“Killing untold numbers of innocents when they do so,” spat Gunnar.
“They don’t worry a lot about collateral damage or due process,” agreed Mads.
Margarethe nodded slightly. “Okay. But the research Smith refers to wasn’t done in some backroom, underworld lab. This whole operation obviously had a lot of forethought and long-duration planning built into it.”
Hilda nodded. “Absolutely. I’m thinking that the research facility in this system is not on Wunderland, or out in the Swarm. Anyone seeing that the system was going to fall to the kzinti would anticipate that those areas were going to be closely watched. So they’d go further out, to Centauri B, maybe. Possibly all the way out to Proxima.”
“Proxima? That’s damn close to a wasteland.”
“Which would be perfect, Gunnar. It’s just a small gas giant and rocks. Lots of rocks, most of which are uncharted. That would be perfect for the construction of a secret base. Or maybe one already existed out there, put in by the ARM before the war.”
“And why would they have done that? They weren’t expecting any trouble from the kzinti, then.”
“No, Gunnar,” Mads drawled. “They would have built that base because the ARM was designed to worry about trouble from us humans.”
After a long pause, Gunnar scratched his ear and mumbled. “Oh. Yeah.”
Hilda smiled. “So I’m guessing they’ve got a commo system distributed across the rocks out there, or maybe across all the systems, as a huge phased array.”
Mads nodded, apparently seeing the deduction toward which Hilda was driving. “So that, when the researchers on Earth found a means of striking back at the kzinti with a really game-changing weapon, they could relay that information back here, so it could be built on site, ready to go. That way, using it did not necessarily mean having to wait for it to be brought by a fleet from Earth.”
Gunnar wrapped himself in his bag against the unseasonable chill. “Okay, but how did they get ‘Captain Smith’ from Proxima back into the main system, presumably someplace close to Wunderland, so they could send him planetside with the weapon?”
Hilda shrugged. “I’m guessing he never left the Serpent Swarm. All they had to do was stick him in a cryo capsule along with the weapon, and insert the completed package into a holding orbit. And wait for a prearranged activation signal.”
“Which almost surely was sent by whatever craft from Earth came ripping through the system today.”
Margarethe nodded at Mads. “Meaning that he may not be the only person-or operation-that got a preprogrammed wake-up call today.”
“Or will get one in the days to come.” Mads nodded. “If this is part of a larger plan, some of the systems awakened today may simply be countdown clocks. When they run to zero, they’d send a second, third, or fourth set of wake-up signals. So like I said, we’d better be alert to the possibility of new opportunities springing up around us.”
“Speaking of being awake and alert,” added Margarethe, “where’s Captain Smith?”
Damn it, thought Hilda, what is Smith up to? If he was going to go running off into the bush, why wouldn’t he have at least-?
Panting almost as heavily as she was, Gunnar ran past, small branches rasping and snapping around him. “I am going to kill the son-of-a-bitch when we catch him.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Mads’ growl was pained: he was getting a little old for two-hour jogs. “We need him alive.”
“Why? We’ve got his box.”
“Which we can’t seem to open.” Hilda pushed an aptly named whipweed away from her welted face. “I suspect he either means to come back to us or is hoping we’ll follow.”
“Yeah, follow him right into a kzin ambush, probably.”
“Makes no sense for him to do that,” gasped Mads. “He could have killed us all right there in camp.”
At first, Hilda was so surprised at the idea that she couldn’t even pant, and then she realized the simple truth of Mads’ observation. Captain Smith had been no more than fifteen meters away from them while they sat chatting about him as if he were on the other side of the planet: they had been sure that he was sleeping, exhausted after the ordeals of his day. But somehow, he had slipped away from them, leaving behind the secured case with the mystery weapon. However, in its place he had taken a long-arm, one of the high rate-of-fire strakkakers. What he intended to do with that weapon, which could spit out almost eight hundred tiny glass lances per minute, was anybody’s guess, but it seemed unlikely that he would train it upon his rescuers. Had he wanted to, he could have riddled them all as they chatted idly about whether he was who he claimed to be. The ridiculousness of Gunnar’s suspicions seemed to double.
Gunnar stopped and turned to face Mads. “Okay, then if he’s not leading us into an ambush, why the hell did he run? He claims his objective was to link up with human resistance on Wunderland, in the greater Munchen region. So meeting us should be ‘mission accomplished,’ right?”
Hilda started understanding why Smith might be running. “Meeting us only accomplished only his first objective. Remember what he said he wanted to do next: hit the kzin compound at Neue Ingolstadt.”
“Yeah. Revenge. I get that.”
“No. Not revenge. He said he needed to do something to get the ratcats furious, to make them follow him.”
Behind her, she heard Mads stop. “What are you saying, Hilda?”
“I’m saying that I don’t think he’s running from us, or setting us up to be ambushed by the kzinti. He’s preparing to ambush the kzinti himself.”
Gunnar scowled. “And so he picks his old home town? That isn’t a mission: that’s collecting a blood debt. While committing suicide.”
“I think he’s heading toward Neue Ingolstadt because, of all the places on the planet, he’ll still be most familiar with that region, despite all the changes over the last half-century.”
“So why wouldn’t he just tell us that?” Gunnar complained. “Hey, I’d even have helped him to-”
“It’s my fault.” Mads’ voice was low.
“What?” Hilda and Gunnar chorused.
“Right before he bedded down, Smith asked me to lead a raid on Neue Ingolstadt. Tomorrow. I told him we couldn’t, not yet. We had to bring him and his weapon back to HQ, first. He just nodded: I figured he understood. Now I think he realized that once we got back to our main camp, he couldn’t be sure he’d get his raid approved there, either. Probably he’d be penned up and grilled about his mystery weapon and where he had come from. And he knew if he argued at all, we might start realizing we had to watch him, guard against him running off on his own.”
Gunnar shook his head. “Still doesn’t make any sense. What does he think he’s going to do with a single strakkaker?”
“He’s going to make the kzinti madder than hell,” Hilda said as she realized how Smith was going to do it with just one shoulder arm.
“How?”
“I know the area a bit too, because I went to Uni-”
“Yeah.” Gunnar’s arms were crossed. “We know.”
She felt herself ready to launch into the old rebuttal against his self-conscious class bigotry-I’m not herrenman stock; we just had enough money, and then I got a scholarship-but she turned aside from that impulse. “There was a satellite campus out in Neue Ingolstadt, which is about sixty kilometers to the north of Munchen. I went there once, for a field study.”
Gunnar affected boredom. “Is this story of old school days going somewhere?”
Mads’ voice was quiet but sharp. “Shut up, Gunnar. Hilda, what’s in Neue Ingolstadt?”
“The old governor’s mansion, about fifteen kilometers to the north. It’s one of the first places the kzinti took over. It’s reserved for the use of their territorial governor.”