“It’s supposed to.” The sound of his own pulse in his ears was louder than the background noise the kzin used to fool their subconscious into comfort. Pain receded, irrelevant, as he looked at the tiny oblong of modified claw. Scores of highly skilled men and women, thousands of hours of computer time on machines whose pricetags ran into the billions of stars, all for this. No, for the information contained in this . . . nearly as much information as was required to make a complete human body; it was amazing what they could do these days with quantum-well storage. Although the complete specs for a man were in a packet considerably smaller, if it came to that.
“Give it here.” It ought to be quick. Milliseconds quick. A lot better than being hunted down by the ratcats, if we can blow the defenses. Vaporization was the commonest way for a space-soldier to die, anyway.
She handed over the nail, and he slipped it into his own interface unit. “As your boyfriend likes to say, here’s viewing, kinder.”
She nodded tightly. He raised a thumb, pressed it down on one of the outlined squares of the schematic that occupied his interfacer.
“Ram dam,” he said. The words came from nowhere, until an eerie memory of old Mukeriji speaking flitted through his mind. That had been as they closed on the kzinti ship, coming in to board before they could blow the self-destruct bomb. Dreadful Bride, spare us: ram dam ram dam ram dam ram—
The walls pulsed, flickered green, flashed into an intricate strobing pattern and froze. Jonah closed his eyes for a second and felt an enormous thankfulness. They might still be only seconds away from death, but at least it wouldn’t be for nothing.
“Finagle!” Jonah said bitterly. “How could even a kzin be this paranoid?”
He kicked the pillar-console; it hurt through the light slipper. There were weapons and self-destruct systems in plenty, enough to leave nothing but a very large crater with magma at its core where Chuut-Riit’s palace-estate-preserve had stood . . . but it wasn’t clear how any of them could be triggered from here.
“Who ever heard of . . . wheels within wheels!” Jonah said disbelievingly. “Am I imagining things, or are these systems completely separate?”
Ingrid shook her head slowly. “I’m afraid that’s a long way past me. Can’t you do anything about it?”
“Complain to the manufacturer . . . oh, maybe. There’s a chance. Worth a try, anyway.”
He touched icons on the screen surface, then tapped in new commands. “Nope. All right, what does this do? Nothing. Hmmm. But if— Yeah, this may work. Not immediately, though. You about through?”
“Hours ago. We don’t have much longer.”
“Right. I do want to look at a couple of things, though.” Jonah’s eyes narrowed. “Call,” he said to the computer. “Weekly schedule for user-CR, regression, six months, common elements.” His finger flicked out to a sequence on the wall ahead of them. “Got it! Got it, by Murphy’s asshole; that’s the single common element outside going to his office? What is it?”
Ingrid’s fingers were busy. “No joy, Jonah. That’s his visit to his kiddies. The males, weanlings up to subadult, they’re in an isolation facility.”
“Oh. Bat puckey. Here, let me look—”
A warning light blazed on the console.
“They’re coming,” Ingrid hissed. “Hurry.”
“Right. Plan B. Only—” Jonah stared at the files in wonder. “I will be dipped in shit. This will work.”
* * *
“We have positive identification,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said. The staff conference rustled, ten men and women grouped around a table of black ebony. It was an elegant room, walls of white stone fretwork and floor of tile, a sideboard with refreshments. No sound but the gentle rush of water in the courtyard outside; this had been the Herrenhaus, the legislature, before the kzin came.
Montferrat leaned forward slightly, looking down the table to his second in command. How alike we all are, he thought. Not physical appearance, but something about the eyes . . . She was a pallid woman, with a beginning potbelly disgusting on someone her age, hair cropped close on the left and in a braided ponytail on the other.
“Oh?” he drawled. It was important to crack this case and quickly, Supervisor-of-Animals was on his track. Unwise to have a subordinate take too much credit for it—particularly this one; she had been using her own dossier files to build influence in the higher echelons of human government. Two can play at that game, he thought. And I do it better, since relying on blackmail alone is a crudity I’ve grown beyond. She doesn’t know I’ve penetrated her files, either . . . of course, she may be doing likewise . . .
No. He would be dead if she had.
“From their hotel room. No correlation on fingerprints, of course.” Alterations to fingerprints and retina patterns were an old story; you never caught anyone that way who had access to underworld tailoring shops. “But they evidently whiled away their spare time with the old in-and-out, and they don’t clean the mattresses there very well. DNA analysis.
“Case A, display,” she continued. Sections of the ebony before each of the staff officers turned transparent, a molecular analysis. “This is the male, what forensics could make of it. Young, not more than thirty. Sol-Belter, to ninety-three percent: Here’s a graphic of his face, projection from the genes and descriptions by hotel staff.”
A portrait overlaid the lines and curves of the analysis, a hard-lined blocky face with a short Belter strip. “This doesn’t include any scars or birthmarks, of course.”
“Very interesting,” Montferrat drawled. “But as you’re no doubt aware, chance recombination could easily reproduce a Sol-Belter genetic profile; the Serpent Swarm was only colonized three centuries ago, and there has been immigration since. Our records from the Belt are not complete; you know the trouble we’ve been having getting them to tighten up on registration.”
Axelrod-Bauergartner shook her head, smiling thinly. “Less than a three percent chance, when you correlate with the probability of that configuration, then eliminate the high percentage of Swarmers we do have full records on. Beautiful job on the false idents, by the way. If we hadn’t been tipped, we’d never have found them.
“And this,” she said, calling up another analysis, “is the female. Also young, ten years post-maturity, and a Swarmer for sure. No contemporary record.”
Montferrat raised a brow and lit his cigarette, looking indifferently down at the abstract. “We’ll have to pick them both up on suspicion,” he said, “and ream their memories. But I’d scarcely call this a positive ID; nothing I’d like to go to the kzin with, for certain.” A pause, a delicate smile. “Of course, if you’d like to take the responsibility yourself . . .”
“I may just take you up on that . . . sir,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said, and a cold bell began ringing at the back of Montferrat’s mind. “You see, we did find a perfect correlate for the female’s DNA pattern. Not in any census registry, but in an old research file at the Scholarium, a genetics survey. Pre-War. Dead data, but I had the central system do a universal sweep, damn the expense, and there were no locks on the data. Just stored out of the way . . .”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Grimbardsun said. He was Economic Regulation, older than Axelrod-Bauergartner and fatter; less ambitious, except for the bank account he was so excellently placed to feed. Complications with the kzin made him sweat, and there were dark patches under the armpits of his uniform tunic. “You said she was young.”
“Biological,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said triumphantly. “The forensics people counted how many ticks she had on her biological clock. But the Scholarium file records her as . . .”
A picture flashed across the data, and Montferrat coughed to hide his reaction. Grateful for the beard and the tan, that hid the cold waxy pallor of his skin, as the capillaries shrank and sent the blood back to the veins and heart, that felt as if a huge hand had locked them fast.
“Ingrid Raines,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said. “Chronological age, better than sixty. Qualified pilot and software wizard, and a possible alternate slotter on one of the slowboats that was launched just before the end.”
“I was a possible alternate myself, if I hadn’t been taken prisoner,” Montferrat said, and even then felt a slight pleasure at Axelrod-Bauergartner’s wince. She hadn’t been born then, and it was a reminder that at least he had fought the kzin once, not spent his adolescence scheming to enter their service. “There were thousands of us, and most didn’t make it anywhere near the collection points. It was all pretty chaotic, toward the end.” His hand did not tremble as he laid the cigarette in the ashtray, and his eyes were not fixed on the oval face with its long Belter strip that turned into an auburn fountain at the back.