“I’ll leave that to you, Suuomalisen. Your Sauna is a good ‘base of operations’; me, I run a bar and some games in the back, and I put people together sometimes. That’s all. The tree that grows too high attracts the attention of people with axes.”
The fat man shook his head. “You independent entrepreneurs must learn to move with the times, and the time of the little man is past . . . Ah, well, I must be going.”
Yarthkin nodded. “Thanks for the tip. I’ll have Wendy send round a case of the kirsch. Good stuff, pre-War.”
“Pre-War!” The fat man’s eyes lit. “Generous, generous. Where do you get such stuff?”
From ex-affluent people who can’t pay their gambling debts, Yarthkin thought. “You have to let me keep a few little secrets; little secrets for little men.”
A laugh from the fat man. “And again, any time you wish to join my organization . . . or even just to sell Harold’s Terran Bar, my offer stands. I’ll even promise to keep on all your people; they make the ambience of the place anyway.”
“No deal, Suuomalisen. Thanks for the consideration, though.”
* * *
Dripping, Jonah padded back out of the shower; at least here in Munchen, nobody was charging you a month’s wages for hot water. Ingrid was standing at the window toweling her hair and letting the evening breeze dry the rest of her. The room was narrow, part of an old mansion split into the cubicles of a cheap transients’ hotel; there were more luxurious places in easy walking distance, but they would be the haunt of the local elite. He joined her at the opening and put an arm around her shoulders. She sighed and looked down the sloping street to the rippled surface of the Donau and the traffic of sailboats and barges. A metal planter creaked on chains below the window; it smelled of damp earth and half-dead flowers.
“This is the oldest section of Munchen,” she said slowly. “There wasn’t much else, when I was a student here. Five years ago, my time . . . and the buildings I knew are old and shabby . . . There must be a hundred thousand people living here now!”
He nodded, remembering the sprawling squatter-camps that surrounded the town. “We’re going to have to act quickly,” he said. “Those passes the oyabun got us are only good for two weeks.”
“Right,” she said with another sigh, turning from the window. Jonah watched with appreciation as she rummaged in their bags for a series of parts, assembling them into a featureless box and snapping it onto the bedside datachannel. “There are probably blocks on the public channels . . .” She turned her head. “Instead of standing there making the passing girls sigh, why not get some of the other gear put together?”
“Right.” Weapons first. The UN had dug deep into the ARM’s old stores, technology that was the confiscated product of centuries of perverted ingenuity. Jonah grinned. Like most Belters, he had always felt the ARM tended to err on the side of caution in their role as technological police. Opening their archives had been like pulling teeth, from what he heard, even with the kzin bearing down on Sol system in all their carnivorous splendor. I bleed for them, he thought. I won’t say from where.
The killing-tools were simple: two light-pencils of the sort engineers carried, for sketching on screens. Which was actually what they were, and any examination would prove it, according to the ARM. The only difference was that if you twisted the cap, so, pressed down on the clip that held the pen in a pocket and pointed it at an organism with a spinal cord, the pen emitted a sharp yawping sound whereupon said being went into grand mal seizure. Range of up to fifty meters, cause of death, “he died.” Jonah frowned. On second thought, maybe the ARM was right about this one.
“Tanj,” Ingrid said.
“Problem?”
“No, just that you have to input your ID and pay a whopping great fee to access the commercial net—even allowing for the way this fake krona they’ve got has depreciated.”
“We’ve got money.”
“Sure, but we don’t want to call too much attention to ourselves.” She continued to tap the keys. “There, I’m past the standard blocks . . . confirming . . . Yah, it’d be a bad idea to ask about the security arrangements at you-know-who’s place. It’s probably flagged.”
“Commercial services,” Jonah said. “Want me to drive?”
“Not just yet. Right, I’ll just look at the record of commercial subcontracts. Hmm. About what you’d expect.” Ingrid frowned. “Standard goods delivered to a depot and picked up by kzin military transports; no joy there. Most of the services are provided by household servants, born on the estate; no joy there, either. Ahh, outside contractors; now that’s interesting.”
“What is?” Jonah said, stripping packets of what looked like hard candy out of the lining of a suitcase. Sonic grenades, but you had to spit them at the target.
“Our great and good Rin-Tin-Kzin has been buying infosystems and ‘ware from human makers. And he’s the only one who is; the ratcat armed forces order subcomponents to their own specs and assemble them in plants under their direct supervision. But not him.”
She paused in thought. “It fits . . . limited number of system types, like an ascending series, with each step up a set increment of increased capacity over the one below. Nothing like our wild and woolly jungle of manufacturers. They’re not used to nonstandardized goods; they make them uneasy.”
“How does that ‘fit’?”
“With what the xenologists were saying. The ratcats have an old, old civilization—very stable. Like what the UN would have become in Sol system, with the psychists ‘adjusting’ everybody into peacefulness and the ARM suppressing dangerous technology—which is to say, all technology. A few hundred years down the road we’d be on, if the kzin hadn’t come along and upset the trajectory.”
“Maybe they do some good after all.” Jonah finished checking the wire garrotes that lay coiled in the seams of their clothing, the tiny repeating blowgun with the poisoned darts, and the harmless-looking fulgurite plastic frames of their backpacks—you twisted so and it went soft as putty, with the buckle acting as detonator-timer.
“It fits with what we know about you-know-who, as well.” The room had been very carefully swept, but there were a few precautions it did not hurt to take. Not mentioning names, for one; a robobugger could be set to conversations with key words in them. “Unconventional. Wonder why he has human infosystems installed, though? Ours aren’t that much better. Can’t be.” Infosystems were a mature technology, long since pushed to the physical limits of quantum indeterminancy.
“Well, they’re more versatile, even the obsolete stuff here on Wunderland. I think”—she tugged at an ear—”I think it may be the ‘ware he’s after, though. Ratcat ‘ware is almost as stereotyped as their hardwiring.”
Jonah nodded; software was a favorite cottage industry in human space, and there must be millions of hobbyists who spent their leisure time fiddling with one problem or another.
“So we just enter a bid?” he said, flopping back on the bed. He was muscular for a Belter, but even the .61 Wunderland gravity was tiring when there was no place to get away from it.
“Doubt it.” Ingrid murmured to the system. “Finagle, no joy. It’s handled through something called the Datamongers’ Guild: ‘A mutual benefit association of those involved in infosystem development and maintenance.’ Gott knows what that is.” A pause. “Whatever it is, there’s no public info on how to join it. The contracts listed say you-know-who takes a random selection from their duty roster to do his maintenance work.”
Ingrid sank back on one elbow. “We need a local contact,” she said slowly. “Jonah . . . We both know why Intelligence picked me as your partner. I was the only one remotely qualified who might know . . . and I do.”
“Which one?” he asked. She laughed bitterly.
“I’d have thought Claude, but he’s . . . Jonah, I wouldn’t have believed it!”
Jonah shrugged. “There’s an underground surrender movement on Earth. Lots of flatlander quislings; and the pussies aren’t even there yet. Why be surprised there are more here?”
“But Claude! Oh, well.”
“So who else you got?”
She continued to tap at the console. “Not many. None. A lot of them are listed as dead in the year or two after I left. No cause of death, just dead . . .” Her face twisted.
Survivor guilt, Jonah thought. Dangerous. Have to watch for that.
“Except Harold.”
“Can you trust him?”
“Look, we have two choices. Go to Harold, or try the underworld contacts. The known-unreliable underworld contacts.”
“One of whom is your friend Harold.”
She sighed. “Yes, but—well, that’s a good sign, isn’t it? That he’s worked with the—with them, and against—”