Legacy

by James H. Schmitz

  15

  "She," said Trigger, "is a remarkable woman."

  "Yeah," said Quillan. "Remarkable."

  "May I ask you, finally, a few pertinent questions?" Trigger inquiredhumbly.

  "Not here, sweet stuff," said Quillan.

  "You're a bossy sort of slob, Heslet Quillan," she said equably.

  Quillan didn't answer. They had come down the stairway to the storeroomslevel and were walking along the big lit hallway toward their cabins.Trigger felt pleasantly relaxed. But she did have a great many pertinentquestions to ask Quillan now, and she wanted to get started on them.

  "Oh!" she said suddenly. Just as suddenly, Quillan's hand was on hershoulder, moving her along.

  "Hush now," he said. "And keep walking."

  "But you saw it, didn't you?" Trigger asked, trying to look back to thesmall open door into the storerooms they'd just passed.

  Quillan sighed. "Certainly," he said. "Guy in space armor."

  "But what's he doing there?"

  "Checking something, I suppose." His hand left her shoulder; and, forjust a moment, his finger rested lightly across her lips. Triggerglanced up at him. He was walking on beside her, not looking at her.

  All right, she thought--she could take a hint. But she felt tense anduncomfortable now. Something was going on again, apparently.

  They turned into the side passage and came up to her cabin. Triggerstarted to turn to face him, and Quillan picked her up and went onwithout a noticeable break in his stride. Close to her ear, his voicewhispered, "Explain in a moment! Dangerous here."

  As the door to the end cabin closed behind them, he put her back on herfeet. He looked at his watch.

  "We can talk here," he said. "But there may not be much time forconversation." He gestured toward a table against the wall. "Take a lookat the setup."

  Trigger looked. The table was littered with instruments, like anelectronic workbench. A visual screen showed a view of both her owncabin and a section of the passage outside it, up to the point where itentered the big hall.

  "What is it?" she asked uncertainly.

  "Essentially," said Quillan, "we've set up a catassin trap."

  "Catassin!" Trigger squeaked.

  "That's right. Don't get too nervous though. I've caught them before.Used to be a sort of specialty of mine. And there's one thing aboutthem--they'll blab their pointed little heads off if you can get onealive and promise it its catnip...." He'd shucked off his jacket andtaken out of it a very large handgun with a bell-shaped mouth. He laidthe gun down next to the view screen. "In case," he said,unreassuringly. "Now just a moment."

  He sat down in front of the view screen and did something to it.

  "All right," he said then. "We're here and set. Probability periodstarts in three minutes, continues for sixty. Signal on any blip.Otherwise no gabbing. And remember they're _fast_. Don't get sappy."

  There was no answer. Quillan did something else to the screen and stoodup again. He looked broodingly at Trigger. "It's those damn computersagain!" he said. "I don't see any sense in it."

  "In what?" she asked shakily.

  "Everything that's happening around here is being fed back to them atthe moment," he said. "When they heard about our invite to Lyad's dinnerparty, and who was to be present, they came up with a honey. In the timeperiod I mentioned a catassin is supposed to show up at your cabin. Theygive it a pretty high probability."

  Trigger didn't say anything. If she had, she probably would havesqueaked again.

  "Now don't worry," he said, squeezing her shoulder reassuringly betweena large thumb and four slightly less large fingers. "Nice muscle!" hesaid absently. "The cabin's trapped and I've taken other precautions."He massaged the muscle gently. "Probably the only thing that will happenis that we'll sit around here for an hour or so, and then we'll have ahearty laugh together at those foolish computers!" He smiled.

  "I thought," Trigger said without squeaking, "that everybody was prettysure it was dead."

  Quillan frowned. "Well, that's something else again! There are at leasttwo ways I know of to sneak it past that search. Jump it out and in witha subtub is one--they could have done that from their own cabin as soonas they had its pattern. So I don't really think it's dead. It's just--"

  "Quillan," a tiny voice said from the viewer.

  He turned, took two steps, and sat down fast before the viewer. "Goahead!"

  "Fast motion in B section. Going your way."

  Fast motion. A thought flicked up. "Quillan--" Trigger began.

  He raised a shushing hand. "Get a silhouette?" he asked. His hands wentto a set of control switches and stayed there.

  "No. Pickup shows a haze like in the reconstruct." An instant's pause."Leaving B section."

  "Motion in C section," said another voice.

  Quillan said, "All right. It's coming. No more verbal reports unless itchanges direction. If you want to stay alive, don't move unless you'rein armor."

  There was silence. Quillan sat unmoving, eyes fixed on the screen.Trigger stood just behind him. Her legs had begun to tremble. She'dbetter tell him.

  "Quillan--"

  For an instant, in the screen, there was something like heat shimmer atthe far end of the passage. Then she saw her cabin door pop open.

  The interior of the cabin showed in a brief flare of blue light. In itwas a shape. It vanished instantly again.

  She heard Quillan make a shocked, incredulous sound. His left handslashed at a switch on the panel.

  Twenty feet from them, just behind the closed door to the passage, was asplatting noise like a tremendous slap. Then another noise, strangelylike a brief cloudburst. Then silence again.

  She realized Quillan was on his feet beside her, the oversized gun inhis hand. It was pointed at the door. His eyes switched suddenly fromthe door to the screen and back again. She felt him relaxing slowly.Then she discovered she was clutching a handful of his shirt along witha considerable chunk of tough skin. She went on clutching it.

  "Fly swatter got it!" he said. "Whew!" He looked down and patted theclutching hand. "No catassin! The trap in the cabin just wasn't fastenough. Had a gravity mine outside our door, just in case. _That_ wasbarely fast enough!" For once, Quillan looked almost awed.

  "L-l-l-like--" Trigger began. She tried again. "Like a little yellowman--"

  "You saw it? In the cabin? Yes. Never saw anything just like it before!"

  Trigger pressed her lips together to make them stay steady.

  "I have," she said. "That's what I was trying to tell you."

  Quillan stared at her for an instant. "You'll tell me about it in acouple of minutes. I've got some quick work to do first." He checkedhimself. A wide grin spread suddenly over his face. "Know something,doll?"

  "What?"

  "The damn computers!" Major Quillan said happily. "They goofed!"

  * * * * *

  The gravity mine would have reduced almost any life-form which movedinto its field to a rather thin smear, but there wasn't even that leftof the yellow demon-shape. Something, presumably something it wascarrying, had turned it into a small blaze of incandescent energy as themine flattened it out. Which explained the sound like a cloudburst. Thathad been the passage's automatic fire extinguishers going into brief butcorrespondingly violent action.

  Quillan's group stayed out of sight for the time being. He'd barely gotthe mine put away, along with a handful of warped metal slugs, which waswhat the mine had left of their attacker's mechanical equipment, andTrigger's cabin door locked again, when three visitors came zooming downthe storerooms hall in a small car. A ship's engineer and twoassistants had arrived to check on what had started the extinguishers.

  "They may," Quillan said hopefully, "just go away again." He and Triggerwere watching the engineers through the viewer which had been extendedto cover their end of the passage.

  They didn't just go away again. They checked the extinguishers, lookedat the floor, still wet but rapidly absor
bing the last drops of thebrief deluge. They exchanged puzzled comment. They checked everythingonce more. Finally the leader made use of the door announcer and askedif he might intrude.

  Quillan switched off the viewer. "Come in," he said resignedly.

  The door opened. The three glanced at Quillan, and then atTrigger-plus-Beldon. Their eyes widened only slightly. Duty on the DawnCity produced hardened men.

  Neither Quillan nor Trigger could offer the slightest explanation as towhat had started the extinguishers. The engineers apologized andwithdrew. The door closed again.

  Quillan switched on the viewer. Their voices came back into the cabin asthey climbed into their car.

  "So that's how it happened," one of the assistants was sayingreflectively.

  "Right," said the ship's engineer. "Like to burst into flames myself."

  "Ha-ha-ha!" They drove off.

  Trigger flushed. She looked at Quillan.

  "Perhaps I ought to get into something else," she said. "Now that theparty's over."

  "Perhaps," Quillan admitted. "I'll have Gaya bring something down. Wewant to stay out of your cabin for an hour or so till everything's beenchecked. There'll be a few conferences to go through now."

  Gaya arrived next, with clothes. Trigger retired to the cabin's bathroomwith them and came out a few minutes later, dressed again. Meanwhile theDawn City's First Security Officer also had arrived and was setting up aportable restructure stage in the center of the cabin. He looked rathergrim, but he also looked like a very much relieved man.

  "I suggest we run your sequence off first, Major," he said. "Then we canput them on together, and compare them."

  Trigger sat down on a couch beside Gaya to watch. She'd been told thatthe momentary view of the little demon-shape in the cabin had beendeleted from Security's copy of their own sequence and wasn't to bementioned.

  Otherwise there really was not too much to see. What the attackingcreature had used to blur the restructure wasn't clear, except that itwasn't a standard scrambler. Amplified to the limits of clarity andstepped down in time to the limit of immobility, all that emerged was ashifting haze of energy, which very faintly hinted at a dwarfish humanshape in outline. A rather unusually small and heavy catassin, theSecurity chief pointed out, would present such an outline. Thatsomething quite material was finally undergoing devastating structuraldisorganization on the gravity mine was unpleasantly obvious, but itproduced no further information. The sequence ended with the short blazeof heat which had set off the extinguishers.

  Then they ran the restructure of the preceding double killing. Triggerwatched, gulping a little, till it came to the point where the hazeshape actually was about to touch its victims. Then she studied thecarpet carefully until Gaya nudged her to indicate the business wasover. Catassins almost invariably used their natural equipment in thekill; it was a swift process, of course, but shockingly brutal, andTrigger didn't care to remember what the results looked like in a humanbeing. Both men had been killed in that manner; and the purposeobviously was to conceal the fact that the killer was not a catassin,but something even more efficient along those lines.

  It didn't occur to the Security chief to question Trigger. A temporalrestructure of a recent event was a far more reliable witness than anyset of human senses and memory mechanisms. He left presently, reassuredthat the catassin incident was concluded. It startled Trigger to realizethat Security did not seem to be considering seriously the possibilityof discovering the human agent behind the murders.

  Quillan shrugged. "Whoever did it is covered three ways in everydirection. The chief knows it. He can't psych four thousand people ongeneral suspicions, and he'd hit mind-blocks in every twentiethpassenger presently on board if he did. Anyway he knows we're on it, andthat we have a great deal better chance of nailing the responsiblecharacters eventually."

  "More information for the computers, eh?" Trigger said.

  "Uh-huh."

  "You got this little chunk the hard way, I feel," she observed.

  "True," Quillan admitted, "But we have to get it any way we can till weget enough to move on. Then we move." He looked at her, with an air ofregarding a new idea. "You know," he said, "you don't do badly for anamateur!"

  "She doesn't do badly," Gaya's voice said behind Trigger, "for anybody.How do you people feel about a drink? I thought I could use one myselfafter looking at the chief's restructure."

  Trigger felt herself coloring. Praise from the cloak and dagger experts!For some reason it pleased her immensely. She turned her head to smileat Gaya, standing there with three glasses on a tray.

  "Thanks!" she said. She took one of the glasses. Gaya held the tray outto Quillan and took the third glass herself.

  It was some five minutes later when Trigger remarked, "You know, I'mgetting sleepy."

  Quillan looked around the viewer equipment he and Gaya were dismantling."Why not hit the couch over there and take a nap?" he suggested. "It'llbe about an hour before the boys can get down here for the realconference."

  "Good idea." Trigger yawned, finished her drink, put the glass on atable, and wandered over to the couch. She stretched out on it. A drowsysomnolence enveloped her almost instantly. She closed her eyes.

  Ten minutes later, Gaya, standing over her, announced, "Well, she'sout."

  "Fine," said Quillan, packaging the rest of the equipment. "Tell them tohaul in the rest cubicle. I'll be done here in a minute. Then you andthe lady warden can take over."

  Gaya looked down at Trigger. There was a trace of regret in her face. "Ithink," she said, "she's going to be fairly displeased with you when shewakes up and finds she's on Manon."

  "Wouldn't doubt it," said Quillan. "But from what I've seen of thatchick, she's going to get fairly displeased with me from time to time onthis operation anyway."

  Gaya looked at his back.

  "Major Quillan," she said, "would you like a tip from a keen-eyedoperator?"

  "Go ahead, ole keen-eyed op!" Quillan said in kindly tones.

  "Not that you don't have it coming, boy," said Gaya. "But watchyourself! This one is dangerous. This one could sink you for keeps."

  "You're going out of your mind, doll," said Quillan.