by Dean Ing
“The plan doesn't matter,” Jonah said. “If it were going to blow, it would have done it. And we'd have heard the bang.” Something itched at the back of his mind. “Unless—”
“Jonah?”
“Nothing.” I don't want to remember. Or maybe there's nothing to remember. “My hand hurts. Wonder what I did to it?”
“You don't need to know that, either.” It was the tenth time he'd asked. Clearly the psychists had done some powerful voodoo on Jonah.
They hailed a pedicab and climbed into the twin passenger back seat. They had both been surprised to see the little vehicles skittering about the streets; surely machinery could not have become that expensive. The man hunched over the pedals was thin, all wire and leather, dressed only in a pair of ragged shorts. It was not that machines were so dear, but that labor was so cheap, labor of a certain kind. For those with skills needed by the kzinti war economy, there was enough capital to support reasonable productivity. For the increasing number of those without, there was only what unaided brute labor would buy: starvation wages.
Get your mind off the troubles of Wunderland and on to the more urgent matter of saving your own ass, she told herself as they turned into the Ba'hai quarter. Back to Harold's Place… she winced. Then out to the Swarm. Catskinner would be waiting, and Markham would simply have to accept them; that was one of the virtues of a ship with a will of its own.
Then a straight boost out of the system, a Dart usually didn't have anything approaching interstellar capacity, but the stasis field changed things. Boost out, tightbeam the precious data, and wait for the fleet to scoop them up. Nothing could affect them within a stasis field, but the field as a whole could still be manipulated with a gravity polarizer…
The chances of coming through this with a whole skin had seemed so remote that it wasn't even worth the trouble of thinking about. Now…
The ship'll hold three. Hari, this time I won't leave you.
They turned into the street that fronted Harold's Place. Ingrid had just time enough to see Hari standing beside Claude at the entrance. Then police vomited forth, dark in their turtle helmets and goggles, and aircars rose silently over the roofs all about. Giant ginger-red shapes behind them—
She rolled out of her side of the pedicab as Jonah did on his, a motion so smooth they might have rehearsed it. The light-pen was in her hand, and it made its yawping sound. A policeman died, dropping like a puppet with the strings cut, and she dove forward, rolling, trying for an angle at the kzin and—
Blackness.
“The interrogation is complete?” Chuut-Riit reclined again at ease on the bubblecouch behind his desk; a censor was sending up aromatic smoke.
The holo, on the far wall showed a room beneath the München police headquarters; a combination of human and kzin talents had long proven most effective for such work. Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals was there, and a nameless shabby-looking telepath. The mind-reader's fur was matted and his hands twitched. Chuut-Riit could see spatters of vomit down the front of his pelt, and hear his mumble: “… salad, no, no, ak, ak, pftht, no please boiled carrots ak, pfffth—”
He shuddered slightly in sympathy, thinking of what it must be like to enter the mind of a human free-associating under drugs and pain. Telepathy was not like speech; it was a sharing that extended to sensations and memory as well. Food was a very fundamental drive. It would be bad enough to have to share the memory of eating the cremated meats humans were fond of — the very stink of them was enough to turn your stomach — but cooked plants… The telepath fumbled something out of a wristpouch and carefully parted the fur on one side of his neck before pressing it to the skin. There was a hiss, and he sank against the wall with a sigh of relief. His eyes slitted and he leaned chin on knees with a high-pitched irregular purr, the tip of his tongue showing pink past his whiskers.
Chuut-Riit wrinkled his nose and dismissed false compassion. How could you sympathize with something that was voluntary slave to a drug? And to an extract of sthondat blood at that.
“Yes, Chuut-Riit,” Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals said. “Telepath's reading agrees with what the trained monkeys determined with their truth drugs.” Chuut-Riit reminded himself that the drugs actually merely suppressed inhibition. “The attempt was a last-minute afterthought to the main attack of the monkey ship. Some gravitic device was used to decelerate a pod with these two; they came down in a remote area, using the disturbances of the attack as cover, and reached the city on foot. Their aim was to trigger the self-destruct mechanisms on your estate, but they were unable to do so.”
Chuut-Riit brooded, looking past the kzin liaison officer to the human behind him. “You are not the human in charge of the München police,” he said.
“No, Chuut-Riit,” the human said. It was a female. A flabby one, the sort that would squish unpleasantly when your fangs ripped open the body cavity, and somehow the holo gave the impression of an unpleasant odor.
“I am Chief Assistant Axelrod-Bauergartner at your service, dominant one,” she continued, giving the title in a reasonably good approximation of the Hero's Tongue. A little insolent? Perhaps — but also commendable, and the deferential posture was faultless. “Chief Montferrat-Palme delegated this summary of the investigation, feeling that it was not important enough to warrant his personal attention.”
“Chrrrriii,” Chuut-Riit said, scratching one cheek against a piece of driftwood in a stand on his desk. This Montferrat-creature did not consider an attack on the governor's private control system important? That monkey was developing a distorted sense of its priorities. The human in the screen had blanched slightly at the kzin equivalent of an irritated scowl; he let his lips lower back over the fangs and continued:
“Show me the subjects.” Axelrod-Bauergartner stepped aside, to show two humans clamped in adjustable plastic brackets amid a forest of equipment. These were two fine specimens, tall and lean in the manner of the space-bred subspecies. Both were unconscious, but seeming intact enough apart from the usual superficial cuts, abrasions, and bruises. “What is their condition?”
“No irreparable physical or mental harm, Chuut-Riit,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said, bowing. “What are your orders as to their disposal?”
“Rrrrr,” Chuut-Riit mused, shifting to rub the underside of his jaw on the wood. The last public hunt had been yesterday, the one to which he had taken his sons. “How soon can they be in a condition to run amusingly?” he said.
“Half a week, Chuut-Riit. We have been cautious.”
“Prepare them.” His sons? No, best not to be too indulgent. There was a bad smelling lot of administrative work to be attended to; he would be chained to his desk for a goodly while anyway. Let the little devils attend to their studies, and he would visit them again when this had been disposed of. Besides, while free there had been a certain attraction in the prospect of dealing with this pair personally; as captives they were just two more specimens of monkeymeat—beneath his dignity.
“Get a good batch together, and have them all ready for the Public Preserve at the end of the week. Dismissed.”
“Was that Suuomalisen I saw coming out of here?” Montferrat said.
“Unless you know another fat, sweaty toad in a linen suit looking like he'd just swallowed the juiciest fly on the planet.” Yarthkin grinned like a shark as he settled behind his desk and pushed a pile of data chips and hardcopy to one side. “Sit yourself down, Claude, and have a drink. If it isn't too early.”
“15:00 too early? That's in bad taste, even for you.” But the hand that reached for the Maivin shook slightly, and there were wrinkles in the tunic. “But why was he so happy?”
“I just sold him Harold's Terran Bar,” Yarthkin said calmly. Light-headed he laughed, a boy's laugh. “Prosit!” he toasted, and tossed back his own drink.
“What!” That was enough to bring him bolt-upright. “Why— what— You've been turning that swine down for thirty years!”
“Swine, Claude? What's so especially swinish
about him?” Yarthkin leaned forward, resting his chin on paired thumbs. “Or have you forgotten exactly who's to be monkeymeat day after tomorrow?”
The reaction was more than Yarthkin had expected. A jerk, as if high-voltage current surged through the other man's body. A dry retching sound. Then, incredibly, the aquiline Herrenmann mask crumpled, slumping and wrinkling like a balloon from which the air has been withdrawn… and he was crying, head slumping down into his hands. Yarthkin swallowed and looked away; Claude was a collabo and a sellout, an extortionist without shame… but nobody should see another man this naked. It was obscene.
“Pull yourself together, Claude; I've known you were a bastard for forty years, but I thought you were a man, at least.”
“So did I,” gasped Montferrat. “I even have the medals to prove it. I fought well in the war.”
“I know.”
“So, when, when, when they let us out of the detention camp, I really thought I could help. I really did.” He laughed. “Life had to go on, criminals had to be caught, we were beaten and resistance just made it harder on everyone. I'd been a good policeman. I still could be.”
He drank, choked, drank. “The graft, everyone had to. They wouldn't let you get past foot-patrol if you weren't on the pad, too; you had to be in it with them. If I didn't get promotion how could I accomplish anything? I told myself that, but every year a little more of me was gone. And now, now Ingrid's back and I can see myself in her eyes, and I know what I am no better than that animal Axelrod-Bauergartner. She's gloating, she has me on this and I couldn't, couldn't do it. I told her to take care of it all, and went, and I've been drunk most of the time since, and she'll have my head and I deserve it, why try and stop her it—”
Yarthkin leaned forward and slapped the policeman alongside the head with his open palm, a gunshot crack in the narrow confines of the office. Montferrat's mood switched with mercurial swiftness, and he snarled with a mindless sound as he reached for his sidearm. But alcohol is a depressant, and his hand had barely touched the butt before the other man's stunner was pointed between his eyes.
“Neyn, neyn, naughty,” Yarthkin said cheerfully. “Hell of a headache, Claude. Now, I won't say you don't deserve it, but sacrificing your own liver and lights isn't going to do Ingrid any good.” He kept the weapon unwavering until Montferrat had won back a measure of self-command, then laid it down on the desk and offered a cigarette.
“My apologies,” Montferrat said, wiping off his face with a silk handkerchief. “I do despise self-pity.” The shredded cloak of his ironic detachment settled about him.
Yarthkin nodded. “That's better, sweetheart. I'm selling the club because I need ready capital, for relocation and grubstaking my people, the ones who don't want to come with me.”
“Go with you? Where? And what does this have to do with Ingrid?”
Yarthkin grinned again, tapped ash off the end of his cigarette. Exhilaration filled him, and something that had been missing for far too long. What? he thought. Not youth… yes, that's it. Purpose.
“It isn't every man who's given a chance to do it over right,” he said. “That, friend Claude, is what I'm going to do. We're going to bust Ingrid out of that Preserve. Have a shot at it, at least.” He held up a hand. “Don't fuck with me, Claude; I know as well as you that the system there is managed through München Police H.Q. One badly mangled corpse substituted for another, what ratcat's to know? It's been done before.”
“Odd you should think of that,” Montferrat said, shaking his head dully. “For the past several days I have been regretting that I always kept out of the set-up side of the Hunts. Couldn't… I have to watch them, anyway, too often.”
Odd how men cling to despair, once they've hit bottom, Yarthkin thought. As if hope were too much effort. Is that what surrender is, then, just giving in to exhaustion of the soul?
Aloud: “Computer, access file Till Eulenspiegel.”
The surface of his desk flashed transparent and lit with a series of coded text-columns. Montferrat came erect with a shaken oath. “How… if you had that, all these years, why haven't you used it?”
“Claude, the great drawback of blackmail is that it gives the victim the best possible incentive to find a permanent way of shutting you up. Risky, especially when dealing with the police. As to the how, you're not under the impression that you get the best people in the police, are you?” A squint, and the gravelly voice went soft. “Don't think I wouldn't use it, sweetheart, if you didn't cooperate, and there's more than enough here to put you in the edible-delicacy category. Think of it as God's way of giving you an incentive to get back on the straight and narrow.”
“I tell you, Axelrod-Bauergartner has the command codes for the Preserve! I can override, but it would be flagged. Immediately.”
“Computer, display file Niebelungen AA37Bi22. Damned lack of imagination, that code… There it is, Claude. Everything you always wanted to know about your most ambitious subordinate but were afraid to ask, including her private bypass programs.” Another flick of ash. “Finagle, Claude, you can probably make all this look like her fault, even if the ratcats smell the proverbial rodent.”
Montferrat smoothed down his uniform tunic, and it was as if the gesture slicked transparent armor across his skin once more. “You appear to have me by the short and sensitives, kamerat,” he said lightly. “Not entirely to my dismay. The plan is, then, that Ingrid and her gallant Sol-Belter are whisked away from under the noses of the kzin, while you go to ground?”
Yarthkin laughed, a shocking sound. “Appearances to the contrary, Claude old son, you were always the romantic of us two. The one for the noble gesture. Nothing of the sort: Ingrid and I are going to the Swarm.”
“And the man, Jonah?”
“Fuck him. Let the ratcats have him. His job was done the minute they failed to dig the real story out of him.”
Montferrat managed a laugh. “This is quite a reversal of roles, Hari… but this, this final twist, it makes it seem possible, somehow.” He extended a hand. “Seeing as you have the gun to my head, why not? Working together again, eh?”
“All right, listen up,” the guard said.
Jonah shook his head, shook out the last of the fog. Ingrid sat beside him on the plain slatted wood of the bench, in this incongruous pen… change-rooms for a country club, once. Now a set of run-down stone buildings in the midst of shaggy overgrown wilderness; the side open to the remnants of lawn and terrace was covered with a shockfield. He looked around; there were around two dozen humans with them, all clad alike in grey prison trousers and shirts. All quiet. The shockrods of the guards had enforced that. Some weeping, a few catatonic, and there was an unpleasant fecal smell.
“You get an hour's start,” the guard said, in a voice of bored routine. “And you'd better run, believe me.”
“Up yours!” somebody shouted, and laughed when the guard raised her rod. “What you going to do, ratcat lover, condemn me to death?”
The guard shrugged. “You ever seen a house cat playing with a mumbly?” she jeered. “The ratcats like a good chase. Disappoint them and they'll bat you around like a toy.” She stepped back, and the door opened. “Hell, keep ahead of them for two days and maybe they'll let you go.” A burly man rose and charged, bounced back as she took another step through the door.
Laughter, through the transparent surface. “Have fun, porkchops. I'll watch you die. Five minutes to shield-down.”
“You all right?” Jonah asked. Neither of them had been much damaged physically by the interrogation; it had been done in a police headquarters, where the most modern methods were available, not crude field expedients. And the psychists' shields had worked perfectly; the great weakness of telepathic interrogation is that it can only detect what the subject believes to be true. It had been debatable whether the blocks and artificial memories would hold… Kzin telepaths hated staying in a human's mind more than they had to, and the drug-addiction that helped to develop their talents did little f
or motivation or intelligence.
“Fine,” Ingrid said, raising her head from her knees. “Just thinking how pretty it is out there.” Tears starred her lashes, but her voice was steady.
Startled, he looked again through the near-invisible shimmer of the shockfield. The long green-gold grass was rippling under a late-afternoon sun, starred with flowers like living jewel-flecks. A line of flamingos skimmed by, down to the little pond at the base of the hill. Beyond was forest, flowering dogwood in a fountain of white against the flickering-shiny olive drab of native kampfwald trees. The shockfield let air through, carrying scents of leafmold, green, purity.
“You're right,” he said. They clasped hands, embraced, stepped back and saluted each other formally. “It's been… good knowing you, Lieutenant Ingrid.”
“Likewise, Captain Jonah.” A gamin smile. “Finagle's arse, we're not dead yet, are we?”
“Huh. Huh-huh.” Lights spun before Jonah's eyes, wrenching his stomach with more nausea. Gummy saliva blocked his mouth as he tumbled over the lip of the gully, crashing through brush that ripped and tore with living fingers of thorn and bramble. Tumble, roll, down through the brush-covered sixty-degree slope, out into the patch of gravel and sparse spaghettilike grass analog at the bottom. To lie and rest, Murphy, to rest…
Memories were returning. Evidently his subconscious believed there wouldn't be another interrogation. Believed they were dead already. My fingernail. I have to escape. And that's a laugh. But I have to try…
He turned the final roll into a flip and came erect, facing in the direction of his flight; force the diaphragm to breathe, stomach out to suck air into the bottom of the lungs. His chest felt tight and hot, as if the air pumping through it was nothing, vacuum, inert gas. Will kept him steady, blinked his eyes into focus. He was in a patch of bright sunlight, the forest above a deep green-gold shade that flickered; the soil under his feet was damp, impossibly cool on his skin. The wind was blowing toward him, which meant that the kzin would be following ground-scent rather than what floated on the breeze. A kzin nose was not as sensitive as a hound's, but several thousand times more acute than a human's.