“We mean no insult-if you are who you claim to be.”
“I’m telling-”
“You must understand us, Herr Hochte. We carry the hope of Wunderland with us, and can take no chances with such a precious cargo.” He paused, his features once more unreadable.
Time for the icy, insulted manner. “I am a fellow human, as you know.”
He ignored it. “You understand that we cannot reduce or shape out our magnetics?”
“I know your specs, ja.” I let more irritation show in my tone and face. Careful…
Bergen paused for a moment, his iron Herrenmann expression softening just a bit. “Herr Hochte, I believe your story. After all, anyone meaning us ill could easily destroy us from a distance, is it not so?”
Yes, I thought to myself, that is one way to think of it. I nodded at Bergen with false satisfaction.
Bergen nodded back once in reply, his face again tight and haughty. “Feynman out.”
So far, so good, I thought grimly.
The viewscreen dissolved to holographic snow. I had been dismissed. No matter that I was supposedly saving his ass. Is still just a ground-grubber Prole in his book.
I took a few deep breaths to calm my nerves. Then back to work, careful work. No room for mistakes.
It took half an hour, just optimizing the gravitic polarizer to full power. Then I laid in my macros, routines which would take me slipping through magnetic field lines. My now-familiar headache began to pound once again as the polarizer came fully on line, and carried me toward the slowboat.
It took over an hour to gingerly navigate among the magnetic field lines, headed toward the main airlock of Feynman. The fields here were strumming with tension-ten kilo Gauss, easy Magnetic field lines are like rubber bands that can never break-but you can stretch them. I had to worm my way through the steep gradients, while plasma hailed against my hull. The field lines stretch, all right-and they can snap back. That would not be good.
Each klick I slithered through felt like it took a day. I knew the slowboat crew could kill me instantly with the slightest change in the fluxline configuration. Or boil me to vapor with the signal laser, if they wanted to make a nice gaudy splash.
Not that it would be so damn bad. At least it would be over then. And why wait for them to make a move? Part of me wanted to die, vectoring right in under full acceleration, say, into the white-hot plasma plume-
But I knew what Kraach-Captain would then do. Who would really suffer as a result of my oh-so-noble gesture?
I was a traitor, yes, but not like Jacobi. Nothing like Jacobi. I had my reasons for serving the damned ratcats, four very good reasons: Sharna, Gretha, Henry and Hilda.
Kraach-Captain would keep his side of the bargain, if I kept mine. Maybe that was the only good side to the kzin. Come hell or high water, they kept their word. Predator’s honor.
Unlike almost any human-especially unlike Jacobi. Horrible to know that I could trust the word of an alien monster more than a fellow human.
Burnt-gold plasma curled and lashed around me. I kept away from the drive wash but errant coils fought up and down the field lines, bow turbulence. The gravitic polarizer whined that thrumming effort. Careful, careful… My target loomed large, a huge hull, raked and burned.
A slight jar as I grounded Victrix next to the main airlock. It loomed huge through the viewscreen, as did every visible aspect of the slowboat. I activated the magnetic grapnels. A hollow boom startled me-I was that tense-as we locked firmly against the slowboat.
On the viewscreen I could see the crew tunnel slowly arching toward my own airlock. Like an elephant’s trunk from an old history holocube, from a time when there had been elephants.
Clunk, whir-the slowboat airlock adapted to the geometry of my singleship airlock. The status board winked green and I keyed the airlock cycle.
You’re on, kid. This first part was easy…
I popped a stimulant to take the ragged edge from my fatigue. Everything depended on the next few hours. Everything.
The singleship airlock chimed and swung open silently. My ears popped a bit with a slight pressure drop. I left my helmet open in what I intended to be a demonstration of harmlessness. Yawning, concentrating on my lines, I grabbed access loops, and swung hand over hand into the dimly lit crew tunnel.
The far end of the crew tunnel was closed, of course. Final inspection time. Try to look like Karl Friedrich Hochte.
I crouched casually, bracing a foot and hand against the microgravity and smiled directly into the camera eye next to the airlock. The slowboat air in the crew tunnel smelled oily and slightly rank I doubted that many of Feynman’s systems worked optimally. Here was the first proof.
The lock slowly irised open. Here I was, and all I had wanted to do was get in one last bit of smuggling, a million years ago…
Chapter Two Smuggler’s Blues
The asteroid swimming in Victrix’s viewscreen had no official name on the navigation charts. The distant glint was listed as 2121-21, the twenty first asteroid catalogued during the 2121 A.D. survey of the Serpent Swarm. To the temporary rockjack crews living there, the asteroid had also developed an obvious nickname: Blackjack.
Blackjack was a slow-spinning oblong of stone twenty kilometers across its long axis. Rich veins of water ice and nickel-iron riddled it, along with deposits of carbonaceous chondrite. Pockmarked and battered by other asteroids in the Serpent Swarm over the eons, it had slowly swung in its orbit, half a billion kilometers from Alpha Centauri A. The rock had raw materials, access to energy, and was in an orbit easily accessible to singleships.
There were many thousands of rocks just like it in the Swarm, but Blackjack was a little different. For a few weeks, this whirling piece of an unformed planet would be home to the few human beings still resisting the iron claws and sharp teeth of the kzin.
I intended to do my part to help them, at least this one last time. Sure, some of the rebels were more pirate than freedom fighter, more interested in lining their pockets than collecting kzinti ears. But an old Earther saying came to mind: “The enemy of my enemy is a friend.” if only it were always true.
I unlimbered the signal laser remotes. Squinting against the sun glare, I set the aiming crosshairs on the tiny flash of the receiver dish a thousand kilometers away. The laser guide prowled slowly in a small arc, seeking. A thin beep- a target lock.
I paused before I set up the recognition signal trigger, and eyed the highly illegal monopole detector array mounted above my control console. I studied it with great care, as if my life depended on it.
Which it did.
Three rows of amber lights shone steadily at me in the cramped lifebubble. All clear. No ratcat ships were within range of the detector. I made a few adjustments, increasing the range, and studied the lights again.
The kzin gravitic polarizers used large quantities of magnetic monopoles. Easily identified-if you had access to the now-illegal tech, that is. Our kzin masters were many things, but stupid was not one of them. The detector array pinged sleepily after a moment, confirming that no large monopole sources were within at least a hundred thousand klicks of Blackjack.
Opening the commlink port, I carefully inserted the tiny chip I had been given at the Nipponese restaurant in Tiamat. The ready lights blinked green. I triggered the downlink recognition code sequence. Multicolored lights rippled across the readout as the signal laser downloaded its smuggler’s message.
Caution was everything in my business. It really wouldn’t do for our mighty felinoid masters to be in the neighborhood while I carried out my last smuggling run for that Prole bastard Jacobi. One more load of equipment that the Resistance needed: monopole detectors, submolar assemblies, nano units, fusion point components. I had carefully double-recorded the cargo back in Tiamat, then loaded the contraband along with my own completely legal cargo.