But she was still learning! One way or the other, she was going to do it. Find them.
Zamm lay there, staring upwards, bitter and unbelieving.
“What is it?” she asked suddenly.
“Company!” the robot said.
* * *
They were a long, long distance away, moving at many times the speed of light. In the vision tank, they seemed to glide past unhurriedly almost within shouting range of the ship. One, two, three, four—
Four clouds of diffused radiance, like great, luminous jellyfish pulsing down an indetectable current of space. Migrating Shaggar ships behind their camouflaging screens. They had spotted her, of course, but like most of the older forms of space life they had learned to be careful about strange ships that did not flee from them at once. They were waiting to see her next move.
“Confirm position and direction of the drift for Central first!” Zamm said. Despair and rage were still bleak in her eyes, but her long, tapered fingers slid swiftly and surely above and about the armament banks of the control desk. Not touching anything just yet; only checking.
“Two of these are nearly in line,” the robot reported.
“Five in all!” sniffed Zamm. “One more could make it a fight. Parallel course, and swing round once to make them bunch up—”
A minute or so later, they flashed across the Shaggars’ path, at point-blank range ahead of them. The nebular screens vanished suddenly, and five deep-bellied, dark ships became visible instead. Light and energy boiled abruptly all about Zamm’s black globe—before, behind. It missed.
“Spot any more, this side?”
“Four more are approaching—barely detectable! They may have been called by this group.”
“Good enough! We’ll take them next.” Zamm waited as the ship completed its swing and drove into line behind her quarry. They were beyond any weapon-reach by then, but space far ahead was being churned into a long whirlpool of flame. At the whirlpool’s core, the five Shaggar ships, retreating at speed, had drawn close together and were throwing back everything they had.
“Instructions?” the robot-voice murmured.
“Contact range—Move in!”
Up the long cone of flame, the ship sprang at the five. Zamm’s hands soared, spread and high, above the armament banks—thin, curved, white claws of hate! Those seeming to swim down toward her now, turning and shifting slowly within their fire-veils, were not the faceless, more or less humanlike ones she sought. But they were marked with the same red brand: brand of the butchers, looters, despoilers—of all the death-thoughts drifting and writhing through the great stupid carnivore mind of the Universe—
At point-blank range, a spectral brilliance clung and hammered at her ship and fell away. At half-range, the ship shuddered and slowed like a beast plowing through a mudhole and out. At one-quarter, space turned to solid, jarring fire for seconds at a time.
Zamm’s hands flashed.
“NOW—”
A power ravened ahead of them then like the bellowing of a sun. Behind it, hardly slower, all defenses cut and every weapon blaring its specific ultimate of destruction, the ship came screaming the hate of Zamm.
* * *
Two years—
The king-shark was bothering Zamm! It hung around some subspace usually where she couldn’t hope to trace it.
It was a big ship, fast and smart and tricky. It had weapons and powers of which she knew nothing. She couldn’t even guess whether it realized she was on its tail or not. Probably, it didn’t.
Its field of operations was wide enough so that its regularly spaced schedule of kills didn’t actually disrupt traffic there or scare it away. A certain percentage of losses had to be taken for granted in interstellar commerce. The chief difference seemed to be that in this area the losses all went to the king-shark.
Zamm circled after it, trying to calculate its next points of appearance. A dozen times she didn’t miss it by much; but its gutted kills were still all she got.
It took no avoidable chances. It picked its prey and came boiling up into space beside it—or among it, if it was a small convoy—and did its work. It didn’t bother with prisoners, so the work was soon done. In an hour everything was over. The dead hulks with their dead crews and dead passengers went drifting away for Zamm to find. The king-shark was gone again.
Disgusted, Zamm gave up trying to outguess it. She went off instead and bought herself a freighter.
The one she selected was an expensive, handsome ship, and she loaded it up with a fortune. She wanted no gilded hook for the king-shark; she’d feed it solid gold! There were a dozen fortunes lying around her globe, in salvaged cash and whatnot from previous jobs. She’d use it up as she needed it or else drop it off at Jeltad the next time she went back. Nobody kept accounts on that sort of stuff.
Her freighter was all ready to start.
“Now I need a nice pirate!” mused Zamm.
She went out and caught herself one. It had an eighteen-man crew, and that was just right for the freighter. She checked over their memories first, looking for the one thing she wanted. It wasn’t there. A lot of other things were, but it had been a long time since that kind of investigation made her feel particularly sick.
“Anyone lives through it, I’ll let him go!” she promised, cold-eyed. She would, and they knew it. They were small fry; let somebody else grab them up if they wanted them badly enough!
At a good, fast, nervous pace, the freighter and its crew crossed what was currently the most promising section of the king-shark’s area—Zamm’s black globe sliding and shifting and dancing about its bait at the farthest possible range that would still permit it to pounce.
By and by, the freighter came back on another route and passed through the area again. It was nearing the end of the fourth pass when the king-shark surfaced into space beside it and struck. In that instant, the freighter’s crew died; and Zamm pounced.
It wasn’t just contact range; it was contact. Alloy hide to alloy hide, Zamm’s round black leech clung to the king-shark’s flank, their protective screens fused into a single useless mass about them. It didn’t matter at what point the leech started to bite; there weren’t any weak ones. Nor were there any strong enough to stop its cutter-beam at a four-foot range.
It was only a question of whether they could bring up something in eighty seconds that would blast out the leech’s guts as the wall between them vanished.
They couldn’t, it seemed. Zamm and her goblin crew of robots went into the king-shark in a glittering wave.
“Just mess up their gravs!” said Zamm. “They don’t carry prisoners. There’ll be some in suits, but we’ll handle them.”
* * *
In messed-up rows, the robots laid out the living and the nearly dead about the king-shark’s passages and rooms.
“From Cushgar!” said Zamm surprised. “They’re prowling a long way from home!”
She knew them by their looks. The ancestors of the king-shark’s one hundred and fourteen crewmen had also once breathed the air of Terra. They had gone off elsewhere and mutated variously then; and, like the Daya-Bals, the strongest surviving mutant strains eventually had blended and grown again to be a new race.
Not a handsome one, by Zamm’s standards! Short and squat and hairy, and enormously muscled. The spines of their neck and back vertebrae stuck out through their skins in horny spikes, like the ridge on a turtle’s shell. But she’d seen worse-looking in the human line; and she wasn’t judging a beauty contest.
A robot stalked briskly along the rows like a hunting wasp, pausing to plunge a fine needle into the neck of each of the people from Cushgar, just beneath the fourth vertebral spike. Zamm and a robot that had loafed till now picked out the ones that seemed damaged worst, settled down beside each in turn and began their questioning.
Some time passed—four, five hours—finally six. Then Zamm and her robots came back to her ship. The leech sealed its egress port, unclamped and took off. The king-shark’s huge, dark hulk went drifting along through space. There was no one alive on it now. Fifteen minutes later, a light suddenly flared from it, and it vanished.
Zamm sat white-faced and silent at her desk for a much longer time than that.
“The dolls,” she said finally, aloud.
“Yes?” said the big robot-voice.
“Destroy them,” said Zamm. She reached out and switched on the telepath transmitter. “And get me a line through to Jeltad. The Co-ordinator—”
There was no reply, and no sound came from within the ship. She lit up some star-globes and began calculating from them. The calculations didn’t take long. Then she sat still again for a while, staring into the luminous green, slowly swirling haze that filled the transmitter screen.