The captain cleared his throat.
“Thank you,” he said aloud, keeping his voice as steady as he could. “Thank you, vatch! Thank you very much!”
It seemed the least he could do. There was an impression of the words rolling away from him as he uttered them, fading quickly into vast distance. He waited a moment, half afraid he’d get a response. But the control room remained quite still.
He broke out the bottle of ship brandy, stuck it in his jacket pocket, and half carried, half dragged Laes Yango back through the ship and into the storage. It took a minute or two to get the big man hauled up to the top of one of the less hard bales of cargo; and Yango was beginning to groan and stir about while the captain wired his ankles together and to the bale. That and the handcuffs should keep him secure, and he’d be out of the way here.
He turned the Agandar on his back, opened the brandy bottle and trickled a little into the side of the man’s mouth. Yango coughed, spluttered, opened bloodshot eyes, and glared silently at the captain.
The captain brought out the little container which held three needles of what should be the antidote to the drug Yango, had released in the ventilation system. “Is this the antidote?” he asked.
Yango snarled a few unpleasantries, added, “How could the witch use the drive?”
“I don’t know,” said the captain. “Be glad she did. Is it the antidote?”
“Yes, it is. Where are we now?”
The captain told him he’d be trying to find out, and locked the storage up again behind him. He left the lighting turned on. Not that it would make Yango much happier. His skull was intact, but his head would be throbbing a while.
The pirate probably had told the truth about the antidote and, in any case, everything would be stalled here until Goth came alert again. The captain made a brief mental apology to Vezzarn; somebody had to be first, and jabbed one of the needles into the little man’s arm. Under half-shut lids, Vezzarn’s eyes began rolling alarmingly; then his hands fluttered. Suddenly he coughed and sat up on the couch, looking around.
“What’s happened?” he whispered in fright when he discovered where he was and saw Goth and Hulik unconscious on the couch beside him.
The captain told him there’d been a problem, caused by Laes Yango, but that the ship seemed to be safe now and that Goth and Miss do Eldel should be all right. “Let’s get them awake. “
Hulik do Eldel received the contents of the second needle. She showed none of Vezzarn’s reactions. Two or three minutes went by; then she quietly opened her eyes.
Confidently, the captain gave Goth the third shot. While he waited for it to take effect, he began filling in the other two sketchily but almost truthfully on recent events. They were still potential troublemakers, and they might as well realize at once that this was a serious situation, in which it would be healthy for all involved to cooperate. The role played by the item in the strongbox naturally was not mentioned in his account. Neither did he refer to entities termed vatches, or attempt to explain exactly how they had arrived where they were. If Hulik and Vezzarn wanted to do some private speculating about mystery drives which might be less than reliable, he didn’t care.
He failed to note that the eyes of his two listeners grew very round before he’d much more than gotten started on his story. Neither of them said a word. And. the captain’s attention was mainly on Goth. Like Hulik, she was showing no immediate response to the drug….
Then a full six minutes had passed, and Goth still wasn’t awake!
There seemed to be no cause for actual alarm. Goth’s breathing and pulse were normal, and when he shook her by the shoulder he got small, sleepy growls in response. But she simply wouldn’t wake up. From what Yango had said, the drug would wear off by itself in something like another eight or nine hours. However, the captain didn’t like the looks of the neighborhood revealed in the viewscreens too well; and his companions evidently liked it less. Loitering around here did not seem a good idea, and setting off blindly through an unknown section of space to get themselves oriented, without having Goth and the Drive in reserve, might be no better.
He switched on the intercom to the storage, stepped up the reception amplification, and said, “Mr. Yango?” There was a brief, odd, unpleasant sound. Then the pirate’s voice replied, clearly and rather hurriedly, “Yes? I hear you. Go ahead…”
“I’ve used the antidote,” the captain told him. “Miss do Eldel and Vezzarn have come awake. Dani hasn’t.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Yango, said, after a moment.
“Why not?” asked the captain.
“I had a particular concern about your niece, sir. As you know.” Laes Yango, after his lapse from character, had gone back to being polite. “When she became unconscious with the rest of you, I drugged her again with a different preparation. I was making sure that any unusual resistance she might show would not bring her back to her senses before I intended her to regain them. “
“Then there’s an antidote to that around?”
“I have one. It isn’t easy to find.”
“What do you want?” the captain asked.
“Perhaps we can reach an agreement, sir. I am not very comfortable here.”
“Perhaps we can,” the captain said.
He flicked off the intercom. The other two were watching him.
“He probably does have it,” he remarked. “I searched him but I’m not in your line of business. He could have it hidden somewhere. The logical thing would be to haul him up here and search him again.”
“It looks to me,” said Vezzarn thoughtfully, “that that’s what he wants, skipper.”
“Uh-huh. “
Hulik said, “Just before that man spoke, I heard a noise. “
“So did I,” said the captain. “What did you make of it?”
“I’m not certain.”
“Neither am I.” It might, thought the captain, have been the short, angry half-snarl, half-whine of some large animal-shape, startled when his voice had sounded suddenly in the storage…. A snarly sort of thing, Goth had said. But the Sheem robot’s locked case stood inside the locked door of that almost impregnable vault.
Hulik do Eldel’s frightened eyes told him she was turning over the same kind of thoughts.
“We can get a look down into the storage from here,” he said.
There was a screen at the end of the instrument console, used to check loading and unloading operations on the ship from the control room. Its pick-up area was the ceiling of the storage compartment. The captain hurriedly switched it on. “We’re wondering whether Yango’s robot is in the storage,” he told Vezzarn.
Vezzarn shook his head. “It can’t be there, skipper! There’s no way Yango could have got into the vault without your keys. I guarantee that!”
And there was no way Yango should have been able to get out of his handcuffs, the captain thought. He’d checked the vault before he left the storage. It was still securely locked then and the keys to it were here, in a locked desk drawer.
“We’ll see,” he said.
The screen lit up, for a second or two. Then it was dark again. The screen was still on. The light in the storage compartment had been cut off.
But they’d seen the robot for the moments it was visible. The great dark spider-shape crouched near the storage entry. Its unfettered master stood a dozen feet from it. Yango had looked up quickly as the screen view appeared, startled comprehension in his face, before his hand darted to the lighting switches beside the entry door. Cargo cases throughout the compartment had been shifted and tumbled about as though the bulky robot had forced a passage for itself through them.
That wasn’t the worst of it.
“You saw what happened to the side of the vault?” the captain asked unsteadily.
They’d seen it. “Burned out!” Vezzarn said, white-faced.” High intensity, a combat beam! It’d take that. It’s an old war robot he’s got with him, skipper. You can’t stop a thing like that…. What do we do now?” The last was a frightened squeal.
Laes Yango suggested, via intercom from the storage, that surrender was the logical move.
“Perhaps you don’t fully understand the nature of my pet,” he told the captain. “It’s been in my possession for fifteen years. It killed over eighty of my men while we were taking the ship it guarded, and would have killed me if I had not cut one of the devices that controlled it from the hand of the lordling whose property it had been. It knew then who its new master was. It’s a killing machine, sir! It was made to be one. The Sheem Assassin. Your hand weapons can’t harm it. And it has long since learned to obey my voice as well as its guiding instruments… ”