Windows Of The Soul
Paul Chafe


This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Larry Niven

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31838-1

Cover art by Stephen Hickman

First printing, January 2002
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Niven, Larry.
Man-Kzin wars IX / created by Larry Niven.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-671-31838-1
1. Life on other planets-Fiction. 2. Space warefare-Fiction. 3. Animals-
Fiction. I. Title: Man-Kzin wars 9. II. Man-Kzin wars Nine.

PS3564.I9 M36 2002
813'.54-dc21 2001043635
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America
Windows Of The Soul
Paul Chafe

For Christian, with love

Transport tunnel nineteen is one of thirty-two that run the fifty-kilometer length of Tiamat's axis to link the docking hubs. Normally it's full of twenty-meter cargo containers, gliding in virtual weightlessness. Last night a roller jammed in section A near the down-axis hub. The Port Authority shut the tunnel down and sent in a tech. The problem was a body. That's when I got involved. Pathology said it had been there nine days and the Scene Team had all the evidence. There was no reason to go down there myself, but I did. You can't get a handle on a crime if you don't get on the scene. I wished I hadn't.
The body was M18JSK98-Miranda Holtzman, nineteen standard years old, engineering student at the Centaurus Center for Advanced Studies. Her dossier holo showed sparkling blue eyes and brown-gold hair. She was a Wunderlander, just arrived in the Swarm on a work-study deal with a spun metal fabricator called Trist Materials. Good looking, smart and last seen alive at a bounce-bar called the Inferno. She'd arrived with friends and left with a stranger. The witnesses agreed on dark hair and a Wunderlander build but little else. A movement trace came up blank. After she left the Inferno, she hadn't thumbed a single scanner-and on Tiamat that takes some effort. That was nine days ago. Pathology had it right on the money.
We identified her through her on-file gene scans so her next of kin didn't have to. That was a good thing. She'd been badly mauled in jamming the track rollers, but that wasn't the worst of it. She was slashed open from throat to groin and eviscerated, her skin was flayed off and her limbs were missing. Her empty eye sockets stared at nothing. The coroner listed cause of death as "unknown." There wasn't enough left to tell.
Now you know why I wished I hadn't looked.
* * *
I tubed over to Trist Materials. They were closing down early, hampered by a swarm of Goldsk...

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