Bayley, Barrington J - Novel 10 (11 page)

 
          
Archier
pursed his lips. He was remembering Volsted Magroom. The little fellow had been
appealing, in a way. Archier had liked him.

 
          
Well,
he would know all about space battles now.

 
          
Once
more Archier sighed. He wondered if the party would still be in progress when
he had finished here. He could certainly use some relaxation.

 
          
It
was with caution that the privateer approached the big, empty bulk of the
Imperial warship. In the nose cabin that he used as a control room, Ragshok
peered disbelievingly.

 
          
"
'Claire
de Lune'
," he murmured, reading
the name on the ship's side, among the Imperial blazon, the flags and ensigns
painted there. "What the Simplex does that mean, Morgan?"

 
          
"I
don't know, chief. It's some foreign language." Morgan, a dark-haired,
florid man, scratched his head perfunctorily.

 
          
"Take
us in a bit closer," Ragshok ordered.

 
          
"Yes
chief."

 
          
The
vessel loomed. She was not one of the fleet's biggest ships, not a
front-line-o'-war, but she was big enough. If Ragshok knew his ships—and
ships was
one thing he knew— she was a Planet Class
destroyer. She loomed, lights still blazing, drive either idle or defunct . . .
derelict.

 
          
Ragshok
had watched the battle from a safe distance. He had hoped the rebels would win,
naturally, but not over-enthusiastically so. He was on the side of political
instability because it made the pickings richer, but on the other hand it might
lead to merchant ships being better armed and therefore less easy prey. He did
not want to be a prospector again, hewing wealth from the natural environment,
which was what he had been doing before he realized how wealthy space was with
other
people's riches.

 
          
The
latest news he had was that Ten-Fleet had nearly finished the job of hunting
down remnants of the rebel fleet and was beginning to regather. It was easy to
understand why
Claire de Lune
had
been abandoned in the first place: she had taken damage, perhaps to her drive,
perhaps to her defences or to her offensive
weapons, that
rendered her a sitting duck. "But why haven't they come back to her?"
he murmured.

           
"Think she's just plasma by
now, I expect," Morgan said. "She ought to be, too."

 
          
"All
right, let's go over and have a look."

 
          
He
snapped down his helmet while Morgan went aft to rouse the others. A minute
later a force forty strong was floating across the gap, drifting across the
bulging, engineered cliff face of the other vessel until they found a port.

 
          
Inside,
the air was good. Ragshok snapped open his helmet and smelled, with
startlement, the sweet perfumes of the ship's interior environment. Here, close
to the hull, the surroundings were more businesslike and he did not see the
luxurious furnishings that were later to amaze him.

 
          
But
it was less than a minute before he realized the effect some of those perfumes
were having on him. He gave a strangled cry of incredulity.

 
          
"Good
grief,
Morgan—they were taking
drugs
during a battle?"

 
          
His
men spread out through the ship, each one having been briefed on what to find
out. Ragshok made his way to the bridge; it was locked, and when he shot the
door open, it had the appearance of being disused. Shortly, his ship's engineer
informed him that the ship had apparently been controlled from another place, a
sort of command centre. He went there and played with the equipment while
reports were brought to him.

 
          
The
ship was holed, which he had not noticed while approaching, but not seriously
so. The emergency gels had kept her airtight, and it would not cost too much
work to draw a new skin over the ruptured parts of the hull. The feetol engines
were out of action, which was what had caused her to be abandoned. But before
leaving, her crew had spiked all the guns.

 
          
"Well
what about the engines?" Morgan demanded of the engineer while his master,
Ragshok, fiddled with a piece of rubbery plastic on the arm of the command
throne. He had discovered it gave him weird visual effects.

 
          
The
engineer was a wiry Salpian. Ragshok had taken him off a passenger liner, had
offered to take him home after he had got a junked engine running. But he had
preferred to stay with the privateers.

 
          
He
grinned. "The damage is mostly superficial, except for one thing. They
need a new flux unit. Then, with a bit of repair work, she'll go."

           
He paused. "The one we have in
the
Dare
would do the job, at a
pinch."

 
          
Ragshok
started.
"The
Dare?'
He pulled a face. The
Dare
was his best and biggest
ship ...

 
          
But
look at what he would be getting in exchange, he told
himself
...

 
          
He
left off playing with the command throne and looked about him, musing. He had
always dreamed of some great exploit. "Do you remember Varana?" he
murmured. "Not a big place. Just a little moon, really, with a littler
moon in attendance. But a nice
place,
and we had it to
ourselves for weeks ... a million people under our thumbs ..."

 
          
"Until
we scarpered rather than face a proper fight," Morgan said acidly.
"And remember, this tub is just a weaponless hulk now."

 
          
"But what a hulk.
You could get thousands in here, armed
to the teeth."

 
          
"We
don't have thousands. We only have a couple of hundred."

 
          
"It's
no secret where we could get more, if there's enticement enough." Ragshok
turned to his Salpian. "How fast could she go if we installed
Dare's
flux unit?"

 
          
"As fast as she ever went—for a while.
You'd have to
replace it after a year or so."

 
          
Ragshok
leaned back, still thinking. The idea is ludicrous, he admitted dismally to
himself. There's nothing we can do with this thing, except strip it bare of
everything valuable.

 
          
He
knew why he was so reluctant to let the ship go. It was because of his notions
of grandeur. To be the outlawed master of a stolen warship of the Empire!

 
          
Just
then Tengu, his systems engineer—or one of them— came bursting in. The lean,
dark-skinned man seemed hot and tense.

 
          
"Those
stories we heard were true," he said in a clipped, harsh accent.
"They've got matter transmitters aboard. They use them to transfer from
ship to ship.''

 
          
Ragshok
stared at him. "You're sure?"

 
          
"Chief,
you can eat my brains if I'm ever wrong."

 
          
The
privateer captain turned away. His face was slack, his eyes glazed. The idea
that was bubbling, fermenting, bursting within his skull was just too good . .
.

 
 
          
The
strident clamour that rang through the craft as it approached the edge of the
planetary system ahead made Hesper Positana grit her teeth in frustration. It
was the 'every man for himself call.

 
          
Sheathed
in one of the forward bubbles (she was supposed to be manning a dart—a
short-range missile launcher), she banged a fist angrily on her communicator
and heard the voice of the captain issuing final instructions to his officers.

 
          
The
ship had once been a licenced police craft and was one of the few vessels in
the rebel fleet—one of the few in the whole of Escoria—actually built as a
fighting vessel. They had done some fighting, but not nearly as much as they
had been running, so it seemed to her, and all her gall was in her voice as she
yelled, "What in space's name is this?"

 
          
"We
can't outrun them, Hesper," the captain's voice came back. "Save
yourself."

 
          
"Then
let's make a fight of it!"

 
          
"It's
no good, Hesper—
it's the flagship itself
that's after us."

 
          
She
swallowed. The alarum was still ringing.

 
          
Then,
with a snarl and
"Tcha"
of
annoyance, she loosed of all three remaining darts in succession and, moving
lithely, snaked herself through the hatch at her back and loped down a narrow
corridor to the escape station. There were several survival eggs left. Without
more ado she tucked herself into one, pulled down the starting blind, and felt
herself go down the chute.

 
          
On
the glowing screen before her eyes she could see what was happening. The
Shark
—the ex-police cruiser—was by now
ploughing halfway into the planetary system where they had hoped to hide,
crossing the orbits of the gas giants. As the survival eggs sprayed out of the
feetol field they carried its remanence; they would guide themselves as close
as possible to any near inhabited planets.

 
          
The
screen tracked the paths the eggs were taking. Many were making for a small
planet with a reddish hue. But others, herself included, had chosen a different
target: the next world inward, of which she could make out little.

 
          
Then
the dot that was the
Shark
flared
briefly: a point of light momentarily brighter by virtue of a consuming instant
of nuclear fusion. A feetol shell had found its mark.

 
          
The
survival egg was decelerating rapidly but it would probably take her, in the
next minute or so, to the inward planet it had selected. Its inertial
protection was without sophistication, and barely adequate. She was spun at she
did not know what rate, at thousands of rotations per second, on a hundred
different axes, as it handled and dissipated the excess inertial energy arising
from a slowing down to below the speed of light and lower still, and which
would otherwise have converted her to a puff of gas. Even so, she passed out
several times.

 
          
A
calm, confident voice sounded in her ear, designed to encourage a
forward-looking attitude in the egg's occupant.
"Atmosphere.
Please prepare to look out for a landing place."

 
          
She
could hear thin upper air whistling past the eggshell now. There was a
blip
and a radar map of the terrain
below appeared on the screen before her. She squinted and tried to make it out.

 
          
She
heard, with a crack, the rotor blades opening.

 
          
Pout
was quivering with pleasure and excitement. He had left his following, telling
them to stay in one place until he got back, and had walked two or three miles
through the savannah. His people were used to him wandering off and he knew
they would wait for him; they had no choice.

 
          
The
boy Sinbiane had told him there was a village here. Pout had seen the flat
roofs of the houses from some distance off. Now, crawling on his belly atop a
grassy bank, a perfect vision awaited him.

 
          
It
was dusk. The air was mild and spicy. And down the other side of the bank,
scarcely more than a few yards away, he was staring straight into a girl's
bedroom.

 
          
She
had her light on; all the cosy details of the room were visible through the
open window with perfect clarity. The girl was sitting at a table with a mirror
on it; he couldn't make out quite what she was doing. But now she rose, and in
full view of where Pout was lying, pulled off her upper garment over her head.
Underneath, she was bare to the waist. Her breasts were heavy and voluptuous,
and they bounced when released from the garment.