Hundreds of Com Worlds were seen to be totally stagnant; many were truly dying, their genetic breeding programs and mass mind-programming having bred populations resembling insect societies more than any past human ones, the billions toiling for the benefit of the ruling class and they for the syndicate. When the syndicate was broken so were most of the ruling classes, discovered simply because the drugs they needed were no longer available and they had to come to the Com or die.
Now there were new structures and new societies, some as bad or worse than those they replaced, but most at least slightly better and the attention of the Com spread outward toward more rapid expansion and the infusion of a new frontier spirit.
Over a thousand human worlds now spread over more than a tenth of the Milky Way galaxy. It was inevitable that they should finally meet others, and they had. The Com had by then encountered fourteen races, some so alien and incomprehensible that there could be little contact and no common ground; others, such as the centaurlike Rhone, with expanding cultures of their own. There had been some conflicts, a lot of misunderstanding, but growth had been positive, overall, and humanity had learned a lot about dealing with alien races. The Council of the Community of Worlds, or Com, had seven nonhuman members.
Of them all, however, the Chugach of Marquoz’s own origin were probably the least well known. They had been found on the outer fringes of the Rhone empire by the Rhone, not humans. Their huge, hot desert world was at first thought to be uninhabited, a swirling, harsh sea of desert sands.
The Chugach lived far beneath those sands, where it was cool, near the bedrock and even in its cavities, where the water was, with great cities and grand castles lay. The Chugach swam in the sand like fish in water, and, since their lungs were not that different from those of humans and Rhone, it was still a mystery how they kept from suffocating. A non-spacefaring race that bred slowly would be virtually lost to most of the people of all races in the Com.
It had taken the semifeudal Chugach a while to get over the shock that they were not alone, nor even the lords of creation, but they’d made do. A collection of thousands of autonomous regions, that translated roughly as dukedoms yet seemed to have an almost Athenian democracy, they’d had no central government, no countries, nothing with which to deal.
But they had knowledge, talent, and skills the Com did not have. They produced intricate glass sculptures that were beautiful beyond belief; they had an almost supernatural way of transmuting substances without complex machinery, taking worthless sand and rock and providing pretty much what you wanted or needed. They had something to trade, and the Com had technology they lacked. Once a single dukedom had entered into a trade agreement with the Rhone, its neighbors had to follow or be left behind. The chain reaction permanently altered Marquoz’s home world.
He didn’t seem to care. He said he was a deposed duke, but it was well known that every Chugacb who wasn’t a duke claimed to be a deposed one. Nobody much understood him or his motives, and least of allwas his almost total lack of concern for his home world. He’d roamed the Rhone empire as agent for a hundred small concerns, always seemed to have money and a knowledge of alien surroundings, and he got results. He seemed to have a sixth sense when something was wrong; he was drawn to trouble like a magnet, and he proved himself capable of handling what trouble he found.
So he was a natural for the Com Police, who recruited him to keep from being embarrassed by him. Marquoz was neither understood nor trusted by his human and nonhuman counterparts as the only Chugach in the Com Police. But he got results every time—and superiors up to the Council itself did not share prejudice against one so productive. He might not be understood, but there was no question that he was a capable friend.
He strode into the lab section with that air of confident authority he always wore, his cigar leaving a trail of blue-white puff-balls in the air behind him. He spotted a technician instantly as the boss of the section, and strode over to him.
The man was standing in front of a wall of transparent material more then twelve centimeters thick. Behind it were cells, cages really, in which sat, thoroughly bound, a middle-aged man, an elderly woman who looked like everybody’s grandmother, and two fairly attractive young women, neither of whom looked to be much older than sixteen. All were naked; although securely bound, the cells contained nothing except the chairs to which they were bound—and even the chair was fashioned out of the material of the cell itself when it was molded.
Dr. Van Chu saw the dragon’s reflection in the glass but didn’t turn from observing the four people in the cells.
“Hello, Marquoz,” he mumbled. “I figured you’d still be in debriefing.”
“Oh, I took a break. You know how much respect I have for all that nonsense. I filed a report. I fail to see what repeating the story a few hundred times will add.”
Van Chu chuckled. “Every little bit helps. You’ve dropped a nasty one in our laps this time. Worse than the last time. Can I persuade you to return home and have a mess of kids or whatever it is you people do and let us get some rest?”
Marquoz took the cigar in his long, thin fingers and snorted. The snort produced a small puff of smoke from his own mouth. Chugach did not need to carry cigar lighters.
“That’ll be the day,” the little dragon responded. “No, you’re stuck with me, I’m afraid, as long as I’m having this much fun.”
Now the lab man looked over and down at him, curiosity all over his face. “What makes you tick, Marquoz? How is shooting and getting shot at on alien worlds for alien races fun? Why not Chugach?”
That question had been asked many times, and he always gave the same answer. “You know that every race has its oddballs, Doc. The ones that don’t fit, don’t like the rules or things as they are. I’m the chief oddball Chugach. I’m a nut, I know I’m a nut, but I’m having fun and I’m useful so I stay a nut.”
Van Chu let the matter drop. Suddenly dead serious, “You sure you got them all?” he asked, motioning toward the prisoners with his head.
Marquoz nodded. “Oh, yeah. On Parkatin, anyway. Who knows how many in other places? Our pigeon, Har Bateen, was dropped on a farm about twenty kilometers from town only the day before. We traced back his movements pretty easily. Apparently he just walked up to the nearest farmhouse—man, wife, one young kid—and pretended to be on his way from here to there. They were hospitable—and the first three he took over. We got none of them. Man, we did a drop on ’em and had that farmhouse surrounded in minutes, but they just wouldn’t give up. We just about had to level it.
“He took their little roadster and drove into town the next day, checked into a small hotel in the sleazy section, near the spaceport. A busy lad: we found eight he’d gotten there including Grandma over there.” He pointed with the cigar to the little old lady in the cell. “Then he went to the bar, took the madam there, then wandered out and over to us. These characters vary in their desire to live—Bateen himself was pretty meek and after we stunned him and put a vacuum suit on him he behaved real nice. The roomers tried to shoot it out; grandma just wasn’t fleet of foot—tripped and knocked herself cold. The others we had to burn. Likewise the madam, although she’d infected the two girls, there, and they were still unsteady enough that we had ’em wrapped and ready to ship before they could do much.”
“How’d you know they weren’t what they appeared?” Van Chu pressed. “I mean, I’d never guess they were anything but what they seemed.”
Marquoz chuckled. “They stink. Oh, not to you. Apparently not to anybody but a Chugach. Not an ordinary kind of stink; a really alien kind of thing, an odor like nobody’s ever experienced before. I can’t describe it to you—but I’m hoping you folks can figure it out and synthesize it so we can get detectors. This crap kind of gives you the creeps—you can’t know who’s who.”