The shooting died down to occasional rattles of small arms, usually
followed by yells for quarter. An explosion thundered from across the
crater. The _Lester Dawes_ fired her big guns a few times. A machine
gun stuttered. A pistol banged, far away. It took two hours before all
the pirates had been hunted out of hiding and captured, or killed if
found by their former captives, who were accepting no surrender
whatever.
Blackie Perales had been one of the latter; he had been found, his
clothes in rags and covered with dirt and grease, hiding under a
machine in one of the shops back of the dock in which the _Harriet
Barne_ was being rebuilt. He had tried to claim that he was one of the
pirates' prisoners who had eluded the roundup at the beginning of the
battle and had been hiding there since. As soon as the real prisoners
saw and recognized him, they had fallen upon him and clubbed, kicked
and stamped him out of any resemblance to humanity. At that, what he
got was probably only a fraction of what he deserved.
The egg breakage had been heavy, and not at all confined to the bad
eggs. A third gunboat, the _Banshee_, had been destroyed with all
hands during the final attack from outside; in addition, a dozen men
had been killed during the fighting in the galleries. Everybody was
shocked, except Klem Zareff, who had been in battles before. He was
surprised that the casualties had been so light.
At first glance, the spaceport looked like a handsome prize of
victory. The docks and workshops were all in good condition; at worst,
they only needed cleaning up. There was a collapsium plant, with its
own mass-energy converter. There were foundries and machine-shops and
forging-shops and a rolling-mill, almost completely robotic. At first,
Conn thought that it might be possible to build a hyperdrive ship
here, without having to go to Koshchei at all.
Closer examination disabused him of this hope. There was nothing of
which the framework of a ship could be built, and no way of producing
heavy structural steel. The rolling-mill was good enough to turn out
eighth-inch sheet material which when plated with a few micromicrons
of collapsium would be as good as a hundred feet of lead against
space-radiations, but that was the ship's skin. A ship needed a
skeleton, too. The only thing to do was go on with the _Harriet
Barne_.
It was sunset before he finished his tour of inspection and let his
jeep down in a vehicle hall off the lower gallery outside what had
originally been the spaceport officers' club. It was crowded, and a
victory celebration seemed to be getting under way. He saw his father
with Yves Jacquemont, Sylvie, Tom Brangwyn, and Captain Nichols.
Nichols had gotten clean clothes from the pirates' store of loot, and
had bathed and shaved. So had Jacquemont, though he had contented
himself with trimming his beard. It took him a second or so to
recognize the young lady in feminine garb as his erstwhile battle
comrade, Sylvie.
"Well, our pay goes on from the day we were captured," Nichols was
saying. "My instructions are to resume command of the ship. Tomorrow,
they're sending a party out to go over her."