The Man-Kzin Wars 12 mw-12

by Matthew Joseph Harrington

  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 gimbaled 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 wis
h 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 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 unbridl
ed 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.”