The skin was stretched taut across Gavin's gaunt features, the freckles
standing out like pennies.
The air, rapidly growing denser, began to whine like the keening for
the dead. He stiffened, straining to catch the sound he had imagined.
It came again. The cough of a rocket tube.
A wild hope flamed in Gavin's blue eyes. The roar of the jets blasted
into life. The cabin heeled sharply to starboard. Gavin slid down
the sloping deck until he fetched up against the bulkhead, which had
suddenly become the floor.
The _Nova_, he realized in a flood of relief, had come out of the fall
and was speeding parallel to the surface. He sat down, his joints
turning to water. He had a violent urge to be sick.
Gavin's first belief that the attacking ship had been one of Terra's
patrol spacers gave way to doubt. In the first place, the _Nova_ hadn't
been beyond Venus' thousand-mile-limit. Furthermore, he didn't believe
a Terran patrol ship would have waylaid the _Nova_ outward bound when
she was innocent of her cargo of slaves.
Then who was it?
He heard a bolt click back. The door through which he had entered was
directly overhead. The _Nova_, though, had been constructed for flying
either keel-on or stern-down. The passages which previously had been
horizontal were now vertical, and the vertical wells running from bow
to stern lay horizontal to the angle of flight. A door which had been
overhead when they were shooting straight up, now was directly across
the cabin.
As Gavin watched, it swung open. Nadia Petrovna was framed in the
opening.
She said in a breathless tight voice, "You've got to take over the
engine room! Half the black gang are dead or laid up! Captain Cabot
sent me to fetch you!"
Her hair, Gavin saw, had come undone and fell about her bare white
shoulders like an inky cloud. A trickle of blood drew a crooked red
line from a cut above her left eye down across her high cheek bone to
her small pointed chin. One of the rose plastic breast plates had been
torn completely away, and the rose gown was split up her left hip from
sandal to belt.
Gavin plunged for the door.
"This way!" Nadia started aft at a run. "The ladder! The elevators are
stalled!"
"Chief engineer?" Gavin grunted. "Where's the chief?"
"Unconscious! Concussion. Don't know how serious," she flung back at
him as she dashed along the corridor, her torn skirt streaming out
behind her. "The first is dead. The second has a broken leg."
She reached the emergency ladder and threw herself down it with
reckless abandon. Gavin followed a little more cautiously.
The engine room, Gavin saw when he and Nadia dropped to the deck, was
functioning smoothly enough now, although there was no evidence of the
explosion. A smear of blood against a bulkhead caught his eyes, then a
twisted body lashed to the deck.
But a jetman, a yellow Venusian girl, naked to the waist, was at her
post beside the quartzite windows of the tubes. Sweat poured off her
in rivulets as she watched the color of the explosions to check the
mixture.
The master mechanic, a fat Terran, was at the bridge televisor. He gave
Gavin a relieved glance. "Bridge calling, sir."
Gavin jumped to the televisor. He saw the lean wolfish profile of
Captain Cabot on the screen. Cabot's cheek had been laid open to the
bone. One arm swung uselessly. His features were bleak as granite.