The Star Hyacinths
Page 7
behindDuomart. He pinched her then in a markedly unparalyzed and vigorousmanner.
Duomart's right eyelid flickered for an instant.
* * * * *
"Somebody wrung the little monster's neck before I got here," sheremarked. "But there're other necks _I'd_ sooner wring! Your partner's,for instance. Not that he's necessarily the biggest louse around at themoment." She nodded at Calat. "The two runches who call themselvesFleetmen don't intend to share the star hyacinths even with their owngang! They're rushing the job through so they can be on their way to theHub before the Spy arrives. And don't think Liu Taunus trusts thatmuscle-bound foogal standing there, either! He's hanging on to the keyof 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?" Shelooked at Dasinger. "They're not shooting _me_ right off, you know," shetold him. "They're annoyed with me, so they're taking me along forsomething a little more special. But they'll have to skip the fun if theSpy shows up, or I'll be telling twenty armed Fleetmen exactly whatkind of thieving cheats they have leading them!" She looked back atCalat, smiled, placed the tip of her tongue lightly between her lips foran instant, then pronounced a few dozen Fleet words in a clear, precisevoice.
It must have been an extraordinarily unflattering comment. Calat wentwhite, then red. Half-smart tough had been Duomart's earlier descriptionof him. It began to look like an accurate one ... Dasinger felt a surgeof pleased anticipation. His legs already were drawn well back beneaththe bench; he shifted his weight slowly forwards now, keeping anexpression of anxious concern on his face. Calat spoke in Fleetlingueagain, 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 tohis left hand and came striding purposefully towards Miss Mines, rightfist cocked. Then, as Dasinger tensed his legs happily, a muffled thumpfrom deep within the wreck announced the opening of the star hyacinthvault.
The sound was followed by instant proof that Hovig had trapped thevault.
Duomart and Calat screamed together. Dasinger drove himself forward offthe bench, aiming for the Fleetman's legs, checked and turned for thegun which Calat, staggering and shrieking, his face distorted withlunatic terror, had flung aside. Dr. Egavine, alert for thiscontingency, already was stooping for the gun, hand outstretched, whenDasinger lunged against him, bowling him over.
* * * * *
Dasinger came up with the gun, Quist pounding at his shoulders, flungthe little man aside, turned back in a frenzy of urgency. Duomarttwisted about on the floor near the far end of the compartment, armscovering her face. The noises that bubbled out from behind her arms setDasinger's teeth on edge. She rolled over convulsively twice, stoppeddangerously close to the edge of the jagged break in the deck, wasturning again as Dasinger dropped beside her and caught her.
Immediately there was a heavy, painful blow on his shoulder. He glancedup, saw Quist running toward him, a rusted chunk of metal like the onehe had thrown in his raised hand, and Egavine peering at both of themfrom the other side of the compartment. Dasinger flung a leg acrossDuomart, pinning her down, pulled out the gun, fired without aiming.Quist reversed his direction almost in mid-stride. Dasinger firedagain, 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 thecloth of Duomart's uniform, and rammed the plunger down.
The drug hit hard and promptly. Between one instant and the next, theplunging and screaming ended; she drew in a long, shuddering breath,went limp, her eyes closing slowly. Dasinger was lifting her from thefloor when the complete silence in the compartment caught his attention.He looked around. Calat was not in sight. And only then did he becomeaware of a familiar sensation ... a Hovig generator's pulsing, savagestorm 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 lakebank stirred uneasily at twenty different points but he wasn't lookingfor the pair. With the Mooncat inaccessible to them, there was only oneplace they could go. Calat's body lay doubled up in the rocks below theramp, almost sixty feet down, where other human bodies had lain sixyears earlier. Dasinger glanced over at the Fleet scout, went back intothe compartment.
He was buckling himself into the third salvage suit when he heard thescout's lifeboat take off. At a guess Hovig's little private collectionof star hyacinths was taking off with it. Dasinger decided he couldn'tcare 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 throughthe water of the hold, and in a moment the headpiece of one of the othersuits broke the oily surface, stayed there, bobbing gently about.Dasinger climbed down, brought Liu Taunus's body back up to the lockcompartment, and recovered the Mooncat's master key.
He found Graylock floating in his suit against a bulkhead not far fromthe shattered vault where Hovig's two remaining generators thundered.Dasinger silenced the machines, fastened them and a small steel casecontaining nearly a hundred million credits' worth of star hyacinths tothe salvage carrier, and towed it all up to the lock compartment.
A very few minutes later, the Mooncat lifted in somewhat jerky, erraticfashion from the planet's surface. As Dasinger had suspected, he lacked,and by a good deal, Miss Mines's trained sensitivity with thespeedboat's controls; but he succeeded in wrestling the little ship upto a five-mile altitude where a subspace dive might be carried out inrelative safety.
He was attempting then to get the Mooncat's nose turned away from thedistant volcano ranges towards which she seemed determined to point whenthe detector needles slapped flat against their pins and the alarm bellsounded. A strange ship stood outlined in the Mooncat's stern screen.
* * * * *
The image vanished as Dasinger hit the dive button, simultaneouslyflattening the speed controls with a slam of his hand. The semisolidsubspace turbulence representing the mountain ranges beyond the lakeflashed instantly past below him ... within yards, it seemed. Anothersecond put them beyond the planet's atmosphere. Then the Spy reappearedin subspace, following hard. A hammering series of explosions showedsuddenly in the screens, kept up for a few hair-raising moments, beganto drop back. Five minutes later, with the distance between themwidening rapidly, the Spy gave up the chase, swung around and headedback towards the planet.
Dasinger shakily reduced his ship's speed to relatively sane level, kepther moving along another twenty minutes, then surfaced into normspaceand set a general course for the Hub. He was a very fair yachtsman fora planeteer. But after riding the Mooncat for the short time he'd turnedher loose to keep ahead of the Spy through the G2's stress zone, hedidn't have to be told that in Fleet territory he was outclassed. Hemopped his forehead, climbed gratefully out of the pilot seat and wentto the cot he had hauled into the control room, to check on DuomartMines.
She was still unconscious, of course; the dose he'd given her was enoughto knock a kwil-sensitive out for at least a dozen hours. Dasingerlooked down at the filth-smudged, pale face, the bruised cheeks andblackened left eye for a few seconds, then opened Dr. Egavine's medicalkit to do what he could about getting Miss Mines patched up again.
Fifteen hours later she was still asleep, though to all outerappearances back in good repair. Dasinger happened to be bemusedlystudying her face once more when she opened her eyes and gazed up athim.
"We made it! You ..." She smiled, tried to sit up, looked startled, thenindignant. "What's the idea of tying me down to this thing?"
Dasinger nodded. "I guess you're all there!" He reached down to unfa
stenher from the cot. "After what happened, I wasn't so sure you'd beentirely rational when the kwil wore off and you woke up."
Duomart paled a little. "I hadn't imagined ..." She shook her blondhead. "Well, let's skip that! I'll have nightmares for years.... Whathappened to the others?"
* * * * *
Dasinger told her, concluded, "Egavine may have run into the Spy, but Idoubt it. He'll probably show up in the Hub eventually with the gems hetook from Calat, and if he doesn't get caught peddling them he may windup with around a million credits ... about the sixth part of what hewould have collected if he'd stopped playing crooked and trying to geteverything. I doubt the doctor will ever quit kicking