Stephen Dedman: Tour de Force

I looked at the controls and the gauges, then stared through the scope. There were no crosshairs, and it didn’t magnify or change the light level; it was like looking through a short length of triangular pipe, apart from a few curvilinear characters and other symbols glowing along the edges. I looked at the ship, and through the window, seeing the aliens and the surrounding chaos, and blinked. Wish you were here to help me, I thought, and then glanced at the holos on the outside of the ship. Wish you were here.

It was only a hunch, but the longer I looked at the device, the more I dared to hope. The mercenary snapped, “Thirty seconds, doctor,” and I looked up to see him standing behind Kylie, his gun to her head.

“Yeah.” I pressed a likely looking switch, and heard a quick faint zzip! “Okay,” I said, and pointed the contraption at his face. “Drop the pistol, and we can discuss this like reasonable people.”

“You can’t shoot both of us,” he replied, calmly. “If you pull the trigger, Uschi will shoot you, then the Russian, and then the girl. I know her gun works. Prove that that thing fires, and we’ll take it, and we’ll go; we’ll pull up the rope, and shoot out one of your tires, but only one; that should give us enough of a head start. Just fire a round into the roof and—”

“A round? ” I smiled. “This only affects living matter. Do you think any halfway intelligent spacers would use something that would put a hole in their ship if it missed?”

He considered this, and then smiled. “You’re smarter than you look. Okay. Put the gun on the floor, and go and stand near the Russian.” Slowly, I obeyed.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Sergei, in Navajo. I didn’t reply. The man released his grip on Kylie, and pushed her over toward us, then reached for the device with his left hand. He looked at Kylie, then at Sergei, then at me, and then back at Sergei. I removed my goggles, and threw them at his feet.

“What are you doing?”

“If you’re going to kill me,” I said, “you’re going to look me in the eye when you do it.”

The mercenary shrugged, then reholstered his pistol, switched the alien device from his left hand to his right, and then pointed it straight at Sergei’s chest. Kylie screamed, and covered her face; I just closed my eyes and waited and prayed very quickly. The idiot pulled the trigger, and the world turned hell-red. I heard shrieks in German, and opened my eyes hurriedly, in time to see Sergei hit the ground.

Uschi fired a round from the AK-47 an instant too late, and Sergei back-somersaulted and planted his feet firmly in her kidneys. She fell backward through the mouth of the cave, screaming.

The man had dropped the device, and was tearing at his goggles; I was still seeing everything through a blood-red haze, and I’d had my eyes closed, so he must have been wondering if he’d been permanently blinded. I took one step toward him, then grabbed his flailing arm, gently twisted it behind his back, and threw him head-first into the side of the ship. When I was convinced he wasn’t going to get up again quickly, I asked, “Are you two okay?”

“Yes,” replied Kylie. “But I think we’d better stay down here for a while. Sergei?”

“Apart from a pair of fouled trousers,” said Sergei, thickly, “I suspect I’m fine. What was that infernal device? A camera?”

“Yeah. With a flashgun.”

“How did you know?”

I looked down at the gunman. “It was just a hunch, but … he was looking for a weapon, so he saw it as a weapon. Barnes was looking for a weapon, so he saw it as a weapon. You were scared it might be a weapon, so you saw it as a weapon. I noticed how much it looked like an old-fashioned movie camera. I looked through the viewfinder, and that confirmed it; it didn’t magnify, and the frame was an equilateral triangle, just like the holograms scattered over the floor. Their eyes are obviously very similar to ours, so if it had a flash, at least some of it would be in the visible spectrum. The hard part was working out how to set the flash to maximum power.

“But even before he brought it out, I thought a camera was more likely than a weapon. There was nothing to suggest they’d be armed. Look at their ship; no weapons, big windows, lots of space inside, lots of furniture, and it’s easier to break into than a rubber dinghy. And look at the junk they collected. They’re not explorers, soldiers, spies, scouts… they’re something much more common in a high-tech world, and infinitely more dangerous.”

They sat there for a few seconds, and then Sergei said, “Okay. I’ll bite. What are they?”

I smiled. “Tourists.”