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Updated: June 27, 2025
Dane volunteered to remain inside the E-Stat and assemble the necessary containers at the air lock while the other two, having had more experience, went back to the spacer to strip the hydro and prepare to switch contents. But, when Rip and Ali left, the younger Cargo-apprentice began to find the bubble a haunted place.
And was the spacer still inviolate, or had the Terrapolice and the Patrol managed to take her over? He was so very tired, his eyes felt as if hot sand had been poured beneath the lids, his body ached. And at last he nodded into naps from which he awoke with jerks of the neck. Rip was frankly asleep, his shoulders and head resting against the wall, while Ali lounged with closed eyes.
The big miner had taken Roger Hunter's gun from the case, and hefted it in his hand, started to check it automatically as Tom talked. But now his hand froze as he stared at the weapon. "What's wrong?" Tom asked. "This gun is wrong," Johnny said. "All wrong. Where did you get this thing?" "From Dad's spacer pack, the one the Patrol brought back. The Major gave it to us in Sun Lake City."
"When the Patrol arrives, you put in your claim. I'll back you." "You can't." "That's where you're mistaken," Hume told him crisply. "I've already taped a full story back at the spacer it's on record now." Vye frowned. The Hunter seemed determined to ask for the worst the Patrol or the planet police back on Nahuatl could deal out.
Then the spacer turned for a moment, in a landing correction, and he had a quick glimpse of a serial number and tantalizingly familiar insignia on its stern where had he seen that before? The ship touched down and the flaring rockets died. There was only the click of cooling metal from the ship: no one emerged, nor did any of the Pyrrans seem interested enough in the newcomer to approach it.
That night he camped out on the edge of rough pasturage where the counter no longer flashed its warning and he was able to shed the suit and sleep under the stars with the fresh air of early summer against his cheek and the smell of honest growing things replacing the dry scent of the spacer and the languorous perfumes of Sargol.
But he need not have worried, his arrival had been anticipated. Above, the rounded side of the spacer bulged as the hatch opened. Lines swung down to fasten their magnetic clamps on the flitter. Then once more they were air borne, swinging up to be warped into the side of the ship.
There was the sharp note of a warning gong, the flash of red light on the control board. They were off automatic, from here on in it was all Kip's work. Dane strapped down at the silent com-unit and was startled a moment later when it spat words at him, translated from space code. "Identify identify I-S E-Stat calling spacer identify "
To look at the two senior officers of the Free Trading spacer were the antithesis of each other in action they were each half of a powerful, steamroller whole as a good many men in the Service scattered over a half dozen or so planets had discovered to their cost in the past.
Then the stranger's hands dropped, and he swung around to face the colony scout squarely, a scowl twisting his black brows almost together. "This isn't my fight," he stated flatly. "I've got to get back to the flitter, to my spacer " What was the matter? Dalgard tried to understand. If the aliens won now, this stranger was in as great a danger as were the rest of them.
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