With his human accomplice pretending to attack him, though, it was almost too easy. In the heat of their phony hand-to-hand combat, it was child’s play for the drugged-up human to grab and use the Colossaur’s weapon. Especially after the double-dealing bounty hunter had helpfully deactivated the biofield detector that should have kept anyone else from firing it.
With the pozzie suddenly out of the picture, the odds were good that the Grodo would turn all his attention to the killer, freezing for a fraction of a second and making himself a perfect target for a nice acid bath. The Colossaur, slightly slower but outfitted with an ideal Grodo-stopper, needed only to take him out.
Oh, the horrible things greed makes sentient beings do. Treacherously firing on a partner of many years. My Chandler would have written a whole chapter on the immorality of criminals, their lack of principles, something like that.
The holotape time line shows that less than five seconds had passed since the heavy human entered the docking module. Makrow 34, his profile blurry, disarmed inside his anti-Psi force field, had not yet moved.
The dying insectoid bagger wasn’t yet done thrashing around on the floor while his nervous system failed, burnt beyond repair by the acid, when the treacherous Colossaur reached down with his thick, scaly arm, and pulled something from his belt. The Cetian’s features suddenly became clear, freed from the neutralizing force field. The Cetian smiled and slipped his handcuffs off by simply spreading his arms as if to stretch.
His Colossaur and human accomplices each took a step back. The massive alien’s acid-thrower was still dripping. The fat Homo sapiens still had Zorro’s sword sticking out of his side, swaying gently, a couple of inches below his left armpit.
Makrow 34 laughed. His laugh, like any Cetian’s, was a grotesque parody of human laughter: a grating, disagreeable noise, more lunatic rejoicing than healthy cheer, yet strangely contagious all the same. His two flunkies joined in. The human (identified a second later by the computers as Giorgio Weekman, thief and smuggler of anything that could be smuggled in the asteroid belt) wriggled out of the foamflesh suit that made him look 70 kilos overweight, incidentally serving as a suit of armor to protect him from the Colossaur’s blows and Zorro’s sword.
A second later Achilles ran in from the control room, firing indiscriminately.
Chastened by Zorro’s fate, he’d left his iconic Achaean sword, shield, and lance in the control room, wielding instead a heavy maser, which of course wasn’t ancient Greek by any stretch, nor did it match his delicately sculpted bronze breastplate, but it undoubtedly was a more effective weapon for the fight he anticipated.
It didn’t seem to be the home team’s lucky day. Moving at a strangely slow pace, Achilles inexplicably missed his first shot. Instead of vaporizing the Colossaur’s thick skull (which dodged the shot at a speed his former Grodo companion would have envied), his high-powered microwave beam sliced halfway through a titanium girder a foot above his head. Pushing his quickest reflexes, undaunted, my pozzie friend fired again, almost point-blank.
This time, his maser beam didn’t even flare. Still moving in slow motion, as if it was all he could do to react, he couldn’t even cover himself. A second later, a shot from an ultrapowered weapon similar to the Colossaur’s cut him in half, with a great splattering of bronze droplets from his breastplate, half melted by the tremendous heat wave.
With no one in the command room to stop them, Makrow and his two liberator-sidekicks turned without another look at the pozzies’ scattered remains and calmly strolled out through the airlock hatch. Then, after deactivating the tracking device in the bounty hunter ship, they took off, destination unknown, with no one to go after them.
I imagine this was the first time the aliens regretted their excessive prudence. Which was responsible, among other things, for never supplying us, the official keepers of order on board the Burroughs, with any sort of armed, rapid patrol ship.
Three
At this point in the story I think it’s about time for me to introduce myself and clarify a few points about our station, about us pozzies, and especially about the relationship between our alien bosses and humans in the twenty-second century.
I’m a police officer on board the space station William S. Burroughs, the Galactic Trade Confederation’s enclave in the Solar System. My keyname is Raymond (as in Chandler, as I may have mentioned). My serial number is MSX-3482-GZ.
Naturally, I’m a pozzie too. In other words, not a human being but one of those robotic abominations, the blasphemous entities, neither alive nor dead, vilified daily by the unregenerate terrestrial preachers who still think everything was better before the aliens came along. A servant of the devils, as many humans still call the Grodos, Colossaurs, and Cetians, without distinction.
Even though I owe them my very existence, I’m not going to say my employers are exactly angels. Beings interested only in profit must necessarily have a pretty unangelic nature. Still, they aren’t all that terrible, either, in my opinion.
But haven’t they refused to hand any of their greatest scientific and technological discoveries—hyperspace travel, artificial intelligence, immortality serum, self-induced regeneration, stuff like that—over to Earthlings, even though they easily could? Well, true. By the same token, they haven’t exterminated or enslaved humanity, which they could also do. And they’ve at least maintained trade relations with Homo sapiens. Under their own rules, of course.
Rules they’ve made absolutely clear. They see humanity as an “unpredictable species.” Which is a polite way of saying humans are a stupid and very dangerous race who have to be kept in check. Accordingly, they’ve shared a few of their secrets with the humans, such as artificial gravity and their universal energy crystals. But that’s it. Trade is one thing, promiscuity’s another. Partners, not equals. Everyone in their own
