Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

“Monkey tricks!” said S’larbo. “Sever the connection.”

First Technician turned a hard switch on his helmet, and the row of blinking indicators went dark.

S’larbo hissed. “My grandfather was right. Technician, dismiss! As for you, Argumos Bothme, I have decided to kill you only after you have been my guest for dinner. You see, my warriors have found your female, dead in her metal coffin. I want her on tonight’s menu while she is still fresh. What kzin can say he’s tasted a human female?”

He spat a command to someone outside the hall, and two kzinti guided a chrome-finished gravity sledge into the hall. Flex tensed as he saw Annie Venzi, still in her armor, atop the gurney. Her helmet had been removed and her eyes were closed. The sight evoked the memory of how he had fallen in love with her when they had wrestled over the last spacesuit during a decompression emergency, and his horror as she floated in vacuum, looking dead. Now her body was truly lifeless. Flex choked in horror, and felt the blood flee from his head.

“Doesn’t she look positively succulent?” S’larbo said, gnashing his fangs in mockery.

Flex shivered. He chewed the inside of his mouth, and then let out a scream of anger. At the same time, a shrill klaxon blared, and everyone leaped in alarm. Jarko-S’larbo whirled around, and the guards ran out of the hall, raising their weapons.

Rifle beams fired outside the steaming windows, and Flex came to his senses. He ran to Annie, placing one hand on her head, and the other on her suited arm. Her skin was cold.

The sounds of a firefight echoed outside, and two of the tall windows shattered. Flex heard an engine whining. It was the extraction team from the Catscratch Fever . His message had gotten through.

Flex raked Annie’s hair, then reluctantly cut loose. He threw Annie over his broad naked shoulder, and hauled her to the shattered opening. Amidst gunfire and chaos, the kzinti were least worried about an unarmed monkey.

But S’larbo’s slumbering kzinrett had awoken, and took notice. She took to all fours, and with an earsplitting shriek, she arched her back, sliced her leather bonds with painted claws, and pounced.

Flex bolted for the nearest shattered window and somersaulted through the opening. Something caught, and he fell hard, his face impacting on a stone walkway. Dazed, he swore and tried to figure out what had happened.

“Annie!” The female kzin had stripped her from his back. Flex tried to stand, but his vision was clouded. From his knees, he looked frantically for the help he knew was nearby.

His sneeze had worked, sending a shower of nanocomps into the technician’s data port. The tiny components coalesced into a homing beacon, signaling good old Zel Kickovich and the Catscratch Fever to commence extraction. Eight armored men had swung in from a roaring lander, beams blazing. Flex was thrown bodily into a stealth shuttle, still calling for Annie. But there was no time. The shuttle rose above the palace.

“So it’s only you,” said the pilot grimly.

Flex huffed an affirmation. He’d lost his Annie.

“I’m sorry.” The pilot ducked the shuttle under some ground fire.

“Just a sec,” Flex said, grinding his teeth until he could feel the pain. “We haven’t killed any kzinti yet.”

“You planted the spybot?” said the pilot.

Flex nodded. “But the Puppeteers expect some collateral damage, to maintain the ruse. Do you know where the kits are?”

“Easy enough to figure out. I saw their jungle gym on the way in. The kittens are all over the place. Even under attack, the kzinti can’t herd their own cats to safety. You want to scratch some of them?”

Annie’s admonition burned in his mind. Don’t kill the kits. He had promised he would not. But that was before. Another image seared his brain-that of the kzinti eating his beloved Annie.

“Drop a butt-breaker on them.”

The pilot smiled. “Can’t do it. That would make us unbalanced. I’m going to have to drop two .” He pushed two release switches, and made for the sky.

Below, an enormous fireball grew to engulf half of the palace.

As they made orbit, joined by two other strike shuttles, the pilot pointed to a flashing yellow indicator. “I’ve been ignoring that,” he told Flex. “A com request from the kzinti.”

“This I gotta hear,” said Flex, still grinding his teeth furiously.

The pilot opened the line, and the screaming voice of Jarko-S’larbo graced the shuttle mid-sentence. “…And I’ll kill you and every shit-flicking monkey that has ever breathed your bastardized name…”

“He’s a real sweetie,” said the pilot.

Flex said nothing, but resumed grating his teeth until they began to crack.

Most battles are cold and impersonal, especially for a data puller. You sit at your station reading data and instructions, pushing buttons and relaying information. Somewhere out there maybe a million klicks away is a faceless enemy, claws and jaws atrophying for lack of flesh on which to gnaw. You have to remind yourself who your enemy is and what they’ve done. That is most battles, for most people. This battle was personal, and Flex was a field agent as well as an ops researcher.

A hundred days passed, filled with thoughts of Annie. He had done everything in his power to save her, but could not. Her lifeless face haunted his soul, and thoughts of what the kzinti might have done to her sickened him physically. On top of all that his broken promise gnawed at his gut because it was the one thing that he had done willingly.

His supervisor sympathized, but eventually felt obliged to growl, “Get to work!”

As if on cue, Flex’s nanos began to report in, giving his ingenuity something tangible to gnash at. Jarko-S’larbo obviously had designs on a more honorable station than that as a tour guide. If Flex could rob him of his wormhole prize, Annie would rest easier.

The nanobots hidden in Flex’s tooth were much more than homing signals. They were the latest tool in the kit of the professional information spy, of which Flex was the best. His sneeze had deployed millions of microscopic vectors, electronic germs whose first task was to unite in as many numbers as possible inside the target device-the kzinti technician’s data helmet in this case. Once the nanobots organized themselves into functional units, they deployed their malicious programs. Sending the homing signal was simple, but incidental. Their primary function took fifty standard days to bear fruit.

On Jinx, Flex returned home to downtown Sirius Mater where he had access to equipment best suited for receiving the precious fragments of intelligence. The Puppeteers were waiting patiently for his report, but Flex was no longer motivated by their money or promises to increase his longevity. Nor was he consumed by the fire of revenge. What was working its way under his skin and into his bones was his broken promise to Annie. Her most strenuous desire was to complete the mission and collect the intelligence without resorting to feline infanticide. A fault of hers, perhaps, but he had sworn to her. Worst of all, his breach of her trust cast a dark shadow over her death.

He did not know how to make it up to her, other than to proceed as originally planned and make good with the Puppeteers. Perhaps in the process, he would find some way to redeem himself. If not, a real suicide attack might be a very good idea, kits be damned.

When the nanobots began feeding stolen data to Flex’s collection system, co-opted from forgotten coldputer cycles, he did not immediately inform the Puppeteers. Better to figure out just what this wormhole thing was all about first, so he would know the full value of his efforts.

In fact, there wasn’t much data to be had, but the information the cat Jarko-S’larbo had dragged in was very specific. There was reference to something that translated to a “non-transversable wormhole,” which he managed to correlate with something called a Zeno’s Wormhole in some esoteric mathematical literature. The intelligence implied that such an object had been found, and its location was given. The importance of this object was not known, but the information had cost the lives of at least one entire expedition.