John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline

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 lightheaded. "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.

"Just a minute. I'll do it." She heard him muttering to himself, then a cry of triumph. "There. They're all reading zero. Did that do it?"

"I'll know in a minute. Now we've got to think fast. Neither of us wants to fall into the thing. You're going to have to move the ship a little farther out. Vejay said the gravity field of a hole is very weak at just a small distance, but it increases sharply the closer you get to it. I'll be all right. But you have to save the ship so we can get back and—"

"It's too late for that. I didn't have time to tell you, but the pilot talked to Poseidon before I gassed him. They know we've taken over. They'll be waiting for us. It's no good, Lilo." She could hear him choking. Oh, God. Vejay and Niobe and Cass, waiting outside on the chance Lilo and Cathay would return in control of the tug...

"Cathay, we talked about that. They know what to do. If they're suspected of anything, they'll hole up with Cass and wait it out. We've got to get away now, so we can come back with some weapons we can use ."

"You're right. We—"

Everything seemed to happen at once. There was a bright flash behind Lilo. She started to turn, thought better of it. It had to be Vaffa impacting the hole, being condensed by the awful gravity into degenerate matter, releasing all the energy stored in the atoms of his body as raw radiation.

That was bad enough, but ahead of her the tug was moving. A thin spear of light shot from it, angled away from her, and the engines continued to burn.

Jupiter had swallowed up the sky. It was beautiful. Even knowing it would be her death, Lilo had to admit that. And she preferred it to the hole, though her death would not be as quick.

From the time two hours earlier when the tug's autopilot had performed its preset maneuver (the details, the endless details; how could she have thought of them all?), Lilo had been overcome with a paralyzing lethargy, a certainty of death. Not that she hadn't struggled against it; she and Cathay had talked over every possible chance of escape. But when the background of stars began to swing around her in a direction she could account for in only one way, she knew her fate was sealed. She had missed the hole, but not by enough.

Vaffa had missed it, too, but by an even smaller margin. His body had come close enough to be compressed into a speck too small to see except for the light of its annihilation. It lasted only a second, then dispersed into space.

Lilo had not come that close. A hole could be a dangerous thing, though not so much from the danger of falling into it. That was very unlikely, since it was so tiny and the space she floated in was so vast. But a near-miss could be fatal. The strength of the gravity field changed sharply as one neared the hole. If Lilo had fallen into a close, hyperbolic orbit around it, the tidal strains induced by the hole's gravity attracting different parts of her body with varying strength would have torn her apart. Or if she came close enough, as Vaffa had done, the gravity could collapse her body to a pinhead-sized mass of neutronium.

She had been lucky, in a way, but not lucky enough. She would remain far enough away from it to stay alive, but she was definitely in a slow orbit around it.