Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII

by Hal Colebatch, Paul Chafe, Matthew Joseph Harrington

  Bodyguard snarled. “We have come to ask questions on the death of Opal Stone.”

  Jameson smiled. “I am sure you have.”

  The kzin’s ears swiveled up and forward. I wasn’t sure if he could pick up the smugness too. “What is your involvement?”

  Jameson shrugged, unperturbed. “I have none.”

  Bodyguard’s lips pulled themselves into a dangerous smile. “I question your honor, human.”

  “Ah, an insult.” Jameson’s smile somehow became as predatory as Bodyguard’s. “I think at this point it’s traditional that I scream and leap to avenge it.”

  Bodyguard crouched, his talons extended and fangs bared. “If you dare, human.”

  Jameson made a command gesture to his AI. There was a soft thwipthwipthwipthwip and Bodyguard collapsed. Mercy needles, fired from a projector hidden in the camera ball overhead. Kzinti physiology isn’t the same as human. Jameson must have arranged mercy slivers made of kzin-specific anesthetic, probably alternating with the standard formula in his defense weapons so they’d work on both species. He really had been expecting us.

  He turned his eyes to me. “Captain Thurmond. I hope we can interact less dramatically.”

  He knew my name, and I knew I was in deep trouble. I looked at the quarter-ton of unconscious carnivore on the expensive carpet. I nodded slowly. Yes. I had walked into the lion’s den and I was getting exactly what I deserved.

  He smiled wide, the predator in victory. “Good. Now tell me what you know.”

  I shook my head. “Believe me, I don’t know anything at all.”

  His smile disappeared. “You don’t expect me to believe that.”

  I could feel the fear creeping into my expression. I was in way over my head. “I’ve had a brain blank. They’ve accused me of killing Opal Stone. I know I didn’t do it.” I shrugged, hoping that would be enough for him.

  “And you think I did?”

  “You have a motive…” I trailed off. I didn’t want to antagonize him.

  He smirked. “A brain blank. She’s a smart woman, but now I know what she’s hiding.” He looked away, his eyes distant for a moment, and when they came back to me they were flint hard. He made a gesture. A holo popped into existence, showing Bodyguard and me clambering through the sliced-open airlock door. He’d been watching us since we’d gotten in, maybe from before that. I was so busted.

  “I could turn you over to the Goldskins now, but I think I have a better use for you.” His voice was smug. Another gesture and pinpricks stitched across my back. I was vaguely aware of the floor coming up to smack me as darkness fell.

  I woke up looking at stars. For a moment I thought I was in Elektra’s cockpit, and then I thought I was in the Constellation, but as I looked around I saw not my familiar command console or the bar’s laser-cut furnishings but exotic flowering plants. The air was humid and rich with the scent of their flowers. There was a throbbing in my temples as the anesthetic in the mercy needles wore off. My extremities tingled and I had a little trouble getting my feet. Bodyguard was watching me.

  “Where are we?” The low gravity told me I was still on Ceres, somewhere.

  “Hrrr. We are in Reston Jameson’s garden dome. I have been here before with Dr. Stone.”

  “Scream and leap.” I couldn’t contain my frustration any longer. “See where it’s gotten us.” I half-expected Bodyguard to scream and leap at me for saying it.

  Instead he just twitched his whiskers. “It has gotten us here, obviously.” He had taken my sarcasm for confusion.

  “It is getting us killed,” I said bitterly.

  “Then we will have deaths of honor.” He seemed unperturbed. I gave up. It isn’t that kzinti don’t fear death, it’s just that they never let it stop them. “I owe you apology and honor debt, Captain Thurmond. You are innocent, as you stated.”

  “Never mind. We need to get out of here while we still can.” I started looking around and noticed that my beltcomp was gone.

  “There is no way out.”

  “There has to be.” The dome was perhaps a hundred feet around, full of lush vegetation.

  “He has taken all my tools, and the airlock is depressurized.”

  I had to see for myself. I found the airlock; evidently the dome was its own pressure zone. As I said it’s illegal to lock an airlock, if that phrase makes any sense. There was no lock on this one, but the cycle light glowed amber. Jameson had sealed us in through the simple expedient of pumping down the airlock chamber. It was a cargo lock, three meters on a side. The door opened upward and outward, so though I could open and close the latching bar easily enough the door itself was sealed shut with tons of air pressure. It might as well have been welded. I punched the cycle button to pressurize it but nothing happened, Jameson had disconnected it.

  Bodyguard had followed me, and I turned back to him. “Now what?”

  He shrugged, a gesture I’m sure he learned in order to communicate with humans. “Now we wait.”

  I wasn’t satisfied with waiting, and so I made a fool of myself exploring the garden trying to find something I could use on the airlock door. Bodyguard watched me with amicable amusement.

  “I have already searched for tools.”

  Nevertheless I persisted in looking. There was nothing else to do, and I hadn’t liked the way Jameson said he had a better use for me than turning me in to the Goldskins. Better for him was not likely better for me. Nevertheless it slowly became clear that Bodyguard had been thorough in his assessment. There were a few gardening tools of extruded plastic, some bags of concentrated plant nutrient, a few light metal hangers and the aluminum trusses that supported the twining vines. None of it was sturdy enough to assault the airlock door, and though I vaguely recalled that it was possible to turn fertilizer into some kind of explosive I didn’t know how. I couldn’t even guess if what was in the bags was the right kind of fertilizer. Even if it was I suspected it would take more than dirt and water to make it explode, and those were all the ingredients I had to hand.

  The garden itself was beautiful, and in other circumstances I would have greatly enjoyed exploring it. I’m no expert on flowers, but these were lush and lavish. Some had huge blossoms a foot across, others ornate and intricate folds, everywhere they exploded in a riot of color, climbing on impossibly slender stalks in the low gravity. In the center of the dome there was a respectable telescope, perhaps sixty centimeters. The garden was also an observatory. I’d heard Reston Jameson was an amateur astronomer, though patiently observing the heavens didn’t seem to square with the rest of his personality. It had a horseshoe-shaped workbench surrounding it, with a data panel to control its tracking motors. I pointed the panel on, but it didn’t respond. I tried manually, but the power had been switched off from somewhere else—so much for getting help over the network. The workbench had drawers underneath it, and I slid one open to reveal an array of lenses and optical instruments of uncertain purpose. Another bigger drawer at the bottom yielded a huge concave mirror, doubtless a twin to the one in the telescope. I quickly checked all the drawers for anything hefty and came up empty.

  I remembered the employment offer from Canexco that I’d turned down. One step better than life in a cage. I was in a cage now, and I didn’t like it. Being an independent has its downsides. I had a brief image of myself trying to batter down the door with an interferometer and turned to Bodyguard. “There’s nothing useful here.”

  “Hrrr.” His tail lashed. “We must wait. The airlock is the choke point. We will ambush them when they come in.”

  I looked at the heavy door and nodded. Bodyguard’s lips were twitching back to clear his fangs. Reston Jameson had chosen to cage a kzin, never a good idea. I began to feel sorry for whoever came through the door next. Sooner or later they would have to come for us, and when they did we would be ready. I grabbed one of the plastic garden hoes and began sharpening the end of the handle against the rough surface of one of the stone planters. It was too light to use as a club,
but rigid enough to make a serviceable spear. I’m not a killer. I’d told myself that but it wasn’t really true. Anyone can be a killer if you push them hard enough. Humans aren’t any less predatory than kzinti, we’re just less open about it.

  Bodyguard settled down to wait down in a resting crouch, his big golden eyes locked on the airlock door. I sat beside him, sharpening my weapon. We waited long enough for the sun to rise and slide across the top of the dome. I finished my improvised spear and for want of anything else to do began to make another one. The air warmed noticeably as the sun came up to the zenith, and suddenly I had an idea. I went back to the horseshoe desk and slid open the drawer with the big mirror. There was a wiring harness embedded in its underside, no doubt to drive the piezo-adaptive glass to keep the surface curve wavelength perfect. I picked it up and brought it back, being careful not to let its considerable inertia overbalance me.

  Bodyguard looked up from his vigil. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to see how much sunlight I can put on the door. If we can melt a hole in it the pressure will equalize and we’re free.”

  He twitched his tail dubiously. “Innovative thinking, but I doubt you will command enough energy.”

  “It’s free to try.”

  He said nothing, and I maneuvered the mirror to catch the sun and spill its concentrated rays on a focal point in the center of the airlock door. The tiny dot of light blazed too brightly to look at directly, and tendrils of smoke curled lazily up as the paint blistered off. The sun is weak out in the Belt, but it was a big mirror, maybe big enough…

  It was hard to hold the mirror steady enough, but I persevered. Once I flicked the beam spot away and was gratified to see a faint red glow. Steel softens as it heats up, and air pressure provided a steady force against the weakened spot. Maybe enough…

  After fifteen minutes I had to admit that there wasn’t enough heat.

  “Let me try this.” Bodyguard had pulled out one of the aluminum support tubes from a planter frame. Squinting against the blinding light of the beam spot he stabbed it against the door. It came back melted, but the steel didn’t give way.

  He held up the melted tube. “You must be close.”

  I shook my head. “Aluminum melts at half the temperature steel does.” I put the mirror down and the red spot faded immediately.

  Bodyguard put a paw against the steel. “Hrrr. The door is hot. I suspect you’ve reached the point where heat is radiating away as fast as you can pump it in.”

  “Close, but not close enough.” I slumped down against a planter and picked up my improvised plastic spear. It didn’t seem like much of a weapon to win freedom with.

  “There is another mirror in the telescope. If we have half the heat we need, let us gather twice as much sun.”

  I jumped up. “Of course.” I would have kissed his hairy, overaggressive hide if I thought I could have done it without getting my head bitten off, literally. Twice the mirror might not get us to the melting point, there would be some complex calculus problem involving heat flux and the door geometry and the Stefan-Boltzmann constant to know for sure. I’ve never been that good at math; it would be easier to just try it.

  I bounded over to the telescope and Bodyguard followed me. Closer inspection revealed a problem. Without power the scope had to be forced against its drive mechanism, a gimballed gear train specifically designed to keep it locked in position against any tendency to move it off target. The angle it was at made it awkward to even see how the mirror was mounted in the tube. I wasn’t strong enough to force it against the gears, Bodyguard and I together weren’t strong enough. We gave that up as not worth the effort and instead I climbed up the mechanism to get a closer look. The tube was steel too, not as heavy as the airlock door, but solid enough to keep the various optical elements in precise alignment with each other, and solid enough to resist attack with the tools we had to hand. The mirror mount itself was a single cast piece, and the bolts securing it to the tube were large and torqued on with the same attention to rigidity. We weren’t going to get at the second mirror. Undaunted, I climbed up the tube to see if the mirror could be taken out from the inside, but when I looked down it all I could see was the silver mirror surface. The mountings that held it in place attached from underneath, which made sense because any other arrangement would have blocked part of the mirror.

  For a moment I considered throwing something down the tube to break the mirror and take it out in pieces, more to relieve my own frustration than because the shards would serve us much purpose. I resisted the temptation and climbed down.

  “We aren’t getting that mirror out.”

  In response Bodyguard hissed and spat something in the Hero’s Tongue, slashing the air with his claws. I backed away and didn’t try to translate what he’d said. Eventually he calmed down. “We will go back to our ambush.”

  I went with him and went back to work on my second spear, but I kept my mind busy trying to think up other ways of getting out. Watchbird Alpha was up there, feeding surface imagery to the Goldskins, among others. If we’d been on the surface we could have drawn rescue symbology to attract their attention, a rarely used planetary emergency system I’d learned along with cold-water survival, six different ways to make fire, and a bunch of other planet skills, just in case I ever made an emergency landing on some uninhabited part of a world. Singleship pilots are like boy scouts, prepared for anything.

  Only we weren’t on the surface, and so rescue symbology wasn’t an option and I really wasn’t prepared for the situation I found myself in. Bodyguard seemed oblivious to my distraction, his relaxed concentration fixed completely on the airlock door. There was a laser amid the optical instruments, and it occurred to me that if I could figure out how to boresight it with the telescope I could use the scope to aim it at Watchbird Alpha and signal the Goldskins in Morse. I went and looked at it again and proved the triumph of hope over reality. It was a little ten-milliwatt device, good for checking optical systems, but unable to put a visible beam on a satellite a thousand-odd kilometers overhead, and anyway we couldn’t move the scope. My eyes went back to the big mirror with the idea of using it as a heliograph but its focal length was only three meters, so getting a spot on Watchbird wasn’t an option. There were some flat mirrors in among the lenses, but they weren’t nearly big enough, and the sun was already setting.

  I went back to the spear again, promising myself that if I managed to get out of this alive I would never again take a contract of questionable legality. No smuggling, no mysterious cargoes, most certainly no brain-blank drugs, and absolutely no kzinti. I would sell Elektra if I had to, and work as a rockjack. I went back to sharpening with a vengeance, and was so concentrated on that and my dark thoughts that I didn’t hear the airlock cycle. I was yanked back to awareness by a paralyzing kill scream and looked up in time to see a blur of orange fur. Hastily I grabbed up my other spear and ran to follow Bodyguard. I found myself staring into the open airlock and a pair of muscled security thugs with leveled mercy guns. Bodyguard was piled in a heap at the end of the airlock, unconscious. There was a woman there too, her face tense. I dropped my spear. I had no wish to endure another anesthetic headache. One guard covered me while the other shoved the woman into the garden dome, then pushed Bodyguard’s unconscious body after her, a heavy and awkward burden even in the low gravity. They smirked and powered the lock door shut. They had come prepared for ambush.

  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 look
ed 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.”