Rykermann squinted in the direction of Vaemar's extended claw. A few moments later his eyes too made out the lights of an approaching car. Vaemar gave a churr of delight as it landed and his old friend and chess partner, Colonel Michael Cumpston, alighted.
Cumpston greeted them briefly, giving Vaemar a scratch under the chin in response to his grooming lick, but in a half-crouching position: in the past Vaemar's enthusiastic welcome had knocked him over more than once.
“I've got a message from Arthur Guthlac,” he told Rykermann. “He would take it as a personal favor if you could meet him at your first convenience.” He paused and went on in a different tone. “Early's involved.”
“Why didn't Arthur just send me an e-mail? We're seeing him in a few days anyway, aren't we?”
“This isn't social, I'm afraid. Security,” said Cumpston.
“Why couldn't he come himself?”
“Give him a break! He's been working round the clock trying to get his desk cleared before the big event. There's some secret business.”
“What?”
“As I said, secret. He didn't confide in a humble colonel. Anyway, you're wanted back at the ranch. Now.”
“I'm not a soldier any more. He can't order me round. In fact, since I'm a Member of Parliament, it could be a breach of Parliamentary privilege to do so.”
“Nils, Arthur may be a friend of ours, but don't mess with Early. You know better.”
“I thought he'd left Wunderland. That Montferrat-Palme or someone had put pressure on him to go—to get out of the system.”
“He went—physically. Some have said it would be better if he was still under our noses.”
“We're just about finished here for the time being, anyway,” Rykermann said. “Vaemar can take charge of packing things up.”
Cumpston nodded. Though he kept his expression blank, the former exterminationist's friendship for and trust in the young kzin pleased and amused him. “Another thing. Arthur says you should upgrade your security. He was vague about the details, but I gather there have been a few… problems in this area.”
“I suppose we have let things get a bit lax.” There were farms and hamlets dotted about the fertile tableland beyond the great escarpment and things seemed very peaceful.
They were silent for a moment. Then Cumpston stretched his arms and cracked his knuckles in a leisurely way. It had the effect of showing him the instruments on the forearm of his jacket.
“Don't look now,” he said slowly, making an gesture that took in a heap of boulders to his left, and raising his hand to pinch his lower lip, “but I am getting a signal from the motion detector from behind that rock-pile. Something quite large and bipedal. The high probability is human.”
Rykermann nodded thoughtfully, as if agreeing with the point Cumpston had made. He did not have a laser-ring like the ARM officer, but the ring on the hand that brushed his thigh activated his pistol. Vaemar yawned and also stretched, a feline's extravagant stretch that arched his back and dug his claws into the ground. He pulled up one forearm and then the other, in a lazy, breadmaking gesture. Then he leapt over the rock.
There was a human scream, and an angry spitting from Vaemar. He reappeared holding a human child or adolescent. Thrust into his belt was a gun it had evidently been carrying.
“Feral,” he said, though the clothes it was wearing made it obvious. “And clever. Look at this.” His hand with retracted claws touched his captive's cheek with surprising gentleness. “Rarctha fat. That's why I didn't smell him. No weapons.”
“Who are you?” asked Rykermann. The youngster struggled and spat.
“Not a Wabbit,” said Cumpstom. The Wascal Wabbits were the most sociopathic gang of ferals on Liberated Wunderland. Their facial tattoos were easy identifiers.
“Turn him round,” said Guthlac, though the young feral's sex was not in fact obvious. With a single practiced movement he brought a tranquilizer-gun from his belt and fired a Teflon dart into its shoulder. The feral went limp.
“They don't hunt alone,” said Cumpston, as the feral was put into his car.
“I know,” said Guthlac.
“A gang of them, armed, can be a real danger,” said Cumpston. “I'll report to security, of course, and get some proper people out here after them, but in the meantime, it wouldn't be a good idea for any of your students to be wandering about unsupervised or unarmed.”
“Not all my students are helpless,” said Rykermann. “And none of us are ever quite unarmed. All the same, I don't want anyone using weapons on children. I hope we have the resources to bring them all in soon.”
“That's up to you. You're the politician,” said Cumpston. “But as I say, I gather Arthur's had… reports. Disappearances. Within a few miles of here. Maybe this lot are to blame.” He turned to Vaemar. “Don't leave your students here alone. I'd suggest, if I may, that you call them up now. Get them back to town as soon as you can.”
Chapter 3
“You sent Earth a message a couple of years ago, asking us if a consignment of radioactives or biological weapons had been sent to Wunderland at a certain time during the war,” said Brigadier Arthur Guthlac. “Why?” He spoke with the indefinable awkwardness of a friend suddenly turned official.
“Two years ago?” Rykermann frowned. “Yes, of course I did. But why bring that up now? I assume it's been dealt with.”
“No. Thanks to our bureaucracy it has only reached the relevant desk recently. And that by chance. One of Early's subordinates with a long memory happened to see it on its way to the files. It was, of course a secret job, and very few ever knew about it. Normally we, or the Wunderland Government, would have sent out a team to clean it up in due course—when a mountain of higher priorities had been disposed of.”
“So?”
“Why did you send it?” Guthlac repeated. “When you did?”
“A routine part of tidying up,” Rykermann told him. “We buried some stuff during the war, stuff we were told had been sent from Earth, and I thought the UNSN should remove it. It was obviously something secret and military. Therefore something dangerous. I won't apologize that it took us a long time to get round to it. We've also had one or two other things on our hands, you know.”
“You're sure it was stuff sent from Earth.”
“That was what we were told,” said Rykermann. “From Earth via the Serpent Swarm belt. The courier who delivered it to us was killed. I don't know any more than that.”
“When did it happen?”
“It was about a year before the kzinti captured me in the caves. About fourteen Earth-years before liberation.”
“So it got through,” Guthlac said. “We thought it had been lost in space.”
“What was it?… Don't pull that stone face on me. We took risks for it,” Rykermann told him. “A number of people died for it. Answer my question, please, Arthur. Also, I happen to be not only the chief biologist for the cave complexes, I'm very close to the Minister for Environmental Protection. Do you want me to tell him there's an unknown bioweapon from Earth at large and Earth won't tell us anything about it? That is my duty as a Wunderlander and a member of the Government. And there was nuclear stuff, too.”
“Nils, I know well enough you are a politician,” said Guthlac. “In any case I suppose you'll need to know. It's Pak tree-of-life. And, Nils, I'm ordering you to say nothing about it.”
Rykermann drew in his breath sharply. He looked as if he was about to burst out with something, but then said only: “Why?”
“I'll tell you. But I'll trade you information. Tell me more. Everything that happened then.”
“We were in the wild country beyond the Hohe Kalkstein. There was a fight.” Rykermann told him the story.
“We hid the stuff and cleared out,” he concluded. “After that we had plenty of other things to do, beginning with getting away. If I thought about it at all later, I wondered if it might be a radioactive agent we were meant to smuggle into kzin ships or areas and then ope
n. Enriched uranium for detonators, perhaps. Initiators for simple fission bombs. Plutonium. Caesium. Or some biological plague that the Sol Laboratories had developed to use on ratcats. But I had other things on my mind. We'd done as Sol instructed, at big risk all along the way. In the day-to-day matters of staying alive I didn't give it too much thought.
“The resistance was getting into a bad way then. Not just because attrition was wearing us down and more and more humans were either giving up and accepting their lot or just dead. Chuut-Riit had begun studying humans and that was making life harder for us all. Some kzinti were investigating monkey stuff—it had been beneath their dignity before—and some were also getting all too interested in what they found. They were learning more about us and it was getting harder to hide.
“Then I was captured by the kzinti,” Rykermann went on. “Thanks to Raargh-Sergeant and because we'd fought together against the Morlocks, and Leonie had soft-heartedly saved his life, I was awarded fighters' privileges and paroled. That changed my lifestyle. I wouldn't risk front-fighting and then falling into kzin claws again after breaking my word to them—there are some things you can't ask of a man and that's one of them. I was exhausted anyway. Plus they had a zzrou implant in me, not being overly trusting of any monkey. I became more a back-room boy for a long time. There was plenty for a backroom boy to do.”
Guthlac nodded. Rykermann went on.
“Time passed. We did what we could, growing a little weaker and more hopeless each year. Then came other things, it seemed on top of one another, hard and fast: the ramscoop raid and the death of Chuut-Riit, followed by the kzinti's civil war and the Liberation. That didn't mean the end of work for us. In many ways we were busier than ever.
“I thought the zzrou would kill me come Liberation. But a human doctor managed to hack it out. He died instead of me when it exploded. Thanks to Leonie, some of my people found me in the wreckage just before I bled to death. But without fancy surgery I spent the Liberation with a hole the size of your fist where my right scapula had been, and not, as you can imagine, taking a very active part. Finally they got me to the UNSN forces and one of the military regeneration tanks. Other wounded had to make do with organ banks. I was fortunate enough to be spared that.”
Rykermann was telling Guthlac things he knew already, but Guthlac let him speak on. He knew one terrible thing Rykermann might be referring to when he spoke of organ banks and apparently it still helped him to talk.
“Later, when things had settled down, and I was generally tidying up loose ends, I asked the authorities if they had sent us any dangerous radioactive material. I didn't hear anything more. That was the last I thought about it until now. I love my biological work and that's what I'd rather concentrate on. And… well, there were other things on my mind, too.”
“Dangerous, to leave radioactives around.”
“Cleaning up Wunderland will be a long job, Arthur,” Rykermann said. “There are lots of crashed ships, lots of spilled radioactives, lots of munitions, half-made experimental bioweapons, lots of hot dumps still. Our granite's generally a lot hotter than Earth's as well, which can make detection more difficult. I guess we'll have to wait till the war's over in space before we can even think of seeing the resources to do the job properly. But now you say…” Again he stopped as if biting off words.
“Anyway, you were right,” Guthlac said. “There were some nukes in it, along with triggers—bombs ready to go. Some of them very dirty and with a big bang for their size.”
“That's not very nice to have loose on Wunderland,” said Rykermann. “There are still kzin revanchists around, not to mention some humans who could be even more dangerous. Apart from—the other thing. We must bring it in now. I suppose you have the signatures of the nukes?”
“Yes. Here.” Guthlac gestured to a computer-brick. “They shouldn't be too hard to find—in fact they were designed to leave signatures so they could be retrieved from hiding-places easily. We also had transmitters broadcasting those signatures. They are so miniaturized they aren't very effective, but they might help. We also have triggering codes. But you want the full story?”
“To Hell with the nukes! Pak tree-of-life. Why?”
“One of the greatest services Markham and the Alpha Centauri resistance did for humanity was to set up a maser facility on Nifelheim,” Guthlac said. “They were able to send Sol a lot of information about the kzinti and in particular their fleets.”
“Markham? He knocked down a lot of the kzin surveillance satellites,” said Rykermann. “And his people jinxed others to send misleading information. The resistance would never have survived otherwise. That's what we owe him for. But what's Markham got to do with tree-of-life?”
“For us it was the intelligence he sent that mattered. Keeping that secret channel open was priceless. We were also masering them, but at both ends we kept our messages short and few. For the kzinti to have intercepted them would have been disastrous. But as you say, until Chuut-Riit settled firmly into command they didn't take much interest in what monkeys did so long as they were decorous slaves. We, like you, took advantage of that.
“The message we sent with the special consignment was deliberately cryptic. Decoded it said only: 'Hide it. You'll get further instructions if and when the time comes.'
“When things were going from bad to worse in the war, about the time of the third big kzin fleet attack on Sol,” Guthlac went on, “Early's people launched Operation Cherubim.”
“I've never heard of it.”
“Very few did. By that time we were beginning to fear sabotage of the war effort by pacifists and would-be quislings in Sol system. Thanks to Markham's masers we knew that in the Centauri system humans had not been exterminated but were living under a collaborationist government. We made that public knowledge, thinking it might be good for morale—Sol people would have grounds to hope their families and so forth here might still be alive. Anyway, we only rediscovered the need for any censorship slowly. It was a mistake. It meant there was a temptation to some Sol people, when they knew they might go on living under the kzinti, to settle for something like the same, rather than endless, grinding, hopeless war and increasing poverty, hardship and coercion for all.”
“If you can call it living,” said Rykermann. “The worst that Sol people endured was paradise beyond dreams compared to what we had here.”
“I know. But the possibility of a negotiated surrender for Sol was an inducement to defeatists and others: People worked out that those who did services for the kzinti—assisted them in their conquest—might expect to be rewarded by them. They worked out there were probably people like that on Wunderland.”
“There were,” said Rykermann. “Since I was out of things at the Liberation I missed seeing most of what was done to them then.”
“At first we hadn't bothered with security much, discounting any possibility of kzin spies or agents,” said Guthlac. “No human would spy or do sabotage for the kzinti, we assumed. But we learnt better as time went on. Humanity wasn't united. Secrets did matter. Operation Cherubim was deadly secret: To send a ship to Alpha Centauri with human volunteers—childless, of course—who would be converted into Pak Protectors. They carried tree-of-life agent in a sealed compartment. Something went wrong. They never arrived. Perhaps they ran into kzin ships. Perhaps just one of the accidents of spaceflight.
“But there was another operation on the same lines: To send tree-of-life agent in an unmanned ship.”
“Why?”
“It was the emergency backup. There were many advantages from the covert operation point of view: simpler, quicker, a ship able to accelerate and decelerate faster and, without life-systems, smaller, harder to detect or intercept. Plus, we weren't over-supplied with suitable Protector volunteers. The resistance had instructions to pick it up at the edge of the system and smuggle it to Wunderland.”
“As geriatric drugs and trace elements.”
“Yes. Not a complete lie, of course. It is a ger
iatric drug—and how! Always make your cover story as close to the truth as possible. The idea was, even if someone at the Alpha Centauri end who had an idea of what it was fell into kzin hands and was probed by a telepath, he or she could fix on the idea of a geriatric drug and medicine, just possibly the telepath would not detect an actual lie. That was the idea, anyway. Whether or not it would have worked is another matter. But anyway nothing was said in our maser as to what it really was. Then, of course, when it arrived it was to be hidden.
“If Sol system had been plainly falling, instructions would have been masered to open the containers and make Protectors. From there it would, we hoped, go as Operation Cherubim had been meant to go. Of course, we would give instructions then to try to ensure that the Protectors created would be suitable individuals—volunteers, with high ethical standards and records—good people, in short—and childless. We would have wanted trained scientists and fighters, of course, so they'd have as big a start as possible in knowledge and experience.
“We would do the same on Earth. The kzinti would find themselves attacked by Protectors in both systems simultaneously. We sent the nukes as well so the Protectors would have powerful weapons ready to hand right away, either as bombs or pumps for lasers. Even Protectors couldn't build nuclear processing-plants and factories in a kzin-occupied system overnight. But it was a desperate ploy, only to be used if all else was lost. We wouldn't have control over the process, or over who the human Protectors in this system would be. You know Protectors, once they are used to their state, are more or less indestructible, smarter than human geniuses, and unless they're killed they live for thousands of years. One can't imagine they would ever have handed power back to breeders, or even agreed not to make more Protectors. They could produce their own tree-of-life, given time. There was fear that we were exchanging one demonic enemy for a worse. But even if they had been universally benevolent, even if they defeated the kzinti, it would have changed our society utterly and probably forever…
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