The man in the grav-suit drifted after the search party, passed above them some two hundred feet in the air, then remained suspended and almost unmoving. Quillan glanced over at the horizon. The sun was nearly out of sight; its thin golden rim shrank and disappeared as he looked at it. Without the starblaze of the Hub, night should follow quickly here, but as yet he couldn’t see any advantage the darkness would bring him.
The man in the grav-suit was coming back to the ridge. He hovered above it a moment, settled uncertainly toward the flat top of a boulder, made a stumbling landing and righted himself. He turned toward the plain and the swamp, lifting the object that seemed to be a pair of glasses to the front of his helmet again. Evidently he’d had enough of the suit’s airborne eccentricities for a while.
Quillan’s throat worked. The man was less than two hundred yards away. . . .
His eyes shifted toward a tuft of shrubs twenty feet beyond the edge of the forest growth.
Some seconds later, he was there, studying the stretch of ground ahead. Other shrubs and rocks big enough to crouch behind . . . but they would give him no cover at all if for some reason the fellow decided to lift back into the air. The fading light wouldn’t help then. Those were space glasses he was using, part of the suit, designed to provide clear vision even when only the gleam of distant stars was there for them to absorb.
But perhaps, Quillan told himself, Grav-suit would not decide to lift back into the air. In any case, no other approach was possible. The far side of the ridge was controlled by the Talada’s night-scanners, and they would be in use by now.
He moved, waited, gathered himself and moved again. Grav-suit was directing most of his attention downhill, but now and then he turned for a look along the ridge in both directions. Perhaps, as the air darkened, the closeness of the forest was getting on his nerves. Native sounds were drifting up from the plain, guttural bellowing and long-drawn ululations. The meat eaters were coming awake. Presently there was a series of short, savage roars from the general direction of the swamp; and Quillan guessed the search party had run into some big carnivore who had never heard about energy rifles. When the roaring stopped with a monstrous scream, he was sure of it.
He had reduced the distance between them by almost half when the grav-suit soared jerkily up from the boulder. Quillan had a very bad moment. But it lifted no more than a dozen feet, then descended again at a slant which carried it behind the boulder. The man had merely changed his position. And the new position he had selected took them out of each other’s sight.
Quillan was instantly on his feet, running forward. Here the surface was rutted with weather fissures. He slipped into one of them, drawing out his gun, moved forward at a crouch. A moment later, he had reached the near side of the boulder on which Grav-suit had stood.
Where was he now? Quillan listened, heard a burst of thin, crackling noises. They stopped for some seconds, came briefly again, stopped again. The suit communicator . . . the man must have taken off the helmet, or the sound wouldn’t have been audible. He couldn’t be far away.
Quillan went down on hands and knees and edged along the side of the boulder to the right. From here he could see down the hillside. On the plain, the night was gathering; the boundaries between the open land and the swamp had blurred. But the bobbing string of tiny light beams down there, switching nervously this way and that, must already be moving through the marsh.
The communicator noises came again, now from a point apparently no more than fifteen feet beyond the edge of the boulder ahead of Quillan. It was as close as he could get. It was important that the man in the grav-suit should die instantly, which meant a head shot. Quillan rose up, stepped out quietly around the boulder, gun pointed.
The man stood faced half away, the helmet tipped back on his shoulders. In the last instant, as Quillan squeezed down on the trigger, sighting along the barrel, the head turned and he saw with considerable surprise that it was Colonel Ajoran.
Then the gun made its spiteful hissing sound.
Ajoran’s head jerked slightly to the side and his eyes closed. The grav-suit held him upright for the second or two before he toppled. Quillan already was there, reaching under the collar for one of the communicator’s leads. He found it, gave it a sharp twist, felt it snap.
5
In the Talada, the man watching the night-scanners saw Colonel Ajoran’s grav-suit appear above the ridge and start back to the ship. He informed the control room and the lock attendant.
The outer lock door opened as the suit came to it. Quillan made a skidding landing inside. His performance in the suit had been no improvement on Ajoran’s. He shut off the suit drive, clumped up to the inner door, left arm raised across the front of the helmet, hand fumbling with the oxygen hose. It would hide his face for a moment from whoever was on the other side of the door. His right hand rested on his gun.
The door opened. The attendant stood at rigid attention before the control panel six feet away, rifle grounded, eyes front. Mentally blessing Ralan discipline, Quillan stepped up beside him, drew out the gun and gave the back of the man’s skull a solid thump with the barrel.
When the attendant opened his eyes again a few minutes later, his head ached and there was a gag in his mouth. His hands were tied behind him, and Quillan was wearing his uniform.
Quillan hauled him to his feet, poked a gun muzzle against his back.
“Lead the way to the control room,” he said.
The attendant led the way. Quillan followed, the uniform cap pulled down to conceal his face. Ajoran’s handgun and a stunner he had taken from the attendant were stuck into his belt. The attendant’s energy rifle and the one which had been strapped to the grav-suit were concealed in a closet near the lock. He had assembled quite an arsenal.
When they reached the wide main passage in the upper level of the ship, he halted the lock attendant. They retraced their steps to the last door they had passed. Quillan opened it. An office of some kind . . . he motioned the attendant in and followed him, closing the door.
He came out a few seconds later, shoved the stunner back under his belt, and stood listening. The Talada seemed almost eerily silent. Not very surprising, he thought. The number of men who had set out after him indicated that only those of the crew who were needed to coordinate the hunt and maintain the ship’s planetary security measures had remained on board. That could be ten or twelve at most; and every one of them would be stationed at his post at the moment.
Quillan went out into the main passage, walked quietly along it. Now he could hear an intermittent murmur of voices from the control room. One of them seemed to be that of a woman, but he wasn’t sure. They were being silent again before he came close enough to distinguish what was being said.
There was nothing to be gained by hesitating at this point. The control room was the nerve center of the ship, but there couldn’t be more than four or five of them in it. Quillan had a gun in either hand as he reached the open doorspace. He turned through it, started unhurriedly down the carpeted stairs leading into the control room, eye and mind photographing the details of the scene below.
Ajoran’s lady was nearest, seated at a small table, her attention on the man before the communicator set in a corner alcove on the left. This man’s back was turned. A gun was belted to his waist. Farther down in the control room sat another man, facing the passage but bent over some instrument on the desk before him. The desk shielded him almost completely, which made him the most dangerous of the three at the moment. No one else was in view, but that didn’t necessarily mean that no one else was here.
Hace became aware of him as he reached the foot of the stairs. Her head turned sharply; she seemed about to speak. Then her eyes went wide with shocked recognition.
He’d have to get the man at the desk the instant she screamed. But she didn’t scream. Instead, her right hand went up, two fingers lifted and spread. She nodded fiercely at the communicator operator, next at the man behind the desk.