That was his second mistake—and his last.
The next instant he was hit squarely by the microwave beam. The mortally wounded pozzie only managed to bring his sword down in a death blow, plunging it up to the hilt in his attacker’s side, and there it stayed.
Then Zorro rolled across the floor with what he himself would have called “great style,” wrapped in his black cape, letting his velvet Cordovan sombrero fall—and gazing in astonishment, first at the hole nearly a hand wide that had opened up in his stomach, then at the obese human who had made it. Who, by the way, seemed utterly unconcerned with the sharp blade dangling from his torso, and who was still holding the Colossaur bounty hunter’s maser.
A maser that, by all rights, should have been individualized. That is: incapable of firing a shot in anyone’s hands but its owner’s.
Zorro must have left this world full of astonishment.
But he missed one of the best surprises. The Grodo pointed his maser at the pozzie-killer—who should by all the rules of anatomy have been lying on the floor, bleeding out from the sword wound—but the Colossaur fired first. Only he didn’t shoot the human. He shot his own astonished companion.
Few energy or projectile weapons in the galaxy (and none that are legal, not even for baggers) can pierce the naturally ultraresistant armor of a Grodo insectoid. Their slick plates make them even slightly more solid than the flashy, impressive armor of the Colossaurs.
But not even a multilayered chitin carapace can save your life when you get hit right in the eye with a jet of acid that penetrates straight to your brain, eating through your flesh.
The Grodo collapsed without a word. Naturally. His race doesn’t use words; they communicate with pheromones.
I have to admit, Makrow 34’s escape plan was good—half brilliant improvisation, half careful coordination—and it worked to perfection. He’d probably bribed the Colossaur on the way here, promising him part of his energy-crystal booty. But acting alone, even a Colossaur would have been up against impossible odds. Everybody knows a bagger doesn’t trust his own shadow, much less another bagger. Old buddies or not.
Plus, it isn’t exactly easy to hit a target less than two inches wide, especially not one that can move faster than an express train. Besides, there’s also the pozzie.
With his human accomplice pretending to attack him, though, it was almost too easy. In the heat of their phony hand-to-hand combat, it was child’s play for the drugged-up human to grab and use the Colossaur’s weapon. Especially after the double-dealing bounty hunter had helpfully deactivated the biofield detector that should have kept anyone else from firing it.
With the pozzie suddenly out of the picture, the odds were good that the Grodo would turn all his attention to the killer, freezing for a fraction of a second and making himself a perfect target for a nice acid bath. The Colossaur, slightly slower but outfitted with an ideal Grodo-stopper, needed only to take him out.
Oh, the horrible things greed makes sentient beings do. Treacherously firing on a partner of many years. My Chandler would have written a whole chapter on the immorality of criminals, their lack of principles, something like that.
The holotape time line shows that less than five seconds had passed since the heavy human entered the docking module. Makrow 34, his profile blurry, disarmed inside his anti-Psi force field, had not yet moved.
The dying insectoid bagger wasn’t yet done thrashing around on the floor while his nervous system failed, burnt beyond repair by the acid, when the treacherous Colossaur reached down with his thick, scaly arm, and pulled something from his belt. The Cetian’s features suddenly became clear, freed from the neutralizing force field. The Cetian smiled and slipped his handcuffs off by simply spreading his arms as if to stretch.
His Colossaur and human accomplices each took a step back. The massive alien’s acid-thrower was still dripping. The fat Homo sapiens still had Zorro’s sword sticking out of his side, swaying gently, a couple of inches below his left armpit.
Makrow 34 laughed. His laugh, like any Cetian’s, was a grotesque parody of human laughter: a grating, disagreeable noise, more lunatic rejoicing than healthy cheer, yet strangely contagious all the same. His two flunkies joined in. The human (identified a second later by the computers as Giorgio Weekman, thief and smuggler of anything that could be smuggled in the asteroid belt) wriggled out of the foamflesh suit that made him look 70 kilos overweight, incidentally serving as a suit of armor to protect him from the Colossaur’s blows and Zorro’s sword.
A second later Achilles ran in from the control room, firing indiscriminately.
Chastened by Zorro’s fate, he’d left his iconic Achaean sword, shield, and lance in the control room, wielding instead a heavy maser, which of course wasn’t ancient Greek by any stretch, nor did it match his delicately sculpted bronze breastplate, but it undoubtedly was a more effective weapon for the fight he anticipated.
It didn’t seem to be the home team’s lucky day. Moving at a strangely slow pace, Achilles inexplicably missed his first shot. Instead of vaporizing the Colossaur’s thick skull (which dodged the shot at a speed his former Grodo companion would have envied), his high-powered microwave beam sliced halfway through a titanium girder a foot above his head. Pushing his quickest reflexes, undaunted, my pozzie friend fired again, almost point-blank.
This time, his maser beam didn’t even flare. Still moving in slow motion, as if it was all he could do to react, he couldn’t even cover himself. A second later, a shot from an ultrapowered weapon similar to the Colossaur’s cut him in half, with a great splattering of bronze droplets from his breastplate, half melted by the tremendous heat wave.
With no one in the command room to stop them, Makrow and his two liberator-sidekicks turned without another look at the pozzies’ scattered remains and calmly strolled out through the airlock hatch. Then, after deactivating the tracking device in the bounty hunter ship, they took off, destination unknown, with no one to go after them.
I imagine this was the first time the aliens regretted their excessive prudence. Which was responsible, among other things, for never supplying us, the official keepers of order on board the Burroughs, with any sort of armed, rapid patrol ship.
Three
At this point in the story I think it’s about time for me to introduce myself and clarify a few points about our station, about us pozzies, and especially about the relationship between our alien bosses and humans in the twenty-second century.
I’m a police officer on board the space station William S. Burroughs, the Galactic Trade Confederation’s enclave in the Solar System. My keyname is Raymond (as in Chandler, as I may have mentioned). My serial number is MSX-3482-GZ.
Naturally, I’m a pozzie too. In other words, not a human being but one of those robotic abominations, the blasphemous entities, neither alive nor dead, vilified daily by the unregenerate terrestrial preachers who still think everything was better before the aliens came along. A servant of the devils, as many humans still call the Grodos, Colossaurs, and Cetians, without distinction.
Even though I owe them my very existence, I’m not going to say my employers are exactly angels. Beings interested only in profit must necessarily have a pretty unangelic nature. Still, they aren’t all that terrible, either, in my opinion.