The men at either elbow guided him to the slower edge-strip of the slideway and onto the sidewalk. Jonah looked “ahead,” performed the mental trick that turned the cylinder into a hollow tower above his head, then back to horizontal. He freed his arms with a quiet flick and sank down on the chipped and stained poured-rock bench. That was notional in this gravity, but it gave you a place to hitch your feet.
“Well?” he said, looking at the second man.
This one was different. Younger, Jonah would say; eyes do not age or hold expression, but the small muscles around them do. Oriental eyes, more common than not, like Jonah’s own. Both of them were in Swarm-Belter clothing, gaudy and somehow sleazy at the same time, with various mysterious pieces of equipment at their belts. Perfect cover, if you were pretending to be a modestly prosperous entrepreneur of the Serpent Swarm. The kzinti allowed a good deal of freedom to the Belters in this system; it was more efficient and required less supervision than running everything themselves. That would change as their numbers built up, of course.
“Well?” he said again.
Early grinned, showing strong and slightly yellowed teeth, and pulled a cheroot from a pocket. Actually less uncommon here than in the Solar system, Jonah thought, gagging slightly. Maybe Wunderlanders smoke because the kzinti don’t like it.
“You didn’t seriously think that we’d let an opportunity like the Yamamoto raid go by and only put one arrow on the string, do you, Captain? By the way, this is my associate, Watsuji Hajime.” The man smiled and bowed. “A member of the team I brought in.”
“Another stasis field?” Jonah said.
“We did have one ready,” Early said. “We like to have a little extra tucked away.”
“Trust the ARM,” Jonah said sourly.
For a long time they had managed to make Solar humanity forget that there had even been such things as war or weapons or murder. That was looked back upon as a Golden Age, now, after two generations of war with the kzinti; privately, Matthieson thought of it as the Years of Stagnation. The ARM had not wanted to believe in the kzinti, not even when the crew of the Angel’s Pencil had reported their own first near-fatal contact with the felinoids. And when the war started, the ARM had still dealt out its hoarded secrets with the grudging reluctance of a miser.
“It’s for the greater good,” Early replied.
“Sure.” That you slowed down research and the kzinti hit us with technological superiority? For that matter, why had it taken a century and a half to develop regeneration techniques? And millions of petty criminals—jay walkers and the like—had been sliced, diced, and sent to the organ banks before then. Ancient history, he told himself. The Belters had always hated the ARM. . . .
“Certainly for the greater good that you’ve got backup, now,” Early continued. “We came in disguised as a slug aimed at a weapons fabrication asteroid. The impact was quite genuine . . . God’s my witness—” he continued.
He’s old all right.
“—the intelligence we’ve gathered and beamed back is already worth the entire cost of the Yamamoto. And you and Lieutenant Raines succeeded beyond our hopes.”
Meaning you had no hope we’d survive, Jonah added to himself. Early caught his eye and nodded with an ironic turn of his full lips. The younger man felt a slight chill; how good at reading body language would you get, with two centuries of practice? How human would you remain?
“Speaking of which,” the general continued, “where is Lieutenant Raines, Matthieson?”
Jonah shrugged, looking away slightly and probing at his own feelings. “She . . . decided to stay. To come out later, actually, with Yarthkin-Schotmann and Montferrat-Palme. I’ve got all the data.”
Early’s eyebrows rose. “Not entirely unexpected.” His eyes narrowed again. “No personal animosities, here, I trust? We won’t be heading out for some time”—if ever, went unspoken—”and we may need to work with them again.”
The young Sol-Belter looked out at the passing crowd on the slideway, at thousands swarming over the hand-nets in front of the shopfronts on the other three sides of the cylinder.
“My ego’s a little bruised,” he said finally. “But . . . no.”
Early nodded. “Didn’t have the leisure to become all that attached, I suppose,” he said. “Good professional attitude.”
Jonah began to laugh softly, shoulders shaking. “Finagle, General, you are a long time from being a young man, aren’t you? No offense.”
“None taken,” the Intelligence officer said dryly.
“Actually, we just weren’t compatible.” What was that phrase in the history tape? Miscegenation abyss? Birth cohort gap? No . . . “Generation gap,” he said.
“She was only a few years younger than you,” Early said suspiciously.
“Biologically, sir. But she was born before the War. During the Long Peace. Wunderland wasn’t sewn nearly as tight as Earth, or even the Solar Belt . . . but they still didn’t have a single deadly weapon in the whole system, saving hunting tools. I’ve been in the navy or training for it since I was six! We just didn’t have anything in common except software, sex, and the mission.” He shrugged again, and felt the lingering depression leave him. “It was like being involved with a younger version of my mother.”
Early shook his head, chuckling himself, a deep rich sound. “Temporal displacement. Doesn’t need relativity, boy; wait till you’re my age. And now,” he continued, “we are going to have a little talk.”
“What’ve we been doing?”
“Oh, not a debriefing. That first. But then . . .” He grinned brilliantly. “A . . . job interview, of sorts.”
* * *
“Why should we trust you?” the man said. He was carefully nondescript in his worker’s overalls and cloth cap; the roughened hands with dirt ground into the knuckles and half-moons of grease under the nails showed it was genuine. The accent was incongruously elegant, pure Wunderlander so pedantic it was almost Plattdeutsch, and the lined gray-stubbled face might have been anywhere between sixty and twice that, depending on how much medical care he could afford. “We’ve watched you growing fat on human scraps your masters threw you, ever since the War.”
“Don’t trust me,” Claude Montferrat-Palme said evenly. “Trust the guns I deliver. Trust this.”
He pushed a data chip across the table. “This is a record of the informants the Munchen Polezi has in the various underground organizations . . . with the Intelligence Branch appraisals of the reliability of each. I’d advise you to use it cautiously.”
The meeting place was a run-down working-class bar on the Donau’s banks. Noise and smells filtered up through the planks from the taproom below, where dockers and fisherfolk spent what they had on cheap gin and pseudo-verguuz and someone played a very bad musicomp. This upper chamber was a dosshouse now, smelling of old sweat from the pallets on the floor, cheap tobacco, less namable things. From the faded murals it had probably been something else back before the War; he racked his memory . . . yes, a clubhouse. The Munchen Turnverein. Through a window the broad surface of the river glistened in the evening sun, and a barge went by silently with a man in a thick sweater and billed cap standing at the tiller smoking a pipe.
For an instant Claude was painfully conscious of how beautiful this world was, and how much he would be losing when they caught him. Not that he was much afraid of death, and he had means to ensure there would be little pain. No, it was the thought of all that he would never do or see that was almost intolerable. The silence stretched as the man clicked the chip into a wrist-comp and scrolled. His graying blond eyebrows rose.
“Very useful indeed, if it checks out. And if we don’t use it cautiously . . .”
Claude nodded. “If you don’t, I’m very dead and no more use to you at all for catching the next set of traitors . . .”
Cold blue eyes met his, infinitely weary and determined in a way that had nothing at all to do with hope.
“Why?” the man said.
“Would you believe I’ve spent forty-odd years infiltrating until I was in a position to do some good?”
“No.”
Claude sighed. “Funny, I haven’t been able to convince myself of that, either. Let’s say that I’ve come to believe we can make some small difference in the outcome of the War.”
At that the man nodded, mouth twisting in a thin smile. “More believable, but not very comforting. We’ve been getting a good many recruits on those grounds since the UN raid. How many of them will stick with it, when the hope goes?” An unpleasant laugh. “Therefore it behooves us to see that they commit themselves with acts beyond forgiveness before their initial enthusiasm runs out.”