"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 ship."
Useful was an understatement; intelligence-gathering was not their primary job, but this was a 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-wargames played by the pussy General Staff for decades. AD 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." Her fingers moved across her interfacer. "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."
"We'll 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 transfer booth. Computer," he continued. "Is the civilian system still online? Slaved to the core-system here?"
"Affirmative, to both."
"That's it, then. What's the closest functional booth to the Ba'hai quarter? 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. He paced through 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 most of his lifespan cooling a temper that had originally been hasty even by kzin standards. He controlled breath and motion, 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 dryspicy 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. Heroes, indeed! 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 wiff 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 asked 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? Honored Chuut-Riit," he added hastily, as he caught the governor's expression and scent.
"What-do-you-mean?" he said.
Well, Honored Governor Chuut-Riit, a successful clandestine insertion is undetectable by definition, hrrrr? 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 was their scent. Very three-dimensional, I suppose it comes of their being monkeys. They do some wonderful gaming programs, very ingenious- 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!”
"Whirrr?" the fat giant chirruped, stopped his continuous nervous purring and then started. "Oh, yes. Lovely system you have here, Honored Governor 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 were 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."
"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 salty water, grass, flowers.
"Of course, staying alive from now on jeopardizes the mission," Jonah continued.
"No." Ingrid shook her head. "You have to get back. "
"I do? Why?"
"You just do. " Murphy's Balls! Those ARM psychists really do know their stuff. He's forgotten already. What have I forgotten? It's no fun, holes in your memory. Even if they're deliberate.
"The plan doesn't matter," Jonah said. "If it were going to blow, it would have done it. And we'd have heard the bang." Something itched at the back of his mind. "Unless-"
"Jonah?"
"Nothing." I don't want to remember. Or maybe there's nothing to remember. "My hand hurts. Wonder what I did to it?"
"You don't need to know that, either." It was the tenth time he'd asked. Clearly the psychists had done some powerful voodoo on Jonah. They hailed a pedicab and climbed into the twin passenger back seat. They had both been surprised to see the little vehicles skittering about the streets; surely machinery could not have become that expensive. The man hunched over the pedals was thin, all wire and leather, dressed only in a pair of ragged shorts. It was not that machines were so dear, but that labor was so cheap, labor of a certain kind. For those with skills needed by the kzinti war economy, there was enough capital to support reasonable productivity. For the increasing number of those without, there was only what unaided brute labor would buy: starvation wages.