More flashing deals of holocards, more body parts, and finally I tossed in three toes and my pancreas. Still more cards flickered out in the intricate ballet and again I drew and discarded and huffed and grinned, finally adding two sebaceous glands and my aorta to the pot. I had been carefully tracking the other player's cards and I knew my own hand to be weak but within striking range. I laid down three cards which, united as the rules allowed, would be able to attack and capture another player's cards. I waited tensely. This was a critical juncture for my head and I.
The table took in my gambit for a long while in silence. I imagined strange pulses sparking through the dark and misshapen caverns of alien brain pans.
Then with a triumphant clatter the Mainer laid down a set of four cards and swept mine up. Captured. I could not win.
Perfect, I said to myself with relief.
"I don't have a human head," the Mainer remarked conversationally, as a rubbery red stalk on his frontal lobe swung towards me. The eyeball tacked to its end spun furiously.
"Yet," the Mainer finished.
The death spiral of the game wound tighter and tighter but the ending was certain. At least I would have my dissection previewed when the chips were distributed.
Finally there were no more moves to make and no more body parts to bet. What was left of me wouldn't fill a sock. Especially since both feet were on the table.
"Final call," intoned the Orlyx.
I gazed at my shimmering squares. I didn't want to lose, but I didn't want to win, either. I didn't have the equipment. Only the Mainer did. That big claw, coupled with that nasty attitude.
I set down my cards. Three Rexes of Comets. Not great, not bad. A gamble.
The Orlyx showed two Suns. Weak. The Mainer and the Meba were both better, but that didn't matter. Low card was the loser.
"You lose," I said to the Orlyx. Then I looked at the Mainer. “And you win."
"You lose, Orlyx," said the Mainer, tensing. An overpowering stench of ancient alien pond water drifted across the table, as unspeakable muscles prepared and scent pores dilated.
"Awk!" said the Orlyx in dismay. “Wait a chron, monkey-food, let's think-"
A blur from my right. Snick went the Mainer's fighting claw. A single jet of purple blood jetted upward before a valve clamped shut. The Mainer hadn't waited, hadn't thought. They never do.
"Urp!" said the Orlyx's right head, glancing across the sudden gap which now separated it from the left. The left head gazed back forlornly.
The removed head perched on the gravtable beside the Mainer, gazing sadly at its former home with glassy eyes. Already a tiny bud was rising on the mesa of the neck, the new head regrowing. This was the moment I'd been looking for.
I stood up. “Pardon me. We humans have to purge our excretory organs frequently. I'll be right back."
I didn't expect it to work and it didn't. The kill team immediately began shuffling, stammering, and oozing to their various walking appendages. They swung into an encircling scythe of chitin and gristle and armored jelly and stopped me short. But I only had to cover two meters.
I did.
"There is still the matter of the Galactic Code and your head," said the Mainer. Apparently heads are like potato chips. It's hard to take just one.
The Crunchies crackled as they spread wider to flank me.
And here, as I'd been unhappily expecting, an interesting aspect of Galactic history came into play.
This CasinoPlex, like many others, had been built eons before by a now-extinct race whose physical form was uncertain, but which some scientists conjectured to have been something like butane-soaked balsa wood. This novel construction left them deathly afraid of fire, but not at all bothered by vacuum. It also accounted for some unusual design features. On their newer stations automatic detectors would, upon the outbreak of even a minor blaze, instantly flood all compartments with a thick green foam that instantly smothered any flames and, almost as instantly, smothered any air-breathers. The builders, of course, didn't breathe.
But the older stations were somewhat different, having been built before the perfection of the suffocating foam. These earlier stations used a different and manual system of fire extinguishing: long orange handles on the bare metal support beams were to be pulled in case of fire. According to a small plaque, this would trigger a cool, safe, refreshing shower of water. This was a lie. Pulling the handle would actually blast open the nearest viewports, dumping all the air, occupants, and contents into deep space. This would quickly extinguish any fire.
In most circumstances it wasn't a great option.
These weren't most circumstances.
The team separated, spreading still wider - a tribute to my reputation - and crackling closer.
"An interesting game, yes, diz Astor?" said the Orlyx, now somewhat recovered.
I backed up against the bulkhead. Ahead of me, beyond the enclosing thicket of aliens, lay the scenic clearsteel window, and beyond that only vacuum. Cold, dark, airless - but at the moment it didn't sound so bad. Almost hospitable, in fact.
"I especially like the surprise ending," I hinted. Most of the Old Galactic Races evolved from colonial insects and so lacked the sense of individual identity and selfishness which a certain non-colonial organism, descended from ape-like creatures in a dull and uninteresting corner of the Milky Way, prided itself upon. A bug would never do what I was about to do.
"Me too," agreed the Mainer, misunderstanding. “It was nice, yes?" Clear yellow fluid dripped from his serrated fighting claw while long, sickening, blood-colored appendages whipped out from a nasty fringe-lined maw in his lower carapace, to caress and fondle and lick at each other. Tiny prehensile tongues, I realized.
"It will be," I said. I raised my hand with fingers extended. “Know what this is?"
The Orlyx answered. “A quaintly primitive grasper, with a single opposable digit."
I clenched it shut. “Not quite. This is a fist."
Then I reached up and pulled the handle.
As my five-fingered hand used its admittedly primitive opposable thumb to grip and pull, the Mainer's ruby eyestalks vibrated and a boiler - the Mainer's weapon of choice - was suddenly rising in a cradle of slim purple tentacles. But it was too late.
The handle made a loud cracking noise, which was suddenly repeated, much more loudly and with much greater sincerity, as the viewport broke free. A roaring hurricane erupted and it was as if the CasinoPlex had taken a deep breath eons before and been waiting all this time to exhale. To make up for the delay it now was trying with impressive success to vomit itself into space. The distant thunk of autodoors closing far off would change nothing here.
I'd dropped to the steel floor just after pulling, which avoided the brace of boiler bolts the Mainer managed to trigger, but which also took me away from the handle. Now the rushing air dragged me along the smooth floor. I glanced about idly for a handhold, but saw none, as expected. I'd looked earlier.
The Crunchies fought and clawed and ended up in a clump, madly grabbing each other, which did them no good because they were all headed Out. A heart-warming cacophony of trills and bleats and squawks and shrieks sounded over the wind as they rolled in an interspecies ball and then popped out the hole in a messy, tangled mass. Millions of years of evolution from three different worlds, nicely disposed of in one fell swoop.
Out into black space
harvest of alien bugs
die, headpickers, die!
Maybe not haiku in the traditional sense, but it worked for me.
I took a moment to exult, but only a moment, for now that my head would remain attached, and the kill team was out of the way, another crisis moved to the top of the list: hurtling into outer space without spacesuit or air.
The floor between me and the hissing, sucking exit was smooth metal. The sides of the hole were too far away to grab. I could see, with startling clarity, a few scattered stars. Unless I thought of something quickly, I'd be joining them.
/> I thought. Quickly. Nothing came to mind.
I thought a little harder, and even more quickly. Still nothing. Then I saw with some surprise that I was out of time.
Sure enough, I popped out the hole. Deep space, I immediately noticed, was cold and tingly, and rather stung a bit.
CHAPTER 2. HEADLOCK
As I drifted away from the station in a slow spin, I felt a cold plucking sting along my arms, legs, all my skin. Vac flush, I knew. Bye bye, capillaries! Adios, alveoli! I'll be along shortly!
The axial fibers built into my Fist-issue jumpsuit tightened and squeezed, trying to offer some protection from the depressurization of vacuum. Death in vacuum is actually not instantaneous, but takes just long enough for Mother Nature to make a point which she wants to be sure you have time to appreciate: Idiot! Primates should stay on their planet!
I began appreciating whole new subtleties of this apparently simple edict; with the encouragement of exposure to vacuum it seemed to take on vast new meanings and a complex multi-layer structure which coherently summarized all of human existence into one brief line of extraordinary simplicity and genius. I realized that I was only just beginning to understand the elegant vastness of this simple axiom, while simultaneously and regretfully experiencing the circumstances leading to my extremely temporary enlightenment.
At the same time I was expecting the next moments to be both impressively gruesome and remarkably uncomfortable. The mixture of a soft pressurized human body with the unpressurized environment of space can be spectacular, at least to a disinterested observer, which I unfortunately was not. I tried to adopt a positive mind-set about exploding. I failed miserably. Maybe it wouldn't feel as bad as it looked.
Probably it would be worse.
And then something - it felt like a hand - grabbed my arm. I didn't fight it because I foolishly imagined that it couldn't do anything worse to me than was about to happen anyway.
My vision was blurred from the eye bulge caused by the vacuum, but I saw that it was a hand, and even more interestingly, that it was connected to a human. The other hand slapped something on my face, a sticky-fuzzy creepy-crawly mass that would have smothered me, except that there was no air to breathe anyway.
The sticky-fuzzy creepy-crawly mass was suddenly moving, stretching out and thinning to wrap itself around me, trying to engulf me like a wide flat anaconda. I had a quick flash of panic then realized that it was a vac-pack - an emergency space rescue pack, formed from a slab of intelli-nano, tiny bots interspersed with a clump of oxygen-saturated spaceplas. When activated and slapped into place, they instantly reformed the mass into a thin but form-fitting and life-saving suit. My head was now enclosed; skeins of nanoplas raced down my arms and legs, sealing them off. My skin felt a bit better, though my lungs still ached.
The material tightened for a moment and then puffed off my skin, as if inflating. Supposedly the bots would liberate oxygen molecules from the suitplas to not only pressurize the interior but create a breathable mixture.
Hesitantly, I took a shallow breath. In. Out. In. Out. Again, and again. Still alive. By definition, then, whatever I was breathing wasn't bad. It smelled like nanoplas - and what didn't, these days - but there wouldn't be any complaints from my quarter. The expectation of imminent conversion into a poorly constructed meat omelet tends to rob one of the urge to whine about trivia. A mist appeared before my eyes and then cleared as final modifications were made to the molecular structure of my face screen.
The figure before me was clad in a tight space-black suit with a silvered visor. He waved, then looped a monofil tether around me and began a swimming motion. The lunar fly, I saw. He had grav paddles in both hands and on both feet; these played off the local gravity waves, and in a neat irony of physics gave one a grip on the ungrippable.
I glanced at my nanosuit. Oddly, it had hardened to a deep black. Vac-pack suits were usually a bright yellow or interstellar orange, designed to be seen easily against the void.
I noticed something even odder. My rescuer was not taking us back towards the station, the only refuge for parsecs around. We were going the opposite direction. Away from the station. Out into the great lonely deep of space.
Ahead of me the gracefully butterflying figure kept rhythmically swimming through the void. Stroke, pull. Stroke, pull. The grav paddles generated a surprising amount of acceleration; these must have been military grade. But towards what were we accelerating? And who was my rescuer?
The answer obviously lay ahead - there was no doubt we were going somewhere - and so I settled in for the ride. I could have hauled myself up my tether and grappled with my human tug but that hardly seemed like an appropriate gesture of gratitude.
So I stared ahead, past those stroking arms and kicking legs, until finally a dim shape began to appear. A black and indistinct outline, occluding a few dim stars. It was impossible to tell how far away it was, at first, or even what it was. A non-gravitational black hole? A rip in the continuum? A burned-out space billboard?
No, none of those, I saw, as we drew closer. A ship. In fact, one particular, and particularly huge, ship. A ship I recognized.
The Bigger Than Yours. The mobile headquarters of the Fist, and my uncle's flagship. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. I was on leave; supposedly no one within the Fist even knew my whereabouts. The Fist should have been off doing good, fighting Earth's battles, tilting at alien windmills. Instead, here it was. While I appreciated the favor I simply had no business being rescued by the Fist. Put another way, they had no business following me around. I'm not naturally devious but most of those I work with - and for - are, so that started me thinking.
Meanwhile my rescuer pulled me into an open personnel lock. The door irisced shut and the lock pressurized with a palpable pop. With the touch of a probe to my nanosuit it poured off me like liquid, puddling into a lumpy mass on the floor.
The black-clad figure stripped off helmet and suit and stood before me, stark naked. What I noticed first was that he was not a he. Her hair was space-black and long and lustrous, her body hard and toned. Nudity was socially acceptable in the 23rd Century, but still. Even a life-long apple farmer will admire a particularly perfect apple. And this was a spectacular example of proportion and form. This statuesque figure could make a Greek statue jealous.
"Welcome back," she said as she shrugged on a coverall. Not out of modesty; it was cold in the lock.
"Thank you," I said, as at my feet the puddle of my nanosuit collected itself into a gray brick, shivered with contentment, and lay still. “How nice that you happened to be passing by."
She grinned, a full-lipped smile, wide and easy. One of her eyes was bright gold, the other a piercing sea-green. “As I'm sure you've guessed, I was hardly just passing by." She held out a hand. “Trina Nova. And I already know who you are."
Of course it was no coincidence that she was waiting outside with a vac-pack. Like a blind man bumping into an elephant my brain had sensed that there was quite a bit more to this than I had seen. But I needed time to explore the pachyderm. To feel out all the angles, so to speak. For example, one pointy tusk was that she had brought me back to the mobile headquarters of the Fist. But the Bigger Than Yours was super secret, known only to the members of the small and exclusive Fist. A round gray leg was that I knew - or at least knew of - all the other Agents. And she was not one of them.
When you want to catch a fish, throw out some bait.
"You're with the Fist?"
She nodded. “Just joined up. A week ago."
She'd neatly eaten the worm but dodged the hook, or most of it. No one just joined the Fist. But I let that slide for now.
"How did you happen to be out there?"
She smiled in a exuberantly sly way. “Someone told me to."
Slow progress, but progress nonetheless. “Who?"
Her eyes twinkled. I noticed that the gold one twinkled slightly more energetically than the green one. “They tell me you're smart. Who do you th
ink?"
Her mocking tone was as subtle as a comet's tail, and so I didn't have to think. I knew. I glanced around the room frantically; with a good camo-suit, a muscular, slightly-crazed avuncular Admiral could well look like that hatchway, that arch, that chair, that viewport, that—
Arg! The potted plant! In the corner of my eye I saw it break into a blur. I spun.
Too late.
A hard shape that looked like a ficus on legs plowed into me and bowled me over. I managed a shot into the ribs that earned a grunt, and another at the skull, which hurt my fist. My own head - the object of so much recent attention - neatly blocked a pair of stiff punches. Then two python-like forearms coiled around my neck and twisted, contracting, squeezing me down. My vision tunneled. I collapsed to the floor.
"Say it!" hissed a voice in my ear, a voice I knew all too well.
"Urg!" I said.
"Not that," instructed the voice in a calm and helpful tone. The pressure on my windpipe increased. Damn my twisted family! Sooner or later I would have to say it, I knew. In that case, it might as well be sooner. But not just yet.
"Hmph," I gasped.
"No, wrong again," counseled the voice.
"Ack?" I tried.
The grip tightened.
"Uncle," I rasped.
"Pardon me?" inquired the voice politely.
"Uncle!" I shrieked, and the pressure vanished. I picked myself up and turned to see the hulking, evilly grinning form of Admiral Beaugeste Fairchile, bearer of that ignoble and oddly anatomical title Head of the Fist. Short, thickly muscular, and bald as a moon, which exaggerated the bullet-shape of his skull. My most dangerous Uncle.
"Hello, Court," he said. “Still a diz Astor, eh?"
"Always," I grunted as I rubbed my neck. This was our standard verbal family greeting, just as the wrestling match was our standard physical greeting. Sometimes I got the drop and choked a few garbled "Nephews" out of him, but these lacked the same satisfying effect, somehow.
The Blue Marble Gambit Page 2
