Man-Kzin Wars XIV (12 page)

In due time, the Patriarchy also looked and wondered. So did other things.

The judge had also looked. Seeing his village on television had surprised him, and the enthusiasm with which telejournalists had pointed out children and kzin kits playing together and going to school together had helped his recovery. But it made him surprised when his visitor was announced.

“My lady, I thought you were holding down my job back at the village,” he greeted Karan.

“It is not too demanding at the moment. Problems that they troubled you with, they fear to bring to me, lest my patience be shorter than yours. As it likely is,” Karan confessed. “Mostly it is getting people to own up to being in the wrong when they are. They know inside themselves, they just don’t want to admit it. Both our species suffer from pride, but yours is better at self-deception.”

“Yes, we’re really good at that,” admitted the judge. “And can I stroke the kits? I think I’m entitled to.”

“Indeed you are,” Karan agreed, letting the two squirming bundles loose. “It remains a blood debt for all my family.”

“Don’t really know why I did it. I guess they just look so cute, and that damned lesslock so damnably ugly, my instincts kicked in before I had time to think. I’m not often noble when I have time to think, I promise you.” He stroked Arwen who purred and rolled over on the bed to have her tummy tickled. Orion scratched his way up to join her.

“At least you have survived. We got you here in time, and they say you will make a complete recovery. You got the best treatment on Ka . . .Wunderland. My mate will meet all costs; it is the very least we could do to show our gratitude. I had to put up with a severe reprimand for exposing them to danger, and I
did
put up with it. Vaemar said I must feel very guilty indeed to be so meek, it was disturbing him. And when he gets a moment’s free time, he wants to come and thank you himself.”

“I look forward to renewing our acquaintance.” The judge separated the two kits, which were practicing fighting with each other. “I get tired rather quickly still, and these kits are cute as buttons, but they are wearing an old man out. I hope to meet them again when I have a little more bounce to the ounce myself. Although I’ll never have as much as they do.”

Karan took them back and held them firmly. “I must go back to holding down your job. And I am very glad I do not have to hold it down indefinitely. You can be sure that my hopes for your early recovery are very sincere. The matron has promised me, however, that she will hide your clothes until she is satisfied that you can be safely discharged, so don’t even think of leaving early. Know that I and my mate are forever in your debt. As are these little furballs.” Karan bowed to the judge as he lay back. Karan looked back at him as he lay there. His eyes were closed with exhaustion, but there was a trace of a smile on his lips.

“It’s coming in from the senator’s own phone,” the technician told Stan Adler. Stan was leaving for the Southland soon, and having a final check on one of his sources. “It’s crazy. He can’t be blackmailing himself.” They looked at the string of e-mails. “Calls himself
Deep Throat
on the e-mails, and they come from a made-up email address, but I’ve traced them and they originate on the senator’s own phone, like I said.”

“Deep Throat. Rings a faint bell. Must check on what it means,” Stan said, half to himself. “I guess it could be that the source is very close to the bastard and has access to von Höhenheim’s phone. A girlfriend maybe. But it’s a chancy business if von Höhenheim gets into the phone and finds out he’s got an account he didn’t know about. Particularly when he reads a few e-mails.”

“You don’t think he’s trying some smart bit of misdirection? Accusing himself of something so bad that when the truth comes out it doesn’t look anything much by comparison? Some charge he can easily prove false?”

“I wouldn’t put it past the bastard,” Stan admitted grudgingly. “And so far there’s been no proof. Just some insinuations that could get the writer hanged anyway. Claims to have been in the KzinDiener. That mob of scum were passed by kzin telepaths, so there’s no question they were traitors as far as humanity is concerned. They just loved the kzin, they’d do anything to show what adoring scum they were. I mean, you could make out a case for some of the collabos, they did at the trials. You know, they were doing their best to help the human race survive in the face of conquest. That sort of stuff. There may have been some truth in it in a few cases.” This was a big admission coming from Stan; he took the view that sliming up to the cats was beneath any self-respecting human. But self-respect had been one of the early casualties of the war, which was why there was so much hatred of the kzin still around. It came not from the people who had fought to the end but from the people who hadn’t. Stan could admire a formidable enemy, but he’d never doubted that they
were
the enemy. Now the enemy tended to be the scum who had temporized, particularly those who had found themselves on the losing side after the surrender. Oh, they had signed up mentally with the kzin, and now they felt betrayed. Those were the ones who really hated the kzin now. Those who had tried to side with the powerful and been let down.

They’d figured out that the kzin despised them and most of humanity despised them too. Well, that was what happened when you sold your soul. It was never a good deal. On the other hand, he had to admit, being eaten wasn’t a good idea either.

He remembered too, the aged, haggard survivors of some of the Resistance groups from the early days. The kzin tortures, which everyone knew of only too well, since viewing them had been compulsory. The Public Hunts. Those who had not had access, or enough access, to the suddenly rare, precious geriatric drugs. The slow deaths of the diabetics (scores of thousands of them unsuspected in the days of autodocs) for whom treatment was denied until a makeshift, primitive plant to make the crude, long-forgotten treatments was set up. The cancer patients. Those of every age who died slave-laboring on the kzinti fleet’s new spaceport. It was not simple.

“I figure he’s someone close to the senator, and he’s angling for immunity if he drops the senator into it right up to the neck. And all we know about him is that he hasn’t got a phone, or not one he’s prepared to use, but he has ready access to the senator’s. Shouldn’t be too hard, I’ll get one of the researchers onto checking out the senator’s staff. And his girlfriends, if any.”

“We can’t give him immunity, that’s a legal thing,” the technician objected.

Stan grinned wolfishly. “He may think I’ve got some sort of hold over a few judges or politicians. I’m not saying he’s altogether wrong about that. He must also think I’d use it to save him in exchange for solid information. That’s where he’s badly wrong. This guy has been a treacherous shit to everyone in sight, and he is going down. But I’m happy to let him think he’s in there with a chance; slime like this always feel they can con you into doing them some good. They’ll believe they can manipulate their way out of any mess. Let’s set him up to give us the real dope and then take them both down. So saith Stan the Man.”

“Why do you have it in for this von Höhenheim, Stan? He may have been a bastard once, but he’s not corrupt like so many of them.”

“Not so far as we know. And nailing ex-bastards is good television. Besides, I hate those kzin-worshipping creeps. Now, I gotta run. ”

The car was large and well-outfitted, strongly armored and armed like the fighter-bomber it had once been, with dorsal and ventral gun-turrets as well as forward-firing guns. Only its bomb-load was missing, replaced by a variety of salvage gear, and the seats which had once held attack marines had been partly removed to provide some kzin-sized accommodation. Orlando and Tabitha, however, were kept in a suitably strengthened playpen under the eyes of Rarrgh and a well-armored human nurse. They would not be welcome tearing about the car in flight and did not take kindly to being strapped in. They were, however, contented enough, standing on their hind legs to peer out through a port at the terrain passing below.

Nils Rykermann had not been particularly happy about bringing them, but Vaemar had been insistent. He had given detailed instructions to watch for signs of intelligence on the female kit’s part. If she had inherited Karan’s intelligence, the implications could be significant. Anyway, Rarrgh came with the kits, and he would be an asset in the event of any trouble.

Just now Rarrgh was flying the car. He was remembering another flight, the day kzin resistance on the planet had ceased, and he had escaped with Vaemar and Jorg von Thoma from the remnants of the kzin garrison at Circle Bay Monastery.

“So what happened to Captain von Thoma?” Nils Rykermann asked him. “I was still recovering from having the Zrrow removed from my shoulder. Removing it killed the surgeon and nearly killed me. We still didn’t have proper autodocs deployed then. I missed all those months.”

“I swore to protect him on the last day,” said Rarrgh. “One of the last servants of the Patriarchy who remained loyal . . . I could not hand him over to the vengeance of your people. You shouldn’t have been able to remove the Zrrow at all. We only accepted your parole because you were wearing it,” he added.

“And because you put in a good word for me, I think,” said Nils.

“We had fought side by side against the Morlocks. You and Leonie had saved my life when I was helpless. As least Leonie did—she dug me out of the rockfall instead of blasting me. And I think I know how else you used your fighter’s privileges . . .”

“I swore to kill von Thoma many times during the war,” said Nils. “But later I grew sick of killing and vengeance. Leonie showed me other things. The abbot released me from my vows. He said they were not good vows anyway. Mind you, if I actually did see him again . . . I had relatives, and students, who went to the Public Hunts, thanks to his police . . .”

“I am still sworn to protect him, but I suppose after this time it can hardly hurt to tell you what happened. And I trust you,” said Rarrgh. “When we were a good way away from any human forces, I set him down, as I had promised him. He had basic survival equipment from the car. A food-and-water maker, a shelter-tent. I did not search him for weapons, but I imagine he had some concealed. He would have needed them in that country. When I checked it out later I found it was thick with tigrepards. They had multiplied without check during the Occupation, and the lesslocks were leaving their burrows. The fighting had destroyed many of their old food sources.”

“I feel sorry for them,” said Nils. “Like the Morlocks. They are unpleasant creatures, but they did us no harm till we attacked them.”

Rarrgh still had trouble understanding certain human emotions.

“It was war,” he said.

“Not their war.”

Rarrgh gestured through the window to a ruined homestead on the ground below. “That might well have been their work,” he said. “Of course, there might be other explanations . . .”

There was only the deep thrumming of the engines for a while.

“And there were other things,” said Rarrgh. “Beam’s Beasts, Advokats, Zeitungers . . . I thought he might not have survived. The Zeitungers were the worst.”

“I know. I had one brush with them. One brush was enough.”

“When I had established a secure and defensible bivouac for Vaemar and myself I went back to check on him, but he was gone. Whether he lived or died I know not. Later, when I was doing some work on the human farms, I tried to probe with a few questions. Some said they had seen a lone male human heading north, but there were many such wanderers then. There still are. Do you have a god that watches over travellers?”

“We have a saint. Saint Christopher.”

“Ah. For us, the brave traveller, who dares the unknown, comes under the attention of Amara, third male kit of the Fanged God. But he lives on the Traveller’s Moon, which orbits Kzin with the Hunters’ Moon. I am not sure how much attention he pays to the goings-on of this world.”

Senator von Höhenheim grunted. He had said relatively little so far, and had kept one wary eye on Rarrgh and the other on Stan and his two assistants. Below them the sea was shallowing and changing color.

“We must be getting close,” Sarah said.

A gong sounded. A light blinked on the control panel.

“There it is. A nuclear engine, leaking but not badly. Let’s get suited up.” Now the radar was focused on the shape of the ship. The warcraft’s sweeping lines, designed for high speed in atmosphere, were marred by obvious damage about two-thirds of the way down the hull. The after part had broken off and lay some distance away.

“That looks like a missile hit, all right.”

They landed the car on a shelving beach about half a kilometer from the rolling hulk.

The Rykermanns and the Rankins headed out to the wreck in a tender-boat. It had a translucent bottom, and diving was carried out through a central airlock. The high seas of Wunderland made this essential.

Had they been on a pleasure cruise there would have been plenty to watch. The seas of Wunderland teemed with life. Boisterous as the surface waves were, the sea a short distance down was tranquil.

The great curve of the
Valiant’
s tail-part rose before them, somehow menacing in its sheer size. Nils steered the tender to the stern of the wreck.

“Look!” he said, rather unnecessarily, pointing. A circular hole had been punched in the banks of exhaust ports. Stan’s people and an automatic camera on the tender were busily filming. Stan’s competitors were trying to get better shots.

“Heat-seeking missile, I’d guess,” Nils continued. “It must have got some way in before it detonated. Well, I guess there’s not much to tell who fired it. The missile itself would have been completely destroyed.”

“I would think,” said Stan, “that such a missile would not have been very effective in space, where there would have been no point in running a chemical motor anyway. It has locked onto its target too neatly. As far as I know, these blockade-runners had ramscoops, which they detached and left in orbit to pick up on return. For flight in atmosphere they had chemical rockets—and hot exhaust ports. Especially in a system as dusty as this one, there would have been too much danger of a ramscoop picking up particles, not to mention enemy tactics like dropping compressed radon into it. I’d say it was flying on chemicals. ”