by Yoss
“Seriously? You think they could?”
“No.”
“Good. I was starting to think too many days in space were messing with your judgment.”
“Not that many days. It’s only been—”
“No! Don’t tell me. If you tell me it’s been two or three, I’ll get depressed. Let me think. We’ve been out here for a month, or a month and a half, that I’m a hero and our odds of being rescued are going up by the second.”
“As you wish, Vasily.”
“Raymond, how long has it been since we left the shuttle?”
“Forty-six days.”
“An exact number and everything, thanks. How’ve I done?”
“Great, Vasily. I don’t know many people who could have held up for so long without going crazy.”
“If I ask you for one more favor, will you do it?”
“Depends.”
“Good answer. Raymond. If I start going downhill—not like now, but really downhill, all the time—will you open my air valve?”
“….”
“Please. Or are you guys really bound by Asimov’s stupid three laws, so as you can’t sit back and let a human die under any circumstances, or what?”
“No. I’ll do it, Vasily. But how—”
“Don’t worry, you’ll know. When I start talking about my mother, my father, and my brothers, that’ll be the time. Because I’m an orphan, remember? Promise me?”
“Whatever you say.”
“That’s what I like, you know, robot? Too bad I hadn’t met up with you yet when I was pulling scams on the orbitals. We would have made a good team, don’t you think? The human rat and the buratino.”
“If you say so, Vasily.”
Gaussical or not, he was visibly deteriorating. He was tougher than he looked, but by the end of day ten he was only speaking in incoherent bursts, and only in response to the fragments of Chandler novels I told him. He began getting me mixed up with the characters from The Big Sleep, and though I kind of liked being called Philip, it was clear he wasn’t going to hold on much longer. The recycling membranes built into the suits were seriously contaminated by his bacterial flora. But at least they were still working, and since we were barely active he wasn’t consuming much in the way of nutritional concentrates either.
The worst parts were the silence, the unvarying temperature, the darkness. A human brain needs constant external stimulus or it starts to malfunction. And the time was fast approaching when the sound of my voice inside his helmet would no longer be enough to preserve his mental health—though he still hadn’t started talking to his unknown parents. I would have done what I promised, I swear. But I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. And he still had moments of lucidity now and then that made me think about things I’d never considered before.
“Raymond, you think Makrow will end up getting rid of Giorgio Weekman himself? He’s not worth anything to Makrow outside of this system, and Makrow doesn’t seem like the sort of person—the sort of Cetian, I mean—that travels with excess baggage.”
“If it’s any consolation to you, I think that’s exactly what he’ll do. I’d been thinking the same thing, Vasily. There’s Cetians and Colossaurs all over the galaxy, they say, but as to humans, outside of here—”
“But that poor bastard Giorgio must still believe they’re going to take him. I almost feel sorry for him. I would have treated him nicer. A fast, merciful death, no fooling around. But his palsies are likely to jettison him far from nowhere, in some binary system’s Oort cloud. Well, at least he’ll get to see other suns in the end. I’d like to visit them. Raymond, you ever left the Solar System?”
“No, Vasily. All of us, all the pozzies, are on board the Burroughs. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever left the station in all my fifty-seven years. And I’d gladly have skipped the trip, now that I think of it.”
“Good thing at least one of us still has a sense of humor. But know what, pozzie? I can’t say I’m going to die happy. Not if I’ve never seen the stars, never flown across the galaxy. The aliens always say we’re not ready yet, but I say: who are they to decide for us? Who told them they could set themselves up as our lords and gods, with the right to rule over life and death for humanity?”
“Technology.”
“Fuck technology. Don’t you think we’d be better off now if they’d left us alone? We have heaps of wonderful little gadgets and they might as well’ve told us they work by magic. Not like they ever taught us how they work or what theories they’re based on. We let them turn us into a race of customers. We don’t invent anything—what’s the point? The aliens already invented more than we could dream up in a thousand years. Get me? I don’t think they really even want our raw materials. All they want is to keep us down, keep us like this, neuter our initiative.”
“Vasily, that’s an interesting intergalactic version of an old conspiracy theory, and I hate to contradict you and tear your theory down—but I know the merchants, and I know that they aren’t faking their greed for raw materials, not in the least.”
“Raymond, enough shitting around. It’s time. Open my fucking valve before I change my mind. Been nice knowing you, really. If I had another life to live I might even think about becoming a cop, if I could have you for a partner.”
“Wow, sounds like a declaration of true love.”
“Go to hell, bag of bolts.”
“We’re here already. But changing the subject—you haven’t told me about your parents.”
“Fuck my parents and my whole family. I want you to open my valve, I’m telling you.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as I’ll ever be. Okay, I still remember I’m an orphan, but my mind is going, I can tell. Over your shoulder, I see three stars moving toward us, and stars don’t move.”
But his mind was perfectly clear. The fact was (thank God—any God, to be on the safe side), those weren’t stars.
The three ships from the Milano 5 asteroid prospecting fleet found us on day seventeen of our ordeal, nearly a million miles from the orbit of what had once been Asteroid G 7834 XC. Their hypersensitive instruments succeeded where the Chimera’s sensors had failed. Was it once more due to Vasily’s strange power, or dumb luck?
No matter. The point is, there they were.
It took the miners ten minutes to decide whether to rescue us after they detected our image. It’s easy to imagine the “humanitarian” discussion they had after discovering us: a tranquil, disinterested debate about rewards for rescues, criminal responsibility, and the odds of going to prison, about what would happen if they decided to play dumb and keep going while hushing it all up….
Luckily you can still find a hint of ethics even among asteroid prospectors, that mutant subspecies of space rat. They helped me pull Vasily aboard (his legs, like the rest of his muscles, were no longer responsive after floating in total weightlessness without any exercise for more than two weeks). They grumbled about how he was draining their reserves of blood plasma and fresh food, but they also did their minimal bit to help El Afortunado’s debilitated body get back to more or less working order by repeatedly administering general dialysis and intravenous metabolic treatments.
But their protests grew louder and angrier, almost spilling over into mutiny, when I pulled my extraordinary police authorization on them by asking them (by which I mean ordering them) to send us off in one of their three ships to the nearest base where we might catch a rapid spacecraft to the Burroughs.
There was shouting, cursing, wailing, and exclamations of “that’s what we get for rescuing a damn pozzie alien-hugger” from a couple of crew members. But when one of the prospectors, who evidently invested all his profits in anabolic steroids and nutritional supplements (he wasn’t very tall, but his arms were thicker than my thighs and his back was so broad he would only look small next to a Colossaur—so broad that it would be easier to jump over him than to walk around him—and also covered with hair) decided to resort to stronger measur
es, putting an electric stiletto to my throat when he thought I wasn’t looking, I had to show him that the extraordinary powers of the Burroughs Space Station Positronic Police Force aren’t based solely on rational persuasion and an assumption of good behavior. I’d left all my weapons on the shuttle, but a positronic robot’s synthetic muscles don’t grow weak after three or even three hundred weeks without exercise and in zero gravity.
After I reduced the rash gorilla’s stiletto to a spark-spewing knot and rearranged his overdeveloped right arm into an anatomically dubious angle dangling from his shoulder, his shipmates suddenly became a lot more collaborative.
A lot quieter, too.
That’s why I didn’t hear until the third day, just a few hours before we landed at the zero-g cubbyhole that the zero-prospect miners called a base, that Vasily had guessed right.
An unidentified ship, coming from an undetermined direction, had attacked the Estrella Rom three days earlier, hitting it with so much firepower that all the Romanis’ combined defenses were unable to resist after the first volley.
The Chimera destroyer (it could only have been Makrow and his sidekicks, though the bit about the “unidentified ship from an undetermined direction” showed that the aliens were being as hard-nosed about censorship as ever—perhaps for good reason this time; if the human police knew what was orbiting their Earth, they might have refused en masse to man their ships) didn’t stop at blasting the whole flimsy structure of the wheel to smithereens. With sadistic thoroughness, they hunted down every wretch, one by one, who hadn’t been lucky enough to die in the explosive decompression that blew the shabby station apart when its seals failed. Escape pods and space suits alike became target practice for their sick game of shipwreck hunting. And by all accounts their aim was excellent. The thuggish miner I had beaten described to me, vindictively and with every gory detail, how Earth police were still finding punctured pressure suits and pulverized pods all over the orbit.
Needless to say, no survivors were found.
Vasily was still sleeping and hooked up to at least fifteen tubes when I heard the news. I didn’t have the stomach to wake him up and tell him. Old Man Slovoban wasn’t Vasily’s father, but he was the closest thing to a father the poor guy ever had. Besides, he wasn’t going to like it when he found out I had saved him from death in space only to send him back to his cell.
It’s true. My superiors had decided that my “Gaussical vs. Gaussical” initiative was a failure. They’d ordered me to return immediately to the Burroughs and account for my mistakes.
And, they explicitly added, if I didn’t want my situation to get even worse, I’d better come back with Vasily.
Nine
This was the moment I’d been dreading all along.
Maybe it was my imagination (after all, only one of the three had what you might call a facial expression), but I saw the Triumvirate of the Galactic Trade Confederation glaring at me from behind their great table like I was a giant turd dumped on their pristine hall.
Maybe a bit more scornfully.
They got right down to business, no greetings or preliminaries.
“Your idea of using a human Psi to capture the criminal Makrow 34 confused us at first. We thought it original, yet it was only suspiciously heterodox and, as was to be expected from such a foolish notion, it ended badly.” Scowling in disapproval, Rebbloh 21, the Cetian representative, subtly stressed his Gaussical compatriot’s status as a renegade, as if to make it abundantly clear that he and the rest of his species had nothing whatsoever to do with those crimes.
The Cetian’s appearance was completely humanoid, his command of Standard Anglo-Hispano impeccable. But neither that nor the fact that he was one of a series of clones hatched from eggs saved him from being an absolute bastard. Good people (if such exist among the Cetians, perhaps as mutants) never reach the top in the Galactic Trade Confederation—or anywhere else in the universe, I fear.
“At least the operation carried out against the asteroid resulted in nothing more noteworthy than human casualties, an insignificant loss compared to the death of one of our own in the first encounter with the criminals,” the Grodo representative broke in, interrupting the Cetian (to my great relief). The Grodo’s scent-marker name, which obviously has no direct equivalent in spoken languages, meant something roughly like Lofty Sniffer-Out of Commercial Possibilities That Will Leave His Adversaries Weeping Over Their Empty Coffers. Fortunately for the translators, he was better known as Escamita or Tiny Scale, at least among us pozzies. He shifted to a topic he found of far greater importance: his own interests. “The nest of… ” (here the sophisticated cyberprotein device gave up on translating the dead bounty hunter’s pheromonic insectoid name, emitting only a pitiful burbling whistle), “which I represent here, consider themselves mortally aggrieved, but would be willing to forget the offense, given adequate monetary compensation. Considering that the malefactors belong to the Cetian and Colossaurian species, nothing could be more just than to—”
The Cetian forgot his manners and hissed something in his harsh native language, to which the Grodo replied by raising himself menacingly on his hind feet and revealing his long ovipositor sting.
“Please, please!” The hulking armored Colossaurian representative stepped between the rivals. The titanic reptiloid’s real name was as unpronounceable as the Grodo’s, so he too was instead known by a well-earned nickname: Yougottaproblem. His call for civility made me only more suspicious. One of the most irascible members of the most warlike species in the galaxy, calling for order? There was something fishy going on. “We may speak of compensation later. Colossa is willing to pay any price necessary to put the lamentable behavior of their representative behind them,” the translation device interpreted him, though I suspect the term the Colossaur used in his own language for the bagger was a good deal saltier. “In the meantime, Makrow 34 and his accomplices remain on the loose, and given their illegal possession of a Chimera-class destroyer they constitute a genuine danger, which is what we must urgently confront.”
“They will be hunted down. A single combat ship cannot thwart all the system’s police forces, no matter how primitive humans are,” Rebbloh 21 objected with an almost human gesture of annoyance.
“A Chimera-class destroyer with a Colossaur at the helm could destroy every base in the Solar System, one by one—except this station, of course—and no human ship could stop it,” the Grodo spoke up again, and the Colossaur gave a bow of his powerful head, as if to tacitly thank him for his respectful acceptance of the obviously superior combat abilities of Colossa-designed craft. “I believe that the resolution of this affair has already surpassed the technical abilities of the human race, and even that of the robotic police force on this station.”
I almost would have preferred getting chewed out. Being urgently summoned only to be treated like a microbe on the wall wasn’t exactly my fondest dream.
“Agreed, it is a major problem. How do you propose to deal with it?” Rebbloh 21 said, making no commitments but clearly sensing something big was up. I sensed it too. “I do not imagine you are thinking of handing so primitive a species the sophisticated combat systems needed to confront this destroyer. The mere presence of which destroyer in this system, incidentally, does not speak well of the supervision of high-risk exports from the Colossa system.”
“Those guilty of this criminal negligence have already been punished,” Yougottaproblem thundered (and I say thundered because there was a sound that the translation device left unchanged, and it sounded precisely like thunder—though more likely it was an especially pungent curse). “This is not however the point.” Nothing in the universe can divert a Colossaur from a subject once he’s locked onto it. “Considering that we cannot provide advanced military technology to either the humans or the pozzies, and that the tripartite agreement expressly forbids the introduction and operation of military detachments from any of the signatories in our free systems, I propose the creation, for this exce
ptional case alone, of a task force to capture these criminals and their illegal spacecraft. Pending which, all the commercial operations on this enclave should be suspended and all the independent merchants currently here should return to their systems of origin.”
“I support the motion.” Escamita reacted on the fly, and if not for the fact that Grodos have no lips, he probably would have smiled. “Indeed, the situation calls for a joint naval blockade so that we can be certain Makrow and his flunkies do not escape from this system in their Chimera.”
I almost clapped my hands: it was a masterful move in the old trading game. Which consists above all in breaking your competition. As humanoids, the Cetians were slightly more interested in the raw materials that Earth and the other human colonies of the Solar System could offer them. Indeed, they were humanity’s largest trading partner, by a narrow margin. If this proposal for an embargo went into effect, the Cetians’ balance of trade could be negatively affected—especially if they were forced to buy the equivalents of terrestrial materials and harvests from planets controlled by Colossaurs or Grodos, as would almost certainly happen.
A dirty trick, but as everybody knows, everything’s fair in love and intergalactic trade. Even war, if it comes to that.
“I oppose this measure, and I will exercise my veto power!” Rebbloh 21 responded energetically, immediately grasping the trap they had laid. A Cetian doesn’t make it onto the triumvirate of a trading station without first developing an intuition that a Psi would envy for sniffing out traps. A single pirate ship, no matter how powerful, isn’t reason enough to freeze all movement in an entire trading enclave. This station closely monitors the only hyperspace portal in the system. If Makrow 34 were crazy enough to attempt an approach, he’d discover that the defenses of the William S. Burroughs are strong enough to demolish his ship, powerful as it is, as soon as the radar identified it….
Those last words, as soon as the radar identified it, bounced around my mind—and an idea exploded across my circuits: what if it doesn’t identify the ship?