The Stainless Steel Rat eBook Collection (94 page)

I had been handed my long-awaited assignment. But translated into simple terms my orders were to get the battleship, or it would be my neck. Never a word about my efforts in uncovering the plot in the first place. This is a heartless world we live in.

This moment of self-pity relaxed me and I immediately went to bed. Since my main job now was waiting, I
could wait just as well asleep.

And waiting was all I could do. Of course there were secondary tasks such as ordering a Naval cruiser for my own use, and digging for more information on the thieves, but these really were secondary to my main purpose. Which was waiting for bad news. There was no place I could go that would be better situated for the chase than Cittanuvo. The missing ship could
have gone in any direction. With each passing minute the sphere of probable locations grew larger by the power of the squared cube. I kept the on-watch crew of the cruiser at duty stations and confined the rest within a one-hundred yard radius of the ship.

There was little more information on Pepe and Angelina, they had covered their tracks well. Their
backgrounds were unknown, though the fact
they both talked with a slight accent suggested an off-world origin. There was one dim picture of Pepe, chubby but looking too grim to be a happy fat boy. There was no picture of the girl. I shuffled the meager findings, controlled my impatience, and kept the ship’s psiman busy pulling in all the reports of any kind of trouble in space. The navigator and I plotted their locations in his tank, comparing
the positions in relation to the growing sphere that enclosed all the possible locations of the stolen ship. Some of the disasters and apparent accidents hit inside this area, but further investigation proved them all to have natural causes.

I had left standing orders that all reports falling inside the danger area were to be brought to me at any time. The messenger woke me from a deep sleep,
turning on the light and handing me the slip of paper. I blinked myself awake, read the first two lines, and pressed the
action station
alarm over my bunk. I’ll say this, the Navy boys know their business. When the sirens screamed, the crew secured ship and blasted off before I had finished reading the report. As soon as my eyeballs unsquashed back into focus I read it through, then once more
carefully from the beginning.

It looked like the one we had been waiting for. There were no witnesses to the tragedy, but a number of monitor stations had picked up the discharge static of a large energy weapon being fired. Triangulation had lead investigators to the spot where they found a freighter,
Ogget’s Dream,
with a hole punched through it as big as a railroad tunnel. The freighter’s cargo
of plutonium was gone.

I read
Pepe
in every line of the message. Since he was flying an undermanned battleship, he had used it in the most efficient way possible. If he attempted to negotiate or threaten another ship, the element of chance would be introduced. So he had simply roared up to the unsuspecting freighter and blasted her with the monster
guns his battleship packed. All eighteen men
aboard had been killed instantly. The thieves were also murderers.

I was under pressure now to act. And under a greater pressure not to make any mistakes. Roly-poly Pepe had shown himself to be a ruthless killer. He knew what he wanted—then reached out and took it. Destroying anyone who stood in his way. More people would die before this was over, it was up to me to keep that number as small
as possible.

Ideally I should have rushed out the fleet with guns blazing and dragged him to justice. Very nice, and I wished it could be done that way. Except where was he? A battleship may be gigantic on some terms of reference, but in the immensity of the galaxy it is microscopically infinitesimal. As long as it stayed out of the regular lanes of commerce, and clear of detector stations and
planets, it would never be found.

Then how
could
I find it—and having found it, catch it? When the infernal thing was more than a match for any ship it might meet. That was my problem. It had kept me awake nights and talking to myself days, since there was no easy answer.

I had to construct a solution, slowly and carefully. Since I couldn’t be sure where Pepe was going to be next, I had to make
him go where I wanted him to.

There were some things in my favor. The most important was the fact I had forced him to make his play before he was absolutely ready. It wasn’t chance that he had left the same day I arrived on Cittanuvo. Any plan as elaborate as his certainly included warning of approaching danger. The drive on the battleship, as well as controls and primary armament had been installed
weeks before I showed up. Much of the subsidiary work remained to be done when the ship had left. One witness of the theft had graphically described the power lines and cables dangling from the ship’s locks when she lifted.

My arrival had forced Pepe off balance. Now I had to
keep pushing until he fell. This meant I had to think as he did, fall into his plan, think ahead—then trap him. Set a
thief to catch a thief. A great theory, only I felt uncomfortably on the spot when I tried to put it into practice.

A drink helped, as did a cigar. Puffing on it, staring at the smooth bulkhead, relaxed me a bit. After all—there aren’t that many things you can do with a battleship. You can’t run a big con, blow safes or make burmedex with it. It is hell-on-jets for space piracy, but that’s about
all.

“Great, great—but why a battleship?”

I was talking to myself, normally a bad sign, but right now I didn’t care. The mood of space piracy had seized me and I had been going along fine. Until this glaring inconsistency jumped out and hit me square in the eye.

Why a battleship? Why all the trouble and years of work to get a ship that two people could just barely manage? With a tenth of the
effort Pepe could have had a cruiser that would have suited his purposes just as well.

Just as good for space piracy, that is—but not for
his
purposes. He had wanted a battleship, and he had gotten himself a battleship. Which meant he had more in mind than simple piracy. What? It was obvious that Pepe was a monomaniac, an egomaniac, and as psychotic as a shorted computer. Someday the mystery
of how he had slipped through the screen of official testing would have to be investigated. That wasn’t my concern now. He still had to be caught.

A plan was beginning to take shape in my head, but I didn’t rush it. First I had to be sure that I knew him well. Any man that can con an entire world into building a battleship for him—then steal it from them—is not going to stop there. The ship would
need a crew, a base for refueling and a mission.

Fuel had been taken care of first, the gutted hull of
Ogget’s Dream
was silent witness to that. There were countless planets that could be used as a base. Getting a
crew would be more difficult in these peaceful times, although I could think of a few answers to that one, too. Raid the mental hospitals and jails. Do that often enough and you would
have a crew that would make any pirate chief proud. Though piracy was, of course, too mean an ambition to ascribe to this boy. Did he want to rule a whole planet—or maybe an entire system? Or more? I shuddered a bit as the thought hit me. Was there really anything that could stop a plan like this once it got rolling? During the Kingly Wars any number of types with a couple of ships and less brains
than Pepe had set up just this kind of empire. They were all pulled down in the end, since their success depended on one-man rule. But the price that had to be paid first!

This was the plan and I felt in my bones that I was right. I might be wrong on some of the minor details, they weren’t important. I knew the general outline of the idea, just as when I bumped into a mark I knew how much he
could be taken for, and just how to do it. There are natural laws in crime as in every other field of human endeavor. I
knew
this was it.

“Get the Communications Officer in here at once,” I shouted at the intercom. “Also a couple of clerks with transcribers. And fast—this is a matter of life or death!” This last had a hollow ring, and I realized my enthusiasm had carried me out of character.
I buttoned my collar, straightened my ribbons and squared my shoulders. By the time they knocked on the door I was all admiral again.

Acting on my orders the ship dropped out of warpdrive so our psiman could get through to the other operators. Captain Steng grumbled as we floated there with the engines silent, wasting precious days, while half his crew was involved in getting out what appeared
to be insane instructions. My plan was beyond his understanding. Which is, of course, why he is a captain and I’m an admiral, even a temporary one.

Following my orders, the navigator again constructed a sphere of speculation in his tank. The surface of the
sphere contacted all the star systems a day’s flight ahead of the maximum flight of the stolen battleship. There weren’t too many of these
at first and the psiman could handle them all, calling each in turn and sending news releases to the Naval Public Relations officers there. As the sphere kept growing he started to drop behind, steadily losing ground. By this time I had a general release prepared, along with directions for use and follow up, which he sent to Central 14. The battery of psimen there contacted the individual planets
and all we had to do was keep adding to the list of planets.

The release and follow-ups all harped on one theme. I expanded on it, waxed enthusiastic, condemned it, and worked it into an interview. I wrote as many variations as I could, so it could be slipped into as many different formats as possible. In one form or another I wanted the basic information in every magazine, newspaper and journal
inside that expanding sphere.

“What in the devil does this nonsense
mean
?” Captain Steng asked peevishly. He had long since given up the entire operation as a futile one, and spent most of the time in his cabin worrying about the effect of it on his service record. Boredom or curiosity had driven him out, and he was reading one of my releases with horror.

“Billionaire to found own world … space
yacht filled with luxuries to last a hundred years,” the captain’s face grew red as he flipped through the stack of notes. “What connection does this tripe have with catching those murderers?”

When we were alone he was anything but courteous to me, having assured himself by not-too-subtle questioning that I was a spurious admiral. There was no doubt I was still in charge, but our relationship
was anything but formal.

“This tripe and nonsense,” I told him, “is the bait that will snag our fish. A trap for Pepe and his partner in crime.”

“Who is this mysterious billionaire?”

“Me,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to be rich.”

“But this ship, the space yacht, where is it?”

“Being built now in the naval shipyard at Udrydde. We’re almost ready to go there now, soon as this batch of instructions
goes out.”

Captain Steng dropped the releases onto the table, then carefully wiped his hands off to remove any possible infection. He was trying to be fair and considerate of my views, and not succeeding in the slightest.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he growled. “How can you be sure this killer will ever read one of these things? And if he does—why should he be interested? It looks to me as if you
are wasting time while he slips through your fingers. The alarm should be out and every ship notified. The Navy alerted and patrols set on all spacelanes—”

“Which he could easily avoid by going around, or better yet not even bother about, since he can lick any ship we have. That’s not the answer,” I told him. “This Pepe is smart and as tricky as a fixed gambling machine. That’s his strength—and
his weakness as well. Characters like that never think it possible for someone else to outthink them. Which is what
I’m
going to do.”

“Modest, aren’t you,” Steng said.

“I try not to be,” I told him. “False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent. I’m going to catch this thug and I’ll tell you how I’ll do it. He’s going to hit again soon, and wherever he hits there will be some kind of a periodical
with my plant in it. Whatever else he is after, he is going to take all of the magazines and papers he can find. Partly to satisfy his own ego, but mostly to keep track of the things he is interested in. Such as ship sailings.”

“You’re just guessing—you don’t know all this.”

His automatic assumption of my incompetence was beginning to get me annoyed. I bridled my temper and tried one last time.

“Yes, I’m guessing—an informed guess—but I do know some facts as well.
Ogget’s Dream
was cleaned out
of all reading matter, that was one of the first things I checked. We can’t stop the battleship from attacking again, but we can see to it that the time after that she sails into a trap.”

“I don’t know,” the captain said, “it sounds to me like …”

I never heard what it sounded like, which is all
right since he was getting under my skin and I might have been tempted to pull my pseudo-rank. The alarm sirens cut his sentence off and we foot-raced to the communications room.

Captain Steng won by a nose, it was his ship and he knew all the shortcuts. The psiman was holding out a transcription, but he summed it up in one sentence. He looked at me while he talked and his face was hard and cold.

“They hit again, knocked out a Navy supply satellite, thirty-four men dead.”

“If your plan doesn’t work,
admiral
,” the captain whispered hoarsely in my ear, “I’ll personally see that you’re flayed alive!”

“If my plan doesn’t work,
captain—
there won’t be enough of my skin left to pick up with a tweezer. Now if you please, I’d like to get to Udrydde and board my ship as soon as possible.”

The
easy-going hatred and contempt of all my associates had annoyed me, thrown me off balance. I was thinking with anger now, not with logic. Forcing a bit of control, I ordered my thoughts, checking off a mental list.

“Belay that last command,” I shouted, getting back into my old space-dog mood. “Get a call through first and find out if any of our plants were picked up during the raid.”