Man-Kzin Wars IX, Larry Niven [leveled readers TXT] 📗

She sat, giving me a forced, trembling smile. She was barely holding herself together. If I pushed her, she'd go over the edge. At times like this it's a judgement call. Sometimes a little nudge brings an easy confession, sometimes it catalyzes uncrackable resolve.

And sometimes you're just adding pressure to a bystander already under emotional overload. Maintien le droit, the ARM motto cuts both ways. Tanya was a prime suspect. I would step softly, but I would find out what I needed to know.

"Look, I know you're upset. I just have a couple of questions for you, and then you can go." I said it gently, coaxing. She nodded in response.

"Were you jealous of Miranda and Jayce?"

She didn't answer; she just shook her head, biting her lip.

"But they did . . . did sleep together?" I couldn't think of a more delicate way to put it."

She nodded. Paydirt.

"That didn't make you jealous?"

She shook her head. "We had a . . . you know . . . all three of us . . ." She collapsed into tears.

I hadn't been expecting that. I sat back, implications running through my brain while Tanya wept. No use questioning her further now, my theory was shot. I needed to reassess.

I sent her out and pulled up the transit logs again and cross-matched all three of them for Miranda's tube station. They'd both been spending nights in her apt. Far from causing a breakup, she'd been the hingepoint of a menage. Tanya and Jayce's transit pattern changed because they'd been spending their time at Miranda's. That didn't clear them but it reopened the question of motive. Miranda's file yielded another link. This was her second time on Tiamat. At sixteen she'd been on a six-month school exchange with FRCK1798—Koffman, Bris, Tanya's younger sister. That explained why Tanya was more upset than Jayce and where the spark for the expansion of their relationship had come from. And it told me what Jayce had been covering up about his relationship with Miranda. At least part of what he'd been covering up. The information also offered some good motive possibilities—jealousy now for Jayce instead of Tanya or an old grudge rekindled for her. Even so, my instincts were telling me that they weren't the culprits. I needed another angle.

After a while I got up and grabbed the tube back to my office. On the way, I thought about dossiers.

* * *

C137PUDV—Allson, Joel K., ARM Captain. 33 standard years old. Born: Constantinople, Earth. Current assignment: Chief of Investigation—Tiamat Station, Alpha Centauri. Fingerprints, retina prints, gene scan. A holo of a man with a Flatlander face, Arab, African, Slav, Balt and Mongol—boringly nondescript on Earth, noticeably different on Wunderland. Date of birth, date of marriage, date of divorce. Medical history, educational records, details of promotion. Case reports from Bangkok, New Delhi and Berlin. Commendations for service and commendations for bravery. Date of transfer outsystem.

A good record, I was proud of it. What's the measure of a man? Nowadays it's his data file. Dossiers are the tools of my trade. They give me a skeleton—my job is putting flesh on the bones.

The best cops are just one step this side of the law—that's how you get into a criminal's mind. I was one of the best. In deep-cover work, the line gets blurry. You make so many sacrifices you start to feel entitled to fringe benefits your cover requires you to take anyway. The Brandywine case cost me my marriage. When it blew up, my position was—confused.

The Conduct Review Board said, "Captain Allson's actions were directly related to his assignment and he did not act with criminal intent." They must have known more than I did. Prakit believed them because he believed in me but when the slot on Wunderland came up, he offered it, firmly. After Brandywine I'd never be safe undercover again, not on the Organization cases I'd made into my life. He never mentioned Holly, but it wasn't my cover that worried him. I took the assignment. What else was I going to do?

Wunderland—the name says it all. The colonists found a virgin paradise of mountains and forests, clear air and low gravity. They turned it into the jewel of Known Space, but the world they'd built was gone now. First the kzinti had invaded taking the land and turning the citizens into slaves—or dinner. Some fought, some fled, some tried to save what they could. Most just survived and carried on in a grimmer world.

Forty years later, Earth attacked with lightspeed missiles, twelve thousand gigatonne impacts that punched to the planet's core and blotted the suns from the sky. The UN wrecked the kzinti industrial base and much of Wunderland in the process. The survivors cheered anyway, and dreamed of liberation. And it came, faster than anyone could imagine, in an Earth armada with We Made It hyperdrives. The Provisional Government was formed and the Wunderlanders began to heal the scars of conquest. The rebels came out of the mountains and the pirates came in from the Swarm. The few kzinti left insystem adapted, disappeared into the forest, or died.

But liberation didn't end the war. Alpha Centauri became the UN advance base. The Provo Government was controlled by UN advisors and the Serpent Swarm made a UN territory outright. The economy went to full war production. The liberators quartered thousands of troops in Munchen in case the kzinti came back—and in case the Wunderlanders objected to the UN plan. Maybe the breakdown was inevitable. The kzinti were no harsher than the Provos and a lot less corrupt. A political party called the Isolationists emerged with a simple solution—Wunderland for Wunderlanders. The kzinti were gone, the Flatlanders could go too. By the time I arrived in Munchen, they were no longer a political party, they were a terrorist group. The Provisional Government's anti-collaborator campaign had become a random witch hunt. The whole infrastructure was falling apart—transportation, medical support, civil services, even basic maintenance stripped to feed the UN war machine. The black market thrived on everything from pleasure drugs to biochips and a