Despite the grimness of their situation, Pias smiled. "We Gypsies are old hands at bargaining," he told Yvette. "The first rule is, when the other side starts off with a preposterous offer, you make an equally preposterous counterproposal. You can always work your way down to reality from there."

  Putting the bullhorn to his mouth, he bellowed back, "I'm afraid that won't do, Sister Elspeth. Instead, I suggest you have your entire army file past the door of the armory and drop their weapons here. Then we can talk."

  There was a short silence from the bottom of the hill. Then FitzHugh's voice came back, "You know I can't do that."

  "And you know we can't accept your kind offer either. Shall we begin talking more realistically?" After another hesitation, FitzHugh said, "Perhaps we can work out a deal, Brother Cromwell, something to our mutual interests."

  "That sounds a little better. What do you have in mind?"

  "First tell my why you came here-and why you broke into our offices in God's Will City."

  Another piece of verification! Only the robot could have identified Pias in that darkened complex. "I came here to find out why you were trying to kill me," Pias said. "Perhaps it's old fashioned of me, but I was curious."

  "We weren't trying to kill you."

  "Your man Hoyden told me otherwise."

  Another pause. "Well, counselor, you must admit that the philosophy you espouse is quite contradictory to our own. Some of our people may have gotten hotheaded in the Lord's cause, but I can assure you they will suffer severe reprimands."

  "Oh good. I was so worried." .

  "And now that we've settled that little problem, perhaps you'd care to come out and discuss the rest of our differences in a civilized manner."

  "I'd love to," Pias replied. "There's just one more small detail to be taken care of first."

  "What's that?"

  "I'd like some assurance that we won't be killed the instant we step outside this building."

  "You have my word as a sister in God that no harm will befall you."

  "Sister my gluteus maximus," Yvette growled. "The only thing she's sister to is a B-1014 computer." "That's very generous of you," Pias said via bullhorn. "But on matters as delicate as this I'm afraid I can't take the word of a second-in-command. I'll have to hear the same vow from Sister Tresa." "She's-indisposed, as I'm sure you well know." "That's smooth, I'm not going anywhere. I can wait. It should only be a couple of hours."

  Pias put down the bullhorn and, despite further entreaties from FitzHugh, did not broadcast another word. Instead, he talked to Yvette about the plans he was developing. "Now that we know Clunard isn't the robot," he said, "we're going to have to take the chance that she's a relatively honest woman who really believes what she says and has been led astray by subtle manipulations from FitzHugh."

  "This may be the biggest gamble of your life," Yvette said. "What happens if you're wrong." Pias shrugged. "Then everybody loses."

  Chapter 14

  The Comet Goes to Work

  Jules and Yvonne had no way to look out of their cargo rocket and see how fast they were moving; the craft had not been intended for passengers and was not provided with windows. They did know, however, that automated cargo rockets were not renowned for their speed. The rocketbus had made the journey from the base in just under an hour; if the cargo ship took much longer than that getting back, they'd have very little air left to do anything once they got there.

  Jules tried to look on the bright side. "The rocket's much lighter than it normally is, because all it's carrying is us. That should help it move faster."

  With their fate now totally out of their hands, they sat down in the darkness against the rear wall of the chamber and did their best to conserve their air. They spoke little, resting instead, and trying to'make their breaths as shallow as possible. They knew once they arrived at the base they would be involved in more action and would use up oxygen at a prodigious rate. It had to be saved until then.

  Jules's feet and ankles were throbbing from where he'd stepped in the molten lead. He experimented a little bit and found that he could stand now if he leaned against something like a wall for support; but moving at any speed faster than a hobble was impossible. He chafed at the idea of being so helpless, but his wife reminded him that he still had the use of his hands and his mind, potent weapons indeed.

  The ride dragged on for agonizing minutes until finally, after an hour, the nose dropped slightly-an indication that their craft was now angling downward toward the base. The DesPlainians checked their air gauges; twenty minutes worth of oxygen was left. With luck, that should just about last them through what they needed to do.

  The ship landed with a solid bump, then rolled so that the cargo door was beneath their feet. The d'Alemberts braced themselves for the shock they knew was coming; without warning, the hatch suddenly sprang open, dropping them-slowly, under Slag's light gravity-almost five meters onto the ore stockpile. After a minute, the hatch door closed again and the ship took off, returning to the digging station for another load of ore.

  Below them the pile of ore was shifting as it sifted through an opening in the bottom that led almost certainly to a furnace. Overhead, through the open top of the bin in which they were standing, the stars gleamed down out of a jet black sky.

  "I think I'd prefer going out that way," Jules said, pointing upward. There was a ladder along the side wall for inspection parties to get in and out of the bin. Jules pulled himself up the rungs with just the power of his arms, using his legs only to steady himself. Yvonne was right behind him. In a couple of minutes the two SOTE agents were at the rim of the tank, looking down at the base spread out below them.

  After scanning the situation for several moments, Jules pointed. "There," he said. "We'll enter through that auxiliary airlock, away from the main occupied section, but we won't take off our suits immediately; I want to be prepared in case they try something desperate, like blowing out a section of the wall to let the air out. If our luck holds there-may be some spare tanks at that lock; if not, we work our way around the perimeter of the base to the passenger tube connected to the Comet. Once were safely in there, I don't think they'll be able to hurt us."

  They climbed down the ladder on the outside of the ore bin without anyone spotting them and, as before, Vonnie loaded her husband on her shoulders. She took off at an easy jog across forty meters of open ground before reaching the designated hatch. The air lock was unguarded-after all, there was really no one on Slag against whom to guard it-and they slipped inside without anyone being the wiser. Once inside, they had to move more slowly; the corridors were too low for Vonnie to carry Jules on her back, and he had to hold onto the wall and proceed one slow, painful step at a time.

  There were no spare oxygen tanks inside the auxiliary airlock, meaning that they had fourteen minutes to inch their way around the periphery and slip into their own ship, hopefully undetected. Vonnie led the way, blaster drawn, while Jules walked gingerly behind her on his injured feet.

  They had traveled three quarters of the way around to their ship when they encountered a party of workmen coming at them from a cross corridor. The men were curious about these space-suited figures inside the base, but not immediately hostile. They waved at the pair, and the DesPlainians waved back-but then the workmen noticed the blaster in Vonnie's hand. One of them whispered something to the others, and they suddenly turned and ran back the way they'd come. Vonnie fired a shot and hit one of them in the back of the leg, but the others rounded a

  corner and were out of sight before she could do anything further.

  "The alarm will be raised any second now," she said. "This is no time for dignity."

  Picking Jules up bodily, she carried him in her arms like a groom about to carry his new bride across a threshold. She ran at top speed down the empty corridor toward the main reception lock, aware of the precious seconds ticking away. They reached the main lock at almost the same instant as an armed party of their opponents. Vonnie's hands were full, but she trusted Jules to use his blaster effectively enough for the both of them.

  Jules did not bother firing at the enemy. Instead, he fired his weapon at the large, glass viewing ports that looked out onto the landing field. The glass was reinforced and built to withstand rigorous conditions, but it couldn't hold up to a Mark 29 Service blaster's deadly bolts. As it shattered outward, a hurricane hit the reception area.

  The force of the air whooshing out of the room nearly pulled Vonnie off her feet, but she managed to brace herself against one wall and hang on until the draft had died down. The enemy forces had not been as lucky. None of them had had time to don their space-suits, and they were unprepared for vacuum conditions. They were ripped off their feet against the forward bulkhead and began gasping for air that wasn't there. Jules and Yvonne instinctively turned their heads away; they had seen many people die before, but death by explosive decompression was never a pretty sight.

  "Have we blown out the whole base?" Vonnie wondered.

  "I don't think so. If this is constructed according to standard practice, each doorway is built to shut airtight, in case of a blowout. This room will be sealed off from the rest of the base until the blowout can be repaired and internal pressure restored. It'll give us a little time; let's. not waste it."

  Yvonne steadied herself and opened the door to the passenger tube that led to their own ship. They made it inside, sealed off the tube, and turned on the Comet's internal air supply. When the lights told them the air around them was breathable, they cracked open their suits' helmets and breathed the pure, sweet air of the ship-a welcome change after the sweaty environment inside their suits. According to the gauges on their air tanks, they had made it with three minutes to spare.

  They had little chance to luxuriate in the fresh oxygen, however. "We'd better get up to the control room, fast," Jules said. "We've still got plenty of work to do."

  Without stopping to remove the rest of his suit, Jules moved over to the ladder and once again began pulling himself up by his arms. He and Yvonne were dead tired after their ordeal on Slag's surface, and both could easily have slept straight through for a week. But there was to be no rest for them yet.

  Checking the outside screens, Jules scanned the activity going on around them. The people at the base had reacted far faster to this situation than he had expected; apparently they had practiced invasion drills, in case their factory was discovered by imperial forces, and they knew just what they should be doing. Space-suited figures were running about the field outside, manning the big artillery pieces that had been hidden around the base's perimeter.

  Jules realized that, if he was not careful, the Comet would be knocked out of the fight while still sitting on the ground-an ignominious defeat for so proud a vessel. Flipping on the series of switches to activate the pile and let the ship warm up, he said, "We're going to have to get out of here. This fight's far from over."

  Across the field another ship was taking off: Chactan's ship. "We can't let him get away," Vonnie said. "He has to lead us to his superior."

  "I'll do the best I can," Jules answered. "The Comet's a great ship, but she can't take off stone-cold." The ship rocked from a near miss as one of the big energy guns was swung in its direction. The Comet had plenty of offense of its own, but as long as they were sitting here on the ground, Jules couldn't use it. They were inside the weapons' minimum range, and they themselves would be caught in the explosion if they tried to fire back at their attackers. In this particular instance, they suffered from an embarrassment of riches. "I never thought too much firepower would be a handicap," Jules muttered.

  The board suddenly gave him a green, and Jules did not hesitate. Slapping at his switches, he goosed the ship to maximum power and the Copper Comet leaped off the surface of Slag at the devastating acceleration of fifteen gees, crushing its two passengers into the acceleration couches. All around them, more energy bolts exploded, some perilously near. But none of the enemy gunners had expected the Comet to rise quite that quickly, and their aim was affected by their miscalculations.

  After several seconds of the intense acceleration, Jules reached out a heavy hand to shut the switch off, and the pair suddenly found themselves in free fall. Had Slag been a world with an atmosphere, Jules would have waited longer to clear it; the Comet had not been designed with intricate atmospheric maneuvering in mind. It was a space fighter, as out of place in open air as a fish.

  But the vacuum above Slag gave Jules the perfect opportunity to slue the ship around and point the weapons downward at the base below. As he gripped the controls he tried not to think of the two thousand individual lives down there; they were all just the enemy, and they were more than willing to do the same to him.

  The Comet's guns spoke, with all the authority SOTE had built into them. For a moment, the base down on the surface was enveloped in a red glow, an almost peaceful sight in contrast to the hell the d'Alemberts knew it truly was. If the base had been of a more ordinary nature, it simply would have blown apart under the ferocious energies focused on it; but being a manufacturing plant for highly explosive materials, the d'Alemberts' blast triggered a chain reaction within the base itself. With the silent suddenness of events in a vacuum, the entire base vaporized in a fireball of blinding intensity. Jules and Yvonne could not keep their eyes on the screen, and when the glow had died, all that was left of the base was yet another crater on the face of Slag.

  Jules sighed and turned the ship outward once more. "Now, let's go after Chactan," he said grimly. The other man's ship had only a couple minutes head start and could not compare in speed to the Copper Comet. Had Jules opened his ship to the limit, he could easily have overtaken the fugitive and either blown his vessel apart or forced him to surrender. But that was not his intent now. He had theorized, while traveling across the surface of Slag, that Chactan had some high-level help on Tregania itself; now that the man was fleeing for his life, he would certainly head for the nearest and strongest place of refuge. And the d'Alemberts were only too willing to let him get there. That would save them a lot of time and investigative effort.

  Jules therefore was careful to gauge his speed exactly against that of his quarry, allowing his ship to close the gap only at an excruciatingly slow pace. As they'd figured, Chactan's ship did not dive into subspace the instant it was beyond the safety limit of Slag's gravitational field, but instead headed straight for the inhabited planet of this system, Tregania, which was presently one-quarter of the way around the sun from Slag and millions of kilometers further out. The ship's computer informed them that, at present speeds, it would take them better than twelve hours to reach the other world. That was time which the d'Alemberts could put to good use. Jules radioed ahead on the standard SOTE frequency to the Service headquarters on Tregania. His code name, Wombat, got him quickly through to the local chief, a man named Lee. Jules explained the situation succinctly and Lee nodded.

  "My entire office is at your disposal," Lee said when Jules had finished, "but I'm afraid that's not as much as either of us would like. Tregania's always been a quiet place, and the Service only has a few ships stationed here. I'll put through a priority call to the navy, but it'll take them at least a day, possibly longer, to arrive."

  Jules nodded grimly, then began giving his instructions. Lee was to put all the ships he had aloft, but keep them as inconspicuous as possible. He gave Lee the course coordinates of Chactan's ship but warned that under no circumstances was Chactan to be interfered with until he reached his destination. Once the enemy had landed and joined with his allies, there would be a no-holds-barred attack. The penalty for treason, after all, was death. It was hoped though, that they could take the leaders alive to question them about possible connections to any conspiracies higher up.

  That accomplished, Jules and Yvonne could take care of more pressing bodily needs. Both were famished and both were fatigued; in addition, Jules's feet were still throbbing from the burns they'd received. The agents were finally able to doff their space-suits-

  Jules with some difficulty because of the solidified lead coating his boots-and Vonnie rubbed some first-aid cream on Jules's blistering feet before floating back to the ship's compact galley, to fix them a quick, nourishing snack. When they had both eaten, Jules insisted that Vonnie sleep for the first five-hour shift; she had done most of the work carrying him across the plains of Slag, and she was the most tired. His wife gave him little argument. When the shift was over, Jules woke her and she stood watch over the instruments while Jules had some rest of his own. Vonnie was not as good a pilot as her husband; her primary duty was to make sure Chactan kept to his previous course without_ trying any new tricks. If something out of the ordinary were to occur, she was to wake Jules instantly.

  Chactan's only concern though, seemed to be escaping from his pursuers, and he strove for that goal with single-minded determination. When Vonnie woke Jules, half an hour out from Tregania, Chactan's ship was still on the same, desperate trajectory, and the Comet was only marginally closer.

  "Time to really turn the screws," Jules said, as he strapped himself down once again in front of the control console. He and Yvonne were now feeling rested from their ordeal on Slag and were actually looking forward to the upcoming battle with a great deal of relish. They had spent weeks on this case so far and were eager for its conclusion.

  At his deft command, the Comet suddenly leaped ahead toward the ship it was chasing. It must have come as a shock to the occupants of the other craft to see the ship that had been just matching their speed for so many hours start to close the gap with ease. Their vessel was already traveling at its top speed; there was no way they could outdistance their pursuer now.

  "Do you think it would frighten them a little more if I fired at them?" Jules wondered aloud.

  "I think we can save our guns for better effect," Vonnie replied. "I traveled from Nampur to Slag on that ship, and I took the chance to look around. It's just a passenger ship, no armament of any kind except a few handguns. If we shot at them they might just stop dead, and we'd lose the connection. We want to tickle them a little, not scare them to death."

 

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