I thought it would be, honored Chuut-Riit," the human replied, and the kzin blinked in bafflement at her amusement.
One of the guards was too obviously entertained by his commander's eccentricity. "Here," Chuut-Riit called as he walked through the small crowd of bowing humans. "Guard Trooper. Care for this infitnt as we fly, in the forward compartment. Care for him well. "
The soldier blinked dubiously at the small bundle of chocolate-and-mud stained ftir that looked with eager interest at the fascinating complexities of his equipment, then slung his beam rifle and accepted it with an unconscious bristling. Chuut-Riit gave the ear-and tail twitch that was the kzin equivalent of sly amusement as he stepped into the passenger compartment and threw himself down on the cushions. There was a slight internal wobble as the car lifted, an expected retching sound, and a yowl of protest from the forward compartment.
The ventilators will be overloaded, the governor thought happily. Now, about that report…
Tiamat was shabby. Coming in to dock on the rockjacker prospecting craft Markham had found for them it had looked the same as it had half a century before-a little busier and more exterior lights; but basically the same spinning ironrock tube twenty kilometers across and sixty long, with ships of every description clustered at the docking yards at either end. More smelters and robofabricators hanging outside, more giant baggies of water ice and volatiles. But inside it was shabby, run-down.
That was Ingrid Raines's first thought. Shabby. The handgrips were worn, the vivid murals that covered the walls just in from the poles of the giant cylinder fading and grease-spotted. The constant subliminal rumble from the freighter docks was louder, nobody was bothering with the sonic baffles that damped the vibration of megatons of powdered ore, liquid metal, vacuum-separated refinates pouring into the network of pumptubes. Styles were more garish than she remembered, face-paint and tiger-striped oversuits. There were a quartet of police hanging spaced evenly around the entry corridor, toes hooked into rails and heads in toward the center. Obstructing traffic, but nobody was going to object, not when the goldskins wore impact armor and powdered endoskeletons, not when shockrods dangled negligently in their hands.
"Transfer booths closed down," Jonah murmured as they made flipover and went feet first into the stickyfield at the inward end of the passage. There was a familiar subjective click behind their eyes, and the corridor became a half-kilometer of hollow tower over their heads, filled with the up-and-down drift of people.
"Shut up," Ingrid muttered back. That had been no surprise, instantaneous transportation would foul up security too much. They went through the emergency pressure curtains, into the glare and blare of the inner corridors. Zero-G, here near the core of Tiamat, one-G at the rims. Tigertown was at one-G, she thought. The resident kzin were low-status engineers and supervisors, or navy types; they liked heavy gravity, the pussies had never lived in space without gravity control. Tigers, she reminded herself. That was the official slang term. Ratcat if you wanted to be a little dangerous. 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 hummknives.
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 smallscale 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 theway, 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 nwnopoly. 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 cus tomers 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. ley 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 roclqacks 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-fblded 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 nwans.
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 W years objective, everything else in the system had collapsed into shit, and the arrogant lop-sided bastards hadn't changed a bit…