Man-Kzin Wars XII by Larry Niven (books you have to read .TXT) 📕

"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