Gavin's first impression was one of numbing cold. He opened his eyes.
Pitch blackness engulfed him. He had difficulty orienting himself.
Rather hazily, he recalled the shelling of the cantonment by X's men.
Gradually his mind cleared.
The swift Jovian night had fallen, he perceived, and the temperature
had dropped sharply. Only his insulating outer garments had saved him
from freezing.
He began to grope around for Nadia's body. He found nothing but bare
ground, stones, shrubs.
He sat back on his haunches, getting his bearings. The night pressed
against his eyeballs; silence rang in his ears. No popping of dum-dum
fire was to be heard. Whether the raiders had won, or Cabot was still
in possession of his ship, he couldn't tell. But the fight was over.
X, himself, he realized, couldn't possibly have reached Jupiter yet.
Even if he had been aboard one of the ships which had pursued the
_Nova_ out from Venus, a whole year must elapse before he could arrive.
Then, if X's men had attacked the _Nova_, they had been planted here
earlier and had been waiting in ambush.
That meant X had been tipped off to the location of the hidden slave
cantonment on Jupiter.
Something brushed against Gavin's face! It felt like cold fingertips.
Gavin's arms flailed the air in stark terror. He struck a soft, cold,
hairless body. There was a barrage of half-human squeaks. The air was
full of the fluttering of wings.
Scavenger bats!
Gavin felt a prickling of cold sweat break through his skin. He began
to grope feverishly for the girl's body again, working outward in an
ever-widening spiral.
After an hour he had lengthened the radius of his search until he was
among the debris of the cantonment. He sat back on his haunches, sure
of only one thing. Nadia Petrovna was not there!
The air above the demolished cantonment was thick with the squeaks and
wing rushing of the hairless bats. A faint yellow glow heralded the
dawn.
If the _Nova_ hadn't sailed, there was still hope.
Gavin drove himself to his feet, prowled the debris in search of
the road. He started hundreds of the half-human scavenger bats into
whispering, squeaking flight, stumbled across countless bodies. The
raiders had been thorough.
At length he found the paved highway, began to follow it by feel.
A wind was blowing across the road. Gavin had to fight it like a man
fording a stream against a strong current. The light, though, continued
to brighten until he could make out the trace beneath his feet. Then
the towering bulk of the _Nova_ loomed dead ahead.
She wasn't gone! Gavin flung himself gasping on the ground, trembling
with exhaustion.
He rested only long enough to control his trembling muscles, then began
to skirt the ship towards the blind spot in the rear. He stayed out of
sight. He had no desire to be spied by a possible watch posted at the
scanner.
The disposal chute was just forward of the rear jets. Gavin reached it
unobserved, as far as he could see, and began to worm his way up the
inside of the tube like a climber ascending a chimney. He reached the
lock and got his shoulder beneath it. The lock had been designed to
operate in space where the pressure inside the ship helped seal it.
Now, aided by Jupiter's dense atmosphere, he succeeded in prying the
lock up and scrambling into the trap.
Ten minutes later, he climbed out of the chute directly aft of the
galley. The air was warm and light, bringing him the odor of cooking
soup.
The passage was deserted.
Gavin slipped into the escape well which led from the engine room to
the _Nova's_ outer skin, clambered downward again. He stepped from the
escape well softly into the engine room itself.
At first he thought it was deserted. Then he discovered a guard posted
beside the sealed door in the aft bulkhead. Gavin had never seen him
before. He was a big Terran in coarse outer garments. He was facing
half away from the T.I.S. agent, holding a dart-gun.
Gavin slipped his fingers through his brass knucks. He edged cautiously
from behind the _Nova's_ cyclotron, crept up on the man with the
stealth of a ferret. At the last moment, the fellow heard him and swung
around.
Gavin clipped him behind his ear with the weight of his shoulder back
of the blow. The guard's head banged against the steel bulkhead. He
slipped nervelessly to a sitting posture, tumbled sideways. His breath
bubbled with a rattling sound from his mouth. Then he stopped breathing.
* * * * *
Without bothering to check his pulse, Gavin turned to the control
panel. The fuel gauge showed a comfortable surplus.
Ears straining to catch any untoward sound, he slowly pulled down the
lever which dumped the fuel, watched the gauge with a growing tensity
of nerves.
The level in the gauge dropped tantalizingly slowly, as the liquid
fuel bubbled out of the tanks onto the surface of Jupiter to saturate
the soil. It was still a half-inch from the empty symbol when he heard
voices.
Someone was descending the ladder into the engine room.
Gavin's jaw set; his lips thinned. With his left hand he drew his
dart-gun, but he didn't release the dumping lever. The gauge showed a
three-eighths of an inch, then a quarter. A pair of boots descended
into his range of vision followed by the legs and waist of a man.
The man reached the deck, faced around and stared at the T.I.S. agent
in astonishment. "Don't move!" began Gavin.