Fire lanced up at him; but he flung the flier all over the sky within the dome, the radar deflectors chittering as they coped with the incoming beams and baffled them, reflecting them at crazy angles. A really sophisticated computer might be able to take a crack at forecasting where the random beam-reflections were going; no computer of such complexity existed down in Locus.
Riding cover for the big armoured flier beneath him, Hook swept in towards the airlocks. The dome here curved down to meet the hard inhospitable earth of Merfalla. They would have to go through together and quick; otherwise they wouldn't go through at all.
Rafflans knew what he was about. He had a pair of Tonota three-seventies in the larger flier and these made devastating work of the structures and defences clustered about the airlocks. Hook fancied the Boosted Men must be apprehensive of something to have this kind of weaponry available; and if they were armed against the Untergods and not against Ryder Hook he could take an extra chuckle about that ...
Their defences were aimed outwards, out on to the planetary surface, and these fliers were constructed to go out there and fight. Coming as they were from inside they were like a pair of exceedingly hard and exceedingly painful boots, kicking the Boosted Men up the rear.
The fliers pelted out through a maze of collapsing masonry, plastic sheeting, shivered shards of armour-glass. Flames and smoke gusted low, out from the shattered airlocks, lacing and dissipating over the alien landscape.
The flier jerked and jounced.
`We made it, Hook! It's all — I'm so —'
`You know what I said about hysterics, Anthea.'
'I suppose you do this sort of thing all the time!'
He felt relief. Fraulein Anthea was all IQ.
`Sure,' said Ryder Hook. 'All the time.'
She chattered on as they sped over the alien landscape. Hook had told her the same story he'd told Rafflans, that he'd come across a ladybird plug and de-activated the booby-trap and channelling circuits and so, putting it in his ear, had had his eyes opened to the hypnosis. One could remember what had happened during hypnosis, even if, when in that unhappy state, most vital memories tended to dissipate. So Anthea knew what they'd been up to in their ramshackle apartment block at night times. The alien sun of Tannenbar was about to sink below the horizon rim. Shaeel and Karg would wait one hour. And this was the night they were going to the ballet, and were intending to follow that with enjoyable sexual athletics ...
The athletics they were engaged in now were involved with dodging gunfire and hitting goons over the head and getting aboard spaceships. It was a funny old galaxy, right enough.
Hook's Boosted power continued. He had already made up his mind that duty to Anthea and the survivors, as to Shaeel, ves kid and Karg, must take precedence over mere vengeance.
He said: 'I'm putting this on autos, Anthea. Can you drive a flier?'
`A sports job — I've never handled an armoured police job like this before.'
`Controls are basically the same. So if you have to, no problem.'
Cutting in the communications equipment he called out for the spaceport traffic control tower. He angled a sidelight on its extending arm so that shadows lay blackly over his face, and highlights altered the plane of his chin and nose.
`Traffic control. if it isn't urgent, stay off the air.'
`It's urgent and address me as sir! Put me a patch through to Communications. And jump to it or I'll have you stripped and kicked into the city.'
There was an awful lot of pure speculation going there; but Hook had a shrewd idea of the way the Novamen ran an operation. Communications came on. He was just as brutally direct, in best Boosted Man style. 'Patch me through to that starpacket on the apron. The one that's special detail. And jump to it, you useless gonil.'
`Yes, sir.'
Now, if the communications or traffic control operatives didn't have the nerve to monitor the call, he would be put through to Shaeel and Karg aboard Watchling. It would appear a normal inter-spaceport call, from this simple triangulation; Hook had often found that simple answers offered most.
`Starpacket Watchling.'
Hook chilled.
The face on the screen was not that of Shaeel or Karg.
It wasn't even Shaeel's kid, and that might not be such an impossibility.
A hard, creased, professional enforcer's face stared out at Hook. The blue helmet lowered over the brows. The eyes were as flinty as flint itself, the lips as thin as a knapped edge.
Hook reached to cut the connection, and the goon said: 'We thought you would call, Hook. Your friends tried to do something foolish and — '
Hook couldn't stop himself, the hot query rushed past his stiffening lips.
`Yes?'
`We have them here, Hook, awaiting your arrival. Then we will find out just what all this is about. The master is not amused.'
Hook shouldn't have been surprised.
After all, Locus was a small, insignificant thing, a pest-item, a quickie. It wouldn't take more than one Boosted Man to run the place, now, would it?
He cut the connection.
'What— ' said Anthea.
Hook said: 'It must be feeding time for a baby about now. I hope, for their sakes, they haven't—'
`Your friends have been caught!'
Hook didn't bother to answer.
The Boosted Man would be as frantic as a Boosted Man ever got to being frantic over the identity of these people who were causing so much grief to his Locus project. The goons were shooting to kill, as was their wont. The Novaman would want to take them alive. If, at this vital juncture, the Boosted Man took off, or his power failed through increased distance, Ryder Hook would be in trouble. As it was, he still thought he had the edge. Had he been in a card game with Shaeel, he'd have thought twice. Risks and chances were part of his life-style.
He called up Rafflans.
`The starpacket is out. There was a ship loading there. Looked fast — a Lehrnen job.'
`Check,' said Rafflans, his face hard and craggy on the screen. 'If they were loading she should be ready to space oue `If she hasn't already gone.'
`Cheerful Terran clod-hopper.'
`Idiotic Krifman.'
`Your arms and legs are in serious danger —'
`Use your three-seventies on the north airlocks. Get straight in and don't stop. And look out for Anthea. She'll be running towards you.'
`Oh, no!' said Fraulein Elterich, sitting up straight. 'You're going to get your friends. I'm not running off and leaving you — '
`If I say so, you will,'
`You chauvenistic terrestrial —
`Terrestrial what, Anthea?'
`Oh!' She found something in her eye and attended to that.
Rafflans said: 'If you don't make it, Hook, I can't say it was an unalloyed pleasure knowing you. But the galaxy won't be the same without you fouling it up all the time.'
'My sentiments exactly.'
They broke the connection.
This time Hook, in the lighter craft, followed the formidable craft Rafflans piloted into the spaceport. He could see bolts of fire striking off Rafflans' armour. The airlocks went down in a gout of flame. If the spaceport personnel attended to the locks, that would help. If they didn't it would mean spacesuits — he'd bet a sizeable wad they didn't have a baby's spacesuit in there, at that...
His thought raced ahead at supernal speed.
He ripped off the police uniform and bent over, naked. Anthea said: 'What? Now, Hook?'
Hook chuckled. 'You just run as fast as you can across to that spaceship there — where Rafflans is headed.'
From the perimeter guards were racing up, bringing weapons.
The instant the nose of the flier emerged past the still-falling remnants of the airlock, Hook switched into speed time.
Around the perimeter the guards froze in positions of the most grotesque originality. The upward-rolling masses of smoke convoluted and twisted like exposed brains, blackened in fire, hung mot
ionless, dense and choking. Men appeared to halt and freeze in mid-motion, although they ran and worked as fast as they possibly could; they were in normal time, real time. Ryder Hook, Boosted Man manqué, operated in speed time.
He raced around the perimeter and he did nasty and unsportsmanlike things to the various weapons caught frozen in the act of firing at the two fliers. Their beams of energy still poured out in lethal radiation, for even a Boosted Man could not outrun the speed of light; but for all purposes now everything was happening in the merest fraction of a heartbeat, the elapsed time from the moment he leaped from the flier until the moment he returned microscopically small, measurable in chronons.
He bounded up the pedway ramp into the starpacket Watchling.
The goon who had spoken to him over the communications net had been as good as his word. Shaeel, ves baby, and Karg, were seated in the main cabin. Everyone in there sat or stood in a stasis of apparent death-in-life. Hook jimmied the enforcers' guns. He took other guns from enforcers he laid low — a nice little way of saying he hit them over the head — and put them in the fists of Karg and Shaeel. He left a clear run from cabin to the ship's airlock.
He knew he had a great deal of time to play with now; but the instant he switched back out of boosted time the minutes would tick along at their sedate minute by minute speed, and the guns would shoot and men and aliens would run, and there would be, as usual, no time at all.
So he had to have everything exactly correct. One gun left unattended could blow the survivors apart as they ran, could flame Shaeel into slaked ashes.
He double checked. If that black bastard of a Boosted Man looked out of traffic control now he would see the spaceport in frantic upheaval as the two fliers battered their way in. But, also, because he was Boosted, he would see the naked form of Hook running about the spacefield in speed time. Hook sweated that one out. No matter how fast his Boosted reflexes and muscles could speed him over the concrete, a blast from the Novaman's gun would crisp him as though he were a simple adolescent yokel from a farm planet instead of a Boosted Man.
He fancied that the cool analysis of a Boosted Man would keep him chained to his screens and control sets, the monitors, the relays and telltales. The Boosted Man would be running this operation on instruments. That is — if he was truly here and not speeding here in a flier from the city. Either way, Hook was taking a chance, and he knew it.
He came across an enforcer with an orange cloak over his orange uniform. His helmet carried a blaze of gold leaf. Hook smiled. Hook usually smiled when a situation gave him not exactly pleasure but a sense of the fitness of things.
He went to work with equipment from his boots and detached the dinky little wrist Delling from under the enforcer's sleeve. He lifted the guy's belt and holster with the Martian Mega unstrapped snugged in it. By holding the plastileather at his back within the vacuum area as he ran, he knew he could carry it without it burning up. The guns, of course, wouldn't burn under those conditions.
About to leave the glass-fronted office where he'd found this important guard — a Tonota one-fifty was in the act of blasting through an aperture and Hook had so fixed it that it would spray back in a most unpleasant fashion — he spotted the wall safe.
A blast from the Mega blew the door off its hinges. The door moved perhaps a centimetre and then hung, askew and unsupported in midair. Hook wrenched it back. The men in the room would react to that when the time came. Inside were no records, no files except a useless report log on security, and only a plastic wallet filled with money-metal. Annoyed at wasting time Hook scooped up the money-metal and looped the gun belt about it, held the bundle into the small of his back as he took off.
One last chore before he switched back into ordinary time and all hell broke loose .
He sprang up the pedway into the airlock of the Lehman ship. She was sleek, fast, capacious, and good for a multi-parsec ride through the galaxy. He cleansed her of guards and goons — dragging them down to the airlock and throwing them out. They clustered in the air above the pedway, like a frozen collection of mayflies, motionless and spreadeagled in the ungainly postures of falling. Some of them had been burned by their brutal carriage in speed time. He checked the controls. The ship was in full operative condition, had already been pre-flighted, and as far as he could see was all due for lift-off.
He didn't bother to check what might be in the hold compartments.
Now.
Now he had to see if his precautions were enough, if they were satisfactory, if he had done all that he should have done to save these people who depended on him.
Shaeel.
Yes, Shaeel was his only concern.
Karg, too, of course, and Shaeel's baby.
But the rest of them must take their chances.
Anthea Elterich must take her chance along with the rest. There was no other way of running accounts in Hook's books. He took a deep breath and went up to the controls of the ship. Her name was Proton Star — but he'd change that.
He sat in the pilot's throne and stared at the screen. It showed the stasis on the field, its light speed impulses perfectly capable of rendering a picture to his Boosted senses. The armament was not unlimbered, and a check showed him that he had the choice of the four blister-mounted Krifarm two-eighties. The other stuff, heavier, would take too long to bring into action.
He hammered the preflighting for the four guns, knowing that as soon as he switched back to real time the operation would instantly finalise itself and the guns be ready to fire.
Now?
Now.
Now.
Hook switched back to slow time.
At once the massive chaos on the field exploded into all colour, all sound, all violence.
Flames spat and sizzled, smoke wafted and choked, men yelled, and guns vomited. Rafflans and his people were out of their flier. Hook saw gun after gun along the perimeter blow up, spectacularly gouting orange flame and gusting into shattered and unrecognisable lumps of metal. Rafflans ran last, shepherding them on.
He saw Shaeel appear at the airlock door of Watchling.
The guards he had thrown out fell to the concrete. Karg appeared, brandishing two guns. Shaeel carried a bundle. Hook spoke into the exterior speakers.
`Over here, Shaeel! Follow that idiot Krifman! And jump!' Shaeel waved ves free arm and ran.
And Anthea?
Hook thought she wouldn't make it.
He ought to have carried her in reduced speed-time; but real time pressed too close.
She ran.
She raced with flashing legs and streaming hair after Rafflans. Hook scanned away from her, panning the field, waiting for that overlooked lethal bolt to come and whiff the girl into her constituent atoms.
He saw only the disintegrating shards of his handiwork.. There was one precaution he could take ...
He angled two of the big Krifman two-eighties up at the top panoramic windows of the traffic control tower. He triggered a long long burst.
The windows vapourised. Plastic sheeting whiffed into nothingness. He kept on spraying and took the whole top of the tower off.
The dome above it began to buckle inwards.
Rafflans disappeared below the curve of the ship's midriff bulge. Shaeel and ves baby and Karg hared after the Krifman. And here came Anthea, running with wide-open mouth and flashing legs and her hair streaming.
He waited for the tell-tale to come up on the board saying the outer airlock valves were closed.
A man ran out from the traffic control tower main entranceway.
The dome buckled and sagged in an inverted bowl.
The tell-tale did not light.
The man ran from the tower,
He ran in speed time.
Hook licked his lips.
The man raced towards the ship and Hook knew that to him everything was in stasis; he would reach the airlock valves in the condition in which they were now; they could never close before he could reach them. Hook's thoughts pace
d the Boosted Man's speed time dash. In speed time he pressed the button.
The Krifarm two eighty aligned on the traffic control doorway erupted.
The Boosted Man — speed time or no speed time — could not dodge.
He crisped.
And then — Hook's powers began that familiar, nauseous, desolating slide towards normalcy.
No!
Normalcy for a Boosted Man was being Boosted. Now Ryder Hook was being deprived of his real status, was being swept back into the herd of ordinary little people; people he loved and hated, people he rescued and killed, people who were like him — and it wasn't fair! It wasn't fair!
Ryder Hook was no longer a Boosted Man.
The tell tale came on. The valve had closed.
At once, Hook sent Proton Star up. She speared up through the dome, splintering it past repair, arrowed away out through atmosphere and up into space.
At normal ship's artificial gravity of one eighth of a g no harm would come to the people passing through the airlock.
Soon they'd all try to come crowding into the control section. Proton Star was a real starship, and she would take them anywhere they wanted to go in this region of the galaxy. There would be no pursuit. Hook fancied the Novamen would reopen their activities down on Locus, and he just hoped they would never find out that a half of a Boosted Man had done all that to them. Locus was a foulness, anyway, and should be expunged,,
Now he could trip the circuits and look into the hold of Proton Star.
Hold-mounted cameras faithfully transmitted to the screens on the control deck just what the starship carried.
He might have known — really, he had known all along what lay ranked neatly, one after the other, in the ship's hold. Boosted Women.
All in cryosleep, all awaiting their resurrection on a planet where the Boosted Men were building up. Well, if Locus was a foulness, what Locus produced was a foulness, also.
The Boosted Man Page 12