Sagittarius Whorl

by Julian May

  What an idiot I was.

  Chapter 6

  Tony Becker, Rampart Vice President for Biotechnology, was an ultraefficient executive and a fine scientist who didn't suffer fools—or cowboys—gladly. He was scrupulously upright, loyal, hardworking, and couldn't stand the sight of a certain flamboyant black-sheep lawyer who used his family name and fortune to make political waves.

  Tony was also the only one I would have trusted to put together my Barky bait.

  When I coerced him into cooperating with me, I made it clear that I needed the crucial materials no later than 0400 hours on Wednesday morning, the day I intended to leave Earth from Oshawa Starport. Tony grudgingly promised to meet the deadline but said he'd probably have to bring the trade goods to the Rampart pilot's lounge at the last minute.

  The starport serving the Human Commonwealth capital had such heavy traffic that landings and departures were firmed up two days ahead of time. To keep Haluk agents off balance, I planned to usurp the liftoff slot of another Rampart ship scheduled to depart at 0440. It was a fairly common ploy of impatient VIP executives. The bumped vessel would be banished to the end of the line and endure a forty-eight-hour delay. Taking its place, Makebate would be entered into the starport computer record only at the last minute.

  Promptly at four in the morning I sat alone in Rampart's pilot lounge in the central module of the lake-island platform, waiting for Tony. Through the observation window I could see the cloudy sky brightening in the east. Every few minutes a massive starship lofted silently off one of the thirty-six floating cradles that encircled the tower structure, then vanished into the overcast under sublight drive.

  Makebate was on the conveyor already, moving along the underwater tunnel from our shoreside maintenance facility to her designated cradle. At 0430 I'd have to be on her flight deck, going through the final checklist of procedures for liftoff, or else forfeit my slot.

  The wall chronometer showed 0410 hours, and still no Tony Becker. I couldn't believe the prickly bastard would screw me, but it wouldn't be any surprise if he shaved the time to the bone just to make me squirm.

  Phone him? Nope. I just cursed and waited.

  At 0415 the pork sausage patties, scrambled eggs, and fried tomatoes Karl had given me for breakfast did a fandango in my gut. For some reason, the notion of postponing the Phlegethon trip for two days was unthinkable. If the Biotech vice president didn't show, I'd leave without the trade goods and think up a new way to entice my quarry into range. As for Tony Becker... would I really have him fired if he failed me, as I'd threatened? Would I dismiss a valued Rampart executive, a tireless charity fund-raiser, a devout churchgoer, a staunch family man, merely because he'd refused to be an accomplice in my cockamamie scheme?

  You're damned right I would.

  But he strolled into the pilot lounge at 0419, blase as you please. I climbed to my feet and said, "Hey, Tony. Almost missed you."

  Becker was a round-faced blond man in his late thirties who wore a white track suit that was not only immaculately clean, but pressed. He looked at me as though I were something that needed scraping off his pristine athletic shoes, then thrust a padded fabric lunch pak into my hands. It was the kind of thing small children took to school, imprinted with images of the cartoon character Daffy Duck.

  "Here," he said snippily. "One of my kids contributed the deceptive packaging. Do you have any idea how tough it was to get this material put together? You'd better be damned sure nobody ever traces this unethical stunt of yours back to me."

  The Daffy pack contained only two items. One was a semiobsolete Macrodur magslate with a chipped case and a dirty screen. The other item was an important-looking little technical container about the size of a sandwich box that had built-in refrigeration and self-destruct units and biohazard symbols stuck on all sides. I tipped it carefully out of the pack onto a coffee table.

  "Here's the key." Tony handed me a dime.

  Inside the box were six smaller self-refrigerating biocontainers nested in contour padding. I opened one and found a sealed, unlabeled vial nearly full of viscous purplish liquid.

  Tony Becker said, "The viral vector is the real thing, with an admixture of harmless contaminants and stain in the culture to make it look exotic. It'll pass any test. The slate contains a complicated production protocol that I faked up, using data from our own Spur factories, and translated into Joru. It'll serve your purposes. However, I should warn y»u that a really competent biotechnician will probably suspect that the alien manufacturing procedures are bogus. They're too efficient."

  "That's okay," I said, "so long as the vector itself passes muster."

  "I told you it would, didn't I?" Tony snapped.

  I handed him a plastic card. It represented five hundred shares of Rampart Preferred, signed over from my personal stakeholding. "A tangible token of my appreciation, as I promised. But perhaps your tender conscience won't allow you to accept a bribe."

  I swear that he hissed at me. Then he snatched the card, shoved it into his belt wallet and stomped off, leaving me grinning. I took a last look at the small vial before putting it away with the others. What looked like runny grape jelly was actually the genetic engineering vector PD32:C2. Barky Tregarth would be led to believe the vials were samples— from a brand new source of the invaluable virus located on a Joru planet.

  I locked up the container, slung the Daffy pack over my shoulder, and dashed to the transporter. I arrived at Makebate's cradle with two whole minutes to spare.

  The early part of my voyage to Phlegethon was spent in dress rehearsal for my upcoming role as a Joru. I strode masterfully about the cramped flight deck practicing xeno gestures, dressed in flowing black-and-white brocaded robes reminiscent of those worn by medieval Dominican friars, doing my best to convey the impression that I was a third of a meter taller and weighed an additional 45 kilos. (A few shrimpy Joru were my height, 193 cm.) My stage presence had to reflect the almighty chutzpah of a person who believed, as every supremely self-confident male Joru did, that the sun, moon, and stars shone out of his cloaca.

  The costume I had purchased at the Mississauga theatrical supply establishment recommended by Halimeda Opper was elaborate and expensive, intended for human actors impersonating Joru in close-up holo performances. The fabric and accessories seemed authentic at close inspection. My body, beneath the voluminous robes, was modified by a padded suit that gave it additional bulk in the right places. I also wore soft-armor longjohns and had additional armor in the hood of the costume. My hands were enclosed in six-fingered gloves—the prosthetic extra digits were even capable of movement—that simulated hairy orange paws adorned with heavy golden rings. I slipped small armor pads into the gloves to guard the backs of my hands.

  Disguising my head and face was trickier, requiring the use of recontouring makeup appliances, bulging faux eyes with vertical pupils, skin texturizer, and a bald cap sporting a knobby crest and tufts of apricot fur.

  Alien oxygen-concentrating equipment hid the lower part of my face—and made the entire impersonation feasible, since Joru had peculiar narrow jaws that were impossible to simulate on a normal human skull. The mask wasn't operational, of course. Instead it was fitted with a special internal translator device that modified my whispered utterances into the alien language and broadcast them through an annunciator at normal volume.

  I also wore an earpiece that would decipher Joru in case any member of that race tried to speak to me in the mother tongue. A second pendant-model translator, clipped to my collar in the usual fashion, could be activated to retranslate my Joru words back into appropriately florid Standard English; I wasn't a good enough actor to reproduce the mechanical idiom on my own.

  After getting my moves down pat and polishing my conversational candences, I used the ship's computer library to brush up my knowledge of Joru culture. I also created a personal legend that was loosely based on a Joru criminal I'd known in the old days.

  My new identity was that of Gulowjad
ipallu Gulow, a native of the planet Didiwa in Sector 7 in the inner Orion Arm. I had three wives, fourteen offspring, and a pet wulip back home. I was a professional middleman, an information broker, as were so many other members of my urbane and discreet race. I was semiretired, but still kept a paw in when a truly unique opportunity presented itself. Because I was rich and my time was so valuable, I traveled in a late model star-ship of human manufacture. No one at Phlegethon would scan it closely because I'd leave it in orbit, hidden in its impenetrable dissimulator field, and dock at the asteroid in my ordinary-looking ship's gig.

  With luck, minions of Ram Mahtani or other unfriendlies would never see through my elaborate camouflage; and Barky Tregarth, even forewarned and wary, wouldn't suspect my true identity until it was too late.

  Four days out of Earth, as I was traversing Red Gap, between the Orion Arm and Sagittarius, I picked up a distress call on the generalized subspace communication channel. At the time, Makebate was outside the normal shipping vectors, streaking through faintly glowing drifts of interstellar gases slightly below the galactic plane. There wasn't a star within 350 light-years, and no solid matter larger than a mouse turd within 100.

  The automated beacon-style subspace signal was so faint it almost missed me. But Makebate's gonzo receiving equipment managed to pull one of the flashes into dimensional focus, enabling us to lock on. I only hesitated for a moment before transmitting a beamed response.

  "Vessel in distress," I said, "do you copy on Channel 6113?"

  "... We copy on Channel 6113. Thank you for responding."

  The voice was human with a heavy ethnic accent, indicating that its owner was Earth-born and probably used his ancestral tongue at home in preference to Standard English. Lots of people were like that, defying the language police.

  My instrumentation showed that the com beam was very weak. The starship sending the SOS traveled anonymously, as was common in regions frequented by pirates. I, of course, was anonymous, too. My rangefinder placed the other ship 154 light-years away in the direction of the Sag, well out of scanner range.

  "State the nature of your emergency, vessel in distress," I said.

  "Responding starship, please identify yourself."

  The hell I would. With a focused SS com linkage established, the other ship could now calculate my hyperspatial pseudovector with precision. If it was an innocent, I'd do my best to help. If it was a trolling buccaneer playing games, attempting to entice me within striking distance, I'd teach it a painful lesson.

  I repeated, "Please state the nature of your emergency. My name is Hugo. I'm a human trader who prefers to remain incognito at this time." This was a coy admission that I was a smuggler. A few of them, like my pal Mimo Bermudez, were not entirely devoid of humane impulses. "I will attempt to contact Zone Patrol on your behalf if you wish."

  Abruptly, the vessel in distress deactivated its ID blank-out. The data display on my console showed its registration and ICS-approved itinerary. SBC-11942 was a Sheltok bulk trans-ack carrier en route from Shamiya in the Sag to the big fuel-plant complex on Lethe in Zone 8 of the Orion Arm.

  "Citizen Hugo, this is Ulrich Schmidt, master of the Sheltok Eblis. We are under attack by a fleet of sixteen bandits. Our ULD engines are disabled and we are operating under minimum subluminal drive—effectively dead in the void. Our AM torpedoes are exhausted. We have diverted nearly all remaining power to our defensive shields. Uh ... I estimate that we can hold out for two more hours, then we will have to surrender."

  "I understand. What can I do to help?"

  "The initial attack severely damaged our communication system. Our SS com input is too weak to reach Sheltok Fleet Security on Lethe or any of our Sagittarian units. We have also been unsuccessful in attempts to contact Zone Patrol. Please notify the patrol of our situation if you can."

  "I copy that and will comply, Captain Schmidt," I said. Then I added mendaciously: "My long-range scanner picked up a ZP heavy cruiser in my slice of hyperspace less than half an hour ago. It might be able to reach you in time to drive off the bandits. Do you have a racial ID on them?"

  "It's the verftuchte Haluk again! No doubt about it. I hoped to outwit them by vectoring below the galactic plane on this trip, but they found us anyhow. Twenty of the pig-dogs! I popped four with AM torpedos before they needled my engines."

  "Haluk? Are you sure of that identification, Cap'n?" I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice. The Barky Hunt had paid off already.

  "Of course I'm sure, du Scheisskopfl Do you think I'm the first carrier to be ambushed by these doppelgurkeri fuckers? They're bleeding Sheltok dry in Zones 3 and 4."

  "Well, that's a rotten shame, but it sure as hell ain't my fault."

  Schmidt was instantly contrite. "I'm sorry I lost my temper, Hugo. Please—if you aren't able to contact Zone Patrol within ... a viable time frame, then I request that you tell Lethe what happened to us, as soon as you are able to do so."

  "You just hang tough, pardner. I'll do my best to set the patrol onto those fuckin' blue scrotes. Good luck! Hugo out."

  "Thank you, Hugo. Sheltok Eblis is out."

  I'd lied to Schmidt just in case his emergency was a hoax. I hadn't scanned a ZP starship for over thirty hours, and that one had been back in Zone 8 of the Orion Arm, nearly 2,200 light-years away. The patrol has precious few high-ross vessels, and they use them to guard heavily traveled regular shipping lanes, not the godforsaken underbelly of Red Gap.

  But not to worry, Cap'n! Makebate could substitute nicely for a ZP heavy cruiser. And I was bored and ready for some Lone Ranger action.

  Roaring down the hype at max pseudovee, I arrived at the ambush scene well within Schmidt's estimated two-hour limit. Still, it was a near thing. The shields of the great eight-kilometer-long carrier were flickering crimson by then, and they wouldn't have held up much longer.

  The bandits were so intent on savaging Eblis that it took them forever to spot me coming at them from down under, among the dust clouds. When one of them finally scanned Makebate, the whole bunch broke off their bombardment, engaged ULD, and sheered away in sixteen different directions. They were driving speedy small starships that looked something like Bodascon Y600 knockoffs, ornamented with those odd cobalt-blue running lights the Haluk are fond of. They had plenty of horsepower to fly rings around a slow-moving leviathan like Eblis, but were hardly a match for my souped-up sled and its extravagant weapon systems.

  I played reasonably fair—aside from misrepresenting myself as Zone Patrol—sending warning shots from my actinic cannons at the Haluk ships and calling for them to throw in the towel or sincerely regret it. They kept running, most of them too panicked by my scary conformation and superior speed even to fire on me. I made a recording of each pirate ship's image and fuel signature before wasting it. It took me almost two hours to chase down the last of the sixteen, by which time I'd lost my appetite for one-sided combat—not that I had any alternative to slaughtering them. If I gave them a pass, they'd just find fresh prey.

  There was no way to tell if the doomed Haluk had sent subspace alarms to their base. I was already having uneasy second thoughts about the wisdom of my knight-errancy, but I put my worries aside, figuring I hadn't really compromised the Phleg operation. If the Haluk high command recognized Makebate from a pirate's description—so what? They already knew I was prowling the galaxy; the lovely Dolores da Gama had seen to that. But they didn't know my destination or my mission, and they certainly had no idea I'd be doing a turn in Joru disguise.

  Look on the bright side, Helly! I told myself. You did your good deed for the day.

  And now I had proof of Haluk freebootery in the inner galactic whorl to add to the pile of accumulating evidence against them, plus some interesting questions that needed answers:

  Were Haluk trans-ack pirates operating out of an independent base in the Sag, or were they using Y'tata facilities? Was it possible that the Haluk had formed a secret alliance with the frolicksome albino farters? Were t
he hijackings intended to create an artificial shortage of ultraheavy elements, or did the Haluk have other motives for grabbing the stuff?

  Perhaps Barky Tregarth would know.

  If he didn't, I might just be forced to nab me a Y pirate out of some low Phlegethon dive and hook him to the truth machine. It would be a nasty interrogation for both of us. Sometimes aliens didn't survive psychotronic questioning. (Occasionally humans didn't, either.) And unless I corked the victim securely, the stress of the procedure would generate a stomach-churning stench. Maybe I could grill the Y while wearing a space suit...

  I returned to the immediate vicinity of the derelict trans-ack carrier and dropped out of hyperspace. The region was still boiling with ionic crud from the earlier bombardment, futzing the big ship's scanners, but to be on the safe side I erected Makebate's dissimulator before hailing Captain Schmidt on short-range RE I didn't want him or his crew to get a close look at me.

  "Sheltok Eblis, this is your old pal Hugo. Do you copy? The bandits are gone and won't be back. You can relax now."

  A Germanic expletive came out of my com speaker, and then the viewer showed an agitated middle-aged man in the ugly marigold-colored Sheltok uniform. He had brush-cut hair and a thick neck.

  "You destroyed the Haluk pirates! All sixteen! Who are you? What are you?"

  I had the recorder going again. I ignored the skipper's demand that I turn on my flightdeck video. "Captain Schmidt, congratulations on your survival. Do you have any casualties?"

  "No, Gott sei Dank! But it was a close call for the engineers when our ULD powerplant was disabled. We—We are very grateful for your assistance, Hugo."

  "Are you aware," I said formally, "that Sheltok management has suppressed information about Haluk pirate attacks against ultraheavy element carriers? The media and the general public know nothing about them."