"From what?" Pat had asked.
"It is a lonely and desolate part of the galaxy.There have been pirate attacks there."
But there hadn't been a recorded act of piracysince X&A had sent fifty ships of the line to reducethe pirate strongholds on the Hogg Moons.
When Pat didn't like a proposition, he set the fee impossibly high. He had named a figure, knowingthat it would be refused, and without blinking aneye the Zedeians had accepted. Obviously, therewas more to the proposition than appeared on thesurface. But it was a lot of money. Pat liked hisfreedom, and without financial freedom there isno personal freedom. And, after all, he was paid totake risks.
"Just what business are you in?" Pat had asked.
"We are involved in several areas," the spokesman had said. "Import-export, for example. Recently we've become interested in producing entertainment films."
Just plain, ordinary businessmen. Businessmenwho were willing to spend a small fortune withouteven bargaining over the price to send a legally armed mercenary on a simple passenger-carryingmission. The problem was that there was nothingsimple about anything Zedeian. It had been a thousand years since the prosperous, populous Zede worlds had engaged in their last war of conquest,but historians, to whom Pat had been often exposed, talked about "the War" as if it had happened yesterday. For a while, during that last ofman's big wars, the first all-out war in space, ithad been anyone's victory, touch and go. In desperation, the free worlds of the United PlanetsConfederation had used a terrible new weapon,the planet reducer, for the first and last time inrecorded history. Seven Zede planets were rup tured, blown apart, sent flying into space in chunksand pieces, all life destroyed, before the Zede warlords capitulated.
UP historians justified the use of the planet destroyer by saying that freedom had been preserved,that millions of lives had been spared by endingthe war. Some historians and moralists went allthe way back to the mid-twentieth century to findhistorical precedents.
The peace treaty had been generous. The surviving Zede worlds had become a semiautonomous part of the Confederation, a status which continued into modern times. UP laws governed all the Zede planets, but the Zedeians were notoriouslyindependent, and sometimes rather frustratinglyinventive. Zede led the Confederation in innovative industrial development, in subatomic technology. The Vervoldt Cloud memory chambers whichhad given a relatively small shipboard computerthe storage capacity and reasoning ability of asomewhat backward human brain had been developed on Zede's Valhalla. The advanced weaponswhich were mounted on the latest ships of the UPFleet and the ship of the Department of Explora tion and Alien Search, were largely Zedeian. Thearms trade, indeed, was at the core of Zede's prosperity, big business within the UP, a profitable sideline when dealing with non-aligned, independent planets of which there were very few, andthose mostly on the far fringes of the explored andcharted portion of the galaxy.
Had the Zede "businessmen" had a small shipment of arms in mind when they hinted at a more profitable cargo for theSkimmer? Pat didn't thinkso. Armaments were often bulky. The store of Class AAA drugs inSkimmer's storage areas was, Patfelt, just about the most profitable cargo he couldcarry, for you could pack a lot of high-class medicine into a small space.
Pat had taken theSkimmer to Zede II to buy hiscargo, having been assured of the lowest prices inthe Confederation. He'd done some talking aroundthe port, and the word was that a man with theright connections could buy just about anything he wanted to buy somewhere on Zede II. It wasthere that he had heard repeated a persistent ru mor, unproven as yet, that someone was dealing inthe filth of the old nuclear weapons, and perhapseven the long-since-outlawed planet reducers.
The rumor had leaked originally from the crewof an X&A ship back from charting a new blink route in search of always scarce habitable planets.A long way from home, in a previously unchartedarea, the ship had picked up suspicious readingsfrom a barren, small, Mercury-like planet. Theplanet, if the X&A ship's analyzers were workingproperly, had recently, in the past two decades at the most, been the site of hydrogen fusion tests.Since the need for power from either fusion orfission had been eliminated soon after the first starship went out from Old Earth, there was onlyone possible use for the nasty power of the atom,nuclear power was good only for destruction,and not even efficient destruction. An X&A destroyer had more firepower than a thousand hydrogenbombs. If someone had been playing around withthe antique nuclear weapons their intent couldonly be blackmail. Livable planets were rare, widelyscattered. The constantly multiplying populationsof the UP worlds made X&A's search for new livingspace the most important function of government.A madman with nuclear bombs, threatening tomake a life-zone planet unlivable with slowlydecaying radioactivity would be in a powerfulposition.
All of these old thoughts replayed through Pat'smind as he sat, scratching himself. That was asmall but important luxury, to be able to scratchwhere he itched when he itched and not worryabout couth. He liked living alone.
He grinned at the computer. "Give me the display file on Taratwo," he said.
The computer disliked oral orders. It fancieditself an old man, hearing becoming impaired. He had to repeat the order, loudly. The computer muttered to itself for a few seconds, punished him bytaking extra seconds to check and crosscheck allreferences to the planet Taratwo, then deliveredthe file to the screen.
Pat had examined the file a dozen times on the trip out. He had in his data banks all the information available on Taratwo, fourth planet of thestar Upsilon Ophiuchus. He had data not availablein the public banks, thanks to Jeanny Thompson.
A few years back, when Pat was enduring tenure in the Roget Seat of Philology at Xanthos University, both he and Jeanny had thought that an alliance between learning and practical science, between the learned professor and the upwardly mobile X&A technician, might work. Neither of themcould remember the moment of mutual decision,nor place blame, for the realization that a permanent marriage would be undesirable.
Jeanny just bent the rules a little bit when sheallowed Pat access to X&A's file on Taratwo.
"That's a long way from home," Jeanny hadsaid, when he made his needs known.
"That makes it interesting," Pat had said.
They had read the file together as it slid silentlyfrom the printer.
"If I were you, boy, I'd walk easy out there,"Jeanny said. "That planet is an anachronism. Anabsolute ruler in this enlightened, unquote, age?"
Taratwo had been discovered by accident and peopled by political dissidents who had carefully nursed on their journey through space an old, oldgrudge from the Old Earth, a grudge so ancientthat the reason for it was a long-forgotten mystery. When a race can lose its home planet forthousands of years the reasons behind a simplelittle family fight among tribes of men can also belost.
"This is interesting," Jeanny had said. "The nameof the planet is taken from the site of the palace ofa legendary race of kings, back on Old Earth."
Pat had been more interested in solid information. Taratwo's political status was Independent.There were no organized trade routes to any UP planet, but there were records of trips to the planetby free traders. The autocratic ruler of Taratwodidn't call himself a king, but according to allinformation he was the boss, the absolute ruler.
"He fancies himself to be a great leader," Jeannyhad said. "He's a bad dude, Audrey—"
"Don't call me Audrey," Pat had said.
"—standing tall and alone on the frontier of theinhabited galaxy. And look at this. He's been buying warships from the Zede munitions plants."
The figures were impressive. Taratwo, a small,insignificant planet, had the most powerful fleetarm of any independent planet or group of independent planets.