“So I’ve heard,” he said, standing, and picking up his gear. “Let’s go: if my space-rock didn’t fool all the kzinti, then we’ll want to put as much ground as possible between us and the crash site.”
Hilda Stensgaard looked away from the distant back of the sleeping man who insisted his name was John Smith. “Everything he’s told us checks out with what we know.”
“Which is almost nothing.” Large, young, eager Gunnar Baden turned toward their leader. “Mads, let’s not get soft-headed just because there were some pretty lights in the sky today and the ratcats got their tails a little singed. It’s clear this was a one-off strike, not a prelude to invasion. We’re still on our own, and that means we can’t afford to take chances.”
“We can’t afford to ignore opportunities either, Gunnar.” Mads Klinkman scooped the last of the cold beans out of his mess tin. “And I think Hilda’s right: he’s genuine. But I’m convinced for different reasons.”
“Oh? And what are they?”
Mads spoke around his last mouthful of beans. “If the kzinti had learned that we were taking samples of them and sending them off-world, I think we’d have had some pretty vengeful indications of it long before now. Even given their new tendency toward increased patience, their outrage would have had them storming around to get to the bottom of what was going on and who was behind it. At the very least, you can be sure that their response would not have been an elaborate counter-intelligence ruse, complete with a human commando from the past. And from what I can tell, he really is from the past.”
Hilda nodded. “He’d have to be an exceptional actor to pull off what he has so far. He really doesn’t seem to know about anything that happened more than three months into the invasion, other than what he read in the briefing materials he showed us.”
“Must be a pretty quick reader,” grumbled Gunnar.
“Oh, he is.” Hilda nodded at the hardcopy they would burn shortly after first light. “Haven’t you noticed? He remembers everything after hearing it just once. And he’s very alert: he picked out the trace Jotuntalander accent I picked up from mein Mutti. Just from listening to me convince you not to shoot him, Gunnar.”
“So he has an ear for accents; so what?”
“So don’t you notice how he verges into Uni slang, from Munchen, on occasion?”
“And that proves what, other than that he has an intolerably high opinion of himself?”
Hilda ignored the hostile tone and undercurrent of envy. “It proves a lot, since the Uni slang just about died out when the kzinti came. There were years of disruption, and the professors and students bolted until it became clear that they weren’t going to be slaughtered, or forced to collaborate. But when they came back, the institutional memory was gone; the links to the past were shattered. You hear a little of the old Uni slang these days: a few words, here and there. But back before the kzinti came, it was almost a dialect unto itself. And he speaks it.”
“Yeah, a dialect for herrenmanner only.”
Mads smiled slowly. “Do I look like an aristocrat to you, Gunnar?”
“No, but you-”
“Then shut up. I went to Uni for a few years, before the kzinti found my family sheltering resistance fighters.”
Gunnar not only became silent; he looked away, abashed.
“Probably the only reason I’m alive is because I was at Uni, at the time,” recalled Mads in an increasingly flat tone. “As it was, they yanked me out in the middle of a class, and grilled me until they were sure I didn’t know anything. Made damned sure. Made me damned sure I wanted to join the resistance, too.”
Hilda let her eyes drop, rather than see the look on Mads’ face. He didn’t talk about his early days very much, mostly because they were simply too painful. He had been nineteen when the kzinti had caught his parents red-handed, aiding and abetting the resistance. They had been condemned to die in the invaders’ “Sport Hunts,” usually held to sharpen the tracking and killing skills of cubs on the cusp of maturity. His whole family had been held in a pen, for Mads to see. And then, one per day, the bastard ratcats drove them out, to run as long as they could before a young kzin caught and eviscerated each one in an ecstatic kill-frenzy.
And after each one died, the kzinti reapproached Mads, offering to spare the remaining members of his family if only he would provide them with some information: where are the headquarters of the resistance? Who are its leaders? How many are there?
And of course, Mads had no answers. He was not a member of the resistance; indeed, his parents had carefully shielded him from even knowing they themselves were involved.
But the kzinti were not interested in excuses, and when, in desperation, he started saying anything to get them to stop, they simply continued to flush his remaining family members out of the pen and into the fields: they knew he was lying. In the end, they apparently realized that the reason Mads had not answered any of their questions accurately was because he couldn’t. By that point, only one of his nuclear family remained: little Anneliese, the “surprise child” who was all smiles and hugs and whom his parents called Fall-flower, since she had arrived later in their life than anticipated-a full eleven years after Mads.
He had never recounted whether, when her day came, Anneliese had shrieked or was mute; was agitated or still; pleaded or spat defiance. Hilda only knew that the kzinti had shooed her out of the pen as a “free target,” almost as an afterthought, a tidying-up. Anneliese didn’t even make it halfway across the field; the fastest of the young kzin chased her down and took his trophies from her body. Right before Mads’ eyes.
Which were now dull. “Smith isn’t lying about how long he’s been asleep: he knows those days too well for it to be something he learned for a role. Little bits of outdated vernacular, the long-past details of his hometown, Neue Ingolstadt, the particulars of sports rivalries back then: some are so minor and old that I barely remember hearing about them as a bub. No: he’s who he says he is.”
“Okay,” Gunnar muttered. “But that doesn’t mean he’s a soldier for our side. He could still have sold out to the kzinti.”
Hilda shook her head sharply. “Nein, that’s nonsense. You could hear that almost everything he knew about the kzinti came from the materials he had just finished reading when we found him. He’s still trying to piece things together and not look like the newbie he is, at least when it comes to kzinti. He’s a fast learner, and he’s drinking in all the tactically relevant materials with incredible speed, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to live with them.”
Margarethe, the group’s sniper, and almost always silent unless there was something truly urgent to say, wondered aloud: “So what’s the real back story on this weapon of his, do you think? How could a research program have been going on all this time, without the kzinti tweaking to it?”
Mads shrugged. “Oh, that’s not so hard to imagine. The kzinti don’t lack energy-god knows-but, lacking patience, they’re not always very tidy. And that’s all a smart intelligence operator needs: the messy parts of the kzin occupation are where intel operators could live and breed. For instance, look at the ratcats’ policy of minimum involvement in our commercial affairs. They clearly know that they are permitting all sorts of black-market operations to thrive, and must know just as clearly that, like remora attaching to Old Earth sharks, intelligence operatives will seed themselves into that community, using it as a conduit to move equipment, information, and orders without the kzinti ever knowing.”
Gunnar flicked a stone from his sleeping bag. “Which I just don’t get: why do they permit any of it?”
“Because we’re the geese that lay golden eggs for them, and they know better than to rearrange our nest: we might stop laying. Besides, they don’t worry about problems until the problem becomes obvious. Which means they have a target. Which allows them to do what they do best: jump into the very center of that problem and lay about, destroying everything they find.”