He drove the sled out of the city at its highest speed, toward the starport. He passed out of the blue radiance and was again in the semidarkness beneath the mourning black sky. Now he met sleds returning from having loaded a first cargo of loot aboard ship, going back for more. Their drivers waved to him elatedly.
When he reached the starport and threaded his way between the little Varnan ships he saw loading still going on at some of them. With reckless speed, in the semidarkness, Chane drove on toward the flagship.
Outside the ship, as though waiting for him, stood two tall Varnan figures, dark in the shadows.
Vengant.
And Harkann.
Instantly Chane knew that there was going to be trouble.
Harkann should not be here; he should be back in the city supervising the operation.
Chane stopped the sled and got off it. And Harkann said in a harsh voice, "I was curious, Chane. I found you'd slipped away and I wondered what it was you were after."
Chane shrugged. "The Council gave me the right to select one single treasure for myself—whatever I wanted. And why are you worried about that? Haven't I brought you to the greatest plunder Varna has taken for years?"
"The plunder is fine indeed," said Harkann. "So fine that I wondered why you would pass it by and go after something else. What have you got on the sled?"
Well, Chane thought, it would have had to come to the pinch sooner or later, so it might as well be now.
He reached forward with both hands and pulled the silken black hanging toward him.
Both Harkann and Vengant stared, astonished, at the glorious thing on the sled. "The Singing Suns," said Harkann slowly, and shook his head as though not believing what he saw. "They were broken up and sold, but here they are ... for the second time in Varnan hands."
Chane, still holding the silken hanging idly, corrected him. "In my hand. I claim the Suns by Council right."
Harkann slowly turned his stunned gaze from the singing jewels to Chane. His face became passionate, his upslanting eyes flaming like embers.
"Oh, no," he said. "No outworld bastard is going to take this all for himself."
"The Council right—" began Chane, and Harkann raged, "The hell with the Council right. We Ranroi would have had your life anyway when we got back to Varna, and it might as well be now!"
Chane triggered his stunner. He had drawn it gently from his belt behind the black hanging he was holding, while the others were staring at the mobile in amazement and greed. The thing buzzed nastily and the force of it went through the cloth as easily as through air. Harkann and Vengant stiffened and toppled over.
Chane dropped the concealing cloth. He muttered to the two still forms, "I should have used it on lethal, but I've got enough feud with the Ranroi without that. Sleep for a while, my friends."
He glanced swiftly around. Some of the Varnan ships being loaded from the loot-piled sleds were not too far away, but in the noise and cheerful confusion and the semidarkness nobody seemed to have noticed.
He bent down and dragged Harkann and then Vengant some little distance from the ship and threw the black hanging over them.
The air lock doors of the ship were open, and they were very wide doors, wide enough to admit a sled. When the Starwolves departed a planet with a load of loot they wanted to depart in a hurry. Chane ran the sled up the gangway and into the ship and maneuvered it to the rear of the main compartment. There were clamps there to lock sleds fast, and in a moment he had his cargo secured. The Suns glittered and sang and wove their dance serenely.
Chane jumped to the pilot chair, hit the lever that sealed all locks, and got the power unit started. When the power unit had built to a barely sufficient level, Chane took the little ship off in a steep climb.
As he shot toward the starless sky he looked down and could see startled faces turned up to him. It would not be long, he thought, before somebody stumbled over Harkann and Vengant. But it would take quite a time to bring them around, time enough, he hoped, to get away with the Suns.
A sudden wild emotion filled him as he sent the little ship arrowing out headlong from dark Chlann. He had snatched the Singing Suns away from the damned Qajars and from Harkann both.
He had not planned at all to do it this way. He had supposed that he would have no choice but to go back to Varna with Harkann, and then try to slip away with the Suns before the Ranroi could finish him off. He had never had the slightest intention of going through single combats with one after another of the Ranroi until inevitably they got hjm. He considered that too damned unfair, when there were hundreds of them and only one of him.
But Harkann had changed the plan by his sudden access of rage, and Chane like a good Starwolf, had changed his tactics in mid-leap.
Fine, he thought. This is much better ... so far. But what if they track me?
That was a problem he would have to face, but not now. His first job was to get out of the dark, crowded cluster and into overdrive.
He headed the ship through the clutter of ashen suns and stony black planets, toward the Spur but not toward Rith. Instead, he laid his course for Varna.
They would be ranging him, back there on Chlann, wondering why the devil a Varnan ship had taken off prematurely, and where it was going. He had better try to deceive them as to his course, though he knew in his heart that no Starwolf would fall for such a clumsy trick. At the moment, it was the only one he could think of.
It was dangerous to go into overdrive too near to a celestial body of any size. It had been done, but not very often. More times than not, the gravitic field had flawed the overdrive reaction and made wreckage out of the ship.
Chane was always willing to take chances but it did not seem to him that there was any real need to risk suicide. He urged the ship to its highest speed, thinking as he looked at the view-port that he never wanted to see this cursed little clutch of dead suns and mourning planets again.
He broke clear of the cluster at last, and now in the distance ahead stretched the immense coast of tarnished fire that was the Argo Spur. When he was at a marginally safe distance from the cluster, he set up the overdrive controls.
Before switching on he looked back at the rear range screen. There were four blips showing, and he knew then that he had overestimated the time it would take to bring Harkann back to consciousness.
"That's what I get for playing it soft like John is always telling me," he muttered. "I should have used lethal."
The pursuers were after him.
XIX
It was a dead, dark, airless world, infinitely desolate and useless, but it was a hiding place. And Chane was hiding.
He had got well inside the Spur when he decided that he had best go to ground. He knew the bitterness and rage with which Harkann and his Ranroi would sweep and quarter after him, waiting for the time when he would have to come out of overdrive, when they could spot him and pounce.
He could not fight four cruisers, or one cruiser. He was only one man, not a crew, and while he could keep the ship going he could not possibly fly it and fight it both. A hiding place was his best chance, and this dead planet of a giant red star looked like the best one he could find in time.
There were no telltale blips on his screen as yet. But he knew better than to linger.
He had dropped out of overdrive on the back side of the dead planet, so that the mass of the world itself served as a screen against their radar. Then he began a quick and frantic search for metal deposits. When the analyzer showed him one of a size and content to meet his needs, he landed the ship at once.
It was a hazardous landing, in the bottom of a narrow gully between glistening rock walls. The ship took a banging, but endured. Chane got into his suit and helmet, cracked the lock and clambered out. Climbing up the side of the rock wall, he used one of the portable lasers he had brought to dislodge a shower of small fragments and he hoped that he was not going to dislodge a big boulder that would crash down and do an evil to the ship. He did
not. He played the laser with skill, and presently the upper part of the ship's hull was dusted thickly with particles of rock debris.
It was a pretty faulty protective coloration, Chane thought, but it would have to do. The debris, containing heavy metal deposits, should blend the ship more or less indistinguishably into the background. The Ranroi would do a search sweep with their analyzers, but Varnan analyzers were not fine scientific instruments; they were, rather, simple affairs designed to detect ambushed ships and the like. With luck, they would simply note an area of metal-bearing rock and go on.
With luck. ...
Sitting in his camouflaged ship and watching the screen, Chane grinned to himself. Luck. "If we have luck they'll go away." That was what Nimurun had said years ago when their Starwolf party had raided the Pleiades and nearly been caught, and they had had to hide their ships in the ghastly metal ruins of a war-destroyed world. Well, they had had luck that time, and all he could do now was hope it would repeat, and in the meantime drink some of the Varnan wine and watch the screen.
Nothing, yet. But he was sure they would be along. They could be very patient, very thorough in their search.
He turned and considered the Singing Suns. Here in the confines of the ship their music was louder, but still soft. It changed and changed in infinite permutations of melodic phrases, always singing of the glory of the great suns, the majesty and burning splendor of the mighty stars that lorded space.
And the Suns moved in their endless glittering mazy dance, and when he looked at them long enough it was as it had been when he first saw them on Chlann: he seemed to be drawn among them and they became, not singing jewels, but flaming giants whose mighty star-song filled the whole of space.
An hypnotic effect? He did not think so. The Suns had no need for such tricks as hypnotism. Their beauty of sight and sound held one imprisoned in a dream.
He had better not get too imprisoned, he thought, and turned to look again at the screen.
He tensed sharply. Two blips moved across it, two ships orbiting this dead world at high speed, moving in the familiar search-sweep pattern. Chane knew that their analyzers, tuned to detect metal, would be probing with broad fans of force, seeking a metal ship on the desolate rock.
The blips came around fast and Chane whispered, "Nothing down here but a metal outcrop, boys. Go right on."
They did. Had the metal outcrop fooled them, or would they come down to investigate?
The minutes went by. The Suns sang softly, of cosmic beauty and strength, of beginnings and endings, of the life of stars which men can never know.
The two blips came on again. They were continuing the search pattern southward. They were not coming down. Chane exhaled pent-up breath.
He continued to watch as they completed their sweep of the planet. Finally the two blips left the screen entirely. They had gone.
Chane did nothing. He continued to sit there arid pour himself the golden wine and listen to the singing of the Suns.
He was not through with the Ranroi yet.
Harkann and his little squadron would shake out this whole part of the Spur before they left. That was certain. For Harkann would not want to go back to
Varna and admit that his clan-enemy the damned Earthman had foxed him, used his mission as a cat's-paw to take the Singing Suns, and gone off with them in Harkann's own ship. Even though the raid would have brought home plunder rich beyond even Starwolf dreams, Harkann would not want to face that.
How Berkt would laugh if he heard that, thought Chane. How all Varna would laugh!
But the laughter would never come if Harkann could prevent it. He and his Ranroi ships would hang to the search like grim death.
Should he leave this planet, try to slip away before the search swung back? Chane thought not. It was exactly what they were looking for; this preliminary sweep was designed to flush him out, urge him to run so that he could be spotted and chased. He had made his gamble when he hid here, and he would push that bet all the way.
He drank, and ate, and slept, and waited. He did not once go outside the ship. Nothing must be disturbed in any way.
Days went by before two blips again came onto the screen. The two ships made exactly the same search-sweep over the planet as before. And Chane knew that the analyzers would be probing again while their little tape-banks chattered through Comparison. If one small object did not correspond exactly with the record of the first sweep, the ship would land and investigate.
The two ships finished their search and went away again. But still Chane made no move. A section of the Spur was a big place to search, and the Ranroi would likely be around for quite some time yet.
Chane hated waiting and doing nothing; all Starwolves hated that. But they could be very good at it when they had to, for there were times in their dangerous trade when it was necessary.
The Suns sang on. It seemed to him, as he watched and listened day after day, that the rising and falling music spoke words, not faulty words such as humans use, but the pure and perfect language of stars.
What did stars talk about, in that silver-singing speech? Of the birth of the universe, when they first exploded into being? Of the mighty rivers of force that ran between them, of the darkening and dying of old comrades, of the dreadful and glorious fate of novae, of the thin, far-off messages that came from brother giants remote across the intergalactic void?
Chane dreamed of these things, but this time he did not let his dreaming interrupt his careful watch on the screen. And there came a time when he saw five faint and distant blips moving away in the direction of Varna.
Chane laughed. "So you finally gave it up, Harkann? I'll gamble that your crews made you do it."
Chane knew the Starwolves, and he knew how it would be with those crews, how eager they would be to get back to Varna and celebrate one of the richest raids in history, and to hell with Ranroi vengeance and Harkann's private feud until after we've had a time!
He waited for a safe interval and then got busy. He put on the suit and helmet, undamped the sled which bore the Suns, and maneuvered it out through the big air lock into the vacuum outside.
The fierce glare of the red giant illuminated the floor of the narrow rock valley. Chane drove the sled along the valley, mile after mile, until he found the place he wanted.
It was a deep cave in the base of one of the enclosing cliffs. It could not have been formed by erosion—this world had never had an atmosphere from its looks—but bursting gases when the planet was formed had created this bubble. High above it on the steep cliff-face was a place where the rock bulged outward.
Chane drove the sled deep into the cave. He took the Singing Suns off the sled and set them on the rock. In the darkness here they still gleamed with supernal beauty, but in the soundless vacuum he could not hear them.
He left the Suns there and backed the sled outside. Then with the laser mounted on the sled he attacked the bulge of rock high above on the cliff. The laser flashed and flashed, quite silently, cutting deep. Finally a section of the cliff tumbled down and effectively sealed the entrance to the cave.
Chane made careful note of the exact location and then turned the sled back toward the ship.
When he was ready he took the ship off with a bold rush. It was an almost suicidal risk to take off from a cramped place like this valley, and he wanted to make it fast or not at all.
He made it. He came up off the dead planet and swept past the glaring red sun, laying his course for Rith.
XX
Storm was sweeping across the night side of Rith where the little capital of Eron lay. Chane had counted on the frequency of the storms here, and he had not brought his ship toward the planet until he was sure another of the interminable tempests was raging.
The ships of the Starwolves were unmistakable because of their small, needle-like shape that had been designed to endure the sudden turns that gave the Varnans their big advantage in space. And when a Starwolf ship arrived at any planet other than V
arna it would pretty surely be met by a hail of missiles.
Chane had had experience with the way the great thunderstorms of Rith played the devil with radar and scanners, and he was hoping to get down on the starport without being scanned.
He got the ship down all right, and the solid downpour of water prevented visual observation. But also his own instruments being aborted led to his making such a bad landing that he was glad no one had seen it.
He worked very fast now, before the storm should cease. He set up the automatic controls so that in three minutes the ship would take off on a course laid for Varna, with the automatic trips set to detour around all celestial obstacles. He was damned if he was going to let a Varnan ship and its secrets fall into enemy hands.
He was grinning as he cracked the lock and started out of the ship.
"How sheepish Harkann will be if his ship comes wandering home empty-handed after him!"
The rain smashing in his face took the laughter out of him. He started struggling through the hellish downpour, and he only heard in a muffled way when the ship he had just left took off. He hoped he could make it to one of the starport administration buildings before he was flattened.
Two hours later, Chane sat in the big cold barny room he had burglarized not too long before. Two of the runty red guards watched him. He thought they must be the same two he had knocked out and tied up, the murderous way they watched him.
Eron and Dilullo came in. Dilullo gave Chane a sour look that had no warmth in it.
"So, we've got you back again, have we?" he said.
"Thanks for the welcome, John," said Chane. "From the way you look, and from the fact you've recovered your usual sunny temper, I take it you're normal again."
Eron had folded his arms and was glaring at Chane in what was intended to be a crushing manner. But when Chane did not look at him, the little red king suddenly roared, "You stole one of my scout-ships! Where is it?"
Chane smiled at him. "It's far away. I don't think you'll ever see it again."
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