The Man-Kzin Wars 12 mw-12

by Matthew Joseph Harrington

  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.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: fbd-fef31d-0864-3d4a-b89b-1282-2208-f027ff

  Document version: 1.1

  Document creation date: 15.12.2010

  Created using: Fiction Book Designer, FB Editor v2.3 software

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  v1.1 - вычитка, KillerBeer, 21.10.2011

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