by B. V. Larson
“Maybe we can make a deal, but I doubt it,” I said. “You’re right, I could let you escape being permed. But what can you do for me? Right now, I’m liking things the way they are. I’m thinking I can solve two problems with a single push of a button. You’re gone, the Nairbs are gone, I come back later—everything’s perfect.”
My thumbnail played with the wrapper and dug into the chocolate a little. He watched and sweated, trying to think of something he could do for me.
“You’re going to have trouble getting away with blowing up a Nairb ship,” he said. “It’s one thing to inconvenience a Galactic by killing him, but a whole Imperial ship—that’s worth real credits.”
“You only have a few minutes left, Claver.”
“You can’t have brought and placed a bomb on your own,” he said. “Turov has to be behind this. But why?”
The answer to this came to me easily. Glibness in lying is a gift, one I’ve been blessed with all my life. You can ask anyone from my old elementary school days for confirmation on that point.
“The Nairbs have too much evidence aboard,” I said. “Turov figures we can’t let them finish their report and send it to the Core Systems on a deep-link.”
“Right, right,” Claver said, buying it all. “The Prefect will report in the second he has the case closed up, and you’ve been executed. Nairbs don’t like wasting money on services, and deep-link relays are expensive—especially all the way to the Core Systems. One big blip of data is what they’ll use, and you’re here to stop that transmission.”
His ideas surprised me a little. Was I really such a big deal that the Nairbs were going to confirm my removal from the cosmos all the way back to the Mogwa? That seemed bizarre to me. I’d always figured I was small-potatoes to the Galactics.
Claver snapped his fingers and grinned. “I’ve got it. Your plan is flawed. You can’t just blow this ship up with a conventional nuke. There will be an investigation eventually. There’s no way around it. They’ll trace the radioactives to Earth. What you need is a false trail, a scapegoat.”
I was listening but frowning. I didn’t know exactly where he was going with this.
“Listen, listen,” he said, beginning to raise his voice. “I’ll let you finish your mission. Turov will be proud. I’m just going to change the circumstances a little.”
“Okay, but hurry the hell up.”
He beckoned me to follow him. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I pulled my boots back on and left the chamber.
The Nairbs took some notice of this. They barked after us. I was pretty sure they were pointing out I only had about ten minutes left before my execution. I waved and nodded then disappeared into a passageway, following Claver.
I knew that, in a way, the Nairbs didn’t care what I did. They were bureaucrats, not sheriffs. If I didn’t report to their execution chamber, they’d grind on, slowly turning their wheels of justice. They’d draw up new charges, maybe expanding them to include the rest of the legionnaires in the system. They’d then order more people to submit to their will.
That was the trouble with Galactic Law, if you didn’t give in, they’d just up the ante and come after you again. They were relentless, and I honestly think blindly applying the law to others was the greatest joy in their sorry existences.
Claver and I began to run the second we were out of sight. We took big strides in the light gravity, our boots thumping on the deck as we charged down a long passage. We came at last to the docking area where a strange ship was attached to the Nairb vessel. It had to be Claver’s ship.
I grabbed his shoulder when he got to the hatch and started to climb in. “We can’t just run from the Nairbs,” I said.
“That’s not the plan, dummy! Let go of me.”
“I’ll go in first,” I said, yanking him back. I didn’t want him zipping away or pulling a gun on me.
Inside the ship, Claver had the oddest collection of crap I’d ever seen crammed into a small vessel. It was a smuggler’s ship—that much was obvious. There were loose jewels in buckets, powders in bags, guns packed in crates of oil—he had it all.
“You got a stuffed bear I could buy?” I asked him. “I always wanted one of those.”
“I’m fresh out, McGill. Now, why don’t you get out of my way so I can show you the weapon?”
“What weapon?”
He rolled his eyes like I was the biggest moron this side of the Moon.
“The squid weapon! What do you think I’ve been talking about?”
“Why do we need a squid weapon?”
“I can see I’m going to have to spell this out for you. You’re not going to use the detonator in your pocket to blow up this ship. You’re going to use a squid mini-missile pod instead. They’re a little hard to program, but I’ll show you how.”
“We don’t have time.”
“Sure we do. The Nairbs will mark you down as a no-show, sure. Then they’ll up the charges—but they won’t report it in to the Core Systems. Not yet. Not until they’ve decided on their next step. Nairbs aren’t fast. What bureaucrat is?
I had to admit, he had a point there.
“When you don’t show up for your execution,” he continued, “they’ll just grind along down the path they’ve set. That will buy you the time you need to take the initiative.”
He actually had a squid missile pod in his ship. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen so many stolen devices in a single place—not since Tech World. This made me realize something.
“That pile of junk hidden above the fountain back on Tech World—that was your stash, wasn’t it?” I asked him.
He flashed me a grin. “Yeah. You were robbing me, not the Tau. Does that make you feel any better?”
I shrugged then smiled. “Actually, it does.”
I examined his collection of equipment. Claver called the stuff “trade goods,” but I knew a pile of smuggled contraband when I saw it. If the Nairbs had ever seen fit to come aboard his ship and have themselves a private inspection, he’d have been permed right off. I filed that tidbit of information away for the future.
“You’ll take this pod, see,” he told me, showing me a strange-looking contraption with a mass of missiles loaded into it. The thing looked like a peeled pomegranate, packed with clusters of explosives. “Set it down next to their engine core, activate it manually and direct it to unload its full magazine into the reactor all at once. Boom! You catch a revive, and all our problems are solved.”
I stared at him. “Where are you going to be while I’m doing this?”
“Flying out of here.”
My eyes narrowed. “Why the hell should I trust you on this?” I asked, lifting my hand inside my jacket. “I’ve got the bomb business covered.”
“Listen, the squids will take the blame this way, I guarantee it. I don’t want Earth wiped any more than you do. I need to trade with someone, don’t I? These missiles are loaded with radioactives from the squid star systems. Radioactives are made inside the guts of stars. The Galactics can trace them to their source of origin. The signatures will match up to the squids, and they’ll take the blame when the investigation comes.
“All right,” I said, pretending to be doubtful. “I guess it could work.”
Claver looked relieved, but a few seconds later as we unloaded the missile pod and stood in the passageway, he frowned at me. He looked at my jacket again. I’d taken my hand out of there to help with the bulky pod, and it must have looked kind of deflated. Following his gaze, I reached into my pocket again and grasped my chocolate bar like it was a shiv.
“Where is your bomb, anyway?” he asked. “On the engine core? When did you plant it?”
The hint of suspicion in his eyes tipped me off. My thin, pathetic dodge was beginning to unravel in his mind. I was surprised it had taken this long. I was only wearing a light infantry uniform, after all. There was no way I could be carrying a bomb on me. A detonator, sure, but not a bomb. And I hadn’t had time to plant anything in t
he Nairb engine room. Anyone who could count should be able to deduce that.
“Of course,” I snapped. “I’ve got the bomb on the core already.”
He held out his hand. I glared at his offending fingers, which he used to make grabbing motions.
“What?” I asked, tensing up.
“Give me the key, McGill. That’s what you have in your pocket. There’s no way you could have reached the core and planted anything down there without the key.”
Claver was talking about the Galactic key, of course, the artifact that allowed the Mogwa to break any of the technological locks their subservient races invented. Now I understood the look in his eyes—it wasn’t suspicion about the bomb, it was greed for the key.
“Come on,” he said, “don’t let something so valuable be blown up with the ship. Give it to me.”
“All right,” I said, pulling my hand out of my jacket at last.
Claver watched, hungrily. His eyes were fixated on my fist.
Instead of receiving an invaluable artifact, he caught my knuckles in his face. At the last second, as my punch slammed home into his nose, he must have realized he was looking at fingers wrapped around a chocolate bar, not a Galactic key, a detonator, or anything else. The baffled look on his face was priceless to me. His greed transformed into confusion and disgust.
But then my big fist nailed him, and he reeled back. He slumped on the deck outside his ship. Behind him was the open hatch full of his piled up, stolen junk.
I picked up the missile pod and heaved it onto my back. There couldn’t be much time left to try to pull this off. Fortunately, the gravity on the ship was set for Nairb comfort everywhere aboard, or I couldn’t have budged the missile pod. As it was, I was grunting and heaving with it on my back. I must have looked like Atlas holding up the world.
The first obstacle I met up with was a serious one. Heading down the main passage way, I ran into two Nairbs. They were humping along, looking for all the world like a pair a green seals on a beach. They chattered at me in irritation then switched on their translators.
“Beast, you will put that object down and explain yourself.”
“Beast, huh?” I asked him. “That’s what you really call us, isn’t it? Well, it’s time to show you I am a beast.”
I put down the missile pod with a grunt then walked toward the Nairbs. They didn’t get it, not until the last moment when I slammed their two heads together.
Now, I’d only planned to crack their skulls together and knock them out. I’d forgotten, unfortunately, that Nairbs come from a low-grav world. They had thin skulls—about the thickness of a sheet of cardboard and not much tougher. Their skulls fractured and gushed on the deck.
Looking down at the mess, I realized I was committed now. Using one of the dead Nairb’s flippers, I was able to pass through the hatch to the bridge.
I thought about the engine room, I really did, but I didn’t think it would work out. There was no telling how many obstacles might be down there. I didn’t know the layout of the ship, and I didn’t have a lot of time before the Nairbs got smart and employed defensive systems to put me down. Claver had probably known this, but hadn’t cared. He’d just wanted to get the hell away from me and see me dead.
I sealed the hatch to the bridge behind me. I managed to disable the override controls from the inside. Fortunately, Empire design mandated that control systems be universally workable for as many beings as possible, so I had no trouble operating them.
Steering the ship would have been difficult, even so, if I hadn’t had such an easy, unmistakable target to aim for. Adjusting the helm and locking in the course, I engaged the engines, full thrust. This caused everything aboard to tip and roll to the back of the chamber it was in. I was pinned to the rear bulkhead for almost a minute before I managed to get crawling again.
I’d almost blown it. If I hadn’t been able to move, my whole plan would have been for nothing. But I’m a strong man, and crawling isn’t as hard as it sounds, even under three Gs of centrifugal force.
When I reached the missile pod, I engaged it, overriding every safety symbol that popped up, and ordered all the missiles to fire at once.
There was a timer—a short one—that ticked down for a few seconds. What were the Nairbs doing all around the ship during their last moments? Probably, they’d been caught and squished flat by crushing G-forces. I don’t know. Hell, they might have all died by now, their hearts unable to pump under this much weight.
I rolled onto my back and looked toward the big display on the forward wall of the bridge. The central star of this system, Gamma Pavonis itself, loomed huge and white-hot. That had been my target, the star itself.
My lips curled back from my teeth, and I tasted metal. That was from radiation poisoning, I knew.
That’s all I can remember now, because I died at some point after that, and my memories of those final minutes are lost forever.
It’s just as well, I guess. Whether I blew up or burned up, it couldn’t have been much fun.
-39-
There was a posse waiting for me when I was reborn. They weren’t there to throw me a party, either.
“That’s it,” the bio specialist said. “He’s a good grow—not that it matters.”
A collar was clamped onto my neck. That was a new one. An honest-to-God collar, like I was some kind of beagle.
“What the hell…?” I croaked, but that was all I managed to get out before I was roughly hauled off the table.
When you first return to life, your senses don’t always work right. For me, the world was a swimming blur, like I was in an underwater universe full of bright lights and barking voices. No one seemed happy with me, I gathered that much.
“I don’t see why we bothered to revive this piece of shit again,” said someone. I didn’t recognize the voice, but it was rough, male, and pissed off.
“He’s screwed the lot of us, that’s for sure. We’re supposed to take him down to detention. The brass wants to know exactly what happened for intel purposes. If he won’t talk, we’re to use any means necessary to get a full confession.”
“Good enough for me.”
Naked and collared, I was hauled through some steel security doors and handed over to a pair of hard-eyed guards. They dragged me into another room and threw me into a chair. My wrists were clamped down to the arms of the chair—which turned out to be shiny, cold, stainless steel.
By this time, I had a reasonable level of control over my body, so I kicked the guy who was trying to clamp my ankles to the chair legs. I caught him right in the jimmy, and he grunted unhappily.
I enjoyed the moment, but it was probably a mistake. They punched me for a while until one of them called it quits, pulling back the red-faced guy I’d nailed earlier.
“Give it up, Bill. That’s what he wants. If you give him an easy out, he’ll avoid talking entirely.”
Huffing and snorting with rage, the man named Bill stepped away.
They were both from Legion Solstice. That didn’t bode well for my immediate future. Like I’ve said, Solstice people were a hard-bitten lot, like those from Varus. No legion man really likes a guy from another legion. It was always easier to mistreat someone from a group that you saw as a rival.
I mumbled something through broken lips. They splashed my face with water so I could speak intelligibly again.
“What’s that, Varus?” Bill asked.
“I said: you boys are a couple of prime pussies.”
This amused them. “Why’s that?”
“Strapping down a fresh revive and beating on him for fun? I’ve always heard that’s the kind of thing that gets a Solstice man hard in the morning, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
For some reason, my words troubled Bill—but not the other guy. The other guy laughed and sneered. “You know what you did? You screwed Earth out of spite. The Empire will never stand for this. Remember what they did to the squids back on Dust World?”
“I sure do
, I watched it.”
They nodded like they already knew that. “Well, they’re going to do the same to Earth once they find out you drove one of their ships right into the local star!”
“But I didn’t.”
They shook their heads in disgust. Bill leaned over so he could look me in the eye.
“Really?” he asked. “More denials? Simply saying you didn’t do something isn’t going to wash, McGill. We’ve heard about you from your own officers. You wrecked the Nairb ship just to screw all of us. Well, now it’s payback time. First, we’re going to find out exactly what you did, second by second, while you were aboard the Nairb ship. Then, we’re going to perm you good.”
“What if I don’t feel like talking?”
Bill got up and walked away, but then the other guy came close and gave me a grim smile. “This isn’t your first time around, McGill. We’ve already killed you six—no, was it seven times now?”
“Something like that Randy,” Bill said. He twisted his lips in thought. “Might be seven. I think it has been seven, in fact.”
For the first time, I felt a chill go through me. I couldn’t remember any other lives or deaths at the hands of these two, but I knew they might have had the storage backup of my mental engrams turned off.
Could these two goons really have revived me and beaten me to death seven times? What was going to make them stop?
“Let me talk to Centurion Belter,” I said. “She knows me. I’ll tell her my story.”
They sighed. “That’s not going to wash,” Bill said. “Never has, never will. You tell us what happened, and then we’ll finish you nice and clean. But if you don’t give us the truth this time, it’ll go badly—all over again.”
I was in a quandary now. My heart was racing like it hadn’t been since the revival. It was one thing to be dragged around and beaten. I’d experienced plenty of that in my life in the legions. But to hear about my former abused selves—and to know I was about to repeat their fate—I didn’t like it and wanted to change the outcome this time.
