Man-Kzin Wars XIII-ARC (34 page)

Hilda picked up her pace until she was trailing Smith by no more than a meter. “You’re not really from Neue Ingolstadt proper. You’re from right around here, aren’t you?”

Smith swept his light in a quick arc across the irregular walls, found a side-branching tunnel they would have walked straight past, otherwise: he slipped into it. “I was born just a few klicks south of the lodge the kzinti are using for their Hunts.”

“Farm boy?”

He half-turned, smiled: he had fine, straight teeth and features to match. “Not really. Dad was a town official.”

“Security? Police?”

He snickered. “Procurement. Don’t tell Gunnar, though: he’ll be sure to crack a joke about my
Vati
being a pimp.”

Hilda grinned back at him. “So, procurement?”

“Yeah, you know: vehicles, maintenance supplies, work suits, screwdrivers, demo charges. Soup to nuts and the kitchen sink in which to keep them.”

“That’s a pretty broad mandate for one official.”

“Well, we lived in a pretty small town. You know how it is: you don’t need much of any one thing, so you assign one person to be your all-around expert on ‘needed stuff.’”

“So that’s the official terminology used: he procured ‘needed stuff’?”

“Something like that.”

“Just the same way your official name is John Smith.”

Smith smiled and didn’t insult her by disputing or wisecracking. The new passage had widened out; small bits of limestone growled and rasped beneath their feet; a fine white mist drifted up to obscure their lamps.

“So that’s how you know these tunnels,” she persisted. “Fled to them to escape having to work alongside Dad?”

“No. Nothing as sensible as that. We just came here as kids because it was dangerous. You know: one wrong turn and you’re lost forever.” He went silent. “Actually, two kids were lost forever. Never found them. But there are really only a few turns you have to watch out for when you’re heading north like we are. It twists a lot, but almost all the secondary tunnels branch out behind us, to the south. So as long as we don’t do something stupid, like taking a hairpin turn, it’s all pretty straightforward until we come out the far side.”

“Which is where?”

“North of the Grunwald, which was where the Hunters were heading, trying to catch their prey before it could get in among the trees. That can slow things down for them, and young kzinti haven’t really learned to savor the thrill before the kill, evidently.”

Hilda shuddered. “You took a big chance.”

“How do you mean?”

“Counting on these tunnels being unused by the resistance, and unexplored by the kzinti.”

“Oh, I was pretty sure your resistance didn’t have access to these.”

“How?”

“From talking with Mads the first night. I didn’t ask about the tunnels, but I asked about your operations: how much lead time for retreat you needed, refuges, bolt holes. Everything he told me indicated that these tunnels did not figure in your broader tactical picture.”

“They might have.” Hilda put up her square chin stubbornly. “Could have been that the very first resistance fighters used them, and the kzinti flushed them out.”

“In which case I would have seen the automated monitors the ratcats would surely have left behind in the region, and possibly live patrol spoor. But when I neared the ridge line and the entrances to the caves, there was nothing there.” He smiled back at Hilda. “C’mon, now, admit it: this one time, aren’t you actually
glad
to be wrong?”

“What do you mean, ‘this one time’?” She sniffed. “It’s not like you know me.”

“No, I don’t know
you
.” The way he emphasized “you,” she was sure he was going to conclude his comment with “—but I know your type.” He didn’t, saying instead: “However, it seems to me that you’re pretty clever and strong-willed. Meaning you’re usually right, and you usually get your way, which is why Gunnar resents you so much. And is probably smitten with you, too.”

“Gunnar likes his women big and dumb, just like himself.”

“Ahhh . . . I suspect he’d make an exception, in your case.”

Hilda elected not to reveal that she’d had a similar, sneaking suspicion herself. “Besides, Gunnar’s got a real class-consciousness issue. He’s convinced my folks were
herrenmanner
.”

“Huh.” Smith did not sound surprised.

“What do you mean, ‘huh’?”

“I mean it’s funny how some things change, and some things don’t. It was the same in my day.”

She considered that. Considered his accent. Considered his familiarity with Neue Ingolstadt and Munchen, despite being from a little
Dorf
up near the hill country. “You went to live in Munchen long before Uni, didn’t you?” She considered the possibilities. “A sponsored invitation to the
Gymnasium
, there?”

He almost missed a step. “You’re good,” he allowed after a moment. He raised his voice so the others could hear him. “We’re coming to the end of our subterranean stroll. They shouldn’t be waiting for us on the outside, but—”

“—but you never know.” Mads nodded, snapped his rifle off safety.

Following Smith’s lead, they shut off their cold-lights. Up ahead, a dim grey patch stood out from the blackness. He turned to them. “I’m going up ahead. I’ll be gone for a few minutes so I can scout not just the exit, but some of the surrounding terrain. It’s far more likely that they’d be in the vicinity by chance, rather than purposely sitting right on top of the exit, waiting.”

Even Gunnar didn’t have any answer other than a single, sober nod.

Smith faded into the grey, stooping lower as he went.

Mads came closer to Hilda. “Did I hear him mention that we’re coming out north of the Grunwald?”

“
Ja
. Why?”

Mads scratched the back of his sun burnt neck. “That puts us well outside of our operations zone. It’s a long way home, from here. And with all the kzinti combing the countryside for us, we wouldn’t stand much chance of making it back.”

Hilda nodded. “I suspect he knows that. In fact, I suspect he’s counting on it.”

“Why?”

Gunnar’s voice was tight, sharp. “Because he’s a crazy, arrogant bastard, that’s why.”

“Gunnar, you are an ass. Smith is doing all this because he doesn’t want, or doesn’t have the time, to negotiate with the resistance cadre. He’s got a secret weapon to test and everything he’s been doing is almost certainly driven by that mission.”

Mads shrugged. “Hell. He should’ve pulled rank on me and taken command. Then at least he could have let us know where we were going instead of trailing us along this way.”

Margarethe remained in the shadows, invisible, but her words were clearly coming out of a smile: “Sure, Mads. And you’d have let him pull rank over you. Sure.”

Hilda sighed. “Look, let’s walk in his shoes for a moment. It’s pretty clear his orders prohibit him from revealing what’s going on: I don’t think he’s playing mystery theater with us just for fun. But at the same time, he’s got orders to test this weapon, something he probably can’t pull off on his own. And it’s also a mission which I’m guessing cannot afford to fail. The folks with the fleets and the power need to know if this weapon is going to work or not.

“So he looks at the situation when we catch up with him and he rightly concludes that if he goes back to our HQ with us, his mission is going to be buried in procedural haggling. He also knows that if he comes right out and tries to usurp command over you, Mads, all of us would have told him to shove his orders and his rank where none of the three suns shine. And what could he have done in response? Reported our mutiny to higher authorities that are light-years away? Besides, he’s no idiot: he knows that our resistance has worked on its own for almost half a century. We have our own values and ranks and traditions and protocols. So he knew that, just because he arrived in a flying refrigerator with an official uniform and rank, we weren’t simply going to snap salutes, fall in, and pretend that the last fifty years hadn’t left us with ideas and a command structure of our own.”

Gunnar rested his own
strakkaker
on both knees, put his elbows atop it, put his chin atop his cupping hands. “Ten gets you one he’s got a bioweapon in that case.”

Hilda reflected that when Gunnar was not busy demonstrating how big his mouth and biceps were, he was actually not the idiot he seemed. “I won’t take that bet. Fact is, I’d put my money on the same horse.”

Margarethe’s voice was cool, level. “Because of the size of the case?”

Hilda looked at the object, which Mads had entrusted to her. “That, and the fact that this is one tricked-out puzzle box. And also because the kzin life sciences tend to lag far behind the others: it could be an area where they’re particularly vulnerable.”

Mads nodded. “
Ja
, medicine and genetics are not their strong suit, probably as much due to impatience as all the other reasons combined. I wonder how many Heroes aspire to earn their Names by conquering a gene code with a computer and a microscope?”

Gunnar’s tone had become more surly. “So if following Captain Kzin-magnet doesn’t get us sliced and shredded by the kzinti themselves, we can look forward to coughing up our lungs in great piles of gooey slime, courtesy of some new viral agent of our own manufacture.”

Hilda sighed. “Gunnar, neither side has shown any willingness to use that kind of broad-spectrum agent: they’re too indiscriminate, and there’s always a chance that, once you let a bug out of its test tube and it starts replicating in a target population, it could mutate and come roiling back in your direction. That’s particularly true if the agent is retroviral, and in this case, it would almost have to be.”

Margarethe sounded genuinely interested. “Why’s that?”

Mads shrugged. “Because any bacteria or non-viral microorganism designed to do them in would almost surely find us tasty as well. But Hilda, even a new retrovirus would be dangerous for the same reason: we’re similar enough in terms of our chemical building blocks that a virus made to harm the kzinti could hop the genetic divide and come for us, just like bacteria.”

“Not quite, Mads: they don’t have our genetics. Hell, their biological blueprint isn’t even encoded on a braided double-helix structure. So if the bug was something that went strictly after the proteins of their gene-analogs, maybe we’d be safe.”

“That’s a pretty big maybe,” observed Gunnar.

“No argument, but it’s hard to imagine what else he’s got in the box.”

“So why don’t you ask me?” inquired Smith’s voice.

The four of them—even sharp-eyed and -eared Margarethe—started violently. Smith emerged from the near-darkness. Hilda was tempted to look down, half-expected to see that he had removed his boots, just to creep up and scare the feces out of them. “You mean, you’ll actually tell us what’s in the case?”

Smith smiled a bit. “No, not yet.”

Gunnar scowled. “Then when, damn it?”

“When the time is right, Gunnar. Now, let’s get going.” He began moving back toward the grey patch at the end of the passage. “It’s dusk out there, but darker and cooler than usual, due to the high-altitude dust. I heard a fast mover heading east to west but it was too far to the south to see. It looks like they landed a few troops here a day ago to look around; the bush is tramped down in a few places, but not more than you’d expect from a fire team.”

Mads nodded. “Sounds like we’re on the far edge of their search perimeter. They dropped a few Heroes to snoop about for a few hours, maybe half a day, then gave it up and moved them elsewhere.”

“That’s how I see it.”

“And they didn’t leave sensors behind?”

Mads shook his head at Margarethe’s question. “
Nei, ’chen
. Hell, the local ratcats aren’t equipped for this kind of search, not out here in the boonies. And their local administrator won’t want to admit that humans have eluded him, not right away. So by the time he realizes that he should have sucked up his pride and taken the prudent step of asking for help and more resources, he’ll also realize that our possible escape radius has become impossible for him to cover, even with additional assets.”

Gunnar nodded. “So they’re ramming around the search perimeter with whatever they’ve got on hand, trying to be in twenty places at once.”

Smith nodded. “And probably doing a fair job of it, too. But I was pretty sure they wouldn’t find us here.” They neared the mouth of the cave, faint light picking its way in through a chaotic filigree of vines, roots, and branches.

“And what’s so special about this place, that the kzinti wouldn’t be looking for us there?” Gunnar asked.

“See for yourself.” Smith pushed through the tangled growth, held an armful back so the others could exit.

Hilda squirmed out, felt a gnarled branch scrape her face, wondered why she suddenly cared how the scratch would make her look, and slowed to a stop two steps beyond the mouth of the cave. She felt, rather than heard or saw, the others drag to a halt around her.

“Oh, Christ,” Gunnar groaned.

“
Gott verdammt
,” profaned Mads, as Margarethe ground her molars audibly.

“
Scheisse lei
,” whispered Hilda. “We’re running there? To this hemisphere’s own natural cesspool?”

“It’s called the Sumpfrinne,” Smith supplied patiently.

* * *

Freay’ysh-Administrator’s mouth sagged open slightly in violent frustration, then he snapped it shut. Not that he was enamored of Chuut-Riit’s endless object lessons in patience, but rage was of little help when coping with human resistance fighters. The leaf-eaters were innate cowards but, being omnivores, had just enough opportunistic cunning and duplicity to be dangerous. As his patrols had learned on one or two occasions, when venturing into the small hamlets that were known to shelter the resistance.

Which was a misnomer, he mused, since the humans did not resist in the physical sense of the word. They struck and faded away, always fleeing, yielding before the kzinti could meet them in battle. Wherever his security patrols went, the humans were not there: having the sympathy of the region’s populace, they also enjoyed timely warnings from multiple sources. Freay’ysh-Administrator had been sure that burning a few of the more troubling hamlets to the ground, inhabitants included, would deprive the monkeys of much of their support. The tactic backfired. If anything, the support had increased.