The Ophiuchi Hotline (23 page)

“About a hundred years ago, we began to notice a few things. It was only after many years that we were able to be sure of them. It’s hard to get reliable time-checks at the speeds we operate at, and it takes a long time to cross-check all the data. But now we’re sure.

“A laser signal is a cone. It’s a very narrow one, but it does have an apex at the end of the laser, and it spreads very slowly the farther it goes. We began to notice a parallax shift. At one edge of the cone, the signal seemed to come from one side of 70 Ophiuchi, then when you got to the other side, it had shifted. We began to plot the lines that define the outer surface of the cone. Other evidence backed us up: the cross-section size of the cone at various points, and the rate of drop-off of signal strength. It all indicated one thing: The Hotline doesn’t originate at 70 Ophiuchi at all, but from some place about one-half light-year from the sun, in the
direction
of 70 Ophiuchi. And that’s not likely to be an accident. They wanted us to think they were that far away. Which brings up all sorts of interesting possibilities.”

“I need to make a radio call,” Vaffa said. She sounded subdued.

“I thought you might. Let’s see if I have Boss Tweed’s phone number here in my files….”

Vaffa looked down at Lilo and Cathay. Lilo was about to protest, but Javelin interrupted her.

“They didn’t tell me anything. I checked your phone records before you came aboard, and you’ve made a lot of calls to Luna. I was sure you were a Free Earther, and you proved it a few minutes ago. Now you’re slavering to have someone tell you what to do, so you don’t have to think. Who else would you be calling but Boss Tweed?”

“That’s none of your business,” Vaffa yelled. “Now you put me through. We chartered this ship, and—”

“And has it occurred to you that you shouldn’t talk to your captain that way? In case you hadn’t noticed, I am in
complete
control of this ship. You can’t even enter the bridge; your pointy head would make it, but not your shoulders. This ship goes where I want it to go, and you will watch your mouth if you want the oxygen ratio in your room to stay the same.”

Lilo was on her feet now, and she dug Vaffa hard in
the ribs. She got away with it, which was a measure of how much the other woman had learned in the last month.

“We really do have to check back, though,” Cathay said, reasonably. “You’re talking about vastly increased expenses, and none of us has the money for that. Tweed would have to authorize it.”

“You’re right, and you’re wrong,” Javelin said, calmly. “Understand that your situation has changed completely. I know why
she
is along.” She made a face. “She’s loyal to Tweed. You two don’t seem to be, if my instincts are worth anything. I assume he has some hold over you. Well, that’s over. I don’t condone slavery, and I won’t take orders from a man six billion kilometers away. You will call Tweed, but you won’t ask him for anything. You will
tell
him this. Pay attention now; I don’t want to repeat.

“‘The
Cavorite
is headed for the Hotline sending station.’ Here you can insert the explanation I just gave you. He’s bright; he should understand. ‘Expenses for this trip will be about four hundred times the figure originally discussed. A drone tanker is now departing the catapult head on Pluto, and will soon start to accelerate at nine gees. As you know, these ships are not recoverable; hence the drastic increase in expenses. It will rendezvous with us in about twenty million seconds. Without it, of course, we would have fuel to reach the station, but not to return.

“‘If you, Tweed, wish to be represented on this expedition, you will cause to be deposited in my account in the Bank of Lowell a sum which my bankers have already communicated to you. Should you not desire to pay, your interest in this expedition will be considered terminated. The ship will go on as planned, underwritten by the Holehunters Trade Association of Lowell, a fact which you are free to check. And your agent, Vaffa, will be put out the lock and invited to walk back. Signed, your obedient, humble former slaves, et cetera, et cetera.”’

“You can’t do that!” The veins were standing out on

Vaffa’s neck. Her clenched fists were bleeding. Cathay seemed delighted, and Lilo wanted to allow herself the euphoria she felt, but knew she wasn’t home free yet. Carefully, gently, she stroked Vaffa’s shoulder. If the woman exploded now, it could be fatal.

“Listen to me, Vaffa,” she whispered. “You’ve got to do what’s best for the Boss, don’t you? Don’t do that!
Let go of me!
” The grip on her arm loosened for a moment. Cathay had come over and put his head close to theirs.

“She’s right,” he said. “Don’t lose your temper. Think it out. Sure, she’s got the Boss over a barrel, but she’s offering him a good deal. She’ll
kill
you if you can’t learn to live with this, and then the Boss is
never
going to get out to the Ophiuchites and find out what he wants to—”

“She couldn’t kill me! That freakish, puny little—”

“Think about what you’re saying, Vaffa. This is her ship. You can’t even get into her
room.
You don’t have a weapon, and there’s no telling what she might have. She even beat you bare-handed. You’re going to have to swallow your pride and admit it. You’ve got to do this for Tweed, remember, for the Boss.”

Slowly, painfully, Vaffa released her grip on Lilo’s arm. Her shoulders slumped, and she sank slowly to the deck with her head on her hands. Lilo glanced up at the screen and the impassive face. She went out into the corridor, up the ladder, and into the solarium. A screen came to life, close to her feet. She looked down at Javelin’s face.

“I want to thank you,” she said, and felt tears coming to her eyes. She didn’t bother wiping them away.

“It’s okay. The situation had to be resolved.”

“It isn’t, not yet. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I…it occurs to me that you could space all of us. After you’ve got the money.”

Javelin shrugged. “I won’t. It’s a chance you’ll have to take. I’m not above pulling a fast one to save myself some money—no holehunter ever is. Stinginess is second nature to us. But I won’t break a bargain. I con-

traded to take you there, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Why?”

Javelin looked a little embarrassed. “Well, we’re going to meet some aliens, maybe. I guess I do have a little loyalty to the human race. It didn’t seem right to go alone; I thought I ought to take a cross-section of the race, if I could.”

Lilo laughed. “A holehunter, a killer, a disbarred teacher, and a condemned criminal.”

“Is that what you are? You’ll have to tell me all about it one of these days. We’ll have plenty of time.”

Lilo choked up. She
did
want to talk about it. She hadn’t been able to bring it up with Cathay; maybe Javelin would be the person.

“What about Vaffa?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll take her along if she behaves. But I won’t feel I’ve broken the contract with Tweed if I have to destroy her like a mad dog, as a menace to the safety of the ship.”

“That’s it. I’m worried about her. She’s not good with abstractions. I can explain to her that being good, not causing trouble, is what the Boss would want her to do. Otherwise, you kill her and Tweed loses out. Damn! Why should I be trying to save her life? She’s threatened to kill me many times. She’s killed two of my clones.”

“All you’d have to do to kill her,” Javelin observed, “is to leave things alone. She’d clash with me, and that would be it, right?”

“I think so.” Lilo sighed. “I don’t know if it’s that I hate to see anyone killed, or if I’m afraid I might get killed before you got rid of her. Anyway, it’s an explosive situation. Here’s what I want. I don’t think Vaffa’s capable of disobeying a direct order from Tweed. I want to add a demand to your list. He must order her not to harm you, or me, or Cathay. She’s to be relieved of her duties guarding us. He must impress on her that she is his only representative on the ship, that it’s all in her hands. She’s got to live to report back to him, and to do that she must live peacefully with us.”

“Done. Will that work?”

“I’m sure of it. It will settle her mind, make her accept it. And Tweed will go along. He won’t be happy, but he doesn’t have much choice, does he?”

“That’s how I saw it,” Javelin said smugly.

Lilo smiled, and finally dared to let herself believe she was free. She was cooped up on this ship, but she was
free.

“How long will we be gone, by the way?” she asked.

“The trip will take about three hundred million seconds, going out.”

“Would you mind putting that into standard Earth months?”

“About one hundred and twenty. Twenty years, round trip.”

We could have made the trip to Poseidon much faster than we did. Even hauling my entire Ring base, that tug Cathay stole had plenty of power; it was built to shove quantum black holes around with a minimum of fuss.

But the whole stunt depended on arriving at Poseidon at exactly the right time, coming from just the right angle. We were constrained by the relative positions of Jupiter and Saturn at the time of departure, the orbital speed of Poseidon, and its rotation rate.

I had never bothered to give my rock hideaway a name. As we neared Poseidon and cut in the tug’s engines again to get the rock up to speed, Cathay named it
Vengeance.

They were hanging motionless relative to Poseidon, about fifty kilometers away. Without magnification it appeared as a small, irregular patch of gray, but on Lilo’s screen it could be seen in more detail. It was dark and jagged, and coming around the horizon was a small cup with a fierce blue light in it.

Lilo thought back to the last time she had seen Parameter/Solstice. She had wanted them to come along, but it was obviously out of the question. If she and Cathay were successful with what they were about to do, there would be no time for dropping Parameter off
anywhere; they would have to leave the system quickly. But Lilo wished they could have been with her to see their plan work.

If it worked, she reminded herself, swallowing nervously.

“Ten seconds,” Lilo called out. She was wired into the computer, monitoring its performance through the cameras on
Vengeance.
She could feel the tiny bursts from the steering rockets as the guidance program made fine adjustments to the course. Now the target was coming up at blinding speed, made accessible to Lilo’s senses only through the computer link. She got a glimpse of silver, then the impact destroyed the camera.

“A hit,” she said quietly. She pulled the computer cord from the socket in her head.

Vengeance
had gone into the nullfield bowl that contained the black hole. In a fraction of a second the mass of rock was churned into a mixture of lava, hot gas, and plasma. It splashed.

Immediately, the hole began to devour it. The gravity gradient quickly collapsed the matter close to the hole and began to pull it down the bottomless pit, releasing energy as it was compressed. As matter was destroyed, more moved in, but was pushed away by the pressure of the reactions happening just outside the vent horizon. There was a huge explosion, and ninety percent of the mass of
Vengeance
was blown free of the combined gravity of Poseidon and the hole. What was left began to collapse again.

None of this made any difference to the hemisphere of the nullfield. It was proof against anything the human race had yet been able to produce. The impact of
Vengeance
had no effect on it.

But Lilo watched very closely to see how the electromagnetic field generators were withstanding the strain. The one wild card in Parameter’s equation was the generators. They were already supporting the mass of the hole. What could not be known for sure was whether they would hold up under the sudden acceleration
caused by the impact. If they failed, the hole would start to drift downward, quickly destroying the nullfield generator beneath it. With the field off, the hole would drift through Poseidon as if it were empty space, and they would have to try to recover it on the other side.

“I don’t see any movement, do you?” Lilo asked.

“No. It seems to be holding.”

There were more explosions, coming only a few seconds apart, until the molten remains of the rock had rid itself of enough mass to reach stability. Now it was a tightly packed white-hot star, brighter than the surface of the sun, and only about a meter in diameter.

“Let the astronomers wonder about
that
for a while,” Lilo said, and turned on the radio. “Can you hear me down there? Vaffa, Vaffa, are you listening?”

There was no answer for a while, and Lilo kept repeating herself until a male voice came over the radio.

“Who is calling?”

“This is Lilo, returned from the dead. And Cathay is with me. We brought back your ship, along with a present. You felt it coming in a few minutes ago. Is anyone hurt?”

“I don’t know,” Vaffa said, impatiently.

Lilo understood that he really didn’t care, either. She shivered. It was her first contact with Vaffa.

“Just what did you hope to accomplish, anyway? You must have known you couldn’t kill us with whatever you did. The best you could hope for was to entomb a few of us—which you did—but our suits will protect us until we can dig out. Which we are doing.” The voice was imperious, used to being obeyed, but there was a note of uncertainty.

“He’s damn sure you’re not that dumb,” Cathay said, with satisfaction. “Sometimes it doesn’t help your nerves to know a lot about someone.”

“I hope so,” Lilo whispered. Then, into the mike: “What we accomplished is to push Poseidon out of its orbit. That’s done, and it’s too late to do anything about it. It was spectacular, let me tell you. In a few minutes people all over the system will be wondering
what’s going on out here. Does that suggest anything to you?”

There was silence from the other end.

“Before you run off to consult with the Boss, there’s some things he needs to know. The way we figure it is simple. Everyone’s going to wonder what’s going on out here, but they’ll figure it’s Invaders up to something. This is Jupiter, after all. They won’t dare send anyone to investigate. You can see if Tweed agrees with that.”