He caught glimpses: distended eyes, scrabbling claws, knives sinking home into flesh, amid a clamor loud enough to drive needles of pain into his ears. Bits of bloody fur hit all around him, and there was a human scream as the fighters rolled over a secretary. Then Staff-Officer rose, slashed and glaring.
Ktriir-Supervisor lay sprawled, legs twitching galvanically with the hilt of Staff-Officer's w'tsai jerking next to his lower spine. The slender kzin panted for a moment and then leaped forward to grab his opponent by the neck-ruff. He jerked him up toward the waiting jaws, clamped them down on his throat. Ktriir-Supervisor struggled feebly, then slumped. Blood-bubbles swelled and burst on his nose. A final wrench and Staff-Officer was backing off, shaking his head and spitting, licking at the matted fur of his muzzle; he groomed for half a minute before wrenching the knife free and beginning to spread the dead kzin's ears for a clean trophy-cut.
“Erruch,” Ingrid said as the recording finished. “You've got more… you've got a lot of guts, Claude, dealing with them at first hand like that.”
“Oh, some of them aren't so bad. For ratcats. Staff-Officer there expressed 'every confidence' in me.” He made an expressive gesture with his hands. “Although he also reminded me there was a continuous demand for fresh monkeymeat.”
Ingrid paled slightly and laid a hand on his arm. That was not a figure of speech to her, not after the chase through the kzinti hunting preserve. She remembered the sound of the hunting scream behind her, and the thudding crackle of the alien's pads on the leaves as it made its four-footed rush. Rising as it screamed and leaped from the ravine lip above her; the long sharpened pole in her hands, and the soft heavy feel as its own weight drove it onto her weapon…
Claude laid his hands on hers. Harold cleared his throat.
“Well,” he said. “Your position looks solider than we thought.”
The other man gave Ingrid's hand a squeeze and released it. “Yes,” he said. A hunter's look came into his eyes, emphasized the foxy sharpness of his features. “In fact, they're outfitting some sort of expedition; that's why they can't spare personnel for administrative duties.”
Ingrid and Harold both leaned forward instinctively. Harold crushed out his cigarette with swift ferocity.
“Another Fleet?” Ingrid asked. I'll be stuck here, and Earth…
Claude shook his head. “No. That raid did a lot of damage; it'd be a year or more just to get back to the state of readiness they had when the Yamamoto arrived. Military readiness.” Both the others winced; over a million humans had died in the attack. “But they're definitely mobilizing for something inside the system. Two flotillas. Something out in the Swarm.”
“Markham?” Ingrid ventured. It seemed a little extreme; granted he had the Catskinner, but—
“I doubt it. They're bringing the big guns up to full personnel, the battlewagons. Conquest Fang class.”
They exchanged glances. Those were interstellar-capable warships, carriers for lesser craft and equipped with weapons that could crack planets, defenses to match. Almost self-sufficient, with facilities for manufacturing their own fuel, parts and weapons requirements from asteroidal material. They were normally kept on standby as they came out of the yards, only a few at full readiness for training purposes.
“All of them?” Harold said.
“No, but about three-quarters. Ratcats will be thin on the ground for a while. And—” he hesitated, forced himself to continue “—I'll be able to do the most good staying here. For a year or so at least, I can be invaluable to the underground without risking much.”
The others remained silent while he looked away, granting him time to compose himself.
“I've got the false ID and transit papers, with disguises,” he said. “Ingrid… you aren't safe anywhere on Wunderland. In the Swarm, with that ship you came in, maybe the two of you can do some good.”
“Claude—” she began.
He shook his head. When he spoke, the old lightness was back in his tone.
“I wonder,” he said, “I truly wonder what Markham is doing. I'd like to think he's causing so much trouble that they're mobilizing the Fleet, but…”
Chapter IV
Tiamat was crowded, Captain Jonah Matthieson decided. Even for the de facto capital of Wunderland's Belt. It had been bad enough the last time Jonah was here. He shouldered through the line into the zero-G waiting area at the docks, a huge pie-shaped disk; those were at the ends of the sixty-by-twenty kilometer spinning cylinder that served the Serpent Swarm as its main base. There had been dozens of ships in the magnetic grapples: rockjack singleships, transports, freighters… refugee ships as well; the asteroid industrial bases had been heavily damaged during the Yamamoto's raid.
Not quite as many as you would expect, though. The UN ramscoop ship's weapon had been quarter-ton iron eggs traveling at velocities just less than a photon's. When something traveling at that speed hit, the result resembled an antimatter bomb.
A line of lifebubbles went by, shepherded by medics. Casualties, injuries beyond the capacities of outstation autodocs. Some of them were quite small; he looked in the transparent surface of one, and then away quickly, swallowing.
Shut up, he told his mind. Collateral damage can't be helped. And there had been a trio of kzinti battlewagons in dock too, huge tapering daggers with tau-cross bows and magnetic launchers like openwork gunbarrels; Slasher-class fighters clung to the flanks, swarms of metallic lice. Repair and installation crews swarmed around them; Tiamat's factories were pouring out warheads and sensor-effector systems.
The mass of humanity jammed solid in front of the exits. Jonah waited like a floating particle of cork, watching the others passed through the scanners one by one. Last time, with Ingrid—forget that, he thought—there had been a cursory retina scan, and four goldskin cops floating like a daisy around each exit. Now they were doing blood samples as well, presumably for DNA analysis; besides the human police, he could see waldo-guns, floating ovoids with clusters of barrels and lenses and antennae. A kzin to control them, bulking even huger in fibroid armour and helmet.
And all for little old me, he thought, kicking himself forward and letting the goldskin stick his hand into the tester. There was a sharp prickle on his thumb, and he waited for the verdict. Either the false ident holds, or it doesn't. The four police with stunners and riot-armor, the kzin in full infantry rig, six waldos with 10-megawatt lasers… if it came to a fight, the odds were not good. Since all I have is a charming smile and a re-jiggered light-pen.
“Pass through, pass through,” the goldskin said, in a tone that combined nervousness and boredom.
Jonah decided he couldn't blame her; the kzinti security apparatus must have gone winging paranoid-crazy when Chuut-Riit was assassinated, and then the killers escaped with human-police connivance. On second thoughts, these klongs all volunteered to work for the pussies. Bleep them.
He passed through the mechanical airlock and into one of the main transverse corridors. It was ten meters by twenty, and sixty kilometers long; three sides were small businesses and shops; on the fourth, spinward, was a slideway. There was a ring of transfer booths around the airlock exits, permanently disabled; only kzinti and humans under their direct supervision were allowed the convenience of lightspeed pseudo-teleportation. The last time he had been here, a month ago, there had been murals on the walls of the concourse area. Prewar, faded and stained, but still gracious and marked with the springlike optimism of the settlement of the Alpha Centauri system. Outdoor scenes from Wunderland in its pristine condition, before the settlers had modified the ecology to suit the immigrants from Earth. Scenes of slowships, half-disassembled after their decades-long flight from the Solar System.