Quillan hesitated, darting a glance right and left. Men lying about
everywhere, the furnishings a shambles. "That you, Baldy?" he asked.
"Yeah," Baldy Perk half sobbed. "I'm hurt--"
"What happened?"
"_Star_ gang jumped us. Portaled in here--spitballs and riot guns! Bad
News, we're clean wiped out! Everyone that was on this level--"
Quillan stood up, holstering the gun, went over to the couch and moved
it carefully away from the wall. Baldy was crouched behind it,
kneeling on the blood-soaked carpet, gun in his right hand. He lifted
a white face, staring eyes, to Quillan.
"Waitin' for 'em to come back," he muttered. "Man, I'm not for long!
Got hit twice. Near passed out a couple of times already."
"What about your boys on guard downstairs?"
"Same thing there, I guess ... or they'd have showed up. They got
Cooms and the Duke, too! Man, it all happened fast!"
"And the crew on the freighter?"
"Dunno about them."
"You know the freighter's call number?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure. Never thought of that," Baldy said wearily. He
seemed dazed now.
"Let's see if you can stand."
Quillan helped the big man to his feet. Baldy hadn't bled too much
outwardly, but he seemed to have estimated his own condition
correctly. He wasn't for long. Quillan slid an arm under his
shoulders.
"Where's a ComWeb?" he asked.
Baldy blinked about. "Passage there--" His voice was beginning to
thicken.
The ComWeb was in the second room up the passage. Quillan eased Perk
into the seat before it. Baldy's head lolled heavily forward, like a
drunken man's. "What's the number?" Quillan asked.
Baldy reflected a few seconds, blinking owlishly at the instrument,
then told him. Quillan tapped out the number, flicked on the vision
screen, then stood aside and back, beyond the screen's range.
"Yeah, Perk?" a voice said some seconds later. "Hey, _Perk_ ... Perk,
what's with ya?"
Baldy spat blood, grinned. "Shot--" he said.
"_What?_"
"Yeah." Baldy scowled, blinking. "Now, lessee--Oh, yeah. Star gang's
gonna jump ya! Watch it!"
"What?"
"Yeah, watch--" Baldy coughed, laid his big head slowly down face
forward on the ComWeb stand, and stopping moving.
"Perk! Man, wake up! Perk!"
Quillan quietly took out the gun, reached behind the stand and blew
the ComWeb apart. He wasn't certain what the freighter's crew would
make of the sudden break in the connection, but they could hardly
regard it as reassuring. He made a brief prowl then through the main
sections of the level. Evidence everywhere of a short and furious
struggle, a struggle between men panicked and enraged almost beyond
any regard for self-preservation. It must have been over in minutes.
He found that the big hall portal to the ground level had been sealed,
whether before or after the shooting he couldn't know. There would
have been around twenty members of the Brotherhood on the level. None
of them had lived as long as Baldy Perk, but they seemed to have
accounted for approximately an equal number of the Star's security
force first.
* * * * *
Five Star men came piling out of the fifth level portal behind him a
minute or two later, Ryter in the lead. Orca behind Ryter. All five
held leveled guns.
"You won't need the hardware," Quillan assured them. "It's harmless
enough now. Come on in."
They followed him silently up to the cubicle, stared comprehendingly
at dials and indicators. "The thing's back inside there, all right!"
Ryter said. He looked at Quillan. "Is this where you've been all the
time?"
"Sure, Where else?" The others were forming a half-circle about him, a
few paces back.
"Taking quite a chance with that Hlat, weren't you?" Ryter remarked.
"Not too much. I thought of something." Quillan indicated the
outportal in the hall. "I had my back against that. A portal's
space-break, not solid matter. It couldn't come at me from behind. And
if it attacked from any other angle"--he tapped the holstered Miam
Devil lightly, and the gun in Orca's hand jerked upward a fraction of
an inch--"There aren't many animals that can swallow more than a bolt
or two from that baby and keep coming."
There was a moment's silence. Then Orca said thoughtfully, "That would
work!"
"Did it see you?" Ryter asked.
"It couldn't have. First _I_ saw of it, it was sailing out from that
corner over there. It slammed in after that chunk of sea beef so fast,
it shook the cubicle. And that was that." He grinned. "Well, most of
our troubles should be over now!"
One of the men gave a brief, nervous laugh. Quillan looked at him
curiously. "Something, chum?"
Ryter shook his head. "Something is right! Come on downstairs again,
Bad News. This time we have news for you--"
The Brotherhood guards on the ground level had been taken by surprise
and shot down almost without losses for the Star men. But the battle
on the fourth level had cost more than the dead left up there. An
additional number had returned with injures that were serious enough
to make them useless for further work.
"It's been expensive," Ryter admitted. "But one more attack by the
Hlat would have left me with a panicked mob on my hands. If we'd
realized it was going to trap itself--"
"I wasn't so sure that would work either," Quillan said. "Did you get
Kinmarten back?"
"Not yet. The chances are he's locked up somewhere on the fourth
level. Now the Hlat's out of the way, some of the men have gone back
up there to look for him. If Cooms thought he was important enough to
start a fight over, I want him back."
"How about the crew on the Beldon ship?" Quillan asked, "Have they
been cleaned up?"
"No," Ryter said. "We'll have to do that now, of course."
"How many of them?"
"Supposedly twelve. And that's probably what it is."
"If they know or suspect what's happened," Quillan said, "twelve men
can give a boarding party in a lock a remarkable amount of trouble."
Ryter shrugged irritably. "I know, but there isn't much choice.
Lancion's bringing in the other group on the _Camelot_. We don't want
to have to handle both of them at the same time."
"How are you planning to take the freighter?"
"When the search party comes back down, we'll put every man we can
spare from guard duty here on the job. They'll be instructed to be
careful about it ... if they can wind up the matter within the next
several hours, that will be early enough. We can't afford too many
additional losses now. But we should come out with enough men to take
care of Lancion and handle the shipment of Hlats. And that's what
counts."
"Like me to take charge of the boarding party?" Quillan inquired.
"That sort of thing's been a kind of specialty of mine."
Ryter looked at him without much expression on his face. "I understand
that," he said. "But perhaps it would be better if you stayed up here
with us."
* * * * *
The search party came back down ten minutes later. They'd looked
through every corner of the fourth level. Kinmarten wasn't there,
either dead or alive. But one observant member of the group had
discovered, first, that the Duke of Fluel was also not among those
present, and, next that one of the four outportals on the level had
been unsealed. The exit on which the portal was found to be set was in
a currently unused hall in the General Office building on the other
side of the Star. From that hall, almost every other section of the
Star was within convenient portal range.
None of the forty-odd people working in the main control office on the
ground level had actually witnessed any shooting; but it was apparent
that a number of them were uncomfortably aware that something quite
extraordinary must be going on. They were a well-disciplined group,
however. An occasional uneasy glance toward one of the armed men
lounging along the walls, some anxious faces, were the only noticeable
indications of tension. Now and then, there was a brief, low-pitched
conversation at one of the desks.
Quillan stood near the center of the office, Ryter and Orca a dozen
feet from him on either side. Four Star guards were stationed along
the walls. From the office one could see through a large doorspace cut
through both sides of a hall directly into the adjoining transmitter
room. Four more guards were in there. Aside from the men in the
entrance hall and at the subspace portal, what was available at the
moment of Ryter's security force was concentrated at this point.
The arrangement made considerable sense; and Quillan gave no sign of
being aware that the eyes of the guards shifted to him a little more
frequently than to any other point in the office, or that none of them
had moved his hand very far away from his gun since they had come in
here. But that also made sense. In the general tension area of the
Executive Block's ground level, a specific point of tension--highly
charged though undetected by the non-involved personnel--was the one
provided by the presence of Bad News Quillan here. Ryter was more than
suspicious by now; the opened portal on the fourth level, the
disappearance of Kinmarten and the Duke, left room for a wide variety
of speculations. Few of those speculations could be very favorable to
Bad News. Ryter obviously preferred to let things stand as they were
until the Beldon freighter was taken and the major part of his group
had returned from the subspace sections of the Star. At that time, Bad
News could expect to come in for some very direct questioning by the
security chief.
The minutes dragged on. Under the circumstances, a glance at his watch
could be enough to bring Ryter's uncertainties up to the explosion
point, and Quillan also preferred to let things stand as they were for
the moment. But he felt reasonably certain that over an hour had
passed since he'd left Reetal; and so far there had been no hint of
anything unusual occurring in the front part of the building. The
murmur of voices in the main control office continued to eddy about
him. There were indications that in the transmitter room across the
hall messages had begun to be exchanged between the Star and the
approaching liner.
A man sitting at a desk near Quillan stood up presently, went out into
the hall and disappeared. A short while later, the white-suited figure
returned and picked up the interrupted work. Quillan's glance went
over the clerk, shifted on. He felt something tighten up swiftly
inside him. There was a considerable overall resemblance, but _that_
wasn't the man who had left the office.
Another minute or two went by. Then two other uniformed figures
appeared at the opening to the hall, a sparse elderly man, a blond
girl. They stood there talking earnestly together for some seconds,
then came slowly down the aisle toward Quillan. It appeared to be an
argument about some detail of her work. The girl frowned, stubbornly
shaking her head. Near Quillan they separated, started off into
different sections of the office. The girl, glancing back, still
frowning, brushed against Ryter. She looked up at him, startled.
"I'm sorry," she said.
Ryter scowled irritably, started to say something, suddenly appeared
surprised. Then his eyes went blank and his knees buckled under him.
The clerk sitting at the nearby desk whistled shrilly.
Quillan wheeled, gun out and up, toward the wall behind him. The two
guards there were still lifting their guns. The Miam Devil grunted
disapprovingly twice, and the guards went down. Noise crashed from the
hall ... heavy sporting rifles. He turned again, saw the two other
guards stumbling backward along the far wall. Feminine screaming
erupted around the office as the staff dove out of sight behind desks,
instrument stands and filing cabinets. The elderly man stood above
Orca, a sap in his hand and a please smile on his face.
In the hallway, four white-uniformed men had swung about and were
pointing blazing rifles into the transmitter room. The racketing of
the gunfire ended abruptly and the rifles were lowered again. The
human din in the office began to diminish, turned suddenly into a
shocked, strained silence. Quillan realized the blond girl was
standing at his elbow.
"Did you get the rest of them?" he asked quickly, in a low voice.
"Everyone who was on this level," Reetal told him. "There weren't many
of them."
"I know. But there's a sizable batch still in the subspace section. If
we can get the bomb disarmed, we'll just leave them sealed up there.
How long before you can bring Ryter around?"
"He'll be able to talk in five minutes."
* * * * *
Quillan had been sitting for some little while in a very comfortable
chair in what had been the commodore's personal suite on the Seventh
Star, broodingly regarding the image of the _Camelot_ in a huge wall
screen. The liner was still over two hours' flight away but would
arrive on schedule. On the Star, at least in the normspace section,
everything was quiet, and in the main control offices and in the
transmitter room normal working conditions had been restored.
A room portal twenty feet away opened suddenly, and Reetal Destone
stepped out.
"So there you are!" she observed.
[Illustration]
Quillan Looked mildly surprised, then grinned. "I'd hate to have to
try to hide from you!" he said.
"Hm-m-m!" said Reetal. She smiled. "What are you drinking?"
He nodded at an open liquor cabinet near the screen. "Velladon was
leaving some excellent stuff behind. Join me?"
"Hm-m-m." She went to the cabinet, looked over the bottles, made her
selection and filled a glass. "One has the impression," she remarked,
"that you _were_ hiding from me."
"One does? I'd have to be losing my cotton-picking mind--"
"Not necessarily." Reetal brought the drink over to his chair, sat
down on the armrest with it. "You might just have a rather
embarrassing problem to get worked out before you give little Reetal a
chance to start asking questions about it."