The group shuffled to a stop near the foot of the ramp, staring up at
him.
"Yes, Dasinger?" Dr. Egavine called back, sounding a trifle winded.
"Have Quist come up first and alone, please." Dasinger disarmed the
little man at the entrance to the lock, motioned him on to the center of
the compartment. The others arrived then in a line, filed past Dasinger
and joined Quist.
"You've explained the situation to everybody?" Dasinger asked Egavine.
There was an air of tenseness about the little group he didn't like,
though tension might be understandable enough under the circumstances.
"Yes," Dr. Egavine said. "They feel entirely willing to assist us, of
course." He smiled significantly.
"Fine." Dasinger nodded. "Line them up and let's get going! Taunus
first. Get ..."
There was a momentary stirring of the air back of his head. He turned
sharply, jerking up the gun, felt twin needles drive into either side of
his neck.
His body instantly went insensate. The lock appeared to circle about
him, then he was on his back and Graylock's pet was alighting with a
flutter of wings on his chest. It craned its head forward to peer into
his face, the tip of its mouth tube open, showing a ring of tiny teeth.
Vision and awareness left Dasinger together.
The other men hadn't moved. Now Dr. Egavine, his face a little pale,
came over to Dasinger, the birdlike creature bounding back to the edge
of the lock as he approached. Egavine knelt down, said quietly, his
mouth near the wrist communicator, "Duomart Mines, you will obey me."
There was silence for a second or two. Then the communicator whispered,
"Yes."
Dr. Egavine drew in a long, slow breath.
"You feel no question, no concern, no doubt about this situation," he
went on. "You will bring the ship down now and land it safely beside the
Antares. Then come up into the lock of the Antares for further
instructions." Egavine stood up, his eyes bright with triumph.
* * * * *
In the Mooncat three miles overhead, Duomart switched off her wrist
communicator, sat white-faced, staring at the image of the Antares in
the ground-view plate.
"Sweet Jana!" she whispered. "How did he ... now what do I ..."
She hesitated an instant, then opened a console drawer, took out the
kwil needle Dasinger had left with her and slipped it into a pocket,
clipped the holstered shocker back to her belt, and reached for the
controls. A vast whistling shriek smote the Antares and the ears of
those within as the Mooncat ripped down through atmosphere at an
unatmospheric speed, leveled out smoothly and floated to the ground
beside the wreck.
There was no one in sight in the lock of the Antares as Duomart came out
and sealed the Mooncat's entry behind her. She went quickly up the
broad, mold-covered ramp. The lock remained empty. From beyond it came
the sound of some metallic object being pulled about, a murmur of
voices. Twelve steps from the top, she took out the little gun, ran up
to the lock and into it, bringing the gun up. She had a glimpse of Dr.
Egavine and Quist standing near a rusty bench in the compartment, of
Graylock half into a salvage suit, Dasinger on the floor ... then a
flick of motion to right and left.
The tips of two space lines lashed about her simultaneously, one pinning
her arms to her sides, the other clamping about her ankles and twitching
her legs out from beneath her. She fired twice blindly to the left as
the lines snapped her face down to the floor of the compartment. The
gun was clamped beneath her stretched-out body and useless.
* * * * *
"What made that animal attack me anyway?" Dasinger asked wearily. He had
just regained consciousness and been ordered by Calat to join the others
on a rusted metal bench in the center of the lock compartment; Duomart
to his left, Egavine on his right, Quist on the other side of Egavine.
Calat stood watching them fifteen feet away, holding Dasinger's gun in
one hand while he jiggled a few of Hovig's star hyacinths gently about
in the other.
Calat's expression was cheerful, which made him the exception here. Liu
Taunus and Graylock were down in the hold of the ship, working sturdily
with cutter beams and power hoists to get to the sealed vault and blow
it open. How long they'd been at it, Dasinger didn't know.
"You can thank your double-crossing partner for what happened!" Duomart
informed him. She looked pretty thoroughly mussed up though still
unsubdued. "Graylock's been using the bird-thing to hunt with," she
said. "It's a bloodsucker ... nicks some animal with its claws and the
animal stays knocked out while the little beast fills its tummy. So the
intellectual over there had Graylock point you out to his pet, and it
waited until your back was turned...." She hesitated, went on less
vehemently, "Sorry about not carrying out orders, Dasinger. I assumed
Egavine really was in control here, and I could have handled _him_. I
walked into a trap." She fished the shards of a smashed kwil needle out
of her pocket, looked at them, and dropped them on the floor before her.
"I got slammed around a little," she explained.
Calat laughed, said something in the Fleet tongue, grinning at her. She
ignored him.
Egavine said, "My effects were secretly inspected while we were at the
Fleet station, Dasinger, and the Fleetmen have been taking drugs to
immunize themselves against my hypnotic agents. They disclosed this when
Miss Mines brought the speedboat down. There was nothing I could do. I
regret to say that they intend to murder us. They are waiting only to
assure themselves that the star hyacinths actually are in the indicated
compartment."
"Great!" Dasinger groaned. He put his hands back in a groping gesture to
support himself on the bench.
"Still pretty feeble, I suppose?" Miss Mines inquired, gentle sympathy
in her voice.
"I'm poisoned," he muttered brokenly. "The thing's left me
paralyzed...." He sagged sideways a little, his hand moving behind
Duomart. He pinched her then in a markedly unparalyzed and vigorous
manner.
Duomart's right eyelid flickered for an instant.
* * * * *
"Somebody wrung the little monster's neck before I got here," she
remarked. "But there're other necks _I'd_ sooner wring! Your partner's,
for instance. Not that he's necessarily the biggest louse around at the
moment." She nodded at Calat. "The two runches who call themselves
Fleetmen don't intend to share the star hyacinths even with their own
gang! They're rushing the job through so they can be on their way to the
Hub before the Spy arrives. And don't think Liu Taunus trusts that
muscle-bound foogal standing there, either! He's hanging on to the key
of the Mooncat's console until he comes back up."
Calat smiled with a suggestion of strain, then said something in a flat,
expressionless voice, staring at her.
"Oh, sure," she returned. "With Taunus holding me, I suppose?" She
looked at Dasinger. "They're not shooting _me_ right off, you know," she
told him. "They're annoyed with me, so they're taking me along for
something a little more special. But they'll have to skip the fun if the
Spy shows up, or I'll be telling twenty armed Fleetmen exactly what
kind of thieving cheats they have leading them!" She looked back at
Calat, smiled, placed the tip of her tongue lightly between her lips for
an instant, then pronounced a few dozen Fleet words in a clear, precise
voice.
It must have been an extraordinarily unflattering comment. Calat went
white, then red. Half-smart tough had been Duomart's earlier description
of him. It began to look like an accurate one ... Dasinger felt a surge
of pleased anticipation. His legs already were drawn well back beneath
the bench; he shifted his weight slowly forwards now, keeping an
expression of anxious concern on his face. Calat spoke in Fleetlingue
again, voice thickening with rage.
Miss Mines replied sweetly, stood up. The challenge direct.
The Fleetman's face worked in incredulous fury. He shifted the gun to
his left hand and came striding purposefully towards Miss Mines, right
fist cocked. Then, as Dasinger tensed his legs happily, a muffled thump
from deep within the wreck announced the opening of the star hyacinth
vault.
The sound was followed by instant proof that Hovig had trapped the
vault.
Duomart and Calat screamed together. Dasinger drove himself forward off
the bench, aiming for the Fleetman's legs, checked and turned for the
gun which Calat, staggering and shrieking, his face distorted with
lunatic terror, had flung aside. Dr. Egavine, alert for this
contingency, already was stooping for the gun, hand outstretched, when
Dasinger lunged against him, bowling him over.
* * * * *
Dasinger came up with the gun, Quist pounding at his shoulders, flung
the little man aside, turned back in a frenzy of urgency. Duomart
twisted about on the floor near the far end of the compartment, arms
covering her face. The noises that bubbled out from behind her arms set
Dasinger's teeth on edge. She rolled over convulsively twice, stopped
dangerously close to the edge of the jagged break in the deck, was
turning again as Dasinger dropped beside her and caught her.
Immediately there was a heavy, painful blow on his shoulder. He glanced
up, saw Quist running toward him, a rusted chunk of metal like the one
he had thrown in his raised hand, and Egavine peering at both of them
from the other side of the compartment. Dasinger flung a leg across
Duomart, pinning her down, pulled out the gun, fired without aiming.
Quist reversed his direction almost in mid-stride. Dasinger fired
again, saw Egavine dart towards the lock, hesitate there an instant,
then disappear down the ramp, Quist sprinting out frantically after him.
A moment later he drove one of the remaining kwil needles through the
cloth of Duomart's uniform, and rammed the plunger down.
The drug hit hard and promptly. Between one instant and the next, the
plunging and screaming ended; she drew in a long, shuddering breath,
went limp, her eyes closing slowly. Dasinger was lifting her from the
floor when the complete silence in the compartment caught his attention.
He looked around. Calat was not in sight. And only then did he become
aware of a familiar sensation ... a Hovig generator's pulsing, savage
storm of seeming nothingness, nullified by the drug in his blood.
He laid the unconscious girl on the bench, went on to the lock.
Dr. Egavine and Quist had vanished; the thick shrubbery along the lake
bank stirred uneasily at twenty different points but he wasn't looking
for the pair. With the Mooncat inaccessible to them, there was only one
place they could go. Calat's body lay doubled up in the rocks below the
ramp, almost sixty feet down, where other human bodies had lain six
years earlier. Dasinger glanced over at the Fleet scout, went back into
the compartment.
He was buckling himself into the third salvage suit when he heard the
scout's lifeboat take off. At a guess Hovig's little private collection
of star hyacinths was taking off with it. Dasinger decided he couldn't
care less.
He snapped on the headpiece, then hesitated at the edge of the deck,
looking down. A bubble of foggy white light was rising slowly through
the water of the hold, and in a moment the headpiece of one of the other
suits broke the oily surface, stayed there, bobbing gently about.
Dasinger climbed down, brought Liu Taunus's body back up to the lock
compartment, and recovered the Mooncat's master key.
He found Graylock floating in his suit against a bulkhead not far from
the shattered vault where Hovig's two remaining generators thundered.
Dasinger silenced the machines, fastened them and a small steel case
containing nearly a hundred million credits' worth of star hyacinths to
the salvage carrier, and towed it all up to the lock compartment.
A very few minutes later, the Mooncat lifted in somewhat jerky, erratic
fashion from the planet's surface. As Dasinger had suspected, he lacked,
and by a good deal, Miss Mines's trained sensitivity with the
speedboat's controls; but he succeeded in wrestling the little ship up
to a five-mile altitude where a subspace dive might be carried out in
relative safety.
He was attempting then to get the Mooncat's nose turned away from the
distant volcano ranges towards which she seemed determined to point when
the detector needles slapped flat against their pins and the alarm bell
sounded. A strange ship stood outlined in the Mooncat's stern screen.
* * * * *
The image vanished as Dasinger hit the dive button, simultaneously
flattening the speed controls with a slam of his hand. The semisolid
subspace turbulence representing the mountain ranges beyond the lake
flashed instantly past below him ... within yards, it seemed. Another
second put them beyond the planet's atmosphere. Then the Spy reappeared
in subspace, following hard. A hammering series of explosions showed
suddenly in the screens, kept up for a few hair-raising moments, began
to drop back. Five minutes later, with the distance between them
widening rapidly, the Spy gave up the chase, swung around and headed
back towards the planet.
Dasinger shakily reduced his ship's speed to relatively sane level, kept
her moving along another twenty minutes, then surfaced into normspace
and set a general course for the Hub. He was a very fair yachtsman for
a planeteer. But after riding the Mooncat for the short time he'd turned
her loose to keep ahead of the Spy through the G2's stress zone, he
didn't have to be told that in Fleet territory he was outclassed. He
mopped his forehead, climbed gratefully out of the pilot seat and went
to the cot he had hauled into the control room, to check on Duomart
Mines.
She was still unconscious, of course; the dose he'd given her was enough
to knock a kwil-sensitive out for at least a dozen hours. Dasinger
looked down at the filth-smudged, pale face, the bruised cheeks and
blackened left eye for a few seconds, then opened Dr. Egavine's medical
kit to do what he could about getting Miss Mines patched up again.
Fifteen hours later she was still asleep, though to all outer
appearances back in good repair. Dasinger happened to be bemusedly
studying her face once more when she opened her eyes and gazed up at
him.
"We made it! You ..." She smiled, tried to sit up, looked startled, then
indignant. "What's the idea of tying me down to this thing?"
Dasinger nodded. "I guess you're all there!" He reached down to unfasten
her from the cot. "After what happened, I wasn't so sure you'd be
entirely rational when the kwil wore off and you woke up."
Duomart paled a little. "I hadn't imagined ..." She shook her blond
head. "Well, let's skip that! I'll have nightmares for years.... What
happened to the others?"
* * * * *
Dasinger told her, concluded, "Egavine may have run into the Spy, but I
doubt it. He'll probably show up in the Hub eventually with the gems he
took from Calat, and if he doesn't get caught peddling them he may wind
up with around a million credits ... about the sixth part of what he
would have collected if he'd stopped playing crooked and trying to get
everything. I doubt the doctor will ever quit kicking himself for that!"
"Your agency gets the whole salvage fee now, eh?"
"Not exactly," Dasinger said. "Considering everything that's happened,
the Kyth Interstellar Detective Agency would have to be extremely
ungrateful if it didn't feel you'd earned the same split we were going
to give Dr. Egavine."
Miss Mines gazed at him in startled silence, flushed excitedly. "Think
you can talk the Kyth people into _that_, Dasinger?"
"I imagine so," Dasinger said, "since I own the agency. That should
finance your Willata Fleet operation very comfortably and still leave a
couple of million credits over for your old age. I doubt we'll clear
anything on Hovig's generators...."