by Yoss
What if Makrow 34’s plan all along was to get us obsessed with the unmistakable outline of a Chimera-class destroyer, while he and his goons slipped through the holes in a net that was only looking for that one vessel?
“I believe that under current circumstances it should be considered utterly inappropriate to exercise the veto power… ” the Colossaur was beginning to say, a malevolent gleam in his piggish little eyes. But I didn’t listen to the rest of the words into which the cybernetic translator converted his bestial grunts and snorts.
I left the three powerful representatives of the Galactic Trade Confederation to squabble over their disagreement and hightailed it out of the room.
Let them work their mess out however they preferred and pin the blame on whoever they wanted. I had more important things to do.
It was like a gambit in chess. If the Cetian Gaussical was prepared to sacrifice his queen (the Chimera-class destroyer), then the pawns (he and the other two bad guys) might make it to the eighth square and get crowned. That would be: the hyperspace portal on the ecliptic plane. If they managed to get out of the Solar System, and especially if they got away with some of their loot, it would probably be a few years before another pair of baggers came within a parsec of them.
Only humans played the game with the sixty-four black-and-white squares. Not even Cetians bothered with it, considering it too simplistic (the closest they had was a three-player game played with sixty variably valued pieces, arranged across five boards of a hundred squares each, placed one above the other to form levels—typical of their mentality; even we pozzies had a hard time following it). But apparently Makrow 34, who had spent a long time running around Homo sapiens territory, had learned it.
But I was good at the old game too. The key to winning at chess is learning how to anticipate your enemy’s moves while coming up with unexpected moves of your own at the same time.
I practically flew down the corridor to grab the nearest express elevator. My mind was turning even faster. First off: find Vasily again. He was somehow able to sense Makrow’s presence, as he had shown when we neared the asteroid. Or rather, as my friend Einstein would have corrected me, he could detect the altered probability curve that the grotesque Gaussical produced with his Psi powers.
But where should I take him? Which variation on the escape route would the crafty Cetian go for? I had to anticipate his next move if I wanted to lay a trap he couldn’t escape.
Of course, they’d have to disguise themselves first: a Cetian, a human, and a Colossaur hanging out together aren’t exactly the sort of trio who can stroll past you unnoticed.
Would they also camouflage the Chimera rather than abandon it? Risky, but possible. The destroyer was worth a lot, and they’d have no lack of costume material: according to the rumors on the illegal Web that had reached the mining prospectors, the attack on the Estrella Rom had left thousands of bits of debris in orbit, in every shape and size, even whole spacecraft. Maybe they’d even find some tumbledown shuttle with a storage hold big enough to hide a smallish ship like a destroyer.
And why not both variations?
But would they all try getting out together, or would they separate so that at least one of them might have a chance of leaving the system?
Or, as Vasily and I had each thought, maybe the aliens would simply sacrifice their human accomplice as a distraction. Queen sacrifice, pawn sacrifice.
Anything was possible….
Just then alarms began blaring all over the station, and I realized it could only mean one thing: the Grodo and the Colossaur had joined forces to outvote the Cetian, and the William S. Burroughs was going to shut down and be evacuated for the first time in fifty-seven years, with all the resulting pandemonium.
An ideal state of confusion for Makrow and his sidekicks to slip away.
I could only wonder if Escamita and Yougottaproblem were also Makrow 34’s accomplices.
Ten
“I can’t sense him, I can’t see him, I ain’t got a fucking clue where he is!” Vasily yelled, and slammed his fist into the control panel, swiveling halfway around to look at me. “Sorry, Raymond. It ain’t the same doing it on a holoscreen as live. To start with, if he don’t use his powers, I can’t pick up on him. Then there’s too many aliens, too many humans; he could be any one of them.” He buried his face in his hands.
Before him, across the wall of screens, the crowds abandoning our station were heading out in endless, grumbling lines toward the docking modules where their ships awaited, with an orderliness that most often was more apparent than real.
Over there, a bunch of humans were struggling with a number of long, narrow boxes, which must have been filled with very heavy objects considering how they strained to manage their loads, even with the help of antigrav carts.
Here, a Cetian was running to grab the spot left empty by a human being throttled by an angry Colossaur. A crowd formed and the murmuring of the masses rose to a roar until a couple of pozzies arrived and detained the pair.
There, it was a Grodo and another Colossaur exchanging blows. The fight sounded like a hammer striking an anvil, against a choral backdrop of hoarse lions. A space had cleared out several yards wide around the massive opponents, obliging another pair of my buddies to intervene with their anti-riot stun guns (not very effective against such armored monsters, but that’s all they had).
It wasn’t quite total chaos yet, but it was getting there. As broad as the halls and passages of the Burroughs are, they weren’t designed for this type of general evacuation, especially not on an emergency basis.
“Oh, don’t worry, it was just on the off chance, but we had to try it, right?” I patted Vasily on the shoulder to comfort him, but when I tried to further calm his worries with a joke, I screwed it up badly. “Besides, I’m surprised you’re even interested. Seems you weren’t so happy in your isolation cell after all, eh?”
He didn’t say anything, but the dark look he gave me was worth any number of words. He still hadn’t forgiven me for letting him wake up from his zero-gravity ordeal in the same cell where he had spent the previous three years imprisoned. I felt sorry for him, but there was nothing I could have done about it: seventeen days floating in a pressure suit through space might be a subjective eternity, but in terms of his sentence it was just seventeen days. After he’d demonstrated that he could remove the supposedly irremovable anti-Psi collar at will, we couldn’t even grant him that sort of conditional freedom—though it’s also true that if he hadn’t taken the collar off when the Chimera attacked us, neither of us would be around anymore.
So I shut my mouth too, and we kept our eyes fixed on the holoscreens.
He wasn’t wearing the collar now, either. He might at least have thanked me for that. But what can you do. Well, he had the excuse that we were too busy.
Once more we were up against the needle-in-a-haystack problem. How can you tell one Colossaur from another? Without his weapons and his gear, the treacherous bounty hunter would be practically indistinguishable in our eyes from any other member of his species. A little bigger at most, but not enough to make a real difference. At night all cats are gray, and at any time all Colossaurs are huge.
As for the Cetians, being clones they’re virtually indistinguishable from each other. Anybody not from Tau Ceti would have an impossible time telling the horrific Makrow 34 not only from the harmless Makrow 33 but even from our own dear Rebbloh 21 (who isn’t really much better as a person, I suspect). The external differences between Cetians and humans aren’t very great either, morphologically speaking—though one species is born from a uterus and the other hatches from an egg. Besides, with costumes and the holocamouflage we have now, details such as their double hearts and the different range of their visual spectrum no longer seem insuperable.
Makrow 34 could be that bearded guy in Module 21 speaking what sounded like Urdu to me, or perhaps Parsi or some more exotic dialect. Or he could be one of the guys struggling with that long, hea
vy box on the antigrav cart. If Giorgio Weekman climbed onto his shoulders, they’d make a perfect six-member person, just a little ungainly—like that Grodo in Module 9.
The fact was, they could be anybody. When this was over, if it ever would end, I thought, they’d have to think about a system for identifying everybody who enters the station: something faster and harder to falsify than thumbprints, a retinal scan, or even DNA. Cheating their scanners with samples from someone else is child’s play even for human criminals, so it wouldn’t slow a damned Gaussical at all.
There were too many of them, too few of us, and not enough time to monitor everyone thoroughly. We put a pair of pozzies in every module, but with the continuous flow of evacuees they couldn’t check out the crowd one by one. So they picked one person out of every ten—choosing at random, or singling out anyone who seemed suspicious—but even this procedure made the evacuees protest, especially the aliens, who felt their privileges were being violated. Selecting one out of every ten at random was as good as not doing anything at all, given our guy’s ability to manipulate the odds.
I was watching several screens at once, trying to catch anything a little off. I knew subconsciously that I was missing something; there had to be at least one clue, perhaps so subtle that my conscious mind couldn’t pick up on it. Or was I just carried away by my desire for there to be something, my guilt at not finding anything? I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better, more efficient, if the aliens had made us entirely cold, mathematical reasoning machines instead of partly analogic and emotional, subjective, fallible, nearly human.
Maybe we had a slim chance, though. If Makrow lost his nerve and had to use his powers, Vasily could detect it and….
“What really pisses me off,” my theoretical fugitive detector exclaimed at last, as if to himself, “ain’t that they wouldn’t give me my freedom. Say you can’t trust me, say you can’t be sure I won’t use my powers if I’m not wearing the anti-Psi collar, say whatever, and I’ll say the same about police promises, including robot police promises: they ain’t worth an old fart, far as I ever saw. But that ain’t it. What burns my ass is this, we let that slimeball Weekman get away, knowing he’ll tell everybody in the galaxy how he pulled another one over on me. And on all you positronic flunkies, too, by the way.”
I stopped listening. Something caught my eye on one of the screens. I zoomed in. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but… instinct? Was I going to start trusting to instinct, too? Module 14. Another false alarm, no doubt. A guy standing behind a couple of humans, who were hauling yet another mysterious long, heavy package (this was suddenly happening all over the station; contraband weapons? Maybe. Under other circumstances I’d have them checked out, but we didn’t have time for misdemeanors just then). Hunched, white-robed, with long Rasta locks, sweating, doubling over just before he got to where my buddy Mao Castro stood controlling the line.
The suspicious detail: his skin, which to all appearances should have been black, had gone ash-gray. Why? Stomachache? Scared shitless? I dialed the sound all the way up: yep, the poor guy’s stomach was burbling like a pot of boiling water. He vomited; hesitated; tried to stand up straight, rose halfway up, hesitated again, let two or three people pass; then at last he squeezed back into line in front of a Colossaur, who snorted at the insult. Hunched, black, Rastafarian dreads, definitely human, didn’t look anything like Weekman or Makrow, though you know that all it takes is the right kind of plastiflesh makeup…. But they wouldn’t be that crazy, risking the reaction of the ornery oversized Colossaurs, would they? Still, definitely suspicious: if he wasn’t one of them, then he was definitely smuggling something. Better call it in. I grabbed the mic.
“Mao Castro: keep an eye on the Rasta in white, he might be… ” I felt Vasily’s breath on my back. “What do you think, Afortunado? Could it be Makrow?”
“No, not him.” He hesitated, but he was staring at the image. “Don’t look like Weekman, either, but you guys better watch it. Something’s off.” He leaned forward until his nose almost touched the screen, watching my buddy in his Red Guard uniform approach the suspect. “Huh. Indigestion? Raymond, ever heard of them metabolic bombs, stuff you swallow in your food? The ingredients seem harmless, one at a time, but when your stomach acid breaks them down and they combine—boom! Weekman loved fooling around with rare poisons like that, years ago. Remember what he did to the Old Man. Better tell your Chinese friend to be careful.”
“Mao, watch out for the guy in white. Could be a human bomb.”
Mao Castro ran toward the suspect and Vasily leaned in closer and closer to the holomonitor, until the inevitable happened: the wheels of his chair slipped forward and he fell clumsily onto his back. I leaned down to help Vasily, as I tried to keep from laughing.
And a thousand suns exploded on the screen.
Holovideo systems are robust and effective, ideal for capturing the three-dimensionality of a scene or a space. But they aren’t perfect. Their main disadvantage is, they’re too realistic. Or, breaking it down: you can’t use optical filters with them, and the light saturation is limitless. That is why they are only used indoors. If a holocamera outside a ship were accidentally to point directly at the sun, the image on the screen would be as blinding as the star itself.
Vasily’s Gaussical power—or his good luck—saved us once again. If his chair hadn’t had wheels instead of an antigrav suspension, he wouldn’t have slipped. If he hadn’t fallen, he would still have been watching the screen, and from that close up his retinas would have been permanently burnt. If I hadn’t leaned over to help him, the brightness would have overloaded my electro-optical systems—nothing irreversible, in my case; after ten minutes I would have been able to see again—but what if by then it was too late?
Suddenly I realized that it would take any other pozzie monitoring the scene the same ten minutes to return to full operational capacity. I ran to the microphone, imagining the worst. “Mao? Mao Castro?”
Surprise. The screen didn’t display the massacre I had feared. Yes, the Module 14 transit hall looked like a wheat field hit by a tornado or a lightning bolt, filled with smoke and bodies lying strewn everywhere, like ears of wheat scattered by the wind.
But setting aside the temporary blindness, they were almost all in one piece, and some were even starting to move again. The number of groans that reached me over the sound channel showed that the wounded greatly outnumbered the dead. Over there was a stunned Colossaur, trying to stand up, tossing aside one of those omnipresent long, narrow, heavy packages, which had landed on him when the explosion hurled it from its antigrav cart. Over here were three humans, trying to stand and tumbling down. Evidently the bomb’s power had mainly been used to generate a flash of light.
Even so, the blast was too powerful for the poor people closest to it to survive. I noticed a couple of scattered limbs and a few bloody tatters, implying at least three or four victims. Several bits of cloth were still smoldering, but only a few of them could have belonged to the Rasta in the white robes. Whoever he had been, the explosion must have reduced him to molecules.
As for Mao Castro, I imagined the worst. After all, he had been the closest. And I could see a few suspicious metaloplastic fragments here and there.
But….
“Raymond, can you hear me?” Though hoarse, faltering, barely recognizable, it was my buddy’s voice, and the next second I saw him. Alive, though not exactly whole: missing both legs and one arm, he had managed to drag himself over to the camera and microphone. He was also missing half his face (his shredded black beard was still burning; not a very pleasant scene), but his torso (the only part of a pozzie that really matters, in the end) was relatively intact. It wasn’t pleasant to see his damaged thoracic air-compressor voice box pumping through the torn khaki of his mangled Red Guard uniform. It looked kind of like an accordion riddled with holes and kind of like the gills of a fish out of the water, dying.
“I hear you. Are you okay?” I shouted. �
�I’m going to call for help.”
“No, no…. Don’t call…. Must have been… diversion. Tell them, go to… other modules…. Not here… not now.” And he toppled over, unable to continue.
“Don’t worry, Mao. I’ll spread the word,” I reassured him. “Attention, everyone. There has been an explosion in Module 14. A human bomb. We have a few wounded and two or three dead. Send paramedics and a pozzie repair team. Mao Castro is seriously damaged. Attention! The bomb appears to have been set as a distraction. Redouble the guard in all other modules,” I yelled into the communication system. Then I had another thought. “Send a DNA identification team, too. I wouldn’t bet on it, but one of the fugitives may have been the human bomb.” A second later I had the satisfaction of seeing three people appear in the unmistakable white bioprotection suits of paramedics. At least the aliens have no prejudices in the health field; whatever your race, you can volunteer for the Emergency Public Health and Hygiene Services. “Good.” I stood and stretched. “At least the Emergency Services still run like clockwork.”
“Good my ass.” Vasily’s voice startled me, and when I turned around, there he was, right behind me, adjusting the cartridge belt I remembered so well—though I still hadn’t seen him use it, or figured out how he’d gotten it from his collection of weaponry and into the control room. But for the moment I had higher priorities than interrogating him on such a minor detail.
“What do you mean?” I asked in all sincerity, ascertaining at a glance that all the weapons in my Gaussical friend’s portable arsenal were in their intended holsters. It looked like he’d even acquired a couple new ones. I’d like to know how he got them onto the station, too. Especially because, it occurred to me at the time, if he could do it, it must have been child’s play for Makrow and his henchmen. I’d have to expect to find them at least as heavily armed as my friend.
“I think you’ve lost your detective’s nose, Tracy, if you ever had one. You really think it’s normal, in the middle of a chaotic evacuation, for a bunch of volunteer paramedics to get to the scene of an explosion in just—” (Vasily glanced at his watch) “—twenty-five seconds?” After checking once more to be sure all his weaponry was where it was supposed to be, he ran to the door.