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 exceptional 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.