“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.