's not what we came for, but it can make a difference. And there—”

Ingrid was not listening. “Hold on! Look!”

“Eh?”

“An alert subroutine.” Her fingers moved across her interfacer. “Gottdamn, that is an alert! Murphy, it's about us, those are our cover-idents it's broadcasting. We're blown.”

“Block it, quick.” They worked in silence for a moment. Jonah scrubbed a hand across his face. “That'll hold it for a half-hour.”

“We'll never make it back to München before the next call gets through,” she said. “Not without putting up a holosign that this system's been subverted down to the config.”

“We don't have to,” Jonah said. He squeezed eyes shut, pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Finagle, why now… the transfer booth. Computer,” he continued. “Is the civilian system still online? Slaved to the core-system here?”

“Affirmative, to both.”

“That's it, then. What's the closest functional booth to the Ba'hai quarter? Right. Key the internal link to that one. Code, full-wipe after execution, purge. Ingrid, let's go.”

“Is the system compromised?” Chuut-Riit asked. He paced through the central control room of his estate. His nostrils flared: yes, the scent of two of the monkeys, a male and… He snuffled further. Yes, the female was bearing. Grimly he filed the smell away, for possible future reference. It was unlikely that he would ever encounter either of them in person, but one could hope.

One of the kzin technicians was so involved with following the symbols scrolling by on the walls that he swept his hand behind him with claws extended in an exasperated protest at being interrupted. The governor bristled and then relaxed; it helped that he came from the hunt. Had killed and fed well, mated and washed his glands and tissues clear of hormones freeing the reasoning brain. Even more that he had spent most of his lifespan cooling a temper that had originally been hasty even by kzin standards. He controlled breath and motion, the desire to lash his tail and pace; it ran through him that perhaps it was his temper that had set him on the road to mastery, that never-to-be-forgotten moment in the nursery so many years ago. The realization that his rage could kill, and in time would kill him as dead as the sibling beneath his claws.

The guards behind him had snarled at the infotech's insolence, a low subliminal rumbling and the dryspicy scent of anger. An expressive ripple of Chuut-Riit's fur, ears, tail quieted them.

“These specialists are all mad,” he whispered aside. “One must humor them, like a cub that bites your ears.” They were sorry specimens in truth: one scrubby and undersized, with knots in his fur; the other a giant, but clumsy, slow, actually fat. Heroes, indeed! Any Hero seeing them would know their brilliance, since such disgusting examples of bad inheritance would only be kept alive for the most pressing of needs.

The governor schooled himself to wait, shifting only enough to keep his heated muscles from stiffening. The big technician mumbled to himself, occasionally taking out a brick of dull-red dried meat from his equipment apron and stuffing it into his mouth. Chuut-Riit caught a wiff of it and gagged, as much at the thought of someone eating infantry rations for pleasure as at the well-remembered smell. The other one muttered as well, but he chewed on the ends of his claws. Those on his right hand were actually frayed at the tips, useless for anything but scratching its doubtless completely ungroomed and verminous pelt.

“Is the system compromised?” Chuut-Riit asked again, patiently. Infosystems specialists were as bad as telepaths.

“Hrrwweo?” muttered the small one, blinking back to a consciousness somewhat more in congruence with the others'. “Well, we couldn't know that, could we? Honored Chuut-Riit,” he added hastily, as he caught the governor's expression and scent.

“What—do—you—mean?” he said.

“Well, Honored Governor Chuut-Riit, a successful clandestine insertion is undetectable by definition, hrrrr? We're pretty sure we've found their tracks. Computer, isolate-alpha, linear schematic, level three.” A complex webbing sprang up all around the room, blue lines with a few sections picked out in green. “See, dominant one, where the picks were inserted? So that the config elements could be accessed and altered from an external source without detection. We've neutralized them, of course.”

The claws went back into his mouth, and he mumbled around them. “This was humans, wasn't it? it was their scent. Very three-dimensional, I suppose it comes of their being monkeys. They do some wonderful gaming programs, very ingenious— I abase myself in apology, Chuut-Riit.” He flattened to the ground and covered his dry granular-looking nose. “We are as sure as we can be that all the unauthorized elements have been purged.” To his companion: “Wake up, suckling!”

“Whirrr?” the fat giant chirruped, stopped his continuous nervous purring and then started. “Oh, yes. Lovely system you have here, Honored Governor Chuut-Riit. Yes, I think we've got it. I would like to meet the monkeys who did the alterations, very subtle work.”

“You may go,” he said, and crouched brooding, scratching moodily behind one ear. The internal security team were in now, with the sniffer-machines to isolate the scent molecules of the intruders.

“I would like to meet them, too,” he said, and a line of saliva spun itself down from one thin black lip. He snapped it back with a wet chop and licked his nose with a broad wash of pink tongue. “I would like that very much.”

“Somehow I think it's too quiet,” Ingrid said. When Jonah cast a blankly puzzled look over his shoulder, she shrugged. “Aren't you interested in anything cultural?”

“I'm interested in staying alive,” Jonah said.

They were strolling quietly down one of the riverside walks. The Donau rolled beside them, two kilometers across; it sparkled blue and green-gray, little waves showing white. A bridge soared from bank to bank, and sailboats heeled far over under the stiff warm breeze. Away from the shrilling poverty of the residential quarters, the air smelled of salty water, grass, flowers.

“Of course, staying alive from now on jeopardizes the mission,” Jonah continued.

“No.” Ingrid shook her head. “You have to get back.”

“I do? Why?”

“You just do.” Murphy's Balls! Those ARM psychists really do know their stuff. He's forgotten already. What have I forgotten? It's no fun, holes in your memory. Even if they're deliberate.

“The plan doesn't matter,” Jonah said. “If it were going to blow, it would have done it. And we'd have heard the bang.” Something itched at the back of his mind. “Unless—”

“Jonah?”

“Nothing.” I don't want to remember. Or maybe there's nothing to remember. “My hand hurts. Wonder what I did to it?”

“You don't need to know that, either.” It was the tenth time he'd asked. Clearly the psychists had done some powerful voodoo on Jonah.

They hailed a pedicab and climbed into the twin passenger back seat. They had both been surprised to see the little vehicles skittering about the streets; surely machinery could not have become that expensive. The man hunched over the pedals was thin, all wire and leather, dressed only in a pair of ragged shorts. It was not that machines were so dear, but that labor was so cheap, labor of a certain kind. For those with skills needed by the kzinti war economy, there was enough capital to support reasonable productivity. For the increasing number of those without, there was only what unaided brute labor would buy: starvation wages.

Get your mind off the troubles of Wunderland and on to the more urgent matter of saving your own ass, she told herself as they turned into the Ba'hai quarter. Back to Harold's Place… she winced. Then out to the Swarm. Catskinner would be waiting, and Markham would simply have to accept them; that was one of the virtues of a ship with a will of its own.

Then a straight boost out of the system, a Dart usually didn't have anything approaching interstellar capacity, but the stasis field changed things. Boost out, tightbeam the precious data, and wait for the fleet to scoop them up. Nothing could affect them within a stasis field, but the field as a whole could still be manipulated with a gravity polarizer…

The chances of coming through this with a whole skin had seemed so remote that it wasn't even worth the trouble of thinking about. Now…

The ship'll hold three. Hari, this time I won't leave you.

They turned into the street that fronted Harold's Place. Ingrid had just time enough to see Hari standing beside Claude at the entrance. Then police vomited forth, dark in their turtle helmets and goggles, and aircars rose silently over the roofs all about. Giant ginger-red shapes behind them—

She rolled out of her side of the pedicab as Jonah did on his, a motion so smooth they might have rehearsed it. The light-pen was in her hand, and it made its yawping sound. A policeman died, dropping like a puppet with the strings cut, and she dove forward, rolling, trying for an angle at the kzin and—

Blackness.

“The interrogation is complete?” Chuut-Riit reclined again at ease on the bubblecouch behind his desk; a censor was sending up aromatic smoke.

The holo, on the far wall showed a room beneath the München police headquarters; a combination of human and kzin talents had long proven most effective for such work. Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals was there, and a nameless shabby-looking telepath. The mind-reader's fur was matted and his hands twitched. Chuut-Riit could see spatters of vomit down the front of his pelt, and hear his mumble: “… salad, no, no, ak, ak, pftht, no please boiled carrots ak, pfffth—”

He shuddered slightly in sympathy, thinking of what it must be like to enter the mind of a human free-associating under drugs and pain. Telepathy was not like speech; it was a sharing that extended to sensations and memory as well. Food was a very fundamental drive. It would be bad enough to have to share the memory of eating the cremated meats humans were fond of — the very stink of them was enough to turn your stomach — but cooked plants… The telepath fumbled something out of a wristpouch and carefully parted the fur on one side of his neck before pressing it to the skin. There was a hiss, and he sank against the wall with a sigh of relief. His eyes slitted and he leaned chin on knees with a high-pitched irregular purr, the tip of his tongue showing pink past his whiskers.

Chuut-Riit wrinkled his nose and dismissed false compassion. How could you sympathize with something that was voluntary slave to a drug? And to an extract of sthondat blood at that.

“Yes, Chuut-Riit,” Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals said. “Telepath's reading agrees with what the trained monkeys determined with their truth drugs.” Chuut-Riit reminded himself that the drugs actually merely suppressed inhibition. “The attempt was a last-minute afterthought to the main attack of the monkey ship. Some gravitic device was used to decelerate a pod with these two; they came down in a remote area, using the disturbances of the attack as cover, and reached the city on foot. Their aim was to trigger the self-destruct mechanisms on your estate, but they were unable to do so.”

Chuut-Riit brooded, looking past the kzin liaison officer to the human behind him. “You are not the human in charge of the München police,” he said.

“No, Chuut-Riit,” the human said. It was a female. A flabby one, the sort that would squish unpleasantly when your fangs ripped open the body cavity, and somehow the holo gave the impression of an unpleasant odor.

“I am Chief Assistant Axelrod-Bauergartner at your service, dominant one,” she continued, giving the title in a reasonably good approximation of the Hero's Tongue. A little insolent? Perhaps — but also commendable, and the deferential posture was faultless. “Chief Montferrat-Palme delegated this summary of the investigation, feeling that it was not important enough to warrant his personal attention.”

“Chrrrriii,” Chuut-Riit said, scratching one cheek against a piece of driftwood in a stand on his desk. This Montferrat-creature did not consider an attack on the governor's private control system important? That monkey was developing a distorted sense of its priorities. The human in the screen had blanched slightly at the kzin equivalent of an irritated scowl; he let his lips lower back over the fangs and continued:

“Show me the subjects.” Axelrod-Bauergartner stepped aside, to show two humans clamped in adjustable plastic brackets amid a forest of equipment. These were two fine specimens, tall and lean in the manner of the space-bred subspecies. Both were unconscious, but seeming intact enough apart from the usual superficial cuts, abrasions, and bruises. “What is their condition?”

“No irreparable physical or mental harm, Chuut-Riit,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said, bowing. “What are your orders as to their disposal?”

“Rrrrr,” Chuut-Riit mused, shifting to rub the underside of his jaw on the wood. The last public hunt had been yesterday, the one to which he had taken his sons. “How soon can they be in a condition to run amusingly?” he said.

“Half a week, Chuut-Riit. We have been cautious.”

“Prepare them.” His sons? No, best not to be too indulgent. There was a bad smelling lot of administrative work to be attended to; he would be chained to his desk for a goodly while anyway. Let the little devils attend to their studies, and he would visit them again when this had been disposed of. Besides, while free there had been a certain attraction in the prospect of dealing with this pair personally; as captives they were just two more specimens of monkeymeat—beneath his dignity.

“Get a good batch together, and have them all ready for the Public Preserve at the end of the week. Dismissed.”

“Was that Suuomalisen I saw coming out of here?” Montferrat said.

“Unless you know another fat, sweaty toad in a linen suit looking like he'd just swallowed the juiciest fly on the planet.” Yarthkin grinned like a shark as he settled behind his desk and pushed a pile of data chips and hardcopy to one side. “Sit yourself down, Claude, and have a drink. If it isn't too early.”

“15:00 too early? That's in bad taste, even for you.” But the hand that reached for the Maivin shook slightly, and there were wrinkles in the tunic. “But why was he so happy?”

“I just sold him Harold's Terran Bar,” Yarthkin said calmly. Light-headed he laughed, a boy's laugh. “Prosit!” he toasted, and tossed back his own drink.

“What!” That was enough to bring him bolt-upright. “Why— what— You've been turning that swine down for thirty years!”

“Swine, Claude? What's so especially swinish about him?” Yarthkin leaned forward, resting his chin on paired thumbs. “Or have you forgotten exactly who's to be monkeymeat day after tomorrow?”

The reaction was more than Yarthkin had expected. A jerk, as if high-voltage current surged through the other man's body. A dry retching sound. Then, incredibly, the aquiline Herrenmann mask crumpled, slumping and wrinkling like a balloon from which the air has been withdrawn… and he was crying, head slumping down into his hands. Yarthkin swallowed and looked away; Claude was a collabo and a sellout, an extortionist without shame… but nobody should see another man this naked. It was obscene.

“Pull yourself together, Claude; I've known you were a bastard for forty years, but I thought you were a man, at least.”

“So did I,” gasped Montferrat. “I even have the medals to prove it. I fought well in the war.”

“I know.”

“So, when, when, when they let us out of the detention camp, I really thought I could help. I really did.” He laughed. “Life had to go on, criminals had to be caught, we were beaten and resistance just made it harder on everyone. I'd been a good policeman. I still could be.”

He drank, choked, drank. “The graft, everyone had to. They wouldn't let you get past foot-patrol if you weren't on the pad, too; you had to be in it with them. If I didn't get promotion how could I accomplish anything? I told myself that, but every year a little more of me was gone. And now, now Ingrid's back and I can see myself in her eyes, and I know what I am no better than that animal Axelrod-Bauergartner. She's gloating, she has me on this and I couldn't, couldn't do it. I told her to take care of it all, and went, and I've been drunk most of the time since, and she'll have my head and I deserve it, why try and stop her it—”

Yarthkin leaned forward and slapped the policeman alongside the head with his open palm, a gunshot crack in the narrow confines of the office. Montferrat's mood switched with mercurial swiftness, and he snarled with a mindless sound as he reached for his sidearm. But alcohol is a depressant, and his hand had barely touched the butt before the other man's stunner was pointed between his eyes.

“Neyn, neyn, naughty,” Yarthkin said cheerfully. “Hell of a headache, Claude. Now, I won't say you don't deserve it, but sacrificing your own liver and lights isn't going to do Ingrid any good.” He kept the weapon unwavering until Montferrat had won back a measure of self-command, then laid it down on the desk and offered a cigarette.

“My apologies,” Montferrat said, wiping off his face with a silk handkerchief. “I do despise self-pity.” The shredded cloak of his ironic detachment settled about him.

Yarthkin nodded. “That's better, sweetheart. I'm selling the club because I need ready capital, for relocation and grubstaking my people, the ones who don't want to come with me.”

“Go with you? Where? And what does this have to do with Ingrid?”

Yarthkin grinned again, tapped ash off the end of his cigarette. Exhilaration filled him, and something that had been missing for far too long. What? he thought. Not youth… yes, that's it. Purpose.

“It isn't every man who's given a chance to do it over right,” he said. “That, friend Claude, is what I'm going to do. We're going to bust Ingrid out of that Preserve. Have a shot at it, at least.” He held up a hand. “Don't fuck with me, Claude; I know as well as you that the system there is managed through München Police H.Q. One badly mangled corpse substituted for another, what ratcat's to know? It's been done before.”

“Odd you should think of that,” Montferrat said, shaking his head dully. “For the past several days I have been regretting that I always kept out of the set-up side of the Hunts. Couldn't… I have to watch them, anyway, too often.”

Odd how men cling to despair, once they've hit bottom, Yarthkin thought. As if hope were too much effort. Is that what surrender is, then, just giving in to exhaustion of the soul?

Aloud: “Computer, access file Till Eulenspiegel.”

The surface of his desk flashed transparent and lit with a series of coded text-columns. Montferrat came erect with a shaken oath. “How… if you had that, all these years, why haven't you used it?”

“Claude, the great drawback of blackmail is that it gives the victim the best possible incentive to find a permanent way of shutting you up. Risky, especially when dealing with the police. As to the how, you're not under the impression that you get the best people in the police, are you?” A squint, and the gravelly voice went soft. “Don't think I wouldn't use it, sweetheart, if you didn't cooperate, and there's more than enough here to put you in the edible-delicacy category. Think of it as God's way of giving you an incentive to get back on the straight and narrow.”

“I tell you, Axelrod-Bauergartner has the command codes for the Preserve! I can override, but it would be flagged. Immediately.”

“Computer, display file Niebelungen AA37Bi22. Damned lack of imagination, that code… There it is, Claude. Everything you always wanted to know about your most ambitious subordinate but were afraid to ask, including her private bypass programs.” Another flick of ash. “Finagle, Claude, you can probably make all this look like her fault, even if the ratcats smell the proverbial rodent.”

Montferrat smoothed down his uniform tunic, and it was as if the gesture slicked transparent armor across his skin once more. “You appear to have me by the short and sensitives, kamerat,” he said lightly. “Not entirely to my dismay. The plan is, then, that Ingrid and her gallant Sol-Belter are whisked away from under the noses of the kzin, while you go to ground?”

Yarthkin laughed, a shocking sound. “Appearances to the contrary, Claude old son, you were always the romantic of us two. The one for the noble gesture. Nothing of the sort: Ingrid and I are going to the Swarm.”

“And the man, Jonah?”

“Fuck him. Let the ratcats have him. His job was done the minute they failed to dig the real story out of him.”

Montferrat managed a laugh. “This is quite a reversal of roles, Hari… but this, this final twist, it makes it seem possible, somehow.” He extended a hand. “Seeing as you have the gun to my head, why not? Working together again, eh?”

“All right, listen up,” the guard said.

Jonah shook his head, shook out the last of the fog. Ingrid sat beside him on the plain slatted wood of the bench, in this incongruous pen… change-rooms for a country club, once. Now a set of run-down stone buildings in the midst of shaggy overgrown wilderness; the side open to the remnants of lawn and terrace was covered with a shockfield. He looked around; there were around two dozen humans with them, all clad alike in grey prison trousers and shirts. All quiet. The shockrods of the guards had enforced that. Some weeping, a few catatonic, and there was an unpleasant fecal smell.

“You get an hour's start,” the guard said, in a voice of bored routine. “And you'd better run, believe me.”

“Up yours!” somebody shouted, and laughed when the guard raised her rod. “What you going to do, ratcat lover, condemn me to death?”

The guard shrugged. “You ever seen a house cat playing with a mumbly?” she jeered. “The ratcats like a good chase. Disappoint them and they'll bat you around like a toy.” She stepped back, and the door opened. “Hell, keep ahead of them for two days and maybe they'll let you go.” A burly man rose and charged, bounced back as she took another step through the door.

Laughter, through the transparent surface. “Have fun, porkchops. I'll watch you die. Five minutes to shield-down.”

“You all right?” Jonah asked. Neither of them had been much damaged physically by the interrogation; it had been done in a police headquarters, where the most modern methods were available, not crude field expedients. And the psychists' shields had worked perfectly; the great weakness of telepathic interrogation is that it can only detect what the subject believes to be true. It had been debatable whether the blocks and artificial memories would hold… Kzin telepaths hated staying in a human's mind more than they had to, and the drug-addiction that helped to develop their talents did little for motivation or intelligence.

“Fine,” Ingrid said, raising her head from her knees. “Just thinking how pretty it is out there.” Tears starred her lashes, but her voice was steady.

Startled, he looked again through the near-invisible shimmer of the shockfield. The long green-gold grass was rippling under a late-afternoon sun, starred with flowers like living jewel-flecks. A line of flamingos skimmed by, down to the little pond at the base of the hill. Beyond was forest, flowering dogwood in a fountain of white against the flickering-shiny olive drab of native kampfwald trees. The shockfield let air through, carrying scents of leafmold, green, purity.

“You're right,” he said. They clasped hands, embraced, stepped back and saluted each other formally. “It's been… good knowing you, Lieutenant Ingrid.”

“Likewise, Captain Jonah.” A gamin smile. “Finagle's arse, we're not dead yet, are we?”

“Huh. Huh-huh.” Lights spun before Jonah's eyes, wrenching his stomach with more nausea. Gummy saliva blocked his mouth as he tumbled over the lip of the gully, crashing through brush that ripped and tore with living fingers of thorn and bramble. Tumble, roll, down through the brush-covered sixty-degree slope, out into the patch of gravel and sparse spaghettilike grass analog at the bottom. To lie and rest, Murphy, to rest…

Memories were returning. Evidently his subconscious believed there wouldn't be another interrogation. Believed they were dead already. My fingernail. I have to escape. And that's a laugh. But I have to try…

He turned the final roll into a flip and came erect, facing in the direction of his flight; force the diaphragm to breathe, stomach out to suck air into the bottom of the lungs. His chest felt tight and hot, as if the air pumping through it was nothing, vacuum, inert gas. Will kept him steady, blinked his eyes into focus. He was in a patch of bright sunlight, the forest above a deep green-gold shade that flickered; the soil under his feet was damp, impossibly cool on his skin. The wind was blowing toward him, which meant that the kzin would be following ground-scent rather than what floated on the breeze. A kzin nose was not as sensitive as a hound's, but several thousand times more acute than a human's.

And I must stink to high heaven, he thought. Even then he could smell himself; he hawked and spat, taking a firmer grip on his improvised weapon. That was a length of branch and a rock half the size of his head, dangling from the end by thin strong vines. Thank Murphy that Wunderland flora ran to creepers…

“One,” he muttered to himself. “There ain't no justice, I know, but please, just one.” His breathing was slowing, and he became conscious of thirst, then the gnawing emptiness under his ribs. The sun was high overhead; nearly a day already? How many of the others were still alive?

A flicker of movement at the lip of the ravine, ten meters above him and twenty away. Jonah swung the stone-age morningstar around his head and roared, and the kzin halted his headlong four-footed rush. Rose like an unfolding wall of brown-red, dappled in the light at the edge of the tall trees, slashed across with the white of teeth. Great round eyes, and he could imagine the pupils going pinpoint; the kzin homeworld was not only colder than Wunderland, it was dimmer. Batwing ears unfolding, straining for sound; their hearing was keen enough to pick a human heartbeat out of the background noise. This was a young male, he would be hot, hot for the kill and salt blood to quench his thirst and let him rest…

“Come on, you kshat, you sthondat-eater,” Jonah yelled in the snarling tones of the Hero's Tongue. “Come and get your name, kinless offspring of cowards, come and eat turnips out of my shit, grassgrazer! Ch'rowl you!”

The kzin screamed, a raw wailing shriek that echoed down the ravine; screamed again and leaped in an impossible soaring curve that took it halfway down the steep slope.

“Now, Ingrid. Now!” Jonah shouted, and ran forward.

The woman rose from the last, thicker scrub at the edge of the slope, where water nourished taller bushes. Rose just as the second bounding leap passed its arc, the kzin spread-eagled against the sky, taloned hands outstretched to grasp and tear. The three-meter pole rose with her, butt against the earth, sharpened tip reaching for the alien's belly. The two met, and the wet ripping sound was audible even over the berserk siren shriek of the young kzin's pain.

It toppled forward and sideways, thrashing and ululating with the long pole transfixing it. He forced rubbery leg muscles into a final sprint, a leap and scream of his own. Then he was there, in among the clinging brush and it was there, too, convulsing. He darted in, swung, and the rock smashed into a hand that was lashing for his throat; the kzin wailed again, put its free hand to the spear, pulled while it kept him at bay with lunging snaps. Ingrid was on the other side with a second spear, jabbing; he danced in, heedless of the fangs, and swung two-handed. The rock landed at the juncture of thick neck and sloping shoulder, and something snapped. The shock of it ran back up his arms.

The pair moved in, stabbing, smashing, block and wiggle and jump and strike, and the broken alien crawled toward them with inhuman vitality, growling and whimpering and moving even with the dull-pink bulge of intestine showing where it had ripped the jagged wood out of its flesh. Fur, flesh, scraps of leaf, dust scattering about… Until at last too many bones were broken and too much of the bright-red blood spilled, and it lay twitching. The humans lay just out of reach, sobbing back their breaths; Jonah could hear the kzin's cries over the thunder in his ears, hear them turn to high-pitched words in the Hero's Tongue:

“It hurts…” The Sol-Belter rolled to his knees. His shadow fell across the battered, swollen eyes of his enemy. “It hurts… mother, you've come back, mother—” The shattered paw-hands made kneading motions, like a nursing kitten. “Help me, take away the noise in my head, mother…” Presently it died.

“That's one for a pall-bearer.” The end of his finger throbbed. “Goddamn it, I can't escape!” he shouted at it.

Ingrid tried to rise, fell back with a faint cry.

Jonah bent over, hands moving on the ruffled tatters that streaked down one thigh.

“How bad…” he pushed back the ruined cloth. Blood was running down the slim length of the woman's leg, not pumping but in a steady flow. “Damn, tanj, tanj, tanj!” He ripped at his shirt for a pressure-bandage, tied it on with the thin vines scattered everywhere about. “Here, here's your spear, lean on it, come on.” He darted back to the body; there was a knife at its belt, a long heavy-bladed w'tsai. Jonah ripped it free, looped the belt over one shoulder like a baldric.

“Let's move,” he said, staggering slightly. She leaned on the spear hard enough to drive the blunt end inches deep into the sandy gravel, and shook her head.

“No, I'd slow you down. You're the one that has to get away.” His finger throbbed anew to remind him. And she's Hari's girl, not mine. But— another memory returned, and he laughed.

“Something's funny?”

“Yeah, maybe it is! Maybe— hell, I bet it worked!”

“What worked?”

“Tell you on the way.”

“No, you won't, I'm not coming with you. Now get going!”

“Murphy bugger that with a diode, Lieutenant. Get moving, that's an order.”

She put an arm around his shoulder and they hobbled down the shifting footing of the ravine's bed. There was a crooked smile on her face as she spoke.

“Well, it's not as if we had anywhere to go, is it?”

The kzin governor of Wunderland paced tiredly toward the gate of his children’s quarters, grooming absently. The hunt had gone well, the intruder humans were undoubtedly beginning a short passage through some lucky Hero's digestive system, and it was time to relax.

Perhaps I should have stayed to track them myself, he mused as he passed the last guard station with an absent-minded wave. No, why bother. That prey is already caught, this was simply a re-enactment.

Chuut-Riit felt the repaired doors swing shut before him and glanced around in puzzlement, the silence penetrating through post-Hunt sluggishness. The courtyard was deserted, and it had been nearly seven days since his last visit; far too soon for another assassination attempt, but the older children should have been boiling out to greet him, questions and frolicking… He turned and keyed the terminal in the stone beside the door.

Nothing. The kzin blinked in puzzlement. Odd. There has been no record of any malfunction. In instinctive reflex he lowered himself to all fours and sniffed; the usual sand-rock-metal scents, multiple young-kzin smells. Something underneath that, and he licked his nose to moisten it and drew in a long breath with his mouth half open.

He started back, arching his spine and bristling with a growling hiss, tail rigid. Dead meat and blood. N'irling, he slapped for the exterior communicator. “Guard-Captain, respond. Guard-Captain, respond immediately.”

Nothing. He bent, tensed, leaped for the summit of the wall. A crackling discharge met him, a blue corona around the sharp twisted iron of the battlement's top that sent pain searing through the palms of his outstretched hands. The wards were set on maximum force, and he fell to the ground cradling his burned palms. Rage bit through him, stronger than pain or thought; someone had menaced his children, his future, the blood of the Riit. His snarl was soundless as he dashed on all fours across the open space of the courtyard and into the entrance of the warren.

It was dark, the glowpanels out and the ventilators silent; for the first time it even smelled like a castle on homeworld, purely of old stone, iron, and blood. Fresh blood on something near the entrance. He bent, the huge round circles of his eyes going black as the pupils expanded. A sword, a four-foot kreera with a double saw edge. The real article, heavy wave-forged steel, from the sealed training cabinets which should only have opened to his own touch. Ignoring the pain as burned tissue cracked and oozed fluids, he reached for the long hide-wound bone grip of the weapon. The edges of the blade glimmered with dark wet, set with a matt of orange-red hairs.

His arm bent, feeling the weight of the metal as he dropped into the crook-kneed defensive stance, with the lead ball of the pommel held level with his eyes. The corridor twisted off before him, the faint light of occasional skylights picking out the edges of granite blocks and the black iron doors with their central locks cast in the shape of beast-masked ancestral warriors. Chuut-Riit's ears cocked forward and his mouth opened, dropping the lower jaw toward the chest: maximum flow over the nasal passages to catch scent, and fangs ready to tear at anything that got past the weapon in his hands. He edged down the corridor one swift careful step at a time, heading for the central tower where he could do something, even if it was only lighting a signal fire.

Insane, he thought with a corner of his mind that watched his slinking progress through the dark halls. It was insane, like something from the ancient songs of homeworld. Like the Siege of Zeeroau, the Heroic Band manning the ramparts against the prophet, dwindling one by one from wounds and weariness and the hunger-frenzy that sent them down into the catacombs to hunt and then the dreadful feasting.

Chuut-Riit turned a corner and wheeled, blade up to meet a possible attack from the dropstand over the corner. Nothing — but the whirl-and-cut brought him flush against the opposite wall, and he padded on. Noise and smell; a thin mewling, and an overpowering stink of kzinmeat. A door, and the first body before it. There was little of the soft tissue left, but the face was intact. One of his older sons, the teeth frozen in an eternal snarl; blood was splashed about, far more than one body could account for. Walls, floor, ceiling; guts and splatters that dripped down in slow congealing trails toward the floor. A chugra spear lay broken by the wall, alongside a battered metal shield; the sound had been coming from behind the door the corpse guarded, but now he could hear nothing.

No, wait. His ears folded out to their maximum. Breathing. A multiple rapid panting. He tried the door; it was unlocked, but something had it jammed closed.

A mewl sounded as he leaned his weight against it and the iron creaked. “Open!” he snarled. “Open at once.”

More mewls, and a metallic tapping. The panel lurched inward, and he stooped to fill the doorway.

The infants, he thought. A heap in the far corner of the room. Squirming spotted fur and huge terrified eyes peering back at him; the younger ones, the kits just recently taken from their mothers. At the sight of him they set up the thin eeeuw-eeeuu-eeeuw that was the kzin child's cry of distress.

“Daddy!” one of them said. “We're so hungry, Daddy. We're so frightened. He said we should stay in here and not open the door and not cry but there were awful noises and it's been so long and we're hungry, Daddy, Daddy—”

Chuut-Riit uttered a grating sound deep in his chest and looked down; his son's w'tsai had been wedged to hold the door from the inside, the kits must have done it at his instruction, while he waited outside to face the hunters. Hunger-frenzy eroded what little patience an adolescent kzin possessed, as well as intellect; they would not spend longing at a closed door, not with fresh meat to hand, and the smell of blood in their nostrils.

“Silence,” he said, and they shrank back into a heap. Chuut-Riit forced gentleness into his voice. “Something very bad has happened,” he said. “Your brother was right, you must stay here and make no noise. Soon I… soon I or another adult will come and feed you. Do you understand?” Uncertain nods. “Put the knife back in the door when I go out. Then wait. Understand?”

He swung the door shut and looked down into his son's face while the kits hammered the knifeblade under it from the inside.

“You did not die in vain, my brave one,” he whispered, very low, settling into a crouch with the sword ready. “Kdari-Riit,” he added, giving his dead son a full Name. Now I must wait. Wait to be sure none of the gone-mad ones had heard him, then do his best. There would be an alert, eventually. The infants did not have the hormone-driven manic energy of adolescents. They would survive.

“Zroght-Guard-Captain,” the human said. “Oh, thank God!”

The head of the vice regal household troopers rose blinking from his sleeping-box, scratching vigorously behind one ear. “Yes, Henrietta?” he said.

“It's Chuut-Riit,” she said. “Zroght-Guard-Captain, it wasn't him who refused to answer, I knew it and now we've found tampering, the technicians say they missed something the first time, we still can't get through to him in the children's quarters. And the records say the armory's open and they haven't been fed for a week!”

The guard-captain wasted no time in speech with the sobbing human; it would take enough time to physically breech the defenses of the children's quarters.

“Hrrnnngg-ha,” Chuut-Riit gasped, panting with lolling tongue. The corner of the exercise room had given him a little protection, the desks and machinery a little more. Now a dozen lanky bodies interlaced through the equipment about his feet, and the survivors had drawn back to the other end of the room. There was little sentience left in the eyes that peered at him out of the starved faces, not enough to use missile-weapons. Dim sunlight glinted on their teeth and the red gape of their mouths, on bellies fallen in below barrel-hoop ribs.

That last rush almost had me, he thought. An odd detachment had settled over him; with a sad pride he noticed the coordination of their movements even now, spreading out in a semi-circle to bar the way to the doors. He was bleeding from a dozen superficial cuts, and the long sword felt like a bar of neutronium in his hands. The blade shone liquid-wet along its whole length now, and the hilt was slimy in his numb grip, slick with blood and the lymph from his burnt hands; he twisted it in a whistling circle that flung droplets as far as the closing pack. Chuut-Riit threw back his head and shrieked, an eerie keening sound that filled the vaulted chamber. They checked for a moment, shrinking back. If he could keep them…

Movement at his feet, from the pile of bodies. Cold in his side, so cold, looking down at the hilt of the w'tsai driven up into the lung, the overwhelming salt taste of his own blood. The one they called Spotty crawled free of the piled bodies, broken-backed but evading his weakened slash.

“Kill him,” the adolescent panted. “Kill the betrayer, kill him.” The waiting children shrieked and leapt.

“He must have made his stand here,” Zroght-Guard-Captain said, looking around the nursery. The floor was a tumbled chaos of toys, wooden weapons, printout books; the walls still danced their holo gavotte of kits leaping amid grass and butterflies. There was very little of the kzin governor of the Alpha Centauri system left; a few of the major bones, and the skull, scattered among smaller fragments from his sons, the ones wounded in the fighting and unable to defend themselves from their ravenous brothers. The room stank of blood and old meat.

“Zroght-Guard-Captain!” one of the troopers said. They all tensed, fully-armed as they were. Most of the young ones were still at large, equipped from the practice rooms, and they seemed ghostly clever.

“A message, Zroght-Guard-Captain.” The warrior held up a pad of paper. The words were in a rusty brownish liquid, evidently written with a claw. Chuut-Riit's claw; that was his sigil at the bottom. The captain flipped up the visor of his helmet and read:

Zroght chirred. There might be time for that, after the succession struggle ended.

“Gottdamn, they're out of range of the last pickup,” Montferrat said. Yarthkin grunted, careful to stay behind the policeman. The transfer booth was an old one, left here when this was a country club. It stood in a secluded cleft below the rocky hill. Deactivated, supposedly permanently, it appeared on no kzin records. His hand felt tight and clammy on the handle of the stunner, and every rustle and creak in the wilderness about them was a lurking kzin.

Teufel, I could use a smoke, he thought. Insane, of course, with ratcat noses coursing through the woods.

“Are they alive?” he asked tightly.

“The tracers are still active, but with this little interfacer I can't— Ingrid!”

He made a half-step forward. A pair of scarecrow figures stumbled past the entrance to the cleft, halted with a swaying motion that spoke of despair born of utter exhaustion. The man was scratched and bloodied; Yarthkin's eyes widened at the scraps of dried fur and blood and matter clinging to the rude weapon in his hand. Both of them were spattered with similar reminders, rank with the smell of it and the sweat that glistened in tracks through the dirt on their faces. More yet on the sharpened pole that Ingrid leaned on as a crutch, and fresh blood on the bandage at her thigh.

Jonah was straightening. “You here to help the pussies beat the bushes?” he panted. Ingrid looked up, blinked crusted eyes, moved closer to her companion. Yarthkin halted speechless, shook his head.

“Actually, this is a mission of mercy,” Montferrat began in his cool tone. Then words ripped out of him: “Gottdamn, there are two kzin coming up, I'm getting their tracers.” Fingers played over his interfacer. “They're stopping about a kilometer back—”

“Where we left the body of the one we killed,” Jonah said. His eyes met Hari Yarthkin's levelly; the Wunderlander felt something lurch at the pit of his stomach at the dawning wonder in Ingrid's.

“Yah, mission of mercy, time to get on with it,” he said, stepping forward and planting the projector cone of his stunner firmly in Montferrats back. “Here.”

He reached, took the policeman's stunner from his belt and tossed it to Jonah. “And here.” An envelope from inside his own neatly tailored hunting-jacket. He handed it to Jonah. “False identity, guaranteed good one. I couldn't get but one exit permit, but maybe you can manage that somehow. You'll have to get cosmetic work done to match, but there's everything you need in the room at the other end of the booth here. Money, clothes, contacts.”

“Booth?” Jonah said.

“Yeah. Let's get going. You get the exit permit.”

“Hari—” Montferrat began, and subsided at a sharp jab.

“You said it, sweetheart,” Yarthkin replied. His tone was light, but his eyes were on the woman.

“I won't leave you here,” she began.

Yarthkin laughed. “I didn't intend for you to, but it looks like you'll have to. Now get moving, sweetheart.”

“You don't understand,” Ingrid said. “Jonah's the one who has to get away. Not me. I don't matter, but he does. Give him the permit.”

“The Boy Scout? Not on your life—”

“You can give it to me. No, don't move, any of you.” The voice came from, the transfer booth behind them. A woman's voice, sneering but triumphant.

“Efficient as usual,” Montferrat said, with a fired slump of the shoulders. “Allow me to introduce my ambitious chief assistant.”

“Indeed, dear Chief,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said as she strolled around to where everyone was visible. The chunky weapon in her arms was no stunner, it was a strakkaker, capable of spraying them all with hypervelocity glass needles with a single movement of her finger. “Drop it, commoner,” she continued in a flat voice. “Thanks for disarming the Chief.”

Yarthkin's stunner fell to the ground. “Did you really think, Chief, that I wasn't going to check what commands went out under my codes? I look at the events record five times a day when things are normal. Nice sweet setup, puts all the blame on me… except that when I show the kzin your bodies, I'll be the new commissioner.”

The tableau held for a moment, until Montferrat coughed. “I don't suppose my clandestine fund account?” He moved with exaggerated care as he produced a screenpad and light-stylus.

Axelrod-Bauergartner laughed again. “Sure, we can make a deal. Write out the number, by all means,” she taunted. “Porkchops don't need ngggg.”

The stylus yawped sharply once. The woman in police uniform fell, with a boneless finality that kept her finger from closing on the trigger of the weapon until her weight landed on it. A boulder twenty meters away suddenly shed its covering of vegetation and turned sandblast-smooth; there was a click and hiss as the strakkakers magazine ran empty.

Yarthkin coughed, struggled not to gasp. Montferrat stooped, retrieved his stunner, walked across to toe the limp body. “I knew this would come in useful,” he said, tapping the captured hgbt-pencil against the knuckles of one hand. His eyes rose to meet Yarthkin's, and he smoothed back his mustaches. “What a pity that Axelrod-Bauergartner was secretly feral, found here interfering with the Hunt, a proscribed weapon in her hands… isn't it?” His gaze shifted to Ingrid and Jonah. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

The woman halted for an instant by Yarthkin. “Hari—” she began. He laid a finger across her lips.

“G'wan, kid,” he said, with a wry twist of the lips. “You've got a life waiting.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, slapping the hand aside. “Murphy's Balls, Hari! I thought you'd grown up; not enough, evidently. Make all the sacrificial gestures you want, but don't make them for me.” A gaunt smile. “And don't flatter yourself, either.”

She turned to Jonah, snapped a salute. “It's been… interesting, Captain. But this is my home… and if you don't remember now why you have to get back to the UN, you will.”

“Data link—”

She laughed. “It would take hours to squirt all that up to Catskinner and you know it. Get moving, Captain. I'll be all right. Now go.”

He started to protest and his finger throbbed unbearably. “All right, but I'll wait as long as I can.”

“…You’ll do nothing of the sort.”

He hesitated for a second more, then walked to the transfer booth.

Ingrid turned to face the two men. “You males do grow up more slowly than we,” she said with a dancing smile in her eyes. “But given enough time… There are some decisions that should have been made fifty years ago. Not many get another chance. Where are we going?”

Montferrat and Yarthkin glanced at each other, back at the woman with an identical look of helpless bewilderment that did not prevent the policeman from keying the booth.

“All three of us have a lot of catching up to do,” she said, and disappeared.

“Well.” Montferrat said dazedly. “Well.” A shake of his head. “You next.”

“Where did you send her?”

Montferrat grinned slightly. “You'll just have to trust me to send you there, too, won't you?”

“Claude—”

“You've been there. My family's old lodge. I've kept it hidden from— from everyone.” He laughed slightly. “You've already had a head start with her. A few more days won't matter. But when I get there, I'll expect equal time. Now get moving, I have to set the stage.”

“Better come now.”

“No. First I see that the Sol-Belter gets offworld. Then I fix it so we can follow. Both will take time.”

“Can you bring that off, Claude?”

“Yes.” He straightened, and the look of the true Herrenmann was unmistakable. “It's good to be alive again”.