Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

ZENO’S ROULETTE

Phase one of the mission had gone without a glitch. Phase two began in the cramped armory of the Catscratch Fever, a dark, sleek pitchfork of a ship, serial number long since removed, now in mercenary hands. Adjacent to the yawning launch tubes, Flex Bothme helped Annie Venzi wriggle into her battle armor. He knew well how to bear hug Annie’s square frame into it; not only had they worked together on a swindler’s dozen missions, but as a fellow Jinxian, Flex was built the same way, and knew the pains and pleasures of a custom suit. It was a shame to fold the wavy brown billows of her hair into a helmet, but he had to admit, she looked sexy in armor, too.

Together they ran her suit’s readiness checklist until the green light came on, then repeated the procedure on his. Flex thumped a fist on his chest, expecting Annie to return the gesture. Instead, she made a wan smile, and then punched his cubical fist in half-hearted solidarity.

“You in this?” he said, studying her hazel eyes as if they were another item on the checklist.

“I’m tired of this so-called war,” she said.

“Then you’re lucky, because the stars we earn from this job will set us up for life.” Flex, freshly thawed from near-death at Brain Freeze, was anxious to get this over with, too. It sounded like a routine affair-infiltrate a kzinti resort compound, obtain some specific intelligence, and get out. If some cats were killed in the process, well, it’s a cold universe, isn’t it? “I don’t know why the Pierson’s Puppeteers are paying so handsomely for a little intel on some exotic wormhole,” he said, “but what a break! This one’s for us.”

After he kissed her, she drew in her lips. “Just remember my terms,” she said. “Don’t kill any kittens.”

He smiled deviously. “Accidents happen.” He tore a slab of protein from a synergy bar dispenser and offered it to her. Its musky odor whispered of their past adventures, hunting for sugar shrooms on Gummidgy, making love in a floating fountain over Paris…He drew the odor in heartily, and smiled.

She wasn’t having any of it. Her expertise was kzin psychology, not felinicide. “Promise me you won’t kill the kits.”

“Look,” said Flex. “Let me tell you about your bleeding heart. When those kits grow up, your heart will bleed all over them as they unzip you from your pretty throat down to your…” He winked.

“This kitten can take care of herself.”

“That’s the only reason Zel lets us work together,” Flex said.

“All right already, time to kiss and ride!” said Zel Kickovich, the captain of the Fever. He pushed them both on the back toward the tumbler capsules where six other specialists were already sliding into place. Flex gnashed at the synergy bar, gave the rest to Annie, and they both washed it down with water from a squeeze bulb.

“Launch in thirty seconds!” Zel turned to lower the canopies onto those who were ready. “We’re picking up some positron streams along your trajectory,” he added as a parting shot, “so watch out for thunderheads.”

Flex nodded at Zel, but Annie kept him in a locked gaze. “Promise me you won’t kill the kits.”

“All right already, I promise. Now let’s go!”

“Swear it.”

“I swear. I won’t kill the flea-bitten kits.”

Annie thumped her chest, and any doubt in Flex’s mind of her readiness fell away. He smiled and thumped, and with the aid of a pull-up bar, they hopped into their respective tumblers. Flex could no longer see Annie, though she lay not two meters away. A hoist lowered the opaque cockpit cover over his tube, and it hissed as it was squeezed into place.

In the dark space above the gravid world Meerowsk, Catscratch Fever yawed to a new attitude, ready to propel the tumblers while at the same time adjusting her orbit, thus disguising the recoil from the tumbler launch. These six tubes carried little more than enough fusion power to make safe planetfall-a controlled crash to be generous-so the initial thrust came from the ship. The tumblers would be aimed against the current orbit, which had the effect of de-orbiting them. The ship’s job was then to distract and survive, until phase three, extraction.

Extraction was going to be dicey, Flex knew. This was supposed to look like a suicide vendetta, so that if things went wrong, the kzinti would not suspect the true mission.

A loud roar shook Flex’s tumbler, and as it kicked him out of the Fever, the G forces made it feel as though he were standing upright inside the flying coffin. To a Jinxian accustomed to increased gravity, it felt good. “Tabam!” he said, a victory cry from Jinx that derived from “to be a man.”

“Tabam!” came Annie’s voice through his helmet speaker. The phrase had become unisexual, as had many such on a world where women had long been recognized as men’s equals in all things physical.

“Do you think this planet will make lucky number eleven?” Flex asked her.

“You mean ten. I don’t count Jinx, because we’re both from there.”

“Which is beside the point that we did it there, too.”

“Not to interrupt, lovebirds,” said Zel, “but what are you talking about?”

“Were going for the record of making love on the most worlds.”

“Well, this won’t be one of them. This is just an in and out mission.”

A dozen voices broke into laughter.

“On that note,” Zel said, audibly grinning, “it’s time for data silence.”

“Love and money!” was Flex’s parting shot.

“Tabam!” Annie said, and the voice com ran silent.

Six fusion tumblers pitched in unison, end over end, until they were heads up. They were quickly dropping into the atmosphere of Meerowsk. Despite the tiny size of his viewer, the images of the other tubes slicing into the stratosphere made Flex shiver. He knew exactly which one was Annie’s by the painted red diamond on it-her mark, stylized from the A and V in Annie Venzi. No doubt she was noting the X on Flex’s tumbler, so they could watch each others’ backs.

The tubes sliced through atmosphere, howling like a pack of morlocks in heat. The breaking engines came vigorously to life, roaring against the wind. Flex had no intention of letting this become a suicide mission. As an intelligence specialist, his job was to extract certain information from a certain kzin character he knew little about, and get out with it and his precious red diamond. The first challenge in avoiding suicide was to keep the tumbler from burning up. Since they were adapted from interplanetary ballistic missiles, the tumblers could not be made of indestructible material. Instead, they were made of schwartzite, a material made from asymmetric carbon crystals that had been a staple in construction in centuries past.

Annie was going in hot. Why didn’t her computer slow her down? “Annie!” Flex shouted, knowing she could not hear. She should switch to manual.

“Annie!” No change. Her engine discharge went white hot, and her tube pulled back with the others. Flex cut to manual just long enough to steer a little closer to her tube, then back to auto. She rocked her fiery tube to signal she was all right.

“Tabam!” he said.

With fusion rockets firing there was no way to see what lay below. Based on his topographic display Flex knew that they were angling in over a continent, on target for the vacation den of one Jarko-S’larbo, a rich kzin who built a reputation as a luxury resort owner. The plotted route was low and stealthy, and with some planned distractions from the Fever, they should be able to slide right into S’larbo’s backyard. The four mercenary soldiers with them were to subdue S’larbo long enough for Annie to implant a coma collar on the cat. Then they could spirit him away. Failing that, Flex’s job was to extract whatever information he could from the compound’s data systems.

The tumblers cut across the terminator and slid into night and then into clouds. Lightning flashed and crackled around them, triggering a warning alert. Usually not a problem, but Zel had mentioned positrons from the storm system…

Through the schwartzite hull, Flex heard a loud booming. Then he felt a violent rumbling as they hauled ass through storm. Another thunderclap, and more flashes.

In the stroboscopic light, Flex went manual to check on Annie. He had to roll to one side to aim a camera in her direction. He found her, red diamond against the cobalt, just in time to see a powerful bolt of lightning forking below her craft. Breaking formation, he fought the turbulence so he could keep the sensor trained on her capsule. Annie would understand his maneuver and rock her tube to show she was all right.

Her tube did not rock. The lightning did not seem to have adversely affected its engine or navigation, but the detection of positrons from orbit meant that the lightening from the storm was probably giving off gamma rays. That could cause any number of problems. The disposable tumblers had no redundant systems, since they were built for single, rapid strikes.

A signal indicated that the power landing would commence in five minutes. The tubes would pitch 180 degrees again, tails up (which really meant tails behind in this case), and cruise over the terrain like guided missiles, until final braking. Flex prayed to the closest thing he had to a goddess, Annie, that her tube would tumble properly. Meanwhile, Annie’s tube had slipped closer, and a proximity alarm sounded.

“Tanj!” Flex instinctively switched to manual, just as his tumbler moved to a safe distance automatically. He wished for daylight, so it would be easier to see his companion.

Another alarm. Again, a proximity warning. Flex steered clear, but now the two of them were veering from the group. Why didn’t she go manual? Why didn’t she rock her tube? He didn’t want to admit it, but Annie must have been hurt in the lightning hit.

It was time for the power approach, and Flex returned to auto, making sure he had a clear visual of Annie. His tube tumbled head over heels, the thruster no longer breaking. Now it accelerated him forward, low over the ground that was still hidden by darkness. Annie’s tube also turned, right on schedule, as did the others, which were now fifty-three meters away. Still manageable, but they had a lot of ground to cover before final braking.

They glided into badlands seeped in pre-dawn mist, the guidance systems keeping them low, between the hills, and then threading them through sandstone canyons and monuments that leaped from the shadows as if they were shoots seeking light. Flex’s tumbler dodged and weaved, leaving him free to scrutinize Annie’s.

Her tube was negotiating the labyrinth, so its maps and guidance were operational. But execution was sluggish-it was slow to evade on all planes. These mountains and rocks provided perfect cover for tiny personal craft to sneak in, but there was no room for the kind of slop that Annie’s tumbler was exhibiting. He watched with horror as Annie careened toward an outcropping, only to avert it at the last minute.

“Not while I’m here,” Flex said, adding a choice swear word he overheard in an isolated vacuum plant while still a boy on Jinx. That was not far from Brain Freeze, where he later learned what the word really meant.

A large stone pillar loomed ahead, and he felt his tube adjust for a tight pass. That’s how this course had been charted, as a geographilic caress of the landscape. Even though they had strayed from the plan, the guidance system adjusted. He felt his thruster ease off some, but noted that Annie’s did not.

That was the problem, then. Somehow her tube was not modifying its speed properly, so its steering was wild and uncontrolled. She was going to hit that mountain.

In desperation, Flex kicked over to manual and gunned it. His tumbler shot ahead, directly toward the rock wall. He caught up with Annie and pulled alongside. With a hearty “Tabam!” he nudged over, physically knocking her tube away from the death ahead.

It worked. He saw her tube shoot off to the left, to a relatively open area. His own tube had yawed to the right, so to avoid the mountain, he had to shoot around the other side, losing sight of Annie. He found her again, this time sliding dangerously toward a rock-ribbed plain.

“Come on, Annie, wake up!” he said. “I can’t steer for both of us!”

He zipped in her direction, taxing the poor maneuverability of the tumbler. The only evident way to keep her from crashing would be to get underneath her, and jostle her upward. He straightened out in front of her and cut power. Annie’s jet was pegged, and as she passed above him he bumped her just enough to level her off. Then he allowed her to move ahead again.

“Wake up, Annie, we need you! You’re the only one who can get S’larbo out alive!” A calculated exaggeration.

Ahead, the ground sloped slowly, sinking into a verdant morass. The kzin backyard was somewhere in that jungle, and somehow he had to get them safely grounded there.

Twice, Flex kicked Annie’s tumbler this way and then nudged it that. One last time he saw the other four tumblers kilometers away. Then the green hills separated them from sight.

Trees seemed to shoot into the sky, the tumblers rising above them, Annie’s with a little kiss from Flex’s. It was impossible to steer the speeding tubes between such dense obstacles.

An alert signaled the final tumble. Flex’s tube pitched 180 degrees back to the braking position that had countered the planet’s gravity a while ago. Annie’s followed suit and their thrusters beat at the steaming air above the forest canopy. Flex predicted that if her thruster did not modulate it would overbrake, and she would drop into the ground like a hot javelin through snow. So with his own retro roaring, he again slid beneath her and gave her an upward push, their hulls grinding together like teeth.

Too much. He contacted off center, too close to the engine. Her tube rose into the air, while his own, scorched from her flaming exhaust, began to shut down. The last thing he saw was her tube, still on a defective autopilot, tumbling back into braking attitude, but yawing and rolling like a snuffed candle discarded into a cloud-spackled sky.

Completely fried, Flex’s tumbler lost power, and the crash net deployed prematurely, draping uselessly over his legs. In utter blackness, he felt the tumbler chopping branches away from the canopy.

He wished that he had broken silence before losing power, if only to say good-bye. What more was there to lose?

The benefit of autopilot is that the organic pilot is free from complicated tasks to focus on tasks more reliant on a natural intelligence. Yet the human mind has its own autopilot, wherein autonomic bodily functions or rote activities continue without conscious management. In Flex’s case, his autopilot was shock-induced, his full consciousness deferred. His legs moved him through the kzinti recreational area, his throbbing head unaware of his surroundings. When he came upon a running stream, a decision was forced upon him, and that kicked him back into manual.

Flex remembered where he was. Slowly, his vision widened, and with a lone breeze that meandered through the trees, he heard the multitude sounds of the jungle. Insects circled him, distant unknown animals barked and cried, and overhead, the whir of a motor grew faint and was gone. A bird began a sweet chirping that invariably ended in a mock-death scream. Its warble-warble-tweet-tweet-YAAAGH neatly encapsulated the beauty and horror of any number of jungles in known space. The sun slanted through the steamy air, slicing the contours of gray-green foliage into confusion.

Born and raised in the nearly doubled gravity of Jinx, Flex Bothme was short and stocky, a knotted muscle of a man. Such a knot might slip at any moment, and he often had. He was wearing cammo flight togs, and his wristcomp still worked. Apparently, he had been walking for only a few minutes. He thought to backtrack to his tumbler, but suddenly he remembered Annie Venzi. If she was still alive, she was in mortal danger, so he had to find her immediately. Had he, in his traumatized subconscious, calculated which way she must be? He’d been walking northeast before encountering the stream. That would be about right, so he decided to continue.

A large winged insect dared a pass at his neck, but before he could swat it, it changed his mind. “Guess I don’t smell right,” he muttered. On Gummidgy, Annie and Flex chased pests through the air with a sizzler, and then swung lazily in a hammock. They watched the wan light of the little moon bobbling on Circle Sea, and then made love. That was number nine on their “worlds to make love on” list. Flex swore to himself that if he found her alive on Meerowsk, he’d make love to her there and then, even if it meant mission interruptus.

In the sandy loam at his feet, fresh footprints from a small clawed animal with at least four legs ran along the stream. Flex was not a tracker, but he was not the stereotypical dull-witted Jinxian either. It was obvious that the thing had lingered for a drink and then bounded downstream, to his left. This might be important if the animal was being tracked by kzinti hunters. After all, this was a recreational park designed for their amusement. Flex might suddenly find himself the prey of known space’s finest hunters.

He scanned the shallow stream up and down. He had a sidearm, but would be no match for a kzin in this situation. Even if he survived, there would be no way to rescue Annie. Come to think of it, his best chance to find her was if the kzinti found her for him. And there was one way he could help them do that.

Flex used his wristcomp to estimate the direction of Jarko-S’larbo’s lodge. His comp calibrated to the planet’s magnetic field, and he bounded off in that direction. If he could surrender to the kzinti, he might be able to bargain for her life, mission be damned. Annie had always said it was a bad idea to serve together. Despite all the fun and profits they’d had, she was right. What good was it earning money to buy expensive treatments to try to extend their short Jinxian lives if you got killed in the process?

Only bruised here and there, Flex made good time through the forest, but he was far from stealthy. He heard the crashing of limbs behind and above him-something large but elusive was leaping from tree to tree, chasing him. He darted behind a thick mossy trunk, drew his flashlight laser, and chanced a look back.

Nothing. Whatever it was, it was clever. His eyes darted around, but could not detect a trace of the arboreal predator. He hadn’t studied the native fauna, because they were supposed to have landed nearer to the kzin compound, and there was no time to look them up now.

A tentative rustle from above. No doubt that by hiding, Flex had signaled a disadvantage that the beast above sensed. If it’s eat or be eaten, Flex’s choice was clear, and he broke cover, crouched and took rough aim.

The thing growled, a marbled, choking sound. Flex’s sidearm could out-growl that. He shot at the thing in the shadows, missing but making his point. Before he caught so much as a sight of it, the creature’s growls were echoed from all directions.

There were a lot more of the things closing on him. So much for growling. Flex stood and ran like hell in his original direction, laser in fist. He heard rustling above, like a hurricane whipping at the trees. Maybe Annie was lucky; if still unconscious, she would be in the safety of her tumbler.

He thought to turn and fire, but hearing the beasts both behind and above, he knew it wouldn’t buy him a quantizer’s nano. It might, however, get someone else’s attention.

He made for an open area where the predators would have to come down from the heights, improving his odds. In the center of the clearing was a rocky knoll, and he climbed that, turned, and fired at will.

The creatures were cats the size of kzinti, but they were not kzinti. Flex had never seen them before, but they reminded him of saber-toothed tigers from pictures, except that these were green and gray, and stout. Black stripes ran straight back from the eyes like tears peeled from the eyes by racing the wind in the treetops.

He took two of them down with one slow sweep, but one got back up, and a dozen more appeared at the forest wall. The laser wasn’t powerful enough to take out these cats quickly-it would take a concerted beam. Now the tigers were wary, but they quickly circled the clearing. Their ears were long and laid back, their jutting teeth curved like scimitars.

“Can anybody hear me?” Flex shouted to the trees. He repeated the call in the Heroes’ Tongue.

The cats roared, and he fired at will, wheeling from his rocky roost. This cowed them only for a moment, then they moved closer, still circling. No solitary hunters, these. The green cats were methodical and organized. Perfect prey for the kzinti, who were ever thirsty for more challenging sport. Probably genetically created just for this purpose, Flex thought.

He fired more shots, taking out several tigers. He also took some random long shots in the direction he thought the kzinti were. “Come on you ass-lickers!” he shouted at the kzinti. “You’re missing some good killzerkitz hunting here!”

One of the tigers leaped at Flex. He took his best shot, hitting it square in the chest. At the same time, he whirled to find a second cat attacking from his rear. He had anticipated that, and took it down, too. But sooner or later, he would miss, or would be overwhelmed. Sooner, he knew. Even his fellow tumblers could not help him now, and they were doubtless continuing the mission elsewhere.

Angry, Flex fired randomly at the monsters, trying to break up their formation. They slunk back and forth-he had bought a few more seconds.

Then, words, unexpectedly screamed from the shadows. “Hold your fire, you stupid monkey!”

The tigers turned on the speaker, a large kzin hunter who screamed and leaped from the jungle onto the back of one of the green things. Flex expected a furious cat-on-cat fight, but the kzin had the beast in a choke hold with one powerful arm, anticipating its reaction. The startled tiger snapped in that direction, lunging its body around to try to throw the kzin off. The kzin hunter let the tiger toss his legs around, and he used that momentum to advantage with his free arm, clawing a deep gash in an arc across the tiger’s throat.

Before the other tigers could react, he had torn open the furry neck of the tiger and thrown the bleeding carcass onto its back. At the same time, a dozen more kzinti screams, and as many dead tigers, and Flex, staring breathless at the slaughter around him.

But three kzinti stood prizeless at the jungle edge, glaring at Flex with eye slits as sharp as their claws. “You stole our prey from us,” one snarled, kicking one of the cats Flex had shot.

Flex exhaled deeply, relieved that the tigers were all lifeless, and certain he could not escape or fight his way out of this jam. He shrugged and dropped his weapon, thinking hard of a ruse to save his skin, and Annie’s.

“You’re wasting your time toying with these pussies,” he said, grinning carefully so as not to show his teeth provocatively. “I know something more challenging for you to hunt, and far more rewarding.”

Flex stood in the den of Jarko-S’larbo, stripped of weapon, wristcomp, and clothes. The three kzinti hunters whose game he had killed stood around him, constantly poking and clawing at him, gently by their standards, but with the successful intention of drawing a little blood.

The den looked vaguely like a hunting lodge, if only because Flex knew that was its function. It was a long, tall hall with windows on the left, tall tiers of blue carpeted couches on the right, all empty. At the far end was a massive iron fireplace the size of a small lander, burning only a modest fire to one side. Most telling were the numerous trophies, huge toothy creatures stuffed in the most horrific poses. These formed two lines of the grand hall, standing fierce on pedestals carpeted with live grass, perhaps as an eternal insult. They were guardians of an old way of life, preserved by the modern kzinti as evidence of the deep instincts that had not been bred out of them despite centuries of attempts by other space-faring species. The angry kzinti forcibly marched Flex through the gauntlet of taxonomic terrors to the great hearth where the puffy Jarko-S’larbo sat on a cushion, looking like nothing less than an overweight tabby cat curled in front of a fireplace. Next to him purred a prret, a female concubine. Not only was she sleeping, she was also loosely bound with red leather leashes, the purpose of which Flex did not want to know. To the left rose a wall of windows, dripping on the outside with condensation that distorted the view of the jungle playground.

“Jarko-S’larbo, I presume.”

“Should I get up?” growled S’larbo, wuffling his tattooed ears.

What a fat, lazy puss, thought Flex. “Not on my account,” he said, in the Heroes’ Tongue.

With a hiss, and rapidity surprising for his size, Jarko-S’larbo bounded to his feet, baring his teeth in Flex’s face. “In my den, you do not speak unless ordered to, kshat.”

Flex put a hand over his mouth in deference, and S’larbo stepped back, arching his back and curling his upper lip in minor victory. At his full height, S’larbo did not appear so fat and lazy. He had flattened his fur to show off his musculature, and he turned his back dismissively.

Wheeling back, he said, “I already know what you are doing here, and I am going to stuff you for it.” S’larbo paced around Flex, whipping his hairless tail cruelly across the cuts already inflicted by the hunters. So much for the myth that the tails were useless vestiges. Flex knew better than to wince. Besides, he prided himself on his rhino hide, the extinct rhinoceros being his martial arts totem. S’larbo inspected his trophy gallery, stopping at the smallest, least-imposing creature. “I think I’ll put you here. A monkey isn’t so threatening as this pitiful specimen, but if I pose you properly, perhaps with a bigger weapon than that piss squirter you came with…”

“Do you think hunting these overgrown fleas was compensation for fear of real predators?” Flex said, deciding it was time to risk speaking. He used the mocking tense of the Heroes’ Tongue, to ruffle the fur.

One of the hunters knocked him to his knees, but S’larbo snarled a “Belay!”

“You know what I’m talking about,” said Flex, not getting up. “The Puppeteers are essentially hunting you to extinction. However cowardly they are, and however unfair they fight, the end result is the same.”

S’larbo licked his whiskers. “It is you humans who have hunted us for them. If they are puppeteers, then you are the puppets. And by the way, you have just confirmed that you have infiltrated this place to kill as many of our offspring as you can.”

Just as well that S’larbo bought the cover story, thought Flex. He could negotiate on that basis. “That is only partly true,” he said. “Some of us came for that purpose.” He watched for reaction, unsure whether the kzin knew about his human companions. Using the most formal words in the Heroes’ Tongue he knew, Flex said, “I myself have sworn not to kill any of your kittens on this mission.”

“We killed the other monkeys,” S’larbo said. “They landed in a secluded place nearby, while your decoy in space tried to fool us.” He hissed and spat on Flex. “You stupid monkeys! You think we are so foolish as to fall for that trick? Your cunning ways have served you long enough, but we are on to them.”

“You killed all three men?” Flex said, probing.

“There were four!”

Good, thought Flex. Not that he felt good about the others being killed and eaten, but at least they hadn’t found Annie yet.

“So you see,” S’larbo continued, “we have enough human meat to satisfy our customers’ wildest dreams, leaving you for my gallery.”

“You’ll let me go.”

S’larbo leaped into the air, turning full around and lashing Flex’s face with his tail in the process. “Ouch,” Flex said sarcastically.

“Why should I let you go?”

“Because I am not really part of this operation,” he said. “I was planted with them for a different purpose. That’s why I broke away from them before landing. In exchange for my life, I will give you whatever information you wish.”

Jarko-S’larbo turned to stoke his fire, gazing into it the way humans have done for centuries when lost in thought. He had them intrigued. Before they came to some decision, he had to play another big card, to gain what advantage he could.

“There is one more human with me,” he said. “She’s injured, and I want you to help me find her and let us go. If you do that, I promise you will find what I have to tell you well worth it. Remember, we still have a big advantage orbiting your establishment.”

“She?” S’larbo repeated, turning back to Flex, his interest piqued. Flex regretted the word instantly. “There was a female with you out in the park?” To the hunters, S’larbo said, “Go find her, before the sizzle-teeth do!”

And to Flex, “I have never tasted a human female before. She will make tonight’s dining a one-in-a-million experience for the hunters. Then maybe it will be the humans that will become extinct, starting with her.”

All three hunters pounced out to initiate a search, leaving Flex alone with S’larbo. Two guards paced at the back of the room, their hind claws clacking on the stone floor. Flex weighed his chances and concluded that he could not fight his way out of this one. His only hope of saving her lay with this whiskered slob.

“We’re not done yet,” Flex said. “Have you ever heard the saying, ‘If you need information, you need a Jinxian’? Well that’s me. That’s how I earn my kibbles and cream.”

“My grandfather had a saying, too,” S’larbo said. “‘Monkey lie, monkey die.’ Why it took so long for us to realize that you don’t think honorably the way we do I don’t know. But you can give up your feeble attempts to deceive me. I have already caught you in a lie about your numbers.”

“What if I just show you then?” Flex said. “I cannot only prove I have information that will save you from the conspiracy we both know is out there, but I can do it without leaving your den. You have nothing to lose.”

“I don’t believe for a whisker that anything you are saying is true. What kind of boneless prick begs for its life with pure deceit?”

“If we wanted to kill you and your kittens, we could have done it with heavy weapons without trying to sneak in here. Think about that. Isn’t it possible that we cooperate with the Puppeteers to learn more about them? Keep your enemies close, and all that?”

“The only information I need from you is the location of the Puppeteer home world.” Jarko-S’larbo kept his eyes narrowed on Flex, but Flex could tell that he was mulling things over. He could have ripped Flex in half at any time. “On second thought, I would also have your title.”

Names and titles were of utmost importance to kzinti, especially those who had particularly good ones. Jarko-S’larbo was a full Name, earned from a successful career as a rich businessman. S’larbo had made his fortune attracting other rich kzinti to his pleasure palace, replete with big game hunting and, evidently, kinky kzinretti.

“I have no official title,” Flex said, “because I represent no government or organization. All I can tell you about is my name.”

“You are a mercenary then,” the kzin concluded.

“My full name is Argumos Bothme, but growing up, people called me Arri. Now they call me Flex,” he translated, “because of my fighting style.”

“A warrior for hire then. Not the sort to go on a suicide mission.” S’larbo growled over the thought.

This cat is smart, Flex thought. Fewer lies, always wise.

“What is the history of ‘Bothme’?”

An odd question. The only reason Flex could imagine for the kzin’s curiosity was that he wanted to know how to label the pedestal that would soon hold Flex’s stuffed carcass.

“Bothme derives from the old English words ‘both’ and ‘me.’ My great-grandfather Argumos was an organlegger, and he had an illegal clone of himself made, so he could harvest the organs when his failed. There’s a black market for those on Jinx. For some reason the clone grew up as an independent citizen. I don’t know why; maybe Argumos was caught. Anyway, the family split from two ancestors, which Argumos called ‘both me,’ to avoid legal battles over inheritance. To this day, none of his descendants knows which was from the original or the cloned line.”

“So you are not even a bastard, but an artificial one!” S’larbo’s hooded ears perked.

Flex shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m from the original line.”

“To be uncertain is the greatest shame imaginable. But let’s cut to the quick. If you monkeys have quick inside those pink beetles that pass for claws. Why are you here?”

“Right now, the only thing I care about is my mate, who is injured somewhere out in the jungle. She and I have a secret mission, that even the mercenaries we came with didn’t know. All they knew was that they were to help kidnap you. It was to be a surgical strike.”

“Not to kill as many kzinti as possible?”

“I’ll be honest with you. No one was concerned about collateral damage. It happens. But no, the clients that funded the mission only wanted you alive. There’s something they need from you.”

That was mostly true. Flex did not know the details, only that a Puppeteer named Hylo wanted information from S’larbo. He knew little about the peculiar two-headed creatures, and had only seen Hylo on image screens, and then only in silhouette. The information sought was about something called Zeno’s Wormhole, whatever that was. How this pompous puss came upon such esoteric data was a mystery. But then, with so many ranking kzinti passing through his lair, it made sense that he might be involved in some far-flung enterprises.

“And you don’t know why they wanted to capture me?”

“You’re rich, aren’t you? I can imagine any number of reasons.”

S’larbo roared. The sleeping female stirred, but did not wake. She only purred louder. “Do you honestly think that paltry bit of disinformation would free you?”

“Of course not. But the Puppeteer home world might.”

“Your ship has scampered away,” S’larbo said, “though that could be a ruse, just like your transparent offer. You don’t know where that home world is.”

“Not yet, but there’s a way to find out. It’s dangerous, especially for you.”

S’larbo bared his teeth and inhaled, but held his breath, ready to hiss. Good, thought Flex. He had to get through to this overgrown housecat somehow; time was running out for Annie.

“The Puppeteers targeted you for some reason,” Flex said. “I have no idea why, but we were supposed to shanghai you and turn you over to them.”

Jarko-S’larbo hissed, spattering Flex’s face. The Jinxian wiped it off and continued. “Suppose you go along with that plan, sending a decoy in your place. Then you can track the decoy right back to the Puppeteer’s home world. We’ve already got data to suggest where it is.”

“Do you now,” S’larbo said, still hissing. “Why don’t you just give me that?”

Bait taken. “I can do that here and now. Get your best astrogator in here.”

S’larbo eyed him suspiciously, but paced to a com console next to the fireplace. He pushed a button and muttered something Flex could not hear. At the same time, one of the hunters who had captured Flex returned to the gallery, and with a guard ready to cut Flex open with a beam rifle, S’larbo conferred in gruff whispers with the hunter. Then the hunter left, and the guard moved next to Flex. In a moment, another kzin entered, smaller than most. He wore a helmet on his head, not for protection in battle, but for virtual computing.

“I’d be a fool to allow you access to my network,” S’larbo said. “But First Technician can check out your story. Can you do this securely First Technician?”

“Certainly, sir. I am familiar with every cyber-trap the humans have conceived.”

That’s what you think, Flex mused. The time was ripe for him to fulfill his mission, and he was intent on doing it, whether he got out of this or not. “Start with the code for the Institute of Knowledge,” Flex instructed the technician. “But do not commit the request.”

“Done,” said First Technician, as a series of connection indicators lit to life. Then, to Jarko-S’larbo, “No risk yet, sir. Everyone uses this portal, kzinti included.”

“Now,” said Flex, “cancel the last three digits of the code.”

“Cancel them?”

“Yes. The system treats the cancel codes as additional entry codes. It doesn’t actually erase the previous three.”

First Technician looked impressed, and he exchanged glances with S’larbo.

“Now re-enter the last three digits, and commit. That will get you into the back door, and I’ll give you my personal code. Of course, the code changes each time, so you’ll need me…”

“Technician?”

“It may be as the human says, m’lord. It would not be a trivial conquest to penetrate the Institute of Knowledge at this level.”

“But?”

“It could be a mousetrap.”

Flex saw his opportunity waning, so he tongued his lower left molar and released a capsule that had been implanted there prior to the voyage. Then he stifled a sneeze.

Flex held a hand to his mouth. “Sorry,” he said. “I must be allergic to your technician’s fur. Some kzinti have that effect on me.”

With Annie, they might still have a chance at their first plan, to catnap S’larbo. Without her, he would at least carry out his part of the mission. Flex sneezed, then covered his mouth politely.

“Monkey tricks!” said S’larbo. “Sever the connection.”

First Technician turned a hard switch on his helmet, and the row of blinking indicators went dark.

S’larbo hissed. “My grandfather was right. Technician, dismiss! As for you, Argumos Bothme, I have decided to kill you only after you have been my guest for dinner. You see, my warriors have found your female, dead in her metal coffin. I want her on tonight’s menu while she is still fresh. What kzin can say he’s tasted a human female?”

He spat a command to someone outside the hall, and two kzinti guided a chrome-finished gravity sledge into the hall. Flex tensed as he saw Annie Venzi, still in her armor, atop the gurney. Her helmet had been removed and her eyes were closed. The sight evoked the memory of how he had fallen in love with her when they had wrestled over the last spacesuit during a decompression emergency, and his horror as she floated in vacuum, looking dead. Now her body was truly lifeless. Flex choked in horror, and felt the blood flee from his head.

“Doesn’t she look positively succulent?” S’larbo said, gnashing his fangs in mockery.

Flex shivered. He chewed the inside of his mouth, and then let out a scream of anger. At the same time, a shrill klaxon blared, and everyone leaped in alarm. Jarko-S’larbo whirled around, and the guards ran out of the hall, raising their weapons.

Rifle beams fired outside the steaming windows, and Flex came to his senses. He ran to Annie, placing one hand on her head, and the other on her suited arm. Her skin was cold.

The sounds of a firefight echoed outside, and two of the tall windows shattered. Flex heard an engine whining. It was the extraction team from the Catscratch Fever. His message had gotten through.

Flex raked Annie’s hair, then reluctantly cut loose. He threw Annie over his broad naked shoulder, and hauled her to the shattered opening. Amidst gunfire and chaos, the kzinti were least worried about an unarmed monkey.

But S’larbo’s slumbering kzinrett had awoken, and took notice. She took to all fours, and with an earsplitting shriek, she arched her back, sliced her leather bonds with painted claws, and pounced.

Flex bolted for the nearest shattered window and somersaulted through the opening. Something caught, and he fell hard, his face impacting on a stone walkway. Dazed, he swore and tried to figure out what had happened.

“Annie!” The female kzin had stripped her from his back. Flex tried to stand, but his vision was clouded. From his knees, he looked frantically for the help he knew was nearby.

His sneeze had worked, sending a shower of nanocomps into the technician’s data port. The tiny components coalesced into a homing beacon, signaling good old Zel Kickovich and the Catscratch Fever to commence extraction. Eight armored men had swung in from a roaring lander, beams blazing. Flex was thrown bodily into a stealth shuttle, still calling for Annie. But there was no time. The shuttle rose above the palace.

“So it’s only you,” said the pilot grimly.

Flex huffed an affirmation. He’d lost his Annie.

“I’m sorry.” The pilot ducked the shuttle under some ground fire.

“Just a sec,” Flex said, grinding his teeth until he could feel the pain. “We haven’t killed any kzinti yet.”

“You planted the spybot?” said the pilot.

Flex nodded. “But the Puppeteers expect some collateral damage, to maintain the ruse. Do you know where the kits are?”

“Easy enough to figure out. I saw their jungle gym on the way in. The kittens are all over the place. Even under attack, the kzinti can’t herd their own cats to safety. You want to scratch some of them?”

Annie’s admonition burned in his mind. Don’t kill the kits. He had promised he would not. But that was before. Another image seared his brain-that of the kzinti eating his beloved Annie.

“Drop a butt-breaker on them.”

The pilot smiled. “Can’t do it. That would make us unbalanced. I’m going to have to drop two.” He pushed two release switches, and made for the sky.

Below, an enormous fireball grew to engulf half of the palace.

As they made orbit, joined by two other strike shuttles, the pilot pointed to a flashing yellow indicator. “I’ve been ignoring that,” he told Flex. “A com request from the kzinti.”

“This I gotta hear,” said Flex, still grinding his teeth furiously.

The pilot opened the line, and the screaming voice of Jarko-S’larbo graced the shuttle mid-sentence. “…And I’ll kill you and every shit-flicking monkey that has ever breathed your bastardized name…”

“He’s a real sweetie,” said the pilot.

Flex said nothing, but resumed grating his teeth until they began to crack.

Most battles are cold and impersonal, especially for a data puller. You sit at your station reading data and instructions, pushing buttons and relaying information. Somewhere out there maybe a million klicks away is a faceless enemy, claws and jaws atrophying for lack of flesh on which to gnaw. You have to remind yourself who your enemy is and what they’ve done. That is most battles, for most people. This battle was personal, and Flex was a field agent as well as an ops researcher.

A hundred days passed, filled with thoughts of Annie. He had done everything in his power to save her, but could not. Her lifeless face haunted his soul, and thoughts of what the kzinti might have done to her sickened him physically. On top of all that his broken promise gnawed at his gut because it was the one thing that he had done willingly.

His supervisor sympathized, but eventually felt obliged to growl, “Get to work!”

As if on cue, Flex’s nanos began to report in, giving his ingenuity something tangible to gnash at. Jarko-S’larbo obviously had designs on a more honorable station than that as a tour guide. If Flex could rob him of his wormhole prize, Annie would rest easier.

The nanobots hidden in Flex’s tooth were much more than homing signals. They were the latest tool in the kit of the professional information spy, of which Flex was the best. His sneeze had deployed millions of microscopic vectors, electronic germs whose first task was to unite in as many numbers as possible inside the target device-the kzinti technician’s data helmet in this case. Once the nanobots organized themselves into functional units, they deployed their malicious programs. Sending the homing signal was simple, but incidental. Their primary function took fifty standard days to bear fruit.

On Jinx, Flex returned home to downtown Sirius Mater where he had access to equipment best suited for receiving the precious fragments of intelligence. The Puppeteers were waiting patiently for his report, but Flex was no longer motivated by their money or promises to increase his longevity. Nor was he consumed by the fire of revenge. What was working its way under his skin and into his bones was his broken promise to Annie. Her most strenuous desire was to complete the mission and collect the intelligence without resorting to feline infanticide. A fault of hers, perhaps, but he had sworn to her. Worst of all, his breach of her trust cast a dark shadow over her death.

He did not know how to make it up to her, other than to proceed as originally planned and make good with the Puppeteers. Perhaps in the process, he would find some way to redeem himself. If not, a real suicide attack might be a very good idea, kits be damned.

When the nanobots began feeding stolen data to Flex’s collection system, co-opted from forgotten coldputer cycles, he did not immediately inform the Puppeteers. Better to figure out just what this wormhole thing was all about first, so he would know the full value of his efforts.

In fact, there wasn’t much data to be had, but the information the cat Jarko-S’larbo had dragged in was very specific. There was reference to something that translated to a “non-transversable wormhole,” which he managed to correlate with something called a Zeno’s Wormhole in some esoteric mathematical literature. The intelligence implied that such an object had been found, and its location was given. The importance of this object was not known, but the information had cost the lives of at least one entire expedition.

With that as his basis, Flex commenced his private research in two directions. First, he learned all he could about the theoretical Zeno’s Wormhole. He did not understand much of the detail, but he compiled it for future use. A non-transversable wormhole was a natural vortex that could form in space connecting two places with a shortcut through hyperspace. Possibly the result of an interaction between two black holes passing in the night, the wormhole could remain stable long after its parents had moved on. What made a Zeno unique was that it didn’t lead anywhere-the far end was pinched off. If one entered the wormhole opening, one would eventually hit a dead end. The literature was unclear whether one could exit from such an object, and Flex guessed that this may have been the little snag faced by previous expeditions. In any case, it was clear why the Puppeteers were interested in a Zeno’s Wormhole. It would be a groundbreaking scientific discovery, if nothing else. Still, Flex couldn’t shake the suspicion that there was more to it than just that.

His second line of inquiry was concerned with Jarko-S’larbo. He surmised that the wealthy kzin had bought the information from someone who did not have the means to mount another expedition, and that S’larbo intended to do so himself. The sweetest revenge would be to rob the kzin at the moment of his finest glory. Flex set about orchestrating his own trip to the wormhole.

With access to all public information in known space, and great skill at piecing together seemingly unrelated data from the great rumor mill in the sky, it was not difficult for Flex to outline S’larbo’s plan. What ships come and go at Meerowsk? Where had they come from, and where did they go next? Who had been talking with whom? What statistical anomalies were there in com logs that might lead to S’larbo’s co-conspirators?

The art of intelligence is to assemble bits of information, make deductions, draw a coherent big picture. At best one might plant information designed to reach a desired outcome. As such an artist, Flex Bothme fancied himself as a pointillist, seeing a broad pattern emerge from the bits. Ultimately, this painting would have his signature on it.

The light was wan, most of it coming from the lights of two landers. Overhead, the bright arm of the Milky Way was cold and remote.

Flex stood next to the spacesuited Jarko-S’larbo, on the dead moon of a gas giant circling a spent sun beyond 18 Scorpii that was gasping its last breaths of exhausted hydrogen. He had timed his arrival just ahead of the kzin. To his surprise, S’larbo had landed alone, presumably to claim his prize for himself. Perhaps not so surprising after all. Flex had a beam rifle leveled on the cat, who was surprised, though he did not yet recognize his human adversary. Spacesuits and vacuums do wonders to mask odors. It was too late for the cat to call for reinforcements and preserve his honor.

The dead moon was larger than Earth, orbiting in a leaden march as if looking for a more pleasant site to be buried. It was a wonder anyone found it. Flex suspected that the Outsiders had tipped someone off, but since the information had been bought and sold several times already, it was impossible to determine.

At nearly twice the gravity of Earth-a bit more than Jinx-Flex felt quite at home. The burden on the kzin helped even up the odds, should there be a fight. Then again, S’larbo’s gloves were tipped with metal claws twice the size of his natural ones. Overhead, Catscratch Fever and the kzin ship, Sizthz Chitz, circled in wary orbits. Zel Kickovich had reconfigured the Fever so as not to be recognized from the cat-and-mouse game back at Meerowsk. It got no trouble from the kzinti ratliner-so called because of the fresh game allowed to scurry the dim corridors as food and sport.

Zeno’s Wormhole? Flex stood at the mouth of an artifact, a cylindrical tube of something like a General Products hull, but showing signs of scarring from what must have been hundreds of millions of years of exposure to the cruel elements of space. The tube was sixty-four meters long, according to data collected shipside (and downloaded into Flex’s in-helmet knowledge well) and just under ten meters in diameter. It floated above a gravity polarizer that had been set up below it by the unnamed party that had vanished from record.

The only other features on the airless surface were piles of rocky rubble that outlined what were once walls. The moon had never had an atmosphere; it was likely that the natural regolith had once protected an underground compound. No doubt the ruins would be worth digging up, but for now, the prize hovered half a meter above the contemporary lift system.

Even with two lights blazing into the tube, Flex couldn’t see a thing inside. “After you,” he said to Jarko-S’larbo through his com unit.

“I don’t trust Jinxians,” S’larbo said, and Flex didn’t blame him. “For example, those protrusions on your helmet look like weapons. Then again, since you are a coward, they are probably antennae, linking you to your precious Institute of Knowledge.”

He was referring to the horns. Flex had a horn affixed to his helmet’s forehead, and a smaller one just above it. The horns represented the weapons of Flex’s self-adopted totem, the rhinoceros. They also contained not a link to Jinx, but a complete data set from the Institute, bootlegged, of course. S’larbo was more right than he knew.

“Bad guess,” said Flex. “Are we going in there, or not?”

“After you,” said the ratcat-in-a-can.

Maybe not such a bad idea, thought Flex, depending on what was inside. If the earlier expedition lay dead in there, the disarmed S’larbo might find a weapon. On the other hand, he would be foolish to go in alone.

“We go together.”

They climbed a portable stair that had been erected at the left end of the metal cylinder. One long stride from there, and they were inside the cylinder. Its surface was a charcoal gray, so that helmet lights revealed no internal detail. Flex expected to at least see the star glow at the far opening, but it was blackness.

They continued ahead, walking cautiously down the inner length of the alien artifact. It seemed safe enough, and there was no trace of the prior expedition. They reached the far end, at which point they could see outside. The nearby midden heaps had blocked most of the light from that side.

“It’s inert,” S’larbo said. “There’s no stasis box here!”

Stasis box? Now that’s a rather important bit of information to have missed, Flex thought. “Maybe someone beat you to it.”

“You!” shouted S’larbo.

Flex was about to deny that when the great cat made his move. Kzinti were notorious for announcing their attacks with a scream, but evidently this fellow had enough sense to attack first, and scream later. He went for Flex’s rifle, but only succeeded in knocking it to the curved floor. Fighting in a spacesuit usually had less than satisfactory results.

Flex scrambled for the weapon, and once the kzin realized he would get it, the cat bounded away down the corridor. By the time Flex raised the rifle, S’larbo was nearly out of the artifact. He would undoubtedly return, with a weapon from his lander. Unable to catch him, Flex opted to stay put, saving his strength. In this gravity, the kzin would tire out quickly. Besides, by staying at the far end of the corridor, Flex could fire, while maintaining an escape route at his back.

He kept an eye on that opening, in case S’larbo tried to sneak in that way, but there were no stairs to allow an easy approach.

After a while, Flex heard a blip from his warning system. His sensor had detected the priming of a beam rifle. Flex could see S’larbo silhouetted at the far opening of the tunnel. He cut off his lights and stepped up the curving wall to his right, to get out of the line of fire. He left his data display up, but covered the lower part of his visor with an arm, to block the light.

“What’s wrong, you hairless coward?” S’larbo was gloating.

“Is that the honor of the kzinti, to hunt with overwhelming force? I thought you hunted with bare claws.”

“Your gibbering spews like bandersnatch dung. Too long have my people faltered at the lies of you bony worms.”

Flex could not keep his position so high up the wall, and slid down. As he sought better footing, two strange things happened. First, he felt the entire cylinder roll slightly under his foot. While the cylinder hung stable over the ground, it was free to rotate on its long axis without friction. And Flex’s weight was enough to set it in motion. Second, as it moved, some hidden mechanism must have awoken, because a dull amber light emanated from an area at the center of the structure.

Jarko-S’larbo grunted with surprise, not knowing that Flex had triggered the device. Flex stepped higher up the rounded wall, and the tube cooperated, rolling down under his weight.

Time to shake things up a bit, Flex thought.

S’larbo fired two bolts down the center of the tube, missing Flex, who continued to climb up the wall. He heard the kzin grunt again, and guessed that the ratcat had momentarily lost his balance.

“Is it true,” said Flex, stopping the roll and reversing it as hard as he could, “that cats always land on their feet?”

“Grrraaarr!”

Flex again turned around and treaded hard up the opposite wall. Once the tube got going, he stopped it, and ran the other way. More bad shots from S’larbo, but they were getting better. Sooner or later, one would connect, and that would be it. Not content to die at the hands of this fur ball, Flex pounded full-bore up one wall, to get the cylinder spinning as fast as he could. It was more fun getting the kzin dizzy, storming him, and fighting hand-and-claw. He wanted to beat the shit out of that bastard before boring a hole in him.

The cylinder rolled at a good clip, so that if Flex stopped too long, his feet would be swept out from under him. Not a problem; at a mere meter and a half, he’d have a better time of it than a knock-kneed feline twice his height.

“Let’s go even faster!” he said.

“You’re doing this?” S’larbo hissed, unable to suppress his astonishment.

Flex worked his way to the center, but slowly, because he wanted to reverse the direction at unpredictable intervals. An image from history formed in his mind: that of two men rolling on a floating log, until one fell into the water. No doubt a competition from the Olympic games of ancient Greece.

Meanwhile, the light at the center of the tunnel was growing, and Flex feared that the keen eyes of the kzin would have no trouble seeing him now. Yet, in the growing light, an object seemed to descend from the ceiling, blocking most of the tunnel at its center. It made no sense, since the “ceiling” was constantly rolling around. When the object-or group of objects, as they now appeared to be-reached the “ground,” the light shot back upward. The beam seemed to reach through the cylinder, forming a shaft of light reaching up at a right angle to the tunnel, extending beyond it, where there was once a curved ceiling. The new shaft appeared to be another cylinder like the first, but Flex could see only a little way up into it.

The objects under the new tunnel were bathed in the amber light. They were solid rectangles of differing sizes, open on their tops. Where the two tunnels joined above, a series of armatures hung, perhaps waiting to re-hoist the empty boxes, or to bring new ones.

“Hey, Slobbo!” Flex said, to see if the kzin saw what he was seeing. No answer. He tried again, but the changes to the cylinder seemed to have cut off their communication.

Flex stopped revving up the cylinder, letting it coast. He had to keep walking up one side, or side-stepping to avoid falling down. He turned his lights back on and did a quick query of his knowledge well. Nothing was forthcoming until he correlated “Zeno’s Wormhole” with “stasis box.” This produced an obscure monogram with the intriguing title: “The Spontaneous Generation of a Quasi-Quantized Stasis Field inside a Rotating, Non-Traversable Wormhole: A Proposal on How the Slaver Stasis Boxes Might Have Been Manufactured.” It was not a quick read.

Wisely, Flex had been studying related material, and as a professional collector and collator of information, he got the gist of it while skimming his display and side-stepping at the same time.

Finagling mist demons, he thought. This artifact is a factory for stasis boxes, and I’ve turned the damn thing on!

While he was coming to grips with that, he was slow to notice something else. His lower legs tingled, from the feet up past his knees, and he found difficulty in walking toward the intersecting tunnel. He took a step with his right leg, to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. He wasn’t. There was an unmistakable increase in resistance as he progressed toward this small wormhole’s pinch point.

Flex scanned some basic material on “the dichotomy paradox,” whereby ancient Earth mathematicians such as Zeno noted that for an object to move from point A to point B, it first had to reach the midpoint between the two. But to reach that midpoint, the object first had to reach the quarter point, and so on. The paradox was that if one had to overtake an infinite number of intermediate points, one could never reach the destination. The mystery took thousands of years for mankind to unravel, by the invention of calculus.

One speculation about non-traversable wormholes that caught Flex’s attention concerned time traps. One theory supposed that because space was squashed inside, time literally slowed as one progressed inward, until it stopped completely at the pit of the wormhole. So, he concluded, this was how the Slavers built and stocked the variety of stasis boxes found scattered throughout known space. This could be the most important technological advance since the conquest of hyperspace.

Thank you Institute of Knowledge, he thought.

The wormhole was only about ten meters in diameter, so there was a distracting sort of Coriolis effect-a differing temporal disparity between his head and feet. It was manageable but caused the tingling in his legs. He felt bloated, and his heart raced to pump blood to feet that plodded through congealing time.

Flex heightened his awareness of things unseen ahead, but doubted the kzin could make it to the stasis boxes, much less past them. The cylinder was open on both ends, and its contents symmetrical, so it was logical to assume that a mirror wormhole stretched out in the opposite direction.

Flex stumbled as he turned back to face the center, and he realized that the spin of the tunnel had slowed. The kzin! He was running himself, trying to de-spin the thing. As the cylinder slowed, Flex helped it, blindly running the same way around as his opponent. The rolling slowed, then picked up rapidly in the other direction.

The phantom tunnel above widened, and then another one opened up at an odd angle to it. Tempted, Flex ran as hard as he could, spinning the cylinder to a breakneck pace, clockwise. As if on cue, three more lighted tunnels opened up, each at an equal angle of separation from the others, forming five spokes of a wheel around the axle spun by Flex and S’larbo.

“Tabam!” said Flex to himself. This isn’t just a Zeno’s Wormhole, or even two or three. It’s a roulette of wormholes meeting at the hub, feeding into the machine. But feeding from where? He wanted to get nearer to the center to be able to peer into one of the adjoining tunnels-he’d be the first to see into them in over a billion years-unless the expedition that had discovered the artifact had already been sucked into eternity.

He pressed on, feeling a thickening of space with each latent step. His left foot kept straying outward, and his right would tend to trip into the left, so he crouched to lower his center of mass and lessen the Coriolis effect.

The next step was a toughie. To his eyes, the tunnel ahead appeared level, but his muscles told him that the floor sloped up like a summitless mountain. Just a few more arduous steps for mankind, he thought, and I should be able to get a look into the other tunnels. Then retreat.

Another step, as through thick mud, then another, through hardening cement. “You’re a Jinxian,” he told himself, “the strongest race in known space, by weight. Now move your Finagling feet.”

Aside from the difficulty in walking, Flex could only assume that the nearer he was to the stasis boxes, the slower time must be moving for him, relative to home. It was a sobering thought, but he recalled an old Jinxian adage: Only a fool wastes time worrying about time. Wisdom for a race of short lifespan, his father once said.

When he was a swindler’s dozen paces from the center, he craned his neck to look up into one of the other spokes in the roulette. As it rolled away and out of sight, he thought he saw inside a huge vehicle of some kind, so huge that it should not have been able to fit inside. It was a transport laden with dozens of terra-movers with mounted guns. Or so it appeared to Flex. Whatever it was, it looked like it was meant to build entire worlds-or destroy them. He could analyze the fleeting image later because his helmet imager was recording.

He gazed into the next wormhole as it wheeled into view to his right. Inside was a star field, and against that, what looked like a fleet of ships in an attack formation. The ships matched the configuration of those he had seen in a research project many years back: Slaver battleships. How a fleet of ships could fit in a tunnel not much larger than a personal yacht he did not know. Perhaps the wormhole could compress space as well as time. The fleet may have fallen into a larger wormhole that pinched into the roulette an eon ago.

Flex kept his feet apace with the rolling floor, and tried to peer into another tunnel. To do that, he had to step aside to see past a trio of the largest stasis boxes, that were large enough to hold a groundcar. He ran opposite the tunnel’s rotation, slowing it into darkness, and then picking up speed counter-clockwise. The light from the other spokes returned, only this time their contents were different.

In the tunnel directly above, the mechanical armatures began to move, and Flex watched in horror as a huge spindly gray creature-or robot-darted through the lowering arms like a bizarre monkey in high steely branches. The leggy creature grabbed two of the crane arms and beat them together until they came untangled. Immediately, the crane separated into two parts, each a cage of curved girders. No longer binding together, the cages lowered until they were just above the tumbling metal boxes ahead. Arms protruding from the cages unfolded to corral the boxes, holding each in the vacuum above the turning floor. What the crane was attached to up in the vertical tunnel was a mystery; it could not be affixed to the inner surface of a rotating cylinder.

I’ll be damned, Flex thought. The robot just repaired this whole thing.

He realized that not only had the wormhole been harnessed into a stasis factory, but that he had the opportunity of a lifetime-if he didn’t end up frozen in the jaws of time. No, it was Jarko-S’larbo who would be caught!

Humans hold a great part of their reflexes in the spinal cord, so that a hand may be pulled from fire without even thinking about it. On the other hand, humans also have instincts to freeze and to flee. Kzinti had a larger part of their reflexes in the spine, hence the “scream and leap” before thinking. Sometimes freezing or fleeing was better than charging. This evolutionary difference was to determine what happened next. With all the technology, knowledge, wisdom, and experience, what matters most at times is a construction of nature that was intended for primordial worlds, not rotating wormholes.

Flex calculated what might make Jarko-S’larbo leap, and decided it was time to reveal himself. He backpedaled, gradually slowing the tunnel’s rotation until the roulette faded into darkness.

“Ratcat!” he said.

“I see where you are now, Jinxian. You’re dead!”

“Don’t you want my name and title first, so you can claim bragging rights? I’m Flex Bothme, the guy who dropped the bomb on your kits!”

“Skalazaal!” bellowed Jarko-S’larbo in a cry meant to freeze prey. “Flex Bothme?”

Flex ran hard, pounding up the wall to set things spinning again. His feet hurt like hell, worse than the frostbite at Brain Freeze, but he ran even harder, conjuring up the roulette, and the mechanical arms overhead.

He only heard the kzin shout, “-you shitflick-” as the cat leaped toward him, and froze in mid-air, amidst the repaired machinery.

When the icy-eyed monkey thing went into action, Flex needed no other warning. He made the most of that human flight reflex, taking the path of decreasing resistance.

As he reached the mouth of the tunnel, he realized he might be able to turn off the machinery, so he jogged the cylinder down to a halt. The roulette spun away into unseen dimensions and the lights went out. Cautiously making his way back to the center, Flex beamed his light around. There was no sign of the Slaver fleet, the monster monkey, nor of Jarko-S’larbo.

Unless you count the neatly packaged, kzin-sized stasis box that lay sealed on the floor.

“Well happy birthday to me,” said Flex.

Zel Kickovich folded his arms and looked Flex hard in the eyes. “What took you so damn long?” he said. “We nearly got fried by the Sizthz Chitz.”

“You try lugging a metal box the size of a groundcar through a tunnel, down eight stairs, across a pile of rubble, and into a cargo hold,” Flex retorted. “With a kzin in it. Then try evading the Lisp Kzinship-”

“Sizthz Chitz.”

“-however you pronounce it, in a lander with half the power of a wristcomp. Oh, and did I mention nearly getting stuck in a time trap? How long is it supposed to take to get out of one of those, by the book?”

Zel beamed and clapped Flex on the back. “I love it when you get mad.”

That drew a wan smile from Flex.

Now that Catscratch Fever had reached hyperdrive, Flex was able to contact the Puppeteer Hylo by hyperwave.

“Mission accomplished,” he said dryly. “I found a stasis box, but I’m keeping it.”

Both Hylo’s sock puppet heads bobbed up and down in silhouette, but did not make a sound.

“Don’t get your necks in a knot,” Flex said. “I’ve got something even better for you.”

“It would not go well with you to renege on our bargain,” said Hylo, composing herself. (At least Flex assumed Hylo was a female, based on the shimmering pitch of her alluring voice. If Hylo was male, Flex felt just a little bit dirty.)

“Trust me, when I tell you what I found, you’re not going to want the stasis box anymore.” Puppeteers were cowards, after all, and used humans to deal with dangerous species. For Finagle’s sake, Hylo would probably be afraid of its own silhouette.

He told Hylo about the stasis assembly line, and Zeno’s Roulette. “Not only can you make your own stasis boxes, there are ageless places to explore, if you can figure out how to get through. It’s impossible to place a value on that.”

After a pantomime of what looked like two weak-knuckled hand shadows consulting one another, Hylo could only agree. “What’s in the stasis box?” she asked.

“One very angry cat I call Schrödinger, because I haven’t made up my mind whether he lives or dies.”

Hylo appreciated that. “You know what I would do,” she said. “In any event, you may have the stasis box.”

“I’ll send you the data you need, and destroy all copies.”

“Then this is our last verbal communication. We have no more use for you.”

“Why not?” said Flex, not so much caring as curious.

“We no longer have enough stars to compensate you. Our budget is exceeded. Money aside, we find you to be motivated by sex and revenge. Both are now spent tools.”

Both unlikely, sex and revenge, Flex considered. But both me. Bothme. Jinxian puns were rancid enough without being one’s actual name. He harrumphed. Sex and revenge, love and money, whatever you called them, that was not him, not anymore. He had his revenge, but Annie was still gone. Maybe she could at least rest in peace now.

“Good-bye,” Flex said, thinking more like “good riddance.”

“I wish you well,” said Hylo. “What will you do, now that you have a tiger by the tail, and a pocketful of stars?”

Flex thought that over. A pocketful of stars. “Tabam,” he said.