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 yam. Black spots clouded my vision. I did the only reasonable thing. I passed out.
