Now he sat in the captain’s shuttle, waiting for the power to return. The main lights flickered briefly, then turned on to full brightness. The air-lock pumps hummed to life, the outer hatch slid open. Hector nudged the throttle and the shuttle edged out of the air lock and away from the orbiting ship.
The Kerak captain needed about ten minutes to piece together all the information: the deliberate misconnection in the switching equipment; Hector’s disappearance; and, finally, the unauthorized departure of his personal shuttle.
“He’s escaped,” the captain mumbled”Escaped. When we were just about to send him back.”
“What shall we do, sir? If the planetary patrols detect the ship, he won’t be able to identity himself satisfactorily. They’ll blast him!”
The captain’s eyes lit up at the thought. But then, “No. If we lose him, the whole Star Watch will pour into Kerak.” He thought for a moment, then told his aides, “Have our communications men send out a (fight plan to the planetary patrol. Tell them that my shuttle and an auxiliary boat are bringing a contingent of men and officers to the Ministry of Intelligence. And get one of the boats ready for immediate departure. Take your best men. This mess is going to get worse before it gets better.”
Odal paced his windowless room endlessly: from the wall screen, around the lounge, past the guarded door to the outside hall, to the bedroom doorway, back again. And again, and again, across the thick carpeting.
He was trying to use his mind as a dispassionate computer, to weigh and count and calculate a hundred different factors. But each factor was different, imponderable, non-numerical. And any one of them could determine the length of Odal’s life span.