The Outpost

by Mike Resnick

  “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” I said. “Hell, assimilating empires is something I’ve always had a hankering to do. I think we should become partners.”

  “You’re hardly in a position to make demands!” she snapped.

  I held up my hands. “You mean these things?” I asked, indicating the manacles. “I just let them put ’em on me so I could meet you. There ain’t never been a chain that could hold Catastrophe Baker.”

  And so saying, I flexed my muscles and gave one mighty yank, and the manacles came apart. Four or five of her bodyguards—did I forget to tell you she had a small army of bodyguards?—jumped me, but I just leaned down, straightened up, and sent ’em flying in all directions.

  She stared at me, wide-eyed, and I could tell that she was torn between yelling “Off with his head!” and “Off with his clothes!”

  “I may have even more uses for you than I thought at first glance,” she said at last.

  “Then we’re partners?”

  “Why not?” she said with a shrug that went a lot farther and lasted a lot longer than your standard shrug.

  “Well, if we’re partners,” I continued, “I’d sure be interested in knowing why you’re a Dragon Queen rather than a Pirate Queen.”

  “And so you shall, Catastrophe Baker,” she said, walking over and taking me by the hand. She smelled good enough to eat. “Come with me.”

  She led me to a small door I hadn’t seen, since it was hiding behind a bunch of her bodyguards. They stepped aside, and she ordered the door to open, and it did, and suddenly we were in a bedroom that was probably a little smaller than the Navy’s flagship and had a few less windows than the governor’s palace (the old palace, not the new fortified one), and right in the middle of it was a bed that could have accommodated a dozen Dragon Queens and still have some room left over for their gentleman friends.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “It’s right impressive,” I acknowledged. “But it still don’t explain why you’re a Dragon Queen.”

  “It’s a result of inbreeding and radiation and genes gone astray,” she said, putting a hand behind my neck and pulling my head down to hers.

  “Looks to me like every gene is sitting right where it’s supposed to be for optimum effect,” I opined.

  “I’m a genetic sport,” she whispered, and suddenly her breath became real warm. “When I get hot, I get hot! I’m like a dragon in that respect.”

  She smiled, her eyes gleamed and flashed, and twin needles of smoke and fire shot out from beneath her lips.

  She directed my gaze down south of her waist where still more smoke was escaping.

  “You see?” she said. “I’m so constituted that I can’t hide my desire for you, Catastrophe Baker.”

  And sure enough, she couldn’t.

  “Just a second,” interrupted Three-Gun Max. “Are you trying to tell us that she actually was smoking down there?”

  “That’s right,” said Baker.

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “I was there,” said Baker pugnaciously. “Were you?”

  “No, but if you’re gonna tell us you took her to bed without getting some real important part of your masculine anatomy fried to a crisp, I’m gonna have a hard time believing any part of this story.”

  Baker glared at him until he kind of shrunk into himself, and then the huge man looked around the room, his hand kind of toying with the pearl handle of his burner. “Has anyone else got a problem with my story?”

  Nobody said a word, and finally he relaxed and began talking again.

  As a matter of fact (continued Baker), I never had a chance to find out just how hot a number she was, figuratively or literally, because at just that instant we heard a huge commotion outside the bedroom, and then there were a bunch of screams, and I could hear the hum of burners and the whine of screechers and the report of bullets.

  “The warlords!” she cried. “They’ve found out about the plutonium and launched a preemptive strike!”

  “That ain’t no problem,” I said. “Give me a couple of them weapons you’re wearing and I’ll send ’em packing.”

  She tossed me a couple of guns, and I walked to the door, opened it, and gently announced my presence by blowing away eight or nine men who were wearing uniforms that were different from her bodyguards.

  Then I looked across the room and saw six men all done up in fancy-looking tunics with rows and rows of medals on their chests, and I knew right away that these had to be the six warlords, so I picked up one of their bigger henchmen, twisted his head around a couple of times until he stopped squirming, and used him as a shield as I began crossing the room.

  “Be careful!”!” the Dragon Queen cried out.

  “Hell, there’s only six of ’em—and they’re little ones at that!” I hollered back.

  Twelve or fifteen warriors jumped me, but I just shrugged ’em off. Another one grabbed my leg, and I kicked him clear across the room; he hit the far wall on the fly, which has to constitute some kind of record if I just knew what record book to report it to.

  When I was maybe fifty feet away from the warlords, I raised the body over my head and hurled it at ’em. Four of ’em went down in a tangled heap. The other two reached for their weapons, but I was too fast for ’em, and after I broke their arms they kind of fell to the floor, and having nothing better to do they started kissing my feet and begging for mercy.

  I looked around and saw that the rest of the invaders were either dead or at least not in any mood to continue the fight, and then the Dragon Queen raced over to me and threw her arms around me and gave me one hell of a passionate kiss.

  (See this here black tooth? That’s what caused it. Burned the enamel top to bottom. I really ought to replace it with a gold one, but it’s almost all I got to remember her by.)

  Anyway, after she ordered her bodyguards to drag the warlords and the surviving soldiers off to the dungeons and have a little fun with them, she turned back to me and said, kind of sultry-like, “Catastrophe Baker, as a reward for your heroism, you may have any single thing in this room.”

  “Well, Miss Dragon Queen, ma’am,” I said, “that seems like a pretty easy decision, since I ain’t never seen a woman to measure up to you.”

  “Surely a man of your broad experience has seen many beautiful women.”

  “Yeah, but you’re head and shoulders and other things ahead of ‘em all.”

  “It’s kind of you to say so,” she said modestly, “but there must be three or four others in the galaxy who are even lovelier.”

  “You really think so?” I asked seriously.

  “Out of trillions and trillions of women? Surely.”

  “Well, then, it’s an even easier choice,” I said.

  “Yes, my love?” she said eagerly.

  “Absolutely, my love,” I replied. “If you tell me there are prettier women in the galaxy, I got no reason not to believe you. But,” I added, plucking the ruby from her tiara, “I know there ain’t no more perfect ruby, so I’ll just take this as a remembrance of my short but happy stay on Terlingua.”

  “I don’t believe it!” she said furiously.

  “And as a token of my high esteem, I’ll dump the plutonium before I leave,” I told her.

  “You are a fool, Catastrophe Baker!” she said. “Think of what you could have had!”

  “You won’t never be far from my mind, Miss Dragon Queen, ma’am,” I said.

  And sure enough, I think of her every time I sit by a blazing fire.

  His story done, Catastrophe Baker displayed the ruby again.

  “And that’s how I came into possession of the most perfect ruby in the galaxy.”

  Everyone seemed properly impressed with his story. Everyone except Hellfire Carson, that is. The grizzled old man walked up to Baker, held out his hand, and asked to see the ruby.

  “Handle it carefully, old man,” said Baker, offering it to him.

  Carson ro
lled it around in his hand for a few seconds, then held it up to the light and peered at it. Finally he tossed it back to Baker.

  “You made a bad bargain,” he said. “You should have took the Dragon Queen.”

  “What are you talking about, old man?” demanded Baker.

  “That thing ain’t no ruby.”

  “The hell it isn’t!”

  “The hell it is.”

  “What do you think it is?” I asked him.

  “Not a matter of ‘think’. I know what it is. I seen enough of ’em in my day.” He paused. “It’s an eyestone.”

  “A what?”

  “A Landship’s eye. That’s what we used to call ’em when we hunted ’em back on Peponi.”

  “And what’s a Landship?” asked Baker.

  “Landships were big suckers,” answered Hellfire Carson, staring off into the past. “Burly, too. Stood maybe sixteen feet at the shoulder, and they were covered top to bottom with shaggy brown fur. Their heads were enormous, and each one had a long prehensile lower lip that seemed almost as useful as a human hand. Their ears were small and rounded, and their noses were big and broad. They looked awkward, but they could move pretty goddamned fast when they were charging.”

  He stopped long enough to take a swallow from his bottle. “Most interesting thing about ’em was their eyes. Red crystal they were. Looked just like rubies, except here” — he pointed to some scratch marks — “where the jeweler removed the pupil. They always got rid of the pupil; people didn’t like to be reminded where their trinkets came from.”

  “And you really hunted them for their eyes?” I asked.

  “Their eyestones,” Carson corrected me. “Fetched about 5,000 credits for a good pair. Probably worth a little more these days” —he grinned at Catastrophe Baker— “but not as much as a Dragon Queen.”

  “How do you know so much about Landships?” asked Max.

  “Because I killed the very last one,” said Carson.

  The Last Landship

  What you’ve got to understand (said Carson) is that the Landships were a doomed species from the moment that Men decided their eyes made pretty baubles. I’ve seen ’em worn as jewelry, and displayed as art, and even used as currency. Until today I hadn’t ever heard of one being chosen over a real live woman, but I’ve been out of touch for quite a while and for all I know it’s happened before.

  Anyway, Peponi was a colony planet, prettier than some, wilder than most, and it attracted a lot of big-game hunters and adventurers. A few of ’em started safari companies and took clients out into the bush, but most of them were there to hunt Landships and sell the eyestones they collected.

  Well, with as many millions of Landships as covered the planet and as few Men to hunt them, you wouldn’t think they could be decimated so fast, but within a century there weren’t more than fifty thousand left. They were mostly gathered in one protected area, a place called the Bukwa Enclave—and then one day the government ran out of money and pulled most of its army out, and suddenly it wasn’t protected any longer, and that was the beginning of the end. I still remember it.

  My old pal Catamount Greene was the first to arrive. He didn’t know a damned thing about tracking, but old Catamount never let minor details like that stop him. On the way to the Enclave he picked up a bunch of carvings and jewelry from one of the local tribes, then found one of the few military outposts left in the Bukwa area and explained that he was trading these trinkets to the tribes that lived in the Enclave. He gave a few of the choicest ones to the soldiers, bought them a couple of drinks, and went on to say that he was terrified of Landships and that he had heard that the Enclave was filled with them—and within ten minutes he had talked them into marking where the herds were on a map so that he could avoid them while he hawked his wares from village to village. He walked into the Enclave with one weapon, three bearers, and his map, and walked out a month later with more than 3,000 eyestones.

  Then there was Bocci, who had made up his mind to leave Peponi, but decided to stick around just long enough to clean up in the Enclave. He found a waterhole way out at the western end, staked it out, poisoned it, and picked up 700 eyestones without ever firing a shot.

  Jumping Jimmy Westerly went in with a stepladder, took it out in the shoulder-high grass where none of the other hunters would go, climbed atop it, and potted twenty Landships the first day he was there. Once they cleared out of the area, he followed them, always keeping to high grass. He’d set up his ladder whenever they stopped, and he kept right on doing it until he had his thousand eyestones.

  Other hunters used other methods. True West Thompson brought in a whole tribe of native hunters who used poisoned spears and arrows and brought down almost three thousand Landships before they started becoming scarce.

  After a couple of months, the Enclave began to resemble a war zone, and you could smell the Landship carcasses rotting from miles away, but it didn’t stop the slaughter. Kalahari Jenkins took a dry area, about forty miles square, at the northwestern tip of the Enclave, announced that it was his personal hunting ground, and swore he’d kill anyone who entered it. A feller named Kennedy wandered in one day, chasing a couple of Landships, and true to his word Jenkins blew him away. What he didn’t know was that Kennedy had six sons, and it started a blood feud. Lasted a couple of weeks before they killed him—I seem to remember that he got four of them first—and then the two remaining sons declared that it was now their territory. That lasted about five days, until old Hakira came up from the south, killed the last two Kennedy boys, gathered up all of Jenkins’ and the Kennedys’ eyestones and lit out for civilization.

  Nobody ever found out what happened to the Maracci Sisters. They were damned good hunters, those girls—but one day they just disappeared, both of ’em, and no one ever found the 8,000 eyestones they were supposed to have taken.

  Anyway, the government finally realized that they had to do something or there wouldn’t be any Landships left, and if there weren’t any Landships, both the hunting and holographic safari businesses would vanish and Peponi’s main source of hard currency would vanish, so they finally passed a ban on hunting Landships.

  They meant well, but the ban came too late. They didn’t know it, but there was only one Landship left.

  “Just a minute,” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “I’ve never even heard of a Landship.”

  “That’s not surprising,” replied Hellfire Carson. “Not many people have.”

  “I never saw one in a museum, or even in a book,” continued Mayflower.

  “Are you calling me a liar?” demanded Carson hotly.

  “I don’t know yet. When was the last Landship killed?”

  “In 1813 G.E.,” said Carson.

  “Now I’m calling you a liar!” said Nicodemus Mayflower. “That was more than 4,700 years ago!”

  “I know when it was,” answered Carson calmly. “I was there.”

  “I’m willing to be told that this thing ain’t no ruby,” interjected Catastrophe Baker, holding up the stone. “After all, talk is cheap. But before I believe anything you say, I’d sure like to know how you came to be almost 5,000 years old.”

  “Might as well tell you,” agreed Carson. “You don’t look like you’re going to take it on faith.”

  “Tell you what,” said Baker. “I’ll take 1,500 years on faith; you prove the rest.”

  Everyone laughed, even Carson, and when the noise had subsided he spoke again.

  “It happened a few years later. I’d left Peponi and had been hunting on Faligor, when I heard there was adventure to be had in a promising little war in the Belladonna Cluster. It figured to be about a three-week trip, so I activated the DeepSleep chamber and told my ship’s computer to wake me when I was within a day of the Cluster.”

  Carson took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he scratched his shaggy gray head. “To this day I don’t know what went wrong, but the next thing I knew some medics were pulling me out of the chamber and saying they’
d found this derelict ship floating in space with me inside it. All I know is I went to sleep in the year 1822 of the Galactic Era, and I woke up ten years ago, in 6513. I can’t prove it, but there are those who can, and if any doubters want to put up enough money, we’ll go hunt them up.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” said Catastrophe Baker. “We got ourselves a regular Rip Van Winkle in our midst.”

  “No,” Three-Gun Max corrected him. “We’ve got a Hellfire Van Winkle.”

  Which was when and how he stopped being Hellfire Carson.

  Getting back to my story (said Hellfire Van Winkle), I stayed on Peponi for a few years after the massacre at the Bukwa Enclave, picking up some money here and there as a guide, or from time to time as a meat hunter for the new towns that were springing up, and in all that time I never saw a Landship. Neither had any of the other hunters or explorers, and we just all assumed that the last of ’em had been killed in the Enclave.

  Then one day I was out in the bush, hunting Demoncats for the trophy market, when I heard this mournful wailing sound off in the distance. Only sound I’d ever heard even remotely like it was years ago—the lonesome, heartbroken sound a baby Landship made when you killed its mother. This was kind of like it, only much louder.

  I followed the sound to its source, and came upon the biggest Landship I’d ever seen. He must’ve stood close to twenty feet at the shoulder, and he was standing all alone in the middle of the forest, howling his misery. I couldn’t see any wounds on him, so I decided to follow him for a while to discover the cause of all this unhappiness.

  Also, truth to tell, I kind of half-believed the old legend of a Landships’ Graveyard, and I wouldn’t have minded a bit if he’d led me to it so I could go around gathering eyestones, but he didn’t. He just kept howling out his pain and his misery as he moved from one spot to another, and after a couple of days it dawned on me that he was searching for another of his kind, that he’d probably been looking for another Landship for years now, and he’d pretty much figured out that he wasn’t going to find one—that he was the last of his kind.