Red Dust by Yoss

Author:Yoss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cuban science fiction;Yoss;Yoss author;cuban sci fi;cuban science fiction authors;cuban sci-fi authors;space opera;Raymond Chandler;positronic robot;robot detective;Grodo;Collosaur;android police;positronic robot detective;Cetian;Gaussian bell curve;A Planet for Rent;Super Extra Grande;Condomnauts;Translated by David Frye;david frye;david frye translator;cuban dystopia;Cuban rock and roll;José Miguel Sánchez Gómez;authors from cuba;Premio David;Timshel;heavy metal band Tenaz
Publisher: Restless Books
Published: 2020-05-05T16:15:33+00:00

Seven

After stuff happens, any idiot with enough time to waste can analyze what went right, what turned out badly, the reasons behind each mistake, and which brilliant move could have made the difference at each point, turning failure into triumph. Any elementary school student could tell Napoleon when to move his artillery, when to call for Murat’s cavalry, and how to maneuver his troops so he could thumb his nose at Wellington in Waterloo. Any halfway competent amateur could advise Lee on how to defeat Grant in Gettysburg or tell Hannibal how to bring Rome to its knees with his elephants.

But in the whirlwind of events, generals not only don’t know where their enemies have their strongest troop concentrations, often they aren’t even very clear about where their own forces are. So a battle in real time is nothing like a chessboard with all the pieces moving in the open. It’s more like a knife fight between two blindfolded opponents, each trying to stab the other, guided only by the sound of their breathing while trying to hold their own breath so the other guy won’t stab them.

All this is just a fancy but futile attempt to excuse myself for the total disaster that was our attempt to overrun asteroid G 7834 XC.

It couldn’t even remotely be called a battle. An ambush, a massacre, maybe even a firing squad. Could it have been avoided? Of course—if I had been a clairvoyant, I might have known that Makrow 34, Weekman, and the Colossaur had planned for exactly such a massive operation. Or if I’d been a brilliant strategist and tactician like Hannibal, Napoleon, Grant, or even his defeated foe Lee, I might have calmly called off the reinforcements and anti-Psi fields and instead attempted a much more low-key incursion. A standard commando action: just Vasily, me, and at most a couple human police as backup. Maybe we would have at least stood a chance.

But when the aliens designed us they forgot to include clairvoyance among our powers. And even the nearly omniscient Slovoban had no way of knowing that the diabolical Cetian and his accomplice Giorgio had invested half their fraud and smuggling profits not in energy crystals but in turning that remote asteroid, their “temporary base,” into a lethal trap.

The other thing is that, even though we were the invaders, they held the advantage of surprise. Neither the human police nor I myself really expected to find the fugitives on the forsaken chunk of rock that the Old Man had indicated. Maybe it was because I had read too many Conan Doyle-style detective stories, but it seemed most likely that I’d show up at an empty lair and have to deal with a complicated jigsaw puzzle of false trails, red herrings, and incomplete clues that would seem impossible to reconstruct at first, until with a brilliant flash of insight I discovered the meaning of some words in an exotic language or of some intriguing signs or drawings, leading me at last to the criminals after a long string of adventures.

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