The voice was human with a heavy ethnic accent, indicating that its owner was Earth-born and probably used his ancestral tongue at home in preference to Standard English. Lots of people were like that, defying the language police.
My instrumentation showed that the com beam was very weak. The starship sending the SOS traveled anonymously, as was common in regions frequented by pirates. I, of course, was anonymous, too. My rangefinder placed the other ship 154 light-years away in the direction of the Sag, well out of scanner range.
“State the nature of your emergency, vessel in distress,” I said.
“Responding starship, please identify yourself.”
The hell I would. With a focused SS com linkage established, the other ship could now calculate my hyperspatial pseudovector with precision. If it was an innocent, I’d do my best to help. If it was a trolling buccaneer playing games, attempting to entice me within striking distance, I’d teach it a painful lesson.
I repeated, “Please state the nature of your emergency. My name is Hugo. I’m a human trader who prefers to remain incognito at this time.” This was a coy admission that I was a smuggler. A few of them, like my pal Mimo Bermudez, were not entirely devoid of humane impulses. “I will attempt to contact Zone Patrol on your behalf if you wish.”
Abruptly, the vessel in distress deactivated its ID blankout. The data display on my console showed its registration and ICS-approved itinerary. SBC-11942 was a Sheltok bulk trans-ack carrier en route from Shamiya in the Sag to the big fuel-plant complex on Lethe in Zone 8 of the Orion Arm.
“Citizen Hugo, this is Ulrich Schmidt, master of the Sheltok Eblis. We are under attack by a fleet of sixteen bandits. Our ULD engines are disabled and we are operating under minimum subluminal drive—effectively dead in the void. Our AM torpedoes are exhausted. We have diverted nearly all remaining power to our defensive shields. Uh … I estimate that we can hold out for two more hours, then we will have to surrender.”
“I understand. What can I do to help?”
“The initial attack severely damaged our communication system. Our SS com input is too weak to reach Sheltok Fleet Security on Lethe or any of our Sagittarian units. We have also been unsuccessful in attempts to contact Zone Patrol. Please notify the patrol of our situation if you can.”
“I copy that and will comply, Captain Schmidt,” I said. Then I added mendaciously: “My long-range scanner picked up a ZP heavy cruiser in my slice of hyperspace less than half an hour ago. It might be able to reach you in time to drive off the bandits. Do you have a racial ID on them?”
“It’s the verfluchte Haluk again! No doubt about it. I hoped to outwit them by vectoring below the galactic plane on this trip, but they found us anyhow. Twenty of the pig-dogs! I popped four with AM torpedos before they needled my engines.”
“Haluk? Are you sure of that identification, Cap’n?” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice. The Barky Hunt had paid off already.
“Of course I’m sure, du Scheisskopf! Do you think I’m the first carrier to be ambushed by these doppelgurken’ fuckers? They’re bleeding Sheltok dry in Zones 3 and 4.”
“Well, that’s a rotten shame, but it sure as hell ain’t my fault.”
Schmidt was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry I lost my temper, Hugo. Please—if you aren’t able to contact Zone Patrol within … a viable time frame, then I request that you tell Lethe what happened to us, as soon as you are able to do so.”
“You just hang tough, pardner. I’ll do my best to set the patrol onto those fuckin’ blue scrotes. Good luck! Hugo out.”
“Thank you, Hugo. Sheltok Eblis is out.”
I’d lied to Schmidt just in case his emergency was a hoax. I hadn’t scanned a ZP starship for over thirty hours, and that one had been back in Zone 8 of the Orion Arm, nearly 2,200 light-years away. The patrol has precious few high-ross vessels, and they use them to guard heavily traveled regular shipping lanes, not the godforsaken underbelly of Red Gap.
But not to worry, Cap’n! Makebate could substitute nicely for a ZP heavy cruiser. And I was bored and ready for some Lone Ranger action.
Roaring down the hype at max pseudovee, I arrived at the ambush scene well within Schmidt’s estimated two-hour limit. Still, it was a near thing. The shields of the great eight-kilometer-long carrier were flickering crimson by then, and they wouldn’t have held up much longer.
The bandits were so intent on savaging Eblis that it took them forever to spot me coming at them from down under, among the dust clouds. When one of them finally scanned Makebate, the whole bunch broke off their bombardment, engaged ULD, and sheered away in sixteen different directions. They were driving speedy small starships that looked something like Bodascon Y600 knockoffs, ornamented with those odd cobalt-blue running lights the Haluk are fond of. They had plenty of horsepower to fly rings around a slow-moving leviathan like Eblis, but were hardly a match for my souped-up sled and its extravagant weapon systems.
I played reasonably fair—aside from misrepresenting myself as Zone Patrol—sending warning shots from my actinic cannons at the Haluk ships and calling for them to throw in the towel or sincerely regret it. They kept running, most of them too panicked by my scary conformation and superior speed even to fire on me. I made a recording of each pirate ship’s image and fuel signature before wasting it. It took me almost two hours to chase down the last of the sixteen, by which time I’d lost my appetite for one-sided combat—not that I had any alternative to slaughtering them. If I gave them a pass, they’d just find fresh prey.
There was no way to tell if the doomed Haluk had sent subspace alarms to their base. I was already having uneasy second thoughts about the wisdom of my knight-errancy, but I put my worries aside, figuring I hadn’t really compromised the Phleg operation. If the Haluk high command recognized Makebate from a pirate’s description—so what? They already knew I was prowling the galaxy; the lovely Dolores da Gama had seen to that. But they didn’t know my destination or my mission, and they certainly had no idea I’d be doing a turn in Joru disguise.
Look on the bright side, Helly! I told myself. You did your good deed for the day.
And now I had proof of Haluk freebootery in the inner galactic whorl to add to the pile of accumulating evidence against them, plus some interesting questions that needed answers:
Were Haluk trans-ack pirates operating out of an independent base in the Sag, or were they using Y’tata facilities? Was it possible that the Haluk had formed a secret alliance with the frolicksome albino farters? Were the hijackings intended to create an artificial shortage of ultraheavy elements, or did the Haluk have other motives for grabbing the stuff?
Perhaps Barky Tregarth would know.
If he didn’t, I might just be forced to nab me a Y pirate out of some low Phlegethon dive and hook him to the truth machine. It would be a nasty interrogation for both of us. Sometimes aliens didn’t survive psychotronic questioning. (Occasionally humans didn’t, either.) And unless I corked the victim securely, the stress of the procedure would generate a stomach-churning stench. Maybe I could grill the Y while wearing a space suit …
I returned to the immediate vicinity of the derelict transack carrier and dropped out of hyperspace. The region was still boiling with ionic crud from the earlier bombardment, futzing the big ship’s scanners, but to be on the safe side I erected Makebate’s dissimulator before hailing Captain Schmidt on short-range RF. I didn’t want him or his crew to get a close look at me.
“Sheltok Eblis, this is your old pal Hugo. Do you copy? The bandits are gone and won’t be back. You can relax now.”
A Germanic expletive came out of my com speaker, and then the viewer showed an agitated middle-aged man in the ugly marigold-colored Sheltok uniform. He had brush-cut hair and a thick neck.
“You destroyed the Haluk pirates! All sixteen! Who are you? What are you?”
I had the recorder going again. I ignored the skipper’s demand that I turn on my flightdeck video. “Captain Schmidt,
congratulations on your survival. Do you have any casualties?”
“No, Gott sei Dank! But it was a close call for the engineers when our ULD powerplant was disabled. We—We are very grateful for your assistance, Hugo.”
“Are you aware,” I said formally, “that Sheltok management has suppressed information about Haluk pirate attacks against ultraheavy element carriers? The media and the general public know nothing about them.”
The captain’s hooded blue eyes looked away. “Ach, it’s a political thing, you know? Anyone who speaks of it …”He trailed off, shaking his head.
“How long have Haluk bandits been attacking Sheltok ships?”
But he was too shrewd to fall into my clumsy trap. “I know what you’re trying to do,” he growled. “You think you’ll sell my admission to the web-tabloid muckrakers. Wouldn’t they pay a pretty penny for a sensational story like this! Well, you won’t get any more out of me, whoever the hell you are. What good is it to be rescued from killer pirates if one ends up Thrown Away for corporate disloyalty, eh? Answer me that!”
“If criminal behavior by the Haluk is brought into the open, they can be pressured to cease and desist. You could avenge the other victims and prevent—”
He interrupted me with a scornful laugh. “I thought before that you were a fool, Hugo. Now I know it for a fact. Sheltok will stamp out these Haluk vermin and their renegade Y’tata confederates without having its affairs smeared across the filthy media. Meanwhile, the situation must be kept under wraps so as not to undermine public confidence in the Concern. Do you understand?”
“I only want to help.”
He suddenly sounded very tired. “Then call Lethe on your subspace communicator and ask them to send a tug for us. Send it soon, Hugo. Eblis out.”
The viewer went dark. And that was that.
I did as Schmidt asked, in a roundabout fashion. As I resumed my interrupted voyage, I contacted Karl Nazarian on the SS com and fed him the recorded information I’d gathered on the pirate attack.
“Sixteen Haluk bandits attacking one bulk carrier?” he marveled. “Good grief. It almost sounds as though your war has already started.”
“Pass this fresh intelligence along to Ef Sontag. Then find a way to anonymously relay Eblis’s request for a tug to Sheltok Tower. Their external security people will take it seriously if they’re given the coordinates of the derelict.”
“What about informing Zone Patrol?”
“Don’t bother. The report would only be suppressed. The carrier captain let slip that Haluk attacks are common out here. Sheltok’s just keeping it quiet so as not to rock the consortium applecart … Do you have any good news for me?”
“Well, there are no demiclones on Sontag’s staff or in his family. Hector and Cassius are skulking around the Assembly dining rooms, pinching used water glasses and half-eaten croissants. So far, no Delegates test positive. Lotte has analyzed and recollated all of the Gala secret files. She’s working with Sontag’s people to mesh the new data with the old. Bea Mangan found six scientists willing to do tissue-culture research with the mystery gene.”
“That’s great.”
“Other news: Simon nominated Gunter Eckert to be the new Rampart chairman and John Ellington to be VC. The board will vote when Eve returns from the Spur next week. Not a trace of your brother Dan. However, one of the injured guards recovered enough to help InSec make up computermodel images of three of Dan’s abductors. Let me show them to you. I think you’ll find them interesting.”
Three male faces, side by side, flashed onto the com display. Two of the men were totally nondescript; but there was something disturbingly familiar about the third, and I felt a sudden dry sensation in my throat.
“Karl, is it my imagination, or does the guy in the middle look a little like Alistair Drummond? Remove the mustache, add more flesh to the cheeks, and lose the eye bags, give him a designer haircut …”
“The resemblance isn’t very close, but I spotted it, too.”
“Drummond and the Haluk? The aliens washed their hands of him—all but betrayed him to us!”
“Yes,” said Karl. “The resemblance is probably coincidental. But I wanted to show it to you anyhow. Give you some food for thought.”
“Thanks all to hell,” I grumbled. “Anything else?”
“The weather in Toronto is sensational—twenty-three degrees celsius, bright sunshine, balmy spring breezes. The Conurb Council turned off the force-field umbrella for the first time this year.”
“Wish I was there.”
“No, you don’t,” said Karl Nazarian.
He bid me goodbye and I resumed my interrupted journey to Phlegethon. A day or so later I arrived at the asteroid without further incident.
From space the little world looked like nothing much—perhaps a pitted and decaying pumpkin, dull orange-black in color, with a handful of tiny orbiting craft floating around it like fruit flies. Here and there amber lights shone out of craters in the surface. What seemed to be scores of deformed silver minnows nibbling the pumpkin rind—together with numbers of smaller noshmates—were actually huge transactinide carriers and lesser starships, either taking on fuel or docked nose-to-ground while their crews rested and recreated inside the not so heavenly body.
I have been told that the original Phlegethon of Greek mythology was a fiery river in Hades. Sheltok Concern owned a dozen or so similar way stations with brimstony names—Gehenna, Styx, Sheol, Tophet, Avernus, Niflheim, and the like—that served vessels bound to or from the terrible R-class worlds where ultraheavy elements are mined. Compared to the genuine inferno of the Sagittarian arm of the Milky Way—nearly lifeless, seething with deadly gamma and x-radiation blasted out from the galactic hub, clogged by colossal interstellar dust clouds and minefields of cosmic debris, and infested with malignant little black holes and the weird oscillating novae that generate stable transactinide elements—dreary Phlegethon was a Garden of Eden.
My computer told me that the asteroid was only 163 kilometers in diameter. It followed a distant orbit about a melancholy blood-orange sun near the outer margin of the Whorl. The other planets in its solar system were tired gas giants and waterless desert worlds. What made Phlegethon appealing to starfarers was the fact that it was not composed of solid rock or sterile meteoric metal, as are most asteroids. Phleg was a carbonaceous chondrite.
CC’s are as common as comets in our galaxy. Most of them are smaller than a bread box, a mixture of iron and magnesium silicates, other minerals, and generous amounts of dihydrogen oxide, plus lots of simple organic compounds—including amino acids, the building blocks of life. Little CC’s, falling as meteorites, can seed the oceans of newborn worlds and cook up primordial soup. Large CC’s, judiciously carved and riddled, are the best possible interstellar way stations.
Warm one of these lumps up with an internal powerplant to melt the embedded ice, provide light and enough artificial gravity inside so denizens and visitors can walk about in reasonable comfort, crack some of the organic compounds to release nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide for a breathable atmosphere in the tunnels, and you have an instant space station. Add fertilizing trace elements to the pulverized asteroidal substance and you can build yourself a garden in space, for an asteroidal carbonaceous chondrite is nothing but a big ball of rocky dirt. Carbon-based foodstuffs will grow like mad in an enhanced CC. So will marijuana, magic mushrooms, coca shrubs, dilly beans, pseudopoon, rakka, hebenon, and a host of other recreational narcotic plants. Phlegeton grew those, but it was also noted for its succulent salad veggies, suzyberries, sweet melons, and barley.
Yep, barley. For beer. The place had five microbreweries.
Even though Phlegethon was Sheltok property, it operated as a freesoil world. There were none of the usual arrival formalities when my gig docked at one of the small-craft mooring facilities. I came through the airlock carrying only a locked titanium case hanging at my hip on a baldric. It contained the contents of the Daffy pack and a Hogan H-18
miniaturized low-power psychotronic interrogation device that would enable me to learn whether Barky knew anything at all useful. If he did, I’d take him back to Makebate and attach him to really efficient truth machines for more serious discussion.
I’d be returning regularly to my starship to sleep and get a decent meal. My costume’s mask had ports for drinking through a straw and the insertion of small edibles, and Joru readily consumed many kinds of human alcoholic beverages and snack foods; but I wasn’t going to give up my favorite rib-stickin’ ranch-type vittles for the duration. My other personal needs would be take care of in the asteroid’s public conveniences, omniracial cubicles of the type that are blast-sterilized after every use.
Hidden under my robes was a collection of special equipment that included both a stun-gun and a Kagi blue-ray blaster, restraint cuffs in several sizes, antigravity supporters similar to the ones Black Leather and Brown Fleece had used on me during my abduction, and a projector capable of generating a movable small force-field hemisphere. My flexible body armor would protect me from stun-darts and most types of photon pistols, but I really hoped I wouldn’t get into a gunfight. The damned six-digit paws didn’t enhance trigger dexterity.
The arrival-departure lobby of Phlegethon was a roughhewn cavern, very well lit, swarming with people of four races. Humans were the most numerous, but there were plenty of Y’tata and Joru. A few groups of ponderous Kalleyni slouched about, giggling and gaping at the goofy-looking humanoid entities.
Gravity in this part of the asteroid was about seven-eighths terrestrial, enough to put a good bounce in your step. The air was chilly, humid, and smelled faintly of formaldehyde, one of the simple organic compounds abundant in the asteroidal substance. A thin mist hung about the light fixtures. I could hear the dull roar of powerful ventilation equipment.
The floor appeared to be wet tarmac, cambered for drainage and punctuated by openings covered by ceramalloy grates. The walls and ceiling, so heavily pocked and cratered that they resembled gritty dark Swiss cheese, were covered by a transparent sealant that had cracked in numerous areas, allowing meltwater and gases to seep through. You could see embedded chunks of dirty ice everywhere. A rat’s nest of exposed cables, pipes, and utility ducts decorated the ceiling.