Agent of Vega and Other Stories by James H. Schmitz

“And now they’ve also begun to suspect somebody’s been poking around in their minds pretty freely this last hour or so.”

* * *

The two men in the corridor outside the Port Offices were using mind-shields of a simple but effective type. It was the motor tension in their nerves and muscles that warned him first, surging up as he approached, relaxing slightly—but only slightly—when he was past.

He drove the warning to the ship.

“Keep an open line of communication between us, and look out for yourself. The hunt’s started up at this end!”

“The docks are clear of anything big enough to matter,” the robot returned instantly. “I’m checking upstairs. How bad does it look? I can be with you in three seconds from here.”

“You’d kill a few thousand bystanders doing it, big boy! This section’s built up. Just stay where you are. There are two men following me, a bunch more waiting behind the next turn of this corridor. All wearing mind-shields—looks like government police.”

A second later: “They’re set to use paralyzers, so there’s no real danger. The Ceetal’s outfit wants me alive, for questioning.”

“What will you do?”

“Let them take me. It’s you they’re interested in! Lycanno’s been complaining about us, and they think we might be here to get Deel and the Lannai off the planet. How does it look around you now?”

“Quiet, but not good! There’re some warships at extreme vision range where they can’t do much harm; but too many groups of men within two hundred miles of us are wearing mind-shields and waiting for something. I’d say they’re ready to use fixed-mount space guns now, in case we try to leave without asking again.”

“That would be it—Well, here go the paralyzers!”

He stepped briskly around the corridor corner and stopped short, rigid and transfixed in flickering white fountains of light that spouted at him from the nozzles of paralyzer guns in the hands of three of the eight men waiting there.

After a fifth of a second, the beams snapped off automatically. The stiffness left Iliff’s body more slowly; he slumped then against the wall and slid to the floor, sagging jaw drawing his face down into an expression of foolish surprise.

One of the gunmen stepped towards him, raised his head and pried up an eyelid.

“He’s safe!” he announced with satisfaction. “He’ll stay out as long as you want him that way.”

Another man spoke into a wristphone.

“Got him! Orders?”

“Get him into the ambulance waiting at the main entrance of the building!” a voice crackled back. “Take him to Dock 709. We’ve got to investigate that ship, and we’ll need him to get inside.”

“Thought it would be that,” Iliff’s murmur reached the ship. “They’ll claim I was in an accident or something and ask to bring me in.” The thought trailed off, started up again a moment later: “They might as well be using sieves as those government-issue mind-shields! These boys here don’t know another thing except that I’m wanted, but we can’t afford to wait any longer. We’ll have to take them along. Get set to leave as soon as we’re inside!”

The eight men who brought him through the ship’s ground lock—six handling his stretcher, two following helpfully—were of Gull’s toughest; an alert, well-trained and well-armed group, prepared for almost any kind of trouble. However, they never had a chance.

The lock closed soundlessly, but instantaneously, on the heels of the last of them. From the waiting ambulance and a number of other camouflaged vehicles outside concealed semi-portables splashed wild gusts of fire along the ship’s flanks—then they were variously spun around or rolled over in the backwash of the take-off. A single monstrous thunderclap seemed to draw an almost visible line from the docks towards the horizon; the docks groaned and shook, and the ship had once more vanished.

A number of seconds later, the spaceport area was shaken again—this time by the crash of a single fixed-mount space gun some eighty miles away. It was the only major weapon to go into action against the fugitive on that side of the planet.

Before its sound reached the docks, two guns on the opposite side of Gull also spewed their stupendous charges of energy into space, but very briefly. Near the pole, the ship had left the planet’s screaming atmosphere in an apparent head-on plunge for Gull’s single moon, which was the system’s main fortress. This cut off all fire until, halfway to the satellite, the robot veered off at right angles and flashed out of range on the first half-turn of a swiftly widening evasion spiral.

The big guns of the moon forts continued to snarl into space a full minute after the target had faded beyond the ultimate reach of their instruments.

* * *

Things could have been much worse, Iliff admitted. And presently found himself wondering just what he had meant by that.

He was neither conscious nor unconscious. Floating in a little Nirvana of first-aid treatment, he was a disembodied mind vaguely aware of being hauled back once more—and more roughly than usual—to the world of reality. And as usual, he was expected to be doing something there—something disagreeable.

Then he realized the robot was dutifully droning a report of recent events into his mind while it continued its efforts to rouse him.

It really wasn’t so bad! They weren’t actually crippled; they could still outrun almost anything in space they couldn’t outfight—as the pursuit had learned by now. No doubt, he might have foreseen the approximate manner in which the robot would conduct their escape under the guns of an alerted planet and a sizable section of that planet’s war fleet—while its human master and the eight men from Gull hung insensible to everything in the webs of the force-field that had closed on them with the closing of the ground lock.

A clean-edged sixteen-foot gap scooped out of the compartment immediately below the lock was, of course, nobody’s fault. Through the wildest of accidents, they’d been touched there, briefly and terribly, by the outer fringe of a bolt of energy hurled after them by one of Gull’s giant moon-based guns.

The rest of the damage—though consisting of comparatively minor rips and dents—could not be so simply dismissed. It was the result, pure and simple, of slashing headlong through clusters of quick-firing fighting ships, which could just as easily have been avoided.

Dreamily, Iliff debated taking a run to Jeltad and having the insubordinate electronic mentality put through an emotional overhaul there. It wasn’t the first time the notion had come to him, but he’d always relented. Now he would see it was attended to. And at once—

With that, he was suddenly awake and aware of the job much more immediately at hand. Only a slight sick fuzziness remained from the measures used to jolt him out of the force-field sleep and counteract the dose of paralysis rays he’d stopped. And that was going, as he bent and stretched, grimacing at the burning tingle of the stuff that danced like frothy acid through his arteries. Meanwhile, the robot’s steel tentacles were lifting his erstwhile captors, still peacefully asleep, into a lifeboat which was then launched into space, came round in a hesitant half-circle and started resolutely back towards Gull.

“Here’s our next move,” Iliff announced as the complaining hum of the lifeboat’s “pick-me-up” signals began to fade from their instruments. “They didn’t get much of a start on us—and in an ordinary stellar-type yacht, at that. If they’re going where I think they are, we might catch up with them almost any moment. But we’ve got to be sure, so start laying a global interception pattern at full emergency speeds—centered on Gull, of course. Keep detectors full on and telepath broadcast at ultimate nondirectional range. Call me if you get the faintest indication of a pick-up on either line.”

The muted brazen voice stated:

“That’s done.”

“Fine. The detectors should be our best bet. About the telepath: we’re not going to call Pagadan directly, but we’ll try for a subconscious response. U-1’s got to be in charge by now, unless Correlation’s quit being omniscient, but he might not spot that—at least, not right away. Give her this—”

Events had been a little too crowded lately to make the memory immediately accessible. But, after a moment’s groping, he brought it from his mind: the picture of a quiet, dawnlit city—seas of sloping, ivory-tinted roofs and slender towers against a flaming sky.

The pickup came on the telepath an hour later.

* * *

“They’re less than half a light-year out. Shall I slide in and put a tractor on them?”

“Keep sliding in, but no tractors! Not yet.” Iliff chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. “Sure she didn’t respond again?”

“Not after that first subconscious reply. But the yacht may have been blanked against telepathy immediately afterwards.”

“Well, anyway, she was still alive then,” Iliff said resignedly. “Give Headquarters the yacht’s location, and tell them to quit mopping their brows because U-1’s on his own now—and any Ceetal that gets within detection range of him will go free-stage the hard way. Then drop a field of freezers over that crate. I want her stopped dead. I guess I’ll have to board—”

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