'I'll come forward with you, Hook.'
'Suit yourself.'
Hook preceded the Krifman up the aisle. Fraulein Elterich smiled at him as he passed; but he ignored that. Myza was asleep, the yellow shirt twisted into creases each side of her breasts, the purple hair somehow ludicrous. In the control section Rafflans sniffed.
'I thought so, you cunning Terran bastard! You've got the emergency bottle up here.'
'Sure. And I'm keeping it. Someone has to be awake to bring this shuttle in.'
'I ought to —'
`Yes? You can have the bottle if you can bring the shuttle in, Rafflans.'
'You know goddam-well I can't!'
'So shut the face.'
Rafflans subsided. But the big Krifman was storing all this up. Hook wondered what stupid bravado had let him allow Rafflans up here. He pointed to the astrogator's seat folded up against the bulkhead and said: 'Sit there. I'll give you a squirt now and then. You might be useful.' He frowned. 'But first, get O'Steele up here. He's more use than you.'
'So help me, Hook, I'm going to — '
'Just do it, Rafflans, you clunkhead.'
Hook felt that spiralling, dizzying sensation and the feeling of pressure around his temples. He hauled the bottle out and squirted. Rafflans gulped greedily.
'We're like a couple of secret drinkers,' said Hook. 'Now go and get O'Steele.'
Rafflans went.
The luminous figures of the digital clock moved over with mocking slowness. Hook checked the air levels again. His calculations, indecently simple, indicated planetfall a bare ten minutes before the last of the oxygen gushed from the last cylinder. After that there would be residuals to come, and then a recycling that would pump less and less oxygen until, in the end, the stupid automotans would pump pure nitrogen and carbon dioxide, over and over again.
Say twenty minutes.
In that time he had to find somewhere to touchdown, and make that touchdown.
Once again he checked. No difference appeared in the picture.
O'Steele appeared in the control section.
Tie down, son, and compose yourself.'
'If you want to fold your arms across your chest to save us the labour,' said Rafflans, croaking. 'That's IQ.'
Hook didn't laugh, and O'Steele looked crushed. He lay down. If he was needed, then Hook wouldn't be around.
The little pressurised orange ball squirted its last.
Hook didn't waste effort by throwing it away. He just let it drop down with a clank like the passing bell gone sour.
The air tasted like mouldy jam, furry and bitter.
A bleep chirruped from the console and a red light woke up and began to blink.
Hook looked for some time before he realised just what had happened.
He said: The detector has picked up a homing signal from Merfalla.'
'It can't have,' said Rafflans. 'The planet is uninhabited.'
`It has.' Hook pushed himself up and flicked on the lock-in. The signal continued, loud and clear.
`By the Great Salvor!' said Rafflans. 'It is!'
The shuttle nosed in toward Merfalla. She screamed in out of the starshot darkness, her deceleration calculated out to bring her neatly into orbit, her artificial gravity maintaining a steady point eight g inboard. Hook gripped on to his senses.
Down there, on this reputedly uninhabited planet, a radio was sending out a homing signal for incoming spaceships. He would take the shuttle down that beam of safety. He over-rode the normal orbital evolutions, cranked the shuttle around and sent her plunging down.
`We'll find out later — ' he said, and then stopped speaking. It was a struggle to breath now.
The screen picked up the curve of the planet, all hazy grey-streaked browns and blues, and then collapsed into itself as the horizon vanished and they were looking down.
The shuttle screamed down through atmosphere.
They rode the beam all the way.
The ground beneath fled outwards and off the sides of the screen with that sickening vertiginous sensation that seemed to whirl one's brain around inside one's skull. Yet they were falling straight down and the ground fled radially outwards.
That ground spouted up at them.
O'Steel was moaning. His face was an unhealthy colour, like the inside of a sewage pipe, and his tongue protruded between his lips.
Rafflans tried to hold on to the console, and collapsed. He fell down with his legs and knees buckling, sprawled on the deck. All manner of pains lanced through Hook's head. Everything was blurred. He had to hold this bucket up off the ground. His over-ride of the control meant she was now under his guidance. On manuals he must do it all. He had to haul her around before she hit the ground and burrowed on, falling to pieces, before she exploded.
He judged his moment.
Their speed was down now to barely supersonic.
He hauled her back and killed the speed and she flattened.
The beam held rock steady.
Now he could see a spaceport.
It jumped and bucked as he fought to hold the shuttle level. The ground was pouring past like a river.
Dust puffed ahead, and a wink of fire, and then, a shape, broad and shining, sliding down from his right flank.
Another ship!
Yes. The ship for which this homing signal had been programmed! Another ship, heading on exactly the same vector as themselves, heading in for rendezvous with the spaceport. Two vessels — one, their tiny shuttle, and the other a monstrous spaceship, boring down to lock together in flame and smoke and destruction.
Chapter Four
So there were damned people on this planet, after all.
The homing signal was a relatively weakly powered beam and clearly intended only for local craft.
This planet might support life on the terminal edges of existence. Hook's awareness of himself and his surroundings picked up speed — significantly — but his whole attention now concentrated on the other ship arrowing in.
The ship let down following the same beam as themselves.
Hook let that concentration overlap into a fleeting thought that had the air been fully breathable here he could simply have blown a hole in the overhead and let the slipstream blow the fug away.
The screen lit up and a man's face showed, arrogant, heavy, accustomed to instant obedience.
Hook knew his sort.
`Get that heap out of Approach! You're interfering with scheduled landings here. Take Vector seven eight green and get out of the way!'
`Not likely,' said Ryder Hook.
The pictured face displayed all the symptoms of imminent seizure.
'Don't you understand, you cretin! A ship is landing, now! And you're in the way! Get out of it — fast!'
'I'm making an emergency landing. I have seriously ill passengers aboard. We have been stranded in space —'
At subsonic speeds there was time to talk in sentences that were almost grammatically correct; unlike the staccato bursts of code-language necessary out in space. Hook's face felt congealed beneath the disguising facial-gel. His hair, a tasteful shade of iron-grey, flopped loosely on his scalp. He recognised the immense effort required to perform the most simple function.
'This is your last warning! Take your bucket out of here or we will fire on you.'
`Do that,' said Hook, 'And you'll burn your own ship.'
He wasn't going to argue. This time he was going to barrel in and let the fates of space — whoever they might be — look out for the other fellow.
The descending ship could be seen, now, a streak of silver with the sun of Tannenbar reflecting off that sleek hull.
Hook drove steadily on.
Converging courses — a fragile shuttle and a mammoth ship —closer and closer — the beam of the homing signal a scientific finger luring them on to destruction. Closer ..
The face flicked from the screen.
Hook got the controls under his palms. His eyes swam with sweat and dizziness.
Up ahead lay the dome and airlock and sweet refreshing air they could suck deeply into their lungs . . .
No other shipload of rubbernecking tourists or whoever would shove him out of the way now.
He delicately dipped the shuttle and then in a smooth zooming movement that brought the thermocouples chittering into life, he let her gain altitude.
The blast from the anti-aircraft batteries sited along the perimeter of the dome splashed liquid fire where the shuttle had been. Once more he could estimate the jink to fox ordinary fire-control radar. Once more. That once had to be enough.
He let the shuttle slide right down until she tore across the ground at deck level.
A blurring impression of speed, of a crazy whirl of colour and movement, with the dome shooting towards them and the opened valves which would enfold them in safety.
Hook slid the shuttle under the second blast.
The third would smack them cleanly and burn them.
Then he chuckled.
The other descending ship, her captain in no doubt that as was his right he would receive right of way, had continued to let down.
That colossal silver bulk settled along the line of the beam. She showed for an instant, plain and distinct before him, directly in line.
Then the third blast lashed out.
That was a shortened blast. A chopped blast — a blast halted even as the finger pressed the button as the betraying radar warned — too late.
The third blast sprayed molten fire around the descending ship.
Her tail assembly blew away, instantly vaporised. She toppled, spouting fire. When she hit the shuttle screamed above her, buffeted by the shock, dipped, dived, streaked for the valve opening.
Hook didn't spare a thought for the savaged ship.
People would have been killed; but that wasn't his fault.
He whipped the shuttle into the opening and let her down and cut the power.
Inside he could hear only the useless susurration of the recycled nitrogen and carbon dioxide. He had to keep awake and to think.
He cracked the seals on the airlock and then tried to stand up from the pilot's throne and walk aft.
His legs wouldn't support him.
From the throne he triggered the door mechanism.
If the monkeys out there didn't close the airlock valves and flood the landing area with air — well, if they did not do that everything else had been a waste of time.
Hook knew they'd do it, though. They'd want to get their hands or their tentacles on the maniac who had brought a shuttle in and wrecked one of their ships.
Something trilled in the stinking atmosphere aboard the shuttle.
Hook sniffed.
Oxygen!
Fresh air welled in through the open airlock. Hook struggled up, fighting the nausea, keeping the vomit down, hauled himself into a shambling semblance of an upright posture.
Now you bastards, come and get me,' he mumbled.
He could hear voices now, and the clink of metal, out there in this vast hangar-like space. The shuttle must look extraordinarily tiny, squatting in the centre of a pad designed for mammoth spaceships.
He caught O'Steele under the armpits and dragged him out of the way. Rafflans lay, his face orange and blue, his tongue thrusting past his teeth. Hook left him. He went back into the astrogation area and stripped off the facial-gel. He pulled off the iron-grey wig. He bundled them up with the stripper and stuffed them into a plastic bag along with the radio set he'd lashed-up. Holding the neck of the bag he walked down the aisle.
People were groaning and he could hear the snorting blurting of lungs grappling with the unfamiliar task of dealing with real oxygen again. He guessed some of those passengers would never wake up.
He yanked his bag from the rack and pulled out a flamboyant scarlet cloak with the black edgings. It had been made for him on Pantacles, and the smiling tailor of The Spaceman's Pit had told him that, yes, taynor, this style is all the rage in the galaxy now. Hook put the cloak on.
At least five men among the passengers wore garments of a similar cut and colour, with different bindings. He wouldn't look out of place whatsoever.
He sprawled out under a seat and flicked his lighter at the plastic bag.
The bag, his wig and the facial gel, the radio, whiffed into flame, which burned sullenly and blackly, greedily sucking oxygen needed elsewhere, burned and slaked and died into a brown gooey ooze.
Hook shoved that aside with the sole of his black boot and sprawled out in a more abandoned posture, an arm flung across his eyes, and waited to be rescued.
The beings who entered the shuttle and began removing the reviving passengers were Reakers.
Listlessly among the others, Hook was picked up and thrown over a broad scale-plated shoulder, and carried outside where anti-grav clamps held the passengers suspended in midair in neat rows.
He hung there next to an Earthwoman of indeterminate age, whose fashionable glitter-clothes pulled around her revealing feet with one shoe between them. A mal was hoisted alongside Hook, one of the race of Homo mal with their chunky bodies and grimly forbidding faces with the high cheekbones and slanting eyes, the tubular ears, so characteristic of this race old in the galaxy. Hook looked down.
Only one human being appeared to be directing the Reakers.
This man — Hook felt fairly confident he was Homo sapiens —wore tight bright-blue clothes with an orange cloak, and he shouted in the intemperate way some humans assumed when giving orders to Reakers. The Reakers were what interested Hook most, for although he had met many exoskeletal races in the galaxy, he had never as yet to his knowledge tangled with a Reaker, and he found them fascinating.
Their exoskeletons had to be exceptionally thick and rigid in order to contain their bulk, for they stood all of a metre and a half in height. The uncanny item here that Hook found confirmed immediately was their uniformity. If one Reaker's flatly-domed skull rose more than a couple of millimetres higher than any of his comrades, no one would notice that. Bunched together they looked like a level pavement of cobble-stones. Their two arms projected rather sideways from slit-like orifices between breast and back plates, and their legs and feet depended from a pelvic-girdle that, not being endoskeletal, hung around the laminated base of their upper platings. Their faces bore short-stalked eyes, set wide apart, of ears no sign, slits for breathing and rat-traps of mouths that looked as though they could gnaw through metalloy and spit out the pips.
They were obedient to their masters, and they worked well —and they were nastily vicious if let off the chain.
Ryder Hook fancied he would have trouble with the Reakers.
They wore fancy curlicues acid-etched on their shells and bits and pieces of finery that included many feathers and imitation-jewelled straps and belts. Hook did not miss the oversize dis-gel guns they wore strapped above the articulated laminations between breastplate and thighplates.
`Bunch of intelligent lobsters,' he said.
The Earthwoman had recovered, breathing stertorously, and she started in screaming at once.
Strange how some folk couldn't always accept the profuse diversity of human shape throughout this teeming galaxy!
The process of bringing the passengers from HGL starship Talcahhuano back to life did not take long and soon they were floating along plastic-walled corridors to a rest centre. Hook had doubts that many econorgs would be represented down on this mystery planet of Merfalla; but he guessed that some quick-talking would establish mutuals between agencies to take care of all those people boasting wrist credit cards.
Hook was a galactic loner. He did not boast a wrist credit card.
He heard the human in the orange cloak yelling.
`Nowhere, you bunch of all-fired dolts! He must be somewhere. He was distinctly seen and we have a record of the conversation. He has to be aboard somewhere.'
A Reaker whose orange shell bore more feathers and beads and straps than the others said: 'He is not aboard. Presence n
egative.'
Rafflans wandered over to Hook in the rest area, threading his way between the loungers and coffee tables. He smiled. `They're looking for you, Hook.'
'I might have known your beady eyes wouldn't be fooled.' Rafflans laughed. Everyone was very happy. They'd been saved from a hideous death, hadn't they?
`Your Tonota Eighty. I don't miss a gun's characteristics. And you still have that fool Jahnian's Krifarm model twelve in your thigh pocket.'
'I did not intend to fool you, Rafflans. Just these people.' He didn't wish to plead with a Krifman.
`That'll be all IQ. But it don't mean I'm not going to rip your arms and legs off, Hook, you Terran bastard, and wrap 'em around your scrawny terrestial neck.'
`You know, Rafflans, you great Krifman twit, I'm looking forward to that wrapping operation.'
Rafflans chuckled and flicked his thick thumb and finger for a service robot. The machine trundled across and Rafflans took the dish of steaming coffee that Homo sapiens had managed to inflict on the Krifmans as a subtle punishment. Hook took good honest tea, and relished it.
The processing of the rescued passengers went on, and none could give any coherent account of what had happened in the shuttle after they'd passed out. All they knew was that a Taynor Hook had been trying to bring them in.
`Was he like this?' and a photograph-cube of Hook would be studied, and a nod would follow, and: 'Yes, that's him.'
Soon the forensic sniffers would have his hair follicles and body-cell detritus, some of his wastes still in the air of the control section, all, neatly packaged up and ready for the computer. When matches were made with the survivors the only match that mattered would be the one that indicated that Ryder Hook, no matter what he looked like, was Ryder Hook.
Well, Hook had got out of tighter scrapes before. He had just to think what he was about, and —
And ...
A tingling all along his organo-metal bones brought Hook quiveringly alive.
Really, fully, truly alive, as he looked at Rafflans he felt the thrilling, jumping all along his nerve-endings as they streamed billions of messages about his body, as his brain speeded up into a near-superhuman level of activity.
The Boosted Man Page 3