Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (50 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You planted the spybot?” said the pilot.

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

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

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

“Drop a butt-breaker on them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We go together.”

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

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

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

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

“You!” shouted S’larbo.

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

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

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

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