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Derec was also the character who'd conscientiously told the cops on Hoddan, when they found his power-receptor sneaked into a Mid-Continent station and a stray corpse coincidentally outside. He opened the boatport and stood in the opening. Derec had been a guest anyhow an inhabitant of Don Loris' castle for a good long while, now. Hoddan wondered if he considered his quarters cozy.
Derec might even have nerved himself up to something quite desperate. "What did you really come here for, Derec?" "To beg you to " Then, in one instant, Derec made an hysterical gesture and Hoddan's stun-pistol hummed. A small object left Derec's hand as his muscles convulsed from the stun-pistol bolt. It did not fly quite true. It fell a foot or so to one side of the boatport instead of inside.
"You just got me out of an awful fix! You're my friend! And anyhow I'm going to marry a girl on Walden, named Nedda. Good-by, Fani! Keep clear of the rocket blast." He went into the boatport, turned to beam paternally back at her, and shut the port behind him. Seconds later the spaceboat took off. It left behind clouds of rocket smoke.
Presently, gloomy and a trifle dogged about it, he brought the spaceboat around to the modernized boatport of the yacht. He got into it, leaving the yacht in orbit. He headed down toward Darth. Now that he'd rested, he had work to do which could not be neglected. To carry out that work, he needed a crew able and willing to pass for pirates for a pirate's pay.
Thal and his companions were charmed to see the landscape outside portrayed on screens. Hoddan shifted the sensitivity-point toward infra red, and details came out that would have been invisible to the naked eye. "With the boatport closed," said Hoddan, "like this " The port clanged shut and grumbled for half a second as the locking-dogs went home. "We're all set for take-off.
It exploded luridly as Derec crumpled from the pistol bolt. There was thick, strangling smoke. Hoddan disappeared. When the thickest smoke drifted away there was nothing to be seen but Derec, lying on the ground, and thinner smoke drifting out of the still-open boatport. Nearly half an hour later, figures came very cautiously toward the spaceboat. Thal was their leader.
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