Burnt-gold plasma curled and lashed around me. I kept away from the drive wash but errant coils fought up and down the field lines, bow turbulence. The gravitic polarizer whined that thrumming effort. Careful, careful… My target loomed large, a huge hull, raked and burned.
A slight jar as I grounded Victrix next to the main airlock. It loomed huge through the viewscreen, as did every visible aspect of the slowboat. I activated the magnetic grapnels. A hollow boom startled me—I was that tense—as we locked firmly against the slowboat.
On the viewscreen I could see the crew tunnel slowly arching toward my own airlock. Like an elephant’s trunk from an old history holocube, from a time when there had been elephants.
Clunk, whir—the slowboat airlock adapted to the geometry of my singleship airlock. The status board winked green and I keyed the airlock cycle.
You’re on, kid. This first part was easy…
I popped a stimulant to take the ragged edge from my fatigue. Everything depended on the next few hours. Everything.
The singleship airlock chimed and swung open silently. My ears popped a bit with a slight pressure drop. I left my helmet open in what I intended to be a demonstration of harmlessness. Yawning, concentrating on my lines, I grabbed access loops, and swung hand over hand into the dimly lit crew tunnel.
The far end of the crew tunnel was closed, of course. Final inspection time. Try to look like Karl Friedrich Höchte.
I crouched casually, bracing a foot and hand against the microgravity and smiled directly into the camera eye next to the airlock. The slowboat air in the crew tunnel smelled oily and slightly rank. I doubted that many of Feynman’s systems worked optimally. Here was the first proof.
The lock slowly irised open. Here I was, and all I had wanted to do was get in one last bit of smuggling, a million years ago…
Chapter Two
Smuggler’s Blues
The asteroid swimming in Victrix’s viewscreen had no official name on the navigation charts. The distant glint was listed as 2121-21, the twenty first asteroid catalogued during the 2121 A.D. survey of the Serpent Swarm. To the temporary rockjack crews living there, the asteroid had also developed an obvious nickname: Blackjack.
Blackjack was a slow-spinning oblong of stone twenty kilometers across its long axis. Rich veins of water ice and nickel-iron riddled it, along with deposits of carbonaceous chondrite. Pockmarked and battered by other asteroids in the Serpent Swarm over the eons, it had slowly swung in its orbit, half a billion kilometers from Alpha Centauri A. The rock had raw materials, access to energy, and was in an orbit easily accessible to singleships.
There were many thousands of rocks just like it in the Swarm, but Blackjack was a little different. For a few weeks, this whirling piece of an unformed planet would be home to the few human beings still resisting the iron claws and sharp teeth of the kzin.
I intended to do my part to help them, at least this one last time. Sure, some of the rebels were more pirate than freedom fighter, more interested in lining their pockets than collecting kzinti ears. But an old Earther saying came to mind: “The enemy of my enemy is a friend.” If only it were always true.
I unlimbered the signal laser remotes. Squinting against the sun glare, I set the aiming crosshairs on the tiny flash of the receiver dish a thousand kilometers away. The laser guide prowled slowly in a small arc, seeking. A thin beep—a target lock.
I paused before I set up the recognition signal trigger, and eyed the highly illegal monopole detector array mounted above my control console. I studied it with great care, as if my life depended on it.
Which it did.
Three rows of amber lights shone steadily at me in the cramped lifebubble. All clear. No ratcat ships were within range of the detector. I made a few adjustments, increasing the range, and studied the lights again.
The kzin gravitic polarizers used large quantities of magnetic monopoles. Easily identified—if you had access to the now-illegal tech, that is. Our kzin masters were many things, but stupid was not one of them. The detector array pinged sleepily after a moment, confirming that no large monopole sources were within at least a hundred thousand klicks of Blackjack.
Opening the commlink port, I carefully inserted the tiny chip I had been given at the Nipponese restaurant in Tiamat. The ready lights blinked green. I triggered the downlink recognition code sequence. Multicolored lights rippled across the readout as the signal laser downloaded its smuggler’s message.
Caution was everything in my business. It really wouldn’t do for our mighty felinoid masters to be in the neighborhood while I carried out my last smuggling run for that Prole bastard Jacobi. One more load of equipment that the Resistance needed: monopole detectors, submolar assemblies, nano units, fusion point components. I had carefully double-recorded the cargo back in Tiamat, then loaded the contraband along with my own completely legal cargo.
The kzin were not good at accounting; it did not fit with their ideal of the Warrior Heart. How could a Hero scream and leap his way to a Full Name while recording a long series of cargo manifests onto a handlink?
Their five-red, five-armed, warty Jotoki monsters, ever watchful and nosy, were another matter. I had waited until I was unsupervised on my loading dock shift, then covered the computer traces most carefully. It was easy; men and women had designed and programmed those computers, not aliens. And what a Jotok can’t see or hear, it can’t report to its furry rat-tailed masters.
Contraband stowed and hidden, I had hitched the cargo pod to Victrix, and started on my kzin-approved trade and delivery route, zigzagging across the Swarm. Tiamat to Avalon. Avalon to Lodestar. Lodestar to Archangel. Now an undocumented stop at nearby Blackjack, the dicey part. Then I’d shape orbit back for Tiamat. It had been five long months, and I was lonely for Sharna and the children.
The route would have taken days with the ratcat gravitic polarizers instead of my fusion drive, but such kzin tech was not for “slave races.”
The commlink warbled in response to the recognition signal. Smuggler’s handshake. Everything was going according to plan which worried me a little.
Still, I followed my instructions. No overt communications traffic, even by tightbeam. I tuned up the fusion drive. It thrummed and headed Victrix down to Blackjack at a nice sedate vector. It never pays to stand out, even when you are not being watched. On the screen, the asteroid swelled from a glint to a toy pebble to an irregular brick.
Not long after the initial kzin assault on Wunderland, Blackjack had been abandoned. Immediately after suppressing military resistance there, the kzinti had moved on the Serpent Swarm, but most of the Belters had focused on protecting Tiamat, with its shipyards and bubblefarms.
Not that it mattered a damn in the long run. Singleship fusion drives were no match for the ratcat space drive. The damage to the densely colonized asteroids like Tiamat and Thule was heavy, and took time to repair. The smaller rocks, like Blackjack, were left relatively intact—very useful to smugglers and pirates. Or as the noble kzin called them, “feral humans.”
As Blackjack slowly filled the viewscreen, I organized the cargo manifest and thought about how to spend my ill-gotten gains. My smuggler’s money had kept my family well insulated from the ratcats, and I intended to keep it that way. Jacobi had gone so far as to suggest that this delivery could earn enough credits to buy my children a billet in the Proxima cometary manufacturing plants.
Kzin almost never went to Proxima. It was not sufficiently Heroic.
About two kilometers above Blackjack, I saw the rhythmic blinking of the landing beacon next to a bubble-domed minehead. I switched to chemical jets so that I wouldn’t have to hike in the microgravity to the airlock. As we slipped in I closed my suit helmet and started pumping the lifebubble air back into the tanks. No sense wasting even a few lungfuls when I popped the airlock.
Wan sunlight gleamed on solar collectors and vacuum fractionating columns near the minehead. I drifted closer to the landing beacon. You don’t
land on an asteroid as small as Blackjack, you rendezvous. Attitude jets held my singleship steady as I carefully shot a mooring line through a landing loop, then made Victrix fast against the bulk of Blackjack.
A few minutes later I was in the minehead airlock, listening to the deepening whistle of pressure building up.
All according to plan, smooth as water ice. The airlock telltales finally winked green, and the inner door cycled open.
The first thing I saw was Jacobi’s sneering smile. But even before that image fully registered, I smelled the spicy-sour scent of excited kzinti. Which had to be imaginary, since my suit helmet was still sealed and dogged down.
Jacobi stood braced in front of the airlock door, dart pistol in hand, eyes bright in his scarred face. Flanking him were two kzin in combat armor—predator fangs bared in identical smile-threats. Before I could make a move to hit the cycle keypad in the airlock, something slammed into my upper right arm. I swung my body in response as Belter micrograv reflexes kept me on my feet.
I looked down. A large, hollow dart, designed to foil the suit’s self-sealing mechanism, protruded from my shipsuit. Crimson spheres of blood began floating out of the wound. They wobbled slowly away in the microgravity… if I cycled the lock now, with my ruptured suit, I would be breathing vacuum in seconds. Pain suddenly flooded my arm and into my gut, folding me in two, my feet leaving the deck.
“So good to see you again, Herr Upton-Schleisser,” I heard Jacobi hiss with irony.
I swore to myself as the snarling figures in battle armor, each over two meters tall, snatched me from midair like kittens batting at yarn. Black spots clouded my vision. I did the only reasonable thing. I passed out.
The bite of a stimulant slapshot in my neck brought me to my senses. My shipsuit and helmet were gone. I was dressed in a standard falling jumper. My right arm throbbed badly, but I could see a ratcat field dressing on the wound. The bandage was easily three times larger than necessary; medicine on a kzin-sized scale. Bindings cut into my ankles and wrists, holding me securely to a packing crate.
I looked up and saw Jacobi seated on air a few meters away, a thin line mooring him in place against the ventilator breeze. We were in a small storage room, with glaring mining lights. The cold air smelled of oil and steel. And of kzin, of course. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. It didn’t help.
“Jacobi,” I said as calmly as I could, my neck still stinging from the drug, “I had no idea that you were a pussy-kisser collabo.”
He made no reply, just stared at me. It was hard to read any expression on the ruins of his face. When I was a boy, Tomás Jacobi had been a leader among the Serpent Swarmers during the kzin invasion. His forces had held back the invasion troopships from Tiamat for most of a week. Then his lifebubble had been lasered open during the final assault, searing his face and giving him decompression scars. Later, Jacobi had become one of the major smugglers in the Swarm and a supplier to the Resistance. A criminal, but a human criminal.
Just like me.
How could he of all people become a collaborationist?
Jacobi’s eyes were ice blue, and peered impassively from the runnels and scars of his face. He made a clucking sound with his tongue. In my years of dealing with Jacobi, he had always tried to act like a kindly uncle to me. I knew better.
“Kenneth, Kenneth,” he said softly, “there is no reason to be insulting. I had to make sure that you didn’t leave suddenly didn’t I? An impression had to be made on my, ah, employers as well. In any event, I tended to your wound myself. No real harm done.”
I kept all expression from my face, my tone level. “Valve that sewage. You sold me out to the kzin.” I took a deep breath, thinking of my family. “You might as well kill me, Jacobi. I won’t go collabo and work for the damn ratcat tabbies.”
“Hush.” He made a throat-cutting gesture with his free hand. “Kraach-Captain speaks Belter Standard, Wunderlander, Jotok, and Principle knows what else. Do not insult his honor or his person.” He looked sternly at me out of that ruined face. “As for selling anyone out, I do not need to justify my decisions to a petty small-time smuggler.”
I allowed my expression to show how I felt then and Jacobi sighed in exasperation. He reached down with a free hand and untied his mooring line. Both of his legs were missing; another legacy from the kzin armory. He reached out to a wall-ring, pushed off, and floated down next to me. His grip was very strong. Jacobi’s mouth was centimeters from my ear.
“Kenneth, my friend,” he whispered, “you are to be taken before Kraach-Captain. So this can go one of two ways after I untie you. The first is for you to overpower me, which would not be difficult for you. Yet if you do, what will you then do?”
“Break your neck.”
“And then? There are over fifty Heroes here on Blackjack Will you fight them all? And if so, to what purpose?”
He paused for a moment, looking at me carefully. It was that look he used when dickering over contraband cargoes. Shrewd and knowing. I said nothing.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “I can call a few Heroes to escort you to Kraach-Captain personally. But I do not wish to do so. It is better, more dignified, that we go to the Captain together. Better for both of us. Surely you would prefer to go under your own power, not as an unconscious lump carried by kzinti guards.” Jacobi waited for my response, scarred lips twisted.
Finally, I nodded curtly. Deftly, Jacobi untied my bonds. I grasped a wall ring to keep from floating off the deck in the tiny gravity of Blackjack. He gestured me to follow, and pushed off for the doorway.
“Just tell me one thing,” I asked Jacobi’s back. “‘Why would you work for the ratcats? You have spent your entire life fighting them. And even if you are a traitor by nature, still they crippled you, Finagle take it!”
His back stiffened at my words, but he did not reply.
We carefully leaped from wall-ring to wall-ring through the corridors of the minehead station. The legless Jacobi was graceful in the microgravity, using just the tips of his fingers to correct each jump. As I followed him from handhold to handhold, I swallowed back my anger and tried to think of a way out of this. Nothing occurred to me.
The low-gray conditions might become yet another problem in considering options and choices. Kzinti hated microgravity, having used gravitic polarizers for centuries; once their monopole-laden ships returned to Blackjack, they could provide some artificial gravity.
Kzinti didn’t deal well with the fluid buildup caused by microgravity; they got a little… short tempered, even for kzinti.
It was a silent five-minute trip to the unused comm center. Jacobi knocked once, the hatch opened, and I followed him into a large room. The ceilings were tall enough to allow a kzin to stand upright. Three kzinti in full space armor stood guard at the doorway, weapons glittering in the orange filtered lamps. As we passed them they hissed softly.
A very large table was fixed to the floor in the center of the room. Clips held holocubes and data platters in neat arrays within easy reach of the obviously high-ranking kzin who sat there working, giving no sign that we had been noticed. Jacobi and I crouched motionless in front of the table, eyes averted, waiting. I could feel the collective gaze of the kzinti at the door on me. The air was cold and very dry.
Finally, one of the guards growled softly.
The kzin behind the makeshift desk looked up from a portable thinscreen display, and blinked at us. His black nose sniffed wetly in our direction. Enormous violet eyes held mine for a moment, weighing and judging. His short muzzle was shot with gray, and I could see the ridged battle scars on his face and arms. Very old for a kzin. There were no old, stupid kzinti.
Jacobi began to hiss and spit in the falsetto human version of the kzin language. I wasn’t surprised that he knew it, given recent events. But the kzin at the desk bared his teeth and roared for silence. The room seemed to echo for a moment.
“Better,” the seated alien rasped in passable Belter Standard. His voice
was octaves lower than human. “Except under necessity, humans should not defile the Hero’s Tongue. No Warrior Heart. No honor. I tell you when to speak.” He paused. We remained silent. Satisfied, he continued.
“I am named Kraach-Captain,” the old kzin grated. His eyes speared me. “How are you called, slave who may soon be meat?”
“I am called Kenneth Upton-Schleisser,” I said slowly, knowing better than to meet the kzin’s eyes directly. My word choice was intentional to a kzin, names are earned, not given.
“Sssoo,” Kraach-Captain rambled. “It is as the legless monkey says. The Jacobi beast is as without honor as legs, but at least on this occasion truth issues from his slave mouth. Your two fathers, they fight Heroes when we first come to Ka’ashi?” I shook my head, not understanding. The old kzin finally snarled a hissing oath and gestured at Jacobi with a careless hand, claws glittering.
Jacobi leaned close and whispered in my ear, “Kraach-Captain means your father and mother, Kenneth. Kzin females aren’t sentient.”
“I know that,” I interrupted loudly, still feeling confused. I shut my mouth abruptly as one of the guards growled a warning behind me. I could smell fear-sweat on the other man.
“Don’t do that again. They expect me to have explained all of this to you.” Jacobi urged me to continued silence with a hard glare. “Explaining details to slaves is a duty for slaves, not for a Hero. Now, listen carefully. They know about your father and mother, Kenneth, but their females aren’t intelligent, so I told them—”
“I get it,” I whispered back, cutting Jacobi’s explanation short. I was not interested in whatever bizarre rationale had led to gender morphing of my female parent.
I took a deep breath, feeling a familiar almost comforting anger rise in my guts, partially displacing the roil of emotions already churning there. My parents. Henry Upton had been a good rockjack Belter in the Swarm, a humanitarian interested in promoting better Swarm-Wunderland relations. It worked so well that he had married the ice queen Herrenmann daughter of the First Family Helga Schleisser. I had been their only child, five years old when the kzin came. My father died holding off the ratcats.
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