The noises from below were muted but unmistakable. Voices raised in angry protest; a brief confusion; the sound of the carrier starting up and going away; silence.
Kettrick wondered if they had left a guard. He waited a long time, listening. At length he sent Chai to find out. Her ears and nose were far keener than his. She came back shaking her head and snorting with displeasure.
"No one, John-nee. Bad smell, like footless thing." In the light from the door she made a gesture indicating a writhing movement.
"They're warm-blooded, just like us," said Kettrick. "They bear their young alive. They have really very pretty skin. But I agree with you."
"What now?"
"We wait till dark."
He looked at his wrist chronometer. It would not be a long wait. After that he would do something. He had no idea what it would be. But he knew that he had better think about it, and think fast.
He sat by the hatch, where he could hear if anyone came. The ship was uncannily quiet, hollow, creeping with faint echoes. Chai watched. And Kettrick felt most terribly alone.
16
The worst of it was that he did not know at all what was going on.
The sequence of events was simple. They had landed. Boker had gone to sign in and check the spaceport board for Starbird. Boker had not returned. Spaceport guards had come and taken away Hurth and Glevan. Perfectly simple.
The question was why.
And Kettrick kept thinking, "It would be easier to figure this out if I weren't so scared." He was getting awfully tired of being scared. He wondered if you ever got to a point where the fear nerves were all so calloused that you couldn't feel them any more; if you ever got so bored with fear that you simply forgot it.
He could hear the wind thrumming on the hull, and the sense of aloneness was overpowering.
Boker, Hurth, and Glevan. What was happening to them, in the slender hands of the soft-spoken, black-eyed men of Achern, the men with the blunt jaws and the faint stripes running from the corners of the eyes to the fluted ear holes, and the lingering suggestion of folded skin at the throat?
The anger which had been there all along since the first sight of the approaching carrier finally asserted itself. It had a fine cleansing heat to it. People who talked piously against anger were people who had never had any real enemies, and people who preached against hate, all hate, under any circumstances, were people who had never been in fear of their lives. It was easy to love when you were not fighting for survival, and more than survival, against those who had never heard the word. Kettrick was full of hate, and he welcomed it. He held it, alone in Grellah's iron belly, and it drove the fear away.
Wherever they were and whatever was happening to them, Boker and Hurth and Glevan were depending on him.
Well, and so. Think.
Boker had gone to sign in and check the board for Starbird. He would have entered the central rotunda of the Administration Building. Kettrick remembered it well, a huge cube-shaped structure, very neat and glistening, a black floor, walls faced in an odd shape of pink, a native stone that took a high polish. There were mosaic murals, weirdly fluid things that had a way of wriggling if you looked at them too long.
Boker would have gone to the desk at the right of the entrance, marked registry. He would have placed the plastic square with Grellah's code number in the scanner and then punched the tape machine with his name, the names of his crew, his lading, port of origin, last port of call, next destination, and his pad number. Then he would have crossed to the board, a huge lighted panel that dominated the rotunda, with the service wing of the building to the right and the office wing to the left; the office wing where the I–C was.
Boker would have looked for Starbird among the many ships listed there. If the name did not appear, meaning that the ship had departed, he would then have gone to the small booths beside the board. Here on a keyboard he could punch the name Starbird and a data storage center would automatically provide him with the date of departure and destination of that ship.
Routine procedure, comfortably confined to incurious electrons. Only Kettrick was sure that that particular set of relays must have been altered to give notice to somebody that Starbird was being paged. And somebody had arrested Boker at once.
Somebody in authority, since the spaceport guards had come to take in Boker's crew.
Which meant to Kettrick that Achern was an active center, dedicated to the ultimate victory of the Doomstar, with at least a part of its high officialdom involved.
It was not easy to decide what to do, and he wished for the simple unaffected savagery of Thwayn where there was not such a huge, sophisticated apparatus arrayed against him. One thing was sure. The port Administration Building was no place to go for help or information. And Sekma, obviously, was not at Achern or he would have reacted by now to Grellah's landing. So much for hope.
When he knew that it must be dark outside he went very quietly up the ladder to the bridgeroom and took from the arms locker a skinning knife that Flay had given him as a gift. Then he went into the cubicle he had shared indistinguishably with Boker and cleaned himself of the grease and stains of the afternoon's unfinished labor.
He put on fresh clothing, hiding the knife in his tunic. Under Hurth's bunk in the adjoining cubicle he found a battered round cap with a second officer's badge on it and a limp peak that would partly shadow his face. He also took what money he could find, including small coins. He still had his money belt, but it did him no good for casual spending.
He went down the ladder again, this time to the lower depths where Glevan kept his tools. Here he got a pair of heavy wire cutters. Then he returned to the companionway where he had left Chai on watch.
The ship's lights were out, except for those in the center well. The companionway was dark, showing the open hatch as a lighter area. Chai blew softly through her nose, and touched him.
He crouched close to her. He could see nothing. The outside floods had not been turned on and the wide space of the pad was dark except for the glimmer of a cloudy sky. The glare of the administration area was too far off to matter. But he trusted Chai.
"Man?"
"Under ship. Not move."
They had left a guard, then, or more properly a spy. He wanted to tell Chai to kill, but he only said, "Hit him."
She went down the ladder like a puff of smoke and there was no noise at all until somebody pulled in his breath in a startled half cry that was broken off by a heavy slap. A second later she called. He went down the ladder. In the black shadow under Grellah's tripod gear there was a lighter blob. He did not stop to examine it. With Chai running beside him he went off between the lines of ships.
He went all the way on foot, avoiding the transport strips with their too-many passengers. Fortunately Grellah's pad was in one of the outermost rows. Even so it was a long way, and he expected every moment to hear a warning hooter sound for liftoff, and he prayed that they would not be caught on the pad.
They were not. Ships landed and took off, but they were in other quadrants. The tall wire fence appeared at length before him, topped with intricate barbs to prevent climbing.
Kettrick cut the heavy mesh quickly and let Chai and himself through. An interrupted impulse would show up on a board at Administration, warning that the fence had been cut, and where, and the guards would be sent at once. But they would be looking for thieves breaking in to pilfer from the docked ships, not for someone going the other way. At least he hoped so. Somebody would probably put two and two together when the spy came to and yelled. In the meantime, he had better make what speed he could.