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

after Hunter and I had chased our quarry from the container bay. One of the names on that list was a drive technician—HJ3U659A Wurzmann. Peter K. Wurzmann was suspected of smuggling but never charged through lack of evidence. Wurzmann took the tube to his apt, then another to the down-axis hub where he'd boarded the mining ship Voidtrekker. Johansen was on to him by then, but the police tag went on his ident seven seconds after he'd passed customs. Voidtrekker cleared docking control ten minutes after that and left on a prospecting trajectory that was bound to be a total fabrication. A comm check showed Wurzmann made four calls—Voidtrekker's captain, a co-worker, a Wunderland tourist, and a Wunderland doctor named Joachim Weiss. The last call was marked no answer. Comm checks on the recipients expanded the list to sixteen names. Fifteen people had taken off with Voidtrekker—everyone on the comm list except Weiss. Weiss was the one with the strakakker.

So we'd flushed our quarry and they'd fled. I guessed the Wunderlanders were Isolationists and the Belters were contract smugglers. They were probably the entire control cell for 19J2—and they were all out of reach.

I screened Hunter and got him to take a search unit down to Weiss's apt. His lips were twitching back to expose his fangs, his speech laden with snarls and heavy with threats. He was barely under control. He took Johansen's death and Tracker's wounding as personal insults. After that, I called up the navy and asked them about intercepting Voidtrekker. A competent-looking commander told me the odds of an intercept were a little less than one in ten. Voidtrekker was polarizer driven, which meant she could put a lot of distance between herself and Tiamat in a very short time. A smuggler ship would have shielded monopoles in her drive, making tracking impossible. Once she cleared Tiamat's control sphere she'd be very difficult to pick up.

"Will the navy try anyway?" I asked.

"There's no question involved." The officer checked something off-screen for a second. "We'll have three ships boosting in the next two hours."

I gave my thanks and rang off.

After that, I went over Dr. Weiss's file again. The Provos had him tagged as Isolationist leaning—that was nothing, most Wunderlanders were. Everything else told me he was Miranda's killer. When the Goldskins had printed him for ID they'd gotten two files back. His retinas said he was Joachim Weiss, his fingertips said he was a bio-engineer named Cas Wentsel. Wentsel was on the Inferno's customer list for the night Miranda was killed and his movements for that night took him past the accessway to container bay J2. Weiss arrived on Tiamat just one day after Miranda, on the next available flight from Wunderland. He fit the physical description from the Inferno, such as it was. He was qualified to perform Class 3 surgery. I pulled up his library list. It was hopelessly technical but I gleaned all I needed to know from the titles—fifty-year-obsolete manuals about tissue preservation and rejection control. They amounted to a primer for organleggers.

Tamara was avenged. Miranda was avenged. I tagged her case file closed.

I didn't feel the usual satisfaction I get when I close a case. Miranda and Tammy were still gone, Weiss's death wouldn't bring them back. His cohorts had escaped. The elation I'd felt when we'd shut down J2 was overshadowed by helpless frustration. On a hunch I pulled up his client files. Miranda Holtzman had been his patient since she was six. That was how he knew she was a universal donor, that was why she'd left the bounce-box with him. I felt ill.

It was late. In the morning I'd open a new case file on the flight of the Voidtrekker. I switched off the system and went home.

When I got back, Suze had gone out. I didn't blame her, but I did miss her. The events of the night and Johansen's death had left me totally drained. I fell into an exhausted slumber. Some time later I felt her slip into bed and snuggle against me, warm and soft. She gently kissed the back of my neck and I went back to sleep, feeling better.

* * *

The next morning Hunter was waiting for me.

"You are late. We have had developments."

"Why didn't you call me?"

He twitched his ears genially. "Your recreation had already been disturbed once."

I avoided the subject. "What happened?"

"There was an explosion in the down-axis docking hub."

"Serious?"

"Yes. The initiating explosive appears to have been thermite but the main blast and fire were caused by a volatile aerosol inside a tranship container. Damage was extensive."

I envisioned the havoc that a two-thousand-cubic-meter sealed vapor bomb would wreak and marvelled at the kzin's capacity for understatement. We were lucky the whole down-axis hub hadn't been blown into space.

"What action have you taken?"

"The area has been sealed and the crime scene team is going over it."

"Findings?"

"A human corpse has been found that appears to have been inside the transport container. The container itself was modified to support life."

"Support life? What do you mean?"

"We have found the remains of an oxygen recycler, food supplies and other items that indicate the container was designed to carry sentients in vacuum for extended periods."

I swore. The Isolationists had been moving people back and forth to Wunderland with perfect impunity, right under our noses. Finagle only knew how many. We'd missed a trick. Reception parties would be waiting for the thirty-six containers on Jocelyn Merral's list when they arrived at their destinations but I hadn't thought about intercepting them in transit. It hadn't even occurred to me that some might still be within my grasp on Tiamat.

"What about the guards and the security monitors. How come they didn't pick this up in progress?"

"The Port was running its normal night shift. The monitors didn't pick up anything out of the ordinary."

"So the perpetrator must have had access."

"Hrrrrr . . . Either that or a tampered ident."

"Granted. So once again we have someone operating in the down-axis hub. Someone who didn't