The Ophiuchi Hotline (12 page)

“It’s repulsive,” she said. She wondered if she was going to throw up.

Cass grimaced. “Yeah. I know what you mean. I got them when I was younger and now I don’t know what to do with them. I can’t just kill them; it wouldn’t feel right.”

“Tweed lets you…”

“We can order stuff sometimes. The kits to build these were in the supplies from Luna a few years back. All the kids made them. I wish I’d asked for cat eggs instead.”

Lilo was feeling dizzy now. There was a sense of disorientation, and a growing feeling of
déjà vu.
She tried to force the memory, but it wouldn’t come. Yet it was building inside her, and wouldn’t be stopped.

“They can’t live outside the jar,” Cass was saying. “Special soil, or something, so if they get loose they
can’t turn into a pest. I don’t guess they’ll last much…hey, are you all right?”

“Just be quiet a minute, please? Don’t say anything.” She continued to stare at the tiny prisoners. Was it just the fact of their confinement? She didn’t see how that could bother her so badly. She never liked to see things caged, had always avoided working with living specimens for that very reason. But that couldn’t account for a reaction like this.

She went back in time, several years earlier. She knew she had looked into a bottle just like this one, at a colony of sugar babies. One time…no, twice. Wait. She was sure it had happened to her three times. Standing there, staring…

Numbers began to tumble through her head. She could see them as if they were solid objects with dimensions and mass. She began to remember.

“I helped make these,” she said, softly.

“What?”

“I was on the research team that first developed this strain of ant. It was twenty-five years ago, I was working for Copernicus Biological Labs. There was me, and Thessa, and Zaire and…and Yao-kaha. My name’s on the patent. They were a big hit for a year, they sold very well, and—” She choked it off. Cass waited silently beside her, looking worried.

Her stomach was feeling better, and the numbers were still there.

“It was a big problem,” she said, as if reading from a book. “The base in the Rings was no good to me if I could tell someone where it was under interrogation. And yet I couldn’t just leave it there. I had to be able to find it if I was not arrested. I had to know and yet not know.”

“What are you talking about?” Cass said. “Lilo, you’re giving me the—”

“Deep hypnotic suggestion,” she said, as if she had not heard him. “I didn’t know what I’d be up against in prison. I had to have it buried so deeply that I could die and never remember it, never know it was even there. I
couldn’t trust anyone to feed me the hypnotic trigger, and yet the location had to be recoverable if I wasn’t arrested. So I set up the trigger stimulus keyed to something that I would encounter more or less at random. But not too often. I couldn’t go through this every day, or even every week. It happened three times in five years. Each time I buried the knowledge again.”

“The sugar babies made you remember something?”

She looked at the creatures again. The choice had been apt. Pitiful little things. Did they try to get out of their bottle? She could not have known she would survive her own execution when she was making her plans, and it had been sheer luck to encounter the sugar babies on Poseidon. But she knew.

“I know. I know where it is.”

The rumors had been going around for a month; there was finally going to be a trial run, an actual test of one of the possible weapons in the war with the Invaders. When Lilo heard what it was to be, she could not credit it. Surely Tweed would not do
that.

But shortly it was official. Everyone was worried, but no one could think of a way to stop it. Tweed was going to remove the black hole from the other side of Poseidon, let it pass
through
Jupiter, then sit back and see if there was any reaction. The general consensus on Poseidon was that if there was a reaction, it would not be necessary to radio the news to Tweed. The whole system would hear about it soon enough.

Lilo talked it over with Niobe and Vejay, then spent hours with Cass and Cathay. They were all frightened. The question Lilo wanted to resolve was what approach to take. Cathay felt that any attempt to stop the project would be suicide, and said the best they could do was hope the Invaders would ignore it. After all, it was a big planet. It might not hit any of them on the way through.

Lilo strongly disagreed, and was backed up by Niobe, Vejay, and Cass.

“You know what I think?” Lilo asked. “I think the time is never going to be better to try and take over Poseidon.”

She waited for the reaction to die down. She was breathing hard, determined to get her point across. If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself. She did not wish to die, and what she was proposing looked dangerous, even to her.

“What I’m saying is, what better time is there to go for broke than when it looks like the alternative might be just as bad? I’m willing to take the chance. What about you?”

The discussion went on into the night, and proved inconclusive. The best Lilo could get was an agreement to discuss the situation further, and pledges of support if she could come up with a plan.

She had one, but it was barely formed. It would have to depend on circumstances as they evolved, but it seemed as though the first necessary step in any plan was to be aboard the ship which would position the hole for its drop into Jupiter. If she could do that, there was time to think of a way to steal the ship and return for the others.

So she approached Vaffa about the possibility of using the ship for the launching of another biological probe. She argued that it would make sense to combine the two missions. The electromagnetic tug could first release the hole on a course to pass through the center of Jupiter, then make a slight trajectory change to position an instrument package for an atmosphere-grazing path.

After conferring with her clones and consulting the guidelines Tweed had given them, Vaffa okayed the project. Lilo said that she would need someone to help her, and suggested Vejay. Vaffa quickly vetoed him, on the grounds that he did not have a good reputation. Lilo hastily named Cathay as an alternative. She didn’t want Vaffa thinking there was an escape being planned.

She was counting on the fact that, while Tweed might know very well what she would do in terms of planning and preparation, he could not predict how she might react when confronted with an unplanned opportunity. Her policy was to put herself in a place where such an opportunity might occur.

She told Vejay to come up with a means whereby Cathay could kill or disable the pilot of the tug, and, with any luck, take control of the ship. She intentionally made no plans to get rid of Vaffa. Not only did it seem impossible, but she was convinced that planning had to work against her rather than for her. The whole thing would have to be played by ear. She would get onto the ship and remain alert for an opening.

She did her best not to think about it much, because when she did it sounded insane.

Tweed surprised them all, and almost ruined everything. The conspirators assembled hastily when Lilo got the news of what was actually going to happen.

“That’s what comes of relying on rumors,” Niobe said.

“We should have thought of it,” Vejay complained. “We would have been hard up for power here if he’d used our black hole. The standby fusion generator would have carried us, but it would have been tight.”

“I just didn’t think he cared enough to worry about that,” Niobe said.

What Tweed had done was to buy a second hole on the open market at Pluto. It was on its way to Luna to become the ninth orbital power station, but what no one in authority knew was that Tweed planned to pass it through Jupiter before that happened.

It was neat, it was economical; it was typically Tweed. Whenever possible he carried out more than one plan of action with every move he made. The hole, in orbit around Luna, would be enormously profitable to him, so the expense of the project would be justified and absorbed. The huge electromagnetic tug which had accelerated the hole at Pluto would let it go on one side of Jupiter, wait for it to pass through, and pick it up on the other side.

Lilo pointed out to Vaffa that it would still be possible to use the small rocket scooter based on Poseidon to rendezvous with the larger ship as it passed them. Vaffa thought it over, and eventually agreed. The
Vaffas might have suspected some sort of plot, but felt secure enough about the scooter. It had the peculiar property of exploding if it passed a certain distance from the gravity well of Jupiter: another of the innumerable precautions against escape.

The scooter was a standard model, little more than an engine with a framework of seats attached. Three of the four seats were filled with silvery bodies as Vaffa matched velocity with the mammoth tug.

They had come in laterally from the front, allowing the tug to catch up with them. None of them wanted to get anywhere near the aft end of the other ship. Somewhere back there, suspended by invisible lines of magnetic force, was a black hole smaller than a pinhead but massing as much as a medium-sized asteroid. It would not do to get too close to it.

Lilo was trying to juggle all the factors in her head, looking for the chance which, when it came, might last only a fraction of a second. One crew member in the tug. Vaffa the only one in communication with him. The homemade gas capsule hidden in the atmosphere probe, the probe strapped to the outside of the scooter. Vaffa’s weapon strapped to his side. Times and courses: twenty minutes to castoff, when the tug would let go of the hole and pull away from it; thirty minutes to the course change that would put the probe on the right trajectory to graze the Jovian atmosphere.

Cathay was to try to get into the tug first—the lock would take only one person at a time. After that, it was up to him. If he gassed the man inside, they were committed to trying to overpower Vaffa. They might do it, with the help of surprise.

Ten meters away, Vaffa cast a magnetic line to the tug and warped the scooter in close. The three of them jumped free and began to lash the scooter. Lilo saw Cathay move toward the compartment where the gas bomb was hidden, and tried to get between him and Vaffa.

“I know what you’re doing,” Vaffa said quietly.

“Inspection,” Lilo said, desperately. “We have to—”

“Let me see that.” He was reaching for his laser.

Lilo put one foot on the scooter and dived at him. Her head hit him in the stomach, doubling him up. She saw the laser swing by her face, his grip loosened for a moment. She chopped at his wrist, and the gun fell away from them, spinning free.

“The lock!” she cried. “Get in the lock! Hurry!” She couldn’t see if Cathay was moving. Vaffa swung at her chin, but the force of his blow turned his body enough so that he missed her. It had been instinctive, but the wrong thing to do in weightlessness. He saw his mistake and was about to switch tactics when he realized he had moved out of reach of the ship and scooter. He grabbed for Lilo’s foot as it came by him, just as she reached for a strut on the scooter. He pulled, she kicked, and her hand lost its grip. The two of them drifted away from the scooter, not fast, but there was no way back under their own power. Unless…

Lilo kicked again, hitting him in the jaw. He hung on desperately until she had to stop because she was no longer facing the ship. Her idea was to push him from her and get back that way. But he saw it, too, and as soon as she stopped kicking he started to climb her leg. In another second he would be pushing
her
away from the ship.

She kicked again, shaking him back to her ankle, and kept on kicking, this time with both feet. His ribs seemed to crunch under her heel as she connected. Savagely, she aimed for the same spot again. He doubled over in pain, and his hand released her. She was floating free, spinning very slowly.

It didn’t look too bad, if Cathay could get control of the ship. She saw Vaffa turning end over end at about one revolution per second, then she spotted the tug. She had drifted about fifty meters away from it. It was impossible to tell yet which way she was moving.

Then she heard Vaffa calling the ship.

“Cathay! He’s talking to the pilot. You’ve got to get
him before he can call back to Poseidon and tell them what’s happened, or…” She stopped, realizing he wouldn’t be able to hear her if he was in the ship and in a position to do anything about it. If he wasn’t in the ship, it was all over anyway.

Three long minutes dragged by. The only thing Lilo learned for sure was that she was not getting closer to the ship. She was moving away. And she didn’t care for the direction, either. Ahead of her, Jupiter was growing, filling the sky with the round circle of the tug exactly centered in it, seen from the stern. Somewhere in the direction she was moving was a black hole.

“You’ll get there first,” she yelled, feeling light-headed. “How does it feel, Vaffa?”

There was no reply for a while. The voice that finally came was strained, full of pain.

“Why did you do it?”

“I don’t think I could explain it to you. But it almost worked. Still might. I’ve got my fingers crossed.”

There was no answer. Lilo thought she heard a moan. In a few seconds she was sure of it. There was an incoherent noise that stood her hair on end even after she had identified it. It was a subvocalized scream, picked up by the voder in Vaffa’s throat and amplified as sheer agony. Then silence. Lilo began to worry. She hadn’t hit him
that
hard.

“Lilo? Can you hear me? Are you alive?”

“Yes, I’m here! You got in!”

“It took me a while to get my radio tuned to the suit frequency.
Damn
, I wish it was you in here. All these buttons scare me.” They had trained him for hours on mock-ups Vejay had built. He could punch in a course, if it came to that, and as long as nothing went wrong he could fly it.

“Never mind about that. You’ve got to cut the hole loose, and fast. I think Vaffa’s dead, and I’m afraid what killed him was the magnetic field interfering with his suit generator. I’m not enough of a physicist to know just what a powerful magnetic field can do, but it didn’t sound pleasant. Can you…I mean, in a
hurry
,
you understand? I don’t know how long it will be—” She stopped herself when she realized she was panicking.