The Man-Kzin Wars 02

“Claude, the great drawback of blackmail is that it gives the victim the best possible incentive to find a permanent way of shutting you up. Risky, especially when dealing with the police. As to the how, you're not under the impression that you get the best people in the police, are you?” A squint, and the gravelly voice went soft. “Don't think I wouldn't use it, sweetheart, if you didn't cooperate, and there's more than enough here to put you in the edible-delicacy category. Think of it as God's way of giving you an incentive to get back on the straight and narrow.”

“I tell you, Axelrod-Bauergartner has the command codes for the Preserve! I can override, but it would be flagged. Immediately.”

“Computer, display file Niebelungen AA37Bi22. Damned lack of imagination, that code… There it is, Claude. Everything you always wanted to know about your most ambitious subordinate but were afraid to ask, including her private bypass programs.” Another flick of ash. “Finagle, Claude, you can probably make all this look like her fault, even if the ratcats smell the proverbial rodent.”

Montferrat smoothed down his uniform tunic, and it was as if the gesture slicked transparent armor across his skin once more. “You appear to have me by the short and sensitives, kamerat,” he said lightly. “Not entirely to my dismay. The plan is, then, that Ingrid and her gallant Sol-Belter are whisked away from under the noses of the kzin, while you go to ground?”

Yarthkin laughed, a shocking sound. “Appearances to the contrary, Claude old son, you were always the romantic of us two. The one for the noble gesture. Nothing of the sort: Ingrid and I are going to the Swarm.”

“And the man, Jonah?”

“Fuck him. Let the ratcats have him. His job was done the minute they failed to dig the real story out of him.”

Montferrat managed a laugh. “This is quite a reversal of roles, Hari… but this, this final twist, it makes it seem possible, somehow.” He extended a hand. “Seeing as you have the gun to my head, why not? Working together again, eh?”

“All right, listen up,” the guard said.

Jonah shook his head, shook out the last of the fog. Ingrid sat beside him on the plain slatted wood of the bench, in this incongruous pen… change-rooms for a country club, once. Now a set of run-down stone buildings in the midst of shaggy overgrown wilderness; the side open to the remnants of lawn and terrace was covered with a shockfield. He looked around; there were around two dozen humans with them, all clad alike in grey prison trousers and shirts. All quiet. The shockrods of the guards had enforced that. Some weeping, a few catatonic, and there was an unpleasant fecal smell.

“You get an hour's start,” the guard said, in a voice of bored routine. “And you'd better run, believe me.”

“Up yours!” somebody shouted, and laughed when the guard raised her rod. “What you going to do, ratcat lover, condemn me to death?”

The guard shrugged. “You ever seen a house cat playing with a mumbly?” she jeered. “The ratcats like a good chase. Disappoint them and they'll bat you around like a toy.” She stepped back, and the door opened. “Hell, keep ahead of them for two days and maybe they'll let you go.” A burly man rose and charged, bounced back as she took another step through the door.

Laughter, through the transparent surface. “Have fun, porkchops. I'll watch you die. Five minutes to shield- down.”

“You all right?” Jonah asked. Neither of them had been much damaged physically by the interrogation; it had been done in a police headquarters, where the most modern methods were available, not crude field expedients. And the psychists' shields had worked perfectly; the great weakness of telepathic interrogation is that it can only detect what the subject believes to be true. It had been debatable whether the blocks and artificial memories would hold… Kzin telepaths hated staying in a human's mind more than they had to, and the drug-addiction that helped to develop their talents did little for motivation or intelligence.

“Fine,” Ingrid said, raising her head from her knees. “Just thinking how pretty it is out there.” Tears starred her lashes, but her voice was steady.

Startled, he looked again through the near-invisible shimmer of the shockfield. The long green-gold grass was rippling under a late-afternoon sun, starred with flowers like living jewel-flecks. A line of flamingos skimmed by, down to the little pond at the base of the hill. Beyond was forest, flowering dogwood in a fountain of white against the flickering-shiny olive drab of native kampfwald trees. The shockfield let air through, carrying scents of leafmold, green, purity.

“You're right,” he said. They clasped hands, embraced, stepped back and saluted each other formally. “It's been… good knowing you, Lieutenant Ingrid.”

“Likewise, Captain Jonah.” A gamin smile. “Finagle's arse, we're not dead yet, are we?”

“Huh. Huh-huh.” Lights spun before Jonah's eyes, wrenching his stomach with more nausea. Gummy saliva blocked his mouth as he tumbled over the lip of the gully, crashing through brush that ripped and tore with living fingers of thorn and bramble. Tumble, roll, down through the brush-covered sixty-degree slope, out into the patch of gravel and sparse spaghettilike grass analog at the bottom. To lie and rest, Murphy, to rest…

Memories were returning. Evidently his subconscious believed there wouldn't be another interrogation. Believed they were dead already. My fingernail. I have to escape. And that's a laugh. But I have to try…

He turned the final roll into a flip and came erect, facing in the direction of his flight; force the diaphragm to breathe, stomach out to suck air into the bottom of the lungs. His chest felt tight and hot, as if the air pumping through it was nothing, vacuum, inert gas. Will kept him steady, blinked his eyes into focus. He was in a patch of bright sunlight, the forest above a deep green-gold shade that flickered; the soil under his feet was damp, impossibly cool on his skin. The wind was blowing toward him, which meant that the kzin would be following ground-scent rather than what floated on the breeze. A kzin nose was not as sensitive as a hound's, but several thousand times more acute than a human's.

And I must stink to high heaven, he thought. Even then he could smell himself; he hawked and spat, taking a firmer grip on his improvised weapon. That was a length of branch and a rock half the size of his head, dangling from the end by thin strong vines. Thank Murphy that Wunderland flora ran to creepers…

“One,” he muttered to himself. “There ain't no justice, I know, but please, just one.” His breathing was slowing, and he became conscious of thirst, then the gnawing emptiness under his ribs. The sun was high overhead; nearly a day already? How many of the others were still alive?

A flicker of movement at the lip of the ravine, ten meters above him and twenty away. Jonah swung the stone-age morningstar around his head and roared, and the kzin halted his headlong four-footed rush. Rose like an unfolding wall of brown-red, dappled in the light at the edge of the tall trees, slashed across with the white of teeth. Great round eyes, and he could imagine the pupils going pinpoint; the kzin homeworld was not only colder than Wunderland, it was dimmer. Batwing ears unfolding, straining for sound; their hearing was keen enough to pick a human heartbeat out of the background noise. This was a young male, he would be hot, hot for the kill and salt blood to quench his thirst and let him rest…

“Come on, you kshat, you sthondat-eater,” Jonah yelled in the snarling tones of the Hero's Tongue. “Come and get your name, kinless offspring of cowards, come and eat turnips out of my shit, grassgrazer! Ch'rowl you!”

The kzin screamed, a raw wailing shriek that echoed down the ravine; screamed again and leaped in an impossible soaring curve that took it halfway down the steep slope.

“Now, Ingrid. Now!” Jonah shouted, and ran forward.

The woman rose from the last, thicker scrub at the edge of the slope, where water nourished taller bushes. Rose just as the second bounding leap passed its arc, the kzin spread-eagled against the sky, taloned hands outstretched to grasp and tear. The three-meter pole rose with her, butt against the earth, sharpened tip reaching for the alien's belly. The two met, and the wet ripping sound was audible even over the berserk siren shriek of the young kzin's pain.