Larry Niven - The Man-Kzin Wars 02

“Murphy Magic. The SeCrEt of the UnIvErSe is 43, NOT 42."!!!

"There is justice," Jonah muttered.

" joy? "

"Yeah." He typed furiously.

She caught her breath. "All right."

By the time the core realizes what's going on, we'll all be dead. "May take a while. Here we go."

Two hours later he was done. He looked over at Ingrid. She had long finished, except for sending the final signals that would tell the system they were done. "About ready," he said.

She caught her breath. "All right."

For a moment he was shocked at the dark half-moons below her eyes, the lank hair sweat-plastered to her cheeks, and then concentration dropped enough for him to feel his own reaction. Pain clamped at his stomach, and the muscles of his lower back screamed protest at the posture he had been frozen in for long hours of extra gravity.

He raised his hand to his mouth and extended the little finger back to the rear molars. Precisely machined surfaces slipped into nano-spaced fittings in the vat-cultured substitute that had been serving him as a fingernail; anything else would have wiped the coded data. He took a deep breath and pulled; there was a flash of pain before the embedded duller drugs kicked in, and then it settled to a tearing ache. The raw surface of the stripped finger was before him, the wrist clenched in the opposite hand. Ingrid moved forward swiftly to bandage it, and he spat the translucent oblong into his palm.

"Tanj," he said resentfully. Those sadistic flatlander morons could have used a nerve-pinch.

Ingrid picked the biochip up between thumb and forefinger. She licked her lips nervously. "Will it work?"

"It's supposed to." The sound of his own pulse in his ears was louder than the background noise the kzin used to fool their subconscious into comfort. Pain receded, irrelevant, as he looked at the tiny oblong of modified claw. Scores of highly-skilled men and women, thousands of hours of computer time on machines whose price-tags ran in the billions of stars, all for this. No, for the information contained in this… nearly as much information as was required to make a complete human body, it was amazing what they could do these days with quantum-well storage. Although the complete specs for a man were in a packet considerably smaller, if it came to that.

"Give it here." It ought to be quick. Milliseconds quick. A lot better than being hunted down by the ratcats. She handed over the nail, and he slipped it into his own interface unit. "As your boyfriend likes to say, here's viewing, kinder."

She nodded tightly. He raised a thumb, pressed it down on one of the outlined squares of the schematic that occupied his interfacer. "Ram darn," he said. The words came from nowhere, and an eerie memory of old Mukeriji speaking flitted through his mind. Dreadful Bride, spare us: ram dam ram dam rant-

'fhe walls pulsed, flickered green, flashed into an intricate strobing pattern and froze. Jonah closed his eyes for a second and felt an enormous thankfulness. They might still be only seconds away from death, but at least it wouldn't be for nothing.

"Finagle!” Jonah said bitterly. "How could even a kzin be this paranoid?" He kicked the pillar-console; it hurt through the light slipper. There were weapons and self-destruct systems in plenty, enough to leave nothing but a very large crater with magma at its core where Chuut-Riit's palace-estate had stood… but it wasn't clear how any of them could be triggered from here. "Who ever heard of… wheels within wheels!" Jonah said disbelievingly. "Am I imagining things, or are these systems completely separated?"

Ingrid shook her head slowly. "I'm afraid that's a long way past me. Can't you do anything with it?"

"Maybe. There's a chance. Worth a try, anyway." He touched icons on the screen surface, then tapped in new commands. "Nope. All right, what does this do? Nothing. Hmm. But if- Yeah, this may work. Not immediately, though. You about through?"

"Hours ago. We don't have much longer.”

"Right. I do want to look at a couple of things, though." Jonah's eyes narrowed. "Call," he said to the computer. "Weekly schedule for user-CR, regression, six months, common elements." His finger flicked out to a sequence on the wall ahead of them. "Got it! Got it, by Murphy's asshole; that's the single common element outside going to his office! What is it?"

Ingrid's fingers were busy. "No joy, Jonah. That's his visit to his kiddies. The males. They're in an isolation facility." "Oh. Bat puckey. Here, let me look-"

A warning light blazed on the console.

"They're coming," Ingrid hissed. "Hurry."

"Right. Plan B. Only-” Jonah stared at the files in wonder. I will be dipped in shit."

"We have positive identification," Axelrod-Bauergartner said. The staff conference rustled, ten men and women grouped around a table of black ebony. It was an elegant room, walls of white stone fretwork and floor of tile, a sideboard with refreshments. No sound but the gentle rush of water in the courtyard outside; this had been the Herrenhaus, the legislature, before the kzin came.

Claude Montferrat leaned forward slightly and looked down the table to his second in command. How alike we all are, he thought. Not physical appearance, but something about the eyes… She was a pallid woman, with a beginning potbelly disgusting on someone her age, hair cropped close on the left and in a braided ponytail on the other.

"Oh?" he drawled. It was important to crack this case and quickly, Supervisor-of-Animals was on his track. Unwise to have a subordinate take too much credit for it, particularly this one, she had been using her own dossier files to build influence in the higher echelons of human government. Two can play at that game, he thought. And I do it better, since relying on blackmail alone is a crudity I've grown beyond. She doesn't know I've penetrated her files, either… of course, she may have done likewise…

No. He would be dead if she had.

"From their hotel room. No correlation on fingerprints, of course." Alterations to fingerprints and retina patterns were an old story; you never caught anyone with access to underworld tailoring shops that way. "But they evidently whiled away their spare time with the old in-and-out, and they don't clean the mattresses there very well, DNA analysis. "Case A, display," she continued. Sections of the ebony before each of the staff officers turned transparent, a molecular analysis. "This is the male, what forensic could make of it. Young, not more than thirty. Sol-Belter, to 93%. Here's a graphic of his face, projection from the genes and descriptions by hotel staff."

A portrait overlaid the lines and curves of the analysis, a hard-lined blocky face with a short Belter strip. "This doesn't include any scars or birthmarks, of course."

"Very interesting," Montferrat drawled. "But as you're no doubt aware, chance recombination could easily reproduce a Sol-Belter genetic profile; the Serpent Swarm was only colonized three centuries ago, and there has been immigration since. Our records from the Belt are not complete, you know the trouble we've been having getting them to tighten up on registration. "

Axelrod-Bauergartner shook her head, smiling thinly. "Less than a 3% chance, when you correlate with the probability of that configuration, then eliminate the high percentage of Swarmers we do have full records on. Beautiful job on the false idents, by the way. If we hadn't been tipped we'd never have found them.

"And this," she said, calling up another analysis, "is the female. Also young, ten years post-maturity, and a Swarmer for sure. No contemporary record."

Montferrat raised a brow and lit his cigarette, looking indifferently down at the abstract. "We'll have to pick them both up on suspicion," he said, "and ream their memories. But I'd scarcely call this a positive ID; nothing I'd like to go to the kzin with, for certain." A pause, and a delicate smile. "Of course, if you'd like to take the responsibility yourself… " I may just take you up on that… sir," Axelrod-Bauergartner said, and a cold bell began ringing at the back of Montferrat's mind. "You see, we did find a perfect correlate for the female's DNA pattern. Not in any census registry, but in an old research file at the Scholarium, a genetics survey. Pre-War. Dead data, but I had the central system do a universal sweep, damn the expense, and there were no locks on the data. just stored out of the way…"