by Larry Niven
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 h
is 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 darn," 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 rant—
'fhe 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 t
he 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.
