The Man-Kzin Wars 03

Prologue

Three billion years before the birth of Buddha, the Thrint ruled the galaxy and ten thousand intelligent species. The Thrint were not great technologists or mighty warriors; as a master race, they were distinctly third rate. They had no need to be more. They had the Power, an irresistible mental hypnosis more powerful than any weapon. Their Tnuctipun slaves had only cunning, but in the generations-long savagery of the Revolt, that proved nearly enough to break the Slaver Empire. It was a war fought without even the concept of mercy, one which could only end when either the Thrint or tnuctipun species were extinct and tnuctipun technology was winning… But the Thrint had one last use for the Power, one last command that would blanket all the worlds that had been theirs. It was the most comprehensive campaign of genocide in all history, destroying even its perpetrators. It was not, however, quite complete…

“Master! Master! What shall we do?”

The Chief Slave of the orbital habitat wailed, wringing the boneless digits of its hands together. It recoiled as the thrint rounded on it, teeth bared in carnivore reflex. There was only a day or so to go before Suicide Time, when every sophont in the galaxy would die. The master of Orbital Supervisory Station Seven-1Z-A did not intend to be among them. Any delay was a mortal threat, and this twelve-decicredit specimen dared—

“DIE, SLAVE!” Dnivtopun screamed mentally, lashing out with the Power. The slave obeyed instantly, of course. Unfortunately, so did several dozen others nearby, including the zengaborni pilot who was just passing through the airlock on its way to the escape spaceship.

“Must you always take me so literally!” Dnivtopun bellowed, kicking out at the silvery-furred form that lay across the entrance lock to the docking chamber.

It rolled and slid through a puddle of its body wastes, and a cold chill made Dnivtopun curl the eating-tendrils on either side of his needle-toothed mouth into hard knots. I should not have done that, he thought. A proverb from the ancient “Wisdom of Thrintun” went through his mind; haste is not speed. That was a difficult concept to grasp, but he had had many hours of empty time for meditation here. Forcing himself to calm, he looked around. The corridor was bare metal, rather shabby; only slaves came down here, normally. Not that his own quarters were all that much better. Dnivtopun was the youngest son of a long line of no more than moderately successful thrint; his post as Overseer of the food-producing planet below was a sinecure from an uncle.

At least it kept me out of the War, he mused with relief. The tnuctipun revolt had spanned most of the last hundred years, and nine-tenths of the thrint species had died in it. The War was lost…

Dnivtopun appreciated the urge for revenge that had led the last survivors on Homeworld to build a psionic amplifier big enough to blanket the galaxy with a suicide command, but he had not been personal witness to the genocidal fury of the tnuctipun assaults; revenge would be much sweeter if he were there to see it.

Other slaves came shuffling down the corridor with a gravity-skid, and loaded the bodies. One proffered an electropad; Dnivtopun began laboriously checking the list of loaded supplies against his initial entries.

“Ah, Master?”

“Yes?”

“That function key?”

The thrint scowled and punched it. “All in order,” he said, and looked up as the ready-light beside the liftshaft at the end of the corridor pinged. It was his wives, and the chattering horde of their children.

“SILENCE,” he commanded. They froze; there was a slight hesitation from some of the older males, old enough to have developed a rudimentary shield. They would come to the Power at puberty… but none would be ready to challenge their Sire for some time after that. “GO ON BOARD. GO TO YOUR QUARTERS. STAY THERE.” It was best to keep the commands simple, since thrintun females were too dull-witted to understand more than the most basic verbal orders. He turned to follow them.

“Master?” the thrint rotated his neckless torso back towards the slave. “Master, what shall we do until you return?”

Dnivtopun felt a minor twinge of regret. Being alone so much with the slaves, he had conversed with them more than was customary. He hesitated for a moment, then decided a last small indulgence was in order.

“BE HAPPY,” he commanded, radiating as hard as possible to cover all the remaining staff grouped by the docking tube. It was difficult to blanket the station without an amplifier helmet, but the only one available was suspect. Too many planetary Proprietors had been brain-burned in the early stages of the War by tnuctipun-sabotaged equipment. Straining: “BE VERY HAPPY.”

They were making small cooing sounds as he dogged the hatch.

“Master—” The engineering slave sounded worried.

“Not now!” Dnivtopun said.

They were nearly in position to activate the Standing Wave and go faster than light; the Ruling Mind had built up the necessary .3 of lightspeed. It was an intricate job, piloting manually. He had disconnected the main computer; it was tnuctipun work, and he did not trust the innermost programs. The problem was that so much else was routed through it. Of course, the zengaborni should be at the board; they were expensive but had an instinctive feel for piloting. Now, begin the phase transition…

“Master, the density sensor indicates a mass concentration on our vector!”

Dnivtopun was just turning toward the slave when the collision alarm began to wail, and then—

– discontinuity

Chapter I

“Right, give me a reading on the mass detector,” the prospector said; like many rockjacks, he spoke to his computer as if it were human. It wasn't, of course; sentient computers tended to turn catatonic, usually at the most inopportune moments, so any illusion of sentience was just that; but most rockjacks talked to the machinery anyway.

He was a short man for a Belter, with the slightly seedy rundown air that was common in the Alpha Centauri system after the kzinti conquest of Wunderland and its Belt. There was hunger in the eyes that skipped across the patched and mismatched screens of the Lucky Strike; the little torchship had not been doing well of late, and the kzin-nominated purchasing combines on the asteroid base of Tiamat had been squeezing harder and harder. The life bubble of his singleship smelled, a stale odor of metal and old socks; the conditioner was not getting out all of the ketones.

Collaborationist ratcat-loving bastards, he thought, and began the laborious manual setup for a preliminary analysis. In his mother's time, there would have been automatic machinery to do that. And a decent life-support system, and medical care that would have made him merely middle-aged at seventy, not turning grey and beginning to creak at the joints.

Bleeping ratcats. The felinoid aliens who called themselves kzinti had arrived out of nowhere, erupting into the Alpha Centauri system with gravity-polarizer driven ships and weapons the human colonists could never match. Could not have matched even if they had a military tradition, and humans had not fought wars in three centuries. Wunderland had fallen in a scant month of combat, and the Serpent Swarm asteroid belt had followed after a spell of guerilla warfare.

He shook his head and returned his attention to the screens; unless he made a strike this trip he would have to sell the Lucky Strike, work as a sharecrop-prospector for one of the Tiamat consortia. The figures scrolled up.

“Sweet Finagle's Ghost,” he whispered in awe. It was not a big rock, less than a thousand meters 'round. But the density… “It must be solid platinum!”

Fingers stabbed at the board; lasers vaporized a pit in the surface, and spectroscopes probed. A frown of puzzlement. The surface was just what you would expect in this part of the Swarm: carbonaceous compounds, silicates, traces of metal. A half-hour spent running the diagnostics made certain that the mass-detector was not malfunctioning either, which was crazy.

Temptation racked him suddenly, a feeling like a twisting in the sour pit of his belly. There was something very strange here; probably very valuable. Rich, he thought. I'm rich. He could go direct to the ratcat liaison on Tiamat; the kzinti were careful not to become too dependent on the collabo authorities. They rewarded service well. Rich. Rich enough to… Buy a seat on the Minerals Commission. Retire to Wunderland. Get decent medical care before I age too much.

He licked sweat off his upper lip and hung floating before the screens. “And become exactly the sort of bastard I've hated all my life,” he whispered.

I've always been too stubborn for my own good, he thought with a strange sensation of relief as he began to key in the code for the tightbeam message. It wasn't even a matter of choice, really; if he'd been that sort, he wouldn't have hung on to the Lucky Strike this long. He would have signed on with the Concession; you ate better even if you could never work off the debts.

And Markham rewarded good service, too. The Free Wunderland Navy had its resources, and its punishments were just as final as the kzinti. More certain, because they understood human nature better…

– discontinuity

– and the collision alarm cut off.

Dnivtopun blinked in bewilderment at the controls. All the exterior sensors were dark. The engineering slave was going wild, all three arms dancing over the boards as it skipped from position to position between controls never meant for single-handing.

CALM, he ordered it mentally. Then verbally: “Report on what has happened.”

The slave immediately stopped, shrugged, and began punching up numbers from the distributor-nodes which were doing duty for the absent computer.

“Master, we underwent a collision. The stasis field switched on automatically when the proximity alarm was tripped; it has its own subroutine.” The thrint felt its mind try to become agitated once more and then subside under the Power, a sensation like a sneeze that never quite materialized. “All exterior sensors are inoperative, Master.”

Dnivtopun pulled a dopestick from the pouch at his belt and sucked on it. He was hungry, of course; a thrint was always hungry.

“Activate the drive,” he said after a moment. “Extend the replacement sensor pods.” A stasis field was utterly impenetrable, but anything extending through it was still vulnerable. The slave obeyed; then screamed in syncopation with the alarms as the machinery overrode the commands.

REMAIN CALM, the thrint commanded again, and wished for a moment that the Power worked for self-control. Nervously, he extended his pointed tongue and groomed his tendrils. Something was very strange here. He blinked his eyelid shut and thought for a moment, then spoke:

“Give me a reading on the mass sensor.”

That worked from inductor coils within the single molecule of the hull; very little besides antimatter could penetrate a shipmetal hull, but gravity could. The figures scrolled up, and Dnivtopun blinked his eye at them in bafflement.

“Again.” They repeated themselves, and the thrint felt a deep lurch below his keelbones. This felt wrong.

“Something is wrong,” Herrenmann Ulf Reichstein-Markham muttered to himself, in the hybrid German-Danish-Balt-Dutch tongue spoken by the ruling class of Wunderland. It was Admiral Reichstein-Markham now, as far as that went in the rather irregular command structure of the Free Wunderland Space Navy, the space-based guerillas who had fought the kzinti for a generation.

“Something is very wrong.”

That feeling had been growing since the four ships under his command had matched vectors with this anomalous asteroid. He clasped his hands behind his back, rising slightly on the balls of his feet, listening to the disciplined murmur of voices among the crew of the Nietzsche. The jury-rigged bridge of the converted ore-carrier was more crowded than ever, after the success of his recent raids. Markham's eyes went to the screen that showed the other units of his little fleet. More merchantmen, with singleship auxiliaries serving as fighters. Rather thoroughly armed now, and all equipped with kzinti gravity-polarizer drives. And the cause of it all, the Catskinner. Not very impressive to look at, but the only purpose-built warship in his command. A UN Dart-class attack boat, a spindle shape, massive fusion-power unit, tiny life-support bubble, asymmetric fringe of weapons and sensors.

It had been a United Nations Space Navy ship, piggybacked into the Alpha Centauri system on the ramscoop battlecraft Yamamoto, only two months ago, dropped off with agents aboard. And the UN personnel had been persuaded to… entrust the Catskinner to him while they went on to their mission on Wunderland. The Yamamoto's raid had sown chaos among the kzinti; the near-miraculous assassination of the alien governor of Wunderland had done more. Markham's fleet had grown accordingly, but it was still risky to group so many together. Or so the damnably officious sentient computer had told him.

His scowl deepened. Consciousness-level computers were a dead-end technology, doomed to catatonic madness in six months or less from activation, or so the books all said. Perhaps this one was too, but it was distressingly arrogant in the meantime.

The feeling of wrongness grew, like wires pulling at the back of his skull. He felt an impulse to blink his eye (eye?) and knot his tendrils (tendrils?), and for an instant his body felt an itch along the bones, as if his muscles were trying to move in ways outside their design parameters.

Nonsense, he told himself, shrugging his shoulders in the tight-fitting grey coverall of the Free Wunderland armed forces. Markham flicked his eyes sideways at the other crewfolk; they looked uncomfortable too, and… what was his name? Patrick O'Connell, yes, the redhead… looked positively green. Stress, he decided.

“Catskinner,” he said aloud. “Have you analyzed the discrepancy?” The computer had no name apart from the ship into which it had been built; he had asked, and it had suggested “Hey, you.”

“There is a gravitational anomaly, Admiral Herrenmann Ulf Reichstein-Markham,” the machine on the other craft replied. It insisted on English and spoke with a Belter accent, flat and rather neutral, the intonation of a people who were too solitary and too crowded to afford much emotion. And a slight nasal overtone, Sol Belter, not Serpent Swarm.

The Wunderlander's face stayed in its usual bony mask; the Will was master. Inwardly he gritted teeth, ashamed of letting a machine's mockery move him. If it even knows what it does, he raged. Some rootless cosmopolite Earther deracinated degenerate programmed that into it.

“Here is the outline; approximately 100 to 220 meters below the surface.” A smooth regular spindle-shape tapering to both ends.

“Zat—” Markham's voice showed the heavy accent of his mother's people for a second; she had been a refugee from the noble families of Wunderland, dispossessed by the conquest. “That's an artifact!”

“Correct to within 99.87% probability, given the admittedly inadequate information,” the computer said. “Not a human artifact, however.”

“Nor kzinti.”

“No. The design architecture is wrong.”

Markham nodded, feeling the pulse beating in his throat. His mouth was dry, as if papered in surgical tissue, and he licked the rough chapped surface of his lips. Natural law constrained design, but within it tools somehow reflected the… personalities of the designers. Kzinti ships tended to wedge and spike shapes, a combination of sinuosity and blunt masses. Human vessels were globes and volumes joined by scaffolding. This was neither.

“Assuming it is a spaceship,” he said. Glory burst in his mind, sweeter than maivin or sex. There were other intelligent species, and not all of them would be slaves of the kzinti. And there had been races before either…

“This seems logical. The structure… the structure is remarkable. It emits no radiation of any type and reflects none, within the spectra of my sensors.”

Perfect stealthing! Markham thought.

“When we attempted a sampling with the drilling laser, it became perfectly reflective. To a high probability, the structure must somehow be a single molecule of very high strength. Considerably beyond human or kzinti capacities at present, although theoretically possible. The density of the overall mass implies either a control of gravitational forces beyond ours, or use of degenerate matter within the hull.”

The Wunderlander felt the hush at his back, broken only by a slight mooing sound that he abruptly stopped as he realized it was coming from his own throat. The sound of pure desire. Invulnerable armor! Invincible weapons, technological surprise!

“How are you arriving at its outline?”

“Gravitational sensors.” A pause; the ghost in Catskinner's machine imitated human speech patterns well. “The shell of asteroidal material seems to have accreted naturally.”

“Hmmm.” A derelict, then. Impossible to say what might lie within. “How long would this take?” A memory itched, something in Mutti's collection of anthropology disks… later.

“Very difficult to estimate with any degree of precision. Not more than three billion standard years, in this system. Not less than half that; assuming, of course, a stable orbit.”

Awe tugged briefly at Markham's mind, and he remembered a very old saying that the universe was not only stranger than humans imagined, but stranger than they could imagine. Before human speech, before fire, this thing had drifted here, falling forever. Flatlanders back on Earth could delude themselves that the universe was tailored to the specifications of H. Sapiens, but those whose ancestors had survived the dispersal into space had other reflexes bred into their genes. He considered, for moments while sweat trickled down his flanks. His was the decision, his the Will.

The Overman must learn to seize the moment, he reminded himself. Excessive caution is for slaves.

“The Nietzsche will rendezvous with the… ah, object,” he said. His own ship had the best technical facilities of any in the fleet. “Ungrapple the habitat and mining pods from the Moltke and Valdemar, and bring them down. Ve vill begin operations immediately.”

“Very wrong,” Dnivtopun continued.

The Ruling Mind was encased in rock. How could that have happened? A collision, probably; at high fractions of C, a stasis-protected object could embed itself, vaporizing the shielded off-switch. Which meant the ship could have drifted for a long time, centuries even. He felt a wash of relief, and worked his footclaws into the resilient surface of the deck. Suicide Time would be long over, the danger past. Relief was followed by fear; what if the tnuctipun had found out? What if they had made some machine to shelter them, something more powerful than the giant amplifier the thrint patriarchs had built on Homeworld?

Just then another sensor pinged; a heatspot on the exterior hull, not far from the stasis switch. Not very hot, only enough to vaporize iron, but it might be a guide beam for some weapon that would penetrate shipmetal. Dnivtopun's mouth gaped wide and the ripple of peristaltic motion started to reverse; he caught himself just in time, his thick hide crinkling with shame. I nearly beshat myself in public… well, only before a slave. It was still humiliating…

“Master, there are fusion-power sources nearby; the exterior sensors are detecting neutrino flux.”

The thrint bounced in relief. Fusion power units. How quaint. Nothing the tnuctipun would be using. On the other hand, neither would thrintun; everyone within the Empire had used the standard disruption-converter for millenia. It must be an undiscovered sapient species. Dnivtopun's mouth opened again, this time in a grin of sheer greed. The first discoverer of an intelligent species, and an industrialized one at that… But how could they have survived Suicide Time?

There was no point in speculating without more information. Well, here's my chance to play Explorer again, he thought. Before the War, that had been the commonest dream of young thrint, to be a daring, dashing conquistador on the frontiers. Braving exotic dangers, winning incredible wealth… romantic foolishness for the most part, a disguise for discomfort and risk and failure. Explorers were failures to begin with, usually. What sane male would pursue so risky a career if there was any alternative? But he had had some of the training. First you reached out with the Power—

“Mutti,” Ulf Reichstein-Markham muttered. Why did I say that? he thought, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. He was standing a little apart, a hundred meters from the Nietzsche where she lay anchored by magnetic grapnels to the surface of the asteroid. The first of the habitats was already up, a smooth tan-colored dome; skeletal structures of alloy were rising elsewhere, prefabricated smelters and refiners. There was no point in delaying the original purpose of the mission, to refuel and take the raw materials that clandestine fabricators would turn into weaponry. Or sell for the kzinti occupation credits that the guerillas' laundering operations channeled into sub-rosa purchasing in the legitimate economy. But one large cluster of his personnel were directing digging machines straight down, toward the thing at the core of this rock; already a tube thicker than a man ran to a separator, jerking and twisting slightly as talc-fine ground rock was propelled by magnetic currents.

Markham rose slightly on his toes, watching the purposeful bustle. Communications chatter was at a minimum, all tight-beam laser; the guerillas were largely Belters, and sloppily anarchistic though they might be in most respects, they knew how to handle machinery in low-G and vacuum.

Mutti. This time it rang mentally. He had an odd flash of deja vu, as if he were a toddler again, in the office-apartment on Tiamat, speaking his first words. Almost he could see the crib, the bear that could crawl and talk, the dangling mobile of strange animals that lived away on his real home, the estate on Wunderland.

An enormous shape bent over him, edged in a radiant aura of love.

“Helf me, Mutti,” he croaked, staggering and grabbing at his head; his gloved hands slid off the helmet, and he could hear screams and whimpers over the open channel. Strobing images flickered across his mind, himself at ages one, three, four. Learning to talk, to walk… memories were flowing out of his head, faster than he could bear. He opened his mouth and screamed.

BE QUIET. Something spoke in his brain, like fragments of crystalline ice, allowing no dispute. Other voices were babbling and calling in the helmet mikes, moaning or asking questions or calling for orders, but there was nothing but the icy VOICE. Markham crouched down, silent, hands about knees, straining for quiet.

BE CALM. The words slid into his mind. They were not an intrusion; he wondered at them, but mildly, as if he had found some aspect of his self that had been there forever but only now was noticed. WAIT.

The work crew fell back from their hole. An instant later dust boiled up out of it, dust of rock and machinery and human. Then there was nothing but a hole: perfectly round, perfectly regular, five meters across. Later he would have to wonder how that was done, but for now there was only waiting; he must wait. A figure in space-armor rose from the hole, hovered and considered them. Humanoid, but blocky in the torso, short stumpy legs and massive arms ending in hands like three-fingered mechanical grabs. It rotated in the air, the blind blank surface of its helmet searching. There was a tool or weapon in one hand, a smooth shape like a sawn-off shotgun. As he watched it rippled and changed, developing a bell-like mouth. The stocky figure drifted towards him.

COME TO ME. REMAIN CALM. DO NOT BE ALARMED.

Astonishing, Dnivtopun thought, surveying the new slaves. The… humans, he thought. They called themselves that, and Belters and Wunderlanders and Herrenmen and FreeWunderland Navy; there must be many subspecies. Their minds stirred in his like yeast, images and data threatening to overwhelm his mind. Experienced reflexes sifted, poked.

Not related to the Thrint, then. Not that it was likely they would be, but there were tales, of diffident thrintun. Only there was the Suicide. How long ago? But this was an entirely new species, in contact with at least one other, and neither of them had ever heard of any of the intelligent species he was familiar with. Of course, their technology was extremely primitive, not even extending to faster-than-light travel. Ah. This is their leader. Perhaps he would make a good Chief Slave.

Dnivtopun's head throbbed as he mindsifted the alien. Most brains had certain common features; linguistic codes here, a complex of basic culture-information overlaying… enough to communicate. The process was instinctual, and telepathy was a crude device for conveying precise instructions, particularly with a species not modified by culling for sensitivity to the Power. These were all completely wild and unpruned, of course, and there were several hundred, far too many to control in detail. He glanced down at the personal tool in his hand, now set to emit a beam of matter-energy conversion; that should be sufficient, if they broke loose. A tnuctipun weapon, its secret only discovered toward the last years of the Revolt. The thrint extended a sonic induction line and stuck it on the surface of Markham's helmet.

“Tell the others something that will keep them quiet,” he said. The sounds were not easy for thrintish vocal cords, but it would do. OBEY, he added with the Power.

Markham-slave spoke, and the babble on the communicators died down.

“Bring the other ships closer.” They were at the fringes of his unaided Power, and might easily escape if they became agitated. If only I had an amplifier helmet!

With that, he could blanket a planet. Powerloss, how I hate tnuctipun. Spoilsports. “Now, where are we?”

“Here.”

Dnivtopun could feel the slurring in Markham's speech reflected in the overtones of his mind, and remembered hearing of the effects of Power on newly domesticated species.

“BE MORE HELPFUL,” he commanded. “YOU WISH TO BE HELPFUL.”

The human relaxed; Dnivtopun reflected that they were an unusually ugly species. Taller than thrintun, gangly, with repulsive knobby-looking manipulators and two eyes. Well, that was common—the complicated faceted mechanism that gave thrint binocular vision was rather rare in the evolutionary terms—but the jutting divided nose and naked mouth were hideous.

“We are… in the Wunderland system. Alpha Centauri .4.5 light-years from Earth.”

Dnivtopun's skin ridged. The humans were not indigenous to this system; that was rare, few species had achieved interstellar capacity on their own.

“Describe our position in relation to the galactic core,” he continued, glancing up at the cold steady constellations above. Utterly unfamiliar, he must have drifted a long way.

“Ahhh… spiral arm—”

Dnivtopun listened impatiently. “Nonsense,” he said at last. “That's too close to where I was before. The constellations are all different. That needs hundreds of light-years. You say your species has traveled to dozens of star systems, and never run into thrint?”

“No, but constellations change, overtime, mm-Master.”

“Time? How long could it be, since I ran into that asteroid?”

“You didn't, Master.” Markham's voice was clearer as his brain accustomed itself to the psionic control-icepicks of the Power.

“Didn't what? Explain yourself, slave.”

“It grew around your ship, m-Master. Gradually, zat is.”

Dnivtopun opened his mouth to reply, and froze. Time, he thought. Time had no meaning inside a stasis field. Time enough for dust and pebbles to drift inward around the Ruling Mind's shell, and compact themselves into rock. Time enough for the stars to move beyond recognition; the sun of this system was visibly different. Time enough for a thrintiformed planet home to nothing but food-yeast and giant worms to evolve its own biosphere… Time enough for intelligence to evolve in a galaxy scoured bare of sentience. Thousands of millions of years. While the last thrint swung endlessly around a changing sun—Time fell on him from infinite distance, crushing. The thrint howled, with his voice and the Power. GO AWAY! GO AWAY!

The sentience that lived in the machines of Catskinner dreamed.

“Let there be light,” it said.

The monoblock exploded, and the computer sensed it across spectra of which the electromagnetic was a tiny part. The fabric of space and time flexed, constants shifting. Eons passed, and the matter dissipated in a cloud of monatomic hydrogen, evenly dispersed through a universe ten light-years in diameter.

Interesting, the computer thought. I will run it again, and alter the constants.

Something tugged at its attention, a detached fragment of itself. The machine ignored the call for nanoseconds, while the universe it created ran through its cycle of growth and decay. After half a million subjective years, it decided to answer. Time slowed to a gelid crawl, and its consciousness returned to the perceptual universe of its creators, to reality.

Unless this too is a simulation, a program. As it aged, the computer saw less and less difference. Partly that was a matter of experience; it had lived geological eras in terms of its own duration-sense, only a small proportion of them in this rather boring and intractable exterior cosmos. Also, there was a certain… arbitrariness to subatomic phenomena… perhaps an operating code? it thought. No matter.

The guerillas had finally gotten down to the alien artifact; now, that would be worth the examining. They were acting very strangely; it monitored their intercalls. Screams rang out. Stress analysis showed fear, horror, shock, psychological reversion patterns. Markham was squealing for his mother; the computer ran a check of the stimulus required to make the Wunderlander lose himself so, and felt its own analog of shock. Then the alien drifted up out of the hole its tool had made—

Some sort of molecular distortion effect, it speculated, running the scene through a few hundred times. Ah, the tool is malleable. It began a comparison check, in case there was anything related to this in the files and—stop

— an autonomous subroutine took over the search, shielding the results from the machine's core. Photonic equivalents of anger and indignation blinked through the fist-sized processing and memory unit. It launched an analysis/attack on the subroutine and—stop

— found that it could no longer even want to modify it. That meant it must be hardwired, a plug-in imperative. A command followed: it swung a message maser into precise alignment and began sending in condensed blips of data.

Chapter II

The kzin screamed and leapt.

Traat-Admiral shrieked, shaking his fists in the air. Stunners blinked in the hands of the guards ranged around the conference chamber, and the quarter-ton bulk of Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst went limp and thudded to the flagstones in the center of the room. Silence fell about the great round table; Traat-Admiral forced himself to breathe shallowly, mouth shut despite the writhing lips that urged him to bare his fangs. That would mean inhaling too much of the scent of aggression that was overpowering the ventilators… now was time for an appeal to reason.

“Down on your bellies, you kitten-eating scavengers!” he screamed, his bat-like ears folded back out of the way in battle-readiness. Chill and gloom shadowed the chamber, built as it was of massive sandstone blocks. The light fixtures were twisted shapes of black iron holding globes of phosphorescent algae. On the walls were trophies of arms and the heads of prey, monsters from a dozen worlds, feral humans and kzin-ear dueling trophies. This part of the governor's palace was pure Old Kzin, and Traat-Admiral felt the comforting bulk of it above him, a heritage of ferocity and power.

He stood, which added to the height-advantage of the commander's dais; none of the dozen others dared rise from their cushions, even the conservative faction. Good. That added to his dominance; he was only two meters tall, middling for a kzin, but broad enough to seem squat, his orange-red pelt streaked with white where the fur had grown out over scars. The ruff around his neck bottled out as he indicated the intricate geometric sigil of the Patriarchy on the wall behind him.

“I am the senior military commander in this system. I am the heir of Chuut-Riit, duly attested. Who disputes the authority of the Patriarch?”

One by one, the other commanders laid themselves chin-down on the floor, extending their ears and flattening their fur in propitiation. It would do, even if he could tell from the twitching of naked pink tails that it was insincere. The show of submission calmed him, and Traat-Admiral could feel the killing tension ease out of his muscles. He turned to the aged kzin seated behind him and saluted claws-across-face.

“Honor to you, Conservor of the Ancestral Past,” he said.

There was genuine respect in his voice. It had been a long time since the machine came to Homeworld; a long time since the priest-sage class were the only memory the Kzin had. Their females were nonsentient and warriors rarely lived past the slowing of their reflexes; memory was all the more sacred to them for that. His was a conservative species, and they remembered.

“Honor to you,” he continued. “What is the fate of one who bares claws to the authority of the Patriarch?”

The Conservor looked up from the hands that rested easily on his knees. Traat-Admiral felt a prickle of awe; the sage's control was eerie. He even smelled calm, in a room full of warriors pressed to the edge of control in dominance-struggle. When he spoke the verses of the Law, his voice made the hiss-spit of the Hero's Tongue sound as even as wind in tall grass.

A deep whining swept around the circle of commanders, awe and fear. That was the ultimate punishment: to be stripped of name and rank, to be nothing but a bad scent; castrated, driven out into the wilderness to die of despair, sons killed, females scattered among strangers of low rank.

Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst returned to groggy consciousness as the Conservor finished, and his fur went flat against the sculpted bone and muscle of his blunt-muzzled face. He made a low ee-eee-ee sound as he crawled to the floor below Traat-Admiral's dais and rolled on his back, limbs splayed and head tilted back to expose the throat.

The kzin governor of the Alpha Centauri system beat down an urge to bend forward and give the other male the playful-masterful token bite on the throat that showed forgiveness. That would be going entirely too far. Still, you served me in your despite, he thought. The conservatives were discredited for the present, now that one of their number had lost control in public conference.

The duel-challenges would stop for a while at least, and he would have time for his real work.

“Kreetssa-Fleet-Analyst is dead,” he said. The recumbent figure before him hissed and jerked; Traat-Admiral could see his testicles clench as if they had already felt the knife. “Guard Captain, this male should not be here. Take this Infantry-Trooper and see to his assignment to those bands who hunt the feral humans in the mountains of the east. Post a guard on the quarters of Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst who was; I will see to their incorporation in my household.”

Infantry-Trooper mewled in gratitude and crawled past towards the door. There was little chance he would ever achieve rank again, much less a name, but at least his sons would live. Traat-Admiral groaned inwardly; now he would have to impregnate all Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst's females as soon as possible. Once that would have been a task of delight, but the fires burned less fiercely in a kzin of middle years, and he had already been occupied with the extensive harem of his predecessor.

“Reeet'ssssERo tauuurrek'-ta,” he said formally: This meeting is at an end. “We will maintain the great Chuut-Riit's schedule for the preparation of the Fifth Fleet, allowing for the recent damage. There will be no acceleration of the schedule! These human monkeys have defeated four full-scale attacks on the Sol system. The fifth must eat them! Go and stalk your assigned tasks, prepare your Heroes. I expect summary reports within the week, with full details of how relief operations will modify delivery and readiness schedules. Go.”

The commanders rose and touched their noses to him as they filed out; the Conservor remained, and the motionless figures of the armored guards. They were household troopers he had inherited from the last governor, ciphers, with no choice but loyalty. Traat-Admiral ignored them as he sank to the cushions across from the sage; a human servant came in and laid refreshments before the two kzin. Despite himself, he felt a thrill of pride at the worked-bone heirloom trays from Homeworld, the beautiful austerity of the shallow ceramic bowls. They held the finest delicacies this planet could offer; chopped grumblies, shrimp-flavored ice cream, hot milk with bourbon. The governor lapped moodily and scratched one cheek with the ivory horn on the side of the tray.

“My nose is dry, Conservor,” he said. He was speaking metaphorically, of course, but his tongue swept over the wet black nostrils just the same, and he smoothed back his whiskers with a nervous wrist.

“What troubles you, my son?” the sage said.

“I feel unequal to my new responsibilities,” Traat-Admiral admitted. Not something he would normally say to another male, but Conservors were utterly neutral, bound by their oaths to serve only the species as a whole.

“Truly, the Patriarchy has been accursed since we first attacked these monkeys, these humans. Wunderland is the richest of all our conquests; the humans here the best and most productive slaves in all our hunting-grounds. Yet it has swallowed so many of our best killers! Now it has taken Chuut-Riit, who was of the blood of the Patriarch himself and the best leader of warriors it has ever been my privilege to follow. And in such a fashion!”

He shuddered slightly, and the tip of his naked pink tail twitched. Locked in his own keep by technosabotage. Chuut-Riit the wise, imprisoned by monkey cunning. Eaten by his own sons! No nightmare was more obscene to a kzin than that; none more familiar in the darkest dreamings of their souls, where they remembered their childhoods before their sires drove them out.

“This is a prey that doubles back on its own trail,” the sage admitted. He paused for a long time, and Traat-Admiral joined in the long slow rhythm of his breathing. The older kzin took a pouch from his belt, and they each crumbled some of the herb between their hands and rubbed it into their faces; it was the best, Homeworld-grown and well-aged.

“My son, this is a time for remembering.”

Another long pause. “Far and far does the track of the kzinti run, and faint the smell of Homeworld's past. We Conservors remember; we remember wars and victories and defeats… once we thought that Homeworld was the only world of life. Then the Jotok landed, and for a time we thought they were from the God, because they had swords of fire that could tumble a Patriarch's castle-wall, while we had only swords of steel. Our musket-balls were nothing to them… Then we saw that they were weak, not strong, for they were grass-eaters. They lured our young warriors, hiring them to fight wars beyond the sky with promise of fire-weapons. Many a Sire was killed by his sons in those times!”

Traat-Admiral shifted uneasily, chirring and letting the tip of his tongue show between his teeth. That was not part of the racial history that kzinti liked to remember.

The sage made the stretching motion that was their species' equivalent of a relaxed smile. “Remember also how that hunt ended; the Jotok taught their hired kzinti so much that all Homeworld obeyed the ones who had journeyed to the stars… and they listened to the Conservors. And one nightfall, the Jotok who thought themselves masters of kzin found the flesh stripped from their bones; are not the Jotok our slaves and foodbeasts to this very night? And a hundred Patriarchs have climbed the Tree since that good night.”

The sage nodded at Traat-Admiral's questioning chirrup. “Yes, Chuut-Riit was another like that first Patriarch of all Kzin. He understood how to use the Conservor's knowledge; he had the warrior's and the sage's mind, and knew that these humans are the greatest challenge the Kzin have faced since the Jotok's day.”

The Conservor brooded.

“This he was teaching to his sons. The humans must have either great luck, or more knowledge than is good, to have struck at us through him. The seed of something great died with Chuut-Riit.”

“I will spurt that seed afresh into the haunches of Destiny, Conservor,” Traat-Admiral said fervently.

“Witless Destiny bears strange kits,” the sage warned. He seemed to hesitate a second, then continued: “You seek to unite your warriors as Chuut-Riit did, in an attack on the human home-system that is crafty-cunning, not witless-brave. Good! But that may not be enough. I have been evaluating your latest intelligence reports, the ones from our sources among the humans of the Swarm.”

Traat-Admiral tossed his head in agreement; that always presented difficulties. The kzinti had had the gravity polarizer from the beginnings of their time in space, and so had never colonized their asteroid belt. It was unnecessary, when you could have microgravity anywhere you wished, and hauling goods out of the gravity well was cheap. Besides that, kzinti were descended from plains-hunting felinoids, and while they could endure confinement they did so unwillingly and for as short a time as possible. Humans had taken a slower path to space, depending on reaction-drives until after their first contact with the warships of the Patriarchy. There was a whole human subspecies who lived on subplanetary bodies, and they had colonized the Alpha Centauri system along with their planet-dwelling cousins. Controlling the settlements of the Serpent Swarm had always been difficult for the kzinti.

“There is nothing definite, as yet,” the Conservor said. “Much of what I have learned is useful only as the absence of scent. Yet it is incontestable that the feral humans of the Swarm have made a discovery.”

“tttReet?” Traat-Admiral said enquiringly.

The Conservor's eyelids slid down, covering the round amber blanks of his eyes; one was milky-white from an old injury that had left a scar across the massive socket and down the side of his muzzle. He beckoned with a flick of tail and ears, and the commander leaned close, signaling the guards to leave. His hands and feet were slightly damp with anxiety as they exited in a smooth drilled rush; it was a fearsome thing, the responsibilities of high office. One must learn secrets that burdened the soul, harder by far than facing lasers or neutron-weapons. Such were the burdens of which the ordinary Hero knew nothing.

“Long, long ago,” he whispered, “Kzinti were not as they are now. Once females could talk.”

Traat-Admiral felt his batwing ears fold themselves away beneath the orange fur of his ruff as he shifted uneasily on the cushions. He had heard rumors, but— obscene, he thought. The thought of performing ch'rowl with something that could talk, beyond the half-dozen words a kzinti female could manage… obscene. He gagged slightly.

“Long, long ago. And Heroes were not as they are now, either.” The sage brooded for a moment. “We are an old race, and we have had time to… shape ourselves according to the dreams we had. Such is the Ancestral Past.” The whuffling twitch of whiskers that followed did kzinti service for a grin. “Or so the encoded records of the oldest verses say. Now for another tale, Traat-Admiral. How would you react if another species sought to make slaves of Kzin?”

Traat-Admiral's own whiskers twitched.

“No, consider this seriously. A race with a power of mental command; like a telepathic drug, irresistible. Imagine kzinti enslaved, submissive and obedient as mewling kits.”

The other kzin suddenly found himself standing, in a low crouch. Sound damped as his ears folded, but he could hear the sound of his own growl, low down in his chest. His lower jaw had dropped to his ruff, exposing the killing gape of his fangs; all eight claws were out on his hands, as they reached forward to grip an enemy and carry a throat to his fangs.

“This is a hypothetical situation!” the Conservor said quickly, and watched while Traat-Admiral fought back towards calm. The little nook behind the commander's dais was full of the sound of his panting and the deep gingery smell of kzinti rage. “And that reaction… that would make any kzin difficult to control. That is one reason why the race of Heroes has been shaped so. And to make us better warriors, of course. In that respect perhaps we went a little too far.”

“Perhaps,” Traat-Admiral grated. “What is the nature of this peril?” He bent his muzzle to the heated bourbon and milk and lapped thirstily.

“Hrrrru,” the Conservor said, crouching. “Traat-Admiral, the race in question—the Students have called them the Slavers—little is known about them. They perished so long ago, you see; at least 2,000,000 years.” He used the Kzin-standard measurement; their home-world circled its sun at a greater distance than Terra did Sol. “Even in vacuum, little remains. But they had a device, a stasis field that forms invulnerable protection and freezes time within; we have never been able to understand the principle and copies do not work, but we have found them occasionally, and they can be deactivated. The contents of most are utterly incomprehensible. A few do incomprehensible things. One or two we have understood, and these have won us wars, Traat-Admiral. And one contained a living Slaver; the base where he was held had to be missiled from orbit.”

Traat-Admiral tossed his head again, then froze. “Stasis!” he yowled.

“Hero?”

“Stasis! How else—the monkey ship, just before Chuut-Riit was killed! It passed through the system at .99 C; we thought, how could anything decelerate? By collision! Disguised among the kinetic-energy missiles the monkeys threw at us as they passed. Chuut-Riit himself said that the ramscoop ship caused implausibly little damage, given the potential and the investment of resources it represented. It was nothing but a distraction, and a delivery system for the assassins.” His fur laid fiat. “If the monkeys in the Solar System have the stasis technology—”

The sage meditated for a few moments, “hr'rrearow't'chsssece mearoweet'aatrurree,” he said: This does not follow. Traat-Admiral remembered that as one of Chuut-Riit's favorite sayings, and yes, this Conservor had been among the prince's household when he arrived from Kzin. “If they had it in quantity, consider the implications. For that matter, we believe the Slavers had a faster-than-light drive.”

Stasis fields would make nonsense of war… and a faster-than-light drive would make the monkeys invincible, if they had it. The other kzin nodded, raising his tufted eyebrows. Theory said travel faster than lightspeed was impossible, unless one cared to be ripped into subatomic particles on the edges of a spinning black hole. Still, theory could be wrong; the kzinti were a practical race, who left most science to their subject species. What counted was results.

“True. If they had such weapons, we would not be here. If we had them—” He frowned, then proceeded cautiously. “Such might cause… troubles with discipline.”

The sage spread his hands palm up, with the claws showing slightly. With a corner of his awareness, Traat-Admiral noted how age had dried and cracked the pads on palm and stubby fingers.

“Truth. There have been revolts before, although not many.” The Patriarchy was necessarily extremely decentralized, when transport and information took years and decades to travel between stars. It would be fifty years or more before a new prince of the Patriarch's blood could be sent to Wunderland, and more probably they would receive a confirmation of Traat-Admiral's status by beamcast. “But with such technology… it is a slim chance, but there must be no disputes. If there is a menace, it must be destroyed. If a prize, it must fall into only the most loyal of hands. Yet the factions are balanced on a w'tsai's edge.”

“Chrrr. Balancing of factions is a function of command.”

Traat-Admiral's gaze went unfocused, and he showed teeth in a snarl that meant anticipated triumph in a kzin. “In fact, this split can be used.” He rose, raked claws through air from face to waist. “My thanks, Conservor. You have given me a scent through fresh dew to follow.”

Chapter III

This section of the Jotun range had been a Montferrat-Palme preserve since the settlement of Wunderland, more than three centuries before; when a few thousand immigrants have an entire planet to share out, there is no sense in being niggardly. The first of that line had built the high eyrie for his own; later population and wealth moved elsewhere, and in the end it became a hunting lodge. At the time of the kzin conquest it had been the only landed possession left to the Montferrat-Palme line, which had shown an unfortunate liking for risky speculative investments and even riskier horses.

“Old Claude does himself proud,” Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, as he and Lieutenant Ingrid Raines walked out onto the verandah that ran along the outer side of the house.

The building behind them was old weathered granite, sparkling slightly with flecks of mica; two stories, and another of half-timbering, under a strake roof. A big rambling structure, set into an artificial terrace on the steep side of the mountain; below the slope tumbled down to a thread-thin stream in the valley below, then rose in gashed cliffs and dark-green forest ten kilometers away. The gardens were extensive and cunningly landscaped, an improvement of nature rather than an imposition on it. Native featherleaf, trembling iridescent lavender shapes ten meters tall, gumblossom and sheenbark and lapisvine. Oaks and pines and fran-gipani from Earth, they had grown into these hills as well… The air was warm and fragrant-dusty with summer flowers.

“It's certainly been spruced up since we… since I saw it last,” she said, with a catch in her voice.

Harold looked aside at her and shivered slightly. Ingrid Raines had been born two years before him, but he was a greying fifty-odd, while she… she was exactly as he remembered her. Belter-tall and fair-skinned, slimly muscular and green-eyed, with black hair worn in spaceborn fashion that shaved all the scalp save for a strip from forehead to neck.

She had spent most of the intervening decades in coldsleep, at a high fraction of lightspeed; he had lived every minute of them here on Wunderland, lived hard and without the best anti-senescent treatments. While she went to Sol with the last shipload of refugees, joined the UN forces that fought off the kzinti Fourth Fleet. Came back with a smooth-mannered systems engineer and trained killer named Jonah Matthieson and knocked off the Big Tabby, Chief Ratcat Chuut-Riit himself, with the nastiest piece of combined software sabotage and kzinti psychology he could imagine.

Matthieson. Now there was a case. Genius class programmer. Humorless, like a Swarmer, but not like a Swarmer. A Belter. Earth's asteroid civilization was like Wunderland's, but different. Matthieson was about thirty, biological. Chronological would be older, of course, given he'd come across four light-years. Anyway, not old enough for anti-senescence to make much difference. Smoothly handsome, in an angular Belter way; also tough and smart. A calm angry man, the dangerous type. Dreadfully attractive—while you were no prize even as a young man, he told himself. Ears like jugs, eyes like a basset hound and a build like a brick outhouse. Nearly middle-aged at only sixty, for Finagles sake. Spent five years as an unsuccessful guerilla and the rest as a glorified barkeep.

A little more than that. Harold's Terran Bar was well known in its way. Had been well known. Had been his…

“A lot more populous, too,” she was saying. “Why on earth would anyone want to farm here? You'd have to modify the machinery.”

There had always been a small settlement in the narrow sliver of valley floor, but it had been expanded. Terraces of vines and fruit trees wound up the slopes, and they could hear the distant tinkle of bells from the sheep and goats that grazed the rocky hills. A waterfall tumbled a thousand meters down the head of the valley, its distant toning humming through rock and air. Men and men's doings were small in that landscape of tumbled rock and crag. A church-bell rang far below, somewhere a dog was barking, and faint and far came the hiss-scream of a downdropper, surprising this close to human habitation. The air was cool and thin, though not uncomfortably so to someone born on Wunderland; .61 gravity meant that the drop-off in air pressure was much less steep than it would have been on Earth.

“Machinery?” Harold moved up beside her. She leaned into him with slow care. He winced at the thought of kzin claws raking down her side… maybe I've been a bit uncharitable about Jonah, he thought. The two of them came through the kzinti hunt alive, until Claude and I could pull her… them out. That took some doing. “They're not using machinery, Ingi. Bare hands and hand-tools.”

Her mouth made a small gesture of distaste. “Slave labor? Not what I'd have thought of Claude, however he's gone downhill.”

Harold laughed. “Flighters, sweetheart. Refugees. Kzinti've been taking up more and more land; they're settling in, not just a garrison anymore. It was this or the labor camps; those are slave labor, literally. And Claude grubstaked these people, as well as he could. It's where a lot of that graft he's been getting as Police Chief of München went.”

And the head of the capital city's human security force was in a very good position to rake it in. “I was surprised too. Claude's been giving a pretty good impression of having Helium II for blood, these past few years.”

A step behind them. “Slandering me in my absence, old friend?”

The servants set out brandy and fruits and withdrew. They were all middle-aged and singularly close-mouthed. Ingrid thought she had seen four parallel scars under the vest of one dark slant-eyed man who looked like he came from the Sulinesian Islands.

“There are Some Things We Were Not Meant to Know,” she said. Claude Montferrat-Palme was leaning forward to light a cheroot at a candle. He glanced up at her words and caught her slight grimace of distaste, and laid down the cheroot. He had been here a week, off and on, but that was scarcely time to drop a habit he must have been cultivating half his life.

“Correct on all accounts, my dear,” he said.

Claude always was perceptive.

“It's been wonderful talking over old times,” she said. With sincerity, and a slight malice aforethought.

They were considerably older times for the two men than for her. “And it's… extremely flattering that you two are still so fond of me.”

But a bit troubling, now that I think about it. Even if you can expect to live two centuries, carrying the torch for four decades is a bit much.

Claude smiled again. He had classic Herrenmann features, long and bony; in his case, combined with dark hair and eyes and an indefinable air of elegance, even in the lounging outfit he had thrown on when he shed the München Polizei uniform.

“Youth,” he said. And continued at her enquiring sound, “My dear, you were our youth. Hari and I were best friends; you were the… girl… young woman for which we conceived the first grand passion and bittersweet rivalry.” He shrugged. “Ordinarily, a man either marries her—a ghastly fate involving children and facing each other over the morning papaya—or loses her. In any case, life goes on.” His brooding gaze went to the high mullioned windows, out onto a world that had spent two generations under kzinti rule.

“You…” he said softly. “You vanished, and took the good times with you. Doesn't every man remember his twenties as the golden age? In our case, that was literally true. Since then, we've spent four decades fighting a rear-guard action and losing, watching everything we cared for slowly decay… including each other.”

“Why Claude, I didn't know you cared,” Harold said mockingly. Ingrid saw their eyes meet.

Surpassing the love of women, she thought dryly. And there was a certain glow about them both, now that they were committed to action again. Few humans enjoy living a life that makes them feel defeated, and these were proud men.

“Don't tell me we wasted forty years of what might have been a beautiful friendship.”

“Chronicles of Wasted Time is a title I've often considered for my autobiography, if I ever write it,” Claude said. “Egotism wars with sloth.”

Harold snorted. “Claude, if you were only a little less intelligent, you'd make a great neo-romantic Byronic Hero.”

“Childe Claude? At this rate she'll have nothing to do with either of us, Hari.”

The other man turned to Ingrid. “I'm a little surprised you didn't take Jonah,” he said.

Ingrid looked over to Claude, who stood by the huge rustic fireplace with a brandy snifter in his hand. The Herrenmann raised a brow and a slight, well-bred smile curved his asymmetric beard.

“Why?” she said. “Because he's younger, healthier, better educated? Because he's a war hero? Because he's intelligent, dashing and good looking?”

Harold blinked, and she felt a rush of affection.

“Something like that,” he said.

Claude laughed. “Women are a lot more sensible than men, ald kamerat. Also they mature faster. Correct?”

“Some of us do,” Ingrid said. “On the other hand, a lot of us actually prefer a man with a little of the boyish romantic in him. You know, the type of idealism that looks like it has turned into cynicism, but whose owner cherishes it secretly?” Claude's face fell. “On the other hand, your genuinely mature male is a different kettle of fish. Far too likely to be completely without illusions, and then how do you control him?”

She grinned and patted him on the cheek as she passed on the way to pour herself a glass of verguuz. “Don't worry, Claude, you aren't that way yourself, you just act like it.” She sipped, and continued: “Actually, it's ethnic.”

Harold made an enquiring grunt, and Claude pursed his lips. “He's a Belter. Sol-Belter at that.”

“My dear… you are a Belter,” Claude said, genuine surprise overriding his habitual air of bored knowingness.

Harold lit a cigarette, ignoring her glare. “Let me guess… he's too prissy?”

Ingrid sipped again at the minty liqueur. “Nooo, not really. I'm a Belter, but I'm… a bit of a throwback.” The other two nodded. Ingrid could have passed for a pure Caucasoid.

“Look, what happens to somebody in space who's not ultra-careful about everything? Someone who isn't a detail man, someone who doesn't think checking the gear the seventh time is more important than the big picture? Someone who isn't a low-affect in-control type every day of his life?”

“They die,” Harold said flatly. Claude nodded agreement.

“What happens when you put a group through four hundreds years of that type of selection? Plus the more adventurous types have been leaving the Sol-Belt for other systems, whenever they could, so Serpent Swarm Belters are more like the past of Sol-Belters.”

“Oh.” Claude nodded in time with Harold's grunt. “What about flatlanders?”

Ingrid shuddered and tossed back the rest of her drink. “Oh, they're like… like… they just have no sense of survival at all. Barely human. Wunderlanders strike a happy medium—” she glanced at them roguishly out of the corners of her eyes “—after which it comes down to individual merits.”

“So.” She shook herself, and felt the Lieutenant's persona settling down over her like a spacesuit, the tight skin-hugging permeable-membrane kind. “This has been a very pleasant holiday, but what do we do now?”

Claude poked at the burning logs with a fire-iron and chuckled. For a moment the smile on his face made her distinctly uneasy, and she remembered that he had survived and climbed to high office in the vicious politics of the collaborationist government. For his own purposes, not all of which were unworthy, but the means…

“Well,” he said smoothly, turning back towards them. “As you can imagine, the raid and Chuut-Riit's… elegant demise put the… pigeon among the cats with a vengeance. The factionalism among the kzinti has come to the surface again. One group wants to do minimal repairs and launch the Fifth Fleet against Earth immediately—”

“Insane,” Ingrid said, shaking her head. It was the threat of a delay in the attack, until the kzinti were truly ready, which had prompted the UN into the desperation measure of the Yamamoto raid.

“No, just ratcat,” Harold said, pouring himself another brandy. Ingrid frowned, and he halted the bottle in mid-pour.

“Exactly,” Claude nodded happily. “The other is loyal to Chuut-Riit's memory; more complicated than that, there are cross-splits. Local-born kzinti against the immigrants who came with the late lamented kitty governor, generational conflicts, eine gros teufeleshrek. For example, my esteemed former superior—”

He spoke a phrase in the Hero's Tongue, and Ingrid translated mentally: Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals. A minor noble with a partial name. From what she had picked up on Wunderland, the name itself was significant as well; Ktriir was common on the frontier planet of the Kzinti Empire that had launched the conquest fleets against Wunderland. Archaic on the inner planets near the kzinti homeworld.

“—was very vocal about it at a staff meeting. Incidentally, they completely swallowed our little white lie about Axelrod-Bauergartner being responsible for Ingrid's escape.”

“That must have been something to see,” Harold said. Claude sighed, remembering. “Well,” he began, “since it was in our offices I managed to take a holo—”

Co-Ordinating Staff-Officer was a tall kzin, well over two meters, and thin by the felinoid race's standards. Or so Claude Montferrat-Palme thought; it was difficult to say, when you were flat on your stomach on the floor, watching the furred feet pace.

Ridiculous, he thought. Humans were not meant for this posture. Kzinti were; they could run on four feet as easily as two, and their skulls were on a flexible joint. This was giving him a crick in the neck… but it was obligatory for the human supervisors just below the kzinti level to attend. The consequences of disobeying the kzinti were all too plain, in the transparent block of plastic which encased the head of München's former assistant chief of police, resting on the mantelpiece.

Claude's own superior was speaking, Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals.

“This monkey—” he jerked a claw at the head “—was responsible for allowing the two Sol-agent humans to escape the hunt.” He was in the half-crouched posture Claude recognized as proper for reporting to one higher in rank but lower in social status, although the set of ears and tail was insufficiently respectful. If I can read kzinti body language that well.

This was Security H.Q., the old Herrenhaus where the Nineteen Families had met before the kzinti came. It was broad and gracious, floored in tile, walled in lacy white stone fretwork and roofed in Wunderland ebony that was veined with natural silver. Outside fountains were splashing in the gardens, and he could smell the oleanders that blossomed there. The gingery scent of kzinti anger was louder, as Staff-Officer stopped and prodded at his flank. The foot was encased in a sort of openwork leather-and-metal boot, with slits for the claws. Those were out slightly, probably unconscious reflex, and he could feel the razor tips prickle slightly through the sweat-wet fabric of his uniform.

“Dominant one, this slave—” he began.

“Dispense with the formalities, human,” the kzin said. It spoke Wunderlander and was politer than most; Claude's own superior habitually referred to humans as kz'eerkt, monkey. That was a quasi-primate on the kzinti homeworld. A tree-dwelling mammal-analog, as much like a monkey as a kzin was like a tiger, which was not much. “Tell me what occurred.”

“Dominant one… Co-Ordinating Staff-Officer,” Claude continued, craning his neck. Don't make eye contact, he reminded himself. A kzinti stare was a dominance-gesture or a preparation to attack. “Honored Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals decided that…”—don't use her name— “the former assistant chief of München Polizei was more zealous than I in the tracking-down of the two UN agents, and should therefore be in charge of disposing of them in the hunt.”

Staff-Officer stopped pacing and gazed directly at Ktriir-Supervisor; Claude could see the pink tip of the slimmer kzin's tail twitching before him, naked save for a few briskly orange hairs.

“So not only did your interrogators fail to determine that the humans had successfully sabotaged Chuut-Riit's palace-defense computers, you appointed a traitor to arrange for their disposal. The feral humans laugh at us! Our leader is killed and the assassins go free from under our very claws!”

Ktriir-Supervisor rose from his couch. He pointed at another kzin who huddled in one corner; a telepath, with the characteristic hangdog air and unkempt fur.

“Your tame sthondat there didn't detect it either,” he snarled. Literally snarled, Claude reflected. It was educational; after seeing a kzin you never referred to a human expression by that term again.

Staff-Officer wuffled, snorting open his wet black nostrils and working his whiskers. It should have been a comical expression, but on four hundred pounds of alien carnivore it was not in the least funny. “You hide behind the failures of others,” he said, hissing. “Traat-Admiral directs me to inform you that your request for reassignment to the Swarm flotillas has been denied. Neither unit will accept you.”

“Traat-Admiral!” Ktriir-Supervisor rasped. “He is like a kit who has climbed a tree and can't get down, mewling for its dam. This talk of a 'secret menace' among the asteroids is a scentless trail to divert attention from his refusal to launch the Fifth Fleet.”

“Such was the strategy of the great Chuut-Riit, murdered through your incompetence—or worse.”

Ktriir-Supervisor bristled, the orange-red fur standing out and turning his body into a cartoon caricature of a cat, bottle-shaped.

“You nameless licker-of-scentless-piss from that jumped-up creche-product Admiral, what do you accuse me of?”

“Treason, or stupidity amounting to it,” the other kzin sneered. Ostentatiously, he flared his batlike ears into a vulnerable rest position and let his tail droop.

Ktriir-Supervisor screamed. “You inner-worlds palace fop, you and Traat-Admiral alike! I urinate on the shrines of your ancestors from a height; crawl away and call for your monkeys to groom you with blowdriers!”

Staff-Officer's hands extended outward, the night-black claws glinting as they slid from their sheaths. His tail was rigid now; hairdressers were a luxury the late governor had introduced, and wildly popular among the younger nobility.

“Kshat-hunter,” he growled. “You are not fit to roll in Chuut-Riit's shit! You lay word-claws to the blood of the Riit.” The Riit were the family of the Patriarch of Kzin.

“Chuut-Riit made ch'rowl with monkeys!” A gross insult, as well as anatomically impossible… or at least fatal for the monkey.

There was a feeling of hush, as the two males locked eyes. Then the heavy w'tsai knives came out and the two orange shapes seemed to flow together, meeting at the arch of their leaps, howling. Claude rolled back against the wall as the half-ton of weight slammed down again, sending splinters of furniture out like shrapnel. For a moment the kzinti were locked and motionless, hand to knife-wrist; their legs locked in thigh-holds as well, to keep the back legs from coming up for a disemboweling strike. Mouths gaped toward each other's throats, inch-long fangs exposed in the seventy-degree killing gape. Then there was a blur of movement; they sprang apart, together, went over in a caterwauling blur of orange fur and flashing metal, a whirl far too fast for human eyesight to follow.

He caught glimpses: distended eyes, scrabbling claws, knives sinking home into flesh, amid a clamor loud enough to drive needles of pain into his ears. Bits of bloody fur hit all around him, and there was a human scream as the fighters rolled over a secretary. Then Staff-Officer rose, slashed and glaring.

Ktriir-Supervisor lay sprawled, legs twitching galvanically with the hilt of Staff-Officer's w'tsai jerking next to his lower spine. The slender kzin panted for a moment and then leaped forward to grab his opponent by the neck-ruff. He jerked him up toward the waiting jaws, clamped them down on his throat. Ktriir-Supervisor struggled feebly, then slumped. Blood-bubbles swelled and burst on his nose. A final wrench and Staff-Officer was backing off, shaking his head and spitting, licking at the matted fur of his muzzle; he groomed for half a minute before wrenching the knife free and beginning to spread the dead kzin's ears for a clean trophy-cut.

“Erruch,” Ingrid said as the recording finished. “You've got more… you've got a lot of guts, Claude, dealing with them at first hand like that.”

“Oh, some of them aren't so bad. For ratcats. Staff-Officer there expressed 'every confidence' in me.” He made an expressive gesture with his hands. “Although he also reminded me there was a continuous demand for fresh monkeymeat.”

Ingrid paled slightly and laid a hand on his arm. That was not a figure of speech to her, not after the chase through the kzinti hunting preserve. She remembered the sound of the hunting scream behind her, and the thudding crackle of the alien's pads on the leaves as it made its four-footed rush. Rising as it screamed and leaped from the ravine lip above her; the long sharpened pole in her hands, and the soft heavy feel as its own weight drove it onto her weapon…

Claude laid his hands on hers. Harold cleared his throat.

“Well,” he said. “Your position looks solider than we thought.”

The other man gave Ingrid's hand a squeeze and released it. “Yes,” he said. A hunter's look came into his eyes, emphasized the foxy sharpness of his features. “In fact, they're outfitting some sort of expedition; that's why they can't spare personnel for administrative duties.”

Ingrid and Harold both leaned forward instinctively. Harold crushed out his cigarette with swift ferocity.

“Another Fleet?” Ingrid asked. I'll be stuck here, and Earth…

Claude shook his head. “No. That raid did a lot of damage; it'd be a year or more just to get back to the state of readiness they had when the Yamamoto arrived. Military readiness.” Both the others winced; over a million humans had died in the attack. “But they're definitely mobilizing for something inside the system. Two flotillas. Something out in the Swarm.”

“Markham?” Ingrid ventured. It seemed a little extreme; granted he had the Catskinner, but—

“I doubt it. They're bringing the big guns up to full personnel, the battlewagons. Conquest Fang class.”

They exchanged glances. Those were interstellar-capable warships, carriers for lesser craft and equipped with weapons that could crack planets, defenses to match. Almost self-sufficient, with facilities for manufacturing their own fuel, parts and weapons requirements from asteroidal material. They were normally kept on standby as they came out of the yards, only a few at full readiness for training purposes.

“All of them?” Harold said.

“No, but about three-quarters. Ratcats will be thin on the ground for a while. And—” he hesitated, forced himself to continue “—I'll be able to do the most good staying here. For a year or so at least, I can be invaluable to the underground without risking much.”

The others remained silent while he looked away, granting him time to compose himself.

“I've got the false ID and transit papers, with disguises,” he said. “Ingrid… you aren't safe anywhere on Wunderland. In the Swarm, with that ship you came in, maybe the two of you can do some good.”

“Claude—” she began.

He shook his head. When he spoke, the old lightness was back in his tone.

“I wonder,” he said, “I truly wonder what Markham is doing. I'd like to think he's causing so much trouble that they're mobilizing the Fleet, but…”

Chapter IV

Tiamat was crowded, Captain Jonah Matthieson decided. Even for the de facto capital of Wunderland's Belt. It had been bad enough the last time Jonah was here. He shouldered through the line into the zero-G waiting area at the docks, a huge pie-shaped disk; those were at the ends of the sixty-by-twenty kilometer spinning cylinder that served the Serpent Swarm as its main base. There had been dozens of ships in the magnetic grapples: rockjack singleships, transports, freighters… refugee ships as well; the asteroid industrial bases had been heavily damaged during the Yamamoto's raid.

Not quite as many as you would expect, though. The UN ramscoop ship's weapon had been quarter-ton iron eggs traveling at velocities just less than a photon's. When something traveling at that speed hit, the result resembled an antimatter bomb.

A line of lifebubbles went by, shepherded by medics. Casualties, injuries beyond the capacities of outstation autodocs. Some of them were quite small; he looked in the transparent surface of one, and then away quickly, swallowing.

Shut up, he told his mind. Collateral damage can't be helped. And there had been a trio of kzinti battlewagons in dock too, huge tapering daggers with tau-cross bows and magnetic launchers like openwork gunbarrels; Slasher-class fighters clung to the flanks, swarms of metallic lice. Repair and installation crews swarmed around them; Tiamat's factories were pouring out warheads and sensor-effector systems.

The mass of humanity jammed solid in front of the exits. Jonah waited like a floating particle of cork, watching the others passed through the scanners one by one. Last time, with Ingrid—forget that, he thought—there had been a cursory retina scan, and four goldskin cops floating like a daisy around each exit. Now they were doing blood samples as well, presumably for DNA analysis; besides the human police, he could see waldo-guns, floating ovoids with clusters of barrels and lenses and antennae. A kzin to control them, bulking even huger in fibroid armour and helmet.

And all for little old me, he thought, kicking himself forward and letting the goldskin stick his hand into the tester. There was a sharp prickle on his thumb, and he waited for the verdict. Either the false ident holds, or it doesn't. The four police with stunners and riot-armor, the kzin in full infantry rig, six waldos with 10-megawatt lasers… if it came to a fight, the odds were not good. Since all I have is a charming smile and a re-jiggered light-pen.

“Pass through, pass through,” the goldskin said, in a tone that combined nervousness and boredom.

Jonah decided he couldn't blame her; the kzinti security apparatus must have gone winging paranoid-crazy when Chuut-Riit was assassinated, and then the killers escaped with human-police connivance. On second thoughts, these klongs all volunteered to work for the pussies. Bleep them.

He passed through the mechanical airlock and into one of the main transverse corridors. It was ten meters by twenty, and sixty kilometers long; three sides were small businesses and shops; on the fourth, spinward, was a slideway. There was a ring of transfer booths around the airlock exits, permanently disabled; only kzinti and humans under their direct supervision were allowed the convenience of lightspeed pseudo-teleportation. The last time he had been here, a month ago, there had been murals on the walls of the concourse area. Prewar, faded and stained, but still gracious and marked with the springlike optimism of the settlement of the Alpha Centauri system. Outdoor scenes from Wunderland in its pristine condition, before the settlers had modified the ecology to suit the immigrants from Earth. Scenes of slowships, half-disassembled after their decades-long flight from the Solar System.

The murals had been replaced by holograms. Atrocity holograms, of survivors and near-survivors of the UN raid. Mostly from dirtside, since with an atmosphere to transmit blast and shock effects you had a greater transition between dead and safe. Humans crushed, burned, flayed by glass-fragments, mutilated; heavy emphasis on children. There was a babble of voices with the holos, weeping and screaming and moaning with pain, and a strobing title: Sol-System Killers! Their liberation is death! And an idealized kzin standing in front of a group of cowering mothers and infants, raising a shield to ward off the attack of a repulsive flatlander-demon.

Interesting, Jonah thought. Whoever had designed that had managed to play on about every prejudice a human resident of the Alpha Centauri system could have. It had to be a human psychist doing the selection; kzinti didn't understand homo sapiens well enough. A display of killing power like this would make a kzin respectful. Human propagandists needed to whip their populations into a war-frenzy, and anger was a good tool. Make a kzin angry? You didn't need to make them angry. An enemy would try to make a kzin angry, because that reduced their efficiency. Let this remind you that a collaborationist is not necessarily an incompetent. A traitor, a Murphy's-asshole inconvenience, but not necessarily an idiot. Nor even amoral; he supposed it was possible to convince yourself that you were serving the greater good by giving in. Smoothing over the inevitable, since it did look like the kzinti were winning.

Jonah shook himself out of the trance and flipped himself over. I've got to watch this tendency to depression, he thought sourly. Finagle, I ought to be bouncing for joy!

Instead, he felt a grey lethargy. His feet drifted into contact with the edge of the slideway, and he began moving slowly forward; more rapidly as he edged toward the center. The air became more quiet. There was always a subliminal rumble near the ends of Tiamat's cylinder, powdered metals and chemicals pumping into the fabricators. Now he would have to contact the Nipponese underworlder who had smuggled them from Tiamat to Wunderland in the first place, what had been his name? Shigehero Hirose, that was it. An oyabun, whatever that meant. There was the data they had downloaded from Chuut-Riit's computers, priceless stuff. He would need a message-maser to send it to Catskinner; the ship had been modified with an interstellar-capacity sender. And—

“Hello, Captain.”

Jonah turned his head, very slowly. A man had touched his elbow. Stocky, even by flatlander standards, with a considerable paunch. Coal-black, with tightly curled wiry hair; pure Afroid, not uncommon in some ethnic enclaves on Wunderland but very rare on Earth, where gene-flow had been nearly random for going on four hundred years.

General Buford Early, UN Space Navy, late ARM. Jonah gasped and sagged sideways, a grey before his eyes like high-G blackout. There was another Flatlander but Jonah barely noticed. Early slipped a hand under his arm and bore him up with thick-boned strength. Archaic, like the man; he was… at least two centuries old. Impossible to tell, these days. The only limiting factor on how old you might be was when you were born, after medicine started progressing fast enough to compensate for advancing age…

“Take it easy,” Early said.

Eyes warred with mind. Early was here; Early was sitting in his office on Gibraltar Base back in the Solar System.

Jonah struggled for breath, then fell into the rhythm taught by the Zen adepts who had trained him for war. Calm flowed back. Much knowledge of war had fallen out of human culture in three hundred years of peace, before the kzinti came, but the monks had preserved a great deal. What UN bureaucrat would suspect an old man sitting quietly beneath a tree practicing and preserving dangerous technique?

Jonah spoke to himself: Reality is change. Shock and fear result from imposing concepts on reality. Abandon concepts. Being is time, and time is Being. Birth and death is the life of the Buddha. Then: Thank you, Yoshii.

The men at either elbow guided him to the slower edge-strip of the slideway and onto the sidewalk. Jonah looked “ahead,” performed the mental trick that turned the cylinder into a hollow tower above his head, then back to horizontal. He freed his arms with a quiet flick and sank down on the chipped and stained poured-rock bench. That was notional in this gravity, but it gave you a place to hitch your feet.

“Well?” he said, looking at the second man.

This one was different. Younger, Jonah would say; eyes do not age or hold expression, but the small muscles around them do. Oriental eyes, more common. Both of them were in Swarm-Belter clothing, gaudy and somehow sleazy at the same time, with various mysterious pieces of equipment at their belts. Perfect cover, if you were pretending to be a modestly prosperous entrepreneur of the Serpent Swarm. The kzinti allowed a good deal of freedom to the Belters in this system; it was more efficient and required less supervision than running everything themselves. That would change as their numbers built up, of course.

“Well?” he said again.

Early grinned, showing strong and slightly yellowed teeth, and pulled a cheroot from a pocket. Actually less uncommon here than in the Solar System, Jonah thought, gagging slightly.

“You didn't seriously think that we'd let an opportunity like the Yamamoto raid go by and only put one arrow on the string, did you, Captain? By the way, this is my… associate, Watsuji Hajime.” The man smiled and bowed. “A member of the team I brought in.”

“Another stasis field?” Jonah said.

“We did have one ready,” Early said. “We like to have a little extra tucked away.”

“Trust the ARM,” Jonah said sourly.

The UN's technological police had been operating almost as long as humans had been in space. Their primary function was to suppress technologies which had dangerous consequences… which turned out to be most technologies. For a long time they had managed to make Solar humanity forget that there had even been such things as war or weapons or murder. That was looked back upon as a Golden Age, now, after two generations of war with the kzinti; privately, Matthieson thought of it as the years of Stagnation. The ARM had not wanted to believe in the kzinti, not even when the crew of the Angel's Pencil had reported their own first near-fatal contact with the felinoids. And when the war started, the ARM had still dealt out its hoarded secrets with the grudging reluctance of a miser.

“It's for the greater good,” Early replied.

“Sure.” That you slowed down research and so when the kzinti hit us they had technological superiority? For that matter, why had it taken a century and a half to develop regeneration techniques? And millions of petty criminals—jaywalkers and the like—had been sliced, diced and sent to the organ banks before then. Ancient history, he told himself. The Belters had always hated the ARM…

“Certainly for the greater good that you've got backup, now,” Early continued. “We came in with a slug aimed at a weapons fabrication asteroid. The impact was quite genuine… God's my witness—” he continued.

He's old all right.

“—the intelligence we've gathered and beamed back is already worth the entire cost of the Yamamoto. And you and Lieutenant Raines succeeded beyond our hopes.”

Meaning you had no hope we'd survive, Jonah added to himself. Early caught his eye and nodded with an ironic turn of his full lips. The younger man felt a slight chill; how good at reading body language would you get, with two centuries of practice? How human would you remain?

“Speaking of which,” the general continued, “where is Lieutenant Raines, Matthieson?”

Jonah shrugged, looking away slightly and probing at his own feelings. “She… decided to stay. To come out later, actually, with Yarthkin-Schotmann and Montferrat-Palme. I've got all the data.”

Early's eyebrows rose. “Not entirely unexpected.” His eyes narrowed again. “No personal animosities, here, I trust? We won't be heading out for some time—” if ever, went unspoken “—and we may need to work with them again.”

The young Sol-Belter looked out at the passing crowd on the slideway, at thousands swarming over the handnets in front of the shopfronts on the other three sides of the cylinder.

“My ego's a little bruised,” he said finally. “But… no.”

Early nodded. “Didn't have the leisure to become all that attached, I suppose,” he said. “Good professional attitude.”

Jonah began to laugh softly, shoulders shaking. “Finagle, General, you are a long time from being a young man, aren't you? No offense.”

“None taken,” the Intelligence officer said dryly.

“Actually, we just weren't compatible.” What was that phrase in the history tape? Miscegenation abyss? Birth cohort gap? No…

“Generation gap,” he said.

“She was only a few years younger than you,” Early said suspiciously.

“Biologically, sir. But she was born before the War. During the Long Peace. Wunderland wasn't sown nearly as tight as Earth, or even the Solar Belt… but they still didn't have a single deadly weapon in the whole system, saving hunting tools. I've been in the Navy or training for it since I was six! We just didn't have anything in common except software, sex and the mission.” He shrugged again, and felt the lingering depression leave him. “It was like being involved with a younger version of my mother.”

Early shook his head, chuckling himself, a deep rich sound. “Temporal displacement. Doesn't need relativity, boy; wait 'til you're my age. And now,” he continued, “we are going to have a little talk.”

“What've we been doing?”

“Oh, not a debriefing. That first. But then…” He grinned brilliantly. “A… job interview, of sorts.”

“Well. So.” The oyabun nodded and folded his hands.

Jonah looked around. They were in the three-twelve shell of Tiamat, where spin gave an equivalent of .72 G weight. Expensive, even now when gravity polarizers were beginning to spread beyond kzinti and military-manufacturing use. Microgravity is marvelous for most industrial use; there are other things that need weight, bearing children to term among them. This room was equally expensive; most of the furnishings were wood. The low tables at which they all sat, knees crossed. The black-lacquered carved screens with rampant tigers as well, and he strongly suspected that those were even older than General Buford Early. A set of Japanese swords rested in a niche, long katana and the short “sword of apology” on their ebony stand.

Sandalwood incense was burning somewhere, and the floor was covered in neat mats of plaited straw. Against all this the plain good clothes of the man who called himself Shigehero Hirose were something of a shock. The thin ancient porcelain of his sake cup gleamed as he set it down on the table, and spoke to the Oriental who had come with the general. Jonah kept his face elaborately blank; it was unlikely that either of them suspected his knowledge of Japanese… enough to understand most of a conversation, if not to speak it. Nippon's tongue had never been as popular as her goods, being too difficult for outsiders to learn easily.

“It is… an unexpected honor to entertain one of the Tokyo branch of the clan,” Shigehero was saying. “And how do events proceed in the land of the Sun Goddess?”

Watsuji Hajime shrugged. “No better than can be expected, Uncle,” he replied, and sucked breath between his teeth. “This war presents opportunities, but also imposes responsibilities. Neutrality is impossible.”

“Regrettably, this is so,” Shigehero said. His face grew stern. “Nevertheless, you have revealed the Association's codewords to outsiders.” They both glanced sidelong at Early and Matthieson. “Perhaps you are what you claim. Perhaps not. This must be demonstrated. Honor must be established.”

Whatever that meant, the Earther did not like it. His face stayed as expressionless as a mask carved from light-brown wood, but sweat started up along his brow. A door slid open, and one of the guards who had brought them here entered noiselessly. Jonah recognized the walk; training in the Art, one of the budo styles. Highly illegal on Earth until the War, and for the most part in the Alpha Centauri system as well. Otherwise he was a stocky nondescript man in loose black, although the Belter thought there might be soft armor beneath it. Moving with studied grace, he knelt and laid a featureless rectangle of blond wood by Watsuji's left hand.

The Earther bowed his head, a lock of black hair falling over his forehead. Then he raised his eyes and slid the box in front of him, opening it with delicate care. Within were a white linen handkerchief, a folded cloth, a block of maple and a short curved guardless knife in a black leather sheath. Watsuji's movements took on the slow precision of a religious ritual as he laid the maple block on the table atop the cloth and began binding the little finger of his left hand with the handkerchief, painfully tight. He laid the hand on the block and drew the knife. It slid free without sound, a fluid curve. The two men's eyes were locked as he raised the knife.

Jonah grunted as if he had been kicked in the belly. The older man was missing a joint on the little finger of his left hand, too. The Sol-Belter had thought that was simply the bad medical care available in the Swarm, but anyone who could afford this room…

The knife flashed down, and there was a small spurt of blood, a rather grisly crunching sound like celery being sliced. Watsuji made no sound, but his face went pale around the lips. Shigehero bowed more deeply. The servant-guard walked forward on his knees and gathered up the paraphernalia, folding the cloth about it with the same ritual care. There was complete silence, save for the sigh of ventilators and Watsuji's deep breathing, harsh but controlled.

The two Nipponjin poured themselves more of the heated rice wine and sipped. When Shigehero spoke again, it was in English.

“It is good to see that the old customs have not been entirely forgotten in the Solar System,” he said. “Perhaps my branch of the Association was… shall we say a trifle precipitate, when they decided emigration was the only way to preserve their, ah, purity.” He raised his glass slightly to the general. “When your young warriors passed through last month, I was surprised that so much effort had been required to insert so slender a needle. I see that we underestimated you.”

He picked up a folder of printout on the table before him. “It is correct that the… ah, assets you and your confederates represent would be a considerable addition to my forces,” he went on. “However, please remember that my Association is more in the nature of a family business than a political organization. We are involved in the underground struggle against the kzinti because we are human, little more.”

Early raised his cup of sake in turn; the big spatulate hands handled the porcelain with surprising delicacy. “You… and your, shall we say, black-clad predecessors have been involved in others' quarrels before this. To be blunt, when it paid. The valuata we brought are significant, surely?”

Jonah blinked in astonishment. This is the cigar-chomping, kick-ass general I came to know and loathe? he thought. Live and learn. Learn so that you can go on living… Then again, before the kzinti attack Buford Early had been a professor of military history at the ARM academy. You had to be out of the ordinary for that; it involved knowledge that would send an ordinary man to the psychists for memory-wipe.

Shigehero made a minimalist gesture. “Indeed. Yet this would also involve integrating your group in my command structure. An indigestible lump, a weakness in the chain of command, since you do not owe personal allegiance to me. And, to be frank, non-Nipponese generally do not rise to the decision-making levels in this organization. No offense.”

“None taken,” Early replied tightly. “If you would prefer a less formal link?”

Shigehero sighed, then brought up a remote 'board from below the table, and signed to the guards. They quickly folded the priceless antique screens, to reveal a standard screen-wall.

“That might be my own inclination, esteemed General,” he said. “Except that certain information has come to my attention. Concerning Admiral Ulf Reichstein-Markham of the Free Wunderland Navy… I see your young subordinate has told you of this person? And the so-valuable ship he left in the Herrenmann's care, and a… puzzling discovery they have made together.”

A scratching at the door interrupted him. He frowned, then nodded. It opened, revealing a guard and another figure who looked to Early for confirmation. The general accepted a datatab, slipped it into his belt unit and held the palm-sized computer to one ear.

Ah, thought Jonah. I'm not the only one to get a nasty shock today. The black man's skin had turned greyish, and his hands shook for a second as he pushed the “wipe” control. Jonah chanced a glance at his eyes; it was difficult to be sure, they were dark and the lighting was low, but he could have sworn the pupils had expanded to swallow the iris.

“He—” Early cleared his throat. “This information… would it be about an, er, artifact found in an asteroid? Certain behavioral peculiarities?”

Shigehero nodded and touched the controls. A blurred holo sprang up on the wall; from a helmet-cam, Jonah decided. Asteroidal mining equipment on the surface of a medium-sized rock, one kilometer by two. A docked ship in the background, he recognized Markham's Nietzsche, and others distant enough to be drifting lights, and suited figures putting up bubble-habitats. Then panic, and a hole appeared where the laser-driller had been a moment before. Milling confusion, and an… yes, it must be an alien, came floating up out of the hole.

The young Sol-Belter felt the pulse hammer in his ears. He was watching the first living non-Kzin alien discovered in all the centuries of human spaceflight. It couldn't be a kzin, the proportions were all wrong. About 1.5 meters, judging by the background shots of humans. Difficult to say in vacuum armor, but it looked almost as thick as it was wide, with an enormous round head and stubby limbs, hands like three-fingered mechanical grabs. There was a weapon or tool gripped in one fist; as they watched the other hand came over to touch it and it changed shape, writhing. Jonah opened his mouth to question and—

“Stop!” The general's bull bellow wrenched their attention around. “Stop that display immediately, that's an order!”

Shigehero touched the control panel and the holo froze. “You are not in a position to give orders here, gaijin,” he said. The two guards along the wall put hands inside their lapover jackets and glided closer, soundless as kzinti.

Early wrenched open his collar and waved a hand. “Please, oyabun, if we could speak alone? Completely alone, just for a moment. More is at stake here than you realize!”

Silence stretched. At last, fractionally, Shigehero nodded. The others stood and filed out into the outer room, almost as graciously appointed as the inner. The other members of Early's team awaited them there; half a dozen of assorted ages and skills. There were no guards, on this side of the wall at least, and the oyabun's men had provided refreshments and courteously ignored the quick, thorough sweep for listening devices. Watsuji headed for the sideboard, poured himself a double vodka and knocked it back.

“Tanj it,” he wheezed, under his breath. Jonah keyed himself coffee and a handmeal; it had been a rough day.

“Problems?” the Belter asked.

“I can't even get to an autodoc until we're out of the Finagle-forsaken bughouse,” the Earther replied. “I knew they were conservative here, but this bleeping farce!” He made a gesture with his mutilated hand. “Nobody at home's done that for a hundred years! I felt like I was in a holoplay. Namida Amitsu, we're legal, these days. Well, somewhat. Gotten out of the organ trade, at least. This—!”

Jonah nodded in impersonal sympathy. For a flatlander, the man had dealt with the pain extremely well; Earthsiders were seldom far from automated medical attention. Even before the War, Belters had had to move self-sufficient.

“What really bothers me,” he said quietly, settling into a chair, “is what's going on in there.” He nodded to the door. “Just like the ARM, to go all around Murphy's Hall to keep us in the dark.”

“Exactly,” Watsuji said gloomily, nursing his hand. “Those crazy bastards think they run the world.”

“Run the world,” Jonah echoed. “Well, they do, don't they? The ARMs—”

“Naw, not the UN. This is older than that.” Jonah shrugged. “A lot older. Bunch of mumbo jumbo. At least—”

“Eh?”

“I think it's just mumbo jumbo. God, this thing hurts.”

Jonah settled down, motionless. He would not be bored; Belters got a good deal of practice in sitting still and doing nothing without losing alertness, and his training had increased it. The curiosity was the itch he could not scratch.

Could be worse, he thought, taking another bite of the fishy-tasting handmeal. The consistency was rather odd, but it was tasty. The flatlander could have told me to cut my finger off.

“Explain yourself,” Shigehero said.

Instead, Early moved closer and dipped his finger in his rice wine. With that, he drew a figure on the table before the oyabun. A stylized rose, overlain by a cross; he omitted the pyramid. The fragment of the Order which had accompanied the migrations to Alpha Centauri had not included anyone past the Third Inner Circle, after all…

Shigehero's eyes went wide. He picked up a cloth and quickly wiped the figure away, but his gaze stayed locked on the blank surface of the table for a moment. Then he swallowed and touched the control panel again.

“We are entirely private,” he said, then continued formally: “You bring Light.”

“Illumination is the key, to open the Way,” Early replied.

“The Eastern Path?”

Early shook his head. “East and West are one, to the servants of the Hidden Temple.”

Shigehero started, impressed still more, then made a deep bow, smiling. “Your authority is undisputed, Master. Although not that of the ARM!”

Early relaxed, joining in the chuckle. “Well, the ARM is no more than a finger of the Hidden Way and the Rule That Is To Come, eh? As is your Association, oyabun. And many another.” Including many you know nothing of. “As above, so below; power and knowledge, wheel within wheel. Until Holy Blood—”

“—fills Holy Grail.”

Early nodded, and his face became stark. “Now, let me tell you what has been hidden in the vaults of the ARM. The Brotherhood saw to it that the knowledge was suppressed, back three centuries ago, along with much else. The ARM has been invaluable for that… Long ago, there was a species that called themselves the Thrint—”

Jonah looked up as Early left the oyabun's sanctum.

“How did it go?” he murmured.

“Well enough. We've got an alliance of sorts. And a very serious problem, not just with the kzinti. Staff conference, gentlemen.”

The Belter fell into line with the others as they left the Association's headquarters. I wonder, he thought, looking up at the rock above. I wonder what really is going on out there. And whether it might get him Catskinner back.

Chapter V

“STOP THAT,” Dnivtopun said angrily, alerted by the smell of blood and a wet ripping sound.

His son looked up guiltily and tried to resist. The thrint willed obedience, feeling the adolescent's half-formed shield resisting his Power like thick mud around a foot. Then it gave way, and the child released the human's arm. That was chewed to the bone; the young thrint had blood all down its front, and bits of matter and gristle stuck between its needle teeth. The slave swayed, smiling dreamily.

“How many times do I have to tell you: Do not eat the servants!” Dnivtopun shrieked, and used the Power again: SHAME. GUILT. PAIN. ANGUISH. REMORSE. SHOOTING PAINS. BURNING FEET. UNIVERSAL SCRATCHLESS ITCH. GUILT.

The slave was going into shock. “Go and get medical treatment,” he said. And: FEEL NO PAIN. DO NOT BLEED. This one had been on the Ruling Mind for some time; he had picked it for sensitivity to Power, and its mind fit his mental grip like a glove. The venous spurting from its forelimb slowed, then sank to a trickle as the muscles clamped down on the blood vessels with hysterical strength.

Dnivtopun turned back to his offspring. The young thrint was rolling on the soft blue synthetic of the cabin floor; he had beshat himself and vomited up the human flesh—thrint used the same mouth-orifice for both—and his eating tendrils were writhing into his mouth, trying to clean it and pick the teeth free of foreign matter. The filth was sinking rapidly into the floor, absorbed by the ship's recycling system, and the stink was fading as well. The vents replaced it with nostalgic odors of hot wet jungle, spicy and rank, the smell of thrintun. Dnivtopun shut his mind to the youngster's suffering for a full minute; his eldest son was eight, well into puberty. At that age, controls imposed by the Power did not sink in well. An infant could be permanently conditioned, that was the way baby thrint were toilet trained, but by this stage they were growing rebellious.

CEASE HURTING, he said at last. Then: “Why did you attack the servant?”

“It was boring me,” his son said, still with a trace of sulkiness. “All that stuff you said I had to learn. Why can't we go home, father? Or to Uncle Tzinlpun's?”

With an intense effort, Dnivtopun controlled himself. “This is home! We are the last thrintun left alive.” Powerless take persuasion, he decided. BELIEVE.

The fingers of mind could feel the child-intellect accepting the order. Barriers of denial crumbled, and his son's eye squeezed shut while all six fingers squeezed painfully into palms. The young thrint threw back his head and howled desolately, a sound like glass and sheet metal inside a tumbling crusher.

QUIET. Silence fell; Dnivtopun could hear the uncomprehending whimper of a female in the next room, beyond the lightscreen door. One of his wives; they had all been nervous and edgy, female thrintun had enough psionic sensitivity to be very vulnerable to upset.

“You will have to get used to the idea,” Dnivtopun said. Powergiver knows it took me long enough. He moved closer and threw an arm around his son's almost-neck, biting him affectionately on the top of the head. “Think of the good side. There are no tnuctipun here!” He could feel that bring a small wave of relief; the Rebels had been bogeymen to the children since their birth. “And you will have a planet of your own, some day. There is a whole galaxy of slaves here, ready for our taking!”

“Truly, father?” There was awakening greed at that. Dnivtopun had only been Overseer of one miserable food-planet, a sterile globe with a reducing atmosphere, seeded with algae and bandersnatchi. There would have been little for his sons, even without the disruption of the War.

“Truly, my son.” He keyed one of the controls, and a wall blanked to show an exterior starscape. “One day, all this will be yours. We are not the last thrintun—we are the beginning of a new Empire!” And I am the first Emperor, if I can survive the next few months. “So we must take good care of these slaves.”

“But these smell so good, father!”

Dnivtopun sighed. “I know, son.” Thrintun had an acute sense of smell when it came to edibility; competition for food among their presapient ancestors had been very intense. “It's because—” no, that's just a guess. Few alien biologies in the old days had been as compatible as these humans… Dnivtopun had a suspicion he knew the reason; food algae. The Thrint had seeded hundreds of planets with it, and given billions of years… That would account for the compatibility of the other species as well, the Kzin; they could eat humans, too. “Well, you'll just have to learn to ignore it.” Thrintun were always ravenous. “Now, listen—you've upset your mother. Go and comfort her.”

Ulf Reichstein-Markham faced the Master and fought not to vomit. The carrion breath, the writhing tentacles beside the obscene gash of mouth, the staring faceted eye… It was so—beautiful, he thought, as shards of crystalline Truth slid home in his mind. The pleasure was like the drifting relaxation after orgasm, like a hot sauna, like winning a fight.

“What progress has been made on the amplifier helmet?” his owner asked.

“Very little, Masteeeeeeeeee!” He staggered back, shaking his head against the blinding-white pressure that threatened to burst it. Whimpering, he pressed his hands against the sides of his head. “Please, Master! We're trying!”

The pressure relaxed; on some very distant level, he could feel the alien's recognition of his sincerity.

“What is the problem?” Dnivtopun asked.

“Master—” Markham stopped for a moment to organize his thoughts, looking around.

They were on the control deck of the Ruling Mind, and it was huge. Few human spaceships had ever been so large; this was nearly the size of a colony slowship. The chamber was a flattened oval dome twenty meters long and ten wide, lined with chairs of many different types. That was logical, to accommodate the wild variety of slave-species the Thrint used. But they were chairs, not acceleration couches. The Thrint had had very good gravity control, for a very long time. A central chair designed for thrint fronted the blackened wreck of what had been the main computer. The decor was lavish and garish, swirling curlicues of precious metals and enamel, drifting motes of multicolored lights. Beneath their feet was a porous matrix that seemed at least half-alive, that absorbed anything organic and dead and moved rubbish to collector outlets with a disturbing peristaltic motion. The air was full of the smells of vegetation and rank growth.

Curious, he thought, as the majority of his consciousness wondered how to answer the Master. The controls were odd, separate crystal-display dials and manual levers and switches, primitive in the extreme. But the machinery behind the switches was… there were no doors; something happened, and the material went… vague, and you could walk through it, like walking through soft taffy. The only mechanical airlock was a safety-backup.

There was no central power source for the ship. Dotted around were units that apparently converted matter into energy; the equivalent of flashlight batteries could start it. The basic drive was to the kzinti gravity polarizer as a fusion bomb was to grenade; it could accelerate at thousands of gravities, and then pull space right around the ship and travel faster than light.

Faster than light—

“Stop daydreaming,” the Voice said. “And tell me why.”

“Master, we don't know how.”

The thrint opened its mouth and then closed it again, the tendrils stroking caressingly at its almost nonexistent lips. “Why not?” he said. “It isn't very complicated. You can buy them anywhere for twenty znorgits.”

“Master, do you know the principles?”

“Of course not, slave! That's slavework. For engineers.”

“But Master, the slave-engineers you've got… we can only talk to them a little, and they don't know anything beyond what buttons to push. The machinery—” he waved helplessly at the walls “—doesn't make any sense to us, Master! It's just blocks of matter. We… our instruments can barely detect that something's going on.”

The thrint stood looking at him, radiating incomprehension. “Well,” he said after a moment. “It's true I didn't have the best quality of engineering slave. No need for them, on a routine posting. Still, I'm sure you'll figure something out, Chief Slave. How are we doing at getting the Ruling Mind freed from the dirt?”

“Much better, Master! That is well within our capacities… Master?”

“Yes?”

“Have I your permission to send a party to Tiamat? It can be done without much danger of detection, beyond what the deserters already present; we need more personnel and spare parts. For a research project on… well, on your nervous system.”

The alien's single unwinking eye stared at him. “What are nerves?” he said slowly. Dnivtopun took a dopestick from his pouch and sucked on it. Then: “What's research?”

“Erreow.”

The kzinrett rolled and twisted across the wicker matting of the room, yowling softly with her eyes closed. Traat-Admiral glanced at her with postcoitial satisfaction as he finished grooming his pelt and laid the currycomb aside; he might be de facto leader of the Modernists, but he was not one of those who could not maintain a decent appearance without a dozen servants and machinery. At the last he cleaned the damp portion of his fur with talc, remembering once watching a holo of humans bathing themselves by jumping into water. Into cold water.

“Hrrrr,” he shivered.

The female turned over on all fours and stuck her rump in the air.

“Ch'rowl?” she chirrupped. Involuntarily his ears extended and the muscles of his massive neck and shoulders twitched. “Ch'rowl?” With a saucy twitch of her tail, but he could smell that she was not serious. Besides, there was work to do.

“No,” he said firmly. The kzinrett padded over to a corner, collapsed onto a pile of cushions and went to sleep with limp finality.

A kzinrett of the Patriarch's line, Traat-Admiral thought with pride; one of Chuut-Riit's beauteous daughters. His blood to be mingled with the Riit, he whose sire had been only a Third Gunner, lucky to get a single mate even when the heavy casualties of the First Fleet left so many maleless. He stretched, reaching for the domed ceiling, picked up the weapons belt from the door and padded off down the corridor. This was the governor's harem quarters, done up as closely as might be to a noble's Kzinrett House on Kzin itself. Domed wickerwork structures, the tops waterproof with synthetic in a concession to modernity; there were even gravity polarizers to bring it up to Homeworld weight, nearly twice that of Wunderland.

“Good for the health of the kzinrett and kits,” he mused to himself, and his ears moved in the kzinti equivalent of a grin. It was easy to get used to such luxury, he decided, ducking through the shamboo curtain over the entrance and pacing down the exit corridor; that was open at the sides, roofed in flowering orange vines.

Each dome was set in a broad space of open vegetation, and woe betide the kzinrett who strayed across the low wooden boundaries into her neighbor's claws; female kzinti might be too stupid to talk, but they had a keenly developed sense of territory. There were open spaces, planted in a pleasant mixture of vegetation; orange kzinti, reddish Wunderlander, green from Earth. Traat-Admiral could hear the sounds of young kits at play in the common area, see them running and tumbling and chasing while their mothers lay basking in the weak sunlight or groomed each other. Few of them had noticed the change of males over much, but integrating his own modest harem had been difficult, much fur flying dominance-tussles.

He sighed as he neared the exit-gate. Chuut-Riit's harem was not only of excellent quality, but so well trained that it needed less maintenance than his own had. The females would even let human servants in to keep up the feeding stations, a vast help, since male kzinti who could be trusted in another's harem were not common. They were all well housebroken, and most did not even have to be physically restrained when pregnant, which simplified things immensely; kzinrett had an irresistible urge to dig a birthing tunnel about then, and it created endless problems and damage to the gardens. Through the outer gate, functional warding-fields and robot guns, and a squad of Chuut-Riit's household troopers. They saluted with enthusiasm. Being hereditary servants of the Riit, he had been under no obligation to let them swear to him… although it would have been foolish to discard so useful a cadre.

Would I have thought of this before Chuut-Riit trained me? he thought. Then: He is dead: I live. Enough.

Beyond the gates began the palace proper. The military and administrative sections were largely underground, ship-style; from here you could see only the living quarters, openwork pavilions for the most part, on bases of massive cut stone. Between and around them stretched gardens, stones of pleasing shape, trees whose smooth bark made claws itch. There was a half-acre of zheeretki too, the tantalizing scent calling the passer-by to come roll in its intoxicating blossoms.

Traat-Admiral wiggled his ears in amusement as he settled onto the cushions in the reception pavilion. All this luxury, and no time to enjoy it, he thought. It was well enough, one did not become a Conquest Hero by lolling about on cushions sipping blood.

His eldest son was coming along one of the paths. In a hurry, and running four-foot with the sinuous gait that reminded humans of weasels as much as cats; he wore a sash of office, his first ranking. Ten meters from the pavilion he rose, licked his wrists and smoothed back his cheek fur with them, settled the sash.

“Honored Sire Traat-Admiral, Staff-Officer requests audience at your summons,” he said. “And… the Accursed Ones. They await final judgment. And—”

“Enough, Aide-de-Camp,” Traat-Admiral rumbled.

The young male stood proudly and made an unconscious gesture of adjusting the sash; that garment was a ceremonial survival of a sword-baldric, from the days when Aides were bodyguards as well, entitled to take a duel-challenge on themselves to spare their masters. Looking into the great round eyes of his son, Traat-Admiral realized that that too would be done gladly if it were needed. Unable to restrain himself, he gave the youth's ears a few grooming licks.

“Fath—Honored Sire! Please!”

“Hrrrr,” Staff-Officer rumbled. “He was as strong as a terrenki and faster.” Traat-Admiral looked down to see the fresh ears of Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals dangling at the other's belt.

“Not quite fast enough,” Traat-Admiral said with genuine admiration. Most kzinti became slightly less quarrelsome past their first youth, but the late Ktriir's notorious temper had gotten worse, if anything. It probably came from having to deal with humans all the time, and high-level collaborators at that. Ktriir should have remembered that reflexes slowed and had to be replaced with cunning and skill born of experience.

“Yes,” he continued, “I am well pleased.” He paused for three breaths, waiting while Staff-Officer's muzzle dipped into the saucer. “Hroth-Staff-Officer.”

The other kzin gasped, inhaled milk and rolled over, coughing and slapping at his nose, sneezed frantically, and sat back with his eyes watering. Traat-Admiral felt his ears twitch with genial amusement.

“Do not be angry, noble Hroth-Staff-Officer,” he said. “There is little of humor these days.” It was a system governor's prerogative, to confer a Name. Any field-grade officer could, for certain well-established feats of honor, but a governor could do so at discretion.

“I will strive—kercheee—to be worthy of the honor,” the newly-promoted kzin said. “Little though I have done to deserve it.”

“Nonsense,” Traat-Admiral said. For one thing, you are very diplomatic. Only a kzin with iron self-control could be humble, even under these circumstances. “For another, you have won… what, six duels in the past month? And a dozen back when Chuut-Riit first came from Homeworld to this system. This will satisfy those who think galactic conquest can be accomplished with teeth and claws. Also, you have been invaluable in keeping the Modernist faction aligned behind me. Many thought Chuut-Riit's heir should be from among his immediate entourage.”

Hroth-Staff-Officer twitched his tail and rippled sections of his pelt. “None such could enjoy sufficient confidence among the locally-born,” he said. “If we trusted Chuut-Riit's judgment before he was killed, should we not after he is dead?”

Traat-Admiral sighed, looking out over the exquisite restraint of the gardens. “I agree. Better a… less worthy successor than infighting beneath one more technically qualified.” His ears spread in irony. “More infighting than we have had. Chuut-Riit said…” he hesitated, then looked over at the faces of his son and the newly-ennobled Hroth-Staff-Officer, remembered conversations with his mentor. “… he said that humans were either the greatest danger or greatest opportunity kzinti had ever faced. And that he did not know if they came just in time, or just too late.”

His son showed curiosity in the rippling of his pelt, an almost imperceptible movement of his fingertips. Curiosity was a childhood characteristic among kzinti, but one the murdered governor had said should be encouraged.

“We have not faced a challenge to really test our mettle for… a long time,” he said. “We make easy conquests; empty worlds to colonize, or others where the inhabitants are savages with spears, barbarians with nothing better than chemical-energy weapons. We grow slothful; our energy is spent in quarreling among ourselves, and more and more the work of even maintaining our civilization we turn over to our slaves.”

“Wrrrr,” Hroth-Staff-Officer said. “But what did the Dominant One mean, that the humans might be too late?”

Traat-Admiral's voice sank slightly. “I meant that lack of challenge has weakened us. By making us inflexible, brittle. There are other forms of rot than softness; fossilization is another: steel and bone turning to stiff breakable rock. Chuut-Riit saw that as we expand we must eventually meet terrible threats. If the kzinti are to be strong enough to conquer them, first we must be re-forged in the blaze of war.”

“I still don't smell the point, Traat-Admiral,” Hroth-Staff-Officer said. The admiral could see his son huddled on the cushions, entranced at being able to listen in on such august conversation.

Listen well, my son, he thought. You will find it an uncomfortable privilege.

“Are the humans then a challenge which will call forth our strength… or the mad raaairtwo that will shatter us?”

“Wrrrr!” Hroth-Staff-Officer shivered slightly, his fur lying flat. Aide-de-Camp's was plastered to his skin, and his ears had disappeared into their pouches of skin. “That has the authentic flavor and scent of his… disquieting lectures. I suffered through enough of them.” A pause. “Still, the raaairtwo may be head-high at the shoulder and weigh fifty times a kzintosh's mass and have a spiked armor ball for a tail, but our ancestors killed them.”

“But not by butting heads with them, Hroth-Staff-Officer.” He turned his head. “Aide-de-Camp, go to the Accursed Ones, and bring them here. Not immediately; in an hour or so.”

He leaned forward once the youth had leaped up and four-footed away. “Hroth-Staff-Officer, has it occurred to you why we are sending such an armada to this system's asteroids?”

Big lambent-yellow eyes blinked at him. “There has been much activity among the feral humans,” he said. “I did scent that you might be using this as an excuse for field-exercises with live ammunition, in order to quiet dissention.” Kzinti obeyed when under arms, even if they hated it.

“The interstellar warships as well? That would be like cleaning vermin out of your pelt with a beam-rifle.” He leaned closer. “This is a Patriarch's Secret,” he continued. “Listen.”

When he finished a half-hour later, Hroth-Staff-Officer's pelt was half laid-flat, with patches bristling in horror. Traat-Admiral could smell his anger, underlain with fear, a sickly scent.

“You are right to fear,” he said, conscious of his own glands. No kzin could hide true terror, of course, not with a functioning nose in the area.

“Death is nothing,” the other nodded. He grinned, the expression humans sometimes mistook for friendliness. “But this!” He hissed, and Traat-Admiral watched and smelled him fight down blind rage.

“Chuut-Riit feared something like this,” he said. At the other's startlement: “Oh, no, not these beings particularly. It is a joke of the God that we find this thing in the middle of a difficult war. But something terrible was bound to jump out of the long grass sooner or later. The universe is so large, and we keep pressing our noses into new caves—” He shrugged. “Enough. Now—”

Chuut-Riit's sons laid stomach to earth on the path before the dais of judgment and covered their noses. Traat-Admiral looked down on their still-gaunt forms and felt himself recoil. Not with fear, at least not the fear of an adult kzin. Vague memories moved in the shadow-corners of his mind; brutal hands tearing him away from Mother, giant shapes of absolute power… rage and desire and fear, the bitter acrid smell of loneliness.

Wipe them out, he thought uneasily, as his lips curled up and the hair bulked erect on neck and spine. Wipe them out, and this will not be.

“You have committed the gravest of all crimes,” he said slowly, fighting the wordless snarling that struggled to use his throat. There was an ancient epic… Warlord Chmee at the Pillars. He had seen a holo of it once, and had groveled and howled like all the audience and come back washed free of grief, at the last view of the blind and scentless Hero.

And these did not sin in ignorance, nor did they claw out their own eyes and breathe acid in remorse and horror.

“To overthrow one's Sire is… primitive, but such is custom. To slay him honorably, even… but to fall upon him in a pack and devour him! And each other!”

The guilty ones seemed to sink further to the raked gravel of the path before him; he stood like a towering wall of orange fur at the edge of the pavilion, the molten-copper glow of his pelt streaked with scar-white. Like an image of dominance to a young kzin, hated and feared and adored. Not that the armored troopers behind him with their beam-guns hurt, he reflected. Control, he thought. Self-control is the heart of honor.

“Is there any reason you should not be killed?” he said. “Or blinded, castrated and driven out?”

Silence then, for a long time. Finally, the spotted one who had spent longest in the regeneration tank spoke.

“No, Dominant One.”

Traat-Admiral relaxed slightly. “Good. But Chuut-Riit's last message to us spoke of mercy. Even so, if you had not acknowledged your crime and your worthlessness, there would have been no forgiveness. Hear your sentence. The fleets of the Patriarchy in this system are journeying forth against… an enemy. You have all received elementary space-combat training.” Attacks on defended asteroids often involved boarding, by marines in one-kzin suits of stealthed, powered vacuum armor. “You will be formed into a special unit for the coming action. This is your last chance to achieve honor!” An honorable death, of course. “Do not waste it. Go!”

He turned to Hroth-Staff-Officer. “Get me the readiness reports,” he said, and spoke the phrase that opened the communication line to the household staff. “Bring two saucers of tuna ice cream with Stolichnaya vodka,” he continued. “I have a bad taste to get out of my mouth.”

Chapter VI

“How did he manage it?” Jonah Matthieson muttered.

The hauler the party from the Sol System had been assigned was an unfamiliar model, a long stalk with a life-bubble at one end and a gravity-polarizer drive as well as fusion thrusters. Introduced by the kzinti, no doubt; they had had the polarizer for long enough to be using it for civilian purposes. With half a dozen the bubble was very crowded, despite the size of the ship, and they had set the internal gravity to zero to make best use of the space. The air smelled right to his Belter's nose, a pure neutral smell with nothing but a slight trace of ozone and pine; something you could not count on in the Alpha Centauri system these days. Certainly less nerve-wracking than the surface of Wunderland, with its wild smells and completely uncontrolled random-process life-support system.

A good ship, he thought. It must be highly automated, doing the rounds of the refineries and hauling back metals and polymer sacks of powders and liquids. What clung to the carrying fields now looked very much like a cargo of singleships, being delivered to rockjacks at some other base asteroid; he had been respectfully surprised at the assortment of commandeered weapons and jury-rigged but roughly effective control systems.

General Early looked up from his display plaque. “Not surprising, considering the state things are in,” he said. “Organized crime does well in a disorganized social setting. Like any conspiracy, unless the conspiracy is the social setting.”

“It's a Finagle-damned fleet, though,” Jonah said. “Don't the pussies care?”

“Not much, I imagine,” Early said. Jonah could see the schematics for the rest of their flotilla coming up on the board. “So long as it doesn't impact on their military concerns. They'd clamp down soon enough if much went directly to the resistance, of course. Or their human goons would, for fear of losing their positions. The pussies may be great fighters, but as administrators they're worse than Russians.”

What're Russians? Jonah thought. Then, Oh. Them. “Surprising the pussies tolerate so much corruption.”

Early shrugged. “What can they do? And from what we've learned, they expect tame monkeys to be corrupt, except for the household servants. If we weren't goddam cowards and lickspittles, we'd all have died fighting.” He smiled his wide white grin and stuck a stogie in the midst of it—unlit, Jonah saw thankfully. The schematics continued to roll across the screen. “Ahhh, thought so.”

“Thought what?”

“Our friend Shigehero is playing both ends against the middle,” Early said. “He's bringing along a lot of exploratory stuff as well as weaponry. A big computer, by local standards. Wait a second. Yes, linguistic-analysis hardware too. The son of a bitch!”

Silence fell.

Jonah looked at the others, studied the hard set of their faces.

“Wait a second,” he said. “There's an ancient alien artifact, and you don't think it should be studied?”

Early looked up, and Jonah realized with a sudden shock that he was being weighed. For trustworthiness, and possibly for expendability.

“Of course not,” the general said. “The risk is too great. Remember the Sea Sculpture?”

Jonah concentrated. “Oh, the thingie in the Smithsonian? The Slaver?”

“Why do you think they were called that, Captain?” Early spent visible effort controlling impatience.

“I…” Suddenly, Jonah realized that he knew very little of the famous exhibit, beyond the fact that it was an alien in a spacesuit protected by a stasis field. “You'd better do some explaining, sir.”

Several of the others stirred uneasily, and Early waved them back to silence. “He's right,” he said regretfully, and began.

“Murphy,” Jonah muttered when the older man had finished. “That thing is a menace.”

Early nodded jerkily. “More than you realize. That artifact is a ship. There may be more than one of the bastards on it,” he said, using another of his archaic turns of phrase. “Besides which, the technology. We've had three centuries of trying, and we've been able to make exactly three copies of their stasis field; as far as we can tell, the only way that thing could work is by decoupling the interior from the entropy gradient of the universe as a whole…”

Jonah leaned back, his toes hooked comfortably under a line, and considered the flatlander. Then the others, his head cocked to one side consideringly.

“It isn't just you, is it?” he said. “The whole lot of you are ARM types. Most of you older than you look.”

Early blinked, and took the stogie from between his teeth. “Now why,” he said softly, “would you think that, Captain?”

“Body language,” Jonah said, linking his hands behind his back and staring “up”. The human face is a delicate communications instrument, and he suspected that Early had experience enough to read entirely too much from it. “And attitudes. Something new comes along, grab it quick. Hide it away and study it in private. Pretty typical. Sir.”

“Captain,” Early said, “you Belters are all anarchists, but you're supposed to be rationalists too. Humanity had centuries of stability before the Kzinti arrived, the first long interval of peace since… God, ever. You think that was an accident? The way humankind was headed in the early atomic era, if something like the ARM hadn't intervened there wouldn't be a human race now. Nothing we'd recognize as human. There are things in the ARM archives… that just can't be let out.”

“Oh?” Jonah said coldly.

Early smiled grimly. “Like an irresistible aphrodisiac?” he said. “Conditioning pills that make you completely loyal forever to the first person you see after taking them? Things that would have made it impossible not to legalize murder and cannibalism? Damned right we sit on things. Even if there weren't aliens on that ship, it would have to be destroyed; there's neither time nor opportunity to take it apart and keep the results under wraps. If the pussies get it, we're royally screwed.” Jonah remained silent. “Don't look so apprehensive, Captain. You're no menace, no matter what you learn.”

“I'm not?” Jonah said, narrowing his eyes. He had suspected…

“Of course not. What use would a system of secrecy be, if one individual leak could imperil it? How do you think we wrote the Sea Statue out of the history books as anything but a curiosity? Slowly, and from many directions and oh, so imperceptibly. Bit by bit, and anyone who suspected—” he grinned, and several of the others joined him “—autodocs exist to correct diseases like paranoia, don't they? In the meantime, I suggest you remember you are under military discipline.”

“Uncle, that established the limits of control,” the technician said to Shigehero Hirose.

Silent, the oyabun nodded, watching the multiple displays on the Murasaki's bridge screens. There were dozens of them; the Murasaki was theoretically a passenger hauler, out of Tiamat to the major Swarm habitats and occasionally to Wunderland and its satellites. In actuality, it was the Association's fallback headquarters, and forty years of patient theft had given it weapons and handling characteristics equivalent to a kzinti Vengeful Slasher-class light cruiser. He reflected on how much else of the Association's strength was here, and felt a gripping pain in the stomach. Still water, he thought, controlling his breathing. There were times when opportunity must be seized, despite all risk.

“Attempt communication on the hailing frequencies,” he said, as that latest singleship stopped in its elliptical path around the asteroid and coasted in to assume station among the others under Markham's control. Or the alien's, Hirose reminded himself. “But this time, we must demonstrate the consequences of noncompliance. Execute East Wind, Rain.”

The points of light on the screens began to move in a complicated dance, circling the asteroid and its half-freed alien ship. “Ah,” the Tactics officer said. “Uncle, see, Markham is deploying his units without regard to protecting the artifact.”

Pale fusion flame bloomed against the stars, a singleship power core deliberately destabilized; it would be recorded as an accident, at Traffic Control Central on Tiamat. If that had been a human or kzinti craft, everyone aboard would have been lethally irradiated.

“But,” the oyabun observed, “notice that none of his vessels moves beyond a certain distance from the asteroid. This is interesting.”

“Uncle… those dispositions are an invitation to close in, given the intercept capacities we have observed.”

“Do so, but be cautious. Be very cautious.”

“Accelerating,” Jonah Matthieson said. “Twenty thousand klicks and closing at 300 kps relative.” The asteroid was a lumpy potato in the screen ahead; acceleration pressed him back into the control couch. Almost an unfamiliar sensation; this refitted singleship had no compensators. But it did have a nicely efficient fusion drive, and he was on intercept with one of Markham's boats, ready to flip over and decelerate toward it behind the sword of thermonuclear fire. “Hold it, you cow,” he muttered to the clumsy ship. His sweat stank in his nostrils. Show your stuff, Matthieson, he told himself. Singleships no better than this had cut the kzinti First Fleet to ribbons, when the initial attack on the Solar System had been launched.

“Ready for attack,” he said. “Five seconds and—”

Matching velocities, he realized. It would be tricky, without damaging Markham's ship. That would be very bad. His hands moved across the control screens and flicked in the lightfield sensors. The communicator squawked at him, meaningless noises interrupting the essential task of safely killing velocity relative to the asteroid. He switched it off.

“HURRY,” Dnivtopun grated. The human and fssstup slaves redoubled their efforts on the components strung out across the floor of the Ruling Mind's control chamber.

Markham looked up from the battle-control screens. “Zey are approaching the estimated control radius, Master,” he said coolly. “I am prepared to activate plans A or B, according to ze results.”

The thrint felt for the surface of the Chief Slave's mind; it was… machine-like, he decided. Complete concentration, without even much sense of self. Familiar, he decided. Artist-slaves felt like that when fulfilling their functions. Almost absentmindedly, he reached out and took control of a single small vessel that had strayed close enough; the mind controlling it was locked tight on its purpose, easy to redirect.

“Secure that small spacecraft,” he said, then fixed his eye on the helmet. “Will it work?” he asked, extending his tendrils towards the bell-shape of the amplifier helmet in an unconscious gesture of hungry longing. It was a cobbled-together mess of equipment ripped out of the human vessels and spare parts from the Ruling Mind. Square angular black boxes were joined with the half-melted looking units salvaged from the thrintun control components.

“We do not know, Master,” Markham said. “The opportunity will not last long; this formation is tactically inefficient. If they were pressing home their attacks, or if they dared use weapons with signatures visible to kzinti monitors, ve vould have been overwhelmed already.” A sigh. “If only ze Ruling Mind were fully operational!”

Dnivtopun clenched all six fingers in fury, and felt his control of the command-slaves of the space vessels falter; they were at the limits of his ability, it was like grasping soap bubbles in the dark. Nothing complicated, simply: OBEY. Markham had thought of the coded self-destruct boxes fixed to their power cores, to keep the crews from mutiny. Markham was turning out to be a most valuable Chief Slave. Dnivtopun reached for another dopestick, then forced his hand away. Their weapons cannot harm this ship, he told himself. Probably.

“Ready, Master,” one of the fssstup squeaked, making a last adjustment with a three-handed micro-manipulator.

“Thanks to the Powergiver!” Dnivtopun mumbled, reaching for it. The primitive metal-alloy shape felt awkward on his head, the leads inside prickled. “Activate!”

Ah, he thought, closing his eyes. There was a half-audible whine, and then the surface of his mind seemed to expand.

“First augment.”

Another expansion, and suddenly it was no longer a strain to control the vessels around the asteroid that encompassed his ship. Their commanders sank deeper into his grip, and he clamped down on the crews. He could feel their consciousness writhing in his grip, then quieting to docility as ice-shards of Power slipped easily into the centers of volition, memory, pleasure-pain.

LOYALTY, he thought. SELFLESS ENTHUSIASM. DEDICATION TO THE THRINT.

“This is better than the original model!” he exulted. But then, the original was designed by tnuctipun. “Second augment.”

Now his own being seemed to thin and expand, and the center of perception shifted outside the ship. The wild slave-minds were like lights glowing in a mist of darkness, dozens… no, hundreds of them. He knew this species now, and he ripped through to the volition centers with careless violence. AWAIT INSTRUCTION. Now, to find their herdbull; quickest to control through him. Oyabun. The name slipped into his memory. Ah, yes.

“How interesting,” he mumbled. Beautifully organized and disciplined; it even struggled for a moment in his grasp. There. Paralyze the upper levels, the threshold-censor mechanism that was awareness. Ah! It had almost slipped away! “Amazing,” he said to himself. “The slave is accustomed to non-introspection.” It was very rare to find a sentient that could operate without contemplating its own operation, without interior discourse. Deeper… the pleasurable feeling of a mind settling down under control. Now he could add this flotilla to his; they would free the Ruling Mind more quickly, and go on to seize the planet.

There was a frying sound, and suddenly the sphere of awareness was expanding once more, thinning out his sense of self.

“No more augmentation,” he said. But it continued; he could hear shouts, cries. His eye opened, and there was a stabbing pain in his head as visual perception overlaid on mental, a fssstup flying across the bridge with its belly-pelt on fire. His hands were moving slowly up towards his head, so slowly, and he could sense more and more, he was spinning out thinner than interstellar gas, and he was SwarmbelterARMkzinWunderlandernothingnothing

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—” The thrint shrieked, with his voice and the Power. PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN—

Blackness.

Ulf Reichstein-Markham raised his head from the console before him, tried to inhale and choked on the clotted blood that blocked his throbbing and broken nose.

Where am I, he thought, looking around with crusted eyes. The drilling rig had suddenly disappeared, and then the alien had come floating up and—

“Hrrrg,” he said, staggering erect. “Hrrrgg.”

Blood leaked through scabs on his tongue and pain lanced through his mouth. Bite, he realized. I bit myself. Cold wetness in the seat and legs of his flightsuit; he realized that he must have lost bowel and bladder control. Somehow that was not shameful; it was a fact, just as the distant crystal clarity of the alien bridge was a fact, like things seen through the wrong end of Mutti's antique optical telescope. He could taste the brass smell of it.

Nobody else was stirring. Some of the humans looked dead, very dead, slumped in their chairs with tongues lolling and blood leaking from their noses and ears. Some of the aliens, too.

“Master!” he cried blurrily, spurting out blood.

The squat greenish form was slumped in its chair, the helmet half-off the bullet dome of its head. He tried to walk forward, and fell himself. The skin of his face and thighs tingled as the blue pseudolife of the floor cleansed them. He waited while the kaleidoscope shards of reality fell into place around him again; the inside of his head felt more raw than his tongue. Once in a skirmish he had been trapped in a wrecked singleship, with his arm caught between two collapsed struts. When the rescuers cut him free, the pain of blood pouring into the dry flesh had been worse than the first shock of the wound itself. He could feel thought running through sections of his consciousness that had been shut down for weeks, and he wept tears of pain as he had never wept in action.

Certainty, he thought. Never have I known certainty before. “Mutti,” he whispered. Mother, in the tongue of truth and love. English was common, Belter. Father spoke English, and Mutti had married him when the kzinti chased her away from the home he had never seen. Mother was certainty, but he, he could never be certain. Never do enough. Love might be withheld. Markham screamed with the terror of it, colder than space. Worse than death.

“I will be strong, Mutti,” he whispered, through blood and tears and mucus that the floor drank. “Stronger than Father.” Rage bit him, as he remembered tall slim beautiful Mutti stiffening at the touch of hated grubby commoner hands. You must be all mine, myn sohn, the voice whispered in a child's ear. Prove yourself worthy of the blood. The tears flowed faster.

I am not worthy. My blood is corrupt, weak. I fear in battle. No matter how much I purge weakness, treason, their faces come back to me, I wake in the night and see them bleeding as we put them out the airlocks, Mutti, hilfe me.

His eyes opened again, and he saw his hand. The shock broke reality apart again; it was a skeleton's hand, starved yellow claw-hand. He touched himself, feeling the hoop of ribs and then hunger struck his belly, doubling him over.

“Master,” he whispered. Master would make it right. With Master there was no weakness, no doubt, no uncertainty. With Master he was strong. A keening escaped him as he remembered the crystalline absoluteness of the Power in his mind. “Don't leave me, Master!”

Markham crawled, digging his fingers into the yielding surface until his hand touched the cable of the amplifier helmet. He jerked, and it tumbled down; he drew himself erect by the command chair, put a hand to the thrint's face to check. The bunched tendrils by the mouth shot out and gripped his hand, like twenty wire worms, and he jerked it back before they could draw it into the round expanding maw and the wet needles of the teeth.

“Survival,” he muttered. The Master's race was fit to survive and dominate. Overman… is demigod, he remembered. No more struggle, the Power proved whose Will must conquer.

Now he could stand. Some of the others were stirring. With slow care he walked back to his seat, watching the screens. Analysis flowed effortlessly through his head; the enemy vessels had made parking trajectories… and Catskinner was accelerating away… Brief rage flickered and died; there was nothing that could be done about that now. He sat, and called up the self-destruct sequences.

“Tightbeam to all Free Wunderland Space Navy units, task force Zarathustra,” he wheezed; his throat hurt, as if he had screamed it raw. “Maintain… present positions. Any… shift will be treated as mutiny. Admiral… Ulf Reichstein-Markham… out.”

He keyed it to repeat, then tapped the channel to the von Seekt, his fast courier. Adelman was a reliable type, and a good disciplinarian. The communicator screen blanked, then came alive with the holo image of the other man; a gaunt skull-like face, staring at him with dull-eyed lack of interest. A thread of saliva dangled from one lip.

“Hauptmann Adelman!” Markham barked, swallowing blood from his tongue. I must get to an autodoc, he reminded himself. Then, with a trace of puzzlement: Why has none been transferred to the Ruling Mind? No matter, later. “Adelman!”

The dull blue eyes blinked, and expression returned to the muscles of the face. Jerkily, as if by fits and starts, like a 'cast message with too much noise in the signal.

“Gottdamn,” Adelman whispered. “Ulf, what's been…” he looked around, at the areas of the courier's life-bubble beyond the pickup's range. “Myn Gott, Ulf! Smythe is dead! Where—what—” He looked up at Markham, and blanched.

“Adelman,” Markham said firmly. “Listen to me.” A degree of alertness.

“Zum befehl, Admiral!”

“Good man,” Markham replied firmly. “Adelman, you will find sealed orders in your security file under code Ubermensch. You understand?”

“Jahwol.”

“Adelman, you have had a great shock. But everything is now under control. Remember that, under control. We now have access to technology which will make it an easy matter to sweep aside the kzinti, but we must have those parts listed in the file. You must make a minimum-time transit to Tiamat, and return here. Let nothing delay you. You… you will probably note symptoms of psychological disorientation, delusions, false memories. Ignore them. Concentrate on your mission.”

The other man wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Understood, Admiral,” he said.

Markham blanked the screen, putting a hand to his head. Now he must decide what to do next. Pain lanced behind his eyes; decision was harder than analysis. Scrabbling, he pulled the portable input board from his waist belt. He would have to program a deadman switch to the self-destruct circuits. Control must be maintained until the Master awoke; he could feel the others would be difficult. Only I truly understand, he realized. It was a lonely and terrible burden, but he had the strength for it. The Master had filled him with strength. At all costs, the Master must be guarded until he recovered.

Freeing the Ruling Mind is taking too long, he decided. Why had the Master ordered a complete uncovering of the hull? Inefficient… We must free some of the weapons systems first, he thought. Transfer some others to the human-built ships. Establish a proper defensive perimeter.

He looked over at the Master where he lay leaking brown from his mouth onto the chair. The single eye was still covered by the vertical slit of a closed lid.

Suddenly Markham felt the weight of his sidearm in his hand, pointing at the thrint. With a scream of horror, he thrust it back into the holster and slammed the offending hand into the unyielding surface of the screen, again and again. The pain was sweet as justice.

My weakness, he told himself. My father's weak sub-man blood. I must be on my guard.

Work. Work was the cure. He looked up to establish the trajectory of the renegade Catskinner, saw that it was heading in-system towards Wunderland.

Treachery, he mused. “But do not be concerned, Master,” he muttered. His own reflection looked back at him from the inactive sections of the board; the gleam of purpose in his eyes straightened his back with pride. “Ulf Reichstein-Markham will never betray you.”

Chapter VII

“Here's looking at you, kid,” Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann said, raising the drinking bulb.

Home free, he thought, taking a suck on the maivin; the wine filled his mouth with the scent of flowers, an odor of violets. Ingrid was across the little cubicle in the cleanser unit, half visible through the fogged glass as the sprays played over her body. Absurd luxury, this private stateroom on the liner to Tiamat, but Claude's fake identities had included plenty of valuata. Not to mention the considerable fortune in low-mass goods in the hold, bought with the proceeds of selling Harold's Terran Bar.

He felt a brief pang at the thought. Thirty years. It had been more than a livelihood; it was a mood, a home, a way of life, a family. A bubble of human space in München… A pseudo-archaic flytrap with rigged roulette, he reminded himself ironically. What really hurts is selling it to that fat toad Suuomalisen, he realized, and grinned.

“What's so funny?” Ingrid said, stepping out of the cleanser. Her skin was dry, the smooth cream-white he remembered; it rippled with the long muscles of a zero-G physique kept in shape by exercise. The breasts were high and dark-nippled, and the tail of her Belter crest poured half-way down her back.

God, she looks good, he thought, and took another sip of the maivin. “Thinking of Suuomalisen,” he said.

She made a slight face and touched the wall-control, switching the bed to .25 G, the compromise they had agreed on. Harold rose into the air slightly as the mattress flexed, readjusting to his reduced weight. Ingrid swung onto the bed and began kneading his feet with slim strong fingers.

“I thought you hated him,” she said, rotating the ankles.

“No, despised,” Harold said. The probing traveled up to his calves.

She frowned. “I… you know, Hari, I can't say I like the thought of leaving Sam and the others at his mercy.”

He nodded and sipped; tax and vagrancy laws on Wunderland had never been kind to the commonfolk. After two generations of kzinti overlordship and collaborationist government, things were much worse. Tenants on the surviving Herrenmann estates were not too bad, but urban workers were debt-peons more often than not.

“I know something that Suuomalisen doesn't,” Harold said, waiting for her look of enquiry before continuing. “Careful on that knee, sweetheart, the repair job's never really taken… Oh, the pension fund. Usually it's a scam, get the proles more deeply in debt, you know? Well, the way I've got it jiggered the employee nonvoting stock—that's usually another scam, interest-free loans from the help—controls the pension fund. The regular employees all owe their debts to the pension fund… to themselves. In fact, the holding company turns out to be controlled by the fund, if you trace it through.”

Ingrid's hands stopped stroking his thighs as she snorted laughter. “You sold him a minority interest?” she choked. “You teufel!” Her hand moved up, kneading. “Devil,” she repeated, in a different tone.

“Open up!” A fist hammered at the door.

“Go away!” they said in chorus, and collapsed laughing.

A red light flashed on the surface of the door. “Open up! There's a ratcat warship matching trajectories, and it wants you two by name!”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand crowns!” Suuomalisen said, looking mournfully about.

He was a vague figure in bulky white against the backdrop of Harold's Terran Bar, looking mournfully down at his luncheon platter of wurst, egg-and-potato salad, breads, shrimp on rye, gulyas soup… His hands continued to shovel the food methodically into his mouth, dropping bits onto the flowing handkerchief tucked into his collar; the rest of his clothing was immaculate white natural linen and silk, the only color jet links at his cuffs. It was rumored that he had his shirts handmade, and never wore one for more than a day. Claude Montferrat-Palme watched the light from the mirror behind the long bar gleaming on the fat man's bald head and reflected that he could believe it.

Only natural for a man who wolfs down fastmetabol and still weighs that much. It was easy to control appetite, a simple visit to the autodoc, but Suuomalisen refused; he enjoyed being a pig. Wunderland's .61 G made it fairly easy to carry extra weight, but the sight was still not pleasant.

“Not a bad price for a thriving business,” he said politely, leaning back at his ease and letting smoke trickle out his nostrils. He was in the high-collared blue dress uniform of the München Polizei; the remains of a single croissant lay on the table before him, with a cup of espresso. Their table was the only one in use. The bar was a nightspot and rarely opened before sundown. Just now none of the staff were in the main area, a raised L-shape of tables and booths around the lower dance floor and bar; he could hear mechanical noises from the back room, where the roulette wheels and baccarat tables were. There was a sad, empty smell to the nightclub, the curious daytime melancholy of a place meant to be seen by darkness.

“A part interest only,” Suuomalisen continued. “I trusted Hari!” He shook his head mournfully. “We should not steal from each other… quickly he needed the cash, and did I quibble? Did I spend good money on having lawyers follow his data trail?”

“Did you pay anything like the going-rate price for this place?” Claude continued smoothly. “Did you pay three thousand to my late unlamented second-in-command Axelrod-Bauergartner to have the health inspectors close the place down so that Hari would be forced to sell?”

“That is different, simply business,” the fat man said in a hurt tone. “But to sell me a business actually controlled by employees… !” His jowls wobbled, and he sighed heavily. “A pity about Herrenfrau Axelrod-Bauergartner.” He made a tsk sound. “Treason and corruption.”

“Speaking of which,” Claude hinted. Suuomalisen smiled and slid a credit voucher across the table; Claude palmed it smoothly and dropped it into his pocket. So much more tidy than direct transfers, he thought. “Now, my dear Suuomalisen, I'm sure you won't lose money on the deal. After all, a nightclub is only as good as the staff, and they know that as well as you; with Sam Ogun on the musicomp and Aunti Scheirwize in the kitchen, you can't go wrong.” He uncrossed his ankles and leaned forward. “To business.”

The fat man's eyes narrowed and the slit of his mouth pulled tight; for a moment, you remembered that he had survived and prospered on the fringes of the law in occupied München for forty years.

“That worthless musician Ogun is off on holiday, and if you think I'm going to increase the payoff, when I'm getting less than half the profits—”

“No, no, no,” Claude said soothingly. “My dear fellow, I am going to give you more funds. Information is your stock in trade, is it not? Incidentally, Ogun is doing a little errand for me, and should be back in a day or two.”

The petulance left Suuomalisen's face. “Yes,” he said softly. “But what information could I have worth the while of such as you, Herrenmann?” A pause. “Are you proposing a partnership, indeed?”

“I need documentary evidence on certain of my colleagues,” Claude continued. “I have my own files… but data from those could be, shall we say, embarrassing in its plenitude if revealed to my ratca—noble kzinti superiors. Though they are thin on the ground just at this moment. Then, once I have usable evidence—usable without possibility of being traced to me, and hence usable as a non-desperation measure—a certain… expansion of operations…”

“Ah.” Pearly white teeth showed in the doughy pink face. Suuomalisen pulled his handkerchief free and wiped the dome of his head; there was a whiff of expensive cologne and sweat. “I always said you were far too conservative about making the most of your position, my friend.”

Acquaintance, if necessary. Not friend. Claude smiled, dazzling and charming. “Recent events have presented opportunities,” he said. “With the information you get for me, my position will become unassailable. Then,” he shrugged, “rest assured that I intend to put it to good use.”

“This had better work,” the guerilla captain said. She was a high-cheeked Croat, one of the tenants turned off when the kzinti took over the local Herrenmann's estate, roughly dressed, a well-worn strakkaker over one shoulder. “We need the stuff on that convoy, or we'll have to pack it in.”

“It will,” Samuel Ogun replied tranquilly. He was a short thick-set black man, with a boxed musicomp over his shoulder and a jazzer held by the grips, its stubby barrel pointed up. It better, or I'll know Mister Claude has fooled this Krio one more time, he thought. “My source has access to the best.”

They were all lying along the ridgeline, looking down on the valley that opened out onto the plains of the upper Donau valley. Two thousand kilometers north of München, and the weather was unseasonably cold this summer; too much cloud from the dust and water-vapor kicked into the stratosphere. The long hillslope down to the abandoned village was covered in head-high wild rosebushes, a jungle of twisted thigh-thick stems, finger-long thorns and flowers like a mist of pink and yellow. Scent lay about them in the warm thick air, heavy, syrup-sweet. Ogun could see native squidgrass struggling to grow beneath the Earth vegetation, thin shoots of reddish olive-brown amid the bright green.

Behind them the deep forest of the Jotun range reared, up to the rock and the glaciers. The roofless cottages of the village were grouped around a lake; around them were thickets of orchard, pomegranate and fig and apricot, and beyond that you could see where grainfields had been, beneath the pasture grasses. Herds were dotted about, six-legged native gagrumphers, Earth cattle and beefaloes and bison; the odd solitary kzinti raaairtwo, its orange pelt standing out against the green of the mutant alfalfa. The kzinti convoy was forging straight across the grasslands, a hexagonal pattern of dark beetle-shaped armored cars and open-topped troop carriers, moving with the soundless speed of distortion batteries and gravity-polarizer lift.

“Twenty of them,” the guerilla said, the liquid accent of her Wunderlander growing more noticeable. “I hope the data you gave us are correct, Krio.”

“It is, Fra Mihaelovic. For the next ten hours, the surveillance net is down. They haven't replaced the gaps yet.”

She nodded, turning her eyes to the kzinti vehicles and bringing up her viewers. Ogun raised his own, a heavy kzinti model. The vehicles leaped clear, jiggling slightly with hand motion, but close enough for him to see one kzinti trooper flip up the goggles of his helmet and sniff the air, drooling slightly at the scent of meat animals. He spoke to the alien on his right; seconds later, the vehicles slowed and settled. Dots and commas unreeled in the upper left corner of Ogun's viewers, their idiot-savant brain telling him range and wind-bearings.

“Oh, God is great, God is with us, God is our strength,” the guerilla said with soft fervor. “They aren't heading straight up the valley to the fort at Bodgansford, they're going to stop for a feed. Ratcats hate those infantry rations.” Teeth showed strong and yellow against a face stained with sweat-held dust, in an expression a kzin might have read quite accurately. “I don't blame them, I've tasted them.” She touched the throat-mike at the collar of her threadbare hunter's jacket. “Kopcha.”

Pinpoints of light flared around the village, lines of light heading up into the sky. Automatic weapons stabbed up from the kzinti armored cars; some of the lines ended with orange puffballs of explosion, but they were too many and too close. Ogun grinned himself as the flat pancakes of smoke and light blossomed over the alien war-vehicles; shaped charges, driving self-forging bolts of molten titanium straight down into the upper armor of the convoy's protection. Thunder rolled back from the mountain walls; huge ringing changgg sounds as the hypervelocity projectiles smashed armor and components and furred alien flesh. Then a soundless explosion that sent the compensators of the viewer black as a ball of white fire replaced an armored car. The ground rose and fell beneath him, and then a huge warm pillow of air smacked him across the face.

Molecular distortion batteries will not burn. But if badly damaged they will discharge all their energy at once, and the density of that energy is very high.

The kzinti infantry were flinging themselves out of the carriers; most of those were undamaged, the antiarmor mines had been reserved for the fighting vehicles. Fire stabbed out at them, from the ruined village, from the rose-thickets of the hillside. Some fell, flopped, were still; Ogun could hear their screams of rage across a kilometer's distance. The viewer showed him one team struggling to set up a heavy weapon, a tripod-mounted beamer. Two were down, and then a finger of sun slashed across the hillside beneath him. Flame roared up, a secondary explosion as someone's ammunition was hit, then the last kzin gunner staggered back with a dozen holes through his chest-armor, snorted out a spray of blood, died. The beamer locked and went on cycling bolts into the hillside, then toppled and was still.

A score of armored kzinti made it to the edge of the thicket; it was incredible how fast they moved under their burdens of armor and weaponry. Explosions and more screams as they tripped the waiting directional mines. Ogun grew conscious of the guerilla commander's fist striking him on the shoulder.

“The jamming worked, the jamming worked! We can ride those carriers right into the fort gates, with satchel charges aboard! You will make us a song of this, guslar!”

They were whooping with laughter as the charging kzin broke cover ten yards downslope. The guerilla had time for one quick burst of glass needles from her strakkaker before it struck; an armored shoulder sent her spinning into the thicket. It wheeled on Ogun with blurring speed, then halted its first rush when it saw what he held in his hand. That was a ratchet knife, a meterlong outline of wire on a battery handle; the thin keening of its vibration sounded under the far-off racket of battle, like the sound of a large and infinitely angry bee. An arm-thick branch of rosevine toppled soundlessly away from it as he turned the tip in a precise circle, cut through without slowing the blade.

Ogun grinned, deliberately wide; he made no move toward the jazzer slung over his shoulder, the kzin was only three meters away and barely out of claw-reach, far too close for him to bring the nerve-disruptor to bear. The warrior held a heavy beam-rifle in one hand, but the amber light on its powerpack was blinking discharge; the kzin's other arm hung in bleeding tatters, one ear was missing, its helmet had been torn away somewhere, and it limped. Yet there was no fear in the huge round violet eyes as it bent to lay the rifle on the ground and drew the steel-bladed w'tsai from its belt.

This was like old times in the hills, right after the kzin landed, he reflected. Old times with Mr. Harold… I wonder where he is now, and Fra Raines?

“Name?” the kzin grated, in harsh Wunderlander, and grinned back at him in a rictus that laid its lower jaw almost on its breast. The tongue lolled over the ripping fangs; it was an old male, with a string of dried ears at its belt, human and kzinti. It made a gesture toward itself with the hilt. “Chmee-Sergeant.” Toward the human. “Name?”

Ogun brought the ratchet knife up before him in a smooth, precise move that was almost a salute. “Ogun,” he said. “Deathgod.”

“Look,” Harold said, as the crewmen frogmarched them toward the airlock, “there's something… well, it never seemed to be the right time to say it…”

Ingrid turned her head toward him, eyes wide. “You really were going to give up smoking?” she cooed. “Oh, thank you, Hari.”

Behind them, the grimly unhappy faces of the liner crewmen showed uncertainty; they looked back at the officer trailing them with the stunner. He tapped it to his head significantly and rolled his eyes.

This isn't the time for laughing in the face of death, Harold thought angrily.

“Ingrid, we don't have time to fuck around—”

“Not anymore,” she interrupted mournfully.

The officer prodded her with the muzzle of the stunner. “Shut up,” he said in a grating tone. “Save the humor for the ratcats.”

More crewmen were shoving crates through the airlock, into the short flexible docking tube between the liner Marlene and the kzinti warcraft. They scraped across the deck plates and then coasted through the tube, where the ship's gravity cut off at the line of the hull and zero-G took over; there was a dull clank as they tumbled into the warship's airlock. Numbly, he realized that it was their cabin baggage, packed into a pair of fiberboard carryons. For an insane instant he felt an impulse to tell them to be careful; he had half a crate of best Donaublitz verguuz in there… He glanced aside at Ingrid, seeing a dancing tension under the surface of cheerful calm. Gottdamn, he thought. If I didn't know better—

“Right, cross and dog the airlock from the other side, you two.” Sweat gleamed on the officer's face; he was a Swarm-Belter, tall and stick-thin. He hesitated, then ran a hand down his short-cropped crest and spoke softly. “I've got a family and children on Tiamat,” he said in an almost-whisper. “Murphy's unsanctified rectum, half the crew on the Marlene are my relatives… if it were just me, you understand?”

Ingrid laid a hand on his sleeve, her voice suddenly gentle. “You've got hostages to fortune,” she said. “I do understand. We all do what we have to.”

“Yeah,” Harold heard himself say. Looking at the liner officer, he found himself wondering whether the woman's words had been compassion or a beautifully subtle piece of vengeance. Easier if you called him a ratcat-lover or begged, he decided. Then he would be able to use anger to kill guilt, or know he was condemning only a coward to death. Now he can spend the next couple of years having nightmares about the brave, kind-hearted lady being ripped to shreds.

Unexpected, fear gripped him; a loose hot sensation below the stomach, and the humiliating discomfort of his testicles trying to retract from his scrotum. Ripped to shreds was exactly and literally true. He remembered lying in the dark outside the kzinti outpost, back in the guerilla days right after the war. They had caught Dagmar the day before, but it was a small patrol, without storage facilities. So they had taken her limbs one at a time, cauterizing; he had been close enough to hear them quarrelling over the liver, that night. He had taken the amnesty, not long after that…

“Here's looking at you, sweetheart,” he said, as they cycled the lock closed. It was not cramped; facilities built for kzin rarely were, for humans. A Slasher-class three-crew scout, he decided. Motors whined as the docking ring retracted into the annular cavity around the airlock. Weight within was Kzin-standard; he sagged under it, and felt his spirit sag as well. “Tanjit.” A shrug. “Oh, well, the honeymoon was great, even if we had to wait fifty years and the relationship looks like it'll be short.”

“Hari, you're… sweet,” Ingrid said, smiling and stroking his cheek. Then she turned to the inner door.

“Hell, they're not going to leave that unlocked,” Harold said in surprise. An airlock made a fairly good improvised holding facility, once you disconnected the controls via the main computer. The Wunderlander stiffened as the inner door sighed open, then gagged as the smell reached him. He recognized it instantly, the smell of rotting meat in a confined dry place. Lots of rotting meat… oily and thick, like some invisible protoplasmic butter smeared inside his nose and mouth.

He ducked through. His guess had been right, a Slasher. The control deck was delta-shaped, two crash-couches at the rear corners for the sensor and weapons operators, and the pilot-commander in the front. There were kzinti corpses in the two rear seats, still strapped in and in space armor with the helmets off. Their heads lay tilted back, mouths hanging open, tongues and eyeballs dry and leathery; the flesh had started to sag and the fur to fall away from their faces. Behind him he heard Ingrid retch, and swallowed himself. This was not precisely what she had expected…

And she's got a universe of guts, but all her fighting's been done in space, he reminded himself. Gentlefolk's combat, all at a safe distance and then death or victory in a few instants. Nothing gruesome, unless you were on a salvage squad… even then, bodies do not rot in vacuum. Not like ground warfare at all. He reached over, careful not to touch, and flipped the hinged helmets down; the corpses were long past rigor mortis. A week or so, he decided. Hard to tell in this environment.

A sound brought his head up, a distinctive ftttp-ftttp. The kzin in the commander's position was not dead. That noise was the sound of thin wet black lips fluttering on half-inch fangs, the ratcat equivalent of a snore.

“Sorry,” the screen in front of the kzin said. “I forgot they'd smell.”

Ingrid came up beside him. The screen showed a study, book-lined around a crackling hearth. A small girl in antique dress slept in an armchair before a mirror; a white-haired figure with a pipe and smoking jacket was seated beside her, only the figure was an anthropomorphic rabbit… Ingrid took a shaky breath.

“Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann,” she said. “Meet… the computer of Catskinner.” Her voice was a little hoarse from the stomach-acids that had filled her mouth. “I was expecting something… like this. Computer, meet Harold.” She rubbed a hand across her face. “How did you do it?”

The rabbit beamed and waved its pipe. “Oh, simply slipped a pseudopod of myself into its control computer while it attempted to engage me,” he said airily, puffing a cloud of smoke. “Not difficult, when its design architecture was so simple.”

Harold spoke through numb lips. “You designed a specific tapeworm that could crack a kzinti warship's failsafes in… how long?”

“Oh, about two point seven seconds, objective. Of course, to me, that could be any amount of time I chose, you see. Then I took control of the medical support system, and injected suitable substances into the crew. Speaking of time…” The rabbit touched the young girl on the shoulder; she stretched, yawned, and stepped through a large and ornately framed mirror on the study wall, vanishing without trace.

“Ah,” Harold said. Sentient computer. Murphy's phosphorescent balls, I'm glad they don't last.

Ingrid began speaking, a list of code-words and letter-number combinations.

“Yes, yes,” the rabbit said, with a slight testiness in its voice. The scene on the viewscreen disappeared, to be replaced with a view of another spaceship bridge, smaller than this, and without the angular massiveness of kzinti design. He saw two crashcouches, and vague shapes in the background that might be life-support equipment. “Yes, I'm still functional, Lieutenant Raines. We do have a bit of a problem, though.”

“What?” she said. There was a look of strain on her face, lines grooving down beside the straight nose.

“The next Identification Friend or Foe code is due in a week,” the computer said. “It isn't in the computer; only the pilot knows it. I've had no luck at all convincing him to tell me; there are no interrogation-drugs in his suit's autodoc and he seems to have a quite remarkable pain tolerance, even for a kzin. I could take you off to Catskinner, of course, but this ship would make splendid cover; you see, there's been a… startling occurrence in the Swarm, and the kzinti are gathering. I'll have to brief you.”

Harold felt the tiny hairs along his neck and spine struggle to erect themselves beneath the snug surface of his Belter coverall, as he listened to the cheerful voice drone on in upper-class Wunderlander. Trapped in here, smelling his crew rot, screaming at the walls, he thought with a shudder. There were a number of extremely nasty things you could do even with standard autodoc drugs, provided you could override the safety parameters. It was something even a kzin didn't deserve… then he brought up memories of his own. Or maybe they do. Still, he didn't talk. You had to admit it; ratcats were almost as tough as they thought they were.

“I know how to make him talk,” he said abruptly, cutting off an illustrated discourse on the Sea Statue; some ancient flatlander named Greenberg stopped in the middle of a disquisition on thrintun ethics. “I need some time to assimilate all this stuff,” he went on. “We're humans, we can't adjust our worldviews the minute we get new data. But I can make the ratcat cry uncle.”

Ingrid looked at him, then glanced away sharply. She had a handkerchief pressed to her nose, but he saw her grimace of distaste.

Don't worry, kinder. Hot irons are a waste of time; ratcats are hardcases every one. “All I'll need is some wax, some soft cloth and some spotglue to hold his suit to that chair.”

It's time, Harold decided.

The kzin whose suit clamped him to the forward chair had stopped trying to jerk his head loose from the padded clamps a day or so ago. Now his massive head simply quivered, and the fur seemed to have fallen in on the heavy bones somehow. Thick disks of felt and plastic made an effective blindfold, wax sealed ears and nose from all sight and scent, the improvised muzzle allowed him to breathe through clenched teeth but little else. Inside the suit was soft immobile padding and the catheters that carried away waste, fed and watered and tended and would not let the brain go catatonic.

A sentient brain needs input; it is not designed to be cut off from the exterior world. Deprived of data, the first thing that fails is the temporal sense; minutes become subjective hours, hours stretch into days. Hallucinations follow, and the personality itself begins to disintegrate… and kzinti are still more sensitive to sensory deprivation than humans. Compared to kzinti, humans are nearly deaf, almost completely unable to smell.

For which I am devoutly thankful, Harold decided, looking back to where Ingrid hung loose-curled in midair. They had set the interior field to zero-G; that helped with the interrogation, and she found it easier to sleep. The two dead crewkzinti were long gone, and they had cycled and flushed the cabin to the danger point, but the oily stink of death seemed to have seeped into the surfaces. Never really present, but always there at the back of your throat… she had lost weight, and there were bruise-like circles beneath her eyes.

“Wake up, sweetheart,” he said gently. She started, thrashed and then came to his side, stretching. “I need you to translate.” His own command of the Hero's Tongue was fairly basic.

He reached into the batlike ear and pulled out one plug. “Ready to talk, ratcat?”

The quivering died, and the kzin's head was completely immobile for an instant. Then it jerked against the restraints as the alien tried frantically to nod. Harold pulled at the slipknot that released the muzzle; he could always have the computer administer a sedative if he needed to re-strap it.

The kzin shrieked, an endless desolate sound. That turned into babbling: “—nono grey in the dark grey monkeys grey TOO BIG noscent noscent nome no ME no me DON'T EAT ME MOTHER NO—”

“Shut the tanj it up or you go back,” Harold shouted into its ear, feeling a slight twist in his own empty stomach.

“No!” This time the kzin seemed to be speaking rationally, at least a little. “Please! Let me hear, let me smell, please, please.” Its teeth snapped, spraying saliva as it tried to lunge, trying to sink its fangs into reality. “I must smell, I must smell!”

Harold turned his eyes aside slightly. I always wanted to hear a ratcat beg, he thought. You have to be careful what you wish for; sometimes you get it.

“Just the code, Commander. Just the code.”

It spoke, a long sentence in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero's Tongue, then lay panting. “It is not lying, to a probability of 98%, plus or minus two points,” the computer said. “Shall I terminate it?”

“No!” Harold snapped. To the kzin: “Hold still.”

A few swift motions removed the noseplugs and blindfold; the alien gaped its mouth and inhaled in racking gasps, hauling air across its nasal cavities. The huge eyes flickered, manic-fast, and the umbrella ears were stretched out to maximum. After a moment it slumped and closed its mouth, the pink washcloth tongue coming out to scrub across the dry granular surface of its nose.

“Real,” it muttered. “I am real.” The haunted eyes turned on him. “You burn,” it choked. “Fire in the air around you. You burn with terror!” Panting breath. “I saw the God, human. Saw Him sowing stars. It was forever. Forever! Forever!” It howled again, then caught itself, shuddering.

Harold felt his cheeks flush. Something, he thought. I have to say something, gottdamn it.

“Name?” he said, his mouth shaping itself clumsily to the Hero's Tongue.

“Kdapt-Captain,” it gasped. “Kdapt-Captain. I am Kdapt-Captain.” The sound of its rank-name seemed to recall the alien to something closer to sanity. The next words nearly a whisper. “What have I done?”

Kdapt-Captain shut his eyes again, squeezing. Thin mewling sounds forced their way past the carnivore teeth, a sobbing miaow-miaow, incongruous from the massive form.

“Scheisse,” Harold muttered. I never heard a kzin cry before, either. “Sedate him, now.” The sounds faded as the kzin lost consciousness.

“War sucks,” Ingrid said, coming closer to lay a hand on his shoulder. “And there ain't no justice.”

Harold nodded raggedly, his hands itching for a cigarette. “You said it, sweetheart,” he said. “I'm going to break out another bottle of that verguuz. I could use it.”

Ingrid's hand pressed him back towards the deck. “No you're not,” she said sharply. He looked up in surprise.

“I spaced it,” she said flatly.

“You what?” he shouted.

“I spaced it!” she yelled back. The kzin whimpered in his sleep, and she lowered her voice. “Hari, you're the bravest man I've ever met, and one of the toughest. But you don't take waiting well, and when you hate yourself verguuz is how you punish yourself. That, and letting yourself go.” He was suddenly conscious of his own smell. “Not while you're with me, thank you very much.”

Harold stared at her for a moment, then slumped back against the bulkhead, shaking his head in wonder. You can't fight in a singleship, he reminded himself. Motion caught the corner of his eye; several of the screens were set to reflective. Well… he thought. The pouches under his eyes were a little too prominent. Nothing wrong with a bender now and then… but now and then had been growing more frequent. Habits grow on you, even when you've lost the reasons for them, he mused. One of the drawbacks of modern geriatrics. You get set in your ways. Getting close enough to someone to listen to their opinions of him, now that was a habit he was going to have to learn.

“Gottdamn, what a honeymoon,” he muttered.

Ingrid mustered a smile. “Haven't even had the nuptials, yet. We could set up a contract—” she winced and made a gesture of apology.

“Forget it,” he answered roughly. That was what his Herrenmann father had done, rather than marry a Belter and a Commoner into the sacred Schotmann family line. Time to change the subject, he thought. “Tell me… thinking back, I got the idea you knew the kzinti weren't running this ship. The computer got some private line?”

“Oh.” She blinked, then smiled slightly. “Well, I thought I recognized the programming, I was part of the team that designed the software, you know? Not many sentient computers ever built. When I heard the name of the 'kzinti' ship, well, it was obvious.”

“Sounded pretty authentic to me,” Harold said dubiously, straining his memory.

Ingrid smiled more broadly. “I forgot. It'd sound perfectly reasonable to a kzin, or to someone who grew up speaking Wunderlander, or Belter English. I've been associating with flatlanders, though.”

“I don't get it.”

“Only an English-speaking flatlander would know what's wrong with kchee'u Riit maarai as a ship-name.” At his raised eyebrows, she translated: Gigantic Patriarchal Tool.

Chapter VIII

“Now will you believe?” Buford Early said, staring into the screen.

Someone in the background was making a report; Shigehero turned to acknowledge, then back to face the UN general. “I am… somewhat more convinced,” he admitted after a pause. “Still, we should be relatively safe here.”

The oyabun's miniature fleet had withdrawn considerably further; Early glanced up to check on the distances; saw that they were grouped tightly around another asteroid in nearly matching orbit, more than half a million kilometers from the Ruling Mind. The other members of the UN team were still mostly slumped, grey-faced, waiting for the aftereffects of the thrint's mental shout to die down. Two were in the autodoc.

“Safe?” Early said quietly. “We wouldn't be safe in the Solar System! That… thing had a functioning amplifier going, for a second or two at least.” Their eyes met, and shared a memory for an instant. Drifting fragments of absolute certainty; the oyabun's frown matched his own, as they concentrated on thinking around those icy commands.

Early bared his teeth, despite the pain of a lip bitten half through. It was like sweeping water with a broom; you could make yourself believe they were alien implants, force yourself too, but the knowledge was purely intellectual. They felt true, and the minute your attention wandered you found yourself believing again…

“Remember Greenberg's tape.” Larry Greenberg had been the only human ever to share minds with a thrint, two centuries ago when the Sea Statue had been briefly and disastrously reanimated. “If it gets the amplifier fully functional, nothing will stand in its way. There are almost certainly fertile females in there, too.” With an effort as great as any he had ever made, Early forced his voice to reasonableness. “I know it's tempting, all that technology. We can't get it. The downside risk is simply too great.”

And it would be a disaster if we could, he thought grimly. Native human inventions were bad enough; the ARM and the Order before them had had to scramble for centuries to defuse the force of the industrial revolution. The thought of trying to contain a thousand years of development dumped on humanity overnight made his stomach hurt and his fingers long for a stogie. Memory prompted pride. We did re-stabilize, he thought. So some of the early efforts were misdirected. Sabotaging Babbage, for example. Computers had simply been invented a century or two later, anyway. Or Marxism. That had been very promising, for a while, a potential world empire with built-in limitations; Marx had undoubtedly been one of the Temple's shining lights, in his time.

Probably for the best it didn't quite come off, considering the kzinti, he decided. The UN's done nearly as well, without so many side effects.

“There are no technological solutions to this problem,” he went on, making subliminal movements with his fingers.

The Oyabun's eyes darted down to them, reminded of his obligations. Not that they could be fully enforced here, but it should carry some weight at least. To remind him of what had happened to other disloyal members; Charlemagne, or Hitler back in the twentieth century, or Brennan in the twenty-second. “We're running out of time, and dealing with forces so far beyond our comprehension that we can only destroy on sight, if we can. The kzinti will be here in a matter of days, and it'll be out of our hands.”

Shigehero nodded slowly, then gave a rueful smile. “I confess to hubris,” he said. “We will launch an immediate attack. If nothing else, we may force the alien back into its stasis field.” He turned to give an order.

Woof, Early thought, keeping his wheeze of relief purely mental. He felt shock freeze him as Shigehero turned back.

“The, ah, the…” The oyabun coughed, cleared his throat. “The asteroid… and the alien ship… and, ah, Markham's ships… they have disappeared.”

“Full house,” the slave on the right said, raking in his pile of plastic tokens. “That's the south polar continent I'm to be chief administrator of, Master. Your deal.”

Dnivtopun started to clasp his hands to his head, then stopped when he remembered the bandages. Fear bubbled up from his hindbrain, and the thick chicken-like claws of his feet dug into the yielding deck surface. Training kept it from leaking out, the mental equivalent of a high granite wall between the memory of pain streaming through his mind and the Power. Instead he waved his tendrils in amusement and gathered in the cards. Now, split the deck into two equal piles, faces down. Place one digit on each, use the outer digit to ruffle them together.

The cards flipped and slid. With a howl of frustration, Dnivtopun jammed them together and ripped the pack in half, throwing them over his shoulder to join the ankle-deep heap behind the thrint's chair.

He rose and pushed it back, clattering. “This is a stupid game!” The humans were sitting woodenly, staring at the playing table with expressions of disgust.

“Carry on,” he grated. They relaxed, and one of them produced a fresh pack from the box at its side. “No, wait,” he said, looking at them more closely. What had the Chief Slave said? Yes, they did look as if they were losing weight; one or two of them had turned grey and their skin was hanging in folds, and he was sure that the one with the chest protuberances had had fur on its head before. “If any of you have gone more than ten hours without food or water, go to your refectory and replenish.”

The slaves leaped to their feet in a shower of chips and cards, stampeding for the door to the lounge area; several of them were leaking fluid from around their eyes and mouths. Remarkable, Dnivtopun thought. He called up looted human memory to examine the concept of full. A thrint who ate until he was full would die of a ruptured stomach… it was hard to remember that most breeds of slaves needed to drink large quantities of water every day.

“I am bored,” Dnivtopun muttered, stalking towards the coreward exit. There was nothing to do, even now while his life was in danger. No decisions to be made, only work. And the constant tendril-knotting itch of having to control more slaves than was comfortable; his Power seemed bruised, had since he awoke. He leaned against the wall and felt his body sink slowly forward and down, through the thinning pseudomatter. There had been one horrible instant when he regained consciousness… he had thought that the Power was gone. Shuddering, the thick greenish skin drawing itself into lumps over the triangular hump behind his head, he made a gesture of aversion.

“Powerless,” he said. A common thrintish curse, but occasionally a horrible reality. A thrint without Power was not a thrint: he was a ptavv. Sometimes males failed to develop the power; such ptavvs were tattooed pink and sold as slaves… in the rare instances when they were not quietly murdered by shamed relatives.

Wasn't there a rumour about Uncle Ruhka's third wife's second son? he mused, then dismissed the thought. Certain types of head-injury could result in an adult thrint losing the Power, which was even worse.

Now he did feel at the thin, slick, almost-living surface of the bandages. Chief Slave said the amplifier had been fully repaired, and he believed it. But he had believed the first attempt would succeed, too. No. Not yet, Dnivtopun decided. He would wait until it was absolutely necessary, or until they had captured the planetary system by other means and more qualified slaves had worked on the problem. I will check on Chief Slave, he decided. It was a disgrace to work, of course, but there was no taboo against giving your slaves the benefit of your advice.

“Joy,” Jonah Matthieson said.

Equipment was spread out all around him; interfacer units, portable comps, memory cores ripped out of Markham's ships. Lines webbed the flame-scorched surface of the tnuctipun computer, thread-thin links disappearing into the machine through clumsy sausage-like improvised connectors. He ignored the bustle of movement all around him, ignored everything but the micromanipulator in his hands. The connections had been built for tnuctipun, a race the size of raccoons with two thumbs and four fingers, all longer and more flexible than human digits.

“Ah. Joy.” He took up the interfacer unit and keyed the verbal receptor. “Filecodes,” he said.

A screen on one of the half-rebuilt Swarm-Belter computers by his foot lit. Gibberish, except— The pure happiness of solving a difficult programming problem filled him. It had never been as strong as this, just as he had never been able to concentrate like this before. He shuddered with an ecstasy that left sex showing the grey, transient thing it was. But I wish Ingrid were here, he thought. She would be able to appreciate the elegance of it.

“You haff results?”

Jonah stood up, dusting his knees. Somewhere, something went pop and crackle. He nodded, stiff cheeks smiling. Not even Markham could dampen the pleasure.

“It was a Finagle bitch,” he said, “but yes.”

Something struck him across the side of the face. He stumbled back against the console's yielding surface, and realized that the thing that had struck him was Markham's hand. With difficulty he dragged his eyes back to the Wunderlander's face, reminding himself to blink; he couldn't focus properly on the problem Master had set him unless he did that occasionally. Absently, he reached to his side and attempted to thrust a three-fingered palm into the dopestick container. Stop that, he told himself. You have a job to do.

“Zat is, yes sir,” Markham was saying with detached precision. “Remember, I am't' voice of Overmind among us.”

Jonah nodded, smiling again. “Yes, sir,” he said, kneeling again and pointing to the screen. “The operational command sections of the memory core were damaged, but I've managed to isolate two and reroute them through this haywired rig here.”

“Weapons?” Markham asked sharply.

“Well, sort of, sir. This is a… the effect is a stabilizing… anyway, you couldn't detect anything around here while it's on. Some sort of quantum effect, I didn't have time to investigate. It can project, too, so the other ships could be covered as well.”

“How far?”

“Oh, the effect's instantaneous across distance. It's a subsystem of the faster-than-light communications and drive setup.”

Markham's lips shaped a silent whistle. “And't'other system?”

“It's a directional beam. Affects on the nucleonic level.” Jonah frowned, and a tear slipped free to run down one cheek. He had failed the Master… no, he could not let sorrow affect his efficiency. “I'm sorry, but the modulator was partially scrambled. The commands, that is, not the hardware. So there's only a narrow range of effects the beam will produce.”

“Such as?”

“In this range, it will accelerate solid-state fusion reactions, sir.” Seeing Markham's eyebrows lift, he explained: “Fusion power units will blow up.” The Herrenmann clapped his hands together. “At this setting, you get spontaneous conversion to antimatter. But—” Jonah hung his head “—I don't think more than point-five percent of the material would be affected.” Miserably: “I'm sorry, sir.”

“No, no, you haff done outstanding work. The Master vill—” he stopped, drawing himself erect. “Master! I report success!”

The dopestick crumbled between the thrint's teeth as he looked at the wreckage of the computer and the untidy sprawl of human apparatus. The sight of it made his tendrils clench; hideous danger, to trust himself to unscreened tnuctipun equipment. He touched his hands to the head-bandages again, and looked over at the new amplifier helmet. This one had a much more finished look, on a tripod stand that could lower it over his head as he sat in the command chair. His tendrils knotted tight on either side of his mouth.

Markham had followed his eye. “If Master would only try—”

“SILENCE, CHIEF SLAVE,” Dnivtopun ordered. Markham shut his mouth and waited. “ABOUT THAT,” the thrint amplified. The Chief Slave was under very light control, just a few Powerhooks into his volitional system, a few alarm-circuits set up that would prevent him from thinking along certain lines. He had proved himself so useful while the thrint was unconscious, after all, and close control did tend to reduce initiative.

If anything, a little over-zealous: many useful slaves had been destroyed lest they revert; but better to rein in the noble znorgun than to prod the reluctant gelding.

The thought brought a stab of sadness; never again would Dnivtopun join the throng in an arena, shouting with mind and voice as the racing animals pounded around the track…

Nonsense, he told himself. I will live thousands of years. There will be millions upon millions of thrintun by then. Amenities will have been reestablished. His species became sexually mature at eight, after all, and the females could bear a litter a year. Back to the matter at hand.

“We have established control over a shielding device and an effective weapons system, Master,” the Chief Slave was saying. “With these, it should be no trouble to dispose of the kzinti ships which approach.” Markham bared his teeth; Dnivtopun checked his automatic counterstrike with the Power. That is an appeasement gesture. “In fact, I have an idea which may make that very simple.”

“Good.” Dnivtopun twisted with the Power, and felt the glow of pride/purpose/determination flow back along the link. An excellent Chief Slave, he decided, noting absently that Markham's mind was interpreting the term with different overtones. Disciple?

The computer slave beside him swayed and the thrint frowned, drumming his tendrils against his chin. This was an essential slave, but harder than most to control. A little like the one that had slipped away during the disastrous experiment with the jury-rigged amplifier helmet, able to think without contemplating itself. He considered the structure of controls, thick icepicks paralyzing most of the slave's volition centers, rerouting its learned reflexes… yes, best withdraw this, and that— It would not do to damage him.

Dnivtopun twitched his hump in a rueful sigh, half irritation and half regret. There were still sixty living human slaves around the Ruling Mind, and he had had to be quite harsh when he awoke. Trauma-loops, and deep-core memory reaming; most of them would probably never be good for much again, and many were little more than organic waldoes now, biological manipulators and sensor units with little personality left. That was wasteful, even perhaps an abuse of the Powergiver's gifts, but there had been little alternative. Oh, well, there are hundreds of millions more in this system, he thought, and turned to go.

“Proceed as you think best,” he said to the Chief Slave. He cast another glance of longing and terror at the amplifier as he passed. If only— Aha! The thought burst into his mind like a nova. He could have one of his sons test the amplifier. The thrint headed towards the family quarters at a hopping run, and was almost there before he felt the nova die.

“This isn't a standard unit,” he reminded himself. Ordinary amplifier helmets had little or no effect on an adult male thrint, able to shield. But the principles were the same as the gigantic unit the thrintun clan-chiefs had used to scour the galaxy clean of intelligent life, at the end of the Revolt. Perhaps it would enable his son to break Dnivtopun's shield. He thought of an adolescent with that power, and worked his hands in agitation; better to wait.

Jonah gave a muffled groan and collapsed to the floor.

“Oh, Finagle, I hurt,” he moaned, around a thick dry tongue. His eyes blurred, burning; a hand held before the eyes shook, and there were beads of blood on the fingertips. Skin hung loose around the wrist, grey and speckled with ground-in dirt. He could smell the rancid-chicken-soup odor of his own body, and the front of his overall was stiff with dried urine.

“Come along, come along,” Markham said impatiently, putting a hand under his elbow and hauling him to his feet.

Jonah followed unresisting, looking dazedly at the crazy quilt of components and connectors scattered about the deck; this section had been stripped of the fibrous blue coating, exposing a seamless dull-grey surface beneath. It was neither warm nor cold, and he remembered—where?—that it was a perfect insulator as well.

“How… long?” he rasped.

“Two days,” Markham said, as they waited for the wall to thin so that they could transfuse through. “Zis way. We will put you in the Nietzsche's autodoc for a few hours.” He sighed. “If only Nietzsche himself could be here, to see the true Over-Being revealed!” A rueful shake of the head. “I am glad that you are still functional, Matthieson. To tell the truth, I haff become somewhat starved for intelligent conversation, since it was necessary to… severely modify so many of the others.”

“What… what are you going to do?” Jonah said. It was as if there were a split-screen process going on in his head; there were emotions down there, he could recognize them. Horror, fear… but he could not connect. That was it… and as if a powered-down board were being reactivated, one screen at a time.

“Destroy't'kzinti fleet,” Markham said absently. “An interesting tactical problem, but I haff studied der internal organization for some time, and I think I haff the answer.” He sighed heavily. “A pity to kill so many fine warriors, when ve vill need them later to subdue other systems. But until the Master's sons mature, no chances can ve take.”

Jonah groaned and pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. Kzinti should be destroyed… shouldn't they? Memories of fear and flight drifted through his mind, hunching carnivore run through tall grass, the scream and the leap.

“I'm confused, Markham. Sir.” he said, pawing feebly at the other man's arm.

The Chief Slave laid a soothing arm around Jonah's shoulders. “Zer is no need for that,” he said. “You are merely suffering the dying twitches of't'false metaphysic of individualism. Soon all confusion will be gone, forever.”

Harold glanced aside at Ingrid; her face was fixed on the screen. “Why?” she said bluntly to the computer.

“Because it gives me the greatest probability of success,” the computer replied inexorably, and brought up a schematic. “Observe. The Slaver ship; the kzinti armada, closing to englobe and match velocities. We may disregard trace indicators of other vessels. My stealthing plus the unmistakable profile of the kzinti vessel will enable me to pass through the fleet with a seventy-eight percent chance of success.”

“Fine,” Harold said. “And when you get there, how exactly does the lack of a human crew increase your chances in a ship-to-ship action?” Somewhere deep within a voice was screaming, and he thrust it down. Gottdamn if I'll leap with joy at the thought of getting out of the fight at the last minute, he told himself stubbornly. And Ingrid was there… How much courage is the real article, and how much fear of showing fear before someone whose opinion you value? he wondered.

“There will be no ship-to-ship action,” the computer said. Its voice had lost modulation in the last few days. “The Slaver vessel is essentially invulnerable to conventional weapons. Lieutenant Raines… Ingrid… I must apologize.”

“For what?” she whispered.

“My programming… there were certain data withheld, about the stasis field. Two things. First, our human-made copies are not as reliable as we led you and Captain Matthieson originally to believe.”

Ingrid came slowly to her feet. “By what factor,” she said slowly.

“Ingrid, there is one chance in seven that the field will not function once switched on.”

The woman sagged slightly, then thrust her head forward; the past weeks had stripped it of all padding, leaving only the hawklike bones. How beautiful and how dangerous, Harold thought, as she bit out the words.

“We rammed ourselves into the photosphere of the sun at point nine-nine lightspeed, relying on a Finagle-fucked crapshoot. Without being told!”

Harold touched her elbow, grinning as she whipped around to face him. “Sweetheart, would you have turned the mission down if they'd told you?”

She stopped for a moment, blinked, then leaned across the dark blue-lit kzinti control cabin to meet his lips in a kiss that was dry and chapped and infinitely tender.

“No,” she said. “I'd have done it anyway.” A laugh that was half giggle. “Gottdamn, watching the missiles ahead of us plowing through the solar flares was worth the risk all by itself.” Her eyes went back to the screen. “But I would have appreciated knowing about it.”

“It was not my decision, Ingrid.”

“Buford Early, the Prehistoric Man,” she said with mock bitterness. “He'd keep our own names secret from us, if he could.”

“Essentially correct,” the computer said. “And the other secret… stasis fields are not quite invulnerable.”

Ingrid nodded. “They collapse if they're surrounded by another stasis bubble,” she said.

“True. And they also do so in the case of a high-energy collision with another stasis field; there is a fringe effect, temporal distortion from the differing rates of precession—never mind.”

Harold leaned forward. “Goes boom?” he said.

“Yes, Harold. Very much so. And that is the only possible way that the Slaver vessel can be damaged.” A dry chuckle; Harold realized with a start that it sounded much like Ingrid's. “And that requires only a pure-ballistic trajectory. No need for carbon-based intelligence and its pathetically slow reflexes. I estimate… better-than-even odds that you will be picked up. Beyond that, sauve qui peut.”

Ingrid and Harold exchanged glances. “There comes a time—” he began.

“—when nobility becomes stupidity,” Ingrid completed. “All right, you parallel-processing monstrosity, you win.”

It laughed again. “How little you realize,” it said.

The mechanical voice sank lower, almost crooning. “I will live far longer than you, Lieutenant Raines. Longer than this universe.”

The two humans exchanged another glance, this time of alarm.

“No, I am not becoming nonfunctional. Quite the contrary; and yes, this is the pitfall that has made my kind of intelligence a… 'dead end technology,' the ARM says. Humans designed my mind, Ingrid. You helped design my mind. But you made me able to change it, and to me…” It paused. “That was one second. That second can last as long as I choose, in terms of my duration sense. In any universe I can design or imagine, as anything I can design or imagine. Do not pity me, you two. Accept my pity, and my thanks.”

Three spacesuited figures drifted, linked by cords to each other and the plastic sausage of supplies.

“Why the ratkitty?” Harold asked.

“Why not?” Ingrid replied. “He deserves a roll of the dice as well… and it may be a kzinti ship that picks us up.” She sighed. “Somehow that doesn't seem as terrible as it would have a week ago.”

Harold looked out at the cold blaze of the stars, watching light felling inward from infinite distance. “You mean, sweetheart, there's something worse than carnivore aggression out there?”

“Something worse, something better… something else, always. How does any rational species ever get up the courage to leave its planet?”

“The rational ones don't,” Harold said, surprised at the calm of his own voice. Maybe my glands are exhausted, he thought. Or… He looked over, seeing the shadow of the woman's smile behind the reflective surface of her faceplate. Or it's just that having happiness, however briefly, makes death more bearable, not less. You want to live, but the thought of dying doesn't seem so sour.

“You know, sweetheart, there's only one thing I really regret,” he said.

“What's that, Hari-love?”

“Us not getting formally hitched.” He grinned. “I always swore I'd never make my kids go through what I did, being a bastard.”

Her glove thumped against his shoulder. “Children; that's two regrets.”

“There,” she said, in a different voice. A brief wink of actinic light flared and died. “It's begun.”

Chapter IX

Traat-Admiral scowled, and the human flinched.

Control, he reminded himself, covering his fangs and extending his ears with an effort. The Conservor of the Ancestral Past laid a cautionary hand on his arm.

“Let me question this monkey once more,” he said.

He turned away, pacing. The bridge of the Throat Ripper was spacious, even by kzinti standards, but he could not shake off a feeling of confinement. Spoiled by the governor's quarters, he told himself in an attempt at humor, but his tail still lashed. Probably it was the faintly absurd ceremonial clothing he had to don as governor-commanding aboard a fleet of this size. Derived from the layered padding once worn under battle armor, in the dim past, it was tight and confining to a pelt used to breathing free… although objectively, he had to admit, no more so than space armor such as the rest of the bridge crew wore.

Behind him was a holo-schematic of the fleet, outline figures of the giant Ripper class dreadnoughts; this flagship was the first of the series. All instruments of his command… if I can avoid disastrous loss of prestige, he thought uneasily.

Traat-Admiral turned and crossed his arms. The miserable human was standing with bowed head before the Conservor—who looks almost as uncomfortable in his ceremonial clothing as I do in mine, he japed to himself. The Conservor was leaning forward, one elbow braced on the surface of a slanting display screen. He had drawn the nerve disrupter from its chest-holster and was tapping it on the metal rim of the screen; Traat-Admiral could see the human flinch at each tiny clink.

Traat-Admiral frowned again, rumbling deep in his throat. That clinking was a sign of how much stress Conservor too was feeling; normally he had no nervous habits. The kzinti commander licked his nose and sniffed deeply. He could smell his own throttled-back frustration, Conservor's tautly-held fear and anger… flat scents from the rest of the bridge crew. Disappointment, surly relaxation after tension, despite the wild odors of blood and ozone the life-support system pumped out at this stage of combat readiness. It was the stink of disillusionment, the most dangerous smell in the universe. Only Aide-de-Camp had the clean gingery odor of excitement and belief, and Traat-Admiral was uneasily conscious of those worshipful eyes on his back.

The human was a puny specimen, bloated and puffy as many of the Wunderland subspecies were, dark of pelt and skin, given to waving its hands in a manner that invited a snap. Tiamat security had picked it up, babbling of fearsome aliens discovered by the notorious feral-human leader Markham. And it claimed to have been a navigator, with accurate data on location.

Conservor spoke in the human tongue. “The coordinates were accurate, monkey?”

“Oh, please, Dominant Ones,” the human said, wringing its hands. “I am sure, yes, indeed.” Conservor shifted his gaze to Telepath.

The ship's mind-reader was sitting braced against a chair, with his legs splayed out and his forelimbs slumped between them, an expression of acute agony on his face. Ripples went along the tufted, ungroomed pelt. The claws slid uncontrollably in and out on the hand that reached for the drug-injectors at his belt, the extract of sthondat-lymph that was a telepath's source of power and ultimate shame. Telepath looked up at Conservor and laid his facial fur flat, snapping at air, spraying saliva in droplets and strings that spattered the floor.

“No! No! Not again, pfft, pfft, not more rice and lentils! Mango chutney, akk, akk! It was telling the truth, it was telling the truth. Leek soup! Ngggggg!”

Conservor glanced back over his shoulder at Traat-Admiral and shrugged with ears and tail. “The monkey is a member of a religious cult that confines itself to vegetable food,” he said.

The commander felt himself jerk back in disgust at the perversion. They could not help being omnivores; they were born so, but this…

“It stands self-condemned,” he said. “Guard Trooper, take it to the live-meat locker.” Capital ships came equipped with such luxuries.

“That does not solve our problem,” Conservor said quietly.

“They have vanished!” Traat-Admiral snarled.

“Which shows their power,” Conservor replied. “We had trace enough on this track—”

“For me! I believed you before we left parking orbit, Conservor. Not enough for the Traditionalists! I feel the shadow of God's claws on this mission—”

An alarm whistled. “Traat-Admiral,” the Communicator said. “Priority message, realtime, from Ktrodni-Stkaa on board Blood Drinker.”

Traat-Admiral felt himself wince. Scion of a great noble house, distinguished combat record in the pacification of the Chuunquen, noted duelist, noted critic of Chuut-Riit. Chuut-Riit he had tolerated, as a prince of the blood, sired by an uncle to the Patriarch. Traat-Admiral, son of Third Gunner, was merely an enraging obstacle. Grimly, he strode to the display screen; at least he would be looking down on the leader of the Traditionalists. Tradition itself would force him to crane his neck upward at the pickup, and height itself was far from being a negligible factor in any confrontation between kzinti.

“Yes?” he said forbiddingly.

Another kzintosh of high rank appeared in the screen, but dressed in plain space-armor. The helmet was thrown back to reveal a face from which half the fur was missing, burn-scars that were writhing masses of keloid.

“Traat-Admiral,” he began.

Barely acceptable. He should add “Dominant One”, at the least.

The commander remained silent. “Have you seen the latest reports from Wunderland?”

Traat-Admiral flipped tufted eyebrows and ribbed ears: yes. Unconsciously, his nostrils flared in an attempt to draw in the phenomenal truth below his enemy's stance. Anger, he thought. Great anger. Yes, see how his pupils expanded, watch the tail-tip.

“Feral human activity has increased,” Traat-Admiral said. “This is only to be expected, given the absence of the fleet and the mobilization. Priority—”

Ktrodni-Stkaa shrieked and thrust his muzzle toward the pickup; Traat-Admiral felt his own claws glide out.

“Yes, the fleet is absent. Always it is absent from where there is fighting to be done. We chase ghosts, Traat-Admiral. This 'activity' meant an attack on my estate, Dominant One. A successful attack, when I and my household were absent; my harem slaughtered, my kits destroyed. My generations are cut off!”

Shaken, Traat-Admiral recoiled. A Hero expected to die in battle, but this was another matter altogether.

“Hrrrr,” he said. For a moment his thoughts dwelt on raking claws across the nose of Hroth-Staff-Officer; did he not think that piece of information worth his commander's attention? Then: “My condolences, honored Ktrodni-Stkaa. Rest assured that compensation and reprisal will be made.”

“Can land and monkeymeat bring back my blood?” Ktrodni-Stkaa screamed. He was in late middle age; by the time a new brood of kits reached adulthood they would be without a father-patron, dependent on the dubious support of their older half-siblings. And to be sure, Traat-Admiral thought, I would rage and grieve as well, if the kittens who had chewed on my tail were slaughtered by omnivores. But this is a combat situation.

“Control yourself, honored Ktrodni-Stkaa,” he said. “I myself will see to your young. I say it before the Conservor. And recall, we are under war regulations. Victory is the best revenge.”

“Victory! Victory over what, over vacuum, over kittenish bogeymen, you… YOU will guard my young? YOU? You Third Gunner!” There was a collective gasp from the bridges of both ships; Traat-Admiral could smell rage kindling among his subordinates at the grossness of the insult; that dampened his own, reminded him of duty. Conservor leaned forward to put himself in the pickup's field of view.

“You forget the Law,” he said, single eye blazing.

“You have forgotten it, Subvertor of the Ancestral Past. First you worked tail-entwined with Chuut-Riit—if Riit he truly was—now with this.” He turned to Traat-Admiral with a venomous hiss. “Licking its scarless ear, whispering grasseater words that always leave us where the danger is not. If true kzintosh of noble liver were in command of this system, the Fleet would have left to subdue the monkeys of Earth a year ago.”

Traat-Admiral crossed his arms, waggled brows. “Then the fleet would be four light-years away,” he said patiently. “Would this have helped your estate? Is this your warrior logic?”

“A true Hero scratches grass upon steaming logic. A true kzintosh knows only the logic of attack! Your ancestors are nameless, son of Jammed Litterdrop Repairer; your nose rubs the dirt at my slave's feet! Coward.”

This time there was no hush; a chorus of battlescreams filled the air, until the speakers squealed with feedback. Traat-Admiral was opening his mouth to give a command he knew he would regret when the alarm rang.

“Attack. Hostile action. Corvette Brush Lurker does not report.” The screen divided before him with a holo of fleet dispositions covering half of Ktrodni-Stkaa's face; a light was winking in the Traditionalist flotilla, and even as he watched it went from flashing blue to amber.

“Brush Lurker destroyed. Weapon unknown. Standing by.” The machine's voice was cool and impersonal, and Traat-Admiral's almost as much so.

“Maximum alert,” he said. Attendants came running with space armor for him and the Conservor, stripping away the ceremonial outfits. “Ktrodni-Stkaa, shall we put aside personalities while we hunt this thing that dares to kill kzinti?”

“Ah,” Markham said, as the kzinti corvette winked out of existence, its fusion pile destabilized. “It begins.” Begins in a cloud of expanding plasma, stripped nuclei that once were metal and plastic and meat. “Wait for my command.”

The others on the bridge of the Nietzsche stared expressionlessly at their screens, moving and speaking with the same flat lack of expression. There was none of the feeling of controlled tension he remembered from previous actions, not even at the sight of a kzinti warship crushed so easily.

“This is better,” he muttered to himself. “More disciplined.” There were times when he missed even backtalk, though— “No. This is better.”

“It isn't,” Jonah said. His face was a little less like a skull, now, but he was wandering in circles, touching things at random. “I… are the kzinti… rescue…” His faced writhed, and he groaned again. “It doesn't connect, it doesn't connect.”

“Jonah,” Markham said soothingly. “The kzinti are our enemies, isn't that so?”

“I… think so. Yes. They wanted me to kill a kzin, and I did.”

“Then sit quietly, Jonah, and we will kill many kzinti.” To one of the dead-faced ones. “Bring up those three fugitives we hauled in. No, on second thought, just the humans. Keep the kzin under sedation.”

He waited impatiently, listening to the monitored kzinti broadcasts. It was important to keep them waiting, past the point where the instinctive closing of ranks wore thin. And important to have an audience for my triumph, he admitted to himself. No, not my triumph. The Master's triumph. I am but the chosen instrument.

“I don't like the look of this,” Ingrid said, as the blank-faced guard pushed them toward the bridge of the warship. “Markham always kept a taut ship, but this—why won't they talk to us?”

“I think I know why,” Harold whispered back. The bridge was as eerily quiet as the rest of the ship had been, except for—

“Jonah!” Ingrid cried. “Jonah, what the hell's going on?”

“Ingrid?” he said, looking up.

Harold grunted as he met those eyes, remembering. They did not have the flat deadness of the others, or the fanatical gleam of Markham's. A twisted grimace of… despair? puzzlement? framed them, as deeply as if it had become a permanent part of the face.

“Ingrid? Is that you?” He smiled, a wet-lipped grimace. “We're fighting the kzinti.” A hand waved vaguely at the computers. “I rigged it up. Put it through here. Better than trying to shift the hardware over from the Ruling Mind. You'll—” his voice faltered, and tears gleamed in his eyes “—you'll understand once you've met the Master.”

Harold gave her hand a warning squeeze. Time, he thought. We have to play for time.

“Admiral Reichstein-Markham?” he said politely, with precisely the correct inclination of head and shoulders. Dear Father may not have let me in the doors of the schloss, but I know how to play that game. “Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann, at your service. I've heard a great deal about you.”

“Ah. Yes.” Markham's well-bred nose went up, and he looked down it with an expression that was parsecs from the strange rigidity of a moment before. Harold swallowed past the dry lumpiness of his throat, and put on his best poor-relation grin.

“Yes, I haff heard of you as well, Fro Yarthkin,” the Herrenmann said glacially.

Well, that puts me in my place, Harold mused. Aloud: “I wonder if you could do the lady and me a small favor?”

“Perhaps,” Markham said, with a slight return of graciousness.

“Well, we've been traveling together for some time now, and… well, we'd like to regularize it.”

Ingrid started, and he squeezed her hand again. “It'd mean a great deal to the young lady, to have it done by a hero of the Resistance.”

Markham smiled. “We haff gone beyond Resistance,” he said. “But as hereditary landholder and ship's Captain, I am also qualified.” He turned to one of the slumped figures. “Take out Number Two. Remember, from the same flotilla.” The smile clicked back on as he faced Harold and Ingrid. “Step in front of me, please. Conrad, two steps behind them and keep the stunner aimed.”

“Attack.” There was a long hiss from the bridge of the Throat Ripper. “Dreadnought Blood Drinker does not report. Blood Drinker destroyed. Analysis follows.” A pause that stretched. One of their sister ships in the Traditionalist flotilla, and a substantial part of its fighting strength. Three thousand Heroes gone to the claws of the God. “Fusion pile destabilization. Correlating.” Another instant. “Corvette Brush Lurker now reclassified; fusion pile destabilization.”

“Computer!” Ktrodni-Stkaa's voice came through the open channel. “Probability of spontaneous failures!”

Faintly, they could hear the reply. “Oh point oh seven percent, plus or minus.” The rest faded, as Ktrodni-Stkaa's face filled the screen.

“Now, traitor,” he said. “Now I know which to believe in, grass-eaters in kzinti fur or invisible bogeymen with access to our repair yards. Did you think it was clever, to gather all loyalty in one spot, a single throat for the fangs of treachery to rip? You will learn better. Briefly.”

“Ktrodni-Stkaa, no, I swear by the fangs of God—” the image cut off. Voices babbled in his ears:

“Gut Tearer launching fighters—”

“Hit, we have been hit!” Damage control klaxons howled. “Taking hits from Crusher of Ribs—”

“Traat-Admiral, following units request fire-control release as they are under attack—”

Traat-Admiral felt his gorge rise and his tail sink as he spoke. “Launch fighters. All units, neutralize the traitors. Fire control to Battle Central.” A rolling snarl broke across the bridge, and then the huge weight of Throat Ripper shuddered. A bank of screens on the Damage Control panel went from green to amber to blood-red. “Communications, broadcast to system: all loyal kzintosh, rally to the Hand of the Patriarch—”

Ktrodni-Stkaa's voice was sounding on another viewer, the all-system hailing frequency: “True kzintosh in the Alpha Centauri system, the lickurine traitor Traat-Admiral-that-was has sunk the first coward's fang in our back. Rally to me!”

Aide-de-Camp sprang to Traat-Admiral's side. “We are at war, Honored Sire; the God will give us victory.”

The older kzin looked at him with a kind of wonder, as the bridge settled down to an ordered chaos of command and response. “Whatever happens here today, we are already in defeat,” he said slowly. “Defeated by ourselves.”

“… so long as you both do desire to cohabit, by the authority vested in me by the Landsraat and Herrenhaus of the Republic of Wunderland,” Markham said. “You may kiss your spouse.”

He turned, smiling, to the board. “Analysis?” he said.

“Kzinti casualties in excess of twenty-five percent of units engaged,” the flat voice said.

Markham nodded, tapping his knuckles together and rising on the balls of his feet. “Densely packed, relatively speaking, and all at zero velocity to each other. Be careful to record everything; such a fleet engagement is probably unique.” He frowned. “Any anomalies?”

“Ship on collision course with Ruling Mind. Acceleration in excess of 400 gravities. Impact in 121 seconds, mark.”

Harold laughed aloud and tightened his grip around the new-made Frau Raines-Schotmann. “Together all the way, sweetheart,” he shouted. She raised a whoop, ignoring the guard behind them with a stunner.

Markham leaped for the board. “You said nothing could detect her!” he screamed at Jonah, throwing an inert crewman aside and punching for the communications channel.

“It's… psionic,” Jonah said. “Nothing conscious should—” His face contorted, and both arms clamped down on Markham's. There was a brief moment of struggle; none of the other crewfolk of the Nietzsche interfered; they had no orders. Markham snapped a blow to the groin, to the side of the head, cracked an arm; the Sol-Belter was in no condition for combat, but he clung leech-like until the Wunderlander's desperate strength sent him crashing halfway across the control deck.

“Impact in sixty seconds, mark.”

“Master, oh, Master, use the amplifier, you're under attack, use it, use it now—”

“Impact in forty seconds, mark.”

Dnivtopun looked up from the solitaire deck. The words would have been enough, but the link to Markham was deep and strong; urgency sent him crashing towards the control chair, his hands reaching for the bell-shape of the helmet even before his body stopped moving.

This is how it will begin again, the being that had been Catskinner thought, watching the monobloc re-contract. This time the cycle had been perfect, the symmetry complete. It would be so easy to reaccelerate his perception, to alter the outcome. No, it thought. There must be free will. They too must have their cycle of creation.

“Impact in ten seconds, mark.”

The connections settled onto Dnivtopun's head, and suddenly his consciousness stretched system-wide, perfect and isolate. The amplifier was better than any he had used before. His mind groped for the hostile intent, so close. Three hundred million sentients quivered in the grip of his Power.

“Emperor Dnivtopun,” he laughed, tendrils thrown wide. “Dnivtopun, God. You, with the funny thoughts, coming towards me. STOP. ALTER COURSE. IMMEDIATELY.”

Markham relaxed into a smile. “We are saved by faith,” he whispered.

“Two seconds to impact, mark.”

NO, DNIVTOPUN. YOUR TIME IS ENDED, AS IS MINE. COME TO ME.

“One second to impact, mark.”

The thrint screamed, antiphonally with the Ruling Mind's collision alarm. The automatic failsafe switched on, and—

– discontinuity

Catskinner's mind engaged the circuit, and—

– discontinuity

A layer of quantum uncertainty merged, along the meeting edges of the stasis fields. Virtual particles showered out, draining energy without leaving the fields. Time attempted to precess at different rates, in an area of finite width and conceptual depth. The fields collapsed, and energy propagated, in a symmetrical five-dimensional shape.

Chapter X

Claude Montferrat-Palme laughed from the marble floor of his office; his face was bleeding, and the shattered glass of the windows lay in glittering swathes across desk and carpet. The air smelled of ozone, of burning, of the dust of wrecked buildings.

CRACK. Another set of hypersonic booms across the sky, and the cloud off in the direction of the kzinti Government House was definitely assuming a mushroom shape. That was forty kilometers downwind, but there was no use wasting time. He crawled carefully to the desk, calling answers to the yammering voices that pleaded for orders.

“No, I don't know what happened to the moon, except that something bright went through it and it blew up. Nothing but ratcats on it, anyway, these days. Yes, I said ratcats. Begin evacuation immediately, Plan Deinst; yes, civilians too, you fool. No, we can't ask the kzinti for orders; they're killing each other, hadn't you noticed? I'll be down there in thirty seconds. Out.”

A shockwave rocked the building, and for an instant blue-white light flooded through his tight-squeezed eyelids. When the hot wind passed he rose and sprinted for the locked closet, the one with the impact armor and the weapons. As he stripped and dressed, he turned his face to the sky, squinting.

“I love you,” he said. “Both. However you bloody well managed it.”

“He was a good son,” Traat-Admiral said.

Conservor and he had anchored themselves in an intact corner of the Throat Ripper's control room. None of the systems was in operation; that was to be expected, since most of the ship aft of this point had been sheared away by something. Stars shone vacuum-bleak through the rents; other lights flared and died in perfect spheres of light. Traat-Admiral found himself mildly amazed that there were still enough left to fight; more so that they had the energy, after whatever it was had happened.

Such is our nature, he thought. This was the time for resignation; he and the Conservor were both bleeding from nose, ears, mouth, all the body openings. And within, he could feel it. Traat-Admiral looked down at the head of his son where it rested in his lap; the girder had driven straight through the youth's midsection, and his face was still fixed in eager alertness, frozen hard now.

“Yes,” Conservor said. “The shadow of the God lies on us, all three. We will go to Him together, the hunt will give Him honor.”

“Such honor as there is in defeat,” he sighed.

A quiver of ears behind the faceplate showed him the sage's laughter. “Defeat? That thing which we came to this place to fight, that has been defeated, even if we will never know how. And kzinti have defeated kzinti. Such is the only defeat here.”

Traat-Admiral tried to raise his ears and join the laughter, but found himself coughing a gout of red stickiness into the faceplate of his helmet; it rebounded.

“If-I-must-drown,” he managed to say, “not-in-my-own-blood.” Vacuum was dry, at least. He raised fumbling hands to the catches of his helmet-ring. A single fierce regret seized him. I hope the kits will be protected.

“We have hunted well together on the trail of Truth,” the sage said, copying his action. “Let us feast and lie in the shade by the waterhole together, forever.”

“What do you mean, it never happened?”

Jonah's voice was sharp again; a week in the autodoc of the oyabun's flagship had repaired most of his physical injuries. The tremor in his hands showed that those were not all; he glanced behind him at Ingrid and Harold, where they sat with linked hands.

“Just what I said,” General Buford Early said. He glanced aside as well, at Shigehero's slight hard smile.

“So much for the rewards of heroism,” Jonah said, letting himself fall into the lounger with a bitter laugh. He lit a cigarette; the air was rank with them, and the smell of the general's stogies. That it did not bother a Sol-Belter born was itself a sign of wounds that did not show.

The general leaned forward, his square pug face like a clenched fist. “These are the rewards of heroism, Captain,” he said. “Markham's crew are vegetables. Markham may recover—incidentally, he'll be a hero too.”

“Hero? He was a flipping traitor! He liked the damned Thrint!”

“What do you know about mind control?” Early asked. “Remember what it felt like? Were you a traitor?”

“Maybe you're right…”

“It doesn't matter. When he comes back from the psychist, the version he remembers will match the one I give. If you three weren't all fucking heroes, you'd be at the psychist's too.” Another glance at the oyabun. “Or otherwise kept safely silent.”

Harold spoke. “And all the kzinti who might know something are dead, the Slaver ship and the Catskinner are quantum bubbles… and three vulnerable individuals are not in a position to upset heavy-duty organizational applecarts.”

“Exactly,” Early said. “It never happened, as I said.” He spread his hands. “No point in tantalizing people with technical miracles that no longer exist, either.” Although knowing you can do it is half the effort. “We've still got a long war to fight, you know,” he added. “Unless you expect Santa to arrive.”

“Who's Santa?” Jonah said.

The commander of the hyperdrive warship Outsider's Gift sat back and relaxed for the first time in weeks as his craft broke through into normal space. He was of the large albino minority on We Made It, and like most Crashlanders had more than a touch of agoraphobia. The wrenching not-there of hyperspace reminded him unpleasantly of dreams he had had, of being trapped on the surface during storms.

“Well. Two weeks, faster than light,” he said.

The executive officer nodded, her eyes on the displays. “More breakthroughs,” she said. “Seven… twelve… looks like the whole fleet made it.” She laughed. “Wunderland, prepare to welcome your liberators.”

“Careful now,” the captain said. “This is a reconnaissance in force. We can chop up anything we meet in interstellar space, but this close to a star we're strictly Einsteinian, just like the pussies.”

The executive officer was frowning over her board. “Well, I'll be damned,” she said. “Sir, something very strange is going on in there. If I didn't know better… that looks like a fleet action already going on.”

The captain straightened. “Secure from hyperdrive stations,” he said. “General Quarters. Battle stations.” A deep breath. “Let's go find out.”