Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII

by Larry Niven

  I tabbed over to Ceres flight control to check their records. They had logged Elektra departing and returning, and had her course plotted by transponder tracking to the edge of the singularity into hyperspace and then back again three weeks later. I was a little surprised at that, with all the secrecy I would’ve expected to have flown with the transponder off. That would be the course the Goldskins were having the Navy search. They had the radar and computing power required to track a pebble if they knew its start vector. If Opal’s body was out there, they would find it sooner or later. They’d be in communication with the authorities on Jinx to get a similar search done there. Neels’ promise to find her had teeth in it.

  Which wasn’t a very warming thought. Why are you worried? You didn’t kill her. I wasn’t sure I believed that anymore. Her blood was on Elektra, that was proof she’d been there. If someone is on a ship when it leaves and isn’t there when it comes back the odds that they will be found alive are zero. A frame by Reston Jameson was enough of a theory to keep Bodyguard from killing me immediately, but it really didn’t seem to fit the evidence. He was certainly seizing on the incident to press his agenda, but that wasn’t enough of a motive for murder.

  I went back to Elektra’s systems and systematically went through every log file. Internal and external video, audio, communications log, they were all blank except one, engineering systems. Elektra monitors her own vital signs automatically, and for some reason that data was still intact. Unfortunately it was unlikely to hold any relevant information. I scanned the entries anyway, and saw only the activity you’d expect to see for a three-week round-trip, air pressure nominal, cabin temperature, fuel flow, power flow, gravity levels, coolant temperature and pressure; there was nothing unusual there. Evidence perhaps that the trip had been made, but little else.

  Except one thing. There was a small blip upward in cabin pressure right before departure. That was normal, because once I had the locks sealed I valved liquid oxygen inboard to pressurize the cabin and make sure it held steady against any possible leaks. There were the normal slow waverings in pressure as the cabin temperature and other variables changed, and finally there was another blip downward at the end of the three weeks. That was when the ship was back in the bay and I vented the cabin to equalize pressure inside and out. If Opal Stone had gotten out at Jinx, or anywhere, that pattern would have cycled twice, once for each leg of the trip. And if she’d left through the airlock in space there would have been the small but distinctive up/down pressure blip caused by the airlock cycling.

  So if she hadn’t gotten out at Jinx, and she hadn’t gone through the airlock, where had she gone? And how did her blood get all over Elektra? I went over the rest of the life-support data and found another anomaly. The CO2 scrubbers had been working half again as hard as I would have expected them to for two people. Had someone else been aboard, stowed away perhaps? Had that person killed Opal and then vanished along with her body? That made no sense.

  “What are you learning?” Bodyguard was growing impatient.

  “Nothing.” I pushed the beltcomp away. “The log is blank. There are some question marks in the system records, but nothing that will lead us anywhere here.” I briefly outlined my findings.

  “Hrrr. We need progress, human.”

  I leaned back and looked up through the dome at the eternal and indifferent stars. “We have to speak to Reston Jameson.”

  “I remain unconvinced of his involvement.”

  “We have to talk to him to find out.”

  “Hrrr. This will be difficult.”

  I nodded. We sat in silence for a while. The more I thought of it the less likely it seemed Reston Jameson was even involved. Tying him in had been the first half-plausible thing that leapt to mind under threat of having my throat ripped out. The vidwall started showing the news and I watched the moving heads and read the texttrans scrolling beneath them. It was the usual fluff, a flood down on Earth, some struldbrug trapped in a tube capsule for twelve hours, a rockjack killed in a fight with another rockjack. They did the shipping news and then the business section came up. I was bored by then and ready to leave, and then suddenly I was paying attention to the words scrolling across the screen. The Consortium was under investigation for gross financial misconduct. Reston Jameson was under indictment. The information had been provided by his missing chief financial officer, Opal Stone. Suddenly she had a motive to hire a singleship to fly to Jinx and brainblank the pilot. Suddenly Reston Jameson had a motive for murder. On the face of it, it looked like Opal believed he would act on the motivation. My doubts vanished; unfortunately that didn’t help my case any. And now she’s gone and There Ain’t No Justice.

  Bodyguard had picked up on the significance of the information as well. “Let us waste no time. If it is Reston Jameson we need to speak to, we need to lay our plans. It will not be easy.”

  “We could just make an appointment.”

  Bodyguard rippled his years. “I will watch while you try.”

  I took out my beltcomp and referenced his office. His secretary answered, a woman as striking as Opal. Evidently Reston liked to surround himself with beauty. It took me under a minute to learn that Reston Jameson was not only not currently available but would remain unavailable to me for the foreseeable future. She managed to convey the message in a manner that combined impeccable style and grace with the warmth and slickness of an iceberg. She was so perfect in her role that I suspected her of being a digital construct, even though I knew a man like Reston Jameson would use a live secretary for the prestige if nothing else.

  I snapped the cover shut on my beltcomp. “Now what?”

  Bodyguard showed his teeth. “Now we attack.” I got the feeling it was the answer he’d been waiting for.

  Now we attack. He made it sound simple, logical, inevitable, but I was not a military man, not police trained, nothing. I was a pilot, and all my experience as a smuggler had geared me to avoid conflict, not seek it out. Aggressive action would not be simple, and it certainly didn’t seem logical to take on the most powerful man in the Belt. I started to say that but Bodyguard’s expression kept me silent. He was a kzin in midleap and wasn’t about to brook any argument. For a moment I considered trying to slip away, but the Goldskins would have a tag on my ident and I wouldn’t be able to get off Ceres. Running would label me as both dishonorable and guilty in Bodyguard’s eyes, and he would track me down and kill me. I was along for what might turn out to be a very uncomfortable ride.

  Unlike me, Bodyguard was perfectly comfortable with direct action, and he knew how to carry it out. Phase one of attack is reconnaissance, and our first reconnaissance was to identify where we might intercept Reston Jameson in order to extract a confession from him. It wouldn’t be easy. He had his own retinue of bodyguards, human ones, and his own tunnel farm, which would have more than its fair share of electronic sentries. We called up a map and the scope of the problem became clear. There was exactly one entry point to his complex, a private tube station. We couldn’t even get a tube car to stop there without an invitation code, and if we somehow managed to clear that hurdle we’d simply be turned around by the guards. We needed another option, and I couldn’t see it.

  Bodyguard could. He tapped a talon on the map display. “This tunnel farm is on level one.”

  “So?”

  “Hrrr. So there will be surface locks.”

  “There aren’t any marked.”

  “I have worked for several wealthy humans. I have learned they are tremendously reticent about every aspect of their lives. There will be much about Reston Jameson which does not appear in the public record. Such a man would not build a lair without a back door. There will be surface locks.”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but…“They’ll be alarmed.”

  Bodyguard smiled a feral smile. “Alarms can be defeated.” I swear he was looking forward to this desperate little venture purely for the challenge.

  My vac suit was on board Elektra so I had to
rent one. It didn’t fit well, and the controls were unfamiliar, an uncomfortable reality for a singleship pilot who was used to intimate and instinctive familiarity with every piece of equipment. Bodyguard had his own suit. The surface of Ceres doesn’t offer much more than hard radiation and vacuum, people don’t go out on the surface unless they have to, but the lock master asked no questions as he cycled us through and we offered no explanations. It was six kilometers over the surface to the area over Reston Jameson’s tunnel farm, four horizons of dead reckoning away. Ceres has no navigational satellites, no magnetic field, and no easy landmarks. The soil has been churned up by the countless tracks of men and vehicles over the centuries so even these are no help. What Ceres does have is a gravity field low enough that you can jump forty meters high. We had a tunnel map that showed surface features like solar arrays and ship locks, and those high slow jumps allowed us to identify enough of them to keep our bearings.

  It was vertigo-inducing, but it would have been fun if our mission wasn’t so serious. It took us only half an hour to cover the distance, and we hit pay dirt immediately. Bodyguard could get twice as high as I could, so he must have seen it as soon as we left the surface lock. We were maintaining radio silence, on the off chance that we needed to, so he kept his own counsel until we were close enough to see it from the ground.

  He waved to get my attention and pointed. I followed his talon. It was a ship lock, and it wasn’t on the map. For a moment I thought we were lost and had somehow come back to the main hangars. I turned the map to try and orient myself, and then I realized what I was looking at. Reston Jameson’s private ship lock.

  That surprised me. I’ve docked at Ceres many times, cleared in and out through Ceres flight control. I knew the approach funnel cold, I knew the obstacles and the beacons, and I could sketch the three-dimensional traffic-control layer cake blindfolded. This ship lock wasn’t in the traffic-control plan. Reston Jameson had clout indeed to keep it off the charts. I looked up and picked up the riding lights of a freighter sliding into the main hangar bay, and visualized the curving low-gee trajectory, wondering how they managed to deconflict the flight paths, and suddenly I understood. Ceres’ main hangar is at the equator, and approach and takeoff are both west to east in order to take advantage of Ceres’ rotation for velocity matching. A ship coming in to Reston Jameson’s lock would use the same approach, offset six kilometers. It would be an open secret in traffic control, but no one else would know the reclusive magnate’s comings and goings.

  It occurred to me that the crimes I was about to commit in order to clear my name were serious enough to rate to heavy jail time if I was caught. I considered suggesting that we go back, but I thought better of it. If Bodyguard decided I was guilty of killing his client he would track me to the end of the galaxy to put my ears on his belt. I mentally rehearsed throwing myself on the mercy of the court, and followed him toward the lock. The thought crossed my mind that he might have an accident, say with his suit seal. I didn’t pursue the idea. I’m not a killer, and that belief had suddenly become important to me.

  There was a transpax dome on the surface too, not far from the shiplock, about the same size as Constellation’s dome. It seemed Reston Jameson liked to look at the stars himself. I looked up at the star-strewn sky. Watchbird Alpha was sixteen hundred kilometers up there, looking down at me with cameras good enough to pick out an individual in daylight. Somewhere down over the equatorial horizon Delta and Gamma kept their own vigils. I began to wish we’d come at night. I was sweating and couldn’t wipe my brow. Dayside Ceres is fifty Celsius, which was enough to make my suit’s cooling system run at a steady purr. It was standard night in the tunnels though, and that was what counted. Bodyguard had been unwilling to wait until standard night came into phase with surface night.

  I felt dreadfully exposed in the harsh glare on the unrelieved terrain, and I muttered a few choice words about kzinti, after first making sure my transmitter was off. Scream and leap. How they’d ever managed to survive as a species was beyond me. I began to wish more fervently that I’d never taken Opal Stone’s contract. Bodyguard seemed completely unconcerned as he took one long, practiced leap to the rectangular outline of a personnel lock. The mechanism was a simple pull bar—it was illegal to have a locking mechanism on an airlock, in case someone got trapped outside. Reston Jameson no doubt could have gotten around that restriction, but it seemed he had chosen not to.

  And I knew the reason for that. As soon as the lock cycled, the computer would log it. His security teams would be there in a minute or less. Short of drilling through ten meters of rock and regolith we were no further ahead here than we were trying to access his private tube car station.

  Bodyguard had come prepared. He drew a variable sword from his day pack, a highly illegal weapon anywhere in Sol System, and extended the blade. The magnetically stiffened monomolecular wire was invisible. I looked for the telltale marker ball that would let him track the tip but there was none. Instinctively I backed up, just in case he wound up cutting me in half by accident. He paid no attention, and with absolute confidence forced the wire into the heavy metal door of the lock. A fine mist of ice crystals began to jet from the incision, growing larger as, with straining muscles, he dragged the force wire around the inner perimeter of the door. The spray had stopped before he’d gotten halfway around; he’d voided the atmosphere to vacuum. A moment later he had a large, roughly square chunk of the airlock door cut out. I had no idea what he intended to accomplish by doing this. He could get away with cutting open the outer door because the lock itself held little atmosphere, but now it wouldn’t seal. Tons of air pressure now held the inner door shut and if he tried to cut through it he would explosively decompress Reston Jameson’s entire complex, probably launching himself into orbit in the process.

  He crawled through the hole he had made and I backed up more to get out of the way of the impending disaster. He stuck his head out and gestured for me to follow him. Somewhat hesitantly I did. Personnel locks are cramped at the best of times. Sharing one with a kzin was downright claustrophobic. I was forced to curl into a ball in one corner while he grabbed the cut-out slab of door and carefully repositioned it where it had come from. Then I had to hold it in position, twisted like a pretzel with fingers straining against the awkward grip my suit gloves afforded while he got a tube of Quickseal from his pack and ran it around the cutline.

  Now I understood. When the Quickseal set the outer door would hold pressure again. He could then repeat the process on the inner door without depressurizing all of Ceres. It was an awkward way to cycle through an airlock. It had the advantage of not triggering the alarms by opening the doors. The computer would no doubt log the pressure drop in the lock, but that was a maintenance issue, not a security issue. We were in.

  Well, we were almost in. We had to wait an hour for the Quickseal to set properly, an hour I spent in a fetal crouch, half crushed by Bodyguard’s weight. I lost all feeling below the waist before he judged it time to go on, and then there were more pretzellike acrobatics to allow him to start cutting the inner door, working with suit lights. The atmosphere hissed in to the lock and I watched the Quickseal carefully for any sign that it might fail as the pressure built up. If it did we would certainly die as we were blasted out that too-small opening, and a lot of other people would die with us as the tunnels depressurized. It was far too late for me back out now. My suit settled on me as the pressure equalized. The Quickseal held, and then Bodyguard was carefully lowering the chunk he’d cut from the inner door into the tunnel beyond. We were in, all the way this time.

  I felt my weight surge as we came into the tunnel’s artificial gravity field. The passage was dimly lit, standard night on Ceres, and it was opulently appointed. Acres of Persian carpet covered the floor, every kilogram of it imported from Earth, and expensive paintings hung on the walls. We stripped our vac suits and stuffed them in the lock, and Bodyguard Quicksealed the lock door so we could use it on the way out. I chec
ked my tunnel map, and we headed off to the right, towards Reston Jameson’s private quarters. The plan was to confront him directly, and as we advanced I could see more and more flaws with that idea. We were screaming and leaping in classic kzinti style. That approach had lost them six wars in a row and eighty-five percent of their empire. I wasn’t encouraged by history.

  We went down the corridor cautiously, unsure of what might be in wait for us. I’d highlighted a few points on the map where he was likely to be. The first one turned out to be his living quarters. I felt like a burglar, which fit the situation closely enough. There was nothing moving but us, and no alarms went off, but neither was Reston there. That state of affairs was fine with me. I was in no hurry to go forward, and spent some time marveling at the sumptuous furnishing, which made the lavish corridors seem sparse in comparison. There was no sprayfoam, no steel, no plastic. Everything was made of wood or wool or cotton. There was stone, but not the laser-cut basalt I was used to. It was all limestone and marble, minerals that could only have formed in the living forge of Earth. It was everywhere, carved and polished, tiled and inlaid, floors and walls and sculptures. The total mass involved was tremendous, the upship costs incalculable. Here in the Belt, where rock represented all that was common and cheap, Reston Jameson had transformed it into an expression of wealth and power.

  And here I was challenging that power like a demented moth hurling itself into a bonfire. Bodyguard was undistracted by the setting. He made a short gesture and went ahead, not even bothering to look to see if I was following. I went with him for lack of a better choice. We found Jameson there, working at a broad desk of polished black stone. He looked up as we came in without surprise. “Good morning. I’ve been waiting for you.”