by Larry Niven
The woman gave me a sardonic smile. "Captain Thurmond. I'd like to say I'm pleased to meet you again, but under the circumstances I'm not."
I looked at her blankly. "Do I know you?"
She came forward and offered me her hand. "I guess the drugs do work. Opal Stone."
I shook her hand, stunned. She wasn't the woman who was at the Constellation that night, but she could have been her sister. "But you..."
"...are on Jinx?" She laughed without humor.
"...are dead," I finished. I looked her up and down. She had the same build as the woman I'd met in the Constellation, and now that I noticed I could see that she moved the same way, but her face was completely different.
"Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated." She looked at Bodyguard's unconscious form and the humor left her voice. "Although they may turn out to be only slightly premature."
"You don't look..."
"Plastic surgery, thanks to your ship's autodoc, and the artistic skills of the best plastic surgeon in the Belt."
I sat down on a planter. "Explain please."
She sat down across from me. "I suppose there's no reason to keep it secret now. The escape to Jinx was faked. We took Dr. Helis of the Helis clinic on board. He worked my face through your autodoc. I came back here and went underground until I could get another ship."
Even I had heard of the Helis clinic and the man who ran it. He was merely the best 'doc-driver in the Belt. "But why?"
She laughed bitterly. "Why do you think? I sold out Reston. You don't expect to do that and live. He'd track me to the end of the universe to kill me, even from jail. Jinx is no obstacle to him. The only solution is to vanish."
"So what are you doing back here?"
"I'm the fox doubling back on her tracks. The hope was he'd believe I was dead, but if he didn't then Jinx would be a dead-end trail. I'm meant to be boarding Nakamura Lines for Wunderland right now with my new face and a hundred million stars in my beltcomp." She shrugged. "It didn't work out that way. Reston's a smart boy."
I looked at her critically. "I liked your old face better."
She smirked. "I don't imagine you'll have to put up with this one for long."
"And what about the blood in my airlock?"
"Leftovers from the operation, drained out of your 'doc. That was to make the Goldskins think you'd killed me."
"You framed me."
"Of course." She saw my expression and went on. "Oh, don't feel so bad about it. Without a body there's no case. You weren't going to prison."
"Says you."
"Hey, you volunteered for a brain blank. You knew you were getting in to something deep and you accepted that risk, for which I paid you well. You're a big boy. Act like one."
She had me there, but I was still angry and her attitude didn't help. I stalked off as well as one can stalk in two and a half percent gravity, and went and looked at the telescope. Plants don't interest me, and Bodyguard was asleep. I didn't want to look at her, so the scope was the default.
She came over after a while. "Look, I'm sorry I set you up. I had to do what I had to do."
"You didn't have to do it to me."
She smiled, and despite what I'd said her face was as beautiful as before. "You're a good pilot, you've got a good reputation, and Dr. Helis said you had the right kind of autodoc on board. I needed the best." I looked at her, met her eyes, and I could tell she was used to getting what she wanted by smiling.
I wasn't biting. I went back to looking through the scope. She tried again. "Look, do you want Reston Jameson to win?"
I looked at her. "Win what? Against the rockjacks?" I shrugged. "If I had to choose sides I'd choose the rockjacks, just because I side with independent operators in general. Only I don't have to choose sides. It isn't my war."
"Interesting you should use the phrase 'war.' That's exactly what it is, and like it or not it is your war."
I knew what she meant but I was still angry enough to make her drag it out of me. "No. It isn't."
"So how's business been lately?" She arched an eyebrow at me. "Booked right up with contracts?"
"Everyone knows the strike is hurting the economy. That doesn't make it my war."
"Oh no?" She smirked again. "And how many bidders do you think you're going to get for your services when Jameson gets a stranglehold on mining?"
"I can fly outsystem."
"Sure you can. And so can every other singleship pilot once Jameson tightens the screws. Eighty percent of the singleship market in Known Space is in the Belt, and ninety percent of that is in support of the rockjacks. You're all going to find the pickings pretty slim out of the colonies."
"So what's your point?"
"Reston Jameson plans on setting himself up as emperor, nothing less. He's going to break the rockjacks, and once he does that he's going to break the singleship pilots, and once he controls Earth's resource base and the means of transporting it, he's going to de facto rule Earth, and through Earth the colonies."
"That's insane. The UN won't allow it."
"They won't have any choice but to allow it. Earth is completely reliant on space resources, the UN can't afford to have the Belt cut off raw materials. Even if they had a choice they wouldn't act. He's already bought half the Security Council." I looked skeptical and she went on, her tone sharpening. "Who do you think planned this with him?"
"You?"
"Me. We've been putting this together for years, manipulating the market, forcing the rockjacks into a corner so they'd have to strike, and so we'd have an excuse to break them, with Belt government backing. I'm his financial wizard, he couldn't have done it without me."
"So why did you turn on him?"
She bit her lower lip and looked away. "At first it was just a game, at least it seemed that way." She laughed. "We were young, anything seemed possible but at the same time it all seemed so far away." She looked back to me. "Did you ever hear the story of the two soldiers who set out to become generals?"
I shook my head. "No."
"Each one made sure to compliment the other in his absence to their superiors, and slowly but surely they advanced ahead of their peers until they reached their goal. We were like that, we structured the social environment, set up our competition in the Consortium to fail, got ourselves senior positions, and then directorships. It worked better than I could ever have imagined."
Realization dawned. "You were lovers."
She nodded. "Yes, we were."
"So again, why...?"
"Because absolute power corrupts absolutely." She paused, and for the first time I saw real emotion in her controlled, beautiful features. "He doesn't love me anymore, he stopped loving me when he fell in love with power. He's lost it, lost any connection between the ends and the means."
"What does that mean?"
"There's still a threat from the UN, from the Navy. Military intervention could stop us cold, so he has a plan. If Earth doesn't go along with our program he's going to drop asteroids on them."
"The Navy would never let them get close."
"The Navy will never see them coming. He has a thing, a Slaver stasis field in reverse. It just absorbs energy, even neutrino radar. He's had a secret lab working on it for the last ten years." Opal shook her head slightly, as if she couldn't quite believe what she was saying. "Ten years. He never told me. I found out by accident." There was pain in her voice, and it occurred to me that perhaps Reston Jameson's larger crime in her eyes was not his unbridled ambition but his refusal to fully share it with her.
"So you turned him in?"
"Do you think I shouldn't have?"
And I had no answer for that. Her motivations were probably wrong, but it was still the right thing to do. I changed the subject. "Now what?"
"I know Reston. Right now he's setting the stage so that when we turn up dead he can use that for his own ends."
"What ends?"
"Probably to discredit the information I gave the Goldskins, and
if he can arrange it, to show singleshippers in a bad light, to ramp up the pressure on the independents generally."
"You think he'd kill us in cold blood?" I asked the question but I already knew the answer. He had a use for us, he'd said, and I doubted it involved any of us being able to tell anyone about what he was doing. His motive for wanting Opal dead was obvious, and the fact that he hadn't kept her isolated from us showed he didn't care what she told us.
"I know he will." Her voice was clipped flat when she said it, and I decided not to ask her how she came to be that certain. "We have to get out of here."
"We've been trying." I showed her the spears and the telescope mirror and described our attempts at getting out. "If we could power up the telescope desk we could get a message out over the net."
"It's on a separate circuit. He looks after the details, he's always been good at that."
Bodyguard stirred unsteadily and got to his feet, looking around. "Our plan has failed."
"You must have known that it would."
"I dreamed that you had screamed and leapt beside me..." Bodyguard shook his head to clear it and then unsteadily turned his attention on Opal. "Dr. Stone. Welcome back."
She looked at him. "You're the first one to recognize me since I had my face changed."
Bodyguard flipped his ears up, focusing his eyes with an effort. "Oh yes, I can see you have changed your appearance. Your scent is the same. You are in your fertile time."
Opal Stone blushed. I carefully didn't watch. She was still very beautiful. The sun was coming up again. My body was adapted to the Belt standard day reflected in the light/dark cycle of the main tunnel lighting, and the asteroid's quick alternation between night and day was confusing me. It must have been eighteen hours since we'd been caught.
Eighteen hours. Reston Jameson must have his staging set by now, awaiting only the right opportunity to inject our bodies into the volatile political landscape of the rockjack strike for maximum advantage. There would be headlines. "Singleship pilot kills whistleblowing Consortium executive." And there would be rumors, that Opal Stone and I were involved, that we'd plotted to bring down Reston Jameson by falsifying documents. Bodyguard would be dragged into it, because anything connected with the kzinti was automatically suspect around Sol System. Nothing would be proven, but everything would be open to question, and reasonable doubt was all he needed to keep on course to his insane goals. Our time was running out fast.
"You said you could heliograph the Watchbird... " Opal was thinking out loud.
"We'd need a flat mirror, a big one. Plus I'm not sure I could aim it accurately enough; Watchbird is way up there."
"We can have a flat mirror, we have the telescope."
"It's concave."
"Yes, the telescope mirror is concave, and this mirror is concave." She tapped the spare mirror. "But what we want is a straight beam of light. So we focus the light from the spare mirror onto the telescope eyepiece, and the optics take that light, focus it onto the telescope primary as a point source at its focus and then we have a beam we can aim anywhere we want."
I nodded. "Clever." It just might work.
Bodyguard turned a paw over, pointing out what I had overlooked. "We cannot traverse the telescope without the workbench controls, and they have no power."
"These are the manual fine adjustments." She pointed to a pair of small, knurled wheels we hadn't noticed when we'd been considering demounting the primary mirror. "It'll take a while, but we can point it anywhere we want."
I looked at Bodyguard. Bodyguard looked at me. I nodded. "Let's do it."
There was a camera body attached to the telescope, with a thick coaxial cable leading to an input jack on the workbench. Opal unlatched it and put in an eyepiece instead, then started laboriously spinning the fine-adjustments knobs. Each full rotation of the knobs moved the scope tube a barely noticeable fraction of a degree. It was going to take forever to line it up on Watchbird Alpha, but we had nothing but time.
No, actually we were rapidly running out of time, but we had nothing to do but try. I mentally urged her to spin faster while I went in search of something to use as a signal shutter so I could pulse the light. Bodyguard pulled down more of the light aluminum plant frames to align the spare mirror with the eyepiece. I finally settled on ripping open a fertilizer bag to use as a shutter, and then wrote down a simple message in Morse. T E L L—L T—N E E L S—G O L D S K I N—O P A L—S T O N E—H E L D—P R I S O N E R—I N—T H I S—D O M E. I started practicing it with my bag. I learned Morse for an emergency but had never had to use it until now. I needed all the refreshing I could get. I didn't bother mentioning myself or Bodyguard, on the theory that the Goldskins would care more about Opal, and that when she got rescued we would too.
Eventually we were ready. Opal had installed the largest aperture eyepiece she could find and Bodyguard carefully arranged the mirror on his improvised and somewhat rickety framework. We couldn't focus the beam all the way down to a spot, we didn't want to melt the eyepiece or any of the optics, and after some debate we settled on a disk of light half a handspan across. That would also avoid the need to constantly readjust the mirror as the sun slowly moved across the dome. I started signaling, snapping the bag back and forth in front of the mirror to form the dots and dashes of the signal. Morse is virtually dead as a communications medium nowadays, but it's still taught as a backup and hobbyists use it. Hopefully someone would see the imagery and figure out they were seeing a signal, and find someone to translate. It took me about a minute to work my way through the message. I would take a break for another minute and repeat. I could do that seven or eight times before the sun had moved far enough to require shifting the mirror. We kept doing it. There was nothing else to do.
I'd gone through five or six iterations of this and was beginning to worry that we'd run out of sunlight—or life—before anyone noticed. Bodyguard was once again repositioning the mirror when we heard the airlock open. I felt immediate relief and was just about to say so when I saw who had come in. Reston Jameson, flanked by the same two thugs who'd brought in Opal. I dropped the bag and grabbed my improvised spear, a useless gesture.
Jameson had a nasty little smile on his face, and a mercy gun in his hand. "Lieutenant Neels tells me you've been keeping your idle hands busy." He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger. "I think you've just about outlived your usefulness." He raised the weapon. The anesthetic in mercy needles is mild and overdose-tolerant, but enough of it could still kill. I was about to go to sleep and never wake up. I should have anticipated that he would have bought out the Goldskins. I'd miscalculated and the game was over.
Bodyguard screamed, but he didn't leap. Instead he threw the telescope mirror at them like a heckler throwing a pie at a politician. They all fired instinctively, but the needles just spattered harmlessly against the glass. Bodyguard leaped a half-heartbeat later, his trajectory following his makeshift shield. He probably took a few stray needles, but then he was on them, talons flashing. Jameson and one henchman had gone down when the mirror hit them, the other had dodged out of the way, but the dodge spoiled his aim.
I threw my first spear and screamed and leaped with my second. The thrown spear missed, and then I was looking down the barrel of a gyrojet rocket pistol at Reston Jameson's ice-cold eyes. I saw his finger tighten on the trigger and it would be a much less pleasant end than an overdose of mercy needles.
There was an earsplitting scream and something blurred and orange slammed me to the ground. I heard a soft zwwwwipppp and bounced hard in the low gravity and came up to see blood spraying. Bodyguard's attack had taken me out of the way and the mushrooming rocket round had gone in through his stomach and made a hole the size of a dinner plate in his lower back. His momentum had slammed him into Jameson though. The second guard's eyes were full of blood, and Jameson was struggling from beneath the dying kzin's bulk. He still had the gyrojet.
I screamed and leaped again, my spear catching him in the che
st, its point digging into his ribs. I braced myself against the edge of the airlock and forced it forward as he struggled to free his weapon arm, his face contorted in exertion and pain. He got his hand free and fired again. I would have died then, but Bodyguard managed to bring a paw up and over and smacked the weapon even as Jameson pulled the trigger. The round zwwipped past and pain seared my shoulder, then a half second later the gyrojet sailed over my head. The kill rage swept over me and I shoved hard on the spear. From someplace far away I heard a bloodcurdling scream and realized it was my own voice. Something gave way with a nasty crunching sound and the shaft lurched forward into Jameson's chest. He looked at me with something close to surprise, his once-distinguished features covered in sprayed blood. I didn't wait to watch him die, I let go of the spear and rolled to take on the other guard.
There was another zzzwwwipp and I ducked reflexively. I saw the guard's chest explode. Opal held the gyrojet leveled, now covering the guard, but she needn't have bothered. Bodyguard had ripped his throat out in his first attack.
I turned to the kzin. Incredibly he was still breathing, but he wouldn't be for long. There was fur and bone spattered everywhere. His spinal column had been blown out and his legs and lower body sagged uselessly.
"Hang on. We'll get you to an autodoc."
He looked up at me with big green eyes. I hadn't noticed their color before, and I saw in them the certainty of his own death. "Honor is satisfied," he said, his breath rasping. "You fought well, Captain Thurmond."
I wanted to say something, do something but there was nothing that could be done, and he closed his eyes and died right there. I knew in that moment it had been no accident that he'd knocked me out of the way as Reston Jameson fired. He owed me honor debt, for his own accusation that I had killed Opal, and he had repaid it in full.