Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (91 page)

"It will be
most interesting to see what the emperor decrees will be done with
the lot of you! Nav equipment isn't so terribly bad. You won't be
executed. If it were medical or critical foodstuffs or such I'll
bet he'd fry the bunch of you!"

"Buh, buh, but
there are...! I've got to get out of here!" Tab cried. "I didn't
know anything about any scans! Fleet? Oh, great Glorch! How do I
get involved in this kind of thing! Why doesn't anything ever go
right for me!"

Tab sat with
his head in his hands to hide the smirk. Kit had come up with the
perfect thing here. To suggest there would be Fleet in the area and
that restricted planets would be scanned would panic the Jornians –
if they fell for it.

Their first
hijacking was almost a year ago so they'd think their time was
running out.

His sonic
detectors located two sets of feet running along the hall toward
them.

*

Kit was seated
on one side of the desk and Tab on the other. A Jornian who
introduced himself as Wahlk was across it asking the questions. He
was acting as though this were a typical session with
businessmen.

"I can't find
any records of you, Giam," he accused. "I don't know anything about
you."

"I don't have
any of the kinds of records you'd know to look for!" Kit snapped.
"I don't deal with criminals! If you'll look in the records of
normal citizens conducting normal business in a normal way I assure
you that you'll find me!"

"You assume far
too much," Wahlk replied carefully. "Loahr, I find some about you.
You are a smalltime dealer who moves around on the fringes of
legality. We are not involved with such things.

"I am going to
ask you once to leave this world. We don't want your type here! If
you are not away within one hour we will turn you over to Fleet
when they come through in ten days on the yearly scan! Do I make
myself QUITE CLEAR?"

Tab wondered
what was going on, but decided to go along so he stood, knocking
over the chair, made an obscene gesture at Wahlk and stalked out.
One of the guards came along and signed for him to come into the
adjoining room.

"Wahlk just
wants to get rid of that character," he explained. "He'll give him
a story and show him some very official looking papers signed by
the emperor himself. You check out okay so we can deal when this
Giam idiot has left. You may have to move your ship for a few hours
until he goes.

"Wahlk wants to
know how you found the stasis resistor field?"

Tab grinned and
went to the table where another Jornian was listening to what was
being said in the other room.

"...can assure
you, Giam. These are authentic! You see the emperor's personal seal
here," Wahlk was saying. "The purpose of the place is to attract
crooks. Big time criminals. We aren't after little nothings like
that Loahr person. We get them by the hundred after the word gets
out about this place among his type, which we spread through the
old rim world sections. His ship will be followed everywhere, of
course, but he's small meteors to what we're after.

"You are
requested not to let anyone know about this place. If there's any
suspicion of what the emperor is doing here it won't work. The ones
we're trying to locate, to catch in the act as it were, will stay
away in armies. You do see that, don't you?

"I'm sorry we
had to detain an honest citizen, but we must appear to be what we
aren't and that's the way real gangsters would act. It may be
necessary for us to say we've killed you if Loahr bothers us again.
That is what real gangsters would do without thinking about it. You
would, in point of fact, have been disposed of as soon as you
landed and this situation would never be taking place. That is
really the type of criminal we are here to locate and arrest."

"I can
certainly see your point!" Kit replied. "You can be sure your
secret's safe with me. I won't give you away. I promise I don't
even know any crooks, but I know how words spread so I won't say
anything to anyone. I hope the empire gets every one of the low
stinking scum who would engage in this sort of sordid activity!
Leeches who prey on honest people don't have the right to exist in
this empire! I'm all for putting every last one of those crooks on
the probe and executing every last one of them who engage in this
obscene behavior! I can guarantee you I won't do anything that
could in any way interfere with getting rid of those crooked kinds
of refuse! I swear it! I will do anything I can to aid in
eliminating that galactic refuse from the face of the N plane!"

"Oh, ha, ha,
no!" Wahlk replied. "We need no oaths! I know the Kheth are honest
as a race and I can see you're a credit to the race.

"I'm afraid
I’ll have to ask you to leave quickly, though. There's a ship from
an important place coming. We must be sure we catch this one!
Hah!"

Tab said, "I'd
better get into orbit before that fool sees my ship here. I'll be
back as soon as he's gone."

"Land on the
pads to the north," the Jornian at the table said casually.
"There's a big freighter due here soon. There's no rush, you know.
Wahlk wanted me to tell you we know all about the scanner ships.
It's arranged so there'll be a slight equipment failure as it scans
this area. Nothing else is anywhere on the planet so it won't be
worth rescanning."

Tab went out,
got aboard TR and they lifted off. There was a tracer on the
underside TR sent a cleaner servo out to retrieve. They paced T6
for a distance after it lifted off, then contacted Kit.

"Good show!"
Tab said. "I'm going back. You get Fleet ready out here. Contact
Maita now and I'll listen in."

"Right!" T6
replied. "I was scared down there. Really scared. If they would've
done anything to Kit I was going to flatten that whole place and
answer to Maita later.

"Maita says
Thing has a message for you."

[ TR, T Six,
you can negate a stasis or inertia field with a double looped
moebus reversal field. I saw that back when we were making the
device for Fleet to use on the Tlessarian brain. That is the
simplest method. I will send a diagram after this on how to
construct the antenna. You can also induce field resistance
inversion, but it isn't so stable. Stand by for diagrams. ]

"I've already
made and used the field," TR sent. "Why didn't you tell us about it
before this? It would've come in handy to have it as standard
equipment."

[ I didn't
foresee any particular practical use for it at the time. ]

So Thing had
been years ahead of this even before they knew it may be
needed!

They explained
what they planned and Tab said there was going to be a very large
ship aground soon.

"It may be the
main fence," Z sent when they had explained the setup. "This Wahlk
jerk fell for the scanner ship bit. He wants to get all of their
merchandise off-planet. What he may be able to sell to you is that
much less to fool with so don't buy much and get away before the
big ship leaves if you possibly can. There has to be some reason
that ship's so close. Maybe Wahlk figured he'd have to leave
suddenly at some time or other."

"The big ship's
landing right now," T6 reported. "Maybe we'd better just grab it
and get it over with."

"No! I have an
idea!" Tab protested. "Kit, get Fleet here, but don't move until
that ship leaves or until I say to move. This is a break, I
think."

Tab and TR went
back to the planet to watch as the hijacked medical supplies were
loaded, then went inside to Wahlk as the navigational equipment was
being taken aboard. It was all done with servos and was a fast
operation.

"I want a lot
of navigational comp hard and software," he told Wahlk. "Do you
have, say, six hundred units? I can move that immediately.

"Oh! And here's
your tracer. I'm up with you on science so I found it right away.
We're going to have to trust each other or we can't deal.

"Six hundred
units?" He knew there were five hundred complete units from the
loss records.

"I can let one
lot of five hundred go at this time and can supply more later –
after other promises have been filled," Wahlk said tossing the
tracer aside onto a table. "Give me an offer."

"Do you have
Zeenan, Mord or Ternz stuff?" Tab asked.

"I wouldn't
touch Zeenan," Wahlk said. "There isn't anywhere in the galaxy to
hide from them and it's too easy to identify. It's all Ternz, but
I'm going to carry Mord later. "Give me an offer."

"Two five
each," Tab suggested.

"No way!" Wahlk
shot back. "They're worth one point five million per!"

"Not that
stuff!" Tab shot back. "Two seven five tops."

"Three and it's
done," Wahlk said.

"No. Two seven
five tops," Tab replied.

"Two eighty.
Not a centime less," Wahlk said.

"Deal," Tab
replied. "I can have a ship here in two days for pickup."

"Not here,"
Wahlk protested. "I've decided not to chance the scanner ships this
time. I'll give you the location of the goods when I have the money
in hand."

"I'll give you
half now and half when I pick the stuff up," Tab agreed. "Run out
on me and my, er, sponsor will have you for dinner. Literally. He's
one of those larger reptilian races."

"Get the chits
and I'll give you the location," Wahlk replied.

Tab had no
choice so he went to TR to pick up seventy million in chits. TR
complained it couldn't get a tracer onto that ship and they'd find
it, anyhow.

Tab said it was
okay because Wahlk would tell him where to find it.

He returned
with the cartload of ten thousand credit chits and Wahlk gave him a
moder-coded block. He wouldn't know where the destination was. The
ship would have the block inserted and would automatically go
there.

Tab went with
Wahlk to have a large mug of hot gincha and they watched the ship
leave. All the stuff except some of the larger agricultural
equipment was gone.

Tab went to TR
and they took off. He placed the moder block into the slot for TR
to read and they called Fleet to grab what was left on the planet.
The agricultural equipment was enough to convict all of them there.
The Zurn would get out of it all right because they would volunteer
to take the probe and because they didn't know it was an illegal
operation.

TR met T6 above
a large rocky world with no atmosphere where they waited until the
ship full of contraband came. The fact there was medical equipment
aboard allowed use of the probe and Wahlk was shown to be the head
of the whole thing. Tab thought there would be someone higher and
the ship would lead them to him, but that wasn't the way it turned
out. Wahlk had invented a small computer that plugged into the
console on a Fleet ship when he was armory officer. He read about
the conic stasis field, then put a lot of people to work on making
such a field for him. The field resistance effect was discovered
almost accident, which probably saved a good many lives. Without
free mobility inside the field he would have dragged the ships into
an asteroid or something such to immobilize them and would have had
to kill their crews so they couldn't identify him. A good outcome
was that T6 invented a detector that could be built into trader
ships. It would automatically detect and counter a stasis field.
This kind of piracy was finished.

The whole group
was again on Z's terrace, where they were discussing the case.

*The trouble
with this crap is that now someone will find a counterfield for the
counterfield and we are right back where we started.*

"Oh, I'll
invent something to make the whole stasis field thing irrelevant,"
Tab said. "Maybe some way to combine a moebus loop and a
rel-resistance field?" He looked at Thing sitting on its floater
there and smirked. He would get ahead of it on this one! He could
show a diagram that would prove such a field would work!

[ Yes, that
works very nicely. I made one out of scrap parts and installed it
on my floater here about thirty years ago. See? It's run off the
stabilizer circuit. ]

Tab grabbed the
floater and dumped Thing off before it could right itself. Thing
swung around behind Tab to wrap its tentacles around his head,
covering his optics and sonic sensors.

[ Help! I'm
being attacked! ]

*You don't need
any help. You've got him as much as helpless now!*

This would go
on for hours.

Fifth Case

Tab walked down
the winding path toward the beach, stopping occasionally to study a
particular orchid beside the trail. This was a bed of wide-leaved
plants with little sprays of flat pink flowers. There was a large
log in the center of the bed. Calanthes.

There were
white and pink phalaenopsis and one large plant with many sprays of
little yellow and brownish-red flowers. He searched through his
memory banks and was able to identify them as Oncidium
sphacelatum.

A large green
and white star-shaped flower on the end of the log he labeled as
Aspasia GN112, a plant from a different world than Earth that
looked almost exactly like the Terran Aspasia principassa.

He turned to
continue on down the path, pitched forward, his stabilizer gyros
screaming and fell flat on his face. He rolled over to have Thing
spring onto his chest to bend its stalked eyes to look into his
visual sensors.

[ Hmmm! It
seems that holding your ankles together impedes your stability as
well as your mobility! ] came from the little floater hovering
overhead. Thing, being an empath, needed the device to speak to the
crew, though Tab could receive directly.

Thing sprang
away as Tab grabbed for it. This was a childish game the whole crew
played when they were around each other either on Empire Center or
on Maita.