The Man-Kzin Wars 02

Jonah, you'll win or go out in a blaze of glory. No dirty alliances and dirtier compromises and decisions with no good choices. The two of you have stolen my life.

“Get out,” he said. “Get the hell out.”

“No.” She took his hand and led him toward the stairs.

***

“They've accepted our bid, Captain.”

Jonah nodded stiffly. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Not that I'm surprised.”

“No, sir.”

Back in Sol System a thousand hackers had labored to produce advanced software they thought might be salable on Wunderland. Most of it had been too advanced; they'd predicted a higher state of the art than Wunderland had retained, and the stuff wouldn't work on the ancient hardware. Even so, there was plenty that did work. It had only taken fifty days to make Jan Hardman and Lucy van den Berg moderately big names in the Datamonger's Guild. The computer records showed them as old timers, with a scattering of previous individual sales. They told everyone on the net that they owed their big success to teaming up.

Teaming up. A damned tough fifty days… Jonah looked unashamedly at Ingrid. “I admit you've improved Herr Yarthkin's disposition one whole hell of a lot, but do you have to look so tanj happy?”

“Capt— Jonah, I am happy.”

“Yeah.”

“I— Jonah, I'm sorry if it hurts you.”

“Yeah. All right, Lieutenant. We've got work to do.”

“These are the same monkeys as before.” The guards spoke in the Hero's Tongue. “The computer says they have access.”

The kzin tapped a large button on the console, and the door lifted.

Jonah and Ingrid cringed and waited. The kzin sniffed, then led the way outside. Another kzin warrior followed, and two more fell in on either side. The routine had been the same the other two times they had been there.

This will be different. Maybe. Jonah pushed the thoughts away. Kzin weren't really telepathic but they could sense excitement and smell fear. Of course the fear's natural. They probably like that scent.

Sunlight was failing behind evening clouds, and the air held a dank chill and the wild odors of storm swept grassland. The two humans crossed the landing field between forms a third again their height, living walls of orange-red fur; claws slid out in unconscious reflex on the stocks of their heavy beam rifles.

Jonah kept his eyes carefully down. It would be an unbearable irony if they were killed by reflex, victims of some overzealous kzin spooked by the upsurge in guerrilla activity. The attack of the Yamamoto had created the chaos that let them into Wunderland, but that same chaos just might kill them.

Doors slid aside, and they descended into chill corridors like a dreadnought's, surfaces laced with armored data conduits and the superconducting coil-complexes of field generators.

One of the kzin followed. “This way,” he said, prodding Jonah's shoulder with the muzzle of his weapon. The light down here was reddish, frequencies adjusted to the alien's convenience; the air was drier, colder than humans would have wished. And everything was too big, grips and stairs and doors adapted to a thick-bodied, short-legged race with the bulk of terrestrial gorillas.

They went through a chamber filled with computer consoles. This was as far as they'd been allowed the last two times. “Honored Governor Chuut-Riit is pleased with your work,” the kzin officer said.

“We are honored,” Ingrid said.

“This way.” The kzin led them through another door. They stepped into an outsized transfer booth, were instantly elsewhere. Gravity increased to the kzin homeworld standard, sagging their knees, and they stepped through into another checkzone. The desire to gawk around was intolerable, but the gingery smell of kzin was enough to restrain them as they walked through a thick sliding door. The transfer booth was inside an armored box, and he recognized the snouts of heavy remote-waldoed weapons up along the edges of the roof. Outside was another control room, a dozen kzin operators lying recumbent on spaceship-style swiveling couches before semicircular consoles. Their helmets were not the featureless wraparounds humans would have used; these had thin crystal facepieces, adjustable audio pickups and cutouts for the ears. Not as efficient, but probably a psychological necessity. Kzin have keener senses than man, but are more vulnerable to claustrophobia, any sort of confinement that cuts off the flow of scent, sound, light.

Patience comes harder to them, too, Jonah thought, as they penetrated another set of armored doors to the ultimate sanctum. At last!

“Accomplish your work,” the kzin said. “The inspector will arrive in six hours. Sanitary facilities are there.”

Jonah exhaled a long breath as the alien left. Now there was only the featureless four-meter box of the control room; the walls were a neutral pearly white, ready to transmit visual data. The only consol was a standup model in the centre, with both human and kzin seating arrangements before it. Ingrid and he exchanged a wordless glance as they walked to it and began unpacking their own gear, snapping out the support tripod and sliding home the thin black lines of the data jacks.

A long pause, while their fingers played over the small black rectangles of their portable interfacing units; the only sound was a subliminal sough of ventilators and the faint natural chorus that the kzin always broadcast through the speakers of a closed installation: insects and the rustle of vegetation. Jonah felt a familiar narrowing, a focus of concentration more intense than sex or even combat, as the lines of a program-schematic sprang out on his unit.

“Finagle, talk about paranoids,” he muttered. “See this freeze-function here?”

Ingrid's face was similarly intent, and the rushing flicker of the scroll-display on her unit gave her face a momentary look as of light through stained glass. “Got it. Freeze.”

“We're bypassed?”

“This is under our authorized codes. All right, these are the four major subsystems. See the physical channeling? The hardware won't accept config commands of more than 10k except through this channel we're at.”

“Slow response, for a major system like this,” he mused. The security locks were massive and complex, but a little cumbrous.

“It's the man-kzin hardware interfacing,” Ingrid said. “I think. Their basic architecture's more synchronic. Betcha they never had an industrial-espionage problem… Hey, notice that?”

“Ahhhh. Interesting.” Jonah kept his voice carefully phlegmatic. Tricky kitty. Tricky indeed. “Odd. This would be much harder to access through the original Hero system.”

“Tanj, you're right,” Ingrid said. She looked up with an urchin grin that blossomed with the pure delight of solving a software problem.

Jonah gave her a cautioning look.

Her face went back to a mask of concentration. “Clearly this was designed with security against kzin in mind. See, here and here? That's why they've deliberately preserved the original human operating system on this — two of them, and used this spatchcocked integral translation chip here, see?”

“Right!” His fingers flew. “In fact, if analyzed with the original system as an integrating node and catchpoint… see?”

“Right. Murphy, but you'd have more luck wandering through a minefield than trying to get at this from an exterior connection! There's nothing in the original stem system but censor programs; by the time you got by them, the human additions would have alarmed and frozen. Catches you on the interface transitions, see? That's why they haven't tried to bring the core system up to the subsystem operating speeds. Sure slows things down,