Starwolf (Omnibus)

by Edmond Hamilton

  And Dilullo?

  He thought, when Gwaath helped him to the pilot's chair, that Dilullo was dying. His eyes were closed, his pulse slow, his whole body slumped and shrunken. Dilullo was a lot older than he, Chane thought, and the thing had hit him harder.

  He had Gwaath open down one of the folding bunks and carry Dilullo back and put him in it. Chane sat down for a few minutes, trying to get his shocked nerves back to normal so that he could move without falling over.

  The scout was in overdrive. Gwaath had set a course toward Rith, but the course was not quite correct. Chane reached out a shaking hand and reset the course. After a time he got unsteadily to his feet and went back to Dilullo.

  Dilullo still lay with his eyes closed, his breathing spasmodic, his face gray. Little shudderings of his limbs and body were evidence that his nervous system was suffering the same aftereffect that Chane had felt.

  Chane massaged nerve centers,' while Gwaath looked back anxiously from the pilot's seat. Finally, to Chane's immense relief, Dilullo opened his eyes.

  They had a dull, glazed look, and when he spoke his voice was thick and slurred.

  "We burned our fingers that time, didn't we?" he said.

  "We did," said Chane, and told him how Gwaath had got them out of orbit.

  "Well, we did right to bring Gwaath along," said

  Dilullo. "I guess we're lucky to get out of this one with our lives."

  Chane said bitterly, "I'll show the Qajars some bad luck if I can ever get back at them. Damn them!"

  "I've seldom seen you so angry," Dilullo said. "Usually you just take it as it comes."

  "You didn't get the full blast of it," said Chane. "You passed out quick. But I got it all, and I'll pay them for it when the time comes."

  "Forget it," said Dilullo. "Think instead about what's going to happen when we come back to Rith emptyhanded."

  Chane thought about that, all the long time it took the scout in overdrive to cross the Spur. He could see big trouble ahead and he did not like the shape of it at all.

  But he worried more about Dilullo. Dilullo had not completely snapped out of it. His face was thin and drawn, his body still occasionally twitched as the nerves remembered their torture. Chane thought he would lose these aftereffects in time but he was not sure. And his own bitter hatred for the Qajars, for the cool voice that had mocked them as it applied the agony, deepened.

  When they dropped out of overdrive and came in to Rith, they were surprised to find a watery sunshine on its daylight side. But beyond the black stone city, vast masses of dark cloud brooded sullenly, promising more tempest for this storm-ridden planet.

  Rith officers met them and escorted them to the barny palace of Eron. Nothing was said except a few politenesses until they reached a chilly stone room where Eron sat. The bantam-sized red ruler looked at them accusingly.

  "You didn't get the Suns," he said.

  "Ah, so your men have already searched the scout and called you," said Dilullo. "No, we didn't get them. We were lucky to get away alive."

  "For your lives I care nothing," said Eron angrily. "Nothing, you understand? What concerns me is your failure."

  Dilullo shrugged wearily. "You can't win them all. The Qajars were just too much for us. You said they wouldn't full-scan, and they did."

  He told what had happened and the cocky little ruler strode back and forth nervously, his tough face getting darker and darker in expression.

  "It comes to this," he said finally. "You used a Rith scout. You tried to deceive the Qajars and failed. Suppose the Qajars ask me how you got that scout?"

  "Tell them we stole it," said Chane.

  Eron glared at him. "You think it's that simple? You still don't comprehend all the powers of the Qajars, even after they showed they could handle you like children! Suppose they find out you're here and demand that I surrender you to justice— their justice?"

  "Are they likely to do that?" asked Dilullo.

  "I don't know," said Eron uneasily. "Nobody knows what the Qajars are liable to do because nobody knows the extent of their powers, how far they can see, what weapons they can wield. I know one thing: I don't want them as enemies, and I don't want to lose them as profitable customers in trade."

  "What you're leading up to," said Dilullo, "is that if the Qajars ask for us, you'll throw us to the dogs."

  "If necessary," said Eron harshly. "Only if necessary. But you will have to stay here until I'm sure the Qajars are not going to demand you."

  "Fine," said Dilullo. "A fine loyal partner you make."

  Chane said nothing. He had expected this.

  "Nothing here will harm you," Eron went on. "I've given a small wing of the palace to your men and they've been quite comfortable. So will you be."

  "In other words, we're prisoners till you find out which way the cat jumps," said Dilullo disgustedly.

  "Yes," said Eron. "You will go now."

  He gave an order in his own incomprehensible language and one of the officers and four armed Rith came forward. Chane noticed that they were armed, not with stunners, but with lasers.

  It was no time to make any resistance, he decided. He and Dilullo went along with the Rith as meek as milk. They went up through stairs and corridors, poorly illuminated, where the gentle blue faces of the old race had not been painted over. The faces looked down at the captives as with vague pity.

  The men halted at a guarded door. A Rith officer searched Chane and Dilullo very efficiently, taking everything they had in the pockets of their coveralls.

  Then the door opened. The ugly, grinning little red man gestured to them with a sort of mock politeness. They went through and the door clanged behind them.

  There was a long ill-lit corridor and there were doors off it. Some of them were open, and from one they heard the sound of voices. They went that way.

  Most of the doors opened onto small sleeping rooms, but the one from which the voices came was a bigger common room. The windows of all these rooms were mere ventilation slits, too narrow to admit anything larger than a cat.

  Janssen sprang up from the group that was sitting around and drinking Rith liquor in the common room.

  "What do you know?" he exclaimed delightedly. Then his face fell as he looked them over. "You didn't make it, did you?"

  "We didn't come within a mile of making it," Dilullo said. He went over to the table and sat down in a chair, and Sekkinen poured him a drink of the fiery liquor from a slender flagon.

  Gwaath reached for the flagon, and it was a measure of Dilullo's weariness that he did nothing to stop him. The big Paragaran tilted the flagon and drank with a gurgling sound and put it down and wiped his hairy lips.

  "We were knocked silly," said Gwaath.

  Chane was not all that tired but he sat down. He saw Bollard scrutinizing Dilullo's worn face by the light of the lamps that were set in brackets around the walls.

  "You know what, John?" said Bollard. "You look like hell."

  "So would you, if you'd been through the wringer we went through," said Dilullo. He drank again, and then he told them all about what had happened.

  "It was a nice idea," said Dilullo. "Real nice. Only it didn't work. And now we're in a bad jam."

  They all sat and thought about that. Nobody said anything for a while. Gwaath reached for the flagon again, but Chane got up and took it from him and poured himself a glassful of the liquor. Then he handed the vessel back to the Paragaran, who emptied it in a long gulp.

  "We've done a lot of things," said Dilullo. "We've pulled it out of the fire a good many times when nobody thought we could. But no matter how good a man is he's going to fall on his prat sooner or later. This is where we did."

  "Then we kiss the whole job goodbye?" said Janssen.

  "What do you think?" asked Dilullo.

  Neither Janssen nor anyone else had an answer to that. After a moment, Sekkinen said, "Then the only thing left is to make a break and get the hell off this planet and go back to Earth?"


  Chane spoke up. "It won't be easy. We might break out of this place, but when we landed at the starport I noticed that they've got enough guards around our ship to hold onto it. Also, there are heavy lasers trained on it."

  "I don't know," said Dilullo. "I just don't know."

  Bollard looked at him keenly. Then the fat Merc got up and said decisively, "One thing for sure. We're not going to do anything tonight. You need some rest."

  A tremendous banging of thunder punctuated his words. Lightning flared outside the window and thunder rumbled again, and then there was the crashing sound of rain.

  "Give us this day our hourly storm," muttered Janssen. "What a planet."

  "Come on, John," said Bollard. "I'll show you where you can sleep."

  Dilullo got up and followed Bollard out of the room and down the corridor, a man in a daze. Chane went with them, not liking the look of Dilullo and afraid he might keel over at any moment.

  Dilullo made it into one of the rooms and onto a bed. He was asleep before he hit it.

  Bollard bent over him, loosening the neck of his coverall, taking off his shoes, putting a blanket over him. From the little window came the hiss of the rain and the turmoil of the storm, and Chane thought, Janssen's right; what a world!

  Chane went out of the room with Bollard. But in the corridor, after he had closed the door, Bollard suddenly stopped. His round fat face was not at all good-humored and moonlike now. It was dark and angry, and he reached out his hand and caught the front of Chane's coverall and pulled him closer.

  "Are you happy, Chane?" he demanded.

  "What the devil are you talking about?" Chane demanded.

  Bollard did not let him go. "Are you satisfied, now that John is about half dead from the job that you thought up for him?"

  Chane began to understand. "So that's it. The job is blown, we're in a mess, and now you're crying because it was my idea. Look, you're all grown men. You could take it or leave it. When I proposed to go after the Singing Suns. You took it."

  Bollard nodded. "We did. And none of us are crying. But with John it was different. He'd retired. He had money. He was going to build him a house and live easy, after all the hard knocks he'd taken across half the galaxy."

  A dangerous light came into Bollard's small eyes. "But you wouldn't let him be. You had to drag him back into space. You went after him and talked him into it, and now where is he? His money's gone, he's half dead, and he's liable to be all dead before we're through. And you did this to him, Chane!"

  Chane's anger surged up and he raised his arm to send Bollard crashing back into the wall.

  He did not do it.

  He could not answer the accusation.

  It was all true.

  X

  In the middle of the night after the third day of his imprisonment, Chane lay unsleeping. A dark and bitter anger had been growing in him.

  His anger was directed partly at himself. He had done an evil thing, by his own code. To a Starwolf, a debt was something that must be paid. He owed Dilullo his life, yet how had he repaid him? By cajoling him back into space, to be subjected to an agony that had now made him only a shadow of his former self.

  And why had he done this? The others might think it was because of greed for the great reward offered for the Suns, or because of sheer lust for adventure. But Chane knew the truth. He knew that it was the chance to get back to the Spur that had driven him. His nostalgia for the world of the Starwolves had become such that even to look at Varna and its sun from a distance had drawn him like a magnet. He had talked the others into this reckless mission chiefly for that.

  And John must have suspected it, thought Chane, but he never said a thing.

  But he also had another anger, one mixed with bitter hatred, and that was directed at the Qajars. Those calm-faced, beauty-loving men who had savored such quiet delight in torturing Dilullo and Gwaath and himself.

  If I could make them pay, he thought. If I could smash in there and loot away their treasures and leave them wailing ...

  It was just his anger and hate speaking, he knew. There was no way to do that. They were prisoners here on Rith, and if the Qajars demanded them they would be turned over, to be tormented until they died.

  The Qajars had weapons of unguessable capacities. There was no power in the Spur able to beat them down, and forces from the main galaxy were not allowed to come into the space of the Spur worlds.

  No power in the Spur? Chane's pulse suddenly leaped. There was one power that could do it ... maybe.

  Varna.

  The Starwolves would go anywhere, and fight any fight, for loot. They would have raided the Qajars' gloomy world long ago if they had dreamed of the immense loot there.

  And what if he, Chane, told the Starwolves about that loot ... and proved it to them? Ah, what then?

  Chane uttered a mirthless whisper of a laugh. It was a fine idea. Fine, except for just one thing: if he went to Varna, he would be killed before he could tell anything. The clan of Ssander still hungered for his death.

  He dismissed the idea that had been born of anger and desperation. He lay in the darkness, watching the tiny window that was lit to a white flare every few minutes, listening to the distant thunder as another of the incessant storms approached. Between the rumbles and bangs he could hear the heavy breathing of Van Fossan and Sekkinen and Janssen, who shared the sleeping room with him.

  But his wild idea would not go away. He kept thinking about it, even though he knew it was all folly. How could he land on Varna without having to face Ssander's clan one by one in single combat, as Starwolf law demanded?

  Gradually, a possible way crystallized in Chane's mind. It was only the shred of an expedient, and it was almost sure to fail. But it might be done.

  Chane sprang up silently from the bunk. He would not think about that possible expedient any more. If he did he would see its hopelessness. No, he would act upon it. Any action was better than being cooped up here waiting for doom.

  He would act now. This minute.

  But how escape this prison?

  The walls were of blocks of solid stone. The windows were too small to get through. There was only one entrance and Riths armed with lasers stood outside it. This was, obviously, a detention wing.

  Chane thought and thought. He could see only one possibility, and that seemed a pretty thin one.

  Don't think! Act!

  He took his coverall and turned it inside out. The stout cloth had an inch-wide tape border over all the seams. The tape was not cloth, though it looked like it. It was a woven plastic stronger than anything except steel. And it could be detached.

  Chane detached it, and it came away in one unbroken length. It was doubled, and when he had undoubled it, it formed a thin rope over thirty feet long.

  Bad fixes were habitual with the Mercs, and over the years they had worked up a good many little things like this tape to help get them out. Chane now proceeded to another of those things.

  He turned the coverall right-side out again and put it on. Then he unsnapped the broad button that held the flap of the upper right-hand pocket. The button was a miniaturized atoflash with good intensity for its size, but with a capacity of less than a minute's duration.

  Not enough, thought Chane. Not nearly enough.

  He moved silently around the room, picking up the coveralls that belonged to the three sleeping Mercs and robbing them of their buttons.

  Then Chane went quietly out of the little sleeping room and down the corridor to the common room. There was no provision for sleeping here, nothing but a few bench-like chairs, so the room was deserted.

  Lightning flashes from the advancing storm lit the room. Chane went to the window. He removed the plastic shield that kept rain out, and by the light of the recurrent flashes he studied the window carefully.

  In the stone-block wall, one block had been omitted to make this opening for light and air. Not the thinnest man could wriggle through the small opening. But his examinatio
n convinced him that there might be another way.

  Chane took one of the miniature ato-flashes and turned its minute flame of force upon the thick mortar around the block immediately beneath the opening.

  In forty seconds the flash went out, its charge exhausted. He used another one, and another. Then he studied his handiwork by the lightning flares.

  The mortar was deeply cut all around the block. But how deeply? Enough?

  There was only one way to find out. He got his arms out through the small opening of the window and took a grip from the outside on the block.

  Bracing himself, he put all the Starwolf strength Varna had given him into a mighty heave.

  The block moved inward, with a grating noise that sounded as loud as the crack of doom to Chane's ears. Luckily, one of the frequent rolls of thunder from the approaching storm masked it.

  He had pulled the block no more than an inch inward, but now that he knew (he mortar was cut through he had no further doubts. He kept heaving and pulling in little jumps, each time waiting for a clap of thunder before he did it.

  The block finally came clear. His muscles were now so numbed by effort that he almost let the block go crashing to the floor of the room. He managed to prevent that by pressing with his body against the block, holding it against the wall and slowly easing it to the floor.

  He stood up, panting and sweating. The small window, now that the block beneath it was also out, had become just big enough for an average-sized man to wriggle through if he held his belly sucked in and didn't breathe.

  And then what? Chane thought of an old Earth proverb that Dilullo used: Out of the frying pan into the fire.

  He shrugged. Maybe it would prove so. But he wasn't even out of the frying pan yet.

  He moved one of the heavy benches, as silently as he could, to a position just beneath the opening. He got up on it and stuck his head out and peered downward. Some of the windows below showed light, and he remembered the way they had come well enough so that he was able to tell which one was a window of the big throne-room where Eron had talked to them and shown them the tridim pictures.