by Dean Ing
“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 dam,” 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 ram—
The 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 the 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 m
yself, 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.
“Why did you come back?” he whispered. “Why did you come back, to torment us here in hell?”
“Right, now download,” Jonah said. The interfacer bleeped quietly and opened to extrude the biochip.
“Well, this ought to be useful, if we can get the information back,” Ingrid said dully, handing him the piece of curved transparent quasi-tissue.
He unwrapped his hand gingerly and slid the fingernail home, into the implanted flexible gasket beneath the cuticle. “Provided we can get ourselves, this, or a datalink to the ship.”
Useful was an understatement; intelligence-gathering was not their primary job, but this was a priceless load. The complete specs on the most important infosystem on Wunderland, and strategic sampling of the data in its banks. Ships, deployments, capacities. Kzin psychology and history and politics, command profiles, strategic planning and kriegspiel-wargames played by the pussy General Staff for decades. All the back doors, from the human systems, then, through them, into the kzin system. UN Naval Intelligence would willingly sacrifice half a fleet for this…
“That's it, then,” Jonah said. “It's not what we came for, but it can make a difference. And there—”
Ingrid was not listening. “Hold on! Look!”
“Eh?”
“An alert subroutine.” Her fingers moved across her interfacer. “Gottdamn, that is an alert! Murphy, it's about us, those are our cover-idents it's broadcasting. We're blown.”
“Block it, quick.” They worked in silence for a moment. Jonah scrubbed a hand across his face. “That'll hold it for a half-hour.”
“We'll never make it back to München before the next call gets through,” she said. “Not without putting up a holosign that this system's been subverted down to the config.”
“We don't have to,” Jonah said. He squeezed eyes shut, pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Finagle, why now… the transfer booth. Computer,” he continued. “Is the civilian system still online? Slaved to the core-system here?”
“Affirmative, to both.”
“That's it, then. What's the closest functional booth to the Ba'hai quarter? Right. Key the internal link to that one. Code, full-wipe after execution, purge. Ingrid, let's go.”
“Is the system compromised?” Chuut-Riit asked. He paced through the central control room of his estate. His nostrils flared: yes, the scent of two of the monkeys, a male and… He snuffled further. Yes, the female was bearing. Grimly he filed the smell away, for possible future reference. It was unlikely that he would ever encounter either of them in person, but one could hope.
One of the kzin technicians was so involved with following the symbols scrolling by on the walls that he swept his hand behind him with claws extended in an exasperated protest at being interrupted. The governor bristled and then relaxed; it helped that he came from the hunt. Had killed and fed well, mated and washed his glands and tissues clear of hormones freeing the reasoning brain. Even more that he had spent most of his lifespan cooling a temper that had originally been hasty even by kzin standards. He controlled breath and motion, the desire to lash his tail and pace; it ran through him that perhaps it was his temper that had set him on the road to mastery, that never-to-be-forgotten moment in the nursery so many years ago. The realization that his rage could kill, and in time would kill him as dead as the sibling beneath his claws.
The guards behind him had snarled at the infotech's insolence, a low subliminal rumbling and the dryspicy scent of anger. An expressive ripple of Chuut-Riit's fur, ears, tail quieted them.
“These specialists are all mad,” he whispered aside. “One must humor them, like a cub that bites your ears.” They were sorry specimens in truth: one scrubby and undersized, with knots in his fur; the other a giant, but clumsy, slow, actually fat. Heroes, indeed! Any Hero seeing them would know their brilliance, since such disgusting examples of bad inheritance would only be kept alive for the most pressing of needs.
The governor schooled himself to wait, shifting only enough to keep his heated muscles from stiffening. The big technician mumbled to himself, occasionally taking out a brick of dull-red dried meat from his equipment apron and stuffing it into his mouth. Chuut-Riit caught a wiff of it and gagged, as much at the thought of someone eating infantry rations for pleasure as at the well-remembered smell. The other one muttered as well, but he chewed on the ends of his claws. Those on his right hand were actually frayed at the tips, useless for anything but scratching its doubtless completely ungroomed and verminous pelt.
“Is the system compromised?” Chuut-Riit asked again, patiently. Infosystems specialists were as bad as telepaths.
“Hrrwweo?” muttered the small one, blinking back to a consciousness somewhat more in congruence with the others'. “Well, we couldn't know that, could we? Honored Chuut-Riit,” he added hastily, as he caught the governor's expression and scent.
“What—do—you—mean?” he said.
“Well, Honored Governor Chuut-Riit, a successful clandestine insertion is undetectable by definition, hrrrr? We're pretty sure we've found their tracks. Computer, isolate-alpha, linear schematic, level three.” A complex webbing sprang up all around the room, blue lines with a few sections picked out in green. “See, dominant one, where the picks were inserted? So that the config elements could be accessed and altered from an external source without detection. We've neutralized them, of course.”
The claws went back into his mouth, and he mumbled around them. “This was humans, wasn't it? it was their scent. Very three-dimensional, I suppose it comes of their being monkeys. They do some wonderful gaming programs, very ingenious— I abase myself in apology, Chuut-Riit.” He flattened to the ground and covered his dry granular-looking nose. “We are as sure as we can be that all the unauthorized elements have been purged.” To his companion: “Wake up
, suckling!”
“Whirrr?” the fat giant chirruped, stopped his continuous nervous purring and then started. “Oh, yes. Lovely system you have here, Honored Governor Chuut-Riit. Yes, I think we've got it. I would like to meet the monkeys who did the alterations, very subtle work.”
“You may go,” he said, and crouched brooding, scratching moodily behind one ear. The internal security team were in now, with the sniffer-machines to isolate the scent molecules of the intruders.
“I would like to meet them, too,” he said, and a line of saliva spun itself down from one thin black lip. He snapped it back with a wet chop and licked his nose with a broad wash of pink tongue. “I would like that very much.”
“Somehow I think it's too quiet,” Ingrid said. When Jonah cast a blankly puzzled look over his shoulder, she shrugged. “Aren't you interested in anything cultural?”
“I'm interested in staying alive,” Jonah said.
They were strolling quietly down one of the riverside walks. The Donau rolled beside them, two kilometers across; it sparkled blue and green-gray, little waves showing white. A bridge soared from bank to bank, and sailboats heeled far over under the stiff warm breeze. Away from the shrilling poverty of the residential quarters, the air smelled of salty water, grass, flowers.
“Of course, staying alive from now on jeopardizes the mission,” Jonah continued.
“No.” Ingrid shook her head. “You have to get back.”
“I do? Why?”
“You just do.” Murphy's Balls! Those ARM psychists really do know their stuff. He's forgotten already. What have I forgotten? It's no fun, holes in your memory. Even if they're deliberate.