Trigger and Friends by James H. Schmitz

Only two of them? Well, that probably was true. But he’d better use the stunner on Hace before attempting to deal with the two armed men.

At that moment, the communicator operator looked around.

He was young and his reactions were as fast as Hace’s. He threw himself sideways out of the chair with a shout of warning, hit the floor rolling over and clawing for his gun. The man behind the desk had no chance. As he jerked upright, startled, an energy bolt took him in the head. The operator had no real chance, either. Quillan swung the gun to the left, saw for an instant eyes fixed on him, bright with hatred, and the other gun coming up, and fired again.

He waited a number of seconds, then, alert for further motion. But the control room remained quiet. So Ajoran’s lady hadn’t lied. She stayed where she was, unstirring, until he turned toward her. Then she said quietly, her expression still incredulous, “It seemed like magic! How could you get into the ship?”

Quillan looked at the dark, ugly bruise his fist had printed along the side of her jaw, said, “In Ajoran’s grav-suit, of course.”

She hesitated. “He’s dead?”

“Quite dead,” Quillan said thoughtfully.

“I wanted,” Hace said, “to kill him myself. I would have done it finally, I believe. . . .” She hesitated again. “It doesn’t matter now. What can I do to help you? They’re in trouble down in the swamp.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“That isn’t clear. It began two or three minutes ago, but we haven’t been able to get an intelligible report from the two communicator men. They were excited, shouted, almost irrational.”

Quillan scowled. After a moment, he shook his head. “Let’s clean up the ship first. How many on board?”

“Nine besides those two . . . and myself.”

“The man in the lock’s taken care of,” Quillan said. “Eight. On the lifeboat?”

“Nobody. Ajoran had a trap prepared for you there, in case you came back before they caught you. You could have got inside, but you couldn’t have started the engines, and you would have been unable to get out again.”

Quillan grunted. “Can you get the men in the ship to come individually to the control room?”

“I see. Yes, I think I can do that.”

“I’ll want to check you over for weapons first.”

“Of course.” Hace smiled slightly, stood up. “Why should you trust me?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Quillan said.

They came in, unsuspecting, one by one; and, one by one, the stunner brought them down from behind. Shortly afterwards, a freight carrier floated into the Talada’s vat room. Hace stood aside as Quillan unlocked the cover of the drop hole in the deck and hauled it back. A heavy stench surged up from the vat. Quillan looked down a moment at the oily black liquid eight feet below, then dragged the nine unconscious men in turn over from the carrier, dropped them in, and resealed the vat.

* * *

A man’s voice babbled and sobbed. Another man screamed in sudden fright; then there was a sound of rapid, panicky breathing mingled with the sobs.

Quillan switched off the communicator, looked over at Hace. “Is this what it was like before?”

She moistened her lips. “No, this is insanity!” Her voice was unsteady. “They’re both completely incapable of responding to us now. What could there be in that swamp at night to have terrified them to that extent? At least some of the others should have come back to the ship . . .” She paused. “Quillan, why do we stay here? You know what they’re like—why bother with them? You don’t need any of them to handle the ship. One person can take it to the Hub if necessary.”

“I know,” Quillan said. He studied her, added, “I’m wondering a little why you’re willing to help me get back to the Hub.”

Anger showed for an instant in the pale, beautiful face.

“I’m no Ralan! I was picked up in a raid on Beristeen when I was twelve. I’ve never wanted to do anything but get away from Rala since that day.”

Quillan grunted, rubbed his chin. “I see. . . . Well, we can’t leave immediately. For one thing, I left the Sigma File in that swamp.”

Hace stared at him. “You haven’t destroyed it?”

“No. It never quite came to that point.”

She laughed shortly. “Quillan, you’re rather wonderful! Ajoran was convinced the file was lost, and that his only chance of saving his own skin was to get you back alive so he could find out what you had learned on the Lorn Worlds. . . . No, you can’t leave the file behind, of course! I understand that. But why don’t we lift the ship out of atmosphere until it’s morning here?” She nodded at the communicator. “That disturbance—whatever they’ve aroused down there—should have settled out by then. The swamp will be quiet again. Then you can work out a way to get the file back without too much danger.”

Quillan shook his head, got to his feet. “No, that shouldn’t be necessary. The man-tracker was being monitored from the ship, wasn’t it? Where is the control set kept?”

Hace indicated the desk twenty feet behind her where the second man had sat when Quillan had come into the control room.

“It’s lying over there. That’s what he was doing.”

Quillan said, “Let’s take a look at it. I want the thing to return to the ship.” He started toward the desk. Hace stood up, went over to the desk with him. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you how to operate it.”

“I should be able to do it,” Quillan said. “I played around a few hours once with a captured man-tracker which had been shipped back to Lorn. This appears to be a very similar model.” He looked down at the moving dark blurs in the screen which formed the center of the control set, twisted a knob to one side of it. “Let’s see what it’s doing now before I have it return to the ship.”

The screen cleared suddenly. The scene was still dark, but in the machine’s night-vision details were distinct. A rippling weed bed was gliding slowly past below; a taller leafy thicket ahead moved closer. Then the thicket closed about the tracker.

Hace said, “The operator was trying to discover through the tracker what was happening to the men down there, but it moved out of the range of their lights almost as soon as the disturbance began. Apparently the devices, once set, can’t be turned around.”

“Not unless you’re riding them,” Quillan agreed. “Tele-monitoring observes what they’re doing, but has only limited control. They either go on and finish their business, or get their sensors switched off and return to their starting point. It’s still following my trail. Now . . .”

“What’s that light?” Hace asked uneasily. “It looks like the reflection of a fire.”

The tracker had emerged from the thicket, swung to the left, and was gliding low over an expanse of open water, almost touching it. There were pale orange glitters on the surface ahead of it.

Quillan studied them, said, “At a guess, it simply means there’s a moon in the sky.” He pushed a stud on the set, and the scene vanished. “That wiped out the last instructions it was given. It will come back to the ship in a minute or two.”

Hace looked at him. “What do you have in mind?”

“I’m riding it down to the swamp.”

“Not now! In the morning you . . .”

“I don’t think I’ll be in any danger. Now let’s find a place where I’m sure you’ll stay locked up until I get back. As you said, one person can do all that’s needed to lift this ship off the planet and head away. . . .”

6

Five hundred feet above the ground, the man-tracker’s open saddle was not the most reassuring place to be in. But the machine was considerably easier to maneuver than the grav-suit had been and the direct route by air to the giant tree beneath which he’d concealed the Sigma File was the shortest and fastest. Quillan was reasonably certain nothing had happened to the file, but he wouldn’t know until he held it in his hands again.

The orange moon that had pushed above the horizon was a big one, the apparent diameter of its disk twice that of the vanished sun. Quillan was holding the tracker’s pace down. But no more than a few minutes passed before he could make out the big tree in the vague light, ahead and a little to his right. He guided the machine over to it, circled its crown slowly twice, looking down, then lowered the tracker down to a section of open water near the base of the tree, turned it and went gliding in toward the tangled root system of the giant. He turned the control set off, remained in the saddle a few moments, looking about and listening.

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