Deadman Switch by Timothy Zahn

teeth and swung my legs out of bed. I knew myself far too well to let this slide. In my mind’s eye still lingered a dark, irrational terror: the Bellwether, helpless, stranded somewhere out in deep space, light-years from Solitaire.
    You will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free …
    Fortunately, in this case truth was easy to obtain. Padding the two steps to my lounge desk, I picked up my control stick and flopped down into the contour couch. “Wall: front view,” I called, activating the computer. Ahead of me, the pastel blue stateroom wall faded into the black of space—
    I took a deep breath, the knots in stomach and psyche dissolving. Off to the left, blazing an artificially muted light against the scattering of stars, was Solitaire’s sun.
    I watched it for a moment, then turned my attention to the rest of the skyscape, searching for Solitaire itself. It was easy to find: a small crescent, just below and to the right of center, with an identical crescent a few degrees away. We’d come space-normal practically on top of it, astronomically speaking. Incredible precision, especially coming from a possessed dead man—
    I shook the thought away. “Wall: grid,” I called. The faint red grid lines appeared— “Wall: section fifty-six: magnification one thousand.”
    The picture jumped, enlarging to fill the wall with the two crescents. Solitaire and Spall, all right—the one known exception to the usual rule that double planets were terrible real estate for humans to dig into. Vaguely, I remembered reading somewhere that both of these worlds were habitable, though the specific reasons why Solitaire had been chosen over Spall eluded me. For the moment, though, I didn’t care. The crisis was over, we’d made it through the Cloud, and with luck I could finally relax enough to get to sleep. I started to ease out of the couch—
    And paused. As long as I was up anyway … “Wall: locate Collet,” I ordered. “Magnification, quarter-fill.”
    There was a brief pause as the computer searched for the gas giant and calculated the magnification needed to make the image the size I’d asked for. Then the twin crescents disappeared … and despite knowing what to expect I very nearly gasped out loud.
    Not at the planet itself, of course. Filling a quarter of the wall as per request, Collet’s hazy green/gray surface was delicately but unspectacularly banded in the normal pattern of gas giants everywhere. At both its poles was an almost cream-colored haze, while at a dozen spots to either side of its equator I could pick out the spiral patterns of huge hurricane storms, some of which had been raging since the first colonists arrived in the system seventy years ago. Perfectly standard planet … until you looked at its rings.
    Not the usual gas giant rings, puny circles of dust and ice flakes invisible to all but the most careful observer. These rings literally filled what was left of the wall, stretching outward nearly from the planet’s surface in a thousand milky-white bands.
    Nowhere in any of the Patri or colony systems did such an anomaly of nature exist, and it had been speculated more than once that if travel to Solitaire weren’t so restricted Collet would be a major tourist attraction. Only Saturn, in the old Earth system, could even approach this sight, and those few observers who’d seen both ring systems up close unanimously considered Collet’s far more dramatic.
    Far more dramatic … and incredibly more valuable.
    I gazed at the view for a long time, an odd melancholy filling me. It seemed wrong, somehow, for so exquisitely beautiful a creation of God to be ultimately responsible for the Deadman Switch and the human lives that went to feed it. Even from this distance, the computer could probably get a fairly clear look at one of the huge Rockhound 606 mining platforms out there, sweeping