Chuut-Riit shook his clawed fists in the air and screamed. "I will have his ears! I will have his testicles for my cubs to eat! I will kill, kill, kill—"
Someone bit his tail, hard. The kzinti governor leapt for the ceiling screeching, whirled, and landed in attack position; almost horizontal, with hands outstretched.
It was Conservor. Chuut-Riit halted his leap before it began, glaring murderously at the priest-counsellor. His calm was unkzin, only a slight quirking of eyebrow-tufts and whiskers indicating sympathetic amusement; his scent had the almost buttery flavor of complete relaxation. Yet of his own will Chuut-Riit was apprentice in the ways of the Conservors—unorthodox for a high noble, but not without precedent—and such tricks were among the teaching techniques.
"You must think before you attack, Chuut-Riit," Conservor said firmly. "You must. This I lay on you in the name of the God."
The younger kzin rose and began pacing; the inner sanctum was a five-meter square of sandstone block, with the abstract-looking sculptures and scent-markings of his ancestors standing in niches in the walls. Iron braziers wrought in the shape of crossed claws glowed, sending trails of incense to the high blackened beams of the ceiling. For the rest it was empty save for the low desk and three reclining cushions, with floors of sanded pine. Traat-Admiral occupied the third cushion, and he was quivering-eager for battle, ears folded away and gingery anger-smell rising from him.
"I cannot tolerate open flouting of my authority," Chuut-Riit said. He had forced enough relaxation that his tail lashed instead of standing out behind him like a rigid pink column of muscle. "What am I to do? Turn him loose in my harem? Invite him to urinate on the shrines?"
One arm slashed at the figures; some of them were so ancient that nostrils must flare to take their scent. He licked his nose and inhaled deeply with his mouth open. The smell of their strength and pride flowed into him, heartening and maddening at the same time.
"Ktrodni-Stkaa disclaims all responsibility for the destruction of the Feud and the Severed-Vein," Conservor said. Traat-Admiral let his lips flutter against his fangs, derisive laughter.
"No," Conservor continued, making a palm-up gesture: do not seize what you cannot hold. "Ktrodni-Stkaa is . . . hasty. He is your enemy. He is not the best tactician in the fleets of the Great Pack. He is overproud of his blood. But he is a Hero; he would not engage in such deception against an honorable"—that was, kzinti—"foe."
"Unless he has decided that I am not worthy of honorable combat, because of my cautious ideas," Chuut-Riit said. He snarled, drooling slightly, fingers flexing as he imagined fangs grinding into bone as he brought up his rear feet and ripped and ripped and ripped . . .
"That is so," Conservor acknowledged with a ripple of his spinal fur. "Yet the balance of hard data could be construed to support his claim of noninvolvement. Is this not so?"
Traat-Admiral gave a grunting cough and licked angrily at his forearms for a moment. "The fur lies flat in that direction," he said grudgingly. "Few recordings survived the EMP of the engagement. They show only a corvette of the Bone-Breaker class, of which there are thousands. Data is insufficient for identification. With the damage to our systemwide surveillance net, we have no direct remote tracking of where it went. Perhaps it is as Ktrodni-Stkaa says"—Traat-Admiral's claws slid in, sign of unconscious distaste—"and an individual firebrand was responsible."
"Arreeoghw," Chuut-Riit said; he had stopped in mid-stride, his fur bottling out. "Bone-Breaker class—that is the older specification, is it not?"
The other two kzinti flexed thumbclaws in agreement; when Chuut-Riit had arrived two decades ago he had brought the latest designs from the inner worlds. Not that there had been great differences—warship design was a mature technology, like most within the Patriarchy—but there had been some refinements in weapons mountings.
"Many of those would have been dispatched with the Fourth Fleet," Chuut-Riit continued softly, musing. "Very many. According to the reports of the survivors, Kfraksha-Admiral lost a number of vessels relatively intact."
"Arrrh." Traat-Admiral came up on all fours, back arching. Conservor sank down fluidly, eyes seeking something beyond the walls.
"Arrrh," Traat-Admiral repeated. "The mass is low enough that the human ramscoop vessel could have included a corvette. But deceleration—the energy discharge— No corvette could carry enough fuel, not with the most efficient of polarizers. And a reaction-drive deceleration is ridiculous; such a discharge would have been a banner across the system for days."
Chuut-Riit licked meditatively at his wrist and smoothed his ears with it, fluttering them out for the soothing feel of cool air on the pink bare-skin membranes.
"Hrrrr. Doubtless correct. A thought, no more."
"Still," Conservor said. The two younger kzin started slightly. "Physics is not my specialty. Yet consider: we and the humans have been learning of each other, in the best of schools." War—nothing taught you a being's inwardness like fighting it. "If such a thing were possible, and if the humans had learned somewhat of us, would this not be a shrewd jugular-strike?"
"Not if we knew—arrrhhhg. Ktrodni-Stkaa."
"Yes." They were all imagining trying to convince that arrogance that mere monkeys were capable of playing on kzinti internal rivalries. Ktrodni-Stkaa barely acknowledged that humans existed, save when he was hungry.
"Still, it is unlikely," Traat-Admiral said, twitching the end of his tail.
"So is sentience," Conservor said. Silence dwelt for long moments. "Let us consider, and clear our minds."
All three sank into the hands-folded-under-chests posture of meditation and let their chins sink to the floor.
"They've accepted our bid, Captain."
Jonah nodded stiffly. "Thank you, Lieutenant. Not that I'm surprised."
"No, sir."
Back in Sol system a thousand hackers had labored to produce advanced software they thought might be salable on Wunderland. Most of it had been too advanced; they'd predicted a higher state of the art than Wunderland had retained, and the stuff wouldn't work on the ancient hardware. Even so, there was plenty that did work. It had only taken fifty days to make Jan Hardman and Lucy van den Berg moderately big names in the Datamongers' Guild. The computer records showed them as old timers, with a scattering of previous individual sales. They told everyone on the net that they owed their big success to teaming up.
Teaming up. A damned tough fifty days . . . Jonah looked unashamedly at Ingrid. "I admit you've improved Herr Yarthkin's disposition one whole hell of a lot, but do you have to look so tanj happy?"
"Capt—Jonah, I am happy."
"Yeah."
"I—Jonah, I'm sorry if it hurts you."
"Yeah. All right. Lieutenant. We've got work to do."
"These are the same monkeys as before." The guards spoke in the Hero's Tongue. "The computer says they have access."
The kzin tapped a large button on the console, and the door lifted.
Jonah and Ingrid cringed and waited. The kzin sniffed, then led the way outside. Another kzin warrior followed, and two more fell in on either side. The routine had been the same the other two times they had been here.
This will be different. Maybe. Jonah pushed the thoughts away. Kzin weren't really telepathic, but they could sense excitement and smell fear. Of course the fear's natural. They probably like that scent.
Sunlight was failing behind evening clouds, and the air held a dank chill and the wild odors of storm-swept grassland. The two humans crossed the landing field between forms a third again their height, living walls of orange-red fur; claws slid out in unconscious reflex on the stocks of the giants' heavy beam rifles.
Jonah kept his eyes carefully down. It would be an unbearable irony if they were killed by mistake, victims of some overzealous kzin spooked by the upsurge in guerrilla activity. The attack of the Yamamoto had created the chaos that let them into Wunderland, but that same chaos just might kill them.
Doors slid aside, and they descended into chill corridors like a dreadnought's, surfaces laced with armored data conduits and the superconducting coil-complexes of field generators.
One of the kzin followed. "This way," he said, prodding Jonah's shoulder with the muzzle of his weapon. The light down here was reddish, frequencies adjusted to the aliens' convenience; the air was drier, colder than humans would have wished. And everything was too big, grips and stairs and doors adapted to a thick-bodied, short-legged race with the bulk of terrestrial gorillas.
They went through a chamber filled with computer consoles. This was as far as they'd been allowed the last two times. "Honored Governor Chuut-Riit is pleased with your work," the kzin officer said.
"We are honored," Ingrid replied.
"This way."
The kzin led them through another door. They stepped into an outsized elevator, dropped for a small eternity; when the door opened they were in another complex, this one with its own gravity polarizer set to Kzin normal. Their knees sagged, and they stepped through into another checkzone. The desire to gawk around was intolerable, but the gingery smell of kzin was enough to restrain them as they walked through a thick sliding door with the telltale slickness of density-enhanced matter. Jonah recognized the snouts of heavy remote-waldoed weapons up along the edges of the roof. Past that was another control room, a dozen kzin operators lying recumbent on spaceship-style swiveling couches before semicircular consoles. Their helmets were not the featureless wraparounds humans would have used; these had thin crystal facepieces, adjustable audio pickups, and cutouts for the ears. Not as efficient, but probably a psychological necessity. Kzin have keener senses than man, but are more vulnerable to claustrophobia, any sort of confinement that cuts off the flow of scent, sound, light.
Patience comes harder to them, too, Jonah thought. Ancestral kzin had chased their prey down in relays.
They penetrated still another set of armored doors to the ultimate sanctum. At last!
"Accomplish your work," the kzin said. "The inspector will arrive in six hours. Sanitary facilities are there."
Jonah exhaled a long breath as the alien left. Now there was only the featureless four-meter box of the control room; the walls were a neutral pearly white, ready to transmit visual data. The only console was a standup model modified with a pedestal so that humans could use it. Ingrid and he exchanged a wordless glance as they walked to it and began unpacking their own gear, snapping out the support tripod and sliding home the thin black lines of the data jacks.
A long pause, while their fingers played over the small black rectangles of their portable interfacing units; the only sound was a subliminal sough of ventilators and the faint natural chorus that the kzin always broadcast through the speakers of a closed installation; insects and the rustle of vegetation. Jonah felt a familiar narrowing, a focus of concentration more intense than sex or even combat, as the lines of a program-schematic sprang out on his unit.
"Finagle, talk about paranoids," he muttered. "See this freeze-function here?"
Ingrid's face was similarly intent, and the rushing flicker of the scroll-display on her unit gave her face a momentary look as of light through stained glass.
"Got it. Freeze."
"We're bypassed?"
"This is under our authorized codes. All right, these are the four major subsystems. See the physical channeling? The hardware won't accept config commands of more than 10K except through this channel we're at."
"Slow response, for a major system like this," he mused. The security locks were massive and complex, but a little cumbrous.
"It's the man-kzin hardware interfacing," Ingrid said. "I think. Their basic architecture's more synchronic. Betcha they never had an industrial-espionage problem . . . Hey, notice that?"
"Ahhhh. Interesting." Jonah kept his voice carefully phlegmatic. Tricky kitty. Tricky indeed. "Odd. This would be much harder to access through the original Hero system."
"Tanj, you're right," Ingrid said. She looked up with an urchin grin that blossomed with the pure delight of solving a software problem.
Jonah gave her a cautioning look.
Her face went back to a mask of concentration. "Clearly this was designed with security against kzinti in mind. See, here and here? That's why they've deliberately preserved the original human operating system on this—two of them—and used this patch-cocked integral translation chip here, see?"
"Right!" His fingers flew. "In fact, if analyzed with the original system as an integrating node and catchpoint . . . See?"
"Right. Murphy, but you'd have more luck wandering through a minefield blindfolded than trying to get at this from an exterior connection! There's nothing in the original stem system but censor programs; by the time you got by them, the human additions would have alarmed and frozen. Catches you on the interface transitions, see? That's why they haven't tried to bring the core system up to the subsystem operating speeds. Sure slows things down, though."
"We'll just have to live with it," Jonah said for the benefit of any hidden listeners. It seemed unlikely. There weren't that many kzin programmers, and all of them were working for the navy or the government. This was the strictly personal system of Viceroy Chuut-Riit.
"Wheels within wheels," Ingrid muttered.
"Right." Jonah shook his head; there was a certain perverse beauty in using a cobbled-up rig's own lack of functional integration as a screening mechanism. But all designed against kzinti. Not against us. Ye gods, it would be easy enough for Chuut-Riit's rivals to work through humans—
Only none of them would think of that. This is the only estate that uses outside contractors. And the Heroes don't think that way to begin with.
His fingers flew. Ingrid—Lieutenant Raines—would be busy installing the new data management system they were supposed to be working at. What he was doing was far beyond her. Jonah let his awareness and fingers work together, almost bypassing his conscious mind. Absently he reached for a squeeze-bulb before he remembered that the nearest Jolt Cola was four light-years away.
Now. Bypass the kzin core system. Move into the back door. He keyed in the ancient passwords embedded into the Wunderland computer system by Earth hackers almost a hundred years before. Terran corporate managers had been concerned about competition, and the ARM had had their sticky fingers here too, and they'd built backdoors into every operating system destined for Wunderland. A built-in industrial espionage system. And the kzin attack and occupation should have kept the Wunderlanders from finding them . . .
/ Murphy Magic. The SeCrEt of the UnIvErSe is 43, NOT 42.
$
"There is justice," Jonah muttered.
"Joy?"
"Yeah." He typed frantically.
She caught her breath. "All right."
By the time the core realizes what's going on, we'll all be dead of old age. "Maybe take a while. Here we go."
Two hours later he was done. He looked over at Ingrid. She had long finished, except for sending the final signals that would tell the system they were done. "About ready," he said.
She bit her lip. "All right."
For a moment he was shocked at the dark half-moons below her eyes, the lank hair sweat-plastered to her cheeks, and then concentration dropped enough for him to feel his own reaction. Pain clamped at his stomach, and the muscles of his lower back screamed protest at the posture he had been frozen in for long hours of extra gravity.
He raised his hand to his mouth and extended the little finger back to the rear molars. Precisely machined surfaces slipped into nanospaced fittings in the vat-cultured substitute that had been serving him as a fingernail; anything else would have wiped the coded data. He took a deep breath and pulled; there was a flash of pain before the embedded duller drugs kicked in, and then it settled to a tearing ache. The raw surface of the stripped finger was before him, the wrist clenched in the opposite hand. Ingrid moved forward swiftly to bandage it, and he spat the translucent oblong into his palm.
"Tanj," he said resentfully. Those sadistic flatlander morons could have used a nervepinch.
Ingrid picked the biochip up between thumb and forefinger. She licked her lips nervously. "Will it work?"
"It's supposed to." The sound of his own pulse in his ears was louder than the background noise the kzin used to fool their subconscious into comfort. Pain receded, irrelevant, as he looked at the tiny oblong of modified claw. Scores of highly skilled men and women, thousands of hours of computer time on machines whose pricetags ran into the billions of stars, all for this. No, for the information contained in this . . . nearly as much information as was required to make a complete human body; it was amazing what they could do these days with quantum-well storage. Although the complete specs for a man were in a packet considerably smaller, if it came to that.
"Give it here." It ought to be quick. Milliseconds quick. A lot better than being hunted down by the ratcats, if we can blow the defenses. Vaporization was the commonest way for a space-soldier to die, anyway.
She handed over the nail, and he slipped it into his own interface unit. "As your boyfriend likes to say, here's viewing, kinder."
She nodded tightly. He raised a thumb, pressed it down on one of the outlined squares of the schematic that occupied his interfacer.
"Ram dam," he said. The words came from nowhere, until an eerie memory of old Mukeriji speaking flitted through his mind. That had been as they closed on the kzinti ship, coming in to board before they could blow the self-destruct bomb. Dreadful Bride, spare us: ram dam ram dam ram dam ram—
The walls pulsed, flickered green, flashed into an intricate strobing pattern and froze. Jonah closed his eyes for a second and felt an enormous thankfulness. They might still be only seconds away from death, but at least it wouldn't be for nothing.
"Finagle!" Jonah said bitterly. "How could even a kzin be this paranoid?"
He kicked the pillar-console; it hurt through the light slipper. There were weapons and self-destruct systems in plenty, enough to leave nothing but a very large crater with magma at its core where Chuut-Riit's palace-estate-preserve had stood . . . but it wasn't clear how any of them could be triggered from here.
"Who ever heard of . . . wheels within wheels!" Jonah said disbelievingly. "Am I imagining things, or are these systems completely separate?"
Ingrid shook her head slowly. "I'm afraid that's a long way past me. Can't you do anything about it?"
"Complain to the manufacturer . . . oh, maybe. There's a chance. Worth a try, anyway."
He touched icons on the screen surface, then tapped in new commands. "Nope. All right, what does this do? Nothing. Hmmm. But if— Yeah, this may work. Not immediately, though. You about through?"
"Hours ago. We don't have much longer."
"Right. I do want to look at a couple of things, though." Jonah's eyes narrowed. "Call," he said to the computer. "Weekly schedule for user-CR, regression, six months, common elements." His finger flicked out to a sequence on the wall ahead of them. "Got it! Got it, by Murphy's asshole; that's the single common element outside going to his office? What is it?"
Ingrid's fingers were busy. "No joy, Jonah. That's his visit to his kiddies. The males, weanlings up to subadult, they're in an isolation facility."
"Oh. Bat puckey. Here, let me look—"
A warning light blazed on the console.
"They're coming," Ingrid hissed. "Hurry."
"Right. Plan B. Only—" Jonah stared at the files in wonder. "I will be dipped in shit. This will work."
"We have positive identification," Axelrod-Bauergartner said. The staff conference rustled, ten men and women grouped around a table of black ebony. It was an elegant room, walls of white stone fretwork and floor of tile, a sideboard with refreshments. No sound but the gentle rush of water in the courtyard outside; this had been the Herrenhaus, the legislature, before the kzin came.
Montferrat leaned forward slightly, looking down the table to his second in command. How alike we all are, he thought. Not physical appearance, but something about the eyes . . . She was a pallid woman, with a beginning potbelly disgusting on someone her age, hair cropped close on the left and in a braided ponytail on the other.
"Oh?" he drawled. It was important to crack this case and quickly, Supervisor-of-Animals was on his track. Unwise to have a subordinate take too much credit for it—particularly this one; she had been using her own dossier files to build influence in the higher echelons of human government. Two can play at that game, he thought. And I do it better, since relying on blackmail alone is a crudity I've grown beyond. She doesn't know I've penetrated her files, either . . . of course, she may be doing likewise . . .
No. He would be dead if she had.
"From their hotel room. No correlation on fingerprints, of course." Alterations to fingerprints and retina patterns were an old story; you never caught anyone that way who had access to underworld tailoring shops. "But they evidently whiled away their spare time with the old in-and-out, and they don't clean the mattresses there very well. DNA analysis.
"Case A, display," she continued. Sections of the ebony before each of the staff officers turned transparent, a molecular analysis. "This is the male, what forensics could make of it. Young, not more than thirty. Sol-Belter, to ninety-three percent: Here's a graphic of his face, projection from the genes and descriptions by hotel staff."
A portrait overlaid the lines and curves of the analysis, a hard-lined blocky face with a short Belter strip. "This doesn't include any scars or birthmarks, of course."
"Very interesting," Montferrat drawled. "But as you're no doubt aware, chance recombination could easily reproduce a Sol-Belter genetic profile; the Serpent Swarm was only colonized three centuries ago, and there has been immigration since. Our records from the Belt are not complete; you know the trouble we've been having getting them to tighten up on registration."
Axelrod-Bauergartner shook her head, smiling thinly. "Less than a three percent chance, when you correlate with the probability of that configuration, then eliminate the high percentage of Swarmers we do have full records on. Beautiful job on the false idents, by the way. If we hadn't been tipped, we'd never have found them.
"And this," she said, calling up another analysis, "is the female. Also young, ten years post-maturity, and a Swarmer for sure. No contemporary record."
Montferrat raised a brow and lit his cigarette, looking indifferently down at the abstract. "We'll have to pick them both up on suspicion," he said, "and ream their memories. But I'd scarcely call this a positive ID; nothing I'd like to go to the kzin with, for certain." A pause, a delicate smile. "Of course, if you'd like to take the responsibility yourself . . ."
"I may just take you up on that . . . sir," Axelrod-Bauergartner said, and a cold bell began ringing at the back of Montferrat's mind. "You see, we did find a perfect correlate for the female's DNA pattern. Not in any census registry, but in an old research file at the Scholarium, a genetics survey. Pre-War. Dead data, but I had the central system do a universal sweep, damn the expense, and there were no locks on the data. Just stored out of the way . . ."
"This doesn't make sense," Grimbardsun said. He was Economic Regulation, older than Axelrod-Bauergartner and fatter; less ambitious, except for the bank account he was so excellently placed to feed. Complications with the kzin made him sweat, and there were dark patches under the armpits of his uniform tunic. "You said she was young."
"Biological," Axelrod-Bauergartner said triumphantly. "The forensics people counted how many ticks she had on her biological clock. But the Scholarium file records her as . . ."
A picture flashed across the data, and Montferrat coughed to hide his reaction. Grateful for the beard and the tan, that hid the cold waxy pallor of his skin, as the capillaries shrank and sent the blood back to the veins and heart, that felt as if a huge hand had locked them fast.
"Ingrid Raines," Axelrod-Bauergartner said. "Chronological age, better than sixty. Qualified pilot and software wizard, and a possible alternate slotter on one of the slowboats that was launched just before the end."
"I was a possible alternate myself, if I hadn't been taken prisoner," Montferrat said, and even then felt a slight pleasure at Axelrod-Bauergartner's wince. She hadn't been born then, and it was a reminder that at least he had fought the kzin once, not spent his adolescence scheming to enter their service. "There were thousands of us, and most didn't make it anywhere near the collection points. It was all pretty chaotic, toward the end." His hand did not tremble as he laid the cigarette in the ashtray, and his eyes were not fixed on the oval face with its long Belter strip that turned into an auburn fountain at the back.
"Which was why the ordinary student files were lost," Axelrod-Bauergartner said, nodding so that her incipient jowls swayed. "Yah. All we got from the genetics survey was a name and a student number than doesn't correlate to anything existing. But the DNA's a one-to-one, no doubt about it at all. Raines went out on that slowboat, and somehow Raines came back, still young."
Still young, Montferrat thought. Still young . . . and I sit here, my soul older than Satan's. "Came back. Dropped off from a ship going point-nine lightspeed?" he scoffed.
A shrug. "The genes don't lie."
"Computer," Montferrat said steadily. "All points, maximum priority. Pictures and idents to be distributed to all sources. Capture alive at all costs; we need the information they have."
To his second. "My congratulations, Herrenfrau Axelrod-Bauergartner, on a job well done. We'll catch these revenants, and when we do all the summer soldiers who've been flocking to those Resistance idiots since the attack will feel a distinct chill. I think that's all for today?"
They rose with the usual round of handshakes, Grimbardsun's hand wet, Axelrod-Bauergartner's soft and cold as her eyes. Montferrat felt someone smiling with his face, talking with his mouth, impeccably, until he was in the privacy of his office, and staring down at the holo in his desk. Matching it with the one from his locked and sealed files, matching the reality with forensics' projection. Feeling the moisture spilling from his eyes, down onto the imperishable synthetic, onto the face he had seen with the eye of the mind every day for the last forty years. The face he would arrest and turn over to the interrogators and the kzin, along with the last of his soul.
"Why did you come back?" he whispered. "Why did you come back, to torment us here in hell?"
"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 Catskinner," he said, wincing slightly. Useful was an understatement; intelligence-gathering was not the primary job for which they had been tasked, but this was 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 played by the pussy General Staff for decades. All 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! 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."
"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 aircar shuttle. Computer," he continued. "Is the civilian system still online? Slaved to the core-system here?"
"Affirmative, to both."
"That's it, then. We just get on the ten-minute flight. 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, looking around 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 the most of his lifespan cooling a temper that had originally been hasty even by kzin standards. He controlled breath and motion as the Conservors had taught him, 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 dry-spicy 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. 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 whiff 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 said 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?—Chuut-Riit," he added hastily, as he noticed the governor's expression and scent.
"What—do—you—mean?" he said.
"Well, Chuut-Riit, a successful clandestine insertion is undetectable by definition, hrrrrr? 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 has their scent. Very three-dimensional; I suppose it comes of their being monkeys. They do some wonderful gaming programs, very ingeniou— 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!"
"Whirrrr?" the fat giant chirruped, stopped his continuous nervous purring and then started. "Oh, yes. Lovely system you have here, 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 was 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."