by Dean Ing
“… didn't just bull in,” Lieutenant Raines was saying, as she followed the third akvavit with a beer chaser. Jonah sipped more cautiously at his, thinking the asymmetry of nearly pure alcohol and laager was typically Wunderlander. “Only it wasn't caution, the pussies just didn't want to mess the place up and weren't expecting much resistance. Rightly so.”
Jonah restrained himself from patting her hand as she scowled into her beer. It was dim in their nook, and the gravity was Wunderland-standard .61 Earth; the initial refugees from the Alpha Centauri system had been mostly planetsiders, and from the dominant Danish-Dutch-German-Baltic ethnic group. They had grown even more clannish in the generation since, which showed in the tall ceramic steins along the walls, plastic wainscoting that made a valiant attempt to imitate fumed oak, and a human bartender in wooden shoes, lederhosen, and a beard clipped closer on one side than the other.
The drinks slipped up out of the center of the table, of course.
“That was, teufel, three years ago, my time. We'd had some warning, of course, once the UN started mastering what the crew of the Angel's Pencil found on the wreckage of that Kzin ship. Plenty of singleships, and any reaction drive's a weapon; couple of big boost-lasers. But,” a shrug, “you know how it was back then.”
“Before my time, Lieutenant,” Jonah said, then cursed himself as he saw her wince. Raines had been born nearly three quarters of a century ago, even if her private duration included only two and a half decades of it.
“I'm Ingrid, if you're going to be Jonah instead of Captain Matthieson. Time— I keep forgetting, my head remembers but my gut forgets… Well, we just weren't set up to think in terms of war; that was ancient history. We held them off for nearly six months, though. Long enough to refit the three slowships in orbit, and give them emergency boost. I think the pussies didn't catch up and blast us simply because they didn't give a damn; they couldn't decelerate us and get the ships back, so why bother? Arrogant sons of…” another of those broad urchin grins “well, bitches isn't quite appropriate, is it?”
Jonah laughed. “You were in München when the Kzin arrived?”
“No, I'd been studying at the Scholarium there software design philosophy — but I was on sabbatical in Vallburg with two friends of mine, working out some, ha, personal problems.”
The bartender with the unevenly-forked beard was nearly as attenuated as a Belter, but he had the disturbingly mobile ears of a pure-bred Wunderland Herrenmann, and they were pricked forward. Alpha Centauri's only habitable planet has a thin atmosphere; the original settlers have adapted, and keen hearing is common among them. Jonah smiled at the man and stabbed a finger for a privacy screen. It flickered into the air across the outlet of the booth, and the refugee saloonkeeper went back to polishing a mug.
“That'd be, hmmm, Claude Montferrat-Palme and Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann?”
Raines nodded, moodily drawing a design on the tabletop with a forefinger dipped in the dark beer. “Yes… teufel, they're both of them in their fifties now, getting on for middle-aged.” A sigh. “Look… Harold's a, hmmm, hard to explain to a Sol-Belter, or even someone from the Serpent Swarm who hasn't spent a lot of time dirtside. His father was a Herrenmann, one of the Nineteen Families, senior line. His mother wasn't married to him.”
“Oh,” Jonah said, racking his memory. History had never been an interest of his, and his generation had been brought up to the War, anyway. “Problems with wills and inheritances and suchlike?”
“You know what a bastard is?”
“Sure. Someone you don't like, such as for example that flatlander bastard who assigned me to this project.” He raised his stein in salute. “Though I'm fast becoming resigned to it, Ingrid.”
She half-smiled in absent-minded acknowledgment, her mind 4.3 light-years and four decades away. “It means he got an expensive education, a nice little nest-egg settled on him… and that he'd never, never be allowed past the front door of the Yarthkin-Schotmann's family schloss. Lucky to be allowed to use the name. An embarrassment.”
“Might eat at a man,” Jonah said.
“Like a little kzin in the guts. Especially when he grew enough to realize why his father only came for occasional visits; and then that his half-siblings didn't have half his brains or drive and didn't need them either. It drove him, he had to do everything twice as fast and twice as good, take crazy risks… made him a bit of a bastard in the Sol sense of the word, too, spines like a pincodillo, sense of humor that could flay a gruntfish.”
“And Montferrat-Palme?”
“Claude? Now, he was Herrenmann all through; younger son of a younger son, poor as an Amish dirt farmer, and…” A laugh. “You had to meet Claude to understand him. I think he got serious about me mostly because I kept turning him down, it was a new experience and drove him crazy. And Harold he halfway liked, and halfway enjoyed needling.”
Municipal Director of Internal Affairs Claude Montferrat-Palme adjusted his cape and looked up at the luminous letters that floated disembodied ten centimeters from the smooth brown brick of the building in front of him.
Harolds Terran Bar, it read. A World On Its Own. Below, in smaller letters: humans only.
Ah, Harold, he thought. Always the one for a piece of useless melodrama. As if Kzin would be likely to frequent this section of Old München, or wish to enter a human entertainment spot if they did, or could be stopped if by some fluke of probabilities they did end up down here.
His escort stirred, looking around nervously. The Karl-Jorge Avenue was dark, most of its glowstrips long ago stolen or simply spray-painted in the random vandalism that breeds in lives fueled by purposeless anger. It was fairly clean, because the Kzin insisted on that, and the four-story brick buildings were solid enough, because the early settlers had built well. Brick and concrete and cobbled streets glimmered faintly, still damp from the afternoon's rain, loud wailing music echoed from open windows, and there would have been groups of idle-looking youths loitering on the front steps of the tenements, if the car had not had München Polizei plates.
Ba'hai, he thought, mentally snapping his fingers. He was tall, even for a Herrenmann, with one side of his face clean shaven and the other a close-trimmed brown beard cut to a floppish point; the plain blue uniform and circular brimmed cap of the city police emphasized the deep-chested greyhound build. This was a Ba'hai neighborhood.
“You may go,” he said to the guards. “I will call for the car.”
“Sir,” the sergeant said, the guide-cone of her stunner waving about uncertainly. Helmet and nightsight goggles made her eyes unreadable. “'tis iz a rough district.”
“I am aware of that, sergeant. Also that Harold's Place is a known underworld hangout. Assignment to my headquarters squad is a promotion; please do not assume that it entitles you to doubt my judgment.” Or you may find yourself back walking a beat, without such opportunities for income-enhancement, went unspoken between them. He ignored her salute and walked up the two low stairs.
The door recognized him, read retinas and encephalograph patterns, slid open. The coal-black doorman was as tall as the police officer and twice as broad, with highly-illegal impact armor underneath the white coat and bowtie of Harold's Terran Bar. The impassive smoky eyes above the ritually-scarred cheeks gave him a polite once-over, an equally polite and empty bow.
“Pleased to see you here again, Herrenmann Montferrat-Palme,” he said. You grafting ratcat-loving collaborationist son of a bitch, Montferrat added the unspoken portion himself. And I love you too.
Harold's Terran Bar was a historical revival, and therefore less out of place on Wunderland than it would have been in the Sol system. Once through the vestibule's inner bead-curtain doorway Montferrat could see most of the smoke-hazed main room, a raised platform in a C around the sunken dance floor and the long bar. Strictly human service here, which was less of an affectation now than it had been when the place opened, twenty years ago. Machinery was dearer than it had been, and human labor much cheape
r, particularly since refugees began pouring into München from a countryside increasingly preempted for Kzin estates. Not to mention those displaced by strip-mining…
“Good evening, Claude.”
He started. It was always disconcerting, how quietly Harold moved. There he was at his elbow now, blue eyes expressionless. Face that should have been ugly, big-nosed with a thick lower lip and drooping eyelids. He was… what, sixty-three now? just going grizzled at the temples, which was an affectation, or a sign that his income didn't stretch to really thorough geriatric treatments. Short, barrel-chested… what sort of genetic mismatch had produced that build from a Herrenmann father and a Belter mother?
“Looking me over for signs of impending dissolution, Claude?” Harold said, steering him toward his usual table and snapping his fingers for a waiter. “It'll be a while yet.”
Perhaps not so long, Montferrat thought, looking at the pouches beneath his eyes. That could be stress… or Harold could be really skimping on the geriatrics. They become more expensive every year, the kzin don't care… There are people dying of old age at seventy, now, and not just Amish. Shut up, Claude, you hypocrite. Nothing you can do about it.
“You will outlast me, old friend.”
“A case of cynical apathy wearing better than cynical corruption?” Harold asked, seating himself across from the police chief.
Montferrat pulled a cigarette case from his jacket's inner pocket and snapped it open with a flick of the wrist. It was plain white gold, from Earth, with a Paris jeweler’s initials inside the frame and a date two centuries old, one of us is few inheritances from his parents… Harold took the proffered cigarette.
“You will join me in a schnapps?” Montferrat said.
“Claude, you've been asking that question for twenty years, and I've been saying no for twenty years. I don't drink with the paying customers.”
Yarthkin leaned back, let smoke trickle through his nostrils. The liquor arrived, and a plateful of grilled things that resembled shrimps about as much as a lemur resembled a man, apart from being dark green and having far too many eyes. “Now, didn't my bribe arrive on time?”
Montferrat winced. “Harold, Harold, will you never learn to phrase these things politely?” He peeled the translucent shell back from one of the grumblies, snapped off the head between thumb and forefinger and dipped it in the sauce. “Exquisite…” he breathed, after the first bite, and chased it down with a swallow of schnapps. “Bribes? Merely a token recompense, when out of the goodness of my heart and in memory of old friendship, I secure licenses, produce permits, contacts with owners of estates and fishing boats—”
“—so you can have a first-rate place to guzzle”
“—I allow this questionable establishment to flourish, risking my position, despite the, shall we say, dubious characters known to frequent it—”
“—because it makes a convenient listening post and you get a lot of, shall we say, lucrative contacts.”
They looked at each other coolly for a moment, and then Montferrat laughed. “Harold, perhaps the real reason I allow this den of iniquity to continue is that you're the only person who still has the audacity to deflate my hypocrisies.”
Yarthkin nodded calmly. “Comes of knowing you when you were an idealistic patriot, Director. Like being in hospital together… Will you be gambling tonight, or did you come to pump me about the rumors?”
“Rumors?” Montferrat said mildly, shelling another grumbly.
“Of another kzin defeat. Two shiploads of our esteemed ratcat masters coming back with their fur singed.”
“For god’s sake!” Montferrat hissed, looking around.
“No bugs,” Yarthkin continued. “Not even by your ambitious assistants. They offered a hefty sweetener, but I wouldn't want to see them in your office. They don't stay bought.”
Montferrat smoothed his mustache. “Well, the kzin do seem to have a rather lax attitude toward security at times,” he said. Mostly, they don't realize how strong the hunting desire to get together and chatter is, he mused.
“Then there's the rumor about a flatlander counterstrike,” Yarthkin continued.
Montferrat raised a brow and cocked his mobile Herrenmann ears forward. “Not becoming a believer in the myth of Liberation, I hope,” he drawled.
Yarthkin waved the hand that held the cigarette, leaving a trail of blue smoke. “I did my bit for liberation. Got left at the altar, as I recall, and took the amnesty.” His face had become even more blank, merely the slightest hint of a sardonic curve to the lips. “Now I'm just an innkeeper. What goes on outside these walls is no business of mine.” A pause. “It is yours, of course, Director. People know the ratcats got their whiskers pasted back, for the fourth time. They're encouraged… also desperate. The kzin will be stepping up the war effort, which means they'll be putting more pressure on us. Not to mention that they're breeding faster than ever.”
Montferrat nodded with a frown. Battle casualties made little difference to a kzin population; their nonsentient females were held in harems by a small minority of males, in any event. Heavy losses meant the lands and mates of the dead passing to the survivors… and more young males thrown out of the nest, looking for lands and a Name of their own. And kzin took up a lot of space; they weighed in at a quarter-ton each, and they were pure carnivores. Nor would they eat synthesized meat except on board a military spaceship. There were still fewer than a hundred thousand in the Wunderland system, and more than twenty times that many humans; it was getting crowded.
“More fighters crowding into München every day,” Yarthkin continued in that carefully neutral tone.
Refugees. München had been a small town within their own lifetimes; the original settlers of Wunderland had been a close-knit coterie of plutocrats, looking for elbow-room. They had allowed only limited industrialization, even in the Serpent Swarm, and very little indeed on the planetary surface. Huge domains staked out by the Nineteen Families and their descendants; later immigrants had fitted into the cracks of the pattern, as tenants or carving out smallholdings on the fringes of the settled zone, many of them were ethnic or religious separatists anyway.
Until the Kzin came. Kzin nobles expected vast territories for their own polygamous households, and naturally seized the best and ready-developed acreages. Some of the human land workers stayed to labor for new masters, but many more were displaced. Or eaten.
One of the first effects of the new ownership had been forced-draft industrialization in München and the other towns; kzin did not live in cities, and cared little for the social consequences. Their planets had always been sparsely settled, and they had developed the gravity polarizer early in their history, hence they mined their asteroid belts but put little industry in space. The refugees flooding in worked in industries that produced war materiel for the kzin fleets, not housing or consumer-goods for human use…
“It must be a bonanza for you, selling exit-permits to the Swarm,” Harold continued. Outside the base asteroid of Tiamat, the Belters were much more loosely controlled than the groundside population. “And exemptions from military call-up.”
Montferrat smiled and leaned back, following the schnapps with laager. “There must be regulations,” he said reasonably. “The Swarm cannot absorb all the would-be immigrants. Nor can Wunderland afford to lose the labor of all who would like to leave. The kzin demand technicians, and we cannot refuse, the burden must be allocated.”
“Nor can you afford to pass up the palm-greasing and the, ach, romantic possibilities—” Yarthkin began.
“Alert! Alert! Emergency broadcast!” The mirror behind the long bar flashed from reflective to broadcast, and the smoky gloom of the bar's main hall erupted in shouted questions and screams.
The strobing pattern of light settled into the civil defense blazon, and the unmistakable precision of an artificial voice. “All civilians are to remain in their residences. Emergency and security personnel to their duty stations, repeat, emergency and security
personnel to their—”
A blast of static and white noise loud enough to send hands to ears, before the system's emergency overrides cut in. When reception returned the broadcast was two-dimensional, a space-armored figure reading from a screen prompt over the receiver. The noise in Harold's Terran Bar sank to shocked silence at the sight of the human shape of the combat armor, the blue-and-white UN sigil on its chest.
“—o all citizens of the Alpha Centauri system,” the Terran was saying. In Wunderlander, but with a thick accent that could not handle the gutturals. “Evacuate areas of military or industrial importance immediately. Repeat, immediately. The United Nations Space Command is attacking kzin military and industrial targets in the Alpha Centauri system. Evacuate areas—” The screen split to scroll the same message in English and two more of the planet's principal languages. The door burst open and a squad of München Polizei burst through.
“Scheisse!” Montferrat shouted, rising. He froze as the receiver in his uniform cap began a hissing and snarling override-transmission in the Hero's Tongue. Yarthkin relaxed and smiled as the policeman sprinted for the exit. He cocked one eye towards the ceiling and silently flourished Montferrat's last glass of schnapps before sending it down with a snap of his wrist.
“Weird,” Jonah Matthieson muttered, looking at the redshifted cone of light ahead of them. Better this way. This way he didn't have to think of what they were going to do when they arrived. He had been a singleship pilot before doing his military service. You could do software design anywhere there was a computer system, of course, and miners had a lot of spare time. But his reflexes were a pilot's, and they included a strong inhibition against high-speed intercept trajectories.
This was going to be the highest speed intercept of all time…
The forward end of the pilot's cabin was very simple, a hemisphere of smooth synthetic. For that matter, the rest of the cabin was quite basic as well; two padded crashcouches, which was one more than normal, an autodoc, an autochef, and rather basic sanitary facilities. That left just enough room to move… in zero gravity. Right now they were under one-G acceleration, crushingly uncomfortable. They had been under one-G for weeks, subjective time; the Yamamoto was being run to flatlander specifications.