The Stainless Steel Rat eBook Collection (96 page)

Back in Corps headquarters, I found myself trying to explain this
all to Inskipp. He had a cold eye and hardened manner and I found myself trying to justify my actions.

“You can’t win them all,” I said. “I brought home your
battleship and Pepe—may his personality rest in peace now that it has been erased. Angelina tricked me and got away, I’ll admit that. But she did a much better job of fooling the boys in the navy!”

“Why so much venom?” Inskipp asked in
an arid voice. “No one’s accusing you of dereliction of duty. You sound like a man with a guilty conscience. You did a good job. A fine job. A great job … for a first assignment….”

“You’re doing it again!” I howled. “Prodding my conscience to see how soft it is. Like keeping
him
around.” I pointed to Pepe Nero who was sitting near us in the restaurant eating slowly, mumbling to himself with vacant-eyed
dullness. His old personality had been stripped from his mind and a new one implanted. Only the body remained of the old Pepe who had loved Angelina and stolen a battleship.

“The psychs are working on a new theory of body-personality,” Inskipp said blandly, “so why not keep him around here under observation? If any of his criminal tendencies should develop in the new personality we’ll be in a
wonderful spot to recruit him for the Corps. Does he bother you?”

“Not him,” I snorted. “After the massacres he pulled for his psychotic girlfriend you could grind him into hamburger for all I care. But he does remind me that she is still out there somewhere. Free and planning new mischief. I want to go after her.”

“Well you’re not,” Inskipp said. “You’ve asked me before and I have refused before.
The topic is now closed.”

“But I could …”

“You could
what
?” He gave me a nasty chuckle. “Every law officer in the galaxy has a pic of her and there is a continual search going on. How could you possibly do more than they are already doing?”

“I couldn’t, I guess,” I grumbled. “So the hell with it, as you say.” I pushed my plate away and stood and stretched as naturally as I could. “I’m going
to get a large jug of
liquid refreshment and go to my quarters and nurse my sorrows.”

“You do that. And forget Angelina. Come to my office at 0900 hours tomorrow and you better be sober.”

“Slave driver,” I moaned, going out the door and turning down the hall towards the residence wing. As soon as I was out of sight I took a side ramp that led to the spaceport.

That’s one lesson I had already
learned from Angelina. When you have a plan put it into action instantly. Don’t let it lie around and get stale and have other people start thinking about it themselves. I was putting myself up against the shrewdest man in the business now, and the thought alone was enough to make me sweat. I was going against Inskipp’s direct orders, walking out on him and the Corps. Not really walking out, since
I only wanted to finish the job I had started for them. But I was obviously the only one who would look at it that way.

There were tools, gadgets and a good deal of money in my quarters that would come in very handy on this job. I would just have to do without them. When Inskipp started to think about my sudden conversion to his point of view I wanted to be well away in space.

A mechanic with
a drag-robot was pulling an agent’s ship into place on the launching ramp. I stamped over and used my official voice.

“Is that my ship?”

“No, sir—it’s for Full Agent Nielsen, there he is coming up now.”

“Check with central control, will you? It’s going to be rush no matter how we handle it.”

“New job, Jimmy?” Ove asked as he came up. I nodded and watched the mechanic until he vanished around
the corner.

“Same old business,” I said. “And how’s your tennis game coming?” I asked, lifting my hand with an imaginary racket.

“Getting better all the time,” he said, turning his head to look at his ship.

“I’ll teach you a new stroke,” I said, bringing my hand down sharply and catching him on the side of the neck with the straightened edge. He folded without a sound and I lowered him gently
to the deck and dragged him out of sight behind a row of lubrication drums. I gently pried the box with the course tapes from his limp fingers.

Before the mechanic could return I was in the ship and had the lock sealed. I fed the course tape into the controls and punched the tower combination for clearance. There was a subjective century of waiting, during which eternal period of time I produced
a fine beading of sweat all over my head. Then the green light came on.

Step one and still in the clear. As soon as the launching acceleration stopped I was out of the chair and attacking the control panel with the screwdriver ready in my hand. There was always a remote control unit here so that any Corps ship could be flown from a distance. I had discovered it on my first flight in one of these
ships since I have always maintained that there is a positive value to being nosey. I disconnected the input and output leads, then dived for the engine room.

Perhaps I am too suspicious or have too low an opinion of mankind. Or of Inskipp, who had his own rules on most subjects. Someone more trusting than I would have ignored the radio controlled suicide bomb built into the engine. This could
be used to scuttle the ship in case of capture. I didn’t think they would use it on me except as a last resort. Nevertheless I still wanted it disconnected.

The bomb was an integral part of the engine mounting, a solid block of burmedex built into the casing. The lid dropped off easily enough and inside there was a maze of circuits all leading to a fuse screwed into the thick metal. It had a
big hex-head on it and I scraped my knuckles trying to get a wrench around it and turn it in the close quarters. With a last grate of bruised flesh and knuckle
bones I twisted it free. It hung down from its wire leads, a nerve drawn from a deadly tooth.

Then it exploded with a loud bang and a cloud of black smoke.

With most unnatural calm I looked from the cloud of dispersing smoke back to the
black hole in the bermedex charge. This would have turned the ship and its contents into a fine dust.

“Inskipp,” I said, but my throat was dry and my voice cracked and I had to start again. “Inskipp, I get your message. You thought you were giving me my discharge. Accept instead my resignation from the Special Corps.”

My most overwhelming feeling was one of relief. I was on my own again and responsible to no man. I actually hummed a bit as I dropped the ship out of warpdrive long enough to slip in a course tape chosen at random from the file. There would be no chance of an intercept this way and I could cut a tape for a new course once I was well clear of the headquarters station.

A course to
where? I wasn’t sure yet. That would require a bit of research, though there was no doubt about what I would be doing. Looking for Angelina. At first thought it seemed a little stupid to be taking on a job the Corps had refused me. It was still their job. On second thought I realized that it had nothing to do with the Corps now. Angy had pulled a fast one on me, pinned on the prize-chump medal. That
is something that you just don’t do to Slippery Jim diGriz. Call it ego if you like. But ego is the only thing that keeps a man in my profession operating. Remove that and you have removed everything. I had no real idea of what I would do with her when I found her. Probably turn her over to the police, since people like her gave the business a bad name. Better to worry about cooking the fish after
I had caught it.

A plan was necessary, so I prepared all the plan producing ingredients. For one terrible moment I thought there were no cigars in the ship. Then the service unit groaned and produced a box from some dark corner of the deep freeze. Not the recommended way to store cigars, but much better than having none at all. Nielsen always favored a rare brand of potent akvavit and I had no
objections to drinking it. Feet up, throat lubricated and cigar smoking, I put the thinkbox to work on the project.

To begin with, I had to put myself in Angelina’s place
at the time of her escape. I would like to have gone back physically to the scene, but I’m not that thick. There was guaranteed to be a trigger-happy navy ship or two sitting there. However this is the kind of problem they build
computers to solve, so I fed in the coordinates of the space action where it all had happened. There was no need for notes on this—those figures were scratched inside my forehead in letters of fire. The computer had a large memory store and a high speed scan. It hummed happily when I asked for the stars nearest to the given position. In under thirteen seconds it flipped through its catalogs,
counted on its fingers and rang its little computation-finished bell for me. I copied off the numbers of the first dozen stars, then pressed the cancel when I saw the distance were getting too great to be relevant anymore.

Now I must think like Angelina. I had to be hunted, hurried, a murderess with twelve fresh corpses of my own manufacture piled around me. In every direction rode the enemy.
She would have the same list, ground out by the computer on the stolen cruiser. Now—where to? Tension and speed. Get going somewhere. Somewhere away from here. A glance at the list and the answer seemed obvious. The two nearest stars were in the same quadrant of the sky, within fifteen degrees of each other. They were roughly equidistant. What was more important was the fact that star number three
was in a different sector of the sky and twice as far away.

That was the way to go, toward the first two stars. It was the sort of decision that can be made in a hurry and still be sound. Head toward suns and worlds and the lanes where other ships could be found. The cruiser would have to be gotten rid of before any planets were approached—the faster the better since every ship in the galaxy
would be looking for it. Then meet another ship—ship X—and capture it. Abandon the cruiser and … do what?

My tenuous line of logic was ready to snap at this point
so I strengthened it with some akvavit and a fresh cigar. With my eyes half closed in reverie I tried to rebuild the flight. Capture the new ship and—head for a planet. As long as she was alone in space Angelina was in constant danger.
A planetfall and a change of personality were called for. When I looked up those two target stars in the catalog the planetary choice was obvious. A barbaric sounding place named Freibur.

There were a half dozen other settled planets around the two suns, but all eliminated themselves easily. Either too lightly settled, so that a stranger would be easily spotted, or organized and integrated so
well that it would be impossible to be around long without some notice being taken. Freibur shared none of these difficulties. It had been in the league for less than two hundred years, and would be in a happily chaotic state. A mixture of the old and new, pre-contact culture and post-contact civilization. The perfect place for her to slip into quietly, and lose herself until she could appear with
a fresh identity.

Reaching this conclusion produced a double glow of satisfaction. This was more than a mental exercise in survival since I was now roughly in the same place Angelina had been. The incident with the scuttling charge was a strong indication of the value the Corps put on their ships—and the low value they placed on deserters. Freibur was a place that would suit me perfectly. I retired
happily with a slight buzz on and a scorched mouth from the dehydrated cigars.

When I dragged myself back to consciousness it was time to drop out of warpspace and plot a new course. Except there was one thing I had to do first. A lot of the little facts I knew had
not
been picked up in the Corps. One fact—normally of interest only to warpdrive technicians—concerns the curious propagation of
radiation in warpspace. Radio waves in particular. They just don’t go anyplace. If you broadcast on one frequency you get a strong return signal on all frequencies, as if the radio waves had been squeezed out thin and bounced right
back. Normally of no interest, this exotic phenomena is just the thing to find out if your ship is bugged. I put nothing beyond the Special Corps, and bugging their
own ships seemed a logical precaution. A concealed radio, transmitting on a narrow band, would lead them right to me wherever I went. This I had to find out before getting near any planets.

There was a squeal and a growl from the speaker and I cursed my former employers. But before I wasted my time looking for a transmitter I ought to be sure one was there. Whatever was producing the signal seemed
too weak to be picked up at any distance. Some quick work with a few sheets of shielding showed that my mysterious signal was nothing more than leaking radiation from the receiver itself. After it was shielded the ether was quiet. I enjoyed a sigh of justified satisfaction and dropped out of warp.

Once I had a course plotted the trip wasn’t a long one. I took the opportunity to scrounge through
the ship’s equipment and put together a kit for future use. The elaborate make-up and appearance-alteration machinery begged to be used, and of course I did. Rebuilding the working-personality of Slippery Jim was a positive pleasure. As the nose plugs and cheek pads skipped into place and the dye seeped into my hair I sighed and relaxed with happiness, an old war horse getting back on the job.

Then I scowled, growled at myself in the mirror and began to remove the disguise as carefully as I had assumed it. It has always been axiomatic with me that there is no relaxation in this line of business, and anything done by rote usually leads to disaster. Inskipp knew my old working personality only too well and they would surely be looking for me under that description as well as my normal one.
The second time around I took a little more care with the disguise and built up an entirely different appearance. A simple one—with facial and hair changes—that would be easily maintained. The more elaborate a job of make-up is the more time it takes to keep it accurate. Freibur was a big question-mark so far
and I didn’t want to be loaded with any extra responsibilities like this. I wanted to
go in relaxed, sniff around and see if I could pick up Angelina’s trail.