All this is just a fancy but futile attempt to excuse myself for the total disaster that was our attempt to overrun asteroid G 7834 XC.
It couldn’t even remotely be called a battle. An ambush, a massacre, maybe even a firing squad. Could it have been avoided? Of course—if I had been a clairvoyant, I might have known that Makrow 34, Weekman, and the Colossaur had planned for exactly such a massive operation. Or if I’d been a brilliant strategist and tactician like Hannibal, Napoleon, Grant, or even his defeated foe Lee, I might have calmly called off the reinforcements and anti-Psi fields and instead attempted a much more low-key incursion. A standard commando action: just Vasily, me, and at most a couple human police as backup. Maybe we would have at least stood a chance.
But when the aliens designed us they forgot to include clairvoyance among our powers. And even the nearly omniscient Slovoban had no way of knowing that the diabolical Cetian and his accomplice Giorgio had invested half their fraud and smuggling profits not in energy crystals but in turning that remote asteroid, their “temporary base,” into a lethal trap.
The other thing is that, even though we were the invaders, they held the advantage of surprise. Neither the human police nor I myself really expected to find the fugitives on the forsaken chunk of rock that the Old Man had indicated. Maybe it was because I had read too many Conan Doyle-style detective stories, but it seemed most likely that I’d show up at an empty lair and have to deal with a complicated jigsaw puzzle of false trails, red herrings, and incomplete clues that would seem impossible to reconstruct at first, until with a brilliant flash of insight I discovered the meaning of some words in an exotic language or of some intriguing signs or drawings, leading me at last to the criminals after a long string of adventures.
That would have been good, maybe, but too Conan Doyle, too S. S. Van Dine. I should also have been paying attention to Chandler and Hammett. As I might easily have learned from Philip Marlowe’s literary adventures, in real life you don’t solve crimes by deciphering clues written in dead languages but, almost always, by a moment of carelessness on the bad guy’s part, a chance meeting on the street, a betrayal, a coincidence—in other words, luck.
First, the idea that we could find the bad guys’ hidden lair so easily, just by following a tip from the Methuselah of the Romani; then, the idea that they’d be dumb enough to stay there, as if they couldn’t guess the Old Man would know how Weekman was linked to Makrow 34, as if they didn’t know he ached for revenge and would tell us where they were, and I’d get help from criminals in the pen—it all seemed too foolish, too simplistic, too easy. Almost like a trick.
But life is a great trickster, because there they were. Even if they weren’t exactly waiting for us, even if it came as a bit of a surprise to them when their radar showed a fleet of police ships approaching, they didn’t lose their heads. After all, they had long since taken precautions against such an eventuality—and, as we were soon to discover, their preparations were more than adequate, almost excessive.
“I don’t like this,” Vasily whispered when the motley planetoid resolved into a bleak labyrinth of rock and ice on our screens but we could see no movement on it. “It’s too quiet. Gives me the willies.”
“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,
