They turned into a narrow side corridor that had been a residential section the last time she was here, transients’ quarters around the lowgrav manufacturing sections of the core. Now it was lined on three sides by shops and small businesses, with the fourth, spinward, side acting as the “downward” direction. Not that there was enough gravity to matter this close to the center of the spin, but it was convenient. They slowed to a stroll, two more figures in plain rockjack innersuits, the form-fitting coverall everyone wore under vacuum armor. Conservative Belter stripcuts, backpacks with printseal locks to discourage pickpockets, and the black plastic hilts of humm-knives.
Ingrid looked around her, acutely conscious of the hard shape nestling butt-down on her collarbone. Distortion battery, and a blade-shaped loop of wire; switch it on, and the magnetic field made it vibrate, very fast. Very sharp. She had been shocked when Markham’s Intelligence Officer pushed them across the table to the UNSN operatives.
“Things are that bad?”
“The ratcats don’t care,” the officer had said. “Humans are forbidden any weapon that can kill at a distance. Only the collabo police can carry stunners, and the only thing the ratcats care about is that production keeps up. What sort of people do you think join the collabo goldskins? Social altruists? The only ordinary criminals they go after are the ones too poor or stupid to pay them off. When things get bad enough to foul up war production, they have a big sweep, and maybe catch some of the middling-level gangrunners and feed them to the ratcats. The big boys? The big boys are the police, or vice versa. That’s the way it is, sweetheart.”
Ingrid shivered, and Jonah put an arm around her waist as they walked in the glide-lift-glide of a stickyfield. “Changed a lot, hey?” he said.
She nodded. The boots were for the sort of small-scale industry that bigger firms contracted out; filing, hardcopy, genetic engineering of bacteria for process production of organics, all mixed in with cookshops and handicrafts and service trades of a thousand types. Holo displays flashed and glittered, strobing with all shades of the visible spectrum; music pounded and blared and crooned, styles she remembered and styles utterly strange and others that were revivals of modes six centuries old; Baroque and Classical and jazz and Dojin-Go Punk and Meddlehoffer. People crowded the ’way, on the rimside and wall-hopping between shops. Half the shops had private guards. The passers-by were mostly planetsiders, some so recent you could see they had trouble handling low-G movement.
Many were ragged, openly dirty. How can that happen? she thought. Fusion-distilled water was usually cheap in a closed system. Oh. Probably a monopoly. And there were beggars, actual beggars with open sores on their skins or hands twisted with arthritis, things she had only seen in historical flats so old they had been shot two-dimensional.
“Here it is,” Jonah grunted. The eating-shop was directly above them; they switched off their shoes, waited for a clear space and flipped up and over, slapping their hands onto the catch net outside the door. Inside the place was clean, at least, with a globular freefall kitchen and a human chef, and customers in dark pajama-like clothing floating with their knees crossed under sticktables. Not Belters—too stocky and muscular—they seemed almost purely Oriental by bloodline, which was rare in the genetic stew of the Sol system but more common here.
Icy stares greeted them as they swung to a vacant booth and slid themselves in, their long legs tangling under the synthetic pineboard of the stick table.
“It must be harder for you,” Jonah said. “Your home.”
She looked up at him with quick surprise; he was usually the archetypical rockjack, the stereotype asteroid prospector; quiet, bookish, self-sufficient, a man without twitches or mannerisms but capable of cutting loose on furlough…but perceptive—and rockjacks were not supposed to be good at people.
Well, he was a successful officer, too, she thought. And they do have to be good at people.
A waitress in some many-folded garment of black silk floated up to the privacy screen of their cubicle and reached a hand through to scratch at the post. Ingrid keyed the screen, and the woman’s features snapped clear.
“Sorry, so sorry,” she said. “This special place, not Belter food.” There was a sing-song accent to her English that Jonah did not recognize, but the underlying impatience and hostility came through the calm features.
He smiled at her and ran a hand over his crest. “But we were told the tekkamaki here is fine, the oyabun makes the best,” he said. Ingrid could read the thought that followed: Whatever the fuck that means.
The frozen mask of the waitress’ face could not alter, but the quick duck of her head was empty of the commonplace tension of a moment before. She returned quickly with bowls of soup and drinking straws; it was some sort of fish broth with onions and a strange musky undertaste. They drank in silence, waiting. For what, the pussies to come and get us? she thought. The Catskinner-computer had said Markham was on the level…but also that he was capable of utter treachery once he had convinced himself that Right was on his side, and that to Markham the only ultimate judge of Right was, guess who, the infallible Markham. Gottdamned Herrenmann, she mused: going on fifty years objective, everything else in the system had collapsed into shit, and the arrogant lop-sided bastards hadn’t changed a bit…
A man slid through the screen. Expensively non-descript dress, gray oversuit and bowl-cut black hair. Hint of an expensive natural cologne. Infocomp at his waist, and the silver button of a reader-bonephone behind his ear. This was Markham’s “independent entrepreneur.” Spoken with tones of deepest contempt, more than a Herrenmann’s usual disdain for business, so probably some type of criminal like McAllistaire. She kept a calm smile on her face as she studied the man, walling off the remembered sickness as the kicking doll-figures tumbled into space, bleeding from every orifice. Oriental, definitely; there were Sina and Nipponjin enclaves down on Wunderland, but not in the Serpent Swarm Belt, not when she left. Things had changed.
The quiet man smiled and produced three small drinking-bulbs. “Rice wine,” he said. “Heated. An affectation, to be sure, but we are very traditional these days.” Pure Belter English, no hint of an accent. She called up training, looked for clues. In the hands, the skin around the eyes, the set of the mouth. Very little, no more than polite attention, this was a very calm man. Hard to tell even the age, if he was getting good geriatric care; anything from fifty minimum up to a hundred. Teufel, he could have been from Sol system himself, one of the last bunches of immigrants and wouldn’t that be a joke to end them.
Silence stretched. The oriental sat and sipped at his hot sake and smiled; the two Belters followed suit, controlling their surprise at the vanish-in-the-throat taste. At the last, Jonah spoke:
“I’m Jonah. This is Ingrid. The man with gray eyes sent us for tekkamaki.”
“Ah, our esteemed GVB,” the man said. A deprecatory laugh and a slight wave of the fingers; the man had almost as few hand-gestures as a Belter. “Gotz von Blerichgen, a little joke. Yes, I know the one you speak of. My name is Shigehero Hirose, and as you will have guessed, I am a hardened criminal of the worst sort.” He ducked his head in a polite bow. Ingrid noticed his hands then, the left missing the little finger, and the edges of vividly-colored tattoos under the cuffs of his suit.
“And you,” he continued to Jonah, “are sent not by our so-Aryan friend, but by the UNSN.” A slight frown. “Your charming companion is perhaps of the same provenance, but from the Serpent Swarm originally.”
Jonah and Ingrid remained silent. Another shrug. “In any case, accordingly to our informants, you wish transportation to Wunderland, and well-documented cover identities.”
“If you’re wondering how we can pay…” Jonah began. They had the best and most compact source of valuata the UN military had been able to provide.
“No, please. From our own resources, we will be glad to do this.”
“Why?” Ingrid said, curious. “Criminals seem to be doing better now than they ever did
in the old days.”
Hirose smiled again, that bland expression that revealed nothing and never touched his eyes. “The young lady is as perceptive as she is ornamental.” He took up his sake bulb and considered it. “My…association is a very old one. You might call us predators; we would prefer to think of it as a symbiotic relationship. We have endured many changes, many social and technological revolutions. But something is common to each, the desire to have something and yet to forbid it.
“Consider drugs and alcohol…or wirehead drouds. All strictly forbidden at one time, legal another, but the demand continues. Instruction in martial arts, likewise. In our early days in dai Nippon, we performed services for feudal lords that their own code forbade. Later, the great corporations, the zaibatsu, found us convenient for dealing with recalcitrant shareholders and unions; we moved substances of various types across inconvenient national frontiers; liberated information selfishly stockpiled in closed data banks, recruited entertainers, provided banking services…Invested our wealth wisely, and moved outward with humanity to the planets and the stars. Sometimes so respectable that our affairs were beyond question; sometimes otherwise. A conservative fraction undertook to found our branch in the Alpha Centauri system, but I assure you the…family businesses, clans if you will, still flourish in Sol System as well. Inconspicuously.”
“That doesn’t answer Ingrid’s question,” Jonah said bluntly. “This setup looks like hog heaven for you.”
“Only in the short term. Which is enough to satisfy mere thugs, mere bandits such as a certain rockholder known as McAllistaire…you met this person? But consider; we are doing well for the same reason bacteria flourish in a dead body. The human polity of this system is dying, its social defenses disorganized, but the carnival of the carrion-eaters will be shortlived. We speak of the free humans and those in the direct service of the kzin, but to our masters we of the ‘free’ are slaves of the Patriarchy who have not yet been assigned individual owners. We are squeezed, tighter and tighter; eventually, there will be nothing but the households of kzin nobles. My association could perhaps survive such a situation, and indeed we are making preparations.” He shrugged. “We have survived much over the centuries. But perhaps this time it will not be. Better by far to restore a functioning human system; our assets would be less in the short term, more secure in the longer.”
“And by helping us, you’ll have a foot in both camps and come up smelling of roses whoever wins.”
Hirose spread his hands. “It is true, the kzin have occasionally found themselves using our services.” His smile became more genuine, and sharklike. “Nor are all, ah, Heroes, so incorruptible, so immune to the temptations of vice and profit, as they would like to believe.
“Enough.” He produced two sealed packets and slid them across the table to them. “This one contains the names of criminals in Munchen who have worked with us and have not betrayed us. You will understand that this is no great endorsement. I cannot guarantee they will not sell you out to the authorities merely to win good will with them. However, these are the only names I have.
“This one is more important. The documentation and credit accounts are perfectly genuine. They win stand even against kzin scrutiny; our influence reaches far. I have no knowledge of what identities you have been given, nor do I wish to. You in turn have learned nothing from me that possible opponents do not already know, and know that I know, and I know that they know…but please, even if I cannot join you, do stay and enjoy this excellent restaurant’s cuisine.”
“Well…” Jonah palmed the folder. “It might be out of character, rockjacks in a fancy live-service place like this.”
Shigehero Hirose halted, part-way through the privacy screen. “You would do well to study local conditions a little more carefully, man-from-far-away. It has been a long time since autochefs and dispensers were cheaper than humans.”
“The inefficiency of you leaf-eaters is becoming intolerable,” the kzin said.
Claude Montferrat-Palme bowed his head. Don’t stare. Never, never stare at a ratca—at a kzin. “We do our best, Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals,” he said.
The kzin superintendent of Munchen stopped its restless striding and stood close, smiling, its tail held stiffly past one column-thick leg. Two and a half meters tall, a thickly padded cartoon-figure cat that might have looked funny in a holo. It grinned down at him, the direct gaze that was as much a threat display as the barred fangs.
“You play your monkey games of position and money while the enemies of the Patriarchy scurry and bite in the underbrush.” Its head swiveled toward the police chief’s desk. “Scroll!”
Data began to move across the suddenly transparent surface, accompanied by a moving schematic of the Serpent Swarm; colors and symbols indicated feral-human attacks. Ships lost, outposts raided, automatic cargo containers hijacked…
“Comparative!” the kzin snapped. Graphs replaced the schematic. “Distribution!”
“See,” he continued. “Raids of every description have sprouted like fungus since the sthondat-spawned Sol-monkeys made their coward’s passage through this system. With no discernible pattern. And even the lurkers in the mountains are slipping out to trouble the estates again.”
“With respect, Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals, my sphere of responsibility is the human population of this city. There has been little increase in feral activity here.”
Claws rested centimeters from his eyes. “Because this city is the locus where feral-human packs dispose of their loot, exchange information and goods, meet and coordinate. Paying their percentage to you! Yes, yes, we have heard your arguments that it is better for this activity to take place where our minions may monitor it, and they are logical enough. While we lack the number of Heroes necessary to reduce this system to true order, and we are preoccupied with the renewed offensive against Sol.”
He mumbled under his breath, and Montferrat caught an uncomplimentary reference to Chuut-Riit.
The human bowed again. “Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals, most of the groups operating against the righteous rule of the Patriarchy are motivated by material gain; this is a characteristic of my species. They cooperate with the genuine rebels, but it is an alliance plagued by mistrust and mutual contempt; furthermore, the rebels themselves are as much a grouping of bands as a unified whole.” And were slowly dying out, until the UN demonstrated its reach so spectacularly. Now they’ll have recruits in plenty again, and the bandits will want to draw the cloak of respectable Resistance over themselves.
His mind cautiously edged toward a consideration of whether it was time to begin hedging his bets, and he forced it back. The kzin used telepaths periodically to check the basic loyalties of their senior servants. That was one reason he had never tried to reach the upper policy levels of the collaborationist government, that and…A wash of non-thought buried the speculation.
“Accordingly, if their activity increases, our sources of information increase likewise. Once the confusion of the, ah, passing raid dies down, we will be in a position to make further gains. Perhaps to trap some of the greater leaders, Markham or Hirose.”
“And you will take your percentage of all these transactions,” Ktriir-Supervisor-of-Animals said with heavy irony. “Remember that a trained monkey that loses other values may always serve as monkeymeat. Remember where your loyalties ultimately lie, in this insect-web of betrayals you fashion, slave.”
Yes, thought Montferrat, dabbing at his forehead as the kzin left. I must remember that carefully.
“Collation,” he said to his desk. “Attack activity.” The schematic returned. “Eliminate all post-Yamamoto raids that correlate to within 75% of the modus operandi of pre-Yamamoto attacks.”
A scattering, mostly directed toward borderline targets that had been too heavily protected for the makeshift boats of the Free Wunderland space-guerrillas. Disconcertingly many of them on weapons-fabrication plants, with nearly as many seizing communications, stealthing, command-and-control c
omponents. Once those were passed along to the other asteroid lurkers all hell was going to break loose. And gravity polarization technology was becoming more and more widespread as well. The kzin had tried to keep it strictly for their own ships and for manufacturing use, but the principles were not too difficult and the methods the Patriarchy introduced were heavily dependent on it.
“Now, correlate filtered attacks with past ten year pattern for bandits Markham, McAllistaire, Finbogesson, Cheung, Latimer, Wu. Sequencing.”
“Scheisse,” he whispered. Markham, without a doubt, the man did everything by the book and you could rewrite the manuscript by watching him. Now equipped with something whose general capacities were equivalent to a kzin Stalker, and proceeding in a methodical amplification of the sort of thing he had been doing before…Markham was the sort for the Protracted Struggle, all right. He’d read his Mao and Styrikawsi and Laugidis, even if he gave Clausewitz all the credit.
“Code, Till Eulenspiegel. Lock previous analysis, non-redo, simulate other pattern if requested. Stop.”
“Stop and locked,” the desk said.
Montserrat relaxed. The Eulenspiegel file was supposedly secure. Certainly none of his subordinates had it, or they would have gone to the ratcats with it long ago; there had been more than enough in there to make him prime monkeymeat. He swallowed convulsively; as Police Chief of Munchen, he was obliged to screen the kzin hunts far too frequently. Straightening, he adjusted the lapels of his uniform and walked to the picture window that formed one wall of the office. Behind him stretched the sleek expanse of feathery downdropper-pelt rugs over marble tile, the settees and loungers of pebbled but butter-soft okkaran hide. A Matisse and two Vorenagles on the walls, and a priceless Pierneef…He stopped at the long oak bar and poured himself the single glass of Maivin that was permissible.