The Man-Kzin Wars 12

Independent
Paul Chafe

I woke up disoriented in milky grey light. I got my eyes open and saw digits floating in front of my face, 1201. I was in a cube, a sleep cube, on a shelf of a bed barely big enough for the thin, firm mattress pressed gently against my back. The cube itself held the bed, a small desk/table and chair, room to stand up and get dressed, and no more. I pushed the stiff and cheap spinfiber blanket down around my waist. I was awake because the lights were on, the lights were on because I must have set them to come on at twelve. The digits blinked to 1202 and I tried to remember how I had gotten here, but there was just a big blank where last night should have been. Why wasn't I on Elektra?

"News," I said. The numerals vanished, replaced by a program list. Ceres local was one of the news options. That squared with the barely perceptible gravity that held me against the mattress. I was on Ceres. So far so good. I pointed that channel up and was rewarded with a holo of some net flak on the business beat talking about the current crisis. The rockjacks were still striking against the Consortium, and the Belt economy was spiraling downhill fast. I didn't care about that, what drew my eye was the market ticker running at the bottom. It featured the time and date, twelve oh two, April fifteenth.

April. It was suppose to be March. What was going on? I stumbled to my feet and through the door. I found myself in a nondescript cube dorm in my underwear. Most of the other cubes were marked vacant. Everyone else had already got up and left, and it was too early for the incoming crowd. I felt bleary; however long I had slept it hadn't been enough. I went back in and hauled the blanket off the mattress and dumped it into the recycler by the door of the cube. The drawers beneath the narrow bed opened to my thumb and I hauled out my clothes. I went through the pockets for a clue as to what I had done last night, but there was nothing. I thumbed my beltcomp alive and checked it. It agreed the date was April 15th, but the entries since March 20th were blank. It wasn't just last night missing, it was better than three weeks. What was going on?

Nothing came to mind, the anonymous, identical cube doors looked back at me blankly. It was accomplishing nothing, and I could ponder the question in the shower. I resealed the drawers and padded down the hall, grabbing a towel on my way past the dispenser. My body knew where the shower was, so I'd been here before. I had a vague memory of checking in the previous night, but it was strangely hazy. I've gone on a few benders in my life, maybe a few more than normal recently, with little else to do but down cheap whiskey and skim for contracts at a booth in the Constellation. But three weeks?

The shower room wasn't overly clean, but the water was steaming hot and I let it stream over me, cascading off my body in lazy parabolas to slide down the walls to the pump-assisted drain. The dispenser spilled depilatory in my hand and I noticed words scrawled on my palm-opal stone in big red block letters. I looked at them for long moment through the translucent depilatory gel. The writing looked like mine, and I have a habit of jotting things down on my palm when I want to remember them. This time the trick wasn't helpful. I couldn't imagine what they referred to, I'm not into jewelry, and opals come from Mars, not something I'd likely be carrying, even as a smuggled cargo. What did that have to do with me? I smeared the gel over my face. The hairs that came away were four or five days' growth. What on earth had I been doing?

I came out of the shower and dried off, feeling better if not less confused. The letters were washed off my palm, but the words were burned into my brain. opal stone. I'd go back to Elektra and ask her what was going on. Elektra is my ship, a singleship officially, although that's more due to me bribing the registrar than any virtue of her design; her class is built for a crew of three. I'd put in a lot of modifications to make her manageable on my own. We've come to know each other well, and she looks after me. I remembered docking at Ceres, some three months ago now. I hadn't had a contract in that long. Docking fees were eating my savings alive, while the rockjacks and the Consortium fought their dirty little war over the concession split. I'm an independent, like all singleship pilots, and sometimes that has its downsides. I went back to my tube to dress, then went out the front desk and thumbed out, nodding to the attendant. There was a Goldskin cop by the door, and he came up to me.

"Dylan Thurmond?" He had his official voice on.

I nodded, not wanting to admit I was me, but if I denied it his next step would be to demand my thumbprint. No point in making him work for it. What had I done? My record isn't exactly spotless. I'm a singleship pilot, and it's a tribute to my skill that I have far fewer than the average number of smuggling convictions. Unfortunately that isn't the same as zero.

"I'd like you to come with me." His voice brooked no argument.

"What's this about?"

"They'll tell you at headquarters." He led me down to the tube station and invited me to share a tube car with him. He sat in stoic silence while I sweated out the twenty minute tube ride, trying to rack my brain for details, any details, but what I remembered wasn't going to help my case any. At headquarters he spoke briefly to the desk cop, and I heard a word that made my blood run cold. Murder. I told myself I had to be a witness, killing isn't in my nature, but my persistent amnesia wasn't reassuring. He took me into a small, unadorned room and turned me over to a tough-looking officer, Lieutenant Neels. Neels' voice was calm, inviting cooperation, but his manner was rock hard beneath the soft exterior. He didn't need to emphasize what would happen if I chose to be difficult.

"I'm not trying to be evasive, Lieutenant," I told him. "I woke up this morning with no idea where I was."

He nodded. "Just think back, and go over what you do remember."

Police stations look the same on any world. I looked up at the grey ceiling and worn sprayfoam walls and as I cast my mind back I suddenly understood where my memory had gone. It all started in the Constellation, I remembered that much. I told him what I knew.

It was an average night, March 20th, though if you'd asked me on the day I would have had to guess at the date. On the vid wall Reston Jameson was being interviewed about the violence between the Consortium and the rockjacks, and the economic disaster the strike was for the whole Belt. The sound was down, but I knew what he was talking about because it was all anyone was talking about. To an underemployed singleship pilot the resulting slump had a very personal impact. Maybe I should have sold out and gone to fly for Canexco or Nakamura Lines, but I'm an independent and flying for someone else would be one step above life in a cage for me. Jameson ran the Consortium, though you'd find other names over his on the directorship list, everyone knew the difference between the figureheads and the controlling mind. He had been quoted as saying he'd break the rockjacks and the Belt with them if that's what it took to keep the Consortium in control of metal mining, and of course he'd denied ever saying it. I was interested in hearing what he was saying, and was about to ask Joe to private me the audio when they came in.

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."

He turned over a paw and studied his extended talons. "Dr. Stone is senior vice president for finance at the Consortium."

"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.

"…very upset about this. This man already has a record for smuggling. I have being saying all along that the cost of allowing these fly-by-night singleship operators…"

I muted the audio and pointed texttrans along the bottom of the image so I didn't have to listen to his voice. He mentioned me by name and the thrust of his argument was the same as it always been. The major lines could handle cargo and passengers, the major exploration companies could handle prospecting and mining, and the murder of Opal wouldn't have happened if only…

I switched it off in disgust, unable even to read the text. He was going to use me as an excuse to shut down the singleships. I couldn't believe he was holding my smuggling record as a strike against me. Every pilot smuggled, it was practically expected.

"I smell your tension, Dylan Thurmond." Bodyguard wrinkled his nose in way that suggested my tension didn't smell very good.

Would Reston Jameson kill one of his own senior directors? It didn't seem likely, but the only other explanation was that I had killed Opal myself and I wasn't willing to accept that one. "I think I know what's going on." Who else could have sent her to Jinx?

"Enlighten me."

"Reston Jameson kills Opal and get me blamed. He uses the public outcry to shut down the independent operators. The immediate target is singleships, but it's the rockjacks he's after, of course." I shrugged. "Simple." Simple to say, probably impossible to prove.

Bodyguard laid one ear flat. "I am unconvinced."

"Grant for a second I didn't do it. Can you think of a better motive?"

"Yes." He wasn't believing me.

"What if she was challenging him for power in the Consortium?"

"Irrelevant. I now have two suspects. Convince me that Reston Jameson is guilty and I will kill him instead of you."

I watched him for the rippling ears that would show he was joking, but he was dead serious. He wouldn't care that an attempt on Reston Jameson's life would almost certainly end his own. Kzinti were like that. Nor would he hesitate to kill me if he decided he wanted to.

"Help me find the truth and you can act with confidence and honor."

Bodyguard's lips twitched. "What do monkeys know of honor?" His claws edged out reflexively. "It seems our interests are aligned, Dylan Thurmond."

I took that as agreement. "Something went badly wrong. I must have anticipated problems when I got back. I would have made some kind of record to protect myself from exactly this circumstance."

"What sort of record?"

"Elektra's log is the most obvious answer, but perhaps that's too obvious. There are wheels within wheels here. Somewhere only I would look for it." I thought for moment. "I wrote her name on my palm. There're a few places on the ship I could think of."

"Then we should get on the ship, Dylan Thurmond."

We tubed over to the hangar bay. I could get on my own ship without disturbing the police seals over the airlocks, but when we got there we found not just seals but guards. That was a setback I probably should have expected, the Goldskins were taking no chances. Instead of crawling on board through the drive inspection ports we went up to the Constellation and got a table with a sound damper, and I tapped into the ship on my beltcomp. I wasn't really surprised to see the log empty for the last three weeks, that was expected for this kind of mission. I was slightly more surprised to see the automatically recorded navigation journal also blanked. The same was true of the engine logs. As I tabbed through Elektra's records more and more information was missing. There was only one person who had the access codes to do that. Me.

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 checked 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."

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 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 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 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 chest, 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.

Honor is satisfied. I found myself shaking, light-headed and nauseous at once.

"We have to get out of here." Opal brought me back to the here-and-now.

I looked up. Three men and a kzin were dead and there was blood everywhere. I was soaked in it myself, and I'd just killed the most powerful man in the Belt. It was definitely not a good time to be me.

"There's a ship here somewhere. I saw the shiplock."

"Reston's courier. I know where it is."

We went straight to the docking bay through the dimly lit tunnels, once having to slip past a lit office where someone was working late on some Consortium project which I had probably just rendered irrelevant by killing Jameson. The ship lock was deserted. Jameson's ship was a converted Hawk-class courier, immaculately maintained, with Lightning scribed on her bow above her registration numbers. Inside she was appointed to a level that went beyond luxury into hubris. With hands both bloody and trembling I preflighted her. I did it in record time; the bloodbath in the airlock might be discovered at any moment, and I wanted to be well away from Ceres when that happened, preferably well away from Sol System. The lock pumped down while I ran the checklist, and by the time I was done the doors were sliding open.

I lifted out and called departure control, trying to keep my voice level. They laconically granted me boost clearance. I wasted no time pivoting the thrusters and shoving the throttles forward. Lightning responded with smooth, even power, and I realized then that I was abandoning Elektra. I would never be back to Ceres now; I was a marked man. Elektra would sit in the docking bay until she was sold to cover my debts. My future, whatever it was, lay in the new colonies, worlds where a good pilot with a good ship counted for more than Sol System justice. That hurt. A singleship pilot and his ship have a bond, an understanding, a kind of love that transcends the gap between man and machine. You can't understand that if you haven't felt it. Elektra was alive to me, and abandoning her hurt. I took a deep breath, punched in a course for the singularity's edge, and engaged it. The ship surged as the starfield tilted and then we were on our way. I had no other option, and at that I was paying less for my freedom than Bodyguard had. Sometimes being an independent has its downsides.

Opal Stone came into the cockpit. She'd cleaned herself up, replaced her blood soaked clothing with a utilitarian jumpsuit. She looked tired but something had changed, a tension had left her face, and I realized that it had always been there.

"Let me look at that." She took the cockpit medpack from its clips and fussed over my wounded shoulder with saline and sterile swabs and sprayskin. I'd forgotten all about it. It wasn't bad, but it began to throb painfully as the adrenaline wore off.

She was very beautiful. I let her keep fussing, watching the eternal stars. The future was out there.