by Larry Niven
Harold lit a cigarette, ignoring her glare. “Let me guess…He’s too prissy?”
Ingrid sipped again at the minty liqueur. “Nooo, not really. I’m a Belter, but I’m…a bit of a throwback.” The other two nodded. Genetically, as well. Ingrid could have passed for a pure Caucasoid, even. Common enough on Wunderland, but rare anywhere else in human space.
“Look,” she went on: “What happens to somebody in space who’s not ultra-careful about everything? Someone who isn’t a detail man, someone who doesn’t think checking the gear the seventh time is more important than the big picture? Someone who isn’t a low-affect in-control type every day of his life?”
“They die,” Harold said flatly. Claude nodded agreement.
“What happens when you put a group through four hundred years of that type of selection? Plus the more adventurous types have been leaving the Sol-Belt for other systems, whenever they could, so Serpent Swarm Belters are more like the past of Sol-Belters.”
“Oh.” Claude nodded in time with Harold’s grunt. “What about flatlanders?”
Ingrid shuddered and tossed back the rest of her drink. “Oh, they’re like…like…They just have no sense of survival at all. Barely human. Wunderlanders strike a happy medium”—she glanced at them roguishly out of the corners of her eyes—“after which it comes down to individual merits.”
“So.” She shook herself, and felt the lieutenant’s persona settling down over her like a spacesuit, the tight skin-hugging permeable-membrane kind. “This has been a very pleasant holiday, but what do we do now?”
Claude poked at the burning logs with a fire iron and chuckled. For a moment the smile on his face made her distinctly uneasy, and she remembered that he had survived and climbed to high office in the vicious politics of the collaborationist government. For his own purposes, not all of which were unworthy; but the means…
“Well,” he said smoothly, turning back towards them. “As you can imagine, the raid and Chuut-Riit’s…elegant demise put the…pigeon among the cats with a vengeance. The factionalism among the kzin has come to the surface again. One group wants to make minimal repairs and launch the Fifth Fleet against Earth immediately—”
“Insane,” Ingrid said, shaking her head. It was the threat of a delay in the attack, until the kzin were truly ready, which had prompted the UN into the desperation measure of the Yamamoto raid.
“No, just ratcat,” Harold said, pouring himself another brandy. Ingrid frowned, and he halted the bottle in mid-pour.
“Exactly,” Claude nodded happily. “The other is loyal to Chuut-Riit’s memory. More complicated than that; there are cross-splits. Local-born kzin against the immigrants who came with the late lamented kitty governor, generational conflicts, eine gros teufeleshrek. For example, my esteemed former superior—”
He spoke a phrase in the Hero’s Tongue, and Ingrid translated mentally: Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals. A minor noble with a partial name. From what she had picked up on Wunderland, the name itself was significant as well: Ktiir was common on the frontier planet of the kzinti empire that had launched the conquest fleets against Wunderland, but archaic on the inner planets near the kzin homeworld.
“—was very vocal about it at a staff meeting. Incidentally, they completely swallowed our little white lie about Axelrod-Bauergartner being responsible for Ingrid’s escape.”
“That must have been something to see,” Harold said. Claude sighed, remembering. “Well,” he began, “since it was in our offices I managed to take a holo—”
Coordinating-Staff-Officer was a tall kzin, well over two meters, and thin by the felinoid race’s standards. Or so Claude Montferrat-Palme thought; it was difficult to say, when you were flat on your stomach on the floor, watching the furred feet pace.
Ridiculous, he thought. Humans were not meant for this posture. Kzin were: they could run on four feet as easily as two, and their skulls were on a flexible joint. This was giving him a crick in the neck…but it was obligatory for the human supervisors just below the kzinti level to attend. The consequences of disobeying the kzin were all too plain, in the transparent block of plastic that encased the head of Munchen’s former assistant chief of police, resting on the mantelpiece.
Claude’s own superior was speaking, Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals.
“This monkey”—he jerked a claw at the head—“was responsible for allowing the two Sol-agent humans to escape the hunt.” He was in the half-crouched posture Claude recognized as proper for reporting to one higher in rank but lower in social status, although the set of ears and tail was insufficiently respectful. If I can read kzinti body language that well.
This was security HQ, the old Herrenhaus where the Nineteen Families had met before the kzin came. The room was broad and gracious, floored in tile, walled in lacy white stone fretwork, and roofed in Wunderland ebony that was veined with natural silver. Outside fountains were splashing in the gardens, and he could smell the oleanders that blossomed there. The gingery scent of kzin anger was heavier, as Staff-Officer stopped and prodded a half-kick at Montferrat-Palme’s flank. The foot was encased in a sort of openwork leather-and-metal boot, with slits for the claws. Those were out slightly, probably in unconscious reflex, and he could feel the razor tips prickle slightly through the sweat-wet fabric of his uniform.
“Dominant One, this slave—” Claude began.
“Dispense with the formalities, human,” the kzin said. It spoke Wunderlander and was politer than most; Claude’s own superior habitually referred to humans as kz’eerkt, monkey. That was a quasi-primate on the kzinti homeworld. A tree-dwelling mammal-analog, at least, as much like a monkey as a kzin was like a tiger, which was not much. “Tell me what occurred.”
“Dominant One…Coordinating-Staff-Officer,” Claude continued, craning his neck. Don’t make eye contact, he reminded himself. A kzin stare was a dominance-gesture or a preparation to attack. “Honored Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals decided that…”—don’t use her name—“the former assistant chief of Munchen Polezi was more zealous than I in the tracking-down of the two UN agents, and should therefore be in charge of disposing of them in the hunt.”
Staff-Officer stopped pacing and gazed directly at Ktiir-Supervisor; Claude could see the pink tip of the slimmer kzin’s tail twitching before him, naked save for a few bristly orange hairs.
“So not only did your interrogators fail to determine that the humans had successfully sabotaged Chuut-Riit’s palace-defense computers, you appointed a traitor to arrange for their disposal. The feral humans laugh at us! Our leader is killed and the assassins go free from under our very claws!”
Ktiir-Supervisor rose from his crouch. He pointed at another kzin who huddled in one corner; a telepath, with the characteristic hangdog air and unkempt fur.
“Your tame sthondat there didn’t detect it either,” he snarled.
Literally snarled, Claude reflected. It was educational; after seeing a kzin you never referred to a human expression by that term again.
Staff-Officer wuffled, snorting open his wet black nostrils and working his whiskers. It should have been a comical expression, but on four hundred pounds of alien carnivore it was not in the least funny. “You hide behind the failures of others,” he said, hissing. “Traat-Admiral directs me to inform you that your request for reassignment to the Swarm flotillas has been denied. Neither unit will accept you.”
“Traat-Admiral!” Ktiir-Supervisor rasped. “He is like a kit who has climbed a tree and can’t get down, mewling for its dam. Ktrodni-Stkaa should be governor! This talk of a ‘secret menace’ among the asteroids is a scentless trail to divert attention from Traat-Admiral’s refusal to launch the Fifth Fleet.”
“Such was the strategy of the great Chuut-Riit, murdered through your incompetence—or worse.”
Ktiir-Supervisor bristled, the orange-red fur standing out and turning his body into a cartoon caricature of a cat, bottle-shaped.
“You nameless licker-of-scentless-piss from that jum
ped-up crecheproduct admiral, what do you accuse me of?”
“Treason, or stupidity amounting to it,” the other kzin sneered. Ostentatiously, he flared his batlike ears into a vulnerable rest position and let his tail droop.
Ktiir-Supervisor screamed. “You inner-worlds palace fop, you and Traat-Admiral alike! I urinate on the shrines of your ancestors from a height! Crawl away and call for your monkeys to groom you with blowdryers!”
Staff-Officer’s hands extended outward, the night-black claws glinting as they slid from their sheaths. His tail was rigid now. Hairdressers were a luxury the late governor had introduced, and wildly popular among the younger nobility.
“Kshat-hunter,” he growled. “You are not fit to roll in Chuut-Riit’s shit! You lay word-claws to the blood of the Riit.”
“Chuut-Riit made ch’rowl with monkeys!” A gross insult, as well as anatomically impossible.
There was a feeling of hush, as the two males locked eyes. Then the heavy wtsai-knives came out and the great orange shapes seemed to flow together, meeting at the arch of their leaps, howling. Claude rolled back against the wall as the half-ton of weight slammed down again, sending splinters of furniture out like shrapnel. For a moment the kzin were locked and motionless, hand to knife-wrist; their legs locked in thigh-holds as well, to keep the back legs from coming up for a disemboweling strike. Mouths gaped toward each other’s throats, inch-long fangs exposed in the seventy-degree killing gape. Then there was a blur of movement; they sprang apart, together, went over in a caterwauling blur of orange fur and flashing metal, a whirl far too fast for human eyesight to follow.
He caught glimpses: distended eyes, scrabbling claws, knives sinking home into flesh, amid a clamor loud enough to drive needles of pain into his ears. Bits of bloody fur hit all around him, and there was a human scream as the fighters rolled over a secretary. Then Staff-Officer rose, slashed and glaring. Ktiir-Supervisor lay sprawled, legs twitching galvanically with the hilt of Staff-Officer’s wtsai jerking next to his lower spine. The slender kzin panted for a moment and then leaped forward to grab his opponent by the neck-ruff. He jerked him up toward the waiting jaws, clamped them down on his throat. Ktiir-Supervisor struggled feebly, then slumped. Blood-bubbles swelled and burst on his nose. A wrench and Staff-Officer was backing off, shaking his head and spitting, licking at the matted fur of his muzzle; he groomed for half a minute before wrenching the knife free and beginning to spread the dead kzin’s ears for a clean trophy-cut.
“Erruch,” Ingrid said as the recording finished. “You’ve got more…you’ve got a lot of guts, Claude, dealing with them at first hand like that.”
“Oh, some of them aren’t so bad. For ratcats. Staff-Officer there expressed ‘every confidence’ in me.” He made an expressive gesture with his hands. “Although he also reminded me there was a continuous demand for fresh monkeymeat.”
Ingrid paled slightly and laid a hand on his arm. That was not a figure of speech to her, not after the chase through the kzin hunting preserve. She remembered the sound of the hunting scream behind her, and the thudding crackle of the alien’s pads on the leaves as it made its four-footed rush, rising as it screamed and leapt from the ravine lip above her. The long sharpened pole in her hands, and the soft heavy feel as its own weight drove it onto her weapon…
Claude laid his hand on hers. Harold cleared his throat.
“Well,” he said. “Your position looks solider than we thought.”
The other man gave Ingrid’s hand a squeeze and released it. “Yes,” he said. A hunter’s look came into his eyes, emphasizing the foxy sharpness of his features. “In fact, they’re outfitting some sort of expedition; that’s why they can’t spare personnel for administrative duties.”
Ingrid and Harold both leaned forward instinctively. Harold crushed out his cigarette with swift ferocity.
“Another Fleet?” Ingrid asked. I’ll be stuck here, and Earth…
Claude shook his head. “No. That raid did a lot of damage; it’d be a year or more just to get back to the state of readiness they had when the Yamamoto arrived. Military readiness.” Both the others winced; over half a million humans had died in the attack. “But they’re definitely mobilizing for something inside the system. Two flotillas. Something out in the Swarm.”
“Markham?” Ingrid ventured. It seemed a little extreme; granted he had the Catskinner, but—
“I doubt it. They’re bringing the big guns up to full personnel, the battlewagons. Conquest Fang class.”
They exchanged glances. Those were interstellar-capable warships: carriers for lesser craft, equipped with weapons that could crack planets, and defenses to match. Almost self-sufficient, with facilities for manufacturing their own fuel, parts, and weapons requirements from asteroidal material. They were normally kept on standby as they came out of the yards, only a few at full readiness for training purposes.
“All of them?” Harold said.
“No, but about three-quarters. Ratcats will be thin on the ground for a while, except for the ones stored in coldsleep. And—” He hesitated, forced himself to continue. “—I’ll be able to do most good staying here. For a year or so at least, I can be invaluable to the underground without risking much.”
The others remained silent while he looked away, granting him time to compose himself.
“I’ve got the false ID and transit papers, with disguises,” he said. “Ingrid…you aren’t safe anywhere on Wunderland. In the Swarm, with that ship you came in, maybe the two of you can do some good.”
“Claude—” she began.
He shook his head. When he spoke, his old lightness was back in the tone.
“I wonder,” he said, “I truly wonder what Markham is doing. I’d like to think he’s causing so much trouble that they’re mobilizing the Fleet, but…”
Chapter 12
Tiamat was crowded, Captain Jonah Matthieson decided. Crowded and chaotic, even more so than the last time he had been here. He shouldered through the line into the zero-G waiting area at the docks, a huge pie-shaped disk; those were at the ends of the sixty-by-twenty-kilometer spinning cylinder that served the Serpent Swarm as its main base. There had been dozens of ships in the magnetic grapples: rockjack singleships, transports, freighters…refugee ships as well; the asteroid industrial bases had been heavily damaged during the Yamamoto’s raid. Not quite as many as you would expect, though. The UN ramscoop ship’s weapons had been iron traveling at velocities 90 percent of a photon’s. When something traveling at that speed hit, the result resembled an antimatter bomb.
A line of lifebubbles went by, shepherded by medics. Casualties, injuries beyond the capacities of outstation autodocs. Some of them were quite small; he looked in the transparent surface of one, and then away quickly, swallowing.
Shut up, he told his mind. Collateral damage can’t be helped. And there had been a trio of kzinti battle-wagons in dock too, huge tapering daggers with tau-cross bows and magnetic launchers like openwork gunbarrels; Slasher-class fighters clung to the flanks, swarms of metallic lice. Repair and installation crews swarmed around them; Tiamat’s factories were pouring out warheads and sensor-effector systems.
The mass of humanity jammed solid in front of the exits. Jonah waited like a floating particle of cork, watching the others passed through the scanners one by one. Last time, with Ingrid—forget that, he thought—there had been a cursory retina scan, and four goldskin cops floating like a daisy around each exit. Now they were doing blood samples as well, presumably for DNA analysis; besides the human police, he could see waldo-guns, floating ovoids with clusters of barrels and lenses and antennae. A kzin to control them, bulking even huger in fibroid armor and helmet.
And all for little old me, he thought, kicking himself forward and letting the goldskin stick his hand into the tester. There was a sharp prickle on his thumb, and he waited for the verdict. Either the false ident holds, or it doesn’t. The four police with stunners and riot-armor, the kzin in full infantry rig, six w
aldoes with ten-megawatt lasers…If it came to a fight, the odds were not good. Since all I have is a charming smile and a rejiggered light-pen.
“Pass through, pass through,” the goldskin said, in a tone that combined nervousness and boredom.
Jonah decided he couldn’t blame her; the kzinti security apparatus must have gone winging paranoid-crazy when Chuut-Riit was assassinated, and then the killers escaped with human-police connivance. On second thought, these klongs all volunteered to work for the pussies. Bleep them.
He passed through the mechanical airlock and into one of the main transverse corridors. It was ten meters by twenty, and sixty kilometers long; three sides were small businesses and shops, spinward fourth a slideway. The last time he had been here, a month ago, there had been murals on the walls of the concourse area. Prewar, faded and stained, but still gracious and marked with the springlike optimism of the settlement of the Alpha Centauri system. Outdoor scenes from Wunderland in its pristine condition, before the settlers had modified the ecology to suit the immigrants from Earth. Scenes of slowships, half-disassembled after their decades-long flight from the Solar system.
The murals had been replaced by holograms. Atrocity holograms, of survivors and near-survivors of the UN raid. Mostly from dirtside, since with an atmosphere to transmit blast and shock effects you had a greater transition between dead and safe. Humans crushed, burned, flayed by glass-fragments, mutilated; heavy emphasis on children. There was a babble of voices with the holos, weeping and screaming and moaning with pain, and a strobing title: Sol-System Killers! Their liberation is death! And an idealized kzin standing in front of a group of cowering mothers and infants, raising a shield to ward off the attack of a repulsive flatlander-demon.
Interesting, Jonah thought. Whoever had designed that had managed to play on about every prejudice a human resident of the Alpha Centauri system could have. It had to be a human psychist doing the selection; kzinti didn’t understand Homo sapiens well enough. A display of killing power like this would make a kzin respectful. Human propagandists needed to whip their populations into a war-frenzy, and anger was a good tool. Make a kzin angry? You didn’t need to make them angry. An enemy would try to make kzin angry, because that reduced their efficiency. Let this remind you that a collaborationist is not necessarily an incompetent. A traitor, a Murphy’s-asshole inconvenience, but not necessarily an idiot. Nor even amoral; he supposed it was possible to convince yourself that you were serving the greater good by giving in. Smoothing over the inevitable, since it did look like the kzin were winning.
