“Which was why the ordinary student files were lost,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said, nodding so that her incipient jowls swayed. “Yah. All we got from the genetics survey was a name and a student number than doesn’t correlate to anything existing. But the DNA’s a one-to-one, no doubt about it at all. Raines went out on that slowboat, and somehow Raines came back, still young.”
Still young, Montferrat thought. Still young . . . and I sit here, my soul older than Satan’s. “Came back. Dropped off from a ship going point-nine lightspeed?” he scoffed.
A shrug. “The genes don’t lie.”
“Computer,” Montferrat said steadily. “All points, maximum priority. Pictures and idents to be distributed to all sources. Capture alive at all costs; we need the information they have.”
To his second. “My congratulations, Herrenfrau Axelrod-Bauergartner, on a job well done. We’ll catch these revenants, and when we do all the summer soldiers who’ve been flocking to those Resistance idiots since the attack will feel a distinct chill. I think that’s all for today?”
They rose with the usual round of handshakes, Grimbardsun’s hand wet, Axelrod-Bauergartner’s soft and cold as her eyes. Montferrat felt someone smiling with his face, talking with his mouth, impeccably, until he was in the privacy of his office, and staring down at the holo in his desk. Matching it with the one from his locked and sealed files, matching the reality with forensics’ projection. Feeling the moisture spilling from his eyes, down onto the imperishable synthetic, onto the face he had seen with the eye of the mind every day for the last forty years. The face he would arrest and turn over to the interrogators and the kzin, along with the last of his soul.
“Why did you come back?” he whispered. “Why did you come back, to torment us here in hell?”
* * *
“Right, now download,” Jonah said. The interfacer bleeped quietly and opened to extrude the biochip.
“Well, this ought to be useful, if we can get the information back,” Ingrid said dully, handing him the piece of curved transparent quasi-tissue.
He unwrapped his hand gingerly and slid the fingernail home, into the implanted flexible gasket beneath the cuticle. “Provided we can get ourselves, this or a datalink to the Catskinner,” he said, wincing slightly. Useful was an understatement; intelligence-gathering was not the primary job for which they had been tasked, but this was priceless load. The complete specs on the most important infosystem on Wunderland, and strategic sampling of the data in its banks. Ships, deployments, capacities. Kzin psychology and history and politics, command-profiles, strategic planning and kriegspiel played by the pussy General Staff for decades. All the back doors, from the human systems, then, through them, into the kzin system. UN Naval Intelligence would willingly sacrifice half a fleet for this. . . .
“That’s it, then,” Jonah said. “It’s not what we came for, but it can make a difference. And there—”
Ingrid was not listening. “Hold on! Look!”
“Eh?”
“An alert subroutine! Gottdamn, that is an alert! Murphy, it’s about us, those are our cover-idents it’s broadcasting. We’re blown.”
“Block it, quick.” They worked in silence for a moment. Jonah scrubbed a hand across his face. “That’ll hold it for a half-hour.”
“Never make it back to Munchen before the next call gets through,” she said. “Not without putting up a holosign that this system’s been subverted down to the config.”
“We don’t have to,” Jonah said. He squeezed eyes shut, pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Finagle, why now . . . ? The aircar shuttle. Computer,” he continued. “Is the civilian system still online? Slaved to the core-system here?”
“Affirmative, to both.”
“That’s it, then. We just get on the ten-minute flight. Right. Key the internal link to that one. Code, full-wipe after execution, purge. Ingrid, let’s go.”
* * *
“Is the system compromised?” Chuut-Riit asked, looking around the central control room of his estate. His nostrils flared: yes, the scent of two of the monkeys, a male and . . . He snuffled further. Yes, the female was bearing. Grimly, he filed the smell away, for possible future reference. It was unlikely that he would ever encounter either of them in person, but one could hope.
One of the kzin technicians was so involved with following the symbols scrolling by on the walls that he swept his hand behind him with claws extended in an exasperated protest at being interrupted. The governor bristled and then relaxed; it helped that he came from the hunt, had killed and fed well, mated and washed his glands and tissues clear of hormones, freeing the reasoning brain. Even more that he had spent the most of his lifespan cooling a temper that had originally been hasty even by kzin standards. He controlled breath and motion as the Conservors had taught him, the desire to lash his tail and pace. It ran through him that perhaps it was his temper that had set him on the road to mastery, that never-to-be-forgotten moment in the nursery so many years ago: the realization that his rage could kill, and in time would kill him as dead as the sibling beneath his claws.
The guards behind him had snarled at the infotech’s insolence, a low subliminal rumbling and the dry-spicy scent of anger. An expressive ripple of Chuut-Riit’s fur, ears, tail quieted them.
“These specialists are all mad,” he whispered aside. “One must humor them, like a cub that bites your ears.” They were sorry specimens, in truth: one scrubby and undersized, with knots in his fur, the other a giant but clumsy, slow, actually fat. Any Hero seeing them would know their brilliance, since such disgusting examples of bad inheritance would only be kept alive for the most pressing of needs.
The governor schooled himself to wait, shifting only enough to keep his heated muscles from stiffening. The big technician mumbled to himself, occasionally taking out a brick of dull-red dried meat from his equipment apron and stuffing it into his mouth. Chuut-Riit caught a whiff of it and gagged, as much at the thought of someone eating infantry rations for pleasure as at the well-remembered smell. The other one muttered as well, but he chewed on the ends of his claws. Those on his right hand were actually frayed at the tips, useless for anything but scratching its doubtless completely ungroomed and verminous pelt.
“Is the system compromised?” Chuut-Riit said again, patiently. Infosystems specialists were as bad as telepaths.
“Hrrwweo?” muttered the small one, blinking back to a consciousness somewhat more in congruence with the others’. “Well, we couldn’t know that, could we?—Chuut-Riit,” he added hastily, as he noticed the governor’s expression and scent.
“What—do—you—mean?” he said.
“Well, Chuut-Riit, a successful clandestine insertion is undetectable by definition, hrrrrr? We’re pretty sure we’ve found their tracks. Computer, isolate-alpha, linear schematic, level three.” A complex webbing sprang up all around the room, blue lines with a few sections picked out in green. “See, Dominant One, where the picks were inserted? So that the config elements could be accessed and altered from an external source without detection. We’ve neutralized them, of course.”
The claws went back into his mouth, and he mumbled around them. “This was humans, wasn’t it? It has their scent. Very three-dimensional; I suppose it comes of their being monkeys. They do some wonderful gaming programs, very ingeniou— I abase myself in apology, Chuut-Riit.” He flattened to the ground and covered his dry granular-looking nose. “We are as sure as we can be that all the unauthorized elements have been purged.” To his companion: “Wake up, suckling!”
“Whirrrr?” the fat giant chirruped, stopped his continuous nervous purring and then started. “Oh, yes. Lovely system you have here, Chuut-Riit. Yes, I think we’ve got it. I would like to meet the monkeys who did the alterations, very subtle work.”
“You may go,” he said, and crouched brooding, scratching moodily behind one ear. The internal-security team was in now, with the sniffer-machines to isolate the scent molecules of the intruders.
“I would like to meet them too,” he said, and a line of saliva spun itself down from one thin black lip. He snapped it back with a wet chop and licked his nose with a broad wash of pink tongue. “I would like that very much.”
Chapter 6
“Somehow I think it’s too quiet,” Ingrid said. When Jonah cast a blankly puzzled look over his shoulder, she shrugged. “Aren’t you interested in anything cultural?”
“I’m interested in staying alive,” Jonah said.
They were strolling quietly down one of the riverside walks. The Donau rolled beside them, two kilometers across; it sparkled blue and green-gray, little waves showing white. A bridge soared from bank to bank, and sailboats heeled far over under the stiff warm breeze. Away from the shrilling poverty of the residential quarters, the air smelled of silty water, grass, flowers.
“Of course, staying alive from now on jeopardizes the mission,” Jonah continued.