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.
“You mean… you think it’s them?” I asked while running to catch up, barely taking time to grab my hat and the highest-power maser I could see in the gun rack. He’d called me Tracy, which meant this was the real deal.
“Who the hell you think they are, Snow White and the Seven Aliens?” he laughed. “I don’t know about the other two, but that Makrow—I can feel him. Come on, pozzie. Best decision you ever made coulda been telling your people not to go to Module 14 just yet. That’ll give us a chance to have a duel, old-style. Two against three, or if the guy that got blown up was Weekman, which would be almost too good to be true, then two on two.” He laughed as we got into the express elevator. “Poor guys, they don’t know what a mess they’re getting into. Up against Raymond Dick Tracy and Vasily El Afortunado. We should maybe give them a little handicap, like blindfolding ourselves, or letting them fire first, I’m not sure.”
I laughed too—but only not to offend him. What I actually thought was that we’d be the ones who’d need a handicap and every other advantage we could grab.
Eleven
It is better one hundred guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.
Sounds like a good principle of justice, and really it is—in theory. So much so that most of the time we pozzies try to hold to it. That’s probably what Makrow 34 was counting on when he decided to escape through a docking module full of bodies in shock, each of which could make a perfectly good hostage if things went badly for him.
Except that he was the one particular guilty person for whom I was likely to make a big exception. For the Cetian Gaussical I was strangely willing to sacrifice two or three innocents just to be sure he didn’t wriggle out again. I’d sacrifice even more if need be. I don’t know if I would have gone so far as to invert the saying completely and let a hundred innocents suffer to keep one guilty party from escaping, but I was more than open to an intermediate compromise solution. Say fifty innocents, more or less—more if they were aliens—if it meant trapping these three sons of bitches once and for all.
We had no time to clear out the module or call for reinforcements. Anyway, Vasily didn’t want to (neither did I). So we used a simple but effective technique:
We came in running, guns in hand. If the three suspect paramedics reacted, it was them. If not—we’d have to risk a nasty diplomatic incident and oblige them to take off their helmets and submit to DNA scans.
It wasn’t necessary. The metabolic bomb guy wasn’t Weekman, after all.
It was Weekman who recognized us the instant we stepped out of the elevator. I knew it was Giorgio when I saw him pull an ultrasonic blaster from one of the pockets of his white uniform: he was too small to be the Colossaur, and if he had been Makrow 34 his shot wouldn’t have gone so wide of the mark. I get it: he was nervous, oozing adrenaline. Things would have gone better for him if, instead of reacting like a cowboy in an old Western, he’d spent another fraction of a second trying to aim—or more so, if he’d warned his pals before squeezing the trigger.