by Yoss
If that’s not enough, all three alien species who come here prefer to repose in solitude. Must be some weird galactic kink. A bar isn’t a bar without a little socialization, is it?
As for meek wives, they’ve got to be a highly endangered species by now even on Earth itself. But if anybody were to waste their credits bringing one of those rare specimens here, she’d never get near anything so dangerous as a knife. Not by a long shot, at least not while me and my buddies are up and about.
Nobody but a pozzie ever gets past a docking module of the Burroughs bearing arms more dangerous than a pair of nail clippers. A small pair.
Yet even so, there is blood and murder. The first to go were my pals Zorro and Achilles, and the Grodo bounty hunter.
At the time we had no idea it was just the beginning.
Two
No matter how many times I’ve watched the holotape, I can’t say I was an eyewitness. Not if the word has any meaning. But I was close to the scene. Very close. Cold comfort, considering there was nothing I could do to stop it.
I was on guard duty in Sector 23-A of the docking modules when it all went down. Zorro and Achilles had Sector 24-A, less than an arc-second away. By the time I was on the scene, all I could do was clean up the butchered remains.
Sector 24-A lies between an artificial gravity generator and 25-A, which is permanently offline. It’s one of our more isolated sectors. The ship hadn’t docked there by accident. The Galactic Trade Confederation had warned us that a couple of bounty hunters, a Grodo and a Colossaur, would be stopping over on the William S. Burroughs, almost against their will, to replenish their energy reserves before continuing on their journey.
Seems they were coming from far away. Must have been very far away, if they were almost out of fuel—energy crystals are almost inexhaustible. One crystal could have lit my Chandler’s old New York City, the whole thing, for a solid decade. The baggers were transporting a prisoner, name of Makrow 34, a fugitive Cetian perp they’d nabbed with no little effort after trailing him for parsec after parsec.
The trading bosses’ big blunder was, they forgot to warn us how dangerous this Cetian guy was. Oh, sure, they let us know, in their own half-assed way, that he was a Psi—but they didn’t give us any particulars about his exotic talent. Nobody could have seen that coming.
Two days after the fact, when the bureaucrats finally relaxed their security screening and let me peek at his folder, I learned Makrow 34 had started young on a life of crime and had made quite the career of it. Not only had he broken every law in the Cetian, human, and galactic books, he had managed to come up with two or three amusing new crimes of his own.
Amusing for him, not for his victims, I mean.
But that comes later.
The top brass of the Galactic Trade Confederation meanwhile stuck to their compartmentalization policy—Let not your right tentacle know what your left claw does would be a good translation of another alien saying. So they didn’t see fit to tell us that—what a coincidence—our Makrow 34 had taken advantage of the close resemblance between Cetians and Homo sapiens to commit a good portion of his crimes in our theoretically forbidden Solar System, where he was also suspected of stashing a massive pile of loot. A few thousand terawatt-hours of energy.
One more thing I found out too late.
If my buddies had known, they would have put two and two together and gotten exactly four. One: if the prisoner was working the Solar System, it was a safe bet he had accomplices here. Two: you can always find someone to do the almost impossible in exchange for a few terawatt-hours of energy. Three: if anybody was going to try to rescue him, this station was the only place they could do it. And four: this all added up to big trouble right around the corner.
If they’d known, then Zorro would never have gone to pick him up alone. Precautions would have been taken. Maybe Zorro would have had Achilles with him from the beginning, who knows.
Maybe the two of them would still be around. Maybe not.
Anyway, it wasn’t bad judgment that caused Zorro to go there alone. It was lack of information he should have been given. He stuck to standard procedures: one pozzie in the module airlock, another on standby in the dock’s outer hatch control room.
Besides, what pozzie—or what Grodo—could have guessed what was about to go down?
I’ve looped the holotape a thousand times and still can’t believe it really happened.
It starts with the usual routine. The airlock hatch opens.
The bounty hunters, like any baggers who’ve survived long enough in a tough line of work, don’t trust each other much and don’t like to take risks. The tall, lanky, hexapod figure of the insectoid Grodo and the somewhat shorter but much more massive bulk of the Colossaur, both bristling with weapons (proof that they didn’t intend to come in past the docking module) flanked their Cetian prisoner: a tiny humanoid figure, handcuffed and unarmed, almost insignificant in contrast, his profile blurry, as if distorted by some powerful force field.
Like the field that’s used to neutralize criminals with the most powerful (and luckily the rarest) Psi powers.
My buddy must have started to suspect something then. You can see on the holotape when he calls Achilles over and starts unbuckling the long whip he always carried under his cape.
At the same moment, a heavy human comes walking calmly around the corner. Zorro pays no attention to him. The fat guy doesn’t seem especially threatening. He’s coming from the inner zone, where nobody but pozzies have weapons. Most likely he just wandered into the wrong module. Just a matter of warning him off, and—
Zorro never had a chance.
The Grodo must have been caught by surprise, too, when the fat guy suddenly changed direction and went on the attack.
It was fast. Too fast. Any human who moves like that has to be stoked on combat drugs or hyped with military neurocircuit implants. Possession and use of such are strictly off-limits for humans, of course—and not just on the station.
Complicated situation, competing priorities. If the attack had been aimed at any other sort of alien, Zorro wouldn’t have skipped a beat before running over to help. He’s a pozzie and his mission is to maintain order. But the fat guy went after the Colossaur, so for a second Zorro didn’t react even though he already had his whip and sword out, ready for action.
That was his first mistake. A justified one, though. Intervening to help a Colossaur is a deadly insult.
Evolved from predatory reptiloids under a blazing sun, a warrior race par excellence, as devoted to strength and personal bravery as other species are to the arts or technology, the natives of Colossa have taken jobs all over the galaxy as security personnel, soldiers, or guardians (especially now that their planet is at peace, much to their regret). Even the weakest Colossaur would be a thousand times happier to get torn limb from limb than to let some pozzie clown help him tackle a measly human.
It didn’t look like he’d need help anyway. A typical Colossaur stands six foot six inches tall and weighs six hundred pounds, and that’s not just muscle: a good portion comes from the exoskeleton, a natural bony suit of armor up to two inches thick. The bounty hunter that the fat human attacked was even bigger than normal. A giant among Colossaurs. Nearly ten feet, from his short, thick, muscular tail to the sunken, beady eyes in his armored head. He must have weighed more than nine hundred pounds, and his bony plates were probably three inches thick in places. There’s nothing like that on Earth—the closest I can think of is a velociraptor crossed with a giant armadillo.
The people of Colossa aren’t the muscle-bound goons they might first appear to be. There’s no doubt they rely more on strength than agility, and rightly so: a pozzie, or even a drug-fueled human, could move and react faster. Grodos? Forget about it. Fast as lightning.
Yet even though their fighting methods are based mainly on their incredible power and resistance and their almost absolute lack of weak spots, they aren’t the least bit clumsy. On the contrary: they can
move with uncanny, lethal fluidity when the situation calls for it, twisting around inside their own shells and taking advantage of the inertia of their own massive bulk, almost like the ancient Japanese sumo wrestlers on Earth.
Considering all this, anyone would have expected the obese human attacker to be reduced to pulp in a fraction of a second. He looked like a baboon trying to go up against a lion, with his hands tied behind his back.
But it turns out the human was very quick. And very fat, too. Fat enough that the impact of his mass, boosted by his onrush, achieved the unthinkable: he knocked the Colossaur down.
The two of them rolled across the floor in a confused heap of bony plates, tail, feet, and scaly or fatty limbs as thick as columns flailing in all directions.
When three more seconds had gone by without the attacker being reduced to ground meat, the Grodo moved so fast that even on the holotape all you see is a blur, rushing over to find out what the fuck had happened to his buddy to keep him from dispatching that insolent, suicidal primate once and for all.
But this time Zorro, true to his duty, did intervene.
That was his second mistake—and his last.
The next instant he was hit squarely by the microwave beam. The mortally wounded pozzie only managed to bring his sword down in a death blow, plunging it up to the hilt in his attacker’s side, and there it stayed.
Then Zorro rolled across the floor with what he himself would have called “great style,” wrapped in his black cape, letting his velvet Cordovan sombrero fall—and gazing in astonishment, first at the hole nearly a hand wide that had opened up in his stomach, then at the obese human who had made it. Who, by the way, seemed utterly unconcerned with the sharp blade dangling from his torso, and who was still holding the Colossaur bounty hunter’s maser.
A maser that, by all rights, should have been individualized. That is: incapable of firing a shot in anyone’s hands but its owner’s.
Zorro must have left this world full of astonishment.
But he missed one of the best surprises. The Grodo pointed his maser at the pozzie-killer—who should by all the rules of anatomy have been lying on the floor, bleeding out from the sword wound—but the Colossaur fired first. Only he didn’t shoot the human. He shot his own astonished companion.
Few energy or projectile weapons in the galaxy (and none that are legal, not even for baggers) can pierce the naturally ultraresistant armor of a Grodo insectoid. Their slick plates make them even slightly more solid than the flashy, impressive armor of the Colossaurs.
But not even a multilayered chitin carapace can save your life when you get hit right in the eye with a jet of acid that penetrates straight to your brain, eating through your flesh.
The Grodo collapsed without a word. Naturally. His race doesn’t use words; they communicate with pheromones.
I have to admit, Makrow 34’s escape plan was good—half brilliant improvisation, half careful coordination—and it worked to perfection. He’d probably bribed the Colossaur on the way here, promising him part of his energy-crystal booty. But acting alone, even a Colossaur would have been up against impossible odds. Everybody knows a bagger doesn’t trust his own shadow, much less another bagger. Old buddies or not.
Plus, it isn’t exactly easy to hit a target less than two inches wide, especially not one that can move faster than an express train. Besides, there’s also the pozzie.
With his human accomplice pretending to attack him, though, it was almost too easy. In the heat of their phony hand-to-hand combat, it was child’s play for the drugged-up human to grab and use the Colossaur’s weapon. Especially after the double-dealing bounty hunter had helpfully deactivated the biofield detector that should have kept anyone else from firing it.
With the pozzie suddenly out of the picture, the odds were good that the Grodo would turn all his attention to the killer, freezing for a fraction of a second and making himself a perfect target for a nice acid bath. The Colossaur, slightly slower but outfitted with an ideal Grodo-stopper, needed only to take him out.
Oh, the horrible things greed makes sentient beings do. Treacherously firing on a partner of many years. My Chandler would have written a whole chapter on the immorality of criminals, their lack of principles, something like that.
The holotape time line shows that less than five seconds had passed since the heavy human entered the docking module. Makrow 34, his profile blurry, disarmed inside his anti-Psi force field, had not yet moved.
The dying insectoid bagger wasn’t yet done thrashing around on the floor while his nervous system failed, burnt beyond repair by the acid, when the treacherous Colossaur reached down with his thick, scaly arm, and pulled something from his belt. The Cetian’s features suddenly became clear, freed from the neutralizing force field. The Cetian smiled and slipped his handcuffs off by simply spreading his arms as if to stretch.
His Colossaur and human accomplices each took a step back. The massive alien’s acid-thrower was still dripping. The fat Homo sapiens still had Zorro’s sword sticking out of his side, swaying gently, a couple of inches below his left armpit.
Makrow 34 laughed. His laugh, like any Cetian’s, was a grotesque parody of human laughter: a grating, disagreeable noise, more lunatic rejoicing than healthy cheer, yet strangely contagious all the same. His two flunkies joined in. The human (identified a second later by the computers as Giorgio Weekman, thief and smuggler of anything that could be smuggled in the asteroid belt) wriggled out of the foamflesh suit that made him look 70 kilos overweight, incidentally serving as a suit of armor to protect him from the Colossaur’s blows and Zorro’s sword.
A second later Achilles ran in from the control room, firing indiscriminately.
Chastened by Zorro’s fate, he’d left his iconic Achaean sword, shield, and lance in the control room, wielding instead a heavy maser, which of course wasn’t ancient Greek by any stretch, nor did it match his delicately sculpted bronze breastplate, but it undoubtedly was a more effective weapon for the fight he anticipated.
It didn’t seem to be the home team’s lucky day. Moving at a strangely slow pace, Achilles inexplicably missed his first shot. Instead of vaporizing the Colossaur’s thick skull (which dodged the shot at a speed his former Grodo companion would have envied), his high-powered microwave beam sliced halfway through a titanium girder a foot above his head. Pushing his quickest reflexes, undaunted, my pozzie friend fired again, almost point-blank.
This time, his maser beam didn’t even flare. Still moving in slow motion, as if it was all he could do to react, he couldn’t even cover himself. A second later, a shot from an ultrapowered weapon similar to the Colossaur’s cut him in half, with a great splattering of bronze droplets from his breastplate, half melted by the tremendous heat wave.
With no one in the command room to stop them, Makrow and his two liberator-sidekicks turned without another look at the pozzies’ scattered remains and calmly strolled out through the airlock hatch. Then, after deactivating the tracking device in the bounty hunter ship, they took off, destination unknown, with no one to go after them.
I imagine this was the first time the aliens regretted their excessive prudence. Which was responsible, among other things, for never supplying us, the official keepers of order on board the Burroughs, with any sort of armed, rapid patrol ship.
Three
At this point in the story I think it’s about time for me to introduce myself and clarify a few points about our station, about us pozzies, and especially about the relationship between our alien bosses and humans in the twenty-second century.
I’m a police officer on board the space station William S. Burroughs, the Galactic Trade Confederation’s enclave in the Solar System. My keyname is Raymond (as in Chandler, as I may have mentioned). My serial number is MSX-3482-GZ.
Naturally, I’m a pozzie too. In other words, not a human being but one of those robotic abominations, the blasphemous entities, neither alive nor dead, vilified daily by the unregenerate terrestrial
preachers who still think everything was better before the aliens came along. A servant of the devils, as many humans still call the Grodos, Colossaurs, and Cetians, without distinction.
Even though I owe them my very existence, I’m not going to say my employers are exactly angels. Beings interested only in profit must necessarily have a pretty unangelic nature. Still, they aren’t all that terrible, either, in my opinion.
But haven’t they refused to hand any of their greatest scientific and technological discoveries—hyperspace travel, artificial intelligence, immortality serum, self-induced regeneration, stuff like that—over to Earthlings, even though they easily could? Well, true. By the same token, they haven’t exterminated or enslaved humanity, which they could also do. And they’ve at least maintained trade relations with Homo sapiens. Under their own rules, of course.
Rules they’ve made absolutely clear. They see humanity as an “unpredictable species.” Which is a polite way of saying humans are a stupid and very dangerous race who have to be kept in check. Accordingly, they’ve shared a few of their secrets with the humans, such as artificial gravity and their universal energy crystals. But that’s it. Trade is one thing, promiscuity’s another. Partners, not equals. Everyone in their own place. No aliens on Earth, no humans among the stars.
There was a call for a no-man’s land, a trading post, and that’s why they built the William S. Burroughs, this enormous station orbiting around Titan.
The orbit of Saturn’s satellite proved perfect: close enough to Earth and its colonies on Mars and the asteroids for slow, plasma-powered human ships laden with grain, petroleum, and art productions to reach it after a couple months’ flying time, then get back after two more months loaded with a few universal energy crystals, high-tech materials, and cybernetic control systems. Also conveniently near the system’s hyperspace portal (merely a common geometric point half an AU above the plane of the ecliptic, with no immediate identifying signs—no romantic vortices of matter and energy glowing in a thousand colors) but far enough from the rest of the galaxy that, without hyperspace travel (which the aliens have no intention of ever allowing humans to get—not until humans have something valuable enough to trade for it, that is), the stars will remain an unreachable dream for mankind. And a safely uncharted paradise for those stars’ own powerful and greedy inhabitants.