I pasted a big shit-eating grin on my face and said, "Hello there! Which one of you is Ba-Karkar?"
The Qastt remained frozen. Finally the one with the lumpiest cheeks and large black skull-brushes uttered a prolonged, grating shriek. His mechanical translator decoded its approximate meaning:
"Castrate you, boomer! May you putrefy!"
Talk about a failure of communication.
"Helly, let me try. I've had experience with them." Ildiko Szabo rose from her seat and approached the diminutive aliens very slowly. She placed both hands over her mouth, then removed them and whispered, "Holy silence be to you all."
"To you also," squeaked the Qastt who stood closest to the lumpy-cheeked nutcracker. The brushes on this one's head were frilly and coral-red, and its eyes were slightly larger than those of the others.
Ildiko sank down onto her haunches so that she and the entity were eye-to-eye. "My leader apologizes for loudspeaking," she breathed. "He did not understand that it is hurtful. Please let him talk to you. He is not an enemy. He wants to help you. He wants to set you free."
Coral Brushes gave a kind of hiccup. "Untranslatable expression of fearful skepticism."
I stood up and repeated the mouth-covering gesture, then whispered, "Let's begin again." I beckoned to Ivor and Zorik O'Toole. They followed my lead as I tiptoed away from the intimidating table and too-tall chairs and sat on the floor with my back to one of the walls.
Ildiko joined us. "Speak slowly and simply," she told me. "Avoid figures of speech and idioms."
I pointed to Lumpy Cheeks and said softly, "Are you the one called Ba-Karkar?"
He glowered wordlessly and finally said, "Yes. I Ba-Karkar, corsair captain."
"Please come closer. All of you. Let us speak."
Reluctantly, the Qastt complied. They stood in a ragged line, with Ba-Karkar and Coral Brushes to the fore.
I whispered, "Thank you. Now please tell me: Why do you refuse to be set free?"
"You not agents of Qastt Great Congress," the irritable little pirate captain said. "Guard lie when he say human Congress agents pay ransom, come take us home. Humans never do this! Who you? What you really want?"
"Call me Asahel. You are correct. I am not an agent of the Great Congress. This was a misunderstanding. But I will pay your ransom and set you free. If you agree to help me."
"Help putrid boomer humans? No! Never!"
Coral Brushes kicked him in the shin and addressed me in a voice like an eager, cheeping bird. "Really free? No more putrid human odor in horrid damp air? No more garbage food? No more boomer guards bully us? Really really free?"
"Yes," I said. "If you help us, I'll take you home."
"No!" Ba-Karkar screeched. His antennae were vibrating in fury. "You lie, boomer Asahel!"
"Rest in holy silence," Coral Brushes told him waspishly. Then to me: "What kind help you want?"
Ildiko Szabo said, "Please. Who are you?"
"I Ogu, wife and partner to Corsair Captain Ba-Karkar."
Uh-oh. A crack in the dike!
"This putrid abomination," he blatted cantankerously. "This undermines my authority. This significantly diminishes my pride."
"Untranslatable!" his wife shrilled. "Eight human equivalent months we stay putrid prison. No ransom comes. You say it comes soon. It not come. You want die here? Not me! Not Tisqatt orTu-Prak, either. Ask them!"
The other two Qastt hiccuped diffidently. One had molting buff-colored brushes, and the other's vibrissae were slate-blue. They showed no inclination to join in the marital spat.
I said, "I will tell you why your ransom didn't come: because you carried a Haluk on your ship. This made my people very angry. The ransom was refused."
"Eeeeee," sighed the Qastt.
"But Haluk say pay me double for quick transfer of untranslatable human cargo," Ba-Karkar crabbed. "This why ride."
Ogu made a sound like a throttled sparrow. "So now we stay prison for ever? Greedy untranslatable epithet you!"
"It doesn't have to be that way," I pointed out. "I'm a very powerful and important human. I'll pay the ransom and get you out of here. But you must promise to help me."
"Tisqatt?" Ildiko Szabo whispered. "Tu-Prak? What do you say about this?"
"They say nothing!" the little captain raged. "They only putrid gunner, ship engineer. I, Ba-Karkar, must speak for all!"
Ogu kicked him again. "Then ask what kind help Asahel wants, untranslatable epithet male. Or no more untranslatable for you! Never again in putrid boomer prison."
Her husband gave a choked gasp. "Cruel female!"
"No more sex, either," she added.
The pirate leader's golden eyes squeezed shut. His defiant black bristles collapsed into flaccid snarls on his bald pate. He chirred almost inaudibly, and the translator decoded: "Misery. This what happens when poor hardworking corsair listens to putrid rich Haluk."
"Yes," I agreed. "Haluk bring misfortune to Qastt and humans alike."
His eyes popped open. "Asahel, what?"
"I hate the Haluk," I murmured. "Let me tell you why. They give shelter to my enemies. My human enemies. I want to punish my enemies, but they're hiding with the Haluk. This is why I want your help. My enemies are hiding with the Haluk on the Qastt planet Dagasatt, near a place called Taqtaq."
"Impossible," scoffed Ba-Karkar.
Scraggly Buff Brushes contradicted his boss softly. "Not."
Ba-Karkar whirled around to confront the crewman. "Tisqatt, you know what this human speaks about?"
"I once live Akakoqoq, city at edge Great Bitumen Desert same like Taqtaq. Everyone know Haluk build untranslatable facility in desert. Dangerous weapons guard facility. No ordinary Qastt person can go near. Haluk kill bonehunters, others who try. Some say that castrating Haluk pay Qastt Great Congress significant money to allow facility on Dagasatt that too dangerous to build on Haluk world. Putrid scandal, but you know politicians."
I knew. Everywhere in the galaxy, on human and non-human worlds alike, there were always slimy boodlers ready to deal.
"What kind of a facility?" I asked.
"Untranslatable. It significantly large."
"Is this Haluk facility near Taqtaq Starport?"
"Not very near," Tisqatt said. "Human distance equivalent from Taqtaq 922.2 kilometers. Much farther from Akakoqoq."
I said, "I want to go to Dagasatt and look for my enemies. I want you to help me get to Taqtaq."
"Impossible!" The Qastt captain semaphored his vibrissae violently.
Ogu silenced him with a vicious chirp. "Explain precisely what kind help you want, Asahel."
I did. The whole bunch broke out in horrified squealing. Ba-Karkar banged his little fists against his chest and shrilled, "No! No! No! Castrate you and your companions also! That plan of action unacceptable. It seditious. It putrid. It get us into significant trouble."
Shrugging, I said, "You can go back to jail if you prefer. No more sex and no more untranslatable."
Holy silence fell. I let him stew for a minute.
"Ba-Karkar," I whispered at last. "I swear we won't deliberately harm you or any innocent Qastt on Dagasatt. There will be some danger. We can't avoid that. But I will do my best to keep you and your people safe. The only ones who will surely suffer from this operation are the conniving politicians, the Haluk, and our human enemies."
"Putrid castrators!" he snarled.
I wasn't sure if he was referring to the Qastt pols, the Haluk, Ollie and the wiseguys, or us. Probably all four.
Smelling victory, I played my trump card. "Help us and I'll let you have your starship back after the raid."
"Starship!" He was aghast. "You say humans not demolish my beautiful ship while we in putrid prison?"
Rampart routinely chopped up captured xeno privateers for scrap before releasing the ransomed crews. During the early stages of our hunt for Eve, I'd told Matt to hang on to this particular pirate craft and its people, thinking they might hold some clue to my sister's disappe
arance. Then I'd completely forgotten the poor jailed Squeakers—until Eve herself had recalled them to mind.
"Except for the guns, your ship is pretty much intact," I told Ba-Karkar. "It's fueled and ready to fly. What do you say?"
The pirate captain's small head tilted to one side. His bulging cheeks rippled, as though he were munching nuts. God only knows what the mannerism signified. Finally he spoke with sly insinuation. "You pay us significant money also?"
"Don't push your putrid luck, peewee!" I hissed. "No more pussyfooting around. Are you in or fuckin' out?"
Ba-Karkar blinked. "Your boomer comments not translatable. But 1 comprehend nevertheless. I think we cooperate."
I gave a profound exhalation of relief. "Right. Just let me call the guard and arrange for finalizing your release. Then we'll go to the starport." I pointed to Zorik O'Toole. "This man and I are going to ride with you and Tisqatt in your ship. Another human will also go with us and pilot your ship to Dagasatt. Our own armed vessel will follow closely. Ogu and Tu-Prak will ride in our ship."
"Not separate me and husband!" Ogu pleaded.
"I'm sorry, Ogu. I wish we could trust you. But Qastt people and humans have been antagonists for too long. You and Tu-Prak will be hostages for the good behavior of Ba-Karkar and Tisqatt."
"I think this human can ride Qastt ship." Ba-Karkar indicated Zorik. "But not you."
"I'm going." I smacked my sidearms, having had a bellyful of Squeak intransigence. "No more arguments, dammit!"
"He not argue," Ogu cheeped. "Translation bad. He means if you ride, you sorry."
And I was, too.
Have you ever visited a kindergarten class where all the furniture and even the rest room fixtures are miniaturized for the tiny children, and you feel like Gulliver trapped in a doll-house? Well, the Squeaker pirate ship was sort of like that to a man of my bulk and altitude. Low overheads, narrow little corridors, a cramped flight bridge with toy instrument consoles and command seats so dinky I couldn't cram my butt into one to save my life. God knows how Rampart ExSec ever brings in captured Qastt ships.
Maybe the members of the prize crews are all runts like Betancourt and O'Toole. They coped beautifully. Joe piloted the alien starship and Zorik kept an eye on our two alien passengers. Meanwhile, 1 crouched in the deactivated weapon-system cubicle just behind the flight deck during the five interminable hours it took the privateer to reach Dagasatt, poking along at its maximum pseudovelocity of forty-one ross. Chispa Dos tagged behind, throttled back, while Mimo kept the tractor-beam generator and photon cannons at the ready in case Ba-Karkar and Tisqatt tried anything cute aboard the bandit.
They didn't—unless you count ripping off the hated human-style jail uniforms and stuffing them into the matter converter to the tune of malevolent chirps. Then they dressed themselves in voluminous white garments that resembled Bedouin robes augmented with floaty gauze scarves. I already knew about these typical robes from the Qastt cultural orientation holovids, and since they had an excellent potential for disguise and weighed almost nothing, I had Mimo duplicate a set for each of us, using Chispa's malle-armoire unit.
In addition to changing their costume, the two mini-buccaneers also drenched themselves with xeno perfume to counteract our disgusting human stench. After they finished their toilette, the pirate tub smelled like a cross between a crude-oil cracking plant and a Tijuana cathouse. Zorik O'Toole and I nearly coughed our brains out until Joe flushed the environmental system with a blast of pure oxygen. I confiscated the perfume flasks for the rest of the trip.
After Ba-Karkar programmed his ship's navigator with the entry codes for the Dagasatt solar system, there was very little more he could, or would, do to help us, so we let him go off and sulk in his teeny-weeny captain's cabin for the rest of the flight. Meanwhile Zorik and I pumped Tisqatt, the gunner, for useful information about the planet of his birth.
Much older than his cross-grained skipper, Tisqatt was a milder and more obliging soul. He told us what he knew about the Great Bitumen Desert, then willingly called up a detailed chart projection of the region from the pirate ship's database, which was in such an appalling state of confusion that Joe had given up on it early in the game.
The mysterious Haluk facility wasn't shown on the map printout—no surprise—but Tisqatt indicated its approximate position in the far northeastern corner of the strange land-form. The desert was sprinkled with cautionary notices warning of unstable and hazardous surface conditions.
Zorik and I conferred and debated the various options for carrying out Mission Q without getting caught, consulting frequently with our tiny pal, who gave useful input on the groundside emergency procedures we intended to subvert during the penetration. Finally, after a lot of second-guessing of my tactics on Zorik's part, we firmed things up—including the best spot for the crash.
"But I think Corsair Captain not like," Tisqatt warned timidly.
I grinned at him. "We not give damn."
Zorik fetched Ba-Karkar. I showed him the printout of the Great Bitumen Desert and told him what his role was going to be in the upcoming charade. It was more complex—and more hazardous—than the earlier scenario I had spun for him back in Visitation 3 on Nogawa-Krupp.
As predicted, he raged, cursed untranslatably, smote his little chest, and told me that the plan was significantly idiotic. When he subsided, we all rested in holy silence for a long time.
Then I spoke, reminding him of the freedom now nearly within his grasp. I allowed as how we could probably carry out our plan without his active cooperation, but the operation would then be even more dangerous. And more likely to leave poor Ogu a widow, since Ba-Karkar would have to accompany us anyhow. . . with a gun pointed at his head.
The gopher cheeks were munching tentatively again. "Asahel, you say only I must go with you to Dagasatt surface. Ogu and other Qastt crew can stay safe in orbit on human ship."
"That's right. Ivor and Ildiko and Mimo will join you and me and Zorik in this vessel. Joe andTisqatt will transfer to the human ship where Ogu and Tu-Prak are. The human ship has a dissimulator mechanism—a way to hide its shape. It will wait in a distant orbit. No one on Dagasatt will see it. If we are killed on the planet, then Joe will fly your three people home. If we succeed, you will have not only your freedom but also your ship to keep."
The Qastt captain turned away from me and gazed somberly at the bridge's main viewer. We were rushing through the sparsely strewn stars of the Spur's tip, the uttermost part of the Milky Way Galaxy. The indeciperable ideographs of the alien instrumentation were transposed into human parameters by a portable navigator unit Joe had spliced into the console. We were presently three light-years from Dagasatt, ETA four and a half minutes.
In the viewscreen's upper right corner was a faint ball of fuzzy diamond dust, the satellite star-cluster over seventeen thousand light-years distant that was the original home of the Haluk race. Ba-Karkar pointed to it.
"Only twenty human equivalent years before humans come," he said, "Qasst own Perseus Spur. No other star-traveling people here. We move from planet to planet, colonize slowly. Then Haluk come from out there, invade our stars, take one two three four planets, very quiet. We not know. Soon Haluk become bold, not so quiet anymore. They take eleven planets, tell us we can colonize no more. They despise us. They rich, we poor. They never share. When they trade, they cheat us. Haluk stop taking more planets only when humans come. Humans tell Haluk and Qastt: Now all useful planets where you not already live belong to humans! If you try take, we kill you. You believe this good and correct, Asahel?"
I said, "No. I believe it's neither good nor correct. But the human government doesn't care what 1 think. I am only one man."
"Zorik. You believe this good and correct?"
"Yes," said O'Toole matter-of-factly.
Ba-Karkar asked Joe Betancourt the same question. The pilot said, "I don't know whether it's good and correct or not. I do know that human science is stronger than Qastt or Haluk science
, and strong people often take what they want."
"Significant," said Ba-Karkar. "This why strong people feared by people not so strong."
"Some humans," I said carefully, "want to help people who are not so strong. Share science. Undertake honest trade."
The pirate hiccuped. The machine said, "Untranslatable expression of fearful skepticism."
Zorik O'Toole shot me a look and chuckled. "You want to go down that road, Chief, you're gonna need a lot better map than the one you got."
"This not translatable," Ba-Karkar said.
"You don't know the half, little buddy," I told him.
The Qastt navigation unit gave a gentle triple ping. The main viewer went white as the ship dropped out of ultralu-minal drive and exited hyperspace. An instant later the view-screen showed a yellowish sun and the apparently motionless red-blue-and-white crescent of a sizable T-2 planet blotched with clouds.
"Dagasatt," said Joe Betancourt laconically. "Gee-synch orbit five hundred kay kilometers, beyond casual landside detection range of known Q equipment. No artificial sats in evidence. Chispa matching our intrinsic vee and closing in for docking and transfer."
"Will you help us?" I asked the little pirate.
He said, "You show me again printout of Great Bitumen Desert. Then I decide if your untranslatable plan can work."
Chapter 7
Our landing party crammed itself into the tiny privateer, and at one point 1 jokingly suggested that we might have to strap Ivor to the outside, like an elk carcass lashed to a pickup truck. The young giant took the joshing in good humor and finally found a place in the cargo bay among the pods of weaponry, assault gear, and supplies. Ildiko and Zorik huddled in the Qastt messroom while Mimo stayed on the flight deck and I took my previous position among the dead weaponry controls.
Ba-Karkar was in the command seat. He had said he would cooperate, under strong protest, with the condition that we allow him to select the precise landing site within a more broadly drawn target area.
Joe Betancourt wished us good luck as he withdrew Chispa's docking tunnel. The Y700 drifted away into space, her external ID and transponder code illegally blanked out so she couldn't be identified. With the dissimulator on, the star-ship was virtually invisible so long as she stayed in orbit or traveled at minimum sublight velocity. I knew for a fact that the more advanced Haluk/Bodascon starship hybrids had dissim-detect capability; but the Haluk themselves were still unskilled in the equipment's use—they had failed to spot Mimo in Plomazo on a couple of occasions—and I was confident that Joe would be able to hide Chispa successfully while we carried out the first phase of Operation Q.