The Outpost (2 page)

“Now, why would you want to burn your own Bible?” asked Baker.

The Reverend Billy Karma shrugged. “I fall off the spiritual wagon every few months, and usually wake up with a hangover in some whorehouse. Then I get saved again. Both of ’em do me a powerful lot of good—getting lost and getting saved. And I know that the first thing I always do when I get lost is try to burn the Good Book so I won’t be confronting it every morning when I get up after a night of sin and sleaze and other good things.”

“Good things?”

“Well, they must
feel
good or I wouldn’t do ’em, would I?” shot back Billy Karma. “People like you do ’em all the time, don’t you?”

“Not every waking minute,” said Baker. “But on the other hand, I ain’t no reverend, either.”

“Well, when I fall off the wagon, I ain’t much of a reverend myself.” Karma frowned. “Last time I killed the whole Giriami Gang on Roosevelt III after they got back from robbing a navy convoy ship. At least, that’s what they told me when they dragged me out the smoking ruins and hung this here medal on me.” He pulled out a gold medal that was suspended on a silver chain beneath his black shirt and shook his head sadly. “What a tragic way to lose thirty-eight potential parishioners! If I’d been sober, I’d have settled for converting ’em.”

One by one Baker started getting introduced to the others. When he was about halfway through, he stopped and pointed to Einstein, who was sitting alone in a corner.

“What’s the matter with him?” he asked. “The man hasn’t moved a muscle since I got here.”

“Oh, that’s just Einstein,” I said.

“Someone ought to teach him some manners.”

“He could teach
you
a little something,” said Three-Gun Max. “He doesn’t look like much, but he teaches things to the best brains in the Monarchy. Or at least he used to.”

“That little twerp?” scoffed Baker. “Hell, if he ain’t comatose, you sure can’t prove it by me.”

“He’s not,” Max assured him.

“Sure he is,” said Baker. He turned to Einstein and yelled, “Hey, you!”

“He can’t hear you,” said Max. "“He’s deaf.”

“Yeah?”

“And blind and mute as well. He’s been that way since he was born.”

“Then what makes him so special?” asked Baker.

“The thing you can’t see,” said Max. “His brain.”

“Explain.”

“Because he didn’t learn to communicate until he was in his twenties, he never learned to think the way everyone else does when they’re growing up. He’s probably the most brilliant man in the galaxy—because he’s the most unique thinker. He creates entirely new sciences in his head because he ain’t hampered by any knowledge of the old ones. Been doing it for close to thirty years now. When the government decided to protect him from exploitation, he decided he needed protection from his protectors, and he wound up here.”

“He’s really that good?”

“He’s the reason we’ll reach Andromeda in the next few years. And he’s the only man who ever came up with a defense against a molecular imploder. And if you’ve come across one of those little gimmicks that lets you see through stone walls, that’s his.” Max chuckled in amusement. “The military wanted to keep the patent on it, but even though Einstein’s never seen a naked lady, he thought it would be tragic if it weren’t made available to lonely, oversexed, and thoroughly unprincipled men …men very much like me, in fact.”

Catastrophe Baker stared at Einstein for a long moment. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he said at last. “A blind little guy did all that?”

“We all have some talent or other,” said Argyle, who’d been hanging back until then.

“Yours is a little more obvious than most,” said Baker, staring at the alien as he constantly changed colors.

“This isn’t a talent,” said Argyle, as it changed from bright red to brilliant yellow to pale blue in less time than it takes me to tell you about it. “It’s a defense mechanism.”

“Seems more likely to attract predators than convince them you’re a tree or a rock or dead or whatever.”

“That all depends on the predator,” said Argyle. “On my home world, they’re carrion eaters. Once I die, I stop changing colors; as long as I keep flashing them, the predators know that I’m alive, and not a rotting corpse. They like their meat
very
rank.”

“So what’s your talent?” asked Baker.

“I juggle things.”

“Balls?”

“Numbers,” said Argyle. “I used to be an accountant for one of the biggest banks in the Albion Cluster.”

“And?”

“And now I’m not,” said Argyle noncommittally.

“This joint’s got an interesting clientele,” remarked Baker.

“We have our moments,” agreed Gravedigger Gaines, who was dressed all in black as usual. “Remember me?”

“How could I forget?” asked Catastrophe Baker. “You damned near killed me back on Silverblue, out on the Rim.”

“I was a bounty hunter. It was my job.”

“You still got those damned dogs?”

“They weren’t dogs,” said the Gravedigger. “They were Nightswarmers. Native to Bodine V.”

“Whatever they were, they were fast as hell and three times as vicious. I was lucky to escape with my skin intact.” Suddenly Baker tensed and laid a hand on his pearl-handled burner. “You still a bounty hunter?”

The Gravedigger shook his head. “My Nightswarmers died, and I didn’t feel like spending ten years training another team.”

“Who says you needed ’em?”

“Whatever the reward, it wasn’t enough to go up against the likes of men like you or Hurricane Smith without them. I earned forty bounties before I hung it up; that’s not bad for a twelve-year career.”

“Well, you seem to have come out of it in one piece,” noted Baker. “You could have done a lot worse, even with those damned dogs.”

“One piece?” laughed the Gravedigger. He held up his right arm. “This came from Deluros VIII. The left leg’s from Pollux IV. The right eye and nineteen teeth are from Greenveldt. Can’t even remember where I got the left foot. And I’m using someone else’s kidney and spleen, thanks to Jenny the Blade. It was time to retire before there wasn’t any of the original me left.”

“Sounds like you’ve got some interesting tales to tell,” said Baker. “Sounds like you
all
do.”

“We’ve been known to tell ’em,” acknowledged the Gravedigger. “But we’ve heard ’em all before. Seems to me someone as famous as Catastrophe Baker’s got a few tales of his own to share.”

“Could be,” agreed Baker. He turned to me. “But first, I want to order a bottle apiece for everyone in the Outpost. Give ’em anything they choose. When a man’s running in luck, he likes to share it.”

“That could amount to some serious money, friend,” I said.

“I ain’t got no money,” he replied—and then, before I could pull my screecher out from under the bar, he reached into a pocket and pulled out the biggest ruby I’d ever seen. “But this ought to hold you for awhile.” I’m not a small man, but when I placed it in the palm of my hand, I couldn’t close my fingers around it.

“Where’d you ever get something like that?” asked Three-Gun Max.

“Well, now, that’s a pretty interesting story, if I do say so myself,” replied Baker, “and it’s my experience that telling stories can be pretty thirsty work, so I’m going to need a little something to keep the old vocal chords fresh and strong. Tomahawk, have Reggie hunt me up a bottle of Cygnian cognac. And if it ain’t older than I am, take it back and get another.”

Willie the Bard took out his notebook—he refuses to use a recorder or computer—while Reggie brought out a two-century-old vintage (well, it was actually thirteen-year-old cognac in a 212-year-old bottle, but what the hell), and Baker bit off the cork and took a long swallow, bellowed an “Ah!” of approval, and began talking.

Catastrophe Baker and the Dragon Queen

It was a couple of years ago (began Baker), and I was out on the Spiral Arm, doing a little mining in the Parnassus asteroid belt.

Well, I didn’t do any actual digging or blasting—I mean, hell, I wouldn’t know raw plutonium from raw beef—but I did hang out in the little Tradertown they set up on Parnassus II. Had a tavern, a lot like this one only smaller and without no high-quality work of art hanging over the bar, and there were some sleeping rooms, though I was between fortunes at the time and slept in my ship. Like all Tradertowns it had an assay office, and I figured that if I ever saw a miner approach the assay office before he stopped for a drink, he’d probably hit on something interesting, and I planned to make it my business to relieve him of his burden.

Which is how I wound up with thirty pounds of fissionable material. I don’t know from fission, but I know the stuff’s worth its weight in prettier baubles, and I know you keep it locked in lead containers and don’t spend overmuch time playing with it, and I decided that if the Monarchy paid well for it, the Canphorites and Setts and Domarians would probably pay even better. I was pretty well-known in the Arm by then, due to a series of unfortunate misunderstanding in which I was always the innocent party, and when I approached the miners who’d made the claim they just took one look at me and suddenly remembered that they had urgent business elsewhere. Well, all but one, anyway, and making wrong decisions in such matters is what you might call genetically self-limiting.

After I loaded the booty into my ship, I headed off for the Rim, where I figured to hold an informal little auction. I had to stop at the space station that orbited Bellabionda IX to refuel, and while I was sitting there sampling half a dozen different brandies, I suddenly felt the barrel of a screecher bury itself in the middle of my back. I would have turned and had harsh words with the gentleman who was at the other end of the weapon, but I also found my nose about half an inch from the business end of an ugly-looking burner. I chanced a pair of quick glances to my right and my left, and discovered things didn’t look any more promising in them directions.

Now, the guy facing me was almost as big as I was, which is pretty rare, at least in this universe, and I can’t speak for noplace else. He had squinty eyes, and a couple of gold teeth, and he hadn’t shaved in a mighty long time, and he hadn’t washed in even longer than he hadn’t shaved, and he kind of learned forward and said, “Catastrophe Baker, you took something that didn’t belong to you.”

“I’ve tooken
lots
of things that don’t belong to me,” I said right back at him. “That’s what I do for a living.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but this particular thing belongs to the Dragon Queen, and she’s charged me with conveying the fact that she’s more than a little annoyed with you.”

“Okay, you conveyed it,” I said. “Now go away and let me finish drinking in peace.”

The man with the gold teeth frowned. “I don’t believe I’m getting through to you at all,” he said. “You stole thirty pounds of prime plutonium from her, and she wants it back.”

“There must be some mistake,” I answered. “I stole
my
plutonium off five miners in the Spiral Arm.”

“Well, it’s probably true that they owned the plutonium, but
she
owns
them
.”

I pondered that for a minute and finally said, “In my opinion it’s miserly to own people
and
fissionable material. Tell her she can keep the men (except for the one I removed from Nature’s game plan) and I’ll keep the plutonium.”

Old Goldtooth kind of sighed and shrugged. “I just knew this was going to happen,” he said unhappily. “I told her and told her that a man like you was never going to give her what she wanted just because we threatened to rip out your eyes and cut off your ears and pull your arms and legs from their sockets. I explained that even after we roasted you over a slow fire and put slime spiders in your ears and started extracting your vertebrae one by one that you wouldn’t tell us what we wanted to know.”

“Since we’re both agreed on that,” I said, “what do you plan to do instead?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” he admitted. “Maybe we’d just better take you to her and let her decide.”

“Couldn’t we torture him just a little?” asked the guy who was poking the screecher in my back. “Just for fun?”

Another sigh from Goldtooth. “No,” he said after some serious consideration. “You know what happened to the last four or five prisoners I let you play with.”

“I got carried away,” came the petulant answer. “It won’t happen again.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“How about if I just castrate him?” said the guy with the screecher. “Won’t stop him from talking, and if she decides to torture him herself, he’ll still be 99% whole.”

“Stupidest suggestion I ever heard,” replied Goldtooth. He turned to me. “You have to forgive him,” he said apologetically. “He’s very young. He just doesn’t realize that these Dragon Queens always have their motors running.”

Well, truth to tell, I hadn’t ever encountered a Dragon Queen. But I’d seen my share of Pirate Queens, which in my long experience could always be identified by their lustful natures, their soul-destroying greed, and their proud, arrogant bosoms, and I figured if Dragon Queens were related to Pirate Queens, or were even some kind of regional offshoot, that maybe I’d fallen out of the frying pan and into the featherbed, to coin what I had every reason to hope was a new and accurate expression.

“So should I put the manacles on him?” asked one of the others.

Goldtooth turned to me. “If we don’t shackle you, do you promise not to try to escape or overpower us?”

“You have my word as a gentleman,” I told him.

“Get the manacles!” he hollered.

Which is what they did, and which is how I was led into the Dragon Queen’s presence a couple of days later, when we finally landed on Terlingua.

We were in an audience chamber that could have housed half a dozen athletic events. The doorways were all different shapes, as if most of them were made to be used by aliens. The walls kept changing colors, and there was a mural maybe fifty yards square painted on the ceiling that I’ll swear was never painted by any human.

Now, you people don’t know me, so you don’t know that I ain’t much given to exaggeration, but take my word for it: the Dragon Queen was the most beautiful female I had ever seen in a lifetime of admiring female critters of almost every race and species.