No pirate had a chance against us; we could blast any of them out of space, from well beyond their return-fire range. In space, of course, a missile could proceed indefinitely until captured by some planetary body, so there was technically no such thing as a limited range, but accuracy was certainly limited, and beyond certain parameters, any missile could be balked or avoided. A laser cannon generally could not penetrate the hull of a spaceship, but it could heat and detonate an explosive missile if the range was great enough to provide time to track it with precision and lock on. Our lasers were far more potent and accurate than those of any converted civilian ship, for our power source and computer specialization was greater. Our eight-inch shells were fired at twice the velocity a pirate could muster. Our big shells were also far more heavily armored than theirs, so they were in effect largely invulnerable to premature laser detonation. Our torpedoes were slower but also more massive and better armored, and they were fired from much closer in, so the effect was similar. A pirate could fire at one of our destroyers, of course, but the fact was, a single destroyer was more than a match for the average pirate vessel. Virtually laser-proof and swift enough to dodge any shell large enough to damage it, a destroyer was—a thing that destroyed.
We were, as the ancient saying went, shooting fish in a barrel. Phist had seen to that, by providing us with the best equipment the Navy had to offer. With that hardware, we were supreme. I blessed the day my sister had gone out to bring him in, for I also liked the man personally. Phist was, as I mentioned before, conservative, honest, and competent; the very model of a modern Naval officer, who should have been an admiral by now if only the Navy had valued his sterling qualities.
The news of our campaign was now making the headlines of the Jupiter news services. The civilians, secure in their great atmospheric city-bubbles, loved the vicarious adventure of cops and robbers, and kept running score of our “kills” as if this were one big game. I became the hero of the hour: the token Hispanic officer making good in the free society of Jupiter. Little note was taken of the fact that I had never been granted Jupiter citizenship, so remained a Callisto national-in-exile, a mercenary fighter. In the Navy this made no difference, but the moment I left the Navy I would revert to resident alien status. I had to make good in the Navy, and so did most of my Hispanic troops; we had nowhere else to go.
So it went, as I said, for forty-seven ships; but the forty-eighth was special. It was the Purple Mountain, taken over by mutiny fifteen years back, preying on refugee-bubbles and unwary pleasure craft in the normal manner. She had no armament to speak of, and it was surprising that she had survived this long without being taken over by another pirate. “There’s something odd about this one,” Mondy muttered. “We’d better take it intact—and carefully.”
No problem about taking it; the Purple Mountain surrendered instantly when challenged. There were no tricks or booby traps; the news had long since spread that we were alert to such things, and this tended to discourage them—as we had intended. The complication came in this case when we processed the crew. They were the usual motley bunch of cutthroats, the scum of space— except for one, the cabin boy.
He had the mark of QYV on him. He was a courier. That, of course, was why he had been spared; no pirate dared interfere with a QYV courier. It seemed this ship had sacked a refugee bubble, discovered this lad, and undertaken to deliver him to his destination, but he had not known where to go. So they had held him, pending communication with QYV, and in the interim no other pirate had bothered this ship. QYV’s protection had thus been extended to the Purple Mountain.
I interviewed the lad in a private cell with only my bodyguard Heller present. I started carefully, getting the feel of his nature. “What is your name?”
“Donald Beams, sir. Are you going to shoot me?”
He was trying to be facetious but was uncertain. He was about fifteen years old, which had been my age when I was a refugee. Now it seemed so young! “Have you murdered anyone?”
“No, sir!”
“Then you will not be shot. What does the term Kife mean to you?”
“That I can’t be touched, sir.”
“You are no longer among pirates. This is the Jupiter Navy. We can touch you.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, unconvinced that his charm of immunity should thus be voided.
“Let me explain something to you,” I said. “When I was your age, I loved a girl. She was a courier, like you. I killed her and took her item.”
“Sir!” It was not the boy, but Sergeant Heller.
I glanced at him inquiringly.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, embarrassed. “I didn’t know.”
“If you loved her—” the boy said, perplexed.
“Why did I kill her?” I finished his question. “It was not because she wasn’t true to me; we were getting married. It was because pirates were raiding, and I had to kill everyone in the bubble to get them before they got us. She was in the bubble. Then I took the item because it was all of her I could keep. That was thirteen years ago, and I still have it.”
“But Kife-”
“Tried to take it back from me three or four times,” I said. “He failed.”
“I don’t believe it!”
I nodded at Heller, giving the cue to speak.
Heller shook his head. “Believe it, kid. This guy ain’t afraid of Kife. I was one of the three or four, and now I serve Commander Hubris.”
“You got the mark of Kife on you?”
Heller shook his head. “No. I wasn’t a courier, I was a killer.”
Now the boy’s certainty was shaken. “Whatcha going to do with me?”
“I am going to use you as a hostage against Kife. If he wants you, he will have to meet my terms.”
“But Kife don’t deal with nobody on nobody else’s terms!”
“If he refuses, I will take your item and add it to the one I have. I think Kife will prefer to deal.”
“Yes, sir.” Now Donald was distinctly uneasy.
“Tell me how you were supposed to make contact with Kife.”
He didn’t know, but with careful questioning I learned that he did have an address in a dome on Europa to which he was not supposed to go. I smiled.
We rejoined my staff. “Treat Donald as a hostage,” I told Spirit. She took charge of him, knowing I had made progress.
“Ready an escort ship,” I told Sergeant Smith. “Program it for Europa.”
“Sir,” Heller protested. “You can’t go there! It’s obviously a trap!”
“What other person should I subject to such a risk?”
He gulped. “Me, sir.”
“You suppose you aren’t marked for death by Kife now?”
He was scared and showed it, but he stood his ground. “If I am, then at least I have saved your life, sir, and repaid my debt. You’ve given me three good years. If you die, I’m washed up, anyway. And so is the battalion.”
Mondy arrived. “He’s right, Commander. We can learn a lot, if we play this correctly. This may even be a setup: Kife’s way of contacting you. Send the sergeant, with news of your hostage— and an empty jar of salve.”
“Salve!” I exclaimed, seeing it. “He will think I’m—!”
“Precisely, sir. Kife wants you to contact him this time. He believes you are ready to deal. He won’t harm the envoy.”
QYV thought he had me in his power now—and just might find the tables turned. Mondy’s sinister intellect had come through again.
Sergeant Heller went, nervous but proud. The ploy worked. Heller brought back QYV’s envoy: a woman of about fifty with the aspect of a clerk. She requested a private interview.
We ran her through decontamination, nominally because we wanted no planetary diseases introduced to our fleet, but actually to assure ourselves she carried no weapons. She was clean, carrying only a purse with harmless routine items. “Unless she’s better at hand-to-hand combat than she looks,” Mondy said, “she poses no physical threat to
you.”
“Just make sure she never gets close to our hostage,” I said. “That’s the pretext for this meeting, and we both need that pretext.”
I met with the woman in a private chamber. She was neatly dressed, heavyset, with fashionable iron-gray hair and trifocal contact lenses that gave her eyes preternatural brightness. Her name was Reba Ward, and she was nominally a Jupiter government research assistant for a minor USJ congressional committee.
I wasted no time with introductions or explanations; she knew, or thought she knew, what we were here for. “You are empowered to deal?”
“I am.”
“I want information. You want your courier. We’ll trade.”
She smiled, as I had expected. “Try another exchange.”
Uh-huh. “Be more specific.”
“I will trade a product for an item.”
“Try another exchange.”
She squinted at me, not understanding this balk. She thought I was desperate for the drug. “We can provide an unlimited quantity—”
“Of information?”
She shrugged. “Very well. First we shall discuss courier versus information. Then we shall discuss a second trade.”
I shrugged, too. “You can meet my price on the courier, at least.”
Now she was really perplexed. “What information do you seek?”
“The nature of Kife.”
“Seek other information.”
That was really sensitive information! Of course, I had known that if Mondy couldn’t run it down, it had to be exceptionally closely guarded. But it was against my nature to leave any potential threat uncomprehended, and QYV had made four savage attempts to take my key. Once I knew the nature of this enemy, I could consider how to nullify it. “That is the only information for which I will deal.”
“Then ask for something tangible instead.”
So I made an impossible demand, rhetorically. “Promotion to Captain, and a fleet to go after the nest of pirates in the Belt.” That was the so-called Asteroid Belt, where the most flagrant piracy in the System flourished. This Juclip mission had been only a warm-up, and it was almost done.
“Done.”
I was startled. “You can authorize that?”
“My employer can. Will you deliver the courier to me now, or do you prefer to wait for confirmation of your promotion and assignment? It will take two weeks to flow through channels.”
I had dealt with QYV before. He had honored his prior bargain on Chiron. It had been years before he tried again for the key, and I considered that sufficient. I did not appreciate his subsequent moves against me, but there had been no actual breach of faith, so it remained possible to deal. “You may take the courier with you.” Reba Ward was hard to read, but I was making progress and realized now that the courier was not important and probably carried no item. This had been merely a device to enable me to contact QYV. Reba had called my bluff on the promotion, and now I had at least to discuss the other matter. In this sense I had been outplayed.
“You know what we want,” she said. “We have what you want. I presume that the matter of the courier can be publicized among your officers while the other is completely private.”
It was time to end this. “The courier carries nothing, and I am not addicted. I will deal only for information, and the key will not leave my possession.”
She took stock, realizing that I could not be bluffing about the drug. She had been lured here for nothing. “Then I shall provide the information.”
Just like that! “You are ready to promote an addict to 06 before answering a question about Kife, and now you give the information, anyway?”
“The promotion may be considered amends for past indiscretions. The key you have is more valuable than our secrecy. The information is the price of last resort.”
“That key was transported by the woman I loved,” I said. “I killed forty-five pirates and twenty-two children along with my fiancée, and the key is all I have left to show for it. How can you hope to return any part of my loss to me?”
“We did not properly understand the nature of your attachment before,” Reba said. “Once we did, we altered our approach.”
“By trying to kill or addict me?” I asked tersely.
“I can explain that—if we are engaged in negotiation for the possession of the key.”
“We are not.” Yet she had excited my curiosity considerably, and I was mindful of her remark about the promotion being an apology for those thrusts of the past. I really did want to know about QYV, for QYV had been the source of my acquaintance with Helse, my love. If QYV was now ready to deal positively rather than negatively—well, I would see.
“I am assuming that we are. I must clarify that Kife is not a person; it is an organization. Individual technicians are assigned to cases as circumstances warrant. We are chronically overextended, so some accounts lapse until it is convenient or necessary to expedite them.”
An organization! That explained a lot. “You are saying that one person elects to negotiate for a lost key and another will try more violent persuasion?”
“Exactly. Your own account has been outstanding for thirteen years and has had several technicians. I assumed the account after the last effort malfunctioned.”
“After they canned the fool who botched my murder?”
She smiled briefly. “Just so. And when it seemed that the addiction ploy had failed or been countered. Later it seemed that it had succeeded, but it was too late for that particular technician. I was prepared to follow up, but now it appears that the original judgment of failure was justified.”
“So you, personally, had no hand in that?”
She nodded agreement, and I could tell it was true. I had already had my vengeance on the one who caused me mischief. “It will benefit me to succeed where others have failed. I believe in positive measures and fair exchanges. I am pleased to have been able to bring you to dialogue. I believe we can deal.”
This woman continued to surprise me. “You are merely a technician—a low-ranking officer—taking over an old and difficult case, and you have the power to dictate my rank and assignment merely as a way to get my attention?”
“True. I believe you have noted our power before.”
“I had. But I thought you had reasonable limits.”
“We don’t.”
“Then why don’t you simply cut orders for me to be court-martialed on a trumped-up charge, condemned without appeal, executed, and the key stripped from my body?”
“We could do this,” she confessed. “But negative approaches have been counterproductive in your case in the past; you have been far more savvy in your defense than anticipated. We also dislike being obvious. We prefer to work with the current. That way, failure carries less consequence.”
“And if you fail now, some other technician will take your place—with some other approach?”
“I will not fail.”
And she believed that. I now appreciated this woman’s motive for success. I knew QYV played hard ball; any organization that kept ruthless pirates in check had to be tougher than they were. She might have great power, but her own position was on the line. Success—or extinction.
“Kife is not, then, a pirate outfit,” I said.
“It is an agency of Jupiter,” she said. “Bear in mind that this is privileged information.”
“Agreed. But my staff must be advised. My officers know more than I do, and I depend on their expertise.”
“Your sister,” she said. “Commanders Mondy, Repro, Phist, and Sheller.”
She had done her homework! “And Sergeant Smith, who is filling in for Operations. And Juana.”
“Your de facto S-3 and your confidential secretary,” she added reluctantly. “I suppose if you cannot trust your former supervisors and mistresses, you have little certainty in life.”
“We checked you for physical armament. We should have checked for mental,” I remarked.
“Success i
s facilitated by information, as it seems you are aware. I don’t suppose you care to advise me how you avoided addiction after using the hallucinogen?”
“Ask some other question.”
She sighed. “Very well. You may brief these personnel with appropriate cautions. But further information is yours alone.”
“Spirit.”
She sighed again. “We gave you back your sister. I am not certain that was not an error.”
“You used her as a lure to trap me. I took her back.”
“And the pirate we bribed. That was typical of our misjudgment of you. Very well; her, too, for this. No others.”