Trigger and Friends by James H. Schmitz

Quillan stared at it a moment, looking somewhat surprised, then went quietly into the room and bent to study the cubicle’s instruments. A grin spread slowly over his face. The trap had been sprung. He glanced at the deep-rest setting and turned it several notches farther down.

“Happy dreams, Lady Pendrake!” he murmured. “That takes care of you. What an appetite! And now—”

As the Level Four portal dilated open before him, a gun blazed from across the hall. Quillan flung himself out and down, rolled to the side, briefly aware of a litter of bodies and tumbled furniture farther up the hall. Then he was flat on the carpet, gun out before him, pointing back at the overturned, ripped couch against the far wall from which the fire had come.

A hoarse voice bawled, “Bad News—hold it!”

Quillan hesitated, darting a glance right and left. Men lying about everywhere, the furnishings a shambles. “That you, Baldy?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Baldy Perk half sobbed. “I’m hurt—”

“What happened?”

“Star gang jumped us. Portaled in here—spitballs and riot guns! Bad News, we’re clean wiped out! Everyone that was on this level—”

Quillan stood up, holstering the gun, went over to the couch and moved it carefully away from the wall. Baldy was crouched behind it, kneeling on the blood-soaked carpet, gun in his right hand. He lifted a white face, staring eyes, to Quillan.

“Waitin’ for ’em to come back,” he muttered. “Man, I’m not for long! Got hit twice. Near passed out a couple of times already.”

“What about your boys on guard downstairs?”

“Same thing there, I guess . . . or they’d have showed up. They got Cooms and the Duke, too! Man, it all happened fast!”

“And the crew on the freighter?”

“Dunno about them.”

“You know the freighter’s call number?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure. Never thought of that,” Baldy said wearily. He seemed dazed now.

“Let’s see if you can stand.”

Quillan helped the big man to his feet. Baldy hadn’t bled too much outwardly, but he seemed to have estimated his own condition correctly. He wasn’t for long. Quillan slid an arm under his shoulders.

“Where’s a ComWeb?” he asked.

Baldy blinked about. “Passage there—” His voice was beginning to thicken.

The ComWeb was in the second room up the passage. Quillan eased Perk into the seat before it. Baldy’s head lolled heavily forward, like a drunken man’s. “What’s the number?” Quillan asked.

Baldy reflected a few seconds. blinking owlishly at the instrument, then told him. Quillan tapped out the number, flicked on the vision screen, then stood aside and back, beyond the screen’s range.

“Yeah, Perk?” a voice said some seconds later. “Hey, Perk . . . Perk, what’s with ya?”

Baldy spat blood, grinned. “Shot—” he said.

“What?”

“Yeah.” Baldy scowled, blinking. “Now, lessee—Oh, yeah. Star gang’s gonna jump ya! Watch it!”

“What?”

“Yeah, watch—” Baldy coughed, laid his big head slowly down face forward on the ComWeb stand, and stopped moving.

“Perk! Man, wake up! Perk!”

Quillan quietly took out the gun, reached behind the stand and blew the ComWeb apart. He wasn’t certain what the freighter’s crew would make of the sudden break in the connection, but they could hardly regard it as reassuring. He made a brief prowl then through the main sections of the level. Evidence everywhere of a short and furious struggle, a struggle between men panicked and enraged almost beyond any regard for self-preservation. It must have been over in minutes. He found that the big hall portal to the ground level had been sealed, whether before or after the shooting he couldn’t know. There would have been around twenty members of the Brotherhood on the level. None of them had lived as long as Baldy Peak, but they seemed to have accounted for approximately an equal number of the Star’s security force first.

* * *

Five Star men came piling out of the fifth level portal behind him a minute or two later, Ryter in the lead. Orca behind Ryter. All five held leveled guns.

“You won’t need the hardware,” Quillan assured them. “It’s harmless enough now. Come on in.”

They followed him silently up to the cubicle, stared comprehendingly at dials and indicators. “The thing’s back inside there, all right!” Ryter said. He looked at Quillan. “Is this where you’ve been all the time?”

“Sure. Where else?” The others were forming a half-circle about him, a few paces back.

“Taking quite a chance with that Hlat, weren’t you?” Ryter remarked.

“Not too much. I thought of something.” Quillan indicated the outportal in the hall. “I had my back against that. A portal’s space-break, not solid matter. It couldn’t come at me from behind. And if it attacked from any other angle”—he tapped the holstered Miam Devil lightly, and the gun in Orca’s hand jerked upward a fraction of an inch—”There aren’t many animals that can swallow more than a bolt or two from that baby and keep coming.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Orca said thoughtfully, “That would work!”

“Did it see you?” Ryter asked.

“It couldn’t have. First I saw of it, it was sailing out from that corner over there. It slammed in after that chunk of sea beef so fast, it shook the cubicle. And that was that.” He grinned. “Well, most of our troubles should be over now!”

One of the men gave a brief, nervous laugh. Quillan looked at him curiously. “Something, chum?”

Ryter shook his head. “Something is right! Come on downstairs again, Bad News. This time we have news for you—”

The Brotherhood guards on the ground level had been taken by surprise and shot down almost without losses for the Star men. But the battle on the fourth level had cost more than the dead left up there. An additional number had returned with injuries that were serious enough to make them useless for further work.

“It’s been expensive,” Ryter admitted. “But one more attack by the Hlat would have left me with a panicked mob on my hands. If we’d realized it was going to trap itself—”

“I wasn’t so sure that would work either,” Quillan said. “Did you get Kinmarten back?”

“Not yet. The chances are he’s locked up somewhere on the fourth level. Now the Hlat’s out of the way, some of the men have gone back up there to look for him. If Cooms thought he was important enough to start a fight over, I want him back.”

“How about the crew on the Beldon ship?” Quillan asked. “Have they been cleaned up?”

“No,” Ryter said. “We’ll have to do that now, of course.”

“How many of them?”

“Supposedly twelve. And that’s probably what it is.”

“If they know or suspect what’s happened,” Quillan said, “twelve men can give a boarding party in a lock a remarkable amount of trouble.”

Ryter shrugged irritably. “I know, but there isn’t much choice. Lancion’s bringing in the other group on the Camelot. We don’t want to have to handle both of them at the same time.”

“How are you planning to take the freighter?”

“When the search party comes back down, we’ll put every man we can spare from guard duty here on the job. They’ll be instructed to be careful about it . . . if they can wind up the matter within the next several hours, that will be early enough. We can’t afford too many additional losses now. But we should come out with enough men to take care of Lancion and handle the shipment of Hlats. And that’s what counts.”

“Like me to take charge of the boarding party?” Quillan inquired. “That sort of thing’s been a kind of specialty of mine.”

Ryter looked at him without much expression on his face. “I understand that,” he said. “But perhaps it would be better if you stayed up here with us.”

* * ** * *

The search party came back down ten minutes later. They’d looked through every corner of the fourth level. Kinmarten wasn’t there, either dead or alive. But one observant member of the group had discovered, first, that the Duke of Fluel was also not among those present, and, next, that one of the four outportals on the level had been unsealed. The exit on which the portal was found to be set was in a currently unused hall in the General Offices building on the other side of the Star. From that hall, almost every other section of the Star was within convenient portal range.

None of the forty-odd people working in the main control office on the ground level had actually witnessed any shooting; but it was apparent that a number of them were uncomfortably aware that something quite extraordinary must be going on. They were a well-disciplined group, however. An occasional uneasy glance toward one of the armed men lounging along the walls, some anxious faces, were the only noticeable indications of tension. Now and then, there was a brief, low-pitched conversation at one of the desks.

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