Trigger & Friends by James H. Schmitz

Author:James H. Schmitz [Schmitz, James H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Telepathy, Space Opera, General, Science Fiction, Adventure, Life on other planets, Fiction
ISBN: 9780671319663
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2004-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

“So they helped you find me?” she said cautiously. It was clear that the major had strong feelings about computers.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “It usually turns out it was a good idea to do what those CCs say. Anything unusual that shows up in the area you’re working on gets chunked into the things as a matter of course. We were on the liners.

Dawn City reports back a couple of murders. ‘

Dawn City to the head of the list!’ cry the computers. Nobody asks why. They just plow into the ticket purchase records. And right there are the little Argee thumbprints!”

He looked at Trigger. “My own bet,” he said, somewhat accusingly, “was that you were on one of those that had just taken off. We didn’t know about that ticket reservation.”

“What I don’t see,” Trigger said, changing the subject, “is why two murders should seem so very unusual. There must be quite a few of them, after all.”

“True,” said Quillan. “But not murders that look like catassin killings.”

“Oh!” she said startled. “Is that what these were?”

“That’s what Ship Security thinks.”

Trigger frowned. “But what could be the connection—”

Quillan reached across the table and patted her hand. “You’ve got it!” he said with approval.

“Exactly! No connection.

Some day I’m going to walk down those rows and give them each a blast where it will do the most good. It will be worth being broken for.”

Trigger said, “I thought that catassin planet was being guarded.”

“It is. It would be very hard to sneak one out nowadays. But somebody’s breeding them in the Hub. Just a few. Keeps the price up.”

Trigger grimaced uncomfortably. She’d seen recordings of those swift, clever, constitutionally murderous creatures in action. “You say it looked like catassin killings. They haven’t found it?”

“No. But they think they got rid of it. Emptied the air from most of the ship after they surfaced and combed over the rest of it with life detectors. They’ve got a detector system set up now that would spot a catassin if it moved twenty feet in any direction.”

“Life detectors go haywire out of normal space, don’t they?” she said. “That’s why they surfaced then.”

Quillan nodded. “You’re a well-informed doll. They’re pretty certain it’s been sucked into space or disposed of by its owner, but they’ll go on looking till we dive beyond Garth.”

“Who got killed?”

“A Rest Warden and a Security officer. In the rest cubicle area. It might have been sent after somebody there.

Apparently it ran into the two men and killed them on the spot. The officer got off one shot and that set off the automatic alarms. So pussy cat couldn’t finish the job that time.”

“It’s all sort of gruesome, isn’t it?” Trigger said.

“Catassins are,” Quillan agreed. “That’s a fact.”

Trigger took another sip. She set down her glass. “There’s something else,” she said reluctantly.

“Yes?”

“When you said you’d come on board to see I got to Manon, I was thinking none of the people who’d been after me on

Maccadon could know I was on the

Dawn City

. They might though.

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