Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - The Houses of the Kzinti

by Larry Niven

  “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 Munchen 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 holecards 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 befhel, 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 paté…“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 mustaches 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 rested at his elbow, perched waveringly on a stack of printout. 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 Ogreson 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 systemwide, and there’s no reason I shouldn’t take advantage of it. Safety’s sake, too: arse to the wall, ratcats over all. 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. Munchenport was solidly cordoned off, antiaircraft missiles and heavy beamers all around it, 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 ident-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, 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 thicker-built, as those brought up under even as feeble a gravity as Wunderland’s tended to be, families with crying children and string-tied parcels, or ragged-looking laborers. They smelled, of unwashed bodies and poverty, a peculiar sweet-sour odor blending with the machinery-and-synthetics smell of the building and the residual ozone of heavy power release. More raw material for the industries of the Serpent Swarm, attracted by the higher wages and the lighter hand of the kzin off-planet.

  “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 maglifters; 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 splintered 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 Nippojen 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, with 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 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’s Sauna, and twice she has refused. You must tell me your secret.”

  Acquaintance, not friend, Harold thought. And my chef prefers to work for someone who lets her 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 Jotunscarp 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.” 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 from the fat man. “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 Munchen, 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 transients’ 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 Munchen,” 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, technology that was the confiscated product of centuries of perverted ingenuity. Jonah grinned. Like most Belters, he had always felt the ARM tended to err on the side of caution in their 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 ARM. 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 fifty meters, cause of death, “he died.” Jonah frowned. On second thought, maybe the ARM was right 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 net—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 nonstandardized goods; they make 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 ARM 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—you twisted so and it 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 there were a few precautions it did not hurt to take. Not mentioning names, for one; a robobugger could be set to 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 indeterminancy.

  “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 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 Datamongers’ Guild: ‘A mutual benefit association of those involved in infosystem development and maintenance.’ Gott knows 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.”

  Ingrid sank back on one elbow. “We need a loc
al contact,” she said slowly. “Jonah…We both know why Intelligence picked me as your partner. I was the only one remotely qualified who might know…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. A lot of them are listed as dead in the year or two after I left. No cause of death, just dead…” Her face twisted.

  Survivor guilt, Jonah thought. Dangerous. Have to watch for that.

  “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…” She paused and ran a hand over her hair. “I don’t know; he just didn’t make the rendezvous in time, they were closing in, and…” A shrug.

  Jonah linked hands behind his head. “I still say it’s damned iffy but I guess it’s the best chance we have; I certainly don’t want to give the gangsters another location to find us at. I guess it’s the best chance we have. At least we’ll be able to get a drink.”

  Chapter 4

  “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, got a thin cut under his thumbnail, and 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.