Seems they were coming from far away. Must have been very far away, if they were almost out of fuel—energy crystals are almost inexhaustible. One crystal could have lit my Chandler’s old New York City, the whole thing, for a solid decade. The baggers were transporting a prisoner, name of Makrow 34, a fugitive Cetian perp they’d nabbed with no little effort after trailing him for parsec after parsec.
The trading bosses’ big blunder was, they forgot to warn us how dangerous this Cetian guy was. Oh, sure, they let us know, in their own half-assed way, that he was a Psi—but they didn’t give us any particulars about his exotic talent. Nobody could have seen that coming.
Two days after the fact, when the bureaucrats finally relaxed their security screening and let me peek at his folder, I learned Makrow 34 had started young on a life of crime and had made quite the career of it. Not only had he broken every law in the Cetian, human, and galactic books, he had managed to come up with two or three amusing new crimes of his own.
Amusing for him, not for his victims, I mean.
But that comes later.
The top brass of the Galactic Trade Confederation meanwhile stuck to their compartmentalization policy—Let not your right tentacle know what your left claw does would be a good translation of another alien saying. So they didn’t see fit to tell us that—what a coincidence—our Makrow 34 had taken advantage of the close resemblance between Cetians and Homo sapiens to commit a good portion of his crimes in our theoretically forbidden Solar System, where he was also suspected of stashing a massive pile of loot. A few thousand terawatt-hours of energy.
One more thing I found out too late.
If my buddies had known, they would have put two and two together and gotten exactly four. One: if the prisoner was working the Solar System, it was a safe bet he had accomplices here. Two: you can always find someone to do the almost impossible in exchange for a few terawatt-hours of energy. Three: if anybody was going to try to rescue him, this station was the only place they could do it. And four: this all added up to big trouble right around the corner.
If they’d known, then Zorro would never have gone to pick him up alone. Precautions would have been taken. Maybe Zorro would have had Achilles with him from the beginning, who knows.
Maybe the two of them would still be around. Maybe not.
Anyway, it wasn’t bad judgment that caused Zorro to go there alone. It was lack of information he should have been given. He stuck to standard procedures: one pozzie in the module airlock, another on standby in the dock’s outer hatch control room.
Besides, what pozzie—or what Grodo—could have guessed what was about to go down?
I’ve looped the holotape a thousand times and still can’t believe it really happened.
It starts with the usual routine. The airlock hatch opens.
The bounty hunters, like any baggers who’ve survived long enough in a tough line of work, don’t trust each other much and don’t like to take risks. The tall, lanky, hexapod figure of the insectoid Grodo and the somewhat shorter but much more massive bulk of the Colossaur, both bristling with weapons (proof that they didn’t intend to come in past the docking module) flanked their Cetian prisoner: a tiny humanoid figure, handcuffed and unarmed, almost insignificant in contrast, his profile blurry, as if distorted by some powerful force field.
Like the field that’s used to neutralize criminals with the most powerful (and luckily the rarest) Psi powers.
My buddy must have started to suspect something then. You can see on the holotape when he calls Achilles over and starts unbuckling the long whip he always carried under his cape.
At the same moment, a heavy human comes walking calmly around the corner. Zorro pays no attention to him. The fat guy doesn’t seem especially threatening. He’s coming from the inner zone, where nobody but pozzies have weapons. Most likely he just wandered into the wrong module. Just a matter of warning him off, and—
Zorro never had a chance.
The Grodo must have been caught by surprise, too, when the fat guy suddenly changed direction and went on the attack.
It was fast. Too fast. Any human who moves like that has to be stoked on combat drugs or hyped with military neurocircuit implants. Possession and use of such are strictly off-limits for humans, of course—and not just on the station.
Complicated situation, competing priorities. If the attack had been aimed at any other sort of alien, Zorro wouldn’t have skipped a beat before running over to help. He’s a pozzie and his mission is to maintain order. But the fat guy went after the Colossaur, so for a second Zorro didn’t react even though he already had his whip and sword out, ready for action.
That was his first mistake. A justified one, though. Intervening to help a Colossaur is a deadly insult.
Evolved from predatory reptiloids under a blazing sun, a warrior race par excellence, as devoted to strength and personal bravery as other species are to the arts or technology, the natives of Colossa have taken jobs all over the galaxy as security personnel, soldiers, or guardians (especially now that their planet is at peace, much to their regret). Even the weakest Colossaur would be a thousand times happier to get torn limb from limb than to let some pozzie clown help him tackle a measly human.
It didn’t look like he’d need help anyway. A typical Colossaur stands six foot six inches tall and weighs six hundred pounds, and that’s not just muscle: a good portion comes from the exoskeleton, a natural bony suit of armor up to two inches thick. The bounty hunter that the fat human attacked was even bigger than normal. A giant among Colossaurs. Nearly ten feet, from his short, thick, muscular tail to the sunken, beady eyes in his armored head. He must have weighed more than nine hundred pounds, and his bony plates were probably three inches thick in places. There’s nothing like that on Earth—the closest I can think of is a velociraptor crossed with a giant armadillo.
The people of Colossa aren’t the muscle-bound goons they might first appear to be. There’s no doubt they rely more on strength than agility, and rightly so: a pozzie, or even a drug-fueled human, could move and react faster. Grodos? Forget about it. Fast as lightning.
Yet even though their fighting methods are based mainly on their incredible power and resistance and their almost absolute lack of weak spots, they aren’t the least bit clumsy. On the contrary: they can move with uncanny, lethal fluidity when the situation calls for it, twisting around inside their own shells and taking advantage of the inertia of their own massive bulk, almost like the ancient Japanese sumo wrestlers on Earth.
Considering all this, anyone would have expected the obese human attacker to be reduced to pulp in a fraction of a second. He looked like a baboon trying to go up against a lion, with his hands tied behind his back.
But it turns out the human was very quick. And very fat, too. Fat enough that the impact of his mass, boosted by his onrush, achieved the unthinkable: he knocked the Colossaur down.
The two of them rolled across the floor in a confused heap of bony plates, tail, feet, and scaly or fatty limbs as thick as columns flailing in all directions.
When three more seconds had gone by without the attacker being reduced to ground meat, the Grodo moved so fast that even on the holotape all you see is a blur, rushing over to find out what the fuck had happened to his buddy to keep him from dispatching that insolent, suicidal primate once and for all.
But this time Zorro, true to his duty, did intervene.