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.
So I shut my mouth too, and we kept our eyes fixed on the holoscreens.
He wasn’t wearing the collar now, either. He might at least have thanked me for that. But what can you do. Well, he had the excuse that we were too busy.
Once more we were up against the needle-in-a-haystack problem. How can you tell one Colossaur from another? Without his weapons and his gear, the treacherous bounty hunter would be practically indistinguishable in our eyes from any other member of his species. A little bigger at most, but not enough to make a real difference. At night all cats are gray, and at any time all Colossaurs are huge.
As for the Cetians, being clones they’re virtually indistinguishable from each other. Anybody not from Tau Ceti would have an impossible time telling the horrific Makrow 34 not only from the harmless Makrow 33 but even from our own dear Rebbloh 21 (who isn’t really much better as a person, I suspect). The external differences between Cetians and humans aren’t very great either, morphologically speaking—though one species is born from a uterus and the other hatches from an egg. Besides, with costumes and the holocamouflage we have now, details such as their double hearts and the different range of their visual spectrum no longer seem insuperable.
Makrow 34 could be that bearded guy in Module 21 speaking what sounded like Urdu to me, or perhaps Parsi or some more exotic
