* * *
There was someone waiting inside the entrance. It was Dionisio.
“What’s slowing you men down in there, Dionisio?” Navigator Gage demanded curtly, striding towards him. “Why aren’t you moving?”
Dionisio was considerably more intelligent than Connick, but, besides being also badly fretted by the toziens, he was, for a moment, confused. He’d been told the navigator was among those to get it here; but he’d also been told that the navigator was unarmed and had no idea of what was going to happen. And here the navigator came walking up, casually holding a gun at half-ready, looking annoyed and impatient, which was standard for him on an operation, and sounding as if he were very much in on the deal. And, of course, there was the further consideration that the navigator was an extremely fast and accurate man with a gun. So Dionisio blinked, licked his lips, cleared his throat, finally began, “Well . . . uh—”
“The skipper’s got the control room cleaned up?”
“Well, sir, I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“I wasn’t there,” Dionisio said sullenly, eyes fixed with some nervousness on the gun Navigator Gage was waving around rather freely. “I was in the skiff. There was that funny feeling we all got. Right after that we got the skipper’s signal. So we came out. The skipper tells us to start looking around for the people.”
“The people in the building?”
“Uh-huh. The skipper and McNulty were in the control room. There were five, six of the people here with them. And then the skipper looks around, and there’s nobody there.”
The navigator’s lip curled. “You’re implying they disappeared? Just like that?”
“Looks like it,” said Dionisio warily.
“Everybody in the building?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So what are they doing in there now?”
“Blowing in the walls. Looking for, uh, doors.”
“Looking for doors!” repeated Navigator Gage, total disgust in his voice. “And what are you doing up here?”
Dionisio swallowed. “I’m to, uh, look out to see if somebody comes.”
“With the toziens around? You out of your mind? Who’s in the skiff? Have the rest of them come down from the ship?”
“No. There’s nobody in the—”
And then Dionisio stopped talking and twitched his gunbarrel up very quickly. Because Navigator Gage had glanced back towards the skiff out in the landing area just then; and while this was a kind of odd situation, Dionisio was positive the skipper anyhow wanted Navigator Gage dead, and he himself had no slightest use for the navigator. So up came the gun, and it was Dionisio who was dead in the same moment, because Navigator Gage had, after all, not glanced away to the extent of not being able to catch the motion.
* * *
Beyond the entry a lit hallway extended back into the building. Harold thought he’d heard distant human voices in there while he was talking to Dionisio, but at the moment there was silence. He checked quickly through the man’s gear, found a folded gas-breather and fitted that over his face. He took off his suit coat, put on Dionisio’s faded brown jacket, slapped Dionisio’s visor cap on his head, and set it at the jaunty angle Dionisio favored. As he finished, there was a remote heavy thump from within the building, followed in seconds by another. Jake Hiskey was still having holes blown out of the walls, looking for the hidden passages through which Professor Alston and the people working in the administration building had vanished when they got the alert signal. He should find them if he kept at it long enough. And as soon as they had the space lock controls figured out, they’d haul down the Prideful Sue with the heavier raiding equipment she carried.
Dionisio’s gun was the only other useful item here. Harold pocketed it, pulled the body over against the entry wall where it wouldn’t be visible from within the building, and set off quickly along the long hallway. Glassy motion flickered for an instant before his eyes; the toziens were still around. Now a series of five doors on the right—all locked. Ahead the hall made a turn to the right. As he came towards the corner, he heard men’s voices again, at least three or four, mingled in a short burst of jabbering, harsh with excitement. Hiskey’s voice among them? The ammonia smell of jolt bombs began to tingle faintly in his nostrils.
He went around the corner without hesitating or slowing his stride. The gas-breather covered half his face; and while Dionisio was about an inch shorter, they were similar enough in general build that he could be accepted as Dionisio for a few moments by men with their attention on other things. Sixty feet ahead, rubble covered the hall floor, chunks of colorful plastic masonry shaken by jolt bombs out of a great jagged hole in the left wall. Only two men in sight, standing waiting in tensed attitudes behind a semiportable gun pointed at the hole. Jake Hiskey’s voice now, raw with impatient anger: “Hurry it up! Hurry it up!” A glow spilled from the hole and there was the savage hiss of cutters. Bomb fumes hung thick in the air. Hiskey and at least four of the crew here. Wait till you’re right among them.
One of the men at the semiportable glanced around as Harold came up, looked away again. He went past them. The hole drove deep into the wall; evidently they’d uncovered a passage but found it sealed a few yards farther on, and the sealing material was holding. Three men were at work in there with Hiskey. The cutters blazed and a broken conduit spat vicious shorted power . . . And what damn fool had left two unused jolt bombs lying on this boulder of plastic? Harold scooped them up in passing, glanced back and saw Hiskey staring open-mouthed over at him, then clawing for his gun.
Harold dropped behind the boulder, thumbed the stud on one of the little bombs and pitched it over into the opening of the hole. The second one went in the general direction of the semiportable. Their successive shock waves rammed at his eardrums, lifted the boulder against him. Clouds of dust filled the hall. After a moment he took out one of his guns and stood up.
They lay where the double shock had caught and battered them. Hiskey had been coming for him, had nearly reached the boulder when he was smashed down. Harold looked at the bloodied head and was surprised by a wash of heavy regret, a brief but intensely vivid awareness of that bright yesterday in which Jake Hiskey and he first swung their ship out past the sun, headed towards high adventure. Too bad, Jake, he thought. Too bad that in eight years the adventure soured so that it’s ending here like this.
McNulty and one or at most two of the original landing group left. Finish it up now before their reinforcements get here—
McNulty at any rate should be in the control room.
Harold went on along the hallway. No sounds anywhere. An open door. He approached it cautiously, looked in. A sizable office, half a dozen desks spaced out, machine stands, wall files—two of these left open. Not many minutes ago, people had been working here. Then the asteroid’s alarm reached them, and like ghosts they’d vanished. At the far side of the office was another door. As he started towards it, two men stood suddenly in the doorframe. Guns went off; Harold dropped behind the nearest desk. Across the room, the two had taken cover as quickly.
A real gun fight now, fast and vicious. The crewmen were Harding and Ruse, two of the Prideful Sue’s best hands. The office furniture, in spite of its elegant appearance, was of tough solid plastic; but within a minute it was hammered half to pieces. Harold had emptied the charge in one of his guns before he got Harding. Ruse was still pouring it at him, battering the shielding desk. There was no way to reach back at him from here. Harold took a chance finally, shifting to another desk in a crouching leap, felt pain jar up from the heel of his right leg as he reached cover. Not an immediately crippling charge, though any hit of that kind was bad enough. Now, however, lying half across the desk, he had the advantage and could pour it on Ruse and did. Pinned behind his cover, Ruse kept firing furiously but ineffectively. At last he stopped firing and tried to duplicate Harold’s trick, and Harold got him in the open. The second gun hissed out emptily instants later.
Ruse had rolled on behind a low console. Only his legs were in sight. He seemed to be sprawled loosely on his side, and the legs weren’t moving. It might be a trick, though Harold didn’t think so. He knew he’d caught Ruse with a head shot; and even at minimum charge that should have been almost instantly fatal. But he stayed where he was and reached back carefully with one hand to get the gun recharger he’d taken from Connick out of his pocket. A moment’s fumbling told him it was no longer there. At some point along the line it had been jolted from the pocket and lost.