The Man-Kzin Wars 02

to lash his tail and pace; it ran through him that perhaps it was his temper that had set him on the road to mastery, that never-to-be-forgotten moment in the nursery so many years ago. The realization that his rage could kill, and in time would kill him as dead as the sibling beneath his claws.

The guards behind him had snarled at the infotech's insolence, a low subliminal rumbling and the dryspicy scent of anger. An expressive ripple of Chuut-Riit's fur, ears, tail quieted them.

“These specialists are all mad,” he whispered aside. “One must humor them, like a cub that bites your ears.” They were sorry specimens in truth: one scrubby and undersized, with knots in his fur; the other a giant, but clumsy, slow, actually fat. Heroes, indeed! Any Hero seeing them would know their brilliance, since such disgusting examples of bad inheritance would only be kept alive for the most pressing of needs.

The governor schooled himself to wait, shifting only enough to keep his heated muscles from stiffening. The big technician mumbled to himself, occasionally taking out a brick of dull-red dried meat from his equipment apron and stuffing it into his mouth. Chuut-Riit caught a wiff of it and gagged, as much at the thought of someone eating infantry rations for pleasure as at the well-remembered smell. The other one muttered as well, but he chewed on the ends of his claws. Those on his right hand were actually frayed at the tips, useless for anything but scratching its doubtless completely ungroomed and verminous pelt.

“Is the system compromised?” Chuut-Riit asked again, patiently. Infosystems specialists were as bad as telepaths.

“Hrrwweo?” muttered the small one, blinking back to a consciousness somewhat more in congruence with the others'. “Well, we couldn't know that, could we? Honored Chuut-Riit,” he added hastily, as he caught the governor's expression and scent.

“What—do—you—mean?” he said.

“Well, Honored Governor Chuut-Riit, a successful clandestine insertion is undetectable by definition, hrrrr? We're pretty sure we've found their tracks. Computer, isolate-alpha, linear schematic, level three.” A complex webbing sprang up all around the room, blue lines with a few sections picked out in green. “See, dominant one, where the picks were inserted? So that the config elements could be accessed and altered from an external source without detection. We've neutralized them, of course.”

The claws went back into his mouth, and he mumbled around them. “This was humans, wasn't it? it was their scent. Very three-dimensional, I suppose it comes of their being monkeys. They do some wonderful gaming programs, very ingenious— I abase myself in apology, Chuut-Riit.” He flattened to the ground and covered his dry granular-looking nose. “We are as sure as we can be that all the unauthorized elements have been purged.” To his companion: “Wake up, suckling!”

“Whirrr?” the fat giant chirruped, stopped his continuous nervous purring and then started. “Oh, yes. Lovely system you have here, Honored Governor Chuut-Riit. Yes, I think we've got it. I would like to meet the monkeys who did the alterations, very subtle work.”

“You may go,” he said, and crouched brooding, scratching moodily behind one ear. The internal security team were in now, with the sniffer-machines to isolate the scent molecules of the intruders.

“I would like to meet them, too,” he said, and a line of saliva spun itself down from one thin black lip. He snapped it back with a wet chop and licked his nose with a broad wash of pink tongue. “I would like that very much.”

“Somehow I think it's too quiet,” Ingrid said. When Jonah cast a blankly puzzled look over his shoulder, she shrugged. “Aren't you interested in anything cultural?”

“I'm interested in staying alive,” Jonah said.

They were strolling quietly down one of the riverside walks. The Donau rolled beside them, two kilometers across; it sparkled blue and green-gray, little waves showing white. A bridge soared from bank to bank, and sailboats heeled far over under the stiff warm breeze. Away from the shrilling poverty of the residential quarters, the air smelled of salty water, grass, flowers.

“Of course, staying alive from now on jeopardizes the mission,” Jonah continued.

“No.” Ingrid shook her head. “You have to get back.”

“I do? Why?”

“You just do.” Murphy's Balls! Those ARM psychists really do know their stuff. He's forgotten already. What have I forgotten? It's no fun, holes in your memory. Even if they're deliberate.

“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 Munchen 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