suspicious.
A soft hiss made him look up, and he strangled a cry of mingled joy and apprehension. It was SKitty! She was right outside the door, and she seemed to be trying to do something with the tangle-field generator.
But SKitty ignored him, using her stubby raccoon-like hands on the controls of the generator and hissing in frustration when the controls would not cooperate.
Finally, with a muffled yowl of triumph, she managed to twist the dial into the “off” position and the field went down. Dick was out the door in a moment, but SKitty was uncharacteristically running off ahead of him instead of waiting for him. Not that he minded! She was safer on the ground in case someone spotted him and stunned him; she was small and quick, and if they caught him again, she would still have a chance to hide and get away. But there was something odd about her bounding run; as if her body was a little longer than usual. And her tail seemed to be a lot longer than he remembered—
Practice must have made perfect; she got the field down just before he reached the doorway, and shot down the hall like a streak of black lightning. Dick stopped; inside was someone lying down on a cot, arm over her dark mahogany head. Erica!
“Erica!” he hissed at her. She sat bolt upright, wincing as she did so, and he felt a twinge of sympathy. A stun-migraine was no picnic.
She saw who was at the door, saw at the same moment that there was no tangle-field shimmer between them, and was on her feet and out in a fraction of a second. “How?” she demanded, scanning the corridor and finding it as curiously empty as Dick had.
“SKitty took the generator offline,” he said. “She got yours, too, and she headed off that way—” He pointed towards the heart of the building. “Do you remember where the translight coms are?”
“Eyeah,” she said. “In the basement, if we can get there. That’s the emergency unit and I don’t think they know we’ve got it.”
She cocked her head to one side, as if she had suddenly heard something. He strained his ears—and there was a clamor, off in the distance beyond the walls of the building. It sounded as if several people were chasing something. But it couldn’t have been SKitty; she was still in the building.
“It sounds like they’re busy,” Erica said, and grinned. “Let’s go while we have the chance!”
But before they reached the basement com room, they were joined by most of the crew of the
“
Dick slumped down so that the tiny medic could reach his head to bandage it. He knew he looked like he’d been through a war, but either the feeling of elated triumph or the medic’s drugs or both prevented him from really feeling any of his injuries. In the end, it had come down to the crudest of hand-to-hand combat on the staircase, as the Com Officer resent the message as many times as he could and the rest of them held off the TriStar bullies. He could only thank the Spirits of Space that they had no weapons stronger than stunners—or at least, they hadn’t wanted to use them down in the basement where so many circuits lay bare. Eventually, of course, they had been overwhelmed, but by then it was too late. The Com Officer had gotten a reply from the Patrol. Help was on the way. Faced with the collapse of their plan, the TriStar people had done the only wise thing. They had retreated.
With them, they had taken all evidence that they
But right now, none of that mattered. What did matter was that
“Dick—” Vena called from the door to the medic’s office, “I found your—”
Dick looked up. Vena was cradling SKitty in her arms.
But SKitty was already on his shoulders.
She must have looked just as stunned as he did, but he recovered first, doing a double-take.
And most