by Dean Ing
“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.”
<
br /> “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 He
roes 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.
