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Updated: May 16, 2025
And their decision was ably endorsed not long afterwards by a sardonic warning on the com a warning which Ali who had been tending the machine passed along to them. "Greetings, pirates " "What do you mean?" Dane was heating broth to feed to Captain Jellico. "The word has gone out our raid on the E-Stat is now a matter of history and Patrol record we've been Posted!"
"Any ship in emergency," he recited automatically, "may claim supplies from the nearest E-Stat paying for them when the voyage is completed." "That means any Patrol E-Stat. The Companies' are private property." "But," Dane pointed out triumphantly, "the law doesn't say so there is nothing about any difference between Company and Patrol E-Stat in the law " "He's right," Rip agreed.
Dane felt a cold finger drawn along his backbone. Now they were fair game for the whole system. Any Patrol ship that wanted could shoot them down with no questions asked. Of course that had always been a possibility from the first after their raid on the E-Stat. But to realize that it was now true was a different matter altogether.
But now the care of the sick occupied hours and Rip insisted that a watch be maintained by the com listening in for news which might concern the Queen. They had done a good job at silencing the E-Stat, for they had been almost six hours in space before the news of their raid was beamed to the nearest Patrol post. Ali laughed.
The high level of radiation makes it almost certain that the outlaws could not have headed into the dangerous central portion. Search is now spreading north. Authorities are inclined to believe that this last outrage may be a clew to the vanished 'Solar Queen, a plague ship, warned off and Patrol Posted after her crew plundered an E-Stat belonging to the Inter-Solar Corporation.
"If we set down and pile out wearing suits at once it will build up our tale of being poor wrecked spacemen " Sleep rods or not, Dane thought to himself, the whole plan was one born of desperation. It would depend upon who manned the E-Stat and how fast the Free Traders could move once the Queen touched her fins to earth. "Knock out their coms," that was Ali continuing to plan.
For the massed green outside, the bright flowers, the bird he sighted as a brilliant flash of wind coasting color those were not to be found in the twisted horror left by man's last attempt to impress his will upon his resisting kind. Well, it had been a good try, but there was no use expecting luck to ride their fins all the way, and they had had more than their share in the E-Stat affair.
The space suit, which had been bulky and clumsy enough on the E-Stat asteroid under limited gravity, was almost twice as poorly adapted to progression on earth. But he climbed into it with Rip's aid, while Ali lashed a second suit under the seat ready to encase the man Dane must bring back with him.
Against a background of jagged rock teeth was the bubble of the E-Stat housing more than three-quarters of it being in the hollowed out sections below the surface of the miniature world which supported it, as Dane knew. But a beam of light shown from the dome to center on the grounded Queen. They had not caught the Stat agents napping.
And at the proper moment he thrust a gloved hand into the cage and brought out the wriggling thing which struck vainly with its poisoned talons, holding it above the dark table so that those unseen watchers could witness the dramatic change of color which made it such a menace. Dane continued the story of the Queen's ill-fated voyage of their forced descent upon the E-Stat.
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