by Yoss
“…but I miscalculated.” Old Man Slovoban tried to shrug, but with his softened skeleton the gesture was reduced to a semiliquid amoeba-like tremble. “I had met somebody tougher than me. Behind the Cetian’s delicate body and doll face, there was a real demon.”
Here came laughter that sounded more like a hoarse cough.
“He pulled one over on me; he challenged me to a knife fight in zero gravity. I accepted. Nobody handled a knife better than I did. But I don’t think any human ever made so many clumsy mistakes in a fight that his life depended on. I don’t know how it could have happened. Every time I was about to get him, something went wrong. I ended up with two wounds—I, who had never been touched by an enemy’s blade. One I gave myself, in my arm, when it cramped up inexplicably. The other was a disaster. My knife hit the metal wall, sparks flew, they blinded me temporarily—and just then he threw his dagger and hit my thigh, right in the femoral artery.”
The Old Man’s dim eyes flashed.
“At least I was lucky enough not to lose the leg. Incredible aim, skill, or luck. You know how hard it is to throw a knife in zero gravity and hit what you aim for?” He sighed. “I’ve never understood how I had so much bad luck that day. And there’s not much else to tell. Makrow 34 ran off with all the contraband while I was unconscious. Also, his stiletto was laced with poison. My doctors couldn’t even figure out what kind of venom he used. I had to spend a mountain of money and hire a Grodo biochemist, who finally identified it, though he was unable to counter it completely. All he could tell me was that it was a toxin from an exotic Rigelian anemone. A strange recombinant substance with no known antidote. Completely illegal throughout the galaxy. Not lethal, but insidious. Its curious effects have turned me into this thing that I am now.”
He waved his long, boneless limbs.
“Hypertrophic osteopathy and muscular degeneration, its primary effects, aren’t fatal if you take good care of yourself, though they are extremely inconvenient. But every sword has two edges: the effects of the genetic venom have also extended my life long enough for me to see the day when the aliens themselves avenge me.”
My pity for this man who had never forgotten his first, last, and only defeat prompted me to reveal the one piece of information I should have kept the most secret. “It wasn’t bad luck, Old Man. Makrow 34 had Psi powers.” And I explained what a Gaussical is while Vasily wrung his hands nervously and kept glancing sidelong at me.
“Ah.” The Romani centenarian’s eyes shined brighter than ever and his toothless mouth twisted into another parody of a grin. “A Psi. A damnable probability manipulator. Interesting, I didn’t know such things existed. That explains my clumsiness, his luck, his good aim, everything.” He cough-laughed again and ran his hand distractedly over another of his suits of armor. “That explains—everything,” he repeated.
For a few long seconds an uncomfortable silence hung over us all. At last Vasily broke it, nervous. “Well. It’s been a long time since we met, and I’m really sorry, Old Man,” he said simply. “But we’re in a rush. You wouldn’t want that monster to get away, would you? Rest easy. I won’t tell anybody about this, you know? And I’ll bring you his heart—if the Cetian has one.”
“Cetians have two, in their abdomens,” I explained, and felt ridiculous for having done so.
“Better—one for you, one for me,” Slovoban joked. “Good luck to you, kid, and to your positronic friend, too. And be careful with that Makrow. I knew he was dangerous, but if he’s a Psi, you’ll have to keep all your eyes on him—and more than four eyes would be better. I’d say, more like ten. May God and a loaded maser always be with you.” With that, the hatch reopened and the interview was over.
We retraced our entire route through the tunnel and the filthy labyrinths of the Romani space station back to our shuttle in silence. It was only when we had left the Estrella Rom behind us that El Ex-Afortunado spoke again. “Thanks, Raymond.”
“For what?” His thanks had taken me by surprise. My train of thought had already moved on to the idea of asking for reinforcements to take Asteroid G 7834 XC. Two police frigates should do it, but only if they were carrying at least a couple of anti-Psi field generators. I hadn’t done any….
“For what you did,” Vasily said. “For giving Slovoban back some of his pride. And especially for not telling him I’m a Gaussical too.” He gulped. “I never dared to tell him. I know it’ll sound weird, but if I’ve ever had anything like a father, it was him, and I’d hate it if he associated me in any way with the guy who reduced him to that.”
I looked at him with curiosity, but I guessed that this was not the right time to ask for explanations. The mysteries of human nature. Sometimes I think the more I know them, the less I understand them.
Seven
After stuff happens, any idiot with enough time to waste can analyze what went right, what turned out badly, the reasons behind each mistake, and which brilliant move could have made the difference at each point, turning failure into triumph. Any elementary school student could tell Napoleon when to move his artillery, when to call for Murat’s cavalry, and how to maneuver his troops so he could thumb his nose at Wellington in Waterloo. Any halfway competent amateur could advise Lee on how to defeat Grant in Gettysburg or tell Hannibal how to bring Rome to its knees with his elephants.
But in the whirlwind of events, generals not only don’t know where their enemies have their strongest troop concentrations, often they aren’t even very clear about where their own forces are. So a battle in real time is nothing like a chessboard with all the pieces moving in the open. It’s more like a knife fight between two blindfolded opponents, each trying to stab the other, guided only by the sound of their breathing while trying to hold their own breath so the other guy won’t stab them.
All this is just a fancy but futile attempt to excuse myself for the total disaster that was our attempt to overrun asteroid G 7834 XC.
It couldn’t even remotely be called a battle. An ambush, a massacre, maybe even a firing squad. Could it have been avoided? Of course—if I had been a clairvoyant, I might have known that Makrow 34, Weekman, and the Colossaur had planned for exactly such a massive operation. Or if I’d been a brilliant strategist and tactician like Hannibal, Napoleon, Grant, or even his defeated foe Lee, I might have calmly called off the reinforcements and anti-Psi fields and instead attempted a much more low-key incursion. A standard commando action: just Vasily, me, and at most a couple human police as backup. Maybe we would have at least stood a chance.
But when the aliens designed us they forgot to include clairvoyance among our powers. And even the nearly omniscient Slovoban had no way of knowing that the diabolical Cetian and his accomplice Giorgio had invested half their fraud and smuggling profits not in energy crystals but in turning that remote asteroid, their “temporary base,” into a lethal trap.
The other thing is that, even though we were the invaders, they held the advantage of surprise. Neither the human police nor I myself really expected to find the fugitives on the forsaken chunk of rock that the Old Man had indicated. Maybe it was because I had read too many Conan Doyle-style detective stories, but it seemed most likely that I’d show up at an empty lair and have to deal with a complicated jigsaw puzzle of false trails, red herrings, and incomplete clues that would seem impossible to reconstruct at first, until with a brilliant flash of insight I discovered the meaning of some words in an exotic language or of some intriguing signs or drawings, leading me at last to the criminals after a long string of adventures.
That would have been good, maybe, but too Conan Doyle, too S. S. Van Dine. I should also have been paying attention to Chandler and Hammett. As I might easily have learned from Philip Marlowe’s literary adventures, in real life you don’t solve crimes by deciphering clues written in dead languages but, almost always, by a moment of carelessness on the bad guy’s part, a chance meeting on the street, a betrayal, a coincidence—in other words, luck.
First, the idea th
at we could find the bad guys’ hidden lair so easily, just by following a tip from the Methuselah of the Romani; then, the idea that they’d be dumb enough to stay there, as if they couldn’t guess the Old Man would know how Weekman was linked to Makrow 34, as if they didn’t know he ached for revenge and would tell us where they were, and I’d get help from criminals in the pen—it all seemed too foolish, too simplistic, too easy. Almost like a trick.
But life is a great trickster, because there they were. Even if they weren’t exactly waiting for us, even if it came as a bit of a surprise to them when their radar showed a fleet of police ships approaching, they didn’t lose their heads. After all, they had long since taken precautions against such an eventuality—and, as we were soon to discover, their preparations were more than adequate, almost excessive.
“I don’t like this,” Vasily whispered when the motley planetoid resolved into a bleak labyrinth of rock and ice on our screens but we could see no movement on it. “It’s too quiet. Gives me the willies.”
“Me too,” I replied, also in a whisper, under the influence of his conspiratorial tone. “But not to worry, we’ll be on our way soon. You can tell they’re not here now, if they ever were. It always seemed too easy to have your Old Man send us straight to their evil lair.”
A light on my control panel switched from blue to green. I smiled; to think that Vasily had thought this shuttle too new to dock with the Estrella Rom, when it didn’t even have a centralized warning system, just this primitive set of Christmas-tree lights. A green light could only mean that one of our escorts was requesting a com channel, despite my orders for strict radio silence.
Well, fuck it, they must have also realized we’d made the trip for nothing; there couldn’t be anybody here. I opened a reception line. “Calling Raymond, Police Frigate 46 here.” The voice of one of the human cops came over the com. “Look at this, pozzie. Doesn’t it look like the wreck of one of those ships the bounty hunters use?”
“Wait, what?” I was surprised, more than a little. “Bounce the image to my holoscreen,” I was beginning to say…
…when all hell broke loose.
The asteroid literally exploded. Giant chunks of carbonaceous chondrites and dirty carbon dioxide ice flew in every direction. The clouds of sublimated water vapor were so thick, the explosion even made a sound for an instant. Its muted rumble reached us through the shuttle bulkheads.
At first I thought, “Shit, it’s a trap—a hydrogen bomb or something,” but I quickly realized that if it had been nuclear I never would have thought anything of it at all. The two blue lights were still blinking on my control panel, meaning that the two frigates hadn’t disappeared in the explosion either.
If we were all still safe and sound, the next logical step was for me to ask myself whether it might not be a natural process. Sometimes these compound or conglomerate planetoids simply become unstable when they approach the sun, and the pressure of the sublimated ice inside them produces this sort of explosive effect.
That’s when I noticed the bluish sheen of monomolecular ceramics among the asteroidal detritus, then saw it form the unmistakable silhouette of a shark, and I understood three things—all too late.
First, there was nothing natural about this.
Second, I’m a reckless idiot.
And third, the reason why the aliens were so obsessed with catching the Cetian Psi. This was no small-time thug: I don’t know if I’ll ever find out all the dirty deals Makrow 34 had a hand in, but I was now sure that some of them must have been extremely profitable, because he had made enough to buy parts, smuggle them into the Solar System (the number of customs agents he must have bribed to do so is incredible), and then secretly assemble inside the asteroid the marvel of Colossaur military technology that humans have named a Chimera-class micro-destroyer.
I won’t go on and on here about the combat abilities of a Chimera. The point is, it was far too tough a nut to crack for two interplanetary patrol craft and an old human-manufactured shuttle.
One second later, the powerful miniwarship fired the first shot from its particle cannon and put one of the frigates that were supposedly supporting Vasily and me out of commission. The hull of the police craft cracked open like a coconut I once saw on a holovideo that a native expertly sliced in half with a single machete blow.
There the similarities ended: no coconut water or pulp emerged from the two halves, only clouds of air that instantly froze, along with weapons, detritus,… and men. I don’t think there were any survivors. Even if they had been wearing their pressure suits, unless the suits were armored the explosive decompression would have reduced them to rags.
The remaining police frigate, with a grand display of dutifulness (or of suicidal tendencies), opened fire with all its weapons. Either the crew didn’t know what a Chimera could do, or they simply didn’t want to pass on to the next world without at least putting a scratch on the pirate ship’s casing. In any case, they failed miserably: their microwave beams, missiles, and regulation police lasers bounced harmlessly off the Colossaur destroyer’s alternating-field armor.
By contrast, when Makrow and his sidekicks also used all their weaponry in response, they literally annihilated the human ship. I think the biggest fragment that remained would easily have fit inside my hat.
Meanwhile, I was intent on doing the only proper thing under the circumstances: getting out of there, full blast. If the battle is already lost, all you can do is retreat. He who loses and runs away in time can return to fight and win. A coward who escapes lives to become brave. Old sayings with which I was suddenly in complete agreement.
That meant pushing our accelerators to the max with a swipe of my hand, turning off the artificial gravity with a kick of one foot, holding the seat restraints with my teeth, hearing the roar of the plasma engines forced from idle to peak in the blink of an eye—and seeing something that looked a lot like a column of flying ants (ants? in a space shuttle? and flying? where’d they come from?) do a cheerleader routine around the air conditioner vent.
In short: madness, terror, chaos, and putting as many light-years as possible between the Chimera’s sharklike profile and us.
And it’s not like giving them the slip would be easy. Chimeras are the pride of the Colossaurs’ military engineering. Not only are they hyper-armored and bristling with all sorts of weapons, they also have batteries of very effective sensors. Only the swiftness of my positronic neural responses allowed us to escape their first attack, evading microwave beams and hailstorms of charged particles that blasted nearby asteroids into millions of shards of rock and ice.
It wasn’t a simulation or a warning shot: the barrage was intended to destroy us. After that first attempt, I knew they were going to pursue us. I swatted away some flying ants and tried to radio for help; by then it didn’t matter if the whole Solar System knew where we were. No answer.
The damn Colossaurs clearly didn’t forget to include a massive radio interference generator in the arsenal of their Chimeras. Not even God could hear us. Nobody would help us unless we helped ourselves. Makrow didn’t want witnesses. After wiping two police frigates off the map, he wasn’t about to let us waltz off to the Burroughs with news about his latest crime and his newest ship.
A crazy pursuit began through drifting rocks. An obstacle race between the defenseless rabbit and the ferocious wolf, an escape punctuated with volleys that would have blown us to bits if any had hit us—but as if some benevolent god had placed us under his capricious protection, the worst they did was graze us, and only a couple of times at that.
Meanwhile, the impossible ants never stopped buzzing around. Weird. Some of them didn’t seem quite normal to me; they had four, even six wings. Mutants?
Aside from that, everything was going bizarrely well. I remember thinking that Makrow 34’s powers of probabilistic manipulation might not be effective beyond a certain distance after all. But all the same, I had to perform my full repertoire of prohibited maneuvers (and even
create a couple of new ones on the fly). I mentally blessed Vasily and his insistence on remaining loyal to our old shuttle. It might not have had anything remotely as good as the shields on the pirate ship or a regulation frigate. Or their weapons, or half the power of their engines.
But even their small Chimera didn’t have much advantage over us in maneuverability, at the low velocities required by an asteroid belt transit. Plus, fortunately, no human, Colossaur, or Cetian pilot is my rival when it comes to reaction speed.
And I’d never reacted so quickly.
Even so, it took us nearly thirty desperate loops, sudden changes in direction, and zigzags around asteroids to lose sight of them, also losing several square feet of our ship’s outer shielding in our insane final maneuver: squeezing between a par of planetoids, each of them more than a hundred million tons of rock.
That was the worst moment. Really ugly. Like slipping between Scylla and Charybdis. A rock and a hard place. The maneuver had to be precise to the nanosecond. If we’d bumped into them a fraction of a second sooner, they would have caught our flying junkster between them and ground our hull like the molars of some immense monster—but then I wouldn’t be telling this story now. And if I had hesitated a millisecond longer to attempt the passage, the pirate ship’s artillery would have reduced us to ashes.
But things worked out like it was the best of all possible worlds. We left the wolf, with its fangs that snarled and its claws that snatched, behind us. Our tortured engines returned to cruising speed. I slowly peeled my hands from the controls. I looked at them: steady as ever. And I thanked the designers of our android bodies for neglecting to give us involuntary muscle spasms, endocrine glands, and sweat. If I had been human, I would have been buzzing with adrenaline, trembling like a leaf, and drenched through like a diving champion’s towel. Like Vasily.
“Well, that was a close call,” I said, patting his shoulder to calm him and enjoying the elemental pleasure of hearing my own voice. “Who could have imagined they’d have a Chimera hidden in there? Good thing their aim was off and luck was on our side. Makrow must not have been having one of his best days—” Then I saw something in El Afortunado’s palm that made me stop short.