The kzin were not good at accounting; it did not fit with their ideal of the Warrior Heart. How could a Hero scream and leap his way to a Full Name while recording a long series of cargo manifests onto a handlink?
Their five-red, five-armed, warty Jotoki monsters, ever watchful and nosy, were another matter. I had waited until I was unsupervised on my loading dock shift, then covered the computer traces most carefully. It was easy; men and women had designed and programmed those computers, not aliens. And what a Jotok can’t see or hear, it can’t report to its furry rat-tailed masters.
Contraband stowed and hidden, I had hitched the cargo pod to Victrix, and started on my kzin-approved trade and delivery route, zigzagging across the Swarm. Tiamat to Avalon. Avalon to Lodestar. Lodestar to Archangel. Now an undocumented stop at nearby Blackjack, the dicey part. Then I’d shape orbit back for Tiamat. It had been five long months, and I was lonely for Sharna and the children.
The route would have taken days with the ratcat gravitic polarizers instead of my fusion drive, but such kzin tech was not for “slave races.”
The commlink warbled in response to the recognition signal. Smuggler’s handshake. Everything was going according to plan which worried me a little.
Still, I followed my instructions. No overt communications traffic, even by tightbeam. I tuned up the fusion drive. It thrummed and headed Victrix down to Blackjack at a nice sedate vector. It never pays to stand out, even when you are not being watched. On the screen, the asteroid swelled from a glint to a toy pebble to an irregular brick.
Not long after the initial kzin assault on Wunderland, Blackjack had been abandoned. Immediately after suppressing military resistance there, the kzinti had moved on the Serpent Swarm, but most of the Belters had focused on protecting Tiamat, with its shipyards and bubblefarms.
Not that it mattered a damn in the long run. Singleship fusion drives were no match for the ratcat space drive. The damage to the densely colonized asteroids like Tiamat and Thule was heavy, and took time to repair. The smaller rocks, like Blackjack, were left relatively intact-very useful to smugglers and pirates. Or as the noble kzin called them, “feral humans.”
As Blackjack slowly filled the viewscreen, I organized the cargo manifest and thought about how to spend my ill-gotten gains. My smuggler’s money had kept my family well insulated from the ratcats, and I intended to keep it that way. Jacobi had gone so far as to suggest that this delivery could earn enough credits to buy my children a billet in the Proxima cometary manufacturing plants.
Kzin almost never went to Proxima. It was not sufficiently Heroic.
About two kilometers above Blackjack, I saw the rhythmic blinking of the landing beacon next to a bubble-domed minehead. I switched to chemical jets so that I wouldn’t have to hike in the microgravity to the airlock. As we slipped in I closed my suit helmet and started pumping the lifebubble air back into the tanks. No sense wasting even a few lungfuls when I popped the airlock.
Wan sunlight gleamed on solar collectors and vacuum fractionating columns near the minehead. I drifted closer to the landing beacon. You don’t land on an asteroid as small as Blackjack, you rendezvous. Attitude jets held my singleship steady as I carefully shot a mooring line through a landing loop, then made Victrix fast against the bulk of Blackjack.
A few minutes later I was in the minehead airlock, listening to the deepening whistle of pressure building up.
All according to plan, smooth as water ice. The airlock telltales finally winked green, and the inner door cycled open.
The first thing I saw was Jacobi’s sneering smile. But even before that image fully registered, I smelled the spicy-sour scent of excited kzinti. Which had to be imaginary, since my suit helmet was still sealed and dogged down.
Jacobi stood braced in front of the airlock door, dart pistol in hand, eyes bright in his scarred face. Flanking him were two kzin in combat armor-predator fangs bared in identical smile-threats. Before I could make a move to hit the cycle keypad in the airlock, something slammed into my upper right arm. I swung my body in response as Belter micrograv reflexes kept me on my feet.
I looked down. A large, hollow dart, designed to foil the suit’s self-sealing mechanism, protruded from my shipsuit. Crimson spheres of blood began floating out of the wound. They wobbled slowly away in the microgravity if I cycled the lock now, with my ruptured suit, I would be breathing vacuum in seconds. Pain suddenly flooded my arm and into my gut, folding me in two, my feet leaving the deck.
“So good to see you again, Herr Upton-Schleisser,” I heard Jacobi hiss with irony.
I swore to myself as the snarling figures in battle armor, each over two meters tall, snatched me from midair like kittens batting at yam. Black spots clouded my vision. I did the only reasonable thing. I passed out.
The bite of a stimulant slapshot in my neck brought me to my senses. My shipsuit and helmet were gone. I was dressed in a standard falling jumper. My right arm throbbed badly, but I could see a ratcat field dressing on the wound. The bandage was easily three times larger than necessary; medicine on a kzin-sized scale. Bindings cut into my ankles and wrists, holding me securely to a packing crate.
I looked up and saw Jacobi seated on air a few meters away, a thin line mooring him in place against the ventilator breeze. We were in a small storage room, with glaring mining lights. The cold air smelled of oil and steel. And of kzin, of course. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. It didn’t help.
“Jacobi,” I said as calmly as I could, my neck still stinging from the drug, “I had no idea that you were a pussy-kisser collabo.”
He made no reply, just stared at me. It was hard to read any expression on the ruins of his face. When I was a boy, Tomas Jacobi had been a leader among the Serpent Swarmers during the kzin invasion. His forces had held back the invasion troopships from Tiamat for most of a week. Then his lifebubble had been lasered open during the final assault, searing his face and giving him decompression scars. Later, Jacobi had become one of the major smugglers in the Swarm and a supplier to the Resistance. A criminal, but a human criminal.
Just like me.
How could he of all people become a collaborationist?
Jacobi’s eyes were ice blue, and peered impassively from the runnels and scars of his face. He made a clucking sound with his tongue. In my years of dealing with Jacobi, he had always tried to act like a kindly uncle to me. I knew better.
“Kenneth, Kenneth,” he said softly “there is no reason to be insulting. I had to make sure that you didn’t leave suddenly didn’t I? An impression had to be made on my, ah, employers as well. In any event, I tended to your wound myself. No real harm done.”
I kept all expression from my face, my tone level. “Valve that sewage. You sold me out to the kzin.” I took a deep breath, thinking of my family. “You might as well kill me, Jacobi. I won’t go collabo and work for the damn ratcat tabbies.”
“Hush.” He made a throat-cutting gesture with his free hand. “Kraach-Captain speaks Belter Standard, Wunderlander, Jotok, and Principle knows what else. Do not insult his honor or his person.” He looked sternly at me out of that ruined face. “As for selling anyone out, I do not need to justify my decisions to a petty small-time smuggler.”
I allowed my expression to show how I felt then and Jacobi sighed in exasperation. He reached down with a free hand and untied his mooring line. Both of his legs were missing; another legacy from the kzin armory He reached out to a wall-ring, pushed off, and floated down next to me. His grip was very strong. Jacobi’s mouth was centimeters from my ear.
“Kenneth, my friend,” he whispered, “you are to be taken before Kraach-Captain. So this can go one of two ways after I untie you. The first is for you to overpower me, which would not be difficult for you. Yet if you do, what will you then do?”
“Break your neck”