As for meek wives, they’ve got to be a highly endangered species by now even on Earth itself. But if anybody were to waste their credits bringing one of those rare specimens here, she’d never get near anything so dangerous as a knife. Not by a long shot, at least not while me and my buddies are up and about.
Nobody but a pozzie ever gets past a docking module of the Burroughs bearing arms more dangerous than a pair of nail clippers. A small pair.
Yet even so, there is blood and murder. The first to go were my pals Zorro and Achilles, and the Grodo bounty hunter.
At the time we had no idea it was just the beginning.
Two
No matter how many times I’ve watched the holotape, I can’t say I was an eyewitness. Not if the word has any meaning. But I was close to the scene. Very close. Cold comfort, considering there was nothing I could do to stop it.
I was on guard duty in Sector 23-A of the docking modules when it all went down. Zorro and Achilles had Sector 24-A, less than an arc-second away. By the time I was on the scene, all I could do was clean up the butchered remains.
Sector 24-A lies between an artificial gravity generator and 25-A, which is permanently offline. It’s one of our more isolated sectors. The ship hadn’t docked there by accident. The Galactic Trade Confederation had warned us that a couple of bounty hunters, a Grodo and a Colossaur, would be stopping over on the William S. Burroughs, almost against their will, to replenish their energy reserves before continuing on their journey.
Seems they were coming from far away. Must have been very far away, if they were almost out of fuel—energy crystals are almost inexhaustible. One crystal could have lit my Chandler’s old New York City, the whole thing, for a solid decade. The baggers were transporting a prisoner, name of Makrow 34, a fugitive Cetian perp they’d nabbed with no little effort after trailing him for parsec after parsec.
The trading bosses’ big blunder was, they forgot to warn us how dangerous this Cetian guy was. Oh, sure, they let us know, in their own half-assed way, that he was a Psi—but they didn’t give us any particulars about his exotic talent. Nobody could have seen that coming.
Two days after the fact, when the bureaucrats finally relaxed their security screening and let me peek at his folder, I learned Makrow 34 had started young on a life of crime and had made quite the career of it. Not only had he broken every law in the Cetian, human, and galactic books, he had managed to come up with two or three amusing new crimes of his own.
Amusing for him, not for his victims, I mean.
But that comes later.
The top brass of the Galactic Trade Confederation meanwhile stuck to their compartmentalization policy—Let not your right tentacle know what your left claw does would be a good translation of another alien saying. So they didn’t see fit to tell us that—what a coincidence—our Makrow 34 had taken advantage of the close resemblance between Cetians and Homo sapiens to commit a good portion of his crimes in our theoretically forbidden Solar System, where he was also suspected of stashing a massive pile of loot. A few thousand terawatt-hours of energy.
One more thing I found out too late.
If my buddies had known, they would have put two and two together and gotten exactly four. One: if the prisoner was working the Solar System, it was a safe bet he had accomplices here. Two: you can always find someone to do the almost impossible in exchange for a few terawatt-hours of energy. Three: if anybody was going to try to rescue him, this station was the only place they could do it. And four: this all added up to big trouble right around the corner.
If they’d known, then Zorro would never have gone to pick him up alone. Precautions would have been taken. Maybe Zorro would have had Achilles with him from the beginning, who knows.
Maybe the two of them would still be around. Maybe not.
Anyway, it wasn’t bad judgment that caused Zorro to go there alone. It was lack of information he should have been given. He stuck to standard procedures: one pozzie in the module airlock, another on standby in the dock’s outer hatch control room.
Besides, what pozzie—or what Grodo—could have guessed what was about to go down?
I’ve looped the holotape a thousand times and still can’t believe it really happened.
It starts with the usual routine. The airlock hatch opens.
The bounty hunters, like any baggers who’ve survived long enough in a tough line of work, don’t trust each other much and don’t like to take risks. The tall, lanky, hexapod figure of the insectoid Grodo and the somewhat shorter but much more massive bulk of the Colossaur, both bristling with weapons (proof that they didn’t intend to come in past the docking module) flanked their Cetian prisoner: a tiny humanoid figure, handcuffed and unarmed, almost insignificant in contrast, his profile blurry, as if distorted by some powerful force field.
Like the field that’s used to neutralize criminals with the most powerful (and luckily the rarest) Psi powers.
My buddy must have started to suspect something then. You can see on the holotape when he calls Achilles over and starts unbuckling the long whip he always carried under his cape.
At the same moment, a heavy human comes walking calmly around the corner. Zorro pays no attention to him. The fat guy doesn’t seem especially threatening. He’s coming from the inner zone, where nobody but pozzies have weapons. Most likely he just wandered into the wrong module. Just a matter of warning him off, and—
Zorro never had a chance.
The Grodo must
