not escape the feeling that she was.
Nevertheless the doors on the ship were closed or closing now. "Take me
aboard," he barked at the machine.
"At once, Man." And they were already flying across the plain.
Aboard ship, Hagen looked out of a port as they were hurled into the sky, then
warped through the sideward modes of space, twisted out from under the falling
veil before it could clamp its immovable knots about the atoms of the ship and
passengers and hold them down forever. There was a last glimpse of the yellow
plain, and then only strange flickers of light from the abnormal space they
were traversing briefly, like a cloud.
"That was exciting!" Out of nowhere Ailanna threw herself against him with a
hug. "I
was worried there, for a moment, that you'd been left behind." She was ready
now to forgive him a flirtation with a girl of a hundred and thirty years ago.
It was nice that he was forgiven, and Hagen patted her shoulder; but his eyes
were still looking upward and outward, waiting for the stars.
VICTORY
Along with everyone else on the Shearwater interplanetary ship, Nicholas
Shen-yang had a bad five minutes or so of waiting to die, not knowing whether
the Condamine patrol craft had decided to blast them or board them. Not until
they heard and felt the clunk of hull against hull were the would-be blockade
runners reasonably certain that the enemy had chosen to capture them and let
them live.
Hands behind his head, face to the bulkhead along with the Shearwater crew,
Shen-
yang got through the next five minutes in silence, even when something that
must have been a gun barrel was rammed into his back hard enough to leave a
bruise. That was after the first quick personal search and was meant to
emphasize an order that he should get the hell over there with the others who
had been searched and sit down.
The voice issuing the order sounded strangely accented to him, but the message
was quite understandable. Condamine, Shearwater, and the multitude of other
states making up the so-called civilized galaxy shared at least one common
language, in-
herited from old parent Earth, which fact tended to make events like this
boarding a little less difficult for all concerned.
More minutes passed before Shen-yang got the chance to show his diplomatic
card when a junior officer of the boarding party came around checking
identification. After the officer had glowered at him in suspicious fury for
half a minute only a born trouble-maker would be carrying such a card, to
upset the officer's smooth routine
Shen-yang was quickly transferred to the boarding party's launch. His brief
passage through the flexible tunnel connecting the two craft allowed him a
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glimpse of space through its transparent windows. There was Shearwater, the
planet he had left yesterday, a full bright dot looking like Jupiter as seen
from Earth except that
Shearwater appeared against a backdrop of pearly, soft, faint clouds of
whitish nebula, the nebula whose slow drift had cut this solar system off from
the galactic world for almost fifty standard years. And somewhere in the
dazzle sunward must be the crescent of Lorenzoni, the war-torn world that was
his goal, but he had no time to try to pick it out.
He was calmly unresisting as burly marines aboard the launch shoved him into a
space that must have been meant as a closet and locked the door on him.
Capture meant nothing essential to Shen-yang, as far as the success of his
mission was concerned. He had been going to visit both sides of Lorenzoni
anyway, and if fate insisted that he drop in on the aggressors first, so be
it.
He had just been beginning to know and like the Shearwater crew, a half-dozen
experienced blockade runners whose swaggers still had something self-conscious
about it, and he hoped they would manage to come through this in good shape.
Likely they would remain as prisoners aboard their own ship, while a Condamine
prize crew brought her in. From what Shen-yang had heard of the war so far,
there was some hope that they might get home later in a prisoner exchange....
At last he heard the sounds of separation, as the launch departed from the
captured smuggler. A minute later came the solid chunk of her arrival at her
berth in what must be a sizable war vessel.
When Shen-yang was brought off the launch, the Condaminer captain was there to
introduce himself, in stiffly correct style, and treat him to another
penetrating glare. A
minute or two later, in a room or cell almost big enough to be called a cabin,
the captain naturally enough wondering just what sort of diplomat he had
bagged so accidentally and what the effect was going to be upon his own
career came to talk with him a little more.
"Your government does know I'm coming, Captain, though they'll no doubt be
surprised when I show up in your custody. By the way, I hope the crew of the
ship you just captured are being cared for properly?"
"Better than they deserve, in my opinion."
"What did they really have aboard as cargo? They told me it was only medical
supplies, and I'd like to know if you found anything else."
The captain frowned, and his heavy jaw twitched, as if he might be having a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]