Sargasso of Space (Solar Queen Series)

by Andre Norton

Yes, with a stun rifle, and this elevation to aid him, a man might pick off those foreshortened figures—even with the range as great as it was. Unfortunately their full armament now consisted of only shot range weapons—the close-to-innocuous sleep ray rods, and the blasters—potent enough, but only for in-fighting.

  “Might as well wish for a bopper while you’re about it,” Dane commented.

  Both flitters had disappeared from the landing place near the ship. He supposed they had been warped in for safety. Now he swept the ground slowly, trying to pick out any shapes which did not seem natural. And within five minutes he was sure he had pinpointed at least as many posts of two or three watchers staked out in an irregular circle about the ship. Four of the groups had transportation—machines which resembled their own crawlers to some degree but were narrower and longer, as if they had been designed to negotiate the valleys of this planet.

  “Speaking of boppers,” Rip’s voice startled Dane because of its tenseness, “what’s that? Over there——”

  Dane’s glasses obediently turned west. “Where?”

  “See that rock that looks a little like a hoobat’s head—to the left of that.”

  Dane searched for a rock suggesting Captain Jellico’s pet monstrosity. He finally found it. To the left—now. Yes! A straight barrel. Was that—could that be the barrel of a portable bopper, wheeled into a position which commanded the ship, from which it could drop its deadly little eggs right under her fins?

  A bopper couldn’t begin to make any impression on a sealed ship, that was true. But it could and would bring sudden death to those venturing out into the gas which burst from its easily shattered ammunition. One had to take a bopper seriously.

  “Space!” he spit out. “We must have strayed into a darcon’s nest——”

  “With the clawed one breathing down our necks into the bargain,” agreed Rip. “Why doesn’t the Queen lift? They could set down anywhere and pick us up later. Why stay boxed in here?”

  “Do you not think,” asked Mura, “that perhaps the odd behavior of our ship may have something to do with the wrecks? That maybe if the Queen takes to the air she might become as they are?”

  “I’m no engineer,” Dane said, “but I don’t see how they could bring her down. They haven’t any big stuff lined up out there. It’d take a maul to push her off course——”

  “Did you see any signs of an attack by a maul on the Rimbold? There were none. She crashed as if she were drawn to this planet by some force she could not resist. Those who wait down there may have the secret of such a force. It could be that they rule not only the surface of Limbo, but some portion of the heavens above——”

  “You think that the installation is a part of it?” Rip inquired.

  “Who knows?” the steward’s quiet voice continued. “It might well be.” He was watching the plain through his own glasses. “I would like to slip down there after nightfall and prowl about. If we could have a quiet and informative talk with one of those sentries——”

  Mura’s tone did not change, he was his usual placid, unexcited self. But Dane knew that the last person he would care to change places with at that particular moment was one of the sentries Mura wished to “talk.”

  “Hmmm—” Rip was studying the terrain. “It might be done at that. Or a man could get to the Queen and find out what this was all about——”

  “You don’t think we could reach them by com?” suggested Dane. “We’re close enough for a clear reception.”

  “Notice those helmets on the sentries’ heads?” Rip pointed out. “I’ll bet you earth-side pay that they’re linked up on our frequency now. If we talk they’ll listen—not only listen but get a fix on us. And they know this ground better than we do. Would you like to play hide and seek across this country in the dark?”

  Dane decidedly would not. But it was difficult to relinquish using the coms. So easy to just call and find out what might take hours and hours of spying and risk to discover by themselves. Only, as the Masters had dinned into them for years back in the Pool, there were few easy short cuts in Trade. It was a matter of using your wits from first to last, of being able to improvise on the spur of the moment such dodges as would save your profit, your ship or your skin. And the last two precious articles appeared to be at stake on this occasion.

  “At least,” Rip was continuing, “we are sure now that more than Rich and his hand-picked boys are involved.”

  “Yes,” Mura nodded, “it would seem that the forces ranged against us are numerically stronger.” His glasses coursed from one group of hidden men to the next, until he had made the complete circle concealed from those aboard the Queen. “There are perhaps fifteen out there.”

  “To say nothing of reinforcements they may have back in the mountains. But who in the Black Reaches of Outer Space are they?” Rip asked of the air about them.

  “Something is about to happen.” Mura stiffened, his attention settling on one spot.

  Dane followed the steward’s lead. The other was right. One of the besiegers had walked boldly out of cover and now approached the ship, waving vigorously over his head the age-old sign for parley—a strip of white cloth.

  For a moment or two it appeared as if the Queen was not going to answer that. And then the hatch opened far above the surface of the ground. No ramp was lowered. Instead a figure paused in the opening and Dane recognized Captain Jellico.

  The bearer of the white flag hesitated some distance away. Though the watchers could not see too clearly in the growing dusk, they could hear, for a voice crackled in their helmet phones, thus proving Rip right—the coms of the raiders were on the same band as their own.

  “Thought it over, Captain? Ready to be sensible?”

  “Is that all you want to know?” Jellico’s rasp could not be mistaken. “I gave you my decision last night.”

  “You can sit here until you starve, Captain. Just try to get off-world——”

  “If we can’t get off—neither can you get in!”

  “And there he speaks the truth,” Mura observed. “Nothing they have down there is capable of forcing an entrance to the Queen. And if they are able to smash her—she will be of no use to them.”

  “You think that that is what they are after—the Queen?” hazarded Dane.

  Rip snorted. “That’s obvious. They don’t want her to lift—they have a use for her. I’ll bet that Rich brought us here just to get the Queen.”

  “There is the matter of supplies, Captain,” the besieger’s voice purred in their earphones. “We can afford to sit here half a year if it is necessary—you can not! Come, do not be so childish. We have offered you a fair deal all around. And you have been caught in a pinch, have you not? Your ready funds went at the auction when you bought trading rights here. Well, we are offering you better than trading rights. And we have the patience to sit it out.”

  But, if the speaker had the patience he vaunted, one of his fellows did not. Through the air came the crack of a stun rifle. Jellico either ducked or fell back into the ship and the hatch was clapped to. The three Traders on the cliff sat very still. It appeared that the man with the flag had not expected that move on the part of his own side. He stayed where he was for a moment before he dropped the treacherous strip of white and dived for the cover of an outcrop, from which point he squirmed back to his original post.

  “That was not planned,” remarked Mura. “Someone was a fraction impatient. He will suffer for his zeal— since he has just put an end to the chance of future negotiation.”

  “Do you think the Captain was hurt?” Dane asked.

  “The old man knows all the tricks.” Rip did not seem worried. “I’d say he got out in a hurry. But now they’ll have to starve him into surrender. That shot is not going to get our men to come out with their hands up——”

  “Meanwhile,” Mura dropped his glasses to his knee, “there is the little matter of our own action. We might be able to slip through those lines in the dark, but with the shi
p sealed, how can we get in? They are not going to lower a line at the first hail out of the night. Not now.”

  Dane gazed across the rough ground which lay between the heights on which he perched and the distant ship. Yes, it might be simple to avoid the sentry post of tht besiegers, they would be more intent on the ship than on the territory behind their own lines. Maybe they did not even know that some of the Queen’s crew had escaped their trap. But, having reached the ship, how could one get on board?

  “A problem, a problem,” Mura murmured.

  “Aren’t we on a level with the control section here?” Rip asked suddenly. “Maybe we could rig up some kind of a signal to let them know we were sending someone in——”

  Dane was willing to try. He squinted along the line from where he sat to the nose of the ship.

  “It will have to be done very soon,” Mura warned. “Night is coming fast.”

  Rip looked up at the sky. The sun of the morning had long since vanished. Leaden clouds hung over them. And it was clearly twilight.

  “Suppose we make a shelter—maybe out of our tunics—and light a torch in it. The range of the light would be limited at the sides—it could not be seen from below.

  But those on the Queen might catch it——”

  The steward’s answer was to unbuckle his equipment belt and pull at the seal latch of his tunic. Dane hurriedly followed his example. Then they crouched shiver- ing in the cold, holding their tunics as side screens, while Rip squatted between, flashing his torch on and off in the distress signal of the Trading code. It was such a slim chance, someone would have to be in the control cabin watching at just the right angle to catch that click, click of light—a mere pinprick of radiance.

  Then the night beacon of the Queen flashed on, striking up into the gray sky as it had fought the fog a day earlier. Only now it lit the surrounding clouds. And as the three on the cliff watched, hoping to read in this some reply to their improvised com, the yellowish beam took on a ruddier tinge.

  Mura sighed with relief. “They have read us——”

  “How do you know?” Dane could see nothing to lead the steward to believe that.

  “They had switched on the storm ray. See, now it fades once more. But they read us!” He was smiling as he donned his tunic. “I would suggest that we compose a proper message among us and also inform Wilcox of this development. If we can communicate with the Queen, even if she can not with us, something may be done to our advantage after all.”

  So they went down to the crawler. It did not take long to relay the news.

  “But they can not answer us.” Wilcox put his finger on the weakness of the whole set up. “They wouldn’t have used the storm ray if they had had any other means of letting us know they read you——”

  “We’ll have to send someone in. Now we can signal that he is coming and they will be waiting to take him aboard,” Rip said eagerly.

  Wilcox’s manner suggested that he did not wholly agree with that plan. But, though they discussed it point by point, there did not seem to be any other solution.

  Mura got to his feet. “The dark is coming fast. We must decide upon a plan at once, for the climb to our signal post is not one to be taken when it can not be seen. Who is to go and when? That much we can send in code——”

  “Shannon,” Wilcox singled out the astrogator-apprentice, “this is the time those cat’s eyes of yours will come in handy. You can see as much in the dark as Sinbad—or you seemed to that time on Baldur. Want to try to make it at, say,” he consulted his watch, “twenty-one hours? That will give our playmates on the sentry posts time to settle down.”

  Rip’s beaming face was answer enough. And he was humming as the three once more ascended the rock and took over the task of beaming the message.

  “You will add,” Mura remarked, “that your safe arrival is to be signaled back to us with the storm ray. We would like to rejoice in your success.”

  “Sure, man. But I’m not worrying.” Rip’s natural buoyance was returning for the first time since he had made that horrible discovery in the wrecked Rimbold. “This is a stroll compared to that job we had on Baldur.”

  Mura looked grave. “Never underestimate what may stand against you. You are experienced enough in Trade to remember that, Rip. This is no time to take unnecessary chances——”

  “Not me, man! I’ll be as silent and slippery as a snake out there. They will never know I passed by.”

  Once again the steward and Dane shed their tunics and shivered in the damp cold as Rip flashed the news of his mission across to the silent, sealed ship. There was no answer but they were certain that after their first assay at communication there had been a watcher stationed to wait for a second message.

  It was arranged that Mura and Dane were to bed down on the heights while Rip went back to the crawler and waited to set out from there. When the astrogator-apprentice disappeared below, Dane moved rocks to provide them with a windbreak.

  They had no source of warmth but their nearness to each other, so they crouched together in the pocket Dane had devised, with nothing to do but wait out the hours until the signal came that Rip had reached his goal.

  “Lighting up,” Mura murmured.

  The beam from the Queen still beaconed in the night. But what Mura referred to were the sparks of fire which marked the fixed posts of the unknown sentries.

  “Make it easier for Rip—he’ll be able to avoid them,” ventured Dane but his companion disagreed.

  “They will be alert for trouble. Probably they have beats linking each of those with the rest and are doing sentry-go along them.”

  “You mean—they guess that we are here—that they are only waiting for Rip to come along——”

  “That may or may not be true. But they are, of course, alert for a move from the men in the Queen. Tell me, Thorson, are you not now aware of something more? Can you not feel it through this rock?”

  Of course he could. That beat of the installation, less heavy than it had been near the ruins, but faithful in its pattern. And now there was no fluctuation in its power as the long minutes dragged wearily by. It was running steadily at full strength.

  “That,” Mura continued, “is what ties the Queen to this earth——”

  The jig-saw bits of what they had learned during the past two days were beginning to fit into a picture. Suppose these strangers who had enmeshed the Queen for some purpose of their own, did control a means of crashing her if she tried to lift from Limbo? It would be necessary to keep that installation, energy broadcaster, beam, or whatever it was, working all the time or the ship would make a sneak escape. Those in her must be fitting the pieces together, too—even if they did not yet know the Sargasso properties of Limbo.

  “Then the only way to get out of here,” said Dane slowly, “is to find the source of power and——”

  “Smash it? Yes. If Rip makes contact—then we must move to that end.”

  “You say ‘if Rip makes contact.’ Don’t you think he’s going to?”

  “You are very young in the Service, Thorson. After some voyages a man becomes very humble. He begins to realize that the quality we name on Terra ‘luck’ has much to do with success or failure. We can never hon- estly say that this or that plan of action will come to fruition in the manner we hope, there are too many governing factors over which we have no control. We do not count on any fact until it is an established reality. Shannon has many of the odds on his side. He has unusually keen night sight, a fact we discovered on a similar situation not long ago, he is used to field work, he is not easily confused. And from here he has had a chance to study the territory and the positions of the enemy. The odds are perhaps eighty percent in his favor. But there remains that twenty percent. He must be ready and we must be ready to prepare for other moves—until we see the beacon signal that he has made it.”

  Mura’s emotionless voice unsettled Dane. It had the old illusion-pricking touch of Kamil, refined, made even more pointed and cutting.
Kamil! Where was Ali? Being held by some of those now ranged about the Queen? Or had he been taken on to the mysterious source of power?

  “What do you suppose they did with Kamil?” Dane asked aloud.

  “He represents to them a source of information about us and our concerns. As such they would see that he reaches the guiding brain behind all this. And he will be safe—just as long as they have a use for him——”

  But there was something vaguely sinister in that answer—a hint twisting Dane’s memory to a scene he did not like to recall.

  “Those men on the Rimbold— Was Rip right? Had they been blasted?”

  “He was right.” The three words were unaccented by any emotion, and the very gentleness of the reply made it the more forceful.

  They talked very little after that, and only moved about when the warning stiffness of arm or leg made it necessary. On the plain the beacon continued to point star-ward from ship without change.

  In spite of the cold and the cramp, the beat of the vibration was lulling. Dane had to fight to keep awake, using an old trick of recalling in detail one tape after another in the “Rules of Stores” he had made his study during the voyage out. If he were only back in Van Rycke’s cubby now, safely engrossed in his studies, with nothing more exciting than a sharp piece of bargaining to look forward to in the morning!

  A whistle, low, yet penetrating, reached their ears from the depths. That was Rip, about to set out on his risky venture. Dane held his glasses to his eyes. Though he knew very well that he could not follow the other’s progress through the dark.

  The rest of the hours seemed days long. Dane watched the beacon with a single-minded intensity which made his eyes ache. But there was no change. He felt Mura shift beside him, fumbling in the dark and a faint glow told him that beneath the shelter of tunic hem the other was consulting his watch.

  “How long?”

  “He has been out four hours——”

  Four hours! It wouldn’t take a man four hours to reach the Queen from here. Even if he had to detour and hide out at intervals to escape the sentries. It looked very much as if that twenty percent which Mura had mentioned as standing against the success of Rip’s mission was indeed the part to be dealt with now.