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The face of the slightly taller man who stood at his shoulder was paper-white, expressionless, with a black beard. His name was Nevil Ormm, nobody was quite sure whence he had come, and he was Dunnan's henchman and constant companion. "You lie!" Dunnan was shouting. "You lie damnably, in your stinking teeth, all of you! You've intercepted every message she's tried to send me."
"Was he killed?" "Wounded; he's in worse shape than you are. When the shooting started, he went charging up the escalator. Didn't have anything but his dress-dagger. Dunnan gave him a quick burst; I think that was why he didn't have time to finish you off. By that time, the guards who'd been shooting blanks from that rapid-fire gun got in a clip of live rounds and fired at him.
He told them about the Enterprise, and the cargo of industrial and construction equipment she carried, and then told them how Andray Dunnan had pirated her. "That wouldn't have annoyed me at all; I had no money invested in the project.
Even under the circumstances, Alex Gorram was glad to see the last of them. As for Dunnan's own mercenary company, there were about a score of former spacemen among them; the rest graded down from bandits through thugs and sneak-thieves to barroom bums. Dunnan himself was an astrogator, not an engineer. "That gang aren't even good enough for routine raiding," Harkaman said.
That was what it was; he was still under treatment. But that seemed so long ago; so many things he must have dreamed them seemed to have happened. Then he remembered, and struggled futilely to rise. "Elaine!" he called. "Elaine, where are you?" There was a stir and somebody came into his limited view; his cousin, Nikkolay Trask. "Nikkolay; Andray Dunnan," he said. "What happened to Elaine?"
They haven't. One thing, we do want to let down and give the men a chance to walk on ground and look at a sky for a while. The girls here aren't too bad, either," Harkaman said. "As I remember, some of them even take a bath, now and then." "That's the kind of news of Dunnan we're going to get.
Then, like a fool, I hired out to the Elmersans on Durendal and lost my ship. When I came here, your Duke was thinking about Xipototec. I convinced him that Tanith was a better planet for his purpose." "Dunnan might go there, at that. He might think he was scoring one on Duke Angus. After all, he has all that equipment." "And nobody to use it. If I were Dunnan, I'd go to Nergal, or Xochitl.
All the major barons are at each other's throats, and they can't even keep their own knights and petty-barons in order. Why, there's a miserable little war down in Southmain Continent that's been going on for over two centuries." "That's probably where Dunnan's going to take that army of his," a robot-manufacturing baron said. "I hope it gets wiped out, and Dunnan with it."
Not to avenge that murder six years ago on Gram; that was long ago and far away, and Elaine was vanished, and so was the Lucas Trask who had loved and lost her. What mattered now was planting and nurturing civilization on Tanith. But where would he find Dunnan, in two hundred billion cubic light-years? Dunnan had no such problem. He knew where his enemy was. And Dunnan was gathering strength.
"I'll have to come back, some time, and visit them," Elaine whispered to him. "They'll miss me." "You'll find a lot of new friends at your new home," he whispered back. "You wait till tomorrow." "I'm going to put a word in the Duke's ear about that fellow," Sesar Karvall, still thinking of Dunnan, was saying. "If he speaks to him, maybe it'll do some good." "I doubt it.
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