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But once inside, he began to realize the magnitude of his problem. This was not a tiny independent orbit-ship with a few corridors and compartments. This was a huge ship, a vast complex of corridors and compartments and holds. There was probably a crew of a thousand men on this ship ... and there was no sign where Greg and Johnny might have been taken.
Greg followed, pushing off harder and passing Johnny halfway down. Tom hesitated. It looked easy enough ... but he remembered the violent nausea of his first few hours of free fall. Finally he gritted his teeth and jumped off after Greg. Instantly he knew that he had jumped too hard. He shot away from the orbit-ship like a bullet; the jagged asteroid surface leaped up at him.
Somewhere, far ahead, an orbit-ship was waiting for the Ranger to return. He would have to be ready for the braking thrust and the side-maneuvering thrusts, but he would manage to hold on. Crouching against the fin, he would be invisible to viewers on the orbit-ship ... and who would be looking for a man clinging to the outside of a scout-ship? Tom sighed, and waited.
"Of course, I can tell you where you can find out, if you want to go look." "We've already searched his records...." "Some of his records," Greg said. "Not all of them. There was a compartment behind the main control panel in Dad's orbit-ship. Dad used it to store deeds, claims, other important papers. There was a packet of notes in there before your men fired on the ship.
"Suppose you tell us," Johnny Coombs said from across the room. "It looks like a gun." "That's what it is, all right." "You've fired it?" "Yes ... but I wouldn't fire it in here, if I were you," Johnny said. "You were wondering how we wrecked Tawney's orbit-ship so thoroughly. That's your answer right there."
Meanwhile, under Doc's orders, the crew of the Jupiter Equilateral ship began a systematic looting of the orbit-ship they had disabled. Earlier they had merely searched the cabins and compartments.
It had been the gun ... the remarkable gun that Roger Hunter had left as his legacy ... that had been the key. It ate through steel and aluminum alloy like putty. Whatever its power source, however it worked, by whatever means it had been built, there had been no match for it on the orbit-ship. It had worked ... and that was all that mattered right then.
Johnny Coombs picked it up, looked at it owlishly, and put it back again. "Pretty large operation for three men, Major," he said. The Major shrugged. "You were armed. That orbit-ship was registered as a commercial vessel. It had no reason to expect a surprise attack, and had no way to defend itself." "They were armed to the teeth," Greg said disgustedly. "Why don't you send somebody out to look?"
The pirates would have their prisoners, indeed ... but they would have one factor to deal with that they had not counted on. For Greg it was a bitter, lonely trip. After ten hours they saw the huge Jupiter Equilateral orbit-ship looming up in the viewscreen like a minor planet. Skilfully Doc maneuvered the ship into the launching rack.
Raw veins of metallic ore cut through it with streaks of color, but most of the sun-side showed only the dull gray of iron and granite. There was nothing unusual about the surface that Tom could see. "Could there be anything on the dark side?" "Could be," Johnny said. "We'll have to go over it foot by foot ... but first, we should go through the orbit-ship and the Scavenger.
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