‘That’s right. They’d have to check out the Splendide, going past the entire staff that knows us well because of our tips, and pry our fortune out of the safe. Nice; I never thought of it cutting both ways. The only way they can match our physiques is to get two other DesPlainians or ex-Puritans, or people from some other heavy gravity world.’ Jules nodded. ‘And for that, they’ll have to send out. Heavy grav types like us just don’t do much unessential traveling to light grav planets. It’s just not comfortable, as you and I both know. In fact, another month of this with no work at grav and we’ll both be as flabby as two tubes of boiled noodles.’
‘So let’s hope it won’t be a month, then. But we certainly should give them a couple more days. Anyone who thinks they can ambush us certainly deserves the opportunity to try.’
Five more hikes proved uneventful, and the two of them began feeling very discouraged. But on the sixth evening following that conversation, at a place where the path passed close to a dense stand of trees on one side and a thick patch of underbrush on the other, their straining ears heard rustling sounds and their keen eyes caught the blur of movement. ‘Rube!’ Yvette whispered to her brother, and Jules nodded. Both were braced for action.
For concealment, the place the attackers had chosen was ideal – as the d’Alemberts had set it up to be.
But in order to make their attack, the muggers would have to move-and, being of a relatively low echelon in the criminal world, they could not take effective precautions against their movements being detected. Also they had no idea whatsoever of how terribly fast their proposed quarries were.
At the first hint of activity, Yvette and Jules became lightning incarnate. Jules’ hat and swagger stick hit the ground almost instantaneously, and Yvette’s tiara was right beside them. The two used their well- muscled legs as springs to catapult them in low dives, Jules to his side of the road and Yvette to hers.
Diving straight through a bush, Jules found himself in the center of a clump of five men. Four of them were in a tight configuration, with the fifth standing a short distance away. Having Jules’ powerful body come flying suddenly into their midst upset them no end. As he landed, Jules slapped the nearest man on the head – but gently, so as not to break his neck. As his momentum carried him still further forward, he grabbed the shirt of this first unconscious man and pulled him along. Then, rolling quickly to his knees, he picked his victim up and hurled him bodily at another man some three meters away. The second man, hit by the ninety-five kilo mass of his compatriot, staggered backwards and fell to the ground.
Jules, of course, had not stopped to watch the effect of his throw; what was most important to him was to keep moving, to do as much damage as quickly as possible and to present as small a target as he could. Springing to his feet, he jumped straight at the third man, who cringed reflexively. Jules’ powerful fist lashed out and struck his would-be assailant squarely in the solar plexus. The man whooshed and crumpled lifelessly to the ground. In the same motion, Jules spun, almost ballet-like, on one foot while, with the other, he kicked the fourth man in the face – not with his toe, but with the whole big flat sole of his boot. The impact crushed the man’s face in and rendered him instantly unconscious.
That made the score four down and one to go. But that one would be a little more difficult, Jules realized as he peered through the darkness at his remaining adversary; this one was a DesPlainian, by the look of him – the man who had obviously been intended to substitute for ‘Carlos Velasquez’.
H e had been standing several meters away from the scene of the battle, not originally intending to take part in it, and the five seconds it had taken Jules to dispose of the other crooks had given this one time to regain his senses. He had a gun drawn, but Jules couldn’t tell in the darkness whether it was a stunner or a blaster.
Jules hit the ground immediately and used the darkness of the night to cover him. His opponent with the gun was moving about and making what to Jules seemed like an awful lot of noise, though the criminal hardly realized that. As a result, Jules could track his adversary by sound, and kept low. Circling around, he came up behind the man, grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. The man had time to register only the briefest look of surprise before Jules’ right fist came smashing up under his jaw. Knowing that the man was another DesPlainian, Jules made no effort to pull his punch, and gave the hapless fellow the full strength at his command.
The DesPlainian criminal fell to the ground, his gun dropping from his hand. Jules caught the gun on the fly; it was a stunner, set on eight. A nasty setting, because it would leave a person helpless for days and could have permanent paralytic effects on the nervous system.
A movement caught his eye where there should not have been one, and Jules whirled to face the threat. The second man, at whom he’d thrown the first, was getting to his feet, gun in hand. Jules had no time to reset the controls on his stunner; he fired point-blank and the man went down again. This time he lay very still.
Yvette, too, had had a busy time of it. Her dive took her between two trees and into a small crowd of people. With arms spread apart, she grabbed two heads in her hands and brought them together with a frightening crack. She rolled as she hit the ground, regained her feet and looked around. A shadow moved, and she attacked it. Bringing her knee up, she produced a sharp cry of pain from the man whose groin she had hit. As he doubled over, she grabbed him by the shoulders, lifted him over her head and flung him at a fourth shadowy figure approaching in the nighttime gloom. There was a satisfying thud as the bodies connected and collapsed on the ground.
Suddenly a blow hit her on the back of the neck. It was a hard one, as such things go, and might have inflicted serious damage on the spinal column of someone in less superb physical condition. In Yvette’s case, however, those neck muscles were so tight and hard that the blow merely stunned her momentarily. She stumbled forward from the impact, but recovered her poise quickly and turned the fall into a roll. After completing her somersault, she sprang to her feet, spun around and faced her attacker.
About all she could make out in the dim starlight was the other’s silhouette- but that was enough to tell her some vital facts. For one thing, the silhouette was definitely female; there was no way a male could have fit into that particular assemblage of curves. For another, the short, squat form obviously belonged to a DesPlainian, or at least someone from a high-grav world. Adding these facts rapidly together in her mind, she came to the conclusion that the woman she was facing was the ‘ringer’ brought in to impersonate her and steal her fortune. That only made sense; if the real Carlos and Carmen Velasquez were waylaid on the trail, the ersatz ones should be ready to move in instantly to take their places.
Once that conclusion was reached, however, it was pigeonholed in her mind. The main problem she faced at the moment was staying alive while incapacitating this other woman at the same time. That problem was complicated by the fact that the DesPlainian criminal most likely had a gun that she would be using any second.
Yvette dove back in the direction from which she had come, toward her attacker. As she dove, she also twisted in mid-air, so that when she landed it was on her side, stretched out horizontally. She converted her forward momentum into a rolling motion, so that she spun along the ground directly into the legs of the woman who’d been standing there. Like a bowling ball hitting a strike, Yvette’s body knocked the woman completely off her feet. The two females sprawled out on the ground in a tangle of shapely limbs.
The other girl landed on top, and tried to press an elbow into Yvette’s windpipe. The SOTE agent fended off the blow with her forearm, simultaneously bringing her knee up to make a sharp blow on the other’s spine. The attacking female cried out and fell over forward; Yvette clipped her on the chin as she went by, and the now unconscious ambusher tumbled loosely to the ground.