“Basil, you came back to me?”
“He came because he had to.” Morzach of Arzun folded his arms, eyes smoldering in anger. “Best we kill him now.”
“Later, perhaps later, but not now.” Valduma laughed aloud.
Suddenly she was in Donovan’s arms. Her kisses were a rain of fire. There was thunder and darkness and dancing stars. He was aware of nothing else, not for a long, long time.
She leaned back in his grasp, smiling up at him, stroking his hair with one slender hand.
His cheek was bloody where she had scratched him. He looked back into her eyes—they were cat’s eyes, split-pupiled, all gold and emerald without the human white. She laughed very softly. “Shall I kill you now?” she whispered. “Or drive you mad first? Or let you go again? What would be most amusing, Basil?”
“This is no time for your pranks,” said Morzach sharply. “We have to deal with this ship. It’s getting dangerously close to Arzun, and we’ve been unable yet to break the morale and discipline of the crew. I think the only way is to wreck the ship.”
“Wreck it on Arzun, yes!” Valduma’s laughter pulsed and throbbed. “Bring them to their goal. Help them along, even. Oh, yes, Morzach, it is a good thought!”
“We’ll need your help,” said the creature-man to Donovan. “I take it that you’re guiding them. You must encourage them to offer no resistance when we take over the controls. Our powers won’t stand too long against atomic energy.”
“Why should I help you?” Donovan’s tones were hoarse. “What can you give me?”
“If you live,” said Valduma, “and can make your way to Drogobych, I might give you much.” She laughed again, maniac laughter which did not lose its music. “That would be diverting!”
“I don’t know,” he groaned. “I don’t know—I thought a bargain could be made, but now I wonder.”
“I leave him to you,” said Morzach sardonically, and vanished.
“Basil,” whispered Valduma. “Basil, I have—sometimes—missed you.”
“Get out, Wocha,” said Donovan,
“Boss—she’s toombar—”
“Get out!”
Wocha lumbered slowly from the cabin. There were tears in his eyes.
4
The Ganymede’s engines rose to full power and the pilot controls spun over without a hand on them.
“Engine room! Engine room! Stop that nonsense down there!”
“We can’t—they’re frozen—the converter has gone into full without us—”
“Sir, I can’t budge this stick. It’s locked somehow.”
The lights went out. Men screamed.
“Get me a flashlight!” snapped Takahashi in the dark. “I’ll take this damned panel apart myself.”
The beam etched his features against night. “Who goes?” he cried.
“It’s I.” Jansky appeared in the dim reflected glow. “Never mind, Takahashi. Let the ship have her way.”
“But ma’m, we could crash—”
“I’ve finally gotten Donovan to talk. He says we’re in the grip of some kind of powerbeam. They’ll pull us to one of their space stations and then maybe we can negotiate—or fight. Come on, we’ve got to quiet the men.”
The flashlight went out. Takahashi’s laugh was shrill. “Better quiet me first, Captain.”
Her hand was on his arm, steadying, strengthening. “Don’t fail me, Tetsuo. You’re the last one I’ve got. I just had to paralyze Scoresby.”
“Thanks—thanks, chief. I’m all right now. Let’s go.”
They fumbled through blindness. The engines roared, full speed ahead with a ghost on the bridge. Men were stumbling and cursing and screaming in the dark. Someone switched on the battle-stations siren, and its howl was the last voice of insanity.
Struggle in the dark, wrestling, paralyzing the berserk, calling on all the iron will which had lifted humankind to the stars—slow restoration of order, men creeping to general quarters, breathing heavily in the guttering light of paper torches.
The engines cut off and the ship snapped into normal matter state. Helena Jansky saw blood-red sunlight through the viewport. There was no time to sound the alarm before the ship crashed.
* * * *
“A hundred men. No more than a hundred men alive.”
She wrapped her cloak tight about her against the wind and stood looking across the camp. The streaming firelight touched her face with red, limning it against the utter dark of the night heavens, sheening faintly in the hair that blew wildly around her strong bitter countenance. Beyond, other fires danced and flickered in the gloom, men huddled around them while the cold seeped slowly to their bones. Here and there an injured human moaned.
Across the ragged spine of bare black hills they could still see the molten glow of the wreck. When it hit, the atomic converters had run wild and begun devouring the hull. There had barely been time for the survivors to drag themselves and some of the cripples free, and to put the rocky barrier between them and the mounting radioactivity. During the slow red sunset, they had gathered wood, hewing with knives at the distorted scrub trees reaching above the shale and snow of the valley. Now they sat waiting out the night.
Takahashi shuddered. “God, it’s cold!”
“It’ll get colder,” said Donovan tonelessly. “This is an old planet of an old red dwarf sun. Its rotation has slowed. The nights are long.”
“How do you know?” Lieutenant Elijah Cohen glared at him out of a crudely bandaged face. The firelight made his eyes gleam red. “How do you know unless you’re in with them? Unless you arranged this yourself?”
Wocha reached forth a massive fist. “You shut up,” he rumbled.
“Never mind,” said Donovan. “I just thought some things would be obvious. You saw the star, so you should know it’s the type of a burned-out dwarf. Since planets are formed at an early stage of a star’s evolution, this world must be old too. Look at these rocks—citrified, back when the stellar energy output got really high just before the final collapse; and nevertheless eroded down to bare snags. That takes millions of years.”
He reflected that his reasoning, while sound enough, was based on foreknown conclusions. Cohen’s right. I have betrayed them. It was Valduma, watching over me, who brought Wocha and myself unhurt through the crash. I saw, Valduma, I saw you with your hair flying in the chaos, riding witch-like through sundering ruin, and you were laughing. Laughing! He felt ill.
“Nevertheless, the planet has a thin but breathable atmosphere, frozen water, and vegetable life,” said Takahashi. “Such things don’t survive the final hot stage of a sun without artificial help. This planet has natives. Since we were deliberately crashed here, I daresay the natives are our earlier friends.” He turned dark accusing eyes on the Ansan. “How about it, Donovan?”
“I suppose you’re right,” he answered. “I knew there was a planet in the Nebula, the natives had told me that in my previous trip. This star lies near the center, in a ‘hollow’ region where there isn’t enough dust to force the planet into its primary, and shares a common velocity with the Nebula. It stays here, in other words.”
“You told me—” Helena Jansky bit her lip, then slowly forced the words out: “You told me, and I believed you, that there was nothing immediately to fear when the Nebulites took over our controls. So we didn’t fight them; we didn’t try to overcome their forces with