The Man-Kzin Wars 06

Chapter 13

(2437 A.D.)

The landing party came down at dawn in the plains outside of what they all called Fort Hssin. In his brief glimpse of Hssin’s ruins from high descent, Yankee had seen the widespread damage; sections of the city were crumpled or gone-but from the ground it looked almost whole. The ruddy light of a huge R’hshssira on the horizon had been further reddened by an oblique passage through the poisonous air, the general gloom and the low angle of their landing site obscuring the injury to the sprawling, once airtight buildings. A steady wind was whipping a thin drift of snow in the direction of the city and the dawn-bright mountains.

“Godforsaken place.”

They had maps of Hssin made by the naval force that destroyed it, and they could run these 3D plots inside their helmets along with marine battle films of the ground assault, keyed to the battle locations. Still, once they had slipped into the city through the breached atmospheric barrier, they were lost tourists in a huge necropolis without any friendly local residents to set them straight-only mummified kzinti who lay in the dark where they had suffocated.

The size of the rooms and corridors was intimidating- built for two-hundred-kilogram, two-and-a-half-meter-tall kzinti. War damage an obstacle to mobility. One grisly room contained racks of improvised hospital beds for badly wounded warriors who had died with their masks on, waiting for medical help that never came, now preserved for posterity. Some of the roofs were open to the sky, exposed corridors drifting in snow. Some corridors looked down into a well of rubble. Yankee’s beamlight caught the upside down head of a kzin grinning at them from a hole in a half-collapsed ceiling. One corridor was filled with the fallen wreckage of four stories. Some of the caverns that Yankee wanted to explore were declared off-limits by the team’s cautious structural engineer.

“Nobody could be living here now!” exclaimed one of Yankee’s companions.

“You’re a flatlander.” Yankee’s eyes and lamp were picking out the details of the strange kzinti air seals with the fascination of a man who had spent half his life in the Belt and in spaceships. “When you’ve lived in space a while you know a city like this is so compartmentalized against failure that even several blowouts won’t knock it out of commission. Life support could be restored in pieces of it I wouldn’t want the job. But it could be done. That’s what we’re looking for.”

They found nothing. They were afraid to call in their kept kzin, afraid the devastation would send him into a rage, but he had passed through this city with Chuut-Riit’s armada and knew the ways of kzin when they were forced to live together. They needed his insight.

In one of the least damaged of Hssin’s public spaces Clandeboye set up an inflatable command center, hardly more than a balloon with portable airlock and life support and communications interfaces. He added instruments that allowed him to follow Hwass by remote sensing, then brought down the kzin and let him loose with his marine escort.

Whatever the warrior felt in this world where the evidence of massacre was everywhere, he maintained an icy professional calm. He was a bloodhound looking for the lost trail. Almost the first place he searched was the old Hssin hunting park.

“Iss where I hunted with Chuut-Riit my first humans.”

“Why don’t we just cut that flea-bitten cat’s throat,” whispered one of Yankee’s men on the monitoring team, two-way comm off. He was a fashionable Belter with delicately carved combs in his mohawk, a postwar hair style that the older generation of Belters considered effete. Mohawks were designed to keep the head shaved and the hair out of the way in space. Adding combs, grumbled parents, was an insubordinate generation’s defiance of practicality.

Yankee had his eyes on the tiny color screen whose image bobbed and whizzed with Hwass’s head motions. “He’s getting even with us for shoving his muzzle into the massacre of his people. Be patient. He’s going to lead us right to this Trainer-of-Slaves.”

“Why would he do that?” asked the logician among Yankee’s companions. “It’s not in his best interest”

“You think. Hwass is a gambler. If he finds the Shark before we do, he’s probably going to try to kill us all. Maybe teamed up with Trainer and his slaves he can capture the Erfolg and take it to Kzin. He can’t do that alone. Why wouldn’t he want to find Trainer?”

“For a pessimist, you’re in a strangely sanguine mood!” snapped the Belter.

Another of Yankee’s men commented wryly, “He just wants us to keep our terrified eyes glued to the screen.”

“If that ratcat’s going to kill us, why don’t we kill him now?” The Belter was back to his theme song.

“We don’t know that he’s going to kill us,” said Yankee happily, watching Hwass’s camera eye move through a hunting park turned to petrified forest. A poisonous snow had drifted in from the open sky

“So we wait till he does before we object?” grumbled the coiffured Belter sarcastically.

“No. We draw first.”

“Nero fiddles while Rome burns. Yankee draws pictures while Rome burns? You aren’t making sense.”

Yankee smiled. “A ‘fast draw’ is just an old flatlander expression in use before you floaters corrupted the language with ‘nano-swat.”

“We’re going to nano-swat him? You could have fooled me. Old man switches don’t swat.”

“You aren’t making sense,” said Yankee. “I ain’t old yet; I’m a spring chicken baby-sitting toddlers.”

Their kzin had picked up his spoor. He was moving out of a pattern of random search and into a quick lope.

“What’s he doing?”

“Hwass thinks Trainer would have gone right to the hunting park. It was a Jotoki run when he was an apprentice slave-master. That’s where he recruited his slaves. Sentimental attachment. We revisit those places we are sentimentally attached to and leave spoor for Hwass to sniff at.

“A kzin is sentimental?”

“Who knows? I’m just simianizing their emotions. I’m sentimental so that’s what I understand. I once cut short a frantically urgent trip just to stop at a motel and rent the same room where I first got laid. Number 27. The wallpaper was bamboo and stars. Over the room’s comp was a huge animation of a deer in the forest done by one of those production line programmers-it just kept wandering through the forest. I remember everything about my lady but her eyes; she was wearing VR goggles plugged into the comp, morphing me into Finagle knows what. Maybe kzinti are sentimental about their first slave. Who knows?”

“Iss used path of travel,” commented Hwass over the phones.

The camera eye was moving now with the speed of one who wasn’t bollixed by sudden rubble intrusions that shouldn’t be there. It wasn’t that Hwass knew where he was going; he was following the trail of someone who did. Once he stopped to examine kzin boot tracks across snow that had taken years to drift in through some breached barrier.

Yankee quickly uploaded a message to the Erfolg. “We’ve got him.” He switched to one of the marine cameras to check that the explosive charge was still attached to Hwass’s upper spine, then followed the lead camera in fascination as it routed itself around the damage.

Suddenly Hwass stopped. One of the internal airlocks was shut. He cycled through it manually into a sector where the telemetry said the air was good, though too cold for comfort. Hwass’s perceptive eyes spotted exactly where the war-made breaches had been sealed. He found an emergency power plant that matched a missing unit from the Bitch. When he turned it on, the lights faded in and the air conditioner began to recycle the stale atmosphere. The system had been left on standby, as if someone had anticipated that he might have to return.

Images began to shift in staccato rhythm. Yankee had no clear idea of why the camera moved to look where it did, except that the glances were quick and purposeful as if Hwass was clicking down a checksheet of his own devising He hastened through the few sealed rooms, checking this and checking that. He was memorizing detail that he wasn’t sure his human masters would give him a second chance to see. Finally he just stopped in the middle of examining a row of machine tools. They could not see his face-but they could hear his voice. “You iss defeated, Major Yankee Clandeboye. They iss gone. The Shark’s motor iss has be here but iss gone.”

Yankee switched his mike back to the frigate. He got the comm officer. “Send a message by hyperwave directly to General Fry Sol, Gibraltar Base.” (They had dropped off a hyperwave buoy outside of R’hshssira singularity and could communicate with it electromagnetically It would take longer for the message to reach the buoy than to travel the 5.3 light years from R’hshssira to Sol.)

“Quote: ‘The Shark has been delivered to the Patriarchy.’ Unquote.”

The captain came on line. “What’s this? What have you got?”

“No details yet.”

“What’s the verification?”

“None. Hwass just told us and he seems sure. Get that message off! I don’t want him deciding that we know too much. He might think we’re all worth killing to keep the news quiet. We can send the rest later as it comes in. I told you, I don’t trust that kzin.”

“There’s such a thing as overcaution,” the captain chided.

“Captain, why does a man have tits?”

“You got me, Yankee. Why?”

“Just in case.”

Later that day, Yankee’s team began its painstaking assessment of the find.

On a separate floor, below the main working area that Trainer-of-Slaves had salvaged for himself, Yankee discovered a suite of luxurious apartments with its own airlock and life support. It had been repaired. Once inside he recognized it for what it had once been in the heyday of Hssin’s power-the harem quarters of some consequential kzin.

The interior was all stone (or structurally enhanced stone) of abnormally large proportions even for a kzin dwelling. Spaciousness meant power and wealth-and a full name. On the floor was a tapestry-like rug, round as the world, woven with scenes of the hunt: here a kzin stalking through the orange grass, there a magnificent kzin head between the leaves of a forest. And everywhere the brilliant colors of animals of the hunt, fleeing, hushed, flying, hiding in the branches. The rug was cuddly soft. It was just right for games of coy chase and play.

There were no hanging weapons or trophies, yet it was a male’s hail. Carved into the eastern wall, an august glyph glorified some noble family a dozen kzinti in profile, the faces of conquerors. An arched niche held a crotch of polished wood, half tree, half tale of nature transformed by sculptor’s power. Next to the niche a floor-to-ceiling tapestry cut a narrow window into the gray stone to a colorful landscape on some unconquered planet of fantastic imagination. A final touch to the male decor might have been lithe kzinretti moving through the hail to entertain and serve.

An arched entrance at the back of the hail led to the living quarters of individual kzinretti: kitchens, birthing chambers, nurseries for the kits and Yankee couldn’t guess what-all. There was no trace that a whole harem might have died here. Its most recent occupants had been human. The auburn hairs in the rug were of Lieutenant Argamentine’s genotype. He remembered the way she used to pull at a curl of that hair when she was agitated. Damn, damn, damn.

In the tunnels and caves shaped for romping kits they found a box of crudely made toys, alien-perhaps a kzin’s idea (a Jotok’s idea?) of what a human child would play with-perhaps leftovers from an earlier time. The only food stocks in the kitchen were formulated for a human child. Somebody had manufactured a stack of diapers. One of the leather-bound picture books wore not only the tooth marks of a kzinrett but what looked like the practice scribbles of a two-year-old child. There were enough organic bits and pieces to establish that Argamentine was the mother of the children. They didn’t seem to have a common father. Frozen sperm from Wunderland?

The discards from the machine shop, hundreds of them, were all attempts to duplicate the same hypershunt part. Yankee took samples to the frigate’s engineer who tested them and had a good laugh.

“Does he know what he’s doing?” asked Yankee.

“Can’t tell. He might be trying random variations to see what works, but I doubt it. That’s like having random variations in a quantum effect chip and expecting the hundredth one to be a fully operational computer. I suspect he knows what he’s doing but is working at the outer limits of his equipment.”

Yankee was still having to grasp the implications of a functional hyperdrive in the claws of the Patriarchy. “It seems he made one that was good enough.”

“Maybe not. The specs are tough. Maybe they took one jump and they are stuck out there in interstellar space freezing to death. I rebuilt a motor once and it checked out perfect. Died on the first jump, though. The navy never would have found us if our hyperwave had gone, too.”

Yankee kept going back to the kzinretti palazzo. He was looking for something that didn’t seem to be there. He brooded about his cousin. She wasn’t the type to just live in a place. She needed people. If you locked her up, she’d go to the phones. If you cut the phone lines, she’d chat on the net. If you took away her infocomp she’d start to write letters. Yankee still had her letters from that boarding school she had attended after her dad got killed at Ceres. She’d meet a little old lady in the grocery and start up a conversation about the brands of coffee-and remember three months later to send the little old lady a birthday card. He was sure General Fry had love letters from her tucked away somewhere.

She had a pen. There were those scribbles in the picture book, done by one of her babies who was sure to have been imitating mother. Yankee knew that Nora couldn’t escape the temptations that came from owning a pen.

He was tearing up a fur rug in one of the least likely of the kzinretti rooms looking for a biding place when his back pocket got caught in loose molding. While unhooking himself, a panel slipped open-just a crack. He pounced. What he found amazed him. It was a kzinrett-built hiding place, something a dog might have made for bones if a dog had hands. Inside was mostly a vulgar collection of baubles, charming. A three-year-old might have prized them. Sitting with the gewgaws was one of the small kzinretti picture books. He opened it, and there, written across the pictures in Nora’s fine hand, was a diary.

She had no one to talk to, so she was talking to herself. Almost the first thing he saw when he flipped through the pages was the capitalized. ‘THIS IS MY MEMORY.” He back-skipped and read, “Nora-From-My-Future, if you are reading this over and do not understand it, I am writing it because my memory is going.”

He was too impatient to wait until he got back to the inflatable command center so he sat on the rug in the great hail of the palazzo and read straight through starting from the first page where her writing squiggled around the picture, seeking white space.