Part 31 (2/2)

And Hoddan headed for Darth. He had to return his crew, and there was something else. Several something elses. He arrived in that solar-system and put his yacht in a search-orbit, listening for the call-signal the s.p.a.ceboat should give for him to home on. He found it, deep within the gravity-field of Darth. He maneuvered to come alongside, and there was blinding light everywhere. Alarms rang. Lights went out. Instruments registered impossibilities, the rockets fired crazily, and the whole s.h.i.+p reeled. Then a voice roared out of the communicator:

”_Stand and deliver! Surrender and y'll be allowed to go to ground. But if y'even hesitate I'll hull ye and heave ye out to s.p.a.ce without a s.p.a.cesuit!_”

Hoddan winced. Stray sparks had flown about everywhere inside the s.p.a.ce yacht. A ball lightning bolt, even of only warning size, makes things uncomfortable when it strikes. Hoddan's fingers tingled as if they'd been asleep. He threw on the transmitter switch and said annoyedly:

”h.e.l.lo, grandfather. This is Bron. Have you been waiting for me long?”

He heard his grandfather swear disgustedly. Not long later, a badly battered, blackened, scuffed old s.p.a.cecraft came rolling up on rocket-impulse and stopped with a billowing of rocket fumes. Hoddan threw a switch and used the landing grid field he'd used on Walden in another fas.h.i.+on. The s.h.i.+ps came together with fine precision, lifeboat-tube to lifeboat-tube. He heard his grandfather swear in amazement.

”That's a little trick I worked out, grandfather,” said Hoddan into the transmitter. ”Come aboard. I'll pa.s.s it on.”

His grandfather presently appeared, scowling and suspicious. His eyes shrewdly examined everything, including the loot tucked in every available s.p.a.ce. He snorted.

”All honestly come by,” said Hoddan morbidly. ”It seems I've got a license to steal. I'm not sure what to do with it.”

His grandfather stared at a placard on the wall. It said archly: ”_Remember! A Lady is Present!_” Nedda had put it up.

”Hm-m-m!” said his grandfather. ”What's a woman doing on a pirate s.h.i.+p?

That's what your letter talked about!”

”They get on,” said Hoddan, wincing, ”like mice. You've had mice on a s.h.i.+p, haven't you? Come in the control room and I'll explain.”

He did explain, up to the point where his arrangements to pay back for a s.h.i.+p and cargo he'd given away turned into a runaway success, and now he was responsible for the employment of innumerable bookkeepers and clerks and such in the insurance companies he'd come to own. There was also the fact that as the emigrant fleet went on, some fifty more planets in all would require the attention of pirate s.h.i.+ps from time to time, or there would be disillusionment and injury to the economic system.

”Organization,” said his grandfather, ”does wonders for a tender conscience like you've got. What else?”

Hoddan explained the matter of his Darthian crew. Don Loris might affect to consider them disgraced because they hadn't cut his throat.

Hoddan had to take care of the matter. And there was Nedda.... Fani came into the story somehow, too. Hoddan's grandfather grunted, at the end.

”We'll go down and talk to this Don Loris,” he said pugnaciously. ”I've dealt with his kind before. While we're down, your Cousin Oliver'll take a look at this new grid-field job. We'll put it on my s.h.i.+p. Hm-m-m--how about the time down below? Never land long after daybreak. Early in the morning, people ain't at their best.”

Hoddan looked at Darth, rotating deliberately below him.

”It's not too late, sir,” he said. ”Will you follow me down?”

His grandfather nodded briskly, took another comprehensive look at the loot from Walden, and crawled back through the tube to his own s.h.i.+p.

So it was not too long after dawn, in that time-zone, when a sentry on the battlements of Don Loris' castle felt a shadow over his head. He jumped a foot and stared upward. Then his hair stood up on end and almost threw his steel helmet off. He stared, unable to move a muscle.

There was a s.h.i.+p above him. It was not a large s.h.i.+p, but he could not judge of such matters. It was not supported by rockets. It should have been falling horribly to smash him under its weight. It wasn't. Instead, it floated on with very fine precision, like a s.h.i.+p being landed by grid, and settled delicately to the ground some fifty yards from the base of the castle wall.

Immediately thereafter there was a muttering roar. It grew to a howl--a bellow; it became thunder. It increased from that to a noise so stupendous that it ceased altogether to be heard, and was only felt as a deep-toned battering at one's chest. When it ended there was a second s.h.i.+p resting in the middle of a very large scorched place close by the first.

Neither of these s.h.i.+ps was a s.p.a.ceboat. The silently landed vessel, which was the smaller of the two, was several times the sizes of the only s.p.a.cecraft ever seen on Darth outside the s.p.a.ceport. Its design was somehow suggestive of a yacht. The other, larger, s.h.i.+p was blunt and soiled and s.p.a.ce-worn, with patches on its plating here and there.

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