The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 2

(2436 A.D.)

Major Yankee Clandeboye scowled at the travel orders on his info comp. Now that was being hauled off to Gibraltar on pretty short notice! A brief mnemonic executed by quick fingers called up his almanac of the Asteroids. He punched in Egeria and Gibraltar and zoomed. At the moment Egeria was 80 degrees out of phase with Gibraltar Base-so it would be a long trip in a tiny can. If it was business that couldn’t be conducted over the network it was going to be trouble. Again. And for a man on disciplinary probation, any kind of trouble was bad news.

Flies in the cow dung!

He swore like a flatlander because he was a flatlander, though he had never touched a cow or smelled dung in his life. Once he had pushed his cousin Nora into a simspace manure pile when he was nine and she was three. His parents believed in education for their children and had put Old Macdonald’s Farm in his library because they believed everyone should know something about Earth’s past. His cousin, who was from an Iowa farm city, had been lording it over him in his own simspace; it was his farm, filled with his colors and sounds and smellies and more pets than he’d ever want to own, his pets. It was not her farm. So he had pushed her into the manure pile. The cows scolded him. Usually they only sang with the pigs and the ducks and the horse and the dancing geese.

What kind of scolding was it going to be this time?

These Belters were never going to leave him alone. Nervously, he looked around his small office. It was free of unauthorized chemicals. There wasn’t anything blocking the air vent, nor dangerous floating things-his mermaid charm on a string didn’t count. If you were a flatlander, to survive in space you had to be twice as good as a Belter or they harassed you to distraction. You had to notice everything. If you weren’t being chewed out for playing hazardous games with their hallowed air supply, you were being chewed out for having too much nefarious hair… or something, even for the way you smelled.

But this time it was going to be big. They didn’t drag a man a quarter of the way around the Belt just to rap his knuckles for neglecting the air filters. He patted his faded lucky charm and she bobbed in the ventilation breeze wiggling her tail. “Gonna need you, pretty baby.” His mermaid was his one reminder of Earth and her seas. She was a plastic antique with a blue bra, which dated her to the twentieth century, and she’d gone to war with him against the kzinti and brought him home.

Major Clandeboye had been in space for a full nineteen of his forty-seven years. He’d been farther from Sol in a marauding hyperdrive than any of these arrogant Belters he met-brave men who panicked if they had to travel farther than five meters from their pressure suits. With the infocomp still in his hand, Yankee toggled back to his orders. Signed by General Fry. Another holier-than-thou Belter who’d never been out of Sol System. What could this flasher have on him?

Ever since the inquest into the Virgo fiasco, Yankee had slavishly cultivated all the aspects of a model military administrator-even to the point of making and filling out daily self-evaluation checksheets. He knew they’d never forgive him, not after five years, not even after hell froze over. For Finagle’s sake, he’d been devoted to his behavior. It was hard work keeping his ass so clean.

Well, almost clean. Oh, oh.

But nobody knew about that. He slumped for a minute, which makes you look like a limp rag in space, and then grabbed a bulkhead handle and slithered through the lock, kicking himself down the narrow fallway, adrenaline ready for a major confrontation. Could Smelly have betrayed him? His best friend? It wasn’t impossible. After all, Smelly (whose real name was Smeegie) was a lanky Belter of low morals. He slipped his infocomp into its holster.

While he sought out Smeegie, he had time to cool down. Yankee and Smeegie had not started out as friends. They were assigned to the same combat flight when the Virgo Volunteers were thrown together for a probing dash deep into kzin space. Smeegie had openly resented serving under a flatlander of insecure demeanor. He valued his life. But danger forges bonds and by the time Clandeboye, the only surviving senior officer, brought them back alive none of his men cared that he was a flatlander.

He found his friend in the workshop with their orange kzin warrior, who was even taller than Smeegie and grinning at him while a furry arm was being operated upon. To divert himself from his untactful suspicions, Yankee took the opportunity to grab the kzin by the nose with one hand. With the other he pulled on the fur of the jaw to pry the mouth open. He ran fingers over the teeth. “I think his teeth are too sharp,” said Yankee. “We should file them down.”

“Why?”

“He might hurt someone.”

“He already has.”

“Yah. That’s what has suddenly started to worry me,” grumbled Yankee, watching his comrade closely for signs of betrayal.

“You don’t think your, ahem, colleagues are going to complain, do you? They wouldn’t dare admit to being mauled by a mechanical kzin. They’d be laughed out the airlock. Who’s to know you were the teleop? I know, but I like my private jokes. You’re not even supposed to know how to run a waldo, much less know how to fight from an op-suit. Your reputation as a rough and tough fighter is piss-in-a-bladder-sack and always has been-except, of course, among us surviving Virgins.” Smeegie grinned while he did something to the kzin’s arm with a whizzing tool. He was remembering the gruesome outcome of the original fistfight at the officers’ mess, tormentors against flatlander. A very beat-up Yankee had had time and reason to work out a careful revenge.

“I overdid it.”

“Just because you gave them a week’s vacation in the autodoc?” Smeegie suggested, slyly. “That was bugs in the equipment.” He smirked. “An unadjusted damping coefficient.” Smeegie lied well. “You know how waldos are; they aren’t good at picking up an egg without breaking it. I’m fixing that, aren’t I? Right now. Maybe you did them a favor. When they meet a real kzin, he’s not going to have his damping coefficients adjusted down to ‘play.’ You make a great kzin, sir. That pair will be reminded about the consequences of flailing with their fists on that day when they meet a flesh-and-blood ratcat.”

“They don’t think there’s going to be another war.”

“And they can prove it, too, by punching out the face of the nearest flatlander who contradicts them.”

“My father never liked my temper,” mused Yankee. “He always told me that revenge was an option-but that no matter how sweet the revenge, revenge was never the end of the story. He was a programmer; to him revenge was an escape routine that called up an endless loop of violence.”

“Well, go ahead and feel sorry for those two rockjacks pretending to be soldiers. I saw both fights and I’m still laughing.” He paused. “You sound worried.”

Clandeboye was feeling guilty that he had suspected his friend of ratting on him. Mystery was unnerving. What did they have on him and from what source? “I’m fertilizing my suit right now. I’ve been called in to Gibraltar It sounds like I’m going to be relieved.”

“Naw. Yankee, sir, you’re the best Training officer we have. They’ve always had enough on you to court-martial you to lighthouse duty on Titan, but they never do. If you really want to worry, think about the upbeat stuff it could be. Maybe some stone-brained general thinks we might field a regiment of kzin waldos and they want to nm the notion past you. Generals get ideas like that. How would you like to head up a regiment of orange waldos?” He grinned.

“Let Finagle toast God’s Death!” exclaimed Yankee, horrified.

“Speaking of Finagle, you know what Finagle said; he said reality can outbid your worse nightmare every time.”

“Maybe I should do some quick research on this guy. Smelly, all you Belters know each other. Tell me about General Fry. He’s the name on my orders.”

“Never met him. We were out there fighting. He was sitting in an office. He’s an ex-goldskin. As a young man he sat at a telescope and watched for torchship exhaust-placement violations. Developed an algorithm for catching offenders. Came up through the ranks. Administrator. He was a goldskin who liked catching smugglers! Got a hot jet name in logistics during the second kzin assault. Cops make the best thieves. He could smuggle anything through a kzin blockade.”

“All I know about him is that he’s a womanizer. He had an affair with my cousin, then sent her off to Wunderland to be killed.”

“I’ve never figured out why it bothers you flatlanders when a man has more than one woman, or a woman has more than one man.”

“He’s in Intelligence now,” grumbled Yankee, changing the subject

“And you, you paranoid, think he is onto our little caper.”

“Yah.”

“Maybe I’m not as impressed by ex-goldskins as you are. It has always been an old rockjack tradition to bypass Ceres’s thirty percent tax with an occasional display of fancy shipping. Rockjacks get away with it all the time.”

“Rockjacks get caught, too, and then the tax is one hundred percent if I remember correctly our Commander Shimmel was an old rockjack who liked to take impulsive risks.” Commander Shimmel had died some forty-four light years from home, at 59 Virginis on the far side of kzin space, taking twelve hyperships with him. And seven hundred and eighty men. The official United Nations Space Navy story was that he’d died valiantly in battle.

“That’s my point,” said Smeegie, “The UNSN still believes he lost all those ships because you refused to support his attack maneuver. Now if that’s the best that intelligence can do, how do you expect them to track down a little practical joke that was done invisibly?”

“Smelly, for a Belter, your systems check out green. Wisdom personified. You can be my valet in prison.”

“What’s to worry? They don’t convert nuisances like you into spare body parts anymore. We’ll send our furry ratcat in after you, sir.”

“You guys would.”

“Sure we would. We were there. We know what happened.”

The loyalty of Clandeboye’s comrades didn’t reassure him. He shipped out to Gibraltar via Farmer’s Asteroid in a little supply truck, huddled and cramped where the vegetables would be on the return trip. Belters never thought in terms of the elegant transport that a flatlander took for granted-the distances were too great. They flitted about in light, cheap ships and took the inconvenience for granted. In such a primitive can, Yankee could hardly connect with the man in himself who had piloted a hyperdrive probe on an interstellar journey to the back of the Patriarchy, farther than any man had ever reached.

After three days, and still only halfway to Gibraltar, he was a tired tourist fascinated by the truck’s approach to the awesome mirrors that fed sunlight into this vegetarian’s bubbleworld. The mirrors grew during sedate docking maneuvers until they filled half the starkly sky. At a berth, far up the long axis-mount, he debarked with the truckers and wandered through the fallways- for the docks were not rotating like the rest of the world-until he found a reception area. He was reluctant to insert his infocomp at a terminal, to reconnect with society.

The machine put him through to military service, which read his orders. He waited. An automated voice confirmed hotel reservations at Farmer’s and told him that his infocomp would be called as soon as transportation to Gibraltar was located. Click.

Three centuries ago Farmer’s had been blown up like a balloon out of the substance that had once been an asteroid, then filled with people and farms. The pioneer days were long gone. He had a full day in one of the hotels, resting in the gentle centripetal gravity. It was as near as he’d been to an earthlike environment in years. The smells were right, but he could never get used to a sky paved with farms. He thought about his singing cows and dancing geese-and his cousin, Nora Argamentine, who had once lived in a real farm city in Iowa.