Doomstar

'I do,' said Kettrick. 'I do.'

And Hurth said gloomily, 'Why is it that there's always some crazy idiot that has to make trouble?'

'The great cry of the human race,' said Kettrick. 'Nobody ever answered it yet.'

They worked. The half hour passed, and few minutes more, and then Chai barked down the ladder well.

'John-nee!'

They jumped up, thinking it was Boker. But she said, 'Men come. No Boker. Strange men.'

They raced up the ladder to the companionway. Through the hatch Kettrick could see a small carrier bouncing toward them over the scorched concrete of the pad. There were several men in it, or rather several Achernans. He could make out the yellow tunics of spaceport guards.

'What do they want?' said Hurth. 'And where's Boker?'

'I don't know,' said Kettrick. 'But my guess would be that we've stepped into a hornet's nest.'

They stood for a moment, a little stunned by the suddenness of it, watching the carrier speed toward them.

'I never did like Kirnanoc,' said Glevan softly. 'There's a smell of evil about it.' He struck Kettrick across the chest, pushing him away. 'Get out of sight, Johnny, you and Chai. They've got no way of knowing you're aboard.'

Kettrick hesitated.

Hurth said, 'Go, Johnny. We may need you, awful bad.'

He went then, swinging up the ladder as fast as he could, with Chai behind him. In Grellah's swagging mid-belly was the hatch into the cargo holds. He went through it with Chai and closed it very quietly behind him, and as he did so he heard the carrier stopping far below, and a challenging of voices.

In the close darkness he groped his way among the fixed cargo cradles until he judged he was hidden from anything but a determined inspection. He sat down on the cold iron that was a deck on land and a bulkhead in flight. Chai sat beside him.

They waited, in the silence and the blind dark.

After a short while Kettrick heard the muffled clatter of persons going up the ladder to the bridgeroom. There were voices. Even through the bulkhead door he could tell by the sound and cadence of them that they were not any of his. A little later they came down again pausing at various levels, and the pauses were accompanied by the clanging of hatch doors.

The steps approached their own hatch, and Kettrick put his hand on Chai to stop her growling.

'Freeze,' he whispered.

They froze, hugged tight against the bolted frame of a cradle. From the baled goods within it a faint scene of crushed grasses and far-off sunlight touched him and made him think of Nillaine. The door was flung open. The powerful beam of a torch probed here and there. The alien voices spoke again, with a soft sweet sibilance that to Kettrick had always been profoundly unpleasant. Then they went away, leaving the hatch open. The light from, the center well made a small puddle in the blackness.

The noises from below were muted but unmistakable. Voices raised in angry protest; a brief confusion; the sound of the carrier starting up and going away; silence.

Kettrick wondered if they had left a guard. He waited a long time, listening. At length he sent Chai to find out. Her ears and nose were far keener than his. She came back shaking her head and snorting with displeasure.

'No one, John-nee. Bad smell, like footless thing.' In the light from the door she made a gesture indicating a writhing movement.

'They're warm-blooded, just like us,' said Kettrick. 'They bear their young alive. They have really very pretty skin. But I agree with you.'

'What now?'

'We wait till dark.'

He looked at his wrist chronometer. It would not be a long wait. After that he would do something. He had no idea what it would be. But he knew that he had better think about it, and think fast.

He sat by the hatch, where he could hear if anyone came. The ship was uncannily quiet, hollow, creeping with faint echoes. Chai watched. And Kettrick felt most terribly alone.

16

The worst of it was that he did not know at all what was going on.

The sequence of events was simple. They had landed. Boker had gone to sign in and check the spaceport board for Starbird. Boker had not returned. Spaceport guards had come and taken away Hurth and Glevan. Perfectly simple.

The question was why.

And Kettrick kept thinking, 'It would be easier to figure this out if I weren't so scared.' He was getting awfully tired of being scared. He wondered if you ever got to a point where the fear nerves were all so calloused that you couldn't feel them any more; if you ever got so bored with fear that you simply forgot it.

He could hear the wind thrumming on the hull, and the sense of aloneness was overpowering.

Boker, Hurth, and Glevan. What was happening to them, in the slender hands of the soft-spoken, black-eyed men of Achern, the men with the blunt jaws and the faint stripes running from the corners of the eyes to the fluted ear holes, and the lingering suggestion of folded skin at the throat?

The anger which had been there all along since the first sight of the approaching carrier finally asserted itself. It had a fine cleansing heat to it. People who talked piously against anger were people who had never had any real enemies, and people who preached against hate, all hate, under any circumstances, were people who had never been in fear of their lives. It was easy to love when you were not fighting for survival, and more than survival, against those who had never heard the word. Kettrick was full of hate, and he welcomed it. He held it, alone in Grellah's iron belly, and it drove the fear away.

Wherever they were and whatever was happening to them, Boker and Hurth and Glevan were depending on him.

Well, and so. Think.

Boker had gone to sign in and check the board for Starbird. He would have entered the central rotunda of the Administration Building. Kettrick remembered it well, a huge cube-shaped structure, very neat and glistening, a black floor, walls faced in an odd shape of pink, a native stone that took a high polish. There were mosaic murals, weirdly fluid things that had a way of wriggling if you looked at them too long.

Boker would have gone to the desk at the right of the entrance, marked registry. He would have placed the plastic square with Grellah's code number in the scanner and then punched the tape machine with his name, the names of his crew, his lading, port of origin, last port of call, next destination, and his pad number. Then he would have crossed to the board, a huge lighted panel that dominated the rotunda, with the service wing of the building to the right and the office wing to the left; the office wing where the I–C was.

Boker would have looked for Starbird among the many ships listed there. If the name did not appear, meaning that the ship had departed, he would then have gone to the small booths beside the board. Here on a keyboard he could punch the name Starbird and a data storage center would automatically provide him with the date of departure and destination of that ship.

Routine procedure, comfortably confined to incurious electrons. Only Kettrick was sure that that particular set of relays must have been altered to give notice to somebody that Starbird was being paged. And somebody had arrested Boker at once.

Somebody in authority, since the spaceport guards had come to take in Boker's crew.

Which meant to Kettrick that Achern was an active center, dedicated to the ultimate victory of the Doomstar, with at least a part of its high officialdom involved.

It was not easy to decide what to do, and he wished for the simple unaffected savagery of Thwayn where there was not such a huge, sophisticated apparatus arrayed against him. One thing was sure. The port Administration Building was no place to go for help or information. And Sekma, obviously, was not at Achern or he would have reacted by now to Grellah's landing. So much for hope.