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?
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.