Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (35 page)

"Good ol'
Dir refused to pay me no mind! I was standin' there waving like
some kind of fool! You heard that Maitan guy say he thought I was
havin' a heart attack by the way I was wavin'! It ain't none of my
fault, neither! Good ol' reliable Dir wouldn't even
look
! Everbody
in the place saw I was waving like a
fool
'cept
him
!"

"You ARE a
fool!" Dir snapped.

"Hah! I
didn't cost the place no twenty million!" the Bentan yelled. "I
guess
that
shows who's
a fool!"

"Stop
it!" Narmel demanded. "You're both fools! I'm surrounded by
fools!
You
don't have
to explain this to Eed!

"Exactly what
did you say to the Mentan, Dir? Did you really beg it to bet?"

"I only gave
the standard line we always give those kinds of marks," Dir
replied. "I told him he could bet anything he wanted and the wheel
wasn't fixed, that we were inspected by the empire. I said the
house would cover any side bet. Standard stuff to a standard
mark!"

"You
damned idiot!" Narmel cried. "
You
're
the mark! You stupid
slug
!
He recorded the whole thing! If we don't pay he'll turn it over to
the VWPA! Neel can't cover us here! Idiot!"

"It weren't my
fault!" the Bentan wailed. "I tried to tell him!"

"Nobody
suggested it was your fault," Narmel said. "There won't be any
sticker (Scapegoat) here. Dir cost the organization fifteen million
credits. We don't have fifteen million credits. We’ll have to
borrow it from another business – from three other businesses. The
whole chain will be hurt. All we can do is stall them. We're going
to have to pay.

"I want the two
of them dead, but I want no chance it can be traced to me or to
this operation. Is that clear? We will pay and THEN they die!
Understood? We'll have to pay them or their heirs to stay in
business, but they should be easier to deal with than the empire or
the VWPA. I've already had one run-in with those two!"

He came back to
where Z was standing with Thing on the floater hovering
overhead.

"I'll give you
a bank draft for the money," he said. "It will have to be
collected. It will be no sooner than noon tomorrow before you can
cash it. We don't keep that kind of money on the premises."

[ Oh, that
should be no problem. You can make the draft out to Hospital and
I'll deposit it directly to their account. It won't be necessary to
have the actual funds for ten days that way. ]

Narmel glared
at Thing, then made out a bank draft. Payable to Hospital.

Z and Thing
arrived back at the hotel, deposited the draft in the bank station
to the account of Hospital, then went to find T6. The floater was
in constant contact with it since it landed and Thing and Z were
truly happy to be with a close friend again. T6 took the floater
into its shop section – brand new. Maita recently installed it –
where it was fitted with the access unit that would interface with
and read any of the machines of the empire, as well as most others.
It had flex pins and flex sockets to fit anything. T6 could read
all the necessary currents and micro-voltages, resistances, and
inductance values and match almost instantly. It became part of the
system, letting it access anything in it, no matter what secrecy
codes had been installed.

While it was
working on that it opened the fastcom channels to Maita that TR had
developed to use by only the crew, Theron, and Searcher. Everyone
could now be brought fully up to date.

*Why haven't
you taken this information to the VWPA? You have proof of hundreds
of violations now. They will close the place down within the hour.
We can't allow this to continue for one more minute!*

"That's the
last thing we want, Maita," Z cautioned. "We want to find out a
hell of a lot more than we know so far about this operation and
who's involved. Closing down one crooked club won't accomplish
anything. They'll simply spread the operation among the other
branches and continue as usual. I want that bank draft paid to
Hospital before we do anything to give them an excuse not to pay it
– besides, we now know someone named Neels on the VWPA is part of
the deal. Narmel let that slip when we were listening through the
bug! We'll want to know who else is involved in that and any other
policing agency. If we close them down now we lose all the really
important leaders and very little would be accomplished. I told
Thing the scam would just be spread to a lot of other worlds. We
have to get the bigshots here, then we can worry about closing that
place. Remember that we don't even know which other clubs HERE are
part of this – yet!"

[ We know
Narmel has a boss. His name is Eed. We don't know if he's the top
or if there are more above him. We don't know what other clubs are
in on it. We don't know how they exert influence on the empire
casinos. We don't know a lot more than we do know, Maita. Z's
right. We have to let this go on while we find the information we
have to find. It wouldn't do any good to stop this one little
operation. We have to get the big boss. ]

"I say we have
to allow the attempt to be made on our lives. We can then use the
legitimate excuse of murder and can begin putting some of those
people on the probe. You can put an anti-gangster law on the court
books. Call it 'conspiracy to cause deaths through direct felonious
acts' and make it capital. That way the murder doesn't have to
actually take place, it only has to be attempted. If there's strong
probable cause the would-be murderer was hired he can be put on the
probe. If two or more persons are known by that person to be behind
the hiring, then the murderer escapes capital punishment and the
conspirators are put under capital sentence, can be put on the
probe and, if they were in turn working under orders, the process
can be repeated until the top boss is found.

"Make the law
in organized crime cases different than in the normal law cases in
that the one who attempts the murder under direct orders from a
higher-up escapes execution and the one who hires or orders them
doesn't. That legitimizes use of the probe. It can save any but the
very top boss, who must face execution. The logic being it's
ultimately at THAT person's hands the murder was ever attempted. It
leaves us a way to trace right to the top.

"Believe me,
Maita. Nothing else will work against the kind of thing we're
fighting. It's either that or we.... I've got it!

"No, that would
make it too dangerous to innocent bystanders.

"Maybe if we
could make them think ... we'd have to stay away from places where
we would endanger people, Thing. I think we can get this working
just right with only a little adjustment."

[ I don't have
even a minor conception of what you are talking about! I doubt you
do! Just tell me what to do, then I will do it. ]

"We'll have to
fight them in one of two ways. Either through the police, which
means bringing in empire agents and giving the judge machines
conspiracy law or by establishing a rival gang.

"Back in the
bad old days on Earth the rival gangs had regular wars with each
other. The trouble with that was a lot of innocent bystanders got
gunned down in the crossfire."

*We'll do parts
of both things. I was about to say we might have to forego my
restrictions on the use of the probe in this case, but there's
certainly logic in the way you present the case for conspiracy
laws. It truly IS the final responsibility of the highest person in
the organization who gives orders for someone to be killed. It's
their act of premeditated murder. The fact it was accomplished by
proxy means nothing. Next you can pretend to be agents of some much
stronger boss who wishes to establish his own syndicate. Killing
you would simply bring down who knows how many in an army that has
one purpose. To crush opposition. Better to share than to have
nothing! Maybe you can work something out that would save anyone
from being endangered who's not directly involved.*

"I was going to
suggest the second part," T6 said. "I can stay in communication in
some form they can be made to discover. It'll be by fastcom, so
they can't track where the signal originates. I can be given the
results of all you do in a breakable code. You'll send from the
hotel room. They can hear you through the taps they've already put
there. If you use one of the standard encoders they can break it in
short time."

[ I agree to
that. We can have the floater there at all times to tell us when
and if anyone near is carrying weapons and to remain in positions
where long range attempts on our lives are basically impractical. T
Six has placed the multi-faceted weapons system on the floater. I
feel a lot safer, so far as the innocent bystanders are concerned.
Through all this scheme we have to consider the bystanders first
and our little project second. Okay? ]

*Definitely!*

"Yes.
Certainly," T6 said.

"It goes
without saying. Once we establish all of that, we can arrange to be
captured in some fashion or other for questioning," Z said. "I
could bet the big boss would want to be somewhere he could observe
the questioning, even if he doesn't do it, himself. We can have a
tracer floater in range that can be called at any time by Thing,
Thing's floater, or maybe even through my internal recorder."

"I can have
tracers close, but undetectable," T6 agreed. "I don't have the
medbox yet, but I'll take you to Maita. It'll want to change
cartridges on the recorder anyhow. It can put a switch
somewhere."

*I'll put an
organic switch under a tooth. You can work a code with your tongue.
I'll change the cartridge, but we have one small problem with this.
That recorder will broadcast radio, so they can detect it.*

[ I don't think
so, Maita. The only radio the floater detected around here is
machine to servo. Everything else is direct wire, light pulse,
gravitics, and monopolar induction. You will simply have to use
something of a much shorter wavelength than the servo machines use
– or longer. It will have to be something that has penetrating
power, though. It will have to get out of buildings most of the
time. Broadcast range won't be such a big problem, but resistance
to interference will. ]

*I'll make it
tracer-type burst broadcast on a fine frequency separation and put
it among the frequencies the machines use. That will make it
virtually impossible to find. I have millions of frequencies
registered for the hotels and casino servos and those things. We
can insert it on a standard channel.*

"Good idea," Z
agreed. "It's mostly a matter of finding something that's not in
use."

"Aren't all
frequencies handled through assignment?" T6 asked. "The empire
machines do the assigning. Put the frequency into the bureaucratic
machines a year or so ago to something that could be anywhere.
It'll then not be assigned to anyone else and the scanners won't
question it. You can put coded bursts into a background babble. All
the unassigned frequencies are scanned to prevent problems, aren't
they?"

*Done. Building
Maintenance Innovators is a company owned by the empire, anyhow. I
have several hundred frequencies already registered. I'll simply
pull one servo out of use and use that frequency. The machines will
ignore it. It also points out that if we can do it others can. I'll
have all the in-use frequencies scanned for content
periodically.*

"Yeah," Z said.
"It did occur to me any company owned by these crooks could've been
doing that for years. Maybe that's how our rooms are entered so
easy. They might use the hotel servos so if they're found in a room
they can be passed off as some machine that was checking wiring or
plumbing or something."

[ That would
mean secondary broadcasting visual scanners on them to allow what
they find to be seen and recorded. They should be easy to find. We
can set a trap for that right away. Just so we'll know. Maita, call
the hotel and have us transferred to somewhere else. We know Narmel
has something to do with the Sea Foam Palace. It's not far. Put a
passive sensor in our luggage or something. ]

*Yo! Good idea!
T Six can bring you two out here and we'll do the rest of it. I
wish I had time to change Z enough to where he would pass for a
Jornian or even a Zurn, but we'll have to work with what we have.
You'll find a lot of Kheth at the Sea Foam Palace. You know you can
generally trust them, but bear in mind that generally isn't
always.*

They went to
Maita, where the cartridge was changed in the recorder in Z's chest
when the radio pulse transmitter was added. He could push a molar
with his tongue at a certain angle to call a sensor floater and
another to send a trace beam. He could push one on the other side
to signal distress.

T6 soon took
them back to the pad at Port City where they took the shuttle to
the Sea Foam Palace. They entered the lobby and looked around at
the setup. There were fancy tapestries on all the walls. It was
likely there were doors behind some of them for quick, unexpected
exits.

[ It's
tasteless and overdone, so I can see Narmel's influence before we
even go in the front door. You can bet the food will be
substandard. Let's eat at a good restaurant somewhere. There's an
air of decay and sleaze around anything he's connected with, though
that may only be a psychological connection in my own mind due to
knowledge. I already don't like the place. ]

The elevators
were automatic, as were the baggage servos, but the floater
detected several watching and listening sensors in the elevator. It
detected them in the halls, in the lobby, and everywhere else.
Thing and Z used Terran English. They knew no one would understand
that, in any case.