by Larry Niven
I noticed the kzin first, two meters of orange fur and fangs. He walked in like he owned the bar, and hardened rockjacks made way for him. Beyond getting the space he wanted his presence didn't cause too much of a stir. There aren't that many kzinti on Ceres, but if you're going to see one, you're going to see him in the Constellation. The woman with him was striking, tall and slender as only a Belter can be. More than that she was beautiful, heartbreakingly beautiful, and I couldn't take my eyes off her, like a predator locked on a prey animal.
Prey animal. I'd been spending too much time with the kzinti out in Alpha Centauri's Serpent Swarm. There's a lot more of them there, and a lot of them run with the smugglers. She was my own species, homo sapiens sapiens, and we don't go in for cannibalism—at least not much, in recent history. I kept watching her with hunger of a different sort, my responses entirely in line with those of a human male presented with a fertile female. Her dress was stunning, concealing everything but designed to show off her figure, so I kept right on not taking my eyes off her until her companion got in my way. He was a lot less beautiful and he carried himself in a way that said dangerous, even more than simply being a quarter-ton carnivore said dangerous. His eyes scanned the crowd until they intercepted mine, and then he started in my direction. I felt a rush of adrenaline, though I knew he wasn't about to call me out for looking at his woman. He was looking for me before he knew I was looking at her, and now he'd found me. He had some business with me, and I might as well wait and find out what it was. He took the bar stool next to mine, overwhelming it with his bulk.
"You are Dylan Thurmond?" he asked.
Like when the Goldskin collared me, there's always that split-second decision to be made at a moment like this. Was it a good thing to be me right now, or a bad thing, and if it was a bad thing, would denying it make my situation better or worse? He couldn't thumb me like a Goldskin, but he might be a bounty hunter. Singleship pilots are by nature cautious, because the bold ones don't live long, and the good ones carry a lot of skills with them, just in case. Situational awareness is the same skill in a bar as it is on board ship, it's only the situation that's different.
But he clearly knew who I was so I gave up on denying it. Whether that would turn out to be bad or good remained to be seen.
I nodded. "I am."
He offered his hand and I shook it. So far so good.
"You're the pilot of the singleship Elektra?"
"Yes."
The woman slipped past me and sat on the other side of me; she wore a stylish slingback and she slipped it off and put it on the bar. The Constellation was a good place for her. The lighting is kept low to so you can see through the dome to the stars spinning overhead. Ceres goes around once every nine hours, and the Constellation is right on its equator, which means you can see every star in the sky if you stay there long enough. The view is breathtaking. You can see the ships coming in to the main hangar ship locks, because the Constellation is under the main approach funnel, and if you look carefully just off the zenith you can see Watchbird Alpha in its Ceres-synchronous orbit, a single bright star that stays fixed while the rest of the starfield spins, relaying signals, listening for distress calls, watching the barren surface with its unblinking high-resolution eye. Joe Retroni runs the Constellation and he'd gambled a lot of money getting the dome put in. His bet was that tunnel-happy rockjacks would pay high for the view. He was wrong about that, rockjacks won't pay high for anything, but given that he charged what everyone else charged they definitely preferred to drink at his place. That was enough to pay for the dome. The decor was a little lacking otherwise, laser-cut stone, glossy and cheap. No one cared about that. It only made the woman more eye-catching, like a diamond ring glinting in a dirty back alley.
"And you are?" I invited the kzin.
"You may call me Bodyguard, Dylan Thurmond. May I buy you a drink?"
Bodyguard. I looked at the woman, and she certainly had a lot of body to guard. Her manner was monofilm smooth, not giving the players an opening to game her up on. "Anyone can buy me a drink," I said, and beckoned Joe over. "Whiskey, straight up." He nodded and squirted me a bulb. His house brand is Glencannon, which tastes exactly like fine Glenlivet would taste if instead of being made of pure barley and Highland spring water, carefully fermented and aged thirty years in charred oak casks according to a time-honored recipe, it was made yesterday out of raw ethyl alcohol and the thousand-times-recycled blood, sweat, and tears of Ceres' close-crowded millions, mixed with a healthy dose of bioengineered flavoring agents.
I say blood, sweat, and tears as a poetic euphemism. Most of the fluids that get processed through the asteroid's ecocycle are, well, you know...They say the water is safe to drink. I say adding alcohol kills the aftertaste. I'm used to recycling systems, and Ceres has the worst I've ever experienced. Glencannon is pretty rough going down, but then the original distillers of the Scottish Highlands were more interested in producing cheap alcohol and avoiding English taxation than maturing a fine whiskey, so I claim the experience is still authentic.
I drained my bulb and turned to Bodyguard. "So what can I do for you, other than drink on your tab?"
"I may have a contract for you."
"A contract?" That got my interest, though I had suspected that was what he was after, once it became clear he didn't intend to arrest me or kill me. "I'll listen to that."
"It's simple enough. I have a package that needs delivering."
I nodded and took his meaning. I'd sworn off smuggling, but at the moment I was desperate enough to take any cargo anywhere. "Where is it going?"
"You find out after you take the contract, when and if you take the contract."
I raised my eyebrows. There was more going on here than met the eye, but one of the prerequisites for getting a job like this is not asking too many questions. I asked the important one. "What's the pay?"
"Half a million stars."
I raised my eyebrows. "For a destination in Known Space?"
He nodded. "Jinx."
"That seems high."
"The cargo is secret. That pays for you, your ship, and a hole in your memory when you come back." He held up a paw and made a motion like he was triggering a sprayjector.
My eyebrows went higher. There were a bunch of drugs that would prevent short-term memory from getting stored to long-term memory. The new ones don't cause brain damage, or so they claim. "Why me?"
"Because you need the money and you have a ship of the required performance."
Bodyguard had been doing his homework. I squeezed the last drops of Glencannon down my throat, then spun the bulb into the disposal behind the bar. "Okay, I'll do it." It didn't sound like a healthy job to take on, but anything beat hanging around the Constellation watching my bank account swirl down the drain. Every singleship pilot smuggles when he thinks he can get away with it. Elektra and I hadn't had a contract in months, and the bank was going to call the mortgage on her. When the Consortium went to war with the rockjacks the demand for pilots went through the floor. No prospecting, no shipping, nobody could afford to go anywhere. I wasn't the only one in trouble. Even Nakamura Lines was running in the red, though they denied it officially.
He nodded. "We will talk in privacy." He gestured to Joe, who in turn motioned to another bartender. The bartender came around counter and led us into the back. Joe has some private tables there with privacy fields. They're available to anyone who asks, but it seemed my new friend had his space prearranged. The woman came with us, and the busy background noise of the bar suddenly vanished as we came under the sound damper. We sat down to business. She unsealed her slingback and reached inside. Suddenly even the sounds at our table became muted, the way everything sounds faraway when your ears can't equalize to a pressure change. She had a portable damper in the bag and she'd switched that on too. I took it in stride. If they were willing to drop half a million stars to convince me to take a brain blank then doubling up on the privacy field only made sense.
> Bodyguard nodded to her and she pulled out a sprayjector. She held it up. Her eyes asked the question. Ready?
My eyes widened involuntarily. Those drugs are restricted, not easy to come by, and I somehow hadn't expected them quite this soon in the game. It was the moment of truth. "I'd like to see the money first." They could have had anything in that sprayjector, the whole thing could be a setup. Making them flash the cash wasn't a guarantee of safety, but at least it would ensure I wouldn't fall for some small-time scam.
Wordlessly the woman pulled a credit chip out of her pocket, thumbed it and handed it over. Why is she the one carrying everything? So she could run while he fought, if it came to that. This pair knew what they were doing. I verified the numbers on the front of the chip, thumbed it myself, and then slid it into my beltcomp. I tapped the keys like I was dumping the funds to my account, but I miskeyed the entry on purpose. When I put the comp down I slid the chip out with my thumb and palmed it. Another quick sleight of hand and it was in the little hidden pocket cut into the back side of my belt. That would make it a little harder for them to get their money back, just in case it was a scam after all. Singleship pilots need a lot of odd skills to survive. I can key a com laser in Morse code when the modulation fails, I can rig a fuel coolant system to scrub CO2 out of the air, and I can spot a dirty setup nine times out of ten on body language alone.
I met the girl's eyes, read them and saw nothing dangerous. "Okay," I said, and held out my arm with my sleeve pulled back, hoping that this wasn't the tenth time. She pressed the sprayjector against my skin and triggered it. I felt the quick burn as the drugs went in, and the deal was done. I didn't feel any different, but the macromolecular labels from the sprayjector were now busy hooking up to binding sites in my synapses. The anticatalyst mixed with them would keep them from metabolizing for as long as it held out. My synapses would adapt to form memories normally during that time, but once the anticatalyst ran out the labels would attack the adaptations and undo any changes that had occurred since they were bound in the first place. A big chunk of experience would simply cease to exist for me.
You'd have to be desperate to take a deal like that. I was desperate.
I took my eyes off the patterned tile ceiling to look at Lieutenant Neels, brought back to the here-and-now. "And that's all I remember. I guess it worked."
He just looked at me for a long, painful time, his expression hard and unreadable. I'd sold three weeks for half a million stars and now I was a witness with no memory in a murder investigation. I told all that to the cop. He dropped a holoprint in front of me.
"Is that the woman?"
I nodded. It would take more than a brain blank to make me forget her. "That's her." I had a bad feeling about the way he asked the question, but I didn't know enough to start lying.
His lips compressed to a thin line. "Did you kill her?"
I looked at him in shock. I wasn't a witness, I was a suspect. The suspect, said a little voice at the back of my brain. I'd known the deal had something deep behind it, but Bodyguard had told me the job was a package delivery, straight up and simple. Kzinti don't lie, it's beneath their honor, and I wouldn't have taken anything dirtier anyway. A brain blank doesn't change the way you act, and I'm not a killer. I shook my head. "I didn't even know she was dead."
"You wouldn't under the circumstances, would you?" His eyes bored in to mine. "There's about a gallon of her blood in your airlock." He held my gaze for a long, uncomfortable time. "Anything you'd like to add to your statement?"
"Who is she?"
"Opal Stone."
Opal Stone. I felt a sudden urge to look at my palm, to the place the red inked words had been. Instead I just looked at him, not knowing what to say. I didn't remember anything... Opal Stone.
He kept his eyes locked on mine for a long, long time, while I sat there feeling like a prey animal myself. Finally he turned away. "We don't have a body, yet. The UNSN has a ship scanning your last recorded course, and we're talking to Jinx." He looked back at me and his voice hardened. "If you spaced her, we'll find her."
"I don't..."
"Remember," he finished for me. "I know. You can go. Your ship is under seal. Don't leave the asteroid."
I left with my head spinning and cursing myself for taking the deal in the first place. I thought I was desperate before, but now...I thought back again, trying to glean some missed detail from my mind, but the brain blank was complete. My first memory after the meeting was of staring up at the time display. She'd died—nobody loses a gallon of blood and lives. It was supposed to be a simple delivery trip. What had gone wrong? I pulled out my beltcomp and tabbed my last transactions, another attempt to fill in the blanks. There was a half-million-star deposit a week ago, and then today there was the rental bill for the cube dorm on horizontal sixteen—I hadn't thought to check the location when I'd left with the cop. Now I knew the timeframe, but what was I doing staying in a place like that with half a million stars to my name? The answer came too easily. Hiding. That didn't help me believe in my own innocence. I took a drop shaft to level sixteen and found the place again. It was residential space awkwardly converted to daily rental cubes, the kind of place that takes cash and doesn't ask names. I had to ask the proprietor which cube was mine. He sent me to number twenty-three. The lock opened when I thumbed it, and I went inside.
Something slammed into me from behind, and suddenly my face was jammed into a corner. Something soft and strong had me by the neck, and three sharp needles pressed delicately against my jugular vein. A kzin. I made a mental note to complain to the management about their security.
"Where is my client, Dylan Thurmond?" he snarled.
"What client?" My life was getting progressively more confusing.
He spun me around to face him, and I found myself staring into bared fangs. "Opal Stone." The kzin was Bodyguard. "She is missing from your ship. I will have an answer." The needles pressed harder.
I shook my head as well as I could. "You were there when she brain-blanked me. I don't have any answers."
"Then I will have your life." His eyes got big and his ears swiveled up.
"I didn't kill her. I know that much." I didn't know that much, but I said it. I hoped it was true.
"I watched her board your ship. Now her blood is all over your airlock." His grip tightened again and I began to have trouble breathing.
"It wasn't me," I gasped.
"Prove it."
"It's too obvious, I've been set up." His eyes bored in to mine, his fangs inches from my face. "With a brain blank I can't even defend myself." The kzin's grip didn't slacken. "Whoever framed me did it." I was grasping at straws, making it up on the fly. "If you kill me you lose your only link to them."
He let go and I slumped to the floor, rubbing my neck. "Thanks for your restraint."
Bodyguard snarled. "My honor has been insulted with the death of my client. That has earned quick death for those responsible." His eyes were still locked on me. "Except if I find that it is you after all. Deception added to insult will make your death slow and painful."
I nodded slowly, and fervently hoped I wasn't deceiving him. Kzinti earn high as bodyguards because they make the consequences of even a successful attack too severe for the most determined assassin. Any smuggler who gets to Centauri System knows better than to cross a kzin. Their honor code demands vengeance regardless of cost, and they're all too enthusiastic about following it.
I went over to the bed and sat down. The tiny space was barely big enough for me. With me and a hostile kzin it was decidedly claustrophobic. "What happened after the Constellation?"
"Hrrr. Opal boarded the ship with you."
"What was in the package?"
"She was the package."
I tried to control my surprise. "Did you see her get on?"
"Yes. I watched until the ship left. Her safety was my responsibility."
"Tell me what you know, about Opal, about anything that might be important."
"Dr. Stone?" My eyebrows went up. I had assumed she had a bodyguard because she was a holo actress. Now I knew better, and the news wasn't good. I was in way over my head. It occurred to me that she hadn't said a word to me in the entire encounter in the Constellation. Had she said anything on board Elektra?
"Where was she going?"
"Jinx."
"And when she got to Jinx?"
"I do not know that."
"Do you usually go with her on trips?"
"Sometimes. At other times not. I am not privy to the details of her business arrangements."
Another advantage of kzinti bodyguards is their lack of insight into the subtleties of human interaction. Opal Stone, what were you doing that you needed some desperate singleship pilot to take a brain blank? I might have refused to take her if I knew who she was. Relations between the Consortium and us independents are hardly smooth. And why didn't she take a Consortium ship?
I needed the money badly, but if I'd thought a little more carefully I never would have taken the job. A brain blank is just too serious. I'd counted on myself to be smart enough to not get into exactly this kind of trouble. Obviously I'd been wrong. Whoever framed me had done a good job.
Whoever had framed me. When I put it that way there was only one answer. Opal Stone worked for the Consortium, at war with the rockjacks and controlled by Reston Jameson. The room had a vidwall and on a hunch I pointed up Reston's last interview. It was dated yesterday, and his image filled the screen.