by Hal Colebatch, Jessica Q Fox, Jane Lindskold, Charles E Gannon, Alex Hernandez, David Bartell
“Nope. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never been further from Wunderland than the Serpent Swarm.”
The larger of the two men, and clearly the youngest of the group, brought his weapon up quickly, sighting along its barrel. “Which means you wouldn’t be alive unless the kzinti wanted you to be. Which would make this a trap.”
“Nope, not the case. When I say I’ve been asleep for a long time, I mean a long time. They corpsicled me three months after the ratcats showed up.”
“And so where were you all that time?”
“Can’t tell you the exact location, because I have no way of knowing. I was in cold storage, so to speak.”
“I ain’t laughing, stranger. Who put you in storage, and for what reason?”
“The who is the local UNSN command staff. The reason was to strike back at the ratcats, but only once we had an effective weapon.”
The leader of the group looked around the area, finding nothing large enough to contain the aforementioned effective weapon: just the man, his gear, his charred combat suit, a sidearm, and a small secure case. “I don’t see any miracle weapon. And why wait all this time if you’ve been in system for—what?—more’n forty years, as you claim it.”
“Yes. Forty years is how long it took to gather enough information about the kzin, pass it on to the facilities on Earth, and then back here. That meant two research labs working together with a four-point-three-seven-year message delay between them. So it took a little longer than a conventional counterattack. And the weapon they came up with is right here.” He laid a long index finger atop the secure box.
The leader frowned. The young man smiled, but it was not a friendly expression. “Well, thanks for explaining things. So either everything you say is utter bullshit, in which case you’re a kzin plant, trying to sneak into the ranks of our resistance. Or you’re not a plant, but we’ve got your miracle weapon, anyway. So the logical alternative is that we take no chances: killing you might be a damned shame, but we still get our hands on the mystery weapon, and haven’t taken any risks with our own security.” He leaned over his tangent sights. “So sorry, but war is hell and all that.”
“No,” said one of the women sharply.
The young man looked at her. “C’mon; can’t you see what’s going on here? He’s a collaborator, a traitor. And even if he’s not, we have to work as though he was. We have no way to find out if he’s telling the truth or—”
“No. We do.” She turned and studied his charred combat suit again. Returning her scrutiny, he saw she was unusually, even strikingly, beautiful. Not in a soft or delicate fashion; her face was severe, with high cheekbones, dark eyes, almost white-blonde hair, and a strangely square chin for a woman. He thought he might have seen a painting of a Valkyrie that looked like her. “You,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Smith.”
“Oh. Really. And let me guess: your first name is Joe.”
“John, actually.”
“So: John Smith. And are you a captain, like your namesake?”
“Well, it so happens that I am.”
“And tell me, Captain John Smith, why did it take so long to research this wonder weapon of yours?”
“Hey, it isn’t mine. But the main development problem, as I understand it, was that while there was plenty of opportunity to observe kzin behavior here, and gather physical samples and specimens, there were no underground research facilities that were really equipped to do the hard number crunching, or diverse lab work, to make any headway with it. So the information had to be gathered on site, here and in the Swarm, relayed off-world, and then sent back to Earth for—”
But she wasn’t listening anymore: she had turned to her four comrades. “He’s for real.”
“What?” squawked the younger man. “How can you—?”
But she was looking at the older man, their leader, who had fallen strangely silent. “You know I’m right,” she insisted. “You told me how, when you started with the resistance, there was a central cell—not an ops group, but an intelligence branch—that kept gathering data on the kzinti. Always wanted specimens, even live prisoners, to sneak off-world.”
“It’s true,” he admitted. “And it fits. But what if the kzinti found out about that operation? What if they got their paws on whoever was behind it, extorted or tortured the info out of him, or her, and realized that this was the perfect ploy for getting someone inside our organization?”
She thought. “No, that doesn’t fit. Even if they were going to launch that kind of operation, they’d have scrubbed it today, given the events out in space. On the other hand, if information has been going back and forth between researchers here and on Earth, then the UNSN or ARM would have seen that this was going to be the perfect day to slip in an operative. The local researchers could have had him pre-positioned so that, when the ship from Earth arrived, they’d send a signal to trigger his drop. And in the midst of all the chaos, who’d notice?” She turned back to look at him. “Well, John Smith, welcome home. I’m sorry to say you’ll find it rather changed.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said, standing, and picking up his gear. “Let’s go: if my space-rock didn’t fool all the kzinti, then we’ll want to put as much ground as possible between us and the crash site.”
Hilda Stensgaard looked away from the distant back of the sleeping man who insisted his name was John Smith. “Everything he’s told us checks out with what we know.”
“Which is almost nothing.” Large, young, eager Gunnar Baden turned toward their leader. “Mads, let’s not get soft-headed just because there were some pretty lights in the sky today and the ratcats got their tails a little singed. It’s clear this was a one-off strike, not a prelude to invasion. We’re still on our own, and that means we can’t afford to take chances.”
“We can’t afford to ignore opportunities either, Gunnar.” Mads Klinkman scooped the last of the cold beans out of his mess tin. “And I think Hilda’s right: he’s genuine. But I’m convinced for different reasons.”
“Oh? And what are they?”
Mads spoke around his last mouthful of beans. “If the kzinti had learned that we were taking samples of them and sending them off-world, I think we’d have had some pretty vengeful indications of it long before now. Even given their new tendency toward increased patience, their outrage would have had them storming around to get to the bottom of what was going on and who was behind it. At the very least, you can be sure that their response would not have been an elaborate counter-intelligence ruse, complete with a human commando from the past. And from what I can tell, he really is from the past.”
Hilda nodded. “He’d have to be an exceptional actor to pull off what he has so far. He really doesn’t seem to know about anything that happened more than three months into the invasion, other than what he read in the briefing materials he showed us.”
“Must be a pretty quick reader,” grumbled Gunnar.
“Oh, he is.” Hilda nodded at the hardcopy they would burn shortly after first light. “Haven’t you noticed? He remembers everything after hearing it just once. And he’s very alert: he picked out the trace Jotuntalander accent I picked up from mein Mutti. Just from listening to me convince you not to shoot him, Gunnar.”
“So he has an ear for accents; so what?”
“So don’t you notice how he verges into Uni slang, from Munchen, on occasion?”
“And that proves what, other than that he has an intolerably high opinion of himself?”
Hilda ignored the hostile tone and undercurrent of envy. “It proves a lot, since the Uni slang just about died out when the kzinti came. There were years of disruption, and the professors and students bolted until it became clear that they weren’t going to be slaughtered, or forced to collaborate. But when they came back, the institutional memory was gone; the links to the past were shattered. You hear a little of the old Uni slang these days: a few words, here and there. But back before the kzinti came, it was almost a dial
ect unto itself. And he speaks it.”
“Yeah, a dialect for herrenmanner only.”
Mads smiled slowly. “Do I look like an aristocrat to you, Gunnar?”
“No, but you—”
“Then shut up. I went to Uni for a few years, before the kzinti found my family sheltering resistance fighters.”
Gunnar not only became silent; he looked away, abashed.
“Probably the only reason I’m alive is because I was at Uni, at the time,” recalled Mads in an increasingly flat tone. “As it was, they yanked me out in the middle of a class, and grilled me until they were sure I didn’t know anything. Made damned sure. Made me damned sure I wanted to join the resistance, too.”
Hilda let her eyes drop, rather than see the look on Mads’ face. He didn’t talk about his early days very much, mostly because they were simply too painful. He had been nineteen when the kzinti had caught his parents red-handed, aiding and abetting the resistance. They had been condemned to die in the invaders’ “Sport Hunts,” usually held to sharpen the tracking and killing skills of cubs on the cusp of maturity. His whole family had been held in a pen, for Mads to see. And then, one per day, the bastard ratcats drove them out, to run as long as they could before a young kzin caught and eviscerated each one in an ecstatic kill-frenzy.
And after each one died, the kzinti reapproached Mads, offering to spare the remaining members of his family if only he would provide them with some information: where are the headquarters of the resistance? Who are its leaders? How many are there?
And of course, Mads had no answers. He was not a member of the resistance; indeed, his parents had carefully shielded him from even knowing they themselves were involved.
But the kzinti were not interested in excuses, and when, in desperation, he started saying anything to get them to stop, they simply continued to flush his remaining family members out of the pen and into the fields: they knew he was lying. In the end, they apparently realized that the reason Mads had not answered any of their questions accurately was because he couldn’t. By that point, only one of his nuclear family remained: little Anneliese, the “surprise child” who was all smiles and hugs and whom his parents called Fall-flower, since she had arrived later in their life than anticipated—a full eleven years after Mads.
He had never recounted whether, when her day came, Anneliese had shrieked or was mute; was agitated or still; pleaded or spat defiance. Hilda only knew that the kzinti had shooed her out of the pen as a “free target,” almost as an afterthought, a tidying-up. Anneliese didn’t even make it halfway across the field; the fastest of the young kzin chased her down and took his trophies from her body. Right before Mads’ eyes.
Which were now dull. “Smith isn’t lying about how long he’s been asleep: he knows those days too well for it to be something he learned for a role. Little bits of outdated vernacular, the long-past details of his hometown, Neue Ingolstadt, the particulars of sports rivalries back then: some are so minor and old that I barely remember hearing about them as a bub. No: he’s who he says he is.”
“Okay,” Gunnar muttered. “But that doesn’t mean he’s a soldier for our side. He could still have sold out to the kzinti.”
Hilda shook her head sharply. “Nein, that’s nonsense. You could hear that almost everything he knew about the kzinti came from the materials he had just finished reading when we found him. He’s still trying to piece things together and not look like the newbie he is, at least when it comes to kzinti. He’s a fast learner, and he’s drinking in all the tactically relevant materials with incredible speed, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to live with them.”
Margarethe, the group’s sniper, and almost always silent unless there was something truly urgent to say, wondered aloud: “So what’s the real back story on this weapon of his, do you think? How could a research program have been going on all this time, without the kzinti tweaking to it?”
Mads shrugged. “Oh, that’s not so hard to imagine. The kzinti don’t lack energy—god knows—but, lacking patience, they’re not always very tidy. And that’s all a smart intelligence operator needs: the messy parts of the kzin occupation are where intel operators could live and breed. For instance, look at the ratcats’ policy of minimum involvement in our commercial affairs. They clearly know that they are permitting all sorts of black-market operations to thrive, and must know just as clearly that, like remora attaching to Old Earth sharks, intelligence operatives will seed themselves into that community, using it as a conduit to move equipment, information, and orders without the kzinti ever knowing.”
Gunnar flicked a stone from his sleeping bag. “Which I just don’t get: why do they permit any of it?”
“Because we’re the geese that lay golden eggs for them, and they know better than to rearrange our nest: we might stop laying. Besides, they don’t worry about problems until the problem becomes obvious. Which means they have a target. Which allows them to do what they do best: jump into the very center of that problem and lay about, destroying everything they find.”
“Killing untold numbers of innocents when they do so,” spat Gunnar.
“They don’t worry a lot about collateral damage or due process,” agreed Mads.
Margarethe nodded slightly. “Okay. But the research Smith refers to wasn’t done in some backroom, underworld lab. This whole operation obviously had a lot of forethought and long-duration planning built into it.”
Hilda nodded. “Absolutely. I’m thinking that the research facility in this system is not on Wunderland, or out in the Swarm. Anyone seeing that the system was going to fall to the kzinti would anticipate that those areas were going to be closely watched. So they’d go further out, to Centauri B, maybe. Possibly all the way out to Proxima.”
“Proxima? That’s damn close to a wasteland.”
“Which would be perfect, Gunnar. It’s just a small gas giant and rocks. Lots of rocks, most of which are uncharted. That would be perfect for the construction of a secret base. Or maybe one already existed out there, put in by the ARM before the war.”
“And why would they have done that? They weren’t expecting any trouble from the kzinti, then.”
“No, Gunnar,” Mads drawled. “They would have built that base because the ARM was designed to worry about trouble from us humans.”
After a long pause, Gunnar scratched his ear and mumbled. “Oh. Yeah.”
Hilda smiled. “So I’m guessing they’ve got a commo system distributed across the rocks out there, or maybe across all the systems, as a huge phased array.”
Mads nodded, apparently seeing the deduction toward which Hilda was driving. “So that, when the researchers on Earth found a means of striking back at the kzinti with a really game-changing weapon, they could relay that information back here, so it could be built on site, ready to go. That way, using it did not necessarily mean having to wait for it to be brought by a fleet from Earth.”
Gunnar wrapped himself in his bag against the unseasonable chill. “Okay, but how did they get ‘Captain Smith’ from Proxima back into the main system, presumably someplace close to Wunderland, so they could send him planetside with the weapon?”
Hilda shrugged. “I’m guessing he never left the Serpent Swarm. All they had to do was stick him in a cryo capsule along with the weapon, and insert the completed package into a holding orbit. And wait for a prearranged activation signal.”
“Which almost surely was sent by whatever craft from Earth came ripping through the system today.”
Margarethe nodded at Mads. “Meaning that he may not be the only person—or operation—that got a preprogrammed wake-up call today.”
“Or will get one in the days to come.” Mads nodded. “If this is part of a larger plan, some of the systems awakened today may simply be countdown clocks. When they run to zero, they’d send a second, third, or fourth set of wake-up signals. So like I said, we’d better be alert to the possibility of new opportunities springing up around us.”
�
�Speaking of being awake and alert,” added Margarethe, “where’s Captain Smith?”
Damn it, thought Hilda, what is Smith up to? If he was going to go running off into the bush, why wouldn’t he have at least—?
Panting almost as heavily as she was, Gunnar ran past, small branches rasping and snapping around him. “I am going to kill the son-of-a-bitch when we catch him.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Mads’ growl was pained: he was getting a little old for two-hour jogs. “We need him alive.”
“Why? We’ve got his box.”
“Which we can’t seem to open.” Hilda pushed an aptly named whipweed away from her welted face. “I suspect he either means to come back to us or is hoping we’ll follow.”
“Yeah, follow him right into a kzin ambush, probably.”
“Makes no sense for him to do that,” gasped Mads. “He could have killed us all right there in camp.”
At first, Hilda was so surprised at the idea that she couldn’t even pant, and then she realized the simple truth of Mads’ observation. Captain Smith had been no more than fifteen meters away from them while they sat chatting about him as if he were on the other side of the planet: they had been sure that he was sleeping, exhausted after the ordeals of his day. But somehow, he had slipped away from them, leaving behind the secured case with the mystery weapon. However, in its place he had taken a long-arm, one of the high rate-of-fire strakkakers. What he intended to do with that weapon, which could spit out almost eight hundred tiny glass lances per minute, was anybody’s guess, but it seemed unlikely that he would train it upon his rescuers. Had he wanted to, he could have riddled them all as they chatted idly about whether he was who he claimed to be. The ridiculousness of Gunnar’s suspicions seemed to double.
Gunnar stopped and turned to face Mads. “Okay, then if he’s not leading us into an ambush, why the hell did he run? He claims his objective was to link up with human resistance on Wunderland, in the greater Munchen region. So meeting us should be ‘mission accomplished,’ right?”