“That means we do as we like with you, Ulrik,” the smooth character who had been appointed my defense counsel said—the first time he had opened his mouth since the ‘trial’ began.
“It is therefore directed,” Whiskers went on, not laughing, “that you shall suffer capital punishment, not in an orthodox manner, but in a fashion which will serve the public interest.”
My counsel leaned close again. “That means we’ve got a use for you, Ulrik,” he told me. “You’re a lucky man: your valuable talent won’t be wasted.”
It took them another hour to come out with all the details; even to Boss Judd, willfully breaking a Class Five quarantine was sweaty business. And there was more:
“The public has a corny idea this big bum is some kind of noble hero, holding onto the ancestral lands all alone, against all the odds,” my counsel summed up.
“Sure,” I agreed. “That’s old stuff, counselor; what’s in it for the Mob?”
“There’s no occasion to sneer,” my lawyer told me. ” ‘Mob’ is a long-outdated term. The Organization exercises, de facto, at least as much power as the so-called “legitimate” government, and has indeed been delegated the police and judicial functions here in the Belt, where the not-so-long arm of the Assembly can’t reach.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “These days, you can’t hardly tell the hoods from the Forces of Righteousness. Well, maybe you never could. So what’s it got to do with little old law-abiding me?”
“With Johnny Thunder dead—get that name some sob-sister hung on this slob—there’s no legal basis for Q-5,” the shyster told me. “That means a wide-awake developer can go in and stake a claim to two million squares of top quality real estate—and Boss don’t sleep much.”
“It’s so silly it might work,” I had to admit. “So when you couldn’t hire me for the hit, you framed me with a half-million units of jazreel—and here I am, ready to do your dirty work.”
“Don’t knock it, Ulrik,” Illini said smoothly. “It works.”
And the dirty part of it was, he was absolutely right. I had no choice.
6
From a half-million miles out, Vangard was a sphere of gray cast-iron, arc-lit yellow-white on the sunward side, coal-mine black on the other, with a wide band of rust-red along the terminator. The mountain ranges showed up as crooked black hair-lines radiating from the white dazzle of the poles, fanning out, with smaller ridges rising between them, forming a band of broken gridwork across the planet like the back of an old man’s hand. I watched the detail grow on the screen until I could match it up with the lines on the nav chart, and it was time to go into my routine. I broke the seal on my U-beamer and sounded my Mayday:
“King Uncle 629 calling XCQ! I’m in trouble! I’m on emergency approach to R-7985-23-D, but it doesn’t look good. My track is 093 plus 15, at 19-0-8 standard, mark! Standing by for instructions, and make it fast! Relay, all stations!” The lines were corny, but at this point I had to follow the script. I set the auto-squawk to squirt the call out a thousand times in one-millisec bursts, then switched to listen and waited while forty-five seconds went past. That’s how long it would take the hype signal to hit the beamer station of Ring 8 and bounce back an automatic AK.
The auto signal came in right on schedule; another half a minute passed in silence, and a cold finger touched my spine. Then a voice that sounded like I shouldn’t have disturbed its nap came in:
“King Uncle 629, Monitor Station Z-448 reading you three by three. You are not, repeat not cleared for planetfall. Report full detail—”
“Belay that!” I came back with plenty of edge. “I’m going to hit this rock; how hard depends on you! Get me down first and we’ll handle the paperwork later!”
“You’re inside interdict range of a Class Five quarantined world. This is an official navigational notice to clear off—”
“Wise up, 448,” I cut into that. “I’m seven hundred hours out of Dobie with a special cargo aboard! You think I picked this spot to fuse down? I need a tech advisory and I need it now!”
Another wait; then my contact came back on, sounding tight-lipped: “King Uncle, transmit a board read-out.”
“Sure, sure. But hurry it up.” I sounded rattled, which didn’t require much acting ability, under the circumstances. Boss Judd didn’t pay off on unavoidable mission aborts. I pushed the buttons that gave Z-448 a set of duplicate instrument readings that would prove I was in even worse trouble than I claimed. It was no fake. I’d spent plenty to make sure the old tub had seen her last port.
“All right, King Uncle; you waited too long to make your report, you’re going to have to jettison cargo and set up the following nav sequence—”
“I said special cargo!” I yelled back at him. “Category ten! I’m on a contract run for the Dobie med service. I’m carrying ten freeze cases!”
“Uh, roger, King Uncle,” the station came back, sounding a little off-balance now. “I understand you have living casualties under cryothesis aboard. Stand by.” There was a pause. “You’ve handed me a cozy one, 629,” the voice added, sounding almost human.
“Yeah,” I said. “Put some snap on it. That rock’s coming up fast.”
I sat and listened to the star-crackle. A light and a half away, the station computer would be going into action, chewing up the data from my board and spitting out a solution; and meanwhile, the sharp boy on duty would be checking out my story. That was good. I wanted it checked. It was solid all down the line. The passengers lashed down in the cargo cell were miners, badly burned in a flash fire three months ago on Dobie, a mean little world with no treatment facilities. I was due to collect five million and a full pardon when I delivered them to the med center on Commonweal in a viable condition. My pre-lift inspection was on file, along with my flight plan, which would show my minimum-boost trajectory in past Vangard, just the way a shoestring operator would plot it, on the cheap. It was all in the record. I was legitimate, a victim of circumstances. It was their ball now. And if my calculations were any good, there was only one way they could play it.
“King Uncle, you’re in serious trouble,” my unseen informant told me. “But I have a possible out for you. You’re carrying a detachable cargo pod?” He paused as if he expected an answer, then went on. “You’re going to have to ride her down, then jettison the pod on airfoils inside atmosphere. Afterwards, you’ll have only a few seconds in which to eject. Understood? I’ll feed you the conning data now.” A string of numbers rattled off to be automatically recorded and fed into the control sequencer.
“Understood, 448,” I said when he finished. “But look—that’s a wild country down there. Suppose the cooler’s damaged in the drop? I’d better stay with her and try to set her down easy.”
“Impossible, King Uncle!” The voice had warmed up a few degrees. After all, I was a brave though penny-pinching merchant captain, determined to do my duty by my charges even at the risk of my own neck.
“Frankly, even this approach is marginal,” he confided. “Your one chance—and your cargo’s—is to follow my instructions implicitly!” He didn’t add that it was a criminal offense not to comply with a Monitor’s navigational order. He didn’t have to. I knew that, was counting on it.
“If you say so. I’ve got a marker circuit on the pod. But listen: how long will it take for you fellows to get a relief boat out here?”
“It’s already on the way. The run will take . . . just under three hundred hours.”
“That’s over twelve standard days!” I allowed the short pause required for the slow mental process of a poor but honest spacer to reach some simple conclusions, then blurted: “If that freeze equipment’s knocked out, the insulation won’t hold low-O that long! And . . .” Another pause for the next obvious thought to form. “And what about me? How do I stay alive down there?”
“Let’s get you down first, Captain.” Some of the sympathy had slipped, but not much. Even a hero is entitled to give some thought to staying alive, after he’s seen to the troops.
There was little more talk, but the important things had all been said. I was following orders, doing what I was told, no more, no less. Inside the hour, the whole Tri-D watching public of the Sector would know that a disabled hospital ship was down on Vanguard, with ten men’s lives—eleven, if you counted mine—hanging in the balance. And I’d be inside the target’s defenses, in position for phase two.