“Do whatever you want,” he said, stepping back as Julie released his shoulder.
Stan pushed open the door that led into the Dolomite proper. As it opened, an alarm went off deep inside the ship. The lights in the corridor behind the door began to flash. There was a sound of heavy running feet, and then two men in brown security-guard uniforms came hurrying up with carbines at port arms.
“What’s going on?” one of the guards asked. “Halt, you people! No one is allowed here.”
“We’re authorized personnel,” Stan said. “I’m the new owner and these are my associates. Kindly escort us to your commanding officer.”
“Back off at once or I’ll fire,” the guard said. “This weapon is set for immediate paralysis. The company is not responsible for any broken limbs or other injuries suffered while resisting authorized orders.”
Julie said, “I warn you not to fire that thing.” Her body tensed. She seemed ready to throw herself at the guards.
There was a moment of impasse. The guards weren’t sure what to do. The situation wasn’t quite serious enough to warrant firing. Not yet. On the other hand, what were they supposed to do? They knew they could get into a lot of trouble if they didn’t handle this right.
A tall man in officer’s uniform came from a doorway inside the ship. “What is going on here?” he asked.
The senior guard said, “These people are trying to break in, Mr. Gill.”
Gill had a long, dark, mournful face. His features were small. His typical expression, in common with those of many androids, was impassive and a little melancholy. He stared at the new arrivals unbelievingly. At last he said, “Captain Hoban? Dr. Myakovsky?”
“And I am Julie Lish,” Julie said, holding out her hand.
Gill hesitated, then shook Julie’s hand.
One of the guards asked, “Do you know these people, sir?”
“Yes,” Gill said. “Stand back and let me handle this.”
The guards saluted and moved back against a wall.
“What is going on, Captain?” Gill asked.
Hoban looked unsure of himself, but his voice was firm enough as he answered, “Mr. Gill, I have decided to take command of the Dolomite again.”
“But, sir,” Gill protested, “a duly appointed court stripped you of this command and gave it to me to hold until the new captain arrives.”
“They had no right to relieve me of command,” Hoban said.
“Are you sure of that, sir?”
“Of course I’m sure, and I am taking over the ship again pending a formal hearing.”
“Perhaps you have that right, sir. I wouldn’t know. But meantime there is a legal decision against you, and to the best of my knowledge that has not been rescinded.”
Hoban looked confused. Stan put in, “We are going to appeal that ruling. A higher court can be counted on to reverse the decision.”
“I sincerely hope so, sir. But in the meantime—”
“In the meantime,” Hoban interrupted, showing a firmness that Stan had not been sure he possessed, “things return to where they were before. I will retain command of this ship until the higher court rules.”
“Unfortunately, sir, I am bound by the lower court’s decree.”
“Your first loyalty,” Hoban said, “is to me.”
Gill looked doubtful. “That is not how my orders read, sir.”
“Hang your orders!” Hoban cried. “I am giving you a direct command.”
Gill looked puzzled, worried. “My orders are to fire on you or anyone else who tries to board this ship.”
“I don’t believe you’ll do that, Gill.” Hoban started to walk toward the entry leading to the interior of the ship.
“Guards!” Gill called sharply. “Switch to killing mode.”
There was a double click as the guards switched their pulse rifles to killing mode.
Hoban smiled with a confidence he didn’t feel and walked toward the entry.
Gill cried, “Stop!”
Stan and Julie fell into step beside Hoban, who continued to advance.
Gill stared at them. There was something like despair on his face. He said, “I must do what I must.”
“And what is that, Gill?” Stan asked him.
Gill said, “Guards!”
The guards snapped to attention.
“Meet your new commander.”
The guards saluted Hoban, who returned the salute.
“Now turn off your weapons”—another double click—“and attend to the incoming crew. They should be arriving any minute. Then you are dismissed.”
“Yes, sir!” Both guards saluted, turned on their heels, and marched off.
“Welcome aboard, Commander,” Gill said.
“Thank you, Gill,” Hoban said. “I knew I could count on your loyalty.”
“It’s my conditioning that turned things your way, sir,” Gill said. “I could not fire on you, nor ask the guards to do so. After our many tours of duty together, you and I have developed too many bonds. But I still think what you are doing is illegal.”
“I know you feel that way,” Hoban said. “You may leave when the guards return to Earth, and no hard feelings.” He held out his hand.
Gill looked at it for a moment, then shook it. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’d like to come along.”
“But why, if you think this is illegal?”
“I don’t care if it’s illegal or not,” Gill said. “I was just stating a fact. Since I couldn’t fire on you, my conditioning in favor of government authority is canceled. I’m your man again, Captain, if you’ll have me.”
“It’s likely to be dangerous,” Hoban said.
“That is a matter of indifference to me.”
“Then I’ll be pleased to have you, Mr. Gill.” Captain Hoban smiled.
“If you two are finished waltzing,” Julie said sarcastically, “do you think we could get on with it?”
* * *
They accompanied Gill into the ship and to the control room.
Julie said to Gill, “How did you know what decision to make?”
“I didn’t know,” Gill muttered. “Androids don’t have to make decisions. We just follow our conditioning.”
“Lucky androids,” Julie said.
“Gill, we’re having some baggage lifted up from the space station,” Stan put in. “With it there will be a large packing case. Please see that it is handled gently.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When they arrive, get the crew bundled down in hypersleep. And get all the tourists off this ship. I want us ready to depart an hour after the crew is aboard and bedded down.”
Gill looked at Captain Hoban.
The captain nodded. “Accept his orders as if they were mine.”
* * *
The volunteers for the voyage of the Dolomite marched in single file under the watchful eyes of armed guards. They left the olive-drab prison lander and marched into the short connecting tube that led into the ship proper. As soon as they were aboard, they all burst into a cheer. The guards gave them hard looks, but put away their weapons and returned to the lander, accompanied by the two guards from the Dolomite. Their job was to see that the prisoners got aboard the ship; once aboard, they were no longer prisoners, though not quite free men, either. The arrangement was that they’d report to the proper authorities after returning from their voyage, and show their good-conduct papers signed by the captain, and receive either a commutation of sentence or a complete amnesty. In practice, many of them never bothered to return, and their names went on a wanted list, to which the authorities gave only minor attention. There were always plenty of new criminals to deal with; no one had any time for the older ones.
They followed the signs that had been set up to guide them to their quarter. But Walter Glint, a short, dark-haired barrel-chested man from Natchez who was Badger’s closest friend aboard, noticed that Red Badger wasn’t even bothering to look where he was going.
“Hey, Red! You been
on this ship before?”
“You bet I have,” Red Badger said. “I know her layout like the back of my hand.”
“How come you never said anything about it when that Hoban guy asked if you’d met before?”
Badger shrugged. “If he didn’t remember, I wasn’t going to remind him. It was a pretty bad time for him. I’ll tell you about it later.”
They went into the crew’s quarters. There was plenty of room. The Dolomite normally carried a crew of thirty-five, but Hoban had pared it down to the bare minimum after consulting with Stan. There was no trouble finding berths. Badger and Glint claimed their own corner, and were joined by their best friends from the federal facility. One of these, Connie Mindanao, was a diminutive woman, brown-skinned and black-haired and fierce looking, her features showing evidence of her mixed ancestry. She was the unlikely combination of a Moro from the Philippines and a Mohawk from New York’s Iroquois Confederation. The only thing the two peoples had had in common was a history of head-hunting. Of the other two, one was a big black man from California named Andy Groggins, and the second was a taciturn Laotian hill woman who didn’t say much but whose actions were direct and sudden, and apt to be lethal; her name was Min Dwin.
There were others who were friendly with Badger, and some who downright hated him. They sorted out their sleeping arrangements accordingly.
Badger was used to being the center of attention.
A voice came over the loudspeaker. “All crew! Put away your gear and strip for hypersleep. Everybody must be on his acceleration couch in five minutes.”
Badger called out, “What’s our destination?”
His voice was picked up by a wall monitor. “There’ll be a full briefing immediately upon your awakening,” the loudspeaker voice replied.
“How long we going to sleep this time?” Badger asked.
“That information will be fed into the hypersleep machinery. No more questions, people! Get ready.”
Connie Mindanao said, “What are they trying to pull on us? I don’t know if I’m going to stand still for this.” She looked at Badger. “What do you think, Red?”
“Relax,” Badger told her. “Nothing much we can do about it just now. The ship’s sealed, and anyhow, the guards are still outside. We’ve got no chance of making a run for it.”
They all settled down onto their hypersleep couches. The lights dimmed.
19
The Dolomite left its geosynchronous orbit and proceeded slowly to jump point: a position in space well enough beyond Earth’s orbit to permit subspace operation without peril to others. From there Hoban radioed for permission to disembark, and shortly thereafter received an okay from the Coast Guard monitoring station at L6.
Stan and his party strapped down. Hoban looked them over and asked, “All ready, Dr. Myakovsky?”
“Ready,” Stan said.
“All right,” Hoban said. “Mr. Gill—get us out of here!”
Gill’s hands moved across the switches. The lights dimmed in response to the sudden power surge as the tachyonic converters whirled into action, compressing time and space, tighter, tighter, until—
—the Dolomite suddenly vanished from normal space. The voyage had begun.
20
Julie was used to the dark. It was friendly and warm, and she felt safe in it. Only in the dark had she found security and safety, shielded away from men’s eyes and their motives. The dark was the place where she had trained, so many years ago, when she had learned those matters of stealth and suddenness that were her protection and her trademark. It was then that she learned to make the darkness her own.
And so it had been for all her young life. But it was different now. This darkness that surrounded her now felt sinister, evil. Maybe that was because she knew something lurked within it, something that was trying to get her.
She stopped for a moment in midstep, trying to get her bearings. Her hearing extended itself through the darkness, searching. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she made out vast shapes on either side of her. They were machines, made of dark, glistening metal, and they towered above her. Spots of white light from some unknown source winked off metallic surfaces, and reflected from coils and condensers. They didn’t even look like objects. They were like the ghosts of objects because their shapes were indistinct, ambiguous, swathed in a darkness that had gradation and depth, and was textured with the layers of silence.
A voice crackled in the tiny radio bug implanted in her ear.
“Julie? Do you see him yet?” It was Stan Myakovsky, calling from the Dolomite’s central control room. He wasn’t far away, as distances go, but he could have been in another galaxy for all the good he could do her now.
“Not yet,” she answered. “But I know he’s in here somewhere.”
“Be careful, huh?” Stan said. “I still think we should have delayed this run. I’m still not entirely satisfied with Norbert’s control system.”
Now was a hell of a time to tell her that. She decided to ignore it. Stan sounded agitated. Was he getting cold feet? Or was he just having an ordinary attack of nerves?
She snapped on a tiny flashlight. Ahead of her, picked up in the thin beam, she could see more profound glooms, silent caves of blackness where awful things might lurk. Some of these horrors were caused by the power of her imagination, but she was afraid that some were not.
It was not imagination that told her something in this great dark place was tracking her. She knew it was there. But where was it? She strained her senses to the utmost, trying to pick up some clue. Nothing. But she could tell it was out there. She had a sense of presence, almost like a sixth sense. It was what a successful thief needed above all else, and Julie was an extremely successful thief.
She thought back now on her years of training with Shen Hui, the old Chinese master criminal. She first met him when she was a little girl, the youngest one in the Shanghai slave market that morning. She remembered peering at the crowd that had come to attend the auction, trying to catch a final glimpse of her mother. But she had already left, unwilling to watch her only daughter being sold on the open market. The men started bidding, men from different countries. Then one old man had outbid the rest, and had paid the auctioneer in taels of gold. That was Shen Hui.
He brought her to his house and raised her like his own flesh and blood. Shen Hui was a master thief, a master of the zen of thievery. He had taught her to develop her latent senses so that she could register things without literally seeing or hearing them. That ability came to her rescue now.
Yes, it was not just imagination. There was something near, and it was situated right over… there!
She whirled as a great looming thing detached itself from the deep knot of shadows near a gigantic machine that lay shrouded in its own dust. She found it fascinating, the way the shadows moved and grew, like something not human, the way they resolved into one, and that shadow suddenly turned solid and launched itself at her with an explosive hiss.
“Julie! Watch out!” Stan’s voice rang in her ears. He had picked up the sudden movement. But late. Stan was always late. What good could his warning do for her now? He never seemed to realize it. Not that she had expected anything more. She was responsible for herself. And Julie was already in motion as the thing came at her.
Her long legs, clad in skintight black plastic, pumped smoothly as she sprinted down the central aisle of the Dolomite’s great central cargo hold. The creature, three times her height, colored an unremitting black, with jaws filled with long closely packed fanglike teeth, came after her. Feeling herself being overtaken, Julie dodged and swerved around the faintly delineated center line of the hold. This one narrow strip had been set for twenty percent less of the faux gravity that so much resembled the real thing. Running on the light-gravity strip made her feel as though she had wings, so rapidly did she move, dodging fixed objects as they came up to smear her, vaulting over smaller obstacles, always moving, the sound of her own blood pounding in her ears.<
br />
The creature came running after her, and a ray of light from a globe in the ceiling picked it up for a moment. It appeared to be a full-size alien, with the typical backward-sloping cranium of its kind.
The thing was as startling as an apparition from hell. Its claws, with their doubled fingers, reached for her. Julie turned and fled down the narrow confines of the hold.
The area she ran in widened, and the creature managed to gain a few steps on her.
Stan, watching the action on a monitor in the control room, yelped in alarm as the creature loomed over her. He asked himself why he had ever agreed to let Julie take this training run. Thinking about it now, he could see that it had been an unnecessary risk. If anything went wrong, it could jeopardize the whole operation.
And aside from that, if Julie got hurt… But he couldn’t let himself think about that.
Julie and the alien dodged around enormous packing cases, cubes of plastic ten feet on a side. There were a dozen or so of them, and they were scattered randomly on the floor, part of the clutter that accumulates in any spaceship. Julie ran her fingers over the edge of a box. With a quick look aided by her flashlight, she had fixed its location. A memory of the placement of the other boxes was burned into her short-term memory. In her mind she could see the zig-zag path she would have to follow to get to the next bulkhead. After that, a sally port served as a midpoint connection to the next part of the ship’s hold.
She ran full out, counting off step by step. Crossing a crowded room in darkness with speed and silence is one of a thief’s most useful accomplishments. Julie continued across the hold, her senses on red alert, trying once again to locate the creature that was stalking her. Norbert was good, he was very quiet, she had to give him that. He had learned how to muffle his body movements, and even to quiet the sounds of his body functions. Good as he was, she still was aware of him, but it was an awareness that flickered in and out of existence.
After the midpoint sally exit, she came to the platform that blocked the way to the farthest exit. It was a prestressed antimagnetic steel plate approximately twenty feet wide by two hundred feet long, and five inches deep. She climbed up onto it. It was drilled with many large, irregularly spaced holes ranging in diameter from two to five feet, where components would be fitted later. Running the length of the plate left you vulnerable to stepping into a hole and breaking a leg, or falling through an unshielded ventilator shaft to the deck below.
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