It was unfortunate that Miss do Eldel bad allowed her curiosity to take her into an off-limits section of the ship and discover their fellow-passenger. He trusted, the captain concluded, that he could count on the discretion of those present to see that the story at least got no farther….
Laes Yango, Vezzarn, and Hulik nodded earnestly. Whatever Hulik had thought when she turned on a light in Olimy’s stateroom, she seemed to accept the captain’s explanations. She was looking both relieved and very much embarrassed as he went off to relock the stateroom and passage doors … not that locking things up on the ship seemed to make much difference at present.
“If I could see you in the control section, Miss do Eldel,” he said when he came back. “Vezzarn, you’d better stay at the viewscreens till Dani and I take over up front….”
In the control room he asked Hulik to be seated. Goth already was at the console. But the detector system had remained reassuringly quiet, and the Megair Cluster was dropping behind them. The captain switched on the intercom, called Vezzarn off the lounge screens. Then he turned back to the passenger.
“I really must apologize, Captain Aron!” Hulik told him contritely. “I don’t know what possessed me. I assure you I don’t make it a practice to pry into matters that are not my business.”
“What I’d like to know,” the captain said, “is how you were able to unlock the passage door and the one to the stateroom.”
Hulik looked startled.
“But I didn’t!” she said. “Neither door was locked and the one to the passage stood open. That’s why it occurred to me to look inside…. Couldn’t Vezzarn…. No, you hadn’t told Vezzarn about this either, had you?”
“No, I hadn’t,” said the captain.
“You’re the only one who has keys to the door?”
He nodded. “Supposedly.”
“Then I don’t understand it. I swear I’m telling the truth!” Hulik’s dark eyes gazed at him in candid puzzlement. Then their expression changed. “Or could the unfortunate person in there have revived enough to have opened the doors from within?” Her face said she didn’t like that idea at all.
The captain told her he doubted it. And from what Goth knew of the disminded condition, it was in fact impossible that Olimy’s shape could have moved by itself, let alone begun unlocking doors. Otherwise, it seemed the incident hadn’t told them anything about the shipboard prowlers they didn’t already know. Hulik do Eldel looked as though she were telling the truth. But then an experienced lady spy would look as if she were telling the truth, particularly when she was lying….
He’d had an alarm device set up in the control desk that would go off if anyone tampered with the strongbox containing Olimy’s crystalloid in the storage vault. He was glad now he had taken that precaution, though it still did seem almost unnecessary, the time lock on the strongbox was supposed to be tamper-proof; and the storage vault itself had been installed on the ship by the same firm of master craftsmen who’d designed the vaults for the Daal’s Bank.
Most of the next ship-day passed quietly-or in relative quiet. They did, in fact, have their first real attack alert, but it was not too serious a matter. A round dozen black needle-shapes registered suddenly in the screens against the purple glare of a star. Stellar radiation boiling through space outside had concealed the blips till then … and not by accident; it was a common attack gambit and they’d been on the watch for it whenever their course took them too near a sun. The black ships moved at high speed along an interception course with the Venture. They looked wicked and competent.
The buzzer roused Goth in her sleep cabin. Thirty seconds later one of the desk screens lit up and her face looked out at the captain. “Ready!” her voice told him. She raked sleep-tousled brown hair back from her forehead. “Now?”
“Not yet.” Sneaking through the sun system, he hadn’t pushed the Venture; they still had speed in reserve. “We might outrun them. We’ll see…. Switch your screen to starboard…”
The ship’s intercom pealed a signal. The passenger lounge. The captain cut it in. “Yes?” he said.
“Are you aware, sir,” Laes Yango’s voice inquired, “that we are about to be waylaid?”
The captain thanked him, told him he was, and that he was prepared to handle the situation. The trader switched off, apparently satisfied. He must have excellent nerves; the voice had sounded composed, no more than moderately interested. And sharp eyes, the captain thought-the lounge screens couldn’t have picked up the black ships until almost the instant before Yango called.
It was too bad though that he was in the lounge at the moment. If the Sheewash Drive had to be used, the captain would slap an emergency button first, which among other things, blanked out the lounge screens. Nevertheless, that in itself was likely to give Yango some food for thought….
But perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary. The captain watched the calculated interception point in the instruments creep up. Still three minutes away. The black ships maintained an even speed. Four of them were turning off from the others, to cut in more sharply, come up again from behind….
He shoved the drive thrust regulator slowly flat to the desk. The drives howled monstrous thunder. A minute and a half later, they flashed through the interception point with a comfortable sixty seconds to spare. The black ships had poured on power at the last moment, too. But the Venture was simply faster.
His watch ended, and Goth’s began. He slept, ate, came on watch again….
SEVEN
IT WAS TIME to rouse Goth once more … past time by twenty minutes or so. But let her sleep a little longer, the captain thought. This alternate-watch arrangement would get to be a grind before the Chaladoor run was over! If he could only trust one of the others on board….
Well, he couldn’t.
He sniffed. For a moment he’d fancied a delicate suggestion of perfume in the air. Imagination. Hulik do Eldel used perfume, but it was over twenty-four hours since she’d been in the control room. Besides she didn’t use this kind.
Something stirred in his memory. Who did use this kind of perfume? Wasn’t it…?
“Do you have a few minutes to spare for me, Captain Aron?” somebody purred throatily behind him. He started, spun about in the chair.
Redheaded Sunnat leaned with lazy, leggy grace against the far wall of the control room, eyes half shut, smiling at him. Her costume was the one which most of all had set the captain’s pulses leaping rapidly, when she’d slid off her cloak and revealed it to him, back in Zergandol.
He started again, but less violently.
“Not bad!” he remarked. He cleared his throat.
“You were off on the voice though, and pretty far off, I’d say, on the perfume.”
Sunnat stared at him a moment, smile fading. “Hmm!” she said coldly. She turned, swayed into Goth’s cabin.
Goth came out a moment later, half frowning, half grinning.
“Thought I was her pretty good!” she started. “Voice, too!”
“You were, really!” the captain admitted. “And just what, may I ask, was the idea?”
Goth hitched herself up on the communicator table and dangled her legs. “Got to practice,” she explained. “There’s a lot to it. Not easy to hold the whole thing together either!”
“Light waves, sound waves, and scents, eh? No, I imagine it wouldn’t be. That’s all you do?”
“Right now it’s all,” nodded Goth.
The captain reflected. “Another thing, if you saw that costume of hers, you were doing some underhanded snooping-around in Zergandol!”
“Looked like you might need help,” Goth said darkly.
“Well, I didn’t!”
“No.” She grinned. “Couldn’t know that, though. Want me to do Hulik? I got her down just right.”
“Another time.” The captain climbed out of the chair, adjusted the seat for her. “I’d better get some sleep. And you’d better forget about practicing and keep your eyes pinned to those screens! There’ve been a few flickers again.”
“Don’t worry!” She slipped down from the table, started over to him. Then they both froze.
There were short, screeching whistles, a flickering line of red on the console. An alarm…
“Strongbox!” hissed Goth.
They raced through the silent ship to the storage. The lounge was deserted, its lights dim. It had been ship’s night for two hours.
The big storage door was shut, seemed locked, but swung open at the captain’s touch. The automatic lighting inside was on-somebody there! Cargo packed the compartment to the ship’s curved hull above. The captain brought out his gun as they went quickly down the one narrow aisle still open along the length of the storage, then came in sight of the vault at the far end to the left. The vault door, that massive, burglarproof slab, stood half open.