"I'll remember this," Blackjack growled, leading the group away to the table.
"What was that all about?" Egor asked.
"That was some of the opposition," Whitey explained. "All of a sudden, I'm a lot more eager to see them through a set of gunsights."
"Speaking of that, did you find your contact?" Tambu interrupted.
"Sure did," Egor nodded. "He's waiting outside. I left him there when I saw the crowd at your table. He seems to be the nervous sort."
"Well, bring him in," Tambu ordered. "The quicker we get this done with, the better I'll like it."
"Do you think it'll be okay?" Egor asked, jerking his
ROBERT LYNN ASPR1N head toward the seated trio glaring at them from across the room.
"I think so," Tambu said judiciously as he hefted one of the guns from the table and glanced pointedly at Blackjack. "Go get him."
The man Egor escorted back to the table was a bespectacled, balding wisp of a man who clutched his attach‚ case to his chest like a drowning man clinging to a life jacket. His eyes kept darting nervously to the guns on the table as the introductions were made.
"There-there won't be any trouble, will there?"
"Relax, Mr. Hendricks," Tambu assured him. "Everything is under control."
"For an arms dealer, you seem awfully nervous around guns," Whitey observed.
"Just because I sell weapons doesn't mean I like to be around when they're used," Hendricks snapped defensively. "If I had my way, I'd deal only through the mail."
"Quite understandable," Tambu nodded. "Now then, Mr. Hendricks, if you could begin going over the weapons specs with Whitey here, I'd like to have a word with Egor."
The man nodded and began unsnapping his case as Tambu drew Egor aside.
"Egor, I have a couple of errands for you."
"I thought I would be here for the bargaining," the big man frowned.
"So did I, my friend, but this is more important. Get down to the spaceport and find out all you can about Blackjack's ship."
"Who?" Egor blinked.
"Mr. Personality at the table over there. Get a description of his ship if you can, and relay the information to Puck. Tell him to stand by the guns and open fire if that ship comes anywhere near ours."
"But our guns aren't good enough to fight off an armed ship!"
"I know, but until we close this deal, they're all we've got. If my guess, is right, Blackjack's crew won't be too eager to get into a fight if he isn't there calling the signals."
"You'll keep him here? Then why do I have to-"
"He might be wired for sound," Tambu broke in. "If anyone on his ship picked up our conversation, they might be getting very curious about us."
"They might be going after Puck right now!" Egor exclaimed.
"Right! So hurry. There's no time to argue."
"Okay, but watch that table. I don't trust them."
"Me neither, my friend," Tambu admitted, but the big man was already on his way.
With a sigh, Tambu joined Whitey and Hendricks, pulling his chair around to where he could watch Blackjack's table without moving his head.
"Sorry to be so long," he apologized. "How are we doing here?"
"Hendricks has what we want." Whitey leaned back from the table. "Compatible with our ship's systems. If they were any bigger, we wouldn't have the power to fire them."
"That big?" Tambu said. "Where'd they come from?"
Whitey answered, "As near as I can figure, they were salvaged from some of the old Planet Tamer ships. Nobody else used guns that big."
"Professional ethics require that I never reveal my sources-or customers," Hendricks commented.
"How would these weapons stack up against their armaments?" Tambu asked, indicating the trio glowering at. them.
"Blackjack?" Hendricks asked, peering over his glasses. "You'll have half again the range of anything on his ship."
"Fine," Tambu nodded. "And now the big question. How much?"
Hendricks produced a small notepad and scribbled briefly on it.
"I dislike haggling," he announced, pushing the pad across the table. "This is a firm price, including installation."
Tambu glanced at the figure on the pad and smiled.
"Let's be realistic, Mr. Hendricks. We want to buy the guns without a ship attached-used guns, at that."
"In mint condition," Hendricks countered. "Warehousing them has cost me dear."
"Which is all the more reason for you to be eager to sell them," Tambu pointed out. "And there can't be much demand for them if you've had to carry them in inventory this long."
Hendricks began to protest, but Tambu held up a restraining hand.
"Fortunately, I also dislike haggling. Here is my top offer, and we'll install them ourselves."
He crossed out Hendrick's figure and scribbled a number of his own on the pad.
"Ridiculous!" Hendricks scoffed, looking at the pad. "Just because I deal with pirates doesn't mean I'll stand still for being robbed myself. I'll let the guns rust away before..."
Tambu smiled to himself as he listened to the man's orations. Despite the volume and bitterness of his objections, Hendricks had not moved from his seat after examining their offer.
They would reach an agreement soon.
INTERVIEW III
"It sounds like you were getting it from all sides in the beginning," Erickson commented. Sympathy was always a good ploy to loosen a subject's defenses.
"Yes, we were quite alone then. Still, that is not particularly surprising. We were setting a new pattern, and change is always resisted. The people we dealt with were constantly assuming that we fit in the order they already knew. Our only consolation was that if they had realized then what we were about, they probably would have treated us much more harshly."
"How do you figure that?" the reporter urged.
"Well, I've always felt Blackjack could have given us more trouble, but he didn't. Pirates are not the devil-may-care adventurers people think they are. Even though they risk their lives in combat, they're usually very careful about the reward they are gambling their lives against. Before we armed our ship, we would have been easy prey for a ship such as Blackjack's, but there was no reason for him to fight us then."
"How about vengeance? You embarrassed him in front of his crew there in the bar. Wouldn't he want to get even for that?"
"Vengeance is an expensive habit, Mr. Erickson. It's a luxury few businessmen can afford, and for all his flaws, Blackjack was a businessman. No, he believed us to be cargo haulers and decided it would be better to wait until sometime when he caught us with a full cargo hold. If he realized our actual plan of becoming pirate hunters, he probably would have attacked us at the earliest opportunity."
"You make it sound as if a confrontation between your ships was inevitable. I should think it would be a long shot at best."
"Not really," Tambu corrected. "While space itself is vast, there are a limited number of settled planets, and even fewer which have substantial space traffic in and out. Most ship-to-ship encounters occur in orbit over a planet rather than in space. If both our ship and Blackjack's were prowling the heavily trafficked lanes, it would only be a matter of time before we collided--especially if we were looking for each other."
"I see," the reporter nodded thoughtfully. "Getting back for a moment to your early difficulties, what would you say was the greatest obstacle you had to overcome?"
"Ignorance."
"Ignorance?" Erickson echoed, caught off guard by the abruptness and brevity of the answer. "Could you elaborate on that a bit?"
"Certainly. Our biggest problem was our own ignorance... na‹vet‚, if you will. We were out to beat the pirates at their own game, but we had no real idea of what that game was. Blackjack was the first pirate we had met face to face, and we wouldn't have known it if he hadn't told us."
"And this ignorance hampered your early efforts?"
"It did more than hamper them, it crippled them.
I've already given you an idea of how long it took us simply to find our suppliers. If any of us had crewed on a pirate ship, we would have had the information and known exactly where to go."
"But once your ship was outfitted, things started to go easier, right?"
"Quite the contrary. It wasn't until our ship was fully outfitted and we went hunting for our first opponent that we began to realize how little we knew about pirates. In many ways, that's when our real problems first began...."
CHAPTER THREE
"How much longer until they can see us?"
As Puck's voice came over the intercom, Tambu punched the 'talk' button on his command console, not taking his eye from the two ships on the viewscreen.
"Stow the chatter, Puck." he ordered. "Just keep watching that upper turret.
As might well be expected, they were all nervous. The next few minutes could well be the culmination of nearly a year's preparations.
Refitting the ship had taken much longer than any of them had anticipated, not to mention costing considerably over the original estimates. The results were heartening, however. The ship, now named the Scorpion, had a sting to be reckoned with in the form of four long-range slicers. Hendricks had assured them that they were now armed better than any ship currently registered. The only discomforting thought was that not all pirate ships were registered.
Even more important than the weapons, and twice as costly, were the custom scanners which allowed them to appraise a situation from a position well outside the range of another ship's detection equipment.
That plus several months of practice made the Scorpion and her crew formidable opponents. When they were all in agreement that they were ready to do combat, a new problem arose. How do you find the pirates?
Their only solution had led them here, to the Weisner System, which reported the highest frequency of pirate attacks. Prepared for a waiting game, they had struck paydirt almost immediately. In orbit over Magnus, the largest inhabited planet in the system, their detectors found two ships lying side by side. One was disabled and showed signs of recent damage, while the other seemed to be unscratched, and had two turret guns prominently mounted on her exterior.
It could be a pirate in the process of looting a victim. Then again, it could simply be a commercial ship answering a distress call. The problem was one captains had been wrestling with for over a decade. How do you tell a pirate from any other ship until he fires on you?
A hurried conference among the Scorpion's crew yielded the current course of action. They would ease close enough to the two ships that their guns would be in firing range, but the smaller guns of the functional ship would be unable to reach them to return fire... hopefully. From that position, they would hail the ship, offering assistance, and try to determine the situation confronting them.
Of course, there were several precautions they took to insure their safety in the maneuver. First, they kept their solar sails furled, relying on their storage batteries for power. Although this meant less power for their weapons or for emergency flight, Tambu reasoned that the fighting, if there was any, would be over quickly one way or another.
They angled their approach so that they were not aligned with the guns of their potential opponent, thus guaranteeing themselves first-shot capability before any fire could be brought to bear on them. Finally, Egor and Puck were manning batteries of two guns each, keeping them closely trained on the turret guns of the ship they were approaching while Whitey handled the actual maneuvering of the Scorpion. Tambu stood by ready to handle the talking once they opened communications.
They had taken every precaution possible, short of simply bypassing the entire situation. Both of the ships they were approaching had their sails out, obviously not combat ready in their vulnerability. Still the crew of the Scorpion were wet-palmed nervous-individually and as a group.
Another few minutes...
"Whitey?" Tambu asked abruptly.
"Yes, captain?"
"Am I set with a hailing frequency?"
It was a needless question, one that he had asked before. Tambu was no more immune to the strain of nerves than any of the others in his crew.
"Sure are, captain. They should be able to hear you now if you want to start."
They were within the range of the Scorpion's armaments now. Tambu knew that if he waited much longer, they would be vulnerable to return fire from the other ship. Licking his dry lips, he reached for the hailing microphone.
"Captain!"
At least two voices called to him from the ship's intercom, their exact identity lost in the garble of their overlap.
"I see it!" he barked. "Open fire!"
One of the turret guns on the functional ship they were approaching had begun to move, swiveling toward them in smooth silence.
Even as Tambu gave the order, the guns of the Scorpion opened up, the orange beams of slicers darting out like striking snakes toward their would-be assailant.
Though the crew of the Scorpion had practiced often and long with their slicers in mock attacks on small asteroids and occasionally on the face of an uninhabited planet, they had never seen the actual effect of their weapons on another ship. Now they had a front-row seat.
There was no explosion, no shower of sparks or flame. The portion of the rival ship which came into contact with the orange beams simply melted away like thin plastic before a soldering iron. One of the beams hit a sail, severing the tip. The remaining portion of the sail crumpled slowly as the severed tip began to drift away into open space. Both turret guns simply vanished, erased completely by direct hits from the slicers.
"Cease fire!" Tambu shouted, finding his voice at last.
The beams halted at the sound of his command, and silence reigned as they surveyed their handiwork.
The stricken ship's hull was already healing itself. The outer hulls on all ships were triple thickness with auto guidance to slide new plates into place in event of damage severe enough to cause interior pressure loss. Soon the exterior of the ship would be repaired. They could only guess at the interior damage of their attack.
Tambu's eyes wandered to the third ship, floating silently next to their recent opponent. Having now seen how fast a ship could heal itself after an attack, he could appreciate anew the extent of the attack which had wrecked such havoc as to leave a ship gaping open like that.
"We got him!" Puck's awe-filled voice came over the intercom.
"Keep your guns on him!" Tambu snapped. "We don't know if he has any more surprises up his sleeve."
"Captain?" Whitey joined the conversation. "Aren't you going to try hailing them now?"
There was something in her voice that caught Tambu's attention. In contrast to Puck's enthusiasm, Whitey seemed almost pensive. "Is something bothering you, Whitey?" he asked.
"Well... it occurs to me that except for some shooting, nothing has changed." she replied hesitantly. "We still don't know whether or not they're pirates."
There was a moment of stunned silence. Then the crew erupted in protest.
"Cm'n, Whitey!" Egor groaned. "He was getting ready to shoot at us."
"That's right," Puck added. "He wouldn't have done that if-"
"Sure he would," Whitey interrupted. "Any of us would. If an unidentified ship came easing up to us with its sails in and its guns out, what would we do? We'd crank our guns around and cover the bastard until he said who he was and what he wanted. That ship couldn't have known whether or not we were pirates just like we didn't know if he was a pirate--and we still don't."
"What were we supposed to do?" Egor snarled. "Wait until he opened fire and cut us in half?"
"Whitey's right," Tambu said softly.
"But-captain-" Egor protested.
"She's right." There was a bitter firmness to Tambu's voice now. "We don't know. We've got to find out-if it's not too late. Whitey, are we still set for hailing?"
"Affirmative, captain."
Tambu slowly picked up the hailing microphone, hesit
ated, then depressed the transmission button.
"This is Tambu, captain of the Scorpion. Identify yourselves and state your condition."
There was no response.
"This is the Scorpion," he repeated. "We want identification of either or both of the two ships in our vicinity. Do you require assistance?"
It seemed strange, offering assistance to a ship they had been firing at a few minutes before. Still there was no response, nor was there any sign of movement from either of the other two ships floating on the viewscreen.
Setting the hailing microphone aside, Tambu flipped several switches on his command console, then settled himself in the swivel chair, one hand resting on a small keyboard.
"Egor!" he called into the intercom.
"Yes, captain?"
"I'm taking over your battery. Take a shuttle over and investigate that ship-the one we fired on. Check for survivors, and look for any records or logs to tell us what kind of ship she is. And Egor... ?"
"Yes, captain?"
"Go armed. Take along a hand communicator and stay in touch."
Then there was nothing to do but wait. Tambu keyed his mind to detect movement from either of the other two ships and blotted out everything else. Even when the shuttlecraft finally appeared on the screen heading out on its mission he did not comment or react. Instead, he thought.
Their procedure had been in error; yet there was no other course they could have followed. They had blundered forward, forcing a confrontation whether the opposing ship was a pirate or a legitimate commercial vessel. Even catching a pirate in the act, they were left unsure as to its identity or motives. Moving in blindly as they had done was wrong, yet they could not afford to let a pirate take the initiative. Just as in this encounter, if fighting was involved, whoever shot first and straightest survived. The other...
How could they identify a pirate? How did pirates operate? He'd have to think like a pirate. A pirate's main weapon would be his anonymity, not his guns. By approaching another ship under the guise of a distress call-perhaps a request for medical assistance or repairs-a pirate could strike the first and final blow before their victim was aware of its danger.
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