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.
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
