A repeater screen from the communications centre showed robots shifting the star cutter away from her berth in the centre of the pad. They were working fast. The valves arching over the landing area rolled back. Hidden by the blaze of lighting the stars were not visible. But Hook knew they were shining away out there, eternally glittering in the whirlpool of stars. They were all his home patch.
Another repeater screen lit and displayed vectors and velocities, closing speeds and estimated time elapses. Hook absorbed them without conscious volition, as one reads print on any and everything without realising one is reading. The picture they formed flowered full in his mind.
"By the Curl of Curls!" said Inlander, and his languid pose vanished. He started to shout a string of orders.
Those constantly shifting strings of readouts were being repeated from the Top-Star closing Stellopolis and from the monitors on the city. The two sets did not match. The star-ship was swinging in on a direct touchdown course and was running a clear hundredth of a second out of phase. A mere hundredth of a second, when translated into terms of steel and metalloy converging under the momentum of thousands of tons of mass meeting millions of tons of mass, would mean absolute disaster. The starship was booming into a collision which the instruments showed clearly. Yet — the starship captain was speaking from another screen with a quietness of the professional making an approach which indicated quite clearly he was totally unaware of the true situation.
Other people's troubles were anathema to Hook in the ordinary way. But he knew where he was sitting and he knew what a Top-Star coming in out of phase like this could do. He stood up quickly as Inlander cut himself into the direct circuit to the incoming ship.
"Stellopolis P.A. to Asshendahll You're out of phase! Captain, you have ten seconds to match. Pull back!" Inlander's languidness had all gone; he was raving. "Pull back!"
Starship captains were a special breed of human beings, and Top-Star captains were the best of the bunch. The captain of Asshendahl did not stop to argue, to say that his control readings indicated to him he was coming in on a perfect course. Immediately he initiated a control sequence that would pull speed off the approach at once. He would know a real emergency faced him and his ship and he would be prepared to have his gigantic vessel temporarily afloat in free fall and thus vulnerable around the star city, and also, into the bargain, wasting money, without further question. A lesser man, a man more confident in his own superiority as against the advice of others, might have argued. The Top-Star captain reacted instantly.
Hook liked that.
The screen over Inlander's head now lit up with a direct optical view of the starship. She was a big one. She was pictured head on and spearing into Stellopolis, and Hook was immediately reminded of a shark bearing down on him, mouth agape, nose thrust forward, tearing in to shred him between those merciless jaws.
Hook knew the Top-Star would never pull back in time. Absolute bedlam erupted from the speakers. Alarm lights flashed continuously. A maniacal gong began to clamour. Inlander span away from his controls.
"Too late!" he screamed. He saw Hook, as though unaware that he'd been there all the time. "Get away! Get away!"
Now the star ship filled the screen. Now her prow vanished off the edges. Now that long snout nosed forward, larger and larger. That proboscis should have made gentle contact with the flexible extension of the berth where Hook's star cutter lay. Down the treads would come the passengers into star city.
But now that long stinger speared into the city like a sword of destruction.
Only moments before Hook had been sitting quietly sipping tea and eating cakes, waiting for his money.
Now the smashing noises of total catastrophe burst about him. The overhead collapsed. The walls of glassite and steel alike crumpled and split. The floor heaved and Inlander flew helplessly through the air, to smash headfirst through his panels and emerge on the far side trailing transistor beaded taped wiring, spraying components, shrieking.
Hook held on.
The far wall splintered and burst. He felt the shock tremble through the floor. Through the savaged opening the end of the starship's probe ruptured its way past metalloy and steel, draped with framing, crumpling under the succession of shocks, driving ponderously on, bearing down on Ryder Hook.
The deadly hiss of escaping air shrieked past.
The whole berthing area had been punctured.
That deck had been laid open to space as though by the random slice of a gigantic scalpel.
Loose objects lifted and were whirled outwards.
And among the debris being flung out into space went Ryder Hook, cursing the bunch of womb-regurgitants who couldn't even berth a ship competently.
CHAPTER THREE
THAT rushing gale of escaping air whirled around Ryder Hook. Scattered chunks of debris, loose raffles of wiring and splintered metalloy, tables and chairs, filing systems, a repeater computer terminal erupting and spraying valuable components, a few screaming people tumbled head over heels, all swept in the blustering stream of air outwards.
The Top-Star had come to rest wedged into the flank of star city. Her proboscis had snapped off, exposing a skeleton of construction members entangled with the construction members of the berthing area. The chaos, the noise, the shriek of people and the shriek of escaping air built up a bedlam of insanity. A fire had caught a grip where cables had ruptured and the smashing passage of the air fanned the flames into long evil streamers before they died.
Hook caught a stanchion in a grip that would not yield before the metalloy stanchion itself broke. He looked back. In a few seconds emergency doors would slam across. The whole city would be programmed to seal itself against any wound that might open a part of itself to space. When that happened the air would exhaust and that would be the end.
Hook saw he had no chance to get back into the deeper recesses of star city before the valves closed.
He was trapped in the smashed area, isolated from the safety within. He could still breathe, dragging in lungfuls of air as it whistled past; but that wouldn't last long.
The one eighth artificial gravity cut. In free fall the departure of air and objects speeded up.
He saw a woman spreadeagled, her hair a streaming mass of vipers' tongues around her, her face distraught, go whirling past. There was nothing he could do. The snout of the starship flailed back in the gale. The stanchion leaned as pressure built up.
Inlander had disappeared.
With a mockery as cruel as it was unnecessary a long striking stream of money-metal flew past. He ducked out of the way; that would puncture him like buckshot. And — that damned money was his! His own money, ejected from the slot of the terminal, whipped up and sucked out and pouring out into space. Hook cursed. There was no-one out there who could use money.
He took a firm grip of the stanchion, aimed himself for the Top-Star snout, and pushed off.
He barely made it.
At the last minute as he went sprawling in the air rush helter-skelter he got a hand around a jagged edge of metalloy. The force of his body sucked outwards and the sharpness of that edge should have lacerated his hand, probably have severed his fingers completely. He felt the edge digging in, and he grunted, and heaved, and got a black boot up over the edge and so hauled himself up into the distorted round of the star-ship's snout.
One thing, when Rocket Consortium Interstellar had monkeyed with his body, and exchanged some of his constituent atoms and molecules for living crystal metals, they'd at least given him a body that he could call on to do things denied to a normal human being. He dived in free fall down the snout and fetched up against a crumpled bulkhead beyond.
If his gamble did not pay off he was dead; but he would never give up, not even when they slipped him into space in his oxygen bottle, consigned to the stars.
A man lay sprawled against the inner edge of the bulkhead, sucked flat by the rush of air, unable to move.
Hook first looked at the telltales ab
ove the lintel of the lock leading back into the ship.
They glowed an intermittent amber, an indication that they had been caught in midcycle and were waiting for an override order.
Hook felt in the mood for giving orders — orders that would save his skin.
There were four other people trapped in this little shattered space, held against the metal walls. But they were dead, and so could not concern Hook. One had been a most lovely girl, clad in gauzy draperies and strings of jewels, with flame-coloured hair ablaze with gems. Now she lay with her head smashed in and blood and brains sticking to that gorgeous hair and streaming out in the wind bluster. With her and holding her waist lay the body of an elderly man whose bluff and stocky build and face — although dead — of dominant power showed he'd been a Krifman. Tough, rough bastards of the Galaxy, the Krifmans; but this one was as dead as the dandy who sprawled next to him, his face vacant and the top of his head missing.
Only the one young man remained alive. His eyes pleaded with Hook. He tried to speak and the air shrieked in his mouth. His blue eyes rolled towards the airlock with those flickering amber lights.
Hook guessed he was trying to say the lock was jammed.
Ryder Hook could not allow a stupid jammed lock to prevent him from getting into the starship. There'd be air in the ship. There was precious little out here, and in a second or two all that would be gone as the valves thunked shut deep in star city, sealing off this wound to space.
A clanking succession of blows resonated from the far side of the lock. Someone in there was trying to force the valves closed.
You couldn't blame them. They wanted to block off the escape of air in the same way star city had shut off this leaching injury.
Hook stared at the lock. The type was quite normal. He put his fingers, gripping with a hawk-talon fierceness, around the edge of metal. He pulled. He put out some power, some force, some of the incredible energy the RCI Powerman Project had given him. He'd not asked to go on that project with any ideas in his young head; he'd just been selected and had gone and they'd played with his body and found out what they needed to know and then they'd tossed him aside so that they could go on to create their Boosted Men. The 'they' of all this were long gone from the galactic scene, for the Boosted Men had taken over RCI. But their handiwork remained.
Ryder Hook, who was not a hundred percent Boosted Man, who was merely a normal man with an unusual body and mind, got his fingers around the jammed airlock valves — and pulled.
The metal shrieked as it dragged back.
He humped the valve just wide enough to slip through and was halfway in when he turned, remembering the youngster plastered up against the inner face of the shattered bulkhead. If the youngster could have screamed in the wind roaring past his mouth he would have done so; as it was he could only gulp at the rushing air, desperately trying to get enough into his lungs to keep alive.
Hook cursed himself for a sentimental fool.
Even as he started back the wind rush subsided.
From a blustering gale the air dropped to a whining moan and then a hideous and chilly silence.
Hook sucked in a huge lungful of the departing air, dived for the lad, got him around the waist, hauled him up. He went in through the gap between valve and architrave like a weasel, flung the youngster onto the deck, Whirled, put his shoulder and hands against the valve — and thrust.
His booted feet slipped, caught a grip on the corrugated floor. There was practically no air left now. Cold smashed down. He pushed and pushed and the metal caught and gave and then, soundlessly, crashed back. Hook gave the valve a final thrust. Without a pause he leaped for the far valve, got his hands around the manual wheel, span it around so fast the spokes blurred.
Air gushed in.
Frost disappeared from the walls, dissipating. The stinging sensations of agony in Hook's eyes and nose went away. He put his head into the gush of air and, warmed, he felt the clean sweet stuff pouring into his lungs.
Then he shoved the lad into the air flow.
By the time the lock was filled and he could open the far door the lad had babbled on about how grateful he was and how terrible this was, and Hook although not having to slap him around the face to quieten him down, had had quite enough of the fulsomeness of it all. The youngster, who said his name was Bolan Cater, laboured under the misapprehension that Hook had been risking his life to save the lad from death. Hook knew that a Bolan was a title of some sort. But for Ryder Hook lords and ladies had always been a kind of sour joke in a galaxy that cared not one whit for them or their kind. A Bolan would suffocate as unpleasantly as a slave without air.
Hook shoved the far valve open.
Half a dozen uniformed personnel of the starship's crew stood back. They carried wrenches and electronic probes and had clearly been trying to get the valves shut. Air still whistled past, escaping through the gaps and between the crumpled rims of the far door. The crew did not look pleased.
"How the hell did you get here?" demanded the man in charge, the second officer, to judge by the insignia on his white uniform.
"You were trying to shut me out," said Hook in his ugly way.
"We have to close down the valves —" The second officer quite clearly was at a complete loss. Here he was trying to do his duty after this terrible catastrophe, and strange and ugly great bastards were breaking in through the very airlocks he was trying to close down!
"You shut me out," said Hook. "And you shut out Bolan Cater —"
A woman's voice lifted in a shriek at this. In a swirl of parting crewmen a woman rushed forward and clasped Cater in her arms. She wore a lightweight spacesuit, with the helmet thrown back and collapsed out of the way, ready for instant use. She had been kilted up against disaster, just in case. Now she hugged Cater to her, smothering him with kisses.
"Bunji! Oh, Bunji! I thought you were dead! Oh, my darling boy! You have come back —"
"Mother! Let me up!"
Bolan Cater was still young enough to feel embarrassment at public display of affection. After a few years of the viciousness of the galaxy he'd be grateful for any affection that came his way.
The woman held young Bunji Cater fast and stared up at Hook. She was good-looking. Not beautiful, although the strengths of her face lay in the firm line of jaw and the clarity of her eyes. Her hair had been gathered back and severely knotted, ready for the space helmet. She looked a woman accustomed to having her own way, and yet she was alive and warm-blooded, and Hook fancied there was no play-acting in her reactions at the sight of her son miraculously restored to life.
"You and Dondar and the others — out in the probe — you were dead! The officers told me. After the accident no-one could be alive out there!" She glared wildly up at the second officer. "You said so! No air — no air —"
The second officer did not know what to say.
Hook said: "There was air. Now there is not. And unless this curd seals the locks properly there'll be no air in the ship."
The second officer shot Hook a glare of venomous hostility which Hook, glaring back, returned with interest.
Then he turned aside. Here he was descending to puerilities of this nature, outglaring some miserable little starship officer who no doubt was already shaking in his spaceboots at the enormity of what he had done. For, let there be no mistake, Hook understood the situation. A Bolan had been left out to die, and his mother had pleaded, and had been told there was no hope. And then some black bastard had wrenched open the air lock valves and carted the youngster in, safe and alive, and made the starship expertise and the starship's officers look a bunch of gonils.
No wonder Hook was glared at! And, too, no wonder that Cater's mother, Terifia, after she could tear herself away from her son, took a great interest in Hook, and held his arm, and insisted he go with her and. Bunji Cater to her staterooms whilst the mess was cleared away from the Top-Star's nose and they could go into Stellopolis.
Hook, had he been a man given to grinn
ing, would have grinned then. As it was, being human, he chuckled a trifle.
Interstellar travellers expected certain minimum standards of comfort in the ships they patronised. Here, in Asshendahl, the standard of comfort approached sybaritic luxury. Of all the various devices for making an interstellar flight on real time pass pleasantly here in Asshendahl, Hook was most taken by the clever adaption of Vin Reenurm's process for sensory enhancement. The lady Terifia's suite of cabins had been extensively wired for various sensory impressions, the controls were discreet, changing of requirements being handled by eye-movements in sequence, and the general effect was at once tasteful and highly effective.
"Oh, yes, Taynor Hook," said the lady Terifia, graciously, ushering Hook in, nodding for the serving robots to rush forward in all their plastic and metalloy servility. "I demand absolutes in life. Absolute comfort. Absolute loyalty. Absolute —"
She paused, and her son said: "What, mother. Love?"
"Oh, Bunji! You've given me enough frights for one day. You'll come of age in just one week." From the way she spoke Hook knew she meant a week terrestrial; Stellopolis employed a chronology that equated a week of their time to about eight days terrestrial. "After that you may be as rude to me as you wish. But —" And here the lady Terifia's voice sharpened. "Until then, Bunji, dear, mind your manners."
For all the horror of his experience, Bunji Cater had got over it quickly enough, and Hook suspected a great deal of his mother's power and force of personality had spilled over into him. His father might have been interesting, too ...
The robots dispensed their services. The lady Terifia reclined in a lounger, letting her robes fall gracefully about her figure. Hook spared her two glances. Each time she still looked good. She, for her part, was perfectly aware of the picture she made, negligently leaning on an elbow, propped against static air cushions, the light brilliant on her jewels, the discarded lightweight spacesuit deftly removed and disposed of by the robots. Hook felt pleasure at the sight of her; and yet he could see her legs were fattish for their length, and he wondered why she'd not bothered to have them tailored. Cosmetic surgery was so commonplace a fact of life in the galaxy of the hundred and first century as to arouse comment when those who could afford it did not do so.
Star City Page 3
