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 myself, 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. AD 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 Munchen 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
